In comparison to other canonical writers of the mid eighteenth century, Oliver Goldsmith has left little from which his views on fiction might be ascertained. This chapter considers both canonical English novels of the middle of the century, and contemporary French writing, as important contexts for the study of Goldsmith’s fiction, and in particular his Vicar of Wakefield. Also considered are problematic attributions to Goldsmith of works other than his famed Vicar, and the longevity and geographical reach of that novel’s appeal.

The fifth chapter explores how concepts of caricature interacted with historical romance in the critical reception and writing of Walter Scott’s characters. I explore Scott’s association of pictorial caricature with accuracy, particularity and referentiality, looking in particular at The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Guy Mannering, and suggesting the implications of John Kay’s caricatures for Scott’s ’compendious realism’. Scott’s defences of historical ’caricature’ – in his essay on Tobias Smollett and in the Magnum Opus edition of The Monastery – are a counterpoint to the anti-caricature rhetoric used to disparage his novels. Returning to the realist device of the ’explained caricature’, I differentiate national caricatures of the Scots and Jewish ’body-corporate’ in Rob Roy, The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Ivanhoe.

The Conclusion traces the afterlife of the knots of memory examined in earlier chapters in two printed genres: the multi-volume histories of the nation that became popular in the late eighteenth century and the historical novel in the hands of Walter Scott. Works such as David Hume’s and Tobias Smollett’s histories replicate some of the counter-memories that were produced in the earlier printed discourse on the nation. Scott, however, transforms the complicated knots of memories and counter-memories by drawing attention to and framing them. Waverley, for example, both acknowledges the power of counter-memories and prevents their re-activation by including them within a narrative that connects a progressive sense of a consolidated British cultural memory with a model of media succession.

Enlightenment thinkers rarely used the word “consumption,” but they spoke incessantly of “luxury,” a multivalent term that became the principal idiom through which writers discussed the moral, social, and political implications of consumption. Controversy over luxury was a proxy for the first modern debate on consumption. The discussion of luxury shifted decisively at the turn of the eighteenth century, when two writers – François Fénelon and Bernard Mandeville – laid the foundations for a vigorous Enlightenment debate. Drawing on ancient and medieval critiques, Fénelon argued that luxury corrupted morals, scrambled the social order, and destroyed states. Mandeville countered by advancing a bold apology for luxury. Far from weakening states, he argued, luxury generated prosperous and powerful nations. Gender would play a key role in the debate that ensued. Whereas critics of luxury like Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned that excessive consumption effeminized men, rendering them unfit for public service, defenders of luxury like David Hume claimed that material well-being was the sign of a civilized society in which men and women frequently interacted. In the second half of the eighteenth century, certain thinkers sought to resolve the debate. Political economists argued that if consumption was directed toward productive ends, wealthy and powerful nations would avoid corruption and endure. Meanwhile, luxury producers incorporated critiques of luxury by designing natural and healthy products. Criticism of luxury did little to slow the pace of consumption.

The second chapter deals with the black page commemorating the death of parson Yorick, often perceived as the pre-eminent symbol of Stern’s experimentation. This chapter suggests that with the black page, Sterne references a longstanding tradition of woodcut ornaments and mourning typography in funeral publications from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, but which had reached their peak in the 1612 commemorations of the death of Henry, Prince of Wales. But he comments on how far this form of typographic commemoration has become clichéd by drawing from two recent typesetting trends: the representation of major funeral processions in newspapers and gravestone-like pages in the mid-century novel, as evidenced in Tom Jones (1749), Peregrine Pickle (1751) and William Toldervy’s Two Orphans (1756). Through considering the rarely studied mourning borders around Yorick’s epitaph alongside the black page’s double-sided covering of black ink, this chapter sees Sterne engaging with past and contemporary clichés of mourning iconography while playing upon – and pushing to its limits – the novelistic epitaph’s self-conscious manipulation of the printed page.