E. Mcgirr - Eighteenth-Century Characters

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHARACTERS

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Elaine M. McGirr

Elaine M. McGirr 2007

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In memory of my father

The term character is a vexed one, particularly when applied to eighteenth-century literature. At the beginning of the century, the term was primarily used to signify the external marks or signs by which something could be recognised (e.g. the characters of the alphabet). Over the course of the century, an additional meaning of the term came into use: the estimate formed of a persons moral qualities. Experience seemed more likely to expose a disjunction rather than a correlation between the physical and the moral: eighteenth-century life and literature is full of bad hearts masked by good faces. In many ways, the eighteenth century is defined by the always-present possibility of this divergence between being and seeming and the overwhelming desire to close that gap, to make appearances unambiguously signify natures. At different points in the long eighteenth century, different aspects of this tension would predominate. The Restoration period is marked by moral and political anxieties about feigning and hypocrisy, the putting on of ideas and identities. At the other end of the century, the Romantic movement tended to highlight the increasing artifice of society and its seeming divorce from nature.

The individual character Mr. Rakewell or Miss Friendly stands in for a class, he or she is representative rather than psychologically realised. The character is an attempt to define social and moral types, suggesting that despite the idiosyncrasies of a Sir Clumsy Tunbelly, he is still a clear type the country gentleman and is thus easily read and understood. Characters hold out the promise of making humanity knowable, or at least recognisable in hindsight.

The character sketch was not new to the eighteenth century the genre had been around since Theophrastus published his Characters c. 319 BCE. Characters are short, usually prose, sketches of fictional but typical individuals. The original Theophrastan characters were all of foolish or vicious types, and while later character books added virtuous characters, this emphasis on negative types remained. For instance, the popular Characters of Virtues and Vices, first published in 1605, consisted of two books, the first with nine virtues (eleven in later editions), the second with fifteen vices. The character sketch included both classes of people lawyers, soldiers, priests and types lovers, drunkards, youths. While often humorous and playful, the character is a didactic genre at heart: it teaches readers how to recognise and value different types of people, from lawyers to drunkards. In describing the good man or identifying hypocrisy as one of the defining characteristics of the courtier, the character sketch is clearly evaluating while describing. This twin role taught contemporary readers what to think of their neighbours and themselves. It also teaches modern readers how to read the society that produced the character sketch. That one society portrays the Soldier as a glorious hero while another makes him a cowardly braggart or blood-thirsty savage tells us a lot about the values of each.

But while it was not new, character writing developed into something of a craze in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, starting with Joseph Halls Characters of Virtues and Vices. Characters became so popular that one Restoration wit published a students guide for writing them:

1. Chuse a Subject, viz. such a sort of men as will admit a variety of observation, such be, drunkards, usurers, lyars, taylors, excise-men, travellers, pedlars, merchants, tapsters, lawyers, and upstart gentleman, a young Justice, a Constable, an Alderman, and the like.

2. Express their natures, qualities, conditions, practices, tools, desires, aims or ends, by witty Allegories, or Allusions, to things or terms in nature, or art, of like nature and resemblance, still striving for wit and pleasantness, together with tart nipping jokes about their vices or miscarriages.

3. Conclude with some witty and neat passage, leaving them to the effect of their follies or studies.

As the craze for characters developed, so did the genre. Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century English authors scoured classical and Continental sources in their attempts to collate the definitive character book. In addition to the original Theophrastan characters, writers turned to Horace and Roman verse satire, to Seneca and Cicero, and to La Bruyre and La Rouchfoucauld. Character books were a kind of miscellany of humanity: they captured the known world, making it transparent and readable in the process. Characters also left the sketch book and found their way into sermons, periodicals, drama, novels and poetry: the character permeated eighteenth-century literature.

The eighteenth-century character, with its insistence that external description could delineate the inner man, was used to bridge the two meanings of character and try to blur the boundaries between physical and moral qualities. The application of typography is in large part an attempt to match internal and external characteristics: the drunkards red nose signified his moral weakness for liquor. By mapping moral qualities on to superficial signs, characters were rendered transparent and the gap between seeming and being was overcome. But at the same time, character sketches also served as warnings that this very gap did, in fact, exist; many characters are defined by a disjunction between their attractive exteriors and their moral failings or by feigned exteriors that masked the deformity of their souls. For instance, the coquettes beauty was not a true reflection of her spotless heart, but was often shown to be augmented by cosmetics and/or at odds with a selfish, vain or shrewish moral character. Beautiful girls with good hearts were also always shown not to be coquettes but only innocently vivacious. The coquette is thus defined by a face at odds with her heart. By exposing and delineating this divergence between appearance and essence, the character sketch actually demonstrated how the two meanings of character could still be proven to be congruent, for they taught readers how to decode potentially deceptive signs and therefore to read moral characters properly.