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Defoe and The Spectator and The London Merchant; the novel as bourgeois. English novels.

But the holy ground for the bourgeoisie became, of course, 18th-century Britain. No one in the 16th century would have thought of England (and less so Scotland) as a bourgeois nation. Look at the portrayal of businesspeople in Shakespeare: mainly absent, in favor of aristocratic gestures for Harry, England, and St. George. The Merchant of Venice is the one exception, but proves the rule, since it was not English businessmen who were being praised [check Merry Wives]. The English were notorious in the age of Sir Francis Drake and Elizabeth herself for a proud, decidedly unbourgeois behavior. A Dutch businessman in 16.. declared that "the people are bold, courageous, ardent and cruel in war, but very inconstant, rash, vainglorious, light and deceiving, and very suspicious, especially of foreigners, whom they despise."

Of these qualities only courage and the suspicion of foreigners survived the embourgeoisfication of England, 1689 to the present. Jeremy Paxman, who is among the numerous tellers of the tale to use the Dutchman's quotation, remarks that in the late 19th century the English came to be viewed, as having on the contrary "honesty, prudence, patriotism, self-control, fair play and courage." Evidently something had changed. In his recent survey of its history 1727 to 1783 Paul Langford characterizes England as by then thoroughly bourgeois, "a polite and commercial people" (in the phrase from Blackstone that Langford uses as his title). He quarrels repeatedly with the more usual notion that aristocratic values ruled in the age of the Whig grandees. The

seeming passion for aristocratic values," for example, evinced in the vogue for spas (such as Bath) and seaside reports (such as Brighton), this is his prose!!!! Do not quote directly!!! Acknowledge!!! depended on a middle class clientele, the upper middling sorts described in Jane Austen's novels. Britain in the eighteenth century was a plutocracy if anything, and even as a plutocracy one in which power was widely diffused, constantly contested, and ever adjusting to new incursions of wealth, often modest wealth.

As early as 1733, Langford claims, "the shopkeepers and tradesmen of England were immensely powerful as a class." "Bath owed its name to the great but its fortune to the mass of middling."

Something evidently happened in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The first voice of theorizing in English is Addison: "With The Spectator the voice of the bourgeois,' Willey declares, "is first heard in polite letters, and makes his first decisive contribution to the English moral tradition." Addison was "the first lay preacher to reach the ear of the middle-classes," though it would seem that for the less high-brow middling sort Defoe scoops him by a decade or so. "The hour was ripe for a rehabilitation of the virtues [against Restoration cynicism], and [Addison and Steele] were the very men for the task." Decades later the Dutch return the favor of the Addisonian project, under the heading of "Spectatorial Papers" in explicit imitation and against a perceived corruption of the bourgeois virtues-French manners, effeminate men, nepotism, and sleeping late.

LOFTIS ARGUMENT. While commending Loftis for his energy in research the economist Jacob Viner offered "the simpler hypothesis . . . that as soon as merchants came to the theatre in sufficient numbers the dramatists would provide fare which would retain them as customers." Viner thus appeals to the Rise of the Bourgeoisie in its simplest economistic form — not as a rise in prestige originating in the superstructure but a rise in sheer numbers originating in the base. Viner may be right about the 18th century. [countervgidence in Loftis/] But in general the relation between actual and implied audience is not so simple. [look into Wayne's thinking on just this point.] Shakespeare flattered his aristocratic and especially his royal audiences, but his actual audience contained numerous merchants of London [check in Shake. literature; also % of population that was merchant; ask John Huntington]. mmmm [auteur] in Wall Street assaulted financial capitalism, but many a financial capitalist liked the movie [check in Wall Street Journal; Financial Times]

In France a little earlier Molière was likewise bourgeois himself and focused his plays on le bourgeois gentilhomme. WORK ON FRENCH 18TH CENTURY PLAYS The English version appears in Lillo's embarrassing encomiums to the life of commerce.

The voice of the novelists, beginning with Defoe, who virtually invented the genre in English, is clearly bourgeois. The 18th and especially the 19th-century roman eventually comes to be focused indeed on the bourgeois home, in sharp contrast to adventure yarns, long called "romances," whence the French word. It is an old point in literary criticism, made most enthusiastically by left-wing critics from the 1930s on, that the genre itself is bourgeois, and had anyway an overwhelmingly bourgeois (and female) readership.