Chapter 4 argues that in the wake of the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688, the medieval, monarchical Tower of London had been superseded as the pre-eminent prison of the nation. Instead, the state prison that looms large in British fiction of the eighteenth century is the Bastille. This French prison is reliably depicted in a proto-gothic mode in British novels in order to frame and revile the absolutism of the French monarchy, and to celebrate the contrasting freedoms afforded by English law. This chapter elaborates the ways in which Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey complicates this commonplace by involving the British writer and reader within the carceral dynamic of absolutist France. Finally, it illustrates the uses to which Sterne’s fictional state prison was put by two of the most influential prison reformers of the eighteenth century: William Eden, one of the three authors of the Penitentiary Act of 1779, and George Onesipherous Paul, who rebuilt Gloucester’s prison into one of the first penitentiaries.

Chapter 3 demonstrates that the bridewell retained a distinct legal and cultural identity in the Hanoverian period. The penal identity of the bridewell is shown to turn around incarceration at hard labour and the character reformation that was thought to be attendant on it. Designed to house the very ‘lowest’ sector of Georgian society, guilty of infractions under the Vagrancy Acts, the bridewell sought to impose a single, stable, labour-dependent identity on its inmate population, particularly on women who did not ‘know their place’. Using first-person accounts, committal rolls, Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress, and novels by Jane Barker, Smollett, John Oakman, and Charles Johnstone, the chapter establishes the cultural place and purpose of the bridewell and analyses the striking absence of these prisons from the novels in which we would expect to find them. It proposes that this elision can be understood to evidence the novel’s move away from its picaresque antecedents in the eighteenth century.

The Introduction demonstrates the proliferation of prisons in eighteenth-century British culture, and in the novel in particular. It argues that by resituating novelistic prison scenes back within their original cultural contexts, their fourfold particularity as ideological and narrative spaces is made evident. Setting out the narrative distinctions between these four prison types – the criminal prison, debtors’ prison, the bridewell (or prisons for the working poor), and the state prison – this chapter stakes out the terms of the study and traces the relationship between fictional prisons and the prison reform movement that was steadily gaining traction in this period. It elaborates the contribution this analysis hopes to make to novel studies, stressing the sociality and interdependence of selfhood in eighteenth-century narratives, and the ramifications of this on claims that have been made for the novel’s role in the advent of modernity.

Chapter 2 differentiates the debtors’ prison from the criminal prison in print. In the novel, debtors’ prisons are reliably depicted as spaces of protracted sentimental suffering, involving the inmate’s wider family circle. This chapter argues that the novel signals a criticism of these prisons as cultural and legal structures not through sarcasm and generic experimentation, but through the inversion of given or inherited social hierarchies. It demonstrates that the debtors’ prison in the novel almost uniformly stresses and celebrates the relational nature of the debtors’ identity and economic practise, complicating Ian Watt’s classic account of the early novel as a generative instrument of individuation and industrial capitalism. It ends by elaborating the relationship between the writer of fiction in the world and the incarcerated debtor in fiction through an analysis of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress and the debtors’ prisons in Smollett’s novels.

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.