All posts tagged Oliver Goldsmith

The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith (1766)

The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale, Supposed to be written by Himself was written by Irish novelist, playwright, poet and critic Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774). It was immediately praised on publication and went on to become one of the most widely read 18th-century novels, and also one of the most widely illustrated, with hundreds of Victorian paintings depicting key scenes from the story.

The two ladies from London dazzle the family of the Vicar of Wakefield (standing at the centre) with their fashionable stories, by Charles Robert Leslie (1843)

Sentimentalism

Wikipedia puts it best:

The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th-century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and the concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility.

Sentimentalism – which is to be distinguished from sensibility – was a fashion in the poetry and prose fiction of the mid-eighteenth century in reaction to the rationalism of the Augustan Age.

Sentimental novels relied on emotional response, both from their readers and characters. They feature scenes of distress and tenderness, and the plot is arranged to advance both emotions and actions.

The result displays the characters as a model for refined, sensitive emotional effect and flatters the reader who is assumed to be refined and sensitive enough to appreciate the characters’ refinement and sensibility.

The Vicar of Wakefield is often mentioned among the half dozen classic examples of 18th century sentimental novels, and we shall see why.

The plot

The Vicar of Wakefield consists of 32 chapters which fall into three parts:

Chapters 1–3: beginning
Chapters 4–29: main part
Chapters 30–32: happy ending

1. Beginning

Charles Primrose The Vicar of Wakefield is Dr. Charles Primrose. The story opens with him living an idyllic life in a country parish with his wife Deborah, adult son George, marriageable daughters Olivia and Sophia, and three smaller children, the teenager Moses, and toddlers Richard and William. He has brought them all up to be ‘generous, credulous, simple, and inoffensive’.

Legacy Primrose is independently wealthy thanks to a legacy of ten thousand pounds from an uncle George, which he has invested with a ‘merchant in town’. Thus he is in a position to hand over the £35 a year he makes from his living as a vicar to trustees for the relief of the local poor.

George’s marriage Primrose’s eldest son George is all set to wed the beautiful daughter of a local landowner, Arabella Wilmot, when disaster strikes! Primrose is informed that the ‘merchant in town’ has absconded with all his money. Reckoning all his assets, he now has £400 left and, since the £35 income is in trust, he is now without income. Arabella’s father, prudent with his money and daughter, calls off the wedding, and George, who has had some education, is packed off to town with an introduction to a cousin to make his own way in the world.

Moralising about poverty This is the opportunity for some moralising about how they must match their expectations to their new station i.e. poverty, which goes hard with the girls who have got used to fussing about dresses and their appearance.

‘We are now poor, my fondlings, and wisdom bids us conform to our humble situation. Let us then, without repining, give up those splendours with which numbers are wretched, and seek in humbler circumstances that peace with which all may be happy.’

New job Primrose casts around and hears of a curate position going in a parish 70 miles distant and wins the job. He and his family pack their things and set out on the journey (noting that none of them had ever been further than ten miles from their beloved home). At an inn they fall in with an eccentric chap named Mr Burchell who doesn’t stand on ceremony and happily accepts Primrose’s charity when it is revealed that he – Burchell – can’t pay the bill.

Next day they ride on with Burchell who knows about and describes their destination. The new house and church is on the land of young Squire Thornhill, who is known to be a womaniser.

Scarce a farmer’s daughter within ten miles round but what had found him successful and faithless.

Mr Burchell goes on to describe the contrasting character of the young squire’s uncle, Sir William Thornhill, who is known throughout the country for his worthiness and generosity.

Mr Burchell rescues Sophia from drowning As he’s chatting on, there are shouts and the two men turn on their horses to see Sophia being swept away in a torrent they were crossing. While Primrose is paralysed, Burchell jumps into the flood and rescues Sophia from drowning. She is instantly attracted to him, but her ambitious mother does not encourage her feelings.

2. The Middle

Lovely new home The new cottage is plain but attractive and set in lovely countryside near a river, and among simple, unspoiled farmers whose vicar Primrose now becomes. Primrose describes the family’s ‘simple’ daily routine, including morning and evening prayers.

Young squire Thornhill One day a deer leaps past, followed by hunters. The most dashing and handsome fellow stops, dismounts and introduces him as Squire Thornhill, paying special attention to Primrose’s two pretty daughters. Next day he sends them a side of venison, and pays a social visit a day later. To Primrose’s dismay Olivia, who Thornhill pays particular court to, is swayed by his wealth and confident conversation, and so is his wife.

It is interesting the extent to which even in this ‘ideal’ family, and even though the book is written by a man, Deborah Primrose is given a mind and strong opinions of her own.

Mr Burchell drops by regularly, to help the family with their field work and harvesting (all very bucolic), reads them a sentimental ballad, pays court to Sophia.

A country dance There is a kind of rural ball, when Squire Thornhill arrives with his chaplain, two ladies of fashion, and a cold picnic. (The ladies are named Lady Blarney and Miss Carolina Wilelmina Amelia Skeggs.) The dancing goes on into the evening, with Primrose disapproving of the ladies’ attitude, and especially the turn the conversation takes to having his two daughters go up to London to be ‘finished’ for a season.

Over the following weeks, Primrose laments the reawakening of female ‘pride’ in his daughters who dream of fine dresses, London fashion and spurn the friendship of the grown-up daughters of their neighbour, Mr Flamborough, as beneath them.

A gypsy reads the girls’ fortunes and tells them they will marry a squire and a lord.

The Primrose family By about this point I realised that he salient aspect of the character of the narrator, Primrose, is his amused indulgence of his family, most notably his would-be married daughters, his ambitious wife, but also of his would-be learnèd son, Moses, who loses no opportunity to slip references to Greek legends into his conversation.

As a family, they rub along together, disagreeing, joshing, but ultimately getting on. Primrose realises that he himself sometimes comes over as too strict or ridiculous, or reveals the little verbal flourishes he uses to oil the wheels of family.

‘Ay,’ returned I, not knowing well what to think of the matter, ‘heaven grant they may be both the better for it this day three months!’ This was one of those observations I usually made to impress my wife with an opinion of my sagacity; for if the girls succeeded, then it was a pious wish fulfilled; but if any thing unfortunate ensued, then it might be looked upon as a prophecy.

The ride to church When it is announced the two fine London ladies will be at the next Sunday morning church service, there is a comic incident as the womenfolk insist they not just walk to church but ride, foolishly choosing the family’s two carthorses to ride on.

This goes even worse than expected, since the parson a) walks to church and b) takes the service on time without his family ever turning up. Only on his return journey does he discover that the obstinate great horses refused to carry their new burdens anywhere.

Michaelmas celebrations Next day the family goes to neighbour Flamborough’s to celebrate Michaelmas Eve with traditional food and party games. They are playing an innocent game of hunter the slipper but this rural mode is spoilt when the two Grand Ladies arrive and insist on replacing country games with high gossip from London. Uncivil Mr Burchell had been of the party and makes his disagreement known by turning his back on the main company and calling out ‘FUDGE’ at the end of every posh anecdote!

The green spectacles The women decide they must sell their old colt at the market and use the money to buy a fine horse for the daughters to take it in turn to ride. They give young Moses the task of doing all this  – taking the old horse to market, selling it, and buying a new one – but he screws up big-time, selling the colt but letting con-men persuade him to spend the entire profits (three pounds, five shillings and twopence) on… a gross of green spectacles!

Olivia and Sophia fitting out Moses for the fair by Daniel Maclise (1838)

Jobs for the girls The two fine ladies have let slip the notion that they might have vacancies for ‘readers’ and companions at £30 a year. Mrs P immediately proposes her girls for the job. The fine ladies say they must ponder. Mrs P and Mr Burchell have a falling out, he arguing really strongly that the girls should not be allowed up to London to be spoiled.

The Whistonian Controversy Initially it seems like a quirk but develops into a recurring comic motif that Primrose prides himself on being the author of several pamphlets on the all-important subject of clerical monogamy i.e. that a cleric may marry once but never remarry.

In this he supports the learned William Whiston – but his pamphlets have met with opposition and he has discovered himself drawn into theological controversy which was, in these halcyon pre-ideological days, the most venomous of all. He finds himself engaged in the Whistonean Controversy!

This hobby horse of his is reminiscent of the numerous hobby horses on display in Laurence Stern’s magnificent masterpiece Tristram Shandy published a few years before the Vicar (1759). Comparison with that book emphasises how boring and very low-level The Vicar is.

Primrose is diddled out of the second horse Anyway, Primrose himself sets out to sell the second horse and a seasoned con-man is able to play on Primrose’s bookishness – and monogamy hobby horse – to con him out of the money for their only remaining horse.

In fact it is the same con-men who sold Moses the green spectacles. He gives Primrose ‘a bill’ to ‘draw upon’ his neighbour Flamborough, a procedure I didn’t really understand since when he gets back home and presents it to Flamborough, the latter says he has no money and the thing is a con. Primrose has lost his money.

Buchell’s letter Surprisingly, the family discover that Mr Burchell has written a poison pen letter to the two Fine Ladies telling them the two Primrose girls are entirely unsuitable as companions, with the result that the ladies have returned to London without them and their prospects are dashed.

The Primrose family know this because they find Burchell’s copybook lying in a field, open it, and find a copy of a letter apparently written to the fine ladies warning them against the Primroses. They’ve barely finished reading it before Burchell himself arrives for one of his regular visits and first Deborah then Primrose himself accuse Burchell of ingratitude and baseness. Burchell takes it in his stride, says he could have them all hanged for breaking into his pocketbook, and walks off.

The family portrait In another comic moment they discover their neighbours and sort-of rivals the Flamboroughs have had their portraits done by a roving limner.

So the Primroses resolve to have a portrait done of themselves, a group portrait, which they over-excitedly decide should cast them in classical characters, as Venus, an Amazon and so on.

It is done very nicely, in the kitchen as a convenient space – but only when it’s finished do they realise it is too big to get through the doors – to take either into the house proper or outside. And so it becomes an expensive cause of mockery and gossip.

The basic mismanagement of this project, and even more so the ridiculous inappropriateness of much of the imagery (Mrs P as the goddess of Love!) is an easy symbol of the moral and cultural confusion the reader is asked to recognise in Primrose’s character.

Farmer William The womenfolk now conceive a strategem, which is to prompt Squire Thornhill to declare his passion for Olivia by encouraging a local farmer, William, in his hopes for Olivia (who he has been wooing since they moved into their new home).

Despite inviting Farmer William round at the same time as Squire Thornhill, and despite Olivia openly flirting with the farmer, the Squire only sighs and goes away, leaving the family puzzled. Even when the actual date of the young couple’s wedding is announced, the Squire only sighs.

Meanwhile, after Farmer William has left, Olivia goes into a corner and cries – Primrose is impressed at how naturally she keeps up her role of coquette but upset at how upset she is becoming, The reader feels like shouting, ‘Well, call the whole silly scheme off, then!’

Olivia elopes One morning the youngest son comes running in and tells the astonished family that he saw Olivia kissing a fine gentleman who helped her into a carriage, her crying very much and was for going back, but the gentleman hustled her into the carriage and off it swept. She has eloped.

Operatic misery and reproach and anger, Primrose rants against the seducer and vows revenge. He marches over to Castle Thornhill but is disarmed when the young Squire opens it and disclaims any knowledge. Some witnesses claim it was Mr Burchell who helped Olivia into the carriage!

A ‘witness’ says he saw them heading off to ‘the wells’, some 30 miles distant, so Primrose sets off to walk there, finds it full of gentry of Fashion. Here he meets ‘a person on horseback’ who assures him the couple have gone on to ‘the race’ thirty miles hence, so Primrose walks there as well. He doesn’t find them in either place.

Lack of description

It’s worth making a general point which these journeys highlight, which is the almost complete lack of description in the book. Primrose walks thirty miles to the wells, and another thirty miles to the races, and you realise there is absolutely no description whatsoever of the countryside he passes through, of the road or bridges or river or woods. When he gets to both the wells and races there is no description of either.

Now I think about it, there is little or no description of the physical appearance of any of the characters. It’s as if the story happens in a kind of empty space, devoid of shape or colour – is made of moralising conversations and reflections which take place in a big blank. And I think it’s this absence of visual information which makes it quite a difficult read. The modern reader is used to at least some description of setting and clothes and appearances. There’s almost none in The Vicar of Wakefield and that helps to make it feel rather… barren.

Fever The exertion of these long walks brings on a fever, and Primrose is forced to take to a bed in a nearby inn for 4 weeks. Fortunately a friend passing by is able to pay his bill (a more than usually ‘random’ coincidence, as my kids would say). Finally, restored to health, he sets off home.

The travelling players And falls in with a cart of props and equipment for some strolling actors. This gives rise, incongruously, to a couple of pages of pure Goldsmith, giving his low opinion about contemporary theatre i.e. he disapproves of the revival of the Elizabethans, Shakespeare and Jonson, as outlandish and unnatural.

Apparently, Goldsmith wrote a lengthy essay arguing for the strongly moral purpose of theatre, which he tried to embody in his own plays, namely his greatest hit, She Stoops To Conquer (1773).

Politics The entire book takes another unexpected turn when the player in charge of the props and Primrose are invited by a well-dressed gentleman they meet at the inn, to dine at his house. A coach takes them out to a very grand mansion, where they are treated to a tip-top dinner in the company of two fine ladies. But when the host starts toasting Liberty in the manner of John Wilkes, it triggers a long monologue in which Primrose appears to present Goldsmith’s political position, i.e. a staunch justification of Monarchy as the best protection of the middle sort of society (who produce all the arts and economy) against the rabble.

The argument between Primrose and the host is just getting nasty when – in a comic reversal – the real lord and lady of the house return and it is revealed that the fine gentleman and his ladies who are hosting our hero are in fact the house’s butler and maids! Hence their republican principles – they have enacted precisely the social overthrow they were proposing and Goldsmith/Primrose opposing.

Arabella Wilmot In a further comic development, it turns out the true owners are the aunt and uncle of Arabella Wilmot, the handsome young lady who Primrose tutored before the novel began, and who his son George was engaged to (the hosts are a Mr and Mrs Arnold).

We learn that it has now been three years since they lost their money and sent George off to earn his living, and have heard nothing of him since.

George Imagine everyone’s amazement when Primrose and Arabella go to see the first night of the play brought by the travelling players to the nearby town only to discover that the promising new lead actor is none other than… George, his son! George sees them in the audience, burst into tears and retreats from the stage. He ends up being invited out to the Arnolds’ mansion where a general reconciliation is effected.

George’s adventures The longest chapter in the book is George’s rambling picaresque first-person account of trying and failing to make a living in London and beyond. Apparently, these are closely based on Goldsmith’s own long, miserable years of struggle.

George goes to London and meets the cousin his father gave him a letter of introduction to and is inducted into the humiliations of being an usher at a school. He soon quits and tries becoming a hack writer in Grub Street. A hack poet introduces him to the method of whipping up subscriptions for volumes you never actually publish. George tries to write honestly, but is ignored.

He ends up sitting dejected in St James’s Park when he was spied by Ned Thornhill (‘Thornhill!’ his father exclaims) who hires him as a personal assistant up to and including fighting a duel for him (against, it turns out, a pimp in defence of the honour of a whore).

Thornhill gives him a letter of recommendation to his uncle, Sir William Thornhill (who rudely dismisses him as an abettor of his nephew’s dissipation) and to another mighty lord, to whom he has barely gained admittance than an important note calls him away, our George jostling the throng of other supplicants, beggars and hangers-on at his gate.

At his wit’s end, George finds himself at the office of a ‘Mr Cripse’ who he gives a deposit to ship him to America to find a good job as a negotiator with Indians, but bumps into a sailor friend who confirms his suspicion that people shipped to the States by Cripse in fact end up as slaves.

The sailor persuades George to come tomorrow on his ship to Amsterdam and teach the Dutch English. But as soon as he arrives he realises the Dutch don’t understand him and, in order to teach English, he needs to speak Dutch which, of course, he doesn’t.

He bumps into an Irishman who tells him barely anyone at the University of Louvain knows ancient Greek, which George does since he studied Classics at university – why doesn’t he apply to be a professor? But when he gets to Louvain, the existing chancellor confesses he doesn’t know ancient Greek, has never needed to, and so considers it worthless.

George wanders on through Flanders, using his skills as a musician to be a kind of minstrel, busking and begging room and board for the night. Arriving in Paris, he bumps (by outrageous coincidence) into the self-same cousin he had first encountered in London and who now undertakes to turn him into a connoisseur of paintings. There are, apparently, two rules:

  1. observe that the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains
  2. praise the works of Pietro Perugino

George witnesses his ‘cousin’ putting on awesome displays of art scholar lying, before the cousin gets him a job as the travelling companion of an immensely wealthy young man who’s been sent out on the Grand Tour. But George quickly discovers that this young ‘gentleman’ turns out to be phenomenally tight and greedy and indifferent to everything he sees.

The said young man, enquiring at an Italian port the cheapest way back to England and finding it was sailing rather than horse and coaching, took the first available boat home, abandoning George. George had to walk from Italy back to England, carrying out disputations at universities along the way, on days when they allowed public debates and rewarded the winner with a night’s board and lodging.

Having finally arrived back in England, he was planning to volunteer for the army when he ran into the players who were looking for a leading man. He joined them on their travels, and thus it was that he walked on stage the night before, only to recognise his father and former fiancée in the audience!

Squire Thornhill So George and Primrose stay a week or so with good kindly Mr and Mrs Arnold, and their niece Arabella. Who should turn up in the first few days but Squire Thornhill? He is initially surprised to see the Primrose males, but immediately becomes the suave soul of friendship. Turns out he has been wooing Arabella and continues to do so over the coming days – although Primrose sees Arabella warming day by day to George.

The army Until the Squire turns up one day with the wonderful news that he has got George the position of ensign in an army regiment which is about to sail to the West Indies, for the bargain price of £100! This is a genuine opportunity and father and son are thrilled and grateful – neither of them realising this is Thornhill’s way of getting George, his love rival, out of the way. The morning George is due to join his regiment, Primrose gives his son his blessing. Then sets out sadly to journey home by easy stages stopping at inns.

Olivia rediscovered In an inn on the way home, he finds the angry landlady kicking out a tenant who’s been holed up for two weeks without paying and discovers that – it is his own sweet Olivia!

Father and daughter fall into each other’s arms, amid much weeping and begging forgiveness. Olivia tells quite a complicated story. For a start it was Squire Thornhill who seduced her and carried her away. The two fine ladies he dazzled the family with were in fact London prostitutes. Good Mr Burchell had been warning the Primroses against them all the time. Thornhill got a Catholic priest to marry him to Olivia (Primrose is relieved at least to find that they are honest man and wife) but then Olivia discovered the same priest had married Thornhill half a dozen times before (Primrose is crushed).

Olivia appears to have lived in Thornhill’s place (Castle Thornhill?) alongside a couple of prostitutes, trying to dress well, dance and converse politely, but crying inside, until Thornhill offered her to a friend, a baronet, like a spare horse – at which point she snapped and ran away, caught a passing coach and dumped herself in this inn.

Fire Primrose takes Olivia a stage nearer home, leaves her at the next inn, and sets out to walk the last five miles to warn the family of her arrival. He is happy to approach the little cottage they call home but, at the precise moment he knocks on the front door, he sees flames leap out of the windows and, to cut a long story short, the family, waked by his cries, rush out and can only stand and watch as their cottage and all their belongings burn to the ground. Kind neighbours provide basic utensils and the family reassemble in the wretched outhouse.

Primrose burned his arm badly when he burst into the inferno to rescue the two smallest children trapped in their cot. So he sends Sophia and Moses to fetch Olivia home. Mrs P is fiercely critical of her shameful behaviour, but Primrose wades in and says they’re all in a hard case now and must pull together and let bygones be bygones.

Thornhill again Olivia continues extremely depressed and miserable, made worse when the family discovers that Thornhill is going to marry Arabella Wilmot. Squire Thornhill pays a visit during which he is casually dismissive of his appalling treatment of Olivia and invites them to his forthcoming wedding. Primrose is calm but incensed, and replies with cold fury. Thornhill calmly declares he was inclined to be forgiving but now finds his steward needs to collect their rent, plus other debts of theirs, and he walks off.

Prison It is winter because everything is buried in snow. Next day Thornhill’s steward comes and impounds their cattle, selling them off at the local town at firesale prices. The day after, through the deep snow, come two officers who arrest Primrose for non-payment of rent and, despite his badly burned arm, fever, and lack of clothes, take him to prison.

He reproves his parishioners A mob of 50 or so parishioners gather and begin to attack the officers and declare they will release Primrose. But, in the classic noble-sentimental style, he begs them to cease and desist and to obey the officers of the law.

(How old is this trope? Does it go all the way back to Jesus telling his disciples not to resist his arresters in the Garden of Gethsemane?)

In prison Thrown into prison, Primrose discovers he is expected to pay for the privilege and that the money is immediately spent on buying booze from the pub so the soldiers can get drunk. In the darkness, a gentlemanly-sounding chap engages him in conversation and there is a comic moment when, from his high-falutin conversation, Primrose realises it is the plausible con-man who took his horse off him at the fair. In the event, his name is Jenkinson and he turns out to be a good-hearted man who regrets having lived a life of trickery.

Prison reform Primrose has strong views about prison reform, a topical subject of the 1760s apparently. He wonders why Britain, the richest country in Europe, has such a high prison population and so many laws which call for capital punishment. He thinks it reflects the over-anxiety of the propertied classes.

He thinks the system is completely wrong: it currently sends malefactors to gaol for even minor infringements like stealing bread, and has hundreds of capital crimes. The result is to make criminals think they might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and commit worse crimes – and to send the relatively innocent to gaol for one minor crime where they are taught by old lags how to commit a thousand others.

Prison, in his view, should be about helping and reforming the prisoners and setting them on the path to a reformed life once they leave.

I cannot tell whether it is from the number of our penal laws, or the licentiousness of our people, that this country should shew more convicts in a year, than half the dominions of Europe united. Perhaps it is owing to both; for they mutually produce each other. When by indiscriminate penal laws a nation beholds the same punishment affixed to dissimilar degrees of guilt, from perceiving no distinction in the penalty, the people are led to lose all sense of distinction in the crime, and this distinction is the bulwark of all morality: thus the multitude of laws produce new vices, and new vices call for fresh restraints.

(It’s when I read speeches like this, from hundreds of years ago which address issues we still wrestle with 260 years later, that I realise some things will never, ever change.)

Sermon Primrose takes it upon himself to sermonise the prisoners. At first they take the mickey, say Amen in funny voices, spit on his books, swap them for porn and so on. He persists, suggesting they turn their minds to reform, and think of the God they will have to face, eventually. After a week they listen with respect and some have started to repent.

Olivia dies His family move in. His little boys and his wife. Olivia stays outside. Every time she visits she looks worse, more and more gaunt. Jenkinson brings news that she’s wasting away, over a four day period, and then, that she is dead. Primrose is prostrate with grief.

Jenkinson begs him to relent and submit to Thornhill’s demands, for the sake of his family, and because Primrose’s health is beginning to fail – but by the time Primrose dictates a letter of apology to Thornhill the latter has hardened his heart. He will marry Arabella in a few days.

Sophia Then Deborah comes news that Sophia was walking along with her mother when a post-chaise stopped, a man grabbed her round the waist and threw her in, then it drove off. Now he has lost both his girls!!

George in chains Still, at least he comforts himself and his wife with the thought that George is thriving. Their littlest reads out the most recent letter from George declaring the colonel of his regiment loves him and all his going well.

Primrose is just sharing this thought when there is the sound of prison doors being unlocked, fetters and chains rattling, and George himself is thrown into the cell, bloodied and wounded and covered in shackles.

Turns out his mother sent him a letter telling him about Thornhill’s responsibility for Olivia’s decline and so George left his regiment immediately, sought out Thornhill, challenged him to a duel, but instead was set upon by four of his ruffians, some of whom he wounded before being overcome and beaten black and blue.

(Clearly the intention of the story is to reduce Primrose to the absolute nadir of human suffering, to make him a latter-day Job. But it would be interesting to know how many of his readers read this as a parody or pastiche or mockery of this kind of sensationalising sentimental novel. The incidents come pell-mell and occur with absurdly pat timing e.g. the house bursting into flames just as Primrose arrives home, or George being thrown into their cell at the very moment Primrose is explaining how his success is his last prop. Were the original readers meant to weep? Or to burst out laughing at the melodramatic contrivance of it all?)

A sermon Primrose puts a moralising cap to this catalogue of woe by delivering a sermon in which he points out that Jesus came to the ill and weak and criminals and sinners, and that their translation from this life of woe into bliss will be all the more intense.

3. Happy ending

Then Mr. Burchell arrives and solves all the problems:

Firstly, Burchell has rescued Sophia from her abductors. Sophia herself appears and explains the whole story. She was grabbed and hustled into a post-chaise, but she screamed from it, Burchell heard and gave chase, bashed the postilion off his seat with his big stick, chased the abductor off into the fields, then returned to the stationary coach and rescued Sophia (who he also saved from drowning, remember: that’s two pretty big debts).

It emerges that Mr. Burchell is in reality the worthy Sir William Thornhill, who travels through the country in disguise. He inspires awe in the gaoler and other officers, who now jump at his bidding. They fetch a damn fine dinner and bottles of wine from the pub nearby.

Olivia is not dead. She is brought in by Jenkinson. Her being dead was a ruse cooked up by Jenkinson and agreed by her mother. It was because they thought the only way Squire Thornhill could be bought off was i.e. made to forgive and release Primrose – was if they offered him Primrose’s other daughter, Sophia. But Primrose had said he would let Thornhill marry Sophia over Olivia’s dead body. So they pretended Olivia was dead. (What a complicated and preposterous scheme!)

Jenkinson now reveals he is a master of disguise and has worked for Squire Thornhill for many years. He explains how they contrived to beat up George, and how the accusation that George injured one of them – the chief cause for him being imprisoned – is baseless. None of them were injured.

Hearing this, Sir William bids the Gaoler let George go, who exits to clean up.

Arabella walks in more or less by accident since she was staying in the town en route to her wedding. She is astonished to find the entire cast assembled in this cell. She is amazed to discover her fiancé, Squire Thornhill, there too. And even more surprised when George re-enters the cell, now tidied up and wearing his army uniform and looking gorgeous.

She is surprised, because Thornhill had told her George had chucked her for someone else, gotten married and left for America – none of which is true. So Arabella rushes into George’s strong manly arms!

Nonetheless, Squire Thornhill chuckles a wicked evil chuckle because all the deeds and contracts for the marriage have been signed and so he will inherit Arabella’s fortune, anyway. This upsets Arabella’s father who has just walked into the scene, and Sir William enjoys a few minutes of gloating over the way the latter’s greed has been rebuked.

But everyone is wrong about this – for Jenkinson now drops the bombshell that when Thornhill underwent the marriage to Olivia, it was not a sham ceremony performed by a fake Catholic priest (as Thornhill believed) but a real ceremony performed by a real priest!

Thus at one stroke 1. the stain of illegitimacy is removed from Olivia, and 2. Squire Thornhill, being already married, cannot take possession of Arabella’s fortune! It reverts to her and to George who she is now determined to marry!!

In a final twist, there is a minute of comic business while Sir William jocosely tries to pair young Sophia off with Jenkinson, who he says he’ll give £500 a year. But Sophia becomes more and more miserable as Sir William increases his briberies and inducements until… he abruptly gives up and says, ‘Well then, he’ll have her for himself!’ Grabs her, proposes, she accepts, he has been looking for years for a woman who would love him for who he is rather than his riches.

Oh, and Primrose is hereby released from prison, all his debts paid off.

What an incredibly complex tangle of themes and revelations and contrivances!

The prison scene from The Vicar of Wakefield by Ernest Gustave Girardot – wicked Squire Thornhill, seated, is having it explained that he will NOT be getting Arabella’s money, the vicar (standing) embraces his ‘dead’ daughter Olivia, Mrs Primrose seated right, teenage Moses standing behind her, George background right in his smart red army uniform standing with fiancée Arabella

Wedding bells

In the last pages, the wealth of the vicar is restored, as the bankrupt merchant is found in Antwerp, in possession of all Dr Primrose’s money and more.

Then, as in traditional comedy since Roman times, the narrative ends with a wedding, in fact a double wedding: George marries Arabella, as he originally intended, and Sir William Thornhill marries Sophia. The family is restored, renewed and expanded.

Sentiment and improving feelings

You can see from this summary how the plot is designed at almost every turn to provide the 18th century reader with a combination of:

  1. shocks and surprises and sensational moments and incidents (the near-drowning, the house burns down, thrown in prison, duels) worthy of a soap opera
  2. and that all of these extreme events are prompts for displays of Christian stoicism in the face of disaster and noble high-minded sentiments, the over-riding ones being forgiveness and charity and big-heartedness

The narrative provides a steady stream of incidents designed to trigger high-minded sentiments of the kind which could be embroidered and hung on the wall of any good Christian family of the middling sort (much as Dr Primrose – comically – hangs the epitaph he’s written for his wife, in a frame over the main fireplace, in chapter 2).

Autobiography

To begin with I had various thoughts about fictional autobiography as a genre, about how writers like Defoe used it at the turn of the 1700s. About the flood of popular literature, pamphlets and ballads and so on, which all claimed to give the personal biographies of all sorts of figures, especially notorious criminals, especially if they were about to be executed. About the interest in people’s personal lives and quirks and oddities which grew throughout the century.

By the 1760s it was a very well-established genre, and the narrative arc from happiness, down into times of tribulation – a vale of sorrows – and then back up to ultimate vindication – this amounts to a basic human story, deeper than religion, underpinning the Christ narrative itself.

The psychology of details

I was going to write something about the growing interest in details – When you read Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or 17th century fictions one of the first thing the reader notices is how sparse they are, how lacking in detail, whereas one of the things that makes Daniel Defoe stand out from contemporaries was his realisation that the telling detail can have a dramatic psychological effect.

What makes Robinson Crusoe so gripping is not only the plot, but the accumulation of significant details which make you believe the plot. The gold Crusoe initially leaves in the shipwreck, but then goes back for, is often cited as a particularly acute and lifelike psychological detail.

But, as mentioned above, The Vicar of Wakefield is quite disappointing in this respect – it lacks the uniting of physical detail and psychological importance which you find in Defoe, to some extent in Fielding, and in the brilliant details of Tristram Shandy. It feels much closer to a sermon, or a highly moralising Christian tract, than to those novels.

Although the narrator reflects a bit upon events, the narrative is very exterior – it focuses on a series of events rather than of thoughts. In this respect it is a highly theatrical narrative, which becomes obvious in the denouement which reads like the climax of a comic play.

Idolising rural life

And I was also going to write something about the ancientness of the cliché of the superiority of ‘simple’ rural life over town life. To begin with, the story is premised on the idea that being a simple, kind-hearted country parson who does a bit of farming on the side, is the purest, noblest, most honest and religious vocation possible for a human being.

The hero of this piece unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth; he is a priest, an husbandman, and the father of a family.

This idea – that simple rural living is purer, more innocent and noble than city living – is at least as old as the Roman Empire (and the Georgics of Virgil), can be found in Chaucer and became a cliché under the Elizabethans (see Spenser’s Faerie Queene).

The paradox is that it is always the opinion of a sophisticated townee (Virgil, friend of the emperor; Chaucer, poet to the king; Spenser, writer for aristocratic patrons).

In Goldsmith’s case, this image of rural content is the product of an urban socialite who made his living by his wits and his writing and steered a precarious course through the dog-eat-dog, hyper-bitchy, gossipy cultural world of Georgian London – and the book was designed to be read by a jaundiced, urban literary elite who enjoyed fancying themselves as simple sensitive souls… if only for the couple of afternoons it took to read the book.

And as the plot unravels, it can be interpreted as indicating the basic instability of the idea. Basically, Primrose’s wife and two daughters both yearn to escape from ‘rural idiocy’ to the bright lights of the city and fashionable living, and George is actually packed off to the city. In other words, this version of rural idyll cannot exist without the city to feed it, or counterbalance it.

The dream of rural contentment is radically unstable and needs constant policing by Dr Primrose to try and maintain, and the whole story is a litany of ways in which he fails to maintain it.

Conclusion

I was going to write about those three areas – autobiography, the importance of details and rural life – but the narrative ended up sweeping past all these clever thoughts and obliterating them in the helter-skelter of hyper-theatrical melodrama – capped by the host of reversals and revelations in the final scene.

It is this concatenation of complex plot denouements which is the lasting impression of the book and which swamps the early pages’ gentle evocations of rural life. And it’s these closing scenes which raise the really obvious question about the book which is – Is it meant to be taken seriously? Are you meant to weep sensitive tears of empathy for Olivia and Arabella and feel your heart swell as Primrose expresses a series of noble sentiments about prison reform, and the souls of sinners and so on?

Or are you meant to burst out laughing at the increasingly farcical complexities and improbabilities of the plot?

Or is it both? Are you allowed to feel both, to be genuinely moved by some scenes but find others broadly comic?

Points of interest – the remoteness of 18th century life

Primrose tells us none of his family had ever been further than ten miles from their homestead, so were quite scared at the thought of an epic journey of 70 miles.

A journey of seventy miles to a family that had hitherto never been above ten from home, filled us with apprehension…

Mr Burchell has no money at the inn where he is first encountered, because he gave three guineas to the beadle ‘to spare an old broken soldier that was to be whipped through the town for dog-stealing’.

Floods The countryside round Wakefield is troubled by floods so deep that, in crossing one, Primrose’s daughter is like to be swept away and drowned.

Home-made gooseberry wine The Primrose family are famous for it among the neighbours.

Related links

18th century art

18th century history

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by Simon on July 13, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 13, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/13/the-vicar-of-wakefield-oliver-goldsmith/

Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (2005)

This is the catalogue of a major exhibition of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portraits held at Tate Britain back in 2005. I went, loved the exhibition and bought this catalogue. In my opinion the written content of the catalogue is poor, but the colour reproductions of 100 or so of Reynolds’s best paintings are spectacular.

The catalogue contains a biography of Reynolds by Martin Postle and four essays by Reynolds scholars:

  • ‘The Modern Apelles’: Joshua Reynolds and the Creation of Celebrity by Martin Postle
  • Reynolds, Celebrity and The Exhibition Space by Mark Hallett
  • ‘Figures of Fame’: Reynolds and the printed Image by Tim Clayton
  • ‘Paths of Glory’: Fame and the Public in Eighteenth-Century London by Stella Tillyard

The essays are followed by some 100 full-colour reproductions, divided into the following sections:

  • Reynolds and the Self-Portrait
  • Heroes
  • Aristocrats
  • The Temple of Fame
  • The Streatham Worthies
  • Painted Women
  • The Theatre of Life

With separate sections of images devoted to:

  • Reynolds and the Reproductive Print
  • Reynolds and the Sculpted Image

The concept of celebrity

As the title suggests, the idea is somehow to tie Reynolds’s 18th century art and career to 21st century ideas of ‘celebrity’. In my opinion all four essays fail to do this. Despite frequently using sentences with the word ‘celebrity’ in them, the catalogue nowhere really explains what ‘celebrity’ is.

The authors have a hard time really distinguishing it from the notion of ‘fame’ and the pursuit of ‘fame’ and the risks of ‘fame’ – subjects which have been thoroughly discussed since ancient Greek times.

In Greek mythology Pheme was the personification of fame and renown, her favour being notability, her wrath being scandalous rumors… She was described as ‘she who initiates and furthers communication’… A tremendous gossip, Pheme was said to have pried into the affairs of mortals and gods, then repeated what she learned, starting off at first with just a dull whisper, but repeating it louder each time, until everyone knew. In art, she was usually depicted with wings and a trumpet… In Roman mythology, Fama was described as having multiple tongues, eyes, ears and feathers by Virgil (in Aeneid IV line 180 ff.) and other authors.

In other words, the concept of ‘fame’ and the way it unavoidably attracts a spectrum of public comment, from dignified praise at one end through to scurrilous rumour at the other end – is as old as Western civilisation.

In my opinion the authors struggle to establish a really clear distinction between these multiple and time-honoured notions of fame with all its consequences, and their attempt to shoe-horn modern-day ‘celebrity’ into the picture.

The whole thing is obviously an attempt by Tate to make Reynolds and his paintings more ‘relevant’ to a ‘modern’ audience, maybe to attract in those elusive ‘younger’ visitors which all arts venues need to attract to sustain their grants. Or to open a new perspective from our time back to his, which makes his society, his aims and his paintings more understandable in terms of modern concepts.

I can see what they’re trying to do, and it is obvious that the four authors have been told to make as many snappy comparisons between the society of Reynolds’s day and our own times as possible – but flashy references to the eighteenth-century ‘media’ or to Reynolds’s sitters getting their ‘fifteen minutes of fame’, aren’t enough, by themselves, to give any insight. In fact, these flashy comparisons tend to obscure the complexity of 18th century society by railroading complex facts and anecdotes into narrow 21st notions and catchphrases.

Being modish risks becoming dated

The authors’ comparisons have themselves become dated in at least two ways:

  1. the ‘modern’ celebrities they invoke have dated quickly (David Beckham is given as a current example)
  2. it was written in 2005, before the advent of social media, Instagram, twitter etc, so has itself become completely out of date about the workings of ‘modern celebrity’

There is a third aspect which is – Who would you trust to give you a better understanding of social media, contemporary fame, celebrity, influencers, tik tok and so on – a social media marketing manager, a celebrity journalist or… a starchy, middle-aged, white English academic?

There is a humorous aspect to listening to posh academics trying to get down wiv da kids, and elaborately explaining to their posh white readership how such things as ‘the media’ work, what ‘the glitterati’ are, and showing off their familiarity with ‘the media spotlight’ – things which, one suspects, library-bound academics are not, in fact, all that familiar with.

The authors’ definitions of celebrity

The authors attempt numerous definitions of celebrity:

Reynolds’s attitude towards fame, and how it was inextricably bound up with a concern for his public persona, or what we today would call his ‘celebrity‘ status.

So Reynolds was concerned about his fame, about building a professional reputation and then defending it, but wasn’t every other painter, craftsman and indeed notable figure of the time? As Postle concedes:

In this respect he was not untypical of a whole range of writers, actors and artists  who regarded fame as the standard for judging the worthiness of their own performance against the achievements of the past.

Postle goes on to try and distinguish fame from celebrity:

However, Reynolds [achieved fame] by using the mechanisms associated with what has become known as ‘celebrity‘, a hybrid of fame driven by commerce and the cult of personality.

Hmm. Is he saying no public figures prior to Joshua Reynolds cultivated a ‘cult of personality’ or that no public figures tried to cash in on their fame? Because that is clearly nonsense. And putting the word celebrity in scare quotes doesn’t help much:

Reynolds pandered to the Prince [of Wales]’s thirst for ‘celebrity‘ and fuelled his narcissistic fantasies.

The author doesn’t explain what he means by ‘celebrity’ in this context or why the prince thirsted for it and how he was different in this respect from any other 18th century aristocrat who ‘thirsted’ for fame and respect.

Through portraits such as these [of the Duc d’Orleans], Reynolds openly identified with fashionable Whig society; the Georgian ‘glitterati’ – liberal in the politics, liberated in their social attitudes, and libidinous in their sexual behaviour.

Does use of the word ‘glitterati’ add anything to our understanding?

He was also the first artist to pursue his career in the media spotlight.

‘Media spotlight’? Simply using modern clichés like ‘media spotlight’ and ‘celebrity’ and ‘glitterati’ didn’t seem to me to shed much light on anything. The reader wants to ask a) what do you understand by ‘media spotlight’? b) in what way did Reynolds pursue his career in a media spotlight?

As experience of the modern media tells us, a sure sign that an individual’s fame has been transmuted into ‘celebrity’ is when press interest in his or her professional achievements extends to their private and social life.

I’m struggling to think of a time when there hasn’t been intrusive interest in the lives of the rich and famous, and when it hasn’t been recorded in scurrilous satires, squibs, poems.

People gossiped about Julius Caesar, about all the Caesars. We have written records of the way Athenians gossiped about Socrates and his wife. Prurient interest in the personal lives of anyone notable in an urban environment go back as far as we have written records.

Here’s another definition:

In a process that seems to prefigure the ephemeral dynamics of heroism and redundancy found in today’s celebrity culture, the exploitation of celebrity typified by Reynolds’s representation of [the famous soldier, the Marquess of] Granby depended not only on the glorification, in portrait form, of individuals who had already gained a certain kind of renown within the wider realms of urban culture, but also on a continual replenishment – from one year to the next – of this hyperbolic imagery of bravery, beauty and fame.

I think he’s saying that visitors to the annual exhibitions liked to see new pictures – or, as he puts it with typical art scholar grandiosity, ‘a continual replenishment of this hyperbolic imagery’.

‘The ephemeral dynamics of heroism and redundancy found in today’s celebrity culture’? Does that tortuous definition have any relevance to Kim Kardashian, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Rihanna et al?

What these authors are all struggling to express is that Reynolds made a fabulously successful career by painting the well-known and eminent people of his day, making sure to paint army or naval heroes as soon as they returned from famous victories, making sure he painted portraits of the latest author after a hit novel or play, painting well-known courtesans, carefully associating his own name (or brand) with success and fame.

It was a dialectical process in which Reynolds’s portraits, often hung at the annual Royal Academy exhibition – which was itself the talk of the town while it lasted – promoted both the sitter and their fame, but also kept Sir Joshua’s name and reputation as Top Painter Of The Famous continually in the public eye.

That’s what the essay writers are trying to say. But you have to wade through a lot of academic rhetoric to get there. Take this questionable generalisation thrown out by Stella Tillyard, which sounds reasonable, until you start to think about it.

Like so much else that defines us in Europe and America now, celebrity appears to have been made in the eighteenth century and in particular in eighteenth century London, with its dozens of newspapers and print shops, its crowds and coffee houses, theatres, exhibitions, spectacles, pleasure gardens and teeming pavements. (Stella Tillyard, p.61)

‘Like so much else that defines us in Europe and America now’? What would you say defines modern society in 2020? I’d guess the list would include the internet, mobile phones, social media, webcams and digital technology generally, big cars, long-haul flights, cheap foreign holidays, mass immigration, multi-cultural societies, foreign food… things like that.

Quite obviously none of these originated in eighteenth century London.

Tillyard’s essay is the best of the four but it still contains highly questionable assertions. She thinks there is a basic ‘narrative’ of ‘celebrity’ which is one of rise, stardom, fall and rise again. The examples she gives are Bill Clinton getting into trouble because of Monica Lewinsky, and the footballers Francesco Totti and David Beckham. She thinks this basic narrative arc echoes the story of Jesus Christ, rising from obscurity, gaining fame, being executed, and rising from the dead. You have to wonder what drugs she is on.

Nonetheless, Tillyard’s is the best essay of the four because she’s an actual historian and so has a wide enough grasp of the facts to make some sensible points. She also gives the one and only good definition of celebrity in the book when she writes that:

Celebrity was born at the moment private life became a tradeable public commodity. (p.62)

Aha. Right at the end of the four essays we get the first solid, testable and genuinely insightful definition of celebrity.

According to Tillyard’s definition, the really new thing about celebrity is not the interest in gossip about the rich and famous – that, as pointed out, has been with us forever – it is that this kind of fame can be packaged into new formats and sold. It has become part of the newly mercantile society of the 18th century.

Celebrity, among other things, is about the commodification of fame, about the dissemination of images representing the individual celebrity, and about the collective conversations and fantasies generated by these processes. (p.37)

The assertion is that Reynolds was able to capitalise on his reputation. He made money out of it. He was able to exploit the new aspects of mid-18th century fame in order to build up a successful business and make a fortune.

He developed a process for making his portraits well known. The lead element in this was ensuring they were prominently hung at the annual exhibition of paintings by members of the new Royal Academy and so became the subject of the enormous amount of comment the exhibition attracted in the scores of newspapers, magazines, cartoons, lampoons, caricatures, poems and plays which infested Georgian London.

Deftly riding this tide of gossip and talk and critical comment, Reynolds was able to assure his sitters that he would make them famous – and he made himself famous in the process. And, as a result, he was able to charge a lot of money for his portraits.

He was able to turn the insubstantial, social quality of ‘fame’ into hard cash. That’s how the argument goes. I’ve put it far more plainly than any of these four writers do, and it’s an interesting point, but still begs a lot of questions…

Robert Orme’s 15 minutes of fame

When Postle says that the soldier Robert Orme got his ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ (p.27) it strikes me as being a flashy but misleading reference.

Andy Warhol’s expression, ‘in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes’, refers very specifically to the 15-minute time slots allocated on the kind of American TV programmes which are punctuated every 15 minutes or so with ad breaks. Its merit derives from its source in a very specific technology and at a very specific moment in that technology (the later 1960s).

Whereas Robert Orme took part in an important battle of the Seven Years War (surviving the massacre of General Edward Braddock’s forces by French and Indians in July 1755), returned to England and was for a while feted and invited to dinners to give first-hand accounts of the massacre.

OK, so interest in Orme petered out after a while, but his story hardly conforms to the ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ description in the very precise, TV-age way Warhol had intended.

It’s an example of the way the authors are prepared to twist the historical record in order to shoehorn in their strained comparisons with modern ‘celebrity’ or the ‘glitterati’ or ‘the media spotlight’.

My point is that just chucking modern buzzwords at historical events doesn’t help us understand the historical events and doesn’t shed much light on the buzzwords or the ideas behind them, either. Not without a much more detailed analysis, anyway.

What was new about 18th century ‘media’

The one place in the four essays which comes alive i.e. presents new facts or insights, is in historian Stella Tillyard’s essay, where she explains that a new concept of ‘fame’ was being driven by some genuinely new developments in mass publication. She suggests four factors which account for the rise of a new type of fame in the mid-18th century:

1. A limited monarchy – the mystique surrounding the Divine Right of Kings which had clung to the Stuart Monarchy (1660-1714) drained away from the stolid Hanoverian monarchs who replaced them after 1714. Their powers were circumscribed from the start by Parliament and this made them much more human, much more worldly and, well, sometimes boring figures, for example. George III, widely known as Farmer George.

2. Royal glamour migrated – instead of surrounding the monarch in a nimbus of glory the human desire to have glamorous figures to look up to and gossip about migrated to new categories of ‘star’ or ‘celebrity’, namely top military figures, successful actors and even writers.

3. The lapse of the Licensing Act left the press a huge amount of freedom. By 1770 there were 60 newspapers printed in London every week, all looking for gossip and tittle tattle to market. Combined with a very weak libel law which allowed almost any rumour and speculation to be printed. Well before the tabloids were invented, the taste for an endless diet of celebrity tittle tattle was being catered to.

4. A public interested in new ways of thinking about themselves or others. This is the tricksiest notion, but Tillyard argues that this huge influx of new printed matter, combined with shops full of cheap prints, to make literate urban populations think about themselves and their roles as citizens of a busy city, and as consumers, in new ways.

Now all this chimes very well with the picture painted in Ian McIntyre’s brilliant biography of Reynolds, which clearly shows how almost every incident, not only from his personal life but of the lives of all his famous friends (e.g. the writer Dr Johnson, the actor David Garrick, the historian Edmund Gibbon, the poet Oliver Goldsmith) was quickly leaked to scurrilous journalists, who reported them in their scandal sheets, or made cartoons or comic poems about them.

Reynolds’s world was infested with gossip and rumour.

By contrast with Tillyard’s authoritative historian’s-eye view, Postle’s art critic assertions are less precise and less persuasive:

Reynolds grew up in an age that witnessed the birth of modern journalism.

Did he, though? ‘Modern’ journalism?

Googling ‘birth of modern journalism’ you discover that ‘modern journalism’ began with a piece written by Defoe in 1703. Or was it during the American Civil War in the 1860s? Or maybe it was with Walter Lippmann, writing in the 1920s, often referred to as the ‘father of modern journalism’?

In other words, the birth of ‘modern’ journalism happened more or less any time you want it to have done, any time you need to add this cliché into your essay to prop up your argument. And that little bit of googling suggests how risky it is making these kinds of sweeping assertions.

In fact it suggests that any generalisation which contains the word ‘modern’ is dodgy because the term ‘modern’ itself is so elastic as to be almost meaningless. Historians themselves date ‘the modern period’ to the 1500s. Do you think of the Elizabethan era as ‘modern’?

The modern era of history is usually defined as the time after the Middle Ages. This is divided into the early modern era and the late modern era. (Define modern era in history)

Postle’s assertion that there was something uniquely and newly journalistic about Reynolds’s era sounds fine until you think of earlier periods – take the turn-of-the 18th century and the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) which was packed with coffee house publications and scurrilous poems written against each other by leading figures. Alexander Pope’s entire career exemplifies a world of literary gossip and animosity.

Going further back, wasn’t the court of Charles II the subject of all kinds of cartoons, pictures, scurrilous paintings and poems and plays? Lots of John Dryden’s poems only make sense if you realise they’re about leading figures of the day, either praising or blaming them. During the British civil wars (1637-51) there was an explosion of pamphlets and leaflets and poems and manifestos denouncing the actions of more or less every notable figure, and giving a running commentary on the political developments of the day. Wasn’t Shakespeare’s time (1590 to 1615) one of rumour and gossip and pamphlet wars?

And in fact I’ve just come across the same idea, on page 4 of Peter H. Wilson’s vast history of the Thirty Years War, where he writes:

From the outset, the conflict attracted wide interest across Europe, accelerating the early seventeenth-century ‘media revolution’ that saw the birth of the modern newspaper.
(Europe’s Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson, page 4)

So surely the widespread availability of gossip sheets and scandal mongering publications was a matter of degree not kind. Artists of the late-17th century (van Dyck, Peter Lely, Godfrey Kneller) had earned types of ‘fame’ and certainly tried to capitalise on it. By Reynolds’s day there were just more outlets for it, more magazines, newspapers, journals – reflecting a steadily growing urban population and market for all things gossip-related. Between 1650 and 1750 the British population increased, the population of London increased, the number of literate people increased, and so the market for reading matter increased.

So when Postle asserts that newspapers played an increasingly important part in the critical reception of art, well, they played an increasingly important role in the critical reception of everything, such as war and politics and religion, such as the Seven Years War, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and every other kind of debate and issue.

1. That is what newspapers do – tell people what’s going on and editorialise about it – and 2. there were more and more of them, because the population was growing, and the number of literate consumers was steadily growing with it.

Reynolds didn’t invent any of this. He just took advantage of it very effectively.

Reynolds’s strategies for success

  • Reynolds was apprenticed to a fellow Devonian, Thomas Hudson, who not only taught him how to paint portraits but introduced him to important patrons
  • Hudson introduced Reynolds to leading gentlemen’s clubs of the time (the 1740s)
  • Reynolds took care to keep a large table i.e. to invite notable people to dinner, specially if they had had a recent ‘hit’ with a novel or play or work of art
  • Reynolds took dancing lessons, attended balls and masquerades, cultivated a man about town persona
  • as Reynolds became well known he was invited to join top clubs and societies e.g. the Royal Society and the Society of Dilettanti
  • he helped to found the blandly named The Club, with a small number of very eminent figures in literature, theatre and politics, including Garrick, Goldsmith, Johnson and Edmund Burke, later to include Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan
  • in the 1770s Reynolds painted portraits of the friends to be met at the Streatham house of his friend Mrs Hester Thrale (who became nicknamed ‘the Streatham Worthies‘)
  • during the 1770s and 80s there was a growth in a new genre, ‘intimate biographies’ told by authors who knew the subjects well, such as Johnsons Lives of the Poets (1781) and Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785) – the intimate portraits of the Streatham Worthies tied into this taste, in fact Boswell considered writing an intimate biography of Reynolds
  • the point of having a cohort of friends like this was that they provided a mutual admiration and mutual support society, promoting each others’ work – for example, Oliver Goldsmith dedicated his famous poem, The Deserted Village to Reynolds, James Boswell’s vast ‘intimate biography’ The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) was dedicated to Reynolds, as was Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777)
  • in former times, getting an appointment to work for the king had been crucial to artists’ careers – by Reynolds’s day, however, it was no longer vital because 1. the monarch no longer had the absolute powers of the Stuarts – the Hanoverian kings’ powers and patronage were much more limited and often determined by Parliament 2. there was a well enough developed domestic market for art for a painter to make a career and livelihood without explicit royal patronage
  • Reynolds very consciously bought a large house in fashionable Leicester Fields; the Prince of Wales owned a big house in the same square
  • Reynolds bought an expensive coach that had formerly belonged to the Lord Mayor of London, renovated it and encouraged his sister Fanny to drive round in it in order to prompt gossip and awe

But was Reynolds unique?

As mentioned above, the four essayists have clearly received a brief to make Reynolds sound as modern and edgy and contemporary and down with the kids as possible.

But the tendency of the essays is also to try and make Reynolds sound unique – in his painterly ambition, in the way he used connections and pulled strings to paint famous sitters, promoted himself socially (by being a member of many clubs and inviting all the famous men and women of the time to large dinners), promoted his work through public exhibitions, tried to wangle key painting positions to the royal family, and by having prints made of his portraits which could be sold on to a wider audience.

The trouble is that – having just read Ian McIntyre’s brilliant biography of Reynolds which presents an encyclopedic overview of his times, its clubs, newspapers, magazines, his colleagues and rivals, of the mechanisms of a career in art and an in-depth overview of all Georgian society – I realise these were the standard procedures of the day.

For example, the authors point out that Reynolds was keen to paint portraits of famous people to boost his career – but what portrait painter of the day wasn’t? Allan Ramsay and Thomas Gainsborough, to name just two contemporary painters, lobbied hard to win aristocratic patrons, to promote their portraits to other potential clients, to expand their client base, and so on. It was a highly competitive and commercial world.

The catalogue contains sections on the portraits of aristocratic ladies, military heroes and courtesans as if Reynolds had invented the idea of painting these kinds of figures – but paintings of aristocrats go back at least as far as the Renaissance, and statues of emperors, notable figures and military leaders go back through the ancient Romans to the Greeks.

There’s a section devoted to showing how Reynolds used prints extensively to promote his career, not only here but abroad, where British art prints commanded good prices. (One of the few new things I learned from the essays was that British mezzotinting was so highly regarded as to become known as la maniere anglaise, p.51)

But all his rivals and colleagues did just the same, too – otherwise there wouldn’t have been a thriving community of printmakers and of printbuyers.

And the authors strain to prove that the kind of high-profile aristocrats, military leaders, and top artists-writers-actors of the day that Reynolds portrayed were often discussed, profiled, ridiculed and lampooned in London’s countless scurrilous newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, poems, broadsides, gossip columns and so on.

But this was just as true of all the notable figures that all the other portrait painters of his day painted. It was an extremely gossipy society.

In other words, none of the activities the authors attribute to Reynolds was unique to him – they were being energetically carried out by scores of rivals and colleagues in the swarming ant hill of rivalry and competition that was Georgian London. What is interesting, is the extent to which Reynolds did all these things best (when he did), or where he failed, or where he pioneered a new aspect of this or that activity.

Unfortunately, the four authors don’t really have much space to make their cases. The four essays are relatively short. They have nowhere like the 550 closely-typed pages that Ian McIntyre has in his masterful biography of Reynolds. Therefore, to anyone who’s read McIntyre, the four essays come over as fleeting and superficial sketches of subjects and issues which deserve to be dealt with in much, much greater detail if you want to understand why Reynolds was the towering figure that he was.

It wasn’t that he did all these activities listed above – it’s that he did many of them better, more comprehensively, and more systematically than his rivals.

And also that he just worked harder at it. He was extremely disciplined and professional, working a solid 6 or 7 hour days, every day, often on Sundays. He produced, on average, well over one hundred commissions a year, an extraordinary workrate. This isn’t mentioned anywhere in the essays, but it is a key reason for his success.

Or the even more obvious fact that a his success was down to the fact that he was, quite simply, the best portrait painter of his time. He may well have adopted the canny career strategies listed above, but they’d have been meaningless if he hadn’t also been a painter of genius.

Art scholarship prose style

This section contains no facts and is devoted to an analysis and skewering of pretentious artspeak. Art scholar prose is very identifiable. It has at least three elements:

  1. use of fashionable, pretentious buzzwords such as subvert, interrogate, engage, gendered, identity, desire, site, gaze, other
  2. combined with a curiously starchy, old-fashioned locutions such as whilst, amongst
  3. thin actual content

1. Buzzwords

In terms of his desire to associate himself with the celebrity of others, the most compelling paintings by Reynolds are surely his portraits of prostitutes… (p.29)

‘Wish’ wouldn’t be a better word?

When the ancient philosopher, Socrates, visited the artist’s house with friends, the courtesan was to be found under the gaze of the painter (p.29)

The word ‘gaze’ now has the adjective ‘male’ attached to it in all contexts, and is always a bad thing.

[At the new public exhibitions of the 1760s] the visitor’s encounter with the painted images of celebrities was crucially informed by those other burgeoning cultural sites of the period, the newspaper and the periodical. (p.35)

Do you think of a newspaper or magazine you read as a cultural site? Alliteration is always good, makes your ideas sound grander and more important.

In arranging that his pictures of such women [the royal bridesmaids at the wedding of George III and Queen Charlotte]… Reynolds… was contributing to, and trading upon, a burgeoning cult of aristocratic celebrity within the sites and spaces of urban culture. (p.39)

Tillyard in particular likes the word and idea of the ‘site’:

In response to the overwhelming attention of the London public [Jean-Jacques Rousseau] took himself off to the wilds of Derbyshire and began to write his Confessions, in which he demanded the right to be heard on his own terms rather than to become the site for others’ imaginings. (p.66)

Omai [a South Sea islander Reynolds painted] is both sophisticate and innocent, celebrity and savage, an eloquent but mute subject whose lack of the English language and inability to write allowed his audience and the picture’s viewers to make him a site for their own imaginings. (p.69)

It is surprising that Omai isn’t taken as an example of The Other, an almost meaningless word commonly used to describe anyone who isn’t a privileged white male.

The press functioned as one vital counterpart to the exhibition space in terms of what was emerging as a recognisably modern economy of celebrity… (p.37)

The ‘modern economy of celebrity’ sounds impressive but what does it mean, what is an ‘economy of celebrity’ (and remember the warning about using the word ‘modern’ which is generally an empty adjective used solely for its sound, to make the text sound grand and knowledgeable).

Reynolds painted a number of portraits of aristocratic patrons such as Maria, Countess Waldegrave and Elizabeth Keppel. This allows art scholar Mark Hallett to write:

In being invited to track the shifting imagery of such women as Keppel, Bunbury and Waldegrave, attentive visitors to the London exhibition rooms thus became witness to an extended process of pictorial and narrative transformation, choreographed by Reynolds himself, in which his sitters became part of a gendered, role-playing theatre of aristocratic celebrity that was acted out on an annual basis in the public spaces of the exhibition room. (p.39)

If you read and reread it, I think you realise that this long pretentious sentence doesn’t actually tell you anything. It is prose poetry in the tradition of the mellifluous aesthete, Walter Pater, just using a different jargon.

‘Narrative’, ‘gendered’, ‘theatre’, ‘spaces’ are all modish critical buzzwords. What does ‘gendered’ even mean? That some portraits were of women and some of men? Hmm. And a gallery isn’t really a theatre, no matter how hard art scholars wish their working environment was more jazzy and exciting. It’s a gallery. It consists of pictures hung on a wall. Therefore to say a gallery is a ‘role-playing theatre’ is simply a literary analogy, it is a type of literary artifice which makes absolutely no factual addition to our knowledge.

Translated, that sentence means that regular visitors to the Royal Academy exhibition often saw portraits of the same famous sitters and so could judge different artists’ treatment of them, or gossip about how their appearance changed from year to year. That’s what ‘pictorial and narrative transformation’ means.

The artist’s portrait of Granby can now be understood as just one element within an unfolding iconography of military celebrity that was being articulated by the artist in the exhibition space during the 1760s.

Translated, this means that Reynolds painted many portraits of successful military heroes. As did lots and lots of other portrait painters of the time. But it sounds more impressive the way Hallett expresses it using key buzzwords.

We can even suggest that such details as the Duchess [of Devonshire]’s ‘antique’ dress and rural surroundings… transform her into a figure of pastoral fantasy, a delicately classicised icon of aristocratic otherness… (p.43)

Ah, ‘the Other’ and ‘otherness’, it was the last empty space on my bullshit bingo card. What does ‘otherness’ mean here? That aristocrats aren’t like you and me? That, dressed up in fake Greek robes, leaning against a classical pillar in a broad landscape, they seem like visions from another world? Better to say ‘otherness’. Makes it sound as if you understand complex and only-hinted-at deeply intellectual ideas (taken, in fact, from Jacques Lacan and other French theorists).

2. Starchy prose style

It’s peculiar the way art scholars combine these flashy buzzwords from Critical Theory (interrogate, subvert, gender, identity, The Other) with creaky old phrases which sound as if they’ve come from the mouth of a dowager duchess.

It’s as if Lady Bracknell had read a dummy’s guide to Critical Theory and was trying to incorporate the latest buzzwords into her plummy, old-fashioned idiolect. For example, art scholars always prefer ‘within’ to ‘in’, ‘amongst’ to among, and ‘whilst’ to while – versions of common English words which help them sound grander.

Some contemporary critics thought Reynolds’s experiments with oil and painting techniques meant his works would eventually decay and disintegrate. Mark Hallett says:

The fact that an exhibition including paintings such as these is now taking place, more than two hundred years after Reynolds’s death, helps put paid to such aspersions.

‘Helps put paid to such aspersions’? Isn’t that the voice of Lady Bracknell? ‘I should certainly hope, Mr Moncrieff, that in future you shall keep your aspersions and animadversions to yourself.’

3. Thin content

See above where I’ve highlighted the relative lack of new or interesting insights in the four critical essays, which can’t be concealed by tarting them up with references to the eighteenth century ‘glitterati’ or Andy Warhol.

Sometimes the essays descend to the bathetic. When we read that scholar Richard Wendorf has written a paper in which he observes that

Reynolds was adept at cultivating patrons through observing the rules of polite society

we are straying close to the University of the Bleeding Obvious.

When we learn that Reynolds sometimes flouted these rules in order to create a Bohemian effect, in order to copy the more raffish end of the aristocratic spectrum of behaviour, it feels like a variation on the obvious, and hardly something which required an entire essay to ‘explain’.

Conclusion

Having read the four essays twice, what you take away is that Reynolds specialised in painting portraits of famous people, this ensured the portraits were much talked about, written about and commented on by the larger-than-ever number of daily newspapers and magazines, and encouraged other famous people to commission their portraits from him, all of which boosted his professional career.

And that he was canny in using the means available to him – aristocratic patrons, choosing famous people to paint – famous soldiers, sailors, aristocrats, courtesans, writers and fellow artists – socialising and hosting grand dinners, joining top clubs, getting supporters to talk him up in the press, and encouraging the distribution of prints of his work – to build a successful and profitable career.

All of these were strategies adopted by most of his contemporaries were doing. He just did it better.

I’m confident making a statement like that because I’ve just read Ian McIntyre’s brilliant biography of Reynolds which places the great man in the incredibly busy, buzzing, competitive, dog-eat-dog environment of Georgian London, and  gives extended portraits of scores and scores of his peers, rivals, colleagues and competitors.

It shows how British society changed during Reynolds’s long career, from his earliest paintings in the 1740s to his last ones in 1790. He changed, art changed, society changed.

None of the essays in this catalogue have much space to play with and so these art scholars play very fast and loose with the historical record, yanking together quotes and events which were actually far separated in time, in order to impose on the people and culture of a very different society the modish contemporary art scholar concerns of ‘gender’, ‘identity’ and ‘celebrity’.

The point being: these essays are actually quite an unreliable introduction to the life and career of Joshua Reynolds, written at the behest of a gallery with an agenda and a marketing plan. By all means buy or borrow this book for its wonderful reproductions of the paintings. But read the McIntyre biography to understand the man and his times.

Unanswered questions

Having read both MacIntyre’s book and this catalogue, I still have a couple of unanswered questions:

1. They both tell me that History Painting was meant to be the highest and most prestigious genre of the day. In which case, how come the greatest painter of the age, Reynolds, didn’t paint any history paintings, and neither did his closest rivals, Allan Ramsay or Thomas Gainsborough?

2. Why are there so many black servants in 18th century portraits?

Related links

Blog posts about the 18th century

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by Simon on July 8, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 8, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/08/joshua-reynolds-the-creation-of-celebrity/

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