Corps de l’article

Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) taught us to read Robinson Crusoe as exemplary of “formal realism,” that is, particularity and referentiality of time, place, and person. Critics of the generation immediately following Watt refined his initial thesis to excavate the layers of “historical, institutional, and social context” encoded in Defoe’s 1719 novel.[1] To many later critics (second, third, and fourth, etc., generations following Watt), the historical, institutional, and social codes were nothing more nor less than the elements of a too influential “colonial fable,” which normalizes what should strike us as appalling. Much critical effort in the past few decades, therefore, has been devoted to explicating the colonial biases of Defoe’s “realistic” text as reflective of deep and disturbing ideological commitments to violence, oppression, domination, and coercion.[2] This pointed postcolonial critique of a powerful and influential narrative has been useful and important, but it has occasioned (perhaps predictably) an unfortunate declaration. To mark the three-hundredth anniversary of the book’s publication, Charles Boyle, writer for The Guardian, called for a boycott of Robinson Crusoe, reasoning thus, “A man who was stuck on an uninhabited island for 28 years and who traded in slaves and reckoned women should be ‘proper for service’ was never going to be much help as a role model for how to live with others, in society. Let him go.”[3] Yet, Crusoe as a role model has other dimensions to which readers have responded over the years. His resilience in the face of adversity, his practical approach to survival, his earnest commitment to self-improvement, and his inner dialogues revolving around ethical decisions are notable features of his isolated life on the island. As a fictional paradigm, he has been a paradoxical inspiration, standing as a seductive representative of colonial power and eliciting meaningful artistic and intellectual engagement from writers and thinkers as diverse as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and J. M. Coetzee. To many ordinary readers, he has proved company worth keeping as a source of inspiration and personal pleasure.[4]

A large part of Crusoe’s attractiveness, which has been noted but inadequately stressed in critical discussion, is his demonstration of the beauty of ordinary existence.[5] Virginia Woolf initiated this kind of reading of Robinson Crusoe in her emphasis on the way Crusoe’s behaviour on the island makes “common actions dignified and common objects beautiful. To dig, to bake, to plant, to build—how serious these simple occupations are; hatchets, scissors, logs, axes—how beautiful these simple objects become.”[6] This observation is related to, but separate from, the kind of “formal realism” Watt would describe a few decades later. Both Woolf and Watt see in Robinson Crusoe attentiveness to the external world. And both see in this attentiveness, especially in the island pages, an homage to “dignity of labour,” as Watt puts it.[7] But while Woolf rests upon the beauty of such detail, Watt elaborates on the social and cultural context, linking labour to “Puritan gospel” and the economic concerns emerging in the early eighteenth century.[8] In other words, Watt drives interpretation outward, toward contextualization and cultural interpretation, whereas Woolf is content to remain with Crusoe as a solitary maker of things. The major twentieth-century studies of Defoe and his most important literary descendant, Samuel Richardson, follow Watt in their concern with the social. Though noting the elevation of the individual in Robinson Crusoe, Pamela (1740), and Clarissa (1748), critics such as John Richetti, J. Paul Hunter, and Michael McKeon find the major thrust of the fictional enterprise in this period to be relational and contextual—epistemological and ethical. In Richetti’s words, “the protagonists of the most realistic novels in the English eighteenth century look outward at the social world and inward at the individuality enforced for both good and ill by that world.”[9]

In these readings, even Crusoe’s solitary life seems defined by social and cultural assumptions that demand interrogation. But these critics also acknowledge that Robinson Crusoe has an affective appeal to individual readers. Richetti, for example, notes that while young readers respond to the island pages as a “boys’ adventure story,” older readers experience the “added frisson of existential anxiety in the face of enormous obstacles to survival and dangers from the unknown, external world of hostile others.”[10] Richetti’s language is significant here, speaking of an emotional readerly response in language that makes the physicality of that response clear. Some readers are afraid for Crusoe on the island, and those readers experience a release of anxiety as he begins to emerge from his own panic into a phase of creative ordering. Hunter, calling the account of Crusoe’s discovery of a footprint on the island “the most moving passage Defoe ever wrote,” credits its power to the fact that “Defoe turned his own feelings and perceptions into print,” again emphasizing the primacy of individual feeling.[11] McKeon, even more explicitly, links the emergence of aesthetic autonomy in the eighteenth century to the rise of sensibility and the feelings generated by art and literature.[12] His reading of Robinson Crusoe notes the “pleasure” experienced by Crusoe on the island in “a new-found ability to spiritualize his situation” and to “alter his understanding of his own desires” in moments of “radiant contentment.”[13] McKeon’s discussion, in particular, suggests that emotion extends beyond the visceral in Defoe’s narrative. Aesthetic pleasure and pain are also tied to the notion of human constructs, human efforts to order and create and explain.

As a castaway, Crusoe organizes life in accord with what philosophers have recently been examining as “everyday aesthetics”—that is, aesthetics concerned with “food, wardrobe, dwelling, conviviality, and going out (running errands or commuting).”[14] Crusoe builds two homes, furnishes them, and creates a habit of life (complete with religious holidays that break the normal routine). And he records sensory pleasures—the taste of turtle, the relief of arriving home after a journey across the island, the comfort (company, assured sustenance) provided by domesticated animals, the pride in making and creating (gardens, tables, enclosures, implements, conveyances, clothes, and his journal).[15] The sense of the dignity of common actions, the beauty of ordinary things and simple objects permeates the pages of Robinson Crusoe that are devoted to his construction of a life in solitude, a life that begins as an effort to survive and becomes a celebration of daily pleasure in the ordinary, the routine, the quotidian.

Everyday aesthetics is related to, but not the same as, formal realism. It shares a focus on the ordinary, but its concern is with affect—feelings of pleasure or pain evoked or provoked by a text or construct of any kind. Attention paid to the aesthetics of ordinary existence in Robinson Crusoe establishes that the experience of beauty is not restricted to those with elite, cultivated taste—and, in that way, expands our notions of the aesthetic beyond the world of the fine arts and high literature. On his island, Defoe’s Crusoe models pleasure in the ordinary—a lesson elaborated by Samuel Richardson, whose expansive narratives turn the events of mundane existence into vast interior landscapes, as completely explored as Crusoe’s island life. Richardson’s final novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753), especially, elevates the common courtesies of domestic life to the level of an art form. Like Defoe’s Crusoe, Richardson’s characters model ways of creating and experiencing the beauty of ordinary life.

To speak of everyday aesthetics tends to involve personal testimony (or analysis based on personal experience of the object or activity at hand). G. Gabrielle Starr’s observation about aesthetics, in general, is useful here. Drawing on William Hogarth’s insistence on the embodiment of beauty (as opposed to its abstraction), Starr remarks on the way that aesthetics “structures appetites” by “privileg[ing] pursuit over attainment.”[16] She summarizes, “Aesthetics, then, is not grounded in objects or in perception but in the way individual subjects approach both ideas and things.”[17] In the following discussion, I will consider how Defoe (in Robinson Crusoe) and Richardson (in Sir Charles Grandison) have modelled and inspired the experience of beauty in everyday life. The dilemma introduced by Boyle’s call for boycott is endemic to realist fiction (and the critical conversation it inspires). This mode of fiction insists on the relationship between literature and life and therefore makes it difficult to enjoy aesthetic pleasure without applying ethical principles. Still, I suggest that, although the threads of ethics (including political ethics) and aesthetics are thoroughly tangled in eighteenth-century literature, an emphasis on the latter can foster continued engagement with and access to the pleasures that brought the works to the attention of the reading public in the first place and that defined their reception by readers for many generations afterward.

Robinson Crusoe and Everyday Aesthetics: Two Readers Respond

The odd fact about Defoe’s novel of male European supremacy is that it has appealed so fundamentally to readers who were not beneficiaries of such assertions of supremacy. I will call on two examples here—Imre Kertész and Harriet Jacobs—who both invoke Crusoe as an exemplar of the human experience in extremis. Interestingly, for both, Crusoe offers aesthetic counsel as much as he models resiliency. In their responses, we note an emphasized attention to detail, not so much out of appreciation for its “realism,” but for its ability to form habits of mind and expectations of pleasure in the everyday despite subjection to external modes of oppression. The allusions are casual and, therefore, all the more stunning. Kertész, author of the semi-autobiographical novel Sorstalanság (1975) (variously translated as Fateless or Fatelessness), speaks through his protagonist George Kovecs of the disorientation he must have felt when incarcerated at the age of fourteen in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.[18] Feeling “like a guest in the world of convicts,” Kovecs begins to adjust to the strange circumstances, including the strange food: bread “shaped like a building block with some white substance on top”—not butter, with which he is familiar, but margarine.[19] He continues, “[t]his I ate, even though I had never seen bread to equal it: it was big and crusty, and its insides seemed to be baked with black mud full of straw and kernels … Still, it was bread … For lack of a better utensil, I spread the margarine with my finger, in Robinson Crusoe fashion.”[20] Here, Robinson Crusoe offers solace as an example of the human ability to do without, adapt to reduced circumstances, and cope successfully with startling change. This is also a scene that has aesthetic implications. Kertész invokes Defoe in a situation tuned specifically to domestic pleasure, its absence, and a possible way to replicate it. Unfamiliar bread is still bread and can approximate the pleasure of familiar bread; margarine can substitute for butter by simulating the pleasures of butter; a finger can replace a knife in the ritual of preparing bread for optimal sensory experience. Robinson Crusoe, to Kovecs, isn’t just about survival. He is about the quality of ordinary life, even amidst suffering.

Jacobs’s invocation is even more striking. As an enslaved person, newly escaped, hiding in a dark garret, and in danger of punishment or death if discovered, Jacobs is in extreme danger. One can only imagine the psychological distress she suffered during that time and in the writing of that time later on. But, as she tells it, a hopeful moment occurs when she finds a gimlet, a small tool, that allows her to create a source of light, a way to “see [her] children” from her secret retreat. Her words are, “I was as rejoiced as Robinson Crusoe could be in finding such a treasure.”[21] While the chink eventually provides her with the means of occupation (sewing, reading) and information (all sorts of people stop and talk on the path beside the garret), her first benefit is an ordinary pleasure—a whiff of fresh air and the sound and sight of her laughing children coming and going about the activities of their day.

These two examples testify to the power of Robinson Crusoe in the reader’s imagination. In both cases, the turn to the beauty of the ordinary is shadowed by the threat of real but incomprehensible cruelty should their attempts at survival be foiled (although they both knew that the worst fate did not await them by the time they wrote their accounts). The “footprint” episode of Robinson Crusoe, articulating fear of the unknown and the fantasies of destruction (both of the enemy and by the enemy) that fear produces, can be seen as anticipatory of the threat of Naziism and plantation violence as, in all three cases, the subject experiences alarm and anxiety in imagining the structure the threatening experience would take should it come to pass. In other words, the fearful alternative to Crusoe’s solitary island existence is also an aesthetic experience, though negative. Negative aesthetics is an important dimension, as Yuriko Saito has noted, of the philosophical focus on the everyday: “dramatically negative qualities can be experienced in a squalid urban space, deafening noise, cluttered billboard with gaudy signage and sordid visual images, stench from a nearby factory, and the like.” [22] Katya Mandoki agrees, observing that while “there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the delights of beauty, we must acknowledge that, in structuring experience, the aesthetic may be triggered also, and often much more intensely, by … hostile environments.”[23]

Following Immanuel Kant, Mandoki conceives of aesthetics as “the interplay of imagination and understanding,” featuring, as pragmatist John Dewey emphasized, “rhythms and forms of sensibility, responsiveness, reciprocity, doings and undergoings, receptivity, awareness and attentiveness, sense and feeling, in short: vibrant, pulsating subjectivity.” [24] For Mandoki, the aesthetic discourse that focuses on “artistic experience” is “poetics.”[25] The kind of aesthetic discourse that focuses on “the non-artistic or everyday” she calls “prosaics.” Everything is open to “prosaic” analysis—“walking through a lane, musing, or enjoying a particular task.”[26] Political ads, household routines, and bureaucratic policies, though perhaps less pleasing than the activities just listed, can also be discussed in terms of their aesthetic nature (positive or negative), for all participate in our attempts to structure experience for ourselves and others. That is what Jacobs and Kertész recognize and value in Crusoe—his structuring impulse, his prosaic gift for creating a rhythm of life, a way of being. That’s what they try to emulate when they invoke the literary character to impose order on their radically disordered lives.

Aestheticizing the Ordinary in Sir Charles Grandison

Richardson was the inheritor of Defoe’s focus on the familiar, the ordinary.[27] His protagonists, like Crusoe, all find themselves in circumstances in which they are alone and required to establish a new order of life. In the aftermath of a kind of marooning, each seeks survival and ease of being in the world, the satisfactions associated with what Mandoki has termed “prosaic aesthetics”—comfort on their own terms. Richardson’s gift to literature is his honesty about how difficult the attainment of such comfort is for women. Think of Pamela trying to preside over her own dinner table and being so threatened by her sister-in-law and guest that she flees through the window of her new home.[28] Consider equally how Clarissa’s progressive loss of agency is conveyed through the affronts she endures in the ordinary moments of domestic life—having tea with her family or reviewing daily household orders with her mother, both of which provoke altercations that leave Clarissa feeling more desperate and less in control, even of things (like the dairy-house) explicitly left to her control.[29]

Perhaps most poignant in terms of women’s everyday life, however, is the relationship to the quotidian of Sir Charles Grandison’s Harriet Byron, for, in her ordinary life, she merges the aesthetic categories that Mandoki finds distinct. Poetic aesthetics figure in Harriet’s daily conversations, as we learn at the beginning of the novel when Harriet engages in literary debate as to whether or not John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667; 2nd ed. 1674) measures up to Homer’s Iliad. It more than does so, as far as she is concerned: “If Homer is to be preferred to Milton, he must be the sublimest of writers; and Mr. Pope, admirable as his translation of the Iliad is said to be, cannot have done him justice.”[30] Secure and confident in her support of Milton, grounded as it is in a preference for the Christian over the pagan and English over a language she cannot understand, and supported by the opinion of Joseph Addison and her godfather, Mr. Deane (62), Harriet speaks politely, but forcefully, in defence of her taste. She clearly enjoys the praise that she receives, and she is at ease enough in her own home to comment wryly on the odd manners of the masculine Miss Barnevelt and the various imperfections of the suitors—some fawning, some patronizing—who surround her and inform the prosaic aesthetic quality of the social visits during which the literary discussions take place.

Soon, however, Harriet loses the sense of security that allows for aesthetic engagement of either the poetic or the prosaic kind. First, she is displaced from her home on a visit to London; and, in London, she is kidnapped and then rescued and taken to the home of the exemplary Sir Charles and his irreverent sister Charlotte. Here she begins to recover, but until she fully understands the nature of Sir Charles’s dilemma regarding Clementina, her ability to experience pleasure in the Grandison household is compromised. For help, she turns to Sir Charles’s mentor, Dr. Bartlett, to whom she addresses a series of questions. His responses allow her to engage emotionally with the Catholic Clementina’s distress at the ultimately irreconcilable religious differences that prevent her marriage to the Protestant Sir Charles. While the combination of compassion for Clementina and longing for Sir Charles does not bring immediate comfort, ease, and control to Harriet Byron, knowledge of and response to the emotional landscape in which she finds herself does provide her the aesthetic and affective basis from which to begin to build her own ordinary life within the Grandison family. In other words, Harriet, marooned like Crusoe, takes the materials she finds on her metaphorical island to fashion a way of being in the world she now inhabits. One notable feature of this world, and one which Harriet refines to an art, is fascination with the calibrations of moral behavior as exemplified by Sir Charles himself.

While the moral and ethical implications of Crusoe’s island existence are not fully articulated by the protagonist and must await critical intervention, in Sir Charles Grandison, the aesthetic and the ethical blend so thoroughly that pleasure can scarce be felt without some commentary outlining the contours of moral significance. The very act of moral reasoning seems a source of pleasure for the characters and readers of Richardson’s novel. Here, for example, is a conversation toward the end of the novel between Sir Charles and his bride, Harriet. Sir Charles comes into a room where Harriet is writing at her table:

Sir Charles would have withdrawn to his Study, when he found me at my pen. I besought him to sit down in my closet.

Remove your papers then, my dear.

No need, Sir. These (putting what I had been just writing, and those I had written the day before, on one side of my desk) I would not, Sir, except you have a curiosity, wish you to see at present: These, Sir, you may, if you please, amuse yourself with.

I will take down one of your books, my Love. I will not look into any of your written papers.

Dear, generous Sir, look into them all—Look into both parcels. Something about Lucy; something of what Mr. Lowther has talked of, in that parcel—Read any of the written papers before you.

A generous mind, my Love, will not take all that is offered by a generous mind.

1531

The everyday pleasure of writing a letter and being pleasantly interrupted by your spouse to whom you would rather talk is nearly derailed by the effort to extract a clear moral lesson from the whole conversation. But there is also pleasure in discovering unexpected moral lessons. While it seems we might be in store for a statement regarding the appropriateness or inappropriateness of reading one’s wife’s letters, we get, instead, a homily on the nature of generosity when encountering generosity. Richardson’s narrative presupposes (or creates) the reader who will find pleasure in such turns and subtle lessons and who will be as pleased with this scene as Harriet herself, reporting it to her grandmother, seems to be.

Two details of Sir Charles Grandison illustrate different aspects of the relationship between aesthetics and ethics posited by the narrative: the detail of Sir Charles’s refusal to dock his horse’s tails and the detail of the cedar parlour in Harriet’s childhood home. In the first instance, we again see the blending of the aesthetic and the ethical. In the second, we witness something more akin to Crusoe’s island life—a unification of imagined space and feeling that can impress on a reader’s sensibility well beyond the pages of the novel itself. To examine the details in succession is to recognize two aspects of the aesthetic pleasure offered by Sir Charles Grandison: a reformative aesthetics that links morality to pleasure and a more sensual, multi-layered aesthetics based on individual emotional experience.[31]

We learn of Sir Charles’s treatment of his horses in a paragraph where Harriet muses on Charlotte’s description of her brother as one who “live[s] to himself” and is never prey to “false glory” or “false shame” (194–95). Harriet questions this characterization, noting that Charles’s fashionable dress proves that he “gives his fine person its full consideration;” his equipage, while not ostentatious, is tasteful, and, when he travels, he does so with “suitable attendants” (195). Of course, the reader realizes that these details support Charlotte’s portrayal of her brother as one who practices the golden mean. In fact, Harriet’s equivocal way of talking about these details—Charles “dresses to fashion, rather richly, ’tis true, than gaudily” (195); his equipage is “not so much to the glare of taste, as if he aimed either to inspire or shew emulation” (195)—stands as evidence of her own failure to convict him of the pride and vanity Charlotte claims he avoids. But his horses’ tails might be a way to puncture this paragon’s perfection. His failure to dock them (as most do) is a mark of “singularity” (195)—attention-grabbing for some reason, Harriet thinks, and, perhaps, a reason not to be overly impressed by one with whom she is obviously very impressed. However, the reason Sir Charles does not dock his horses’ tails is to his credit rather than otherwise. Without tails, horses cannot combat “vexatious insects” (195). So, in the interest of equine comfort and ease, Sir Charles simply ties up the horses’ tails when they are on the road and in the pasture he chooses not to “depriv[e] his cattle of a defence, which nature gave them” (195). Sir Charles’s reputation as “a man of mercy,” Harriet decides, is substantiated by the fact that he is even “merciful to his beast” (195).

The cedar parlour may owe its signature status to Jane Austen’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, whose comment regarding his aunt’s attentive reading of Richardson is one of the most well-known testimonials in literary history: “Every circumstance narrated in Sir Charles Grandison, all that was said or done in the cedar parlor, was familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered as if they had been living friends.”[32] The cedar parlour is, at least on one level, a synecdoche standing for all the conversations and activities in all the rooms of Selby-House, Shirley Manor, the Reeves’ home on Grosvenor Street, Lord L’s house at Colnebrooke, the Grandison London home in St. James’ Square, and, of course, the stately Grandison-Hall. But Austen-Leigh’s comment also draws attention to the privilege given to the cedar parlour in Selby-House, Harriet’s childhood home, because of crucial events in her emotional life. Upon investigation, it might surprise us to see how little, beyond the presumed cedar panelling, we know about the physical nature of the room or, as Cynthia Sundberg Wall has pointed out, any room in any home in Sir Charles Grandison until the end of the novel when Harriet “enters the life—and house—of her choice” as the wife of Sir Charles.[33] Then we get a detailed description of furnishings, wall coverings, and architectural detail missing from earlier treatment of interior space. One reason could be that, at this point, Harriet is taking up a public role as the mistress of a stately home; before, she lived an uncertain life in various dwellings.[34] The cedar parlour’s significance is tied to what happens in that room, where, to quote Teri Ann Doerksen, “important and life-changing conversations … take place.”[35] The events that occur in the cedar parlour are episodes in a love story—the love story of Harriet Byron and Sir Charles Grandison. What Austen was responding to as a young female reader is, perhaps, Richardson’s structuring of romantic love. What happens in the cedar parlour is never described in graphic detail. Still, the events themselves need little elaboration for the imaginative reader we can assume the adolescent Austen to be.[36]

In the first cedar parlour scene, Harriet ushers the pining Mr. Orme into the room when he requests a moment of private conversation regarding his feelings for her and hers for him. Harriet feels her suitor presses for an explicit answer from her that he already knows and which he should not force her to say. She courteously secures this realm of privacy as the conversation is painful to them both. In writing to Charlotte about the encounter, Harriet glosses the cedar parlour as a room “which you have heard me mention, and with which I hope you will one day be acquainted” (946). It is a privileged space for Harriet, a room in her childhood home deeply connected to her sense of self. For that reason, the setting is appropriate for the second cedar parlour scene—another scene of discomfort brought on by the intensity of misaligned affection, complicated by the recognition of a romantic rival—or, to be precise, two rivals. Harriet and Olivia converse privately in the cedar parlour where Olivia speaks frankly of her hatred of Clementina and her love for Sir Charles while also pressing Harriet to admit her own love. Harriet reports this conversation in some detail to Charlotte. Suppressing her anxieties about Charles’s potential marriage with Clementina, Harriet focuses her comments on Olivia, whom she finds too passionate. She expresses fear of possible future violence (which does occur). In this second (unlike the first) cedar parlour scene, Harriet becomes all too aware of how much she does not control; in other words, she uncomfortably faces the corrosive and debilitating effects of intense, unrequited emotion.

However, the novel’s remaining cedar parlour scenes celebrate the progress of Harriet’s ultimately happy love story. After the anxieties introduced by the first two cedar parlour scenes, the representation of this steadily improving course of true love in the same space is highly gratifying. It is to the cedar parlour that Harriet retreats alone when she is overwhelmed by Sir Charles’s first revelations of his feelings and introduction of the topic of marriage to her family. Harriet does not remain in the parlour long before she is retrieved by her aunt and ushered back into company to be present for Sir Charles’s long, detailed explanation of his love for Harriet and the impediments that have prevented his speaking of it before. It is in the cedar parlour that Sir Charles first kisses Harriet “in so fervent a way” (1353). It is here, too, that he proposes marriage.[37] After the wedding ceremony, Harriet, as the bride, receives her well-wishers and Sir Charles, as the groom, writes letters announcing the marriage to those who could not be present at the nuptials—his sister Caroline, Dr. Bartlett, and, significantly, Jeronymo della Porretta, who is cautioned to break the news to Clementina with care.

A cedar parlour makes an appropriate backdrop of intimacy combined with formality against which romantic fantasies can be safely indulged. Unlike the docked horses’ tails, the cedar parlour has never, to my knowledge, been subject to ridicule. However, fashions changed in the early nineteenth century, and the “old cedar parlour” was replaced by the “modern living room.” Humphry Repton’s print contrasting the formality of the one with the more relaxed atmosphere of the other suggests a shift in domestic life and social interaction that may account for both the tinge of nostalgic quaintness in Austen-Leigh’s memory of his aunt’s response to Richardson and for the tensely confined spatial configuration of the course of love and courtship in her own novels.[38]

Richardson and the Everyday Reader

Austen’s reputed feeling of “friendship” for Lady L. and Lady G. was not a unique response to Richardson’s fiction. Other readers also discovered access to everyday pleasures transferable to their own lives in the world created by Richardson. A vivid example is Margaret Collier, who found herself in reduced circumstances living in Ryde on the Isle of Wight as companion to an elderly couple. While there, she corresponded with her long-time friend Richardson from time to time, and in an early letter she sounds very much like one who has been marooned. Though she is known in the village as “a civil gentlewoman” and is greeted with bows and curtsies from the village children, she lives in a “very poor house” with “earthen floor[s]” and “a bed-chamber without any door to it.”[39] She paints a picture of low circumstances that have her quoting Madame de Maintenon: “It is high time to die; why should I stay longer in this world.”[40] Richardson sends her money for a bedroom door. And she finds solace in reading Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison to her “good old folks,” who think “both … to be real stories and no work of imagination,” and she does not care to “undeceive” them. In fact, she thinks of them as “just such good old folks as Mr. and Mrs. Andrews in Pamela.”[41] For Collier and her “good old folks,” the everyday aesthetics modelled by Richardson are character-centred, and the phenomenon they experience during their long, isolated time together is the company of fully realized fictional friends, an aesthetic pleasure familiar to Austen and to all novel readers who become absorbed in a character-driven narrative.

Anecdotal evidence similar to that cited for Robinson Crusoe earlier in this essay can be called upon to support readers’ sense of the everyday pertinence of Richardson’s fiction beyond the time it was written. One of my favourite examples of Pamela’s continuing power comes from an essay by Florian Stuber in which he describes teaching the novel to students at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. Stuber required written journal responses to the reading, producing many insightful comments, astute reactions, and informed critiques. The one I remember from my first reading of the essay (nearly twenty years ago) still touches me in its guileless embrace of Pamela’s natural nobility and honour. The student wrote, “I think of Pamela as an example. Now when I have to make an important decision about myself or others, I ask myself, ‘What would Pamela do?’”[42] Richardson would be pleased, I believe, with that student’s response. He expected readers to see each of his works as contributing to “a History of Life and Manners, and not a mere collection of Morals and Sentiments.”[43]

The kind of moral reasoning that Richardson models can be exhausting, but it elevates the ethical significance of ordinary experience and, in that sense, argues for an aesthetic elevation as well. Unlike Robinson Crusoe’s slow and deliberate creation of a satisfying solitary life made from wreckage, however, Richardson’s characters make decisions in the middle of the storm, as it were, in “the moment, while the heart is agitated by hopes and fears, on events undecided” (Grandison 6). In preface to A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Caution, and Reflections (1755) in Richardson’s novels, Reverend Benjamin Kennicott praises Richardson’s narrative method as one that “must engage more strongly, and prove far more interesting to the reader, than a cold, unanimating series of events, long since determined.”[44] Richardson, he says, delineates the virtues of all ages and sexes “affectingly,” “accurately,” and “invitingly” to “engage attention” and “invite imitation,”[45] thus promoting “reformation under the notion of amusement.”[46] The attractions and pleasures of Richardson’s novels render them “captivating,” according to Kennicott.[47]

Collections of aphorisms were popular in the eighteenth century, as Kennicott notes, using a metaphor drawn from the visual arts to express their attraction: “They have been considered the first strokes in a picture, in which are seen the justness and beauty of the painter’s design, though it has not the colouring.”[48] Of course, one can extract the maxims and morals from the story itself. Still, the collection allows for a concise catalogue of “beneficial” truth, the more so in Richardson’s case for the novels being based on “persons exemplary in private and common life”—not a mirror for princes but a reflection of ordinary experience and everyday behaviour. Moreover, and most importantly, such attentiveness to the moral implications of everyday life is not exclusionary but available to anyone who cares to participate in self-awareness and regard for others.

Conclusion

As Toril Moi has said, “aesthetic experience is ordinary; to find out what our aesthetic experience means entails the same difficulties and joys as the investigation of other experiences.”[49] She elaborates, aligning herself with Stanley Cavell’s signature formation of the critical imperative:

To account for one’s experience of art requires willingness to pay close attention to that experience. It requires us to trust it, and to find it worth expressing: “Without this trust in one’s experience, expressed as a willingness to find words for it, without thus taking an interest in it, one is without authority in one’s experience,” [Stanley] Cavell writes. There are four tasks here: to be willing to have the experience (in the sense of paying attention to it), to judge it important enough to be expressed, to find words for it, and to claim authority for it. These tasks require judgment, and courage.
But this is true for accounts of every kind of experience. Aesthetic experience—I mean simply the experience of reading, watching, seeing a work of art—is a specific region of ordinary experience.[50]

As much as the novels of Defoe and Richardson appeal through their attention to and expression of the aesthetic dimensions of everyday life, they also provide an occasion to probe the significance of aesthetic experience for those who choose to comment on the works in terms of personal pleasure and/or pain.

In the introduction to this essay, I referred to Charles Boyle, a reader/critic for whom Robinson Crusoe offers no aesthetic pleasure that compensates for the pain of Crusoe’s (and the British empire’s) involvement in the slave trade, colonization, and the subjugation of women. This, too, is an ordinary experience; we are often faced with negotiating our response to a work of art and our disapproval of (or even horror at) the artist’s behaviour, as one contemporary reader of Sir Charles Grandison found. Today’s readers will have little sympathy for this anonymous reader (henceforth referred to as “Anonymous”),[51] but the principle that defines his disappointment in his ordinary experience of reading Richardson’s third novel is the same as underwrites the experience of the conflicted reader of Robinson Crusoe. “Anonymous” had formed expectations of Richardson as an author through reading and responding to his earlier work, probably both Pamela and Clarissa, but Clarissa most certainly, since he refers to the novel as exemplary in “the Cause of Charity” (172). He was set to write a “letter of congratulation on so useful a design as the idea of a compleat man of Honour” (172) in Sir Charles Grandison, that is until he arrived at a point in the novel when he claims to have been “shocked!” He goes on to wonder if “while the good Author Slept, some insinuating Jusuit [sic] had penned” the story of Clementina (172–73). As he laments, what an “opportunity lost” to combat the encroaching power of the Roman Catholics “in a work so Generally read” and during a “time so critical” (173). “O Church of England how unhappy art thou,” he continues, ending his first (of four) letters with these words: “I am disapointed [sic], afflicted,” as he does seem to be (174). The second letter begins with a truism: “When a Work makes its publick [sic] Appearance, everybody thinks they have a right to sit in Judgement,” as certainly the readers of Richardson’s fiction did.[52] “Anonymous” then proceeds to bemoan the “dark Cloud” spread “over [Sir Charles’s] Excellencies” by his willingness to “take a zealous Papist … and by his Vows make her a Part of himself!”—an idea the anonymous letter writer calls a “wicked absurd Supposition!” (173). In other parts of the novel, he complains, Richardson is “always himself,” but the openness to an alliance with Roman Catholics is like a “Poison spread through every Page” of the work (173). These “odious Particulars” are so distressing that “Anonymous” can devote only a half-sentence to his gratitude for “the merciful Hint about Horses” (174), whose tails, we gather, he will cease to dock. In his third letter, “Anonymous” reveals that the “Italian Story” so “disgusted” him that he “thought no English Woman ought to accept of Sir Charles,” though he then compliments the “Diamond-Polish” of Charles’s character as well as the “perfect Character” of Clementina who, when not distracted, shines through “Love” and “Humility” (175). Still impressed with Richardson’s novelistic talents, “Anonymous” admits that his own reaction to the story thus far (through the fifth volume) is evidence of the “Observation” that “they who can displease most can please most” (175). He urges Richardson to use his “Power” in the final volume (which readers were still awaiting) to rectify (to him) the signal fault of the story thus far. In his final letter, he suggests how this might be done: a “Conversation” or a description of a “Library, or Closet” centred on volumes of English history that celebrate Protestantism and expound on the dangers of Roman Catholicism (177).

It is to Richardson’s credit that he did not follow that advice. Part of Richardson’s stated aim in Sir Charles Grandison was to promote harmony between Protestants and Roman Catholics in the wake of national disruption, which had aggravated old enmities. To polemicize for the Protestant cause would have run counter to this intention. Focusing on the everyday dilemmas introduced by intercultural exchange rather than on the ideological divisions evident in creed or religious practice, Richardson’s compelling, affecting narrative creates a world in which readers can contemplate difference and acknowledge the other. As “Anonymous” realizes, such contemplation and acknowledgement in a fictional setting may produce change in the real, ordinary, everyday world.[53] This notion, frightening to him, is why many of us—then and now—read novels, attend the theatre, listen to music, peruse poetry, or visit art museums. As we seek such engagement throughout our lives, we may be called upon, or feel personally compelled, to examine past pleasure in light of new information and attitudes, to see what’s worth defending and what’s best to let go. In my view, Defoe and Richardson still have much to offer the everyday reader—aesthetically and ethically. I disagree with both Boyle and “Anonymous,” but everyone has the right, perhaps even the obligation, to account for their own pleasure in reading as they do for their pleasure in everyday life. For all the bigotry of “Anonymous,” his struggle is a model of everyday aesthetic/ethical engagement. Boyle, however, goes a step further—and, in my view, a step too far. In calling for us to reject the novel he now finds unworthy, he has crossed the line between critical evaluation through which others can filter their own aesthetic responses and censorship that predetermines value for us all. On a personal level, however, he, too, serves as a model of engagement. Though they come to different conclusions (“Anonymous” continuing to read; Boyle deciding to discard), they both stand witness to the power of literature in the shaping—enhancing, defining, or disturbing—of the ordinary lives of everyday readers.