SOURCE: “Evelina and the Culture Industry,” in Criticism, Vol. XXXVII, No. 4, Fall, 1995, pp. 559-81.

[In the following essay, Dykstal's reading of Evelina is informed by Jürgen Habermas's analysis of the role of the bourgeoisie in early capitalist Europe. According to Dykstal, Evelina presents Burney's hope that the fictional culture she presented would encourage independence and cultural literacy, both of which are necessary in Habermas's view for the bourgeoisie to challenge the dominance of the aristocracy.]

In an early scene from Volume III of Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), Mrs. Selwyn, the experienced, independent “lady of large fortune” who acts as Evelina's guardian after her arrival in the resort community of Bristol Hotwell, reproaches Lord Merton, a dissolute aristocrat, for making a play for her charge.¹ After “listen[ing] in silent contempt” to his flirtatious banter with Evelina, Mrs. Selwyn tells Merton that “his Lordship's rank and interest will secure him a place” in hell (274). Evelina, who had earlier confessed her apprehension of Mrs. Selwyn's “masculine … understanding” (268), is “surprised” now by her “severity” (274), yet it pays off: Merton abandons his pursuit of Evelina for a later time when he may catch her alone. With everyone else in Burney's novel deferring, even groveling, to the rank and privilege that Lord Merton represents, where does Mrs. Selwyn acquire the confidence to criticize her social better? If she sees anything of herself in Evelina, she acquired it from a liberal education. When Merton, astonished that Evelina has chosen not to attend the assembly that evening, asks “how in the world can you contrive to pass your time?” Mrs. Selwyn answers for her: “In a manner that your Lordship will think very extraordinary. … For the young Lady reads” (275). Obviously Mrs. Selwyn—unlike, it seems, Merton—reads too, and it is from her reading that she has acquired the “masculine understanding” to protect her younger, and less experienced, charge.²

EVELINA'S PUBLIC SPHERE

In Burney's novel, Mrs. Selwyn enacts the critical function of the “public sphere” that Jürgen Habermas sees emerging for the first time between the state and the realm of the private in early capitalist Europe. Associated with (but not tied to) institutions like the coffee house, the public sphere is the social space where the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie exchanged opinions, came to understand itself, and gained the esteem to challenge the domination of the aristocracy. Ultimately resulting in more political power, that challenge began, according to Habermas, in conversations about culture: “the bourgeois avant-garde of the educated middle class learned the art of critical-rational debate through its contact with the ‘elegant world.’” By forming its own opinions about works of art, the middle class developed a habit of critical thinking that it began to apply to other kinds of arbitrary power.³ Simply put, one need not read Locke to discover that power is often exercised arbitrarily; one need simply move in the same circles as those who exercise it, and find their opinions, or their behavior, to be lacking. In this scene from Burney's novel, the “arbitrary power” is Lord Merton's, exercised over Evelina, and Mrs. Selwyn is able to criticize it not necessarily because of what she reads, but because she knows her own mind about what she reads.

The extraordinary thing about the public sphere depicted in Burney's novel, however, is that it is only Mrs. Selwyn who enacts its critical function. All the other middle-class characters, even Evelina herself, are remarkably inarticulate about the culture that surrounds them, unable to say anything intelligent about it, much less to use what intelligence it gives them to say anything critical about the aristocracy. Yet the aristocracy is speechless about culture in Evelina too. The cultural scene in Burney's novel, in fact, more resembles Theodor W. Adorno's description of the twentieth-century “culture industry” than a public sphere: it instructs those who participate in it, but the quality of that instruction is “vacuous, banal, or worse,” and it encourages “shamefully conformist” behavior.⁴ What accounts for this vast difference between the promise of the cultural sphere (a term that, given Habermas's account of the origin of the public sphere, I shall use interchangeably with it in this essay) and the mere culture industry that it has become? In Evelina, what accounts for it is that culture has become a spectacle, a place to see and be seen. Yet Burney, as Mrs. Selwyn's defense of Evelina demonstrates, continues to hope that a kind of culture—specifically, the culture afforded by novels like her own—can encourage the independence, rather than the conformity, of its consumers. She contrasts the cultural illiteracy of most of the spectators in her novel to the good reader to whom she addresses it, and she suggests the only art that can truly enlighten is not an art that can be seen.

When Evelina leaves the country estate of her guardian Mr. Villars for London, long before she encounters Mrs. Selwyn at Bristol Hotwell, Burney supplies perhaps the fullest novelistic representation that we have of late eighteenth-century English culture. In London, Evelina enters a world replete with cultural activities: she dances at balls, goes to plays, and listens to music; she promenades at public places like Ranelagh, the Pantheon, and Vauxhall; and she gazes at exhibits, paintings, and the buildings that contain them. She enters, in fact, a full-blown commodity culture. “[B]y the latter eighteenth century,” says M. H. Abrams, “the cultural situation in England … was recognizably the present one, with a large, primarily middle-class public for literature, together with public theaters, public concerts of music, and public galleries and museums of painting and sculpture.” Evelina's public sphere also includes the public places that Burney's heroine inhabits in London (and elsewhere): at Vauxhall, for example, Evelina may be as much on display as the sculpture, cascades, and shrubbery, but being in public does give her the chance to exercise her critical intelligence with both the middle and the great. What emerges in Burney's London, concludes Abrams, is “an astonishing number of institutions for making a diversity of human artifacts public—as commodities, usually for pay.”⁵ The emergence of art as a commodity—the fact that, as performance or product, it could be purchased by anyone with sufficient means—increased the quantity of opinions that could be exchanged in the public sphere. It also made the benefits that art was supposed to provide available to more people and classes than ever before.

THE THREE BENEFITS OF ART

The first of those benefits was moral instruction. The idea that art should instruct as well as please is at least as old as Horace.⁶ In Burney's novel, “the history of a young lady's entrance into the world,” art does indeed perform an educational function: taking the public places of London as a synecdoche of the world, the art within those places both instructs Evelina as to the various behaviors available in that world and, because it is so pleasing, draws her into it.⁷ Mr. Villars has “detained” Evelina in the country in hopes of “contract[ing] her views to something within it”; as Evelina's excited reaction to the family friend Lady Howard's proposal that she accompany her to London makes clear, however, he has not succeeded. Lady Howard, in turn, justifies her desire to show Evelina “something of the world” in pedagogical terms: “When young people are too rigidly sequestered from it, their lively and romantic imaginations paint it to them as a paradise of which they have been beguiled; but when they are shown it properly, and in due time, they see it such as it really is, equally shared by pain and pleasure, hope and disappointment” (17). Being “artless” to the ways of the world (18), as Villars pronounces Evelina to be, has only increased her eagerness to learn about them: her imagination “paints” even more “lively and romantic” images than the artists from whom Villars is keeping her. Almost reluctantly, he agrees that “the time draws on for experience and observation to take the place of instruction” (18). As Sidney might have said, the experience and observation of art “move” Evelina to find her place in the world as mere instruction—typified by the general precepts and particular examples of her philosopher/historian guardian—no longer can (Sidney, 91). Paradoxically, Lady Howard's art-ful education—being “properly” shown the world and its objects—is what will teach Evelina to contract her views to her proper place within it.

The cultural sphere that Evelina enters, however, required a new explanation of its benefits, for when art became a commodity, it was removed from the political, religious, and social contexts that had given it meaning (Abrams, 149). As numerous commentators have shown, that explanation was provided by “the evolution of a new eighteenth-century vocabulary of polite taste.”⁸ As befitting a commodity culture (and as the metaphor to the physical sense implies), taste could be acquired through judicious consumption. To shore up those lost contexts, however, the benefits that taste provided were as much spiritual as material. For the third earl of Shaftesbury, virtue has “the same fixed standard” as “symmetry and proportion” in music, painting, or literature, and learning to appreciate the liberal arts could improve one's moral aptitude. For Lord Kames, similarly equating taste and virtue, “no occupation attaches a man more to his duty, than that of cultivating a taste in the fine arts: a just relish of what is beautiful, proper, elegant, and ornamental, in writing or painting, in architecture or gardening, is a fine preparation for the same just relish of these qualities in character and behavior.” Adding a religious dimension to Shaftesbury's and Kames's emphasis on the moral, Jonathan Richardson promises that the cultivation of taste will not “merely give us Pleasure, but … Enlighten the Understanding, and put the Soul in Motion. From hence … we are not only Thus Instructed in what we are to Believe, and Practice; but our Devotion is inflamed.”⁹ Prior theorists of the moral benefits of art could assume a universal context in which to couch those benefits: classical or Christian, the average spectator knew the codes with which to interpret the political, religious, and social meanings of a work of art. Shaftesbury and other eighteenth-century theorists, however, faced a cultural sphere full of art objects that were, like their consumers, numerous, mobile, and increasingly secular. The vocabulary of taste allowed them to make many of the same claims for the benefits of art in language that acknowledged the marketplace.¹⁰

When members of the middle class exchange opinions in Habermas's theory of the public sphere, what they attain is a kind of enlightenment: the ability to think independently about things—from works of art to the social order—that present themselves for judgment.¹¹ (“‘Have courage to use our own reason!’—that,” says Kant, “is the motto of enlightenment.”)¹² Enlightenment is also the second benefit that eighteenth-century theorists promised the judicious consumer of art. Kames states that learning the art of criticism allows persons to “assert their native privilege of thinking for themselves”; in contrast to those “Rude ages” that “exhibit the triumph of authority over reason” and in which persons slavishly and “implicitly followed a leader,” the present age contains persons who “disdain to be ranked in any sect, whatever be the science” (29—emphasis added).

The enlightening power of art seems to conflict with the benefit that Kames previously explained, that art educates, or attaches one to one's duty. Thinking for oneself represents the “triumph” of reason over authority, but one can do one's duty without thinking, by simply following a leader. Kames, it seems, is trying to have it both ways: both to sell the benefits of criticism to those in power and to those who seek to challenge it. Joshua Reynolds resolves that apparent conflict by presenting the educative and enlightening powers of art as developmental stages. On the one hand, Reynolds follows Shaftesbury in saying that the “contemplation of universal rectitude and harmony which began by Taste, may, as it is exalted and refined, conclude in Virtue.” He demands “that an implicit obedience to the Rules of Art, as established by the practice of the great MASTERS, be exacted from the young Students”: they should “imitat[e]” rather than “criticiz[e].” On the other hand, Reynolds declares that the third and final stage of a students' apprenticeship (after that first stage of study under a master and a second stage of self-study), “emancipates the Student from subjection to any authority, but what he shall himself judge to be supported by reason. … He is from this time to regard himself as holding the same rank with those masters whom he before obeyed as teachers; and as exercising a sort of sovereignty over those rules which have hitherto restrained him.”¹³ If the educative power of art fits one for one's place in society, its enlightening power teaches one to question that place. It is possible, as well, that neither Kames nor Reynolds see any conflict between thinking for oneself and doing one's duty: they could think that thinking for oneself will only bring one back to those standards of “duty” and “virtue” that authority and tradition have long supported. But the way that Kames and Reynolds explain how art enlightens does at least make possible real departures from tradition, or challenges to authority. After one has learned to think about things, or gained the educative power of art, one can begin to think critically about them: to gain its enlightening power.

The difference between these first two benefits of art is clarified by considering a class of eighteenth-century consumers to which one of them was unavailable: women. Both male and female theorists emphasized that women could be educated by art, but not enlightened by it. They encouraged a cultural (or a “liberal”) education for women only if it taught them better to know their feminine place. John Burton, in Lectures on Female Education and Manners (1793), emphatically denies “that the natural talents of Men are superior to those of Women,” but declares that “It is not necessary, neither is it expedient for the purposes of civil Society, that Girls should be educated in the same manner as Boys.” Citing “The productions of several literary Ladies … as sufficient proofs of the extent of the female mind,” Burton nevertheless advises women to confine their studies to polite literature, “for when Ladies enter into political contentions, or devote their lives to study, they throw off the female character.” In her fictional Letters to some of those “literary ladies” (1795), Maria Edgeworth constructs a dialogue in which a “gentleman” congratulates a “friend” on the birth of a daughter but warns him against educating her as he would a son. The father's reply gently exposes the speciousness of the gentleman's argument, but even the father concedes that female education should only have the object of preparing daughters to assume, not question, their traditional place in society: “It seems to me impossible that women can acquire the species of direct power which you dread: the manners of society must totally change before women can mingle with men in the busy and public scenes of life.”¹⁴ Women were thus told by even the defenders of female education to study only the fine arts, the theater, and polite literature, including selected novels (the areas that Mary Wollstonecraft sanctions in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters [1787]), leaving history, philosophy, and politics to men.¹⁵ Whether Burney herself would so confine female education is an open question. She contrives her plot so that her heroine Evelina needs the help of an educated woman, Mrs. Selwyn, to be recognized by Sir John Belmont and complete her entrance into the world, but she also has Evelina concur, with critics of female education like Burton, that Mrs. Selwyn has “thrown off” her female character by cultivating her intelligence. If Evelina is to keep that character, she seems unable to benefit from the enlightening power of art: to use it, like Mrs. Selwyn, to criticize those who define what her proper place in society is.

I emphasize “seems,” however, because, despite what most eighteenth-century theorists said, we can exaggerate how unavailable to women were the benefits of art. First, there is a rough equivalence between Habermas's model of the bourgeois man who articulates his demand for more freedom against a hoary aristocracy and a bourgeois woman who articulates her demands against an “aristocracy” of men: in both cases, those hoping to gain power must be circumspect about their designs. Edgeworth, for example, may declare herself uninterested in changing the manners of society, but her “father” challenges the manners of her “gentleman,” and her book necessarily takes a place “in the busy and public scenes of life.” Second, confining female culture to the fine arts, the theater, and polite literature does not itself prevent women from using it for enlightenment, for, as Habermas suggests, it matters less what was read or seen in the public sphere than what was said about what was read or seen. Finally, some women (if not some men) did call for female emancipation through culture. Hannah More, for example, recognizing that it was “the character of the present,” enlightened age “to detect absurd opinions,” criticized the idea that “intellectual accomplishments too much absorbed the thoughts and affections” of women. “Whatever removes prejudices, whatever stimulates industry, whatever rectifies the judgment, whatever corrects self-conceit, whatever purifies the taste, and raises the understanding, will be likely to contribute to moral excellence,” asserts More, and “The fine arts, … polite literature, elegant society, these are among the lawful, the liberal, and becoming recreations of higher life.” If her idea of “moral excellence” still dictated that “domestic life is to woman the proper sphere,” More had enough confidence in her own opinions to call others—namely the one that certain kinds of study were inappropriate for women—absurd.¹⁶ In summary, the most definitive thing that can be said about the place of women in the eighteenth-century cultural sphere, including their possibilities for enlightenment within it, is that it is “ambiguous.” In Kathryn Shevelow's words, they are offered “simultaneous enfranchisement and restriction” there.¹⁷

Perhaps the third benefit that art was supposed to provide is the most gender-neutral of the three. Both men and women who mingled in the cultural sphere pursued the distinction of “connoisseurship,” a mode of life devoted “to the study and enjoyment of the products of an art for the interests and pleasure they afford” (Abrams, 141). Shaftesbury said that “virtuosoship” (another word for connoisseurship) was “essential to the character of a fine gentleman and man of sense,” and he insisted that such a fine “taste or judgment, … can hardly come ready formed with us into the world. … Use, practice, and culture must precede the understanding and wit of such an advanced growth as this” (2:254, 257). Such culture took leisure to cultivate, the sort of leisure that came easily to aristocratic gentlemen like himself. The middle-class individuals without such leisure who sought to cultivate what he and other gentlemen deemed tasteful anyway were seeking by association the benefit of social status. As Stephen Copley says, although “The acquisition of taste may well be represented as an educative process, … its results are repeatedly naturalized as a sense that confers privileges of its own on its possessors, and that, in doing so, confirms the special status of the polite in society” (24). Taste may begin its life as a kind of democratic notion, available—unlike an aristocratic sense of worth—to all who learn the rules of polite discourse, but it eventually becomes “naturalized” and exclusive. It confers distinction on its possessor by separating those who have it from those who do not.¹⁸ Richardson argued (like Shaftesbury) that connoisseurship could help to “Reform[] our Manners” and (uniquely) “Increase … our Wealth” (41), but saved his most persuasive reason to cultivate it for last: “To be a Connoisseur is to have an Accomplishment which tho' 'tis not Yet reckon'd amongst those Absolutely necessary to a Gentleman; he that possesses it is always Respected, and Esteem'd upon that Account. … Not to be a Connoisseur … Silences a Gentleman, and Hurts his Character” (219, 221). To be a connoisseur, Richardson adds, is one sure way that a gentleman can distinguish himself from the “Vulgar” (221).¹⁹ The final benefit of art reduces to a kind of snob appeal.

If it is possible to resolve the apparent conflict between the educative and enlightening powers of art by seeing them as stages in an artist's (or spectator's) apprenticeship, there is a real conflict between the power of art to confer distinction and its power to enlighten that cannot be so resolved. It is difficult to gain a critical perspective on a mode of life that one is pursing, uncritically, as a way of improving one's social status. Another way of seeing this conflict is to note, first, that the educative and enlightening powers of art are utilitarian benefits, and that connoisseurship, its social benefit, is deliberately inutilitarian (Abrams, 143). Shaftesbury maintained that, although the “intention” of an artist “be to please the world, he must nevertheless be, in a manner, above it,” “fix[ing] his eye upon” that certain “je ne sçay quoy” that could not be translated into economic (or any other) terms (1:214). Connoisseurship would cease to appeal to middle-class consumers if it reminded them of the world of work: they consumed the products of culture because they were not the useful objects that they produced in order to survive. Leisure, not utility, was the sign of their success. Burney's Evelina contains a character who illuminates this “benefit” of art by being unable to comprehend it. Captain Mirvan, the middle-class sailor who is the husband of one of the women who, as a middle-class woman herself (before she reclaims her patrilineage), Evelina can legitimately aspire to be, enters the cultural sphere of London as a kind of ignoble savage, after long periods of useful activity. At the jeweller James Cox's Museum, Mirvan asks the “conductor” of the tour to “tell me the use of all this?,” gesturing to the trifles that even Evelina calls “a mere show,” albeit a “very astonishing, and very superb” one. “Why, Sir, as to that, Sir,” replies the conductor, “the ingenuity of the mechanism,—the beauty of the workmanship,—the—undoubtedly, Sir, any person of taste may easily discern the utility of such performances” (76). With the conductor's evasions, Burney is pointing out (and, I submit, satirizing) that such questions are, in fact, unanswerable: as Shaftesbury said (or tried to say), the point of aesthetic experience is its ineffability, its “je ne sais quoi.” In another sense, however, the conductor's reply does answer Mirvan's question: the “utility” of such trifles of connoisseurship is precisely that they distinguish those “persons of taste” who can appreciate them from those who cannot—those persons, like Mirvan, who would ask such inappropriate questions about “the use of all this.” Charles Burney, Frances's father, a historian and teacher of what was regarded in the eighteenth century as the most frivolous art of all, music, made it the art of choice for connoisseurs when he defined it as an “innocent luxury.”²⁰

Clearly, Frances Burney did not regard her own art as equally useless. Albeit in a typically self-effacing way, she makes the claim for the moral effect of her fiction in the preface to Evelina: speaking of the novels by and for women that her fiction would likely be grouped with, Burney contends that, “since the distemper they have spread seems incurable, … surely all attempts to contribute to the number of those which may be read, if not with advantage, at least without injury, ought rather to be encouraged than contemned” (8). Aware of the conflict between art's distinctive and enlightening powers, and interested in improving the moral, not just the aesthetic, sentiments of her readers, Burney emphasizes the vacuity of Evelina's public sphere in order to criticize the equally vacuous, and aristocratically dominated, mode of connoisseurship. By doing so, she sacrifices the power of art to confer distinction while preserving its educative, and potentially enlightening, power.

AGAINST CONNOISSEURSHIP

There are numerous examples in Evelina of the evils of connoisseurship. The characters in the novel, both middle-class and aristocratic, frantically consume the products of culture while remaining oblivious to its capacity to enlighten or educate. From the start, on her arrival in London, Evelina is disappointed by the public places that, like “the Mall in St. James Park” (one of the first sights that she takes in), “by no means answered my expectations” (26). At the Pantheon, in contrast, Evelina is “extremely struck with the beauty of the building, which greatly surpassed whatever I could have expected or imagined,” but she is still disappointed that “it has more the appearance of a chapel, than of a place of diversion,” and she feels “that I could not be as gay and thoughtless there as at Ranelagh, for there is something in it which rather inspires awe and solemnity, than mirth and pleasure” (104-105). For Evelina and others, the purpose of moving in public is “thoughtless” oblivion, not—as Habermas would have it—the thoughtful exchange of informed opinions: a public place fulfills its function if it pleases, not if it educates or enlightens, and fails not if it is vacuous, but only if it is boring. (And boredom does threaten early on, when Evelina tells Mr. Villars somewhat peevishly that the public places of London are “almost as innumerable as the persons who fill them” [49].) A typical conversation about, if not in, such public places occurs among Evelina and her middle-class relations the Branghtons at their house in Holborn: her cousins and their border Mr. Smith ask Evelina what she has seen in her more than two months in the city, and, when she denies knowledge of places like Vauxall and Marylebone, chide her for her ignorance. The basis of their chiding, however, is merely that, in her failure to see such places, Evelina has “seen nothing” and “been no where”: it is the basis of connoisseurship (or of tourism, its equivalent with respect to places rather than things). They allege their superior social status, acquired simply from having seen and been seen (187-88).²¹ They obviously do not chide that Evelina has missed a significant educational experience by not seeing such places. Evelina seeks only diversion when she moves in the cultural sphere, and her companions are only too happy to provide it.

From merely moving around London's public places—from the outside, as it were—Evelina graduates to looking at the pictures within them, from the inside. Unfortunately, when the talk turns to painting, the conversation does not improve. When Mr. Smith proposes that they, the Branghtons, her maternal grandmother Madame Duval, and Duval's companion Monsieur Du Bois “mak[e] a party for Vauxhall” (193), Evelina—in order to avoid the attentions of Sir Clement Willoughby—“turned towards one of the paintings, and, pretending to be very much occupied in looking at it, asked M. Du Bois some questions concerning the figures.” Madame Duval redirects Evelina's question to Mr. Smith, “for he's been here the oftenest,” but the hapless Smith, eager to impress, can only stammer out an answer to her questions: “I have attended … to all these paintings, and know every thing in them perfectly well; for I am rather fond of pictures, Ma'am; and really, I must say, I think a pretty picture is a—a very—is really a very—is something very pretty—” (202). Evelina knows that Mr. Smith's answer is tautological, and joins Willoughby in suppressing her laughter over it, but neither she nor he manage any more insightful comment about painting in the whole course of the novel. Richardson told his bourgeois audience that “making proper Observations” on paintings was a “profitabl[e]” way to employ one's “Hours of Leisure” (45); Evelina and the men trying to impress her have the leisure without the profit.

“[A]s to all … your public places, d'ye see, if they were all put together, I would n't give that for 'em!” So—“snapping his fingers”—says Captain Mirvan after a cursory survey of London's cultural sphere. Although he is usually regarded as one of Evelina's comic characters, I think that we should take Mirvan's censure seriously, especially as he makes an exception for an art that may yet educate or enlighten: the theater. According to Mirvan, “a play is the only thing left, now-a-days, that has a grain of sense in it” (108). Is the theater as “dead” in London as public places and painting are, or does it truly have a “grain of sense” in it? At first, Mirvan does seem to use the theater to ridicule, in the manner of an enlightened critique, that which deserves ridicule. When the pretentious fop Mr. Lovel acknowledges that he has trouble staying awake in the theater, for example, Mirvan at first laughs at him for not knowing “what was the play to-night,”—“by my soul, this is one of the best jokes I ever heard! Come to a play, and not know what it is!”—and then, on finding out that the play is Dryden's Love for Love, compares Lovel to Dryden's hypocritical gossip “Mr. Tattle.” When Lovel returns the insult, however—by comparing Mirvan to Dryden's ignorant seaman “Mr. Ben” (thereby exposing that he was merely pretending a fashionable ignorance of the play [81, 82])—Burney reveals what is lacking in Mirvan's attempt to use the theater as social criticism. Mirvan so characterizes his fondness for the theater as to exclude women from its benefits. He replies that he likes Mr. Ben because he “is a man!,” and, later, he asserts that the “play-house” is the only “public place … where a man, that's to say a man who is a man, ought not to be ashamed to show his face” (110). By itself, that does not invalidate Mirvan's critique: as I have shown, most male eighteenth-century theorists of the benefits of art excluded women too, and women found a way to reap those benefits anyway.²² But Mirvan's misogyny also causes him to expend what critical energy he has on vendettas against women (and womanly men like the fop Lovel): most persistently (and cruelly) Madame Duval. Rather than using the awareness that the theater gives him to attack a societal imbalance like the privileges accorded to the upper-class, that is, the self-made middle-class Mirvan taunts a single, pathetic woman. With Captain Mirvan's potentially enlightened critique gone awry, the vision of the theater that prevails in Burney's novel is not Habermas's but Lovel's: it is not a site of critical exchange, but a place in which “one merely comes to meet one's friends, and shew that one's alive” (80).

As if to confirm, albeit in an ironically negative way, her father's opinion of the art as a mere luxury, Burney connects the worst examples of cultural illiteracy in her novel with music. Evelina goes to a concert at the Pantheon and thinks it “an exceedingly good” one. Unfortunately, there was “too much talking to hear it well”: not the sort of intelligent conversation that signals critical exchange, and none of the attentive listening that may be even more important to sustaining it. Instead of listening to the music, she observes, concert-goers are preoccupied with the spectacle of the event: “Indeed I am quite astonished to find how little music is attended to in silence; for though every body seems to admire, hardly any body listens” (105). Her experience at the concert is merely annoying; when Evelina goes to the opera with the Branghtons, the experience is a disaster. “Surprised at [their] ignorance” of the social conventions to be observed there, Evelina complains that the Branghtons are underdressed, even for the pit (85, 84); that “they could not tell at what door we ought to enter” (89); and that Mr. Branghton fusses about the ticket prices, higher than “at the playhouse” (89-90). If one were being charitable, one could forgive the Branghtons their ignorance: it is, after all, their first visit to the opera. They quickly demonstrate, however, that they do not even desire to dispel it, refusing to listen to the opera because, as they complain, it is not in English. Beth Kowaleski-Wallace argues that with the contrast to the egregious Branghtons Burney wants to show what kind of behavior—Evelina's—a proper woman should emulate.²³ I would add that, in the image of her heroine “lean[ing] my head forward to avoid hearing their [the Branghtons'] observations” (93), Burney is showing just how difficult it is for anyone—proper woman or proper man—to gain what benefits the cultural sphere has to offer. The Branghtons attend the opera merely because it confers social status, not to learn anything from it. The noisy, fashionable pursuit of connoisseurship in eighteenth-century London society threatens to overwhelm the potentially educative, enlightening powers of culture.

Of course, there is something unfair about picking the Branghtons to test anyone's theory of the benefits of art. Even to the tediously charitable Evelina, they are “so low-bred and vulgar, that I should be equally ashamed of such a connexion in the country, or any where” (94). Then again, the Branghtons are so appealing to pick on because, as artisans, they are among the middle classes that Habermas describes as benefitting from the discussion of culture in the public sphere. Mr. Branghton, the patriarch of the family (introduced as the nephew of Madame Duval [68]), is a silversmith, an occupation that furnishes him with the sort of comfortable living (if not necessarily the aristocratic sort of leisure) to indulge himself and his family with the products of eighteenth-century culture. And, soon after Evelina joins Madame Duval and her relations in London, that—to her dismay—is just what she and the Branghtons spend their leisure time doing. If there is something unfair about picking the Branghtons to represent their class, however, we should note that after her first night at the opera even Evelina, who is nominally middle class, describes the performance, not as enlightening, but as a kind of narcotic: “the music and singing,” she says, “soothed me into a pleasure the most grateful, the best suited to my present disposition in the world” (36). Evelina may prove herself in the opera scene to be more capable of receiving pleasure from art than the Branghtons—more capable, in fact, of being a genuine connoisseur—but she is ultimately no more receptive to being instructed, at least by the public sort of art that the opera represents, than they. Art that enlightens should not suit or endorse one's “present disposition”; it should show one where that present disposition is lacking.

Perhaps the problem with the public sphere in Evelina is that it is not yet as emancipated from the authority of the aristocracy as its public seems to think it is. The middle class could be stuck in (or passing through) what Kant calls a period of “tutelage,” having to ask both what is desirable in polite society and how to express it there, without the maturity to think, and talk, for itself (83). Being indebted to the aristocracy for its opinions about art would considerably reduce the middle class's ability to mount a cultural critique against the upper class—and thus reduce the enlightening power of art—but it would salvage its educative power. Indeed, the only person who manages to say something intelligent about art in Burney's novel is the aristocrat Lord Orville, Burney's (and Evelina's) ideal man. When Captain Mirvan dismisses Cox's Museum as so much “jem cracks,” for example, Orville manages to agree with him in language that nevertheless sets him apart: “The mechanism … is wonderfully ingenious: I am sorry it is turned to no better account; but its purport is so frivolous, so very remote from all aim at instruction or utility, that the sight of so fine a shew, only leaves a regret on the mind, that so much work, and so much ingenuity, should not be better bestowed” (110). What makes Orville's aesthetics so different from anyone else's in the novel (except perhaps Captain Mirvan's!) is that he judges on the basis of utility, not of connoisseurship: he appreciates art for what it can teach, and he is able in addition to pass that knowledge on to those (in this case, Mrs. Mirvan) who ask for it. Unfortunately, Orville's anachronistic sense of modesty—Mrs. Selwyn says that his manners seem “designed for the last age” (283)—makes him reticent to offer his opinions unless asked. Furthermore, even Orville is capable of lapsing, however playfully, into fashionable cliché, as when he tells an assembled company that Evelina's color must be natural, for “that of art,” is “set, and too smooth; it wants that animation, that glow, that indescribable something which, even now that I see it, wholly surpasses all my powers of expression” (80).²⁴ Sir Clement Willoughby appropriately classifies that ironic remark of Orville's when he declares that Orville “is universally acknowledged to be a connoisseur in beauty” (80), and Sir Clement—not Lord Orville—is the aristocrat who proves to be the rule in Evelina. When he is at Cox's Museum, rather than venture his own opinion “of this brilliant spectacle,” he asks Evelina for hers, and, when she vaguely replies that “It is very fine, and very ingenious … but I seem to miss something,” he returns, “you have exactly defined my own feelings” (76). It is a measure of the degeneracy of Evelina's public sphere that Burney seems to be parodying Habermas's model here: rather than Evelina, the nominal middle-class person, challenging the aristocrat Willoughby's opinion, he meekly acquiesces to hers. In general, the aristocracy is just as inarticulate about culture in Burney's novel as the bourgeoisie is.

In contrast to Habermas's vision of a public sphere full of articulate individuals exchanging informed opinions, then, Evelina depicts a public sphere in which no one really knows what to say about all the culture that surrounds them. Among both the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, culture seems, at best, a diversion, at worst a place of inane discourse. What replaces intelligent conversation and attentive listening in Burney's novel is the sort of gazing that psychoanalytic theorists associate with the desire to consume (rather than, in the Enlightenment manner, communicate with) the object of admiration. Willoughby is right to call one of the “shows” of London a brilliant spectacle, and Mr. Lovel is clearly in the wrong when he laughs at Captain Mirvan's idea that London is “a mere shew, that may be seen by being looked at” (397). The commodification of culture in the eighteenth century may have made it more visible to the general public, but the cultural sphere that Burney depicts in Evelina is a place where things quickly get used up, and where the search for novelty replaces the search for enlightenment.

READING AND ENLIGHTENMENT

The only kind of cultural activity that Evelina and her fellow consumers do not discredit, in fact, is reading. As I have shown, Mrs. Selwyn implies that she has gained the knowledge to criticize Lord Merton through reading, and she asserts that Evelina's reading is an “extraordinarily” useful way to pass her time, especially in contrast to the fashionable amusements in which Merton passes his. Evelina proves herself an adept reader, and critic, when she intercedes on behalf of the “poor Scotch poet” Mr. Macartney, first by giving him money just as he is preparing to turn robber, and then by taking an interest in his destiny until Sir John Belmont reveals himself to be the father of them both. It is significant that, while everyone else, especially the Branghtons, simply read Macartney's poverty as a sign (the only sign necessary) of his unworthiness, Evelina is led to sympathize with his plight after detecting in his poetry “an internal wretchedness which, I own, affects me.” Evelina's liberal (in the sense of bountiful) reading has made her a liberal (in the sense of generous) critic, able to ignore the “harsh[ness]” of Macartney's lines for the “misfortunes of no common nature” that are “indicate[d]” therein (177).

Even before she allows herself the protection of Mrs. Selwyn, meeting the poet Macartney triggers Evelina's ability to apply her reading appropriately to situations; applying it, indeed, in a way that sometimes constitutes social criticism. At least three times after she meets him, Evelina recalls a line of Pope's, once comparing Macartney's appearance after she interrupts his robbery attempt to the poet's “bloodless image of despair” (182), and once judging the garden at Vauxhall as “too formal,” comparing it to “the false taste of Magnificence” exemplified for Pope by the garden at Timon's villa, where “Grove nods at grove, each alley has its brother” (193).²⁵ Although that hardly constitutes social criticism, it does show that Evelina is learning to interpret her world through the lens of her reading, and is exercising a critical intelligence. Occasionally, too, Evelina can be socially critical. If Mrs. Selwyn's comparison of Merton, his companion Jack Coverley, and Mr. Lovel to “Swift's hospital of idiots” is severe enough for Evelina to regret the number of “enemies” it “excite[s]” (362), it only agrees with what the reader has been thinking about them all along. Evelina herself is more gentle, writing of Mr. Smith—again only after she meets Macartney—that “his vivacity is so lowbred, and his whole behaviour so forward and disagreeable, that I should prefer the company of dullness itself, even as that goddess is described by Pope, to that of this sprightly young man” (178). Later, she is even critical of Macartney, or of some verses in praise of her beauty that she guesses he must have written. When Willoughby asks her opinion of the verses—of which, because of their courtly style, we suspect that he, not Macartney, is the author²⁶—she sharply if modestly dismisses them as “written ironically, or by some madman” (335). Having encountered someone in Macartney who reminds her of her love of books, Evelina begins to use her reading to gain some critical distance from the purely visual culture of London, and from those who—like Willoughby—would fit her squarely within it.

In various ways, Burney associates the culture of reading in her novel with enlightenment. Merely as physical objects or props, books occasionally signify when Evelina turns a corner in her moral development, becoming more independent in her charity. Mr. Macartney is holding a book when Evelina gives him money (214), and, when the poet follows her to Bristol Hotwell to plead for additional assistance, Orville gives him a book “by way of pretence for continuing in the room” (320), allowing their conversation to continue. By connecting books to Evelina's most gracious act of charity—her intervention on behalf of Macartney—Burney proposes that reading, unlike the arts that she criticizes in the rest of Evelina, can be useful. More than useful, reading can be enlightening. Evelina's care for Macartney, whom everyone else in the novel dismisses as too poor for consideration, demonstrates that she has learned to think for herself. In addition, her intervention upsets the social order, bringing to light the genetic connection between her middle-class self, the disenfranchised poet, and the aristocrat Sir John Belmont. By socially elevating the most serious readers and writers in the novel—Macartney and Evelina herself—Burney rewards the independence of mind that reading brings. As they will carry their tastes with them, she may also be forcing verbal, as opposed to visual, literacy on the aristocracy that she has used that literacy to criticize.

But the most obvious sign of the importance of reading and writing to Burney is the book that she herself is writing: the novel Evelina. Shortly after her arrival in London, Evelina wishes for “a book, of the laws and customs à-la-mode, presented to all young people, upon their first introduction into public company” (83); in many ways, the novel Evelina is that book, written in epistolary fashion by the heroine herself.²⁷ I have mentioned how Burney “very carefully distinguishes her novel from those that undermine virtue” (Campbell, 558) by claiming in her preface that it “may be read, if not with advantage, at least without injury.” In addition, according to Gina Campbell, Burney demonstrates in the very fabric of her novel how to read “without injury” by “explicitly present[ing] … misapprehensions” of Evelina's motives “as problems of readerly interpretation”: Mr. Villars proves himself a bad reader when he misreads Evelina's reserve on her retreat to Berry Hill as a sign that she has something to hide, rather than that she has been offended; and Lord Orville misreads Willoughby's attentions to Evelina as indicating a corresponding interest on her part; but Orville, at least, “redeems” himself as a reader when he “recognizes her [Evelina's] moral authority” to interpret herself (Campbell, 561, 57-78). Among eighteenth-century novels, there is nothing unique about Evelina's desire to instruct as well as please. Compared to the public art that Burney criticizes, however, Evelina's book is unique in aspiring to be more than a trivial pursuit.

Why is reading more enlightening than the other activities going on in Evelina's cultural sphere? First, as a private, rather than public, activity, the taste of reading is less susceptible to market forces. Because it cannot be cultivated en masse, that is, it is less likely, in Adorno's terms, to be deceptive, to lull the consumer into a bland acceptance of the status quo. Second, unlike connoisseurship, reading is intrinsically a modest pursuit, not lending itself to social display: a reader can always show off his or her library, but otherwise the knowledge gained through reading is known only when it is serving some useful purpose, like the enlightened one of criticizing those in power. Third, reading is verbal. If Habermas is right that the middle class had to learn the rules of polite discourse before it could intervene in public affairs, the verbal tools that one may acquire through reading and its medium of language are more immediately useful to that intervention than, say, the tools that one may acquire through gazing at paintings. The first traffics in words; the second in images that must be translated, for the purposes of social criticism, into words. In other words, the medium through which reading bestows its benefits on the consumer is the same as that through which the consumer bestows it on others.

Most important, however, reading, unlike connoisseurship, provides examples of the kind of behavior that, for Burney, signifies maturity. In an important early letter, Mr. Villars advises Evelina that, if she is to grow into a “respectable” eighteenth-century woman, “you must learn not only to judge but to act for yourself” (164). The kinds of art that can be cultivated by a connoisseur, the kinds of art that Burney is criticizing—especially painting, music, the musical theatrics of opera, and the public spectacles of Cox's Museum, Ranelagh, and Vauxhall—have little to do with action: what they ask of their spectators, at the most, is to be judged. The narrative of a novel, however, both depicts characters in action—making choices, for good or ill—and asks us to judge the worth of those choices.²⁸ In the degenerate public sphere that Burney portrays in her novel, no one—with the exception of Evelina's last guardian Mrs. Selwyn—either acts or judges for him- or herself. The fact that the judgment that is represented is so pathetic—with nearly every middle-class character aping the opinions of an aristocracy that does not understand what it is seeing anyway—suggests that the concern with judgment in theories of the public sphere must be supplemented by a concern with action. Education, Burney says through Lady Howard, can take Evelina only so far. Experience—the equivalent of action—must take her the rest of the way. Only experience can tell Evelina when to moderate the harshest judgment, or, conversely, when to judge as harshly as Mrs. Selwyn judges Lord Merton. For Burney, the novel, by placing its characters in situations where they must exercise their manners as well as their wits, is the only art form that can exemplify such action, and that can encourage its consumers—in the novel's case, its readers—to imitate it. To the connoisseurs of the degenerate public sphere that she depicts in her novel, Burney offers the alternatives of her heroine and Mrs. Selwyn, the characters who practice criticism as enlightenment by doing something “quite extraordinary”: reading.

Notes

1. Fanny Burney, Evelina: Or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 260.

2. Burney's critics are almost unanimous in seeing Mrs. Selwyn as representing, in Kristina Straub's words, “an alternative ideology [to the dominant one of ‘female powerlessness’] in which women are valuable in terms of their importance to other women,” but disagree as to whether Burney herself regards Mrs. Selwyn so positively (Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy [Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987], 27). In “Defiant Women: the Growth of Feminism in Fanny Burney's Novels,” SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900] 17 (1977): 519-30, Rose Marie Cutting observes that Burney both satirizes Mrs. Selwyn for her masculine understanding and admires her for her abilities as a satirist, who “alone has the courage to call them [‘the rakes and fops of her society’] to account for their behavior” (522). In The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women's Writing (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), Julia Epstein presents an even more positive view of Mrs. Selwyn, contending that Burney sees her as “a woman who is kind and compassionate to those who deserve it and who achieves independent status without compromising herself either socially or personally” (133). Straub, however, proposes that Burney's fictions are ideologically “divided” between her “desire to achieve two different kinds of mutually contradictory value—as woman and artist” (6), and that her portrayal of Mrs. Selwyn manifests this ideological split: Selwyn's “apparent freedom from male control is actually an unconscious, left-handed deference to male authority,” and she “labor[s] for the male approval she can never command” (27). Straub's thesis helps to explain Burney's (and Evelina's) ambivalence about Mrs. Selwyn—Burney can admire her (I think real, not apparent) intellectual independence at the same time that Evelina “must learn to avoid” her masculine behavior “if she is to make the system of romantic love work for her”—but I disagree with Straub that Mrs. Selwyn ultimately “fails” as Evelina's protector (27, 28). Evelina would never have been recognized by Sir John Belmont, and therefore completed her entrance into the world, without Mrs. Selwyn's shuttle diplomacy between the two.

3. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989), 29. “Thus critical debate ignited by works of literature and art was soon extended to include economic and political disputes, without any guarantee (such as was given in the salons) that such discussions would be inconsequential” (33). In The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), Peter Uwe Hohendahl elaborates on the origin of the public sphere in polite society, especially in the “institution” of literary criticism.

4. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1989), 132. This essay is a restatement of Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's classic definition of the “culture industry,” “Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 120-67.

5. M. H. Abrams, “Art-as-Such: The Sociology of Modern Aesthetics,” in Doing Things With Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Fischer (New York: Norton, 1989), 148, 151.

6. “Poets aim either to benefit, or to amuse” (Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. ed., The Loeb Classical Library 194 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929], 479). In his “Defence,” Sidney revived the classical apology for art by defining poetry as “an art of imitation … with this end, to teach and delight,” and added that the poet (or any imaginative artist) outperforms both the “philosopher” and the “historian” (who supply, respectively, the precept and the example) in moral instruction by making virtue attractive (Philip Sidney, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973], 79-80, 90).

7. As Patricia Meyers Spacks says, surveying the place of women in the imaginary city of eighteenth-century novels, “The fictional city provides a synecdoche for the ‘public’ realm” (“Women and the City,” in Johnson and His Age, Harvard English Studies 12, ed. James Engell [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984], 488).

8. Stephen Copley, “The Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century Polite Culture,” in Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays in British Art, 1700-1850, ed. John Barrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 13. For more on what Copley calls the “ubiquitousness” of the vocabulary of taste in the period, see Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 1-68.

9. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John M. Robertson, 2 vols. (1711; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 1:227. Henry Home of Kames, Elements of Criticism, ed. James R. Boyd (1761; New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1855), 28-29. Jonathan Richardson, Discourse II. An Argument in behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur; Wherein is shewn the Dignity, Certainty, Pleasure, and Advantage of it, in Two Discourses (1719; Menston: Scolar Press, 1972), 16. Not every eighteenth-century aesthetic theorist agreed with Shaftesbury's equation of taste and virtue. Alexander Gerard asserted that “A taste for the fine arts, and a high sense of virtue, … are often separated: and a careful examination of the moral faculty, would probably lead us to derive it from other principles than those from which taste has been explained” (An Essay on Taste: Together with Observations Concerning the Imitative Nature of Poetry [1759; Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1963], 189). As a middle-class theorist (his Essay was published, in fact, as the winner of a contest on the subject proposed by the Select Society of Edinburgh), Gerard may be moved to oppose Shaftesbury's aristocratic notion of taste, the “fundamental qualification” for cultivating which, as Copley remarks, was “leisure,” and which therefore “serve[d] to moralize pleasure and legitimize leisure and luxury expenditure” (16). For the whole range of associations evoked by Shaftesbury's original equation, see Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

10. This is not to say that acknowledging the marketplace was Shaftesbury's intent. On the contrary, as David H. Solkin says, he and those theorists who followed his lead consistently opposed commerce for its corroding effects on the humanizing benefits of art. My point is simply that the metaphor of taste already concedes that consumption, rather than, say, reverent contemplation, is the way that such benefits are acquired. For a fuller account of how, despite his opposition, “Shaftesbury's construction of polite virtue drew upon the discourse of the marketplace” (22), see Solkin's Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), especially the “Introduction: On Painting, Commerce, and the ‘Public’ in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” 1-26.

11. This claim for the enlightening power of art applies only to the early Habermas (of Structural Transformation), however, not the later. In “Art and Democracy in Habermas,” in Writing the Politics of Difference, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), Claude Piché shows how Habemas hedges the claim later in his career when he more strictly subjects art to the “theory of communicative action” that comes to dominate his entire philosophical project. According to Piché, Habermas comes to devalue the aesthetic experience because “the primacy of communication” in his theory interferes with art's “inner logic,” the fact that, like science and morality, aesthetics has necessarily become an “autonomous” and specialized sphere (an “expert culture”) in the modern world (270, 267-68). Habermas wants to force artists to communicate aspects of the aesthetic phenomenon that cannot be communicated except to experts, and, when they fail, he ignores those cognitive aspects of art that can be so communicated. It may be that Habermas makes a more positive claim for art in Structural Transformation because, as he views eighteenth-century society, art had not yet become an expert culture.

12. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What Is Enlightenment?, trans. Lewis White Beck, 2nd ed., rev. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990), 83. Richardson also counted enlightenment among the many benefits of taste: “Those who are Connoisseurs have this farther Advantage; They will have no occasion to Ask, or Rely upon the Judgment of Others; They can Judge for Themselves” (221).

13. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1959), 17, 26-27.

14. J. Burton, Lectures on Female Education and Manners (New York: Source Book Press, 1970), 163-64. Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies (New York: Garland Publishing, 1974), 13, 52.

15. Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, vol. 4 (London: William Pickering, 1989), 18-21, 46-47.

16. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), in The Works of Hannah More, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1872), 1:387.

17. Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (New York: Routledge, 1989), 2. As quoted, with the description of a woman's place as “ambiguous,” in Copley, 25.

18. As Raymond Williams says in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), words like “taste … make little sense unless we are able to contrast their presence with their absence” (281). Pierre Bourdieu analyzes the aristocratic exclusivity that gives life to the sense of taste in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

19. “A Connoisseur has this further Advantage, He … sees Beauties in Pictures, and Drawings, which to Common Eyes are Invisible” (Richardson, 203). Also Joseph Addison: “A Man of Polite Imagination, is let into a great many Pleasures that the Vulgar are not capable of receiving” (The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965], 3:538).

20. Charles Burney, A General History of Music: From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, ed. Frank Mercer, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company), 1:21.

21. As usual, the Branghtons betray their very lack of that status in the way that they interrogate Evelina, drawing no distinction in their visited itinerary between such aristocratic pleasure gardens as Vauxhall and Marylebone and such plebeian attractions as Don Saltero's coffee house and the Tower of London. For more on the distinctions among such attractions and their cultural content, see Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

22. Wollstonecraft, for example, recommends the theater in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters as a “rational … amusement” suitable for “a cultivated mind” (46). Also and incidentally, and without distinguishing their gender, she is just as critical as Burney of characters like Lovel who go to the theater only “to shew themselves and to waste time” (47).

23. Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, “A Night at the Opera: The Body, Class, and Art in Evelina and Frances Burney's Early Diaries,” in History, Gender, and Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1994), 141-58.

24. Orville is literally translating “je ne sais quoi,” the French phrase that English theorists (like Shaftesbury above) borrowed to describe a work of art that, in its sheer exceptionality, eludes evaluation. If taken seriously, as tutelage, Orville's remark would actually do more harm than good to Evelina's public sphere. For Habermas, the public sphere is sustained by rational discourse, but the French phrase makes a virtue out of irrationality.

25. Evelina, as Bloom notes, is quoting Pope's Moral Essays, Epistle IV, line 117 (416); Pope himself describes the “false taste” of Timon's garden in a footnote (The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963], 592).

26. Gina Campbell, “How to Read Like a Gentleman: Burney's Instructions to her Critics in Evelina,” ELH 57 (1990): 570.

27. I take this point from Catherine Parke, who—in “Vision and Revision: A Model for Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel of Education,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 16 (Winter 1982/83): 162-74—notes that “Once during her correspondence” Evelina “specifically remarks how useful such a book as the one now accumulating in her letter-journal would have been to her before coming to London.” Parke adds that “Evelina's wish for such a book makes an inside commentary on the novel itself and defines one of its purposes: to offer the reader mock encounters with the unfamiliar, dangerous situations that Evelina must puzzle out for herself” (168).

28. The same could be said of the theater, but—as I have discussed—at least in Burney's novel it, too, is a public art cultivated by connoisseurs, and it suffers from being championed by the unreliable Captain Mirvan. Burney thus takes essentially the same position on the contrast between novel-reading and theater-going as Rousseau, who, in the Letter to M. d'Alembert, denounces the theater for “present[ing] virtue to us as a theatrical game, good for amusing the public but which it would be folly seriously to attempt introducing into society,” and admires England as a nation of (especially female) novel readers, who thereby “give themselves less to frivolous imitations, get more of a taste for the true pleasures of life, and think less of appearing happy than of being so” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theater, trans. Allan Bloom [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968], 26, 82).

Subsequent references to the texts documented below will be cited in the text.