Displaying an impressive command of early modern science in her engaging and highly interdisciplinary Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel, Helen Thompson strives to (re)assert the central place of “Corpuscularian Philosophy” (1) in the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British culture. In Thompson's compelling account, the corpuscle hypothesized by Robert Boyle and variously deployed by Isaac Newton, John Locke, and some of the period's novelists postulates that all matter is made up of miniscule parts that cannot be sensed directly. Instead, the corpuscle's existence can only be established relationally; consequently, it produces knowledge in the perceiving subject despite—or, more accurately, because of—its evasion of the viewer's senses. One of Thompson's many examples is illustrative here: that a chemical process such as sublimation can make a substance such as sulfur disappear from the bottom of a flask only to reappear on the flask's sides shortly after establishes that sulfur is composed of minute particles precisely because it disappears for a time (3–4).
Modern accounts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science and the novel, Thompson argues, have elided the period's indebtedness to corpuscularian philosophy, with its attendant interest in “imperceptible causes” and “sensed qualities” such as “sourness or acidity” (1). As a result, empiricism is often presented as a mimetic mode of knowing that relies exclusively on a direct, one-to-one transposition of the external world to sensory perception. For Thompson, however, such an understanding neglects the period's interest in “corpuscular matter's power to stimulate empirical knowledge” (69). In Fictional Matter, histories of early science by critics such as Ian Hacking, Karen Barad, Steven Shapin, and Simon Schaffer as well as literary histories of the novel by Michael McKeon and Ian Watt are equally implicated in this construction of a “‘realist’ regime of transparently apprehended and transparently rendered facts” (1) that Thompson seeks to refute. Thompson convincingly demonstrates that, in failing to acknowledge seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British culture's indebtedness to the corpuscle, such studies have obscured how empiricism accommodates knowledge acquired relationally. It is this relational way of “knowing,” Thompson argues, that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science and the novel engage or activate, in a variety of ways.
As Thompson stresses, Fictional Matter is not in any straightforward way a study of the eighteenth-century novel against the “factual backdrop” early modern science (3). Instead, she organizes the chapters according to topics that develop readings of the works of early scientists and empiricists such as Boyle, Locke, and Newton alongside those of the novelists it studies. In chapter 2 she illustrates how a “Boylean” (68) Locke presents identity as something “approximated from the outside” (69) rather than a matter of essence before demonstrating how Eliza Haywood activates that radically contingent notion of identity in Fantomina (1725) and Love in Excess (1719). In chapter 3 she explores how George Thomson's and George Starkey's scientific writings in the wake of the Great Plague are grounded in the corpuscular understanding that all things are composed of miniscule parts to posit an imperceptibly “porous” or “pervious” person (113); that concept of personhood, Thompson argues, directly informs the presentation of character in Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a text in which interiority or “innerness” remains inaccessible and unknowable. In chapter 4 she turns her attention to the subject of race, moving from Boyle's and Newton's competing accounts of color to John Arbuthnot's and John Mitchell's anti-essentialist justifications of slavery to, finally, Penelope Aubin's and William Chetwood's vexed engagements with these corpuscularian accounts of color and race.
As the book unfolds, Thompson moves the novel to the center stage, although the thematic organizational scheme continues. In chapters 5 and 6 she examines Henry Fielding's and Samuel Richardson's corpuscularian considerations of class and gender, respectively, and Thompson's accounts here are especially illuminating. Much as in the earlier chapters' accounts of identity and race, the author's engagements with corpuscularian philosophy that Thompson examines in the final two chapters destabilize essentialist accounts of class and gender. In a text such as Shamela (1741), for instance, Fielding stages “readable” selves who lay claim to virtues they lack, and he deploys “the sensible qualities of print” (194), Thompson argues, as the marker of character that otherwise troublingly eludes direct sensory observation. Meanwhile, in chapter 6 Thompson examines Richardson's fractious attempts to separate Clarissa from the prostitutes among whom she is forced to live and breathe the same air, arguing that “Clarissa’s failure to isolate the source of Clarissa's sexed virtue reflects the novel's engagement with a metaphysics and an ontology engendered by corpuscles” (234).
While she succeeds in confirming the surprisingly widespread influence and implications of corpuscularian philosophy, Thompson provides no clear rationale as to why she selects for study the texts that she does. Consequently, and with some notable exceptions such as Haywood, Aubin, and Chetwood, she largely ends up replicating the canon of novelists studied in Watt's Rise of the Novel (1957), moving from extended considerations of Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson to Jane Austen (in the epilogue), while the fiction of the latter half of the eighteenth century remains on the periphery. One wonders how the introduction of the writings of Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, Fanny Burney, or—perhaps more interestingly, given his peculiar aesthetic—Tobias Smollett might complicate or augment Thompson's findings. Nor does Fictional Matter offer an easy reading experience: the writing is at times dense, and the interdisciplinarity of the material is simultaneously a source of the argument's strength and an occasionally challenging hurdle for the reader to overcome.
Rigorously argued and consistently insightful, Fictional Matter demands a rethinking of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century understanding of empiricism and its role in early modern science as well as the novel's development. In particular, and despite the occasional opacity of her claims, Thompson persuasively demonstrates that our too-literalist construction of an empiricism that relies exclusively on direct sensory observation both misrepresents the period's scientific and “chymical” (10) investigations while at the same time it hinders our familiar, prevailing narratives of the eighteenth-century novel.
