Chapter 5 - Alternative communities

Summary

Over the course of the eighteenth century, the consolidation of the nuclear family and decline of the extended “household” one had wide-reaching consequences. As literary critic Ruth Perry and historian Naomi Tadmor have documented, kinship structures that favored the “affinal” bonds of marriage over “consanguineal” or blood connections helped to erode traditional affiliations. This reshaping of family networks occurred alongside parallel developments – a growing capital economy, urban migration, and, particularly after the 1763 Treaty of Paris ended the global Seven Years War, an unwieldy but increasingly lucrative empire – that together contributed to hone a quintessentially modern individualism. This chapter focuses on the attention paid in contemporary fiction to the human costs of these developments and to the compensatory versions of sociability they inspired. It opens with a series of novels that represent alternative orders designed to shield the vulnerable from an increasingly competitive culture: Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) and Sir George Ellison (1766), Clara Reeve’s School for Widows (1791) and Plans of Education (1792), and the anonymous Henry Willoughby (1798) and Berkeley Hall (1796). The sections following examine two overlapping clusters of works that also question the pace and extent of social, political, and economic change by addressing its effects on susceptible populations. The first looks at novels that counterpoint metropolitan and imperial orders, such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), the anonymous Female American (1767), Frances Brooke’s Emily Montague (1769), Phebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta (1789), Elizabeth Hamilton’s Hindoo Rajah (1796), and two novels by George Cumberland, The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar (1798) and The Reformed (c. 1800). The second considers Gothic’s fascination with failures of sociability in relation to turn-of-the-century turbulence principally through examination of Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796).