SOURCE: Ebersole, Gary L. “Capturing the Audience: Sentimental Literature and the New Reading Covenant.” In Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity, pp. 98-128. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995.

[In the excerpt below, Ebersole traces the emergence of the sentimental novel format in eighteenth-century captivity narratives, focusing on Edward Kimber's novel The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson.]

Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. … By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations.

—Adam Smith

Puritan captivity narratives—part confessional, part meditational text, and part jeremiad—were dominant for two generations. By the early eighteenth century the Puritan divines' monopoly over publication in America had ended, while the American book trade saw ever-increasing imports of works, both nonfictional and fictional, from England and Europe.¹ Captivity was to remain a popular literary theme, but it was to be narratively cast in a different fashion and consumed to different effect. The most significant development in terms of literary form was the emergence and tremendous popularity of the sentimental novel.

Most studies have overemphasized the discontinuities between the Puritan works of the seventeenth century and the fictional captivities of the eighteenth century while ignoring important elements of continuity. Drawing upon the recent work of J. Paul Hunter, G. J. Barker-Benfield, and others, I will suggest that the sentimental novel developed out of the increased emphasis in the eighteenth century on the affections of the heart—“sentiments”—as the locus of morality. With the appropriation and adaptation of features of earlier genres, the sentimental novel represented a newly emergent social reality.

The reading practices discussed in the preceding chapters were adapted to new ends. The sentimental novel was both a product and a producer of a new reading community, based on a shared understanding (which I shall call a new “reading covenant”) of epistemology, human nature, and the moral significance of the transaction between author, text, and audience. Only after tracing the outlines of this emergent worldview, with its emphasis on the moral significance of one's affective responses to the existential situations of other human beings in the real world and in literature, will we be able to appreciate the cultural role the captivity topos played at this time.

The sentimental novels that appeared in great numbers from the 1740s onwards, beginning most especially with Samuel Richardson's Pamela, were very different from the earlier sorts of texts we have seen, even as they shared certain elements. The captivity narratives produced in this period were not limited to sentimental works, but a large number were cast in this mode. Moreover, Pamela, the paradigm of virtue-in-distress, was herself a captive of a sort, suggesting an early link between sentimental fiction and the captivity topos.² In this chapter, two eighteenth-century works—Edward Kimber's The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson (1754) and Ann Eliza Bleeker's The History of Maria Kittle (1797)—will illustrate both the general assumptions operative in sentimental literature and the way scenes of Indian captivity functioned therein. Kimber's is one of the earliest sentimental novels to include a captivity episode, while Bleeker's work represents a famous example of a fictional captivity narrative presented to the reader as a factual account. Not limiting our purview to works written or published in America may also remind us that the book market of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was transatlantic in nature, since many works of fiction published in Europe were readily available in America.

It must be said immediately, however, that the distinction commonly drawn between fictional and nonfictional captivities is problematic. Some of the fictional narratives are based, however loosely, on an actual captivity (e.g., the many stories of Jane MacRea), while many so-called nonfictional works have been embellished (some a little bit, others to a much greater extent) with events and scenes that did not happen. Moreover, narrative stylization in these works often functioned to shape disparate events into similar tales. The intertextual relations among works were complex—works of fiction constantly borrowed descriptions and even whole action scenes from earlier travel or journal accounts, while factual accounts were similarly influenced by fictional descriptions. Many students of the captivity narratives have despaired over the hybrid character of so many of these texts, preferring plain, first-person, historical accounts above all others. Yet as Cathy Davidson has reminded us in a different context, this approach to works of fiction from this period is wrongheaded; works of fiction helped to create events in history through the very act of narrative representation, which always included interpretation.³

Unfortunately, most fictional captivities have received short shrift from literary critics and historians. Some critics have been quick to dismiss many novels as penny dreadfuls, hardly worthy of critical attention. Richard Van Der Beets, voicing a common prejudice, suggests that “for all practical purposes and with few exceptions, the two-hundred-year development of the narratives of Indian captivity culminates in the travesty of the Penny Dreadful.” Thirty-five years earlier Roy Harvey Pearce had stated as an obvious and indisputable fact, “The first, and greatest, of the captivity narratives are simple, direct religious documents,” while many of the later narratives were, to his mind at least, “mainly vulgar, fictional, and pathological.”⁴ Many other critics have found most of the popular novels to be bad literature and the products of the hack writer gone wild. These novels are characterized as being filled with cardboard characters, impossible plot twists, absurd coincidences, and heavy-handed moralism. Moreover, most modern readers find the plots of sentimental novels to be both predictable and redundant, much as are the story lines of modern romance novels. Such judgments, though, finally tell us more about the different reading structures and expectations of modern readers than they tell us anything of significance about the meaning of these texts in the lives (imaginary and real) of earlier readers.

In 1794 Susanna Haswell Rowson, one of the most successful American novelists of her generation, wrote, “I wonder that the novel readers are not tired of reading one story so many times, with only the variation of its being told in different ways.”⁵ While Rowson was speaking of the sentimental novel, the genre in which she worked, her comment is equally relevant to captivity narratives. Rowson's puzzlement is instructive, for she rightly sees that the fact that a familiar plot remains popular over time is a problem requiring explanation. To her credit, unlike some modern scholars, she does not take the shared general plot to be an adequate explanation of the popularity of the texts. The pleasure readers found (and find) in reading basically the same story again and again was (and is) a function of the specific reading practices and expectations readers bring to them. In this regard, we may recall that many types of narrative, from myths and folktales to children's bedtime stories, are consumed not for their novelty but for their familiarity. As Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty has rightly noted, “People listen to the stories not merely to learn something new (communication), but to relive, together, the stories that they already know, stories about themselves (communion). Where communication is effective, communion is evocative.”⁶

The consequences of failing to reconstruct the reading practices of earlier generations while projecting one's own back onto texts are evident in many studies. For example, in a generally excellent study of the literary representations of the American Indian, Louise K. Barnett's discussion of fictional captivities is marred by her uncritical acceptance of the long-standing negative evaluation of sentimental and romantic fiction. “Although the captivity narrative continued to be published successfully during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century,” she writes, “by 1800, according to Roy Harvey Pearce, it ‘had all but completed its decline and fall.’ Its vitality passed at this time into overt fiction in which the horrors and travails of the frontier experience were combined with a complicated romantic plot of English origin. In this amalgam, a set of foreign and artificial conventions was superimposed on the basically real and indigenous captivity events.” Jay Fliegelman, in his masterful study Prodigals and Pilgrims, slips into this same characterization of the history of captivity narratives as one of progressive degeneration.⁷

This evaluation of the history of the captivity narrative is unacceptable for a number of reasons. First, by privileging the plain first-person Puritan accounts as the paradigm and norm against which all other captivities are to be measured, the fictional narratives inevitably emerge as distorted or corrupt. Moreover, the assumption that the Puritan first-person accounts were objective reports, uncolored by any stylistic or genre conventions is untenable. Barnett mistakenly assumes that at this time in history English literature and American literature were neatly and meaningfully separated. This allows her to assume that romantic conventions were alien to America, while American writers had ready at hand their own separate cultural idioms and conventions with which they could narratively represent “the basically real and indigenous captivity events.” She implies that while it may be acceptable that romantic conventions were imposed on the historical reality of captivity from a distance by foreign writers, this is unforgivable in American literature, which, in order to be authentic, should capture and represent the historical reality. To put this another way, Barnett shares the broadly held assumption that early American literature—or at least the best of it—is realistic. Yet for readers in the eighteenth century, Pamela, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, and other similar works were all held to be realistic. Indeed, realism was understood to be one of the hallmarks of the novel.

For their part, historians of religions have tended to focus their attention almost exclusively on those texts that are explicitly religious, ignoring others that are not. Thus, Puritan captivity narratives, with their informing theological interpretive frame and explicit biblical citations, have been considered appropriate objects of study, while works of fiction (and most especially sentimental novels) have not. Yet we can learn something about the social function of religion and of the history of religion in Europe and America by paying attention to what replaced an explicitly religious interpretive frame in the narration and reception of essentially the same event or existential situation. Thus, if we find that the Puritan interpretive frame had largely disappeared from most captivity narratives by the mid-eighteenth century while captivity tales continued to be generated in great numbers, then we need to explore the significance of this fact and to investigate what replaced the earlier interpretive frame and see how this shift affected the reception of the captivity story line. Moreover, we need to understand the continuing attraction of captivity as a narrative topos in different types or genres of literature, as well as to understand the new questions and concerns that people brought to these texts. In pursuing this task, we will once again explore issues of generative occasion and authorial intention, as well as the reading practices and expectations brought to bear on captivities.

THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF SENTIMENTS

An appreciation of the socioeconomic and historical developments contributing to the emergence of a “culture of sensibility” in the eighteenth century, of the reading structures brought to the sentimental novel, and of the horizon of expectations of the readers of such texts will prove much more important in increasing our understanding of the cultural work of the captivities from this period than will a facile appeal to the congenial nature of the theme or to archetypalism. We ignore to our peril the significance of what some scholars have called a paradigm shift in cultural discourse in the decades following the publication of Mary Rowlandson's narrative in 1682, resulting from a convergence of developments in science, physiology, epistemology, and religion.

A number of recent studies have greatly increased our knowledge of the origins and development of sentimental literature. Several important cultural developments in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries deserve mention here, since they led to the emergence of new epistemological assumptions and new compositional and reading practices. Newton's Principia (1687) and his Opticks (1704) changed the scientific view of the world. Newton's work had an important impact on the religious worldview of many and affected the literary sphere as well. For our immediate purposes, it is enough to recall that Newton's great intellectual prestige led many to take his work on sensory perception seriously.⁸

In his research into how human beings come to know anything about the world around them, Newton argued for the existence of an organ in the body called the sensorium, the node of all the nerves in the brain. Already in 1675 he had argued that the nerves were solid, rather than hollow, and transmitted sense impressions through vibrations carried to the brain, where they were registered by the sensorium. Significantly, Newton's sensational psychology was promulgated along with an implicit religious worldview. He argued that the human sensorium was a part of God's “boundless uniform Sensorium.” Linking these two was to have important consequences. For Newton, the world was a divine book to be read by man, who could know God and his grandeur by discovering the laws at the foundation of the universe. By identifying the sensorium in each individual with the boundless uniform sensorium of God—and by invoking the metaphor of reading nature—Newton was to open the way for a revisioning of human nature, divine providence, and the significance of human affective responses to external stimuli.

The Puritan literature of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was replete with reports of the great variety of wonders, miracles, and instances of God's direct intervention in the world known as “special providences.” The Puritans also spoke of God's “general providence,” which ordered and structured the universe and maintained its regularity and, thus, functionally was roughly equivalent to Newton's natural laws. In general, however, the Puritans were more interested in appealing to the agency of special providence in order to explain events in history than in proving God's general providence through scientific experimentation. While many seventeenth-century texts besides the captivity narratives regularly invoked special providence as an interpretive frame, such appeals declined noticeably in the literature of the early eighteenth century, the writings of Cotton Mather notwithstanding.

Moreover, at the same time—first among the Cambridge Platonists and then more broadly—the predominant conception of God shifted from that of the excoriating and afflicting God of the Old Testament to that of a more benevolent God. Concomitantly, human nature was also reconceptualized from the earlier emphasis on the fallen and corrupt state of humanity to a more positive view of humans as innately compassionate beings.⁹ For our purposes it is most important to note that the new sensational psychology led to a revaluation of the moral significance of human emotional and somatic responses and, by extension, to a revaluation of audience responses to nature, art, and narrative activity.

While this history cannot be rehearsed in any detail here, we can say that Newton's ideas were quickly picked up and extended by many others, including Locke, whom Newton christened “the first Newtonian philosopher.” In his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke dismissed Descartes's idea that humans were born with innate ideas; instead, he characterized the infant as a tabula rasa. All human knowledge, Locke maintained, was gained through sensory perceptions. This sensationalist epistemology was then translated into a pedagogical program by Locke in Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693), “a volume whose influence on eighteenth-century English culture and especially eighteenth-century English literature can hardly be overemphasized.”¹⁰ Other thinkers and authors soon accepted Locke's views in whole or in part, either extending his ideas or challenging them, but no one could ignore them. Many of the major questions that were to occupy thinkers in the eighteenth century came to cluster around the status and implications of Newtonian-Lockean thought, most especially on the relationship of reason and affect. Discussions of human understanding necessarily led to reconsiderations of human nature, human faculties, the bases of moral systems, and issues related to religious experience.

The major shift in cultural episteme that occurred in the first half of the eighteenth century involved not only a reconceptualization of divinity but also of human nature, familial relations, and education. All of these developments were tied together by a focus on models of sensory perception and the relationship of human sentiments, reason, and morals. George Cheyne (1671-1743), a well-known English physician, is typical of the general acceptance among men of science of Locke's argument that all knowledge was based on experience of the world and, most especially—building on Newton's corpuscular theory of light—that sensory experience was based on motion caused by objects. In 1733 Cheyne wrote, “Feeling is nothing but the Impulse, Motion or Action of Bodies, gently or violently impressing the Extremeties or Sides of the Nerves, of the Skin, or other parts of the Body, which … convey Motion to the Sentient Principle in the Brain.”¹¹

Cheyne is a historically significant figure insofar as he served as an intermediary between the medical and the literary worlds. As Richardson's physician and confidant, he made the latest medical and physiological knowledge immediately available to this novelist. Most importantly, this knowledge informed the early novel, which became a major means of transmitting to the general public an epistemology and moral system based primarily on affect rather than reason. In this cultural milieu, “sentimental fiction, next to the religion with which it overlapped, was to become the most powerful medium for the spread of popular knowledge of sensational psychology.”¹²

The Scottish commonsense movement, which I will return to later, represented at once an extension and a challenge to Lockean thought. The figures associated with this school, including Adam Ferguson, Francis Hutcheson, and Thomas Reid, shared Locke's views concerning the moral necessity for parents to educate their children in a proper manner. They differed from Locke, however, insofar as they denied that the newborn child was a complete tabula rasa. Rather, they believed that humans were born with an innate moral sense or affection. As the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica said in defining the subject matter and goal of moral philosophy, “Its object is to shew whence our obligations arise and where they terminate. Moral philosophy is concerned not with what he may be, by education, habit or foreign influence come to be or do, but what by his nature or original constituent principles he is formed to be and do, what conduct he is obliged to pursue.”¹³

This is a crucial difference between Locke and the Scottish philosophers. Locke emphasizes the agency of early education as determinative in forming an individual's moral character, whereas the Scottish commonsense philosophers assume a moral sense to be a part of human nature. Yet by accepting Locke's sensational psychology, these philosophers were driven to posit a sixth sense in human beings, the affections, but now with an innate, if undeveloped, moral component. This linkage of morality, first with the affective rather than the rational side of humans, had important implications. Among other things, it meant that moral education was to be realized through the affections rather than through reason alone. It is this implication that the writers of the eighteenth century were to take up and run with. The novel was to emerge as a vehicle of rational entertainment and moral edification in two ways—first, by illustrating the cultivation of the main characters' sensibilities in a variety of difficult and trying situations and, second, by evoking a sympathetic affective response in the reader.¹⁴ (This latter fact helps to explain the prevalence of the term pathetic in so many titles of the day.)

A few names and titles will suggest the extent to which “sensibility,” “sentiment,” and “affection” characterized the discourse of the eighteenth century: Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728); David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40); Richardson, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa (1744); Edmund Burke, The Philosophical Origins of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757); Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, (vol. 1, 1759) and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768); Albrech von Haller, De Partibus Corporis Humani Sensibilus et Irritabilius (1753), published in English in 1775 as A Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals; Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759); Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloise (1761); and Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771).

For many people in the early eighteenth century, physiological sensibility and moral sensibility were intertwined or one-and-the-same. This was so because they assumed that the sensorium or the human faculties, however these were understood, had been created by God precisely so that humans might be morally responsible for their behavior. After the Restoration, the Cambridge Platonists had sought to soften various aspects of Puritan theology and thought. Rather than stressing man's sinful nature, they began with the assumption that humans were essentially benevolent beings. These thinkers influenced in turn the Latitudinarians, who also argued that human nature was instinctively sympathetic and that humans were, thus, naturally inclined to virtuous actions. This nature was to be reinforced by self-discipline, however, or refined through education and cultivation. Even Hume, the supreme skeptic, held that all human virtues flowed from sympathy.

Eighteenth-century thinkers and writers differed in their precise evaluations of human moral capabilities and of human nature in general, of course. They also had to address the issues of the great differences that were evident among individuals and peoples; in addition, many people began to address gender differences and in so doing sought to naturalize these. In general, these explanations ascribed differences to environmental factors or innate differences, or to some combination of these. On the one hand, some writers, following Locke, stressed that education and training in morals from an early age was essential. Other persons, however, proffered their own varieties of Calvinist determinism by suggesting, for instance, that individual differences were in large part the results of the endowments God had given each person at birth. Cheyne belonged to the latter camp. He wrote:

There are as many and as different Degrees of Sensibility or of Feeling as there are Degrees of Intelligence and Perception in human Creatures; and the Principle of both may be perhaps one and the same. One shall suffer more from the Prick of a Pin, or Needle, from their extreme Sensibility, than others from being run thro' the Body; and the first sort, seem to be of the Class of these Quick-Thinkers I have formerly mentioned; and as none have it in their Option to choose for themselves their own particular Frame of Mind nor Constitution of Body; so none can choose his own Degree of Sensibility. That is given him by the Author of his Nature, and is already determined.¹⁵

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the new sensational physiologies and moral philosophies could be (and were) extended to the social sphere and used to justify and legitimate social hierarchies, class distinctions, gender roles, and even racism. Yet the significance of the scientific evidence was unclear, so that the same fact could be used to argue for both sides of a question. For instance, reports of the ability of American Indians to bear great pain and deprivation were cited by some authors as proof of their relative inhumanity; others, however, used the same reports to cast the Indians as stoics with a developed moral sense.

It is in light of these developments that we can better understand the tremendous upsurge in interest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in recording the manners, customs, and beliefs of peoples around the world, including the American Indians. Gathering and ordering these objective facts, it was believed, would allow one to determine the degree of humanity these people possessed (or lacked). Moreover, the diverse societies provided case studies of the effects of different environmental situations and educational practices on human development. When the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), often called “the father of sentimental ethics,” published a collection of his essays as Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, he was participating in a broad-based discourse of moral philosophy that included subject matter we would now divide among psychology, anthropology, sociology, pedagogy, and politics.

Such investigations into human nature, however, were not limited to works of science, theology, or philosophy. Works of literature also imaginatively (yet realistically) explored the nature of men and women, familial and sexual relations, and the consequences of different socioeconomic systems and situations, and in so doing served as vehicles of moral instruction. For many persons in the eighteenth century, sentimental literature functioned as an adjunct of these fields. Pamela, for instance, was sometimes read from the pulpit; others report that people who would never have deigned to read mere novels read Clarissa with the same care and in the same contexts that they read the Bible.¹⁶ Richardson's works served as moral guides for generations of readers. In 1755, no doubt in response to market demands, he published a handbook entitled A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions and Reflections Contained in the Histories of “Pamela,” “Clarissa,” and “Sir Charles Grandison,” Digested under Proper Heads. This instructional manual was extremely influential in the second half of the century. Similar works appeared during the century drawing from the novels of Sterne, Fielding, and others. In fact, Sterne's fictional character Parson Yorick became so popular that Sterne took to publishing volumes of his own sermons under the guise of The Sermons of Mr. Yorick.

Because sentimental novels were consumed in this way, informing the religious lives of many persons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they are important documents for the work of historians of religions, as well as literary critics. In the following pages we will work toward understanding how a work like Pamela came to be read from church pulpits and how tears and sighs came to be viewed as “natural revelations” of God's moral expectations for human beings. It was no accident that the sentimental novel, John Wesley's “heart religion,” and the Great Awakening in America all appeared in the same decade; all of these developments were a result of, and further contributed to, the heightened value placed on the religious or moral affections.¹⁷

In chapter 1 we saw how tears and affliction worked in Mary Rowlandson's text. By comparing these and related phenomena with those found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sentimental works dealing with Indian captivity, we will be able to glimpse an important aspect of cultural change. Admittedly, sentimental novels do not speak to modern readers; they do not easily give pleasure to us. Instead, the characters and plots seem to be overwrought (both narratively and emotionally), if not impossible to believe as realistic. Writing about these novels in general, Jane Tompkins notes, “What all of these texts share, from the perspective of modern criticism, is a certain set of defects that excludes them from the ranks of the great masterpieces: an absence of finely delineated characters, a lack of verisimilitude in the story line, an excessive reliance on plot, and a certain sensationalism in the events portrayed.”¹⁸ Rather than accepting these modern values as normative and then imposing them on these texts, Tompkins has made a concerted effort to recover the aims and practices informing the literary activity of sentimental authors, as well as the perspectives, expectations, and reading practices the nineteenth-century audience brought to these texts. As a result of this and other recent studies, it is clear that many (though not all) works of sentimental literature functioned didactically, conveying a moral message to readers and helping them to evaluate their lives.

KIMBER'S MR. ANDERSON

The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson. Containing His Strange Varieties of Fortune in Europe and America (1754), a novel by the English writer Edward Kimber (1719-1769), may serve as an entrée into the heated cultural debate about the social responsibilities of authorship, the operative understanding of the power of narrative representation, the didacticism of sentimental literature, the role of imagination in the reader's creation of the meaning of the text, the role of the cult of sensibility or cultivated emotions in the composition and reception of the novel, and the topos of Indian captivity as an instance of virtue-in-distress.

With this mid-eighteenth-century work, we find the form of the sentimental novel fully developed. (Pamela had been published several years earlier, in 1740, and was brought out in an American edition by Benjamin Franklin in 1744.) The title page, however, is similar in layout and appearance to most of the earlier captivity narratives we have seen, thus linking it, at least visually, to those nonfictional texts. Below the title and between two heavy rules, one finds the words “Compiled from his Own Papers”—an epistolary ruse used to suggest that the work is nonfiction. Below this is an excerpt from a verse by Addison:

—If there is a Power above us,
And that there is, all Nature cries aloud,
Thro' all her Works, he must delight in Virtue,
And that which he delights in must be happy.(19)

This verse encapsulates the informing religious and moral world-view of the sentimental novel: the virtuous will be rewarded with happiness in the end, even though they suffer terribly beforehand, because divine providence has so ordered the world. At the same time, then, that Kimber's work is linked to the earlier tradition of captivity narratives, this verse marks it as also belonging to the newer genre of sentimental literature.

The title page represents this text to prospective readers through a number of key words—“history,” “life and adventures,” “strange varieties of fortune,” “Power,” “Nature,” and “Virtue”—all which combine to suggest a true story of the adventures and vicissitudes in the protagonist's life in Europe and America, which, of course, ends happily. At the same time it suggests links to other forms of literature. The word strange, for instance, would have evoked a connection with the wide variety of popular works of surprising happenings in the world, such as Defoe's immensely popular The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.²⁰

The title page also implies that when read, this story of virtue triumphing in the end will lead the reader to a heightened appreciation of God's goodness and providence. Absent, though, is the Puritan emphasis on the fallen, sinful nature of humankind; instead, one finds an optimism concerning the innate goodness of human beings—at least those “of the better sort.” This is characteristic of sentimental literature at large and marks a significant change from the religious anthropology of the Puritans, for, as Herbert Ross Brown rightly noted, “A favorite article in the sentimental creed is the belief in the innate goodness of the heart.”²¹

The eighteenth century saw a broad-based reaction against both the Puritan anthropology and that found in Hobbes. The Cambridge Platonists, Lord Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Henry More, and others argued that spontaneous affections were the true locus of all knowledge and morality. Shaftesbury, for instance, in his Inquiry concerning Virtue (1699) had argued, “We cannot doubt of what passes within ourselves. Our passions and affections are known to us. They are certain, whatever the objects may be on which they are employed.”²² He assumed that the sense of right and wrong was “implanted in our heart,” but it had to be cultivated, as did the natural recognition of beauty and the odious. Aesthetic taste and moral sensibility were natural capacities, but they had to be cultivated through a disciplined regimen of training involving “labour and pains.” More, the Cambridge Platonist, was representative of the age (and in complete agreement with Addison) when he argued that we “relish and savour what is absolutely best and rejoice in it.” Moreover, he maintained that natural expressions of human emotion, such as a “lamenting tone of Voice, the dejection of the Eyes and Countenances, Groaning, Howling, Sighs, and Tears” have the power to move others to compassion and sympathy. More himself was to influence John Wesley's theology and “religion of the heart.” The Great Awakening and the sentimental novel may both be seen as expressions of the increased cultural attention to the affective side of human life and religiosity.²³

For persons of sensibility, affective exchanges participated in a moral economy within which the exchange of a shared currency of tears, sighs, swoons, and shudders created value and social relations. Moreover, since spontaneous emotive and physical responses were understood to be natural revelations of God's moral expectations of human beings, they were also signals to persons for action. In the sentimental novel, the innate potential of individuals for making proper value judgments and acting virtuously is realized through a process of education, training, and testing through adversity.

It is the last of these—the testing through a reversal of fortune or unmerited suffering—that both shares some aspects with the Puritan representation of affliction and marks a radical difference. The Puritans employed the metaphor of refining gold in a crucible to represent the positive spiritual transformation that could result if instances of divine affliction were experienced and accepted in the proper attitude of humility. In the sentimental novel, however, the characters are not radically transformed through their experience of affliction; rather, the trying experience, be it captivity or whatever, serves to bring out more clearly or to heighten their innate goodness and virtue. In the sentimental novel, the character of the protagonists is never in doubt and, consequently, neither is the final result. Adversity is an occasion for displaying one's virtue and sensibility to the world and to oneself.

The opening of Kimber's novel confirms the reader's expectations, generated by the title page, of the type of narrative one is about to enter into, even as the author apologizes for necessarily breaking with one of the conventions of biography: he cannot provide much detail concerning the hero's parents and family because as a child he had been “plunged into the deepest calamities of life” and denied this knowledge himself. Nevertheless, the reader is assured, Mr. Anderson's experiences proved “equally capable of affecting the head and improving the heart.” The narrator then announces the purpose of this work of fiction, masquerading as historical biography:

If the narrative I am about to present to the public, insensibly, under the guise of a rational entertainment, steals instruction upon the peruser, and produces benefit to the mind; if it should draw the hard bound tear from the eye of inhumanity; if whilst the souls “that bleed for others woes, that feel for suffering merit's deep distress,” lend an attentive ear, or eye, to this strange story; it serves to mollify unfeeling, obdurate cruelty, I shall have my wish, and the trouble I have been at to fashion my friends memoirs, will be well repayed; for I am of the poet's opinion, that

“One moral, or a mere well natur'd deed,
Does all desert in sciences exceed.”

(Garland 7:1-2)

In the world of the sentimental novel (that is, among authors, readers, and the characters populating the texts), one finds a supreme confidence in both the revelatory power of emotions and the power of narrative representation to [steal moral] “instruction upon the peruser” by “affecting the head and improving the heart.” Kimber's belief—that if he is successful in moving his readers, in drawing “the hard bound tear from the eye of inhumanity” through his narration, then acts of human cruelty in the world will decrease—was widely shared in the culture of sensibility. The stated goal of the act of narration is to effect a moral change in society through affecting individual readers. This authorial intention, based on this understanding of the power of literature to alter the real world, was, significantly enough, still found a century later in sentimental works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin.²⁴

Kimber's confidence in the power of literature is such that, like Richardson, he implies that it is more efficacious than even sermons. Whereas many persons might experience the message of theological writing or preaching as heavy handed and thus resist it at some level, with fiction (“a rational entertainment”) the ethical message is artfully and painlessly transmitted.

Writers of sentimental fiction played an important cultural role in promulgating this new epistemology, which privileged feeling over reason as a guide in discerning virtue and making moral decisions. Sentimental authors shared the view of Adam Smith and others that the imagination played an important role in the moral life, for only through imagining oneself into the situation of another was sympathy fully activated. The pleasure to be derived from the exercise of the sympathetic imagination, however, was twofold. On the one hand, there was the pleasure to be had in aiding another person in distress and in knowing that one had done some good. However, while the operation of the sympathetic imagination involved an element of identification with the suffering of another, at the same time (and somewhat paradoxically) it also involved an element of distancing and of contrasting one's own situation with that of the person in distress. This second pleasure was found especially in the act of reading moving tales, where leisure allowed the requisite time for comparative reflection, even if it was largely unconscious. The Spectator put this clearly, noting that “when we read of torments, wounds, deaths and the like dismal accidents, our pleasure does not flow so properly from the grief which such melancholy description gives us, as from the secret comparison which we make between ourselves and the person who suffers. Such representations teach us to set a just value upon our own condition, and make us prize our good fortune, which exempts us from the like calamities.”²⁵

We have already seen Per Amicum direct the reader of Mary Rowlandson's narrative to “read therefore, peruse, ponder, and from hence lay up something from the experience of another, against thine own turn comes.” What is new here is the heightened attention to be paid to one's visceral responses to narrated scenes. In one sense, of course, this aspect of the reading practices brought to bear on works of sentimental literature was an extension and application of the imaginal activity implied in the Golden Rule. To “do onto others as you would have them do onto you” requires one to project oneself imaginatively into the situation of the other person and then to act out of that assumed position. At the same time, part of the pleasure to be found in the reflective activity the Spectator speaks of is a result of the recognition that “there but for the grace of God go I.”

Most moral philosophers and sentimental writers concurred that morality and moral action originated in feeling rather than reason. Hume, for instance, maintained, “All morality depends upon our sentiments,” not upon reason.²⁶ What philosophers sought to demonstrate through logical argument the writers of fiction sought to represent through the lives of the characters in their novels. It is important to recognize how developments in philosophy, theology, physiology, and psychology were brought into the real world through works of fiction. Along with sentimentally colored historical pieces, novels helped to shape the expressions of feeling of historical agents. Such works helped to locate affective responses within a moral economy. This fact was recognized by authors throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Adam Bede (1859), for instance, George Eliot says of one of her characters, “Hetty had never read a novel … how then could she find a shape for her expectations?”²⁷

Today we assume that an individual can (and must) learn to control and modulate his or her emotional responses, such as laughter or words spoken in anger, in ways appropriate to the specific time, place, and circumstance. Our ancestors believed the same thing, although they assumed that it was the sensorium, or the moral sense, that needed to be trained or, better, refined, so that the affective and physiological responses (tears, sighs, tremors, fainting) to specific stimuli and situations could be controlled. Once this was assumed, it was a natural next step to suggest that the emotional responses of a person to a given situation were an immediate and accurate expression of moral character.

In claiming for literature the role of inculcating moral values, Kimber participated in an increasingly influential cultural discourse in the eighteenth century that privileged examples from real life in the contemporary world over those from antiquity as effective vehicles in this exercise. Novels, as well as biographies, provided paradigmatic figures for emulation by readers seeking both entertainment and self-improvement. Just as the third generation of New England Puritans had come to accept funeral sermons, eulogies, and even biographies of members of the founding generation as vehicles for instructing others, especially youth, so too many eighteenth-century readers and commentators were willing to acknowledge factual accounts as, potentially at least, morally uplifting.

Vociferous resistance surfaced, however, when some people argued that explicitly fictional tales could also serve proper didactic purposes. They argued that the novel could serve as a vehicle of moral instruction precisely because this form was based on everyday life, not fantasy. The trials and situations faced by the characters in novels were similar, even if heightened, to those readers would encounter in their own lives. Such arguments, however, did not convince many others. One commentator, writing in the Weekly Magazine in 1789, expressed a concern he shared with many of his contemporaries:

I have heard it said in favour of novels that there are many good sentiments dispersed in them. I maintain, that good sentiments being found scattered in loose novels, render them the more dangerous, since, when they are mixed with seducing arguments, it requires more discernment than is to be found in youth to separate the evil from the good … and when a young lady finds principles of religion and virtue inculcated in a book, she is naturally thrown off her guard by taking it for granted that such a work can contain no harm; and of course the evil steals imperceptibly into her heart.²⁸

The presumption behind the “of course” here clearly demarcates the critical point on which these two camps differed: either readers could be trusted to discern the good and the moral from the seductive or seemingly good and the immoral or they could not be so trusted. Either moral instruction stole upon the reader's mind and heart in the reading of novels, or “seducing arguments” and evil did. It is clear that issues of class and gender lay behind the fears of many of those who were suspicious of the novel and other forms of popular literature. Yet both camps shared the belief that literature had the power to affect the moral fiber of the readers, even if they differed radically in their valuation of this power.

Kimber, like many of his fellow fiction writers, sought to evade the critical arrows flung at him by adversaries of fiction by assuming the pose of being merely the editor of the papers of an actual individual. Though a work of out-and-out fiction, Mr. Anderson was presented to the reading public as a factual account. Similarly, Bleeker's The History of Maria Kittle employed the same epistolary ruse. This may be merely an artful (or clumsily obvious) dodge. On the other hand, this appeal to historicity may also have been a literary device used to justify the act of narration itself, to create a narrative voice, and to heighten the reader's sense of engagement with the story by facilitating the willing suspension of disbelief or tempering skepticism.²⁹

In Kimber's novel, however, unlike the Puritan texts we saw earlier, no program of ritual humiliation and spiritual reformation is offered, nor is there a heavy emphasis on the involvement of divine providence in the protagonist's captivity. Rather, the emphasis is on releasing and developing the innate goodness and powers of moral discrimination found in persons of sensibility through their encounters with both virtuous and villainous characters. At the same time, the earlier confidence, epitomized by Cotton Mather, that the deep meaning of the text of history could be spelled by human beings, is absent. Instead, Kimber cautions his reader, “We must not expect that all seeing Providence should, according to our expectations, always punish even the most degrading and abominable crimes” (Garland 7:9-10).

Significantly, the authoritative texts appealed to by Kimber are inevitably poetic texts, not Scripture. Moreover, the proper locus of moral attention here is the individual human heart, not the community or society at large. Through the act of reading, an increasingly private practice, the narrative “steals instruction upon the peruser, and produces benefit to the mind” by providing paradigmatic existential situations of conflict or real-life problems and their resolutions. For the modern reader, this understanding of the spiritual and moral impact of the expected narrative transaction (indeed, almost a pact) between author, text, and reader must be taken seriously in order to appreciate the cultural work such texts performed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Davidson has noted, “Psychologically, the early novel embraced a new relationship between art and audience, writer and reader, a relationship that replaced the authority of the sermon or Bible with the enthusiasms of sentiment, horror, or adventure, all of which relocate authority in the individual response of the reading self.”³⁰ Not surprisingly, this democratization, if you will, of the ability to interpret texts and to judge affect was perceived by many to be a threat to the patriarchal social order and moral values.

Most important, perhaps, for the authors and readers of sentimental literature, the moral authority and the power of a text were to be measured and verified through the affective responses it elicited in readers. Given that reading was usually done individually and in private, only the reader would be in a position to note and then to evaluate these responses. This situation is in sharp contrast to that associated with the Puritan confessional narrative. There not only was the narrative of the applicant's spiritual responses to specific existential situations in the past subjected to scrutiny by an examining committee from the church, but the individual's oral responses to questions posed by this group were also judged as to their appropriateness. Although there were shaded differences in Puritan conversion narratives at different times and places, as Caldwell has demonstrated, there was nevertheless a communal consensus as to what constituted proper and improper responses to specific types of situations or scenes in life. This consensus was worked out and then reinforced through ritualized public performances as well as through the improvements of such narratives offered by the clergy in the oral delivery of sermons and in print. Both the Rowlandson and the Swarton narratives were, as we saw, circulated with accompanying texts that framed and guided their reception and proper usage.

Yet it must always be borne in mind that the sentimental author had designs on his reader, too. The author assumed that readers would learn about the proper affective responses to specific sorts of situations from his novel and then act on and out of these. Through the act of reading, readers would refine their own sensibilities and display these in their reactions to similar situations as these were encountered in their own lives. And even if many of the wildest episodes were unlikely to be found in the lives of most readers, there was still moral good to be gained through imaginatively entering into and contemplating such scenes. Here the sentimental novel clearly shares a direct continuity with Puritan assumptions and reading practices, as we saw in both Per Amicum's preface, the Rowlandson narrative proper, and the sermons of Mather. This understanding of the didactic value of narrative representation was to continue to be held by many persons down through the late nineteenth century.

In an important sense, though, the sentimental novel represented a significant challenge to the earlier cultural status quo by shifting the ultimate locus of moral authority from the clergy as a group to the individual lay person and from the Bible to secular works of rational entertainment and wisdom. This shift was in part a result of the implicit drive of Protestant understandings of the status and power of the Bible, of religious epistemology, and hermeneutics. Insofar as Protestant thought and practice stressed both the necessity and the efficacy of the individual's immediate encounter with the written revealed word of God, the relationships of reader to text and reader to author (or “Author” in the case of the Bible) were already culturally available for extension to other sorts of texts, including didactic works of fiction.

This is not to say, however, that readers were left to their own devices in reading these sorts of texts. Indeed, the opposite is the case. Readers were given explicit guidance in the novels themselves as to what constituted the proper reactions to specific scenes in real life and in narrative representations. There were, as well, negative examples, which illustrated uncultured, out-of-place, and otherwise improper responses.

The following passage from Maria Kittle has frequently evoked derisive comment precisely because modern readers have failed to appreciate the active manner in which the author, as part of her role as instructor and guide in moral sensibility, involved her original audience in imaginatively composing a scene and then empathetically entering into the emotional life of the characters. The husband, Henry Kittle, is returning to his frontier home, where he had left his beloved wife, Maria, and two small children, only to discover that they have fallen victim to an Indian attack:

As he approached his late happy dwelling, his bosom dilated with the pleasing hope of soon extricating his beloved family from danger; he chid the slowness of the carriages, and felt impatient to dissipate the apprehensions of Maria, to kiss the pendant tear from her eye, and press his sportive innocents to his bosom. While these bright ideas played round his soul, he lifted up his eyes, and through an opening of the woods, beheld his farm: but what language can express his surprise and consternation at seeing his habitation so suddenly desolated! a loud exclamation of amaze burst from the whole company at so unexpected a view—the blood revolted from Mr. Kittle's cheek—his heart throbbed under the big emotion, and all aghast, spurring on his horse, he entered the inclosure with full speed.—Stop here unhappy man! here let the fibres of thy heart crack with excruciating misery—let the cruel view of mangled wretches, so nearly allied to thee, extort drops of blood from thy cleaving bosom! It did—it did. Uttering a deep groan, he fell insensible from his horse.

(Garland 20:27-28)

Brown assigns most of the end of this passage to Kittle as a soliloquy, although the punctuation of the 1797 text does not justify this reading. According to him, “Henry Kittle's outburst was too self-conscious to be indicative of anything more than his own egoism.”³¹

In Brown's misreading, the text seems very awkward, while the characters come off as pretentious poseurs. Yet the reading practices brought by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers to texts such as this would have made this scene very effective. Brown himself seems to have sensed something of what was involved in the transaction between author, text, and reader in the sentimental novel, although he never put the various clues or pieces together and, as a result, was never able to appreciate the cultural work of such texts or to transcend a condescending bemusement with the seeming silliness of the genre. Only a few pages earlier, he had perceptively noted (although he quickly trivialized his own insight) that sentimental novels often portrayed specific emotional responses in given situations (“swoons, trances, visions, languishings, ecstasies, and a variety of emotional delirium tremens”) as proof of the character's sensibility and even spiritual election, a situation not unlike that found in Puritan conversion testimonies and written accounts.³²

Passages such as that above can only be understood if we take seriously the extent to which the early novel, in many ways seemingly so different from Puritan texts, nevertheless shared a deeper identity, for the sentimental novel developed out of the exploitation of certain shared reading structures and practices. If, for example, one recalls the meditative practice of “the composition of place”—a practice first popularized in Ignatian meditation manuals but widely adopted and adapted in Protestant circles as well in the form of “Occasional Meditation”—one can better appreciate how and why Bleeker composed this scene as she did, confident that her readers would share reading practices which would make it work. In the First Exercise of St. Ignatius's spiritual exercises, the meditator is directed to use his imagination to conjure up “a mental image of the place … where the object that we wish to contemplate is present.” After “seeing” this place or scene “with the mind's eye,” the meditator next seeks to share the “pain, tears, and suffering” of Christ in the Passion, or other emotions from the specific biblical scene. In the sentimental novel, this spiritual exercise is simply applied to nonbiblical scenes and narratives. If Bleeker knew her audience, as any successful author must, then she was cognizant of the expectations and reading practices that the reader would most probably bring to her text.³³

After having assisted the audience in conjuring up the scene of devastation and death, one that would have been well known to most readers already from acquaintance with earlier captivity narratives and their accompanying illustrations, Bleeker then invites the reader to pause before it, to hold the scene before one's gaze, precisely in order to feel the emotional response of Henry Kittle in one's own body. Brown was more correct than he realized when he suggested that the affective response of the reader was taken to be evidence of one's spiritual condition in much the same way as in Calvinist practice.

In order to demonstrate the tradition that immediately links captivity in the sentimental novel with Puritan captivities, let us recall that a century earlier Per Amicum had also conjured up the scene of a husband (there the Rev. Joseph Rowlandson) returning to the site of his former domestic happiness, only to find it a scene of death and destruction: “At his return, he found the Town in flames, or smoke, his own house being set on fire by the Enemy … and all in it consumed: His precious yoke-fellow, and dear Children, wounded and captivated (as the issue evidenced, and following Narrative declares) by these cruel and barbarous Salvages. A sad Catastrophe!” Let us recall, too, Per Amicum's claim that “the works of the Lord … are great, sought out of all those that have pleasure therein.”

Over a century before Bleeker composed her novel, the affective power of the idyllic domestic scene suddenly shattered by Indian attack and captivity had been fully realized and employed as a didactic device by the Puritans. If Per Amicum and his friends had found the Rowlandson narrative “worthy to be exhibited to, and viewed, and pondered by all, that disdain not to consider the operation of [God's] hand,” this was because they were convinced that, “forasmuch as not the general but particular knowledge of things makes deepest impression upon the affections,” “those of a true Christian spirit” would necessarily find themselves moved by the account and the scenes recalled therein. That is, Per Amicum also recommended scrutinizing reader responses as a way of evaluating the spiritual condition of individuals (Garland 1:A2, A3, A4). The continuity in the understanding of the narrative and reading processes and the transaction between author, text, and reader found in these works by Per Amicum and Bleeker is undeniable, although the obvious differences in genre and style have heretofore kept us from realizing the full nature of this continuity. These differences, however, now appear to be less significant than the continuity in the reading structures and practices brought to bear on these texts.

The theme of captivity was widely employed in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in diverse literary genres because it represented a striking instance of sudden reversal of fortune, whether this was understood to be divine affliction or not. The theme of the sudden reversal of fortune of the good and apparently blameless was, of course, as old as the story of Job. Yet if it was seemingly guaranteed to evoke a response, the shape and meaning of the response was determined by the then-operative reading practices, narrative conventions, and communal valuations of the expression of specific emotions in specific contexts.

Such an empathetic emotional response by the reader was the goal of sentimental authors. In a letter to one of his own readers, Laurence Sterne, a doyen of the genre, explicitly pointed to the role of the reader in generating the pleasure to be found in novels, such as his Tristram Shandy: “A true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with him … and the vibrations in him so entirely correspond with those excited [in the novel's characters], it is like reading himself and not the book.”³⁴ Sterne understood full well that the author could only do so much in order to elicit a given response; the reader played an equally important role in bringing certain reading structures to bear on the text.

As a result of this situation, the sentimental novel worked only so long as the author and the audience shared the same practices and expectations. If such novels do not work for us today, it is because we no longer identify with the emotional lives of the characters, not because Kimber and Bleeker were bad writers. The words on the page have not changed, but reading practices have. Puritan readers—who had already affirmed the moral imperative of observing the movements of their souls, participated in the tradition of writing spiritual autobiographies and journals, and learned to read themselves through devotional practices of intense self-scrutiny—would have readily understood the assumptions shared by the authors and readers of sentimental novels even if they finally could not have embraced them.

The sentimental novel, then, no less than the Puritan captivity narrative, provided rational entertainment insofar as the emotional responses evoked in the reader were subjected to intense scrutiny as a part of a practice of self-examination. Reading done in this manner was an efficacious path, it was held, leading to the cultivation of one's sensibilities and powers of moral discrimination. Not everyone shared this understanding of the moral benefits of novel reading, as we have already had occasion to note. Many commentators (not all of them male) doubted that the young and female readers would have the wherewithal, the reading skills, and powers of discrimination needed to distinguish corrupting literature from morally uplifting works. We have also alluded to the beginnings of a significant shift in epistemology and ethical thought in the English-speaking world related to the intellectual movement that came to be known as Scottish commonsense philosophy. This involved a shift from an explicitly Calvinist providential view of history to an increased emphasis on natural religion.

Many of those who doubted the claims made for literature as a vehicle of moral education feared that works of fiction threatened to seduce or captivate the hearts and minds of the “weaker sex” and youth. The common usage of terms such as captivate and captivating in the ongoing, sometimes boisterous, cultural discourse over the relative merits or demerits of fiction in general is worth noting in passing. In railing against novels and other forms of fiction, some opponents had appeal to imagery redolent of the Puritan rhetoric on the dangers of temptations and sin. One editor argued, for instance, that novels “are written with an intent to captivate the feelings, and do in fact lead many on to the path of vice, from an idea that they are within the pale of gallantry.” Another male opponent of fiction, wrote in the Massachusetts Magazine, “But too many [readers], especially persons of warm passions and tender feelings [i.e., females], are too apt to be captivated with everything which drops from [Sterne's] descriptive, though loose and unguarded pen, and, in swallowing the nectar, to swallow what is enflaming and poisonous.” This writer employed, no doubt unconsciously, phallic images that would seem to invite a Freudian analysis themselves, even as they hint at the sexual politics involved in this debate, often just below the surface.

Richardson presented a standard counterargument by suggesting that because the new novel was rooted in the everyday world it represented reality in ways other forms of fiction, such as romance, had not. He called the novel “a new species of writing, that might possibly turn young people into a source of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvelous with which novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion and virtue.” The contest between these positions was not settled quickly, however. Over a century later, in 1853, Margaret Fuller concurred with the critics who found fiction to be seductive and captivating, although she was willing to accept it if certain conditions were met. “But it is only when some effort at human improvement is robed in its captivating garb that fiction should be tolerated,” she wrote.³⁵

With this general introduction, let us look more closely at our two selected novels. The protagonist of Kimber's Mr. Anderson is Tom(my) Anderson. The novel is told in the third-person past tense, with an omniscient narrator. It opens with the editor-narrator recalling that Tommy's parents had been “above the common rank.” In May 1697, as Tommy (then aged seven) waited on a doorstep in London for his father, who had gone inside on business, he was abducted by a sea captain. With this incident, Kimber invoked the fairly widespread and highly publicized incidents of child abduction in the British Isles earlier in the century. The kidnapping functions as a device to get his protagonist to America;³⁶ at the time it would have represented a realistic touch.

Kimber then proceeds to tell a typical sentimental tale of class and virtue denied yet triumphing in the end. We learn that onboard the ship, a slaver headed for America, Tommy was sexually abused by the captain. When they arrived in Maryland, Tommy was immediately sold to a planter, Mr. Barlow, a mean-spirited, abusive man in his own right. Mrs. Barlow, on the other hand, was “a woman of sense and humanity, of many extraordinary endowments, and a mother” (Garland 7:1-2).

As in so many sentimental novels, one finds maternal love, virtue, warmth, gentleness, and a nurturing nature counterposed to male brutality, insensibility, and baseness. Equally sharp contrasts are drawn between virtuous individuals and dastardly reprobates throughout the novel. Of special note, however, is the moral anthropology shared by the sentimental novelists and readers, including the belief that the character and moral fiber of individuals were ultimately a matter of temperament. The character, or mettle, of individuals was tested and tempered on the anvil of adversity and suffering. If temperament was inherited, however, it was so along lines distinct from genetic inheritance (e.g., we are told that the sweet daughter, Fanny, had her mother's temperament and nothing of her father's). Moreover, innate goodness had the power to establish bonds of affection that transcended biological relationships—Mrs. Barlow cannot help but feel maternal toward Tommy, who naturally reciprocates, while Fanny and Tommy recognize each other to be soulmates, not merely playmates. Indeed, we are told that all those with any sensibility readily discerned that Fanny and Tommy were almost “twins from the same womb,” while the crude and uncultured Mr. Barlow was oblivious to any elective affinities.

The moral anthropology of the sentimental novel owed something to the Calvinist belief in predestination but was not limited to this theological understanding. Like the Calvinists, sentimental novelists and readers believed that a person's innate virtue would necessarily attract the attention of the divine (even if this was often delayed) and ultimately lead to the virtuous being blessed. Some, but by no means all, sentimental novels promised that virtue might well be rewarded in this world, rather than being withheld until the afterlife. Indeed, as we shall see shortly, Kimber claims that the natural activities of the virtuous would prove to be not only economically viable but profitable. There was an inherent economic rationality, then, in virtuous activity—men of good character and sensibility got the goods and the girl.

Persons of sensibility naturally resonated to each other, producing or evoking mutually recognizable physiological and emotional responses. Both their speech and actions disclosed their true nature, their innate goodness and virtue, to others of a similar temper or nature, while those who did not share these qualities were blind to their existence in others. As a consequence, persons of the latter sort rarely recognized the true character and value of persons of refined sensibility. As was to be expected, then, in a woman of refined sensibility and cultivated mind, Mrs. Barlow immediately recognized Tommy's “promising genius, and a softness and good nature of disposition, that would have melted any heart, but that of the villain who had him in his power.” Kimber repeatedly emphasizes the innate goodness of his main character, Tommy, and then proceeds to create scenes in which this goodness is readily recognized by others of refined sensibility, no matter how low Tommy's present station or how wretched his material conditions.

We must note, though, the importance attached in the novel to literacy and education in cultivating innate qualities of mind and moral discrimination. Mrs. Barlow, for instance, ignores the express commands of her brutish husband and secretly teaches little Fanny, her daughter, and Tommy to read “prettily.” After they had quickly exhausted her “female collection of the politest authors,” a more substantial library was supplied by a family friend, a Scottish clergyman. The children studied with a neighbor, another Scottsman, Mr. Ferguson. In time Tom “became a proficient in the Latin and French, in all the useful branches of the mathematics, spoke and wrote correctly and elegantly, and acquired such additions to his native dignity of soul and sentiment” that everyone “stood amazed at him” (Garland 7:10, 26).

Education, then, was of value in developing and refining one's “native dignity of soul and sentiment.” We may assume that the reading of novels of rational entertainment also was felt to contribute to this end. The seemingly minor detail of these educated gentlemen being Scottish is in fact significant, since it suggests (albeit anachronistically within the time frame or historical setting of the novel) Kimber's endorsement of Scottish commonsense philosophy. The influence of Lord Kames, whose Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751) had appeared three years before the publication of Kimber's novel, can clearly be sensed informing the moral of this tale.³⁷

Kimber occasionally uses his novel as a vehicle for criticizing the moral hypocrisy of England and many Christians. For instance, in speeches by Mrs. Barlow, Tommy, Mr. Ferguson and others, he repeatedly rehearses the theme that a person's worth and character are not to be measured by financial or social status but by integrity and industry. After Tom and Fanny have grown into young adulthood, a different love appropriate to their age develops between them. Because they have been raised almost as brother and sister, they realize that they need to know how Tom came into the family and what their true relationship to each other is. They implore Mr. Ferguson to enlighten them. Instead of immediately complying, Ferguson tells the history of his own fall from a high estate into poverty and even serfdom in order to criticize those who judge people by exterior trappings rather than on their merits. He also instructs them on the morally deadening effects of the hurried life in the cities, as people scramble to make ends meet. Finally, Ferguson tells Tommy and Fanny of his father-in-law, who, through no fault of his own, had been cast into debtor's prison “through the merciless principles of revenge, of a few creditors, who yet were church goers, and every day repeated, ‘Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors’” (Garland 7:36).

This pathetic tale leaves everyone in tears. When Mrs. Barlow happens upon this scene and finds the participants all weeping, Ferguson hastens to inform her that it had been “their sensibility … which had cast them into such disorder.” Mrs. Barlow's response reflects the shared assumption in the cult of sensibility that affective responses revealed one's character: “‘I'm glad of it, cry'd the excellent woman; shedding tears for others woes, betokens a goodness and nobleness of nature, that I hope my children will never be deficient in.’”

Then a series of sudden reversals of fortune are introduced, which are each in turn turned completely around as the force of Tom's goodness overcomes all adversity. Mr. Barlow is intent on marrying his daughter to the doltish and uncouth son of a wealthy neighbor, a plan that throws everyone into the depths of despair, although he is oblivious to the entreaties and tears of his wife and daughter. Tom is exiled to a distant plantation as an overseer, but ever true to himself—hardworking, honest, diligent, kind, and considerate—the plantation is soon more profitable than it had ever been, since even the slaves love to serve him (Garland 7:40).

Tom is then sold to an Indian trader and seems doomed to a life in the distant wilderness, separated from Fanny and civilization. As Tom and the trader, named Matthewson, leave the plantation on horseback, he has Tom recount his life story. Matthewson is deeply affected by it (and, thus, the reader learns he is a man of sensibility), sets Tom free, and adopts him as his own son. Tom's narrative of his sad history—like the novel itself—evokes the sentimental cycle of emotional responses that witness to the character and temper of each character. As a result, Tom wins a new relation, patron, and friend. Like Ferguson before him, Matthewson sees that Tom's innate goodness and character will ultimately lead him to success.

Sentimental characters are inevitably captivated by each other, as they are enmeshed in a social—even cosmic—world of affect, a world spun out of emotive webs of signification. Kimber expresses as much in the following passage:

There is a certain somewhat, in certain countenances, that prepossesses us in the favour of the wearers at first sight, an openness, and ingenuity, and an amiableness, that immediately strikes the beholder—such was Tom's, and that and the many noble instances he had given of his sentiments and his fortitude, had quite captivated his master, so that he really began to look upon him as a son. The mingled starts of joy, gratitude, and love towards this generous man, which inspired Tom's breast, at the conclusion of this speech, no words can paint—it actuated his whole person, it heaved his bosom—it flushed his face, and deprived him of utterance.

(Garland 7:99)³⁸

Predictably, when Matthewson is killed, Tom inherits all of his property and quickly becomes the most successful Indian trader in the country. Indian captivity is introduced into the novel as yet another (though certainly not the last) sudden reversal of fortune precisely when the tide seems to be turning in his favor. The reader is addressed directly at this point: “Thus behold a reserve of fortune—he, who but a small space of time before, was happy, and employed in making others so, is now strip'd naked, bound with thongs, and a spectacle of triumph and reproach to a barbarous gang of savages!” (Garland 7:140-41).

This familiar scene of the captive being carried off to an unknown fate functions in this sentimental novel as one of many reversals that the protagonist undergoes in the course of the tale on the way to his reward—economic security, social status and respect, and domestic bliss. It is impossible to rehearse all of the vicissitudes of the hero's life thereafter as they are played out over the next hundred pages. Suffice it to say that they all follow the same pattern. One incident bears mention in passing, however, since the introduction of divine providence here is representative of its function in many works of sentimental literature. At one point, after a battle with pirates on the Atlantic, Tom discovers that one of the prisoners he has taken is none other than the man who had kidnapped him as a child years before. As Tom recounts his history to the crew, the sailors' “resentment at so base, so wicked an action, carry'd them out into exclamations against the villain, and the captain added—how just is providence—who has permitted you to see the miserable death of your persecutor! I am convinced that, in crimes of an enormous nature, heaven most commonly punishes the criminal even in this life” (Garland 7:156-57).

Tom eventually wins his Fanny, rescues the long-suffering Mrs. Barlow from her life with her abusive husband, and they all return to England. The novel ends with the reader being assured that “Mr. Anderson and his lovely Fanny are still living, and, tho' now in the decline of life, experience that love founded on good sense and virtue can never know decay, and that providence ever showers down blessings on truth and constancy. “Oh! never let a virtuous mind despair; / For heaven makes virtue its peculiar care” (Garland 7:287-88).

Notes

1. For a summary of the publishing situation, see Davidson, Revolution and the Word, p. 11. For background on the history of the book in America at this time, including publication, distribution, and consumption of texts, see Lehmann-Haupt, Book in America; Berthold, American Colonial Printing; Oswald, Printing in the Americas; Shepard, History of Street Literature; Hall and Hench, Needs and Opportunities; Resnick, Literacy; Joyce et al., Printing and Society; Hall, Worlds of Wonder; and J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels. American booksellers imported most of the fictional reading materials available in North America well into the eighteenth century or, alternatively, brought out American editions (frequently pirated) of English and European fiction. At the same time, there was a ready market in England and on the Continent for some types of American works, which were quickly reprinted there. An instance of the latter case is A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Johnson (Walpole, N.H.: David Carlisle, Jr., 1796), which was brought out in a pirated edition the following year in Glasgow. The pirated edition included the following notice: “The Publishers of this Narrative bought it of an American Gentleman who arrived at Greenock in the Bark Hope, a few weeks ago; and as he assured them that there was not a copy of it to be procured in Europe, and that it sold in America for four shillings and sixpence, they deemed it worthy of reprinting” (Garland 23: n.p.).

2. This linkage of Pamela and captivity narratives has recently been made by Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Imaginary Puritan, pp. 200-216.

3. See Davidson, Revolution and the Word, p. 260.

4. Van Der Beets, Indian Captivity Narrative, p. 36; Pearce, “Significances,” pp. 2, 9.

5. Rowson, The Inquisitor, cited in Herbert Ross Brown, Sentimental Novel, p. 166. Two useful studies of the female domestic novel and the modern romance novel are Papashvily, All the Happy Endings; and Radway, Reading the Romance.

6. O'Flaherty, Other People's Myths, p. 148.

7. Barnett, Ignoble Savage, p. 48; Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, p. 144.

8. I have found the following works useful in understanding the emergence of the Newtonian-Lockean sensory psychology and epistemology, as well as the attendant developments over the next century and a half, especially the rise of a culture of sensibility: Todd, Sensibility; Proby, English Fiction; Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability; Brissenden, Virtue in Distress; Beasley, Novels of the 1740's; Sambrook, Eighteenth Century; Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims; McKeon, Origins of the English Novel; Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism; Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility; Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse; Samuels, Culture of Sentiment; Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility; Bredvold, Natural History of Sensibility; and Gura, Wisdom of Words.

9. Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, p. 69. See also Fiering, “Irresistible Compassion.”

10. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, p. 12.

11. Cited in Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, p. 42, n. 60.

12. Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, p. 6. This form of the transmission of knowledge should not surprise us, nor should the fact that developments in science quickly affected literary forms. It is well known, for instance, that secondhand information on Einstein's theories of relativity, which Virginia Woolf gained from acquaintances at Oxford, affected the form of her novels and inspired aspects of her narrative manipulation of time.

13. “Moral Philosophy” (unsigned), Encyclopaedia Britannica.

14. As Brissenden has noted, concerning Richardson's works, “The sentiments in his novels were indeed ‘moral and instructive’ and they were intended to provide comfort as much for the reader as for the heroine during her trials” (Virtue in Distress, p. 100).

15. Cited in Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, p. 9.

16. Dr. Benjamin Slocock read Pamela to his congregation from the pulpit. See Beasley, Novels of the 1740's, pp. 134, 138.

17. For an introduction to the culture of sentiment and the moral economy of tears in France, see Vincent-Buffault, History of Tears.

18. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, p. xii.

19. Garland 7. The source of these lines is not cited on the title page, but we may assume that most contemporary readers would have readily recognized them as from Addison's Cato, 5.2.15-18.

20. In Before Novels, J. Paul Hunter convincingly argues that the early novel is indebted to the diverse literature of wonders and remarkable occurrences, including the works of Puritans such as Cotton Mather, while eschewing the earlier reliance on supernatural intervention in history because of the increasing acceptability of rational scientific explanations of the world and of causality.

21. Herbert Ross Brown, Sentimental Novel, p. 38.

22. Shaftsbury, cited in Humphreys, “‘The Friend of Mankind,’” p. 205.

23. See Fiering, “Irresistible Compassion”; Crane, “Suggestions”; and Donald Greene, “Latitudinarianism and Sensibility.”

24. Stowe felt that social reformation would come about only through a spiritual conversion in the individual, which would be marked by correct emotional responses to specific situations: “There is one thing that every individual can do—they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race. See, then, to your sympathies in this matter! Are they in harmony with the sympathies of Christ? or are they swayed and perverted by the sophistries of worldly policy?” (Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 448).

    For more on the ways in which Uncle Tom's Cabin participated in the cultural work of the sentimental novel, see Jane Tompkins, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History,” in Sensational Designs, pp. 122-46. In the following pages, however, I will suggest by example that the sentimental novel was not exclusively a female literary form but was a culturally available form appropriated by female authors for their own soteriological or religiopolitical purposes.

25. The Spectator, No. 418, cited in Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, pp. 62-63.

26. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 569.

27. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 116.

28. Cited in Davidson, Revolution and the Word, p. 43.

29. Thomas Berger followed in this tradition of the fictional ruse of an editor retelling “remarkable” tales in his 1964 best-selling novel Little Big Man, a modern fictional captivity.

30. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, p. 14.

31. Herbert Ross Brown, Sentimental Novel, pp. 86-87.

32. Ibid., p. 78.

33. On the popularization of Ignation and other meditative practices in Protestant circles, see Martz, Poetry of Meditation, as well as the more recent work of J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels, which links these practices to the novel.

34. Cited in Herbert Ross Brown, Sentimental Novel, p. 85. In an important sense, Sterne's understanding of the complicity of the author and the reader in the construction of meaning (more precisely, shared meaning) would have helped modern critics to avoid the major weakness of early reader-response and audience-oriented criticism—an overemphasis on the author's ability to channel or structure the reader's response. The reader was represented as largely passive, while the text, as an autonomous object, had the power to generate specific responses.

35. Brown notes that some sentimental authors even claimed that medical autopsies, then a new scientific advance, “proved” the refined sensibility of certain characters by revealing the delicate lines of his or her sensorium, the organ of sensibility (ibid., pp. 78-79).

36. Cited ibid., pp. 9, 76.

37. On the kidnapping of children for sale into indentured servantship, see Coldham, “‘Spiriting’ of London Children,” and Robert C. Johnson, “Transportation of Vagrant Children.”

38. On the influence of Scottish commonsense philosophy on Americans, including Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and American fiction, see Terence Martin, Instructed Vision, Gura, Wisdom of Words, and Fiering, Moral Philosophy.

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