SOURCE: Henderson, Andrea. “Passion and Fashion in Joanna Baille's ‘Introductory Discourse.’” Publications of the Modern Language Association 121, no. 2 (March 1997): 198-213.

[In the following essay, Henderson considers Baille's introduction to her plays as not only a treatise on writing but as an examination of consumerism.]

In 1802 a reviewer for the British Critic remarked that “Miss J. Baillie, even if her pen were now to be inactive, which is not likely, would be always celebrated among the brightest luminaries of the present period” (Rev. of Series, 194). Although relatively little known today, Joanna Baillie arguably “exerted the most direct practical and theoretical force on serious drama written in the Romantic period” (Curran 186); indeed, she was hailed in her time as the finest British dramatist since Shakespeare. Emphasizing the importance of her work to an understanding of Romanticism, Stuart Curran notes that in her 1798 “Introductory Discourse,” the preface to her first volume of plays, Baillie champions the use of simple, natural, common language in literary composition—thereby anticipating Wordsworth's now more famous pronouncement, in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, on the value of rustic language. Her innovations extend beyond style, however, as Anne Mellor argues: “by moving the realm of private, psychological feelings from the domestic ‘closet’ to the public stage, Baillie implicitly asserts that a hitherto culturally marginalized ‘women's realm,’ the realm of feelings, sympathy, and curiosity, is in fact the basis of all human culture, and especially of political culture” (563).

In the past few years, then, critics have argued that Baillie's work has broad social implications for British culture in the late eighteenth century. This period has long been regarded as decisive for the development of a unified bourgeois subject, a subject defined in terms of emotions and desires.¹ Building on Foucault, Clifford Siskin maintains that the Romantic subject, “by requiring and expecting [of itself] unlimited development … always opens deeper truths to surveillance and invites more and more specialized intervention” (153). The privatization of emotions and desires was, however, no straightforward process. “[T]he romantic period and the era that precedes it often appear to us as eras in which people increasingly learned to claim their emotions as the guarantors of their individuality, buried in their breasts,” as Adela Pinch argues, but the writing of the period reveals a “concomitant tendency to characterize feelings as transpersonal, as autonomous entities that do not always belong to individuals but rather wander extravagantly from one person to another” (3). While emotions and desires enjoyed a new ideological prominence around the turn of the century, they were not yet fixed deep within psychic interiors. Indeed, as Baillie's work demonstrates, in the late eighteenth century feelings were often portrayed as exchangeable goods. For while the passions and desires of the modern subject are generally represented as having developed outside the marketplace and even in opposition to its values,² they nevertheless emerged alongside it, and they bear the marks of its influence. In Baillie's “Discourse,” passions function as discrete items available for inventory, display, and sale. Desire obeys the particular protocols of turn-of-the-century consumerism—it seeks out “natural” objects, and it focuses on them serially, without overinvesting in any one of them. Thus Nancy Armstrong's claim that the modern subject is “first and foremost a woman” (8) does not necessarily imply that that subject is defined in opposition to the market, for female domesticity allows for and even requires active involvement in the market in the form of consumerism.³

In the first part of this essay I argue that Baillie's conception of the passions, though founded on a rejection of earlier forms of fashionable consumerism, is organized according to the logic of a contemporary form of consumerism, one that centers on the subtle and intellectual pleasures of collecting. The second section, which examines turn-of-the-century physiognomy and clothing fashion, explores the political value of consumer goods—including Baillie's Series of Plays—that functioned as “natural” and flexible taxonomic systems. Finally, I demonstrate that Baillie's aesthetic, like the popular aesthetic of the picturesque, not only reflects contemporary consumer tastes but also promotes a modern consumerist form of desire—one that focuses on the pleasures of acquisition as well as those of possession. The “Introductory Discourse” thus offers valuable insight into the commercial underpinnings of the passionate, desiring modern subject.

I

Baillie's “Discourse” is preeminently a theoretical argument for the primacy of drama among literary genres and a justification for the systematic delineation of the passions in the plays that follow. In its opening pages Baillie lays out the bold premise of her project: the most fundamental and universal human impulse is sympathetic curiosity about others. As she explains, “From that strong sympathy which most creatures, but the human above all, feel for others of their kind, nothing has become so much an object of man's curiosity as man himself” (2). The observation of human character provides the “native and favourite aliment” for persons of all kinds, from children to renowned wits (19). This curiosity, moreover, gives rise to an urge not just to observe and to know but also to classify:

From this constant employment of their minds, most people … have stored up in idea the greater part of those strong marked varieties of human character, which may be said to divide it into classes; and in one of those classes they involuntarily place every new person they become acquainted with.

(3)

According to Baillie, this ceaseless classification of fellow human beings gives rise to a strong and natural desire to see character embodied in the form of drama.

However, the observant and curious persons Baillie describes sometimes allow their sympathetic curiosity to be perverted from an interest in classifying people on the basis of character into a focus on the material objects that for centuries served as reliable signs of social classification. In fact the “Discourse” makes clear that Baillie views her project as being in competition not with the work of other playwrights but with fashion. Baillie describes numerous instances in which sympathetic curiosity is misdirected into a fascination with fashionable distinctions and the world of goods, and she notes that such curiosity often leads to mere gossip about dress and manners. Still, Baillie insists that the interest in passion ultimately prevails over the interest in fashion:

Anger is a passion that attracts less sympathy than any other, yet the unpleasing and distorted features of an angry man will be more eagerly gazed upon … than the most amiable placid countenance in the world. Every eye is directed to him; every voice hushed to silence in his presence; even children will leave off their gambols as he passes, and gaze after him more eagerly than the gaudiest equipage.

(10)

This comparison encapsulates the logic of the “Discourse.” The fascination with goods and with external signs of rank yields to the healthy, natural interest in human states of mind. An angry man “naturally” commands the hushed attention usually reserved for a person of rank with a gaudy equipage. Similarly,

[c]hildren in their gambols will make out a mimick representation of the manners, characters, and passions of grown men and women, and such a pastime will animate and delight them much more than a treat of the daintiest sweetmeats, or the handling of the gaudiest toys.

(26)

Again, passions and characters afford more delight than the most refined and costly luxuries.

Nowhere does Baillie articulate this antifashion stance more clearly than in her discussion of literary genre. Baillie argues that drama is the most natural and fundamental of genres: even children spontaneously mimic human behaviors. She defines most other popular genres of her day as derivative and overrefined—essentially, as fashionable exotics. Her account of the desires satisfied by the romance and the novel puts one once again in mind of a gaudy equipage: “Our love of the grand, the beautiful, the novel, and above all of the marvellous, is very strong; and if we are richly fed with what we have a good relish for, we may be weaned to forget our native and favourite aliment” (19). Baillie links the pleasures of the “higher sentimental novel” to delight in exotic flora and formal gardens: the sentimental novel “is a dressed and beautiful pleasure-ground, in which we are enchanted for a while, amongst the delicate and unknown plants of artful cultivation” (20).

Baillie's conception of human nature is structured in terms of a competition with fashion and what I shall call consumerism. Most modern readers regard consumerism as a twentieth-century, or at the earliest a nineteenth-century, phenomenon, but scholars in history and literature have recently argued that modern consumerism has its roots in the eighteenth century.⁴ Nevertheless, I do not use the word consumerism to evoke modern notions of aggressive advertising and massive-scale retailing. By consumerism I simply mean a relation to vendible items that tends to encourage their sale, a relation that underwent significant, albeit gradual, changes at the end of the eighteenth century.

The “Discourse” is characterized by an acknowledgment of and a powerful resistance to typical eighteenth-century consumerist modes of thinking. But by setting passion in competition with the world of fashionable goods, Baillie suggests an affinity between the two. That is, her own procedure implies that consumerist voyeurism and the theater of sympathetic curiosity are somehow comparable. Indeed, Baillie describes passions not as internal experiences but as discrete “things” to be viewed from without and evaluated. Moreover, in the “Discourse” the observation of character is not an activity of cold reason but a sort of fascination. Baillie claims, for instance, that the sight of “a criminal the night before he suffers … would present an object to the mind of every person, not withheld from it by great timidity of character, more powerfully attractive than almost any other” (6-7; my emphasis). Knowledge of human nature is something one craves as an infant craves its “favourite aliment.” Baillie's resistance to consumerism cannot hide the extent to which her project and her understanding of human nature are shaped by the logic of consumerism. According to Marx, under industrial capitalism labor assumes the form of a commodity belonging to the laborer (165). But it is not only human labor that comes to be reified; for Baillie, even human passions become things. Thus, at the same time that commodity fetishization lends manufactured objects a mystical character,⁵ something as potentially mystical and ephemeral as human emotion becomes yet another commodity. As Lukács puts it, with the advent of modern capitalism the commodity structure “penetrate[s] society in all its aspects and … remould[s] it in its own image” (85). Baillie's very language reflects the common commercial ground between passion and fashion: if one talks about “how a man wears his wig and cane, what kind of house he inhabits, and what kind of table he keeps” rather than “slight traits in his words and actions,” it is because “in communicating [one's] ideas of the characters of others, [one is] often called upon to support them with more expence of reasoning than [one] can well afford, but … observations on the dress and appearance of men, seldom involve [one] in such difficulties” (4). Baillie insists on the value of exploring marks of personal distinction that do not involve purchasing power or consumer clout. What she offers is, in effect, a better buy for one's classifying labor. Although opinions on subtle distinctions of character may demand “more expence of reasoning,” such reasoning is a small price to pay for access to what Baillie calls a “rich vein” of knowledge (3).

The link between sympathetic curiosity and consumerism is suggested by the broader social resonances of the terms sympathy and curiosity. Sympathy—whose venerable eighteenth-century heritage dates back to the Characteristics (1711) of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury—has links to both theatricality and commerce. Shaftesbury may warn against the performances and impostures of the world and try to distance his text from the marketplace, but his language reveals that theatricality and commerce are central to his argument. For instance, he argues that through soliloquy, a sort of performance to oneself, one can assess or “audit” one's own morality:

A person … comes alone upon the stage; looks about him to see if anybody be near; then takes himself to task, without sparing himself in the least. … By virtue of this soliloquy he becomes two persons.

(105)

The assessment of one's morality, as a matter of private performance, requires dramatic indirection, the capacity for sympathetic responsiveness to oneself. At the same time, as the term “auditor” suggests (122), Shaftesbury speaks of emotions in commercial terms. By “taking an inventory of the same kind of goods within [oneself], and surveying [one's] domestic fund” (124), one learns to understand oneself and others.

As Jean-Christophe Agnew demonstrates in Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750, there is a close link between the growth of the marketplace and the sense of the world as a stage: life in a developing capitalist society seemed increasingly to be a matter of performance. “[T]he theatrical perspective” of the eighteenth century was a response to the “ideal of the detached and impartial observer of life, the discriminating consumer of the urban spectacle. More controversially, it became, at the hands of Adam Smith, a … functionalist social psychology of market society” (13). For Shaftesbury and Smith, sympathy could help bind an increasingly atomistic society together. Smith, after Shaftesbury the most important figure in the philosophical treatment of sympathy, speaks of this quality as both a sign of the irreducible separateness of persons and the force that ties them to one another. Unlike Shaftesbury, however, Smith explicitly links sympathy to theatricality and commerce; in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he insists that it is the “original desire to please … his brethren,” a desire to garner sympathetic feeling, that motivates a man to seek wealth, since “[t]he man of rank and distinction … is observed by all the world. Every body is eager to look at him, and to conceive, at least by sympathy, that joy and exultation with which his circumstances naturally inspire him” (116, 51).

Even before the publication of Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), sympathy and sentimentality were integral to arguments for the value of commerce and capitalism, for they were understood by proponents of capitalist development to be signs of the refinement that commercial relations and dealings had wrought in modern society. As J. G. A. Pocock notes, “Notions of refinement and politeness … were crucial elements in the ideology of eighteenth-century commerce” (115). The growing importance of sympathy in the eighteenth century therefore both reflected the growing importance of commerce and played a crucial role in its ideological success. Not surprisingly, then, by the end of the eighteenth century the ability to respond sympathetically to the sentiments of others was valued in itself. As Agnew observes, it was the “view of feeling as an object, good, or property in itself, that bourgeois popular culture embraced in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (187). Thus, while for Smith sympathy allows one to translate an image of wealth into an abstract but satisfying feeling, for Baillie, at the end of the century, sympathy allows one to translate an image of feeling into an abstract form of wealth.

This gradual objectification of feeling toward the end of the eighteenth century can be related to the particular form sympathy takes in Baillie's writing: it becomes a modifier for curiosity. For during the period curiosity often functioned not simply as a desire for knowledge but also as a desire for possession. Baillie's interest in classification and in the storing up of types lends her writing an austere, scientific appearance but also ties it to collecting, one of the most important consumerist pastimes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁶ Classifying and collecting made objects—from flowers to books to outdated coins—valuable. As Marcia Pointon writes of Grangerism, the fad for collecting and cataloging portrait heads, “[T]he dynamics of collecting were determined … by a desire to … produce a complete map which, like the world of plants, would be open to taxonomic investigation” (58). During the politically unstable 1790s such exercises in taxonomy had a special appeal. One bookseller even provided a ready-made portrait collection, since some portrait heads were so difficult to find that it required “almost the work of one person's life to get them together” (63). These fads were no small-scale affairs; as Robert Southey's Espriella remarks in Letters from England, “[S]ince a clergyman some forty years ago published a biographical account of all persons whose likenesses had been engraved in England … you rarely or never meet an old book here with the author's head in it; all are mutilated by the collectors.” But Espriella also notes, “There is, perhaps, no country in which the passion for collecting rarities is so prevalent as in England” (117, 115).

Baillie's linking of collection and classification to primary human impulses reveals the extent to which her thinking is informed by contemporary consumerism. Moreover, her desire to publish a series of plays on the passions, with a comedy and a tragedy devoted to each, can be viewed not just as a quasi-scientific research project but also as a clever marketing device. Baillie emphasizes that her “extensive design” is not to be taken for granted as an obvious way of proceeding (1):

How little credit soever, upon perusing these plays, the reader may think me entitled to in regard to the execution of the work, he will not, I flatter myself, deny me some credit in regard to the plan. I know of no series of plays, in any language, expressly descriptive of the different passions; and I believe there are few plays existing in which the display of one strong passion is the chief business of the drama, so written that they could properly make part of such a series. I do not think that we should, from the works of various authours, be able to make a collection which would give us any thing exactly of the nature of that which is here proposed.

(71)

Baillie's projected series can be linked to a new conception of drama as the representation of character rather than action, and as Jeffrey Cox argues, her plays resemble the contemporary monodrama, which focused on passion in a single character (44). Moreover, the codification of the passions and their external expression helped shape the aesthetics of eighteenth-century acting (see Hughes). But a plan to build entire plays around the display of a single passion was anomalous in the dramatic world, as a writer for the Edinburgh Review notes: “to confine the whole interest of the story to the development of a single passion, seems to us to be altogether impracticable” (Rev. of Series, 271). And yet within the social context of obsessive collecting Baillie's plan makes perfect sense, for it is a rarity, a product not to be found elsewhere. Moreover, since the plan is for a series, Baillie stimulates the urge to master a series that fuels the collector's desire. That is, she establishes a context within which her plays will of necessity be valuable; she claims that a collection such as she describes cannot be cobbled together from existing material, that one simply must turn to her as a source. With this logic in place, even if her plays were vastly inferior to her plan, they would still be valuable. The aim is possession and plenitude; the scheme stimulates a drive for completion. Thus Baillie's first volume, which does not include the comic companion to De Montfort, a tragedy on hatred, leaves the reader's (and the collector's) appetite whetted for more. And the collector's taxonomy accommodates additions. Thus, while Baillie's original “Discourse” suggests that she will focus on three passions—love, ambition, and hatred—she is able to introduce others, such as fear and hope, later, claiming in her third volume, for instance, that jealousy and remorse are the passions best suited to dramatic representation.

II

In the turbulent 1790s, a period of transition from a society of ranks to one of classes (Perkin), traditional signs of hierarchy no longer seemed fully operative. It is not surprising then that new, workable systems of classification enjoyed a considerable market value. In fact, I would argue that Baillie's interest in the external expression of passion and character represents part of a broader social quest for ever more intimate and inalienable signs of hierarchy. Simply put, if in the eighteenth century one generally relied on dress and accoutrements as immediate indicators of rank, in the nineteenth century one often went one layer deeper, relying on signs of status embedded in the flesh itself. Hence the growth of interest at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth in such sciences as phrenology and physiognomy.

Physiognomy played an important role in Renaissance thought, and its usefulness in reinforcing hierarchies was already clear during that period, as Juliana Schiesari shows with respect to della Porta's influential Della fisionomia dell'uomo (60). For Renaissance thinkers, physiology and emotion were linked by what Foucault calls a logic of resemblance; this logic is clear in the popular conception of the four temperaments, originally an element of Greek physiognomic theory. During the seventeenth century, however, the influence of physiognomy waned with the development of the Cartesian notion of the self and the rise of secular modern science. But the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a new flowering of physiognomic theory—in spite of the difficulty of reconciling this traditional system of analogies with modern science. This development began with the publication in 1774-78 of Johann Lavater's Essays, which by 1810 was available in ten English editions. Lavater tried to develop the study of physiognomy in the context of modern taxonomic science, and after him, Franz Gall, Johann Spurzheim, and numerous others explored his insights in the context of natural history. Physiognomic assumptions about the readability of human character were by the Victorian period ubiquitous. Physiognomy was thus revived at the very moment that older signs of hierarchy were being challenged. Mary Cowling explains:

Physiognomy and phrenology, by their very nature, entailed a preoccupation with the establishment of human differences. Gall and other physiologists most particularly pioneered the undermining of the Lockean-based belief in man's equality. It was their researches into physiological and psychological differences which revealed inequality to be a fact of nature and of human nature, overturning the Lockean explanation of human differences in terms of nurture alone.

(121)

This scientific study came to be viewed as a necessity as traditional classificatory systems broke down. According to Barbara Stafford, “Only categorization, systematization, and standardization saved the ‘scientific’ physiognomist from being overwhelmed by the mob, i.e., by the Romantic intricacy and multiplicity of his miscellaneous subjects” (Body Criticism 103).

Baillie's description of the expression of passion recalls the engraved studies of faces so common in works on physiognomy and pathognomy: “It is not merely under the violent agitations of passion, that man so rouses and interests us; even the smallest indications of an unquiet mind, the restless eye, the muttering lip, the half-checked exclamation, and the hasty start, will set our attention as anxiously upon the watch, as the first distant flashes of a gathering storm” (10-11). Baillie argues that whereas poets “have made use of the passions to mark their several characters, and animate their scenes,” she will endeavor to “open to our view the nature and portraitures of those great disturbers of the human breast, with whom we are all, more or less, called upon to contend” (38; my emphasis). Accordingly, Baillie promoted a “natural and genuine” acting style (Works 233) and even suggested technical innovations in overhead stage lighting to ensure that the performance of her plays would reveal as fully as possible the nuances of human expression. At the same time, however, she attempted to discourage the people-watching that was a traditional part of theatergoing by suggesting ways of circumscribing the drama, presenting it not as just another part of human life but as a delimited object of consumption: “[T]he removal of the stage-boxes itself would be a great advantage. The front-piece at the top; the boundary of the stage from the orchestra at the bottom; and the pilasters on each side, would then represent the frame of a great moving picture, entirely separated and distinct from the rest of the theatre” (Works 235n). Drama would thus be flattened out into a series of pictures, each of which would stimulate the viewer's desire for the next. In her plays, then, Baillie offers the dramatic equivalent of the series of engravings that invariably served as the backbone of pathognomic and physiognomic best-sellers.

Baillie's interest in phenomena believed to suggest natural and refined discriminations of character, an interest that allies her work with physiognomy, points to a similarity between passion as she presents it and turn-of-the-century consumer goods. For the consumer goods of the 1790s, called on to mark distinctions at a time when distinctions were everywhere being challenged, bore an unprecedented semiotic burden: they had to signify distinctions in a way that seemed both subtle and natural, a function that is central to Jean Baudrillard's notion of the consumer society. In the modern world, according to Baudrillard, “objects are no longer tied to a function or to a defined need. This is precisely because objects respond to something different, either to a social logic, or to a logic of desire, where they serve as a fluid and unconscious field of signification” (44). At the end of the century the social logic of objects, their signifying role, became both more important and more ambiguous. It was then that objects came increasingly to serve as an “unconscious field of signification.”

Even clothing fashion, which Baillie's passions were designed to supersede, took on “naturalness” and subtlety in an effort to maintain its importance. While costume could not attain the nice distinctions and stable significations that physiognomy enjoyed, it came closer to achieving those goals through a change in its functional logic—a shift from bold to subtle means of signification.⁷ During the eighteenth century, as sumptuary regulations were relaxed, there was a growing clamor about those who dressed or tried to dress like their betters. Of course, this concern was voiced as early as the Renaissance; one commentator remarked that some women “wear velvet for the street … who cannot afford a crust of bread at home” (Platter 181). But Renaissance self-fashioning achieved its ends largely through traditional emblems. It was not until the seventeenth century that expense became the primary value signified by dress:

[T]he growing influence of a simple bourgeois style can be seen infiltrating the hierarchical and symbolic importance of aristocratic dressing. Emphasis switched from allegory and rhetoric in dress, a reliance on the specific meanings of decorative motifs and colours, to an appreciation of quality in terms of precise cut and smooth finish. Actual possession became more important than symbolic display, a trend identified in the growing naturalism of portraiture during the period which tended to incorporate fashionable objects of real worth as a replacement for the more traditional emblem.

(Breward 87)

In a context of growing national prosperity, this simplification of meaning along the single major axis of market value made the self-serving manipulation of fashion's signifying functions ever more plausible. During the eighteenth century, the numbers with means to afford fashionable clothes expanded still further, and “what might justifiably be termed the beginnings of a ‘modern’ and ‘democratised’ fashion system” emerged (112). As Neil McKendrick notes, “Clothes were the first mass consumer products to be noticed by contemporary observers. … Dress was the most public manifestation of the blurring of class divisions” (53). Increased social mobility made members of elite groups all the more anxious to distinguish themselves and made outsiders all the more eager and able to emulate them. Given new communication and transportation systems that made fashions familiar and available outside London, as well as an increased production capacity, this situation led during the 1770s and 1780s to more-rapid fashion changes and more-extravagant styles (55). The elaborate tête of the 1770s, for instance, with hair powdered and piled high, has been called “[o]ne of the most picturesque modes of the century” (Cunnington and Cunnington 28). In the duchess of Devonshire's 1779 novel The Sylph, a woman describes such a style: “what with curls, flowers, ribbands, feathers, lace, jewels, fruit and ten thousand other things, my head was at least from one side to the other full half an ell wide, and … three-quarters of a yard high” (66). These extravagances were often criticized and parodied, as, for instance, in Matthew Darly's engraving Chloë's Cushion; or, The Cork Rump (1777). Baillie herself disparages the quick turnover and extravagance that characterized fashion: “It belongs to [comedy] to shew the varied fashions and manners of the world, as, from the spirit of vanity, caprice, and imitation, they go on in swift and endless succession. … Those endless changes in fashions and in manners … offer such obvious and ever-new subjects of ridicule” (44, 45).

But to some extent Baillie was fighting a phenomenon of the past; these rapid changes and extremes of style came to an end in the 1790s:

Changes in women's dress were … striking. “Habits” were followed in 1785-6 by inflated “derrières” … together with huge wide-brimmed hats and big muffs, much caricatured and long remembered as monstrosities. These extravagancies were short-lived. The next sensational change introduced a fashion that lasted, with variations, for over twenty years.

(George 138)

What is notable here is that a relatively simple style carried the day for a considerable length of time. This change reflected the influence of classicizing French fashions, the exigencies of wartime, and the desire and need to rely on domestic cloth. But this change in the fashion system also signaled a transformation in the use of costume as a signifier of class distinction:

[A]t the onset of the French Revolution in 1789 sympathisers in England aped a plebeian appearance. “The era of Jacobinism and Equality in 1793-4” increased this. “It was then,” wrote Wraxhall “that pantaloons, cropped hair and shoe-strings as well as the total abolition of buckles and ruffles and disuse of hair-powder characterised the men.”

(Cunnington and Cunnington 24)

However, while some may have adopted lower-class dress in an egalitarian spirit, the importance of distinction remained—its logic had simply changed:

The final triumph of [English cloth] came when the arbiter of fashion George [“Beau”] Brummel pronounced the revolutionary doctrine that henceforth a gentleman's clothes should be inconspicuous in material and exquisite only in fit. … As woollen textiles lack the lustre of silks and satins it meant that in evening dress a man's appearance became sombre; the change from the gorgeous colours of brocaded and figured silks was profound and lasting.

Brummel's conception of a gentleman's clothes was, in fact, a fundamental change from a pictorial design to an architectural one; from a composition in colours to one in lines, marking a progress from a crude to a subtle method of expressing social superiority.

(Cunnington and Cunnington 20)

Thus, however much the idea of equality shaped 1790s fashion, the new trends in costume represented a conservative response to the wildness of the 1770s and 1780s. Extravagance of style was fast becoming ridiculous; clearly the answer to the problem of sartorial distinction would not lie in making styles ever larger, more elaborate, and so forth. If distinctions of rank could no longer be made obvious, at least they could still be made, and in ways that would be comprehensible only to those in the know. A system of subtle discriminations would permit exclusivity along with a certain amount of flexibility. To be fashionable would require taste, not just money, and since taste, although usually represented as an innate faculty, is in fact generally learned, it can function conservatively, as Bourdieu's Distinction shows. In a book attributed to Beau Brummel, clothing is said to be closely related to character: “in costume, the conjunction of beauty, or kindness, or love, or virtue, with particular dresses, produces a combined effect upon the mind, which the weak person is unable, and the enthusiast, perhaps, unwilling to unravel.”

Baillie's arguments against extravagant representations of character and in favor of a focus on the nuances of its display have an affinity with this new phase in the logic of sartorial fashion. Though most people remark only the obvious signs of character, Baillie shows that “slight circumstance” and the “smallest indications” should alert the observer to the subtle discriminations necessary to a true understanding of character and type.

III

The form of fashionable consumption that appears most frequently in the “Introductory Discourse” is grounded in the opposition of artifice and nature: Baillie relies on metaphors that contrast “bad” ancien régime-style formal gardens to “good” British natural landscapes. Thus she both a progressive commitment to changing hierarchies and a somewhat conservative British nationalism. More specifically, Baillie's aesthetic of the passions is arguably a politically ambivalent picturesque aesthetic. Baillie's kinship with theorists of the picturesque clarifies not only her politics but also the way turn-of-the-century consumerism shaped the mode of desire her work promotes.

Eighteenth-century Britain saw the development of an antifashion, antiartifice discourse in which “nature” and “the natural” were privileged categories. This language was important in many cultural spheres, especially in landscaping and gardening, where “naturalness” was a primary desideratum. Early in the eighteenth century the royal gardeners George London and Henry Wise drew on Dutch, Italian, and especially French influences, but as the century progressed “nature was gradually reconceived in opposition to “culture.” The English landscape garden defined itself against the intricate geometries of the French garden, epitomized by the gardens at Versailles designed by André le Nôtre. As the novelist and essayist Horace Walpole remarks in his History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, devices like the ha-ha, or sunk fence, allowed “the contiguous ground of the park without the sunk fence … to be harmonized with the lawn within, and the garden in its turn was to be set free from its prim regularity, that it might assort with the wider country without.”

This logic was carried even further at the end of the century by writers on the picturesque.⁸ During the years of the French Revolution older, “unimproved” British parks and woodlands came increasingly to be associated with nostalgic ideals regarding English land and English landed families and with a past paternalistic age when the relation between the propertied and propertyless seemed more secure. Uvedale Price, the preeminent theoretician of the picturesque and himself a landowner, criticized the landscape park, originally designed to mimic nature, as too severe, too threatening, and noted that the climps of trees resembled “compact bodies of soldiers.” Price recommended that estates be managed according to ideals of paternalistic benevolence and painterly intimacy—that they be designed to look less like emblems of status and more like natural landscapes. Evoking analogous shifts in clothing fashion, Price’s fellow picturesque theorist Richard Payne Knight illustrated in his 1794 poem The Landscape with a pair of views: the first is a scene “dressed in the modern style” of the prominent landscape architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown, and it is, by implication, too artificial, while the second, an image of the picturesque, is described as “undressed.”

While Price and Knight read a hierarchy in the interrelations of trees and other landscape elements, both argue for a more natural and “connected” landscape, what Stephen Daniels calls “a landscape with distinctions but not divisions” (61). Grounds that appeared to be natural woodlands thus served as signs of a kind of liberalism as well as a nostalgic conservatism for good old England.⁹

Baillie, like writers on the picturesque, makes frequent use of this discourse of the free and the natural in asserting the innate human desire to see representations of character that are faithful to “nature.” Significantly, she uses elaborate conceits centered on landscaping to make her point:

The one [novels focused on the refined part of society] is a dressed and beautiful pleasure-ground, in which we are enchanted for a while, amongst the delicate and unknown plants of artful cultivation; the other [works that characterize human nature in the middling and lower classes] is a rough forest of our native land; the oak, the elm, the hazle, and the bramble are there; and amidst the endless varieties of its paths we can wander for ever. Into whatever scenes the novelist may conduct us, what objects soever he may present to our view, still is our attention most sensibly awake to every touch faithful to nature.

(“Discourse” 20)

In contrasting the pleasure ground to the forest Baillie applies the logic of the picturesque. In her play The Alienated Manor this logic emerges in an interchange between the Brownian landscape gardener Sir Level Clump and Crafton, a young man with a taste for the picturesque, whose ancestral grounds Clump intends to “improve.” For Clump, the forest is to the landscape park as a “rude, untamed clown” is to a “gentleman,” while for the sympathetic Crafton the relation is, rather, that of “a savage chief” to “a posture-master” (Dramas 126). In this language Baillie echoes Knight's description of the forest's “savage pride.”

While the British landscape garden and the picturesque estate were set in opposition to formal sophistication and artificiality, they also served to make the natural a possessable commodity and a sign of status. Even here the collector's spirit is at work, although the collectibles are not exotics but “natural” specimens of English flora: the oak, elm, hazel, and bramble, lovingly inventoried. In an age when the rate of enclosure—the privatization of common land—was increasing, natural grounds such as Baillie describes were becoming ever more closely tied to the idea of property. Ann Bermingham argues that as enclosure made “the real landscape … look increasingly artificial, like a garden, the garden began to look increasingly natural, like the preenclosed landscape. Thus a natural landscape became the prerogative of the estate, allowing for a conveniently ambiguous signification, so that nature was the sign of property and property the sign of nature” (Landscape 13-14). Similarly, the picturesque “aesthetically packaged the landscape” and offered “a discourse that was as easily consumed as the scenery it described” (Bermingham, “Picturesque” 85). Thus, even though Baillie's forest was not a sophisticated pleasure ground, the nature it represented may ultimately have been an even more fashionable commodity.

Furthermore, a closer look at Baillie's work and at theories of the picturesque reveals a kinship that goes beyond a fashionable stand against fashion or a rhetoric of natural property; both incorporate a new attitude toward possession itself. Baillie and Price value similar things: he asserts that violent emotion renders creatures picturesque (Price 1: 60) and that the picturesque is an effect of character, especially of “marked and peculiar character,” which renders even “a disagreeable mind” interesting (1: 203). But more important, Baillie and Price argue for a similar form of interest in these valuable things. Thus Price speaks of the workings of “sympathy” and “curiosity” in response to picturesque landscape (see, e.g., 1: 122). For him, “intricacy” in landscape involves a partial obfuscation of the landscape's charms, a concealment that generates and nourishes curiosity; the picturesque is “the coquetry of nature” (1: 89). The bald display of power and property in the Brownian park is not only impolitic, it also deprives one of the subtle pleasure—the “suspense and uncertainty”—of discovery (2: 200). Baillie too contrasts the movement of discovery to the static reverie induced by artifice. Thus it becomes clear that the consumerism that informs Baillie's work is not just about ownership; Baillie's aesthetic, like Price's, is an aesthetic not of possession but of acquisition. The picturesque theorist William Gilpin was well known for his tourism; Baillie's work records a kind of emotional tourism. Baillie discovers and collects nuances of character and passion, and that act of discovery and collection is interminable—the collector's work is never done, the tourist is ever on the move. As Mary Shelley writes of Frankenstein's journey through picturesque scenes, “[A] traveller's life is one that includes much pain amidst its enjoyments. His feelings are forever on the stretch; and when he begins to sink into repose, he finds himself obliged to quit that on which he rests in pleasure for something new, which again engages his attention, and which also he forsakes for other novelties” (202).¹⁰ Or as Gilpin remarks, “The variety of nature is such, that new objects, and new combinations of them, are continually adding something to our fund, and inlarging our collection” (50). Like Gilpin's hunger for picturesque scenes, Baillie's “sympathetic curiosity” functions as an unflagging form of acquisitive desire.¹¹

Although Baillie and Price underscore the intellectual, nonmaterial aspects of such desire, it nevertheless serves as a paradigm for a development within everyday consumerism that became increasingly important during the nineteenth century. As David Alexander observes, the decades around 1800 witnessed a gradual shift away from “the very old economic assumption that demand curves are inelastic, and that competitive pricing will not increase sales sufficiently to maintain profit margins; or, looked at from another point of view, that the size of the retail market is fixed, and that increased sales in one shop means losses for others” (161). The traditional insistence on fair trade rather than free trade reflects this conception. But the legal structures, including sumptuary laws, that supported this older form of trade in its local networks had largely disappeared by the start of the eighteenth century, and the system they supported increasingly lost ground in the latter part of the century (Carrier 74). The theory and the practice of the free-market economy required that desire be elastic, capable of keeping pace with or even outstripping production. Thus even as industrial methods of manufacture made more goods available to more people, desire remained unsated. The good consumer of the late eighteenth century, then, did not just own a certain number of things or things of a particular quality; he or she learned to enjoy the adventure of desire itself. The aim was no longer simply to own but to experience the pleasure of desire; the aim was to shop.

As Baillie's work reveals, the privatization of feelings and desires at the turn of the century was a complicated process shaped by a network of specific economic and political developments. For Baillie, the objects, logic, and mode of contemporary consumerism played a role in structuring a striking new view of emotional life. Baillie's conception of passion—that it can be classified and collected, that it is spectacular but subtly nuanced, that it elicits sympathy, curiosity, and insatiable desire—reflects a way of consuming the things of this world that was specific to her time. In her “Introductory Discourse” Baillie reveals that the understanding of even intimate aspects of personal character can be shaped by market relations at their most impersonal.

Notes

1. This idea is at the heart of Foucault's writings. Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction provides the standard formulation of the idea with respect to fiction, and Romanticists such as Jerome McGann and Charles Rzepka have explored it within the domain of poetry. Historical and sociological studies of the rise of sensibility and its relation to capitalist development have, with slightly different emphases, made the same point: see, for instance, G. J. Barker-Benfield's The Culture of Sensibility and Colin Campbell's The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism.

2. Armstrong claims that the bourgeois woman served as the model for the modern subject and that her domesticity defined that subject in opposition both to aristocratic values and to the modern public world of commerce. Recently, however, studies of women's writing have complicated the links among women, privacy, and a subjectivity grounded in emotion. Harriet Guest, for instance, argues that women and men perceived the boundaries between public and private differently (136), and Claudia Johnson asserts that women in the 1790s found themselves with no proper form of subjectivity once “feminine” sensibility had been appropriated by men.

3. For extensive discussions of women and consumerism see Barker-Benfield; Bowlby.

4. See, e.g., McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, as well as the essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain in Consumption and the World of Goods (Brewer and Porter).

5. See Marx's discussion of the fetishization of commodities, the process by which they are “changed into something transcendent” with a “mystical character” as their functional uses are increasingly obscured by exchange practices (76).

6. Baillie spent many years under the protection of her uncle John Hunter, the foremost natural historian of Britain, and Baillie's interest in the subtleties of classification clearly arose in part from her exposure to natural history. And yet the worlds of science and commerce were not in the eighteenth century so distinct as one might imagine; for instance, museums were often money-making ventures that traded in the exhibition of curiosities.

7. See Bermingham for a discussion of a Victorian text on fashion that aims to “resolve the tension between nature and artifice by mapping physiognomy onto fashion so as to arrive at ‘natural’ categories of ‘fashion types’” (“Picturesque” 107).

8. The past few years have seen extensive revisionist reassessment of the picturesque. See, e.g., Hunt; Clarke and Penny; Cosgrove and Daniels; Pugh; Robinson; Michasiw; and Copley and Garside.

9. See Liu for an excellent discussion of the complicated politics of the picturesque (84-115).

10. On the semiotics of disappointment's structural role in tourism and the “shifting historical relationship between the subject and the world of objects,” see Frow (142); for a discussion of tourism as a semiotic project, see Culler. Recent accounts of tourism in its various eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century forms have explored its many links to other cultural and literary phenomena; see Stafford, Voyage; Fabricant; Lynch; Trott; Langan; and Buzard.

11. Liu too notes that the picturesque does not emphasize consummation, but his focus on Wordsworth leads him to develop this insight into an argument regarding arrested rather than sustained desire (63).

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