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CHAPTER 1

Powerlessness as Entertainment

Intrusive Narration

In the years before and immediately after Tristram Shandy appeared, a significant number of lesser-known but equally self-conscious novels were published. Most of these contain only moderately interestingly romances, adventures, and life narratives. But they are framed and delivered by well-characterized narrators possessed of the disarming power to describe the flaws of novel writing and to reprimand and banter with fictional readers. The narrator of one of the more successful fictions of the period, the anonymous History of Charlotte Summers, the Fortunate Parish Girl (1750), comments in this spirit on the interpretive activities of those reading the novel. His intrusions include addresses to “Miss Censorious,” who is told not “to run too quick upon a malicious Scent,” and to readers who are permitted to “yawn a little” while the narrator rests to “smoak a serious Pipe.”¹ In the second volume, the “numerous Tribe of Criticks, who may find materials sufficient in this work to employ their malicious talents” is hailed as a force from which the author must be saved (2:52). Charlotte is introduced as a character to be “dressed and presented” and installed within the papery mansion of the book, where readers are invited to visit her (1:13).

As such gestures illustrate, the entity that fictions like Charlotte Summers appear to know best is a reader whose mood oscillates between boredom and frustration. “You are much obliged to me,” claims the narrator of The Temple Beau or the Town Coquets (1753) in justification of an abridgement, “if I cure you of that impatience, which many Readers are seized with, to know the End of a Story.”² More specifically, these fictions anticipate a reader in the physical throes of reading or of mishandling a text. The brazen narrator of Edward Long’s The Anti-Gallican; or, The History and Adventures of Harry Cobham, Esquire (1757) flags the hardship of reading a bad novel by advising that “if, after traveling through half a dozen Pages, you find your senses gradually declining into a heavy Torpitude, halt directly, and advance no further without the repelling Aid of Tea or Coffee.”³ In John Kidgell’s The Card (1755), the narrator claims to have included an illustration of the ten of clubs, on which a message is written, in order to increase the chances of his novel being rescued from its fate as waste paper by a child’s seeing the illustration:

as probably the labourious compilers of the History of the Present Times may adjudge Incidents of this sort too low to deserve a place in their immortal Register, this elaborate Representation of a Message is devoted to the Perusal of the curious. By this artifice doth the Author ingeniously project a message to preserve himself from total oblivion; humbly conceiving, that when this neglected Treatise under the character of waste-paper, shall be doomed to share the Fate of it, some little Master or Miss may be kindly advertised of the picture of that harmless Card which adorns one happy leaf of it, and which began about the year one thousand Seven hundred and Fifty, to be universally respected as a high Messenger of Honour.⁴

The inclusion of an illustrated page works here as occasion to flaunt the author’s perception of novels being fashionable items, quickly cast aside and reduced to paper. In a similar spirit, William Toldervy includes songs that he hopes will catch the eye in a novel his narrator otherwise admits is thin on remarkable events.⁵

Other authors describe more broadly the mood of their disgruntled audience and their possible reactions to the page. Readers of William Goodall’s Adventures of Capt. Greenland (1752) are invited to “indulge their spleen” by tearing out digressive passages they don’t like or “if it should better please them, by throwing the Whole Book into the consuming flames,” and Shebbeare’s Lydia, or Filial Piety: a novel (1755) challenges readers discontent with a chapter to “write a better themselves.”⁶ The cocky narrator of The Marriage Act (1754) encourages readers to leave off reading and head down to the club to bet on the events to come in the novel—“Now in this very Place, if an Author could lay Wagers with his Readers, Thousands of Pounds might be won; but as he cannot, it may serve a Bet a White’s, where the Lives of men are play’d at Chuck-Farthing.”⁷ In return for their assumed animosity toward the novels being written, readers are cast in these asides as distractible gamblers, volatile and impatient.

Until recently, these novels have been discussed very little by critics. In the 1950s, Wayne Booth reviewed them as part of the fashion in intrusive narration that began in England with Fielding and culminated with Sterne. Booth imagines the mounting tension readers felt as they saw devices used by Fielding—the chapter headings, intrusions, prefatory material—implanted in the works of lesser authors “with almost complete disregard for their artistic function.”⁸ For Booth, these intrusions register as distractions, impinging on otherwise limp but progressive narratives in a pattern that is not corrected until the appearance of Tristram Shandy, with which Sterne skillfully sublates the progressive function of narrative entirely to the humor of digression. Because his main interest is in pegging the development of mid-century fiction to the work of better-known authors, Booth shows little interest in the self-reflexivity of these mostly forgotten, mid-century novels being of its own order. Yet the frequency and creativity with which mid-century novelists refer to readers and introduce them as locked in combat with the materiality of the page is unrivalled in the more famous examples of eighteenth-century, self-conscious fiction Booth privileges. Although Fielding anticipates such a field of reference, imagining reading as a form of physical travail and presenting chapter headings as physical breaks in his narrative journey, he never goes so far as to write prose that explicitly anticipates its mediation in print, or on paper. On the contrary, while he promotes the spirit of transparency about the production of fiction that carries over from Cervantes into so much mid-century fiction, he generally does so by suggesting the conversational presence of an author accountable to the demands of a live audience.

The most significant feature of self-reflexive, mid-century fiction, however, is its genuine engagement of its own qualitative limitations. Neither Cervantes, Fielding, nor Sterne is in the position of most mid-century authors, of candidly referencing the limited quality of the reading material they are producing. The frequency with which sub-canonical authors acknowledge that their work is boring, incoherent, written only for profit, and likely to be used as scrap paper is productive of an unusually flat kind of reflexivity. When Shebbeare invites readers to bet on the turn his story is to take, he highlights a novel written conspicuously on the fly; when authors pronounce their powerlessness to produce a certain quality of prose, the gesture becomes disarmingly honest. “It would be tedious and disgusting to our readers, to give a particular and minute account of the little accidents and trifling circumstances which befell our heroines on their journey,” writes William Dodd in The Sisters (1754), a novel full of tedious descriptions and concessions to the inability of the narrator to complete unfinished scenes. When Long uses his novel to deplore “a Tribe of Novelists [who] have started into Business, and carried on a very extensive and lucrative Trade,” the joke rebounds as an indictment of his own ambition (ii). And when the narrator of Sarah Scott’s Agreeable Ugliness (1754) grants readers “full Liberty to forget me,” her claim that she will also try to forget herself rings true with a novel in which the artifice and conventionality of the prose make this patently difficult.⁹ These metanarratives seem to nullify any critical debate about how good the novels actually are by anticipating every criticism that might be thrown their way.

Yet the novels I discuss in this chapter, and the it-narratives I discuss in the next, cultivate a consciousness about the production of bad fiction for a target audience inclusive of middle-class readers that does not rely on the production of distinction for either readers or books. Instead it yields the impression of a book sentient about its limited conditions of production and reception and resistant to human efforts to usurp its ironic, critical authority. With mid-century novels, this ruse relies on various representations of readers having to contend with the stuff of narrative. The page and the conventions of novel writing are presented as impasses to reader involvement. Later in the chapter I argue that this shows up as books are likened to more mechanistic forms of transport. In providing perspectives on their own production and consumption, these novels achieve a certain status as entertaining objects. They do so, however, at the cost of instilling in readers a sense of the way in which print prevents people from intervening in the events unfolding on the page and from controlling the fate of the narratives they consume.

The Appeal of Self-Conscious Novels

It is in some sense difficult to explain why candidly self-deprecating novels should sell at all. In drawing attention to the ephemeral and material aspects of their literary enterprise, surely inferior authors drive potential readers away? To some extent, this was the case of mid-eighteenth-century novels, which were lambasted by critics in disdainful reviews published in the Monthly Review, established in 1749, and the Critical Review, established in 1756. In 1761, the preface of the Critical Review looked back at recent history and compared novelists to “the insects of a summer’s day that have buzzed, and stung, and sunk and expired.”¹⁰ James Raven suggests that two-thirds of reviewers in the 1760s shared this negative opinion of the novel and cites as typical one vehement judgment of A Fair Citizen (1757) as “a puny, miserable reptile that has here crawl’d into existence, happily formed to elude all attack by its utter insignificance.”¹¹ However, as Raven also points out, such reviews evidence the frustration critics felt as readers continued to buy novels under these conditions, against their advice. Even as the general opinion of the form remained low, the number of self-proclaimed novels in circulation increased from 50 in 1759 to more than 100 in 1769.¹² Most of these were slim volumes, commodious to experimentation, rash to announce their own popularity, and aligned with fashion rather than erudition.¹³ Their success was closely connected to the fortunes of a new class of booksellers and printers engaged in a period of frenzied economic activity. Between 1750 and 1770, the number of fiction publishers in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin doubled.¹⁴

There is also evidence that at least some readers found more pleasure in this faddish, reflexive fiction than in the works of realism on offer at the time. The mood in which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu opened a box of newly published novels sent to her in Italy in 1752 shows her genuine taste for the humor of self-conscious productions. Perusing the contents of the package, she has little to say about Smollet’s Peregrine Pickle, finds the style of Leonora “most affectedly florid, and naturally insipid” and calls Clarissa, on the whole, “most miserable stuff.” The novels she reads with interest are Charlotte Summers, which she finds good enough “not to be able to quit it till it was read over,” and Francis Coventry’s Pompey the Little, “which has really diverted me more than all the others, and it was impossible to go to Bed till it was finish’d. It was a real and exact representation of life, as it is now acted in London.”¹⁵ Pompey, a sharp satire of London life delivered from the perspective of a lap-dog, includes chapter titles such as “Containing what the Reader will know, if he reads it,” “a dissertation upon nothing,” and frequent representations of bad readers and novelists. These devices are integral enough to the novel that Montagu can hardly have found herself engrossed in its depiction of real life in spite of them.¹⁶

Thus, while self-conscious novels like Pompey are openly derivative of Fielding and inferior in obvious ways to Tristram Shandy, it is misleading of Booth to imply that they were not enjoyed at all.¹⁷ The most compelling evidence for their entertainment value may be the fact that Sterne looked to them when he planned his own entry in the race to please and attract consumers of the novel. Keymer’s work situating Sterne squarely in the 1750s, articulating his debt to the minor novelists writing before and during the publication of his best-selling volumes, has made it clear that Sterne’s choice of models went beyond Cervantes and Scriblerian satire and almost certainly included Capt. Greenland and the equally self-conscious Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates (1756). As an author responsive to the newest fashions in fiction, it is significant that Sterne chose to follow the lead of modern authors who were exposing and ridiculing realist tendencies. Tristram Shandy becomes in this sense a confirmation, not only of the fascination of eighteenth-century readers with experimentation, but of the tolerance for “self-consciousness about innovation and novelty” that Hunter lists as characteristic of the novels to emerge in the eighteenth century.¹⁸

What is it, then, that made Montagu and Sterne amenable to novels boasting of their own devices, shoving the reader conspicuously from scene to scene, and reminding her of the papery world in which she is unwittingly ensconced? The appeal of self-conscious fiction is often explained by theorists of the novel as liberating readers from their belief in an alternative reality. Rather than forcing them to surrender to the effects of mimesis, fiction that announces its own operation can be seen as disseminating power among its readers, making them visible and dialogically active in ways that are normally opposed by the impersonality of print. “These strategies,” argues Hunter of the tendency of early novels to address their readers directly, “create an atmosphere—intrusive and unattractive to most modern readers—of directness, a feeling that the author is right there with us, intruding as we read, observing and sorting us.”¹⁹ Celebrating a tradition of fictions that draw attention to their artifice, Brian Stonehill contends that “by virtue of its greater honesty, its manifest awareness of its own limitations, and its peculiarly sophisticated humility before life itself, self-depicting fiction can in fact be more persuasive than purely naturalistic fiction.”²⁰ The category of writers he describes includes Fielding and Sterne as its eighteenth-century founders, and he praises the way both achieve intimacy with their readers through their narrators’ concessions to the operation of fiction. Wolfgang Iser and John Preston also celebrate the openness of eighteenth-century fiction to the subjective discoveries of the reader. In Iser’s terms, Fielding’s reader has to formulate meaning: “the text offers itself as an instrument by means of which the reader can make a number of discoveries for himself that will lead him to a reliable sense of orientation.”²¹ For Preston, this extends more widely to the novelists of the eighteenth century who invite the reader to participate: “They are interested in creating a text which will, as it were, give instructions to the reader. They wish to keep the form open; they think of the novel as a process, not a product, and as a situation for the reader, not as a received text.”²²

Although these reader-response theorists focus on canonical works rather than on writers who package the derivativeness, disposability, or obsolescence of their single-edition productions, some of the less celebrated novels of the 1750s and ’60s can be understood in their terms. The dramatized narrator of John Shebbeare’s Lydia, for instance, comes across as charmingly open about the mechanics of novel writing. Early in Lydia, he interrupts a description of his heroine with a long paragraph comparing his making characters to an army tailor’s cutting out clothes for off-the-rack consumption: “when we have gotten together our materials, and, like the … army-taylors, we have cut them out into characters, and spread them upon the ground, we let people chuse for themselves, till they are fitted” (1:73). Shebbeare uses this analogy to distinguish his work from the common romance, which he claims only dupes readers by taking existing literary material and “tacking it together” under a new title, “like rags gathered by old women, and then beaten into paper to form a new manufacture” (1:22). In preference, he suggests, the writer of a “true history” works openly with words, cutting them out and presenting them as material offerings, acknowledging the freedom his readers have to apply the general truths of his story to their own particularity: “by Tom’s being too tall, and Dick’s being too short, the clothes are all out of fitting at first, till, changing round, every man in the regiment settles into the coat that suits him” (1:72).

Shebbeare’s pun on textiles cleverly connects the material process of paper-making with the metaphorical one of dressing readers and characters according to well-worn conventions. It also allows him to think of “pulp” literature in two ways: one that involves the literary product compromised and beaten flat by the recycling of conventions, and the other that foresees the scale of production as an occasion for physical multiplicity and flexibility. The readymade novels Shebbeare advertises as his line of business are visible generally on book stalls and in libraries as an array of objects belonging to the first category, but those that qualify as “true histories” are elevated to the second category, making their popularity into the capacity to accommodate the preferences of different readers.

In this spirit, many of the self-conscious novels of the 1750s and ’60s distinguish themselves by soliciting readers literally as partners in the processes of bringing characters to life, solving problems, and finishing or destroying the book they are reading. Readers of mid-century fiction are asked in various tones of joviality and condescension to fill in blanks and help out with scenes authors have failed to complete. Capt. Greenland’s “amorous readers” are told they will “save our Pen almost a quarter an hours Labour if they will here be pleased to conceive the extraordinary situation of our poor entangled Silvius” (1:61). The narrator of Pompey the Little complains, “had I a hundred Hands, and as many pens, it would be impossible to describe the Folly of that Night” before “begging the Reader to supply it by Help of his own imagination” (156). The narrator of Charlotte Summers cedes power to the reader by rhetorically excusing himself from the scene of composition while assuming that the reader’s imagination continues to work in his absence:

as it is almost Morning, the reader must excuse me if I return to Bed and take a Nap, after the Fatigue of this Chapter, before I proceed any further, if he is not so disposed, he may entertain himself with Miss Summers under the old Oak, till I am at leisure to conduct her further on her Journey. (1:56)

Later, once Sterne has made the invitation to readers to fill in narrative blanks well known, readers of Jenner’s The Placid Man (1770) are praised for having stuck with the book as long as they have, then asked to step in and write the final wedding scene: “as describing wedding ceremonies is not so much my talent as Mr. Richardson’s, let him (the reader) be so good as to take the two brides and the two bridegrooms … and having marshalled them in as many coaches as he thinks proper, convey them safe to St. Georges church.”²³

These representations of author-reader collaboration carry through the carefully controlled appeals Fielding makes in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones to the judgment and imagination of his audience, described by Warner as “a novelistic species of performative entertainment which concedes to the reader his or her essential freedom as a pleasurable responsibility.”²⁴ But the specific trick of less accomplished authors is to position readers as physical co-authors of a text, rather than as imaginative collaborators in an unfolding story. Arguably, second-rate authors make their interpretive openings wider than those of accomplished authors by building them into less-polished works of fiction, where references to the book’s improvised quality, the condition of its pages, or its vulnerability to public opinion have their own degree of candor. The possibility that pages will be missing or scenes incomplete is quite real in these faddish novels, which would much less often have been bound, and much more quickly have been recycled as paper, than the works of major literary figures. Gestures of authorial distress are not, in Goodall’s or Shebbeare’s case, quite the “false scent” that Dorothy Van Ghent shows them to be in the case of Sterne.²⁵ In this perspective, Sterne capitalizes on the self-deprecating humor of the relationship professional novelists had established with their public. Expanding his cast of fictional readers to include distinct characters and their various interpretive hobbyhorses, blank pages, and jokes about sexual imagination, Sterne plays in a new realm of confidence with the dangerous alliance forged in these earlier novels, between an author genuinely uncertain about the objective shape of his output and his sceptical customer.

Artificially Intelligent Books

In this light, the novels of the mid-century provide important evidence that eighteenth-century readers were not simply, or even primarily attracted to novels as a credible, alternative realities. Even their moderate success attests to the presence of a reader different from the one imagined, for instance, by Julie Park in her account of eighteenth-century novels beloved as part of a culture devoted to making non-human characters as lifelike as possible.²⁶ Readers of Shebbeare and Goodall and Coventry were keenly attuned to the quality and economy of entertainment as a human construction. And yet the mid-century fiction that reminded readers of the material constraints of novels did not necessarily encourage them to command or improve the production of fiction or to deploy the spirit of critique for their own purposes.

One sign that gestures of transparency and collaboration worked against a feeling of human empowerment in mid-century novels is the number of fictional narrators pursuing a combative relationship with their reader. Shebbeare, Goodall, and their contemporaries are artful at making the environment of the printed book a barrier to the human involvement in the technical production of a story. Tristram Shandy has been described as a narrator whose collaborative gestures frequently turn out to have no substance: although he relinquishes passages of his narrative, he frequently recants on these moments. At one point, after inciting readers to guess what is to come next, Tristram announces that “if I thought you was able to form the least judgement or probable conjecture to yourself, of what was to come in the next page,—I would tear it out of my book” (70). “It is in vain,” he exclaims at another point, “to leave this to the Reader’s imagination …. ’Tis my own affair: I’ll explain it myself” (340). In such moments, argues Keymer, Tristram becomes more of a “control freak” than a partner in conversation with his readers.²⁷ But most self-conscious novels that appeared before Tristram Shandy flaunt an even cruder brand of authorial control than this.

The passage from Charlotte Summers in which the narrator has left his readers to imagine Charlotte for themselves concludes, for instance, with the narrator pointing out that although he has left his character to their imagination, he has also “cast a Spell upon her, that she cannot move one Step without my leave” (1:56). In the same spirit, the narrator announces gleefully that

I am determined my Readers shall learn something in every Chapter, and this, amongst other Things, they must learn and practice Patience, for let them be in never so great a Hurry to come at the Speech of Miss Summers, they cannot come near her, without my Permission, and as I have now got them into my Custody, they must travel my Pace, or get back to London, on Foot, without seeing the show. (1:24)

This attitude of authorial bravado makes narrators the tormenters and hostage takers of fictional readers, who are subject to digressions and deprived of narrative satisfaction. In The Sisters, the narrator turns to the implied reader after offering a brief glimpse of the “young, gay, sprightly and charming” Charlotte to advertise his power: “no wonder the heart burns to know more of her, and the bosom pants for a nearer acquaintance.”²⁸ Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) tauntingly claims that “the reader, if he has the patience to go through the following pages, will see into the secret springs which set this machine in motion.”²⁹ In this move, Haywood, like Sterne later, presumes knowledge of and superiority over the hungry consumer of novels.

In some novels, the narrator reins in the fictional reader on the charge of indecency. Dodd’s narrator hails “gentle readers” in the middle of a raunchy scene from The Sisters to “stop here a while with me [and] think not these pages … written solely to amuse or divert thee” (55). The narrator of Charlotte Summers claims that when he circulates among his female characters in their private rooms he wears his “conjuring invisible cap” and views them chastely from his position as a deity (2:155). Asserting that he chooses not to represent things more intimately, this narrator distinguishes himself from readers who lack such impunity by announcing that, while readers must be controlled against their will, he has access to the pornographic aspect of his narrative but restrains himself from using it. In The Brothers (1758), Susan Smythies coos: “I choose to leave to the imagination, rather than attempt the description of the tender, generous, grateful things, which were thought and said on this affecting occasion.”³⁰ This playful willingness to withhold erotic and romantic detail gestures to the real reader’s ability to fill it in. But the same strategy often erupts into pure shows of authorial confidence: “if we had the least inclination,” Shebbeare’s narrator of Lydia boasts, “we might fill this journey with marvellous and surprising adventures” (2:18). Goodall’s narrator puts it most vociferously in Capt. Greenland, announcing at one point that “we are much better Judges than our judicious Readers, what is necessary to insert in this History and what should be omitted” (1:47).

Rather than enjoining the reader to participate in a conversation with a narrator, these dialogues underscore a situation in which the lone reader-of-print’s powers are few and desires are many. They draw attention to the way that narrators design a plot and its characters without consulting an audience and to the fact that, once this plot makes it into print, it becomes indelibly fixed as a course of events. Novel readers are positioned in these exchanges as particularly impatient and likely to be sexually frustrated by the non-interactive environment of the book. Their communication with the narrator, however tantalizing it might appear as a dialogue between creative minds, is thematized as a confrontation with the medium of the novel and an impasse to the imagination: the reminder of paper works against the illusion of collaboration.

But the dialogue between fictionalized readers and narrators can also be used to spell out the way narrators are subject in different ways from readers to the medium with which they work. One tendency that distinguishes Shebbeare, Goodall, Haywood, and the author of Charlotte Summers most clearly from Cervantes and Fielding is their suggestion that even aggressively original storytellers are answerable to the established rules of novel writing. Haywood, for instance, makes a point of obeying the putative unity of time and space by arguing that “it would be as absurd in a writer to rush all at once into the catastrophe of the adventures he would relate, as it would be impracticable in a traveller to reach the end of a long journey, without sometimes stopping at the inns in his way to it.”³¹ She differs in this respect from Fielding, who explains in Tom Jones that he will meet the reader’s need for interest by filling out extraordinary scenes and passing over periods of time when nothing happens.³² The narrator of Lydia makes a similar gesture to fixed narrative conventions when he turns a long digression into a description of himself running as a child to meet his father on the road, but discovering it is impossible to speed up the rate at which he travels: “In the like manner we conceive if we walked through the woods of America to meet this valiant chief, we could in no wise hasten his journey to New-York” (1:28). These intrusions demonstrate a writer bound to produce a sequential story, to write one sentence after another in continuation on the surface of the page. They pit this writer against the reader tempted by the possibilities of codex to leap ahead in the story. Digressive asides illustrate that even an author’s deviation from a narrative must occur in obedience to the linear logic of the scroll, while a reader has the power to skip or access at random the pages of a book.

Such gestures of creative limitation on the part of the narrator function as reminders of the novel as a medium rather than a forum for open conversation. As authors work with print’s constraints, their humor suggests, they become answerable to way that pages contain and convey their narrative, and the way that novelists are expected to write. In Lydia, Shebbare’s narrator presents himself obliged to include the salacious diary of his character, Rachel Stiffrump. However, he postures, “we desire those readers, who trifle with their salvation, to skip the leaves which contain this diary” (42). This scenario presents reader and narrator wrangling in their own way with the physical and generic conventions of the novel. Odysseus-like, the narrator who is bound to the mast of his own profession has no choice but to transcribe the sirens’ song while the reader, unable to stop rowing, can only block her ears by skipping pages. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of this scene the vital question, the one that modernity has prevented us from asking, is why the whole ship might not be steered differently.³³ Mid-century novels seem to raise the same question in presenting the logic of book production as the one invariable in their contest for power. Some of the most creative endeavors of the time present narrators and reader locked in a struggle which ultimately works to the disadvantage of both kinds of human agent. When Charlotte Summers entertains the reader with the idea of a paper object mysteriously programmed to include her, or Kidgell, rather than defending his novel as literature, deploys its disposability by securing his pages the special status of being precociously alert to their lowly material fate as waste paper, books appear as the only victors in a visibly mediated world. This fiction becomes the elaborate and ambiguous selling point of self-conscious, mid-century novels.

As I suggested in the Introduction, one of the basic tricks of authors working in this mode is to suggest that a text already knows what will happen to it in print. David Hume captures this spirit of resignation to the transcendence of books when he delivers his own “funeral oration” by speaking in the past tense of his existence, concluding “I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humor.” His perspective suggests that he has committed consciousness itself to paper, a conceit in keeping with his claim that his life story will be “little more than the History of my Writings.”³⁴ Jonas Hanway produces a more basic version of this effect when he prompts his reader to look at the “gilded leaves” of his book’s material form as corresponding with his treatment of “celestial matters,” and at the green binding, which “will naturally remind [them] of the livery of nature.”³⁵ This description appears in a first-person travel narrative. And yet, when Hanway boasts knowledge of his book’s binding, the center of conscious seems to tip from being his, as the author of a manuscript of uncertain future, to being that of a book already bound and in circulation.

Books, Hume and Hanway imply, have not only the ability to describe their own physical presence, but also the gadget-like ability to register and stay ahead of their readers. Charlotte Summers anticipates its real reader in this way by having Miss Arabella Dimple, lying naked in bed, call her maid to fetch “the first volume of the Parish Girl I was reading in the afternoon.” When Polly returns and sits down with the copy of Charlotte Summers, the sixth chapter of the novel procedes with a description of Arabella searching for the place she left off, which turns out—of course—to be the sixth chapter (1:67). In one sense, this scene simply carries on with a vein of humor introduced in Don Quixote, where the fictional world of the novel’s second part includes the presence of the first part, but it also pushes the joke to the surface of the page. As Arabella chastises her maid for imagining that she might have turned down a corner of the page as a marker, the copy of Charlotte Summers in the reader’s hand seems to become alert, not only to its own existence, but also to its physical condition.

The culture in which such a possibility seemed entertaining is one in which Tristram Shandy was affably at home, native to a context where authors were playing with the idea that paper could be conscious of what was written on it, and of how that writing was to be received in the imagined future of its material life. Tristram Shandy is well known as a book about a man trying to tell the story of his own genesis. But it can just as well be described from the perspective of the 1750s and ’60s as the story of a book—a book that makes its physical extension an integral part of the world of which the narrator claims to be conscious, recalling its genesis and circulation and announcing its cognitive superiority over the reader who is hostage to its technology. This is a good description of many of the jokes that have made Tristram Shandy seem so modern. Like the narrator of Charlotte Summers, Tristram illogically claims experience of his book as a material entity: he knows when the marble page is coming up and he deploys previous pages and volumes as a presence to which readers can be referred. At one point, excusing the bookbinder from charges of carelessness, Tristram mentions that he has torn out a chapter of his narrative (282). As we saw in the Introduction, he inserts a chapter offering his dedication for sale to the highest bidder, pledging to remove this advertisement in his next edition and to update the dedication according to the wishes of the winning bidder. At another point, he introduces Dr. Slop just as Trim is about to start speaking: ’Tis not two-pence matter—the corporal shall go on in the next chapter, let who will come in” (360). In each of these cases, Tristram draws attention to the materiality of his occupation and the process of communication that will follow from his publication. The effect of his doing so is that he inflates the knowledge an author can plausibly claim to have of the writing process at hand by extending it to take account of the book as an object already in print.

At times Tristram is also physically identified, like Hume, with the pages he is writing. For instance, he accuses his reviewers of having “cut and slash[ed] my jerkin,” offering a gloss on the image that suggests a literally bookish body, with his leather bound surface connected to his “rumpled” interior—“A Man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining;—rumple the one—you rumple the other” (144). Within the logic of his own life story it makes sense that Tristram should strive for the limited kind of transcendence associated with the inanimate consciousness of a book. His father, Walter Shandy, has tried to breathe life into books with little success, scratching meaning out of the pages of Slawkenbergius and pouring meaning fruitlessly into his Tristrapedia rather than into his son’s body. He handles Euclid with reverence, turning over the leaves of its initial chapter while displaying his knowledge of its contents, correcting its translation, and shutting it “slowly; his thumb resting, when he had done it, upon the upper-side of the cover, as his three fingers supported the lower-side of it, without the least compressive violence” (355). By transforming himself into a book cognizant of its own handling and reception, Tristram becomes the object that Walter fantasizes about keeping company with, a superior version of his own textual siblings, able to respond to the reader’s avid attentions in ways that Walter’s books so pointedly cannot.

Tristram’s figurative father, Yorick, is also honored in the possibility of Tristram Shandy as a book that stays awake to its own circulation. Yorick is, of course, dead at the time Tristram Shandy is supposedly being written, but his presence is palpable through the documents he has left behind. The fate of these documents, which include the sermon that has been lost, sold, misused, and finally made its way—as commodity, rather than legacy—into Tristram’s and now the reader’s hands, suggests that the promiscuous life Yorick leads as a literary character circulating on the market keeps him uncannily alive and present. In Yorick, Tristram has a model for the metemphychosis of papers as objects to whom superficial consumers as well as readers supply volition. The afterlife of Yorick’s writings provides evidence that the posterity of character is facilitated by the market. But in creating an equivalent life form for himself, Tristram also trumps Yorick, whose papers circulate with a logic alien to their original, whimsical sprit of composition. The intimacy Tristram claims with his reader at the moments where he “tugs” her through a chapter, promising that “the book shall not be opened again this twelve-month” or referring him to the title page for evidence of his own name, thus converges with the vertiginous claim a variety of self-conscious novels make on the present in which they are read; on the “now” in which this very moment can be invoked through the sentient presence of the paper (364). By making his model of a paper self an improved one, where circulation and misappropriation are anticipated, and into which self-consciousness is built, Tristram continues in the tradition of the self-conscious, mid-century narrators who may revile the commercial transactions propelling them toward uncreative situations, but who count on the impression of their novels coming to life in the reader’s hands.

Novels as Coaches

In the last decades, eighteenth-century culture has been described as experimenting with the simulation of life in forms that included automata, popular displays of lifelike machines and clockwork mechanisms, newly complicated networks of commerce, and expedited forms of transport.³⁶ It is tempting to assume that books were simply part of this setting: axes of material autonomy generated as technological developments pointed generally but objectively in the direction of a material world straying away from control and understanding. But the novels I have discussed so far belong more convincingly to another history—that of an imaginative investment in the artificial intelligence of the medium of entertainment. They complicate the idea of authors registering at the level of their thematic concern the developments of material culture, and show instead the specific ways novels refract and work this interest into their formal and material properties. Books that are strenuously aligned with the material world under these conditions conceal, as Latour argues of many of the phenomena on which we bestow objectivity, their real intractability from the field of human creation.

I have already suggested some of the cases in which narrative intrusions were used to propagate the effect of books being beyond human control. I turn now to a different source of evidence for the ways the authors of novels cultivated the fiction of books being more powerful than the people who made them: the analogy between reading and coach travel that was built up after the publication of Joseph Andrews. This analogy was used by novelists to suggest that certain episodes of fictional action involved a reader’s surrender to an objectively given technology. Novels delivered experience, they proposed, in the same way that journeys did, as a compound of scenery, company, and physical progress and limitation. During the 1750s and ’60s, Goodall, Shebbeare, Toldervy, and Sterne, along with Susan Smythies, who perfected this ruse of the novel as journey in The Stage-Coach (1753), delight in imagining their readers as passengers in claustrophobic narrative machines that consist of paper and pages as well as generic conventions. They set up thematic excursions within their novels that use this comparison to emphasize the objective technology of a book. Toldervy, for instance, compares the pacing of his novel to the pacing of a horse, suggesting that drivers and passengers are in a similar position of having to obey the limits of technology. His narrator becomes a horseman who must manage his steed carefully by reining in the story, as if it were likely to run out of steam: “not presently upon the spur, or in his full career, but leisurely out of the stables [he] settles himself in his stirrups, and when fair road and season offer, puts on perhaps to a round trot.” This rider is obedient, like Goodall’s and Smythies’s, to external conditions: he “favours his Palfry, and is sure not to bring him puffing, into a heat, into his last inn” (3:2).

In Capt. Greenland, Goodall uses this analogy to dramatize the way his reader gets stuck with a stretch of tedious narrative. One episode describes Silvius, Shebbeare’s well-meaning hero, traveling by stagecoach to London. For company he has a host of characters suggestive of those Sterne will reinvent later in the decade: a captain log-line, who cannot speak except in nautical terms, a Methodist midwife and her daughter, and a reverend who spends most of the journey asleep. Despite this company, readers are told from the outset that the journey will be uneventful. Abusing the “learned biographers” who would have used “such a coachful of good-natured people to have them robbed or assaulted,” Goodall’s narrator announces that the only interruptions to the passage will be his own interventions (1:168). This creates an image of the reader’s entrapment that is premised on her being like the stage coach traveler, a victim to random fellow passages. Although the narrator announces “that it may possibly be as amusing to our Readers to now and again to pass an intervening minute in conversation with us, as in the continual Prosecution of the direct Narrative of this History,” his sourness and self-confidence as a character emphasize the reader’s sense of being trapped in a small, inhospitable circle of company (2:108).

Clearly, readers of fiction do not automatically experience either the kind of enthrallment to a journey or the sense of captivity to technology that these narrators dramatize. As we have seen, readers know quite well that they can close a book at any time, or skip pages to come more quickly to its highlights. But, by being compared to paying coach-passengers, readers of self-conscious novels are primed to entertain their concession to the demands of print technology as a necessary condition of being moved by narrative. The authorial intrusions that bring the presence of mediation into view through this trope help create a stance for the reader that is like that of the passenger: aware of herself turning the pages, she feels bound to the course of action followed by the characters and events represented there. Although one can burn a book, or tear it up, scenes focusing on the reader’s desire for narrative movement make it appear as difficult to really get at a story as to change the route taken by a stagecoach. Emphasising the physicality of the book, and the fiction of a narrator as little responsible for the course events in his plot as the driver of the stagecoach for the route his coach must follow, novelists downplay the interactive and elective elements of reading and writing in order to promote the book as a medium that makes content unreachable.

Eighteenth-century coach travel worked well as an analogy for those who wanted to imagine printed objects in this way, as things over which customers had limited control. There is a widespread sense among cultural and literary historians that the history of transport, like the history of the novel, involved an outward expansion of spatial and imaginative horizons.³⁷ Fielding and others before him celebrated this connection by likening the novel in a positive light to the forward-moving journey. But eighteenth-century descriptions of how it felt to travel inside “a tedious, tiresome, dull, jolting Vehicle,” as one character from a dramatic satire describes a stagecoach, outnumbered accounts emphasizing the pleasures of transport.³⁸ Coach travelers could easily appear effeminate and restricted in outlook. Cowper’s “The Task” addresses “ye who, bourne about / In chariots and sedans, know no fatigue / But that of idleness, and taste no scenes / But such as art contrives.”³⁹ Real travelers’ reports also frequently describe coaches as scenes of artificial confinement, boredom, and forced company. One English traveler in France describes his captivity in a “ponderous machine”; another traveling through England describes how “the coach was for three days a perfect jail to us.”⁴⁰ Daniel Bourn, identifying boredom and a lack of view as the traveler’s main problems, recommends milestones as “an entertaining piece of garnish and road furniture, that by measuring the way make the hours pass with pleasure, and thereby much alleviate the irksomeness of a long stage.”⁴¹

Coach travel also produced for many the feeling of really losing control over what they did and said. James Murray diagnoses sleep as an inevitable condition of travel and recommends ways to fight its onset:

After a person in perfect health has traveled two stages in a stagecoach, even suppose he should take a nap, he will find himself disposed for his breakfast at the end of the second stage.—This is necessary for the purpose of keeping the spirits strong, to beat off sleep from his quarters;—if a traveller desire to keep awake, he must take his breakfast to strengthen his spirits.⁴²

Sylvia Hughes describes her father moved artificially by the motion of the coach from a state of reverie to a state in which “the Jumbling on the Stones made him open his Mouth and address himself to the Ladies,” and The Travels of the Imagination; a True Journey from Newcastle to London (1773) describes passengers “jolted into good humour by the motion of the coach.”⁴³ This loss of control over one’s body was made worse by a driver’s determining the pace and shape of a journey. Those who hired private carriages frequently relayed in writing how vulnerable they felt to the men Murray portrayed as petty tyrants, “vociferous hostler(s)” and “little arbitrary Bashaw(s).”⁴⁴ Although better off travelers were able to navigate the public road system by way of private vehicles, the power of the coachmen and innkeepers who kept it running could make even their power seem negligible.

Fielding’s and Sterne’s accounts of travel both describe their lack of control as passengers over the technology of the road, and include tirades against the men who convey them along it. The feeling of bodily disempowerment and the feeling of vulnerability to a driver are captured most acutely in Fielding’s account of being transported as an invalid to Portugal. His Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) depicts the perspective of a conscious person deprived of volition. As his dropsical, dying body is hauled between boats and carriages, he makes the unfavorable comparison between his flesh and his luggage. In the conveyance of goods and people from one place to another, he argues, one general principle prevails:

as the goods to be conveyed are usually larger, so they are to be chiefly considered in the conveyance; the owner being indeed little more than an appendage to his trunk, or box, or bale, or at best a small part of his baggage, very little care is to be taken in stowing or packing them up with convenience to himself.⁴⁵

In the 1760s Sterne describes himself in similar terms as no more than an object while on the road in France, and he writes in his letters that he has been “conveyed thus far like a bale of cadaverous goods consigned to Pluto and company—lying in the bottom of my chaise most of the rout [sic], upon a large pillow which I had the prevoyance to purchase before I set out.”⁴⁶ On this same journey he describes himself “toasted, roasted, grilled, stewed and carbonated on one side or another” like a piece of meat in the heat of the carriage.⁴⁷

These reports demonstrate that coach travel served as an occasion for passengers to note their own powerlessness. In the scenes Sterne and Fielding describe, it can even be said that this physical powerlessness, actively observed, becomes its own source of entertainment. But what finally happens in texts where such a posture is taken up as a description of fiction reading involves a complicated transference of a practical experience into the realm of imaginative transport. Coaches can be used only by a sleight of hand to represent the kinds of transport that discourse provides. Evidence provided by the technology of coach travel that humans were prey to the machines that moved them must be made to fit the image of books controlling minds and bodies, and the coachman must be worked into a caricature of the professional author in the system of print entertainment. Thus, although there is a strong ethnographic element to Fielding’s and Sterne’s descriptions of travel, there is also a literary one. Writers keen to explore the reader’s submission to the mechanical nature of print mediation put their experience of the real hardships of traveling to work as an analogy that is far from obvious.

Fielding’s and Sterne’s disposition as travelers who report with glee on their powerlessness illuminates some of the better-known junctures at which self-conscious writers play up the human vulnerability to the technology of print. Take Tristram’s boast of the way he has kept his reader hostage to the physicality of the book, and thereby kept her from other kinds of exploration: “What a tract of country I have run!…and how many cities have I seen, during the time you have been reading, and reflecting, Madam, upon this story!” (460). This jibe draws attention to Sterne’s prowess as manipulator of the book as printed product. But it also works, like many of the analogies with coach travel in earlier novels, to emphasize the way the physical vehicle of the book prevents readers’ contact with the scenes they experience. Approaching his marbled page, Sterne reminds readers of the black page they encountered in the first volume of his novel and warns against “deep” reading on this new occasion of physical interruption:

You had better throw down the book at once; for without much reading … you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unraval the many opinions, transactions and truths, which still mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one. (204)