The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England

263 Pages·2009·1.96 MB·English

by  Linda Zionkowski, Cynthia Klekar (eds.)

The Culture of the Gift in
Eighteenth-Century England
The Culture of the Gift in
Eighteenth-Century England
Edited by
Linda Zionkowski
and
Cynthia Klekar
THE CULTURE OF THE GIFT IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND
Copyright © Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-60829-0
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-37512-7 ISBN 978-0-230-61841-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230618411
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The culture of the gift in eighteenth-century England / edited by
Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism.
2. Generosity in literature. 3. Politics and literature—Great Britain—
History—18th century. 4. Great Britain—Intellectual life—
18th century. 5. Locke, John, 1632–1704—Influence. 6. Social
classes—England—History—18th century. 7. English language—
18th century—Social aspects. I. Zionkowski, Linda. II. Klekar, Cynthia.
PR448.G46C85 2009
820.9(cid:2)005—dc22 2008024779
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: January 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
List of Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar
I Theories of Benevolence
1 R ights and Reciprocity in the Political and Philosophical
Discourse of Eighteenth-Century England 15
Anna Moltchanova and Susannah Ottaway
2 C harity Education and the Spectacle of
“Christian Entertainment” 37
Jad Smith
3 D ebt without Redemption in a World of “Impossible
Exchange”: Samuel Richardson and Philanthropy 55
John A. Dussinger
II Conduct and the Gift
4 ’Tis Better to Give: The Conduct Manual as Gift 79
Marilyn Francus
5 T he Gift of an Education: Sarah Trimmer’s Oeconomy
of Charity and the Sunday School Movement 107
Dorice Williams Elliott
III The Erotics of the Gift
6 O bligation, Coercion, and Economy: The Deed of Trust in
Congreve’s The Way of the World 125
Cynthia Klekar
vi Contents
7 The Erotics of the Gift: Gender and Exchange in the
Eighteenth-Century Novel 143
Charles Haskell Hinnant
8 Fictions of the Gift in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall 159
Jennie Batchelor
9 The Nation, the Gift, and the Market in The Wanderer 177
Linda Zionkowski
IV The Gift and Commerce
10 Josiah Wedgwood’s Goodwill Marketing 197
Susan B. Egenolf
11 Anson at Canton, 1743: Obligation, Exchange, and
Ritual in Edward Page’s “Secret History” 215
Robert Markley
Bibliography 235
Index 253
Acknowledgments
It seems altogether appropriate that a collection of essays on the topic of
gift relations should begin with a note of thanks. For the time and energy
that they devoted to helping this book take shape, our contributors deserve
our deepest gratitude; working with them has been a pleasure from begin-
ning to end. Institutional support for our research and editorial labor has
been generous as well. Joseph McLaughlin, chair of the English Department
of Ohio University; Ohio University’s College of Arts and Sciences; and
Western Michigan University’s College of Arts and Sciences have pro-
vided us with timely assistance in bringing our manuscript into print.
Behind the scenes, our reader at Palgrave offered encouragement and
insightful advice on individual essays and on the collection as a whole. We
are especially grateful to our copyeditor, John Knapp, who brought to this
project an admirable degree of expertise, professionalism, and patience.
Thanks are also due to Rick Huard, who composed our index with preci-
sion and insight in record time. Our most profound debts, of course, are
to our families and friends, whose innumerable gifts can never be
returned.
Contributors
Jennie Batchelor is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at
the University of Kent. She has published various essays on gender and
material culture, and is the author of Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing
and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature (2005), and
coeditor of and contributor to British Women’s Writing in the Long
Eighteenth Century: Authorship, History, Politics (2005) and Women
and Material Culture, 1660–1830 (2007). She is currently completing a
monograph on literary representations of manual and intellectual labor
in women’s writing between 1750 and 1830.
John A. Dussinger is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Author of The Discourse of the Mind in
Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1974) and In the Pride of the Moment:
Encounters in Jane Austen’s World (1990), and numerous articles and
reviews on eighteenth-century subjects, he is currently editing the letters of
Thomas Edwards, Sarah Wescomb, Laetitia Pilkington, and Frances
Grainger for The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of
Samuel Richardson. His recent work includes articles in Studies in
Bibliography, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Papers for the
Bibliographical Society of America on Richardson’s anonymous writings;
a critical biography of Thomas Edwards (1699?–1757) is also in progress.
Susan B. Egenolf is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M
University, where she teaches courses in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-
century British and Irish literature and culture and Women’s Studies. Her
publications, such as her forthcoming study The Art of Political Fiction
in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson (2008), have focused primarily
upon women writers and the intersections of literature and the visual
arts. Her current book-length project is an exploration of Josiah
Wedgwood and his influence upon Romantic aesthetics.
Dorice Williams Elliott is Associate Professor and Chair of the English
Department at the University of Kansas. Her book, The Angel out of the
x Contributors
House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England
(2002), was published by the University Press of Virginia. She has pub-
lished articles on Elizabeth Gaskell, Hannah More, Sarah Scott, and
Jane Austen, and on servants, class, and Australian convicts. She is cur-
rently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled “Transporting
Class: Reinventing Social Relations in Australian Convict Fiction.”
Marilyn Francus is Associate Professor of English at West Virginia
University. She is editor of The Burney Journal and author of The
Converting Imagination: Linguistic Theory and Swift’s Satiric Prose
(1994), as well as multiple articles on eighteenth-century literature and
culture. She is currently writing a book on monstrous motherhood in the
eighteenth century.
Charles Haskell Hinnant served as the Catherine Paine Middlebush
Chair from 1996 to 1999 before retiring from the University of Missouri
English Department in 2000. He is the author of seven books, most
recently The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Edition (1998), which he
coedited with Barbara McGovern, and a number of articles, the latest of
them on Defoe, Austen, Shaftesbury, Burke, and Wollstonecraft. His
edition of the anonymous picaresque novel, The London Jilt (1683), was
published by Broadview Press in 2008. A companion to his essay on “The
Erotics of the Gift,” entitled “Gifts and Wages: The Structures of
Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Drama,” is forthcoming in
Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Cynthia Klekar is Assistant Professor of English and Associate Editor of
Comparative Drama at Western Michigan University. Her work has
appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and The Journal for Early
Modern Cultural Studies, and is forthcoming in Philological Quarterly
and Eighteenth-Century Studies. She is currently completing a book
entitled Fictions of the Gift: Generosity, Obligation, and Economy in
Eighteenth-Century England.
Robert Markley is Professor of English and Romano Professorial Scholar
at the University of Illinois, and editor of The Eighteenth Century:
Theory and Interpretation. His books include Two-Edg’d Weapons:
Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and
Congreve (1998); Crises of Representation in Newtonian England,
1660–1740 (1993); Virtual Realities and Their Discontents (an edited
collection of essays); Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination
(2005); and The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730
(2006). He is currently working on two books—one on climate and cul-
ture before and after the age of fossil fuels, the other a study of European–
Asian relations between 1740 and 1850.
Contributors xi
Anna Moltchanova is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Carleton
College. She received her Ph.D. from McGill University in 2001. Her
present research deals with issues in international law and global justice
and with theories of group agency and group intentionality as they relate
to social moral epistemology. Her article “Stateless National Groups,
International Justice and Asymmetrical Warfare” appeared in The Journal
of Political Philosophy 13. 2 (2005), and “Nationhood and Political
Culture” appeared in Journal of Social Philosophy 38. 2 (2007).
Susannah Ottaway is Associate Professor of History at Carleton College.
She is the author of The Decline of Life: Old Age in Eighteenth-Century
England (2004), and the coeditor of The History of Old Age in England,
1660–1800 (2008), an eight-volume set of primary sources on old age in
early modern England, and Power and Poverty: Old Age in the Pre-
industrial Past (2002). She is currently working on a project on work-
houses and poor relief reform movements in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.
Jad Smith is Assistant Professor of British Literature and Cultural Studies
at Eastern Illinois University. His work “Custom, Association, and the
Mixed Mode: Locke’s Early Theory of Cultural Reproduction” appeared
in ELH 73. 4 (2006), and “How Fanny Comes to Know: Sensation,
Sexuality, and the Epistemology of the Closet in Cleland’s Memoirs”
appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 44. 2–3
(2002). His book manuscript, Childhood and Moral Reform in the Age
of Locke, explores the relationship of childhood and culture in early
eighteenth-century knowledge economies linked to projects of social
reform.
Linda Zionkowski is Professor of English at Ohio University and author
of Men’s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry,
1660–1784 (2001), as well as numerous articles on authorship and print
culture. She served as editor for Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture,
volumes 37–38, and is currently finishing a book on women and gift
economies in novels by Richardson, Burney, and Austen.