ABSTRACT
We know that British literary production became increasingly commercialized across the eighteenth century, and that shifts in literary genre, address, and mood over the period need to be considered in that light. In this chapter, I want to move away from ecclesiastic writing to address two quite specific structures within mid-eighteenth-century commercial literature which can, indeed, be regarded as the gentlemanly bloc’s dangerous others. The first of these structures is the close relationship between commercial writing and charlatanism or quackery. The second structure, which I will attend to more briefly, is the slow emergence among writers of what will later come to be called ressentiment from out of that old Satanic vice, envy. Setting these very different events side by side may seem perverse, but, by focusing on a cluster of commercial book-trade participants – John Newbery, Oliver Goldsmith, and Christopher Smart – I want to make the case that, in the narrow period between about 1750 and 1780, they are in fact linked and in ways that help us make sense of the romanticism to come. In brief, my argument is that literary production in the period was
“charlatanized” in three related ways: first, the book trade was materially connected to the patent medicine trade, which was often regarded as a diluted and rationalized form of quackery; second, the literary world itself was often engaged in practices of charlatanism; and third, the difficulties of escaping the contingencies of commerce and politics led to a widely accepted diagnosis of charlatanism as infecting the society and culture quite broadly. In this environment, I further contend, cultural affects were unstable – a situation that fostered not just sentimentalism but a particular nexus between feeling and print in which certain writers were dominated by resentments that they could not transparently express in their writings – Goldsmith and Smart being my examples.
