The Agency of Objects in English Prose, 1789–1832: Conspicuous Things [1st ed.] 9783030491109, 9783030491116

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The Agency of Objects in English Prose, 1789–1832 Conspicuous Things n i kol i n a h at t on

The Agency of Objects in English Prose, 1789–1832

Nikolina Hatton

The Agency of Objects in English Prose, 1789–1832 Conspicuous Things

Nikolina Hatton English Department Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Munich, Germany

This book is based on a doctoral dissertation completed by the author at the University of Freiburg in 2018 ISBN 978-3-030-49110-9    ISBN 978-3-030-49111-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49111-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my grandmothers Emma Hatton & Alice Dunets

Acknowledgments

I cannot begin to express how grateful I am to Benjamin Kohlmann, whose helpful feedback, suggestions, and encouragement have made this book possible. My heartfelt thanks as well to Jan Alber, whose enthusiasm and expertise have been much appreciated. I would also like to thank Monika Fludernik, Evi Zemanek, Stefanie Lethbridge, Judith Frömmer, Kerstin Fest, Eva von Contzen, Dorothee Birke, and Miriam Nandi for their support and advice. Thank you to the editing and production team at Palgrave Macmillan for being so patient and helpful: Allie Troyanos, Rachel Jacobe, Vinoth Kuppan, and Brian Halm. Thank you to my insightful reviewer, Beth Kowaleski Wallace. Special thanks to Mark Blackwell and Rod Mengham, for their answers to my queries. Thank you to the administrative staff at the University of Freiburg, especially Gert Fehlner, Nicole Bancher, Luise Lohmann, and Mariana Vargas Ustares. I am also grateful to the University of Freiburg International Office together with Jesus College, Oxford, for funding my research exchange to Jesus College in 2017. I wish to thank the participants and organizers of the MatteReality Conference (FRIAS, University of Freiburg, 2017) as well as the two blind reviewers from Open Cultural Studies, whose comments on my Jane Austen research have been very helpful. Thank you to those who shaped my research skills early: Ursula Irwin, Jodie Marion, Julia Young, and Martha Diede. Also a huge thank you to my friends and colleagues for their aid, wit, and support: Maxi Albrecht, Judith Eckenhoff, Christen Grindahl, Kate Elliot, Shane Frankiewicz, Ester Gnandt, Sara Hobe, Sarah Link, Debora Niermann, Anna Rauscher, Léna Remy-Kovach, Martyn vii

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Acknowledgments

Rittman, Golnaz Shams, and Leonie Wanitzek. Thank you to Leslie Davis, who is an inspiration and a cheerleader of uncommon grit. Thank you to my loving family—the host of Hattons—Daniel, Pamela, Joe, Lacie, Paul, Alisa, K., Jon-Marc, Gavin, Emma, Lucas, Cade, Rogan, Olivia, and Averie—for their continuous support. And, finally, to Jonas Heckel, for his unwavering confidence in this venture, thank you. This book has its origins in a dissertation in English philology written at the University of Freiburg and completed in 2018. My project would not have been possible without the funding provided by the Elite Programme for Postdocs, Baden Württemberg Foundation (“Literature, Liberalism, and the Laissez-Faire Economy, 1776-1900”). Finally, thank you to the New University Endowment Freiburg for the additional funding provided by the STAY! program for post-doctoral researchers.

Contents

1 Introduction: Objects in Prose, from Actants to Things  1 Historicizing the Material   6 Reevaluating Ways of Reading Objects  11 Heeding Object Agency  15 Literature as a Thing  18 Conspicuous Things, 1789–1832  25 Bibliography  35 2 A Pin, a Mirror, and a Pen: Everyday It-Narrators, Conspicuous Tools 43 It-Narratives in the Eighteenth Century  47 The History of a Pin (1798): Responsibility and the Didactic It-Narrator  52 Defamiliarizing the Satirical It-Narrator in “Adventures of a Mirror” (1791)  59 “The Adventures of a Pen” (1806) and (Hyper)Functioning Tools  67 Bibliography  84 3 “Very Conspicuous on One of His Fingers”: Generative Things in Austen’s Juvenilia, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma  91 Objects, Consumerism, and Austen’s Literary Form  94 Genre Conventions and Objects in Austen’s Juvenilia  98

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The Love Token as Plot Device in Sense and Sensibility 108 Pianofortes as Actants in Emma 115 Bibliography 130 4 Unwieldy Objects in De Quincey’s Confessions (1821): Things That Undermine Subjectivity137 De Quincey’s “Involutes”: Luggage, Books, and Other Conspicuous Objects 141 Indifferent Things in the House in London 148 Destroyed, Lost, and Appropriated Things in Oxford 153 “Turned out” of Dove Cottage (By Books) 161 The Nightmare: Things That Come Alive 169 Bibliography 177 5 Performing Authorship in the Silver Fork Novel: Managing a Thing Filled with Objects185 Fashionable Novels, Lithographs, and a Crisis of Representation 191 Describing the “Real” in Gore’s Pin Money (1831) 199 Static Representations and Boredom in the Silver Fork Novel 206 Distancing the Reader from Representations: Performing Authorship 210 Bibliography 223 6 Conclusion: All Those “Tables and Chairs”: Productive Objects and Chaotic Things?229 Bibliography 238 Index241

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Grand Piano, John Broadwood and Sons, London, 1808, No. 4099. Dimensions with lid closed: 246(l), 114(w), 90(h) cm. (Image reproduced with permission from the Royal Academy of Music, London) 119 Square Piano, John Broadwood and Son, London, 1801. No. 5999. Dimensions with lid closed: 163 (l), 61 (w), 83 (h) cm. (Image reproduced with permission from the Royal Academy of Music, London) 121 Catherine Gore, by J. Freeman (1837). Printed by Henry Colburn. (Image reproduced with permission from Alamy Images)196 Plate 1, “Peut être!” (Perhaps!) (1831). Hand-colored lithograph from Henri Grévedon’s Le Vocabulaire des Dames series (1831–1834). Paris: Chez Rittner and Goupill. London: Ch. Tilt. (Image reproduced with permission from the Robert Sterling Clark Collection of Rare Books, Clark Institute Library, Williamstown, MA) 197

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Objects in Prose, from Actants to Things

In 1759, Adam Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that although the “various motions” of a watch “conspire in the nicest manner” to tell the time, “Yet we never ascribe any such desire or intention to them, but to the watch-maker, and we know that they are put into motion by a spring, which intends the effect it produces as little as they do” (Smith 1979, 2.2.3.5). Materiality, in this view, is a passive receptacle for the designs which a superior human understanding inscribes upon it. Smith makes this human–nonhuman relationship a metaphor for the relation between Providence and human nature, suggesting his overall hierarchical view of divine, human, and nonhuman activity. Nonetheless, Smith’s choice of example demonstrates the irrelevance of his concern with the object’s “intention,” as it acknowledges that, in the eighteenth century, humans are relying upon these mechanical devices to direct their daily activities. An it-narrative from 1788 makes this point further explicit by noting how the watch “instructs the man of taste when to dine; the belle when to dress; the beau when to take his drops; the cit when to go on a change; and the man of understanding how to number and make a proper use of those few hours Fate hath allotted” (Anon. 2012d, 4:133). Regardless of intention, the watch was bound up quite integrally in human affairs and activities in the late eighteenth century and would only become more folded into social assemblages as the new century wore on, as attested by didactic Victorian poems like Thomas Hood’s “The Workhouse Clock: An Allegory” (1844). © The Author(s) 2020 N. Hatton, The Agency of Objects in English Prose, 1789–1832, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49111-6_1

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While the eighteenth-century it-narrator bears witness to the ubiquity of the inanimate object in everyday life, toward the end of the century, several it-narrators unequivocally assert their active role in human activities: a mirror from 1791 thus informs its readers that “my family have existed for many hundred years, have been known all over Europe, and have had a very large share in the refining and polishing of mankind to their present state of civilization” (Anon. 2012a, 4:165). Unlike most earlier it-narrators, this mirror moves beyond simple prosopopoeia as it extensively narrates how it directly affects and influences human actors. Written at a time when it-narrators had become largely generically exhausted, “Adventures of a Mirror” more directly questions the hierarchy of human and nonhuman by characterizing its physical reflective work as “advice” that is then promptly and scrupulously followed by its human viewers. In its constructive depiction of the relationship between the human user and the nonhuman object, the text functions not just as a modern satirical commentary on human vanity, but also as an explication of the role of the tool in enabling human activity. Other late eighteenth-century popular texts register their anxiety about agential objects through recourse to the occult. In a series of newspaper reports that eventually culminated in a small publication (Anon. 1772a), a gentlewoman’s belongings all begin to dash themselves to the floor, actively disintegrating before their mistress’s eyes. Some of the newspaper extracts include a passage that rises to the level of farce: in short, about four o’clock in the morning of Tuesday, almost everything in the parlour and kitchen were animated, and made such a racket, that Mr. Payne’s maid servant ran up stairs, and took a child out of bed, and carried it into the stable naked, thinking it was not safe longer to stay in the house. (Anon. 1772c)

Accounts similar to this one appeared throughout the eighteenth century, amounting to a small sub-genre of “factual” articles that reported on domestic occult or pseudo-occult activity (Benedict 2007). Yet, at least part of this particular account is probably true, considering at the same time that the disturbance is presumed to have begun (the morning of January 6, 1772), three powder mills in nearby Hounslow exploded, with shocks reportedly felt as far as Gloucestershire (Anon. 1772d, 724). Connecting the two events, one correspondent observes, “it is nothing marvelous that an explosion of gunpowder at Hounslow should produce

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an explosion of lyes so near as Stockwell” (Anon. 1772b). The Stockwell incident provides examples of a real instance of the material behaving in an unexpected and potentially deadly manner as well as a more imaginative attempt to make meaning out of that traumatic event. The Stockwell reports are further significant for how it is largely domestic objects—china, pottery, pewterware, lanterns, candles, tables, clocks, jars, and tea pots— that are affected and not just in passive terms. While these objects are sometimes “thrown,” they just as often seem to “jump,” “turn upside down,” or “fly off” of their own accord (Anon. 1772a, 10–14). While such lexical variation may arise from rhetorical style, the words themselves attribute agency to the inanimate and suggest a fear of the potential of objects to behave contrarily to their designed functions. These examples provide a sampling of the extreme ways that objects— and specifically domestic objects—are represented in popular literature in England as the eighteenth century was coming to a close. Each features a very different view of object agency: the watch is described as directing human activity, the mirror portrays itself as a productive partner to mankind, and the Stockwell accounts represent objects as a threat, rather than an asset, to human well-being. The watch and the mirror, for the most part, fulfill their designed functions; the crockery and furniture of the Stockwell reports produce chaotic and even deadly living conditions. While the present study does not investigate occult objects as such, it does explore domestic objects that have somehow “gotten out of hand”— here the mirror text is also significant for including a passage in which objects seem to have copulated, filling up whole rooms and leaving no space for human inhabitants, discussed further in Chap. 2. The text thus finds a synthesis between the spatially aware and clinical descriptions of objects Cynthia Wall (2006) identifies in eighteenth-century scientific and literary texts and the self-reflexive book-narrators of the mid eighteenth century that Christina Lupton (2011) has argued disavow the interconnectedness of the human–nonhuman by positing completely autonomous material objects. In attributing total agency to the textual medium and erasing the status of the author—as in it-narratives such as Adventures of a Quire of Paper (1779)—Lupton writes that such texts “seem to make paper cleverer than people” (Lupton 2011, 10; Anon. 2012b). The texts explored here less often treat objects as though they are sentient creatures—we learn that the increase of furniture in the mirror text has nothing to do with copulation and everything to do with their mistress’s inability to resist a bargain—but rather blend the two extremes of circumscribing

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through description, what Bruno Latour calls the “myth of the Neutral Tool under complete human control,” and pretending that objects hold authorial power (“the myth of the Autonomous Destiny”) (Latour 1999, 178). These texts are made up of humans and nonhumans, as nonhuman actants are critical both to the action and plot and to the aesthetics of the text. The human narrators, implied authors, and characters of these texts demonstrate awareness of the role of the object in human activities, but this awareness proves to be precarious, as the mirror from earlier bears witness, that although its abilities are central to the “polishing of mankind to their present state of civilization—yet I seldom hear that we are mentioned with respect” (Anon 2012a, 4:165). While these texts draw attention to the activity of the material, such explicit references to object agency also highlight the surprise and anxiety that attends the human acknowledgment of that agency, anxiety that is present both within plots, as characters relate to objects, as well as on the formal level, as writers consider the physical embeddedness of their work. This research demonstrates that the further one moves into the nineteenth century, the more concern narrators and authors betray over the power objects within the text wield over human subjectivity as well as over the creation of the text itself. To some degree, these texts share this fear with their eighteenth-­century forebears: in addition to a fascination with the material object, eighteenth-­ century texts are often concerned with the object’s agency and its role within “human” affairs. Turn-of-the-century texts continue to preoccupy themselves with how, as Jonathan Lamb writes, accidents or “sudden emergencies” tend to “capsize the hierarchy of things and people” both in literature and in society (Lamb 2011, 4). Lamb argues that this fascination with objects arises from the alternate temporality of the material world, its thereness, what Lamb calls “an existential simplicity” that the human may in turn identify with or envy (Lamb 2011, xxi). What distinguishes late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts is the degree to which the human–nonhuman assemblage is identified and, even, accepted. These later objects are often well integrated into the narratives in which they form a part, as they prove essential to the message, the aesthetics, and the success of the text—an integration demonstrated especially well in the writings of Jane Austen and openly discussed in the autobiographical writings of Thomas De Quincey. The present study engages with texts at the turn of the nineteenth century that demonstrate a reorientation to the thing, not just as something

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helpful or enabling, but also as something prescriptive, not just made as an aid to humankind, but as also involved in the making, a thing that Latour terms factish because the a priori question of what came first, maker or thing, can never quite be unraveled (Latour 1999, 275). In these texts, material objects are often integrated as aids to narrative as well as represented as integral to human modes of being. However, many of these texts also stage a crisis in which the humans interacting with these objects suddenly perceive the material as asserting its autonomy, that is, humans recognize these active objects as things in Bill Brown’s sense (2001). Thus, while these texts register the interconnectedness of the human and the nonhuman, they also attest to an increasing tendency in the nineteenth century to see unexpected material agency as a threat to human activities and desires. This process of integration and reaction to the prescriptive and often conspicuous object can be seen in how the texts during this period employ self-reflexivity differently than their eighteenth-century counterparts: the self-reflexivity of these later texts arises more as a corrective response to generic expectations, evolutions, or constraints than as a deliberate attempt, as Lupton (2011) argues, to alter the orientation of the reader to the text or to efface the work of the human author. Rather, the self-­ reflexivity in these later texts is engaged in by authors responding to their work’s relationship or orientation to (a) specific object(s)—whether that be other books or objects that the author feels obliged, for various reasons, to include within the narrative framework. Thus, these texts are less likely to index their own materiality (of paper, leather, and ink) than to attempt to account for other kinds of materiality—including other physical books. The following accounts for the status of domestic objects in prose narrative during a literary period that due to its heterogeneity and seeming lack of organizing principle tends to receive less attention than what would come after in the monolith of Victorian culture. Largely a period of revolution, war, and social and economic upheaval, the history of domestic things in English prose from the French Revolution to the passing of the first Reform Bill in England has been often neglected, while it is in fact a period that provides a bridge between eighteenth-century attempts to circumscribe the material through description and the late  nineteenth-­ century urge to turn the domestic or “British” object into a symbol with a largely ideological function (Freedgood 2006; Plotz 2008; Daly 2011).1 While these seemingly interstitial texts demonstrate a tendency toward

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both urges, they also bear witness to an acknowledgment—although precarious—that the world is being transformed by objects in an unprecedented manner, a reality that had a significant effect on the form of narrative just as it had on the domestic interiors of the middle class.

Historicizing the Material While medieval and early modern scholars demonstrate that “efforts to come to grips with ‘what a thing actually is’ in relation to the human began well before the seventeenth century” (Robertson 2008, 1072), they also establish that the demarcation between these two realms was considerably more fluid and contested than in enlightenment and nineteenth-­century Britain (cf. J. Cohen 2006); Lightsey 2007; Yates 2003).2 Kellie Robertson notes that in failing to circumscribe the meanings of objects he invokes, Geoffrey Chaucer allows for “an acknowledgement of things as events whose signified is their own interiority, an inwardness that makes possible an agency independent of the human,” suggesting that a human sense that things have agential potential was well alive before the age of mechanization (Robertson 2008, 1074). This ambiguity about the ascendency of human mastery in the medieval period was supported by the status of sacred relics as “problematically embodied things,” whose agency or vitality would eventually become a target of English and European Reformation movements (1074; cf. Stallybrass and Jones 2001, 115).3 The debate over religious icons (and whether or not they constitute idolatry) was further complicated, as Sarah Stanbury notes, by pre-modern understandings of optics and “visual rays” (“species”), which suggested that sight was “a property of physical contiguity,” connecting us “physically to the objects we see” (Stanbury 2015, 6). Such a view of sight suggests a dramatic difference in how medieval Britons cognitively oriented themselves within their physical surroundings. When it came to church imagery, Stanbury adds that although worshipers were continually reminded to “worship the idea behind the image and not the image itself,” “the spectral lives of images in the popular imagination suggest that images crossed the line between matter and spirit or the living and the dead” (6–7). Despite the eventual rejection of the icon by the English state church, the human–object relationship remained complicated in the early modern period by another semi-religious form: investiture, that is “ceremonially dressing someone” (“investiture n.” 2a). Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter

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Stallybrass stress the importance of clothing during the period, showing that it “literally constituted a person as a monarch or a freeman of a guild or a household servant” (Jones and Stallybrass 2000, 2). Investiture allowed for an understanding of material objects as animated, but if early modern dress helped “constitute subjects,” the person’s donning of said clothing in turn invested the material with human presence (2). A person’s clothing could function as a replacement for the embodied person herself. They investigate this process by looking at the role of the glove, an object of clothing that, through metonymy, manifested an absent person’s favor and power. These “detachable objects” “materialized the power of people to be condensed and absorbed into things and of things to become persons” (Stallybrass and Jones 2001, 116).4 Furthermore, they note that this process of “objectification as a form of power” runs entirely contrary to current understandings of capitalist reification and constitutes “a distinctly pre-capitalist way of thinking about the relations between person and thing” (116).5 Here, the supplementation provided by objects, rather than posing a threat, is accepted as an asset, a means of extending the human with the aid of the material. Neither did one assume that although objects could extend and amplify the presence and power of the human, they did so in an entirely passive manner. “The contingency of things” could threaten their social usage: “the gloves might not fit; they were easily lost (like handkerchiefs); they wore out or got stained” (119). Thus, while such a pre-capitalist and more fluid understanding of the boundary between the human and the nonhuman existed, this is not to say that the relationship was always characterized by harmony or that users perceived these objects as consistently complying with their wishes. When such material resistance began to be seen as a threat to human subjectivity has been the subject of debate (Robertson 2008, 1068; Yates 2003, 3–9). Latour argues that changes in the perception of objects and in the way in which humans relate to the material are rooted in the late seventeenth-­century impulse to describe and demonstrate the workings of nature, a process he views as the beginnings of an attempt to “purify” the realms of the human and nonhuman from one another (Latour 1993, 10–11). But his discussion of relics and fetishism—which imagines the irony of fifteenth-century Portuguese Catholics, “covered with amulets of the saints and the Virgin,” accusing Guinean peoples of “worshipping fetishes”—suggests that he, like the scholars noted above, also sees this debate as rooted in religious icons (Latour 2010, 2). Nonetheless, the coincidence of his hypothesis that the late seventeenth century saw the slow

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emergence of a demarcation between “society” and “nature,” with Wall’s research on the evolution of eighteenth-century literary description, suggests the significance of the eighteenth century in the development of the human–nonhuman dichotomy. Significantly, like Stanbury, Wall’s work on description connects changes in a person’s orientation to the material to altered ways of understanding sight and one’s ability to view objects—a theme picked up by Victorian scholars of consumerism and materiality as well (cf. Armstrong 2008; Berg 2005, 14; Miller 1995). Wall argues that the microscope and telescope as well as empirical practices directly affected how the material world was described not only in scientific but also in literary texts (Wall 2006, 2). The fascination with the material was no doubt also due to a rapid technical development that was quickly transforming the everyday landscape of many Britons’ lives and habits. Although Neil McKendrick’s (1982) bold assertion that eighteenth-century Britain saw the “birth” of the first full-­ scale consumer society has been rightly called into question and tempered (cf. Agnew 1993, 24; Berg 2005, 9), historians accept that eighteenth-­ century Britain as well as other parts of the world saw an impressive increase in the number and types of domestic goods belonging to the rising professional classes (Weatherill 1988, esp. 7–8; Trentmann 2017, 60–71). It is further no surprise that this increase in consumerism led to the development of moral and gendered paradigms for thinking about the consumption of goods within the home to the degree that a certain level of consumption took on an almost religious significance (Garofalo 2012, 77; Smith 2002, 211; cf. Tombs 2015, 369; Trentmann 2017, 109).6 Woodruff D. Smith has explored how the rise of the concept of “respectability”—itself coined around 1785—was used to refer to an emerging paradigm for thinking about a person’s worth, a paradigm that emphasized virtue and honor rather than birth, and one that made a certain standard of comfortable living morally acceptable, even necessary (Smith 2002, 194). Smith recognizes the irony that advocates of respectable middle-­class comfort were engaging in: “Moderate, virtuous attention to convenience and comfort are acceptable. ‘Luxury,’ in its traditional sense, is excessive and potentially vicious attention to much the same things” (201). Such a new standard for the middle classes made certain types of controlled consumption acceptable, leading to a hierarchy of consumption based on one’s income. This connection between one’s moral worth, one’s respectability, and a particular level of consumption helps explain why the author, Charlotte

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Smith, complained in 1800 that the position of her family required expenditures that she could not afford: “I have embarrassed myself in getting into [a house] by paying for pictures & having furniture still to pay for… I could not help it. My family is such, that a small house will not hold us” (Qtd. in Copeland 1995, 9). Smith’s problem highlights how respectability is embodied in material objects: a large family requires a large house, a large house requires furniture, and so on. Her predicament further demonstrates how the gentry often found themselves worse off than some tradesmen in this quest to signal respectability. These new ways of expressing one’s class and taste through objects led, Georg Lukács argues, to an increase in literary description in the early nineteenth century, as fiction adapted “to provide an adequate representation of new social phenomena” (Lukács 1971a, 117). This emphasis on individualized consumerism—everyone consuming in line with his or her particular and rather unique position—coincides with what Dror Wahrman has referred to as “a new alternative identity regime” emerging in the last two decades of the eighteenth century which emphasized an “individual subject with a well-defined, stable, unique, centered self” (xii) over more generic categories such as “gender, race, class, and the distinction between humans and animals” (Wahrman 2004, xii–xiii). What is of course ironic about the eighteenth-century rise of individualized consumerism, as Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace has pointed out, is that it offered “goods that, while mass-produced, were meant paradoxically to convey a ‘unique’ and ‘individualized’ taste” (Wallace 2018, 34). Furthermore, the search for “respectability” or individuality—through filling one’s home with new and convenient objects—was aided by advances in technology that did more than simply make manufacturing processes more efficient (and clothing more affordable): these advances provided more explicit examples of animate objects. Robert Tombs highlights how these active tools supplemented and aided human work: Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine (1712) permitted the pumping out of deep coalminers; John Kay’s flying shuttle (1733) speeded up weaving; James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (c. 1765) multiplied the effectiveness of hand spinning; Richard Arkwright’s water frame (1769) used power for spinning with rollers. (Tombs 2015, 374)

These inventions demonstrated how material devices could be optimized through human invention to supplement human industry at a seemingly

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unprecedented scale. Such mechanization was accompanied by a renewed interest in horticulture, breeding as a hobby, and scientific discourse as entertainment, with “the idea of experiment, of changing nature” being “no longer a philosophic concept but a widespread practical art” in an emerging and “modern” Britain (Plumb 1982, 323; cf. Berg 2005, 14). But, counter to such a view that humans were “mastering” nature, such machines also demonstrated that objects could literally create other objects that would never have been possible without their mediation. This increasingly perceived divide between the human and nonhuman was emerging in the realm of language as well. Karen Barad has drawn attention to the history of considering representation as something other and separate than the material world, a stance she roots, via Joseph Rouse, in a “Cartesian division between ‘internal’ and ‘external’” (Barad 2003, 806; Rouse 1996, 209). The coinage and increased usage, especially in the eighteenth century, of emotive and “introspective” words is a case in point (Smith 1912, 247–51). Lupton similarly highlights that the growing perceived distance between the human and nonhuman expresses itself in the eighteenth century not by “a failure to talk about things” but rather in “the impulse to seize upon objects and physical phenomena in their most empirical form,” to reduce the object “to the content of a description” (Lupton 2016, 302). For Colin Campbell, the “increasing separation of man from the constraining influence of external agencies,” a separation of inner- and outer-worlds, human subjects, and external objects (73), allowed for a development of a form of consumerism in which the quality of physical satisfaction was ignored in favor of a more ephemeral emphasis on subjective, mental “pleasure,” namely, a “longing to experience in reality those pleasures created and enjoyed in the imagination” (Campbell 1987, 205).7 This worldview inadvertently places the human at the center of the experience, even while it places the nonhuman “on a pedestal and admir[es] it from afar,” as Timothy Morton argues much Romantic writing has done with “Nature” (Morton 2007, 5; cf. Coole and Frost 2010, 8). The result of this orientation to the material world is a form of self-­ reflexive, “hypostasized” consumption in which one observes or represents oneself in the act of consuming, as Thomas De Quincey does in his opium eating (Morton 2000, 108). In the silver fork novel, the last group of texts explored in this study, this tendency expresses itself not only in the self-reflexivity of the novel—its attempts to distance its readers from the actual experiences related in its pages—but also in its seeming obsession with material representations, visual and textual.

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While the developments outlined here have traditionally been attributed to “modernity,” to a sense of an increasing distance between the inner self and some kind of external reality, Latour argues that modernity has existed only in theory, but not in everyday praxis. Despite this philosophical and linguistic insistence upon separate human and nonhuman spheres, “the adjective modern* does not describe an increased distance between society and technology or their alienation, but a deepened intimacy, a more intricate mesh, between the two” (Latour 1999, 196; cf. Latour 1993, 10–11). Latour and Wall both insist on the unreasonableness of the assumption that the perception of the material as separate and other infected all forms of cultural expression at once; rather, they argue that this perceptual demarcation occurred gradually over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Latour 1993:30–36). Wall’s comment that “for the eighteenth century, as for the Renaissance, things could still be interpreted as intertwined with persons, objects with subjects” (Wall 2006, 152) highlights the importance of the period for addressing questions regarding the evolution of things in literary discourse. As demonstrated by the watch, the mirror, and the crockery at the beginning of this chapter, what one finds at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century are contradictory representations of things as aids, things as threats, things as agents, and things as intimately connected to the human while also disturbingly alien. This is particularly noticeable in how things contribute to narrative form—how they become both generators of narrative and inhibitors of narrative—as well as in how the humans in these narratives relate to, discuss, and treat their material possessions.

Reevaluating Ways of Reading Objects The traditional way to approach objects in prose narrative in the romantic period has been to interpret them as forerunners to or even already implicated in capitalist modes of reification. Due to the influx of consumer goods both in the eighteenth century and after 1815,8 the literary Marxist approach has been to analyze such objects in terms of their manufacture and exchange, emphasizing how the emergence of mass production resulted in the alienation of the object from the human.9 For Frederic Jameson in his reading of Theodor Adorno, the commodity fetishism that results from capitalist production reifies people and their objects of consumption so that both a “substitution for human relations of thing-like

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ones” occurs and “the former solid things of a world of use values are transmogrified into abstract equivalencies” (Jameson 1990, 180). The view that capitalism has led to a widespread alienation between the human and the material is reflected throughout literary criticism of the period. Eighteenth-century it-narratives are frequently read in these terms because of their exchange motif (Alber 2015; Douglas 2007; Flint 2007), and criticism on objects in Jane Austen’s novels is often colored by the moral aspects of consumption, as humanistic values (e.g. sociability) are juxtaposed with materialism (Benedict 2009; cf. Copeland 1996; Saglia 2009). However, the material turn calls such readings into question. Timothy Bewes (2002) notes that critiques of capitalism often inadvertently slip into discussing human subjects and nonhuman objects as though these are accepted categories (261) with “anxiety towards reification” becoming “itself reifying” (xiv).10 As a literary scholar, Elaine Freedgood cautions against applying Marxist language too enthusiastically to literature of the nineteenth century, noting that these interpretations are often “more symptomatic of our own immersion in commodity culture” than of the relationships actually found in the texts themselves (Freedgood 2006, 142); in her view, critics effectively commodify fictional goods which were not necessarily commodified in their respective texts (140–41) when, in practice, “things and commodities had a long struggle for priority in reality and representation” (157). These scholars highlight that while the Enlightenment did enact a separation between the human and the nonhuman, one can by no means view this process as (ever) fully completed. While critiques of consumption and capitalism in pre-Victorian texts have undeniable value, they can miss the complexity of things. Even the understanding of the word “commodity” would have had a different connotation in the eighteenth century, as it could refer not just to “a piece of merchandise” or “article of commerce,” but also to something “convenient, suitable, or useful” (“commodity,” n. 3b., 4a.). Kowaleski-Wallace writes, “The two senses of the word complemented each other, since a thing of no use could not be a commodity, it literally could not be ‘commodious’” (Kowaleski-Wallace 1997, 73). Trentmann further highlights how the use value of specific commodities of the period should not be forgotten: while the ideological meanings of tea and sugar consumption have been thoroughly glossed by research (Fromer 2008; Kowaleski-­ Wallace 1997; Mintz 1986; Morton 2000, 171–206), he reminds one that these substances also had practical effects on the consumer’s everyday life “enabling [workers] to spin late into the night, stay warm and keep awake”

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(Trentmann 2017, 75). Many of the conspicuous objects which show up in this study—pins, candles, umbrellas, trunks, and so on—have similar practical, everyday uses. Significantly, most of the objects examined here do not fit into Thorste in Veblen’s (1899) paradigm of “conspicuous consumption,” in which each class strata attempts to mimic the consumer habits of the strata above it (Veblen 2005, 63–64). Rather, these objects are “conspicuous” in how they themselves contribute to, enable, or disable courses of action within texts. Furthermore, even for the objects that do seem to fit Veblen’s emulative consumer hypothesis, like the Coles’ piano in Austen‘s Emma, it becomes evident that the object’s ability to facilitate social mobility is directly linked to its physical attributes, its materiality. This is not to say that these objects do not denote symbolic meanings or that these practical uses do not also reinforce capitalist social structures, merely that such reinforcement has as much to do, if not more to do, with the object’s practical use as with its social signification. The “meaning” of an object is always wrapped up in material praxis: consumers used the objects they purchased, integrated them into their daily lives, and learned to depend upon them. The loss in critical discussions of the practical applications of the commodity is rooted in how discussions of commodity fetishism often make the manufacture of goods their main focus of inquiry. Trentmann goes so far as to argue that Marx “wrote consumption out of the story,” the effect of which was the assumption “that the desire for goods had to be unnatural, the result of manipulation,” effacing the idea that “people not only lost but found themselves in their possessions” (Trentmann 2017, 113). Brown further notes that in the traditional understanding of commodities, “material specificity disappears” (Brown 2012, 222). Because commodities are considered “nothing but values,” critiques of capitalism often fail to account for the material excess contained in the object as revealed in its tendency to flout delineated courses of action or modes of human meaning (222; cf. Brown 2003, 13–14). This can have serious consequences for how one understands how social assemblages function, as accounts of materiality that emphasize the symbolic nature of objects at the expense of the object’s material specificity fail to describe fully how those at the top of the social hierarchy gain and hold onto their power (Latour 2005, 63–64).11 The consequences for literary criticism for neglecting the purposes, properties, and effects of material objects have obscured not simply how material practices undergird social structures, but also how they

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undergird narrative form. When the symbolism of an object becomes separated from its usage within the known world, it becomes difficult to connect how an object’s utilitarian function (or lack of functioning) might also have relevance for the formal role it plays within narrative, how it is “put to work” in the service of literary form. This is important because literary form has a reflexive relationship with the society it springs from, both as it reflects and imagines new possibilities for social assemblages. A failure to connect the material “stuff” of everyday life with how one makes sense of that life creates a fragmented and one-sided literary and cultural criticism. New materialist theoreticians have attempted to return to looking at objects in their specificity, rather than effacing their physical uses and attributes in favor of examining their modes of production or their position within ideology. The physical qualities of objects, how they function, and the actions they enable or disable—all of these aspects are of prime interest. It is no accident then that the material turn has occurred simultaneously as literary scholars have begun to question the tenets of symptomatic reading—of which Marxist and poststructuralist readings form a part. Across sociologies of literature especially, scholars have called for returning to the text as the primary focus of literary analysis, that is, as the primary subject of analysis rather than as merely the window through which one traces some hidden layer (ideology, psychological proclivities) that must be teased out by the human critic. This impulse comes after a period in literary studies, as Bewes points out, in which “the phrase ‘against the grain,’ and the method supposedly denoted by it, slowly, and in violation of its most essential principle, took on the force of a critical axiom” (Bewes 2010, 1). As a result, scholars such as Heather Love, Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, Rita Felski, and others have been inspired (in part by the work of Latour) to return to more concrete readings of texts and to reevaluate poststructuralist assumptions about cultural and literary history.12 The practices of the material and descriptive turns enable a more comprehensive reading of prose texts that seem both inundated with and gripped by domestic objects. These impulses further highlight not only how objects and humans in concert create and enforce social structures but also how these assemblages evolve into other narrative forms and aesthetic effects, that is, how literary fantasy turns into cultural history.

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Heeding Object Agency While “new materialism” is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of scholars working in various fields from sometimes quite divergent philosophical points of view, what largely unites these various modes of research is an interest in exploring, one, the relationship (or conception of the relationship) between the human and the nonhuman and, two, the agency of matter or “phenomena.” Under the headings of various titles and approaches, including Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), Thing Theory, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), vitalism, and posthumanism, scholars across academic disciplines are attempting to interrogate what they consider a problematic understanding of humanity in relation to the wider world. Jane Bennett, who one finds associated with OOO and vitalism, writes: What would happen to our thinking about politics if we took more seriously the idea that technological and natural materialities were themselves actors alongside and within us—were vitalities, trajectories, and powers irreducible to the meanings, intentions, or symbolic values humans invest in them? (J. Bennett 2010a, 47)

One of the motivations for such work is the realization of a need to move away from anthropocentrism. Timothy Morton characterizes OOO as “an emerging philosophical movement committed to a unique form of realism and nonanthropocentric thinking” (Morton 2013, 2; cf. Harman 2002). OOO investigations often take as their subject of critique objects which defy the human–nonhuman dichotomy because of their apparent nearness to human modes of being. Bennett’s investigations into both eighteenth-century and newer conceptions of vitalism have led her to look at what she calls “vital materialities”: she notes how “stem cells, electricity, food, trash, and metals are crucial to political life (and human life per se),” and how when humans become aware of them (through disruptions) “these activities and powers are represented as human mood, action, meaning, agenda, or ideology” (J. Bennett 2010b, x). Morton goes further when he argues that capitalism has led to the creation of “hyperobjects”—“from humble Styrofoam to terrifying plutonium”—that are so lasting they defy human understandings of time: “thinking about these materials does involve something like

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religion, because they transcend our personal death” (Morton 2010, 130; cf. Morton 2013; Kelly 2010, 14).13 If Morton looks at the macro, Timothy LeCain draws attention to the micro, that is, the microbiome of the human body, arguing that emerging medical and psychological research into how bacteria and viruses affect human health and behavior make a clear human–nonhuman binary untenable. He notes that “humans do not just manipulate a clearly separate and distinct material environment that exists beyond the bounds of our genes, bodies, brains and mind” but that “countless other material things, both biotic and abiotic … helped to create who we are” (LeCain 2017, 7). In drawing attention to objects and assemblages that defy the human–nonhuman binary, these researchers each urge one to reconsider how one makes sense of “human” behavior and everyday phenomena. LeCain calls his approach “neo-materialist theory” and argues for the development in the humanities of “a much less anthropocentric approach to understanding both their human and nonhuman subjects” (20). Part of this shift in approach means paying heed to everyday things that previously may have seemed straightforward and uncomplicated but that are in reality intimately tied with human development, health, culture, as well as with the health of the planet and other organisms. While the domestic objects explored in the current study may seem far removed from the climate-altering, climate-affected entities, bacteria, and viruses discussed by Bennett, Morton, and LeCain, these seemingly everyday objects also defy understandings of human time, independence, and dominance. These objects either “die” far too soon or they outlive their human users as they are passed down to future generations (or recycled) for an unknown period of time. This is especially apparent in late eighteenth-­century it-narratives as well as in the autobiographical writings of Thomas De Quincey: in these texts, possessions are never really owned by humans but are rather markedly transferable. These texts demonstrate how objects of this period are conspicuous not only in their ambiguous relationships to the human, but also in how this ambiguity comes through on the level of form, as the questions raised by these objects also affect the aesthetics of their respective narratives. A view of materiality that emphasizes its alternate life cycle further complicates the self-reflexivity of the text, as these objects potentially raise ontological questions about the nature of existence and even selfhood. In turn, these texts question not only what it means to be an “author” but also what happens to the author’s subjectivity when their book has passed out of existence, is no longer

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accessible, and can no longer be read because it is, after all, a material object with an alternate life cycle. New materialism provides a framework for breaching both questions of form and content in these texts. Tony Bennett writes that its “singular-­ planar or flat ontology” allows one to explore “the interactions between varied assemblages” of “heterogeneous elements (things, persons, technologies, texts, et cetera)” (T.  Bennett 2010, 259). Such an approach resists both the intentional fallacy at the same time that it defies the idea that literary texts must be read “in terms of the external forces that had acted on them” (255). While the work of critics like Jane Bennett and Morton helps underscore the broad applications of the field, Latour’s ANT proves especially helpful for the domestic and localized objects addressed in this study. I have argued elsewhere that Latour’s ANT is useful for addressing questions of both form and content in early nineteenth-­ century prose literature (Hatton 2019, 136–37). This is largely due both to his rather simple definition of actant—a concept inspired in part by the structuralist A. J. Greimas—as well as to his own references to literature as being able to provide particularly cogent examples of human–nonhuman networks.14 Latour attributes to “novels, plays, and films from classical tragedy to comics a vast playground to rehearse accounts of what makes us act” (2005, 54–55; cf. 46–47). This “sidelining” of “the question of categories” is what makes Latour’s ANT especially useful to literary studies, Julian Yates writes, as it provides a “practical way of exiting the genres of historical writing that take the human subject as their organizing principle” and allows one “to begin to take ‘things’ seriously” (Yates 2006, 1005).15 Latour’s explication of actants evolved out of an early ontological realization that “nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else” (Latour 1988, 163). From this point of view, every entity, human and nonhuman, wields a force of some kind, weak or strong, and such force is strengthened by an entity’s association with other entities (“assemblages” or “collectives”).16 Latour’s broad view of action specifies that “any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference” can be considered an actant (Latour 2005, 71). His sole criterion for designating an entity as an actant is whether one can affirm the following questions: “Does it make a difference in the course of some other agent’s action or not? Is there some trial that allows someone to detect this difference?” (71). Latour’s examples denote that the most banal objects—hammers,

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kettles, baskets, and clothing—pass this test. He thus broadens the concept of action so that it includes more than what “‘intentional’, ‘meaningful,’ humans do,” and, in so doing, he raises the possibility that “there might exist many metaphysical shades between full causality and sheer inexistence” (71, 72). Latour’s alternative to what he considers to be the “modern” human– nonhuman binary is to approach all entities, including cultural forms, as networks of relations between humans and nonhumans. In Latour’s point of view, there is never an underlying “social” realm, only assemblages of actants; the social, he argues, is merely a “type of connection between things,” between various actants, be they human or nonhuman (Latour 2005, 5). There is, for Latour, no underlying ideology that society or the text displays symptoms of—there are simply material conditions that produce effects. He writes, “It is always things—and I now mean this last word literally—which, in practice, lend their ‘steely’ quality to the hapless ‘society’” (68). In Latour’s view, cultures and societies do not exist as entities made up of humans only but as “assemblages” of human and nonhuman actants, the networks of which create the effects often (wrongly) attributed to nebulous “social factors.”17 Latour’s emphasis on the interdependence of the human and nonhuman, and his pragmatic, almost ethnographic approach to exploring these dependencies,18 as well as the way in which literature has influenced his own way of thinking about assemblages makes his ANT a useful tool for reorienting discussions of objects within literature and debates about literature as a “thing” that can be studied at all. ANT presupposes that the object, the thing, the piece of materiality that was easily assumed to be given, predictable, and passive is itself an agent. In many ways, an ANT reading further emphasizes the tool-like aspect of the literary or the “instrumentalization of literature”—an idea that may only be looked down upon because literary scholars have forgotten how surprisingly tools themselves can behave.

Literature as a Thing Latour argues in his early work that his concept of actant applies to language itself. This is not because language has some mysterious power, but because it is also made up of actants: “It is not possible to distinguish for long between those actants that are going to play the role of ‘words’ and those that will play the role of ‘things.’ … Everything that is said of the

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signifier is right, but it must also be said of every other kind of entelechy” (Latour 1988, 184). He highlights that words have not come into being in a vacuum but, rather, are the result of a long series of assemblages of the human and the nonhuman: “The words ‘same’ and ‘other’ are the consequences of trials of strength, defeats and victories” (169).19 In his view, language relies on processes of assemblage that have such a dense history and utilize so many individual actants that they appear to the user as a closed system that cannot be disentangled.20 Karen Barad, via Foucault, similarly stresses the embodied or performative aspect of language, noting that discourse is not pure language but rather language coupled with material practices and performances (Barad 2003, 819).21 Again one must return to Latour’s test of whether a thing (an object, a word, a human being) qualifies as an actant: does it have a discernible effect? The key, for Latour, is to see language as a series of assemblages in process, rather than as an established, static, set of facts: “Language is well articulated, like the world with which it is charged, provided that we treat the notion of the sign with skepticism” (Latour 2013, 123). Treating language as just another assemblage has far-reaching implications for the way one approaches the literary artifact because it requires one to treat signifiers and the “things” they signify as both capable of producing (unexpected) effects in the “real” world outside the text. This idea of text as assemblage has allowed Miruna Stanica to reconsider the process by which a writer authors a text. She writes that each stage in the writing process requires the human (author) to delegate some of his or her power to other entities (Stanica 2016, 236). Such a view resists anthropocentricm by highlighting instead how the nonhuman is dynamically involved in the creation of the work of art. Responding to Latour’s assertion that “action is dislocated,” Stanica writes, “if objects do not completely obey our intentions even when they do the work for which they have been designed, we are in charge neither when we are delegated to nor when we are delegating” (Latour 2005, 46; Stanica 2016, 237). Furthermore, authors rely not only upon the assemblage of a specific language to make their meaning known, but also upon other kinds of assemblages: institutions and generic expectations, other texts, the print technology that makes the final book in its material form possible, and the embodied knowledge that the reader has of everyday actants, just to name a few. Latour sidesteps the question of textual mediation (i.e. the assumption that objects within the text have no materiality, are simply linguistic signifiers) by noting that objects which appear in texts frequently produce

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effects that their human authors never anticipated, as they behave in a way beyond that allowed “by their author’s own philosophy of matter. Even as textual entities, objects overflow their makers, intermediaries become mediators” (Latour 2005, 85).22 This has serious implications for literary studies because Latour denies that the human (whether the individual author or “society”) has autonomous authority over the text, as he argues that objects that at one point in literary history would have been considered mere representations have an agency of their own (cf. Barad 2003). From this point of view, a text is not merely a representation of some form of reality (an approach to which Barad is fully opposed), but also, or instead, an assemblage in itself, an actant, a technology, and a performance that is capable of producing effects, what Latour calls “factish” because it seems both deceptively passive and active simultaneously (Latour 1999: 266–92). The theory of the “factish” acknowledges that, while the novel, poem, or play is itself a social actant—creating future effects and encouraging assemblages—it is also, at least in part, made by humans. Brown expresses a similar point of view, when he writes, We might … while recognizing the “cultural work” that literature consciously strives to accomplish, look outside that instrumentalizing frame to sense how the play of the text can foreground the conditions of such “work.” Or we might thus grant that “the only relation literature as such has to culture as such is that it is part of it,” while nonetheless discerning that the part of culture that literature is is precisely that part that understands culture as a loose assemblage of disparate parts. (Brown 1996, 18; in qts. Thompson 1991, 13)

Brown emphasizes the role of literary texts as being made (reflecting society at a specific point) while simultaneously contributing to future constitutions of that society. James Thompson recognizes this as a reciprocal relationship between the state of the social at a particular point in time and the novels that emerge out of that society, that “represent and effect, solidify, or modify social change” (Thompson 1996, 7). While novels at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sometimes purport to represent Things as They Are (Godwin 1794), Thompson highlights their use as markers of “things as they might be.” Lamb takes this idea a step further, speaking of novels as “fidelity to the consequences of an imagined beginning,” arguing that novels do “imaginative work,” the mimetic quality of which is irrelevant because they “do not mirror a given

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reality but wholly constitute our sense of how things actually are” (Lamb 2011, 159; cf. Thompson 1996, 12). While Thompson and Lamb both identify the novel as especially capable of such imaginative work, thinking of the text more generally as an assemblage of actants capable of heterogeneous effects allows one to examine the activity in which the book engages in both its physical and textual forms. But while all these critics recognize the reflexive relationship of the text to society, Brown’s Thing Theory points to the fact that the reflexive status of literature—that is the ambiguity between its constitutive (making) and representative (made) roles—is often identified as a threat by authors or readers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This anxiety goes beyond the fear that the author’s pen “carries [him] on,” a situation in which the author fantasizes about literature that writes itself, a state of affairs Lupton has explored in eighteenth-century literature (Disraeli 1831, 1:66). She has demonstrated that such a stance is not nearly as radical as it first seems, as it grants more power to the author by allowing them to hide behind the curtain and pull the puppet strings, as it were (Lupton 2011, 10). On the contrary, authors and narrators at the turn of the nineteenth century betray a fear that, while literature has a constitutive power, it may or may not actually function as such. These authors are not as worried that their texts will take on a life of their own, as that their texts just may not function or be read at all. This is due to the fact that, ultimately, to make any difference whatsoever, the text requires other actants—readers, specifically—with the material opportunity and desire to take up the physical book and open it. The texts of this period also highlight a blind spot of Latour’s ANT that Brown’s Thing Theory helps allay—that is, sometimes the object’s inactivity, its seeming lack of effectuality can itself be a form of agency, as it impresses the modern subject with the object’s material existence outside courses of activity or productivity. The texts examined in this study attest to a developing wariness at the turn of the nineteenth century to the generating and constitutive power of the material object, as well as more specifically to the power of literature as an assemblage of the human and nonhuman, capable of altering—by affecting—reality. But these works also direct one’s attention to the question of how the physical materiality of the book and the perceived ephemerality of the text (as communicated ideas) interact and interfere with one another. While this is hinted at in it-narratives as a popular genre and gestured toward in comments about reading in Jane Austen’s novels,23 this concern becomes most explicit in the works of Thomas De Quincey and

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silver fork novels. These texts demonstrate an overt consciousness of the book as an artifact, as a printed object that can be read and enjoyed or ignored, skimmed, thrown against the wall, even destroyed. Despite the silver fork novel’s obsessive interest in questions of “representation”—the representation remains a material thing, capable of being possessed, displayed, and interpreted by others. Communicated in a material book, the “high” intellectual work done by the text can become a victim to a whim of fancy as well as natural decay. This “coming down to earth” moves from imagining the book as an important cultural force, as constitutive, or as a cultural agent to seeing it also as functioning as little more than a decoration, a decoration that may itself fall to pieces or fall out of one’s hands and smash one’s toe. This letdown further highlights the difficulty humans have in understanding the full implications of the inanimate—that unpredictable quality of material objects to do what we least expect or to do nothing at all—a problem Brown draws attention to as the human confrontation with the thing. If Latour is the champion of the unmodern actant, the object that has always been central to human development, but which has been maligned by modernity as passive and silent, Brown orientates himself first to this modern, silent, alien object, the object continually hailed in literature and by society as separate and other. This difference has caused some critics to question Brown’s relevance for nonanthropocentric thinking (Stanica 2016, 236; Armstrong 2012, 23). However, considering that Brown ordinarily makes nineteenth-century and modernist literature the subject of his inquiry, his work can be seen as particularly interested in the emergence of modern anthropocentrism and its inherent blind-spots as well as anxieties. Against the “modern” background in which humans assume dominance over nonhumans—a stance which often expresses itself through not acknowledging the object at all—Brown argues that humans suddenly see objects as things when they recognize their otherness, their position beyond prescribed human programs of action. Brown is interested in objects that are perceived as no longer functioning properly and how, in that lack of functioning, “things seem to assert their presence and power” (Brown 2001, 3). While Brown refrains from referring to objects as “actants” or “agents” as Latour does, the examples he uses correspond to those of Latour—“you cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get bopped on the head by a falling nut”—in that the thing has a perceivable effect that is not rooted in human agency (3–4).

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Although Brown, in contrast to most new materialists, focuses his interest on the human apprehension and awareness of this materiality, he never loses sight of the fully materialized object. In short, Brown’s work draws attention to moments of crisis in anthropocentric thinking as they are expressed in literature. By speaking of the thing, he highlights the irony inherent in recognizing thing agency in this period: any surprise expressed at such agency points toward the entrenched assumption that humans have dominance over and are in control of the materiality with which they come in contact. But such a human–thing confrontation also has the power to undermine the strength of anthropocentric modes of thought, even as it highlights their cultural dominance. Latour similarly notes that “accidents” have the effect of allowing one to “hear” what objects “silently did and said” (Latour 1992, 233). Objects (Latour’s actants) become things in Brown’s understanding because the logic of the commodity fetish—itself a modern explanation—does not adequately explain the human relationship to the nonhuman. If one takes the idea of the assemblage seriously, objects never merely signify or accomplish what “humans” have (supposedly) designed them to signify because their “attachments,” as Latour calls the connections between any set of actants, infinitely increase the possibilities, the consequences of their assemblage (Latour 1999, 275). In regard to Victorian fiction, Freedgood argues that those objects that are assumed in modern discourse to function as metaphors or symbols within literature give way to things that are characterized by their physical metonymies, their “connections to people and places beyond the novel that have meaning in the novel” (Freedgood 2006, 154). Although one finds some “symptoms” of “commodification,” she writes that literature of the Victorian period also featured a “thing culture” “in which systems of value were not quarantined from one another and ideas of interest and meaning were perhaps far less restricted than they are for us” (Freedgood 2006, 7, 8). So also, in the pre-Victorian period, the meanings attached to objects are often rooted in their position on a wide spectrum between active and passive: the works explored in this study imagine objects, in turn, as prescribers of human action, as constituting human subjects, as denotative (of class or status), and finally, as simply existing. To imagine an object as an active narrator or as a carrier of narrative humor (it-narratives; Austen), as a narrative adversary (De Quincey), or as constitutive of the individual (silver fork) requires an understanding of materiality that allows for its generative and productive power.

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However, while the texts explored in this study demonstrate a number of ways that objects have agency, both within the story-world of the novel as well as on those that choose to read the novel, they also demonstrate that sometimes the thing asserts its power by simply existing without producing any effect and that this ineffectuality can be as disconcerting—if not more so—as an object that seems to actively rebel against its human user’s wishes. Brown argues that, in modernity, humans employ a “discourse of objectivity that allows us to use [objects] as facts” (Brown 2001, 4) and that, when this fails, humans are forced to acknowledge their own limitations in controlling matter. This confrontation, whether arising from the object behaving contrarily to the human’s wishes or simply not doing anything at all, appears repeatedly in the texts of this study, and it is accompanied by a range of aesthetic effects. In it-narratives, Jane Austen’s juvenilia, and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions, such a confrontation can be mined for its humorous effects, but in these texts, it also more subtly registers social inequality, as the frustration of a human’s desired course of action is portrayed again and again as the result of having fewer resources, fewer material attachments. These are also works that suggest the actantial nature of the book itself, as a thing that is able to create effects—both physically and intellectually— but which may also be entirely ineffectual or irrelevant. As Brown highlights, while “literature” and “narrative” imply intellectual ephemerality, books as objects embody this matter-as-actant paradox in and of themselves, having both a material (the physical book) and a textual (the narrative contained therein) presence. Brown writes, “the experience of texts—be they mediated by books or boulders or billboards—amounts to a dialectical drama of opacity and transparency, physical support and cognitive transport, representation as object and as act” (Brown 2010, 26). Given that Latour argues vehemently against an analytical approach that separates the social lives of humans from the world of inanimate materiality, it is better to conceive of this book–text paradox as he conceives of “the prime mover of an action,” namely, as “a new, distributed, and nested series of practices whose sum may be possible to add up but only if we respect the mediating role of all the actants mobilized in the series” (Latour 1999, 181). However, the materialized form of the text also enables the possibility that it may not produce much of a perceivable effect at all. Brown’s note that “an unfamiliar alphabet” can completely forestall this dialectical process problematizes the concept of any “pure” textual experience (Brown 2010, 27). Even texts one can read and understand are

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mediated through a language that is itself a complex assemblage that derives much of its power from the embodied experience of reading in the physical world. This study tracks a developing consciousness of how objects relate to narrative and narrative relates to objects, a process that culminates in a sense of texts as factishes—objects that are created and create simultaneously, texts as “action displacers” (Latour 2010, 11). This sense of text as factish is hinted at in the early works examined, becomes more apparent in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions, and becomes explicit in the metareferential play of silver fork novels. The narrators of these latter works explicitly assert their own roles over the construction of the text because they feel their control being sapped by generically prescribed conventions that threaten the very form of the novel; thus, despite these novels’ overt narrative voices, they nonetheless seem to come into being “without the practitioner ever believing in the difference between construction and reality, immanence and transcendence” (Latour 2010, 22). Such texts are factishes because, arising from a highly conventionalized genre, these novels are, in a sense, already written before they are even begun. The metareference of these works suggests an authorial performance, in which the author self-consciously takes on the role of the silver fork novelist, in a sense, melding with the genre.

Conspicuous Things, 1789–1832 When one turns to it-narratives at the end of the eighteenth century, it becomes clear that the genre had seen better days. With the heyday of the satiric and self-reflexive it-narrative past, what remains are new texts directed at children which explore the didactic value of the genre as well as some generic, satiric stragglers—rightly denoted unoriginal and “hackish.” If the it-narrator had provided, as Stanica (2016) and Hudson (2007) have argued, a segue to the naturalization of the distanced, omniscient, third-person narration found in the works of Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen, then the development of this latter form at the end of the eighteenth century made the earlier it-narrator to some degree obsolete. What accounts then for Mark Blackwell’s assertion that several it-narratives at this time took on unprecedented levels of agency within their own narratives (Blackwell et  al. 2012, 4:xv–xvi)? What one finds in these late eighteenth-­century it-narratives, which come from both satiric and didactic traditions, is a kind of it-narrator that, rather than standing by as an

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observer and commentator of human actions, actually plays a role in these actions; the it-narrator examined here positions itself as an authority figure, in extreme cases becomes conflated with its own user, and teaches the human reader how to live a moral life. These are the roles, respectively, assumed in the anonymous “Adventures of a Mirror” (1791), “The Adventures of a Pen” (1806), and Eliza Andrews’s The History of a Pin (1798). Rather than addressing questions of commerce or exchange, which had already been largely exhausted by their forebears, these narratives interrogate questions of agency and, in so doing, evolve into quasi-sociological accounts of human–nonhuman networks. However, by claiming a heightened, sometimes even hyperbolic level of agency, these objects do more than reverse the human–object hierarchy: they inadvertently complicate the idea of agency as such, as they call into question any form of “pure” or autonomous action. Such a reading highlights how the representation of a specific kind of active materiality itself evolves over the period to produce new and unexpected effects—effects which apply to both form and content, not only  as the it expresses its agency in everyday life, but as the object–narrator device evolves in response to literary convention and reader expectations. By pressing the genre’s potential to an extreme, these narratives respond to the clichéd nature of the genre at the end of the century as well as to the newly claimed authority of objects in the didactic children’s literature of the 1780s and 1790s. These extremely active it-­ narrators are thus the result, not of some genius author, but of literary and market materialities—how could it be otherwise, the pen seems to ask, when an author and pen are the same, metonymically? The humor that results from such gross exaggerations of material agency and responsibility has a correlate in the hyperbolic usage of objects in Austen’s juvenilia, from roughly the same period. These texts also show a keen awareness of eighteenth-century generic norms and a willingness to engage in “incongruous exaggeration” to supplant and expose those norms. The juvenilia are full of everyday, rather banal domestic objects, which appear in bizarre settings or, alternatively, grotesque objects that appear in idealized, pastoral settings. David Alworth’s explication of the social connections between object, character, and setting demonstrates how settings, as opposed to individual objects, can also function as actants; he has traced a “literary tradition” from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries “in which the question of setting (how to represent the palpable world) is imbricated with the question of social form (how to represent

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society and its constituents)” (Alworth 2016, 10). By juxtaposing socially suggestive settings (e.g. a gentleman’s estate, Newgate prison) with socially reprehensible behavior, the juvenilia not only highlight the stylized conventions of the eighteenth-century novel, but they also raise questions regarding Regency injustice, as they draw attention to how objects are implicated in forms of oppression by being made to serve as surrogates for humans, allowing the humans themselves to eschew their moral responsibilities (cf. Lamb 2011, 14–15). While in Austen’s later novels, this self-reflexivity is largely muted, Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Emma (1815) feature objects that are more specifically narratively generative, as they dictate reader expectations and motivate human characters. Here the insight of Stanica that objects can “enable their human owners’ mobility and action in the narrative” (Stanica 2014, 516) is helpful for thinking about the way that Austen deploys objects to strengthen the causal relationship between a protagonist’s character and the actions they then engage in within the plot. Objects in these novels function prescriptively as they direct and limit the view of the reader and circumscribe the actions available to the protagonists. But such prescription is more than a narrative device in these novels, as becomes clear in the case of Jane Fairfax, who becomes quite “fenced in” by a love token—the pianoforte—an object that dictates specific behavior of her and that, by its sheer physical size, disallows her from keeping her secret engagement a secret much longer. The love token in both of these later novels is especially significant for how it demonstrates how an object valued for its symbolic significance and its ability to increase and generate human intimacy relies upon its materiality, and especially its visibility, to function properly. Much like its Renaissance counterpart—the glove (Stallybrass and Jones 2001)—the love token allows one to possess the beloved, to be metonymically connected to the beloved, while publically signifying such a connection. But this material manifestation of the beloved is problematized in Austen through the trope of secrecy, a narrative setup that makes the materiality of the love token immediately conspicuous to both the reader and the other characters of the novel. Like the objects in the juvenilia, the object’s ability to continue to generate narrative at the moment of generic resolution—the marriage plot—helps underline Hilary Dannenberg’s point that female authors of the period responded to pressure to conform to generic expectations by hinting at counterfactual narratives that may have better represented the contemporary plight of women than their generically

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homogeneous counterparts (Dannenberg 2008, 138). At the ends of both novels, these material tokens of love become narrative detritus that gestures toward other, less felicitous probable outcomes to the stories being told—even if these outcomes are never realized. If Austen experiments with objects that hint at counterfactual narratives, De Quincey’s autobiographical works take to heart the consequences to the subject of acknowledging the alternate timelines and life trajectories that material objects enable. De Quincey cites the unpredictability of material “accidents” as a means of calling into question his own agency, and hence, his own responsibility over his opium addiction. Moving beyond an interrogation of where responsibility for action lies, as in it-­ narratives, De Quincey claims the agency of the material thing—in Brown’s sense—as a talisman against nineteenth-century moralistic accusations that he has deliberately chosen an “immoral” path by eating opium. However, as one reads Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar (1821) it becomes clear that De Quincey nonetheless wishes to control matter, to make his material possessions signify his own respectability, the subjectivity that he claims for himself as a middle-class “scholar.” These desires frequently betray themselves in his attempts to constitute his subjectivity within his own text—representations from which, as one scholar has pointed out, De Quincey himself is conspicuously absent (Rzepka 1988). Yet simultaneously, De Quincey suggests that he is aware that the text he is helping to assemble, the text in which he tries so hard to communicate his subjectivity, may be the only thing that is one day left of him—that is, if it survives. This understanding of the text as inscribed in a physical book haunts the Confessions and De Quincey’s other writings, as he continually reflects on the ephemerality of the book, its potential to decay and turn to dust, a process that obliterates the contents of the book. Such an event also represents a potential anti-­ narrative, a narrative void enacted by the mutable nature of matter. This anxiety about the materiality of the book form in Confessions is thrown into new light by his later autobiographical works, which demonstrate a philosophical fascination with the way that objects spark human thought, allowing ideas and feelings to come into being that would have been impossible had the human been operating alone. De Quincey’s view of the role of the object in this sense is not unlike how Webb Keane, following Latour, describes the “interaction between the possibilities suggested by form and the taking up of that suggestion” when creating the work of art: “The object in this case plays a role in the creation of

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something new that is not reducible to the acting subject’s intentions” (Keane 2005, 189; cf. Latour 1993, 10). De Quincey’s openness to material agency and his acknowledgment of this agency is thus what makes his autobiographical writings, paradoxically, expressive—perhaps more so than those of his Romantic idols, Coleridge and Wordsworth—of the ways that the human and the nonhuman are intertwined, dependent upon one another, constituted by one another. This constant vacillation within De Quincey’s autobiographical writings between a utilization of objects as tools or even slaves of human subjectivity and a celebration of the thing that introduces unprecedented life trajectories and artistic possibilities creates a tension in the work that is reflective of De Quincey’s own ambivalent relationship to his nonhuman, material environment. The acknowledgment of his loss of control in the face of the material means that De Quincey cannot deploy these objects merely to signify middle-class respectability within his work, and his awareness of how his possessions (and sometimes dearth of possessions) have helped shape his life trajectory becomes an implicit acknowledgment that he cannot be considered the sole author of this work: rather, the English Opium-Eater is constituted, not just by what he eats, but also by the other forms of materiality that he relies upon and with which he shares his life. Similarly, while silver fork novels, with their derivative plots and obsessive material enumeration, might seem as far generically from autobiographical drug writing as possible, they betray their contemporaneous status in their deployment of two prevalent concerns: an anxiety about the role of textual and visual representation in constituting the human and a skepticism about the agency of the author as the main creator of the text. On the one hand, objects in these novels seem far more passive than in the other texts examined, as they usually appear in the narrative in extensive lists or in aperspectival descriptions of lavish interiors; however, on the other, these descriptions were widely believed to be used by readers as a means of determining what was in fashion, so that the stronger the belief in the fidelity of the representation, the more powerful the novel became as a prescriptive guidebook for shopping as well as for the performance of a specific class. That such novels explicitly pandered to an aspiring middle class is further testified in the anxiety that silver fork novels register toward the power of the medium—whether visual or textual—to change or alter the human subject, especially to devalue them. Subjects in these novels are constituted by their (re)presentations—that is by the “face” they choose to

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perform (with their material accoutrements) as well as by how they are then represented by others in material mediums, for example, the novel, the newspaper, the lithograph, and the miniature. Especially in Catherine Gore’s Pin Money (1831), the belief in an external “false” self and an internal “authentic” self is registered in explicit terms, as the protagonist finds herself increasingly mired in financial difficulties and material embarrassments that do not reflect her “true” character. Yet, while Gore registers this concern, her novel nonetheless supports the reading of the silver fork as a performance guidebook, suggesting that any “moral” stance the narrator takes is disingenuous. Neither is this crisis of subjectivity only Gore’s concern, as evidenced by the fact that such themes are present in the earliest examples of the genre, for example, Henry Lister’s Granby (1826) and Marianne Hudson’s Almack’s (1826). Objectification—what had been “a form of power” for the aristocracy in the Renaissance (Stallybrass and Jones 2001, 116)—becomes increasingly problematic for an aristocracy that is seeing not only its own power erode, but is also witnessing and, in many instances, enabling its own supplantation by newly rich manufacturers and tradesman (Hughes 1992, 334). But while these novels demonstrate the power of objects to reconstitute entire spheres of social life through “fashion,” objects within these novels are also aesthetically problematic. In contrast to the objects that narrate that began this study, the objects found in this other popular genre impair narrative by becoming narrative dead weight, static objects in superfluity. As plot is subjugated to description, to groups of beautiful objects arranged in an appealing, but ultimately static manner, three works—Hudson’s Almack’s, Gore’s Pin Money (1831), and Benjamin Disraeli’s The Young Duke (1831)—feature human narrators who turn to metanarrative commentary to allay the effects of seemingly unending description. Through frequent allusions to description and generic conventions, as well as self-­ conscious evaluations of other “fashionable novels,” these human narrators perform their roles as silver fork authors in order to distance their readers from potential boredom, while simultaneously still providing them with the descriptions so necessary to their social aspirations. While drawing attention to representations versus “reality,” the metareferential stance of these narrators suggests that there is no deeper level: the performance becomes the reality—for the manufacturing classes, the aristocracy, and the professional author.

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Notes 1. Sattaur (2012) provides a detailed summary of studies on Victorian “Thing Culture.” Julie Fromer (2008) and Isobel Armstrong (2008) each examines tea and glass, respectively, and investigates these objects’ various meanings, metonymies, and the complex ways in which they intersect with larger cultural questions. A collection of essays edited by Katharina Boehm (2012a) investigates the relationship between the human body and materiality, namely, “the dynamic modes in which subjects and objects merge, exchange positions, and materially transform one another” (Boehm 2012b, 2). A collection by Tamara S. Wagner and Narrin Hassan (2010) looks at the role of food in literature, the “cultural as well as social functions of meals” in both canonical and non-canonical works of the long nineteenth century (vii–viii). Turning their gaze to the broader British empire, John Plotz (2008) examines objects carried with Britons on their travels and movements around the world, and, in the reverse direction, Suzanne Daly (2011) looks at the objects imported to Britain from India and, following on Brown’s work on the “material unconscious,” examines how “in making something called ‘India,’ the English also remade themselves” (4). 2. Robertson (2008) provides a broad overview of medieval and early modern criticism that intersects with thing theory and Latour’s ANT.  More specifically, J. Cohen (2006) examines the medieval conception of monsters, and Lightsey (2007) and Yates (2003) discuss the role of automata in the medieval and early modern periods, respectively. 3. For Latour, this supposed difference between what he calls “facts” and “fetishes” is itself rooted in the anti-fetishist’s denial that humans both make and are made by their materials—whether idols or icons, see Latour (2010, 8–9). 4. Hammons (2010) further complicates questions of human subjects and nonhuman objects by examining the paradoxes inherent in objectifying the Renaissance woman. The role of gender in discussions of objectification is also taken up by it-narratives and discussions of eighteenth-century prostitution, see B. Blackwell (2007) and Alber (2016, 61). 5. Stallybrass and Jones view the later anxiety over the reification of people and objects as resulting from a distinctly capitalist attempt to “separate … the priceless (us) from the valueless (the detachable world)” (Stallybrass and Jones 2001, 116). 6. That this dynamic continued to develop into the Victorian period is attested by the title of Deborah Cohen’s comprehensive study of Victorian objects, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (2006) 7. Campbell locates this evolution in the Romantic period, but already in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith writes of how the imagination plays

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a role in shaping the ordinary person’s perception of the lavish consumption of the rich (Smith 1979, 4.1.9). 8. For more on the hardships faced in these intervening years, see Tombs (2015, 390–91). 9. Marx argues that the means of production takes on a life of its own, as it can no longer be controlled by either producer or consumer, forever alienating the object of production from what should be its human origin: “our own product has risen up against us; it seemed to be our property, but in fact, we are its property. We ourselves are excluded from true property because our property excludes other men” (Marx 1975 (1823), 3:226–27). Georg Lukács similarly speaks of this process as one of fragmentation as the worker becomes “a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system” (Lukács 1971b, 89). 10. Bewes is one of several recent critical theorists trying to resurrect Marxist critiques through reevaluation. Bewes sees reification as a completed fact within capitalist society, but he argues that it reveals its own reversibility (Bewes 2002, 262). Axel Honneth, on the other hand, advocates a kind of return to a “better form of praxis” (before reification) but he suggests that this form of praxis is not categorically inconsistent with some form of a capitalist economic system (Honneth 2008, 31). Honneth and Bewes are in agreement, along with Jason Edwards, in recognizing the “defeatist” leanings of some Marxist thought and in attempting to imagine new alternatives (Bewes 2002, 9; cf. Edwards 2010, 292). 11. Both Erving Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu have highlighted the important role that “invisible” material distinctions play in social life—Goffman (1974) through his analysis of unspoken but embodied “frames” of social contact and Bourdieu (2000 [1979]) in his analysis of the role that “natural taste” plays in reinforcing social hierarchies (68). Miller (2005) sums up these views of “invisible” materiality when he writes that “The less we are aware of [objects] the more powerfully they can determine our expectations by setting the scene and ensuring normative behavior, without being open to challenge” (5; cf. Brown 2001, 4). For Latour’s comments on the contributions and blind spots of these sociologists, see Latour (2005, 84). 12. Utilizing the example of Latour and Goffman, Love argues for a criticism of “close attention” that relies more on “descriptions of surfaces, operations and interactions” (Love 2010, 375). She, along with Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, has argued that description as a form of analysis has been unfairly maligned, cast either as hiding an underlying ideology or as inherently boring; instead, these critics argue that description is a valuable critical process, as it allows the critic a level of “generosity” and openness in examining the subject of inquiry (Marcus et  al. 2016, 4). Along with Felski, these critics share Latour’s concern with the power of the social

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scientist or the literary critic and how that power is deployed to arbitrarily critique or disenchant. Love quotes Latour when she writes that “instead of trying to see through the facts we should try to ‘get closer to them’” (Love 2010, 382; Latour 2004, 244). Felski similarly is weary of “explanation-as-reduction” and instead advocates continued and close attention to the subject studied (Felski 2011, 581; cf. Latour 2004, 235). James F. English (2010) provides a historical overview and critique of these problems and the new sociologies of literature. 13. More recently, Stacy Alaimo has criticized OOO for failing to recognize significant differences between different types of entities (Alaimo 2016, 179). She specifically critiques Morton for his attention to “hyperobjects,” writing that it “obscures the sort of entanglements that are the very stuff of ethical and political relations” (183). A similar, albeit less convincing, critique is made by Katherine C. Little, who, upon noticing that new materialists often employ lists of humans and nonhumans in their discussions, notes that such lists do politically counterproductive ideological work, as they “conceal the labor that went into making the thing and the power structures that determine the conditions of this labor” (Little 2019, 126). Little appears oblivious to the fact that such lists do not wholly constitute new materialist critiques; rather such lists are often catalysts for discussion as they provoke the reader to examine material things more closely. For many scholars, it is less about arguing that such constituents are the same and more about demonstrating that the boundaries are more blurred than often acknowledged. Thus, Coole and Frost speak of a “monolithic but multiply tiered ontology” where “there is no definitive break between sentient and nonsentient entities or between material and spiritual phenomena” (Coole and Frost 2010, 10) and Latour writes of the “many metaphysical shades between full causality and sheer inexistence” (Latour 2005, 72). 14. Stanica writes, “We find the terms—like ‘actant,’ ‘network,’ ‘figuration,’ and ‘transformation’—so important to Latour’s theory in Greimas’s description of narrative structure. … The actant is the actor before figuration in the discourse—an entity in its capacity of performing a narrative function” (Stanica 2016, 237). Høstaker notes that Latour is especially indebted to Greimas in his formulation of technical mediation, in which a person uses an object to achieve a goal: “Latour here uses the same example as Greimas and Courtés: a monkey fetching a stick in order to get a banana” (Høstaker 2005, 15; cf. Latour 1999, 181–82; Greimas and Courtés 1982, 246). Høstaker provides an extensive overview of Latour’s borrowings from Greimas and critiques Latour’s method (2005, 22). 15. Babette Bärbel Tischleder has also found Latour’s ANT useful to articulating what she describes as the “material imaginary,” that is how “literary

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texts invite us to imagine physical objects in active roles” in American literature (Tischleder 2014, 18). 16. This view differentiates Latour’s work slightly from that of Barad (2003), who writes, “Reality is not composed of things-in-themselves or things-­ behind-­phenomena but ‘things’-in-phenomena” (817). While Latour is similarly in agreement that the “social” world cannot be understood outside of the “assemblages” of humans and nonhumans that make it up, and he calls into question the individual actant’s ability to act alone (Latour 2005, 46–47), Barad goes further than Latour in arguing that no agency can be attributed to these entities when separate from one another, but rather that such agency can only be found in the “entanglements/relationalities”: “Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world” (Barad 2003, 818). 17. More recently, Latour has become a public intellectual, writing for a wide audience. No longer exclusively examining the work of scientists in laboratories or addressing himself only to academics, Down to Earth (2018) discusses such current issues as social inequality, climate change, migration, and the global elite. However, a red thread from his work on ANT, especially from Reassembling the Social (2005), is still discernable in his most recent writing, namely, his belief that inequalities stem from material realities; thus, he writes that the 1990s saw not only an “increasingly vertiginous explosion of social inequalities,” but also a “systematic effort to deny the existence of climate change—‘climate’ in the broad sense of the relations between human beings and the material conditions of their lives” (2018, 1). 18. Latour’s colleague, John Law, goes so far as to call his own work Organizing Modernity (1993) an “organizational ethnography” (2). 19. Since, as Graham Harman notes, Latour rejects the notion of “language as the basis for all philosophy,” a stance putting him at odds with Jacques Derrida and poststructuralist understandings of textual mediation, one can approach language as a result of the assemblages of humans (sound) and nonhumans (object, sign) (Harman 2009, 24). Interestingly, such an approach to language nonetheless highlights its precariousness, leaving ironically, “a surprising Derridean moment. Since actants are always fully deployed in the universe, with no true reality lying in reserve, Latour dismisses any distinction between literal and metaphorical meaning of words” (24; cf. Latour 1988, 189). 20. In a sense, the everyday function of language has been blackboxed, a term that refers to how “technical work is made invisible by its own success”; that is, “when a machine runs efficiently … one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity” (Latour 1999, 304).

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21. Barad and Latour both stress that Michel Foucault’s thought has often been misapplied. Latour is obviously indebted to poststructuralism, and he is careful not to do injustice to it in his criticisms; however, he argues that Foucault’s work has often been (unjustly) interpreted as a “social explanation” despite his close attention to the “tiny ingredients from which power is made” (Latour 2005, 86). Similarly, Coole and Frost (2010) highlight Foucault’s interest in genealogy to show his awareness of how materiality contributes to the social order (32–33). 22. Latour takes as his example William Pietz’s readings of the objects of analysis in Marx’s writings (Pietz 1985, 1993). 23. See Austen 2005, 28–34, 37; Austen 2006b, 107. See Chap. 4, n. 3.

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Edwards, Jason. 2010. The Materialism of Historical Materialism. In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 281–298. Durham/London: Duke University Press. English, James F. 2010. Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature After ‘the Sociology of Literature’. New Literary History 41 (2): v–xxiii. Felski, Rita. 2011. Context Stinks! New Literary History 42 (4): 573–591. Flint, Christopher. 2007. Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction. In M. Blackwell, 162–186. Freedgood, Elaine. 2006. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fromer, Julie E. 2008. A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England. Athens: Ohio University Press. Garofalo, Daniela. 2012. Women, Love, and Commodity Culture in British Romanticism. Farnham: Ashgate. Godwin, William. 1794. Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, 3 vols. London: B. Crosby. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Gore, Catherine. 1831. Pin Money, 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. Greimas, A.J., and Joseph Courtés. 1982. Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hammons, Pamela S. 2010. Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse. Farnham: Ashgate. Harman, Graham. 2002. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court. ———. 2009. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Anamnesis. Melbourne: Re.Press. Hatton, Nikolina. 2019. A Tale of Two Pianos: Actants, Sociability, and Form in Jane Austen’s Emma. Open Cultural Studies 3 (1): 135–147. https://doi. org/10.1515/culture-2019-0012. Honneth, Axel. 2008. Reification and Recognition: A New Look at an Old Idea. In Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, ed. Martin Jay, 17–94. Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press. Hood, Thomas. 1872. The Workhouse Clock. In Poems by Thomas Hood, 38–40. New York: G.P. Putnam and Son. Høstaker, Roar. 2005. Latour – Semiotics and Science Studies. Science Studies 18 (2): 5–25. Hudson, Marianne Spencer Stanhope. 1827 (1826). Almack’s, 3 vols. 2nd ed. London: Saunders and Oatley. Hudson, Nicholas. 2007. It-Narratives: Fictional Point of View and Constructing the Middle Class. In M. Blackwell, 292–306.

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Hughes, Winifred. 1992. Silver Fork Writers and Readers: Social Contexts of a Best Seller. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 25 (3): 328–347. Investiture, n. 2018. OED Online. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com. Accessed 11 Mar 2018. Jameson, Fredric. 1990. Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic. London/New York: Verso. Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass. 2000. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Keane, Webb. 2005. Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things. In Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller, 182–205. Durham/ London: Duke University Press. Kelly, Kevin. 2010. What Technology Wants. New York: Penguin. Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. 1997. Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press. Lamb, Jonathan. 2011. The Things Things Say. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1992. Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts. In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe E.  Bijker and John Law, 225–258. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004. Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–248. https://doi. org/10.1086/421123. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge/Medford: Polity. Law, John. 1993. Organizing Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. LeCain, Timothy J. 2017. The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lightsey, Scott. 2007. Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Lister, T.H. 2005. Granby. In Silver Fork Novels, 1826–1841, ed. Clare Bainbridge. London: Pickering & Chatto. Little, Katherine C. 2019. The Politics of Lists. Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 31 (2): 117–128. https://doi.org/10.108 0/10412573.2019.1581567. Love, Heather. 2010. Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn. New Literary History 41 (2): 371–391. Lukács, Georg. 1971a. Narrate or Describe. In Writer & Critic, and Other Essays. Trans. Arthur D. Kahn, 110–48. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. ———. 1971b. Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat. In History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone, 83–222. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lupton, Christina. 2011. Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Material Texts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2016. Paper Ontologies: Reading Sterne with Bruno Latour. Textual Practice 31 (2): 299–313. Marcus, Sharon, Heather Love, and Stephen Best. 2016. Building a Better Description. Representations 135 (1): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1525/ rep.2016.135.1.1. Marx, Karl. 1975 (1823). [Comments on James mill, Élémens d’Économie Politique]. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 3: 211–228. New York: International Publishers. McKendrick, Neil. 1982. The Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-Century England. In The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, 9–33. London: Europa P Limited. Miller, Andrew H. 1995. Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture, and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Daniel. 2005. Materiality: An Introduction. In Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Mintz, Sidney W. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin. Morton, Timothy. 2000. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Boston: Harvard University Press. ———. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pietz, William. 1985. The Problem of the Fetish, I. Res 9: 5–17.

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———. 1993. Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx. In In Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz. Ithaca: Cornel University Press. Plotz, John. 2008. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Plumb, J.H. 1982. The acceptance of modernity. In The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H.  Plumb, 316–334. London: Europa P Limited. Robertson, Kellie. 2008. Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicism, and the Premodern Object. Literature Compass 5 (6): 1060–1080. Rouse, Joseph. 1996. Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rzepka, Charles J. 1988. The Body, the Book, and ‘The True Hero of the Tale’: De Quincey’s 1821 Confessions and Romantic Autobiography as Cultural Artifact. In Studies in Autobiography, ed. James Olney, 141–150. New York: Oxford University Press. Saglia, Diego. 2009. Luxury: Making Sense of Excess in Austen’s Narratives. In A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite, 355–365. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Sattaur, Jennifer. 2012. Thinking Objectively: An Overview of ‘Thing Theory’ in Victorian Studies. Victorian Literature and Culture 40: 347–357. Smith, Logan Pearsall. 1912. The English Language. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Smith, Adam. 1979. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D.  Raphael and A.L. Macfie. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Smith, Woodruff D. 2002. Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800. New York: Routledge. Stallybrass, Peter, and Ann Rosalind Jones. 2001. Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe. Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 114–132. Stanbury, Sarah. 2015. The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stanica, Miruna. 2014. Bundles, Trunks, Magazines: Storage, Aperspectival Description, and the Generation of Narrative. Style 48 (4): 513–528. https:// doi.org/10.5325/style.48.4.513. ———. 2016. Portraits of Delegation. The Eighteenth Century 57 (2): 235–249. https://doi.org/10.1353/ecy.2016.0015. Thompson, E.P. 1991. Customs in Common. London: Penguin Books. Thompson, James. 1996. Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. Durham: Duke University Press. Tischleder, Babette Bärbel. 2014. The Literary Life of Things: Case Studies in American Fiction. Campus Verl: Frankfurt am Main. Tombs, Robert. 2015. The English and Their History. London: Penguin Books.

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Trentmann, Frank. 2017. Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First. London: Penguin Books. Veblen, Thorstein. 2005. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. Delhi: Aakar Books. Wagner, Tamara S., and Narin Hassan, eds. 2010. Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives of Consumption, 1700–1900. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Wahrman, Dror. 2004. The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wall, Cynthia. 2006. The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wallace, Elizabeth Kowaleski. 2018. ‘Character Resolved into Clay’: The Toby Jug, Eighteenth-Century English Ceramics, and the Rise of Consumer Culture. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31 (1): 19–44. Weatherill, Lorna. 1988. Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760. London/New York: Routledge. Yates, Julian. 2003. Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2006. What Are ‘Things’ Saying in Renaissance Studies? Literature Compass 3 (5): 992–1010. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113. 2006.00361.x.

CHAPTER 2

A Pin, a Mirror, and a Pen: Everyday It-Narrators, Conspicuous Tools

Often termed “novels of circulation” or “object tales,” it-narratives are a form particularly suited to address eighteenth-century anxieties surrounding an increased reliance upon trade, credit, consumable goods, and the relations between humans and nonhumans.1 On the one hand, with its circulation motif and considering the conditions under which these authors were writing, the genre is inundated by consumerism (Douglas 2007, 148; cf. Flint 2007; Alber 2015). On the other, this is a strange representation of consumerism in which the consumed—that is, the eponymous object of the tale—speaks out about its role in human society. As the thing becomes the narrator and the human the narrated, the genre seemingly reverses subject and object categories. As a genre that purports to make ordinarily inanimate objects speak for themselves, these texts seem to demand an analysis informed by the material turn. However, to use the word genre in this context is to group all of these texts together and to suggest that they deal with questions of human and nonhuman or subject and object in a similar manner. In reality, the it-narrative is a trope adapted to a number of types of texts with different aims and with varying levels of success in achieving those aims. Even the two simplest criteria, set out by Liz Bellamy, for what binds these texts together generically—that these “its” are almost always passive and/or circulating—have exceptions, exceptions that prove significant for understanding how object agency was considered and discussed in the period.2

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Much of the scholarship devoted to these narratives focuses on the period between 1750 and 1780, the zenith of the satiric application of the genre (Flint 2007; Hudson 2007; Lupton 2011; Stanica 2016), but it-­ narratives continued to be published until the turn of the twentieth century. Over its long history, the manner in which the it-narrative dealt with questions of agency and passivity or the subject–object dichotomy changed. It-narratives from the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth demonstrate concerns that popular writers were taking with them into the new century—concerns that would continue to develop in the works of Jane Austen, Thomas De Quincey, and in the silver fork novels of the pre-reform period. These it-narratives have features that were stereotypical of their earlier counterparts as well as features that were unprecedented. While a chapter on earlier it-narratives could be titled “conspicuous narrators, everyday tools,” the naturalization of the trope and the subsequent attempt to re-defamiliarize the it-narrator led to the transformation of these everyday objects from “mere” narrators to participants in the action of their narratives. Despite the fact that as a literary motif, the inanimate narrator is already a kind of thing—an object that talks back—in practice, over much of the eighteenth century, these narratives avoided raising questions of actual object agency. The it was utilized instead for its ability to move quickly between disparate social and spatial positions with the objects themselves functioning as an excuse for an otherwise anthropocentric, albeit fragmented, narrative point of view (Lynch 1998, 96; Ellis 2007, 105). Christopher Flint writes that despite the titles of these narratives—which often cite “adventures” or “memoirs”—the texts have little to do with the materiality of the objects themselves and instead provide “a secret examination of human experience”; he concludes: “The commodity, even when it is given voice, is thus still rendered as a potential aid to human self-­ realization” (Flint 2007, 177).3 Similarly, Miruna Stanica argues that these texts should not be considered “‘autobiographies’ of the object,” because “for much of the text, the materiality of the object is forgotten” in favor of its narrative function, which is to connect otherwise unrelated literary material (Stanica 2016, 241). While they remain interesting from a narrative perspective, many of these eighteenth-century texts have little to say explicitly about human–object relations beyond the facts of circulation. However, toward the end of the eighteenth century, these its increasingly express a moral point of view as the motif is co-opted by didactic children’s literature. The explicit appeal to moral authority required of

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such literature contradicts the idea of a neutral observer, something previous satiric it-narratives had relied upon in order to soften their ideological messages (Hudson 2007, 293–94). Didactic it-narratives paradoxically situate allegedly “passive” objects in positions of authority, raising questions of who or what is responsible for actions carried out with the use of tools. In utilizing the it-narrative form, didactic it-narrators open the genre up to questions of object agency—a problem that, interestingly, didactic authors considered a potential threat to their educational project. In the didactic The History of a Pin (1798), an ostensibly passive pin laments its role in carrying out actions that it condemns. The text queries questions of responsibility and highlights the paradox of a moral object since the didactic narrator is almost always reliant on its human user to follow its moral instincts. Furthermore, the pride and pleasure that the pin takes in performing noble actions calls into question its claim to total passivity, an ambiguity that undermines the entire didactic thrust of the text, as it paradoxically suggests that the pin is both actively moral and passively immoral. In concurrence with the emergence of such didactic it-narratives, satiric texts from the period explicitly attribute agency to objects in an attempt to defamiliarize the already naturalized role of the it-narrator as satirist or social critic. “Adventures of a Mirror” (1791) and “The Adventures of a Pen” (1806)4 take the it-narrative motif to an extreme: while the mirror positions itself as an “advisor” to its human owners and mistakes their homage of their own reflections as esteem for itself, the pen takes responsibility for everything its human owners do—even the things that do not require its usage. Both narratives, which can be read as parodies of earlier eighteenth-century it-narratives, stress a ludicrous degree of responsibility, responding to the naturalization of the it-narrator by resorting to an even greater degree of the “incongruous exaggeration” required of satirical texts (Stableford 2009, 358). In following the implications of the it-narrator to their extreme ends, these narratives become inadvertent chronicles of human–object relations. They narrate both the crucial role that objects play in all kinds of human-­ motivated actions and outline how humans respond to the disruption of the subject–object hierarchy, to seemingly rebellious, inconvenient, or broken objects. The mirror text accomplishes the “substitution of words for silence” which Latour recommends to the sociologist who wants to understand the role that tools play in everyday life (Latour 1992, 232). The pen’s thingness is revealed in the human responses to its functioning

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or malfunctioning, as the user inadvertently acknowledges the work of the tool, even as the human narrator writes a narrative recalling the work of his own writing implement. These narratives self-reflexively stress the crucial position of the object that has had action delegated to it, while, at the same time, they raise questions about where responsibility for action lies. They narrate the invisible role that material objects play in everyday life and chronicle the human’s shock in the face of the thing that resists his or her wishes. While eighteenth-century it-narratives may comment generally upon the increasing prevalence of objects in public and private life, the appropriation of the trope by didactic literature, as well as the intensification, even parodying of the genre’s conventions toward the end of the century means that these later it-narrators do not simply implicitly suggest the interconnected nature of people and things by stringing together a series of anecdotes on commerce. Rather, by questioning where responsibility for action lies, they explicitly suggest that human action is contingent upon and affected by the workings of the material world. In some cases, this point becomes so exaggerated as to suggest a comedic worldview in which objects act irrespective of their human owners or users, a reversal of the (misguided) assumption that humans ever truly act without their material aids. These narratives function as a useful introduction to conspicuous objects in fiction in the early nineteenth century because of their transitional nature. The narratives examined here take a clichéd eighteenth-­ century motif and modify it to remain relevant to the concerns of the turn of the century. In so doing, they inadvertently interrogate the assumptions and the connotations of a genre that became popular at the same time that the human–nonhuman dichotomy was becoming more entrenched. As such, many of the concerns hinted at in these narratives are more fully addressed in later, early nineteenth-century works: these include concerns such as if it is possible to have too many objects, where the limit of human control over matter lies, how authors self-reflexively interact with their own texts as objects, and, finally, if it is possible for an object to exert agency by (seemingly) doing nothing.

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It-Narratives in the Eighteenth Century Charles Gildon’s The Golden Spy (1709) introduced the concept of an it-­ narrator to British literary practice, and his text was quickly followed by Joseph Addison’s “Adventures of a Shilling” (1710) in the Tatler.5 In both these narratives, specie relate their adventures from being passed hand to hand. In The Golden Spy, the human narrator draws attention to the power invested in money, writing, I have indeed often thought what noble and diverting Discoveries might be made, could any of the Louis d’Ore’s or Guineas reveal by discourse what Affairs they have negotiated, and those secret Intrigues, which have produc’d strange and terrible Effects in Kingdoms, and Families. (Gildon 1709, 2)

This observation is followed by his discovery that his specie can speak, a fact that suggests, for him, “the Sensibility of Things which we generally not only esteem mute but inanimate” (2). The idea of using the perspective of things to shed light on human transactions—both social and financial—was taken up by later eighteenth-century narratives and continued into the nineteenth century. From its inception, however, Ann Louise Kibbie notes that Gildon took advantage of an anxiety that would become a major theme of later it-narratives, “the fear that, in the world of the marketplace, in which human beings themselves are becoming more and more like commodities, things are coming to seem more and more human” (Kibbie 2006, 114). Although Gildon’s and Addison’s narratives were followed by a handful of narratives in the 1730s and 1740s, the genre did not become widely utilized until 1750, after which an it-­narrative was published for every year, on average, from 1750 to 1850 (Bellamy 2007, 134).6 While most it-narratives take the first-person point of view of the object, animal, or specie, others simply make the object the focal point of the narrative, relating its adventures in the third person, as in the case of Francis Coventry’s The History of Pompey the Little: or, the Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog (1751). The more common first-person it-narrative often has a frame narrative which attempts to account for how such a story came into print in the first place. As in the case of Gildon’s work, such narratives begin with a human frame narrator who chronicles how an object began speaking with him and who reports the first-person narrative of that object—as though it is easier for a reader to believe that an object speaks

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than that an object writes. This framing device is utilized in the works The Memoirs and Interesting Adventures of an Embroidered Waistcoat (1751), “Adventures of a Quire of Paper” (1779), and Theophilus Johnson’s Phantoms; or, The Adventures of a Gold-Headed Cane (1783), among others. Although this method had become less common toward the end of the century, “The Adventures of a Pen” (1806) nonetheless opens with the anonymous, ostensible author recounting how one day, having fallen asleep after being hard at work, he dreamt that his pen stepped out of its standish and began relating its various adventures and travails (BIN 4:258). The alternative to this method is for the it-narrator to initiate its own narrative, often giving no account for how the work made it into publication. Quite often, it-narratives cite literary precedent. The eponymous narrators of The Travels of Mons. Le Post-Chaise (1753) and The Sedan (1757) begin their accounts by citing Aesop’s talking beasts; the Sedan adds Phaedrus and Ovid as authorities on the volubility of matter, writing, “How this may be philosophically proved, is not my business” (Sedan, BIN 3:82; cf. Post-Chaise, BIN 3:30). Other it-narratives merely cite the talking guineas, toys, and animals that have come before the public in recent decades. Finally, some narratives rely on no introduction at all, but simply begin, like an autobiography, with an account of the object’s pedigree or “birth,” which usually refers to its manufacture, as in the case of the “Gold-Ring” (1783), the mirror, and the “Silver Thimble” (1799) (BIN 4:81; BIN 4:165; Palmer 2012, BIN 4:233). Despite these formal differences, most of these narratives are linked through their use of the circulation motif, what Liz Bellamy identifies as the “transference of the narrator or protagonist between otherwise unconnected characters” (Bellamy 2007, 121). That specie or paper money was a convenient as well as relevant it-narrator—especially when addressing concerns about the commercialization of society—is evidenced in its continued popularity even into the nineteenth century. This becomes apparent in such titles as Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal; or, the Adventures of a Guinea (1760–64), Helenus Scott’s The Adventures of a Rupee (1782), and Anne Hamilton’s The Adventures of a Seven-Shilling Piece (1811), to name a few. However, as the genre developed, it-narrators took their shape in any number of objects (and even animals)—often, as Christina Lupton has observed, with the object chosen having a thematic connection to the specific concerns raised within the text (BIN 3:vii). Nonetheless, whether the protagonist was a waistcoat, a sedan chair, or a pin, the effect of such circulation was a disjointed narrative made up of

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seemingly random anecdotes, a quality to which many contemporary reviewers in the Critical Review drew attention. Reviews often suggested that this narrative device was especially suited to inexperienced or bad writers looking for a pretense to draw any number of “trite” observations on contemporary society (Anon. 1788, 569).7 For this reason, Mark Blackwell has located the contemporary critical attitude toward these narratives—and sometimes even the attitudes of the authors themselves—in fears regarding the increased commercialization of print culture: Their writers’ cognizance of, and anxiety about the niche they occupy is revealed by their shameless co-optation of voguish narrative idioms, by their insistent allusions to hack culture, and by the framing devices that signify their self-conscious participation in a generic tradition. (Blackwell 2007a, 189)8

In this view, both objects and authors are passive participants in the nascent machinery of capitalism. Just as the object is passive to the human actors who trade it from hand to hand, so also the author is a passive purveyor of generic material that needs only to be repackaged in order to be marketed as something “new.” For this reason, Bellamy also identifies passivity as a key marker of the genre, as the narrator, “whether animal, vegetable, or manufactured object, lacks independent agency,” and the objects, rather than telling their own stories, merely relate the stories of those who own them (Bellamy 2007, 121). This supposed passivity is literally inscribed into the grammatical structure of many texts, as it-narrators employ passive constructions or position themselves in the accusative case (as the direct object) within the sentence: the “Very Unfortunate Goose-Quill” (1751) relates how a human “transformed me into a Pen” and how it was “enclosed in a black Case” (BIN 4:15–16). Johnson’s gold-headed cane writes that “we were tied up in bundles, and sent on board an English East-Indiaman” (BIN 4:48). Often such passivity is registered in explicit terms, as objects suggest their “slavery” and refer to their human “masters” and “mistresses” or to themselves as “property.”9 At other times, this passivity is registered in ontological terms, as when the consciousness in “Adventures of a Quire of Paper” (1779) asks, “Why was I made a vile thistle?” (BIN 4:27). Yet occasionally, alongside such slavish descriptions come others more dignified, as objects refer to themselves as co-operators (Embroidered Waistcoat, BIN 3:13), instruments (“Very Unfortunate Goose-Quill,”

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BIN 4:16), aids, and so on. In Christopher Smart’s “The Genuine Memoirs of an Unfortunate Tye-Wig” (1751), the wig writes that when in the use of an actor, “I may say without Vanity, that I have acted the principal Parts, both in Tragedy and Comedy, to the satisfaction of the publick; and have often, with the Assistance of skillful Barbers, gain’d an Applause, in which the Actor what wore me, had no Share” (BIN 3:4). Such comments hint at the fully entangled nature of Latour’s idea of the “social,” of cause and effect, passivity and agency. Latour even utilizes the space of the theater as an example of the “thick imbroglio where the question of who is carrying out the action has become unfathomable”; because the production of a play requires so many different humans and nonhumans, it becomes impossible to locate the origin of action: “the very word actor directs our attention to a complete dislocation of the action, warning us that it is not a coherent, controlled, well-rounded, and clean-edged affair” (Latour 2005, 46). The wig not only suggests the crucial role it plays, but also acknowledges the aiding help of other humans—the barbers—suggesting a whole range of material practices that contribute to the end result, namely, the total effect produced on stage for the audience’s entertainment. Nonetheless, when referring to their own work, even these more active objects suggest that while they may be instrumental, they ultimately have no power to resist the uses to which their human “masters” put them. This notion of passivity is further challenged, however, by the ways in which these objects facilitate their narratives. While many it-narratives articulate as well as trigger anxieties about how commerce is infiltrating culture—through literature, for instance—it-narratives are also a form of literary technology, an alternate literary mode to that found in the eighteenth-­century novel. Nicholas Hudson (2007) and Stanica (2016) have each highlighted the innovative nature of the it-narrator, as it enables the author to achieve a variety of effects that neither the authorial narrators nor the first-person human narrators of the eighteenth century could achieve. Because of the object’s circulatory ability, it allows authors to create narratives with insights into multiple classes of society as it passes deliberately or accidentally between diverse classes of people.10 Examples include when the waistcoat passes from his original owner, a Lord, to an informant of the Lord’s (BIN 3:14) or when a doll is dropped by a little girl visiting a prison and picked up by one of the prisoner’s daughters (Mister [1816], BIN 4:288). The genre thus functions as an egalitarian mode of writing, as it allows its protagonist to move across social lines in

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a way that no human protagonist ever could. While this very quality was denigrated by contemporary critics, Douglas speculates that it may have been what lent it-narratives so much popularity (Douglas 2007, 148). Furthermore, Hudson argues that in the second half of the eighteenth century, the it-narrator was utilized as a means of effecting political neutrality during a period of volatile class relations by enabling the “illusion of a socially and politically non-committed perspective” (Hudson 2007, 294). Although the selection of events that the author chooses to present before the reader in an it-narrative is necessarily biased, the nonhuman position of the object narrator ostensibly allows it to report events without judgment, leaving the reader (seemingly) to draw her own conclusions. Hudson views the it-narrative as a crucial stepping stone toward the “modern non-focalized narrative” utilized initially by Ann Radcliffe and then to greater effect by Jane Austen (298, 301). Blackwell also emphasizes the “extraordinary narrative possibilities” of these texts, possibilities found in their “proximity” to their human owners coupled with their “presumably cool, objective distance from human affairs” (Blackwell 2012, 243). Festa, following Hudson, writes that this ostensible objectivity is due to “the personified narrator’s lack of personality—the absence of character development; the fact that its point of view cannot (always) be fastened to a human analogue,” qualities that, ironically, have also contributed to the genre’s exclusion from traditional histories of the English novel (Festa 2015, 343–44; cf. Blackwell 2004). When viewed from the perspective of Actor-Network-Theory, this usage of the it-narrator as a narrative device that achieves specific purposes demonstrates the ability of the object to act on the part of the human in a unique way. Stanica argues that it-narrators functioned as “delegates” in Latour’s sense because they allowed eighteenth-century authors to create the narrative effects described above before the naturalization of non-­ focalized narration: In my reading, these magical objects perform a function that cannot be accomplished by human characters—they motivate a perspective that is not tied to a human body and a human subjectivity and that prefigures the position of the disembodied third-person narrator of the later realist novel. (Stanica 2016, 238)

Additionally, many it-narrators either compel their users to relate their stories, as Stanica demonstrates with The Sedan (1757), or they claim

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supernatural abilities to understand their owner’s thoughts, like the guinea in Johnstone’s Chrysal. Both of these qualities suggest, she argues, “an early form of the representation of thought” (244–45). Both Stanica and Hudson demonstrate how written objects are used as a means of accomplishing specific effects on the level of narrative before such effects have been accepted or naturalized for human narrators. It-narratives form an interesting contrast to the silver fork novels of the late Regency: while it-narrators can be seen as “delegates”—helping the human author achieve otherwise impossible narrative effects, the objects in silver fork novels become a narrative hindrance, forcing the human narrator to intervene on a metanarrative level. Otherwise, these two genres have much in common, sharing a mostly negative literary reputation and critical treatment as well as a self-reflexive interest in their own modes of production. Their similarities heighten the significance of the different ways in which they each engage with objects, suggesting how much the perceived relationship between humans and their possessions changed over the roughly 40 years in between. For the it-narrator, despite its use as a delegate from a narrative point of view, however, Stanica agrees that the actual materiality of these objects is often of little concern, as “the object becomes a disembodied voice that observes and recounts the stories of its human owners” (241). This passive position is undermined toward the end of the century through the utilization of it-narrators in children’s didactic literature. Because of the moral tendency of this literature, late  eighteenth-century it-narrators, more often than their forebears, lay claim to some form of responsibility and, through responsibility, quasi-subjectivity and agency.

The History of a Pin (1798): Responsibility and the Didactic It-Narrator Although passivity might have been the norm for mid-eighteenth-century it-narratives, toward the end of the century, the adaptation of the trope to children’s didactic literature meant a compromise in the perceived narrative neutrality that Hudson has identified. In addition to simply showing good and bad behavior, the aims of didacticism require that the object narrator explicitly comment and make value judgments on the behavior that it observes. Thus, the object itself must wield some form of moral credibility, if not authority. However, crediting an object or an animal with

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moral authority is problematic in and of itself, as it disturbs the “natural,” anthropocentric order of things put forward by the Enlightenment and which these narratives attempted to inculcate into their readers.11 The problematic nature of moral, inanimate objects that in turn speak is brought to the foreground in Mary Ann Kilner’s The Adventures of a Pincushion (1784). Here, Kilner informs the reader early on “that it is to be understood as an imaginary tale”: “so, when you read of birds and beasts speaking and thinking, you know it is not so in reality, any more than your amusements which you frequently call making believe” (BIN 4:66). By 1800, despite the prevalence and possible naturalization of the technique of a speaking object or animal in children’s didactic literature, this speaking-object fallacy and its implications still concerned some authors. Before initiating her The Life of a Bee. Related by Herself (1800), Lucy Peacock writes that she is utilizing the motif of the bee relating its own story for the pleasure of the reader with the caveat that, “I wish not to persuade you that a Bee any more than another insect is capable of speaking or of moralizing” (BIN 2:194). In addition to the seeming incongruence of a speaking object and a mimetic depiction of life, these narratives raise the question of how these animal or object narrators claim didactic authority. This is perhaps especially problematic for the purchased object, whose “purity” is contaminated by its relations with trade. When the amiable little girl Clara Steady buys the eponymous narrator of Palmer’s The Silver Thimble (1799), it rejoices at no longer being in the possession of a “mercenary” peddler: “for it is a truth, too fully established to be disputed, that the example of superiors oftener tends to the corruption of moral virtue, than any natural temptations originating from the in-being of vice” (BIN 4:236). But if, on the one hand, the object may be sullied by its relations with impecunious tradesmen, on the other hand, some objects gain their sense of morality through their process of manufacture: the thimble writes that it was “the offspring of an union founded on rational principles,” the works of which were “renowned for worth and beauty” as well as “stability and firmness” (4:233). In fact, Miss Steady purchases the thimble for its steel top, noting that it will be “more durable” than the more ornamental thimbles for sale (4:236). In so doing, she demonstrates her virtue by making a prudent choice. Furthermore, the thimble is a useful object, ostensibly necessary to the education of young girls. Unlike other didactic it-narrators which take the forms of various toys, the thimble symbolizes industry and domesticity, the very qualities that it then attempts to impart to its readers.

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The didactic lesson of the novel lies primarily in contrasting the behavior of Miss Steady with her cousin, Miss Amelia Careless. Miss Steady’s virtue is demonstrated not simply in making a good choice, but also in taking care of the object and being careful not to waste, by losing, it. The narrative suggests that the object’s life, or consciousness, rather than being contingent on continuous use (the thimble may sit, lost, for a long time before being rediscovered), is only threatened by destruction, when it is recognizable as a thimble no longer. The narrative thus registers a “life” of objects that has no connection to humans, although the object itself frequently longs for such a connection and is only satisfied once it is again of use. In The History of a Pin, as Related by Itself (1798)—probably written by Eliza Andrews12—one finds a similar correlation between the specific qualities of an object and its moral worth, but this link becomes increasingly problematic as the text moves forward: the pin is put to both “moral” and “immoral” uses while inconsistently claiming agency in the former and attempting to eschew responsibility over the latter. Published in London by Elizabeth Newbery, a prominent publisher of children’s literature and many it-narratives from the period, one may safely argue for the text’s popularity, given its five reprints over the next nine years (Hudson 2017, 27–28). Formally, the pin is a perfect candidate to fill the it-narrator role: with its high use value and low exchange value, its various owners rejoice at finding it but do not take particular pains to keep from losing it, causing the pin to pass frequently from person to person. That the pin is essentially monetarily valueless is evidenced by a scene in which a young servant girl, who has already been depicted as a paragon of virtue, picks up the pin from the carpet of her mistress and takes it home with her (BIN 4:222). Although pin production was not fully mechanized until the 1820s, the process had been perfected to the degree that Adam Smith utilizes the efficiency of pin production as an example in his Wealth of Nations (1776), reporting that, in some contemporary pin-manufactures, ten persons could produce “upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day” (Smith 1979, 1.1.3).13 Thus, the once highly valued pin could be exchanged somewhat freely by the last decade of the eighteenth century, making it a perfect it-narrator. Through being given, lost, or purposefully discarded, this pin passes from the hands of a young mother, to her servant, to a peddler, to a miser, to the miser’s niece, to a cleaning girl, to a governess, to a woman at the theater, to her ward, to the ward’s friend, only to

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miraculously land in the hands of its original owner once again—a common denouement. This first-person narrative has no frame, beginning with the pin promising to convey only the “simple facts” of its existence (BIN 4:215). Like the thimble, the pin’s credibility springs from its physical qualities: “I had a good head, and was prepared by various hands with sharp qualities, to make myself useful in the world” (BIN 4:215). The pin’s material qualities are ostensibly what make it an ideal narrator to instill into young readers the importance of education and moral virtue. Furthermore, due to Smith’s case study, the pin would have also triggered associations with good manufacturing processes and the division of labor, with Smith’s attention effectively transforming the miniscule object, Benjamin Hudson writes, “into a symbol of industrial modernity and labor” (Hudson 2017, 26). The pin is also in a unique position to champion domestic virtue. Heather Klemann coins the phrase “didactic book-toy hybrid” to draw attention to earlier eighteenth-century didactic literature that was sold with an accompanying ball or pincushion with pins; these pins in turn helped the child keep track of his or her good and bad behavior. In addition to highlighting the “primacy of the physical and material alongside the linguistic activity of juvenile didactic reading,” in their utilization of ordinary household objects, these texts emphasize the everyday nature of moral virtue (Klemann 2011, 231).14 A similar emphasis on the domestic is evident in Kilner’s Pincushion (1784): Trifles are frequently regarded by the giddy and thoughtless as of no moment, when essentials are taken care of: but it is the repetitions of trifles which constitutes the chief business of our existence. In other words, people form their opinion of a young lady from her personal appearance; and if, because she is at work, and in want of pins, and destitute of a Pincushion, she has quite undressed herself, and her cloaths are dropping off, she will be thought a negligent slattern. (BIN 4:69)

The passage frames seemingly insignificant, domestic practices so that one’s use of a pin or a pincushion is viewed as a microcosm to the macrocosm of one’s virtue. Together, whether it is an actual, physical pincushion or a textual depiction of one, Klemann writes that these domestic articles come to signify “the preparedness and mindfulness of a young woman who always has a pin on hand” (Klemann 2011, 231).

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As a descendent of this tradition, the it-narrator pin does not simply hint at these associations, but explicitly maps out the usefulness of the pin in everyday domestic duties. In addition to relying upon its specific qualities in order to justify its role as a didactic narrator, the pin also emphasizes the moral work in which it is often engaged. Although the pin stresses its passivity—like previous it-narrators—and assures the reader early on that “if I have been in error, the fault has been that of others, not my own” (BIN 4:215), its assertions are belied by the active language it uses to describe its good actions: “I pointed to great A—still no repetition of great A came from her lips; she looked both at me, and her mamma, with rather an arch countenance; but no great A could we get echoed from her tongue” (4:216). Hudson argues that this is an instance of self-reflexivity in the text, as “it acts as not only the subject of the sentence but also a singular letterform of the alphabet being taught and a representation of the slender form of the pin itself” (2017, 31). The pin not only aids education, it embodies it. By placing itself in the subject position, the pin takes responsibility over the child’s education, a fact which implicitly gives it the right to impress upon children the value of that education. This stressing of its own usefulness for education occurs again and again: “I was called upon to lend my aid” and “no one was better able than myself to point out the beauties and useful part of language to the young learner” (BIN 4:215). Furthermore, the pin credits itself for the role it plays: “I was flattered with the hope of being instrumental to her treading the paths of piety, morality, and virtue” (4:215). The quality of being useful is elevated to a virtue, as the pin actively enables the moral and practical education of a young person. Such instances problematize the pin’s ostensible passivity: if it is truly passive, then its actions cannot have a moral impetus beyond what springs from the human user. But the pin, according to its own testimony, is not passive. Its ostensible passivity is discarded in favor of moral triumph when, after listening to a young woman make plans to exclude the rest of her family from her recently acquired inheritance, the pin declares, Happily I had an opportunity to express my indignation and contempt for these base sentiments: just as she spoke, she put her hand to her head, and I instantly tore her finger with all my strength; in revenge, she dragged me from her knot, and threw me to the ground. Blessed was my escape from such a mistress. (4:221)

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The pin puts itself in the active position, claiming responsibility for enacting justice on an immoral person. Although the pin has not itself moved— the woman’s hand has come to the pin—the accidental nature of the prick allows the pin to claim agency over it. The claim of passivity at the beginning of the text turns out to be a disclaimer over the eventual immoral actions of the pin. The duty of the didactic text to demonstrate bad behavior as negative means that the pin must be used for questionable actions as well as virtuous, raising the question of what happens to the moral authority of the pin when it acts as a delegate of wrongful actions. The pin demonstrates the paradoxical nature of a moral object, since this object (having been designed by humans for human purposes) could be said to have conflicting moral duties. On the one hand, it should faithfully serve its human owner and it should long to do so—just like Palmer’s lost thimble, never happy until it is again in use. On the other hand, these didactic objects espouse a higher moral sense, one that could be said to be a priori to their human users’ wishes. Philosophically, the pin vacillates between an empirical, Humean account of causality, in which necessity—that is, a force external to its control—propels it to engage in certain actions15 and a view of morality that places the emphasis on personal responsibility, regardless of external forces.16 The pin thus admits that after having passed into a household of young ladies, it has also done immoral things: “I must be obliged to relate, though I am sorry to do it, that I have been scandalously ordered to trace dogs, and cats, and many other animals, upon the table, in the hands of both the ladies, by turns, when they ought to have been attending to the lessons of their master” (BIN 4:225). While stressing its passivity—it was “ordered”—the pin nonetheless suggests that it becomes a needful extension of the human’s physical abilities, a fact that calls into question its moral authority, especially considering the view of the thimble on the importance of one’s companions for one’s moral development. Furthermore, the pin’s nature—its innate ability to prick—becomes problematic. Pricking is the very quality that allows the pin to be so useful to the world, and it is also the quality that allows it to punish its evil mistress. However, this pricking can be used for malicious purposes, such as when a Jewish mother,17 while attempting to instruct her son, uses the pin to enact a punishment. At first, the pin is overjoyed at once more having become an aid to education, but “short-lived and fallacious were these hopes” for, when the young boy fails to perform as his mother wishes,

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I, compelled by his mother’s rage, penetrated to his finger bone. The poor boy (I say poor boy, because I did not consider him so much in fault as his intemperate and impatient teacher) flew into the street, tore me with indignation from his bleeding hand, and trampled me, his innocent victim, under his feet. If he had possessed more age and judgment, it is to be hoped he would not have been so unjust, for I was only a passive instrument under the dominion of an enraged woman. (BIN 4:219)

Generally, the language of passivity in this passage is consistent with the other “immoral” actions in the narrative. The pin is utilized by the mother to perform this action, and the pin can do nothing about it. Telling are the similar responses of humans to these two scenes of pricking: just as the young woman rips out the pin and throws it to the ground, so also the boy expresses his anger toward the pin. Both humans irrationally seem to attribute motivation to the object, rather than the user or perpetrator (in the first instance, the woman herself; in the second, the mother). While the former scene lacks the human motivation of the latter, both the victims’ responses suggest that they acknowledge the role the pin played in the pain they experienced—leaving the pin equally implicated in each. Blackwell has interpreted the boy’s response as an indication of Hume’s “primitive theory of causation” (BIN 4:xvi)18 which, as Julie Park has demonstrated, was often applied to children in the eighteenth century, a fact that emphasized primitive humans’ and children’s “mutual tendency to project causal force to objects contingent or accessory to their experience of pain” (Park 2010, 36). Labeling such responses as “primitive” and advising that humans should not respond in this way suggests that motivation is necessary for “enlightened” adults to constitute something as action. It would follow, then, that the young woman and the boy, by responding emotionally, inadvertently impute agency or malicious intent to the pin. However, as I demonstrate with “The Adventures of a Pen” further on, their behavior is also explained in terms of Brown’s idea that when objects behave in an unexpected manner, humans become suddenly cognizant of the limits of their own desires and abilities and therefore must acknowledge the object’s independence. The inconsistencies in The History of a Pin surrounding the question of agency and responsibility demonstrate how difficult it is to depict an object with moral credibility that consistently remains passive. Once the question of agency, or even responsibility, is raised, all the pin’s actions come under close scrutiny. While not always the case in didactic children’s texts, in The

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History of a Pin, the very attempt to establish the pin’s passivity jars with its moral triumphs, creating inconsistent discourses on agency and responsibility that subvert one another. While Bellamy argues that the didacticism of these narratives is undermined by “the structural incoherence that constitutes the essence of the circulation format” (Bellamy 2007, 133), the pin’s insistence on its passive status coupled with its claim to justified action suggests that this ideological ambiguity also arises from these narratives’ ambiguous representation of object agency.

Defamiliarizing the Satirical It-Narrator in “Adventures of a Mirror” (1791) Like the didactic pin, everyday objects that claim responsibility over their actions and voice explicit opinions on these actions are also found amongst satirical it-narrators at the turn of the nineteenth century. The power of satire has been attributed by various critics to its “grotesque or absurd” elements (Frye 1973, 224), its “unnatural” tendencies (Alber 2017), or its “incongruous exaggeration” (Stableford 2009, 358). Much like with humor, the naturalization and repetition of these features weaken their effects, so that satirical elements must continuously evolve. As the it-­ narrator became clichéd after over 40 years of consistent use, the writers of these texts evidently felt that the motif had to be strengthened—even to the level of parody—to continue to be effective. The eighteenth-century philosopher James Beattie was the first to use “incongruous” to describe humor (Morreall 2016). In his essay “On Laughter and Ludicrous Composition” (1776), Beattie argues that laughter is based upon “comparison,” the uniting together of “inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances” (Beattie 1809, 153, 155).19 In this same model, he includes hyperbole—“Humorous amplification will generally be found to imply a mixture of plausibility and absurdity, or of likeness and dissimilitude” (175). Under this definition, it-narratives are humorous because they use mundane, circulating objects and transform them into conscious social commentators. Beattie’s warning that “familiar hyperboles” will not be humorous, as “some degree of surprise” is necessary for the process to function, describes the dilemma facing the authors of satirical it-narrators at the end of the eighteenth century (177).

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Festa has argued that didactic literature took over the it-narrative motif partially because of the “market saturation” of the satiric speaking object (Festa 2007, 315). She references an often quoted article in the Critical Review of 1781: “This mode of making up a book, and styling it the Adventures of a Cat, a Dog, a Monkey, a Hackney-coach, a Louse, a Shilling, a Rupee, or—anything else, is grown so fashionable, that few months pass which do not bring one of them under our inspection” (Anon. 1781b, 477–78). This attack is repeated in 1783 when a reviewer in the magazine remarks that “this mode of conveying political censures, private scandal, or general satire, is almost exhausted” (Anon. 1783, 234–35). By the last two decades of the eighteenth century, the it-narrator had evidently become tediously familiar. The naturalization of the it-­ narrator may be why in the following texts, a mirror and a pen assume a level of responsibility that is ludicrous, even for it-narrators, as each claims an extreme level of agency from which many of their circulation forebears abstained. The two texts examined in the rest of the chapter almost do away with the notion of the object’s passivity altogether, as these it-narrators suggest that they have independent agency. In “Adventures of a Mirror,” this agency is largely a matter of perspective, as the mirror misinterprets its own relationship to its owners and conflates its physical qualities with moral virtue as it remarks on the value of its reflections. The pen claims more direct agency, as it refuses to cooperate with its human user and is in turn punished for its rebellion. These narratives attribute to objects a form of human morality that suggests a parodying of earlier it-narratives and an intensification of the trope. By attributing agency and imputing responsibility to these objects, these narratives make literal a view of agency found in Hume’s writings that sees action as flowing out of a “conjunction of objects” including “the operations of the body and of brute unintelligent matter” (Hume 2007b, 8.1.22). By articulating agency along the lines of cause and effect, these narratives “follow the actors themselves” in Latour’s sense, as they recount in detail the interactions between humans and the objects they use as tools (Latour 2005, 12). Three anonymous “letters” published in the Ladies Magazine of January, February, and May of 1791 comprise the incomplete “Adventures of a Mirror.” The work cuts off somewhat abruptly with textual indications that the author intended to publish more installments. Despite Blackwell’s note that “its anonymity and incompleteness suggest an amateur author” (BIN 4:163), the mirror’s unique point of view suggests an

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innovative approach to the it-narrative form. As a mirror, it is not particularly prone to circulation and instead bears similarities to the few “static narratives” that Bellamy identifies (Bellamy 2007, 119).20 The mirror text contains no frame narrative, beginning instead with a defense of why the mirror feels it has the right to relate its history—“I think I may claim most of these honours which have been bestowed on persons eminently useful in the world” (BIN 4:165). In expressing itself thus, the mirror brings to memory Samuel Johnson’s comment (1750) that in glass and its various forms “lay concealed so many conveniences of life, as would in time constitute a great part of the happiness of the world” (Johnson 1801, 51).21 The mirror’s strong self-regard is further emphasized in how it signs its letters, as simply the mirror. While neither overly satirical nor heavily didactic, the mirror’s position in a Lord’s household and its subsequent position in an upwardly mobile middling family allow it the opportunity to offer several moral “reflections” to the reader on vices such as gambling and the love of fashion. The ironic turn of the narrative is achieved throughout by juxtaposing the perspective of the mirror, which sees itself as an active agent, with that of its viewers, who, once they recognize its splendid size and luster, are soon distracted by the sight of their own features. This makes the mirror largely invisible to those who spend so many hours staring into it, invisibility being another form of “silence” in Latour’s sense, as the work that the object does is effaced by the failure of human perception (Latour 1999, 185). The language of the mirror vacillates from that of earlier it-narratives, which describe themselves as aids, to a much more active language. At some points, the mirror suggests that it is simply a tool, aiding its human owners: “I was often the means of discovering an error in arrangement, a defect in symmetry and uniformity which had escaped my lesser namesakes in the dressing room” (BIN 4:166). But this normative idea of the mirror as passive aid is more often undermined by the object’s sense of active agency, noticeable in how it interprets the responses of its human users: “I enjoyed, too, the happiness of knowing that from me there was no appeal. If I offered a reflection upon an error, it was corrected; and if on consulting me all was declared to be right, no alteration then could be permitted” (4:166). The mirror sets itself up as an authority figure, as an advisor, claiming human-like influence over its human beholders. This sense is strengthened by its claim in the beginning that “My family … have had a very large share in the refining and polishing of mankind to their present state of civilization” (4:165). The mirror understands itself (and

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its ancestors) as playing a crucial role in how human beings are able to reflect upon their outer appearances. Thus, the mirror makes literal the mediating, even dialectical potential of the material world found in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807). Daniel Miller writes that Hegel’s work “suggests that there can be no fundamental separation between humanity and materiality” since “we cannot know who we are, or become what we are, except by looking in a material mirror, which is the historical world created by those who lived before us” (Miller 2005, 8). The it-narrator mirror makes this process explicit by emphasizing how individuals and their actions would have been different, if not for its civilizing work. While the mirror’s comments are rife with potential for a psychoanalytic reading, the physical necessity of the mirror in this configuration should not be forgotten. Even in Jacques Lacan’s own formulation of the mirror stage, the material circumstances of confronting oneself in a mirror are taken seriously into account.22 One simply cannot view oneself from head to toe without such a device, making the device a material tool useful for constructing one’s self-subjectivity and for changing the persona one creates for others’ apprehension. The mirror recognizes that when humans look in it, they assume certain gestures, poses, and, on finding something amiss in their outer appearances, immediately correct it. The radical or hyperbolic turn of the narrative rests on the mirror’s claim that it directly causes this behavior. The lack of perception on the part of the human user does not forestall a human response to the workings of the mirror; on the contrary, it becomes clear that the human response is programmed, to use Latourian terminology, not to recognize the mediating work of the object. Because it physically reflects anything that appears before it, the mirror, excepting its frame, is invisible by default. The mirror’s invisibility is compounded by the fact that the mirror’s human beholders are prone to be so enthralled by their own reflections, a state that often renders them oblivious even to the mirror’s frame. In Isobel Armstrong’s investigation of representations of glass and mirrors in nineteenth-century works, she identifies a paradox within the concept of transparency: “we would not call it transparent but for the presence of physical matter, however invisible—its visible invisibility is what is important about transparency. It must be both barrier and medium” (Armstrong 2008, 11). In the mirror text, this paradox is demonstrated by how the mirror manifests its visibility to its readers at the same moment that it narrates how it appears invisible to its users. This thematization further positions “Adventures of a Mirror” as a transitional

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text, as it uses the it-narrator trope but also anticipates the “scopic culture” in architecture, literature, and painting, which Armstrong identifies as dominating Victorian England between 1830 and 1880 (3). While the mirror’s human owners admire its transparency when it first comes into their possession—it is after all, an especially large and valuable mirror, costing 500 pounds—this admiration instantaneously turns into examinations of their own selves: I had not been here long before the whole family came to pay their respects to me. My lady approached first, held up her hands in amazement, and with an eye of curiosity beaming with delight at the same time, viewed me from head to foot—stepped backwards, then forwards, then sideling, then half averted, and all the while my silly fancy represented that she was admiring me.—Alas! I soon found out my mistake. (BIN 4:166)

The mirror mistakes its lady’s admiration and close scrutiny for appreciation of itself but then realizes that her attention has transferred to her own personal appearance. The same process occurs a few pages later when the lord and lady have guests: “Not a few compliments were paid me on account of my size and luster; but, in some cases, I was viewed with a frown of discontent. My regard for truth had made me point out several errors and improprieties from top to toe” (4:168). The mirror misunderstands the displeasure it perceives in its viewer to be directed at itself when, in reality, this displeasure is only directed at herself, as she finds fault with her own reflection, perceiving it as an unmediated representation of how others view her. By noting its “regard for truth,” the mirror claims moral credibility, like the thimble and the pin, for a value (verisimilitude) that is literally inscribed in its own physical makeup, as the mirror ostensibly presents a mimetic reflection. However, by couching this in the words of choice, “my regard,” the mirror suggests that its physical attribute is personally motivated: it claims the quality of truthfulness as a moral virtue rather than a physical trait, an indication of a Humean worldview that positions “natural abilities … on the same footing, both as to their causes and effects, with those qualities which we call moral virtues” (Hume 2007a, 3.3.4.1). By laying claim to morality, the mirror lays claim to subjectivity. This amounts to a reverse-hypostatization as the object expresses transcendent motivation for what has already been physically inscribed within it.

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Latour argues that objects have a relationship to morality—in the sense that objects can be designed in such a way as to force humans to behave in a moral manner. He writes that objects follow rules more reliably than humans and that humans have delegated not only “force” but also “values, duties, and ethics” to objects (Latour 1992, 232). Latour’s conception of morality has nothing to do with intentions or desires and everything to do with effects. The humans affected by these “moral” objects benefit from what Thomas Nagel terms “moral luck” and, specifically, “causal luck,” as they are helped into being moral “by antecedent circumstances” (Nagel 2006, 28). However, the mirror does not so much help humans behave morally as it suggests their supposed moral failures. The mirror highlights the reliability of objects as opposed to humans when it laments, “I was sorry to hear that certain abigails would probably lose their places for the blunders which I detected. This created in me some uneasiness, but it is the fate of those who speak bold truths to make open enemies” (BIN 4:168). The mirror suggests that it is either more truthful than these servant girls or more proficient at seeing or both. Indeed, it performs a function of which the servant girls are incapable, that of giving their mistress what she perceives as an “objective” view of herself unmediated through the consciousness of another human. The mirror indicates that the failure of its users to perceive its work only amplifies its power over them. The mirror registers this power in terms of an authority that it makes explicit when the Lord comes to practice a speech before the mirror and the mirror claims literal, physical power over him: “I took the liberty so often of setting him right in the articles of attitude and grimace,” including “twenty times I had his arm to pull down when he raised it” and “his left hand I had to take out of his waistcoat pocket several times, and convinced him that that practice was very vulgar” (4:167). Remarking on these examples, Blackwell argues that the mirror serves as a form of proxy interiority, a materialization of self-­ consciousness, with its advice about appearance merely reflecting, as it were, viewers’ own thoughts as they render themselves objects of their own critical attention. (BIN 4:xv)

Blackwell describes how the viewer perceives the operation. To him, the mirror serves as an extension of his own body: all he sees is himself—or so he thinks. However, in reality, there is a feedback loop in which the user looks at the mirror, the mirror reflects an image back at the user, and the

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user responds to this reflection. But this happens so instantaneously that the user remains largely unaware of the mediated nature of his reflection, of the object-tool situated in the middle of this process—an obliviousness that would eventually be corrected and transformed into codified scientific knowledge by later nineteenth-century explanations of reflection and perspective (Armstrong 2008, 96; cf. Tyndall 1870). However, because the reader takes on the point of view of the object narrating, the mirror actualizes its work by imagining that it physically changes the Lord’s movements and gestures. The rationale behind this actualization is simply that these minor adjustments of deportment and facial expression could never be corrected without the mirror’s mediating work. This process of recreating the human user (by causing him to alter his mannerisms) hearkens back to an older, but still relevant “belief that a reflective surface does not recreate the present but instead reveals the future” (Ezell 2004, 327). While the mirror cannot be said to function as a fortune-teller in the medieval or early modern sense, it has the power to bring into being and simultaneously reveal a form of subjectivity that was not possible without its mediation. The mirror’s narrative is not unlike the “strings of sentences” that Latour suggests sociologists write from the object’s point of view in order to understand how it “prescribes” human action: “do this, do that, behave this way, don’t go that way, you may do so, be allowed to go there. Such sentences look very much like a programming language” (Latour 1992, 232). While the mirror, unlike some pieces of technology, does not physically constrain its human users, the narrative suggests that its psychical effect on them is just as strong as any physically regulating device. Furthermore, the action or goal achieved on the part of the human—that is, fixing his or her dress—would be entirely impossible without the mirror’s activity. One simply cannot render oneself visible before one’s own eyes without an external reflective surface; thus, the mirror, by presenting a full-body image of the viewer, is able to provide the material by which one judges one’s own self. While the mirror is not visible through much of the text as a thing to its human users, the mirror-as-narrator is already a thing from the very beginning as it registers “how … the inanimate object world helps to form and transform human beings” (Brown 2010). While invisible for much of the narrative to those within the text, the reader’s perception of all that occurs is guided by the mirror; the mirror also serves as a moral guide by spouting a number of moral aphorisms regarding vanity and gambling. Thus,

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the mirror draws attention to itself as an actant both within the narrated story and on the formal level of narration, as it independently (without a frame narrative) guides the reader toward the realization of moral “truths.” Incidentally, its human users only recognize the mirror when they break it, and they only break it because it is invisible to them. This happens accidentally in the ruckus that follows an incident in which a man utilizes a fork to detect a gambler—also a curious use of an object. The lord who makes the “detection” is allowed the honor of dishonoring the cheating Baron, “this, however, he performed in a manner so clumsy, not being, I suppose, used to the business, that he knocked the baron with great force towards me, and his elbow coming in contact with my lower part, one fourth of me was shivered to pieces” (BIN 4:172–73). To paraphrase Brown, while the unbroken mirror gives its users the illusion of objectivity that allows them to use it as a fact, the broken mirror “can hardly function as a window” to an “objective” view of themselves (Brown 2001, 4). It is no wonder that the object is quite quickly disposed of, cut down, and repurposed into “a very handsome parlour mirror for a middling family” (BIN 4:174). The scene of breaking is actually the event that precipitates the circulation of the object, as its reduced size means that it must be removed from the home of the wealthy family and recycled down the chain of consumption. While briefly visible in a furniture-maker’s shop as an object to be acquired, its purchase precipitates once more the effacement of the object, as in its new abode the mirror again becomes invisible and serves as a silent tool and secret commentator. But while the vices of the lord’s family tend toward vanity and gambling, the vices of the mirror’s new family are characteristically middle class. When the mirror first arrives in its new home, it believes it has been removed to another furniture shop; this is because his new mistress, Mrs. Simple, has an affinity for collecting as many articles of furniture as possible. While the mirror retains its advisory role, it indicates that many of the other objects in the house have no purpose. The mirror quotes Mr. Simple as he berates his wife: I am sure you have an excellent knack at heaping goods upon goods, that there is no stirring about the house for them. You have as many pictures in the garret as would furnish a decent exhibition,—except, indeed, that few of them are sit [sic] to be seen. You have ten chairs for every guest the house can hold, and above a dozen curious India cradles, though you know we have but two children, and both grown up. Your table and tea services

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would set up a moderate china shop, had you not used them one after another, and not one set is now complete. … As to our cabinet-work, how many chests of drawers and bureaus have you, which are placed one before the other, unable to be opened if we had anything to put in them!—all this you call buying bargains. (4:175)

Mr. Simple characterizes the objects his wife amasses as collectively useless, as the family has no need for them. Mrs. Simple’s collecting instinct is ridiculed by both Mr. Simple and the author of the text, as her middle-class acquisitiveness is shown to be unrefined and irrational. But while this lack of need strips these objects of their function, their materiality remains. These objects may be made ineffectual by their setting, but they still exist and therefore operate as things. In turn, in their ineffectual recalcitrance, these objects enact their thinghood by inhibiting their possessor rather than enabling her; the mirror writes, “The rooms not immediately wanted were so filled with chairs piled one upon another, tables, &c. &c. that the doors of them when opened, could with difficulty be shut” (4:174). Here, objects that are meant to make one’s life more comfortable have the opposite effect due to their number and sheer bulk. The mirror text thus not only highlights the tool’s agency, but also imagines a space in which this agency exists outside of human programs of action. These concerns over the agency or recalcitrance of objects that have been “heaped up” or collected, and especially the question of how the negation of their utilitarian purposes highlights their status as things, become more poignant in the early decades of the nineteenth century, as testified by De Quincey’s references to household goods in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) as well as by the lavish, but boredom-­ inducing, interiors of silver fork novels.

“The Adventures of a Pen” (1806) and (Hyper)Functioning Tools While the feedback loop so evident in the case of the mirror is lacking from “The Adventures of a Pen,” the pen nonetheless exhibits an unprecedented level of agency in its narrative by interpreting its own malfunction as a rebellion against its human user’s wishes. Like the pin before it, the pen vacillates between instances of agency and passivity, but, more dramatically than the didactic pin, the pen responds to a scene of treachery by resisting its delegated role. In a parody of earlier it-narratives, didactic

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novels, and sentimental fictions, the pen expresses an inordinate amount of responsibility over the actions carried out with it and beyond—to the degree that it assumes responsibility even for things its users do without its assistance, including armed robbery. This feature is what makes the pen text the most humorous of those here explored, since, in some instances, it severs any link between actual cause and effect. The humorous tone of the piece is intensified by a strong self-reflexivity that hearkens back not only to previous it-narratives but also to eighteenth-­ century experimental literature, as it positions itself as a Sternean pen—a pen which writes a narrative almost independently of its author. In Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), he writes, “Ask my pen,—it governs me, I govern not it” (Sterne 1792, 2: 96). Blackwell notes that a “Sterne fetish” for these types of instances followed the publication of the novel as evidenced by an introductory note to The Adventures of a Hackney Coach (1781) in which the author credits “an old worn-out pen of Yorick’s” with having provided the inspiration for the text (Blackwell 2007a, 195–96; D.  Kilner, BIN 3:184). In fact, such references to the independent or inspiring work of a pen appear well into the nineteenth century—notably in Walter Scott’s Waverley (1839 [1814], 157) and Disraeli’s The Young Duke (1831, 1:66)—clear tributes to Sterne’s influence.23 By referencing Yorick’s pen, the author of Hackney Coach—probably Dorothy Kilner—pays tribute to Sterne’s own manner of paying tribute to objects. Blackwell argues that Sterne’s objects “hover uneasily” between being mediators between humans and “becoming so brimful of sentiment and subjectivity that they come to life as animate, independent interlocutors” (Blackwell 2007a, 196–97). In “The Adventures of a Pen,” as the pen moves between different users, it gains subjectivity, even feeling, and reflects a reversal of the human–nonhuman binary that plays to anxieties about the mechanized or automatized nature of authorship (190). On the one hand, the invocation of an active pen is a means of partial disavowal— “blame the pen” or the market or the publisher. Lupton has noted that the self-reflexivity found in popular literature between 1750 and 1780 attests to a high degree of medial awareness as well as to the pleasure that such awareness can generate. She argues that such self-reflexivity amounts to a trick played on the reader: “With close reading … their apparent concern with the ability of print to overtake thought can be reclaimed as belonging to the realm of willful human construction and imagination” (Lupton 2011, 11). On the other hand, in “The Adventures of a Pen,” this disingenuous strategy to hide the work of the human author is parodied by a

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pen that ludicrously takes on responsibility for things with which it has no causal connection whatsoever, a strategy that underscores the absurdity of such eighteenth-century self-reflexive strategies. In these moments, the pen becomes an unlikely stand-in for certain “modern” humans—those individuals who think they have control over all their actions, even those events resulting from chance or made possible by material tools. By taking responsibility for creating links (or endangering links) between human beings, the pen writes the human consciousness out of these actions, just like some appraisals of human agency write the material out of human action. The human user becomes merely an amanuensis, as the pen bears the weight of guilt for the action completed. Finally, more like the pin than the mirror, the pen reports a human response to its recalcitrance, its seeming malfunction, as one of supreme, even sexual violence, registering the anger that arises when the human is suddenly confronted with the limits of his or her own delegating power. “The Adventures of a Pen” was published in the European Magazine and London Review in July, September, and October 1806 under the name of the unidentified, “Dionysius.” The human frame narrator (who also characterizes himself as its author) introduces the it-narrative by musing on the “fashionable” nature of biography. Like the “mutilated sacks, or altered ruffles” quickly copied by “chambermaids or tradeswomen” to the mortification of their betters, so also with literary works “an author no sooner produces something original, and admirable, into the world, but a swarm of imitators copy his grains of sentiment and language at secondhand” (BIN 4:257). From the very beginning, the human narrator implicitly acknowledges his own work’s similarity to other it-narratives.24 Even the device of utilizing a pen as an it-narrator is nothing new, as probably “Dionysius” knows. Two very short pen it-narratives appeared one after another as part of the paper wars of the early 1750s.25 The Genuine and Most Surprising Adventures of a Very Unfortunate Goose-Quill (1751) relates a series of anecdotes that satirize authorship of the period, although the narrative does not exploit the metonymic potential of pen/author taken up by the 1806 narrative (BIN 4:1–24). Instead, it places itself in the position of an instrument and spy, as it reports on the ludicrous letters and poems that its owners write. The other anonymous text—“The Adventures of a Goose-­ Quill, In the Manner of Mrs. Midnight’s Tye-Wig” (1751)—takes greater advantage of the self-reflexive potential of the pen narrator, using the motif to comment on the relationship between authors and their

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publishers (Anon. 1751; cf. BIN 4:2). Though short, a few striking similarities between this second goose-quill narrative and the pen narrative suggest that “Dionysius” was aware of the older work, although he takes up themes that feature only briefly in “Goose-Quill” and carries them to their illogical extremes. But it is not only it-narratives that Dionysius hopes to parody. He writes that while history used to be the genre “in which was recorded the virtues and heroic achievements of such as had marked their lives with particular honours,” it is now “degraded to romance” and utilized for nothing better than “to commemorate the intrigues of a mistress, or the riots of a toper, to celebrate such beings as have never distinguished themselves by any efforts either of manual, mental, or mechanic superiority” (BIN 4:257–58). Rather than simply invoking the example of previous it-­ narratives as an excuse for his own production, the human narrator focuses on and denigrates biographies of both humans and objects, most specifically those “beings” whose purpose is merely decorative. Thus, Dionysius targets a class of biographies that would take as their heroes and heroines criminals, prostitutes, and the dissipated wealthy, as well as the lap-dogs, coins, waistcoats, and so on of it-narratives—objects that ostensibly perform merely symbolic or ornamental functions. From the beginning, the frame narrator trespasses the human–nonhuman binary by suggesting that it is as ridiculous to read a narrative about a courtesan as it is to read one about a waistcoat, since neither has any claim to heroism. By invoking these examples, he attempts to obtain the reader’s pardon for communicating “a series of circumstances, which, however ludicrous they may appear, yet often happen in everyday life” (4:258). Dionysius then informs the reader that, having fallen asleep one evening musing on these things, “imagination” “represented the Pen with which I had been writing burlesquing the historic mode” (4:258). The first-person narrative that follows is a mixture of improbable exaggerations on the part of the pen intertwined with reports of the not-so-improbable handling of the pen by humans, suggesting that the human narrator’s promise to achieve some level of mimesis to “everyday life” has not been entirely subsumed in the urge to parody such literary productions. In the course of the narrative, “The Adventures of a Pen” parodies not only other it-narratives and self-reflexive eighteenth-century texts, but also popular sentimental novels like Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art (1797) and Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799). By interspersing a self-reflexive, humorous narrative with trite moral aphorisms, the pen

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manages to create a defamiliarized reading experience that calls all of these modes into question simultaneously. The pen—as a component of the mechanical process of writing, as a metonym for authorship, and as the title character of a sentimental story—is able to reflect in turn on tools, authors, and victims, all of which, it reveals, may be various identities of the same character. Just as the didacticism of the History of a Pin is undermined by its moral agency, the pen’s overemphasized agency deconstructs sentimental narratives while highlighting the inherent contradictions of the idea of the self-reflexive author as victim of the market. The result is an uncomfortable mixing of moral aphorisms with the self-reflexive humor typical of satirical narratives. Surprisingly, unlike the mirror narrative, the pen’s ostensible agency is not merely a matter of perspective but is acknowledged by the reactions of a few of its human users—reactions to both its malfunction and its full integration into human interactions. These negative reactions to the (in)efficacy of the mediating pen gesture toward an underlying anxiety about situating who or what is responsible for actions carried out by human–nonhuman assemblages. The most striking instance of a human becoming suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the object as a thing is also the scene in which the pen most actively resists (fails to fulfill) its user’s wishes. When the pen realizes early on that it will be used for criminal purposes, it expresses a desire for independent agency: “Methought, Sir, I felt my feathers stand ruffled and erect upon my back, at the villainy of this unfaithful steward, and I heartily wished for the unassisted power either to detect him, or to escape the infamy to which I was involuntarily condemned” (4:260). Although here it implicitly suggests its passivity, only a few paragraphs later, at the end of the first installment of the piece and perhaps as a means of piquing the reader’s interest in the next installment, the pen demonstrates that it has the power to resist by malfunctioning. However, because the pen’s existence is predicated on its usefulness, its very life is threatened by its rebellion. When the “heir of the family” (4:260) uses the pen to write a series of love epistles that eventually lead to the ruin of a young woman and her subsequent suicide, the pen writes, Here a second time I began to kindle with indignation at the monster, and even to myself, to reflect that I was instrumental to the seduction of innocence, and the defloration of maiden honour; and surely, Sir, an honest abhorrence of the deed so wholly possessed me, that I twirled myself round in his odious hand, and endeavoured to blot out those sentiments that ought

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(for the sake of virtue, manhood, and society) to be obliterated for ever. But this virtuous effort availed nothing, and its consequence nearly threatened my destruction; for my attempts had no other effect than to make me transact again the detestable business; and my refusal to mark the delusive expressions on paper (for indeed the ink had froze with horror to the nib) induced the barbarian to deepen the slit of my tongue; after which (not answering his purposes) he dashed me with a malicious force against a corn-bin on which he had been writing, and damning me for a good-for-nothing scoundrel, left me gaping, in the agonies of ruin, on the ground. (4:261)

As if atoning for its “instrumental” role in the seduction, the pen couches its resistance in active terms, relating its own refusal to cooperate with its user’s wishes. While later the pen phrases the results of the things that it writes in active terms, as though it were responsible for them, this is the only instance in which it claims a visible physical action irrespective of its human owner. Its user has two interpretive possibilities before him: he can either see the action as being the result of some kind of user error combined with an accidental malfunction (the ink becoming clogged in the nib) or he can interpret the pen as having some kind of magical power. Yet to interpret the young man’s response as proof that he believes in the magical capacities of matter seems absurd. Brown offers a third possibility: the man’s anger arises from the shock of realizing the limits of his own power over the object, that is, realizing that he can only delegate actions to the pen, but that the pen may not perform, may “fail,” may be entirely ineffective in completing the action. Even without the pen’s own claim of agency, the scene humorously, and even realistically, presents a scenario in which an ostensibly educated man enacts his rage upon an insignificant writing implement—a seemingly childish or “primitive” response in eighteenth-century thought. Irrespective of any supposed belief in the non-agency of objects, he lets his anger run away with him, even to the point of “damning me for a good-­ for-­nothing scoundrel.” The scene portrays a human response to recalcitrant or malfunctioning matter that cannot be accounted for in terms of subjects and objects or humans and tools, but that instead hints at a realm in which tools or objects are suddenly revealed to be more than simply extensions of human abilities: rather, they are other, outside or beyond human control. In this realm, agency is attributed to objects that malfunction, almost as though the young man in this instance was imagining the very motivations that this hyperbolic pen espouses in this fictional narrative.

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In addition to parodying it-narratives in this scene by explicitly suggesting that the object has the power to act independently, the episode thematically pays tribute to sentimental fictions. In his introductory comments, Blackwell notes in the passage an “odd, displaced scene of rape” that potentially genders the pen as female (BIN 4:253). The scene suggests the threat of the pen coming to the same fate as the woman that this young master has seduced—an allusion that objectifies the female while it personifies the pen. The narrative compares the fates of these two: just as the woman must live in infamy or die, the pen must facilitate crimes or be destroyed. Festa more generally interprets the conflation of the human and nonhuman in the it-narrative as a sign of the “ethical project of these narratives” as this conflation draws attention to structural inequalities in how eighteenth-century law defined a “person,” which “includes non-human entities—offices, bridges, institutions, as well as the abstract and disembodied aggregate of corporations—but may exclude human beings such as slaves, the poor, women under coverture” (Festa 2015, 350). Blackwell’s and Festa’s analyses highlight the ambiguity inherent in acts of gendered objectification: while women can be turned into objects, objects can be turned into women. A similar object–female reversal appears in De Quincey’s Confessions (1821), when he lumps female servants in the category of “frailer vessels” along with “glasses and decanters”—although class clearly plays a key role in this conflation as well.26 When examined in light of the “burlesquing” aim announced at the beginning of the narrative, the pen’s “rape” scene reads as a parody of both it-narrative conventions and sentimental fictions as it takes up common themes (e.g. sex as exchange), but embodies them in an unsuitable object.27 The metaphor of a pen for the female body, while contradicting the phallic symbolism of the writing implement, complicates the metonymy sustained throughout the rest of the text between the pen and the author and other professions that would be read as male-gendered, potentially producing the “incongruous exaggeration” necessary to satire. Furthermore, the invocation of a helpless victim in the hands of a vengeful man recalls sentimental fictions which heroize the stolid virtue of a friendless innocent. Near the beginning, when the pen narrates how it began its career, it says, “Sir; many an acquaintance of yours, no doubt, has risen from the kitchen to the drawing room; and it is one of your own maxims, that nothing but intrinsic greatness can confer superiority” (BIN 4:259). Although most it-narratives by this time no longer had frame narratives, here the device is especially useful because it allows the pen to

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speak to the author about the very themes which it has so often been employed to inscribe on paper by said author’s desire. The narrative highlights the triteness of the comment through the burlesque of the pen aspiring to rise from the kitchen (where it is originally fashioned into a pen) to the home of a Duke, despite being thrown in a trash heap28 and almost burned in the meantime. This combination of self-reflexivity and sentimentality is expressed even more explicitly when the pen comments on the mechanized nature of authorship and its relationship to didactic narratives: It has been the great misfortune of my being, Sir, to experience severities of vicissitude, and seldom to become either more happy or secure by a change. But, from the constant persecutions I have met with, I am at length taught this useful lesson: “That there is no human situation untaxed by inconvenience and pain, and that to suffer much, and well, is the most important art and duty of every individual.” This reflection, Sir, may appear ludicrous from the lips of a Pen; but you will please to consider, that I have long traded in sentiment; and if I now and then disclose an impertinent truth, consider also that you authors bring the mischief upon yourselves; for were we suffered to adorn the plumage of our parents in the virgin whiteness and purity of quillhood, it were impossible for us to be rude; but when the parrot, the pye, and the pen, are taught to prattle, and an incision made for that purpose in their tongues, who can wonder if they sometimes address their sentiments warmly to the bosom of their masters? (4:263)

The pen first expresses a view characteristic of sentimental heroes and heroines, only to then reveal that expression to be merely a mode of hack-­ authorship, one that can be copied, even by an animal or object. The pen suggests that long use in the hands of authors has habituated it to a form of writing that it can now carry out on its own. In this formulation, the human author-narrator (Dionysius) becomes merely an amanuensis, marking the words on the paper dictated by the pen. Focusing on the use of specie to narrate stories, Flint argues that by disguising their work in the form of a specie narrator, authors both enacted a useful form of neutrality and simultaneously highlighted the invisibility forced upon them in the burgeoning print market (Flint 2007, 179–80). But the use of a pen is a more explicit metaphor for the mechanized or physical aspects of authorship, as it is not simply metaphoric but metonymic. In fact, the pen is so literally present in the composition of the literary text that one can argue

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that, without it, no text would become physically materialized. Like the mirror and the pin before it, the pen, under Latour’s definition of action, does act, since it is a crucial part of the human–nonhuman assemblage that writes. Despite acknowledging its role in the process of literary production, however, the pen laments its actions, continuing in the next paragraph that it was never happier than when it was an “innocent feather … unacquainted with the vicious drudgery of literary deception” (BIN 4:263). Yet, immediately after, the pen’s frustration with its role in the literary marketplace is once more called into question by the outrage it expresses in regard to human cruelty to animals—another common theme of both it-­ narratives and didactic children’s literature, evident in such titles as The Hare, or Hunting Incompatible with Humanity (1799) (Anon. 1799; cf. Festa 2007, 320–22). Here the hasty inclusion of such specifically didactic material reinforces the sense that the pen is simply running the gamut of every possible kind of hack-writing. At other moments, the pen tries to inspire interest in the vicissitudes of the poor, both exaggerating its role in various frauds (by taking outright responsibility for them) while expressing its own outrage at its role in harming the innocent. When the pen goes to write the inventory of a poor family’s furniture, meant to be auctioned, it notes, “the ink actually rose above the nib, and refused to flow, or mark a stroke upon the paper, before my indignation subsided sufficiently” for it to mark down “the very cradle linen of an infant, who was at that moment harmlessly sleeping between torn and threadworn blankets” (4:264–65). In such instances, the pen registers its desire to resist, but, perhaps out of fear, carries out the desired action anyway. However, the pen’s moral outrage at the family’s fate is somewhat dampened by its discordant emphasis on its own subjectivity: “As I am only relating the particulars of my own story, I cannot attempt to describe the misery of theirs” (4:265). The pen’s comment contradicts Flint’s observation that it-narrators often serve as mere reflectors of human experiences (Flint 2007, 176–77), and it also draws attention to the it-­ narrator’s habit of abruptly leaving its human subjects in the middle of unfinished narrative arcs, a practice that undermines the object’s ability to create sympathy for its human characters despite its ostensible desire to do so. This odd combination of sentimental narrative with self-reflexive commentary is heightened by the pen’s exaggeration of its actions to the point of absurdity. When it passes into the hands of an attorney, this

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instrumentality is complicated by the pen assuming, grammatically, the full weight of the actions carried out through its nib: I was now (it is true) in a state of exaltation, and in the way of preferment, but far, very far, from the paths either of honesty or peace. I shiver with horror (and the ink curdles into frost about my tongue) as I recount the variety of concerns wherein I became an instrument of accumulated tyranny and treachery. How shall I inform you, Sir, of the practices by which, under equitable veil, I robbed (with diversified turpitude) the widow and the matron, the heir and the orphan? by what dexterity of deception I distracted property, perplexed truth, unsettled jointures, conveyed away priorities, and sold birthrights, to unconnected relations, or to friends of my own? (BIN 4:264)

In the first part of the passage, the pen expresses its moral concern similarly to the pin, as the pen stresses its use, but this soon gives way to the use of first-person, active verbs—“robbed,” “distracted,” “perplexed truth”—grammatically bypassing the human user. The passage bears similarities to another found in “The Adventures of a Goose-Quill”: In this first service I suffer’d great hardship, and was unknowingly the instrument of much harm. Many an estate have I convey’d away from it’s [sic] right owner; many a mortgage has a crafty old userer by my means engross’d to himself; and many a young blood have I help’d to set his mark to his absolute ruin. (Anon. 1751, 296)

Again, in keeping with its parodic aims, the 1806 work carries these suggestions to their extremes, increasing the weight placed on its own actions through repetition, and suggesting that the pen is morally responsible for the actions carried out through its nib. The later pen strengthens the sense of instrumentality through hyperbole; in this manner, it emphasizes its role not as a passive, morally exempt tool, but as an active participant in these actions. The pen hints at this collective sense of action earlier with its use of the word “accessory” and strengthens it later through the use of legal language that denotes shared moral responsibility. When the pen’s gambler owner resorts to crime, it writes, “that very night, I was aiding and abetting in no less than eleven robberies; for the unfortunate man had now equipped himself for the Road” (BIN 4:267). On the one hand, the fact that the pen has no actual instrumental role in these robberies (which are carried out by force, not legal subterfuge) indicates the fully parodic aim of the narrative, as it

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credits itself not simply with its own mechanical actions, but also with the actions performed by its human user entirely irrespective of it. On the other hand, the pen’s comments imply a metonymic relationship between the human and the pen, a oneness, an integration with its human possessor, as it shares responsibility for its human possessor’s actions, if not his or her motivations and values. This point is reiterated self-reflexively in relationship to the idea of authorship when the pen falls into the hands of a “party-writer” (before meeting its current user, Dionysius). The pen writes that because this writer “espoused both sides of the question with equal zeal,” “thus was I led into a constant rudeness, not only of proving the falsity of my master, but also of giving myself the lie: nay, sometimes I was obliged to contradict my own maxims so violently, that I was quarrelling with myself” (4:268). The pen claims the ideas written through it as opinions of its own, a viewpoint that allows for the defamiliarization of the role of the hack-writer, reinforcing the unnatural nature of a form of periodical writing that adopts a “party-line” regardless of the writer’s own personal convictions or ideology. This conflation between the pen and the author becomes even more pronounced when he writes, “In the service of Mr. Eitherside I totally lost my reputation, and was unanimously pronounced to be the most scandalous pen that was ever prostituted to the purposes and profit of a turncoat” (4:268). The pen takes advantage of the double meaning of its own name—as that of the word for both an instrument and, metonymically, the ”name” of an anonymous author—inferring that, at moments, the metaphor within the narrative itself slips out of hand, and Dionysius is talking about himself rather than a goose-quill (“pen, n.” 3.c). Finally, this metonymic substitution of pen for user is not simply sustained in relationship to professional literary production, but holds in private interactions as well, indicating a more closely intertwined relationship between the human and the nonhuman than any subject–object binary admits. This final instance of object agency is all the more interesting for being imputed to the pen by the human user because the pen functions precisely in the way in which it was designed. Near the end of the last letter, the pen literally becomes a mediator between a quarreling Duke and his lady, as its human users ascribe blame to it for actions carried out through its nib. The Duke uses the pen to write a “billet” to his lady, the expressions of an “indignant heart”; the Duchess responds in turn (also with the pen) and the Duke returns a third letter “still more sarcastic”

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(BIN 4:274). The pen reports that the “open rupture” which followed led to actions taken out on one another’s prized possessions: His Grace killed her ladyship’s monkey, broke her china, and twisted the neck of her parrot; and the Duchess threw out of the window his Lordship’s gold-headed canes, all the letters preceding their nuptials, his picture … and every other appendage of pride or convenience. You may be sure I did not escape her fury in the general confusion. (4:274)

Here each takes their anger out upon the other’s personal effects—suggesting not only the metonymic connection between the individual and his or her possessions but also the pleasure inherent in destroying such favored objects. Whether animate or inanimate, commercially manufactured or personally created, these objects equally fall under the wrath of the estranged couple. The violence enacted on these objects is explained by the pain that such destruction occasions to the owner; however, given that the pen has been used by both parties, the narrative suggests that the impulse to discard the pen derives from some other feeling: “I was considered as the hateful go-­ between and disturber of domestic quiet, and therefore shared the fate of a meddler in family affairs” (4:274). The pen, despite its use by both parties, becomes anthropomorphized to the degree that it is imagined as active and partisan in the affair at hand, as though, as the instrument used for penning these letters, it shares some responsibility with the writers of those letters. The human’s response to this culpability is similar, although less violent, to that of the young man’s at the beginning of the narrative. The duchess throws the pen out of the window, discarding the hateful object from her sight, as though throwing away the mediating object will somehow materially change the circumstances of the couple. On the one hand, she acknowledges the work of the tool, but, on the other, her action attributes too much agency to the tool, effacing the work of the human user in this collective program of action (cf. Latour 1999, 178). When the pen at last ends its narrative, having fallen into the hands of the very Dionysius writing this story, it rejoices at the “prospect of spending the residue of my days in ease and honour,” essentially excluding Dionysius of any charge of hack-writing despite this very article’s publication in a magazine (BIN 4:275). Yet, given what has come before, the purport of the piece as a whole evokes another interpretation. Lupton writes that despite the author’s ostensible dislike of it-narratives, “This

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ironic move takes readers right back to the text they are holding, undercutting its fictional author’s stance by drawing attention to the magazine’s evanescence and to the fashionable shape the piece assumes” (Lupton 2011, 158). Despite the highly parodic nature of the piece, it still quite clearly falls into the mode of it-narration; the author has intensified the trope and added to its absurdity, but in the end, his alterations have only made the it-narrative more striking. * * * The three it-narratives examined here demonstrate an extraordinary level of thing-agency within their narratives. The History of a Pin suggests that the pin has moral agency to the point of not only castigating but also punishing its “immoral” users and exhorting its young readers to follow the right path. The eponymous hero of “Adventures of a Mirror” positions itself as an advisor to its users and claims credit for their improvement and success. In “The Adventures of a Pen,” the object is conflated with the human to a ludicrous degree, as the pen takes advantage of the metonymic relationship between “author” and “pen” to suggest that it is a fully motivated actor capable of carrying out actions that do not even require a pen. The burlesquing tone of this latter narrative not only challenges the assumptions of the it-narratives that have come before it, but also throws their entire system of logic into question, as it blames itself for a robbery and shoulders the blame for a domestic dispute. The pin and the mirror, by exaggerating their actions and claiming moral responsibility for their positions within their given households, demonstrate the plethora of ways in which these particular objects aid human beings. In going beyond the actions reasonably attributable to a pen, this last narrative questions the idea that any single actant has complete independent agency and highlights the folded and collected nature of any single action. The authors who penned these it-narratives were working in a literary culture that was increasingly defined by the demands of mass print. They wrote within a genre that, while it had been innovative and fascinating earlier in the century, was primarily being adapted to serve the purposes of children’s literature. These constraints helped shape the parodic tones of “Adventures of a Mirror” and “The Adventures of a Pen.” While the authors of earlier it-narratives took advantage of the circulating narrator in order to achieve a level of neutral narration and to “spy” on their users in places and contexts in which a human narrator could not be motivated,

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these later narratives take the speaking-object device to its extreme conclusions. In so doing, they remark on the relationship between the human and the nonhuman and consider questions of where responsibility for specific actions lies. Rather than functioning as “biographies” of objects, these narratives involuntarily function as quasi-sociological accounts of human–object assemblages. This might seem like a bold project for rather unknown authors working in an unassuming genre, but to acknowledge the interesting questions these it-narratives raise is itself to acknowledge the power of the artwork as an assemblage, that is how the human and nonhuman collective achieves aims that neither human nor nonhuman would have been capable of alone (cf. Keane 2005, 189).

Notes 1. It-narratives are cited with either the author’s name or a shortened title (anonymous works) and (if applicable) the volume and page number from the 2012 collection British It-Narratives (abbreviated BIN), edited by Mark Blackwell, Liz Bellamy, Christina Lupton, and Heather Keenleyside. Original publication information has also been included in the bibliography for ease of reference. All italics are as they appear in the original text, unless otherwise noted. 2. Bellamy identifies “two definitive components” of most it-narratives: (1) “a narrator that, whether animal, vegetable, or manufactured object, lacks independent agency,” and (2) “the transference of the narrator or protagonist between otherwise unconnected characters” (Bellamy 2007, 121). 3. Leah Price argues that the it-narrative is comparable to the bildungsroman: “Each genre endows its narrators with consciousness while stripping them of power; each contrasts the narrator’s fluency with other characters’ refusal to recognize its standing to speak” (Price 2012, 124). 4. This chapter finds its origins in Blackwell’s identification of these three texts as especially good examples of it-narratives that deal with questions of agency, as opposed to the many which “purport to be passive pawns of their human owners and users” (BIN 4:xv). 5. Bellamy writes that Gildon’s work took inspiration from Alain René Le Sage’s Le Diable Boiteux, in which “the devil flies about the city taking the roofs off houses to expose what is going on below” (Bellamy 1998, 119). However, more recently, Blackwell has identified Apuleius’s Metamorphosis (or Golden Ass) as the inspiration for Gildon’s work (Blackwell 2012, 241). 6. While there were it-narratives published after 1850, Bellamy notes that it becomes increasingly difficult to demarcate the genre from other genres (Bellamy 2007, 130).

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7. The reviewer for The Adventures of a Hackney Coach could not resist the punning title: “This is as execrable a hack as any private gentleman would wish to be drove in” (Anon. 1781a, 651). However, it would be misleading to suggest that all it-narratives received such treatment. Two decades earlier, a reviewer of Chrysal notes the “good sense and merit of this performance” and is pleased that the public has responded by swiftly buying up copies of the novel (Anon. 1761, 336). 8. Blackwell contextualizes the it-narrative by positioning it in dialogue with the work of Laurence Sterne; while it-narratives shamelessly attempted to appropriate Sterne’s style, Blackwell, following Thomas Keymer, argues that, as Sterne himself liked to appropriate modes from contemporary writers, “the ‘borrowing’ likely worked in several directions at once” (Blackwell 2007a, 200; cf. Keymer 2002, 58–59). 9. For slavery, see “Adventures of a Quire of Paper,” BIN 4:25–39. For masters and mistresses, see “Very Unfortunate Goose-Quill,” BIN 4:1–24; “The Life and Adventures of a Cat,” BIN vol. 2:1–23; Johnson, BIN 4:41–56; Palmer, BIN 4:231–56. For “property,” see Embroidered Waistcoat, BIN 3:7–26. 10. Contrasting the novels of the eighteenth century to the it-narratives between 1750 and 1780, Hudson writes, “Traditional fictional narratives … lacked the formal capacity to view English society from a perspective not strictly oriented by the rank and gender of the narrator. Without the resources of what Gérard Genette famously called ‘non-focalized’ narration, every account had to be colored by the sociopolitical biases of the putative ‘author’” (Hudson 2007, 293–94; cf. Genette 1980, 189–94; Stanica 2016, 238). 11. David Rudd writes that speaking objects potentially “undermine the very rationality of the Enlightenment” as they parody individualism; “it is seen as excessive if everything has it: ‘It thinks therefore, it is’” (Rudd 2009, 248–49). Festa places this problem in a historical context noting the total rejection of animal narrators for the use of children’s literature by John Marchant in 1751 and the concept’s repudiation by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1787 (Festa 2007, 316). 12. The novel had been attributed to Susan Smythies, but more recently, Blackwell has argued for attribution to Eliza Andrews, see Blackwell’s introductory notes to the text (BIN 4:209–11). A male pronoun will be used for this anonymous author, given the nature of his or her pen-name. 13. For more on the history of pins, their uses, materials, and production, see Beaudry 2006, 10–43. For an overview of the influence of Smith’s chapter on texts which utilize pins as metaphors (there is indeed more than one), see Hudson (2017, 20–27).

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14. Klemann (2011) examines A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744), which was sold with an optional ball or pincushion in order to record one’s good and bad behavior. Interestingly, this work was published by John Newbery, the forerunner of E. Newbery publishing. A later edition of the work records that no copies of the original text have survived (Anon. 1944). 15. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume allows for a broader view of the potential causes of action than Kant. Hume observes that humans continually recognize the workings of cause and effect in nature, but then they deny that any material causes could possibly affect human reasoning; Hume rejects this behavior as irrational, arguing that any number of factors affect or necessitate the actions of humans, including “law,” “forms of government,” and “sentiments” (Hume 2007b, 8.1.18) as well as “unintelligent matter” (8.1.22); how else, he writes, “could we employ our criticism upon any poet or polite author, if we could not pronounce the conduct and sentiments of his actors, either natural or unnatural, to such characters, and in such circumstances? It seems almost impossible, therefore, to engage, either in science or action of any kind, without acknowledging the doctrine of necessity, and this inference from motives to voluntary actions; from characters to conduct” (8.1.18). 16. In Kantian terms, the pin suffers from a heteronomous will, since its compliance with moral law is contingent upon its human user (Kant 2011, 4:444). Lara Denis and Eric Wilson write, “Heteronomous wills … are governed by some external force or authority—that is, by something other than a self-given law of reason” (Denis and Wilson 2016). 17. Pejorative references to Jews recur in it-narratives from the mid eighteenth century on, see Kibbie (2007, 259). 18. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1738–40), Hume writes that this tendency “appears in children, by their desire of beating the stones, which hurt them,” but also in “poets, because they profess to follow implicitly the suggestions of their fancy” (Hume 2007a, 1.4.3.11). However, further on Hume seems to explain why such a fantastical association would take place: “when we have the prospect of pain or pleasure from any object, we feel a consequent emotion of aversion or propensity, and are carry’d to avoid or embrace what will give us this uneasiness or satisfaction” (2.3.3.3). He argues that passion always precedes the exercise of reason, and reason cannot be said to have any effect on the will: “Since reason alone can never produce any action, or give rise to volition, I infer, that the same faculty is as incapable of preventing volition, or of disputing the preference with any passion or emotion” (2.3.3.4).

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19. The incongruity theory is now widely acknowledged by humor theorists, although it does not serve as an adequate explanation for all instances of humor (Farber 2007, 67). 20. The other “static narratives” that Bellamy takes note of appear in the 1830s, much later than the mirror (Bellamy 2007, 119). 21. Johnson locates the origin of the miracle of glass at the intersection between the human and nonhuman: “Yet by some such fortuitous liquefaction was mankind taught to procure a body at once in a high degree solid and transparent,” but he goes on to fix the human as the subject of this transformation: “Thus was the first artificer in glass employed, though without his own knowledge or expectation. He was facilitating and prolonging the enjoyment of light, enlarging the avenues of science, and conferring the highest and most lasting pleasures; he was enabling the student to contemplate nature, and the beauty to behold herself” (Johnson 1801, 51). 22. While Lacan is interested in the psychological effects of this stage, he nonetheless emphasizes the material circumstances under which the individual experiences this transformation into alienated subjectivity. Lacan writes that the mirror stage “is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic—and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development” (Lacan 2001, 3; italics mine). 23. For more on Disraeli’s reference to the pen, see Chap. 5. 24. A male pronoun will be used for this anonymous author, given the nature of his or her pen-name. 25. Blackwell (BIN 4:2) and Lupton (BIN 3:vii) both discuss these narratives in relation to the paper wars; for more on the specifics of the “war” between Henry Fielding and those he considered hacks, see Bertelsen (1999). 26. See Chap. 4, p. 154. 27. Bonnie Blackwell argues that “male object-narrators should be read as female” because they often tell the story of a prostitute through the use of a narrating object, and in turn, she reads John Cleland’s pornographic Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49) as an “it-novel, this time narrated by an enthusiastic vagina” (Blackwell 2007, 289). For prostitution and the it-narrative, see also Alber (2016, 61). For more on the it-narrator and sex and exchange within marriage, see Douglas (2007, 152). 28. This is another aspect of the 1806 narrative that bears affinities to “The Adventures of a Goose-Quill” (Anon. 1751, 297).

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———. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Lupton, Christina. 2011. Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lynch, Deidre. 1998. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, Daniel. 2005. Materiality: An Introduction. In Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Mister, Mary. 2012. The Adventures of a Doll. In Blackwell et al. (BIN) 4: 277–298. Originally published by London: Darton, Harvey, and Darton, 1816. Morreall, John. 2016. Philosophy of Humor. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humor/. Accessed 15 June 2017. Nagel, Thomas. 2006. Mortal Questions. 12. print. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Palmer, Charlotte. 2012. The Silver Thimble. In Blackwell et al. (BIN) 4: 231–252. Originally published by London: E. Newberry, 1799. Park, Julie. 2010. The Self and It: Novel Objects and Mimetic Subjects in Eighteenth-­ Century England. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Peacock, Lucy. 2012. The Life of a Bee. Related by Herself. In Blackwell et  al. (BIN), 2: 191–210. Originally published by London: J. Marshall, [1800]. “Pen, n.” 2016. OED Online. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com. Accessed 6 July 2017. Price, Leah. 2012. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rudd, David. 2009. Animal and Object Stories. In The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, ed. M.O.  Grenby and Andrea Immel, 242–257. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/ CCOL9780521868198.015. Scott, Helenus. 1782. The Adventures of a Rupee: Wherein Are Interspersed Various Anecdotes Asiatic and European. London: J. Murray. Scott, Walter. 1839 (1814). Waverley: Or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since. Paris: Baudry. Smart, Christopher. 2012. The Genuine Memoirs of an Unfortunate Tye-Wig. In Blackwell et  al. (BIN), 3: 1–5. Originally published in Midwife, or The Old Woman’s Magazine, 2 (1751): 1. Smith, Adam. 1979. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner, and W.B. Todd, 2 vols. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Stableford, Brian. 2009. The A to Z of Fantasy Literature. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press.

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Stanica, Miruna. 2016. Portraits of Delegation. The Eighteenth Century 57 (2): 235–249. https://doi.org/10.1353/ecy.2016.0015. Sterne, Laurence. 1792. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 2 vols. Basil: J.L. Legrand. Tyndall, John. 1870. Notes on a Course of Six Lectures on Light. 2nd ed. London: Longmans, Green, & Co.

CHAPTER 3

“Very Conspicuous on One of His Fingers”: Generative Things in Austen’s Juvenilia, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma

In contrast to many eighteenth-century novels, descriptions of interiors rarely appear in Austen’s novels and catalogues or collections of objects are almost nonexistent.1 These novels thus lack the “considerable attention” to interiors which Ian Watt recognizes in the works of Samuel Richardson (Watt 1987, 26–27).2 Nor does one find the “architectural approach” to interiors that Cynthia Wall identifies as becoming prevalent at the end of the eighteenth century (Wall 2014, 543). Rather, the objects that do appear help facilitate the narrative in usually one of two ways: arising in instances of focalization, they shed light on a particular character’s needs, desires, or priorities, or they enable particular plot possibilities and gesture to counterfactual and extratextual narratives. While objects that function as reflections of characters have received a considerable amount of critical attention, these latter, narrative-generating objects in Austen have been comparatively neglected. This is perhaps partially due to the fact that as facilitators of narrative, they are meant to be inconspicuous in that role. However, by examining these novels side by side with Austen’s experimental juvenilia, one can trace the evolution of the more explicitly narrative-generating objects in Austen’s early juvenilia into the more implicitly narrative-enabling objects in the later novels. From there, one can see how objects in these novels enable plots that feel naturally probable while they also hint at extratextual narratives that undermine generic conclusions.

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While this sparse usage of objects sets these novels apart from some forms of eighteenth-century description, the character- and plot-­enhancing material object is not entirely unprecedented. Miruna Stanica writes that in some early eighteenth-century fiction, objects facilitate or, to use a design theory term recently appropriated by Caroline Levine to literary studies, afford certain courses of action for the protagonists within the plot (Stanica 2014, 521; Levine 2015, 6). Stanica writes that “in the picaresque and early novel tradition lists of objects introduce rival agents to human characters, which provide motives for action and propel the plot forward” (Stanica 2014, 526). While she focuses specifically upon lists of objects and objects housed in storage spaces, her underlying understanding of narrative-generating objects helps shed light on how Austen adapted eighteenth-century narrative strategies to develop her own approach to using objects in narrative. In opposition to theories of description that see it as merely a “handmaiden of the narration” (Genette 1976, 6) or, worse, a blockade to narrative progression (Lukács 1971, 130), Stanica sees these objects as narrative actants in their ability to create an impetus for narrative (cf. Stanica 2016). She bases her concept of generating narrative on the work of Mieke Bal who argues for “a view of narrative generated by a descriptive motor rather than the other way around” (Bal 2006, 572). But the concept also has roots in the theory of Michael Riffaterre, who views the referential nature of language itself as “impl[ying] a description” (Riffaterre 1986, 282). In Austen’s novels, however, it is not enough for the object to be invoked; it must also be materially motivated in the novel: its materiality must be integrated into the causal workings of the plot. Objects in Austen’s novels that function as generators of narrative do so because they possess not only symbolic or personal meaning but also narrative significance as they are causally and materially motivated within the plot. Many an object in Austen is important not simply because its representation reflects the point of view of a particular character, but also because it plays a dynamic role in the events that unfold within the narrative. Regarding Austen’s own works, Stanica largely ignores the object’s narrative productivity, since Austen’s objects are not located within storage spaces, and she further lays little stress on the importance of potential narratives that are not explicitly realized within the text. Of Harriet’s “treasures” that she has saved from her supposed courtship with Mr. Elton in Emma, Stanica argues that, rather than generating narrative, they “mark a now-aborted

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and very ineffectual plot, the match between Harriet and Mr. Elton that Emma desired” (Stanica 2014, 525). While this is certainly the case for the text as a whole, by the time these objects appear it is also possible to read these objects retroactively, as indicative of the power of mundane objects to be claimed and fetishized for their proximity or former proximity to the object of one’s desire—as actants in the sense that they fostered and fed Harriet’s imagination, her own internal narrative. In fact, Harriet’s objects play out the uncanny otherness of objects—their thingly “excess” in Brown’s terms—that is how they connect people to one another, irrespective of those individuals’ particular desires, a theme more exhaustively explored later in the autobiographical writings of Thomas De Quincey. Objects in Austen’s novels do not exclusively wield symbolic power but become integral tools or “actants” both within the plot, as they afford certain character actions and help provide hints to the reader of narrative possibilities yet to be realized. When objects function in the latter manner, they provide gateways into counterfactual narratives that the novel may or may not discursively explore, possibilities that allow the reader to ask, what if? Hilary Dannenberg has shown how nineteenth-century authors like Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot rely on coincidence as a plot strategy to create convergent and thus unified novel endings. This can be seen in the nineteenth-century novel in the systematic unification of protagonists in what Dannenberg refers to as “an unrealistic fairy-tale narrative of blissful wedlock” (Dannenberg 2008, 226). As a means of combatting this stifling generic norm, Dannenberg recognizes a strategy often employed by these novelists to introduce alternative possibilities into their narratives, even if these possibilities are never realized. At the heart of this drive, Dannenberg identifies the constraining and unrealistic nature of generic expectations: In some writers there is an underlying sense that the convergent pressures on plot to depict harmonious conclusions and happy marriages are in fact inimical to social realism and the representation of the position of women, since such euphoric resolutions follow the utopian plot agendas of comedy and romance. (138)

In Austen’s juvenilia, one can clearly trace a frustration with the generic expectations inherited from the eighteenth-century novel as well as earlier traditions. While Dannenberg focuses on explicit cases in which characters

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or the narrator speculates on what could have happened, if…, the objects explored here similarly, although less discursively, introduce suggestive, alternative plotlines. While the nonhuman aspect of these objects, that is, their ability to bring to the novel courses of action that would be impossible or unthinkable without them, strengthens the causal probability of the plot, this narrative fecundity also undermines the generic conventions to which these novels ostensibly conform by providing additional narrative possibilities at the very moment of supposed resolution.

Objects, Consumerism, and Austen’s Literary Form Although the current study is concerned primarily with materially motivated objects, most criticism on objects and descriptions in Austen is focused on objects that are focalized through specific characters and thus shed light on those characters’ values. This has caused most of the criticism of objects in Austen’s works to focus too closely on the symbolic and moral aspects of particular objects (what Latour would deem a “social explanation”) at the expense of understanding the relationship in Austen between materiality and narrative function. Of objects that reflect character, the description of the school room that Fanny has claimed for her own at Mansfield Park stands out as a rare example of extended description in Austen’s repertoire (MP 177–79; Lane 1966, 99), and it is colored throughout by Fanny’s own subjective feelings.3 Similarly, in less discursive instances, a character’s attention to objects frequently reflects on their own particular priorities—whether it is Mrs. Bennett’s misplaced obsession with Lydia’s wedding clothes (PP 318; Willis 1975, 109) or Robert Ferrar’s over-inflated “correctness of … eye” and “delicacy of … taste” when purchasing a tooth-pick case (SS 250; cf. Selwyn 2005, 222–23; Benedict 2009, 345; Saglia 2009, 357–60). Abundant criticism on these objects reflects this focalization with studies on class and shopping habits (Spring 1983; Copeland 1986; Copeland 1996; Selwyn 2005), critical commentary on the symbolic or political nature of objects in a text (Tanner 1986, 85; Elliott 2012; Merrett 1998), and extended attention to questions of sociability through objects (Hardy 1975; Thompson 1984; Benedict 2009; Saglia 2009). Unsurprisingly many of these studies are interested in the relationship between consumption and character, and one recurring theme of these investigations is the question of Austen’s moral assessment of her class’s burgeoning standard of living. A consumer dichotomy is often posed

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between a socially constructive, balanced consumer practice and a competitive acquisitiveness.4 While such readings provide insight into the culturally inscribed meanings of the objects and the forms of consumption that take place within Austen’s novels’ worlds, in the aggregate, this attention often implicitly suggests that the limited role of objects in Austen’s texts is the result of her moral stance on consumer practices. Another way of viewing the curtailment of descriptions in Austen is taken by Barbara Hardy, who accounts for the lack of objects in Austen’s works by attributing it to the author’s penchant for focalization: objects mostly appear in the novels “as they strike the characters, sometimes vaguely, sometimes clearly, sometimes lovingly, sometimes obsessionally, sometimes stupidly” (Hardy 1975, 149). Beth Wallace extends this point by contrasting Austen’s usage of objects with the “loquacious objects” found in the it-narrative, observing that Austen “silenc[es]” these objects in order to “make room for her characters” (Wallace 2018, 118). These focalized objects in Austen are, to a degree, already things in Brown’s sense then, as they are invoked through the representation of a human consciousness trying to make sense of objects that suddenly catch its attention. However, when one examines objects that fall into my second category, that is, objects that appear in the text as aids to narrative development, it becomes evident that objects are not simply important markers of the protagonists’ or others’ moral characters, but that they also have a significant role to play in the construction of the plot and the novels’ final moments. In her juvenilia, Austen experiments with the narrative-generating and genre-undermining potential of “real-world” material objects invoked within the text and the narrative-generating objects in her later novels are the aesthetic descendants of these early narrative experiments. Sandie Byrne notes how Austen may have learned from Edgeworth, more than Burney, how to employs objects “to initiate discussions and episodes that allow for the narration of back story” (Byrne 2014, 9). I would go further to argue that not only do invoked objects enable specific narrative possibilities but these objects in turn help contribute to counterfactual narratives that undermine the generic norms to which the novels otherwise adhere. In seeming contrast to many of the objects found in her later published novels, objects in the juvenilia often provide the means of burlesquing the fictional nature of generic literary conventions. When an object appears in an unlikely setting, the object helps unveil the mechanisms and conventions of eighteenth-century sentimental fiction. In this way, objects in her

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juvenilia are similar to their it-narrative counterparts in that they utilize incongruity to create humor by registering the distance between the mundane world of the everyday and the literary conventions they parody. These objects conspicuously usher in particularly contrived plot elements, and, in so doing, they lay bare the mechanics of fictional representation. Furthermore, in addition to stimulating a critique of generic conventions through incongruous juxtaposition, their existence in certain settings makes evident their roles in various Regency networks of humans and nonhumans that are often effaced or ignored by fiction. Stories within the juvenilia thus critique society at the same time that they stimulate humor. For the juvenilia, both of these functions of objects are aesthetically productive, since these burlesques are meant to self-consciously reflect upon themselves as fiction, and any ensuing comments on “real-world” networks—which occasionally rise to the level of legitimate social commentary—enhance the effect of drawing attention to the distance between fictional, sentimental conventions and the real. In Austen’s later realist novels, the relationship between the aesthetics of the text and the narrative-generating ability of objects is subtler. While materially motivated objects aid the construction of the novels’ narratives, their work is less recognizable in this role. One can attribute the subtlety to Austen’s attention to probability in her later works, a preoccupation noted by contemporary critics who recognized in her works a new style of novel. In the wake of the posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey (1818) and Persuasion (1818), Richard Whately echoed Walter Scott’s earlier espoused view that Austen was one of the “modern” school of novelists because of how “the story proceeds without the aid of extraordinary accidents; the events which take place are the necessary or natural consequences of what has proceeded” (Whately 1821, 360). Rather than writing of astonishing or heroic feats, which happen rarely, Whately praises this new school for its delineation of a “comprehensive view of human nature” that provides “general rules of practical wisdom” (353). Whately’s portrayal of Austen’s works highlights her suppression of any character, event, or object that would defy such generality and gesture to her work’s status as fiction. Thus, excepting Northanger Abbey (1818), Austen eradicates most self-reflexivity in her novels. In a letter giving advice to her niece Anna Austen on a novel the latter was writing, she emphasizes the need to excise anything that would even “appear unnatural in a book,” even when it had been known to happen, and warns Anna against “giving false representations” by following her characters to locales

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in which she had never herself been (Austen 2009 [1814], 171–72). These requirements suggest the need to carefully consider all events, characters, objects, and locales included in a work of fiction and regulate them by the laws of probability. Sir Walter Scott’s review of Emma also highlights the “difficult task” of reflecting the “ordinary probabilities of life” as the author “places his composition within that extensive range of criticism which general experience offers to every reader” (Scott 1815, 193). Commenting on these examples, Peter Knox-Shaw has cited Austen’s interest in the probable and the realistically mundane—itself a descriptive, “experimental” approach to ethics—as a sign of the influence of David Hume and Adam Smith on her artistic development (Knox-Shaw 2005, 347). These novels’ lack of specific dates and references to famous persons as well as the absence of detailed descriptions of clothing and objects demonstrate this commitment to generality. This lack also highlights a significant difference between the aesthetics of Austen’s novels and those of silver fork novels which are so invested in “verisimilitude” to fashion that they make themselves obsolete by the next season. In Austen’s early juvenilia, objects register the distance between the everyday—supposedly governed by causal relations and probability—and the nonrealist fictional story worlds of eighteenth-century genre fiction, worlds ostensibly governed by coincidence and improbable accident. Objects register fictionality in these texts by behaving in a perfectly plausible manner against the background of extraordinary settings and events. Here the combination of these objects’ functions with particularly unlikely settings or contexts makes the objects themselves conspicuous. Additionally, these objects draw attention to their role within Regency society, but the narratives never resolve the conflicts that arise from this reference—a fact which further self-consciously emphasizes these short works’ derivative generic status. The utilization of objects in the later published novels at first seems to directly contrast with that of the juvenilia, as the objects are more organically woven into plot structures. In contrast to the juvenilia, objects in the later novels undergird the probability of the plot by providing a naturalistic impetus to certain characters’ actions and behaviors. In Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, a transitional novel in many respects,5 one can see this technique being developed, although it is not so well implemented as in Emma. Sense and Sensibility relies upon an object— a love token—to generate one of the main plot strands of the novel. However, because the object’s function within the narrative is tied more

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to its symbolic than to its physical functions, it is more difficult to motivate within the plot, causing the object to be conspicuous in its role as a narrative actant and threatening the novel’s probability by laying the workings of the narrative bare. Nonetheless, the object appears again at the end of the novel to destabilize the novel’s otherwise generic ending. Emma, thought to be Austen’s most sophisticated novel,6 features a similar narrative-generating love token, Jane’s pianoforte. In contrast to Sense and Sensibility, this object is materially motivated within the narrative. By examining two pianofortes from this novel, and how each is fully entangled in a human–nonhuman assemblage, I show how Jane’s pianoforte generates a wide range of effects within the narrative. Because this object is especially well motivated within the plot, it is even more successful at gesturing toward extratextual narratives—that is, the possibility that Frank and Jane’s marriage will not be as felicitous as the novel’s ending explicitly suggests—and thus destabilizing the generic expectations to which the novel outwardly conforms. These novels demonstrate that, on the one hand, objects can function as narrative-aiding actants when carefully embedded within the causal relations of the narrative, as they enable the illusion of “true” narrative by suggesting that the outcome was causally given. However, on the other, because of their embeddedness within the workings of the narrative plot, objects may also resist the neat resolution of the marriage plot and assert themselves as conspicuously ambivalent things right up to the end of the novel. Objects like Lucy’s hair ring or Jane’s pianoforte become, at the end, narrative detritus that must be either ignored or placed in a box governed by a question, suggesting that even after the narrative has ceased, the problems raised in the text by these objects, problems effaced by generic conventions and the norms of public discourse, remain unresolved.

Genre Conventions and Objects in Austen’s Juvenilia As an adult, Austen compiled her various juvenile works, finished and unfinished, into three numbered notebooks. The pieces range in genre and length, from very short one- to two-page comedic skits to novella-­ length burlesques. Readers coming to Austen’s juvenilia for the first time may be surprised at how radically different in tone these short works are to her later published novels. This suggestive difference may also be why Austen’s family long kept these early works out of the public eye. Emily Auerbach notes that when Austen’s brother Henry revealed her identity

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with the publication of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey (1817), he emphasized her quiet life and ladylike demeanor, leaving out “that she wrote saucy adolescent burlesques filled with outrageous heroines who murder their parents and poison their rivals” (Auerbach 2004, 5). The juvenilia was not even publically acknowledged until James Edward Austen Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen (1869), and, even then, Peter Sabor writes, “he dismissed them as the crude experiments of a child” (J xxxix). Up until 1922, when the middle volume of Austen’s juvenilia was published in full, very little was known of these early writings (xl). Since the final volume of juvenilia was published in 1951, critical reception of these short works has greatly differed. While some critics value them only for the clues they provide regarding Austen’s artistic development, others argue that these early stories delineate a less censured view of Regency society. Of those of the first view, Sabor notes the tendency in the 1950s and 1960s of critics like Q. D. Leavis, A. Walton Litz, and Brian Southam to “depict the early writings as novels in training” (J lii). Still in 1989, John McAleer echoes these critics when he writes, “The juvenilia provide us a context within which to identify and scrutinize environmental factors crucial to Jane Austen’s formation” (McAleer 1989, 8). G. K. Chesterton, who wrote the preface to the first volume of juvenilia published, was of the other persuasion, suggesting that the charm of the juvenilia is that the stories were never intended for publication: “The whole thing is full of the sort of high spirits that are always higher in private than in public; as people laugh louder in the house than in the street” (Austen 1922, xi). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar approach Austen’s juvenilia as significant works in their own rights, seeing in Love and Freindship in particular a double critique, not simply of eighteenth-­century sentimental literature, but also of the limited roles available to women (Gilbert and Gubar 2000, 117). More recently, Margaret Anne Doody has blamed the differences between these early juvenile works and her later novels on the demands of a conservative Regency print market combined with the privileging of certain genres (the novel, the realist text) over others (the short story, the burlesque), both of which factors forced Austen to adapt her wit as well as her medium (Doody 2010, 75; cf. Byrne 2013, 55). Both critical perspectives have relevance for examining objects within Austen’s works: the juvenilia offer explicit examples of how material objects can contribute to narrative humor and undermine generic expectations, aspects that in turn reflect more explicitly on Regency social problems than her later “mature” novels.

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In one of Austen’s earliest pieces, the enabling and constraining physical qualities of objects create a slapstick comedic effect. In the short theatrical, The Visit (c. 1788/89),7 which may even have been performed in the Austen home (Byrne 2002, 14–16), the family is continually apologizing for the lack and unsuitability of their home furniture. Yet they make no attempt to remedy their domestic situation and even seem, at moments, to forget all about the fact that they have only six chairs and have invited a large party. The result of this lack provides the opportunity for a form of physical comedy that upsets the rules of propriety in polite society. In the first scene, one learns that the Fitzgeralds’ grandmother had a penchant for buying extremely small beds, “as she never wished to have any company in the House,” a fact which now, after her death, is inconvenient to her children (J 65). One also learns that Lord Fitzgerald is in love with Sophie Hampton. In the second act, Sir Arthur and Lady Hampton and their relations visit the Fitzgeralds’ home, and the following scene ensues: Miss F.

—Pray be seated. (They sit) Bless me! there ought to be 8 Chairs and these are but 6. However, if your Ladyship will but take Sir Arthur in your Lap, and Sophy, my Brother in hers, I beleive we shall do pretty well. Lady H. Oh! with pleasure…. Sophy. I beg his Lordship would be seated. Miss F. I am really shocked at crouding you in such a manner, but my Grandmother (who bought all the furniture of this room) as she had never a very large Party, did not think it necessary to buy more Chairs than were sufficient for her own family and two of her particular freinds. Sophy. I beg you will make no apologies. Your Brother is very light. (J 65)8 The scene, no doubt, is meant to be played out with perfect seriousness, but with a husband sitting on his wife’s lap and a young man taking the lap of a young lady, the impropriety of the scene would have no doubt produced considerable amusement. The incongruity of the situation is heightened by the fact that by this period a family in the Fitzgeralds’ position could easily have rectified this problem of insufficient furniture. Thus, alongside indicating the distance

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between the real and the fictional, these objects also bring into play cultural questions regarding proper consumption and material necessities. The entire scene is grounded in the question of what their grandmother deemed necessary for herself—alluding to the eighteenth-century debate over “respectability” and socially acceptable spending (Smith 2002, 211; cf. Trentmann 2017, 109). The grandmother interpreted such a concept as that which suited herself perfectly and perhaps one or two friends; however the limited properties of these objects become social hindrances to those who inherit. The inconvenience of these objects registers their somewhat static materiality, and it further highlights how much work humans must continually exert to effectively integrate material objects into their lives. Latour speaks of the work that goes into “maintain[ing] asymmetries,” but this short burlesque also demonstrates the work that goes into creating and maintaining an environment of comfort (Latour 2005, 66). Furthermore, the under-consumption presented in this passage inverses the over-consumption that the mirror of the last chapter finds in the middle-­ class home (Anon. 2012, 4:175).9 The unsuitability of the Fitzgeralds’ furniture also looks forward to the inhospitable items De Quincey finds in the house in London where he temporarily resides, explored in the next chapter (De Quincey 2001, 22). In each case, the human is plagued either by too few, too many, or the wrong kinds of objects. The absurdity of the plot reaches its apex when Sophy and Lord Fitzgerald become engaged (J 68), suggesting that their closeness due to the lack of seating had a positive effect upon their courtship, an ending that undermines and plays with the concept of “convenient” objects. While The Visit is politically innocuous, it suggests how the thematization of the everyday functions of objects and how humans rely upon them can be used to comedic effect. However, these same material functions also gesture toward larger concerns surrounding consumption, respectability, and comfort. In other pieces of the juvenilia, the deployment of similarly agential objects raises questions about the use of violence, all while the narrative retains a burlesquing tone. In Jack and Alice (c. 1790), the daughter of a tailor is wandering the grounds of the estate of the man she loves when she is suddenly “seized by the leg” by “one of the steel traps so common in gentlemen’s grounds” (J 24). The incongruity of catching a young woman in a trap meant for poachers is heightened by the narrative then taking a sentimental turn. Lucy, the victim, is discovered by two other women who

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are both (one secretly and one not so secretly) also in love with this gentleman. Because of their appetite for sentimental stories, they press her for her history before offering physical help. After she provides them with her life story, one of the women, Lady Williams, is able to set the fracture “with great skill which was the more wonderfull on account of her having never performed such a one before” (J 25). Lucy then promptly stands up and walks, a development that shows that the “steel trap” was merely a narrative convention that allowed these three women to meet one another under contrived sympathetic circumstances. The materiality of the steel trap and the reality of the broken leg are effaced by the absence of any lasting effect of either. However, the fact that the convention could also have been supplied by Lucy spraining her ankle suggests the significance of this particular object. The steel trap not only satisfies the convention but also invokes a “horror” like that found in a Gothic novel, elevating the scene from satire to farce. The narrative’s forgetfulness when it comes to the brute violence that has been enacted (and the leg that has been broken) suggests the narrator’s total disregard for probability or causality. This, of course, is where the humor comes in. Yet, as with the chairs in the last excerpt, the trap also gestures toward more ambiguous and troublesome narrative ground. By invoking the trap, the broken leg, and the subsequent unrealistic rectification of the damage, the scene glosses over while at the same time alluding to an unpleasant truth about the dark underside of the landscape surrounding the country house and the material delegates employed by landowners to enforce their wishes in their absence. The use of steel traps or “man traps” began in the 1770s to combat poaching; P. B Munsche writes that these contraptions broke trespasser’s bones and, in extreme cases—with larger traps, known tellingly as “body squeezers”—caused death (Munsche 1981, 72–73). Although the use of such devices became illegal in 1827, the legal liability of the landowner in severe cases remained uncertain at the end of the eighteenth century (72–74), a fact which highlights that the law had not yet caught up with the need to assign human liability in cases of what Latour calls “technical mediation” (Latour 1999, 178).10 In examining objects designed to enforce the wills of human authorities, Latour writes that human desires are “translated” into matter but that these objects are still full of engineers and chancellors and lawmakers, commingling their wills and their story lines with those of gravel, concrete, paint, and standard

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c­ alculations. The mediation, the technical translation, that I am trying to understand resides in the blind spot in which society and matter exchange properties. (190)

The trap becomes a material testimony to a state of society in which steel traps and landowners have created collectives that allow the object to do the damage while the human potentially remains legally free of blame. In fact, the invocation of the trap could even be viewed as a kind of pre-­ critique of the anesthetized Regency conventions of Austen’s own later published novels, for the trap highlights the non-existence of such objects in her later works, as the norms of Regency discourse demand the excision of such politically explicit and gruesome details.11 While critics have long acknowledged that the juvenilia parody fictional and literary forms of the time (Halperin 1989, 29), Patricia Meyer Spacks has more specifically argued that the juvenilia is “fiction about fiction” (Spacks 1989, 127; cf. Litz 1965, 7). The juvenilia demonstrates a preoccupation with how fiction operates and how plot happens, as evidenced by the play of causal and temporal incongruity in these works (Spacks 1989, 123–24). Laurie Kaplan further notes the usage of “standard conventions … to explore multiple voices, various points of view, new plot complexities, and absurd juxtapositions in order to thwart her audience’s demands and expectations” (Kaplan 1989, 75). McAleer, although generally dismissive of the juvenilia, provides a helpful catalogue of the many different modes and techniques to be found in these early works—and especially evident in the example above: “fortuitous encounters, unmotivated narrative digressions, … calculated irrelevancy, … inflated rhetoric, cliché diction, gothicism, epistolary absurdity, trivialized history-writing, and neglect of time scale” (McAleer 1989, 10). As an experimental space, the juvenilia suggests a self-conscious author invested in questions of fictionality, probability, and, ultimately, realism (8). Objects in the juvenilia play a key role in these self-conscious burlesques of literary form, and this role highlights the importance of the materially motivated objects found in the later novels. Objects in the juvenilia often highlight extraordinary plot elements and, in so doing, force the reader to confront the generic conventions of the narrative. This invocation of conspicuous objects to concentrate the satire into a sharpened, material point becomes explicit in Henry and Eliza (c. 1788/79), which opens with the following:

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As Sir George and Lady Harcourt were superintending the Labours of their Haymakers, rewarding the industry of some by smiles of approbation, and punishing the idleness of others by a cudgel, they perceived lying closely concealed beneath the thick foliage of a Haycock, a beautifull little Girl not more than 3 months old. (J 38)

Claudia L.  Johnson notes that this opening presents a kind of “gentry Everyman-and-his-wife” engaging in the “superintendence” expected of them but that this image is violently upended when the reader arrives at the “cudgel” (Johnson 1989, 47–48). Suddenly the entire import of the introduction, its country overtones, and its invocation of a particular social class engaging in particular codified behavior is irreverently interrupted. The “shock” of the passage, Johnson writes, is the result not of the incongruity between the depiction and reality, but rather the “discovery that such people may indeed beat their farmers” and “that certain novelistic forms do not permit us to imagine, much less to represent, realities of this sort” (48). Significantly, a material object enables this realization. Like the steel trap, the cudgel has violence programmed into its design: a cudgel is not an object that ordinarily suffers from ambiguous meanings or usages. Both of these objects enable human actions that would be more difficult or impossible without them (Latour 1999, 179). In the case of both the steel trap and the cudgel, the disturbingly violent object ironically becomes the nexus of a comedic juxtaposition (love-sick girl/man trap; country gentleman/cudgel). But these objects also reference the actions that their usage makes possible, highlighting a range of deplorable behavior that is enabled by material objects. Later in the text, when Eliza, the baby who has been brought up as the Harcourts’ own, is caught stealing a 50 pound note, she is disowned, wanders throughout the world, and is eventually thrown into Newgate. Once in prison, she finds “in a Corner of her Cell, a small saw and a Ladder of ropes” (J 42). These objects are conspicuous for their sheer “convenience” as they felicitously show up in an unlikely place (Byrne 2014, 199). However irrational their placement in the prison, they contribute further to the farce by highlighting the material necessities required for Eliza to escape. Unfortunately, even these enabling objects have physical limitations that the narrative registers. Eliza realizes that her babies cannot climb down the ladder themselves, and “she determined to fling down all her Cloathes, of which she had a large Quantity, and then having given them strict Charge not to hurt themselves, threw her Children after

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them” (J 42). The image of a pile of clothing deep enough to ensure that her children are found “in perfect Health and fast asleep” is as funny as the idea that her children somehow have control over whether they will be injured by the fall (J 42). The shock of the scene arises not simply from a young woman being imprisoned or the absurdity of her finding tools for her escape in her own cell, but also from the juxtaposition of such strange events with a very real and horrifying setting. David Alworth argues that sites within novels can also be read as Latour’s “actants,” as they “exercise[e] a kind of agency with and through their nonhuman constituents” (Alworth 2016, 2). Newgate prison is a perfect example of such a site, being itself an actant that triggers reflection and horror in its human viewers and occupants. Eliza flinging petticoats out of the “window” offers a stark juxtaposition to the architecture terrible of the newly rebuilt prison, designed “to create an impression of foreboding” through its brutish design, scarcity of windows, and “by such overt symbolism as the carved chains over the entrances” (Bergdoll 2000, 91). Here, Newgate itself functions as an actant, not just through restraining prisoners, but also in dissuading would-be offenders by materially exemplifying the horror of incarceration. The image painted in this short work is thus delightfully morbid—the woman crawling out the window of this horrific Newgate via a rope ladder after having sawn through the bars over her windows with a rustic saw and having flung her children onto a pile of petticoats below. Incongruity appears on almost every level, and the purpose of these objects directly contradicts the rules of probability, registering the wide chasm between burlesque and reality. But while invoking Gothic novels with their heroines imprisoned in towers, these objects register the absurdity, even the trite quality of such depictions in light of the very real threat of Newgate. These objects provide a comedic reversal, but they also enable a plot twist in which the heroine is thrown into Newgate only to immediately escape in an overtly conspicuous manner. Setting, character, and material objects all coalesce in this scene to create a truly unlikely and thus humorous anecdote. Yet the setting and objects do more than stimulate amusement, for they could not achieve their comedic aim without referencing the very real prison. Alworth argues that “by transposing real sites into narrative settings” novels “render them operative as figures in and of collective life” (Alworth 2016, 2). “Newgate” references its own role in Austen’s society at the same time that it figures as a part of the narrative’s humor, because

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only by knowing the “real-world” Newgate can the reader truly appreciate the absurd and improbable role it plays in this short extract. A similar technique, in which objects are the carriers of narrative irony, has been observed by Hardy in Northanger Abbey: Catherine continually seeks out spaces in which she hopes to discover some Gothic horror, but Austen invokes objects in these spaces that are so thoroughly ordinary as to throw into relief her Gothic sensibilities: “The object seems to flout her by its very blandness” (Hardy 1975, 140). Contextualizing this function with Riffaterre’s understanding of description allows one to see how the object becomes “the vehicle of irony” to draw attention to the disconnect between contemporary everyday life (the life of hats, bonnets, furniture, umbrellas, and even cudgels) and the fictional fantasy on the page (Riffaterre 1986, 285). In addition to functioning as registers of fictionality, the objects in the juvenilia and Northanger Abbey invite potential new readings of specific genres, as they introduce disruptive meanings that run contrary to the conventional aims of the genre being parodied. This is an important point because only by looking at these additional readings can one fully appreciate how everyday material objects in novels like Sense and Sensibility and Emma are transformed into sites of contested or generative meaning. Finally, A Collection of Letters (c. 1791/92) tends more toward the sophisticated irony found in Austen’s later novels than toward the burlesques of her earlier juvenilia.12 The objects discussed in the letter “From a young Lady in distress’d Circumstances to her friend” are necessities that are denied to the writer by her social superiors. In this letter, burlesque seems to give way to comedic social criticism, as the objects of censure draw attention to Lady Greville’s failure to understand the needs of her social “inferiors.” The objects, in their very practicality, testify to her snobbishness and show how a dearth of objects can be particularly constraining—socially and physically. In the letter, a young woman, Maria Williams, complains to her friend of the insufferable condescension of Lady Greville, who often chaperones Maria to balls along with her own daughters.13 One evening, Lady Greville expresses surprise at the fineness of her gown, noting “It is not my way to find fault with people because they are poor, for I always think that they are more to be despised and pitied than blamed for it” (J 198). When Lady Greville asks Maria if her mother has already gone to bed, her own daughter expresses shock at the question, noting that “it is but nine o’clock” (J 199). Lady Greville tellingly responds, “True Ellen, but

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Candles cost money, and Mrs Williams is too wise to be extravagant” (J 199). By making no differentiation between beeswax and tallow candles, she suggests that even the latter would be “extravagant,” dooming Mrs. Williams to a darkness under which not even the working poor would have suffered.14 The next day she calls on Maria and, while making the young woman stand outside in the elements at the door of her carriage, invites her to dine with them: “There will be no occasion for your being very fine for I shant send the Carriage—If it rains you may take an umbrella” (J 201–202). By “allowing” Maria to take an umbrella, Lady Greville implies that Maria needs her permission to use such a convenience. Gown, candles, and umbrella seem to fall under some rubric of extravagance in Lady Greville’s eyes. However, by honing in on the practical, everyday utility— the enabling qualities—of objects like candles and umbrellas, the narrative also subtly acknowledges the manner in which more nuanced objects, like a new gown, are socially enabling. This letter, which foreshadows Austen’s use of objects in her later novels, especially embodies the way material relations can be represented in literature to highlight social practices, while, at the same time, these objects enable aesthetic effects. The power of these material objects lies in how well they invoke recognition of their own importance in the network of social relations represented. Objects in Austen’s juvenilia both highlight their fantastical settings and, while gesturing to their everyday usages, disclose additional, even unexpected, interpretive possibilities. To view objects in this manner is not, however, as Ellen E. Martin has proposed in a psychoanalytic reading of the juvenilia, to see them as free-floating signifiers, “emblems of meaning that bestow no meaning” (Martin 1989, 91). Rather, it is to view them as representative of a kind of materiality that resists a conventionalized, fictional world. When an object appears in the juvenilia, it rarely serves a merely descriptive function. Its utilization either mocks such decorative conventions by its conspicuous superfluity and convenience within the plot or it serves an important function within the plot as an object on which an irrational juxtaposition hinges—the object functioning as an arbiter of the comedic punchline, in a sense. The physical uses and qualities of these objects contrast narrative conventions or expectations that either fail to take such materiality into account or take it for granted. Similar to the roles of it-narrators in the last chapter, the object’s role and position in these plots registers the incongruity that is key to the humor of these works. While it-narratives achieve this by giving voice to the object and demonstrating an absurd level of object agency, in the juvenilia, the

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humor is achieved by juxtaposing objects, settings, and extraordinary circumstances. In Austen’s later novels, conspicuous objects play various roles in generating narrative possibilities but also contribute to ambiguous resolutions of the texts by hinting at extratextual or counterfactual narratives. While specific objects at various moments function as hints to narrative possibilities or as material motivation within the plot, the complex relationship between humans and nonhumans proves to be far more complicated and “folded” than their simple invocation acknowledges, as once they are dynamically integrated into the narrative, they continue to generate possibilities even at the fictional text’s resolution (Latour 1999, 189).

The Love Token as Plot Device in Sense and Sensibility In the juvenilia, objects often register the text’s improbability, its fictionality, as they indicate a narrative peculiarity, unmotivated behavior, or narrative convention. But in her later novels, objects generally reinforce the aesthetic illusion of these texts by providing material motivation for the behavior of human characters. Nonetheless, although Sense and Sensibility represents a total break in tone with Austen’s juvenilia, it draws attention to its own narrative construction, especially when an object—a love token—generates the primary conflict and impetus of one of the main plot strands. The inability to materially motivate the object’s conspicuousness within the plot causes it to become formally conspicuous. This love token, in its implausibility within the narrative, draws attention to one of the few instances in Austen’s novels when the plot structuring gives way to improbability, inadvertently revealing the novel’s status as an arbitrary fiction. This revealing “mistake” helps uncover how objects function as a means of generating narrative and undermining generic expectations in Austen’s narratives. Sense and Sensibility is considered by some Austen scholars as the novel that engages the most in consumer display (Copeland 1995, 96; Saglia 2009, 357). While the novel features such overt materialists as John and Fanny Dashwood, Lucy Steele, and Robert Ferrars, it is Elinor Dashwood who demonstrates the most practical and logistical awareness of material objects, noticeable in her fine attention to the family’s household economy (SS 30–31). Elinor is highly cognizant of the human–nonhuman

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networks and assemblages that make up society’s forms and codes, an understanding that often translates into anxiety about her own family’s relationship to these mundane things. As the character through whom most of the novel is focalized, Elinor’s awareness of the material significance of the presence and movement of objects conveys that knowledge to the reader, who is asked to understand and account for the few objects that hint at the unfolding of the plot. On the one hand, the novel demonstrates how humans deploy objects to further their own particular ends; on the other, it highlights how this deployment is not always successful, how the object may in turn function in a manner that defies its human utilizer’s desires or wishes. Although the entire novel hinges on a conflict between Edward’s desire to be with Elinor and his duty to Lucy to whom he has been engaged for four years, neither Elinor nor the reader are aware of this conflict until the end of the first volume. The first significant hint to the conflict appears in the form of an object which Marianne notices when Edward visits the sisters at Barton Cottage. Elinor is at first struck by his “low spirits” (SS 111), but it is Marianne who sees the ring: Marianne remained thoughtfully silent, till a new object suddenly engaged her attention. She was sitting by Edward, and in taking his tea from Mrs. Dashwood, his hand passed so directly before her, as to make a ring, with a plait of hair in the centre, very conspicuous on one of his fingers. (113)

Marianne, being open and unthinking, immediately draws attention to the ring and asks if it contains Fanny’s hair; Edward looks “pained” but agrees. With her romantic sensibilities, it is little surprise that Marianne actually believes the hair to be Elinor’s own, thinking it “a free gift from her sister” (SS 114). The greater surprise is that Elinor herself is deceived, despite the fact that it “must have been procured by some theft or contrivance unknown to herself” (SS 114). Jill Heydt-Stevenson hones in on the unaccountability of Elinor’s wrong conclusion when she writes that Elinor is blinded by her own desires in the passage, denying her own bodily experience: “when and how could he have secured her hair?” (Heydt-Stevenson 2005, 43). The passage is interesting because it shows a distinct failure of judgment on the part of Elinor—a character defined by her careful commitment to such judgment (Morgan 1980, 128)—and demonstrates Elinor’s own fallibility.

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The ring thus creates a space to be filled by narrative. It is unlikely that one of Austen’s nineteenth-century readers would have made the mistake of Marianne and Elinor and believed it to be the latter’s hair. Austen’s readers would have been familiar with the familial and romantic associations of hair rings, and they would have known that women were not allowed to bestow such a gift of hair jewelry upon a male nonrelative except in the case of a positive engagement.15 Thus, the idea of Edward pilfering Elinor’s hair would not only be inappropriate, but also improbable given his characterization up to that point. Thus, the scene opens up the possibility, given Edward’s severe embarrassment, that there is some impediment in his relationship to Elinor, that, in fact, he is engaged to someone else, despite the fact that he loves her. Alternatively, perhaps Elinor and her family have been deceived: perhaps he does not love her after all. Each of these interpretations is in play at this point within the novel. So far, the hair ring successful aids the narrative by hinting at a mystery that is yet unresolved. In Austen’s novels, this is one instance of two when the word “conspicuous” refers to a material object. The other occurs in Northanger Abbey: when Catherine sees a dark cabinet in her room, the narrative reads “though in a situation conspicuous enough” it “had never caught her notice before” (NA 172), the joke being that, previously when she was in her room, her attention was engrossed by “an immense heavy chest” (167) which proved to contain nothing but a sheet of “white cotton counterpane” (169). Despite her shame over her misplaced enthusiasm over the chest, Catherine falls into the same trap with the cabinet, which despite her meticulous search, proves to contain nothing but “an inventory of linen, in coarse and modern characters” (176). In Northanger Abbey, these objects fool Catherine over and over again as they gesture toward the Gothic narratives that she has been consuming. But, in a sense, they fool the reader as well, who, despite all his or her awareness, must be intrigued as to whether or not Catherine will actually discover something interesting. The heavy chest is obviously a self-conscious narrative device, a fact that may lessen its overall power but does not entirely do away with the curiosity it inspires, much less the humor that it incites. Despite the lack of such explicit generic self-reflexivity in Sense and Sensibility, the manner in which the ring is so conveniently later called upon by Lucy to signify proof of her engagement to Edward is formally rather too obvious, as it neatly allows for the confirmation of the couple’s engagement without providing any additional information regarding

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Edward’s feelings. In the final paragraphs of volume one, Lucy produces a letter written in Edward’s hand, a miniature of him, and invokes the ring— “perhaps you might notice the ring when you saw him?” (SS 154). Volume two opens with the following rationalization of Elinor: However small Elinor’s general dependance on Lucy’s veracity might be, it was impossible for her on serious reflection to suspect it in the present case, where no temptation could be answerable to the folly of inventing a falsehood of such a description. What Lucy had asserted to be true, therefore, Elinor could not, dared not longer doubt; supported as it was too on every side by such probabilities and proofs, and contradicted by nothing but her own wishes. Their opportunity of acquaintance in the house of Mr. Pratt was a foundation for the rest, at once indisputable and alarming; and Edward’s visit near Plymouth, his melancholy state of mind, his dissatisfaction at his own prospects, his uncertain behaviour towards herself, the intimate knowledge of the Miss Steeles as to Norland and their family connections, which had often surprised her, the picture, the letter, the ring, formed altogether such a body of evidence, as overcame every fear of condemning him unfairly, and established as a fact, which no partiality could set aside, his ill-treatment of herself. (SS 159)

The passage is strewn with language that indicates Elinor’s analytical reasoning process—“probabilities and proofs,” “foundation,” “body of evidence,” “established as a fact”—which suggests her firm commitment to enlightened empiricism. Elinor is aware of her own subjective weakness— perhaps more so because of her previous naivete. While Lucy is able to produce much circumstantial evidence of the likelihood or the plausibility of their engagement (not least of which is the unlikelihood of her resorting to the “folly of inventing” such a lie), the material evidence is what convinces Elinor beyond doubt. The picture, we learn in the previous chapter, “might have been accidentally obtained” (SS 154)—a note that hints at some of the problems associated with having one’s visage turned material in the later silver fork novel. However, the letter and the ring are material signs of the truth of Lucy’s story that cannot, in her opinion, be disputed. The reader must also acknowledge these hints and concede the claim Lucy has upon Edward, grappling with the uncertainty that such a revelation entails for the rest of the narrative. However, despite the positive nature of the abovementioned “proofs” in Elinor’s mind and the material love tokens that Lucy brandishes, doubt as to the emotional significance of the ring continues to linger.

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Had Edward been intentionally deceiving her? Had he feigned a regard for her which he did not feel? Was his engagement to Lucy, an engagement of the heart? No; whatever it might once have been, she could not believe it such at present. His affection was all her own. She could not be deceived in that. Her mother, sisters, Fanny, all had been conscious of his regard for her at Norland; it was not an illusion of her own vanity. He certainly loved her. (SS 159–160)

In this passage, Elinor reveals her commitment to enlightenment principles—to a continual reassessment of truth based on reason and sentiment, the same principles expected of the inductive reader.16 While Lucy relies upon the ring as a “fact,” an indisputable material marker of the “truth” of her claim upon Edward, the ring does not actually function in the manner in which she desires. Elinor bases her opinions not just on the material actant, but also on Edward’s behavior, on the human–nonhuman imbroglio. Her conclusion is that the ring may denote that they are indeed engaged, but it cannot account for Edward’s feelings. As Lauren Wilwerding notes, the social significance of gifts in the novel does not always “correspond to the true nature of the relationship” (Wilwerding 2015, 214). Even though Edward inexplicably wears the ring, Lucy, when she gives him the ring, cedes control of its usage and meaning. Instead of demonstrating their mutual attachment to one another, the ring catalyzes the emergence of a complicated narrative problem for the novel, namely, how will Elinor and Edward surmount this obstacle? The ring gestures toward, not Edward’s love for Lucy, but the potential tension that the reader can expect to encounter over the next two volumes. The ring at first seems to have performed its narrative function quite well; however, on close examination, the plotting of this episode is particularly significant among Austen’s published work because of its implausibility. Given the highly indicative nature of gifts of hair and the secretive nature of their engagement, one wonders at both Lucy for bestowing it and Edward for wearing it, for, besides his sister Fanny and his own mother, no other women in the narrative could appropriately give such a gift to him. The ring, as a gift, is akin to Jane’s pianoforte, which I will look at in the next section, in that it must obviously give rise to undesirable questions, making both gifts highly conspicuous tokens in the context of their secret engagements. But Jane’s gift is more materially motivated within the text, having physical properties that make it

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impossible to conceal yet also provide an alternate motivation for why it has been given to her. In contrast, the ring is especially conspicuous in that, unlike objects which have everyday uses, it has no utilitarian value and therefore can only gesture toward its sentimental value, incidentally, the very value most in need of concealment. The ring’s general passivity is highlighted by the fact that, at this particular period, love tokens such as these no longer held any weight in breach of promise of marriage cases, although “tokens such as rings and locks of hair continued to signify a binding commitment and pledge of a suitor’s love” (Holloway 2013, 56). Austen’s readers would have identified the letters, jewelry, and portrait as stereotypical of courtship procedures (53–89), objects which could at both previous and later points in time—but not in the early nineteenth century—have functioned as legal proof of the couple’s commitment to one another (Frost 1995, 13–15). The ring in this instance is significant because it only has value within the context of Edward and Lucy’s relationship: it intimately connects Edward to Lucy—in fact, the object, in Latour’s words, is quite literally “full of people” in that it contains a part of Lucy’s body (Latour 2000, 10). Akin to the “detachable objects” that Peter  Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones identify in the early modern period, the ring objectifies a tiny part of the beloved as a means of fostering intimacy in courtship (Stallybrass and Jones 2001, 116). However, for this very reason, with the lover embodied in it, the ring is exactly the kind of object that most needs concealment, as the primary function of the object is to testify to the relationship that it denotes (Holloway 2013, 88). Edward has every reason to conceal this evocative object and no reason to advertise it, as the wearing of this ornament ultimately does. This failure of the object as a “probable” generator of plot is due to the weakness of the human–nonhuman network invoked. The object hangs on to the plot by a tenuous link—Lucy having given it to Edward, and Edward having the ring in his possession. Edward’s behavior after this point, that is, his interactions with the object, can be motivated neither by his character nor by the physical qualities of the object, suggesting, on the whole, the object’s conspicuous status as a plot device. One certainly cannot imagine Edward wearing the ring when he visits his mother in London—an act which would surely be disastrous—which raises the further question of why he wears it when he visits Elinor. For if, as Kristen Miller Zohn has suggested, “he is wearing it as a noticeable reminder to himself to stay true to Lucy and to keep an emotional distance from

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Elinor” (Zohn 2011, par. 26), why has he not anticipated the fact that one of the Dashwood women might notice it? Either the reader must attribute this lack of successful secrecy and self-preservation to a baffling lack of foresight, or the incident must be accepted as one for which a character’s motives cannot account, an instance in which the object emerges as a tool of novelistic convention, a hint to the reader of an unknowability that she can expect to complicate the course of “true love.” But even if one were to forgive the narrator for this brief show of literary contrivance, the ring continues to gesture toward the contingency of the fictional text. In the final chapters of the novel, after Lucy has broken her engagement with Edward, married his richer brother Robert, and Edward has asked Elinor to marry him, Edward shows Elinor Lucy’s last letter, which includes the following suggestive passage: “I have burnt all your letters, and will return your picture the first opportunity. Please to destroy my scrawls—but the ring with my hair you are very welcome to keep” (SS 414). Edward expresses embarrassment at this letter for its style, but perhaps part of his embarrassment lies in Lucy’s impropriety in suggesting he can keep her love token. “Very welcome” implies that it is Edward who suffers from Lucy’s lack of faith, as though Lucy—despite all her machinations—remains unaware of his attachment to Elinor and assumes that he is still in love with herself. But beyond Edward’s own feelings, the ring’s existence functions also as a lasting reminder of the primary moral difficulty of the text, that is, that Edward would have sacrificed his happiness to save his honor, and, as such, it highlights that the “happy ending,” in which Edward is released from his engagement with his honor intact, has been dependent entirely upon happenstance, if not literary convention. The invocation of the ring here, while it draws readers back to the uncertainty that informed much of the novel and allows them to rejoice with the characters at their happy escape, also highlights a counterfactual narrative in which Robert does not agree to run away with Lucy and Edward remains bound in a loveless marriage. By invoking the ring at the very moment of narrative convergence, Austen allows the reader to shudder at the all too probable story line that has been barely evaded. Dannenberg writes that such counterfactual narratives satisfy “the human psyche’s fascination with events that might have been” (Dannenberg 2008, 5), but, in this case, the dominant emotion is more relief than fascination. The ring and the alternative narrative it connotes reveal Edward and Elinor’s happiness to be entirely dependent upon chance—that is, narrative convention.

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Pianofortes as Actants in Emma In Emma, it is not one but a series of objects and events that denote a mystery that Emma and the reader must attempt to solve. The novel, which has sometimes been referred to as a quasi-detective novel (James 1999, 250; Bell 2007), is full of objects that stand in for humans, disrupt human attempts at communication, and facilitate plot. While the hair ring of the earlier novel functions as a static and, thus, only partially effective material delegate, the objects in Emma are thoroughly integrated into the causal and material workings of the plot. The novel demonstrates how humans deploy objects as delegates “to enlarge their powers good or bad, with the aid of things” (Hardy 1975, 161; cf. Miles 2003, 76). Objects in the novel acquire special social and narrative importance, as they become the subject of neighborhood speculation and the impetus for Emma’s own personal fictions (Lustig 2004, 90; Murphy 2013, 107). More than simply narrative MacGuffins—which “se[t] the story in motion” (Whitty 2016, 245; cf. Byrne 2014, 121)—the physical properties and purposes of these objects are of supreme importance to the effect they have on how the narrative unfolds. The novel features two new pianofortes, a grand purchased by the upwardly mobile tradesman, Mr. Cole, and a square piano given anonymously to Jane Fairfax, the relation of the impoverished Mrs. and Miss Bates. The Coles’ pianoforte demonstrates how the instrument is entwined in a network of humans as expressed by the act of performance—itself an assemblage of the human and the nonhuman. It further provides a discursive space for a discussion of Jane’s pianoforte, which in turn enables the characters and reader to speculate on what will unfold in the rest of the narrative. An examination of the physical qualities of the Coles’ pianoforte hints at why Jane’s pianoforte functions so well in facilitating and complicating plot, as it highlights how the instrument’s material qualities are crucial to its role in maintaining an interest that the mystery surrounding Jane’s piano initially sparks. For both of these pianofortes, the effects that they have on the neighborhood and within the novel are tied not simply to their symbolic value, cultural capital, or significance within a gift exchange, although these aspects are important and have been explored (cf. Zionkowski 2016; Lustig 2004; Wiesenfarth 2004, 157; Selwyn 1999, 124–25). But these effects are also attributable to the pianoforte’s role as a musical tool and to its physical dominance, as its conspicuous material presence blurs the boundary between public and private (as it is housed in

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the more public part of the home), attracts human attention, and affects human behavior. In the piano, symbolic and physical traits combine to make it an irresistible object that becomes entwined with key events in the novel. Although the Coles are not the only family changing their social position within the world of the novel, we are to assume that the Coles have made the most vertical movement, their style of living having become “second only to the family at Hartfield” (Emma 223). In a passage of free indirect discourse, Emma considers them “very good sort of people— friendly, liberal, and unpretending,” but remembers that “they were of low origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel” (223). Despite her dismissal however, the rest of her neighbors accept the Coles and their attempts to rise in social class. As a family the Coles aspire to the status of the pseudo-gentry, a term coined by Alan Everitt to refer to a class emerging in the eighteenth century and set on acquiring the trappings of gentry-­ status (Everitt 1974, 170). This could be done, according to David Spring, by attaining “the schooling, the accent, the manners (from style of conversation to dressing for dinner), … the large house in its own grounds, servants, carriages and horses” (Spring 1983, 60). To these objects the Coles add a grand pianoforte, which—if it came from Broadwood and Sons like the other piano of the narrative—would have cost between 40 and 46 pounds in 1815 (Harding 1978, 394). Owning a pianoforte satisfies a nexus of taste, sociability, and conspicuousness, all of which aid the Coles’ social climbing. Historically, it was a favored object: the pianoforte had been gaining in popularity since the 1770s with John Broadwood leading advances in English piano technology well into the nineteenth century; Cyril Ehrlich attributes Broadwood’s market success to “the affluence and social ambitions of a prosperous middle class”—families precisely in the Coles’ position (Ehrlich 1990, 16; cf. Wood 2009, 373). Mary Burgan goes so far as to argue that the piano became a “necessity in many middle-class homes” by the beginning of the nineteenth century (Burgan 1986, 52). The instrument displayed not only a family’s disposable income but also their refinement. Jodi Lustig writes of how it “quickly became the emblematic object of upper- and middle-­ class daughters who learned to play the instrument as an ‘accomplishment’ illustrating their grace and their family’s gentility” (Lustig 2004, 85). However, what is taken for granted in accounts that focus on the piano’s ability to aid social mobility through symbolic capital is how this effect is only made possible by the pianoforte’s physical presence and material

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properties, that is, its actual usage in a social setting. Because the pianoforte is itself such a complex material object, it enables the formation of a number of interpersonal bonds by appealing to multiple senses and facilitating different types of experience. Significantly, it is precisely this usage that Mrs. Cole stresses when she brings their new purchase into the conversation at a dinner party coincidentally given by the Coles directly after the arrival of their new instrument. After bemoaning the injustice that such a fine artist as Jane Fairfax should ever be without a pianoforte, she continues: It seemed quite a shame, especially considering how many houses there are where fine instruments are absolutely thrown away. This is like giving ourselves a slap, to be sure! and it was but yesterday I was telling Mr Cole, I really was ashamed to look at our new grand pianoforté in the drawing-­ room, while I do not know one note from another, and our little girls, who are but just beginning, perhaps may never make any thing of it; and there is poor Jane Fairfax, who is mistress of music, has not any thing of the nature of an instrument, not even the pitifullest old spinet in the world, to amuse herself with. … only [Mr Cole] is so particularly fond of music that he could not help indulging himself in the purchase, hoping that some of our good neighbours might be so obliging occasionally to put it to a better use than we can; and that really is the reason why the instrument was bought—or else I am sure we ought to be ashamed of it.—We are in great hopes that Miss Woodhouse may be prevailed with to try it this evening. (Emma 233)

This is a very diplomatic speech. Given that neither she nor her daughters can do the pianoforte justice, they risk being perceived as having purchased the instrument merely for the prestige it confers (a perception that should be avoided, even if true). To counter this assumption, Mrs. Cole downplays the symbolic importance of the piano and instead invokes the convenience and pleasure it will afford. She attributes the purchase to the taste of Mr. Cole, and she tactfully beseeches Emma to play for the pleasure of the party. Thus, rather than focusing on the incipient accomplishments of her daughters, she turns her gaze outwards to the neighborhood and validates the purchase by emphasizing how it will enable her family to enjoy their neighbors’ performances. The Coles ask their visitors to sanction their new social position—evidenced by the pianoforte—by actually forming a physical relationship with this instrument: to touch it, to hear it, to enjoy the pleasure it can confer.

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Mrs. Cole’s stress on the neighborhood’s usage of the piano and the pleasure that it will create highlights the instrument’s intermediary as well as symbolic role and reveals that its physical qualities are what allow it to function so effectively as an actant in forming the new social bonds that the Coles desire. These qualities range from the most basic to the more complex. First, given its size and the impracticability of moving it, the pianoforte exerts its presence within their drawing room; its material properties make it conspicuous, unavoidable (see Fig. 3.1). Second, as a piano performance requires both a player and an instrument, it exemplifies Latour’s concept of the assemblage. This human–nonhuman performance in turn attracts attention and induces pleasure, as the Coles’ guests are seated “round the instrument, to listen” (Emma 245). In Pride and Prejudice (1812), the piano’s potential for bringing characters within the novel into intimate social relations is also evident: Burgan notes, “Without the availability of the piano for dance music, the confrontations of Jane Austen’s Elizabeth and Darcy could hardly have been staged” (Burgan 1986, 54). In both novels, the piano as a nonhuman object facilitates new bonds between humans and fosters social reorganization and, eventually, inclusion—exactly the effects that the Coles seek. Finally, the pianoforte generates discourse because there may be so much difference between musical instruments of the same type. When Mrs. Weston hears of Jane’s pianoforte, Austen writes that, “Mrs. Weston, kind-hearted and musical” had “so much to ask and to say as to tone, touch, and pedal” (Emma 237). One thus engages with the pianoforte through multiple embodied senses: one does not simply listen to a pianoforte but also touches it, interacts with it, sings or dances to it, looks at it, and, finally, one discusses its physical and musical qualities for no two pianofortes are alike. In no way does such a material analysis downplay the social and symbolic significance of the pianoforte or the fact that the Coles’ motivation for the purchase springs from their social aspirations. On the contrary, it sheds light on the physical realities that undergird social practices and in so doing helps account for why the piano functioned so well at enabling social mobility for the rising middle classes of the period. The Coles’ piano thus throws Jane’s into relief by highlighting the instrument’s material conspicuousness. Jane’s piano demonstrates that when an additional level of secrecy is added to an object that is already a fine inducement to conversation and sociability, that object becomes irresistible. In the novel, Jane’s anonymous gift becomes a mystery to be solved by Emma, the neighborhood,

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Fig. 3.1  Grand Piano, John Broadwood and Sons, London, 1808, No. 4099. Dimensions with lid closed: 246(l), 114(w), 90(h) cm. (Image reproduced with permission from the Royal Academy of Music, London)

and the reader. The material properties of the gift combined with the mystery surrounding it foster speculation and generate a host of narrative possibilities, ushering the reader into a dynamic, imaginative relationship with the plot of the novel.

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The discursive potential of Jane’s pianoforte is evident from its very first mention in the novel as Mrs. Cole imparts to her guests the latest Highbury news: she had been calling on Miss Bates, and as soon as she entered the room had been struck by the sight of a pianoforté—a very elegant looking instrument—not a grand, but a large-sized square pianoforté; and the substance of the story, the end of all the dialogue which ensued of surprize, and inquiry, and congratulations on her side and explanations on Miss Bates’s, was, that this pianoforté had arrived from Broadwood’s the day before, to the great astonishment of both aunt and niece—entirely unexpected; that at first, by Miss Bates’s account, Jane herself was quite at a loss, quite bewildered to think who could possibly have ordered it—but now, they were both perfectly satisfied that it could be from only one quarter;—of course it must be from Col. Campbell. (Emma 232)

Although this account is given by Mrs. Cole, the pianoforte’s significance within the text clearly goes beyond reflecting on the speaker, as the instrument becomes embroiled in a number of conversations and subplots. In a novel known for its gifts (Zionkowski 2016, par. 26), this particular one is made especially conspicuous by its “large-siz[e],” its expense, and its supposed anonymity.17 The giver of the gift, Frank Churchill, to whom Jane is secretly engaged, remains a mystery until the final pages of the novel. But while the giver is anonymous, the gifting is conspicuously public, making it realistically impossible for Jane to refuse it (see Fig.  3.2). Although the transport of the instrument is not addressed in Emma, the practical difficulty of moving large, expensive instruments is a topic of discussion in Mansfield Park (1814) when Mary Crawford expresses her surprise that, even with compensation, a farmer will not give up a horse and cart in the middle of the harvest season so that she may transport her beloved harp (MP 68–69). A piano would have posed an even greater difficulty, leaving little doubt that its arrival would have attracted attention, with the anonymity of the giver only amplifying the interest with which it is discussed. Frank gives the gift as a love token, the normal purpose of which, as Holloway has highlighted, is to “stimulate remembering of the absent, and hasten the development of intimacy,” but it remains unclear if he entirely anticipates (for afterwards he seems to relish) another function of the love token, how it works as a tangible sign and hence “as a means of

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Fig. 3.2  Square Piano, John Broadwood and Son, London, 1801. No. 5999. Dimensions with lid closed: 163 (l), 61 (w), 83 (h) cm. (Image reproduced with permission from the Royal Academy of Music, London)

publicity” (Holloway 2013, 88). The public nature of love tokens can be interpreted in light of Marcel Mauss’s observation that “it is not individuals but collectives that impose obligations of exchange and contract upon each other” (Mauss 2002, 6). This idea of the love token as a means of publicity suggests that the love token must be materially embodied, an enduring physical object rather than a one-time private gesture. One may only preclude this public purpose if the love token is given in secret, but Frank’s anonymity only hides his own identity and the specific sentiments behind it, not the gesture itself. By allowing the gift to be public without offering a plausible reason or narrative behind it, Frank creates a discursive void that allows the instrument to become “subject to the speculation of the entire village of Highbury” (Copeland 1995, 106). The narrative possibilities fostered by the gift appear almost instantaneously, for Jane must account for it to Mrs. and Miss Bates and, inferring that it must be from Frank, is forced to immediately sanction (as one

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imagines Miss Bates invents) a supposition that she knows to be false: “of course it must be from Col. Campbell.” Byrne writes that the gift compounds Jane’s “complicity” in the couple’s secret engagement (Byrne 2014, 134), and the public nature of the gift essentially heightens both the precariousness of Jane’s position and her embarrassment. With only the insufficient supposition that the gift may have come from the Campbells, the circumstances surrounding the gift make it the perfect evening conversation piece, and when Jane and Miss Bates appear at the Coles after dinner, “the subject was almost immediately introduced” (Emma 237). Much of the confusion that follows as well as many of Emma’s own mistakes and her subsequent repentance are fueled by this mysterious object. The manner in which the piano functions as a catalyst for the events of the novel has led several literary critics to draw a direct parallel between the discourse in Highbury surrounding the piano and the act of writing: Tony Tanner writes that the “mystery” and “surprise” surrounding the piano help “make the novel possible” (Tanner 1986, 206) and Olivia Murphy writes that the piano provides a blank space in which Emma can humor her own “novelizing tendencies” (Murphy 2013, 107). Lustig draws attention to the instrument’s narrative productivity when she delineates the “possible narratives” the pianoforte brings into being: “Jane, the fallen woman betrayed by a married man; Jane, the poverty-stricken governess forced to serve below her station; Jane, the invading temptress preying on unsuspecting men” (Lustig 2004, 90). Emma’s speculation involves a forbidden love match: she imagines Mr. Dixon has fallen in love with Jane after already having proposed to her friend, now Mrs. Dixon. In her fantasy, Emma thinks that Jane would wish to change places with Harriet, “to have purchased the mortification of having loved—yes, of having loved even Mr. Elton in vain—by the surrender of all the dangerous pleasure of knowing herself beloved by the husband of her friend” (Emma 237). However, while the pianoforte makes each of these fictive story lines possible, they remain only possibilities. Even Emma admits to Frank, “One might guess twenty things without guessing exactly the right” (234). Yet Emma is more on track than those who believe the gift comes from the Campbells; this is why Frank can honestly, though ironically, tell her that “now I can see it in no other light than as an offering of love” (236). Yet for the reader, and even for Emma herself, doubt pervades these suppositions: “There was no occasion to press the matter further. [Frank’s] conviction seemed real; he looked as if he felt it” (236; italics

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mine). The narrative, focalized through Emma, expresses her concern that Frank may be playing some kind of game. Yet, at this point in the novel, whatever speculations have been voiced, it is clear that the true story has yet to be revealed. Other objects in the narrative provide additional hints toward the truth of the mystery. P. D. James, by reading the novel as a proto- or pseudo-­ detective novel, notes the various “blunders” that provide hints to the reader throughout the text: Frank asks Mrs. Weston about Mr. Perry’s plan to set up a carriage, a plan which he mistakenly thinks was communicated to him by his step-mother, when he had actually read about it in one of Jane’s letters. He follows this mistake by another misstep, using some children’s alphabet blocks to give Jane the letters for the word “blunder” (Emma 373–377; James 1999, 256–57). Interestingly, both of these “blunders” are observed by Mr. Knightley: the alphabet blocks especially, like the piano, register Frank’s lack of concern as to how his messages to Jane, when transformed and expressed in material form, are also observable and readable by others. As nonhuman objects in the physical, discernible world, these objects and Frank’s gift gesture toward the couple’s secret. Pierre Bourdieu criticizes Mauss’s conceptualization of the gift for failing to consider the place of timing in the gift exchange: It is all a question of style, which means in this case timing and choice of occasion, for the same act—giving, giving in return, offering one’s services, paying a visit, etc.—can have completely different meanings at different times, coming as it may at the right or the wrong moment. (Bourdieu 2010, 6)

Bourdieu highlights the physical context, especially the place and the others present, of the gift exchange. Building on the work of Mauss, C. A. Gregory argues that one thing that distinguishes the gift from the commodity is its inalienability from its original giver, a relationship often resulting in “personification,” leading him to argue that “things are anthropomorphized in a gift economy” (Gregory 1982, 45). While “anthropomorphization” assumes human dominance in this process, Latour’s ANT highlights how it is not only the nonhuman object that becomes imbued with humanity but that this process also works in reverse, as the nonhuman supplements the human and, in so doing, alters what were thought to be purely human-directed meanings and intentions.18 Thus, Kirstyn Leuner can argue that each of the prized possessions in Fanny’s dressing room in Mansfield Park not only “invokes its

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family-counterpart” but also “comforts her when her cousins do not” (Leuner 2012, 55). In extending themselves through objects, humans also cede control (and parts of themselves) to these objects. While the piano functions as a mediator for Frank as the gift extends his influence and presence, Emma demonstrates that by delegating his desires to the external, nonhuman object, Frank loses control of the gift’s usage and meaning as well as who interprets it. Even within the more intimate context of Frank and Jane’s secret relationship, the pianoforte remains interpretively ambivalent. Although Frank later claims that “its being ordered was absolutely unknown to Miss F—, who would never have allowed me to send it” (Emma 479), looking back at earlier episodes in the novel, the pianoforte provides an excuse for Frank and Jane to come together, and Jane seems to take a secret pleasure in the gift, even if she feels its impropriety (237, 262). When Emma visits the Bateses to hear the instrument, Frank tells Emma that, “I have been assisting Miss Fairfax in trying to make her instrument stand steadily, it was not quite firm; an unevenness in the floor, I believe. You see we have been wedging one leg with paper” (259). Whether an unevenness in the floor or of the instrument itself, the materiality of the instrument invites care, concern, and sustained attention. Several critics have read this scene as a cover-up: Frank and Jane have been left alone for a few choice minutes with only a sleeping Mrs. Bates. Frank’s usage of the first-person plural denotes their shared activity: the piano, in this reading, is the material excuse for what David Bell calls “a few rare moments of intimacy” as they work “in such close proximity that physical contact is surely inevitable!” (Bell 2007 par. 12; cf. McMaster 1996, 98). However, while the piano allows them an external outlet for shared experience, the piano’s physicality is not limited to their own convenience. If the pianoforte offers a rare opportunity for the two of them to come into close contact, it also gestures dangerously to others of the existence of a secret. When the engagement is broken off, the thingness of Frank’s material delegate becomes especially apparent as the piano’s materiality continues to be a burden to Jane. As Emma sits in Miss Bates’s parlor musing on Jane’s fate after the latter has resigned herself to becoming a governess, Emma’s gaze rests on the pianoforte: quite unconscious on what her eyes were fixed, till roused by Miss Bates’s saying, “Ay, I see what you are thinking of, the piano forté. What is to become of that?—Very true. Poor dear Jane was talking of it just now.—

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‘You must go,’ said she. ‘You and I must part. You will have no business here.—Let it stay, however,’ said she; ‘give it house-room till Colonel Campbell comes back. I shall talk about it to him; he will settle for me; he will help me out of all my difficulties.’—And to this day, I believe, she knows not whether it was his present or his daughter’s.” (Emma 417–18)

Even when not thinking about the pianoforte, Emma’s eyes move toward it, an indication of its prominent position in the room and its unavoidable physicality. Jane begs her aunt to keep it, to “give it house-room” as though it were a person: here, especially the pianoforte’s physical attributes combined with other values, that is, its inalienability from its giver, Frank, make its thingness especially troublesome. This is part of the “excess” that Brown speaks of when he argues that things exceed their materiality, as they exert “their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence” (Brown 2001, 5). But the emotional connection, rather than doing away with the materiality of the object, is made more complicated by that physicality: how does one rid oneself of a large, substantial, and valuable object that also happens to stimulate such strong feelings? This question raises the possibility that the pianoforte will sit in the Bateses’ parlor, unused, like a specter of the mystery that has yet to be revealed. The challenge of parting with a gift that holds so many painful associations is further heightened by the fact that it is practically difficult to dispose of such a conspicuous object. Here again, Jane’s lack of material resources as well as her position as the receiver of the gift puts her at a disadvantage. Had she the financial and spatial means she could have it moved, placed out of sight, but her poverty forces her not only to accept but also to keep the gift because selling it or giving it away would raise more questions than she is willing to answer. One foresees a future in which, on every return to Highbury to visit her aunts, Jane is welcomed by a material reminder of her failed relationship with Frank. Aesthetically, the object enables the aims of Austen’s text by hinting at a mystery that is materially motivated and thus dynamically integrated into the plot structure. Linda Bree writes that devices such as Jane’s pianoforte allow, at the end of the novel, for “the reader to discover, on revisiting earlier chapters, an entirely logical but quite different sequence of events from what appeared to have been taking place” (Bree 2009, 139). Lustig also highlights the narratively productive nature of the instrument, but she limits her examination to the piano’s symbolic cultural meaning as “a point where woman meets man, nature meets culture and art meets

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artifice” (Lustig 2004, 103). Such a position leads her to argue that the piano as plot device enables a number of narrative possibilities only to then negate them with the revelation that the piano is from Frank, a strategy in which the piano “serves as a rhetorical device that re-establishes the dominion of conservative bourgeois values within the fictional universe” at the end of the novel (90). However, highlighting the material aspects of the instrument and especially the object’s continued presence within the fictional story-world challenges such a conclusion, as the instrument continues to foster narrative ambiguity just at the moment of formal resolution. Although Jane’s potentially tragic story line is forestalled by Mrs. Churchill’s death and the reinstatement of Frank and Jane’s engagement, the gifting of the pianoforte maintains a peculiar status. When Frank tries to clear Jane of any blame in a letter to Mrs. Weston, he in effect settles the guilt of the matter squarely on his own shoulders. While James suggests that Frank’s letter is part of the explanation usually rendered in the last few chapters of a detective story, in which “the significance of all the moves in this game of love and misunderstanding are clearly explained” (James 1999, 266), the “explanation” only accounts for previously obscured actions but fails entirely to clarify Frank’s dubious motivations. Mr. Knightley aptly describes the problem when he reads Frank’s letter and exclaims to Emma, the piano-forte! Ah! That was the act of a very, very young man, one too young to consider whether the inconvenience of it might not very much exceed the pleasure. A boyish scheme, indeed!—I cannot comprehend a man’s wishing to give a woman any proof of affection which he knows she would rather dispense with; and he did know that she would have prevented the instrument’s coming if she could. (Emma 486)

Mr. Knightley’s own general harshness toward Frank aside, he highlights a problem of resolution at the end of the novel: namely, can the reader ignore Frank’s liberalities with both Jane and Emma’s feelings throughout the text in order to anticipate happiness for the couple at the end? One must wonder, what will the couple do with the pianoforte? Surely, the “inconvenience” of the gift remains even after their reconciliation since the instrument can only recall ambivalent feelings in Jane, whatever it recalls for Frank. At the end of the novel, the pianoforte destabilizes the certainty of a “happy” resolution. While the Coles’ pianoforte will most likely continue

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to foster sociability by forming a material bridge between neighbors of different backgrounds and similar tastes, Jane’s pianoforte remains a material testament to a number of undesirable memories and feelings. As a witness to Frank’s lack of consideration for Jane as well as Emma, the instrument registers the problems posed by his and Jane’s love match, and, in so doing, the pianoforte augurs future conflict and complicates a simple evaluation of the novel’s marriage plot denouement. Examining the narrative-generating effects of Jane’s piano suggests the aesthetic potential of employing objects in narrative and demonstrates the object’s ability to produce lasting effects both within the social world of the story and on the formal makeup of the novel. While a materially motivated object strengthens the aesthetic illusion by making the events of the narrative feel “probable” or causally given, it also enables alternative narratives and timelines that can be used to challenge generic norms like the marriage plot. The pianoforte provides a space at the end of Emma for the reader to speculate on whether or not the novel’s “harmonious conclusions and happy marriages” will last the tests of time (Dannenberg 2008, 16). In a novel which satisfies the basic requirements of the marriage plot, the instrument remains a subtle but material testament of Jane and Frank’s merely tenuous felicity. * * * In Austen’s early burlesques as well as her later novels, the material motivation of objects—that is, their physical attributes and functions—enables the aesthetic aims of the text, either drawing attention to generic norms or undermining those norms. These objects become part of the causal fabric of narrative, as they highlight incongruity, facilitate plot, or provide narrative suspense. The ambiguity of objects, the manner in which their meanings cannot be entirely circumscribed or controlled, allows the reader to entertain multiple possibilities at once, to weigh and consider various versions of events and potential outcomes of the novel. Although the majority of immediate questions may be resolved by the end of a work, these alternate possibilities remain in play, even if only as memories of a misunderstood thing. When one turns from a fictional text to an autobiographical text, the ambiguous things which are potentially destabilizing to a fictional narrative throw the autobiography’s entire project of subject formation into flux and endanger the coherence of the speaking subject. Objects in

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Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), like those in Austen, point to alternate potentialities, narratives, and life trajectories. However, instead of gesturing only to the potential alternate fates of fictional characters, De Quincey’s objects have an immediacy that haunts his autobiographical project by denoting his lack of control over his material existence. While in it-narratives and in Austen’s works the alternate viewpoints and narratives that objects introduce are often aesthetically productive, in De Quincey one can distinguish an increasing awareness of the fragility of human control over matter, especially the matter of the book itself.

Notes 1. Sandie Byrne writes that noting the lack of objects in Austen’s works “has become almost a critical commonplace” (Byrne 2014, 3; cf. Lane 1966, 100; Hardy 1975, 149). Byrne further writes that the lack of details such as colors and deictic indicators demonstrates the influence of the eighteenth-­century authors Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Samuel Richardson on Austen (6), but this is where the comparison ends, for unlike these authors, who often provide catalogues and lists of objects, Austen generally abstains from such “iteration” (9). 2. A version of part of this chapter has previously appeared in print as “A Tale of Two Pianos: Actants, Sociability, and Form in Jane Austen’s Emma.” Open Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2019): 135–47. 3. For brevity, I reference the novels with abbreviated titles. All references are from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (2005–2006). All italics are in original unless otherwise noted. 4. Edward Copeland writes that “Jane Austen’s novels imagine two separate acts of consumption: on the one hand, the low life of money exchange in the market, and, on the other, the elegant life of genteel consumption in the home” (Copeland 1996, 136). Diego Saglia, while arguing for a nuanced understanding of luxury in Austen’s works, emphasizes that luxury can be “good or bad, excessive or controlled,” with each instance being carefully codified according to “historically and culturally situated signs, selves, and social groups” (Saglia 2009, 364–65). Barbara Benedict goes even further in her evaluation of the moral aspects of consumption, noting that “purchasable things become the means for the struggle between a cooperative and a competitive sociability” (Benedict 2009, 343). 5. See Copeland’s introductory comments to the novel (SS, xxiii).

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6. See, for example, Litz (1965, 132–33) and Schorer (1964, 98). Viewing Emma as Austen’s most technically perfect novel is now a critical commonplace. 7. It is impossible to be certain when most of her juvenilia were composed, as they were copied into the three notebooks after composition. For more on dating the juvenilia, see Southam (1964, 14–19) and Marshall (1989, 111). 8. All italics and spelling peculiarities of the juvenilia have been retained. 9. See Chap. 2. Both texts rely upon demonstrations (either literal, as in the play, or descriptive) of the physical properties and uses of objects to highlight the potential extremes to which the middle class are in danger when accumulating furniture. Incidentally, while the mirror text was most likely written two to three years after The Visit, it appeared in the Ladies Magazine, which Edward Copeland argues Austen probably read, see Copeland (1989, 170). 10. This is probably partially due to the concept of the “deodand” in English law, that is, an object or animal, that due to its complicity in the death of a human being, is considered forfeited to God or the Crown and “distributed in alms”—only abolished in 1846 (“deodand, n.” a.). Jonathan Lamb writes, “Fault lay with the thing and travelled with the thing; the owner simply provided the route to retribution” (Lamb 2011, 15). 11. Some Austen fan-fiction attempts to redress this suppression by including such uncomfortable details and emphasizing the plights of servants and soldiers during the early nineteenth century, see, for example, Jo Baker’s Longbourn (2013). 12. For more on Austen’s irony, see Müller (2017, 43). 13. Multiple scholars have drawn attention to the obvious similarities between Lady Greville and Lady Catherine De Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, suggesting that the latter was a character long in development, see Marshall (1989, 109), Halperin (1989, 36), and Kaplan (1989, 79). 14. Candles were not the only form of indoor lighting in the period. Daniel Pool notes how the masses mostly used rushlights—rushes dipped into a burnable substance and then set into a tin with holes in it and lit. These, he writes, “were probably the most widely used form of illumination in England before the coming of gas” (Pool 1993, 198–99). 15. Shirley Bury notes that there was a difference between giving a piece of hair “set in jewel” and giving a lock of hair alone—the latter being allowed outside of an engagement (Bury 1985, 44). Heydt-Stevenson notes that, due to the commercial proliferation of hair jewelry at the end of the eighteenth century, the exchange of hair was bound up in questions related to nature, folk art, and commerce (Heydt-Stevenson 2005, 34–39, esp. 38). Finally, Sally Anne Holloway reiterates the importance of the hair ring when she writes that, “The two key items carrying the obligation of mar-

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riage were hair (whether incorporated into jewellery or a simple strand) and a ring” (Holloway 2013, 88). 16. Hans Werner Breunig notes Austen’s affinity with the philosophy of David Hume in Pride and Prejudice, especially in how judgments regarding character must be continually amended in the novel (Breunig 2001, 168). For more on Elinor’s judgment, see Morgan (1980, 128). For more on how Austen was influenced by the Scottish enlightenment, see KnoxShaw (2004). 17. In her work on the history of English pianos, originally published in 1933, Rosamond Harding includes a Broadwood and Sons pricelist from 1815 which lists a “square with single action” at 17 pounds, 6 shillings, and an “elegant” model at 26 pounds (Harding 1978, 394). A more recent publication reports that a Broadwood square piano from 1809 cost 32 guineas (almost 34 pounds) (Cole and Broadwood 2005, 132). At either end of this spectrum, the piano would have been highly valuable, especially considering Copeland’s estimate that Mrs. and Miss Bates live on as little as 100 pounds per annum (Copeland 1995, 28). 18. Latour frequently emphasizes the fatuity of the human–nonhuman binary: “Anthropos and morphos together mean either that which has human shape or that which gives shape to humans” (Latour 1992, 235).

Bibliography Alworth, David J. 2016. Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Anon. 2012. Adventures of a Mirror. In British It-Narratives, 1750–1830, ed. Mark Blackwell et  al., 4: 165–177. London: Pickering & Chatto. Originally published in Lady’s Magazine, 1791. Auerbach, Emily. 2004. Searching for Jane Austen. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Austen, Jane. 1922. Love & Freindship and Other Early Works, with a Preface by G.K. Chesterton. London: Chatto & Windus. ———. 2005a. Emma, ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005b. Mansfield Park, ed. John Wiltshire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006a. Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006b. Northanger Abbey, ed. Barbara M. Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 2006c. Pride and Prejudice, ed. Pat Rogers. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006d. Sense and Sensibility, ed. Edward Copeland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009. To Anna Austen, 10–18 August 1814. In Selected Letters, ed. Vivien Jones, 171–172. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Austen Leigh, J.E. 1871. A Memoir of Jane Austen. 2nd ed. London: Richard Bentley and Son. Baker, Jo. 2013. Longbourn. London: Random House. Bal, Mieke. 2006. Over-Writing as Un-Writing: Descriptions, World-Making, and Novelistic Time. In The Novel: Volume 2: Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti, 571–610. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bell, David H. 2007. Fun with Frank and Jane: Austen on Detective Fiction. Persuasions On-Line 28 (1). http://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol28no1/ bell.htm. Accessed 13 Oct 2017. Benedict, Barbara M. 2009. The Trouble with Things: Objects and the Commodification of Sociability. In Johnson and Tuite, 343–354. Bergdoll, Barry. 2000. European Architecture 1750–1890. New  York: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2010. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bree, Linda. 2009. Emma: Word Games and Secret Histories. In Johnson and Tuite, 133–142. Breunig, Hans Werner. 2001. Jane Austen: Romantic? British Empiricist? In Re-Mapping Romanticism: Gender-Text-Context, ed. Christoph Bode and Fritz-Wilhelm Neuman, 163–181. Essen: Blaue Eule. Brown, Bill. 2001. Thing Theory. Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 1–22. https://doi. org/10.1086/449030. Burgan, Mary. 1986. Heroines at the Piano: Women and Music in Nineteenth-­ Century Fiction. Victorian Studies 30 (1): 51–76. Bury, Shirley. 1985. An Introduction to Sentimental Jewellery. London: HMSO. Byrne, Paula. 2002. Jane Austen and the Theatre. London: Hambledon and London. ———. 2013. The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. New York: Harper. Byrne, Sandie. 2014. Jane Austen’s Possessions and Dispossessions: The Significance of Objects. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cole, Michael, and John Broadwood. 2005. Broadwood Square Pianos. Cheltenham: Tatchley Books. Copeland, Edward. 1986. Jane Austen and the Consumer Revolution. In The Jane Austen Handbook, with a Dictionary of Jane Austen’s Life and Works, ed. J.  David Grey, B.C.  Southam, and A.  Walton Litz, 77–92. London: Athlone Press.

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———. 1989. Money Talks: Jane Austen and the Lady’s Magazine. In Grey and Drabble, 153–171. ———. 1995. Women Writing About Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996. The Austens and the Elliots: A Consumer’s Guide to Persuasion. In Jane Austen’s Business: Her World and Her Profession, ed. Juliet McMaster, 136–153. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Dannenberg, Hilary P. 2008. Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. De Quincey, Thomas. 2001. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar. In The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop, 2: 1–79. London: Pickering & Chatto. Deodand, n. 2019. OED Online. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com. Accessed 22 July 2019. Doody, Margaret Anne. 2010. The Early Short Fiction. In The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, 72–86. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/ CCO9780521763080. Ehrlich, Cyril. 1990. The Piano: A History. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Elliott, Kamilla. 2012. Jane Austen and the Politics of Picture Identification. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 34 (4): 305–322. https://doi.org/10.108 0/08905495.2012.711615. Everitt, Alan. 1974. Kentish Family Portrait. In Rural Change and Urban Growth 1500–1800, ed. C.W.  Chalklin and M.A.  Havinden, 169–199. New York: Longman. Frost, Ginger S. 1995. Promises Broken: Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Genette, Gérard. 1976. Boundaries of Narrative. Trans. Ann Levonas. New Literary History 8 (1): 1–13. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 2000. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gregory, C.A. 1982. Gifts and Commodities. London: Academic Press. Grey, J. David, and Margaret Drabble, eds. 1989. Jane Austen’s Beginnings: The Juvenilia and Lady Susan. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Halperin, John. 1989. Unengaged Laughter: Jane Austen’s Juvenilia. In Grey and Drabble, 29–44. Harding, Rosamond E.M. 1978. The Piano-Forte: Its History Traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851. 2nd ed. Old Woking: Gresham Books. Hardy, Barbara. 1975. A Reading of Jane Austen. London: Owen.

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Hatton, Nikolina. 2019. A Tale of Two Pianos: Actants, Sociability, and Form in Jane Austen’s Emma. Open Cultural Studies 3 (1): 135–147. https://doi. org/10.1515/culture-2019-0012. Heydt-Stevenson, Jillian. 2005. Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Holloway, Sally Anne. 2013. Romantic Love in Words and Objects during Courtship and Adultery c. 1730 to 1830. PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, London. James, P.D. 1999. Emma Considered as a Detective Story. In Time to be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography, 250–266. London: Faber. Johnson, Claudia L. 1989. ‘The Kingdom at Sixes and Sevens’: Politics and the Juvenilia. In Grey and Drabble, 45–58. Johnson, Claudia L., and Clara Tuite, eds. 2009. A Companion to Jane Austen. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Kaplan, Laurie. 1989. Jane Austen and the Uncommon Reader. In Grey and Drabble, 73–82. Knox-Shaw, Peter. 2004. Jane Austen and the Enlightenment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. Philosophy. In Jane Austen in Context, ed. Janet Todd and Deirdre Le Faye, 346–356. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lamb, Jonathan. 2011. The Things Things Say. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lane, Margaret. 1966. Jane Austen’s Sleight-of-Hand. In Purely for Pleasure, 95–107. London: Hamish Hamilton. Latour, Bruno. 1992. Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts. In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 225–258. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2000. The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things. In Matter, Materiality, and Modern Culture, ed. P.M.  Graves-Brown, 10–21. London: Routledge. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Leuner, Kirstyn. 2012. ‘The End of All the Privacy and Propriety’: Fanny’s Dressing Room in Mansfield Park. In Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, ed. Katharina Boehm, 45–65. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton/ Oxford: Princeton University Press.

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Litz, A. Walton. 1965. Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development. London: Chatto & Windus. Lukács, Georg. 1971. Narrate or Describe. In Writer & Critic, and Other Essays. Trans. Arthur D. Kahn, 110–148. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Lustig, Jodi. 2004. The Piano’s Progress: The Piano in Play in the Victorian Novel. In The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction, ed. Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff, 83–104. Aldershot: Ashgate. Marshall, Mary Gaither. 1989. Jane Austen’s Manuscripts of the Juvenilia and Lady Susan: A History and Description. In Grey and Drabble, 107–121. Martin, Ellen E. 1989. The Madness of Jane Austen: Metonymic Style and Literature’s Resistance to Interpretation. In Grey and Drabble, 83–94. Mauss, Marcel. 2002. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. W.D. Halls. London: Routledge. McAleer, John. 1989. What a Biographer Can Learn About Jane Austen from Her Juvenilia. In Grey and Drabble, 7–27. McMaster, Juliet. 1996. Jane Austen the Novelist. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Merrett, Robert. 1998. Consuming Modes in Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen’s Economic View of Literary Nationalism. Persuasions: Journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America 20: 222–235. Miles, Robert. 2003. ‘A Fall in Bread’: Speculation and the Real in Emma. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 37 (1–2): 66–85. Morgan, Susan. 1980. In the Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen’s Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Müller, Wolfgang G. 2017. Irony in Jane Austen: A Cognitive-Narratological Approach. In How to Do Things with Narrative: Cognitive and Diachronic Perspectives, ed. Jan Alber and Greta Olsen, 43–64. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Munsche, P.B. 1981. Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws 1671–1831. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Murphy, Olivia. 2013. Rethinking Influence by Reading with Austen. Women’s Writing 20 (1): 100–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2013.754261. Pool, Daniel. 1993. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. New York: Simon and Schuster. Riffaterre, Michael. 1986. On the Diegetic Functions of the Descriptive. Style 20 (3): 281–294. Saglia, Diego. 2009. Luxury: Making Sense of Excess in Austen’s Narratives. In Johnson and Tuite, 355–365. Schorer, Mark. 1964. The Humiliation of Emma Woodhouse. In Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt, 98–111. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Scott, Walter. 1815. Emma: A Novel. The Quarterly Review, Review, 14 (October): 188–201.

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Selwyn, David. 1999. Jane Austen and Leisure. London: Hambledon Press. ———. 2005. Consumer Goods. In Jane Austen in Context, ed. Janet Todd and Deirdre Le Faye, 215–224. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Woodruff D. 2002. Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800. New York: Routledge. Southam, B.C. 1964. Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 1989. Plots and Possibilities: Jane Austen’s Juvenilia. In Grey and Drabble, 123–134. Spring, David. 1983. Interpreters of Jane Austen’s Social World: Literary Critics and Historians. Women & Literature 3: 53–72. Stallybrass, Peter, and Ann Rosalind Jones. 2001. Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe. Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 114–132. Stanica, Miruna. 2014. Bundles, Trunks, Magazines: Storage, Aperspectival Description, and the Generation of Narrative. Style 48 (4): 513–528. https:// doi.org/10.5325/style.48.4.513. ———. 2016. Portraits of Delegation. The Eighteenth Century 57 (2): 235–249. https://doi.org/10.1353/ecy.2016.0015. Tanner, Tony. 1986. Jane Austen. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Thompson, James. 1984. Jane Austen’s Clothing: Things, Property, and Materialism in Her Novels. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 13: 217–231. Trentmann, Frank. 2017. Empire of Things. London: Penguin Books. Wall, Cynthia. 2014. Approaching the Interior of the Eighteenth-Century English Country House. Style 48 (4): 543–562. https://doi.org/10.5325/ style.48.4.543. Wallace, Beth Kowaleski. 2018. Traveling Shoe Roses: The Geography of Things in Austen’s Works. In Jane Austen’s Geographies, ed. Robert P. Clark. New York/ London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Watt, Ian. 1987. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Hogarth Press. Whately, Richard. 1821. Modern Novels. The Quarterly Review 24 (January): 352–376. Whitty, Stephen. 2016. The Alfred Hitchcock Encyclopedia. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. 2004. A Likely Story: The Coles’ Dinner Party. In Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Emma, ed. Marcia McClintock Folsom, 151–158. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Willis, Lesley H. 1975. Object Association and Minor Characters in Jane Austen’s Novels. Studies in the Novel 7: 104–119. Wilwerding, Lauren. 2015. Amatory Gifts in Sense and Sensibility. Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal 37: 208–217.

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Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. 2009. Austen’s Accomplishment: Music and the Modern Heroine. In Johnson and Tuite, 366–376. Zionkowski, Linda. 2016. ‘Small, Trifling Presents’: Giving and Receiving in Emma. Persuasions On-Line 37 (1). http://jasna.org/publications/persuasions-online/vol37no1/zionkowski/. Accessed 13 Nov 2017. Zohn, Kristen Miller. 2011. Tokens of Imperfect Affection: Portrait Miniatures and Hairwork in Sense and Sensibility. Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line 32 (1). http://legacy.jasna.ares.dynamicservr.com/publications/persuasions-online/vol32no1/zohn/. Accessed 23 Sept 2017.

CHAPTER 4

Unwieldy Objects in De Quincey’s Confessions (1821): Things That Undermine Subjectivity

When Bill Brown asks, “how are things and thingness used to think about the self?” he is asking a question that is poised to be answered by the genre of human autobiography (Brown 2003, 18). While many an it-narrative from the eighteenth century purports to do this from the perspective of the object but instead reveals more about its human owners than itself, human autobiography, ironically, more appropriately answers this question by inadvertently underscoring the ways in which humans attempt to use objects to construct subjectivity. Already in the writings of Thomas De Quincey, the sense that humans and nonhumans belong to separate spheres is prevalent, but, at the same time, De Quincey frequently acknowledges his dependence on the material object.1 E. S. Burt emphasizes the recurring role of the other within autobiography as the one “against which the [self] is defined” as well as the one “to whom the ‘I’ addresses itself in its act of confessing” (Burt 2009, 1). In Confessions of an English Opium-­ Eater (1821), the more De Quincey tries to constitute his subjectivity, the more he feels obliged to relate that subjectivity to material objects, whether those objects are as banal as teacups or as noble as the paper on which he is composing his unprecedented narrative. Unlike classical autobiography, which ostensibly thematizes “great” lives and functions as a guide to others, Romantic confessional writing explores the identity in situ and, as such, is a self-reflexive and fragmented process (Levin 1998, 3; Watson 1993, 58, 66). De Quincey’s Confessions is a prime example of such self-reflexive fragmentation, as the text stages © The Author(s) 2020 N. Hatton, The Agency of Objects in English Prose, 1789–1832, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49111-6_4

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the fraught relationship between the human autobiographer and the objects he attempts to integrate into his daily life. De Quincey’s relationship to objects is characterized in his autobiographical writing by opposing drives. First, he invokes objects as a means of stabilizing his middle-class subjectivity through his possessions, that is, he tries to use objects with specific goals in mind, like signifying respectability or attaining comfort. Second, he continually acknowledges and even celebrates the independence of the material, its existence outside of human (and specifically his own) programs of action. These contrary worldviews clash in the Confessions, as De Quincey simultaneously tries to create a stable subjectivity through autobiography and also embraces the role that material agency plays in his own work and thought. While Wordsworth and Coleridge certainly influenced De Quincey’s artistic vision, his descriptions and utilization of objects within Confessions suggest an altered view of the first-generation Romantic poets’ desire “to achieve various types of harmonies, systems, and reconciliations” in their works (McGann 1983, 40).2 While Jerome McGann argues that this is never achieved in their work (47), the drive for such unity is a key part of early Romantic thought. De Quincey’s interest in antagonism, especially in relation to his idea of the involute—an embodied experience which impresses some idea or feeling on his memory—shows that he, like other intellectuals in the late eighteenth century, was intrigued by the concept of vitalism and the notion that the world was operating in perpetually re-­ adjusting balance. However, Josephine McDonagh writes that, compared to Coleridge’s writings articulating this desire, De Quincey’s were “perpetrated in panic and heavy-handed” (McDonagh 1994, 36). While opium has been regarded as one of the primary reasons for De Quincey’s “fixation and repetition,” that is, his rather dark interpretation of Romantic themes (Platzner 1982, 613), his anxiety about his relationship with the nonhuman extends beyond opium to everyday material objects. These largely domestic objects repeatedly feature in De Quincey’s work yet have very often been passed over, a fact that this research seeks to remediate. De Quincey demonstrates a preoccupation with objects and forces that are outside his control, thus when one discusses De Quincey’s worldview in relation to Romanticism, “nature” is better replaced by “nonhuman” because he is also concerned with the seemingly human-­ made object that is nonetheless separate matter. While De Quincey is obsessed with natural processes, such as death, weather, and seasonal change, the Confessions repeatedly registers his interest in the agency of

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the inanimate domestic objects with which he shares his life. Although these objects act contrarily to his wishes, are indifferent to his existence or his needs, or, in the worst cases, are disloyal—actually endangering his well-being or that of his literary protagonists—he also acknowledges how they also act as catalysts to artistic thought, an aspect of these objects to which De Quincey feels particularly indebted. These recalcitrant objects, rather than revealing a rift in De Quincey’s own philosophy of antagonism, demonstrate the difference between De Quincey’s ideal of balance and the first-generation Romantic poets’ ideal of harmony. While the Romantic concept of harmony found in Wordsworth’s poetry tends to place the human speaker at the center, De Quincey’s Confessions reveals that, due to the inherent anthropocentrism of autobiography, antagonism requires that this always be offset by some other force or material thing to return the work to equilibrium. For De Quincey, the autobiographical project, by its very nature, gives over too much control to the human, a fact that must in turn be corrected through some concurrent submission to the nonhuman. In order for the rebellion or recalcitrance of objects to indicate imbalance, the reader or writer must assume that the human autobiographer has control over his own story. In such a case, the objects that resist this narrative of autobiographical control appear to act unnaturally contrary to a worldview that is thereby revealed to be less about the balance of the human and the nonhuman and more about the fetishization of the nonhuman world for the pleasure and enhancement of the human subject. In opposition to this view and despite De Quincey’s own egocentrism, Confessions demonstrates that he cannot ignore the object’s claim on his attention. He struggles to understand the full implications of that claim, but he recognizes it, grapples with it, and, in so doing, object agency becomes an important feature of his Confessions. This is why, throughout De Quincey’s experiences with objects, he expresses both horror and fascination at their existential otherness. In a way, De Quincey follows the Romantic desire for unity with the nonhuman world to its rational conclusion and beyond, for he cannot stop fixating on the potential of a subjectivity in thrall to and potentially erased by the inanimate world. Thus, in De Quincey, the human–nonhuman rift is not only present, it is antagonistic; De Quincey confronts, not a neutral idea of matter, but a thing as a separate, nonhuman entity. However, while this difference is prevalent in De Quincey’s thought, he does not necessarily register superiority over the nonhuman but views nonhuman matter as capable of

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radically influencing his life. This is why De Quincey’s greatest anxiety over the nonhuman arises not from its agency, but from its lack of agency: when the agential object does not act, does not influence his life, then De Quincey is entirely perplexed by the thing. While Confessions and Sense and Sensibility (1811) or Emma (1815) feel worlds apart in terms of genre, both Austen’s utilization of objects and De Quincey’s encounters with objects emphasize the thing’s suggestive ability, its ambiguous semiotic standing, and its position, if not outside, then at the edge of human-circumscribed meanings. Returning to Latour, the humans and nonhumans found in these texts suggest how the network of the two can produce previously impossible narrative possibilities (Latour 1999, 178). But they also demonstrate how these objects extend the narrative’s effectiveness, as they provide seemingly concrete signifiers and causal relationships to Austen’s fictional or De Quincey’s philosophical narrative. Just as objects in Austen’s texts introduce extratextual and counterfactual possibilities and questions, so also objects in De Quincey’s autobiographical works help bring his narrative down to earth. Yet these objects have an intellectual function as well, as they help him think, draw connections, and make his feelings material. However, unlike in Austen, where objects mostly aid the aesthetic aims of the text and only occasionally assert their thingness to characters within narrative, De Quincey’s grasp on the objects that strengthen and enable his project is tenuous at best. One might even go so far as to say that De Quincey loses control of the objects he attempts to integrate into his autobiographical portrait. His work thus provides a bridge from the narratively generating and genre-­ undermining objects in Austen’s works to the world of the silver fork novel where the desire for objects, their enumeration, and their representation threatens plot and narrative progression. Finally, at the heart of the question of material agency for De Quincey is the acknowledgment that the potential agency of his own autobiography is threatened by its status as a physical artefact.3 In De Quincey’s view, there simply are too many books; they cannot all be realistically read. This is a problem for the scholar, who wishes to know all, but it is also a problem for the author and especially the autobiographer, who is never guaranteed that his self will be communicated, even if printed. Through print, the autobiographer may potentially face a second death, the death of his or her book, its disintegration into dust.

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De Quincey’s “Involutes”: Luggage, Books, and Other Conspicuous Objects Early in De Quincey’s Confessions, he relates the circumstances surrounding the fateful day in his youth when he ran away from school. As he recalls, he encountered a certain impediment in the execution of his plan: I had a trunk of immense weight, for, besides my clothes, it contained nearly all my library. The difficulty was to get this removed to a carrier’s: my room was at an aërial elevation in the house, and (what was worse) the staircase which communicated with this angle of the building was accessible only by a gallery, which passed the head-master’s chamber door. (Works 2:17)

Even as a boy attempting to run away from school, De Quincey feels his need for his clothes and his books, objects that mark him out as a scholar and the son of a merchant. De Quincey was highly aware of his position in the rising middle or professional classes, and this sensitivity comes across in Confessions repeatedly, not least in the subtitle of the work, “Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar.” David Trotter points out that novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that concern the “education of a young man of indeterminate origins” often demonstrate the need to materially define oneself (Trotter 2010, 27). This struggle is made all the more “intense” by the genre of autobiography and De Quincey’s need to carve out a space for himself as an autonomous middle-class subject—a situation further complicated by his refusal to append his name to his publication.4 However, as the passage above demonstrates, these needs are often defied by the sheer materiality of objects themselves. To counter the obstacles of weight and the unfortunate placement of his room within the house, he enlists a groom with “a back as spacious as Salisbury plain” to carry down the enormous luggage (Works 2:17). His plans are almost foiled when, at a key point in the staircase, his foot slipped; and the mighty burden falling from his shoulders, gained such increase of impetus at each step of the descent, that, on reaching the bottom, it trundled, or rather leaped, right across, with the noise of twenty devils, against the very bed-room door of the archididascalus. (2:17)

The groom immediately bursts out laughing, and De Quincey finds himself compelled to join him, despite the fact that his plan to abscond silently

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in the night seems to have been sacrificed to “the unhappy étourderie of the trunk” (2:17). This brings one to the “modern” problem of objects: they are ambivalent to one’s determined course of action. Because of the failure of the human groom, the trunk falls down and makes noise when De Quincey wishes all to be silent. Interestingly, despite this recalcitrance to his wishes and despite this incident’s prominent position within his memory, the episode is causally divorced from the rest of the narrative. While De Quincey expects the headmaster to stomp out of his room at any moment and arrest his escape, inexplicably, the headmaster does not awake. The trunk is safely removed downstairs and “placed upon a wheel-­ barrow” and De Quincey is off—“free”—to follow his heart’s desires. The 1856 expanded Confessions offers a clue as to why De Quincey includes such a seemingly unimportant incident within his 1821 text. In this later text, he turns this slip of the groom’s foot into a metaphor for the trajectory of his life. He thus describes his flight from school as the “one erring step” which freed his youthful self “to poison the fountains of his peace”: I trace the origin of my confirmed opium-eating to a necessity growing out of my early sufferings in the streets of London. Because, though true it is that the re-agency of these London sufferings did in after years enforce the use of opium, equally it is true that the sufferings themselves grew out of my own folly. (2:109)

In this second version of Confessions, De Quincey uncovers a line of causation that goes back to that fateful day in his early youth: he is addicted to opium because of the stomach pains that he attributes to the period he spent going hungry in London after he ran away from school. But while this “slip” is clearly a human action, the trunk represents the ineffectuality of such human–nonhuman assemblages by “nearly put[ting] a stop” to this plan (1821); as a result, the entire incident and all the “actants mobilized” take on special significance in his memory (Latour 1999, 181). Despite the anecdote being a disappointing nonevent within the narrative arc, the trunk, like some of Austen’s objects, hints at a counterfactual life trajectory, a trajectory in which De Quincey does not escape from school and perhaps never eats opium. However, the slip of the groom’s foot cannot metaphorically correlate with De Quincey’s “erring step” without highlighting the inconsistencies

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of his autobiographical project. On the one hand, one may interpret the slip and De Quincey’s subsequent escape (despite the slip) as a sign of fate (i.e. he was meant to run away). On the other, one may view the slip and the fact that on this night the headmaster sleeps extraordinarily well as a sign of the arbitrary, chaotic nature of the world. In each case, De Quincey’s own ability to take such an “erring step” is called into question, since the reader sees that the execution of his plan is predicated on such faulty stuff as fate and chaotic materiality. Furthermore, De Quincey’s 1856 diatribe against his youthful self cannot be read without a great deal of irony—is he not regretting the very course of action on which his greatest literary achievement is founded? The fact that Confessions became the basis for all of De Quincey’s later literary success suggests the paradoxical nature of (published) Romantic confessional writing: the confessor thematizes (and profits from) the very events of which he or she ought to be ashamed. Susan Levin writes that Romantic confessional writing marries the religious sense of confession— that is, confessing to one’s guilt in order to be absolved—with a Romantic form of identity exploration: “Complementing the desire for absolution is the attempt to set out a personal identity, as if in analyzing what he has done wrong by examining his past and present existence, the confessor will attain pardon through self-knowledge” (Levin 1998, 3). Pardon, for the Romantic confessor then, arises not from wishing these events had never happened but from learning from the experience of living them. Regret takes the form of acknowledging one’s wrong-doing but not wishing that one had not done wrong. Thus, while De Quincey may express regret at this “step” in his revised Confessions, the inclusion of the anecdote—the actions of the trunk–groom assemblage and the failure of the human response—far from embodying this regret hint at the complex relationship De Quincey has to his possessions. Michael Cochise Young writes that throughout his writings, De Quincey “refus[es] to admit any taint of guilt” by positioning himself “as a victim of circumstances—familial, constitutional, social” (Young 1985, 57; cf. Barrell 1991, 33). To this list, one could add, the material. De Quincey’s possessions’ seeming unpredictability allows De Quincey to sidestep his own guilt by fantasizing about an alternate narrative path and by emphasizing the highly contingent nature of his own decisions: apart from any choices of his own, the trunk could have awoken the headmaster, in which case his life would have been different.

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To the reader interested in objects as actants, the incident of the trunk is at once disappointing and paradoxical, for while the trunk holds a conspicuous place within the text, it does not behave extraordinarily and ultimately has no lasting effect upon the events which follow. Yet, I find it significant because De Quincey himself is intent upon drawing meaning from it. Ironically in the context of this study, only the trunk in the anecdote really does what is expected of it, falling when it is let go and leaping when it comes into contact with the hard stuff of stairs. In comparison, the groom laughs when he should be quiet, De Quincey runs away from school when he should stay, and the headmaster sleeps when he should awake. In De Quincey’s formulation, the trunk fulfills its role faithfully.5 If not for the failure of the human actants in this assemblage, the falling trunk would have put a stop to his plan. In such an alternate universe, De Quincey would perhaps not have escaped school, not wandered in London, and not become addicted to opium. The trunk episode demonstrates that material activity may or may not be transformative, may or may not produce long-term physical effects— depending on its relationships with other actants mobilized in the course of action (Latour 1999, 181). However, in this instance, the trunk has an intellectual effect, even if its physical effect is dampened by unreliable humans. What is interpreted as an “occasion of laughter” that keeps the headmaster from waking becomes, in hindsight, an “occasion of … tears,” marked for De Quincey by the consistent but somehow ineffectual material object. In this case, it is the object’s reliability, highlighted by what could have resulted, that obsesses him to the point that the trunk takes on a conspicuously significant role in his life story. De Quincey’s trunk is a good example of how an object does not have to malfunction to be perceived by the human as a thing. The trunk anecdote offers an early example of De Quincey’s belief in the power of material circumstances and embodied experiences to impart concepts, ideas, and feelings to the mind which return forcefully upon recollection, a principle he would later term the “involute.” In Suspiria de Profundis (1845), he writes: often I have been struck with the important truth—that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly, and in their own abstract shapes. (Works 15:142)

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His subsequent discussion and his later comments on involutes suggest a highly complex, though not fully articulated, system in which material or embodied physical stimuli are combined with emotionally charged events to create impressions or ideas that return to him at a later time.6 The involute has been variously described in De Quincey scholarship as a different type of memory, one that is “atemporal and visual (or occasionally, musical)” (Shilstone 1983, 22) or as a “knot of ideas or images” from which De Quincey draws meaning (Barrell 1991, 32). De Quincey writes in Suspiria that these involutes are often governed by “antagonism,” the unexpected juxtaposition of material circumstances with an opposing emotional state. Already in the 1821 Confessions, he writes, “wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it were by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other” (Works 2:72). In Suspiria, he relates how, because of the death of his sister in summer when he was six years old, a connection exists in his mind between heat and death (15:142), an association made even stronger by the passion of the Christ occurring in summer-like Palestine (15:143). The force of De Quincey’s impressions at this young age arises exactly from a juxtaposition between lived experience in the physical world and the emotional heartache of grief. Physical stimuli combine with deep emotional distress to create an impression that he continues to ponder for decades after. John Barrell emphasizes the material nature of the involute when he writes that the word “was already familiar to conchologists, for example, who used it to describe the tightly whorled shells of some gastropods”— suggesting both the convoluted nature of the concept and “the idea of a shaped vacancy enclosed by an open-ended spiral of concrete objects” (Barrell 1991, 32). De Quincey scholars often remark on the involuted shape of De Quincey’s ideas (described as labyrinthine) but miss the importance of the shell—the materiality that contributes and gives shape to these ideas and informs De Quincey’s thought (cf. Reed 1983, 210–14). Because an involute is the result of both concrete and emotional stimuli, it functions like a poetic version of Latour’s “assemblage” —as the interaction between the human and the nonhuman allows for philosophical ideas that could not have resulted from merely one or the other (cf. Latour 1999, 178, 281; Keane 2005, 189). Furthermore, De Quincey’s use of a word that denotes the spiral-like nature of this process suggests the folded nature of this human–nonhuman interaction. Here, if one thinks of De Quincey’s involute as a kind of form in which he organizes his experience, then it becomes clear how the “involute” acts as an affordance, that is,

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how it “allows or forbids” his understanding of the role of the material in his everyday life (Akrich and Latour 1992, 261; cf. Levine 2015, 3). Various scholars have privileged literature as De Quincey’s material involute stimulus. Barrell writes that the “shell” of the involute “is also a book” (Barrell 1991, 32). Narratologist Regina Hewitt formulates a narrower definition of involute, which she defines as “a passage stored in memory from reading that is later enlisted as a problem-solving device” (Hewitt 2008, 105). She follows on the work of Frederick Burwick, who compares De Quincey’s involute to Wordsworth’s “spot of time” but who notes that, for De Quincey, an involute can be made up of not just physical experiences but also “scattered up and down literature” (Burwick 2001, 89, 90). Yet, even in focusing on the power of reading in relation to the involute, critics acknowledge that the involute has a distinctly material aspect as well. Hewitt notes that “De Quincey does not really distinguish between textual and actual experiences, for he finds all experience to be composite” (Hewitt 2008, 109), and while Rzepka draws attention to how De Quincey’s description of the “literature of power” is similar to his description of the involute, he also emphasizes that involutes “are encountered in real life” (Rzepka 1991, 128, 127). The materiality of De Quincey’s involute is also clear from his openness to various embodied experiences and the manner in which he approaches his material possessions in Confessions. De Quincey recognized a broad range of influences upon his thought, even to the point of acknowledging the power of the physical body over the workings of the mind. In an article on “Madness” (1824), De Quincey explicitly states that cognition cannot be fully carried out by the brain alone: “if we must use the phrase, ‘organ of thought’ at all, on many grounds I should be disposed to say that the brain and the stomach-apparatus through their reciprocal action and reaction jointly make up the compound organ of thought” (Works 3:180). Further on, he suggests that the “billiary functions” may have an even stronger ability “to modify the power of thinking” to the degree that De Quincey believes madness may result from disturbances therein (3:181). Similarly, in Confessions, De Quincey argues that he has become all too aware of his own digestion, leading Paul Youngquist to suggest, “When digestion enters consciousness, cognition turns material” (Youngquist 1999, 356). By not adhering to a strict mind–body binary, De Quincey acknowledges that his ideas and works are influenced by the physical workings of his body.

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While De Quincey’s body and his luggage are two very distinct types of things, his view of the power of the physical body helps inform and clarify his use of the involute by highlighting how the mind can be affected by a non-intellectual thing—whether animate or not. De Quincey views the involute, like the body, as having power over the mind, but a power that is positive and productive rather than debilitating and maddening. Involutes, he writes in “Infant Literature” (1852), are like “vegetable seeds,” external phenomena implanted in the mind, perhaps from long ago and far away, that later sprout into unexpected associations and feelings that cannot be disentangled from these original physical experiences (Works 19:73). Returning to the significance of the trunk and its narration early in the Confessions, he begins his recollection of the incident, “So blended and intertwisted in this life are occasions of laughter and of tears, that I cannot yet recall without smiling an incident which occurred at that time, and which had nearly put a stop to the immediate execution of my plan” (2:16–17). As an event over which De Quincey cannot decide whether to laugh or to cry, the trunk incident embodies his concept of antagonism and hints at what he only later articulates as the involute (cf. Barrell 1991, 184). The trunk anecdote provides an introduction into De Quincey’s heterogeneous and contradictory engagement with and representation of the agency of the nonhuman. On one level, he needs the trunk to carry his possessions—to which he attaches symbolic, class significance. On another, the mass of the trunk presents a potential barrier to his designs and desires. Finally, in recollection, the entire episode, with its faithful object and unfaithful humans, allows him to articulate his own ambivalence about his youthful actions and their consequences. By invoking the trunk incident as an example of a human–nonhuman assemblage with ineffectual agency, De Quincey grapples with what he views as the chaotic nature of existence. To a degree, this episode helps him to absolve himself retroactively of his own responsibility. This latter point also explains why the trunk exits the narrative at this point: it has served its ideological and narrative purpose. Thus, while De Quincey seems open to acknowledging an external force in the material object, Confessions also demonstrates his attempts to manipulate this external agency to serve his own ideological purposes.

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Indifferent Things in the House in London In the chronology De Quincey sets up to describe his descent into opium addiction, the physical deprivation he experiences as a 17-year-old in London allows him to position himself as a victim of injustice and chance. At this point in the Confessions, De Quincey frequently stresses his loss of identity and, subsequently, his loss of agency. His interactions with objects demonstrate his lack of agency, and, in fact, he himself becomes objectified during this period of underage vagrancy. In the midst of these travails, a stranger allows him to sleep in an almost abandoned house in Greek Street. De Quincey’s experience in this house is notable for the total disharmony he feels between the human and the nonhuman. In contrast to his later depiction of Dove Cottage as a domestic paradise, the house in Greek Street portrays a domestic dystopia: Unoccupied, I call it, for there was no household or establishment in it; nor any furniture, indeed, except a table, and a few chairs. But I found, on taking possession of my new quarters, that the house already contained one single inmate, a poor friendless child, apparently ten years old; but she seemed hunger-bitten; … From this forlorn child I learned, that she had slept and lived there alone, for some time before I came: … The house was large, and, from the want of furniture, the noise of the rats made a prodigious echoing on the spacious staircase and hall; and amidst the real fleshly ills of cold and, I fear, hunger, the forsaken child had found leisure to suffer still more (it appeared) from the self-created one of ghosts. I promised her protection against all ghosts whatsoever: but, alas! I could offer her no other assistance. We lay upon the floor, with a bundle of cursed law papers for a pillow, but with no other covering than a sort of large horseman’s cloak; afterwards, however, we discovered in a garret an old sofa-cover, a small piece of rug, and some fragments of other articles, which added a little to our warmth. (Works 2:22)

Significantly, he describes the house as “unoccupied” despite the young girl’s presence there, a situation that De Quincey’s added presence does not change. His comment that “there was no household or establishment in it” implies that true occupancy requires both “a group of people (esp. a family) living together as a unit” and the “contents or appurtenances of a house considered collectively” (“Household, n.” 1a., 3.). His reiteration of this point with “establishment” further highlights his inability to set up a material household (“Establishment, n.” 5a.). These highly charged

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words indicate that people require furnishings in order to truly occupy a house. In a sense, De Quincey denies his own agency in this instance, highlighting John Law’s insight that “without our props we would not be people-agents but only bodies” (Law 1993, 33). This connection between household furnishings and the idea of a “home” being established is reflected in contemporary literature. In Catherine Gore’s short story, “The Auction” (1823), for instance, the auction of household goods, becomes a metonymy for the destruction of the protection provided by the family: “Imagination pictured those delicate looking females driven from their home, stripped at once of all the elegancies of life, and sent to brave a world, the hardships of which they were now for the first time to learn” (Gore 1823, 4).7 Turned out from their home, these young women are left unprotected with little more than their own persons. While De Quincey’s own deprivation has been the result of his own choices, the lack of a household in Greek Street draws attention to his own inability to make a home from the bare components of his personhood. In lieu of such a household, De Quincey finds a few sparse pieces of furniture and a random collection of objects that are divorced from their original purposes. These various objects are the true habitants of the house, and, as such, they live separate and indifferent lives to the two human (un)occupants. These objects pose a challenge to the anthropocentric autobiographical project by suggesting an alternate teleology and temporality in which objects have no human purpose, yet continue to exist—slowly decaying in a thing-wasteland. Even the “bundle” of “law papers” has been stripped of its proper human purpose and is now being haphazardly employed as an excessively uncomfortable pillow—a use for which it neither was designed nor is suited. The same goes for the other items in the house: a “large horseman’s cloak,” an “old sofa-cover,” and a “small piece of rug.” The horseman’s cloak no longer has a horseman—one could then ask, in a reversal of Latour’s question (1999, 192),8 can it really be a “horseman’s cloak” if there is no horseman to wear it? Yet even if these things lose some of their associations when disconnected from the human world in which they were previously employed, they (seemingly) defy human purposes by “resisting” De Quincey’s attempts to re-employ or reuse them. What disturbs De Quincey’s sense of human preeminence is these objects’ thereness, what Jonathan Lamb calls their “serene self-sufficiency … in representing only what they are and nothing else” (Lamb 2011, 4) and what Brown refers to as “an excess” to their designed purposes (Brown

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2001, 5). Their recalcitrance to his wishes betrays the fact that they inhabit an alternate temporality in which there is no progress, growth, or adaptation—simply stasis. Rather than aiding him in his growth as a human being, he perceives them as inhibiting his growth by refusing to offer any relief from the “darkness—cold—silence—and desolation” that the house embodies (Works 2:24). During this same period of material deprivation and reduced agency, De Quincey’s own personhood is called into question. In addition to living among the rats, he writes that the lack of comfort and warmth removes even his ability to sleep like a human being: “my sleep was never more than what is called dog-sleep; so that I could hear myself moaning, and was often, as it seemed to me, wakened suddenly by my own voice” (2:22). While a home and domestic comforts help distinguish humans from beasts, in this house, De Quincey is not much better off than a common animal sleeping in a barn. His inability to exist in this manner without adverse effects to his health emphasizes his bodily need for objects that supplement his human abilities: about this time, as it seemed to me, a hideous sensation began to haunt me as soon as I fell into a slumber, which has since returned upon me, at different periods of my life, viz. a sort of twitching (I know not where, but apparently about the region of the stomach), which compelled me violently to throw out my feet for the sake of relieving it. (2:22)

Like in his “Madness” essay, written a few years later, this passage connects the mental and the corporeal for, while “twitching” refers to the physiological, “haunt” implies the psychological. De Quincey experiences first-­ hand the trauma of what it means to be a human living in an inhospitable physical environment, a trauma that is only intensified by his ineffectual attempts to mold it to his needs and desires. Here, at the zenith of his youthful idealism (when he has yet to meet the disappointingly human Wordsworth and Coleridge), he finds not only an absence of unity with his material housemates in Greek Street, but their indifference is actually pernicious, as they throw into relief his bodily suffering. Nonetheless, while De Quincey’s experiences in London are traumatic, they are also rhetorically productive: they help further De Quincey’s persona as a man victimized by external forces, by coincidence, and, in this instance, by a kind of indifferent materiality. While Austen utilizes objects as hints of narrative possibilities that, once fulfilled, then feel causally

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given, De Quincey, in this instance, utilizes them to shore up a causal account in which youthful folly has led to severe health problems which precipitate his first ingestion of opium. Thus, at this point in his narrative, these uncooperative objects, these objects that defy his attempts at use or appropriation, function as a means of gaining sympathy from the reader, who bears witness to his privation. However, his failure to prove his identity to a money-lender at this time, a problem that proves to be distinctly middle class, as well as his later insistence on his status as a middle-class intellectual, suggests that at some point, his attempts to garner sympathy from the reader are also indicative of a legitimate crisis of personhood. Despite the fact that the house in Greek Street lies in a respectable part of town, he cannot claim it as his proper residence; the place he lives, rather than providing De Quincey with a supplement to his own identity, reduces him to a nobody, a nothing, a useless object that resides with other objects. This crisis is exacerbated when he goes to the moneylender in an attempt to borrow against his future patrimony: “one question still remained, which the faces of the Jews pretty significantly suggested,—was I that person? … It was strange to find my own self, materialiter considered …, accused, or at least suspected, of counterfeiting my own self, formaliter considered” (2:29).9 Nigel Leask likens these two states of being “considered” to Coleridge’s ego contemplans and ego contemplatus, respectively (Leask 1992, 192). In both cases, the difference lies between one’s physical, material now (materialiter) and, as Coleridge writes, “the visual image or object by which the mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its personal identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have existed” (formaliter) (Coleridge 2014, 56).10 This experience is strange to De Quincey because it highlights that not even his bodily presence is enough to attest the truth of what he considers to be irrefutable facts about himself— namely, that he is the son of the merchant Thomas Quincey and entitled to 200 pounds a year upon coming of age. Leask writes that, for Wordsworth and Coleridge, autobiography functioned as a way of “demonstrating a consistency principle between present and past selves …, to gain the credit of personal identity” (Leask 1992, 192). However, De Quincey cannot even prove that he is the physical embodiment of the man known legally as Thomas De Quincey, much less demonstrate a consistency in his personality or character. Incidentally, De Quincey attempts to satisfy the concerns of the moneylender by producing some letters he has in his possession “being, indeed,

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by this time, almost the only relics of my personal incumbrances (excepting the clothes I wore) which I had not in one way or other disposed of” (Works  2:29). De Quincey describes his possessions as “incumbrances,” for, having moved mostly by foot after running away from school, he has come face to face with the cumbersomeness of his objects and possessions. While “incumbrances” suggests that he has “freed” himself from these objects, he now finds that he needs these things to help substantiate his personhood in the eyes of society. In an odd inverse of the eighteenth-­ century picaresque storage and luggage spaces that Stanica identifies, De Quincey’s loss of his luggage means that he has no space to house objects to aid the constitution of his developing subjectivity, not even the “unsettled subjectivity” attributed to eighteenth-century heroes and heroines (Stanica 2014, 525). De Quincey needs objects to attest objectively to his class status. Unfortunately, such objects, like his trunk filled with books, are unwieldy and unhappily material.11 The letters he produces also fail to satisfy the money-lender, suggesting that even the written attestations of others cannot establish his corporeal identity. This episode makes it startlingly clear that if he cannot look the part of Thomas De Quincey, he cannot be trusted as Thomas De Quincey. Yet this is not a universal problem, for the money-lender agrees to terms if De Quincey can furnish a “guarantee” from his young friend, an Earl— evidently, needing to establish one’s corporeal identity materially is a specifically middle-class problem. Incidentally, De Quincey internalizes the oppression that denies the middle classes personhood due to their lack of possessions and titles and later writes vehemently against the Reform Bill of 1832.12 Reform would mean that more people were considered “persons” with a voice in their government and representation, and De Quincey was incongruously opposed to changes in the hierarchy of this status quo. The objects in the house in Greek street and De Quincey’s experience with the money-lenders demonstrate the importance of possessions to subjecthood. When he returns to the house in Greek street a few years later, he finds that the situation has been changed—the inhospitable objects have been replaced: “it is now occupied by a respectable family; and, by the light in the front drawing-room, I observed a domestic party, assembled perhaps at tea, and apparently cheerful and gay” (Works 2:24). This juxtaposition of the house in which De Quincey himself resided, and the house that has been turned back into a home with the aid of objects, highlights the ambiguity of this episode within the narrative arc of the Confessions. While his descriptions of the house and his physical reactions

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to sleeping there seem curated to maximize the reader’s sympathy with his youthful follies, at the heart of De Quincey’s descriptions of his time in London rises up an anxiety about these object’s thingness, and his inability to mold indifferent objects to his will. This awareness of his own lack of control is partially tied to his own poverty at this point in his life, but, significantly, even after coming into his inheritance, De Quincey’s inability to control matter remains a primary theme of the Confessions.

Destroyed, Lost, and Appropriated Things in Oxford De Quincey’s life becomes considerably easier once he comes of age and can afford the necessities that mark out his class status; he spends some time at Oxford but, while he would later write extensively about his Oxford years, in the Confessions this time is largely passed over. In the “Introduction to the Pains of Opium,” De Quincey asks the reader to step forward, from 1804 to 1812, and, to signal this passage of time, he provides a list of possessions he once owned as a student: The years of academic life are now over and gone—almost forgotten;—the student’s cap no longer presses my temples; if my cap exist at all, it presses those of some youthful scholar, I trust, as happy as myself, and as passionate a lover of knowledge. My gown is, by this time, I dare say, in the same condition with many thousand excellent books in the Bodleian, viz., diligently perused by certain studious moths and worms; or departed, however (which is all that I know of his fate), to that great reservoir of somewhere to which all the tea-cups, tea-caddies, tea-pots, tea-kettles, &c., have departed (not to speak of still frailer vessels, such as glasses, decanters, bed-makers, &c.), which occasional resemblances in the present generation of tea-cups, &c., remind me of having once possessed, but of whose departure and final fate I, in common with most gownsmen of either university, could give, I suspect, but an obscure and conjectural history. (2:52)

The passage is significant because it clarifies De Quincey’s understanding of different forms of nonhuman otherness. While John Plotz argues that the passage embodies the dross of De Quincey’s experiences, as it stands in for the objects that have no meaning and have therefore been dismissed from the narrative (Plotz 2000, 77), De Quincey does not simply group all of these objects together in one large lump of nothingness. Instead, he envisages three final possibilities for the ‘fates’ of such objects: (1) the object has been thrown away or recycled so that it has been fundamentally

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changed; (2) the object is hidden away “somewhere,” where it is not being used and either slowly decays or statically exists; or (3) the object is in use, but by someone other than De Quincey. Each of these possibilities demonstrates a different aspect of nonhuman independence from the human. When he writes “if my cap exist at all,” he acknowledges the possibility that his cap exists no longer: it has disintegrated, been thrown away, and recycled, or burned as waste. Research has identified a complex market-­ based waste-management system in late eighteenth-century London, a system that suggests that the materials of De Quincey’s ragged cap, after falling out of use as a cap, would have been reused for other purposes if they were not burned and sold as ash (Velis et al. 2009, 1288–89). A similar fate can be inferred from his mention of “frailer vessels” like glasses and decanters. Perhaps they have been crushed, thrown away, or “sold to Swedish manufacturers of emery paper” in which case, they have passed out of existence as glasses and decanters (1284, Table 1). His inclusion of “bed-makers” in his list of “frailer vessels,” that is, as Morrison clarifies, women who were “college servants, and a byword for women of easy virtue” (De Quincey 2013, 280), unfortunately strengthens the sense that these objects have been tossed aside, possibly even destroyed, like disgraced women.13 Furthermore, by being recycled or fundamentally changed, these objects no longer exist in their previous forms and therefore can no longer be recovered. They have an alternate life span and life cycle, one that is shorter than De Quincey’s own life, yet one that also carries a hint of immortality. The basic materials are reused but take on a new, unidentifiable form; the matter of his cap or his glasses reincarnates into some other kind of object. Like the it-narrator of the anonymous “Adventures of a Quire of Paper” (1779), De Quincey highlights the transformation of one type of object into something completely different in character, a transformation that, at least for the it-narrator, imagines the core atoms of these objects remaining fundamentally the same.14 Yet more disturbing for De Quincey than the idea that these objects have been destroyed or transformed is the second possibility that these objects have not passed out of existence but, rather, slowly decay in some “great reservoir of somewhere”—in ignored closets, boxes, or forgotten attics. If others are not using these objects, where are they? What is their purpose when divorced from human society? In this “somewhere,” objects either decay or remain in a state of stasis; they do not simply disappear. His gown is slowly being eaten by worms and moths, signifying the

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“unrecoverable physical facticity” that Plotz finds so key to the passage (Plotz 2000, 77). Yet, there is also a correlation here between De Quincey’s former possessions and his own subjectivity: his gown, the thing that made him an Oxford man, no longer functions for that purpose, just as he could no longer pass as an Oxford undergraduate. This understanding of the passage of time as one of decay runs contrary to the ostensibly regenerative goal of Confessions, as a narrative that is “useful and instructive” (“Notice to the Reader”) by recording both his descent into opium addiction and his (almost total) “ren[unciation]” of said opium (Works 2:9; 2:81–82). His appendix of 1822 includes a chart of his attempts to extricate himself from the talons of this drug and reveals the active, positive exertion that such a goal required, even if, in the end, he remained addicted (2:82; cf. Hatton 2021). Decay, then, even aging, seems at odds with the teleological implications of a work that supposedly documents a return to health. This sense of decay is further heightened by his recognition of the unused books of the Bodleian. De Quincey implies that the Bodleian has too many books for the student body of Oxford to read; a failure to be read reduces these books, despite their high intellectual content, to their mere materiality, a reduction that also leaves them in danger of physical decay. Rzepka has pointed out that De Quincey did not consider a literary work to be “published” unless it was also read and comprehended by readers (Rzepka 1991, 120; cf. McDonagh 2007, 125). In an essay entitled “Style, No. IV” (1841), De Quincey comments that print technology has made actual publication “an unattainable ideal” since the flooding of the market with so many books means that few of them are actually read (Works 12:75). Therefore, some books can be said to have never really existed in the first place, despite physical publication. Yet the physicality of the published book means that it could always be potentially discovered, read, and comprehended, that is, until physical decay causes the book itself to pass out of existence. For De Quincey, whether he acknowledges it or not, the life cycle of books metonymically correlates to the life cycle of the scholar: once De Quincey dies, the knowledge he has accumulated will die with him, and the Bodleian comment suggests that the medium he has chosen for storing that knowledge—print—might be lost as well. As a periodical writer, this is an even more pressing concern, as evidenced by an editorial attributed to him from 1818:

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Books are immortal; for some of them last for ten or even fifteen years; but newspapers must content themselves with an existence almost literally ephemeral: a week is the term of their natural lives; and, if a newspaper exceeds that term, it may be said to have ‘descended to posterity:’ the readers of the second week are the posterity of a newspaper. (Works 1:156)

A book is indeed “immortal” relative to a newspaper that will “be bought, borrowed, shared, read, and then (necessarily) replaced” (Mulrooney 2002, 357). Yet compared to De Quincey himself, who lives to be 74 years old, this is a greatly curtailed life cycle. If one agrees with Rzepka that De Quincey uses autobiography as a method for carving out a space for himself as a “‘real’ and lasting part of history,” then this passage reveals his own fear that his method (writing) is ineffective, since it too is inscribed in a material world that is subject to decay (Rzepka 1991, 148). According to De Quincey, his friend the travel writer John Stewart (“Walking Stewart”) was also concerned with his and his works’ embeddedness within the material world. In 1823, De Quincey records that Stewart feared “that all the kings and rulers of the earth would confederate in every age against his works, and would hunt them out for extermination” (Works 3:138). This fear leads Stewart to ask his friends to bury various works “properly secured from damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth” and to pass these works’ locations on to the next generation (3:138). Though less concerned with the natural life cycle of books, Stewart’s fear also arises from the corporeal nature of his intellectual offspring. The object-nature of the book is exactly what allows him to pass his ideas on to generations after him, but this object-nature is also what could preclude that process, what could allow the text, the ideas, to be destroyed. Moreover, all of Stewart’s measures for preserving the physical book are called into question when Stewart realizes that some later generation may not speak English. He determines that his works must be translated into Latin, a task that De Quincey promises to take up, yet, “like many another plan of mine, it went unexecuted” (3:139). All the work of preserving the physical book might be for naught, if generations later cannot read the text. This fear of the failure of intergenerational communication brings one back to Brown’s comment that the dialect between “physical support and cognitive transport” embodied by the book fails if the book “confronts you with an unfamiliar alphabet” (Brown 2010a, 26, 27). In this hypothetical, non-English-speaking world, the book once again transforms

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into a mute, material object, a piece of sheer mass with little nonmaterial value. Here it is the book’s ineffectuality—its lack of functioning—that registers the divide between the human desires that created it and the assemblage that results from this delegation. The book may have attained a degree of immortality as an object, as an artifact, but this immortality cannot convey the author’s meaning because it cannot be adequately read. De Quincey’s as well as Stewart’s sense that books are physical objects that are thus vulnerable to decay or human neglect, a status that threatens their immaterial “human” value, is at odds with the talking book it-­ narrators to which Leah Price has drawn attention. These it-narratives, which flourished in the nineteenth century and were co-opted by religious writing, applied the circulating object formula to the book itself. But by personifying books, she writes that these narratives also avoid, to some degree, the reality of the book itself, as they “conveniently forget that books need someone to carry them” (Price 2012, 134). What is precisely disturbing about the book is that, although it can seem to “speak” and produce effects, it can also be inanimate and, as testified by De Quincey on multiple occasions, brutally blockish. The potential decay and muteness of the book is thrown into somewhat horrific relief by the fact that some less important objects do not have much of an organic life cycle at all—at least one that is perceivable in a human’s lifetime—but simply exist in a state of (seeming) perpetual stasis. Objects such as “tea-cups, tea-caddies, tea-pots, tea-kettles, &c.” defy the passage of time and the “studious moths”: they neither slowly disintegrate on their own nor are susceptible to being eaten away. They are both fragile in their ability to be destroyed in a moment and durable in their ability to outlast their human owner. If left alone, they remain relics to another age, another style, and stalwart reminders of lost moments, memories, and desires. Given enough time, these objects will become so thoroughly divorced from their human contexts, their human–nonhuman networks, that they become unknowable things—unreadable testaments to the ultimate dissolution of entire human civilizations and modes of life. Such contextual distance raises another potential, related concern, not just that the object will be unreadable, but that it will be discursively rewritten, that is, used as evidence to tell a story that may or may not be appropriate to the object (cf. Brown 2010b, 184). Like Franz Kafka’s Odradek, from his short story “The Cares of a Family Man” (1914–17), these objects, in their ability to exist for multiple human lifetimes, challenge the superiority of the individual human by

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bearing witness to a much broader span of experience and history. De Quincey is just as fearful of meeting such vivid reminders of an irrecoverable past and of losing control of his possessions’ meanings as he is of forever losing such memories to the moth and the worm. These remaining objects—objects which are still in existence, still useable—not only inhabit another temporality, but also enable the possibility that they could be employed by others: “Am I to suppose, then,” writes the narrator of Kafka’s story, “that [Odradek] will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children’s children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful” (Kafka 1988, 429; cf. Bennett 2010, 8). Similarly, De Quincey feels that these objects may play a role in an “obscure … history” of which he knows nothing but with which he has a painfully intimate connection. Finally, the Oxford passage introduces the third possibility that these objects have neither disappeared nor are hidden away unused, but rather, are in use by others. “If my cap exist at all, it presses those of some youthful scholar”: perhaps his previous belongings are happily in the possession of other people who think of them as their own. In his “Sketches of Life and Manners; from the Autobiography of an English Opium Eater” (1835), he discusses the ordinary Oxford practice of buying used possessions from outgoing students and reselling these possessions upon graduation (Works 10:123). These reused objects intimately connect De Quincey to strangers whom he may not even have met. While De Quincey may be able to accept that other Oxford men use his former possessions, he has no guarantee that his possessions will remain in the hands of his intellectual equals. If he constitutes his subjectivity and class-position through objects, then the transferability of these objects can potentially undermine that very position. Wall speaks of the “profoundly ambivalent experience” of the eighteenth-century auction for “the fashionable world—precisely because it wasn’t just the fashionable world to whom auctions appealed” (Wall 1997, 2). De Quincey’s possessions go on to play roles in the lives of others, offering “the promise of the reconstruction of a new [world]” (Wall 1997, 3). The same could be said for De Quincey’s trunk, from earlier in the narrative: once it disappears, who knows what becomes of his belongings and his precious library. This sale or reuse of items is very different than De Quincey’s use of the house in Greek Street—where he existed despite the objects there; rather, with his Oxford possessions, these younger students think of these objects

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as their own and use them accordingly. His belief in involutes complicates the simple transference of objects to a new owner: if his material surrounding can influence his own thoughts, then those same material surroundings can influence others’ thoughts and feelings. De Quincey is connected to these others, by way of objects, yet can neither control nor even know definitely about these other uses, meanings, and narratives. Overall, these objects contribute to a theme that De Quincey will wrestle with throughout his works—his interconnectedness to other agencies and consciousnesses. In Suspiria, he remarks that, as opposed to the isolated state of childhood, in which one’s actions generally have few long-­ term effects, “Far otherwise is the state of relations connecting an adult or responsible man with the circles around him as life advances. The network of these relations is a thousand times more frequent, and the vibrations a thousand times harsher which these jarrings diffuse” (Works 15: 189). De Quincey reveals his anxiety over sharing a material world with others, bumping up against other consciousnesses both in and through the material environments that neither of them can escape. Wherever he lives, his life becomes material in some sense, and this materiality both plagues him—as excess “stuff” and through the persecutions of debt collectors— and may be transferred to others, even without his consent. This is also part of Walking Stewart’s fear, according to De Quincey: the anxiety that the rulers of the earth will want to “exterminate” Stewart’s books simply masks the greater fear that they may utilize them for their own purposes, twisting his genius into some other form. At best, this transferability of objects and intellectual property demonstrates how others can use one’s former possessions for their own purposes, irrespective of their ‘original’ owner. However, it also suggests that objects may be disloyal; they may contribute to courses of action that are inimical to their original or proper owners. De Quincey’s short story “The Household Wreck” (1838), one of his few works of fiction, demonstrates this fear most keenly. Frequently read alongside Kafka (Lindop 1985, 231; Plumtree 1985, 146; Bridgwater 2004, 148–49, 151), it thematizes guilt as a complex, regardless of whether a crime has or has not been committed. Patrick Bridgwater and Frances Wilson read it as a metaphor for De Quincey’s own relationship with his wife and his inability to care for her (Bridgwater 2004, 148; Wilson 2016, 291). Significantly, the plot takes shape around an inert object. The narrator’s wife, Agnes, is accused “of having … secreted in her muff, and feloniously carried away, a valuable piece of Mechlin lace”

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(Works 9: 232). At first, what seems like an unlucky twist of fate (foretold by a fortune-teller), is soon discovered to be a conspiracy perpetrated by a haberdasher with sexual designs on Agnes. The conspiracy is discovered by the couple when they remember that “she had laid aside her winter’s dress for the first time on this genial sunny day. Muff she had not at the time, nor could have had appropriately from the style of her costume in other respects” (9: 236). The conspiracy is deepened when she remembers that “the muff had been missed some little time before” and realizes that her nursery maid has been in league with the haberdasher for months (9: 250). Yet any defense she can mount on this count is annulled by the fact that, in the moment of accusation, she was so confused that she did not bring up these points (9: 249). Therefore, while the absence of the muff confirms a conspiracy, the late discovery of that absence precludes its usefulness in her defense. Finally, the fact that Agnes’s name is “embroidered within” strengthens the power of the muff as evidence against her (9: 250). Despite public sympathy on her account, she is convicted to ten years hard labor. The muff holds a peculiar place in the narrative, for it demonstrates both proof of guilt (to the court) and proof of innocence (to the narrator)—these two incompatible “truths” reveal competing interpretations of the material world. Since her name is inscribed in the muff, her identity as innocent or guilty also hinges upon this one inert object. Embroidering a name on an object ostensibly ensures that, if lost, it can be recovered. In the case of theft, the name helps prove to whom the object belongs. However, in this case, the situation is reversed: the very thing that signals the muff as her own seemingly turns against her. The muff speaks its owner’s name and thus ratifies her guilt. The actions of her nursery maid and the haberdasher show that, once the muff leaves her possession, and despite being inscribed with her name, the inert object bears no loyalty to her, and she has no control over how others interpret its absence or presence. This “fiction as autobiography” (Perry 1993, 816) expresses De Quincey’s deepest fears about the potential disloyalty of objects, whether or not they are in fact transferred to another’s possession. By emphasizing the helplessness of Agnes and her husband and their inability to extricate themselves from the plot laid against them, De Quincey highlights the key role that material circumstances play in his own life—not simply his addiction to opium but his addiction to objects. Agnes’s lawfully owned object functions as an image of guilt just as the objects De Quincey buys for his

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family on credit are the physical embodiments of debt (cf. Plumtree 1985, 146). A list of his debts adequately shows how mired De Quincey was in the material of everyday life: included in the creditors when he filed for bankruptcy in 1833 were a “Boot & Shoe maker,” “’Tinplate Worker,” “Dressmaker,” “Brazier,” and “Haberdasher” amongst others (Morrison 2009, 280–81). These objects suggest needs as much as the list denotes the inability to pay for the fulfilling of those needs. Yet, “The Household Wreck” does not just gesture to the pressure De Quincey feels to go into debt to provide for his family’s physical comfort. Similarly to the narrative-­ generating objects analyzed in Austen’s novels, the narrative mechanism of this story hinges on this object, as it enables the conflict of the tale, demonstrating that De Quincey needs objects, not just for physical comfort, but as catalysts for writing.

“Turned out” of Dove Cottage (By Books) De Quincey’s description of his time living in Dove Cottage demonstrates how the objects of Confessions—objects that he attempts to integrate into the narrative progression of the work—offer resistance and undermine his attempts at subject-formation. De Quincey frames the objects of the house in Greek street as indifferent and even treacherous, all the while revealing that his subjectivity, not just his victimhood, is reliant upon the objects that he no longer possesses. His anxiety about the alternate life-cycles of the objects he once owned while a student at Oxford further highlights his fear that he cannot properly control the nonhuman things with which he shares his life. In contrast, the image he paints of his possessions in Dove Cottage is designed to show De Quincey at the height of his middle-class ascendency; his objects contribute to his comfort, indicate his class status and aid his subject formation by contributing to his intellectual pursuits. However, like the image of deprivation in London, this image of paradise and the meaning that the reader is encouraged to take from it, is undermined by the objects he describes. In the introduction to “The Pains of Opium” portion of the Confessions, De Quincey describes his life while living in a cottage in the Lake District. In the revised Confessions (1856), he reveals the cottage to be Dove Cottage, which he rented (after Wordsworth) for a total of twenty-six years (Works 2:237; Morrison 2009, 291). In the earlier text, he prefaces his account of the cottage by remarking, “I will here lay down an analysis of happiness; and as the most interesting mode of communicating it, I will

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give it, not didactically, but wrapt up and involved in a picture of one evening” (2:58). Twenty-four years before De Quincey would define his “involute” in Suspiria, he here describes such an involute: “involved” is derived from the same Latin word, involvere, and “wrapt” again signals the meaning of said root, alternatively “to roll about” or “wrap up, envelop” (“In-volvo,” 1B). These words have both passive and active implications, suggesting that while De Quincey may come to a realization of being already involved with objects, he also learns to embrace that position. His rejection of a “didactic” narrative in this case further hints at how the involute transcends rational explanations, rather emphasizing visual and tactile experience: Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter fireside, candles at four o’clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without, … Indeed, so great an epicure am I in this matter, that I cannot relish a winter night fully if it be much past St. Thomas’s day,15 and have degenerated into disgusting tendencies to vernal appearances: no: it must be divided by a thick wall of dark nights from all return of light and sunshine.—From the latter weeks of October to Christmas-eve, therefore is the period during which happiness is in season, which, in my judgment, enters the room with the tea-tray: … Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, and not more than seven and a half feet high. This, reader, is somewhat ambitiously styled, in my family, the drawing-room; but, being contrived ‘a double debt to pay,’ it is also, and more justly, termed the library; for it happens that books are the only article of property in which I am richer than my neighbours. Of these, I have about five thousand, collected gradually since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, put as many as you can into this room. Make it populous with books: and, furthermore, paint me a good fire; and furniture, plain and modest, befitting the unpretending cottage of a scholar. And, near the fire, paint me a tea-table; and … place only two cups and saucers on the tea-­ tray…. (2:59–60)

The argument for this description functioning as an involute is further supported by his emphasis on the weather and the juxtaposition of the comfortable “winter fire-side” and “the wind and rain … raging audibly without,” an inverted image of his death–summer antagonism. This involute-­like language shows that the passage is less an account of any one given winter evening, and more an amalgamation of lived experiences and

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feelings imparted through the physical objects of the scene. These objects and memories upon recollection denote the ultimate feeling of happiness for the writer. Setting the sentimental and emotional significance of this description aside momentarily, the passage reveals several things about how De Quincey expects or desires objects to function. In De Quincey’s ideal, the home of a middle-class scholar is populated with objects of comfort: candles, rugs, curtains, books, furniture “plain and modest,” tea-ware, a tea-­ tray. These are objects known for their physical benefits. They add warmth to the interior of his cottage, make the cottage “habitable” by a human person, and even supplement the human faculties. Historically, these objects also mark De Quincey as a respectable middle-class consumer of the early nineteenth century. His inclusion of “carpets” and “curtains” designates his interior as modern—for, as Lorna Weatherill notes—these household objects were quite absent from the homes of those in a similar social position one hundred years earlier (Weatherill 1988, 7–8). Maxine Berg further identifies carpets, tea-ware and tea-trays as amongst the necessary comforts of the emerging middle class of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Berg 2005, 19). De Quincey himself was born and raised in this emerging middle class: his father started as a linen draper in 1775 and was successful enough to move into foreign trade later in his career (Morrison 2009: 7, 9). In Suspiria, De Quincey reports that his father’s estate was worth £1600 a year, eighty percent of that of Colonel Brandon, Austen’s comfortable country gentleman in Sense and Sensibility (1811), a work also set at the end of the eighteenth century. Yet, De Quincey insists that, although merchants have a tendency to live in a more flamboyant style than the lower aristocracy—leading to what he calls “a disturbance upon the general scale of outward signs by which we measure the relations of rank”—he indeed comes from the middle class (Works 15:136). However, as a scholar living on a much smaller income than his father’s, he avoids giving an account that is too decadent in his opinion. In emphasizing “furniture, plain and modest,” he denotes his desire for comfort and respectability rather than luxury. By adding “befitting the unpretending cottage of a scholar,” De Quincey suggests that he also connects domestic simplicity to his ideal of a man of letters. His “plain and modest” furniture is just as indicative of his social status as a more luxurious house would be indicative of the gentry or upper tradesmen. Timothy Morton argues that a consumerism that makes a point of exercising restraint in the

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process of consuming is a particularly Romantic form (Morton 2012; cf. Campbell 1987, 203). By emphasizing their lack of consumerism, the Romantics created, in Morton’s eyes, a brand of anti-consumerism, which became a type of consumerism in itself, since it remained “reflexive” and “socially communicative” (Morton 2012). In this sense, De Quincey’s glorification of cottage life is akin to Wordsworth’s glorification of the language of common men as De Quincey rejects decadence and luxury in exchange for curated simplicity. Notably, in regard to books, this dynamic is reversed in the passage. If De Quincey feels that restraint in domestic furnishings marks him as a scholar, so also does his lack of restraint when it comes to books: “for it happens that books are the only article of property in which I am richer than my neighbours.” This, De Quincey imagines, is a safe way to invest: since books are, generally, markers of their immaterial contents, he can admit to being rich in knowledge. His added note that he has accumulated them “gradually since my eighteenth year” emphasizes the metonymy between his books and his intellectual maturation. The enlargement of his library, like his development as a scholar, has been a gradual process of linear organic growth over time. His accumulation of books mirrors the autobiographical part of his confessional project—itself a slow unfolding of subjectivity. With his idolization of the first-generation Romantic poets, his early penchant for scholasticism, and his subtitle for the Confessions (“Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar”), one can posit that De Quincey strives after the “character ideal” of the Romantic scholar who enjoys a simple, domestic life, surrounded by books (cf. Campbell 1993, 47). Of course, the most emblematic sign of De Quincey’s “modern” or “Romantic” consumption is his “bohemian” consumption of opium, in which, “the existential ‘feel’ of the act of consuming is hypostasized” (Morton 2000, 108; cf. Campbell 1993, 54; Clej 1995, viii). This hypostatization extends to De Quincey’s understanding of “happiness” itself, which is described both as wrapped up in this particular image of embodied experience with material objects, as well as in opium: “But I, who have taken happiness, both in a solid and a liquid shape, both boiled and unboiled, both East India and Turkey … I (it will be admitted) must surely know what happiness is, if any body does” (Works 2:58). However, De Quincey’s representation of happiness as embodied in a drug that alters his mental state conflicts with his idealization of his happy, domestic household. In the one instance, De Quincey is in thrall to a

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psychotropic substance, and, in the other, he is (supposedly) master of his domain. He adds at the end that the reader may also paint a “wine-­ decanter” of laudanum and a “book of German metaphysics placed by its side” and that these two objects “will sufficiently attest my being in the neighbourhood” (2:60). On the one hand, De Quincey’s seemingly laid back, bohemian approach to his opium consumption extends as well to his literary production, which he characterized as chaotic and disorganized (McDonagh 1994, 1). On the other hand, this side of De Quincey’s representation is belied by his insistence on his middle-class furnishings, his “respectable” cottage life. This very paradox, between a De Quincey at the mercy of nonhuman objects and substances and a De Quincey that is master of both his everyday life and the narrative progression of the Confessions may be what leads to De Quincey’s inability to include himself, corporeally, in the painted picture. Noting that De Quincey’s body is absent from the passage, Rzepka argues that the reader can interpret “paint me” as “paint me,” paint De Quincey himself as somehow embodied in the contents of this room (Rzepka 1988, 143). One can then view the Confessions not just as a means of presenting a certain type of character to the world, but also as an opportunity for De Quincey to prove to himself that he is the man here represented. De Quincey predicates his own identity on his physical possessions—he needs them to constitute his class, his style, his intellectual hopes—but in so doing, he also ties his subjectivity to objects over which he has only limited control. The narrative frame “paint me” further betrays the fact that De Quincey’s ideal is static. Rather than a faithful account of one particular memory, this image is a mosaic of memories blended together to fit De Quincey’s ideal of happiness. Because of this, he cannot truly inhabit this scene. On the one hand, this approach is indicative of what Watson calls an anti-metaphysical approach to autobiography because it reveals the constructed nature of autobiographical subjectivity (Watson 1993, 61). Like Michel de Montaigne, De Quincey is implicitly admitting that, “Painting for others, I represent my self in a better Colouring than my own natural Complexion” (Montaigne 1711a, 2:508; cf. Watson 1993, 63), an idea that suggests that autobiography cannot capture an authentic self.16 In De Quincey’s attempt to constitute his subjectivity through household scenery, he himself recedes from the construction. Rzepka writes that this is because of the dual nature of objects, as they both “reflect the personality of their owner” and are also part of the “real, actual world

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of concrete objects and signs” that De Quincey shares with other people (Rzepka 1988, 143). Rzepka emphasizes De Quincey’s situatedness in a literary culture of other artists, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, who have a profound influence upon his life both through their literary works and material objects—i.e. Dove Cottage itself. But while Rzepka focuses on the dual ownership or usage of objects, how objects connect De Quincey to “history,” he leaves out the effects that the nonhuman object has upon De Quincey irrespective of other human intentions and concerns. If one includes objects, on their own, amongst the influences that affect De Quincey’s subjectivity, then one brings an additional layer of complexity to Rzepka’s thesis that “De Quincey enters history as both ‘real’ object and ‘true’ potency of consciousness, a cultural artifact” by embodying himself in the book (Rzepka 1988, 148). While Rzepka suggests that De Quincey can in some sense escape influence by creating a new self in the form of autobiography, De Quincey’s inclusion of objects as part of his “book” curtails his authorial control over his book-self. But if including objects in his book undermines his control, so also the object-nature, the materiality, of the book itself challenges De Quincey’s ability to immortalize himself in text. Part of the problem with De Quincey’s ideal of happiness in Dove Cottage is that, by imagining these objects as static, he fails to recognize what Alworth calls, “the porous and dynamic boundary between setting and character” (Alworth 2016, 19). Although De Quincey does not include a record of them in the published Confessions, his problem with books as objects is evident in his relationship with the overwhelming number of books (ca. 5000) that he keeps in the cottage. In an unpublished fragment from 1819, probably part of the manuscript for Confessions, De Quincey writes, “My studies have now been long interrupted” due to illness, so that for sixteen months he has barely been able to read anything, except aloud “for the pleasure of others” (Works  2:325). While such a large library could be a problem even for someone able to read some of the books, for De Quincey, these unread books pose a challenge to his sense of self as a scholar. As Price writes, “The book’s material properties trump its textual content when its value … lies in attributes orthogonal to its legibility” (Price 2012, 8). In lieu of anyone reading these books, De Quincey’s son “has found out a use for some of them” that De Quincey joins him in (Works 2:326). They build a tower out of books together and then his son shoots arrows at it:

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the Schoolmen begin to totter: the Stagyrite trembles: Philosophy rocks to its centre:—and before it can be seen whether time will do anything to heal their wounds, another arrow is planted in the schism of their ontology: the mighty structure heaves—reels—seems in suspense for one moment and then with one choral crash, to the frantic joy of the young Sagittary, lies subverted on the floor; … All are at his feet … the greatest philosopher and the least differ but as to the brief noise they have made. (2:327)

Due to his health, and probably his opium and possible alcohol addictions (Morrison 2011, 273), De Quincey cannot read his books and instead joins his son in the “intellectual labo[ur]” of playing with them as blocks (2:326). In his bathetic commentary, he notes each piece of the pyramid for its intellectual content: “we build up a pile having for it’s [sic] base some slender modern Metaphysician ill able (poor man!) to sustain such a weight of philosophy” (2:325). Yet, in the end, he admits that the contents of the books are irrelevant, as books containing strong and weak philosophers make an equally loud noise when they fall down. This reduction of entire schools of philosophical thought to the weight and mass of their pages suggests that without being read, these great tomes might as well be children’s playthings. Furthermore, these objects move from a position of circumscribed order to total disorder. They, like the trunk, literally fall down, creating a crash, creating chaos. In 1820, before Confessions is published, these heavy tomes prove to be more than simple playthings, as they seemingly force De Quincey out of his home. When the family is obliged to leave Dove Cottage for Fox Ghyll because the house could no longer accommodate both De Quincey’s growing family and his growing library, Sara Hutchinson writes, “Mr de Quinceys Books have literally turned their master & his whole family out of doors” (Hutchinson 1954, 209; cf. Morrison 2009, 291; Lindop 1981, 240–241). Hutchinson’s comment is indicative of the absurd situation De Quincey finds himself in—he can neither dispense with his books nor his children, both need a home. In this case, as with the pile of books turned into a child’s playthings, the books assert their materiality: it is easier to move his entire family out of the beloved Dove Cottage and into new lodgings than to move his books. Perhaps because of the sheer effort required to move a library that extensive, De Quincey continues to rent Dove Cottage for another fifteen years, until forced out by the landlord. In 1835, he moves “thousands of books” in the space of a week (Morrison 2009, 291). Clearly an emotional feat, Morrison notes De Quincey’s

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letter to the publisher William Tait the following July: “I now possess my mind: heretofore I was under a possession” (291). In both Hutchinson’s sly remark about master De Quincey and his own comment to Tait, lies the image of a man overwhelmed not by the intellectual content of his books but by their sheer physicality—their literal weight, the space that they inhabit. Like his family, his library has grown and developed over time, but unlike his family, which is moveable, his books, like their counterparts in the schoolboy De Quincey’s trunk, wield a mass against which even the adult De Quincey struggles. Returning to his comments about the unread books in the Bodleian library, De Quincey knows first-hand the impossibility of reading all of the books.17 When one reaches this point, when the number of books surpasses one’s ability to read them, when one is too indisposed to read, or when they exceed one’s shelf-space, books assert their materiality as things that no longer invisibly perform their function of conveying immaterial knowledge. At this point, books become mere cumbersome dead-weight. More critically, when the number of one’s own books outstrips one’s capability of reading them or housing them, the metaphor of the growth of the library as akin to the growth of the individual no longer applies. The library becomes its own organism, making it impossible for the individual to integrate each piece into his or her personhood. At this point, one would expect De Quincey’s relationship to his books to become like that described by Walter Benjamin as the passion of the collector which “borders on the chaos of memories.” Even Benjamin’s comment, “the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books” suggests De Quincey’s idea of the involute (Benjamin 2007, 60).18 Yet, for De Quincey, the “chaos of memories” of his library might not be so delightful as it is to Benjamin, for, in addition to his troubles in Dove Cottage, he writes in Suspiria that it was his addiction to books at the age of seven which first initiated him into debt and a corresponding sense of guilt over that debt (Works 15:163).19 Throughout De Quincey’s adult life, his insatiable love of books is always at odds with his guilt over his frequent book-seller indiscretions (cf. McDonagh 2007, 124). Indeed, Rzepka estimates that over the period when the events in Confessions are supposed to take place, De Quincey spent roughly £1300 on books (Rzepka 1995, 178). He paid dearly for said books, not just in money but also in peace of mind. The Dove Cottage episode helps articulate some of the problems with “involutes”: because involutes are grounded in material

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circumstances—feelings married to objects and states of being—they always leave open the possibility of other or new associations crowding in upon the old. There is a kind of Derridean deconstruction at work here, where a memory, by being associated with an object, must then be associated with other memories involving that same object. Alina Clej writes, “Memory for him is no longer a meaningful ‘spot of time,’ as it was for Wordsworth, but an ‘abyss,’ an empty chain of signifiers because ‘in the lowest deep there still yawns a lower deep’” (Clej 1995, 254; cf. Watson 1993, 66–67). Contextually, the Dove Cottage passage functions within the narrative not simply as an involute for happiness, but more specifically, as an involute for the pleasures of opium consumption. Positioning the passage in the introduction to the pains of opium, De Quincey assures the reader that he will soon “quit the subject of happiness altogether, and pass to a very different one—the pains of opium” (Works 2:58). The passage should be read as a foregrounding device for the horrors that follow. However, his nostalgic view of happiness in Dove Cottage does not preclude his other, also very real, experiences with objects within the cottage—experiences that must impose themselves on any reading of his time there. These other experiences intimate that things do not always behave according to his desires. They also suggest that, despite his attempts to define the concepts and feelings that objects impart to him, these ideas, or involutes, will always evade linguistic over-simplifications such as “happiness” and cannot be divorced from their embeddedness in the material.

The Nightmare: Things That Come Alive Just as many of De Quincey’s preoccupations play out more vividly in his opium-induced dreams, so also his concern with the agency of objects becomes psychically manifest in his nightmares as household goods transform into animals and threaten their owner. In this horrific montage of imprisonment and menace, De Quincey becomes victimized by physical things, and his feeling of powerlessness in the face of an active, material other results in his own objectification. These nightmares, which feature Oriental motifs, have been analyzed as a form of wish-fulfillment: De Quincey casts himself as the victim of Oriental horrors, a position which allows him to inwardly justify British imperial expansion.20 But these nightmares have a distinctly material aspect as well, as De Quincey is made the object of menace and feels physically

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imprisoned: “I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids” (Works 2:71). He becomes victim to a crocodile born out of domestic goods: The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him; and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated. (2:71)

In this nightmare, De Quincey finds himself in a domestic but also foreign, exoticized, and fragile space.21 This space moves beyond the dystopia in Greek Street to signify a domestic hell. However, what is most curious about the passage is De Quincey’s odd ambivalence to this experience: “I stood loathing and fascinated.” On the one hand, the image is horrifying—as the crocodile itself evinces terror in the beholder. But on the other, the crocodile, as a living thing, is less terrifying than the knowledge that one’s interactions with inanimate objects have an agency that allows them to alter the course of one’s life. The crocodile is De Quincey’s adversary, but it is a worthy adversary with instincts and motivations. It wields great power against which De Quincey can struggle and, even in defeat, feel a sense of accomplishment. Before crocodile hunting transforms in the mid nineteenth century “into a potent sign of masculine and imperial power” (Leighton and Surridge 2007, 225; cf. MacKenzie 1988, 7), De Quincey is already psychically pitting himself against this “extreme danger.” The ordinary furniture and objects of his adolescence or those found in Dove Cottage are not such worthy adversaries, for he can neither trace their motives, nor find a vestige of pride in his inability to make them conform to his needs. Yet, while De Quincey’s nightmares at first seem bizarre and otherworldly, his depiction of crocodile-like furniture is not unprecedented: Grevel Lindop draws attention to the “crocodile-footed sofa at the Royal Pavilion at Brighton” (Lindop 1995, 124; cf. Woof et  al. 1985, 14); Leighton and Surridge also note the use of crocodile imagery in exotic décor of the period, a fad which was itself satirized as “meublomanie” (Leighton and Surridge 2007, 251);22 and Barrell comments on the craze

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in “tables and sofas ‘instinct with life’ because carved with the heads and feet of animals” (Barrell 1991, 8), a trend found in eighteenth-century porcelain as well (e.g. Howard and Ayers 1978, 121, object 98). Additionally, even outside the realm of chinoiserie, domestic furnishings with clawed feet are characteristic of the period, making the animating metaphor of table or chair “leg” explicit even outside the realm of the exotic examples cited above. These fashion trends again suggest the influence of the material on De Quincey’s thought, as the animated metaphor of these designs becomes literal in his dreams. Furthermore, De Quincey indicates that the transition from these nightmares into his everyday waking life is often just as traumatic as the dreams themselves: And so often did this hideous reptile haunt my dreams, that many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear ever thing when I am sleeping); and instantly I awoke; it was broad noon; and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bed-side; come to show me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of infancy, that, in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind, I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces. (Works 2:71–72)

If De Quincey takes some subconscious pleasure in being menaced by the dream crocodile, it is because he is able to frame his own sufferings and fears in the most grandiose language and scenery possible and thereby downplay his own defeat at the hands of the material other. Yet how must he feel when he awakens to the banal inanimate objects that haunt his being in his waking hours? “Coloured shoes” and “new frocks” are just a few of the articles to which De Quincey owes his insolvency. They are material objects that are necessary for the family of a man with his middle-­ class and scholarly pretensions, but they are also objects that form a subjugating connection between the scholar and his fellow cobbler or tailor. In addition, De Quincey’s drugged state makes this nightmare especially lucid, putting animate furniture on the same existential level as his children’s clothes. Thomas H.  Schmid points out that when high on opium, De Quincey’s waking and dreaming states become blurred (Schmid 2008, 36).23 De Quincey’s comment “I hear everything when I am

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sleeping” suggests that he is aware of what is happening in his home while he dreams. In such a case, waking from a nightmare to one’s children would indeed be traumatic since the children with their “innocent human natures” inhabit in his drug induced state the same reality as his crocodile, an animate creature evolved from inanimate things. One may choose to interpret this dream symbolically, as a type of wish-­ fulfillment in which pieces of furniture transform into animals with which De Quincey can wrestle, or more literally, as an opium-induced waking horror in which his children inhabit the same space as animate crocodile-­ furniture. Yet, each interpretation involves a process in which De Quincey’s material surroundings take on animate life and return to harass their master. He records that these dreams occur in May 1818—while he and his family were still living in Dove Cottage (2:70). The objects of comfort, the objects that help make up his involute of happiness, have become objects that—sleeping or waking—take on a heinous existence of their own. The paradise of his life in Dove Cottage has transformed into a nightmare. The transformation of the objects in his home from passive tools to recalcitrant objects and active antagonists suggests how the involute challenges the human–nonhuman binary: when the autobiographer’s memories and ideas are grounded in others—independent objects—he yields his power over meaning. As for his children, waking from his dream brings him face to face with the other humans with whom he shares a material world in common. The dream has a prophetic value as well: De Quincey will indeed find himself “fixed … in secret rooms” when he moves his family into the Holyrood debtor’s sanctuary in Edinburgh in 1834, due, of course, both to his penchant for renting multiple houses to accommodate his things, and to his children’s colored shoes and new frocks (Morrison 2009, 282–83). At this later period, he pays for these objects by surrendering his body to physical incarceration. * * * At the beginning of this chapter, I quoted Brown asking how “things” are related to one’s constitution of the self, or, in another of his formulations, “how objects mediate our sense of ourselves” (Brown 2010b, 187). Both De Quincey’s interaction with things and his attempt to conceptualize that interaction (through his concept of the involute) represent his preoccupation with the process of which Brown speaks and his inability to fully

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integrate (or subjugate) the material other into his self-formulation. The rebellious objects that crop up in his Confessions help him express his complex and fraught relationship with the external agency of the material at the same time that they resist easy appropriation into a linear narrative. De Quincey’s relationship to these objects is complicated, for while they resist his appropriation, they are also philosophically productive: without them, it would be impossible for him to think about loss, death, and the plethora of missed opportunities that crowd his work and his worldview. As involutes, they enable him to think about what it means to live in a world that feels chaotic and random. He believes that he needs them to perform specific functions—to provide comfort, to signal his class—but he also needs them to think, to spark his imagination: without these objects, the Confessions would lose much of its specificity and grounding in embodied experience. Yet, despite the productivity of this human–nonhuman network in the Confessions, De Quincey finds this ceding of his authorial control threatening. While his addiction to opium means that a fight for control is continually taking place within his own corporeal self, on the outside, in the world that he shares with other human beings, objects are the ultimate antagonists because they form the link that connects him to others. His anxiety arises both from his knowledge that he has little control over these objects and from his inability to fully comprehend their alternate temporalities and nonhuman ontologies. Along the way, it is not just the agency of objects that troubles De Quincey, but their existence outside of specific programs of action, their potential to exist statically, to be ineffectual, or to decay within a timeframe that does not coincide with the human lifespan. Thus, the Confessions records simultaneously how the modern subject attempts to subjugate the material, to incorporate it into his text and identity, while it also acknowledges the impossibility of this endeavor, as things resist such appropriation. Despite the obvious generic differences between De Quincey and the other texts in this study, De Quincey’s relationship with nonhuman materiality represents an extension of the discussions explored in the preceding chapters. De Quincey’s Confessions acknowledges, like it-narratives, that objects have their own “secret lives”—temporalities that are largely divorced from the lives of their human user at any moment in time. The Confessions goes further than it-narratives by meditating on the implications of the idea that once the object has been created and put out into the world, it can no longer be controlled by its human maker. When thinking

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about the relationship between objects and narrative, the Confessions reveals the more troubling side of the narrative-generating and genre-­ undermining power of objects found in Austen’s works, as the Confessions more explicitly deals with the question of whether or not a narrator can actually control this object-productivity. The effect of this questioning of the narrator’s ascendency leads to a feeling that the Confessions is both highly constructed while also chaotically disordered. De Quincey’s text thus hints at the idea of the factish, the object that appears both made and making, simultaneously constructed and constitutive (Latour 1999, 275; cf. Latour 2010, 22). The confusion resulting from this ambiguity creates a crisis for the silver fork authors of the next chapter. Genre prescriptions require that objects be invoked en masse in the silver fork novel, causing the object to become a collective problem for novelists, as they attempt to forestall the narrative problem of excessive description.

Notes 1. The 2001 Works of Thomas De Quincey (abbreviated Works), edited by Grevel Lindop, are used throughout the chapter. Wherever possible, the original publication date of specific works has been provided in the text. Original publication details have also been included for more obscure works within the bibliography. All italics reflect the original unless otherwise noted. 2. Scholarship has struggled to characterize the relationship between De Quincey and Romanticism. Using Coleridge as an example, McGann notes that even the Romantics themselves could not assert a unified ideology, but that Coleridge’s own writings on his artistic ethic are presented in “scattered and unintegrated forms—in aphorisms, fragments, and partial or unfinished presentations” (McGann 1983, 47). David Simpson argues that most readers of the Romantics identify an “obsession with the self and with self-­consciousness” that pervades their works (Simpson 1993, 10). While self, self-consciousness and fragmentation aptly describe De Quincey’s Confessions, he has, nonetheless, traditionally been relegated to a minor status within the Romantic canon (Russett 1997). More generally, De Quincey’s interpretations of the first-generation poets draw out the darker sides of their works (Beer 2004, 84). 3. Austen also hints at the threat of the unread book in her works: in Sense and Sensibility, Edward attributes to Marianne a fear that her favorite books will not be read properly (Austen 2006, 107), and a minor plot point in Emma relates to whether or not Mr. Martin has read a novel Harriet suggested (Austen 2005, 28–34). In this latter passage is the idea

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that the book has agency as it acts as an intermediary—as it brings two people together and gives them something to talk about—yet this is upended by the fact that the text has to be read by a person to be effective (and read properly, as Mr. Elton learns). Emma herself, as we learn, is a terrible reader (37). 4. Philippe Lejeune argues that the author’s name on the autobiography represents a “pact” made with the reader that the author, narrator and protagonist are one and the same. An anonymous text allows for the possibility that the text has been “counterfeited” (Lejeune 1989, 19). 5. In arguing that De Quincey is cognizant of object agency in his works, I am flatly contradicting claims made by V. A. de Luca, who argues that parts of Confessions suggest a “vision of ideality virtually unencumbered by the compromises imposed by the embodiment in the tangible forms of daily life” (De Luca 1980, 15). 6. The involute has a correlation with the Romantic poets’ usage of natural objects in their lyrics: as Mary Jacobus points out, they use such objects to think, imagining “things … being alive without being animate” (Jacobus 2012, 2). 7. In turn, the removal of furnishings from a home also demystifies their home-­making power, as the household is “laid bare in its material being; indeed, understood as matter” (Trotter 2010, 19). 8. Latour suggests that some specific human identities are predicated on a human–object relationship by their very nature—“A forsaken gun is a mere piece of matter, but what would an abandoned gunner be? A human, yes …, but not a soldier … and certainly not one of the NRA’s law-abiding citizens”—but objects tend to defy this loss of subjectivity by continuing to exist with or without the human user (Latour 1999, 192). 9. For more on anti-semitism in De Quincey’s writings, see Barrell (1991, 69–70); Rzepka (1995, 93–94). 10. For a theological reading of this anxiety, see Rzepka (1995, 94). 11. Compare to Walladmor (1825), a German Walter Scott forgery that De Quincey translated into English: here, the protagonist also needs his possessions to substantiate his identity, as evidenced by the narratives obsession with his “portmanteau,” which appears 16 times in the first volume (Works 9:407). 12. See McDonagh (1994, 15, 25). For more on De Quincey’s apparent middle-class inferiority complex and its affect on his politics, see Barrell (1991, 4). For general insight into Romanticism and conservative politics, see McGann 1983, 35. 13. See my discussion of a similar women–object conflation in “The Adventures of a Pen,” in Chap. 2, p. 73.

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14. In “Adventures of a Quire of a Paper” (1779), a flax plant narrates its transformation into fabric and its eventual recycling into paper; the narrative suggests that the original materials that constitute the essence of the plant’s consciousness stay together: “I possessed the power of separating my atoms from those that did not belong to me, and uniting them” (Anon. 2012, 4:35). 15. December 21, the winter solstice. 16. Watson identifies the autobiographical texts of Montaigne, De Quincey and Rilke as “transgressive boundary texts that disrupt the genre’s biobased self-definition and reveal the shifting instability inscribed within the representation of any Western self, including their own” (Watson 1993, 61). Interestingly, De Quincey and Montaigne also share an obsession with their work spaces. In “Of Three Commerces,” Montaigne describes his library, the top floor of a round tower attached to his home (cf. Montaigne 1711b, 3:55). This passage led Rod Mengham (Jesus College, Cambridge), in a talk given at the University of Freiburg on 23 October 2017, to note that Montaigne allows his physical surroundings, his workspace, to influence the form of his essays. 17. See also De Quincey’s comments in his essay “On Languages” (1823) about the impossibility of one man reading more than five percent of the “current literature of Europe” (Works 3:63–64). 18. Benjamin revels, like Brown, in the mystery of the tactile thing which has a lifespan beyond its current owner (Benjamin 2007, 60). While he seems to endorse a subject–object dichotomy throughout his text, he turns this relationship on its head at the end: “ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them” (67). 19. De Quincey’s ambiguous relationship with books may be why he responds so harshly to bibliomania in his essay “The Street Companion” (1825) (Works 4:449–54), see Lynch (2004, par. 14). 20. De Quincey ambiguously represents himself as both subject and object— he is “the idol,” but also “the priest”; he is “worshipped” but then alternately “sacrificed” (Works 2:71). Cannon Schmitt demonstrates how this reversal serves De Quincey’s ideology by “identify[ing] the Orient as the source of persecution,” a move which he uses in his various writings to help justify military force in Britain’s encounters with China (Schmitt 2002, 70, 79). De Quincey would later write articles in favor of both Opium Wars, in which, “Gothic tropes … are projected outward and made to serve as an excuse for war—and, finally, as a representation of what it means to be English” (79). For more on De Quincey and imperialism and racism, see Barrell (1991); Leask (1992, 170–228); Lindop (1995); Simmons (2007).

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21. David Porter writes that chinoiserie functioned as a domestication of the foreign “by providing a material and visual context through which the vast, even overwhelming power and history of the Chinese empire could be re-­ imagined as fragile, superficial, and faintly absurd,” an aestheticization of the “Orient” that allowed the British to objectify a competing civilization (Porter 2010, 7). 22. For more on De Quincey’s usage of the crocodile, especially in his later work, The English Mail Coach, and how it corresponds to contemporary travel writing, see McCown (2014). 23. In light of research into how opiates affect brain chemistry, Schmid suggests that an opium high means that “in these nightmares, a crocodile is just a crocodile—more terrifying as a result. … this crocodile cannot be reasoned with, nor reduced … to a symbol of some unresolved childhood trauma” (Schmid 2008, 37).

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Kafka, Franz. 1988. The Cares of a Family Man. In The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, 427–429. Trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books. Keane, Webb. 2005. Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things. In Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller, 182–205. Durham/ London: Duke University Press. Lamb, Jonathan. 2011. The Things Things Say. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham: Duke University Press. Law, John. 1993. Organizing Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Leask, Nigel. 1992. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Leighton, Mary Elizabeth, and Lisa Surridge. 2007. The Empire Bites Back: The Racialized Crocodile of the Nineteenth Century. In Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Deborah Denenholz Morse, Martin A.  Danahay, and Harriet Ritvo, 249–270. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lejeune, Philippe. 1989. The Autobiographical Pact. In On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, 3–30. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Levin, Susan M. 1998. The Romantic Art of Confession: De Quincey, Musset, Sand, Lamb, Hogg, Frémy, Soulié, Janin. Columbia: Camden House. Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lindop, Grevel. 1981. The Opium-Eater, a Life of Thomas De Quincey. New York: Taplinger Publishing Co. ———. 1985. Innocence and Revenge: The Problem of De Quincey’s Fiction. In Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder, 213–238. Norman/London: University of Oklahoma Press. ———. 1995. De Quincey and the Cursed Crocodile. Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism 45 (2): 121–140. Lynch, Deidre. 2004. ‘Wedded to Books’: Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists. Romantic Circles. https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/libraries/lynch/lynch. html. Accessed 3 Nov 2017. MacKenzie, John M. 1988. The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McCown, Julie. 2014. Crocodilian Transmission: Correspondence Networks in William Bartram and Thomas De Quincey. Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 22 (3): 361–384.

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McDonagh, Josephine. 1994. De Quincey’s Disciplines. Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press. ———. 2007. De Quincey and the Secret Life of Books. In Thomas De Quincey: New Theoretical and Critical Directions, ed. Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, 123–142. New York: Routledge. McGann, Jerome J. 1983. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Montaigne, Michel de. 1711a. Of Giving the Lye. In Essays of Michel Seigneur de Montaigne, 2: 506–512. 4th ed. Trans. Charles Cotton. London: printed for Daniel Brown. ———. 1711b. Of Three Commerces. In Essays of Michel Seigneur de Montaigne, 3: 41–57. 4th ed. Trans. Charles Cotton. London: printed for Daniel Brown. Morrison, Robert. 2009. The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ———. 2011. De Quincey’s Addiction. Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture and Criticism 17 (3): 270–277. Morton, Timothy. 2000. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. 19: Thomas de Quincey. Romanticism. UC Davis. 25 May. Audio. https://archive.org/details/Romanticism19ThomasDeQuincey. Accessed 2 Nov 2017. Mulrooney, Jonathan. 2002. Reading the Romantic-Period Daily News. Nineteenth-Century Contexts 24 (4): 351–377. Perry, Curtis. 1993. Piranesi’s Prison: Thomas De Quincey and the Failure of Autobiography. SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 33 (4): 809–824. Platzner, Robert L. 1982. De Quincey and the Dilemma of Romantic Autobiography. Dalhousie Review 61 (4): 605–617. Plotz, John. 2000. The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Plumtree, A.S. 1985. The Artist as Murderer: De Quincey’s Essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’. In Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder, 140–163. Norman/London: University of Oklahoma Press. Porter, David. 2010. The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Price, Leah. 2012. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Reed, Arden. 1983. Romantic Weather: The Climates of Coleridge and Baudelaire. Hanover: University Press of New England for Brown University Press. Russett, Margaret. 1997. De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Rzepka, Charles J. 1988. The Body, the Book, and ‘The True Hero of the Tale’: De Quincey’s 1821 Confessions and Romantic Autobiography as Cultural Artifact. In Studies in Autobiography, ed. James Olney, 141–150. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1991. Thomas De Quincey and Roman Ingarden: The Phenomenology of the ‘Literature of Power’. In Ingardeniana III: Roman Ingarden’s Aesthetics in a New Key and the Independent Approaches of Others, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, 119–130. Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1995. Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Schmid, Thomas H. 2008. Crocodiles and ‘Inoculation’ Reconsidered: De Quincey, Opium, and the Dream Object. Wordsworth Circle 39 (1–2): 35–38. Schmitt, Cannon. 2002. Narrating National Addictions: De Quincey, Opium, and Tea. In High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction, ed. Janet Farrell Brodie and Marc Redfield, 63–84. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shilstone, Frederick W. 1983. Autobiography as ‘Involute’: DeQuincey on the Therapies of Memory. South Atlantic Review 48 (1): 20–34. Simmons, Diane. 2007. The Narcissism of Empire: Loss, Rage, and Revenge in Thomas De Quincey, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and Isak Dinesen. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Simpson, David. 1993. Romanticism, Criticism and Theory. In The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran, 1–24. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Stanica, Miruna. 2014. Bundles, Trunks, Magazines: Storage, Aperspectival Description, and the Generation of Narrative. Style 48 (4): 513–528. https:// doi.org/10.5325/style.48.4.513. Trotter, David. 2010. Household Clearances in Victorian Fiction. Critical Quarterly 52 (s1): 17–28. Velis, Costas A., David C.  Wilson, and Christopher R.  Cheeseman. 2009. 19th Century London Dust-Yards: A Case Study in Closed-Loop Resource Efficiency. Waste Management 29 (4): 1282–1290. Wall, Cynthia. 1997. The English Auction: Narratives of Dismantlings. Eighteenth-­ Century Studies 31 (1): 1–25. Watson, Julia. 1993. Toward an Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography. In The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, ed. Robert Folkenflik, 57–79. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Weatherill, Lorna. 1988. Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760. London/New York: Routledge. Wilson, Frances. 2016. Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey. New  York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Woof, Robert, Dove Cottage, National Library of Scotland, and Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum. 1985. Thomas De Quincy: An English Opium-­ Eater, 1785–1859. Grasmere: Trustees of Dove Cottage. Young, Michael Cochise. 1985. ‘The True Hero of the Tale’: De Quincey’s Confessions and Affective Autobiographical Theory. In Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder, 54–71. Norman/London: University of Oklahoma Press. Youngquist, Paul. 1999. De Quincey’s Crazy Body. PMLA 114 (3): 346–358.

CHAPTER 5

Performing Authorship in the Silver Fork Novel: Managing a Thing Filled with Objects

In a review of a volume of short stories from 1827, De Quincey writes that novels “are a positive necessary of intellectual life” but he stresses, “let them be short” (2001, 5:107). Among the brief tales he praises is one written by Catherine Gore, an author who would go on to be a prolific writer of silver fork fiction, a genre that by no means heeded De Quincey’s call for brevity. Few writers have been tasked with transforming minute descriptions of objects and architectural interiors into engaging elements of narrative, but this was the challenge faced by the silver fork novelists of the 1820s and 1830s. These novels obliged the desires of their publishers and readers by providing detailed descriptions of objects, interiors, clothing, and manners—in essence anything that fell under the category of the “latest fashion”—and they did so in a distinctly self-reflexive manner, continually registering the narrative conventions of the genre. Unlike the previous objects analyzed in this study, objects in silver fork novels are often commodities valued merely for their status as fashion icons and desired for being new first and foremost. While the agency of these objects can nonetheless occasionally be traced in the relationships between characters and their possessions, objects in silver fork novels more often pose a formal problem to the text’s narration as they dictate the inclusion of long, bulky passages of description that threaten to overpower other textual features. When one turns to an examination of these formal difficulties, it becomes

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evident that the strong self-reflexivity and the metareferential devices found in these novels are one means of redressing the problems posed by such an influx of objects into narrative. The result is an oddly hybrid form, in which an intrusive human narrator contends with a mass of domestic objects for control over the narrative of a three-volume novel. Due to the strong emphasis placed on objects and shopping in these texts, from the outset the novels were criticized as mere advertisements whose paltry or derivative plots functioned simply as carriers for decadent displays of consumption. As early as 1827, the genre received its epithetical title “silver fork” from William Hazlitt, who inveighed against this class of novels in which “the passing object, the topic of the day (however insipid or repulsive) is served up to you with a self-sufficient air” (Hazlitt 1934, 20: 144).1 This dismissal, in addition to defining many contemporary assessments of these novels, has also carried over to twentieth-century literary criticism that traditionally characterizes the genre as homogenous, frivolous drivel—an evaluation due, in no small part, to the genre’s focus on fashion (Gillingham 2006, 71).2 While the silver fork novel has slowly garnered more attention in the recent decades, April Kendra points out that in general literary criticism, critics are still “familiar with fashionable novels and novelists only as the targets of parody” (Kendra 2009, 192). Edward Copeland attributes this lack of interest to what he calls “the general amnesia that has always afflicted the period between the last of the Romantics and the first of the Victorians” (Copeland 2009, 436). However, these and other scholars have taken an interest in these novels, finding that they attest to the rather unique nature of pre-Victorian English society and challenge prevailing critical assumptions about nineteenth-century novels that have long largely been defined by Victorian aesthetics (Barkley 2014, 36–37). Set in the late 1820s and 1830s, these novels depict a changing relationship between the human and material that is perceived as becoming increasingly both intimate and problematic. The heroes and heroines of these novels are almost always first and foremost consumers. While in the previous texts of my study, characters displayed various degrees of awareness of an object’s agency or alterity, in silver fork novels, objects have a more collective agency, as they come to define entire spheres of social intercourse (through fashion), and even old aristocratic orders begin to surrender before the nouveaux riches’ flagrant display of commodities. Ellen Miller Casey writes that the period was particularly susceptible to

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“permeable class boundaries,” with the silver fork novel practically “provid[ing] instructions” for how to infiltrate the upper orders (Casey 2011, 22). In these novels, characters’ objects of consumption affect their feelings—positive and negative—about themselves as individuals and play important roles in the relationships that individuals have to their peer groups. In demonstrating such subject–object dynamics, these novels stage the beginnings of Victorian consumer capitalism. Furthermore, that this evolving relationship between the human and nonhuman is met with not only chagrin and skepticism but also enthusiasm and curiosity is an ambivalence that one can trace throughout the genre. This aesthetic concern with multiple, rather competing goals in the novels’ representations is no better exemplified than in the opening of a long description from Benjamin Disraeli’s The Young Duke (1831). Here metanarrative commentary crosses into description and then into banalized ekphrasis: Room after room, gallery after gallery—you know the rest. Shall I describe the silk hangings, and the reverend tapestry, the agate tables, and the tall screens, the china, and the armour, the state beds, and the curious cabinets, and the family pictures mixed up so quaintly with Italian and Flemish art? (Disraeli 1831, 1:270)

In what follows, the narrator identifies a number of works of art by artists like Peter Paul Rubens and Hans Holbein the Younger, only to then fixate on the minutest and most insignificant details of “some mad Alcibiades duke who had exhausted life ere he had finished youth” (1:271). In addition to providing his reader with another description of fashionable life, the narrator utilizes the hall of portraiture to make a larger point about representation—namely, that its reception is precarious, as all the glorious feats of heroic men are passed over for more detailed descriptions of fashionable buffoons. The metareferential nature of this passage is not just indicated in its explicit comments to the reader but also in its thematization of a young duke and of fashionable life, with the fact that these images have been commissioned only highlighting their ostensible “fictionality.” Here the object—in this case, the representation—becomes, in a step beyond De Quincey’s understanding of objects in his autobiographical writings, a thing that fails to reflect yet nonetheless has the power to retroactively constitute its user or subject. The silver fork novel repeatedly draws attention to the object’s and, specifically, the representation’s lack of

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depth, its fictionality, its status as a thing utterly disconnected from the self—only to then reacknowledge the representation’s potential to define the individual, retroactively and contemporaneously. In what appears to be an attempt to counter the agency of the representation—be it visual or textual—the silver fork novel goes a step further and enacts a void between the human and the nonhuman object through engaging in metareferential discussions on representations and their potential falsehood or fictionality. That this self-reflexive distancing often occurs at the very site of conspicuous descriptions of objects only underlines the suggestion that anxiety toward the reifying powers of consumerism drives this impulse. Silver fork novels are objects of mass consumption filled with objects of mass consumption, but they undermine the objectivity of their own representations of materiality by drawing attention to their own mediality and foregrounding their generic requirements. While these techniques disrupt the novels’ ability to produce vicarious experience through their ostensible verisimilitude, the novels make clear that vicarious experience is not their first goal. In fact, when this distancing is examined more closely, it becomes clear that (1) metareference does not lessen these novels’ ability to function as prescriptive guidebooks in how to perform a certain fashionable identity; (2) such self-reflexivity registers the collective nature of authorship in these texts, as the human author contends with the nonhuman generic and market requirements of their text; and (3) metanarrative commentary is engaged in by humans who perform their authorial roles because their creative powers are, in reality, greatly curtailed. As the inventions of the advertising-genius and publisher Henry Colburn, the silver fork attests to the reification of writing and the emerging role of the author not as a person of letters or poetic genius but as a worker creating a product to be sold for his or her daily bread.3 In his influential study of Victorian fiction and consumerism, Andrew Miller has drawn attention to how Victorian novelists felt that “their social and moral world was being reduced to a warehouse of goods and commodities, a display window in which people, their actions, and their convictions were exhibited for the economic appetites of others” (Miller 1995, 6). This feeling was compounded by the increased commodification of a literary marketplace that forced authors to “negotiate” between a moral and a pragmatic stance (7). While Miller’s work is insightful, it is also dated by the fact that he focuses on mid-Victorian fiction while pre-Victorian silver fork novelists were already wrestling with these issues, even if they espoused

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their moral messages less heavy-handedly than their Victorian counterparts. In John Strachan’s account of contemporary responses to silver fork novels, and specifically to the advertising methods of Colburn, which boosted popularity and sales, he recognizes a “common cultural anxiety, rooted in a threatened literary idealism, a sense that high art is sullied by its connections with commerce” (Strachan 2007, 254). Indeed, in the silver fork genre, it is not simply domestic objects that become the topic of consumer debates, but discussions of the representation—textual and visual—acknowledge its material position within the marketplace. While these concerns seemingly move one away from the narrative-­ generating or ontologically disruptive pins, pianos, and teacups of previous chapters, it is important not to lose sight of the material aspect of these representations. When the silver fork novel brings up “fashionable novels,” “lithographs,” or “miniatures,” it is invoking the representation as a physical object that is spatially and ontologically separate from the human figure. The anxiety registered in these novels regarding this divide is attributable to what Karen Barad defines as a distinctly modern belief in “representationalism” (Barad 2003, 806). This belief posits three entities according to Barad, the “knower” (creator of the representation), the “known” (what is ostensibly represented), and the representation itself; she notes that the “taken-for-granted ontological gap” between knower and known that the physical representation ostensibly bridges leads inevitably to “questions of the accuracy of representations” (804). As demonstrated especially in Gore’s Pin Money (1831), it is these questions of accuracy that the silver fork novel takes particular relish in considering. Yet, while it is tempting to assume that this discourse suggests the purely commodified status of high fashion in the 1820s, one must remember that the anxiety toward representations in these novels is rooted in a belief in the agency of the representation, the idea that the novels themselves had the power to constitute social assemblages, that is, that they would act as guidebooks to aspiring social climbers. If the silver fork novel demonstrates a broadened divide between the human and the nonhuman by thematizing the problem of representation, it also exists in a space that ostensibly defies this divide by suggesting that fashion is contingent upon performance—a view that ultimately rejects representationalism (Barad 2003, 802). In the 1820s and 1830s, the playbook for this performance is the representation itself—the fashionable novel and the lithograph especially—suggesting that these artworks constitute as much as they reflect social practices.

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Furthermore, if one views the silver fork novel as an actant that produces effects within the society it also depicts, the metanarrative commentary so frequently engaged in by silver fork narrators suggests the “modern” difficulty of what it means to come to terms with assemblages whose origins are difficult to trace back to a particular, single agent. Following Latour, Lupton shows how modern humans often lack the ability to articulate the relationship between the human agent who makes something and the resulting object of their hands, a difficulty that leads to a binary opposition: “either one makes a book, in which case one controls it, or it belongs to the realm of the empirically given, in which case one perceives oneself to be at its mercy” (Lupton 2016, 304). In a genre so highly conventionalized that Benjamin Disraeli wrote a “receipt” for writing one of these novels, narrators frequently display an obsession with their own control or lack of control over their texts (Disraeli 1831, 2:22). Not unlike the it-narrators in Chap. 2, they vacillate between characterizing themselves as passive slaves to market demands and powerful omniscient narrators who hold the puppet strings of their characters and plots. But while it-narrators largely attempt to mask the human agency behind their messages (cf. Hudson 2007), silver fork novelists take a different and somewhat paradoxical strategy: they draw attention to both their omniscience and their roles as passive pawns creating generic material for the commercial publishing trade. In so doing, they suggest that their status as “silver fork authors” is actually a performative identity that they have assumed. Their self-reflexive commentary is part of this performance, not only functioning as a guide to future practitioners, but also highlighting the network of humans and nonhumans involved in creating the novel. This doubling of the silver fork novel as both created by humans and, in a sense, capable of writing itself through generic reproduction is what gives the form so much potency as a social actant. Latour stresses that for the factish, “it is because it is constructed that it is so very real, so autonomous, so independent of our own hands” (Latour 1999, 275). In helping to form the links that challenge and reinforce new constellations of London society, these novels necessarily function as both passive reflectors of and social actors in an increasingly acquisitive society. This chapter focuses on three silver fork novels, Marianne Spencer Stanhope Hudson’s Almack’s (1826), Catherine Gore’s Pin Money (1831), and Benjamin Disraeli’s The Young Duke (1831) with reference to several others from this early period. These novels, from different authors, a man and two women, provide a diverse picture of the genre before the passing

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of the first Reform Bill in 1832. According to Copeland, the novels from these first five years portray a buoyancy, a hope of change and progress, as “youth and optimism drive their consumer display,” yet, even in all their optimism, these novels feature strong caveats to the culture that they celebrate (Copeland 2012, 38). The novels selected are further linked by their preoccupation with the question of representations and the power physical representations have over human subjectivity.

Fashionable Novels, Lithographs, and a Crisis of Representation Silver fork novels often represent individuals in thrall to their commodities, subsumed under their possessions, even reified by their possessions, yet they also register the contempt that the aristocratic classes feel at this ostensible devaluation. This contempt comes through in the descriptions of individual characters’ consumer practices, but it becomes most significant in the genre’s self-reflexive problematization of visual as well as textual representations. A general sense of the reifying powers of consumer display can be seen in two of the earliest examples of the genre, Marianne Spencer Stanhope Hudson’s Almack’s (1826) and Henry Lister’s Granby (1826). Almack’s chronicles the ascension, the social faux pas, and the total effacement through fashion of a nouvelle riche mother, fittingly named Lady Birmingham, determined to have her daughter married to a son of the aristocracy—a common plot for the genre and one repeated as a subplot in Catherine Gore’s Pin Money (1831).4 The title of the work is taken from Almack’s, a contemporary social club in London that held invite-­ only balls for the most exclusive society (Wilson 2009). Much of the novel’s irony arises from the fact that Lady Birmingham has no self-knowledge of how absurd she appears, but neither does she seem to care, given her social aspirations. The novel draws attention to her markedly conspicuous consumption: “she was the glory of her maid—the boast of her milliner— the chef-d’oeuvre of her hair-dresser—the wonder of all the newspapers, and the amusement of the distingués at the drawing-room” (Hudson 1827, 3:296). As Copeland notes, she becomes a “walking advertisement, a veritable billboard display” (Copeland 2012, 112) to their ability to transform a “ridiculous, … ignorant, purse-proud” woman into someone that society will tolerate (Hudson 1827, 1:194). The spectacle she

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presents is precisely that which sells newspapers (and novels) to middleclass readers who will consume her description with no reference to her actual person or personality. Yet Lady Birmingham makes this choice, unashamedly. In a sense, without rank she cannot afford any other strategy. In Granby, one finds a similar conflation of people with their possessions. When Tyrrel, a relative of Granby, shows him about the town, we read that Tyrrel was an amusing Cicerone … as he had generally something to say about ‘the gentleman in the cabriolet, with the pye-bald horse,’ or ‘the lady that is waltzing, with the diamond head-dress,’ or ‘that person in the pea-green coat, who is just turning into Bond-street,’ or ‘the fat man that is going to sleep in White’s bow-window. (Lister 2005, 112)

In each instance, individuals are designated based on the objects that they possess and display in public. In the one instance in which he refers to the body, it is in reference to corpulence, a tacit indicator of consumption, as it is with Lady Birmingham as well (cf. Hudson 1827, 1:224, 2:82). Throughout the genre, non-central characters are often designated by their consumer choices: at the eponymous ball in Almack’s a woman is called the “bonnet rouge” (3:223), and in Gore’s Pin Money, the main protagonist characterizes one of her husband’s political connections by his “very dirty gloves, and a very intrusive hat!” (Gore 1831, 1:94). The shameful nature of this idea that persons “might in fact be interchangeable with things” (Barkley 2014, 142) leads Granby’s Brummelesque-dandy, Trebeck, to reject fashionable clothing altogether (Lister 2005, xvii). Intent on notoriety, he discards fashion because it is too simple an indicator of superiority: “He scorned to share his fame with his tailor, and was, moreover, seriously disgusted at seeing a well-fancied waistcoat, almost unique, before the expiration of its ‘honey-moon,’ adorning the person of a natty apprentice” (42). Trebeck, who not only has rank but also that “nameless grace of polished ease” can afford to relinquish fashion in order to pursue a more mysterious form of social notoriety, one grounded entirely on his finely tuned ability to read and manipulate others. Trebeck foregoes fashionable display because its inherent materiality allows others to imitate it, and he finds such a material connection to others intolerable. Unlike Lady Birmingham, Trebeck refuses to be turned into an object to be looked at and admired, ridiculed,

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or copied—he refuses to allow his own consumption to become a guide to others on how to “perform the dandy.” However, while Almack’s and Granby would seem to function as respective examples of middle-class and aristocratic consumption, Catherine Gore’s Pin Money (1831) suggests that it is not only the middle class that engages in public displays of wealth—that is, turning themselves into objects for public consumption. Gore’s novel follows Frederica Rawleigh—a charming, newly married young woman with 400 pounds per annum pin money—the perfect combination of attributes to make her a success in the London season. The novel chronicles her naïve forays into the society of ton, as she makes several dubious, though highly fashionable friends “whose flightiness, indiscriminate spending, and self-important name-dropping tempt the heroine into similar follies” (Kendra 2007, par. 11). As a result, she quickly finds herself spending beyond her pin money and damaging her relationship with her husband, Sir Brooke, despite her general innocence.5 In the novel, mass production and objectification become linked to the visual representations—the very likenesses—of aristocratic figures when Frederica’s friend Mrs. Erskyne suggests that the former have her miniature engraved for a “series of female portraits of the nobility” (Gore 1831, 2:150). Unsurprisingly, Frederica’s husband, Sir Brooke, rejects this promotional scheme, remarking, “I entertain the old-fashioned prejudice of wishing to retain the resemblance of my wife sacred from the comments of the crowd round a printseller’s shop.” His added comment, “had I married an actress, I must have submitted to such a degrading publicity” reveals his belief that notoriety within the public sphere leads to objectification (2:151). Privacy, for Sir Brooke, is antipathic to commerce. The root of the aristocratic suspicion of “notoriety” is not simply being viewed or having attention drawn to oneself—for drawing the gaze of those below one on the social scale can also be a sign of one’s power.6 Rather, the problem arises, first, from representation in a mass material form, and, second, from the fear that such a representation may be inaccurate (cf. Barad 2003, 804). Incidentally, this latter critique applies to the genre of the fashionable novel itself, which included romans à clef. In the words of Mr. Vyvyan in Gore’s The Manners of the Day (1830), “The worst fault of such productions … is the distortion of their portraiture; the writers or painters generally move in so base a sphere, that their upturned and wandering eyes necessarily disfigure the objects of their art” (Gore 1830, 2:234). That this “distorted” representation has the potential to be

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materially possessed and even ridiculed by one’s social inferiors is inimical to the regard in which members of the aristocracy or political establishment hold themselves. Furthermore, by commenting disparagingly on publicity itself, Sir Brooke suggests that such schemes are used only by social climbers, like Mrs. Erskyne and Lady Birmingham, or persons whose professions rely upon their notoriety, like popular entertainers. However, the relationship between aristocratic power and notoriety is far more entwined than Sir Brooke’s comments allow. In typical silver fork fashion, the ambiguities involved in aristocratic notoriety are even explicitly addressed: in Hudson’s Almack’s, a roman à clef (Wilson 2012, 43), the author apologizes in her preface to the real Lady Patronesses of Almack’s but defends her artistic license by noting that “public characters have been always considered to be public property” (Hudson 1827, 1:ix). Hudson suggests that those in the nobility that have chosen to have a public persona must accept their own objectification within the press; as public property, these persons are set-pieces of the metropolis and the London season and are therefore open to artistic appropriation. This artistic license, while bemoaned, is further testified by Annesley, a dandy in Disraeli’s The Young Duke (1831), who remarks, do you know? I never enter society now, without taking as many preliminary precautions, as if the plague raged in all our chambers. In vain have I hitherto prided myself on my existence being unknown to the million. I never now stand still in a street, lest my portrait be caught for a lithograph; I never venture to a strange dinner, lest I should stumble upon a fashionable novelist: and even with all this vigilance, and all this denial, I have an intimate friend whom I cannot cut, and who, they say, writes for the Court Journal. (Disraeli 1831, 2:115–16)

Annesley’s reference to “the million”—though hyperbolic—indicates the growing middle class who browse and collect such lithographs or borrow such “fashionable novels” from the lending libraries. Like Lister’s Trebeck, he acknowledges that whether visual or textual, having oneself represented as a “fashionable” for the pleasure of the masses is demeaning and undesirable. Annesley’s reference to the lithograph trade highlights the material aspect of this fear and its relevance to the silver fork novel specifically. The lithograph trade had a significant overlap, in development, appeal, and

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usage, with the silver fork genre. Although the technology behind the lithograph is credited to Alois Senefelder, working in Munich in the 1790s, it was not until around 1820, after he had published a treatise on the subject and it had been translated into English, that the technique was adopted more widely into a practical method of quickly and cheaply reproducing images (Twyman 2001, 3, 24; Marzio 1971, 38). Susan L. Siegfried has noted how the language used to market series of lithographic fashion plates “tied the production of the lithographs to changes in the clothing styles that it pictured and brought the two forms of material production into a parallel and mutually reinforcing relation” (Siegfried 2014/15, 166). Her description of the co-dependency between the lithograph trade and the fast-paced consumer environment of the 1820s and 1830s bears a strong similarity to the relationship between the silver fork novel and this same fashion economy. What is crucial about such new print technologies was that they made the physical ownership of images available to a wider class of people. Series of fashion lithographs, like Henri Grévedon’s Le Vocabulaire des Dames (1831–1834), imported from France and reproduced in England, could be purchased with all the images bound together as a volume or as single images that could then be individually framed (Siegfried 2014/15, 168). Other smaller lithographs could be collected into scrapbooks by eager viewers. Although in Pin Money Frederica’s image would be engraved, Sir Brooke seems to consider having one’s effigy disseminated commercially in any form to be undesirable to the aristocracy. His reference to the “actress” especially highlights the fact that popular images tended to commodify, even subtly sexualize their female subjects. While aristocratic figures would certainly not have been put in such positions, the fact remains that emerging print technologies like the lithograph tended to “blu[r] boundaries between fine art and commercial art” (Siegfried 2014/15, 166) as well as between subjects and objects (cf. 179). In addition to representing famous performers, popular prints frequently depicted indigenous persons and clothing, satirized social and political issues, or represented particular “types,” with telling, generic captions like “The Washerwoman” or “The Wife.”7 Furthermore, just as in the silver fork novel, lithography and advertising often went hand in hand (Twyman 2001, 140) and lithographers were known to copy or draw inspiration from real persons, sometimes even copying the sitters of portrait paintings and marketing them with generic captions (Siegfried 2014/15, 201).

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Yet, while both Sir Brooke’s and Annesley’s comments suggest that the nobility falls victim to a hungry middle-class audience, voracious for representations of the rich—whether visual or textual—The Young Duke reveals that members of exclusive London society are often implicated in their own objectifications. When asked why he cannot “cut” the writer for the Court Journal, Annesley admits that said writer is his brother. That such “fashionables” were involved in these publicity schemes is more than a fictional theme, but is rooted in the social reality of the 1820s and 1830s. Catherine Gore herself, although an “exclusive” and married into high society, was nonetheless financially dependent upon her novels (Hughes 1996, 160). In Fig. 5.1, Gore is represented with her autograph in a print released by her publisher Henry Colburn in 1837. Not only does her image suggest the importance of notoriety for professional authorship, it also highlights the appeal that new forms of reproducing images had—one was given an idea of the woman as well as the “pen” behind the novel. In Fig. 5.1  Catherine Gore, by J. Freeman (1837). Printed by Henry Colburn. (Image reproduced with permission from Alamy Images)

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fact, one of the main advantages of lithographs was that they more easily combined textual and visual representations (Twyman 2001, 133).8 The manner in which Gore’s likeness is depicted is further significant for how it blatantly contrasts with fashion lithography of the time. Siegfried notes that, very often, in the latter, the human subjects recede into the background of prints whose main purpose is to showcase objects (Siegfried 2014/15, 179). This attention to objects over subjects is evident in plate 1 of Grévedon’s series, shown in Fig.  5.2. Here, the human subject is barely visible, almost hidden behind an elaborate bonnet, veil, and high collar. The sitter’s clothing is expertly represented, especially the fine lace over her bonnet, but besides her partially visible face, staring listlessly into the foreground, no other part of the female human is rendered. The emphasis in this image is clearly on the sitter’s fashionable clothing, a fact made even more evident in the hand-colored copies of the print. Gore, in contrast, is represented ascetically with unadorned shoulders and head. Gore’s fashionable hairstyle demonstrates the interstitial space she navigates as a Fig. 5.2  Plate 1, “Peut être!” (Perhaps!) (1831). Hand-colored lithograph from Henri Grévedon’s Le Vocabulaire des Dames series (1831–1834). Paris: Chez Rittner and Goupill. London: Ch. Tilt. (Image reproduced with permission from the Robert Sterling Clark Collection of Rare Books, Clark Institute Library, Williamstown, MA)

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fashionable novelist: she must know her subject, but she (or her publisher) resists having her subjectivity reduced to her ability to showcase fashionable clothing. While the aristocrats of these novels lament the use of such forms of attaining (and retaining) notoriety, Annesley’s comment and Gore’s image imply that these methods are nonetheless necessary. Winifred Hughes remarks how, despite the fact that the reliance on fashion as a mode of exclusion successfully helped the aristocracy entrench their own diminishing power in the period, it only did so “at the price of acknowledging the forces of competition and change, and thus in effect letting them in the door” (Hughes 1992, 334). These novels’ depictions of a materially obsessed aristocracy that nonetheless feigns caring about “birth” hints at that aristocracy’s precarious social position. Their scramble to create a cult of exclusivity through fashion demonstrates Latour’s point about the material work that goes into retaining social power (cf. Latour 2005, 66). As the aristocracy found their political power declining, they turned to fashion and even popular representation as a form of social eminence, but, in so doing, they revealed that their power had always rested in a material ascendency that was now being eroded away. The intense concern seen in these passages over visual and textual representations of individuals demonstrates that not only do these figures subscribe to a binarized worldview in which individual selves are distinct from their own representations, but they are also nevertheless dependent upon these objects—books and images—for their individual and class survival. By thematizing such blatant consumption, these novels continually probe the boundary between the human and the nonhuman, a boundary that sometimes disappears altogether, revealing the troubling truth that when it comes to heiresses and dandies and fashionable ladies, the faces and names are interchangeable, and the possessions are the only thing that actually matter to the world of ton. In such a world, the individual’s use of objects to perform a certain class as well as how that individual is materially represented performing their class delimit the individual’s power and influence. Commodities or not, objects—whether bonnets or lithographs—remain a central part of the assemblage that makes up and perpetuates fashionable society.

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Describing the “Real” in Gore’s Pin Money (1831) While Pin Money explicitly highlights the upper class’s objections to having one’s likeness taken, mass produced, and sold, it also raises questions about what novels and images—in their representations of contemporary characters and settings—do to those characters and settings. While Pin Money is especially preoccupied with these questions, the enquiry relates to the entire genre of the silver fork because of its special interest in “verisimilitude,” that is, how accurately it represented a society that was as ephemeral as its own sartorial modes (cf. Sadleir 1931, 125; Rosa 1964, 8). For the silver fork, “verisimilitude” often meant “references to real people, real clubs, real shops and real tradesmen” (Cronin 2002, 116). This can lend the novels a historical effect that has been variously termed “anthropological” (117) or “quasi-ethnographic” (Adams 2015, 247; cf. Adburgham 1983, 165). Significantly for the silver fork, adjacent to this enquiry is the question of the role of description in literature. Both Cronin and James Eli Adams attribute the verisimilitudinous effects of the silver fork novel to the legacy of Walter Scott, a view which may originate from Georg Lukács when he argues that Scott’s increased reliance on literary description grew out of “the need to adapt fiction to provide an adequate representation of new social phenomena” (Lukács 1971, 117). He implies that the ascension of capitalism led to a rise in a form of consumer individualism that impaired one’s ability to easily detect or categorize someone based on the person’s external appearance. In this “more complicated” class situation, there are more classes and the boundaries between them are not as clear as they once were. Cynthia Wall echoes this view by noting that “the expansion of consumer culture” was one reason for changes in modes of literary description (Wall 2006, 2): “What is no longer shared is no longer familiar, assumed, a priori visible. The world is differently mapped out, and the differences need new mapping” (39; cf. Adams 2015, 247).9 For some, the silver fork novel’s dependence on description is reason enough to dismiss the genre, but this dismissal highlights how traditionally criticism has looked down upon description while failing to acknowledge the degree to which the realist novel relies upon it (cf. Barkley 2014, 9, 31–33; Stewart 1984, 5). Description in twentieth-century criticism and narrative theory has often been subordinated to narration (Wolf 2007, 23) with classical narrative theory “defin[ing] description as a narrative pause interrupting the presentation of the chain of events” (Pflugmacher

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2010, 101) or characterizing the descriptive as “retrospective” (Cobley 1986, 398). Even Lukács condemns this literary mode because it focuses on the contemporary, the “static,” and does not lend itself to “action” (Lukács 1971, 130). Such evaluations of description fail to acknowledge its many different types and purposes, a situation that has resulted, as Ansgar Nünning points out, in the neglecting of the descriptive mode in narrative theory (Nünning 2007, 93).10 For contemporary critics of the silver fork, its ornate descriptions of the ways of life of the very rich had two possible purposes. One view was that the genre instructed the middle classes in the very worst qualities and behaviors, that is, the genre functioned as a guidebook to “parasites, sycophants, toad-eaters,” and so on (Anon 1831a, 406; cf. Casey 2009, 255). In the same vein, Hazlitt’s criticism of the genre arises partially from the novels’ lack of edifying morals (Hazlitt 1934, 144). An opposing view, and one that obviously applies to the nineteenth-century novel more generally, held that the genre helped reveal the rot and decay of the ruling class (Bulwer-Lytton 1874, 252). Additionally, for those navigating the vagaries of fashion in the 1820s and 1830s, the numerous descriptions in the silver fork novel ostensibly aided one’s ability to correctly determine someone’s class, with the novels serving as historical records to rapidly changing styles. At least this is what some novels claimed to do, as in Gore’s The Manners of the Day, when one character suggests that fashionable novels function “as the amber which serves to preserve the ephemeral modes and caprices of the passing day” (Gore 1830, 2:233). This line of argument suggests that the genre fulfills a purpose for contemporary society—cataloging rapid social change. The genre’s reliance upon material verisimilitude suggests the collective nature of this particular form of novel, since, unlike the realism of later in the century, the material representations that make up these novels are just as important as the human characters and relationships narrated therein. Danielle Barkley argues that while Victorian realism “rel[ies] on detail” but “also contains it, marshalling it towards productive ends” (33), silver fork novels upend this hierarchy, as they “use plot as a means to arrive at the next description” (Barkley 2014, 65). In her opinion, the silver fork novel contrasts the realist novel through a literary aesthetic in which “hierarchies between people and things” are actively undermined and, in so doing, the genre gives one a broader picture of nineteenth-century literary aesthetics (37). Barkley highlights that while the reversal of people and things occurs within the value systems of these novels, this reversal is also

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mirrored on the level of narrative construction, as description as a narrative mode dominates the aesthetics of the novel. In contemporary reviews and criticisms of silver fork novels, it becomes clear that such a heavy reliance on description had not entirely shaken off the “vulgar provincialism, self-centeredness, boring prolixity” or the “working-class” connotations that Wall identifies as still haunting description at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Wall 2006, 32). Contemporary reviewers warned silver fork novelists that description could arrest and even co-opt the narrative itself: Gore particularly is advised that “the great end of entertainment must not be lost sight of” (Anon 1831b, 435). Another notes that writing a “‘fashionable novel’ is a difficult task to achieve … all the scenes are over-wrought, or they are lamentably destitute of incident, and therefore tedious and wearisome” (Arnold 1831, 276). In a letter, Maria Edgeworth quotes a friend’s judgment of Almack’s, “Of all slangs, that of fashion is easiest overdone. People do not hold forth about what is with them a matter of course” (Edgeworth 1894, 2:150). The danger is clear: long descriptions and lists of objects might alienate, even bore, readers. Compounding the challenges of incorporating long descriptive passages into the text is the question of whether or not these representations of fashionable life, of London, and of the individuals that make up these worlds are legitimate. An anxiety about the power of the text to not just represent but also define or constitute the individual is why characters such as Sir Brooke and Annesley react so negatively to the idea of having one’s visage turned material. This need to authorize the representations in one’s novel led some silver fork authors to unashamedly blur the boundary between fiction and nonfiction by including specific references to places, people, and other literary works in the real world. When Frederica enjoys a day of shopping in the metropolis in Pin Money, the narrative includes multiple references to specific shops that were open for business in 1831: After a morning’s round of busy idleness—after having seen a case just arrived from Herbault unpacked in Maradan’s anteroom, and perceived the contemptuous glance cast by Dévy on her last season’s bonnet,—she began to experience a reviving interest in the minutiae of female existence. She felt that the finery of her trousseau, which had worn the newest gloss of novelty in Warwickshire, was obsolete in town; that her waist was too short, her dress too long, to appear with credit in a London ball-room;—and by the time she had paid her subscription at Eber’s, purchased a few new canezous

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at Harding’s, replenished her dressing-box at Delcroix’s, and her writing-­ box at Houghton’s, she found herself in that elation of spirits which a first morning passed in the hurry of the metropolis is apt to infuse into a person, whose head is bossed with the organ of acquisitiveness, and whose pocket is garnished with a well-filled purse. (Gore 1831, 1:46)

Gore’s depiction of London shopping was so minutely correct for the period that a reviewer in the Westminster Review called the novel “a sort of London Directory” and suggested that she should “add an appendix of addresses” of tradespeople and shops; the reviewer further infers that perhaps Gore is in collusion with these “dealers in articles of luxury, who know the value of getting notoriety” (Anon 1831b, 433–34). The accusation suggests that, rather than a well-developed novel that makes occasional mention of things, Pin Money is instead a catalogue illustrated with “a series of brilliant sketches, bordering occasionally on the caricature” (442). In this reviewer’s estimation, the purpose of the novel is to inform readers about fashionable objects and where these objects are sold. The storyline, Frederica’s feelings, even Gore’s narrator’s occasional moralizing, are simply the trappings of a complex publicity stunt. Gore was not alone in including such real-life referents in her novels and such references had a two-fold effect, as Clare Bainbridge notes, offering either direction or assurance to upper-class readers while giving lower-­ class readers a feeling of authentic experience, the references themselves serving “as markers … of the novel’s quality” (Lister 2005, xxiii).11 For the reader living in London, these descriptions gave the novel an experiential quality, situating the narrative spatially in the metropolis and mapping London as a center of shopping and fashion. Rather than psychological realism, the descriptions contribute to an urban-topographical realism. Gore’s readers could find these very shops and peer into their windows, enhancing the vicarious experience already latent in the novel and making it easier for them to fantasize about being consumers, like Frederica. Yet, just as these referents draw the narrative into the outside world, suggesting images to the reader’s mind of actual places and objects, they similarly draw these outside referents into a fictional text, endowing the text with power that potentially spills off the fictional page as it comments on life in 1830s London or sketches a satirical picture of one of the leading dandies of the period. This blurring of the line between the fictional story world and the “real world” outside of the novel endows the text with a power that has ramifications beyond its own particular narrative. These

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novels’ “attachments”—how implicated they are in the present day through their reference to specific objects and settings—“do not decrease autonomy, but foster it” (Latour 1999, 281). The more authors integrate such real-world actants into their texts, the more these texts exert agency and influence over their readers. Thus, the agential power of the novel is reciprocal: just as these real-world people, objects, and places make their way into the novel, the novel also influences how these people, places, and objects may be understood or perceived; the novel is not simply representing, but also potentially constituting these people and objects for its readers (cf. Latour 1999, 281). This takes us back to the concern of Sir Brooke and Annesley that one’s visual or textual representation may be accepted as “truth” over one’s own embodied self: as physically manifest, textual representations, silver fork novels have the power to insinuate any number of things about contemporary members of the beau monde be they grounded in truth or imagination. Later in Gore’s novel, this tension between fiction and nonfiction is extrapolated into a greater theme on the opposition between appearance and reality and how visual or narrative representations can masquerade as truth. The narrator of Pin Money does not simply implicitly suggest her power in depicting people and things, but actually thematizes her own ability to paint (with words): In her hand was a volume of one of Madame de Souza’s most touching novels; on the little marble table by her side was a scented taper, casting its pale reflection upon a bouquet of Colvile’s freshest roses; at her feet the velvet ottoman brought home by Lord Launceston from his Turkish travels; behind her head the cambric pillow embroidered with her own initials by her mother’s hand. She looked the very picture of voluptuous indolence,— luxurious ease; and had Rochard seen her in that attitude, with the scattered tresses of her raven hair entangled round her beautiful hand and wrist, he would have presented a fairer Lady Rawleigh to the admiration of posterity, than could be hoped from the formal model she had afforded with her locks tortured by a French hairdresser, and her robe primly adjusted after the latest fiat of Victorine! (Gore 1831, 1:242–3)

The narrator sets up a spectrum of reality in this passage by contrasting Frederica at home among her own things to the “formal model” she has presented to the artist who is to paint a miniature of her for her mother. She creates a contrast between a naturalistic portrait of the sitter in her own space and a miniature modeled after a fashion plate, such as those

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drawn by Grévedon (see Fig.  5.2). The former is marked by all that is charming and lovely: Frederica presents an engaging portrait of female idleness as she reads a novel surrounded by a number of things that provide comfort and ease: the taper enables her reading, the roses add a delightful scent, an ottoman and pillow provide both bodily comfort and remind her of important family ties. The description is “experiential” in that it is rife with sensual qualities, inviting the reader to participate in her leisure, a quality that potentially enhances the aesthetic illusion of the text (Wolf 2007, 16). By contrasting this view with the “formal model” Frederica has already presented to the artist Rochard for her miniature, the narrator highlights the stylized nature of visual representations that flaunt the latest fashions and seems to argue in favor of more realistic or “true” representations. Significantly, this novelistic portrait of Frederica at home bears similarities to the scene that De Quincey “paints” in Dove Cottage; each is characterized by domestic comfort and each offers a visualized, consumer-oriented, and idealized version of the self. However, like De Quincey’s prose painting, this textual image proves to be largely a narrative illusion. Unlike De Quincey’s passage, here the narrator herself destroys the image: But, alas! The ease of Frederica’s position was wholly extrinsic. In spite of the lustrous taper, her soul was dark as that of Samson Agonistes;—in spite of the air-stuffed cushions in which she was buoyantly embedded, her frame appeared encircled by one of the compressive engines of the Inquisition;— and had she swallowed all the hors d’oeuvres of the Martwich dinner, her feelings could not have been more acidulated against herself and all mankind. (Gore 1831, 1:243)

The narrator’s “But, alas!” prepares the reader for a shattering of the tableau’s charm as she intimates that what she has created is merely a façade that has no bearing on Frederica’s real state of feelings. While the passage implies that her objects fail to please or provide comfort to her, more importantly, the juxtaposition draws attention to the divide between outer appearance and inner reality, suggesting that mere observation cannot discern between the two. “In spite” of the fashionable luxuries that inundate Pin Money, Frederica is racked with fear and guilt, which, ironically—as the narrative emphasizes—have been brought on by these and other luxuries.

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By comparing the work of the narrator to that of the painter, the narrator suggests that silver fork novels are inherently deceptive, since a description of the visual—a narrative of pure surface—is not enough to convey the total truth of a situation. Authors, like painters, are capable of staging their productions so as to produce a specific impression on the reader. It might be that Gore is attempting to redress one of Hazlitt’s major problems with the genre that “you have no inlet to thought or feeling opened to you” (Hazlitt 1934, 144). Presumably, by highlighting the insufficiency of objects and surfaces to reveal the truth, she emphasizes the superior quality of her own novel regardless of its plethora of fashionable objects and enticing shopping engagements. Yet, her lack of belief in the ability of objects to reflect human inner realities is just as disingenuous as De Quincey’s suggestion that he himself is somehow conveyed through his domestic furnishings. The tableau Gore paints of Frederica and then her effacement of that tableau supposedly reveals the entirely arbitrary nature of fictional art: she could just as easily have left Frederica in her false state and the reader would never have been the wiser. In so doing, her interrogation of the responsibilities of the novelist is also a demonstration of her own supposed “power” as the novelist, yet her status as a silver fork novelist calls this power seriously into question. When this passage is juxtaposed with that of Frederica’s shopping excursions, the resulting compositional effect is confusing. Pin Money is a novel that flaunts its verisimilitude to the “real” of fashionable life by utilizing factual London referents only to then reveal that verisimilitude to be a ruse. This method utilizes description for its experiential effects and then undermines those effects by highlighting their contingency. This is by design, as Gore’s ability to correctly taxonomize fashionable life lends her credibility with her readers (if not with her reviewers), and only after gaining that credibility can she then reveal the shallow, even false, nature of her depiction of fashionable life (cf. O’Cinneide 2008, 48). However, in flaunting the role of the omniscient narrator so transparently, she also engages in a performance of her role as “author,” distancing her readers from her representation and its vicarious power, but nonetheless satisfying her readers’ desire for representations of the rich and, ostensibly, the tools they need to emulate the upper classes. Gore deploys objects in her text, only to then rewrite their supposed meanings, yet her care in representing London society—testified by her reviewers—suggests the banality of her moral gloss. Her moral tone and her corresponding belief in inner versus outer truth can thus be seen as insincere, as she showcases her omniscience

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and moral superiority but nonetheless sticks to the silver fork formula with, ultimately, the novel’s status as guidebook to the middle-class remaining intact.

Static Representations and Boredom in the Silver Fork Novel While description in the early nineteenth century inevitably raises questions about the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, or the human as depicted in the nonhuman (the text, the image), in the silver fork novel, these discussions are also curiously adjacent to textual references to boredom. A relatively new word coinage in the 1820s and 1830s, “boredom” was still largely a privilege of the wealthy (Hughes 1992, 332; cf. Svendsen 2005, 21–22).12 Unlike the novels that would appear later in the nineteenth century, in silver fork novels it is not the everyday or the domestic (in the middle-class sense) that connotes boredom (cf. Langbauer 1999; Maynard 2009). While boredom is occasionally associated with one’s duty (attending parliament; paying social heed to important, but tedious persons), it only becomes a formal problem in the silver fork novel when it appears at the site of leisure—inevitably also the site of a description of things. Saikat Majumdar has written that although the quotidian is necessary to create “realist narration,” it can also pose a threat: when it begins to “define the limits of this fictional world, preventing aesthetic, psychic, or symbolic transcendence, that world … becomes dreary, predictable, and banal” (Majumdar 2013, 9–10). Silver fork novels, with their emphasis on describing the latest fashions in the most correct manner possible, demonstrate how what is meant to be exciting by providing “insider information” can eventually become predictable and thus potentially boring. Over and over in these texts, individuals express their boredom with things, that is, the inanimate’s failure to universally please the human. Nowhere is this connection between objects, leisure, description, and the problem of static representation so evident as in Disraeli’s The Young Duke, in which boredom features as a leitmotif of the text. A novel written in dire financial circumstances (Parry 2011) and revised heavily in subsequent editions (Barkley 2014, 135), Disraeli was reportedly ashamed of the novel later in life (Stewart 1975, 132) despite its arguably incipient social commentary (cf. Bachman 2000, 22). In this heavily self-reflexive novel, Disraeli engages with the boredom of the aristocracy as well as the

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potential boredom of the reader, at times explicitly connecting this latter boredom to the mode of narrative description and visual representation. Disraeli’s depiction of the exploits of a young duke—younger, richer, and more dissipated than anyone else—begin magnificently. He orders massive architectural and decorating overhauls of both his country estate and town house, hosts exquisite fêtes of entertainment, and he builds a new home that he fashions after, and dubs, the Alhambra. However, his consumer delights slowly devolve into monotony as he becomes disillusioned with the myriad of objects whose sole purpose seems to be to please him. Boredom becomes frequently addressed in the text as the duke continuously tries to allay his and others’ boredom. Negotiating the boredom of the reader also figures as a major theme, as the narrator repeatedly addresses whether the reader is entertained at any given moment. The novel plays with satiation as an actual narrative effect, for perhaps the reader could endure minute descriptions of two of his houses and one of his parties, but four houses and multiple entertainments stress the reader’s patience. Excessive narrative description that commodifies objects is followed by the narrator praising his pen for how it “carries me on,” revealing that an external agency—the generic requirements of the novel—is helping “pen” the piece (Disraeli 1831, 1:66).13 As the novel goes forward, the repetitive nature of the duke’s engagements, his lifestyle, and his consumerism is addressed in language that suggests a parallel between the duke’s consumption of objects and entertainments and the reader’s consumption of the silver fork novel. Horrified of doing everything that he had done the season before, by the third volume, “The Duke could no longer keep off the constantly recurring idea, that something must be done to entertain himself” and so he decides to remodel yet another of his estates (3:4): Who can see a Pantomime more than once? Who could survive a Pantomime the twentieth time? All the shifting scenes, and flitting splendor; all the motely crowds of sparkling characters; all the quick changes, and full variety, are, once, enchantment. But when the splendour is discovered to be monotony; the change, order, and the caprice, a system; when the characters play even the same part, and the variety never varies;—how dull, how weary, how infinitely flat, is such a world to that man who requires from its converse, not occasional relaxation, but constant excitement! Pen Bronnock was a new object. At this moment in his life, novelty was indeed a treasure. (3:5)

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The novel reproduces the condition of boredom with encyclopedic accuracy: the Duke of St. James has plenty to do, plenty to amuse himself with, plenty to consume; however, because he is only interested in the “novel,“ he is quickly running through his entertainment resources. Yet the language used—“pantomime”—highlights that the duke (and Disraeli) is simply replicating what he, for instance, reads in novels or sees on stage. Not only does one have the sense that these objects themselves are recalcitrant to humans, that they do not simply universally please the consumer or bend to his will, but also that the human’s dissatisfaction with these objects is a signal of a deeper crisis within the subject himself. Gore also registers the connection between the dramatic representation and boredom when she describes the effects of a series of expensive tableaus (costing “a thousand pounds or so”) given at an exclusive party: “For full five minutes, every one was in an ecstacy of delight, … in five minutes more, every one yawned, … and in the concluding five minutes …, every one whispered that the whole thing was a bore” (Gore 1831, 3:141). Gore and Disraeli both draw attention to their own conundrum through these references: how is the novelist supposed to make representations of people and objects engaging elements of narrative, especially when these representations are simply copies of copies? Hudson’s Almack’s hints at one strategy for allaying such narrative malaise. Hudson introduces Norbury, the seat of the most aristocratic part of her cast of characters, as “proverbially dull,” noting that “a visit there could seldom be a pleasant thing” (Hudson 1827, 1:256). Yet, the neighbors flock to Norbury anyway, for the Norburys have the best connections, and the Lady’s patronage virtually ensures one’s invitation to the Almack’s ball. In a descriptive passage, Hudson registers Lady Norbury’s attempts to entertain her guests but questions their efficacy: new pens put in all the inkstands, fresh paper in the blotting-books, more sealing-wax, more wafers supplied; new plants were brought from the green-­ house, new candles put in the lustres, and every order given about the arrangement of the lights in the evening; and when all was settled, Lady Norbury and Fudge paused to inspect and admire the pleasing effect of the whole. Then the chairs were placed in new positions, another sofa brought forward, the bergères arranged by the fire-places, the scattered volumes of all the new novels collected and laid invitingly on the reading-table, all the hand-screens put in their places, different games and puzzles laid out;—­

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certainly, when finished it was very complete; time could never hang heavy in a room so full of every sort of amusement; it would be impossible! (2:90)

The details of this description highlight the proliferation of the material in tasks both of business and pleasure, but especially pleasure. Lady Norbury has a clear purpose in her mind as to how each of these objects should function, but her end goal—allaying the boredom of her guests—is evidently unattainable. Each object may individually function perfectly well, but collectively, they seem to flout her wishes by failing to alleviate the seeming inevitable malaise of her guests. Just a few paragraphs later, as the general “dullness” of most of the room’s inhabitants has been noted, Lady Norbury herself is roused by the chiming of the clock, “Half-past six, I declare!” she cries and then tells the others, amidst a yawn, that dinner will not be ready before eight (2:91–92). The mood is intentionally soporific. In delineating Norbury, Hudson does not describe anything extraordinary to readers. Unlike the tableau in Pin Money of Frederica at home, this passage avoids sensory details and overall functions as little more than a list of random objects. The description reduces the object to what it can do (the pens, inkstands, paper, etc.) or to an indicator of a specific fashion, as in the case of the bergères. In her work on description, Evelyn Cobley writes that lists, and Hudson’s description does seem to function like a list, have the effect of “foreground[ing] the arbitrary process of selection and arrangement which descriptions usually try to conceal” (Cobley 1986, 400). With its lack of deictic indicators—its “aperspectival” aspect in F.  K. Stanzel’s typology—the reader “learns of a number of judgments regarding the taste and value of individual furnishing, but he arrives at no concrete impression, no experienced perception of the room itself” (Stanzel 1988, 120). The description, rather than giving readers an opportunity to immerse themselves in a sensory experience, merely draws attention to its function as a description of an aristocratic house filled with objects. The passage links this lack of aesthetic immersion or emotional identification to the feeling of boredom. Like Disraeli’s ironic juxtaposition of the two paragraphs above about Pen Bronnock, the Almack’s passage suggests the drawback of the very subject of silver fork novels. Even for those reading the silver fork novel primarily as a means of gaining “insider information,” the depiction of the boring—in this case, lists of objects—“exists in an antithetical relation to the intuitive functions of literature” (Majumdar 2013, 4). However, since the aristocracy is apparently plagued by

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boredom, and the novels focus on representing the lifestyles of this same aristocracy, a silver fork novel is not really “authentic” unless it registers boredom. One finds this paradox alluded to in the journal of Sir Walter Scott, who comments on Hudson’s novel: “the author has so well succeeded in describing the cold selfish fopperies of the time that the copy is almost as dull as the original” (Scott 1972, 287). Yet the novels also suggest that the silver fork manages, somehow, to keep such boredom from entirely alienating the attention of the reader. Similarly, Disraeli’s reference to the “pantomime” implies that just as the Duke moves on to another expensive project, so also the reader, having already read other novels, has picked up The Young Duke, and will pick up another after it, eager for another list of objects. Thus, for authors writing silver fork novels, the challenge becomes how one can transform a character’s boredom into a reader’s entertainment. Patricia Meyer Spacks suggests that this transformation occurs through a “distance” which “converts banality into comedy” (Spacks 1995, 170). Hudson attempts to create this distance toward the end of her passage, when she flirts with self-­ reference by mentioning “all the new novels.” Reading, acquiring, or discussing a “new novel” occurs frequently in her text—at least seven times over the three volumes—denoting not only the prevalence of novel reading, but the prevalence of reading what is specifically (yet so nonspecifically) “new” (Hudson 1827, 1:267; 2:90, 115; 3:23, 38, 214, 363). Furthermore, Hudson’s sarcastic expostulation that boredom should be impossible in such a setting allows the reader to stand back and judge the Norburys at a comfortable distance. While here the self-referential touch is light, the passage hints at how distancing the reader from a representation can also distance the reader from the boredom or moral problems so carefully depicted.

Distancing the Reader from Representations: Performing Authorship From Gore’s highlighting her ability to create realistic fictions to Disraeli’s and Hudson’s explicit underlining of the repetitiveness and boredom of their own novels lies a common narrative strategy, namely, breaking the aesthetic illusion to evade the dissatisfaction, incipient boredom, or moral qualms of the reader. These novelists seem to have instinctively understood what Karl Rosenkranz notes in his Aesthetics of Ugliness (Ästhetik des

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Häßlichen, 1853), namely, that humor results when “tautology and boredom is produced as self-parody or irony” (Rosenkranz 2015, 183). In Wolf’s discussion of metareference and its potential functions within media, he writes that the technique allows an author to both “experimen[t] self-consciously with the possibilities and limits of his or her medium” while also “including the (intelligent and interested) recipient in these experimentations” (Wolf 2009, 66).14 In the case of the silver fork novelist, such a strategy allows the author not only to parade his or her fine understanding of generic requirements, but also to flatter the aesthetic sensibilities of readers by suggesting that they already know what he or she is about to tell them—all the while providing those coveted lists of objects and fashionable shopping locales. This strategy further provides the illusion that the author is in control, despite the fact that he or she is strictly adhering to a generic formula. Metareference allows silver fork novelists to distance themselves and their readers from the banal and, in so doing, to transform the act of narration into a “new” kind of spectacle, namely, the performance of silver fork authorship. Literary historians have often remarked in passing on the self-reflexivity of the silver fork novel (cf. Hughes 1992, 330; Cronin 2002, 120–22; Wilson 2012, 147). Tamara Wagner writes that this “self-conscious satire” enabled “the consolidation of the silver-fork novel as a distinctive category” with parodies only heightening its visibility (Wagner 2009, 183). On the one hand, these references are a means of self-promotion, a way of forming a genre while they reflected upon that genre; self-reflexivity enabled authors to initiate readers and future practitioners into an understanding of the norms of the emerging genre, much as Janine Hauthal has argued regarding the use of metaization in the formation of new postmodern genres out of an old “exhausted tradition” (Hauthal 2013, 88). On the other hand, this inherent self-reflexivity makes it very difficult to discern between a silver fork novel and its parody. It thus allows the silver fork novel to disavow, while not foregoing, its own representations, to laugh at itself, and in so doing, its readers. In the novels examined here, self-reflexivity—especially when it lends itself to metareference—enables the author to distance readers from potential narrative or moral problems, like boredom or excessive consumerism, by engaging them at a critical distance. This distance allows the author to transform these problematic elements of the narrative into highly entertaining spectacles in which generic expectations and the novels themselves are objectified—a strategy

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that nonetheless does not change the status of these novels as social-­ climbing guidebooks. Wolf’s interdisciplinary terminology distinguishes between self-­ reference and self-reflexivity, which he sees as existing on a spectrum, with the former simply “refer[ing] or point[ing] to (aspects of) themselves or to other signs … within one and the same semiotic system” (Wolf 2009, 19) and the latter triggering “a discursive ‘reflection’ on elements of the same system” (21).15 At a further extreme, metareference tends to view “texts and media” from “‘from the outside’ of a meta-level from whose perspective they are consequently seen as different from unmediated reality and the content of represented worlds” (22–23).16 While metareferential elements tend to break the aesthetic illusion and highlight the constructed nature of the text or work of art, Wolf stresses that any single element’s metareferential potential will often be contingent upon how it functions within the work as a whole. While one does not find as many explicit instances of metareference in the silver fork novel as one would find in a postmodern novel (e.g. metalepsis), one does encounter a stacking of self-referential or self-reflexive elements that creates a parodic, illusion-breaking effect. These examples especially lend themselves to metareference because anxieties surrounding representation are already so thematized within the genre in general. This thematization makes the silver fork novel reader more aware of the frame of representation than if he or she were reading a novel that did not draw attention to the potential fictionalizing nature of art. As already demonstrated in Pin Money with Gore’s word painting and in The Young Duke through Annesley’s anxiety toward having a lithograph made of him, silver fork novels thematize the representation of individuals in commodified medial forms, and, in so doing, they make the mediation of their texts “an object of more or less active awareness” (Wolf 2009, 28). That this thematization is often combined with self-referential statements about the genre amplifies the metareferential potential of these textual moments. Wolf’s further note that “intertextuality” becomes “regularly metareferential in parodies” (Wolf 2009, 61) highlights the ambiguity which Wagner has identified between the silver fork novel and its parodies (Wagner 2009, 183). The Young Duke provides the best example of self-parody. The novel is generically formulaic, but it is exemplary in its deployment of the silver fork formula, making blatant the metareferential potential already inherent within the genre. The novel is marked by frequent intrusions of the

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narrator, causing one Athenaeum reviewer to note that the actual story only takes up half of the novel, with the other half “consist[ing] of various essays—accounts of the author’s palace at Rome—his hopes—his dreams— his ability or inability to write a novel—his former reviewers—his weekly expenditure, &c. &c.” (Arnold 1831, 276). Sometimes these comments are directed at the flow of the story and the narrative itself, as in the passage discussed briefly at the beginning of the chapter and expanded here: Room after room, gallery after gallery—you know the rest. Shall I describe the silk hangings, and the reverend tapestry, the agate tables, and the tall screens, the china, and the armour, the state beds, and the curious cabinets, and the family pictures mixed up so quaintly with Italian and Flemish art? But I pass from meek Madonnas and seraphic saints,—from gleaming Claudes and Guidos soft as Eve,—from Rubens’ satyrs and Albano’s boys, and even from those gay and natural medleys—paintings that cheer the heart—where fruit and flower, with their brilliant bloom, call to a feast the butterfly and bee;—I pass from these to square-headed ancestors by Holbein, all black velvet and gold chains; cavaliers, by Vandyke, all lace and spurs, with pointed beards, that did more execution even than their pointed swords; patriots and generals, by Kneller, in Blenheim wigs and Steenkirk cravats, all robes and armour; scarlet judges that supported ship-money, and purple bishops, who had not been sent to the Tower. Here was a wit who had sipped his coffee at Button’s, and there some mad Alcibiades duke who had exhausted life ere he had finished youth, and yet might be consoled for all his flashing follies could he witness the bright eyes that lingered on his countenance, while they glanced over all the patriotism and all the piety, all the illustrious courage and all the historic craft, which, when living, it was daily told him that he had shamed. (Disraeli 1831, 1:270–271)

Unlike the narrator of Almack’s, who focuses on Lady Norbury’s ineffectual attempts to create an agreeable atmosphere in her home, Disraeli’s narrator focuses primarily on the static, interior décor of the estate. Yet the contents of the description are disturbed from the beginning by the overbearing voice of the narrator who questions the reader, asking him if he would like a description, even though that description is already present within the question. He begins with a list of specific objects that range from the commodified to the priceless: “new” objects of consumption such as agate tables and china are listed along with family heirlooms such as tapestries, state

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beds, and, finally, family portraits. Then the narrator moves from a description of the interior to a description of the paintings themselves. He skips over mythic and natural themes and moves straight to the renaissance portraits, the visual representations of aristocrats. Even his choice of Hans Holbein the Younger is suggestive, a painter known for “his ability not merely to take an excellent likeness, but to establish a sense of physical presence and character almost unparalleled among his contemporaries” (Foister et al. 1997, 12). By invoking Holbein, only to then neglect the details and symbols that these portraits contain, he effects a thorough effacement of the fictional ancestor and the artwork itself. In the place of true ekphrasis or art appreciation, he fixates on the merest, most trifling objects within the portraits, implying that this is all the viewer within the novel (as well as the reader) really desires. Consumption drives the descriptions, rather than any desire to understand the artistic merits or symbolic elements of the piece. These ancestors are only notable for their sartorial and lifestyle choices, their “black velvet and gold chains,” “lace and spurs,” “Blenheim wigs,” and so on. Reducing the paintings to these objects effectively turns these portraits into fashion plates. As in Fig. 5.2, the individual recedes into the background, emphasizing again the belief that representation in a material form constitutes the individual, in this case, retroactively. But the constitution that occurs in this passage is as much an erasure as a rewriting. Unnamed, these ancestors are only included for their ability to introduce interesting—that is, novel—objects into the narrative. As though the suggestion was not enough, the narrator makes this point explicit by moralizing on his own description. By utilizing portraiture in this way—similarly to how Gore thematized miniatures in Pin Money—Disraeli creates an intermedial juxtaposition between visual and textual artifacts; however, his depiction of the differences between the textual and the visual is more grotesque than in Pin Money due both to his method of effacing the paintings and his suggestion that these paintings are masterpieces of Holbein the Younger, Peter Paul Rubens, and Anthony van Dyck.17 The novel’s shallow consumption of fine portraiture reflects on the lack of control that the work of art commands over its interpretation and consumption. By reducing these portraits to consumable objects within the text, Disraeli reflects on the marketplace requirements that dictate his own writing as well as on emerging print technologies, like the lithograph, that make visual representations more and more reproducible.

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These metareferential effects are made even more explicit given the narrative introduction of the passage. That the content of his piece is repetitive is already signaled by the first line: “room after room, gallery after gallery—you know the rest.” Disraeli’s narrator will give the reader what they have had before, but he will only do it by drawing attention to the norms to which he conforms. This line together with the second sentence—“Shall I describe…”—breaks the aesthetic illusion as it suggests the formulaic, yet arbitrary nature of the novel itself. In other parts of The Young Duke, the problems posed by description are registered less overtly through simple overemphasis, such as in a description of Castle Dacre: “A terrace … was covered with orange trees, and many a statue, and many an obelisk, and many a temple, and many a fountain, were tinted with the warm twilight” (Disraeli 1831, 1:207). The polysyndeton of this list, “suspend[s]” the reader’s expectation of its termination, potentially suggesting that the list could go on forever (Belknap 2000, 50). In another instance, Disraeli’s narrator notes how the Duke spent his time in Brighton: “One day, a new face; another day, a new dish; another day, a new dance, successively interested his feelings, particularly if the face rode, which they all do” (Disraeli 1831, 2:35). The use of repetitive diction is here compounded with the reiteration of “new.” By foregrounding language in this manner, and specifically foregrounding his representations and his descriptions of fashionable life, Disraeli triggers reflection not simply on the mundane nature of continuous decadence but also on the banality of the novel itself and the role of the narrator in presenting that banality to the reader. In other parts of the narrative, the narrator draws attention to his inability to describe something, but again, disingenuously blames generic norms: when the Duke has an exclusive party at his country estate, he and his fellow hosts wear “fancy uniforms, worthy of the Court of Oberon,” but the narrator refuses to offer any further details, “I shall not describe them, for the description of costume is the most inventive province of our historical novelists, and I never like to be unfair, or trench upon my neighbour’s lands or rights” (2:142). Barkley suggests that such foregrounding of descriptive norms within silver fork novels is especially prevalent in the dandy novels—in which The Young Duke is included (Barkley 2014, 132).18 Yet a similar strategy can be seen in Hudson’s Almack’s, in which a short summary is provided of what has been excised from the text: “This was followed by a long and learned discourse upon cork soles and galoshes, their infinite convenience and general use, either for boots or shoes; but it may be omitted without loss of interest” (Hudson 1827, 2:178). Here

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Hudson draws attention to a “boring” discourse about the usefulness of objects, only lingering long enough to remind the reader that she is excising anything that could induce boredom. Such self-reflexivity, by creating a distance between the content of the narrative and how that content is represented, highlights the contingency and mediated nature of the text. This usage of metareference and self-­ reflexivity can be read as “double-coded,” as it may simultaneously strengthen the power of the text (by flattering and playing to the knowledge of readers) and highlight the arbitrary nature of the novel’s represented world (Wolf 2009, 23–24). Similar to the self-reflexivity Lupton identifies in mid  eighteenth-century it-narratives, the silver fork novel “announces its own operation (socially, materially, economically) with an audience that ‘gets’ and enjoys the candor” (Lupton 2011, viii), but unlike those narratives, which purportedly wrote themselves,19 silver fork narrators explicitly intervene in their narratives, ostensibly to amend what is generically prescribed. Instead of featuring books that supposedly write themselves—as some it-narratives do—these narratives are obsessed with humans that write, but humans that write in conditions in which their authorial independence is necessarily called into question, revealing their anxiety that they are in fact not in control of their texts but are rather engaging in a performance of a certain authorial identity.20 In drawing attention to the length of descriptions, silver fork authors betray an awareness of the book as a physical object and reading as a temporal and tactile process. In The Young Duke and Pin Money, this awareness is registered in direct metanarrational directions to the reader (cf. Fludernik 2003, 30). Disraeli’s narrator instructs his reader, “If I be dull,—skip: time will fly, and beauty will fade, and wit grow dull, and even the season, although it seems, for the nonce, like the existence of Olympus, will, nevertheless, steal away” (Disraeli 1831, 1:108). These comments forestall criticism that he is “prosing” too much, especially given that this command follows a long discourse by the narrator on how to enjoy a good dinner. He reminds readers that they remain in control of the physical book that they are reading, and they may shut him up any time they please. Gore’s narrator suggests something similar when she actually advises the “rational reader” to skip three pages while she “proses” (Gore 1831, 2:53). She then goes on to reflect that because novels, especially fashionable novels, “are born to such an inheritance of shame” with “dull or silly people” frequently castigating them

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with a sentence of contempt as the most frivolous, flighty, useless, and condemnable productions of the press … that it becomes necessary from time to time to throw a heavy lump of marl on the surface, where it must lie for ever in unaffinitive disunion, in order to deceive the dunces into a belief that some mysterious process of improvement is carrying on for their advantage. (2:53–54)

Gore’s narrator self-reflexively comments on the challenges of novelists when she expostulates on the purposes of novels in general; she goes on to defend her “small tale” of people and their things on the basis that the “rational reader” understands that novels are meant as innocent entertainment and should not to be taken too seriously. Although Austen goes further in her “defense of the novel” in Northanger Abbey, the two authors share the view that novels provide “extensive and unaffected pleasure” (Austen 2006, 30). The passage suggests both the agency and the passivity of the narrator, as she, on the one hand, notes her command of all the necessary modes of novelistic writing but, on the other, suggests her own powerlessness in the face of market requirements. She may consider herself powerful enough to castigate the “dunces” but she acquiesces to their demands nonetheless and writes three pages of moral reflection which she encourages the “rational reader” to skip (Gore 1831, 2:55). However, by suggesting, in what follows, alternative plots featuring Sir Brooke and Frederica as the hero and heroine of ancient myth, she inexplicably calls attention to her power as the narrator to create the fictional story at hand. In so doing, she reflects not merely on the nature and difficulties of telling or conveying a story, but on her power to invent the story. While in Austen, counterfactual narratives are presented as plausible alternative choices for the characters, Gore’s narrator deliberately makes these alternative plots unrealistic and ridiculous, flaunting her own power as the novelist to do what she will with her characters. Not unlike the passage above in which the narrator juxtaposes Frederica’s real internal state with how she looks to an outside observer, she here invites the reader to step back from what Wolf calls the “pragmatic zone” and into the “metareflexive zone” by drawing attention to her own creative powers.21 She draws attention to the construction and generic norms of the novel at hand, as she foregrounds the mediality of the representation of fashionable life found in Pin Money. Yet, like in the earlier passage with Frederica, Gore’s drawing attention to her own power can also be seen as a tacit admittance of her own powerlessness in the face of generic requirements.

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In The Young Duke, the fact that the author is merely following a generic formula is not only foregrounded but celebrated when a friend of the Duke offers the following “receipt” for fashionable novels: “Take a pair of pistols and a pack of cards, a cookery-book and a set of new quadrilles; mix them up with half an intrigue and a whole marriage, and divide them into three equal parts” (Disraeli 1831, 2:22). Often cited as a summation of the extremely formulaic nature of the genre (Kendra 2009, 193; Hughes 1992, 328), the recipe functions self-reflexively by haphazardly combining humans and objects in a manner that emphasizes the highly commodified nature of the genre. A list of consumable objects forms one half of the recipe, while the phrasing of “half an intrigue and a whole marriage” suggests that these social relationships are actually things: countable (dividable) entities, commodified, physical specimens of social life, not unlike the “deck of cards” which can be divided into ever so many equal parts. Together, these objects are combined to produce another countable, dividable object: the three-decker novel. Furthermore, as a mise en abyme of the novel itself, the recipe gives the reader a hint as to how the rest of the plot will unfold. The Duke will eventually duel with Sir Lucius Grafton after the latter proposes an adulterous elopement to the innocent May Dacre. Then, in an attempt to gain back some of his squandered fortune, the Duke will lose “about one hundred thousand pounds” over the course of several intense days of heavy gambling. Eating and dancing appear in large quantities. The Duke’s emotional-toying and almost-­ elopement with Lady Aphrodite answers the definition of a “half affair,” and his final marriage to May Dacre more than fulfills the pronouncement of a “whole marriage.” While, it would be impossible for the reader to know all of this when the “receipt” is pronounced, he or she should recognize the recipe as a summary of Granby and—since Granby became a model for the genre—a valid description of many of the male-centric specimens in general. With that being the case, the reader may reasonably be expected to anticipate these events within The Young Duke, implicitly recognizing the recipe’s status as a mise en abyme of genre if not of the novel itself. By drawing attention to this formula, and then by so faithfully following it, Disraeli also performs authorship, and specifically the role of silver fork novelist, whose job is simply to take a basic plot, fill in the names, and add a little gilding to the descriptions. At the end of Disraeli’s novel, the Duke of St. James repents of his profligacy, scrapes together his remaining resources, marries May

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Dacre—the virtuous heroine—and reforms into a respectable aristocrat. Overall the moralistic ending jars with the parodic tone of the novel as a whole, but this reforming of the novel as well as the protagonist is also generic. In a sense, the novel is a success, since its real value lay not in the representation of a developed character, but in how a narrator turned following a recipe for writing a novel into an entertaining spectacle. * * * Material representations—whether visual or textual—are shown in these novels to pose a threat to individual subjectivity. These material objects are ontologically separate from the human they depict and are therefore possessable, interpretable by others; the novels even go so far as to suggest that these representations have the power to remake the human. These physical objects, whether novels, newspaper articles, lithographs, or miniatures, are not simply passive reflections of human subjectivity but are seemingly capable of producing pernicious effects on a person’s reputation, at the very least. However, these novels and images also suggest that the notoriety resulting from employing a material extension of oneself is a form of social power, but power that is no longer exclusively under human control, as the human has delegated power to a physical object. A similar, but more forced, delegation occurs in the silver fork novel as novelists rely upon generic formulae to make their works appealing to readers. Like their characters, the narrators of these novels demonstrate an anxiety that they too will somehow lose control of their stories. They frequently betray a fear that their textual representations of fashionable life lack depth or “truth,” yet their concern that their readers will be afflicted with boredom, the very boredom that the aristocracy ostensibly feels, suggests otherwise. This vacillation, between texts that are so generically prescribed, they are little more than copies of copies, and texts, the experiential effects of which threaten to generate malaise in readers, suggests contradictory understandings of representational objects and the power they wield over human subjectivity. Furthermore, these novels call into question human agency, and specifically authorial agency. Given the generic expectations of publishers of the fashionable novel, authors had little choice as to the general themes, plots, or even contents of their novels. This is one argument for why so many narrators of these works adopt a self-reflexive stance, in a sense, performing a certain authorial identity since they cannot enact it. The

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generically mandated lists of seemingly required objects are not passively incorporated into these texts: instead, the moment at which the object appears as thoroughly effaced—that is, fully immersed in cycles of consumption—is often the moment when the object becomes a formal problem that seems to dictate a metareferential intervention. Reading these novels for their metareferentiality allows one to see not only how they represent a transition to a society that is undergirded by material commodities, but also how they stage the double-bind of professional authorship in the nineteenth century. Despite the narrators’ performed assertion of control over their fictions, these works’ self-reflexivity just as often highlights how little control the authors of these works have over the stories they tell. Nonetheless,  these novels are simultaneously commodities and actants; while they are determined by human and nonhuman forces, they are also participants in creating new social assemblages as they aid the rising middle classes. In this process, the silver fork author turns out to be just one actant among many, not the least of which is the novel he or she attempts to write.

Notes 1. Despite its pejorative connotations, “silver fork novel” remains a more useful term for referring to these novels than the broader “fashionable novel”: first, it denotes a (retrospectively) widely recognized genre that flourished from about 1825–1840. For what made this emerging genre unique, see Sadleir (1931, 125). Second, “silver fork” with its focus on “materiality” fits topically with these novels’ themes (O’Cinneide 2008, 47). 2. See, for example, Matthew Rosa’s influential 1936 study, the title of which makes the critic’s priorities clear: The Silver Fork Novel: Novels of Fashion Preceding Vanity Fair. Rosa’s comments on Catherine Gore are representative of his attitude toward the genre as a whole: “Any absolute comparison of Mrs. Gore with the great masters of English fiction is inappropriate, but in the historical study of the novel she deserves a place larger than she has” (1964, 145). 3. Alison Adburgham credits Colburn as the “conceptor, producer, editor, publisher and—most effectively—promoter” of the silver fork genre (Adburgham 1983, 68). For more on Colburn and his revolutionary advertising methods, see Rosa (1964, 178–206); Hughes (1992, 346); Wilson (2012, 123–49). 4. One of the plots in Gore’s Pin Money features a similar family, the Waddlestones, who own a soap factory. The main character’s brother

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affects being in love with the daughter, remarking to his sister, “My father used to make an annual speech on the amelioration of the manufacturing classes;—and how can we amend them more satisfactorily than by a mutual exchange of our superfluous commodities—rank and wealth?” (Gore 1831, 1:188–89). 5. Pin Money is a good example of how many fashionable novels borrow plotlines and motifs from Burney, Edgeworth, and Austen. The Frederica plot is almost identical to Fanny Burney’s Camilla (1796) in its thematization of a young, light-hearted, but inexperienced girl entangling herself in financial and romantic embarrassments through little fault of her own. Moving the action from before to after the marriage is a typical strategy of Gore’s. For more on the tension between aristocratic (Georgian) and middle-class (Victorian) marriages and gender roles in Gore’s novels, see Hughes (1996, 162–66); for more on Edgeworth’s influence on the silver fork novel, see Hart (1981). 6. The eponymous Duke of St. James remarks in Disraeli’s The Young Duke, “Let them stare, … we were made to be looked at. ‘Tis our vocation … and they are gifted with vision purposely to behold us” (Disraeli 1831, 1:178). 7. The John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library has a small, but broadly themed collection of lithographs that suggest the range of popular subjects depicted. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to browse some of the collection’s items in September 2017. Part of the collection is also available online through ProQuest. 8. I have not been able to confirm that Gore’s image (Fig.  5.1) is a lithograph, although my contact at Alamy images believes it is. I would further argue that Gore’s signature appended at the bottom suggests lithographic reproduction. 9. Beth Kowaleski Wallace points out that the focus on individuality constitutes one of the major paradoxes of mass consumption (Wallace 2018, 35). 10. Wolf, Nünning, Monika Fludernik, and others have more recently worked to redress this lack. Wolf rejects Seymour Chatman’s likening of description to an “existent” (as opposed to an “event”), noting that descriptions may also describe dynamic processes (Wolf 2007, 24; cf. Chatman 1978, 19). Monika Fludernik and Suzanne Keen have also edited an issue of Style devoted to description, see especially Fludernik and Keen (2014); Stanica (2014); Wall (2014). 11. On other novels that feature real-life referents, see Adburgham (1983, 215–221). For more on “product placement” in the silver fork, see Wilson (2012, 145). 12. “To bore” in the sense of “to weary” appeared first in the mid eighteenth century accompanied by other words that similarly denote subjective responses to the outside world (e.g. “interesting”) (“bore, v.” 2; Smith

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1912, 248). While the OED references the first example of boredom from 1853, the word appears in print long before this (“boredom, n.”). In The Young Duke, one finds the word twice (2: 57, 2: 216). Nonetheless, the verb and noun forms of “bore” are used much more often, especially in The Young Duke and Pin Money. For more on boredom in eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century English literature, see Spacks (1995); Healy (1984); Langbauer (1999); Maynard (2009); Majumdar (2013). 13. Disraeli’s use of this device (the pen that writes) is less of a tribute to Sterne than an acknowledgment of his own work’s derivative nature. For more on the Sternean pen and its use in it-narratives, see Chap. 2, p. 68. 14. Wolf provides a simple model for discussing metareference, which suffices for the discussion of the silver fork novel; for a more detailed discussion of “metanarrative,” see Nünning (2001a, b); Fludernik (2003). Throughout my analysis, I have heeded Fludernik’s cautioning and avoided the use of the term “metafiction” to define what is happening in the silver fork novel (Fludernik 2003, 10–15). 15. Here, Wolf’s terminology is considerably looser than Fludernik and Nünning’s. Following Nünning, Fludernik writes that metanarration “can therefore either ‘undercut the fabric of fiction’—in which case we are dealing with self-conscious fictions; or they do not undercut the fabric of fiction and then are merely self-reflexive narratives” (Fludernik 2003, 5; cf. Nünning 2001b, 33). 16. Hauthal’s concept of “metaization” is comparable to Wolf’s “metareference” (Hauthal 2013, 82). 17. While Wolf argues that intermediality does not presuppose metareference, he notes that metareferential qualities can be foregrounded by a “high degree of deviation from the traditional use of the medium in question” (Wolf 2009, 62–63). 18. For more on the (largely) gendered distinction between the dandy silver fork novels, which focus on a male protagonist, and the society silver fork novels, which focus on “family and community relationships” (27), see Kendra (2004). For more on the relationship between the dandy aesthetic and boredom, see Burnett (1983, 51). 19. Speaking specifically of eighteenth-century texts purportedly narrated by the book, paper, or pen, Lupton writes, “The knowledge of mediation also becomes a strangely anti-human cause, entertaining because of the way in which it seems to make paper cleverer than people” (Lupton 2011, 7). 20. I reverse Lupton’s insight that mid  eighteenth-century it-narratives obscure the fact that “people do in fact control the technologies they use” (Lupton 2011, 10).

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21. Wolf writes that the metareflexive zone “involves a rational distance and presupposes that a recipient is aware of the nature, forms and conventions of the signifying systems and media in question. This ‘backgrounds’, at least preliminarily, possible emotional responses as well as the heteroreferentiality (including possible pragmatic functions) that may inform the work or text in question” (Wolf 2009, 28).

Bibliography Adams, James Eli. 2015. The Novel in Theory Before 1900. In A Companion to the English Novel, ed. Stephen Arata, Haley Madigan, J.  Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke, 241–255. Hoboken: Wiley. Adburgham, Alison. 1983. Silver Fork Society: Fashionable Life and Literature from 1814–1840. London: Constable. Anon. 1831a. Lackey School of Authors. Westminster Review 15: 399–406. ———. 1831b. Pin Money. Westminster Review 15: 433–442. Arnold, Walter. 1831. The Young Duke. The Athenaeum 183: 276–277. Austen, Jane. 2006. Northanger Abbey, ed. Barbara M. Benedict and Deirdre Le Faye. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bachman, Maria K. 2000. Benjamin Disraeli’s The Young Duke and the Condition of England’s Aristocrats. Victorian Newsletter 98: 15–22. Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–831. Barkley, Danielle. 2014. Reading the Details: Realism and the Silver Fork Novel, 1825–1845. PhD diss, Montreal: McGill University. Belknap, Robert. 2000. The Literary List: A Survey of its Uses and Deployments. Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics 2 (1): 35–54. https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/2.1.35. Bore, v. 2016. OED Online. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com. Accessed 2 Feb 2017. Boredom, n. 2016. OED Online. Oxford University Press. www.oed.com. Accessed 2 Feb 2017. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. 1874. England and the English. London: George Routledge. Burnett, T.A.J. 1983. The Rise and Fall of a Regency Dandy: The Life and Times of Scrope Berdmore Davies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Burney, Fanny. 1796. Camilla: or, A Picture of Youth, 5 vols. London: Payne, Cadell & Davies. Casey, Ellen Miller. 2009. Silver-Forks and the Commodity Text: Lady Morgan and the Athenaeum. Women’s Writing 16 (2): 253–262. ———. 2011. ‘The Aristocracy and Upholstery’: The Silver Fork Novel. In A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Pamela K. Gilbert, 13–25. Malden: Wiley.

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Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Cobley, Evelyn. 1986. Description in Realist Discourse: The War Novel. Style 20 (3): 395–410. Copeland, Edward. 2009. Jane Austen and the Silver Fork Novel. In A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia L.  Johnson and Clara Tuite, 434–443. Chichester: Wiley. ———. 2012. The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cronin, Richard. 2002. Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840. Houndmills: Palgrave. De Quincey, Thomas. 2001. Tales of All Nations. In The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop, 5: 107. London: Pickering & Chatto. Originally published in Edinburgh Saturday Post, 13 (Oct. 1827): 182. Disraeli, Benjamin. 1831. The Young Duke, 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. Edgeworth, Maria. 1894. The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, ed. Augustus J.C. Hare, vol. 2. London: Edward Arnold. Fludernik, Monika. 2003. Metanarrative and Metafictional Commentary: From Metadiscursivity to Metanarration and Metafiction. Poetica: Zeitschrift Für Sprach-Und Literaturwissenschaft 35 (1–2): 1–39. Fludernik, Monika, and Suzanne Keen. 2014. Introduction: Narrative Perspectives and Interior Spaces in Literature Before 1850. Style 48 (4): 453–460. https:// doi.org/10.5325/style.48.4.453. Foister, Susan, Martin Wyld, and Ashok Roy. 1997. Holbein’s “Ambassadors”: Making and Meaning. London: National Gallery. Freeman, J. 1837. Catherine Gore. London: Henry Colburn. Gillingham, Lauren. 2006. The Novel of Fashion Redressed: Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham in a 19th-Century Context. Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies 32 (1): 63–85. Gore, Catherine. 1830. The Manners of the Day, 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. ———. 1831. Pin Money, 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. Grévedon, Henri. 1831–1834. Le Vocabulaire des Dames, lithographié par H. Grévedon. Paris/London: Rittner et Goupil/Ch. Tilt. Hart, Frances Russell. 1981. The Regency Novel of Fashion. In From Smollett to James: Studies in the Novel and Other Essays Presented to Edgar Johnson, ed. Samuel I.  Mintz, Alice Chandler, and Christopher Mulvey, 84–133. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hauthal, Janine. 2013. Metaization and Self-Reflexivity as Catalysts for Genre Development: Genre Memory and Genre Critique in Novelistic Meta-Genres. In The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction: Theoretical Frameworks, Genres and Model Interpretations, ed. Michael Basseler,

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Ansgar Nünning, and Christine Schwanecke, 81–114. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Hazlitt, William. 1934. The Dandy School. In The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, vol. 20, 144–148. London/Toronto: J. M Dent and Sons, Ltd. Healy, Seán Desmond. 1984. Boredom, Self, and Culture. In Rutherford. London: Fairleigh Dickinson. Hudson, Marianne Spencer Stanhope. 1827 (1826). Almack’s, 3 vols. 2nd ed. London: Saunders and Oatley. Hudson, Nicholas. 2007. It-Narratives: Fictional Point of View and Constructing the Middle Class. In The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and it-­ Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell, 292–306. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Hughes, Winifred. 1992. Silver Fork Writers and Readers: Social Contexts of a Best Seller. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 25 (3): 328–347. ———. 1996. Mindless Millinery: Catherine Gore and the Silver Fork Heroine. Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 25: 159–176. Kendra, April. 2004. Gendering the Silver Fork: Catherine Gore and the Society Novel. Women’s Writing 11 (1): 25–38. Kendra, April Nixon. 2007. ‘You, Madam, Are No Jane Austen’: Mrs. Gore and the Anxiety of Influence. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 3 (2). http:// ncgsjournal.com/issue32/kendra.htm. Accessed 31 Jan. 2017. Kendra, April. 2009. Silver-Forks and Double Standards: Gore, Thackeray and the Problem of Parody. Women’s Writing 16 (2): 191–217. Langbauer, Laurie. 1999. Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850–1930. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Lister, T.H. 2005 (1826). Granby, ed. Clare Bainbridge and Harriet Devine Jump. Silver Fork Novels, 1826–1841. London: Pickering & Chatto. Lukács, Georg. 1971. Narrate or Describe. In Writer & Critic, and Other Essays. Trans. Arthur D. Kahn, 110–48. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Lupton, Christina. 2011. Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2016. Paper Ontologies: Reading Sterne with Bruno Latour. Textual Practice 31 (2): 299–313. Majumdar, Saikat. 2013. Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire. New York: Columbia University Press. Marzio, Peter C. 1971. Lithography as a Democratic Art: A Reappraisal. Leonardo 4 (1): 37–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/1572229.

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Maynard, Lee Anna. 2009. Beautiful Boredom: Idleness and Feminine Self-­ Realization in the Victorian Novel. Jefferson: McFarland. Miller, Andrew H. 1995. Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture, and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nünning, Ansgar. 2001a. Metanarration Als Lakune Der Erzähltheorie: Definition, Typologie Und Grundriss Einer Funktionsgeschichte Metanarrativer Erzähleräußerungen. Arbeiten Aus Anglistik Und Amerikanistik 26 (2): 125–164. ———. 2001b. Mimesis Des Erzählens: Prolegomena Zu Einer Wirkungsästhetik, Typologie Und Funktionsgeschichte Des Akts Des Erzählens Und Der Metanarration. In Erzählen Und Erzähltheorie Im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Jörg Helbig, 13–47. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag. ———. 2007. Towards a Typology, Poetics and History of Description in Fiction. In Description in Literature and Other Media, ed. Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart, 91–128. Amsterdam: Rodopi. O’Cinneide, Muireann. 2008. Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832–1867. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Parry, Jonathan. 2011. Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield (1804–1881), Prime Minister and Novelist. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/7689. Accessed 26 Feb 2018. Pflugmacher, Torsten. 2010. Description. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 101–102. London: Routledge. Rosa, Matthew W. 1964. The Silver-Fork School: Novels of Fashion Preceding Vanity Fair. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, Inc. Rosenkranz, Karl. 2015. Aesthetics of Ugliness: A Critical Edition. Trans. Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Sadleir, Michael. 1931. Bulwer: A Panorama; Edward and Rosina 1803–1836. London: Constable. Scott, Walter. 1972. The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W.E.K Anderson. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Siegfried, Susan L. 2014/15. Portraits of Fantasy, Portraits of Fashion. nonsite.org 14: 166–212. Smith, Logan Pearsall. 1912. The English Language. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. 1995. Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stanica, Miruna. 2014. Bundles, Trunks, Magazines: Storage, Aperspectival Description, and the Generation of Narrative. Style 48 (4): 513–528. https:// doi.org/10.5325/style.48.4.513. Stanzel, F.K. 1988. A Theory of Narrative. Trans. Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Stewart, Robert W. 1975. Disraeli’s Novels Reviewed: 1826–1968. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press. Stewart, Susan. 1984. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Strachan, John. 2007. Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Svendsen, Lars. 2005. A Philosophy of Boredom. Trans. John Irons. London: Reaktion Books. Twyman, Michael. 2001. Breaking the Mould: The First Hundred Years of Lithography. The Panizzi Lectures 2000. London: British Library. Wagner, Tamara S. 2009. From Satirized Silver Cutlery to the Allure of the Anti-­ Domestic in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing: Silver-Fork Fiction and its Literary Legacies. Women’s Writing 16 (2): 181–190. Wall, Cynthia. 2006. The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2014. Approaching the Interior of the Eighteenth-Century English Country House. Style 48 (4): 543–562. https://doi.org/10.5325/ style.48.4.543. Wallace, Elizabeth Kowaleski. 2018. ‘Character Resolved into Clay’: The Toby Jug, Eighteenth-Century English Ceramics, and the Rise of Consumer Culture. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31 (1): 19–44. Wilson, Cheryl A. 2009. Almack’s and the Silver-Fork Novel. Women’s Writing 16 (2): 237–252. ———. 2012. Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel. London: Pickering & Chatto. Wolf, Werner. 2007. Description as a Transmedial Mode of Representation: General Features and Possibilities of Realization in Painting, Fiction and Music. In Description in Literature and Other Media, ed. Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart, 1–90. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———. 2009. Metareference Across Media: The Concept, its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions. In Metareference Across Media: Theory and Case Studies, ed. Werner Wolf, Katharina Bantleon, and Jeff Thoss, 1–88. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: All Those “Tables and Chairs”: Productive Objects and Chaotic Things?

Shall I sonnet-sing you about myself? Do I live in a house you would like to see? Is it scant of gear, has it store of pelf? “Unlock my heart with a sonnet-key?” Robert Browning, “House,” (1876) ll. 1–4

This study has explored how everyday objects contribute to literary form at the turn of the nineteenth century. For each of the genres or authors examined, there appears to be a normative way in which objects are supposed or assumed to aid the text at hand. In it-narratives, objects ostensibly offer an interesting or amusing way for the human author to present his or her agenda. In Austen’s juvenilia, objects provide a humorous twist, while in her later novels, they generate narrative possibilities. De Quincey uses, or wants to use, objects to signify his class standing to himself or to others. Silver fork novels utilize objects in order to legitimize their own creation, with their readers allegedly turning to them as social-climbing guidebooks, the objects themselves becoming mere stepping stones in the acquisitive world of ton. And yet, in each of these cases, the objects—the things—of these novels and short narratives do more. They step beyond the bounds prescribed for them and register their own importance within human action and within the construction of their own texts. In so doing, they gesture toward human dependency on the material.

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The texts disclose an often implicit but sometimes explicit anxiety toward the object’s ability to disrupt its human-prescribed function, to produce effects that its human users never foresaw. This occurs within these narratives, as characters come to rely upon and in turn acknowledge the work of the material object. But this process also occurs on the formal level, whether through having an object narrate its own entanglements in and disruptions of human society or through the narrator self-reflexively chronicling his or her own attempts to control the role objects play within the text. In their own unique ways, each of these texts suggests that even the productive suggestiveness of the object may eventually lead to the chaos of the thing. To speak of objects in this manner may seem to suggest a figuratively organic process of literary evolution in which tools eventually resist their role as such. However, the reason for the resistance of the object lies not in some premeditated (human-like) desire; on the contrary, being forced to acknowledge the contrary agency of inanimate things is the foreseeable result of an increasingly stringent belief in the idea that the human and nonhuman are separated by a wide chasm. Anthropomorphizing the inanimate is merely what happens when humans have no vocabulary for the force exerted and the role played by inanimate objects within their own lives. As such, the potential agency of the object, its ability to affect humans in both positive and negative ways, increasingly comes to be viewed as an undermining of some fallacious “natural” order. The panic over the potential chaos produced by material objects, articulated so well in De Quincey’s feeling of being buried under stuff, is the result of a belief that human identity and modes of being are states that are originally pure and unassailable by the nonhuman. The fear expressed by silver fork writers that humans are being effaced by objects, reified by their own consumption, rather than indicating that objects—commodities or not—have any such power, merely signposts how entrenched the spurious idea of the autonomous human was becoming. In the opening pages of this study, Adam Smith expresses this view of the ascendency of the human in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) when he suggests that watches simply behave as their human designers wish (Smith 1979, 2.2.3.5). Anyone who has faced a “malfunctioning” tool knows that such a naive belief in the fealty of material objects to their human designs lasts only until the object no longer functions as one thought it must. But while saying that a thing “malfunctions” is automatically to make a value judgment about its behavior, the narratives of this study

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demonstrate that chaos is not necessarily inimical to creation. Genres may not break in the sense that a watch or a glass can break, but they can, through repetition and overuse, lose the power to affect their human readers as they once did. As a result, new innovations must be made as the assemblage of the human and nonhuman reforms to create new fictions, new literatures that are surprising, interesting, and intriguing. Literary precedent and inanimate materiality meet human imagination and new genres and new concepts result. This is perhaps why for all De Quincey’s “panic,” one also senses a pleasure in the chaos of his text, the pleasure of a new creation that even he could not have foreseen. De Quincey is a peculiar character in that, for all of his striving after a certain ideal, one feels that he rather enjoys his failures as much as his successes, and Confessions testifies to the idea that his greatest failure and his greatest success are tied up in one and the same project. As such, De Quincey, despite the seeming anthropocentricism and modernity of his genre, probably most fully testifies to the folded nature of the human and the nonhuman during this period, as he acknowledges and relishes that all his brilliantly laid plans may in a moment be interrupted by a piece of brute materiality doing something he failed to expect. As a so-called Romantic-Victorian, De Quincey, like the silver fork novel, provides a bridge to the Victorian period (Ford 2007, 244). The fact that his writings continue to show a preoccupation with the agency of the nonhuman well into the Victorian period is already a testament to how the themes addressed in this study continued to be of concern as the century wore on. The same can be said for the silver fork novel, as highlighted by its emphasis on the material as well as the success of the ultimate parody of that genre, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847). While this study concludes with the passing of the first Reform Bill in 1932, many of the concerns explored not only remained but gained in immediacy and relevance as the century progressed, as the genre “set issues in the foreground which became even more prominent in both social-problem and, furthermore, also sensation fiction” (Wagner 2009, 186). How the human relates to objects and material spaces is heavily thematized in realism as well as Victorian genre fiction. While Andrew Miller has written about the fear of commodification in the Victorian novel—that is, the fear that personal relations were becoming thing-like (Miller 1995, 6)—and Freedgood has stressed how late-Victorian writers transformed objects into metaphors of meaning at the expense of the object’s materiality and metonymies (Freedgood 2006, 10), this study has argued that these concerns were

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rooted in an already developing crisis of representation of the human and the material that begins to manifest in the early nineteenth century in discussions of the physicality of the book or piece of art. When Gore rejects the representation of Frederica’s outer appearance as a genuine indicator of her true feelings (Gore 1831, 1:243), she shows her affinity with an emerging realism, one in which, as Freedgood has highlighted, “our relationship to things involves by-passing their materiality in order to get to an abstraction of generalization that tell us their meaning or import or value, or even, as in the case of realism, their realness” (Freedgood 2006, 135). By turning objects into metaphors, she argues, late realism— for example, novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy—effectively commodifies the commodities of the text, as these works banish the object’s metonymies. Furthermore, the silver fork novel’s usage of visual art demonstrates its employment of themes that are later more thoroughly glossed by the Victorian novel. While Gore hints at the falsity of representations, this “feminine gift of seeing the reality behind the façade” becomes a defining mark of Victorian female realism (Onslow 1995, 451). The difference between late-Victorian fiction and the earlier prose works examined here lies largely in how these earlier works, like the early Victorian works that Freedgood also  examines, retain a sense of the object as a materialized thing in causal relationship with other materialized people and things. Gore—while utilizing the metaphor of the portrait—still acknowledges the circulation of visual representations as physical objects. An additional theme that crosses the boundary between late eighteenth-­ century literary objects and mid  nineteenth-century, as well as to some degree early twentieth-century, objects is the idea of objects collectively, what becomes prevalent in the Victorian period as the “collection” (Stewart 1984; Briggs 1988) but which can also be understood earlier in the century as the middle-class tendency toward amassing a number of objects that one does not specifically “need.” While Victorian and later collectors like Walter Benjamin (2007 [1931]) emphasize the curating, connoisseurial aspect of this activity, in “Adventures of a Mirror,” De Quincey’s Confessions, and the silver fork novel as a genre, the impulse to collect is still wrapped up in the material constraints that accompany such an activity, namely, the question of where all these material objects are going to be stored and kept. In the it-narrative and De Quincey, this is a problem of physical space; in the silver fork novel, of novelistic space— quite literally text on a page. In all three instances, the spatial aspect of the entity comes into opposition with the ideational. This is especially the case

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when reckoning with the book as a material object, as its intellectual content is subjugated to its material form. In the transitional texts examined, one still has a sense of the object’s utilitarian function and spatial dimensions. The idea of objects understood collectively demonstrates how the imbroglio of human and nonhuman in the early nineteenth century remains messy, prone to contradiction and ambivalence, as likely to aid the aesthetics of a narrative as to knock those aesthetics off balance. Authors of this period are keenly aware of the material object’s agency within their own texts, its usefulness, but also its cumbersome realities. In Victorian realism, authors attempt to assert more control over their representations, carefully policing these material ambiguities, as they usher their objects “towards productive ends” (Barkley 2014, 33). In the sensation novel, however, the role of the material remains precarious and prone to narrative outbursts of frustration. This is evidenced by Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), a novel that, while entirely different from the silver fork genre, retains the silver fork’s anxiety about the banality of the numerous objects collected in its pages. Krista Lysack argues that Lady Audley’s unapologetic acquisition of clothes, jewelry, and feminine trinkets highlights both the constructed nature of femininity (Lysack 2008, 47) and the ability to use goods to enable class mobility, what Lysack dubs “consumer-enabled fraud” (60). This novel demonstrates, like the silver fork, how objects can aid a form of social-climbing that is perceived as inimical to an orderly society. The novel probes surfaces, as Rachel A. Bowser has written, but ultimately fails to make objects “reflective of personal depth” (Bowser 2008, 90, 93). This attempt to make objects “speak” for character is a step beyond Gore’s recognition that objects cannot reflect interiority; it is an attempt to narrativize objects, to turn them into stories. Bowser’s essay provides a detailed explication of the relationship between objects and subjectivity in the novel, but she also highlights the novel’s attempts and failures to subsume objects to human meanings. As such, the novel provides an insightful look into how some of the themes of this study continued to be of interest to Victorian writers and readers, but how the focus shifted to the object’s failure to speak about human subjects, rather than its failure to perform a task. Throughout the novel, objects are employed to hint at the ”truth” hidden within the novel’s title. Like Austen, Braddon utilizes a love token, a ring, to gesture to the reader of the mystery that must be solved. In the very first chapter of the novel, Helen Talboys/Lucy/Lady Audley, the antagonist and villain of the work, takes a “ring wrapped in an oblong

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piece of paper” from her bosom as she mutters the words “every clue to identity buried and forgotten—except these” (Braddon 1998, 17). A fitting opening to a sensation novel, these objects are both obscure (the paper cannot be read, although the reader is told that it is “partly printed”) and indicative: a ring kept on a ribbon and hidden beneath one’s clothes gestures presumably to a romantic attachment. Immediately readers are expected to begin to collect these clues for themselves, as they attempt to unravel the mystery presented to them by the novel’s title. However, as Bowser stresses, these objects never figure in the investigations of the protagonist, Robert Audley (Bowser 2008, 85); instead, the omniscient narration allows the reader to observe the future Lady Audley from the outside as she sits privately in her room with these reflections. As such, these objects are never materially motivated within the novel, and they have even less materiality than the ring that Lucy Steele gives to Edward in Sense and Sensibility, for although Lucy’s hair-ring cannot be motivated, it is at least materialized, perceptible to the other characters (Austen 2006b, 113). In this sense, the ring in Braddon’s novel, like the objects examined by Roland Barthes in his essay “The Reality Effect,” exists only for the specific effect it will have on the reader, serving no purpose for the characters within the story itself (Barthes 1986, 145). Furthermore, the “secret” that the ring gestures toward is not even the “secret” of the novel’s title. The materially motivated love token that generates narrative and undermines genre in Austen’s novels here has been reduced to a barely material, marginally veiled hint to the reader that “Lucy,” the future Lady Audley, is already married. However, if the ring seems to suggest that objects have lost their generating power in the novel, the pre-Raphaelite-like portrait of Helen Talboys/Lucy/Lady Audley, on the other hand, is more ambivalent: It was so like and yet so unlike; it was as if you had burned strange-coloured fires before my lady’s face, and by their influence brought out new lines and new expressions never seen in it before. The perfection of features, the brilliancy of colouring, were there; but I suppose the painter had copied quaint mediaeval monstrosities until his brain had grown bewildered, for my lady, in his portrait of her, had something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend. (72)

A more apt hint to the reader of the “real” secret of the novel (i.e. that she is “mad”) than the ring, the portrait purports to denote the truth of Lady Audley’s character (Bowser 2008, 87). Lady Audley’s Secret plays to

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its natural conclusion the fear registered, if rejected, in Pin Money and The Young Duke, that representation—visual or textual—can be constitutive of character. However, rather than situating this power in the generative suggestiveness of the object, Lady Audley’s step-daughter, Alicia, ascribes to the artist the capability of seeing in his subject qualities that are not visible to “common eyes”: “We have never seen my lady look as she does in that picture; but I think that she could look so” (73). She suggests that the artist has seen in Lady Audley a form of evil that will be revealed in time; in the novel, this incipient evil nature is revealed later when she attempts to murder Robert Audley by setting a fire at his inn. However, the narrative also hints that Lady Audley may simply  be a product of generic tropes, as the painter has too often “copied quaint mediaeval monstrosities,” just as Braddon herself works within a generic framework. There remains here, like in the silver fork and De Quincey, an awareness of the influence of external agents on the artistic work at hand. Lady Audley’s Secret further registers a more concentrated anger toward the banal thereness of objects than that which is evident in the turn-of-­ the-century pin and pen it-narratives. When characters in those texts respond to the agency of the object with a degree of violence, these it-­ narratives gesture toward the shock, the fear that results when the object ostensibly resists or fails to do what the human wished (Andrews 2012, 4:219, 221; Anon. 2012b, 4:261). In other texts of this study, humans respond to the thereness of objects with various levels of frustration. To some degree, the metareference of silver fork novels is a type of violence against endless descriptions of lists of objects. Yet, Lady Audley’s Secret registers violence against the simple banality of the material in much more explicit terms. After Robert visits George Talboy’s family and realizes that he must continue his investigation, the narrator expands on human anger at material realities: The cab stopped in the midst of Robert Audley’s meditation, and he had to pay the cabman, and submit to all the dreary mechanism of life…. We are apt to be angry with this cruel hardness in our life—this unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the human machine, which knows no stoppage or cessation, though the mainspring be forever broken, and the hands pointing to purposeless figures upon a shattered dial. Who has not felt, in the first madness of sorrow, an unreasoning rage against the mute propriety of chairs and tables, the stiff squareness of Turkey

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carpets, the unbending obstinacy of the outward apparatus of existence? We want to root up gigantic trees in a primeval forest, and to tear their huge branches asunder in our convulsive grasp; and the utmost that we can do for the relief of our passion is to knock over an easy chair or smash a few shillings’-worth of Mr. Copeland’s manufacture. (Braddon 1998, 205–206)

Here human life is likened to a machine. “Technicalities” rule and confuse. Flesh and blood has been banished in favor of “unflinching regularity” that leads, nonetheless to purposelessness. Technology, materiality, the “clock,” is implicitly blamed for societal ills. But for all this talk of technicalities and grinding wheels, the materiality of the clock has been banished. The perception of the clock as directing the activities of the human, seen in it-narratives, and even, to some degree in Adam Smith’s comments at the beginning of this study, has transformed into a metaphor for the grinding and repetitive (banal) nature of human existence. But just when one feels that the materiality of the watch has been transformed entirely into a metaphor for reality, the narrator continues by expressing anger over the banality of domestic objects. What has happened in the century between Smith’s easy dismissal of the agency of mechanical objects and their effects on human existence and what amounts to an existential frustration that turns irrationally violent toward the most mundane household furniture? What is notable in Brandon’s summation of material domesticity is its generic invocation of even the most basic nineteenth-century furnishings—chairs and tables, objects that have shown up repeatedly in the texts of this study—leading one to ask, from whence comes this “unreasoning rage” and what has brought on such a response to the everyday thing? One answer is perhaps the increased pressure, developing in the late-­ Victorian period and evidenced by the novel itself, to make one’s domestic furnishings speak for one’s subjectivity (Cohen 2006, 122–144). It is against this pressure that Robert Browning lashes out in his poem, “House” (1876), when he imagines a “house stood gaping” due to an earthquake and the conversation of the passersby. Again the tables and chairs (Browning 1964, 93, ll. 22–28): “Odd tables and chairs for a man of wealth! What a parcel of musty old books about! He smoked,—no wonder he lost his health! “I doubt if he bathed before he dressed.

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A brasier?—the pagan, he burned perfumes! You see it is proved, what the neighbors guessed: His wife and himself had separate rooms.”

These voyeurs make judgments about the victim of an earthquake with a callousness that Browning articulates through inelegant, direct speech. The utilitarian nature of these objects is of little interest, rather, they, like De Quincey’s “furniture plain and modest,” are assumed to reflect some part of his inner self. It is no coincidence that this poem appeared the same year that Edmund Yates published his first rendition of “Celebrities at Home” as Jennifer McDonell pointed out in a paper in 2017 at the NAVSA/AVSA conference in Florence, Italy. Deborah Cohen writes that Yates’s series experienced unprecedented popularity as public figures as diverse as Disraeli, Charles Spurgeon, and Thomas Carlyle agreed to be interviewed (Cohen 2006, 122). What Browning rejects in “House” is both the idea that his personal possessions reflect back upon his identity as well as the fact that his poetry can provide a window into his soul, as he parrots the question of whether his reader will “‘Unlock my heart with a sonnet-key?’” (Browning 1964, 92, l. 4). Not only does Browning wholeheartedly reject De Quincey’s idea that objects can be artistically productive, but so also he rejects the idea that the artist’s work itself reflects the artist. While Browning ridicules a reliance upon possessions as a means of making meaning, Braddon’s narrator laments that these objects cannot be made to mean. Appearing in the middle of the nineteenth century, her work is situated between works that acknowledge and, even to some degree, embrace the important mediating role of the material and others that either reject the material altogether as meaningless (as Browning does) or that attempt to narrativize objects, as the realist novel does. This inability to acknowledge that mediation also means that “action is dislocated” results in Robert Audley’s “unreasoning rage against … the unbending obstinacy of the outward apparatus of existence” (Latour 2005, 46). Although one can trace the origins of this rage in the works examined in this study, Braddon’s novel also throws these earlier texts into stark relief and allows one to see how, for all their frustration, these earlier texts playfully handle the potential chaos—the element of surprise—that the thing provides. Despite the instability of this period after the French Revolution and before the passing of the first Reform Bill, the prose texts examined here deal humorously with the excess of objects. Object agency

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in it-narratives, Austen’s juvenilia, and the silver fork are often tied to humor, to acknowledging and to some degree critiquing the emerging human–nonhuman demarcation and all that it entails. In the “The Adventures of a Pen,” this leads the pen to take on agency for actions in which it has no part, as though it has learned to embody the stance of the author himself, who thinks he alone “pens” the piece. In Austen’s juvenilia, objects playfully help highlight the incommensurability between probability and courses of action found in generic fiction. In De Quincey, object agency is embraced, not just as a means of avoiding guilt, but also because De Quincey recognizes that objects provide unexpected possibilities, thoughts, and ways of meaning—provide both “occasions of laughter and tears.” While the silver fork registers the increasing commodification of the human, it recognizes the humor inherent in this reversal, as the “bonnet rouge” steps into the ballroom (Hudson 1827, 3:223). Key to the humor of these pieces is the hybrid nature of writing itself, suggesting that each of these writers is saying with Latour, “I never act; I am always slightly surprised by what I do” (Latour 1999, 281).

Bibliography [Andrews, Eliza]. 2012. The History of a Pin, as Related by Itself. In British It-Narratives, 1750–1830, ed. Mark Blackwell et  al. 4: 209–230. London: Pickering & Chatto. Originally published by London: E. Newberry (1798). Anon. 2012a. Adventures of a Mirror. In British It-Narratives, 1750–1830, ed. Mark Blackwell et  al. 4: 165–177. London: Pickering & Chatto. Originally published in Lady’s Magazine (1791). ———. 2012b. The Adventures of a Pen. In British It-Narratives, 1750–1830, ed. Mark Blackwell et  al., 4: 253–275. London: Pickering & Chatto. Originally published in European Magazine and London Review, 50 (1806). Austen, Jane. 2006a. Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006b. Sense and Sensibility, ed. Edward Copeland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Barkley, Danielle. 2014. Reading the Details: Realism and the Silver Fork Novel, 1825–1845. PhD diss., Montreal: McGill University. Barthes, Roland. 1986. The Reality Effect. In The Rustle of Language, 141–148. Trans. Basil Blackwell. Oxford: Blackwell. Benjamin, Walter. 2007. Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting. In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, 59–67. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.

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Bowser, Rachel A. 2008. Shattered Dials and Mute Objects: The Surfaces of Lady Audley’s Secret. Genre 41: 75–94. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. 1998. Lady Audley’s Secret, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor. London: Penguin Books. Briggs, Asa. 1988. Victorian Things. London: B.T. Batsford. Browning, Robert. 1964. House. In Robert Browning’s Poems and Plays, 5: 92–94. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Cohen, Deborah. 2006. Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. De Quincey, Thomas. 2001 (1821). Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar. In The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop, 2: 1–79. London: Pickering & Chatto. Disraeli, Benjamin. 1831. The Young Duke, 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. Ford, Natalie. 2007. Beyond Opium: De Quincey’s Range of Reveries. The Cambridge Quarterly 36 (3): 229–249. Freedgood, Elaine. 2006. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gore, Catherine. 1831. Pin Money, 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. Hudson, Marianne Spencer Stanhope. 1827. Almack’s, 3 vols. 2nd ed. London: Saunders and Oatley. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Lysack, Krista. 2008. Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing. Athens: Ohio University Press. Miller, Andrew H. 1995. Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture, and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Onslow, Barbara. 1995. Deceiving Images, Revealing Images: The Portrait in Victorian Women’s Writing. Victorian Poetry 33 (3/4): 450–475. Smith, Adam. 1979. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D.  Raphael and A.L. Macfie. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, Susan. 1984. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wagner, Tamara S. 2009. From Satirized Silver Cutlery to the Allure of the Anti-­ Domestic in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing: Silver-Fork Fiction and Its Literary Legacies. Women’s Writing 16 (2): 181–190.

Index1

A Addison, Joseph “Adventures of a Shilling” (1710), 47 Adorno, Theodor, 11 Affordance, 145 Alworth, David, 26, 166 Andrews, Eliza The History of a Pin, as Related by Itself (1798), 26, 45, 52–59, 235 Anonymous works “The Adventures of a Gold-Ring” (1783), 48 “The Adventures of a Goose-Quill, In the Manner of Mrs. Midnight’s Tye-Wig” (1751), 69, 76, 83n28 “Adventures of a Mirror” (1791), 2, 4, 11, 26, 45, 60–67, 101, 232

“The Adventures of a Pen” (1806), 26, 45, 48, 60, 67–79, 175n13, 235, 238 “Adventures of a Quire of Paper” (1779), 3, 48, 49, 81n9, 154, 176n14 “The Adventures of a Watch!” (1788), 1, 11 The Genuine and Most Surprizing Adventures of a Very Unfortunate Goose-Quill (1751), 49, 69 The Life and Adventures of a Cat (1760), 81n9 The Memoirs and Interesting Adventures of an Embroidered Waistcoat (1751), 48, 81n9 The Sedan (1757), 48, 51 The Travels of Mons. Le Post-Chaise (1753), 48

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

Anthropocentrism, 15, 22, 23, 44, 53, 149, 231 Anthropomorphization, 78, 123, 130n18, 230 Aristocracy, 30, 152, 187, 191, 194, 198, 206, 209 Austen, Anna, 96 Austen, Henry, 98 Austen, Jane, 4, 12, 13, 21, 23–25, 27, 28, 44, 51, 140, 150, 174, 221n5, 229 A Collection of Letters, 106 defense of the novel, 217 Emma, 27, 92, 97, 98, 106, 115–127, 140, 174n3 Henry and Eliza, 103 Jack and Alice, 101 juvenilia (general), 26, 91, 95, 98, 129n7, 238 Love & Friendship, 99 Mansfield Park, 94, 120, 123 Northanger Abbey, 96, 99, 106, 110, 217 Persuasion, 96, 99 Pride and Prejudice, 94, 129n13, 130n16 Sense and Sensibility, 27, 94, 97, 106, 108–114, 140, 163, 174n3, 234 The Visit, 100, 101, 129n9 Austen Leigh, James Edward A Memoir of Jane Austen, 99 Autobiography, 44, 137, 139, 141, 149, 165, 176n16 B Barad, Karen, 10, 19, 20, 34n16, 35n21, 189, 193 Barthes, Roland “The Reality Effect,” 234 Benjamin, Walter, 168, 176n18, 232

Bennett, Jane, 15–17 Best, Stephen, 14, 32n12 Bewes, Timothy, 12, 14, 32n10 Books (as objects), 22, 24, 28, 140, 155–157, 166–168, 232, 233 Boredom, see Silver fork novel Bourdieu, Pierre, 32n11, 123 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth Lady Audley’s Secret, 233–235, 237 Brontë, Charlotte, 93 Brown, Bill, 5, 22–24, 58, 65, 66, 72, 125, 137, 149, 156, 176n18 critique of Marxism, 13 Thing Theory, 15, 21, 46, 93, 95, 172 views on literature, 20, 24 Browning, Robert “House,” 236, 237 Burlesque, 99, 101, 103, 105, 106 Burney, Fanny, 95, 128n1 Camilla, 221n5 C Campbell, Colin, 10, 31n7 consumer character ideals, 164 Capitalism, 12, 13, 15, 187, 199 Causality, 151 plot, 27, 97, 103 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 6 Chinoiserie, 171, 177n21 Cleland, John Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), 83n27 Colburn, Henry, 188, 189, 196, 220n3 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 29, 138, 150, 151, 166, 174n2 Collections (of objects), 66, 232 Commodities, 12, 13, 186, 188, 213, 218, 220, 232

 INDEX 

Confessional literature, 137, 143 Consumerism, 8, 9, 12, 32n7, 43, 66, 94, 108, 128n4, 186, 188, 192, 198, 199, 206, 207, 213, 214 advertising, 186, 189, 191 aristocratic, 193 conspicuous, 191 emulative hypothesis, 13 middle-class, 8, 66, 116, 129n9, 163, 165, 171, 193 opium, 10, 29, 164, 169, 177n23 respectability, 8, 9, 29, 101, 138, 163 romantic, 164 shopping, 186, 202 social climbing, 116, 191, 233 Victorian, 8, 187, 236 Coventry, Francis The History of Pompey the Little (1751), 47 D Dandy, 192, 198, 202, 215 Dannenberg, Hilary counterfactual narration, 27, 91, 93, 95, 108, 114, 217 De Quincey, Thomas, 4, 10, 16, 21, 23–25, 28, 185, 187, 229, 230, 237, 238 antagonism, 138, 139, 145, 162 books, 164, 166, 168 class, 151, 152, 161, 163, 173, 175n12 Confessions (1821), 28, 101, 128, 137–184, 177n23, 204, 231, 232 Confessions (1856), 142, 143 debt, 159, 161, 168, 172 The English Mail Coach, 177n22 guilt, 143, 159, 168 “The Household Wreck” (1838), 159, 161 “Infant Literature” (1852), 147

243

involute, 138, 145–147, 162, 168, 169, 172, 173, 175n6 “Letters to a Young Man … On Languages” (1823), 176n17 “Madness” (1824), 146, 150 “Notes … Walking Stewart” (1823), 156 opium, 151, 155, 164, 167, 171, 173 on publication, 155 romanticism, 138, 174n2 “Sketches of Life and Manners” (1835), 158 “The Street Companion” (1825), 176n19 “Style, No. IV” (1841), 155 Suspiria de Profundis, 144, 145, 159, 163, 168 Walladmor (1825), 175n11 Deodand, 129n10 Derrida, Jacques, 34n19, 169 Description, 3, 8, 9, 29, 30, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 106, 111, 161–163, 174, 185, 188, 191, 199–202, 204–206, 209, 213, 215 Detective fiction, 123, 126 Didactic literature, 25, 26, 44, 46, 52–60, 68, 75 Disraeli, Benjamin, 190, 208 The Young Duke, 21, 30, 68, 187, 190, 194, 196, 206, 210, 212, 215, 216, 218, 221n6, 222n12, 235 Dove Cottage, 161, 166, 167, 169, 172, 204 E Edgeworth, Maria, 95, 128n1, 201, 221n5 Ekphrasis, 187, 214 Eliot, George, 93, 232 Enlightenment, 12, 53, 81n11, 111, 130n16

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INDEX

F Felski, Rita, 14, 32n12 Fielding, Henry, 83n25 Focalization, 91, 94, 95, 109 Foucault, Michel, 19, 35n21 Freedgood, Elaine, 12, 23, 231, 232 French Revolution, 5, 237 G Genette, Gérard, 81n10, 92 Genre conventions, 25, 27, 30, 103, 114, 185, 188, 211, 217, 219, 235 evolution, 5, 211, 231 Gift, 118, 120, 121, 123 Gildon, Charles The Golden Spy (1709), 47 Godwin, William Things as They Are, 20 Goffman, Erving, 32n11 Gore, Catherine, 185, 196, 198, 220n2, 221n8 “The Auction,” 149 The Manners of the Day, 193, 200 Pin Money, 30, 189–193, 195, 199, 201, 203–205, 208, 209, 212, 214, 216, 217, 220n4, 222n12, 232, 235 Gothic novel, 105, 106, 110 Greimas, A. J., 17, 33n14 Grévedon, Henri, 195, 197 H Hack (authorship), 25, 49, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81n7 Hair ring, 109, 114 Hamilton, Anne The Adventures of a Seven-Shilling Piece (1811), 48 Hardy, Thomas, 232

Hays, Mary The Victim of Prejudice, 70 Hazlitt, William, 186, 200, 205 Holbein the Younger, Hans, 187, 214 Honneth, Axel, 32n10 Hood, Thomas “The Workhouse Clock,” 1 Hudson, Marianne Almack’s, 30, 190–192, 194, 201, 208, 210, 215, 238 Hume, David, 57, 58, 60, 63, 82n15, 82n18, 97, 130n16 Humor, 107, 238 theory of, 59, 82n19 Hutchinson, Sara, 167 I Icon (religious), 6, 7 Imperialism (British), 169, 170, 176n20 Inchbald, Elizabeth Nature and Art, 70 Individuality, 9, 199 Investiture, 6 It-narratives, 12, 16, 23, 43, 95, 96, 107, 137, 154, 176n14, 216, 229, 232, 238 prostitution, 31n4, 83n27 (see also Sentimental literature) See also Anonymous works; Didactic literature J Jameson, Frederic, 11 John Broadwood and Sons, 116, 119, 130n17 Johnson, Samuel, 61, 83n21 Johnson, Theophilus Phantoms, or, The Adventures of a Gold-Headed Cane (1783), 48, 49, 81n9

 INDEX 

Johnstone, Charles Chrysal, or, the Adventures of a Guinea (1760–64), 48, 52, 81n7 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 6, 7, 27, 30, 31n5 K Kafka, Franz, 159 “The Cares of a Family Man,” 157 Kant, Immanuel, 82n16 Kilner, Dorothy The Adventures of a Hackney Coach (1781), 68, 81n7 Kilner, Mary Ann The Adventures of a Pincushion (1784), 53, 55 L Lacan, Jacques, 83n22 Lamb, Jonathan, 4, 20, 149 Latour, Bruno, 4, 32n12, 33n14, 45, 50, 60, 61, 64, 65, 75, 94, 101, 104, 105, 108, 113, 130n18, 140, 144, 175n8, 198, 203, 237, 238 actant, 17, 18, 22, 190, 203, 220 Actor-Network Theory (ANT), 15, 17, 18, 21, 33n15, 51, 123 assemblage, 13, 17–20, 34n16, 118, 145, 189 blackboxing, 34n20 delegation, 72, 102 factish, 20, 25, 174, 190 fetishes, 7, 31n3 modernity, 7, 11, 18 technical mediation, 102 views on literature, 17, 19 Law, John, 34n18, 149 LeCain, Timothy, 16

245

Lejeune, Philippe, 175n4 Library, 141, 162, 164, 167, 168, 176n16 Bodleian, 155, 168 lending, 194 Lister, Henry Granby, 30, 191, 192, 218 Lithograph, 30, 189, 194, 195, 197, 214, 219, 221n7 Love, Heather, 14, 32n12 Love token, 27, 108, 113, 120, 233 Lukács, Georg, 9, 32n9, 92, 199, 200 Lupton, Christina, 5, 10, 21, 190, 216, 222n19, 222n20 Luxury, 8, 128n4, 163, 164, 202, 204 M MacGuffin, 115 Marcus, Sharon, 14, 32n12 Marriage plot, 27, 98, 127 Marx, Karl, 13, 32n9, 35n22 Marxism commodity fetish, 11, 13, 23 literary theory, 11, 12, 14 Materially motivated object, 92, 94, 96, 98, 103, 112, 125, 127, 234 Material turn, 12, 14 Mauss, Marcel, 121, 123 McKendrick, Neil, 8 Mechanization, 10, 32n9 Metalepsis, 212 Metareference, see Silver fork novel, metareference Miniature, 30, 189, 193, 203, 214, 219 Mise en abyme, 218 Montaigne, Michel de, 165, 176n16 Morton, Timothy, 10, 12, 15–17, 163 criticism of, 33n13 hyperobjects, 15, 33n13

246 

INDEX

N Nagel, Thomas, 64 Narrative theory, 199 Nature, 8, 138 Newgate prison, 27, 104–106 New materialism, 14, 15, 17 criticism of, 33n13 O Objectification, 73, 148, 169, 192–194, 196 Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), 15 See also Bennett, Jane; Morton, Timothy Opium, see Consumerism; De Quincey, Thomas Opium wars, 176n20 P Palmer, Charlotte The Silver Thimble (1799), 48, 53, 57, 81n9 Parody, 45, 67, 73, 96, 103, 186, 211, 212, 219 Peacock, Lucy The Life of a Bee. Related by Herself (1800), 53 Performance, 189, 190 Pianoforte, 13, 27, 98, 115–128 Plot, see Causality; Marriage plot Portraiture, 187, 193, 214, 234 Posthumanism, 15 Postmodern fiction, 211, 212 Poststructuralism, 14, 34n19 Price, Leah, 157, 166 Prosopopoeia, 2 Pseudo-gentry, 116 Psychoanalysis, 107

R Radcliffe, Ann, 25, 51 Realism, 103, 199, 200, 202, 206, 231–233, 237 Recycling, 16, 153, 154, 176n14 Reformation, 6 Reform Bill, 5, 152, 191, 231, 237 Reification, 7, 11, 12, 31n5, 32n10, 188, 230 Religion, 6 Renaissance, 11, 27, 30, 31n4 Representation, 29, 187–189, 191, 193, 198, 201, 203, 206–208, 211, 215, 217, 219, 232, 235 Richardson, Samuel, 91, 128n1 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 176n16 Romanticism, 138, 143, 174n2, 175n6, 175n12, 186 Rosenkranz, Karl, 210 Rubens, Peter Paul, 187, 214 S Satire, 44, 59, 60, 73, 211 Scott, Helenus The Adventures of a Rupee (1782), 48, 60 Scott, Walter, 68, 96, 175n11, 199, 210 Self-reflexivity, see Silver fork novel, self-reflexivity Senefelder, Alois, 195 Sensation fiction, 233, 234 Sentimental literature, 68, 70, 71, 73–75, 95, 96, 99, 102 Sight, 6, 8 Silver fork novel, 10, 22, 23, 29, 97, 111, 140, 174, 185, 229–233, 238 advertising, 202, 220n3, 221n11

 INDEX 

Almack’s, 191, 194, 208 authors, 210, 211 boredom, 206, 207, 210, 219, 222n12 class, 187 metareference, 30, 186–188, 211, 218, 222n14, 222n16 morality, 200, 202, 210, 217, 219 receipt, 218 reviews, 201, 202, 213 romans à clef, 193 self-reflexivity, 3, 16, 27, 56, 68, 70, 71, 74, 185, 188, 211, 212, 216, 219, 220, 230 Smart, Christopher “The Genuine Memoirs of an Unfortunate Tye-Wig” (1751), 50 Smith, Adam, 97 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1, 31n7, 230, 236 Wealth of Nations, 54 Smith, Charlotte, 8–9 Sociology of literature, 14, 33n12 Stallybrass, Peter, 6–7, 27, 30, 31n5 Stanica, Miruna, 19, 27, 33n14, 92, 152 Steel trap, 101, 102, 104 Sterne, Laurence, 68, 222n13

247

T Thackeray, William Makepeace, 231 V van Dyck, Anthony, 214 Veblen, Thorsten, 13 Verisimilitude, 63, 188, 199, 200, 205 Victorian fiction, 23, 186, 188, 200, 231, 232 Victorian period, 63, 187, 231, 232, 236 Visual art, see Ekphrasis; Lithograph; Miniature; Portraiture Vitalism, 15, 138 W Wahrman, Dror, 9 Wall, Cynthia, 3, 8, 11, 158, 199, 201, 221n10 Wolf, Werner, 199, 204, 211, 217, 221n10, 222n14, 223n21 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 81n11 Wordsworth, William, 29, 138, 139, 146, 150, 151, 164, 166 Y Yates, Edmund “Celebrities at Home,” 237