Courting ruin: The economic romances of Frances Burney

Burgess, Miranda J

In February, 1774, the case of Alexander Donaldson, an Edinburgh bookseller accused of violating the shared perpetual copyrights of the London book trade, was being debated in the House of Lords and the salons of Edinburgh and London. Sometime during the eighteen days it took to decide the case, Frances Burney, future novelist and professional woman of letters, met John Shebbeare, hack writer and pamphleteer and the author of an attack on Hardwicke's Marriage Act in novel form. Burney sat silent as Shebbeare discussed the Beckett-Donaldson case with her father's guests, but in her diary she associated Shebbeare's hatred for women with his carelessness toward copyright, his opposition to Hardwicke and his desultory support for Donaldson.(2) The Marriage Act granted control to fathers and husbands until widowhood placed a woman under her own protection, and Burney would become one of its staunchest defenders. At the same time, like Samuel Johnson, who supported. neither the Donaldson decision nor the resulting Bill that limited bookseller copyright to a period of fourteen years, she favored lifetime copyright for writers; after the writer's death, the work would enter the public domain (see Boswell 1: 437-39; 2: 259, 272). In opposing Shebbeare, Burney established her lifelong preference for subscription, with authorial control of the circulation and pricing of literary products, as a mode of publication.(3)

I look at this conjunction of courtship and the book trade as one representative instance of a broad but cohesive critique of commerce by late eighteenth-century conservative women, a critique that did not--as historians of commerce tended, and still tend, to do--separate economic activity from domestic privacy.(4) Recent accounts suggest that the ambivalence of late-century courtship novels, their ironic undercutting of their own sentimental resolutions, marks a covert, even unconscious opposition to ideologies of romantic love.(5) At the same time, historians of the eighteenth-century novel have drawn attention to the numbers of women writing, and their uncertain response to the (resultant or underlying) marginal status of the genre.(6) Using Burneys novels as a springboard, I propose that a close connection existed between these two forms of uncertainty, and that their closeness is the mark, within novels, of a political protest that extends well beyond domestic life and the writing of women. Conservative novelists, embodying their questioning of the marriage marl(et in a market-oriented genre, united in a generalized assault on the commerce that, they feared, drove both. Such an assault was already incipient in the response of Frances Burney, barely of age and not yet a novelist, to John Shebbeare.

That the Beckett-Donaldson case was a landmark in English literary and political culture is evident in the passion that spills out in contemporary responses. Edmund Burke, his brand of conservatism standing in opposition to "pirate" printers and in support of established trade, vigorously defended the claims of the London monopoly (Burney, Early Diary 288n); Attorney General Thurlow, on the other hand, damned Beckett and his colleagues as "impudent monopolizing men" (qtd. in Walters 304). Burney's disagreement with Burke and with Parliament suggests the magnitude of the break that some female conservatives made with conservative as well as liberal economic thought. Burney, with other Tory women, saw commerce as a diffuse force that had penetrated into and changed the safest corners of private life. While the new Copyright Act gave writers a nominal, if limited, right to their own productions, it also subjected texts to the competition of booksellers and, more fundamentally, to the vagaries of consumer demand. So too, Burney's novels would suggest, the desires that drove the marriage market supplanted the written rule of the Marriage Act: if fathers and clergymen could, by law, prevent elopements, they also encouraged their daughters to compete for the notice of potential husbands. The double critique of the marriage market and the culture market contested what conservative women feared was the triumph of commerce in England--the defeat of English institutions by individual desire, the law by unchained human will.

Taken together, as I will show, Burney's novels form a detailed response to these contests between written law and the overriding law of supply and demand. The three novels she wrote between 1782 and 1814 pioneer the new conservative genre that I will call the "economic romance." Their characteristic mode is an irony that wells up from between the cracks in what at first appear to be romances of sentiment, inundating their heroines before chastening them with a lesson in the advantages of tradition. Burney directs her irony at the related terms of "sensibility" and "taste," which offer the rule of "natural" human dispositions as a mediator between disregarded institutions and the capricious logic of (respectively) courtship and print culture. Her treatment of her heroines' "credit" unites two public fictions that sanctioned the law of demand and the circulation of women and books: the institution of financial credit and the sensibility that was said to impel all human desires, uniting competing consumers. Credit undergoes a thoroughly ironic split in Burneys novels, functioning with equal inefficiency as a moral and an economic indicator, and it may be seen as a parody of the moralized and naturalized Whig socioeconomic theory that dominated commerce, courtship, and the book trade.

Burney's characters rigorously exclude questions of birth from marriage and of worth from the field of culture, replacing them with financial credit and "the credit of sensibility."(7)

I.

With other prominent late-century women of letters, Burney recognized the book trade, with its reliance on the choices and emotional responses of readers to regulate literary production, as a meeting ground for commerce and courtship. These women described a dialectic between feminine tears and the printed text that they saw being promoted by economic and moral theorists alike: the tears of a virtuous young lady guaranteed the virtue of the novel she was reading, while her heartfelt response to moral novels simultaneously attested to her own moral fitness. At least some critics of this exchange between tears and texts identified its roots in the contemporary marketplace. Writing in late life, the editor and biographer Lady Louisa Stuart recalled her youthful fear of reading sentimental novels "lest she should not cry enough to gain the credit of proper sensibility" (qtd. in C. Campbell, Romantic 141; C. Campbell, "Understanding" 49).(8) Stuart's remark ironically marries the language of the economic tract with the conduct writer's cant: "proper" sensibility gives its possessor "credit" in the eyes of her audience, who simultaneously assess the value of the text and Stuart's own value on the marriage market.

In a series of vignettes remarkably consonant with Stuart's analysis, Burney first satirized sensibility in 1778, soon after the publication of her debut novel, Evelina. In a letter to her sister Susanna, Burney describes the competing claims to fame of her acquaintance Sophy Streatfield: a talent for translating Latin and Greek and the ability to weep at will. Cynically aware of the social capital manufactured by Streatfield's tears, Burney pays an edgy homage to her theatrics with the artiste's title "the S.S." When Streatfield is commanded to weep for the pleasure of Hester Thrale's assembled company, "Two crystal tears came into the soft eyes of the S.S., and rolled gently down her cheeks." Burney's sentimental diction gives way to sardonic analysis as Streatfield displays herself and her tears, "very well satisfied that she was only manifesting a tenderness of disposition, that increased her beauty of countenance."(9) No one will marry an impoverished bluestocking, according to Burney's account, so Streatfield has developed control of her tear ducts to compensate for her learnedness and poverty. Streatfield assumes, correctly, that her absurd tears will buy more desire than condemnation. Thrale tells her male guests that she "would insure [Streatfield's] power of crying herself into any of your hearts she pleased." Her figure of speech shrewdly names the force of Streatfield's performance: as good as coin to buy herself a husband, the canny S.S.'s tears are a sure thing--so sure that Thrale would offer a financial guarantee.

Middle- and upper-class women like Burney and Thrale, Streatfield and Stuart received clear messages from many sources about the essential moral purpose of sensibility. More covertly, they also recognized the growing market for it. Economists, educators, and novelists alike urged their readers to cultivate visibly feeling hearts, to gain the "credit of proper sensibility" in the eyes of the world. Like Stuart, Burney will examine the ambiguous meaning of "credit," its tendency to equate moral with economic worth. The cooperation of these interests surfaces unintentionally and often in the most popular conduct books of the period.(10) In attempting, by inculcating "sensibility" in women, to provide the unstable public market with an unchangingly virtuous and feeling anchor in the privacy of the home, conduct writers reintroduce, despite themselves, market logic into courtship and domestic morality.

In A Father's Legacy to his Daughters (1774), for example, John Gregory finds himself torn between marketing and preaching to his unmarried daughters. His wish for them to develop "in whatever can make a woman amiable," including sensibility, conflicts with his "father's quick apprehension of the dangers that too often arise ... from the attainment of that very point" (vi). To mediate this conflict between traditional propriety and masculine demand, Gregory exhorts his daughters to cultivate "your modesty,... the natural softness and sensibility of your dispositions" (10). He begs them, that is, to employ sensibility against itself, attracting men by the very device that guarantees his daughters' virtue. Yet his warning that "I do not want you to affect delicacy; I wish you to possess it" jars against his concession, immediately following, that "it is better to run the risk of being thought ridiculous than disgusting" (36): in seeking a husband, it is better to assume false modesty than to be caught with one's modesty down altogether.

This collision between natural and cultivated "sensibility" tends to reproduce, even in Gregors own preventive discussion, the feared infiltration of virtue's laws by desire and demand. Burney did not fail to recognize this mutual contamination of market and morals, taking a sardonic delight in the bold conduct of Gregors daughter at their first meeting: "Miss Gregory, though herself a very modest girl, quite stared me out of countenance, and never took her eyes off my face" (Diary, Ed. Woolsey 1: 42, 4446). Like Sophy Streatfield's tears, the modest stares of Gregory's daughter belie the claim that women are governed by natural sensibility. Assumed as a flirtatious veneer to be dropped in female company, her apparent modesty allows Burney to demonstrate that Gregory's lessons create social and sexual demand rather than bolstering his daughter's essential virtue--and that Miss Gregory has learnt her father's lessons well.(11)

Nor was this infiltration by the market unique to Gregory's work, and other conduct writers were less subtle in their market orientation. In a tract reprinted throughout the 1790s and the early nineteenth century, and parodied by Burney, William Kenrick unapologetically, if metaphorically, outlines the economics of reputation: "Fairer than polished silver, more valuable than virgin gold, more precious than the oriental pearl, or the diamonds of Golconda, is reputation to a female" (24). Kenrick aims his exhortations entirely toward promoting the appearance of virtue, and of feeling in particular.(12) The subversive effects Burney feared from this doctrine appear in Cecilia (1782) as a series of escalating disasters that follow the mad moralist Albany's coercion of the heroine into charities she cannot afford. His Kenrick-like prophetic tone masks an equation of virtue with spending identical to that of Cecilia's guardian, the miserly tradesman Briggs. Burney gives Briggs's speech a bent for sentimental metaphor and couplets that appear as a debased mimicry of Albans--and Kenrick's--psalmodic style: "Is he a good man? that's the point, is he a good man? ... is he warm? that's the point, is he warm?" (Cecilia 751). Their shared belief that Cecilia's money can and should signal her virtue to the eyes of the world discredits Albany's lessons in sensibility.

It is in such an authoritative context of conflated morals and money that Lady Louisa Stuart's fears for the credit of her sensibility, and Sophy Streatfield's performance of hers, must be read. As a young woman of the genteel classes, the addressee par excellence of the conduct writers, Burney's Cecilia, like Stuart and Streatfield, cannot separate the "credit" of her sensibility from her value on the marriage market. By the time of Camilla (1796), Burney has fully integrated her analysis of economically-driven moral theory with her account of "taste," and its operations in the marketplace of culture, as commerce's way of justifying its own desire-based relativism.(13) Like Louisa Stuart, Camilla faces not only the ideology of romantic love, which the novel exposes as a form of masculine consumerism, but also the dependence of masculine "taste" upon her own "sensibility," in the double form of aesthetic response and social feeling.

In assessing both forms of the heroine's sensibility, the elite world of the "ton" into which the innocent Camilla is thrown relies on financial measures. Burney plays on James Fordyce's notion of a "generous sensibility" that links a woman's taste and character with her spending on charity, accomplishments, and elegant items of dress.(14) For Fordyce, the most influential of the late-century conduct writers, courtship divides its players into consumers and consumed, and Camilla's fiance Edgar Mandlebert learns from the clergyman Doctor Marchmont a Fordycean caveat emptor approach to courtship. His tutor exhorts him to look with "positively distrustful" eyes at Camilla throughout the novel; to scrutinize her as a wary purchaser would do:

Whatever she does, you must ask yourself ...: "Should I like such behaviour in my wife?" ... the interrogatory, Were she mine? must be present at every look, every word, every motion; ... justice is insufficient ..., and instead of inquiring, "Is this right in her?" you must simply ask, "Would it be pleasing for me?" (Camilla 160)

However stringent Edgar's law may be, it remains self-interested; it can shift at his pleasure. As such, it visibly mimes the relativism that underlies a morality based on taste and sensibility.

Displays of emotion figure largely among the determinants of Egar's taste for Camilla, and when Edgar angrily condemns her loss of "sensibility" (705), she desperately sets out to regain it. She promises "upon her honour" to redeem the credit of a failed shopkeeper and his family, although she herself is penniless: her honor is at war with her sensibility, but her "steadiness ... could not withstand her compassion," and it is her compassion that she must prove in Edgar's eyes (711-12). At the same time, she purchases an expensive ballgown to impress Edgar with her beauty and taste. Her attempts to prove her sensibility take the double form of reckless charity and fashion, and both require her to spend money that she does not have. Burney stages a set-piece in which Camilla looks "now at the pleading group, now at her expensive dress ... and with a blush turning from the mirrour, and to the children with a tear,... consented" to pay their debts (714).(15) Camilla's charity and her "expensive dress" are acts of mirror-gazing directed outwards, a response to Camilla's awareness of a public eye that continually judges her virtue by her spending. Acutely aware of her reputation for sensibility, she finds herself compromising it again and again. The credit of her sensibility shades into financial credit as, like Cecilia before her, she becomes entangled with a moneylender.

Burney places her heroine at the center of a web of demands, her credit fluctuating in relation to men's competing claims. As Camilla encounters it, fashionable society is a giant marketplace, with no law save the law of appearances and the desires to which they cater. The unstable balance of supply and demand in Camilla's world plays out on an uncomfortably personal and feminized level, the entrapment of courtship and culture within the field of commerce. Camilla's loving rescue of an abused pet bird and her care for her spendthrift brother Lionel attract the eye of the rakish Sir Sedley Clarendel, who responds with offers of money. To Lionel, in turn, Camilla is currency, a limitless order on Clarendel's banker: "What will it cost you," he asks, "except a dimple or two the more?" (523). Edgar Mandlebert completes this triangle of male demands. Like Lionel he equates women with coin: if a man's credit depends on his honor, then the woman must "guard ... the honour of her husband" as well as his fortune, a "deposit" in her hands (476). Like Clarendel, he desires Camilla most when he watches her sacrifice herself. Camilla is at once a standard of value, her taste signaling her fitness for the taste of men, and an object of fluctuating and unsettled worth, dependent on the caprices of consumers. In each case, her worth, like the worth of a literary work subjected to the logic of commerce--like morality itself, or so Burney and other conservative women fear--depends on masculine demand.

II.

I want to suggest that Burney's homology between Camilla's courtship and the Copyright Act of 1774, and its connection with commerce more broadly, is essential to understanding the conservative reading of "sensibility in its moral and social fullness. The key term in making this connection, for Burney as for other novelists, is "credit." The doubleness of credit--its economic and ethical valence, which derives from its two distinct sources in economic and moral theory--helps to elucidate the microcosmic relationship of courtship to commerce. Financial theorists and conduct writers share responsibility not only for the coexistence of moral and financial registers in the concept of credit, but for their mutual contamination as well: as a woman's reputation for sensibility tends to be seen by moralists as an economic matter, so economic theorists tend to view financial credit as a moral issue. To Burney, this interpenetration signaled the inescapability of the laws of commerce, even in the socalled private spheres of literary and marital choice.

The word "credit" appears with increasing frequency in novels after 1780, especially those that respond to contemporary social theory. Its sources lie partly in conduct literature, but also, and largely, in the rising anxiety that writers of popular economic tracts expressed about public credit and private debt, especially after war with France put an end to England's issue of specie (see Brewer 204-10). To Jane Austen, for example, credit unites personal relations with financial dealings, Elizabeth Bennet's willingness to believe George Wickham's slanderous gossip and the town of Meryton's indulgence of his gambling debts and tradesmen's bills (260). Although it plays a similarly ambidextrous role in Burney's novels, Burney is more deeply critical than Austen of her own uses of "credit," which her novels represent, in both its economic and ethical senses, as a falsehood: a display of socioeconomic power by those without it and a value for reputation over character. Austen's importation of economic terminology ("credit," "interest") has been explained as a willingness to engage with a commercial society "in its own terms" more than a critique of commerce (Copeland 79). Burney's novels see such quiet acceptance of financial thinking in daily life as a product of hegemonic commerce and the supplanting of traditional morals by financial expediency.(16)

For Burney, credit is more than a metaphor: it is the crux in popular economics as well as in conduct books where ethics and finances begin to shade into one another and where tracts about money and morals become indistinguishable. Just as conduct books made good consumers of their readers in order to make them good choices for prospective husbands, works of economic theory tended to double as conduct books. In 1763, for example, Adam Anderson,

career merchant, civil servant, and one of the Scottish Enlightenment's popularizers (see Letter on Adam Anderson 41), recounted the economic history of Britain as a teleology of moral as well as commercial triumph. Anderson writes for the moral instruction of middle-class readers, attempting to instill in them a sense of the benefits of private spending, even where personal debt is involved (Anderson v). He preaches a definition of wealth that includes all the circulating money in Great Britain, not excepting money owed by one party to another (xxv): he shares the enthusiasm of Adam Smith or David Hume for circulating credit as the inevitable consequence of expanding trade and a contributor to commercial growth. To Anderson, "The immense increase of our ... plate, jewels, furniture, paintings, equipages, libraries, medals, coins, shipping, horses, and other cattle, &Ci," I regardless of the debts of the buyer, is visible proof of economic health (xxiv).

Particularly troubling to Burney was this insistence of Whig economic history that the active circulation of funds in the national economy--a form of financial success that itself rests atop a precarious pyramid of credit relations--is a sign of England's moral triumph. The 1688 Revolution, for example, becomes for Anderson a watershed of moral improvement, precisely because England has since then "very much increased in ... almost every part of our general commerce" (111). In his Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), Edmund Burke would attack Anderson's teleological account of credit and financial history for its indifference to public spirit and England's moral interests abroad--matters newly relevant in the face of the "regicide peace" he attempts to forestall.

As he wrote the Letters, Burke was simultaneously attempting to establish a subscription for Burney's CamilIa. Burney's novel shares Burke's suspicion of credit, but whereas Burke condemns credit for its ill effects on the health of English commerce, the clash between self-interested private lenders and the national interest, Burney directs her attention to the displacement of "real" financial equity by credit agreements and the supplanting of government regulation by self-regulating networks of lenders and borrowers.(17) For Burke, the government suffers at the hands of private financiers, but the government's policy on private finance appears by its absence in Burney's novels: the laissez faire policies of a liberal administration permit the kind of financial amorality that her villains, from Harrel and Sir Robert Floyer in Cecilia to the minor confidence tricksters in Camilla and The Wanderer, employ in their dealings with her heroines.

In the face of financial chaos caused by the wars of the 1790s, liberal apologists attempted to defend on moral grounds the government's lack of interest in legislating credit. Sometimes their arguments took the form of a pessimistic resignation to human desire: one anonymous pamphleteer noted that "there are few acts of parliament tending to restrain the selfish interests of man, which his ingenuity has not evaded.(18) Others invoked early-century Tory attempts to justify commercial policy by appealing to the "universal" laws of human nature, producing, for example, a cheap reprint of Robert Harley's Essay Upon Public Credit (1710), which defines credit as "the offspring of universal probity," immune to the incursions of artifice (8-9, 12-13). But in the 1790s this repackaging of Harley's optimistic claims must have seemed to Burney, as to other conservatives, more consolatory than truthful, offering little security to those whose powers of discrimination failed to protect them against the artifice of the successful but impoverished credit seeker.

The last decades of the century abound with such dupes: conservative pamphleteers remark the increase of counterfeiting--a consummately artful means of gaining credit--and condemn the wielding of financial clout by those without hard cash as robbery for driving up the price of essential commodities. Burney's own portrait of the heiress-hunting Bellamy (ne Nicholas Gwigg) in Camilla epitomizes conservative fears of the confidence trickster sprung from beneath to undermine moral and economic safety.(19) Despite its prohibitions on elopement, the Marriage Act does nothing to protect Camilla's sister, the innocent Eugenia, from his clutches. What Burney shares with the pamphleteers is not only a terrifying sense of the ubiquity of credit, but a belief that its own internal logic has fully supplanted the laws that regulate both marriage and commerce.

As Burney's novels recognize and lament, credit depended largely on the fashionable appearance of the debtor--an appearance easily assumed through pretense, which meant that credit could be founded on nothing more solid than the credulity of a previous seller. Her belief that England's government was doing nothing to protect its citizens from such desire-driven artifice derived added weight from the events she describes in Cecilia, the tendency of the credit edifice to come crashing down, crushing those at its base. With the 1760s commenced a time of increasing worry over liquidity in England, both public and private--a shortage of specie that the policies of the 1790s only intensified, as Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace suggest. The government's vague and permissive attitude to private finance had led to the proliferation of mortgages and third-party bills of exchange even among smaller tradesmen, many of whose assets were tied up in consumer credit and dependent on payment by a certain date. The default of one link in the networks of circulating promises produced a chain of escalating claims, and the bottommost participant, faced with unpayable debt, was often precipitated into financial ruin, starvation, and prison--a state of affairs that Burney's virtuous tradeswoman Mrs. Hill faces before being rescued by Cecilia.

Credit was indeterminate, unlegislated, dependent upon subjective moral perception.(20) Thus Burney's fears for the inflated state of the state economy reflected her belief that artifice was quickly supplanting birth and virtue in social relations: a triumph of opinion and appearances over law. Conservative moralists began to treat credit as a figure for the destruction of the old hierarchies of English society. Burney, too, attacks the attempts of the middle class and minor gentry to ape their social betters in ways beyond their means, but she also indicts economists and moralists for their complicity with Parliament's failure to protect the victims of credit: her heroines, too quick to demonstrate their sensibility of heart, and the lesser tradesmen, calling day after day for wages the gentry never intend to pay.

III.

By demonstrating the moral and financial perils of their heroines in terms of "credit," Burney's novels reproduce and condemn the cooperation of conduct writing and laissez faire economics. But the critique runs deeper, to the intellectual foundations of English commerce. The shadowy presence of Hume's sentimental empiricism, with its systematic grasp of the totality of social relations, lies behind the complicity of conduct writer and economist. His self-regulating economics underlies Anderson's faith in credit, and his belief in sensibility as a moral anchor for the relativism of the marketplace foreshadows the conduct books' insistence on women's natural sensibility. Conduct writers urged young women to read Hume's History of Great Britain, and Burney read it at sixteen (Early Diary 1: 30).(21) By assailing the economics of sentiment and sentimental economics, Burney's novels counter the cooperating discourses of late-century social theory that promote Hume's sentimental view of society.

The consoling presence of sensibility, alternately named "sympathy" and "sentiment," arrests the deconstructive tendencies of Hume's skeptical epistemology and holds his aesthetics, economics, and social history together. "Of the Standard of Taste" (1742) equates sympathetic sentiment with a love of particular kinds of beauty (230). Hume forestalls dissent by preemptively submerging its social explanation: he essentializes the tastes of the privileged as "the common sentiments of human nature which develop properly only among those unhindered by work or faulty education ("Standard" 232). Beauty was a gendered and socially-loaded term in eighteenth-century aesthetics, and Hume associates beauty with femaleness as well as with sociability ("Dignity" 84).(22) The association with women allows him to extend the operation of sympathy, a process of "infusion" in which feelings must be seen to be communicated, beyond groups of immediate "friends and daily companions." For it is also universal: all men (at least in theory) desire Woman (Hume, Treatise 316-17).

This natural desire establishes a biologically-based common ground for sexual relations and the commodity market, and it is this equation, produced by Hume's systematic account of sensibility and taste, that conservatives most fear in its popular guises. The passion to accumulate results from an "original principle," a social drive for reputation, and not from inherent desires for particular kinds of goods (Treatise 281). In the same way, men's general desire for Woman creates specialized tastes for different kinds of women. The prototype of the sexual drive naturalizes Hume's demand-based theory of value, which might otherwise threaten stable relations between objects and their worth. Although labor determines value, the underlying mechanism of sympathy controls the demand for particular goods, and so for particular kinds of labor. For Hume, consumption and sexuality share a common root: "our passions are the only causes of ; labour ("Commerce" 261). All men desire Goods, but each community of men establishes its own competition for particular goods, just as all men want Woman, but different women please different men. Sympathy assigns a class-inflected character to men's consumption and their sexuality, and to this sympathy Hume gives the primary responsibility for social regulation.

Hume's biological theory of demand undergirds his version of the social contract, "a convention entered into by all the members of the society to bestow stability on the possession of ... external goods, and leave every one in the peaceable enjoyment of what he may acquire" (Trentise 489). By defining society as a set of laws governing desire among sympathetic subjects, Hume gives women an obvious place among the goods that, if allowed to pass with "looseness and easy transition from one person to another destroy the bonds and hierarchies of society. Women are both the bearers of their own potentially dangerous sensibility and the objects of masculine choice, and an implicit "sexual contract," controlling the movement of women, implicitly precedes the all-male social contract. At the same time, however, Woman and the operations that surround her provide a crucial ground for sympathetic community, not only binding men together in shared desire, but also absolving them from the softer forms of sympathy.(23) Sympathy in men confines itself to acts of judgment and desire, but women have stronger imaginations, more subject to empathic sentiments (Treatise 370, 388). They have custody, that is, of sympathy when it enters the realm of sensibility, bringing communal feeling into the lives of citizens without becoming citizens themselves. Sensibility, as Hume employs it, positions Woman at the junction where gold standard encounters demand-based value. In Humean theory, women's bodies, their emotions, and their conduct are all scored across and across with the competing demands of social and economic naturalism.

Conduct writers, too, argued that the essential sensibility of women required simultaneous cultivation and control, and justified in its very nature the control it required. Yet they none the less attempted to produce women whose piety and skill at "making puddings and pies"--qualities Burney's elderly gentlemen are fond of demanding--play second fiddle to sensibility and taste.(24) In making women manageable objects of male desire, the conduct books affirmed the "natural" desire for beauty on which Hume had insisted. One arena remained on which consumers could agree; one area remained in which consumer agreement could result in competition without disrupting value. But Burney's novels show that this agreement is itself constructed by apologists for an uncertain and unregulated marketplace. Sensibility guarantees neither morals nor social order.

IV.

Luxury, the evil twin of credit, was the standard bugbear of the classical republican tradition, whose stern promotion of national interest over individual desire in the first half of the eighteenth century made these writers the ancestors of conservatives and liberals alike. Among the first moralists to re-examine luxury, Hume argued not the Mandevillian defense that private vices produce public benefits, but the essential virtue of desire-and therefore luxury and credit--as expansionist economic impulses ("Refinement 272, 277, 280). His argument began with the principle of the state, but his belief in the compatibility of personal appetite with public spirit threatened classical republican tradition from within.(25) To attack credit after 1740, then, was to defend traditional society against encroaching commercial interests, to espouse the cause of absolutes in the face of desire-dependent theories of economic and moral value.

By the 1790s, classical republican claims had become unreliable for conservative purposes. The English Jacobins had assumed the attack on luxury as a weapon against the excesses of the rich, while defense of public spirit gave way to a Burkean insistence on private virtue, including virtuous commercial practices like those, or so Burke insisted, of the London book trade. Burney's developing response to naturalized and demand-based social theory places her alongside Jane Austen and Hannah More, among others, in the dialectical swing that opposed Hume and his popularizers not with a return to classical republicanism, but with a new theory that based national security on domestic order.(26) Although Burney is generally considered an eighteenth-century novelist, she wrote and published two novels after 1795, and her career extended into the second decade of the nineteenth century--an extension not merely chronological, but ideological as well. A development can be seen in Burney's approach to commerce, from her first desperate attempt in CeciIia (1782) to forestall the approach of sensibility and credit, to her exposure in Camilla (1796) of the dangerous belief that taste defends traditional values, and finally to The Wanderer (1814), in which she counters the triumph of commerce by a thorough retreat into the bosom of the genteel family. In emphasizing the role of the family in regulating society, Burney joins the nineteenth-century promoters of domestic ideology.(27)

But Burney's roots in the debate on sensibility, her suspicion of commerce and her mourning for lost law, set her apart from these novelists: unlike the Victorian domestic ideologue and her early-century forebears, Burney never resorts to the family for an idealized, natural social order. She sets her sights not on sentimental love between family members, but on values explicitly held in place by governmental authority. These are not the same values as the political power that masquerades as morality in the later domestic novels Nancy Armstrong discusses: Burney makes no attempt to situate her families outside history. In responding to liberal economics, and not least to Hume, she reverses in her fictions the naturalized social theory and moralized commerce that most of the didactic novelists of the nineteenth century, like Hume himself, approved. Even within the developing domestic ideology, then, Burney is a conservative.

Nor is Burney a "feminist" novelist. The romantic endings of the novels do not blindly fulfill the desires of her readers, but neither are they imposed on a resistant Burney by the demands of the book trade. Such views arise from the assumption that late-century social criticism is necessarily of a radical character, an assumption that has sometimes led to the equation of Mary Wollstonecraft's politics with the views of Hannah More.(28) Burney's novels not only exist within, but actively contribute to a conservative politicaI context, the same context that produced an Edmund Burke. I want to propose that there is little ambivalence in Burney, without seeing her novels as subversive in their treatment of women's position in late-century society. They are coherent wholes, and taken together form a unified body of social comment and, sometimes, protest. Burney's simultaneous investment in and critique of romantic love responds to the contemporary yoking of marriage with the market, not in contradiction of her essential conservatism, but precisely in keeping with it.(29)

The marketplace in Burney's novels does not escape the rule that goods communicate social relations and demarcate value (Douglas and Isherwood 12, 67). If goods are universal, however, the nature of what "particular" values they convey differs from society to society--or even, historically, within a single society. Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer conceive societies wrongs as somehow "new," the first stage in an ongoing process of corruption. Their heroines suffer because not just values but value itself is changing, creating the unstable "divided blazon--family and fortune ... against beauty, education, and character--[that] outlines the contested ground on which Burney's heroine stands" (Green 80-81). When Burney delineates the ambivalence of her characters to the marriage market, she does so because the market is likewise conflicted in its requirements and desires, and its wavering valuation of Burney's heroines renders their worth unstable and fluctuating.

Thus Burney's critique of credit stands for more than a simple dissatisfaction with contemporary sexual relations, however destructively gendered their consequences. The heroine's debts in a Burney novel exemplify a complex of moral and social dilemmas imposed upon her by a world whose stable hierarchies, bonds, and information networks have collapsed. But it would also be a mistake to view Burneyan economics as only a metaphor for relativism. Rather, the heroine's "credit" problems stem from ascendant commerce, represented in courtship and the culture market, which lies behind the relativistic moral order depicted in the novels.(30) As Burney's novels make clear in their side-by-side parodies of conduct writing and contemporary finance, economic and moral relativism arise together.

V.

The luxury and credit relations of commercial society have become enhanced, in Burney's view, by the early nineteenth century. The most forceful critique of Hume and his popularizers had been conducted by Burke, and while Burney shared his fear of public credit, she objected to his acceptance of other commercial relations that had, in his wake, become part of conservative belief. Her letters to Susanna explore her divergence from Burke. She violently disagreed with his prosecution of Warren Hastings, a disagreement that she saw as sup port for her country's "honor" as an imperial power against Burke's regard for England's commercial interests (Diary, Ed. by her niece 5: 306, 311-13). And her views of literary property follow the Tory views of Johnson rather than Burke's more commercial conception.

Burney's dread of upper-class acceptance of commerce, and its workings in the fields of culture and courtship, appears in the nameless, penniless situation of Juliet, heroine of The Wanderer, and her forays into genteel and commercial life. Juliet's trials represent a fully-realized form of the issue that Burney's earlier novels also engage: the fluctuating worth of a young woman perpetually in danger of betrayal into extravagance and by luxury or fraud. The novel re-examines the scene of Sophy Streatfield's tears as Juliet, deprived of her noble name, is forced to support herself by performing, under the name of "the L.S.," on a public stage. That this displaced heroine must survive by displaying her sensibility suggests that Burney has come to sympathize with Streatfield, recognizing in retrospect that Streatfield's, too, was a command performance. The despairing tone is new: among the powerful persons represented in the novel, none stands up against the new law of sensibility and desire. Among all levels of society in Juliet's world, a "'fashion' system of consumption" (McCracken; Barthes) has supplanted landed wealth and ancient name.

It is in this novel that Burney's critiques of credit and sentiment become a fully integrated analysis of the workings of a consumer society in which Burkean conservatism has become the rule among the ruling class. The closed system of manners and morals of a traditional aristocracy has given way to the question-begging of credit and taste that, in Burke as in Hume, establishes a new tradition of defenses of commerce. Juliet needs a genteel appearance and good connections in order to find employment, but can gain neither without first acquiring both. She must be able to consume in order to be able to consume further, while her survival and her place in society hang desperately in the balance. Burney's narrator condemns the "imitative custom ... of patronizing those who had already been elevated by patronage; and of lifting higher, by peculiar favour, those who were already mounting by the favour of others" (229). In order to enter the credit system, one must already have entered it, for credit circulates without end in this novel, founded solely on successful representations. True character and worth (Juliet's virtue and her noble birth) get lost in the system of financial and social credit.

In rebuking Burkean conservatism for its inadequate response to Hume, The Wanderer proceeds through the theoretical subsets that Burke and Hume share: sensibility and taste. In this novel, the patronage of artists and the collecting of art unite charity and taste, the most visible branches of sensibility.(31) Characters assume these moral qualities like clothing, to gain social--and therefore economic--credit. Such performances recur throughout the world of The Wanderer: with the exception of Juliet, nearly all the female characters emulate Sophy Streatfield's interested sensibility. Their quests for a show of softheartedness and taste often cooperate, to the special detriment of the female object of patronage. When Juliet turns harp teacher, she finds a patron in Miss Arbe, who compensates for her own lack of fortune with the taste and sensibility she displays in serving as a kind of artistic pimp for other fashionable women: "nothing [is] so commodious, as ... patronage" (316). Even Lady Barbara Frankland, whose name reflects her sincere and affectionate nature, learns the harp as a way to attract men by "curving, straightening, or elegantly spreading her fingers upon the strings; and ... the general bend of her person." Frankland's attitude is typical: the harp "shews beauty and grace to advantage, [and] is often erroneously chosen for exhibiting those who have neither--an observation Arbe would do well to keep in mind (230).

From Arbe to Frankland, women spend to show their sensibility and taste, and their financial credit and reputation collapse into one another. In response, they construct a system of acquirement and display that exploits and scapegoats those at the end of the financial chain. The mothers of Juliet's students refuse to pay her, condemning her for providing the luxury accomplishments that they require for their daughters, and making her the subject of a public ethical debate. To pay for services rendered, one claims, would be "to pamper a set of lazy dancers, and players, and painters; who think of no one thing but idleness, and outward shew, and diversion" (324). The position of Burney's own literary profession in relation to the book trade is an obvious subtext here. The parallel continues as Juliet's patrons force her into the marketplace, although she teaches to support herself in privacy, and attempt to draw off condemnation of their own public ambitions by clothing her as a scarlet woman in a "sarcenet of a bright rose-colour" of "vivid" and "shew hue: to "distinguish us Dilettanti from the artists," as one of her white-clad patrons puts it. Fashionable society makes the artist bear the burden of its own enslavement to commerce. The credit system claims its victims from the bottom of the chain.

For fashion victims are also credit victims. When Juliet's employers counter her requests for payment with an attack on her character, she soon loses her employment: reputation, fashion, and credit cannot be separated from each other. Unnerved by Juliet's decline in status, her landlady demands immediate payment, and although Juliet's noble blood takes immediate offense, in fact she cannot pay, because her patrons will not pay her (276). On eviction from the house, Juliet seeks refuge from the public eye in the impoverished room of her friend Gabriella, like Juliet a banished noblewoman. Together they start a private business, to protect against judgment and suspicion as well as to support themselves, but credit nearly destroys their livelihood. Financial disaster looms once more, "from the difficulty of accelerating payment for what [they] sold, or procrastinating it for what [they] bough (623).

Nor is the victimization of cultural producers the sole destructive consequence of the system of sentimental consumption. The female consumer'consumels familiarity with cultural goods becomes a sign to potential suitors of her position on axes of "cultural" and "economic capital" (see Bourdieu 99-168). The objects of fashion, those that demonstrate currently desirable taste, change as the bearers of sensibility choose and reject them, and the status of the consumer rises and falls in tandem with them.(32) The inherent worth and traditional role of the young lady and the artistic skill or charitable act disappear into the fluctuating desires that structure the markets of culture and courtship. Thus Lady Barbara acquires taste and skill from Juliet, but raises the stakes by participating in a system that dresses Juliet, as a social inferior, in the garb of a prostitute. A system in which the desirability of other women depends upon her-and upon her exclusion--overdetermines Juliet's access to credit. Her "real" noble status remains invisible in a world of layered representations.

As worth becomes fashion-dependent, the marriage market must face another, related issue, apparent in the acquirements even of the virtuous Lady Barbara: that of superficiality and falsehood. Fashion systems can retain their exclusiveness only insofar as they can distinguish the impostor from the privileged participant--a distinction that is obvious only where the social actors are few, unchanging, and known to each other (McCracken 34). But one of the major marketplaces in contemporary courtship, for example, was the masquerade, where open boundaries and identities masked beyond recognition meant, or so its critics feared, that intruders could "get in" to threaten the virtue of the young lady participants (for example, in Cecilia 119-23).

These anxieties appear in the labeling of Juliet as an "impostor" and the demand that she name herself before anyone will help her. Even Juliet's uncle Lord Denmeath refuses to believe the proofs of her legitimacy and tempts her to return to France with promises that "The road is still open for you to affluence and credit"--reflecting his fear that this "impostor" has already been granted credit, in both senses, as a member of his family (616). Another acquaintance, meeting Juliet for the first time without the blackface she wears to escape Robespierre's France, accuses her of a kind of commercialized witchcraft: "What a fine fortune she may raise, if she will take up a patent for beauty-making! I know many a dowager that would give half she is worth for the secret." His public exposure of Juliet as a wearer of manufactured masks drives off her supporters, "alarmed ... for ... [their] own credit" (252-53). To participate in a system of social hierarchies based on sensibility and credit is to dread the presence of impostors. Indeed, this society attempts to exclude Juliet from the credit system because it fears that she has already infiltrated it.

VI.

Unlike the English Jacobin women she influenced (Wollstonecraft, for example, had a quoting knowledge of Cecilia [Doody 147]), Burney does not object to the equation of women with men's worth or their role as bearers of economic value. She criticizes instead the Humean calculus of the conduct books and the economic pamphlets, their investment in sensibility, and the mismanaged Burkean conservatism that helped them gain a social and intellectual footing. She conceives her ideal society as a return to a world in which a woman's recognized value corresponds with her moral and financial worth, and marriage is a private agreement between a woman's father and the suitor he approves: the world of the Marriage Act, respected and rigorously enforced.

Burney offers such a moment at he end of The Wanderer. From having been goods "advertised in a news-paper" Juliet becomes an object of private contract (663). In the privacy of a "bathing-machine," itself a contrivance for protecting modesty, Juliet's uncle, brother, and guardian bargain with her only suitor:

Harleigh ... was speedily summoned into the machine; his proposals were so munificent, that they were applauded rather than approved; and, All descending to the beach, the Bishop took one hand, and the Admiral another, of the blushing Juliet, to present, with tenderest blessings, to the happy, indescribably happy Harleigh. (864-65)

Juliet herself does not enter this masculine bargaining machine, but neither do her guardians parade her through the public places of the marriage market. Only after the contract do they present her to the public, in a symbolic transfer of physical custody from guardians to husband, ensuring her constant protection and control. Her blush, the sign of her modesty, consecrates the privacy of the occasion and guarantees her virtue. The safe transfer that concludes The Wanderer is the most unequivocal of Burney's endings. As a formal legal contract between father and husband, Juliet's marriage reinvents a pre-sentimental courtship tradition, and unlike the sentimental ideal, which hides its market interests, the aristocratic agreement acknowledges its base in contract and the law.

Driven by French revolutionary appropriations on the one hand-Napoleon, with his radical rhetoric of state and citizenhood, had declared England a nation of shopkeepers--and betrayed on the other by Burke's defense of commerce, late-century conservative women adapted without moderating conservative rhetoric. Like Napoleon, they despised the division of England between "selfish vanity and cringing cunning," "the insolent, vain, unfeeling buyer" and "the subtle, plausible, over-reaching seller" (Wanderer 428), yet they feared the French Revolution and the radical critique of commerce. In this nineteenth-century context, a republican rhetoric of public virtue could no longer oppose the decline of rank and family and the moral absolutes they stood for. Burney responds with an ancient ideal of marriage, a traditional contract between male acquaintances, replacing circulating women and fluctuating worth with a stable system of value and exchange. She revives the Great Chain of Being as a great chain of families. Its elegiac overtones derive from its sense of impossibility, as Burney's own career makes plain. In order to get The Wanderer into print, Burney was forced, after months of internal debate and family discussion, to sign a profit-sharing contract with her publishers, a commercial speculation on the novel's success, and in ceding control of the text, she forfeited the critics' approval as well." Despite its ironies at the expense of commerce, The Wanderer remains an economic romance, escaping the march of commercial history only through a fictive historical return.

1 I am grateful for the fellowship support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which enabled me to complete this project.

2 Burney notes that "what most excited his spleen was Woman, to whom he professes a fixed aversion." After he declares his unconcern for copyright, Burney calls him and his novel an "antidote" to desire for marriage (Early Diary 1: 285-89). On the copyright debate, see Walters, Berlanger.

3 Before contracting to publish The Wanderer, Burney declared, I wish ardently to superintend the press" (Journals 7: 104, 165). Fergus and Thaddeus outline the differences between subscription and other forms of copyright and note Burney's concern for her last novel's sales. (193,201).

4 Discussed by Davidoff and Hall 30-34. but see also the omission of marriage and family studies from such texts in consumer history as those collected in Brewer and Porter--with the exception of Agnew's essay--and in McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb.

5 For the classic treatment of the subject, see Poovey. More recent accounts include those of Green and Yeazell. For the early years.

6 For example, Tuchman, Raven, Lovell, Spencer

7 To argue that Burney protests encroaching consumer demand is not to imply that a "consumer revolution" actually took place between 1760 and 1800, as McKendrick suggests (13); conversely, one need not agree with Raven that the rich only now began to serves as a scapegoat for publishers seeking to justify their own profits-orientation. Theorists propose a variety of alternative dates for the "consumer revolution," and a range of interpretations. See in particular Agnew's forceful argument that studying consumerism from a supply-side perspective masks the idealoligies that give "things" value.

8 Stuart was born in 1757.

9 Impressions of Streatfield occupy a week's letters. Her fame precedes her, for "Mr. Seward, you know, told [Burney] that she had tears at command." See Burney, diary, Ed. Woosley 2: 71-77.

10 As identified by Henlow.

11 Gregory's daughter would marry Archibald Alison, who equates "Modesty" with a modest appearance (131).

12 According to Kenrick, one can identify a woman of good reputation as one whose "tears mingle with those who weep, and she laugheth with those who are cheerful; she shareuth the calamities of her neighbours, and she partaketh also of their joys" (45).

13 I disagree here with Henlow's account of Camilla as a "courtesy novel" (773) and with G. Campbell's belief that Burney uses conduct models to control the terms within which her novels will be read.

14 Fordyce's "generous sensibility" equates charitable spending with virtue. But women should also "spread a certain grace and embellishment over human life" (1: 164) by acquiring "ELEGANT ACCOMPLISHMENTS" (1: 184) and dressing to please: "should they, by any neglect of their persons, render themselves less amiable than God has made them, they would ... disappoint the design of their creation" (1: 15-16.)

15 Here, as in quotations from Burney and other writers throughout this essay, I retain contemporary spelling and typography.

16 Copeland distinguishes Burney's economic terms from Austen's (79).

17 Burke discussed Anderson in March 1796 (Correspondence 413-14, 421, 447). On Camilla, see his letter to Mrs. John Crewe, 17 March 1796 (Correspondence 423).

18 The Laws Respecting the Ordinary Practice of Impositions in Money Lending, and the Buying and Selling of Public Offices 408. The latest case cited by this undated pamphlet is 1772.

19 See Facts and Observations Relative to the Coinage and Circulation of Counterfeit or Base Money; with Suggestions for Remedying the Evil 1, The Iniquity of Banking: Or, Bank Notes Proved to be Injurious to the Public, and the Real Case of the Exorbitant Price of Provisions 10. The son of "the master of a great gaming-house," Gwigg chooses a more lucrative gamble--marrying an heiress under false pretenses (Camilla 892-93).

20 As conservative pamphlets lament. See also Brewer 214.

21 On the popularity of Hume in the classroom and his nfluence on other conservative women, see Kent. Chapone recommends Hume's history as the "most entertaining" account of Britain's economic and political ascendancy 9209, 217). See also Fordyce 1: 214, a and Gisbone 214.

22 Eagleton discusses contemporary sociopolitical implications of "the beautiful" in detail. See also Christenten for a suggestive account of women and tastes in Hume's theory (99-100).

23 On women's place in "social contracts" see Patemen, Sexual 1-18, and "Disorder." Hume makes taste a ground for masculine communities in "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion."

24 For example, Captain Mirvan in Evelina 109; ridiculed by Ellinor Joddrel in the Wanderer 399.

25 On private consumption and public spirit, see Barrell. Robertson treats Hume more specifically.

26 To name Burney as conservative is no longer a popular response to her novels; see not3 28 below.

27 Importantly described by Armstrong.

28 For example, see Kelly 115-117. For readings of marriage-market ambivalence as (conscious or unconscious) feminist protest, see Newton's account of Burney's novels as "both the locus of compensating fantasies and the site of protest" (11); see also Castle 276, 285. For Todd, Burney's home-bound biography explains her ambivalence (287); in Straub's historical-formalist reading, Burney parodies her own political uncertainty.

29 In his context, I disagree with Doody that Cecila is "the first of the 'Jacobin' novels" (147); see also D. Campbell's reading of Cecilia as a radical critique of national credit (122). Burney's financial critique is conservative rather than radical, for while her novels indeed lament that "Wealth governs ... society" and "the highest sin ... is running out of money," a mercenary world is not an aristocracy in which money is inextricable form birth. Burney assails the modern phenomena of liberal finance and trade--not the artisocratic values that The Wanderer's conclusion restores.

30 Epstein 152, 159, says that money troubles in Burney are a "surreal" rendition of the simultaneously therapeutic and potentially shameful self-exposure of writing. but wholly to biographize Burney's economics is to obscure the material causes not only of the heroine's troubles, but Burney's as well--as

their relation to the real conditions of the book trade.

31 Van Sant usefully defines sensibility as "immediate moral and aesthetic responsiveness" that can be seen by others (5).

32 Or, as Bourdeiu puts it, "what the competitive struggle" between social groups "makes everlasting is not different conditions but the difference between conditions" (164).

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