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The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

The Making of British

Bourgeois Tragedy
Modernity and the Art of
Ordinary Suffering
A L E X E R IC H E R NA N D E Z
1
1
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To Kelsie, Eliana, and Charlie, for together we make CAKE

Acknowledgments
One happy consequence of a years-long steep in tragedy has been a

clearer sense of my own good fortune. The writing of this book has been
accompanied by countless affirmations of this, from friendships personal and
professional, to serendipitous moments where an argument came together,
to the various structural supports that made writing about everyday misfor-
tune bearable (even rewarding). Here’s a very brief attempt, then, to account
for some of these graces.
This book would not have been possible without the guidance and
encouragement of Felicity Nussbaum, whose insightful criticism saw the
project through its early years as a dissertation. I only hope it reflects her
wise influence adequately. Helen Deutsch pushed me to think about the
theoretical stakes of the project early on in its development, and on more
than one occasion offered a suggestion that was so perfectly timed that it
seemed fateful. Lowell Gallagher’s perceptive reading of my work repeatedly
challenged me to do better, while Jonathan Sheehan kept me honest about
the history and, in the process, helped turn a five-page document into
what it is today. At a pivotal moment during this book’s life, Sarah Kareem
gave feedback on its opening gambit and helped me more than I think
she realizes. Other friends and co-conspirators from my time at UCLA
were instrumental in testing arguments. Ian Newman, Michael Nicholson,
Taylor Walle, Katherine Charles, and James Reeves have all gone on to carry
out their own research, but as it turns out, played a key part in supporting
my own.
At the University of Toronto, I’ve found a vibrant intellectual community
whose support remains indispensable. Tom Keymer, Simon Dickie, Terry
Robinson, Brian Corman, Paul Stevens, Carol Percy, and Jeremy Lopez,
among others, have read or listened to parts of this book. Their engagement
with my thinking has made it immeasurably better. Audiences at a number
of venues have sharpened my claims, and I owe debts in particular to Julia
Fawcett, Misty Anderson, Josh Gang, Lynn Festa, Colin Jager, Vincent
Pecora, Paula McDowell, Jane O. Newman, and Morgan Vanek for conver-
sations that yielded a number of well-timed suggestions. Denise Cruz was
a crucial support during the writing of this book and continues to be a
viii Acknowledgments
valued friend. She and Sam Pinto helped push me to the finish line, one
thirty-minute writing session at a time.
Several institutions have aided in this book’s completion as well. I am
grateful to the Social Science Research Council and the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation for their support of a timely interdisciplinary working group
on “Religion and Modernity” that got the project off and running. Research
assistance provided by Yale University’s Lewis Walpole Library and its staff
was similarly formative. A great debt is owed to the staff of The William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library and UCLA’s Center for 17th- and 18th-
Century Studies, who supported me through a fellowship and copious
research help. And a Connaught New Researcher Award at the University
of Toronto greatly aided in bringing the project to completion. Parts of
Chapter 3 first appeared in an earlier form as “Tragedy and the Economics
of Providence in Richardson’s Clarissa,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22
(Summer 2010): 599–630; and a portion of Chapter 4 appeared earlier as
“Prosaic Suffering: Bourgeois Tragedy and the Aesthetics of the Ordinary,”
in Representations 138, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 118–41. I appreciate their per-
mission to reuse some of that material here.
I have been fortunate to work with Jacqueline Norton at Oxford University
Press, who saw its potential and shepherded the manuscript through the
process of publication. Anonymous readers made critical suggestions
that improved the manuscript, and for that I thank them. A special note
of thanks goes to my research assistant, Veronica Litt, who, in addition to
being a fine scholar herself, proved essential to the book’s completion. Ian
Johnston provided the translation of Medea used in the Introduction’s epi-
graph, for which I am also grateful.
My greatest debts are owed to my family, however, whose household
labor is present, silently, on every page of this book. I thank my parents
especially for their indefatigable encouragement and inspiration, adding
that they are a constant reminder of what it means to strive against the pres-
sures of economic precariousness by risking it all. Without them, none of
this would have been possible. Most of all, I thank my partner, Kelsie, and
our little ones Ellie and Charlie, to whom this book is dedicated. In a project
so concerned with the fragility of our domestic ties, you have been a source
of deep comfort, security, and affection, daily reminders of just how tough
these bonds can be.
Contents
List of Illustrations xi
An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy: Or, “Silently

and Smoothly Thro’ the World” 1
1. The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy: Dignity and the
Ordinary in George Lillo’s London 29
2. Close to Home: The Uncanny of Georgian Domestic
Tragedy68
3. A Fine Subject for Tragedy: Providence, Poetic Justice,
and Clarissa’s Real Affliction 105
4. Prosaic Suffering: Edward Moore, Diderot, and the Natural
Picture of Drama 139
5. Tragic Sensibilities: Sentimental Fiction and the
Serious Genre 172
Conclusion: Modern Tragedy and Ordinary Suffering 210
Bibliography 227
Index 249
List of Illustrations
1.1. William Hogarth, Gin Lane. 1750–1. Engraving, 37.4 × 31.8 cm 45
1.2. William Hogarth, detail from upper-right corner of Gin Lane.
1750–1. Engraving, 37.4 × 31.8 cm 49
1.3. William Hogarth, Plate 1 (“Moll Hackabout arrives in London
at the Bell Inn, Cheapside”) of A Harlot’s Progress. 1732. Engraving,
30.8 × 38.1 cm 50
1.4. William Hogarth, Plate 5 (“Moll dying of syphilis”) of A Harlot’s
Progress. 1732. Engravings, 31.8 × 38.2 cm 51
1.5. Anonymous, Frontispiece to The London Merchant. 1763 61
2.1. Anonymous, detail from The complaint and lamentation of Mistresse
Arden of Feversham in Kent [1633?]. Woodcut print 78
2.2. Image depicting the home of Arden of Faversham, Abbey Street,
Faversham79
2.3. Anonymous, details from Newes from Perin in Cornwall Of a Most
Bloody and Unexampled Murther. 1618. Woodcut print 79
2.4. [François Boitard?], Illustration depicting Act V, scene 2 of Othello
in Jacob Tonson’s The Works of Wiliam Shakespeare [sic]. 1709 84
2.5. [Engleman?], after a painting by Thomas Stothard, Plate depicting
Act III, scene 2 of Fatal Curiosity in Inchbald’s The British Theatre. 1807 87
4.1. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, La malédiction paternelle. Le fils ingrat
[The Paternal Curse: The Ungrateful Son]. 1777. Oil on canvas,
130 × 162 cm 149
4.2. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, La malédiction paternelle. Le fils puni [The Paternal
Curse: The Son Punished]. 1778. Oil on canvas, 130 × 163 cm 150
4.3. Mather Brown, The Last Scene in the Tragedy of the Gamester. 1787.
Oil on canvas, 200 × 256 cm 162
5.1. W. W. Ryland, after Angelica Kauffman, Maria—Moulines. 1779.
Stipple and etching in red-brown ink on paper 202
5.2. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Le Malheur Imprévu ou Le Miroir brisé
[Unforeseen Misfortune, or, The Broken Mirror]. 1763. Oil on
canvas, 56 × 46 cm 204
C.1. Thomas Rowlandson, The Sorrows of Werter; The Last Interview.
1786. Etching with stipple engraving, 25 × 35 cm 224
An Introduction to Bourgeois
Tragedy
Or, “Silently and Smoothly Thro’ the World”
I don’t want a grand life for myself—

just to grow old with some security.
They say a moderate life’s the best of all,
a far better choice for mortal men.
Going for too much brings no benefits.
And when gods get angry with some home,
the more wealth it has, the more it is destroyed.
Medea, 149–55
The middle class has long seemed impervious to tragedy. Consider the
opening to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which famously begins
with a vision of modest productivity and social stability for what his contem-
poraries called “the middling sort of people.” Recalling those days before he
set out to try his fortune, Crusoe narrates the chiding of his father, an immi-
grant, who warns him to adhere to the via media of a simple, commercial life:
He bid me observe [this middle state] and I should always find, that the
Calamities of life were shared among the upper and the lower Part of
Mankind; but that the middle Station had the fewest Disasters, and was
not expos’d to so many Vicissitudes as the higher or lower Part of Mankind;
nay, they were not subjected to so many Distempers and Uneasiness either
or Body or Mind, as those who, by vicious Living, Luxury and Extravagancies
on one Hand, or by Hard Labour, Want of Necessities, and mean or insuf-
ficient Diet on the other Hand, bring Distempers upon themselves by the
natural Consequence of their Way of Living . . . Peace and Plenty were the
Hand-maids of a middle Fortune.1
1 Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 4–5. Subsequent citations refer to this edition and appear paren-
thetically in the text.
The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering. Alex Eric Hernandez,
Oxford University Press (2019). © Alex Eric Hernandez.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846574.001.0001
2 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy
It’s a touching scene, Crusoe tells us: “I was sincerely affected with this
Discourse, as indeed who could be otherwise?” (6). Desperate to preserve
the only son that remains to him, the elder Kreutznaer voices the already-
clichéd promise of middling prosperity: “observe, and you will always
find . . . ” Neither precarious like the indigent, nor liable to the reversals of
aristocratic fortune, bourgeois life was industrious and low-risk, “calculated
for all kind of Vertues and all kinds of Enjoyments.” In this way, as Defoe
elegantly phrases it, the middle station went “silently and smoothly thro’
the World” (5).
Father Crusoe had reason to be optimistic. For decades now, economic
and social historians have traced the extensive growth of the British middling
sort, that amorphous social category that encompassed, in fine gradations
of perceived rank and standing, merchants of all stripes, tradespeople,
shopkeepers, and artisans, professionals, even (according to some contem-
poraries) members of the lower gentry, country farmers, freeholders, and
well-off laborers and their families. In his classic history of eighteenth-
century England, for example, Paul Langford paints a picture of steady
economic growth in which a “powerful and extensive middle class [resting]
on a broad, diverse base of property . . . increasingly decided the framework
of debate.”2 “An English tradesman is a new species of gentleman,” Samuel
Johnson claimed, not without concern over the changing cultural land-
scape.3 Standards of living were on the rise too, with a prolonged if not also
modest estimated per capita income growth of 0.30% per year between 1700
and 1760, according to recent accounts. If we talk of the “long eighteenth
century,” those figures are far more impressive, curving upwards into what
many call the “hockey-stick graph” of GDP during industrialization.4 By
about 1780, output grows decisively to between 1.32% and 2.06% annually,
helping most of Britain (though not yet Ireland) escape the Malthusian trap,
eventually doubling the population during the century that followed the
Hanoverian accession.5 Inventories, legal and marital records, as well as
2 Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 68.

3 Quoted in Porter, English Society, 50.
4 See Broadberry et al., “British Economic Growth, 1270–1870,” esp. table 22. The authors of
this study note that their work largely confirms what has come to be known as the Crafts-
Harley view of British economic development. See Crafts and Harley, “Output Growth.” An
important corrective to this is offered by Eric Hobsbawm, who influentially traced the slowing
in growth in the per-capita figures to increasing numbers of laboring poor. See his “British
Standard of Living.”
5 Rule, Vital Century, 5–15; 28–31. On population growth in the period, see Wrigley and
Schofield, Population History of England.
An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy 3
countless anecdotes confirm a sense of the expanding material comforts

available to households with standards of living above mere subsistence, the
numbers of which swelled, and more and more defined Britain’s culture.6
A few years before Robinson Crusoe’s foreboding advice, Defoe character-
ized the nation’s social fabric in terms of the comforts a bit of surplus could
buy. Nestled between twin extremes—“The great, who live profusely” and
“The miserable, that really pinch and suffer want”—were those most insulated
from the “Disasters” and “Vicissitudes” we colloquially refer to as tragic:
“The middle sort, who live well.”7
Perhaps it’s unsurprising then that the era witnessing the “rise of the
middle class” is also often seen to mark the so-called “death of tragedy.”
For George Steiner, whose endlessly controversial argument I invoke here,
the late seventeenth century is the “great divide” for the genre, the era after
which a variety of historical forces (capitalism, Enlightenment, the loss
of shared “mythological, symbolic, and ritual reference,” to name a few)
coalesce to make tragedy an impossibility.8 His view seems to confirm the
sense of Defoe’s opening vignette in Crusoe that tragic misfortune would
be largely avoidable in this new era, the middling sort having squeezed out
the “Hellenic forms” of high tragedy, leaving nothing behind but a plod-
ding, epic-comic prosperity. How then can a life defined by its stability, by
the rhythms of an everyday getting-and-spending, foster the sort of convul-
sive passions necessary for tragedy? Isn’t the very idea of “the bourgeois,” as
Franco Moretti observes, predicated on values like efficiency, lawfulness,
and comfort?9 Hardly fodder for the tragic, it would seem. Echoing Walter
Scott’s complaint about the bourgeois tastes of modern audiences, Steiner
goes on to claim that the values of middling life ensured that the market for
tragedy turned middlebrow and sentimental.10 Thrust into a world much
6 A number of studies confirm Langford’s account of the growing cultural influence exerted
by consumers and thinkers tied to the middle rank, and together present a narrative of rank’s
transmutation into a self-conscious discourse of middle-class ideology. See, for example, Hunt,
The Middling Sort and Earle, English Middle Class. For a survey of the rich historical literature
debating the extent to which a middle rank or “class” cohered in the period, see Wahrman,
“National Society, Communal Culture.”
7 Defoe, Review, 6.
8 Steiner, Death of Tragedy, 292. For a sense of the persistence of this argument, as well as a
series of powerful critiques, see Felski, Rethinking Tragedy.
9 See Moretti, The Bourgeois, chap. 1.
10 See Scott, “Essay on the Drama,” 1:219–395. This is not to say that tragedies were no
longer written—Susan Staves points out that the latter half of the century alone saw more than
a hundred new tragedies brought to stage—but that they failed to embody the essence of the
genre. See her “Tragedy,” 87.
more ordinary, tragedy loses the possibility of transcendence so that finally

it “disappeared altogether or took tawdry refuge among the gaslights of
melodrama.”11
In place of tragedy, many have argued, the middling sort looked to
another incipient literary form often linked to our narratives of eighteenth-
century optimism: the novel.12 Sandra Macpherson notes, for example, that
the history of the novel has largely been read as an explicitly anti-tragic
tradition; the famed “rise of the novel” passes as more or less the flip side
of the old “death of tragedy” coin.13 “The suspicion that there is something
inherently untragic about the novel-form is hard to shake off,” adds Terry
Eagleton, concluding that this assumption is largely a function of class: “The
temper of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English fiction, the heyday of
the making of the English middle class, is anti-tragic.”14 Tragedy hibernates
in his view, suspended by the dynamism of what Georg Lukács called the
novel’s “extensive totality,” its ability to draw in complex causal chains and
diverse agencies, glossing over the isolation of one’s personal misfortunes.
Thus: “[The novel] gives form to a totality of life that is rounded from
within; [it] seeks . . . to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life.”15
Construction, revelation, meaning—like Crusoe’s Providences, novels dis-
close the secret fullness of the everyday, rescuing the quotidian details of
the modern world from its veneer of banality and senselessness. A narrative
exercise in the consolations of bourgeois life, in which “the triumph of
meaning over time” gradually emerges through the epic perspective made
possible for its reader, the novel legitimates its evils. It exposes what seems
to be the “intensive totality” of the drama—with its pitched suffering and
claustrophobic plots—as merely one of a thousand counterfactual trade-offs
necessary in order for the ascendant middle rank to “live well.”16
11 Steiner, Death of Tragedy, 194.

12 Eagleton, Sweet Violence, chap. 7. See also Peyre, “Tragedy of Passion,” 77; and cf. Steiner’s
related point in The Death of Tragedy: “The history of the decline of serious drama is, in part,
that of the rise of the novel” (118).
13 In Harm’s Way, Macpherson looks to the novel to overturn this assumption. See her intro-
duction for a slightly different framing of this problem in eighteenth-century literary studies.
14 Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 180; 179. In his provocative account of modernity and the
tragic, Mourning Happiness, Vivasvan Soni offers a slightly different take, arguing that modernity
converts tragedy into “trial narratives,” most of which devolve into mechanical illustrations
for a bourgeoisie coming to grips with secular happiness. Interestingly, he doesn’t mention
bourgeois tragedy.
15 Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 60.
16 Thus, Franco Moretti argues that the modern novel finds its truest expression in
Bildungsroman, which formalizes the process of becoming reconciled to the world (Way of the
World, 55).
Silently and smoothly thro’ the world indeed. And yet despite this, for
eighteenth-century Britons, depictions of middling misfortune seemed to
be vital in a way that they had rarely been before. Onstage, tragedies fea-
tured new and complex characters pulled from the social middle; a thriving
print market fueled a healthy demand for tales of domestic discord; novels
examined intensely personal, existential pain and suffering in the lives of
their everyday figures; few scenes could evoke more feeling than that of the
bourgeois déclassé. The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy seeks to account
for this vitality and the lasting cultural importance of what has come to be
known as “bourgeois tragedy.” In what follows, I assemble a body of text
and performance that contradicts both Defoe’s optimism and the narrative
of tragedy’s demise in the period, redefining the genre in order to better
account for its movement between media, examining the changing conven-
tions through which its practice mobilized a shared present more felt than
articulable. Where many have seen aesthetic stagnation, overwrought or
misfiring emotions, and the absence of an idealized tragicness, I see instead
a sustained engagement in the affective processes and representational tech-
niques through which the middle rank feels its way into modernity. I’m
interested, that is, in the way the Crusoevian “rise of the middle class” was
always far from certain, burdened from the start by an anxiety over the
potential of loss or failure. Giving the lie to so much of what we think we
know about the effervescent middling sort in the period, the making of
British bourgeois tragedy records a haunting ambivalence toward the mod-
ernizing processes that went hand in hand with the creation of Defoe’s
confident middle class.
At the core of this account is the simple, often overlooked fact that the
afflictions of common people came to be treated in the genre with a meas-
ure of dignity and seriousness previously denied them in tragedy. Indeed,
the central insight of this book is that the very historical emergence of
something like “bourgeois tragedy” represents a gradual, shifting cultural
debate over the extent and shape of suffering: who precisely gets to suffer
meaningfully, and what is the character of the affliction they undergo?
Whose life, and whose way of life, is grievable? After all, tragedy posits the
destruction or forfeiture of something valued, the mournful loss of one’s
attachments, whether those attachments happen to be people, or fantasies
of the good life, or even a newly materializing sense of the dignity of the
ordinary. To see something as tragically lost is to register its considerable
worth. In rehearsing these losses in relation to everyday life, bourgeois
tragedy argues for a realignment of many of the genre’s core values.
Yet tragedy also shows us what it is to suffer, playing out and exploring
these emotions, meditating upon what it means to be afflicted—or, in fact,
what it fails to mean. Bourgeois tragedy is no exception to this, telling of
how the era’s valorization of this-worldly happiness erodes those cherished
frameworks that made sense of not only the good, but also one’s affliction.
The genre imagined a particularly modern sort of affliction, I argue, an
“ordinary suffering” proper to ordinary life, divested of the sorts of mean-
ings, rhetorics, and affective resonances once deployed to understand it.
Whereas neoclassical aesthetics aligned tragedy with the heroic and the
admirable, ordinary suffering was domestic, familiar, a private phenomenon
turned public, entangled in the nascent values of capitalism and the particu-
larities of the era’s rationalizing bureaucratic systems, yet no less haunted by
God. Responding to the changing atmosphere of the age, the works assem-
bled here offered practical affective responses to a range of concerns that
were virtually unprecedented in tragic literature, and thereby enlivened a
kinesthetic imagination through which those emotions were embodied. In
this way, bourgeois tragedy heralded a European modernity in which pain
and suffering were increasingly taken as difficult facts to be overcome, tenu-
ously bound to notions of its sanctifying or positively dolorous effects,
though not for that reason secular.17
That last point is worth emphasizing here, for in taking up the notori-
ously difficult term, “modernity,” I certainly don’t mean to imply that that
cultural condition is inherently secularized, or that the refiguration of tragic
suffering necessarily involves a loss of sacrality. As Misty Anderson has
recently noted, “the modern” “name[s] an ideology that unfolded in time,”
one that thrives by positing a “religious antimodernity as a foil in the narrative
of modernity’s rise.”18 Similarly, Jonathan Sheehan cautions that our notions
of secularization have too often devolved into a “shorthand for the inevitable
(intentional or not, serious or ironic) slide of the pre-modern religious
past into the modern secular future,” a zero-sum story of modernization
as the eclipse of belief.19 To be sure, few genres pressure the assurances
of faith like tragedy. Yet time and again, the strategies employed in order
to meditate upon affliction in bourgeois tragedy testify not only to the
persistence but the positive flourishing of religion, even when such beliefs,
17 See Taylor, Secular Age, 647–66, for example, though the discussion across part V,
Dilemmas I in the text is germane; Cf. Odo Marquard’s argument in “Theodicy Motives in
Modern Philosophy.”
18 Anderson, Imagining Methodism, 13.
19 Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization,” 1076.
mythologies, and ritual practices seem to make increasingly less sense and
offer little comfort to those depicted. A case in point is the fact that the
encroaching assumption that (for more and more people) happiness is
at hand in this life rather than the next not only fails to extinguish faith
in one’s futurity but, in many cases, also invests everyday suffering with
a metaphysical import largely alien to earlier periods. Like all ideologies,
then, modernity tends to minimize its fissures, but these complexities are
present in spades in bourgeois tragedy—indeed, modernity’s ambivalences
tend to lie at the heart of the genre and contribute to a sense that, as several
scholars have claimed, modernity simply is a tragic condition.20 Insofar
as the genre explores many of these characteristic aspects of the modern
social imaginary, therefore, it seems to mark a largely unacknowledged
site in which the contradictory processes of modernization play out in print
and performance.
In other words, bourgeois tragedy names both an innovation in tragic
aesthetics and an episode in the history of suffering. This is a complex claim,
of course, whose nested elements unfold slowly in the ensuing chapters and
may only be fully appreciable in the hindsight enabled by history and
recounted at the close of this book. What follows here, consequently, merely
sketches a brief, preliminary history of the genre that situates it within some
of the larger trends of the period. In doing so, I’ll begin clarifying the terms
I draw upon and gesturing toward the layers of argumentation that make up
this book’s intervention, turning later to questions of method. Here then is
an introduction to bourgeois tragedy.
* * *
Ever since Denis Diderot’s founding definition in the Entretiens sur le Fils
naturel (1757), historians of eighteenth-century theatre have referred to a
series of dramas focused on the misfortunes of the middle rank as “bour-
geois tragedy.”21 This name has always been somewhat misleading when
applied to the British context, however, a jarring anachronism in light of
what we know about the period’s social rhetoric. For one, Britons did not
often speak of their middle sort using the term “bourgeois” until somewhat
later (and then only rarely), when it assumed a more pejorative connotation
or was enlisted in Marxist analysis to denote the class of manufacturers that
20 A recent collection of essays explicitly links the two and continues a longstanding critical
tradition. See Billings and Leonard, Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity.
21 Diderot, “Entretiens,” 1131–92.
drove capitalism in the nineteenth century.22 (Even the decidedly British

“middling,” H. R. French observes of the eighteenth century, was used rela-
tively infrequently as a means of self-identification.23) Moreover, Diderot’s
French bourgeoisie was a complicated social entity with its own endemic
complexities and definitional problems, a category not always easily exported
across the Channel because it implied a status closer to the English landed
gentry or a narrow circle of the moneyed elite, largely confined and defined
by their association with the cities.24 To be sure, there are several figures we
would identify now as part of an haute bourgeoisie in the British tragic
canon (and we shall return to them, for they are important to the story I tell),
but notable examples of the genre drew from the ranks of apprentices,
migrant laborers, and skilled tradespeople, bearing little resemblance to the
incipient ruling class of classical French historiography or Marxist dialectics.
In such cases, “bourgeois tragedy” depicts a seedy, unsentimental urban
world we might think of as decidedly un- or even anti-bourgeois in the typical
sense, closer in spirit to that navigated by E. P. Thompson’s beleaguered
laboring class.25 Evidence of the diverse economic base that made up the
British social middle, these tragic figures aspire to the stability of our
stereotypical middle, suggesting that the enduring usefulness of Diderot’s
terminology lies in the way it maintains a fantasy of the good life even
when enacting its failure. Mindful of these caveats, I nevertheless adopt
much of this traditional critical vocabulary precisely because such acts of
naming see the genre as elaborating a way of life that the bourgeois came
to connote. Which is to say that much like Defoe’s r hetorical middling,
bourgeois tragedy imagined a way of being in the world whose values,
assumptions, and practices were seen as fundamentally those of ordinary
people and everyday life.
Apropos of such terminological acts of creation, one might point out that
until relatively late in the century, the term Britons most often associated
with this literature was “domestic tragedy.” This designation traced the
22 Moretti’s dataset is revealing here, and unsurprisingly, sees a late rise in the frequency of
that term’s usage relative to both the French context and the more preferred British “middle
rank” and “class.” See Moretti, Bourgeois, 9–10.
23 This contention lies at the heart of his account of social representation in the period. See
French, Middle Sort of People.
24 See Sarah Maza’s subtle exploration of these issues in Myth of the French Bourgeoisie;
Darnton tackles some of these issues as well in Great Cat Massacre, 125–7. The French under-
standing of the bourgeois, for example, typically implied an urban rentier class not necessarily
synonymous with the working merchants and tradesmen one sees fallen from grace in many of
the earliest British bourgeois dramas.
25 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class.
genre’s pedigree back to the theatre of the English Renaissance and framed
it according to a particular set of nascent values that would later seem
inextricably linked to the middle sort. Plays like the anonymous Arden of
Faversham (1592) and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness
(1603) and The English Traveller (1633) focused their plots on the home-
bound tensions that threatened the early modern family, utilizing a mix-
ture of prose and verse by which to represent “the horror of the everyday
ordinariness of it all.”26 Among the earliest forms of stage realism, the
genre familiarized tragedy, locating its action among Englishmen and
women in the present, the mundane spaces they inhabited, and the com-
monplace circumstances that brought about their suffering. In many cases,
too, they brought to life true or folkloric incidents, enacting a violent
crime literature that remained popular well into the early decades of the
eighteenth century, by which time the plays themselves were seldom (if ever)
actually performed.
According to Raymond Williams, these experimental tragedies were
part of a process “long and deep” in the making, in which a “new structure
of feeling” began permeating the soil of European art and culture.27
Playwrights in the Restoration and early eighteenth century, for instance,
linked the Renaissance domestic tradition to their more recent work in she-
tragedy, mapping the “pathetic” female leads of the latter onto the homely
concerns of the former and thereby privileging what several of them claimed
was “private woe.” Like the homes simulated onstage, private woe imagined
a pain interiorized and personal, constituted by the tender intimacies and
attachments that the domestic increasingly seemed to promise.28 Domestic
dramas like Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent (1702) and Lewis Theobald’s
The Perfidious Brother (1715) thereby helped transition to what many critics
to this day have taken to be a more self-consciously sentimental tragedy
aligned with bourgeois feeling. Nevertheless, Thomas Otway’s The Orphan
(1680) and Venice Preserv’d (1682), Thomas Southerne’s The Fatal Marriage
(1694), and Rowe’s The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714) remained lavishly
draped in the trappings of earlier theatrical traditions. These plays retained
26 Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances, 15. 27 Williams, Modern Tragedy, 28; 45.

28 Thus, Samuel Johnson claims that Thomas Otway’s The Orphan is “a domestic tragedy
drawn from middle life,” adding that “Its whole power is upon the affections” (Lives of the
Poets, 1:339–40). That is, rather than move the intellect, Johnson claims that its force lies in the
drama’s power to “interest” the heart. On the relation of she-tragedy to later domestic or bour-
geois tragedies, see Laura Brown’s classic essay, “The Defenseless Woman and the Development
of English Tragedy.”
elements of the grandly heroic, sometimes exotic worlds they ostensively

depicted, even if that world increasingly appeared in the literal and meta-
phorical backdrop of the action. Republic, kingdom, and empire are finally
at stake in their plots, but many later tragedians will move their political
themes further and further behind the proscenium, until finally the only
matter left onstage is the home itself. Looking forward to these developments,
Allardyce Nicoll thus takes this to be nothing short of a “progressive and
revolutionary . . . endeavor to find a new field of tragic emotion.”29 Writers in
the period sensed a realignment in tragedy’s operative passions too: the
preface to Charles Johnson’s 1717 revision to Racine’s Bajazet (1672), to
take just one example, positioned she-tragedy alongside its ancient models,
offering Britons a “A sad, true Tale, a Modern Scene of Woe.”30
The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy contends, however, that the
watershed moment in the creation of this “new field of tragic emotion” came
in the decades that followed she-tragedy’s vogue, when a group of tragedians,
many of whom were themselves commoners, began depicting a specifically
middling misfortune as worthy of the tragic. What defined this new field
was its earnest exploration of ordinary affliction; its familiar emotional
tenor, recognizable situations, and representational tactics. In contrast to
the baroque chromaticism of early modern passions, these plays enacted
feelings at once more direct and decidedly smaller, paradoxically sensa-
tional and somehow tenderly intimate. Like the heroic tragedies celebrated
in the period, bourgeois tragedy sought to evoke terror and pity; unlike them,
no admiration was to be engendered by watching the great suffer. Instead,
the average spectator, for the first time perhaps, could have mourned a
version of him- or herself battered and broken onstage, imagining their
experience as part of a genre bound at once by social, cultural, and affective
ties. Of course, this isn’t to say that the full impact of that genre upon col-
lective practice was registered immediately, as if its mere appearance sig-
naled the arrival of the bourgeoisie as a class with coherent and singular
aims. Nor did this newfound seriousness render the middling and lower
orders immune to the indignities that could be part of life in those stations,
even decades later. As we’ll see, in many ways the pleasures of t ragedy could be
constituted by the spectator’s condescending pity, by the assertion of dif-
ference and the asymmetries of situation and power. As Robert Hume has
repeatedly insisted too, sentimental tragedies would never form the dominant
29 Nicoll, History of Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, 114–15.

30 Johnson, Prologue to The Sultaness.
tradition in the period (though it’s worth countering that many of these
plays were much too grim to dismiss as sentimental).31
And yet the importance of this moment is unmistakable in retrospect, as
the Georgian stage saw common folk and their concerns become an increas-
ingly prevalent source of serious dramatic material over the 1720s and 30s.
Thus, by 1721, Aaron Hill (perhaps the most important English tragedian
in the first quarter of the century) published his domestic drama, The Fatal
Extravagance, very loosely based on The Yorkshire Tragedy (1608). In Hill’s
tragedy, a failed gambler struggles against the urge to commit murder-
suicide in a series of set pieces that only thinly veil his family’s bankruptcy
as a figure for the sudden collapse of South Sea Co. stock. The jeweler-
turned-playwright, George Lillo, would achieve lasting fame in a pair of
God-haunted dramas produced in the 1730s, The London Merchant (1731)
and Fatal Curiosity (1736), that dwelled largely on the economic pressures
faced by those on the edges of respectable society. Other experiments in
bourgeois and domestic tragedy, many of which utilized a stripped-down
prose so as to both capture the status of their principal characters and foster
modes of theatrical realism, cropped up often if not always successfully.
Charles Johnson’s Cælia, or the Perjur’d Lover (1732), John Hewitt’s blank
verse Fatal Falsehood (1734), and Thomas Cooke’s The Mournful Nuptials,
or Love the Cure of all Woes (1739) dilated upon violence and betrayal by
those nearest to oneself, and together began to imagine what would become
the melodrama of the industrialized nineteenth century. More influentially,
Edward Moore’s prose tragedy, The Gamester (1753), staged a tension between
aristocratic Epicureanism and middling providentialism as a sort of class-
inflected Pascal’s wager, a wager in which suffering ultimately gives rise to
both Christian faithfulness and profound doubt. Unfairly relegated to the
footnotes of sentimentalism, this body of serious drama paved the way for
Diderot’s “tragédie domestique et bourgeois” and G. E. Lessing’s “bürgerliche
Trauerspiel,” innovations which Peter Gay numbers as among the signal artistic
achievements of the Enlightenment.32 By midcentury, then, the British stage
offered an honest exploration of ordinary people and their feelings, with
profound consequences for modern art.
Exactly what brought about this cultural turn is a difficult question to
answer, and doesn’t boil down to one single factor in my view. For instance,
though capitalism is the single most commonly cited reason for the genre’s
31 Hume, Rakish Stage, 297–300; 343; and Stone, “Making of the Repertory,” 195–6.
32 Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2, chap. 6.
emergence—and in many ways rightly so—to claim it as the sufficient

condition for a particularly bourgeois tragedy is undoubtedly too tidy an
explanation. If this were so, we might expect to see the same thing in
Holland, Venice, or Genoa, three other commercial centers where mer-
chants had a relatively high social standing. We simply don’t. On the con-
trary, France and Germany take up the genre with just as much gusto as
their British counterparts, despite less enthusiastic (and for historians, more
hotly debated) adoptions of capitalism in the period. One faces the same
sorts of explanatory issues if they posit the Protestant religious tradition
instead as the determining factor, though it is true that several early bour-
geois tragedians were raised in a strain of dissenting Christian theology that
we associate with the sanctity of the ordinary. Much more likely, however,
these large-scale social changes coalesced around existing British institu-
tions and forms (like she-tragedy and true crime ballads) that could give
voice to everyday concerns at a moment when the early public sphere pro-
vided a venue for their amplification. Bourgeois tragedy would appear then
to be a response to processes that ran parallel in the period. On the one
hand, there was slow, steady economic growth leading up to the boom times
of industrialization at the turn of the nineteenth century; on the other hand,
a culture of public performance and print that everywhere seemed to trum-
pet the gains of the middle sort thereby creating a widespread sense (so
Defoe argued) that the social sphere was relatively fluid and the bourgeois
way of life in particular was on the upswing. Bourgeois tragedy spoke to
the gap between these two realities, which is to say the dynamic, imagined
space where collective and individual fantasies meet and produce (if the
conditions are right) new arts.
In fact, this story might seem oddly familiar. In The Rise of the Novel, Ian
Watt describes a similar process of cultural investment in the commonplace,
though in his reckoning, a newfound “serious concern with the daily lives
of ordinary people” helped to explain not the drama’s shifting affective
priorities, but rather prose fiction’s developing feel for formal realism and
its relationship to capitalism.33 In Watt’s view, interest in the lives of non-
aristocratic figures reflected the rising fortunes of the middling sort and their
curiosity for stories of others in comparable socio-economic conditions.
Hence, the novel is the great scene of everyday struggle, and in this way, the
cradle of realism. Or consider instead the “conceptual leitmotif ” of Erich
33 Watt, Rise of the Novel, 60.

Auerbach’s still-indispensable Mimesis: “the serious treatment of everyday

reality, the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the
position of subject matter for problematic-existential representation.”34 His
argument envelops the history of realism into an account of how the quo-
tidian and bourgeois came to be taken seriously, an account that doesn’t so
much abolish tragedy as it liquidates and sublates its form. Thus, Auerbach’s
thesis culminates in what he calls the grand “formless tragedy” of Gustav
Flaubert, and later, Virginia Woolf and Émile Zola—but interestingly, not
before tracing a bead through Friedrich Schiller’s bourgeois drama, Kabale
und Liebe (1783), and thereby finding high realism’s true sources in both
“the sentimental middle-class novel and the middle class tragedy.”35 Drawing
these literary threads together, Moretti notes that in taking up Diderot’s
auxiliary terms for bourgeois tragedy, “le genre sérieux,” “le genre moyen,”
“the class in the middle adds a style which is itself in the middle.”36 Moretti
means to signal the novel’s prosaism here—readings of Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre (1796), Illusions perdues (1837–43), and Madame Bovary (1856)
illustrate the turn—but the implication is a telling one, for even in its eras-
ure from the account of realism that ensues, bourgeois tragedy hides, like
the artifice of its prose, in plain sight. Hence, the genre figures something
of a prolepsis for this shift in cultural moods, one of the first sustained,
self-conscious attempts to fuse the severity of tragedy with an interest in
“everyday reality.”
Now to be sure, the differences between drama and novel matter—quite a
bit, in fact, as later chapters will show—but my account seeks to re-stitch
these histories together, taking as a matter of fact that these forms inter-
sected in fateful ways around questions of how to approach that “everyday
reality.” Accordingly, and though the work of theatre and performance stud-
ies forms an important part of its conceptual framework, this study refuses
to limit itself to the theatre. For while the genre no doubt initially arose
out of theatrical traditions, the questions it pursued, the stories it told, its
spectatorial methods, and, in many cases, its critical language were catalyzed
in the experimental milieu of eighteenth-century print and performance, an
instance of what Joseph Roach has called the “interdependence of orature
and literature” through which cultural memory is kept alive in practice.37 In
34 Auerbach, Mimesis, 491; Moretti, from whom I take the phrase “conceptual leitmotif,”
argues that Auerbach’s most lasting contribution lies in the way Mimesis materializes the elu-
sive quality of “everydayness” (Bourgeois, 71).
35 Auerbach, Mimesis, 488; 437. 36 Moretti, Bourgeois, 73.
37 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 12.
re-situating bourgeois tragedy in the messy context of these early attempts

at mediating the ordinary, therefore, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy
traces an exploration of pathos that ultimately finds voice across drama,
novel, ballad, and even elements of visual arts in the period. To offer a
robust account of bourgeois tragedy’s emergence in the period thus entails a
refusal to essentialize the link between tragedy and the stage at a time when
disparate media were fledgling, developing in close dialogue, in mimicry,
and sometimes in competition.38 Moreover, none of this is to say that bour-
geois tragedy is the only genre where ordinary suffering is worked through
in the period, or that any and all meditation on such affliction constitutes an
implicit membership in that body of works; one might, for instance, pro-
ductively contrast the work of pastoral elegy or laboring-class georgic in the
period in order to flesh out a different, though nonetheless complementary
account of suffering’s affective history.
Nevertheless, reframing our existing histories of form around a broader
sense of the affective and representational concerns animating bourgeois
tragedy yields some interesting results. For example, we could read domes-
tic drama’s cautious proseification not only as an expression of rhetorical
aptness (in which modulating its language corresponds with the lower status
of the play’s personages), but also as a means of embodying extemporaneous
feeling akin to, and inspired by, the novel’s “writing to the moment.” Similarly,
the elements of middling tragedy migrate amorphously between popular
forms amenable to depicting their so-called meanness (such as the ballad),
to dramas like The London Merchant, to a number of adaptations as senti-
mental and realist novels (such as T. S. Surr’s anti-Jacobin bowdlerization
of Lillo’s play in 1798). Consider also that one way to read amatory fiction’s
popularity in the early decades of the eighteenth century is as a careful
re-negotiation of the emotional terrain of domestic and she-tragedy,
newly attuned to the concerns of female writers and readers. Aphra Behn,
Catherine Trotter, and Eliza Haywood would offer a genealogical link
between the she-tragedies of an earlier generation and the decidedly middle-
rank Georgian texts of later years, for instance. One example: Southerne’s
domestic tragedy, The Fatal Marriage (1694), which reworked Behn’s novella,
The History of a Nun (1689), later laid the groundwork for David Garrick’s
38 The neat, assumed distinction between drama and novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries has undergone a reassessment in recent years. See Ballaster, “Rivals for the
Repertory”; Anderson, Play of Fiction; Saggini, Backstage in the Novel; and with respect to the
nineteenth-century context, Kurnick, Empty Houses.
popular domestic drama, Isabella (1757). If these literary migrations seem

to result in something less than tragedy, the collective, performative reading
practices memorialized in works like Sarah Fielding’s Remarks on Clarissa
(1749) suggest that in many respects, the early novel aimed at the kind of
shared catharsis central to that genre.39 Remediating the gravitas of tragedy
may in fact be just one method in which the novel authorized its claim to
truth and cultural standing by trading on the theatre’s cachet.40
In some cases, the notion that long prose narratives work through domestic
or bourgeois tragedy is neither surprising nor especially, well, novel. I just
mentioned, for example, Samuel Richardson’s work at midcentury, which
critics have long identified as adapting many of she-tragedy’s central ideo-
logical and affective investments.41 But I am thinking of Clarissa (1747–8)
especially here, whose elopement-rape plot reworked the same ground as
Johnson’s domestic tragedy, Cælia, a detail often forgotten or obscured in
work on the midcentury novel. Like that little-read play, Clarissa meditates
at length on the suffering of a young middling woman and the small circle
that mourns her, insisting on her dignity and moral standing despite being
sexually “ruined” and socially outcast. This is made all the more unbearable
by her innocence and the simplicity of her desires, which, like Father
Crusoe, consist in “sliding through life to the end of it unnoted.”42 In his
eulogy to Richardson a year after the author’s death in 1761, Diderot joined
the chorus of those celebrating Clarissa as “the first book in the world,”
adding that the novel is a “great drama,” as if to place it alongside the
bourgeois tragedies he was working to translate and publish that very same
year.43 Perhaps unsurprisingly too, Watt himself takes Richardson’s “formal
innovation” to lie precisely in “basing his novels on a single action,” co-
opting for prose fiction one of the fundamental elements of the era’s tragic
theatre: unity of plot.44 Clarissa strives to “represent the action of action
itself,” Macpherson echoes, in what sounds remarkably close to Lukács’ cap-
sule definition of the drama’s essence as an “intensive totality.” Readers who
39 Thus, as Abigail Williams’ recent account of collective reading practices makes clear, the
home was a lively site of literary performance, and perhaps the main zone of contact between
the average person and a play script. See her Social Life of Books, esp. chap. 6.
40 McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 126–8.
41 A number of important critical accounts have drawn these sorts of correspondences in
the era’s amatory fiction. See, for example, Bowers, Force or Fraud; Ballaster, Seductive Forms;
and Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction.
42 Richardson, Clarissa, 40.
43 Diderot, “Éloge,” 4:155–70. See also Donald Schier, “Diderot’s Translation of The Gamester.”
44 The quotation is from Macpherson, Harm’s Way, 61, and summarizes Watt’s insight on
p. 208 of Rise of the Novel.
wade through Richardson’s genteel epistolary prose will likely agree, for the
slow temporality of that readerly process is punctured by the intensity of just a
few critical moments, in which its plot thickens into decisive, tragic action.45
At least here, affinities between bourgeois tragedy and the early novel seem
hard to deny. And so if we take Clarissa as a high water mark for the devel-
opment of realist fiction (and I think we should), the novel comes into its
own precisely as a bourgeois tragedy.
Clarissa’s lasting importance to the serious treatment of the everyday
is confirmed in a number of important prose works concerned with the
suffering of the haute bourgeois, among which we might count The Gamester
(written following Moore’s correspondence with Richardson), Frances
Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (which she dedicated to the nov-
elist in 1761), and Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782), especially attuned to the
precariousness and pain that haunts one’s pursuit of happiness. Together
they bear witness to the gradual dissolution of genre into realism, as Fredric
Jameson has recently put it, a “middle state more natural [and] according to
real life” that Burney saw as the promise of Cecilia’s depiction of everyday
suffering and which Diderot sought to canonize tonally as le sérieux.46 But
it’s also clear that the more overtly “sentimental” works that came out of the
middle decades of the century owed a profound debt to the serious genre
that British authors were carving out only a few years before. Foundational
texts in this tradition, such as Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David
Simple (1742), bore witness to the pervasiveness of modern affliction and
answered an urgent need to mediate those distresses through the s pectatorial
aesthetics of tragedy. A standing catalogue of the ways that everyday people
suffer and look upon the suffering of others, sentimental fiction depends
upon a recognition that the ordinary has worth and dignity, mourning
its loss even as it mitigates the harshest effects of its social and descriptive
realisms. In some cases, such as David Simple’s 1753 sequel, Volume the
Last, the sentimental novel collapses inward, becoming itself a bourgeois
tragedy, as if to dramatize David’s fall from pitying bourgeois to the objecti-
fied pauvre honteux sketched exquisitely in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental
Journey (1768).
One might read such diversions from the traditional genealogy of bour-
geois tragedy as evidence of its flagging imaginative vision rather than its
lasting literary presence, but this would fail to account for a number of
45 Macpherson, Harm’s Way, 61.

46 Burney, Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 2:136.
revived and new middling tragic works that appear in the last quarter of the
century and stretch well into the decades of social unrest that open the next.
Thus, Henry “The Man of Feeling” Mackenzie’s 1784 adaptation of Fatal
Curiosity contends with George Colman the Elder’s more successful revival
two years earlier (as The Shipwreck); Sophia Lee’s smash debut, A Chapter of
Accidents, was a “serio-comic” rewrite of Diderot’s 1758 drame, Le Pére de
famille, for the Haymarket’s 1780 season; still later, Hill’s Fatal Extravagance
becomes a matinee “dramatic piece” as The Prodigal (1793), one of many
transmutations of bourgeois tragedy back into “lower” pantomime, melodra-
matic, and afterpiece forms. Despite all odds—and perhaps good sense—
both Pamela’s unauthorized sequel (The Fatal Interview in 1782) and Clarissa
(in Johann Heinrich Steffens’ 1765 German version, and later, Robert
Porett’s 1788 attempt for Britons in the Oporto community) are rewritten as
bona fide domestic dramas. The Continent’s infatuation with British bour-
geois tragedy was well known and reciprocated, as Diderot’s archetype for
the genre, Le Fils naturel (1757), was novelized as The Natural Son in 1799,
while Lessing’s Anglophilic Trauerspiel, Miss Sara Sampson (1755) became
The Fatal Elopement over a two-year period in the pages of the Lady’s
Magazine. Emilia Galotti (1772) gave rise to no fewer than three versions in
the 1790s, only one of which finally made it to production for audiences
at Drury Lane.47 Countless so-called melodramas in the first decades of
the nineteenth century—many of which depict rural poor, disenfranchised
laborers, tradesmen, and ruined women—announced themselves not as
exemplars of that wrongly discredited form, but rather as “domestic
drama . . . founded on real facts” (as the playbill for Edward Fitzball’s 1833
Jonathan Bradford; or, Murder at the Roadside Inn claims, and several others
confirm).48 If the sheer number of new and revived productions, and the
market for their adaptation and translation, is any indication, the last dec-
ades of the eighteenth century may be the unacknowledged heyday of bour-
geois tragedy. No wonder, perhaps, for by then a much more recognizable
sense of the social middle seemed to have solidified.49
Even though many of these latter-day works were met with a mixed recep-
tion, and few (if any) have ascended to canon, the cumulative impression
47 Baker, “Early English Translation of Miss Sara Sampson,” 103–4. On the three Emilia
Galottis, see Baker, Biographia Dramatica, 2:193.
48 These include, among several others, Peckett, Susan Hoply; Buckstone, Luke the Labourer;
and Bernard, Lucille.
49 Take, for example, Wahrman’s argument in Imagining the Middle Class, which focuses on
the turn of the century.
one receives is of a genre whose cultural energies remained vital and

whose structure of feeling gradually crystalized into the potent ideology
that Scott, Auerbach, and Moretti argue drives the nineteenth-century
middle class. The Victorian “serious century”—with its Hegelian “prose of
the world” and its formless tragedy—embodied a web of subtle emotions,
attitudes, and assumptions whose exploration was initiated more than a
century earlier in bourgeois tragedy, an imaginary now firmly entrenched
as cultural memory, as so many silent habits of thought, of gesture, indeed
of feeling. To return afresh to those founding moments is thus to be
reminded that navigating the middle rank was much more fraught than the
elder Crusoe’s triumphalism and Whig histories alike would have us believe,
and that the happiness the former imagines as essential to middling life was
all too often an illusion.
* * *
Still, for many critics even to this day, tragedy doesn’t easily accommodate
ordinary suffering, even less so when that suffering is prosaic. So I want
to turn now to think briefly about some of the claims made by the genre’s
detractors, and thereby situate this book’s argument in relation to recent
work on tragedy and the history of emotion. For example, one view of
tragedy implies that its bourgeois form devalues the genre, bringing it low
into vulgarity, making it unrecognizable as really tragic. I mentioned a ver-
sion of this argument earlier in relation to Steiner’s classic thesis, but the
sentiment is certainly not uncommon. Defenders of heroic or “high” tragic
forms assure us that tragedy is essentially aristocratic, the genre’s grandeur
unable to countenance the middling (much less lower) orders of society.
The height of the tragic protagonist’s fall is interpreted as a function of their
elevated social standing, accordingly, in turn buttressing many of tragedy’s
other cherished poetic notions: Aristotelian principles like hubris (pride),
hamartia (error or flaw), and peripeteia (reversal or turning point) seem
to arise naturally from contexts in which “the very great” assert their agency
in the world.50
Comparing Lillo unfavorably to Shakespeare, Charles Lamb notes by
contrast that the trouble with bourgeois tragedy is that its figures lack “a
great or heroic nature, which is the only worthy object of tragedy.”51 If our
pity is underwritten by the magnitude of the hero’s loss, then who cares if an
50 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 207.

51 Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” 4:43.
ordinary apprentice dies? Doesn’t that sort of thing happen every day?
“Ordinary people die naturally,” Northrop Frye observes, “a hero’s death has
an outrage or the portentous in it.”52 Unacknowledged here, though difficult
to miss, are the gendered implications of the great hero, who is typically
imagined as a great man striving against some outside force that impinges
upon his will. This life, this kind of life, is simply of more value than the
ordinary and homely ones of everyday men and women. A kind of category
error, representing the sufferings of commoners as if they were tragic slips,
accidentally, on the banana-peel of bathos. Following this line of thought,
G. W. F. Hegel avers in his Lectures on Aesthetics (pub. 1835) that tragedy
resists the ordinary in all its forms, for the genre paradigmatically “strip[s]
off the matter of everyday life and its mode of appearance.”53 Is it any sur-
prise then that tragedy increasingly comes to be seen as a lost, quasi-mythic
art form?
A common assumption in the views I’ve outlined here is that tragedy
embodies a set of transhistorical, almost prelapsarian values according to
which these comparative judgments make sense, values that (as it turns out)
likely owe less to classical or early modern thought than to the heady
philosophy of nineteenth-century German Idealism. Recent work by Simon
Goldhill, Joshua Billings, Miriam Leonard, and Blair Hoxby, for example,
has shown persuasively that so much of what we take as essential to tragedy
arises in fact from a specific, post-Kantian reading of a handful of Attic
dramas.54 Around 1790, a group of thinkers based in Jena (the most influ-
ential of which were Hegel and Schiller, whom I’ve already mentioned,
as well as brothers August Wilhelm and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel,
Friedrich Hölderlin, and Friedrich Schelling) began theorizing what Hoxby
refers to as the “transcendental idea of tragedy,” a philosophical approach
to the tragic often in sharp contrast to what was actually performed and
theorized in early modernity.55 In their wake, tragedy increasingly came to
be defined by a narrow set of “timeless” thematic ideals: “action, collision,
fate working as an invisible spirit, the death of the hero, and the intimation
of moral freedom that his destruction yields.”56 The newborn spirit of
tragedy, as Nietzsche will characterize the genre’s classical origins, sees
the hero lean into the Dionysian forces that inevitably, though gloriously,
52 Frye, Notebooks on Renaissance Literature, 20:282. 53 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:289.

54 Goldhill, Sophocles; Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic; Leonard, Tragic Modernities; and
Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?.
55 Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?, 4. 56 Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?, 25.
annihilate him. This philosophy of the tragic, with its search for meaning
and existential assertions of agency, becomes a theme central to the so-called
“modern condition.”
Worth noting here is that this distinction between tragedy’s classical
poetics and a turn-of-the-century “philosophy of the tragic” isn’t exactly
new. Peter Szondi’s influential “Essay on the Tragic” spelled this out in 1961,
the same year that Steiner first eulogized the genre.57 For Szondi, the tragic
named a distinctly modern, philosophical disposition that departed from
the Aristotelian frame through which tragedy was traditionally approached
as art. Unlike the classical model, the modern concept of the tragic concerns
the subject’s autonomy against the objective necessities of law and death.
This distinction seems to refigure—for world literature—the tectonic process
of disenchantment that Max Weber names Entzauberung, a shift that sees
the Enlightenment’s erosion of older mythic forms as a kind of ineluctable
loss, as a desperate grasping after meaning that plays out across the broader
culture of modernizing Europe. Yet what’s become clearer in light of recent
work is our understanding of the ways in which that late Idealist philosophy
of the tragic, with its modern “tragic sense of life,” has retroactively come to
color practically every notion we hold about what tragedy as a genre really is,
was, or ought to be. Whether one is a classical humanist or a New Critic, a
Lacanian or a New Historicist, our discussions of tragedy remain dominated
by Jena’s questions, terms, and assumptions, the practical effect of which
has been to limit the canon to a handful of exemplary types and tropes.58
In reality, tragedy has always been much messier—a much more capacious
and certainly less hermetic tradition.
What’s most striking, however, is how this generic triage often takes
place around questions of tragic emotion, installing a hierarchy of suffer-
ings that denigrates those feelings explored in depictions of middling
misfortune. We saw this sort of condescension at work above when the
quality of bourgeois tragedy’s pathos first came into question, but here the
class connotations of that imagined Aristotelian hero converge with an
anachronistic, Idealist understanding of what it is for that hero to suffer. In
one of the founding moments in the philosophy of the tragic, for instance,
Schiller will argue that the genre’s true exemplars depict a specifically
tragic suffering—or rather more precisely, a “moral resistance to suffering”
that bifurcates the rational will from emotion.59 This “noble,” conventionally
57 Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, 1. 58 Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?, chap. 1.

59 Schiller, “On the Pathetic,” 49; Bradley, Lectures on Poetry, 81.
masculine state (pace Antigone) is always to be distinguished from “mere

suffering,” an ordinary pathos that is passive and pathetic, trivial and
unworthy of admiration or compassion.60 The brute facts of affliction are in
many ways a scandal to this grand tragic tradition, for such facts represent
an impoverished moral and bodily state to be denied by the protagonist’s
unbending will. Tragedy celebrates the hero’s transcendence of their “sensu-
ous being,” in Schiller’s technical vocabulary for the affective body, turning
affliction into its other—anesthetized bliss, sublime self-determination, an
occasion for melancholic philosophizing, and perhaps ultimately, a glorious
dis-embodiment.
This is tragedy as Kantian aesthetic experience rather than r hetorical
and affective practice, a vision of the genre largely alien to the period,
when pathos was taken as tragedy’s very essence and raison d’être. In fact,
eighteenth-century tragedy was much more sensually attuned to its enacted
and narrated experience of suffering, seeing this action as the practical
exploration of feelings, as a kind of training for “think[ing] with emotions.”61
Tragedy drew upon the spectator’s full bodily engagement in the work of
(even virtual) mourning, thus “inculcat[ing] on men the proper government
of their passions,” as Hugh Blair’s popular rhetorical manual put it in 1783.62
“No man goes to the theatre to study metaphysics” remarked another Briton
the same decade in which the Idealists would claim precisely the opposite,
with profound consequences for our understanding of tragedy’s relation
to feeling.63 In fact, nowhere has this denigration of embodied emotion
been felt more than in relation to bourgeois tragedy. In such conditions,
tragedies of the middling sort are too easily classed as melodrama avant la
lettre, swallowed into an ancillary account of the era’s “illegitimate theatre”
where that illegitimacy is defined not by the legalities of the theatre’s
patent system (according to which melodrama was illegitimate) but by a
value judgment that sees their affects as a maudlin and undignified “mode
of excess.”64 If this is tragedy, it is tragedy manqué, its ordinary suffering
not to be engaged with on its own terms, but to be dismissed as “mere
misfortune.” Why then, one might well respond, did so many eighteenth-
century Britons argue that these texts were tragic? What did they see in
60 Schiller, “On the Pathetic,” 49; 45; and Bradley, Lectures on Poetry, 81.
61 Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?, 41 (emphasis in original).
62 Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric, 2:335. 63 “Poetry,” 15:203.
64 The phrase “mode of excess” is of course a reference to Peter Brooks’ landmark,
Melodramatic Imagination. See his use of the term, for example, on pp. 64 and 199.
the way these ordinary people suffered? And what happens to our critical
histories if we take their claims seriously?
* * *
To answer these questions, this book adopts a very different approach.
Following Williams, whose Modern Tragedy remains critical reading on the
genre, I take “tragedy” to emerge from a tension between the everyday
experience of loss and misery, and the specific literatures and theoretical
traditions that go by that name. A repository for many of a culture’s deepest
beliefs and contradictions, tragedy is not a stagnant category beholden to
archaic rules (whether these are antique or an invention of Enlightenment),
or a “single or permanent kind of fact.” Rather, the genre tells of an
unfolding cultural conversation regarding the ways in which we suffer and
collectively mourn loss and hardship. “A series of experiences and conven-
tions and institutions,” tragedy gives a culture’s suffering performative and
imaginative shape, thereby opening up new possibilities for its enactment in
ways that necessarily bleed out of its formal constraints. Less an idealized,
transhistorical poetics than an evolving negotiation of our feeling in the
social imaginary, what goes by tragedy documents a culture’s developing
experience of affliction.
This approach is sympathetic to the conceptual framework David Worrall
uses to theorize Georgian theatre as a network of evolving social agencies,
especially insofar as we both envision the performance space as a locus
of collective mediation and debate. So, too, the nuanced work of theatre
scholars like Daniel O’Quinn, Julia Swindells, and David Francis Taylor
(among others), who manage to move from the received texts of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century British drama to the political, artistic, and otherwise
material conditions of actual performances and reception.65 The chapters
that follow attempt to balance historical detail against careful close reading in
ways that are clearly inspired by their work. The Making of British Bourgeois
Tragedy’s focus differs, however, in that it locates that assemblage primarily
around sites of textualized and performed emotion, and hence eschews the
formal constraints of standard theatre studies in favor of a genre bound by
the difficult ordinary feelings it collectively works through.
As this might suggest, therefore, my argument’s theoretical sources lie
more deeply in the contemporary turns to affect and history of emotion that
65 Worrall, Celebrity, Performance, Reception; O’Quinn, Staging Governance; Swindells,

Glorious Causes; and Taylor, Theatres of Opposition.
have continued Williams’ foundational work on structures of feeling. Williams

famously defines that analytical category as “social experience in solution,”
the as-yet unformalized intensities of lived experience that he positions as
anterior to the reifying effects of ideology.66 This point is worth flagging
here since one oft-cited notion of bourgeois tragedy claims that the genre’s
rise reflects the arrival of a middle-class consciousness struggling against
the Ancien Régime. Without recourse to claims about the structures of
feeling that made middling ideology possible, however, the genre’s origins
in the first half of the century (to say nothing of its Jacobean roots) would
seem to further disprove the “bourgeois tragedy as class consciousness”
thesis since, for starters, the genre appears before the class it purportedly
represents. The truth is more complicated and certainly more interesting,
drawing our attention to questions of historical causality in relation to social
representation and emotional habitus. In the British context at least, the
experimental tragic works that made up bourgeois tragedy offered explora-
tory affective scripts that predated a stable social identity and a defined class
consciousness, as if to call that identity into being around certain values and
the experience of loss. The earliest bourgeois tragedies thus seem to forecast
instead that rank’s emergence, to contribute to its so-called “rise” by taking
the ordinary and its misfortunes deadly seriously. Seizing upon the archaic
forms of tragedy, ordinary people imagined modes of being-in-the-world
later bourgeois tragedies can be said to reflect as empirical objects of social
representation. Lauren Berlant outlines a similar process when she advo-
cates a close attention to the way the aesthetic engages in the work of world-
ing: “Affect’s saturation of form can communicate the conditions under
which a historical moment appears as a visceral moment, assessing the way a
thing that is happening finds its genre, which is the same as finding its event.”
Hence, she goes on to clarify: “The aesthetic or formal rendition of affective
experience provides evidence of historical processes.”67 Or as Moretti’s
cheeky assessment of what “seriousness” means to the driving politics of
the genre moyen puts it: “Serious is the bourgeoisie on its way to being the
ruling class.”68
Like much of the recent revisionist work in tragedy, therefore, this book
expands our understanding of what the genre was by attending closely to
that affective work, withholding totalizing aesthetic judgments in favor of
anthropological curiosity, description, and critical reparation. Interestingly,
66 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 133.

67 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 16. 68 Moretti, Bourgeois, 74.
to take bourgeois tragedy on its own terms is not necessarily to reject

wholesale the insights of what will become the philosophy of the tragic
(though it does complicate them). Nor is it to paper over the very real dis-
juncture that the genre’s emergence in the eighteenth century represents
(as if tragedy’s domestication wasn’t a flagrant violation of many of the
period’s most cherished poetic and Aristotelian pieties). In many ways, what
emerges instead is something of a conceptual and practical bridge linking
those ancient and modern values that were circulating simultaneously. To
think deeply about what the emergence of bourgeois tragedy does with
and through emotion is to consider how a structure of feeling—with its
aspirations, contradictions, and possibilities—solidifies into a genre of not
only aesthetic but also historical experience. Because of this, The Making of
British Bourgeois Tragedy is an account of tragedy’s passage into a bourgeois
modernity, its passage, that is, into a world characterized at once as tragic
and prosaic.
Neither a sentimental devaluation of a traditional genre nor a disastrous
fall from an ideal form, bourgeois tragedy is instead one aspect of a larger
“bourgeois revaluation” in this view, an historical event in European (espe-
cially British) culture whereby the middle station gained an importance and
moral standing that was traditionally viewed as characteristic of the Ancien
Régime.69 If there was a “rise” to the middling sort, then, it followed upon a
more diffuse process of investment whereby the ordinary and this-worldly
happiness were valorized in the imaginary, a process which took up the
embodied memory of everyday experience and creatively enacted its loss as
loss. What came into place in Georgian Britain were thus conditions under
which the lives of these people and their attachments could be understood,
once destroyed, as needing redress, as having been instances of grave suffer-
ing that necessitated mourning and reflection in the arts. Tragedy’s bour-
geoisification located worth and dignity in common people, in the things
they found delightful, and the shared way of life that gave them comfort and
meaning. It provided a frame for recognizing the merit of this ascendant
class built on family, capitalism, and piety, and just as importantly, a frame
for displaying and exploring the frailty and vulnerability of both their bod-
ies and ideals. Ironically too, these are broken, time and again, under the
strain of holding fast to these same values, ultimately calling their justice
69 See McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity. On the concept of the “revaluation” as opposed to

“rise” of the middle class, see chap. 3. Cf. Jacob and Secretan’s “Introduction” in In Praise of
Ordinary People, 7–8.
and truth into question. But a new sensitivity to the available comforts and
happiness of this life underscores a point of Stanley Cavell’s, who (in a dis-
cussion of Freud’s late essay “On Transience”) notes that our sense of the
tragic is sustained by a deep affection for what we esteem and fear to lose in
this world; mourning its future loss is the toll one pays in “accepting the
world’s beauty.”70
For what ultimately is the elder Crusoe’s warning if not a claim about the
deep worthiness of his modest way of life, or an urgent petition for his son
to find happiness in its simpler pleasures? What is it, finally, if not a scene
colored by the same concerns that propel bourgeois and domestic tragedy?
“I say,” Crusoe painfully recollects, “I observed the Tears run down his Face
very plentifully, and especially when he spoke of my Brother who was kill’d;
and that when he spoke of my having Leisure to repent, and none to assist
me, he was so mov’d, that he broke off the Discourse, and told me, his Heart
was so full he could say no more to me” (6). Crusoe’s wanderlust will reject
his father and cast a skeptical eye upon the worthiness of his way of life.
Only after the hard labor and solitude of the island, long after his father is
gone, will Robinson come home, confident in the dignity of his person, for
by then he has transcended the mediocrity of an imagined middling exist-
ence. Yet one suspects too that Father Crusoe knew well about the frailty of
his home and way of life—much more so than he lets on to his headstrong
son. The vicissitudes of the middle class may swing in a narrower ambit, but
they are not for that reason any less painful. The urban world of trade and
financial obligation could be as hazardous to navigate as the sea, its failure
as isolating as shipwreck. A woman need not be entangled in royal intrigue
in order to find herself abused and wounded by those holding more power.
And the family home, with its potential for cold, hidden violence, could be
as alien and threatening as the savage abroad. The prosaic world had its own
dangers and sufferings, for which a new aesthetic idiom, calibrated to the
ordinary, came to be fashioned.
* * *
Each chapter that follows narrates this revaluation in more detail, exploring
the emotional practices through which bourgeois tragedy imagined its
world. Chapter 1 begins by placing George Lillo’s 1731 landmark play, The
London Merchant, in the context of the experimental theatre of the early
70 Cavell, “Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” 172.

eighteenth century as well as the gritty world of London’s commercial

city-center. Reading that play alongside burlesques and satires on the middle
and lower sorts by Edward Ravenscroft, John Gay, William Hogarth, Henry
Fielding, and John Kelly, I trace a transvaluation underway in middling
life as it occurs through the radical theatre of Lillo and a handful of
contemporaries. Lillo’s genre-bending assertion of the dignity of the ordinary
confounded expectations, I show, offering an audacious challenge to
entrenched ideas about one’s lot in the Ancien Régime. In this way, the earliest
bourgeois tragedies began to invest ordinary forms of suffering with a gravity
that had once been unthinkable.
Chapter 2 brings the argument “closer to home,” leaning upon that meta-
phor’s work in order to think about affliction in the context of the middling
sort’s domestic values. Broadening the archive of the genre’s source material
by situating Georgian domestic tragedy alongside the true crime narratives
it in many cases adapted, I argue that a constellation of texts stressed the
troubling familiarity of domestic tragedy, the sense of danger and proximity
to suffering that inheres in spaces simultaneously imagined as inviolable
and increasingly bound by the warmth of affection. As readings of Lillo’s
Fatal Curiosity and Arden of Feversham demonstrate, “striking close to home”
imagines an all-too-ordinary experience of pain that the tragedy, by its veri-
similitude, inexorably unearths. If bourgeois tragedy sought to evoke pity in
its audience, the task of regarding pain was never uncomplicated.
I turn to the novel in Chapter 3, returning Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa
to its place in the history of bourgeois tragedy by tracing its affinities to
precursors like Charles Johnson’s drama, Cælia, a decade earlier. In a well-
known twist in literary history, the novel’s tragic turn elicited the public’s
disgust, with a variety of correspondents pleading with the author to reward
his heroine’s virtue with a happy ending. Working through painful responses
to the novel’s finale, I examine poetic justice in the period as a secular theology,
arguing that it offered a way of redressing the injustice of this world by
enacting a deep moral order in the world it represented. A mode of generic
wish-fulfillment, poetic justice signaled at once an urgent demand for this-
worldly happiness as well as an ambivalent attachment to life. Richardson
maintained, however, that a realistic tragedy entailed an inscrutable
Providence, demanding faith on the part of the reader and afflicted. Staging
a contest over the possibility of pain’s fullness in tragedy, Clarissa’s suffering
launched a midcentury debate over how that experience was navigable.
Chapter 4 heads back to the theatre, exploring the affective stakes of
“prosaic suffering,” a turn of phrase meant to denote not only the literal
prose of its dialogue but also the quotidian realities of the life it imagined.
Offering a close comparative reading of Aaron Hill’s The Fatal Extravagance
and Edward Moore’s The Gamester, I place the developing conventions of
British bourgeois tragedy in conversation with the insights of Richardson,
Diderot, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and those actors called upon to embody
its emotion, and argue that prosaic suffering performed its grief with a
raw immediacy, in ways that were absorptive rather than theatrical, and
provocatively disenchanted in their implications. Prosaic suffering presents
the tragic figure as an emblem of abandonment, this chapter contends,
in which everyday life is experienced as simultaneously leaden and trivial
(as Georg Lukács claimed of the novel). In this way, bourgeois drama’s
“natural picture” adapted the novel’s “writing to the moment” and embodied
emotional practices characteristic of a middling mode of existence marked
by the tragic.
Chapter 5 considers the sentimental novel, arguing that its often over-
wrought narrative form—whereby sensibility mediates one’s pleasurable
engagement with a world in pain—belies its development alongside bour-
geois tragedy. The Adventures of David Simple (1744), reckoned the first
sentimental novel, illustrates this well, for it narrates the process by which
the middling object of affliction (unfit for tragic representation only a dec-
ade before) became the feeling subject theorized decades later in moral
philosophy. In fact, Sarah Fielding was steeped in Lillo’s and Richardson’s
work, and part of a broader literary milieu that included her brother and other
early theorists of bourgeois tragedy. Her novel carries on an intertextual
commentary on the ordinariness of suffering and the difficulty of navigating
its approach, adopting aspects of bourgeois drama’s “aesthetic of affective
identification” and anticipating what would later be termed the “serious
genre.” Reading the culture of sensibility alongside bourgeois tragedy
therefore—in works as varied as Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751), Laurence
Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), Sophia Lee’s
Chapter of Accidents (1780), and others—I contest the standing assumption
that realism is a response to sentiment, rather than a mutual negotiation of
the era’s feeling and form.
I conclude by arguing that contrary to our current understanding, bour-
geois tragedy was alive and well at the turn of the nineteenth century, if
anything invigorated by a middle class eager to be seen as having arrived.
Looking briefly to a number of domestic and bourgeois tragedies often erro-
neously labeled melodramas, I suggest that the genre’s influence continued
to be felt for years after its supposed heyday. But I also gesture to the larger
implications of the genre for the continental Enlightenment, connecting the

English tradition to the bourgeois tragedies and serious fiction of Diderot,
Louis-Sébastien Mercier, G. E. Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, and Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe (all of whose work made its way back to Britain in
translation). Returning to one of the book’s core themes, I argue that the
dignity of the ordinary assumes a central place in this tradition, which
increasingly views modernity as a tragic condition—and the stage of revolu-
tion. Culminating with a reading that places Goethe’s landmark Die Leiden
des jungen Werthers (1774) in dialogue with its theatricalization in Frederick
Reynolds’ little-studied domestic drama, Werter: A Tragedy (1786), I close
the book by noting that if British bourgeois tragedy imagined an “ordinary
suffering,” by the close of the century, and on the eve of the age’s greatest
social upheavals, ordinariness—indeed, being middling—seemed itself a
kind of modern affliction.
1
The Bourgeois Revaluation
of Tragedy
Dignity and the Ordinary in
George Lillo’s London
Bourgeois tragedy was once radical. Long the exclusive domain of kings and
nobles, figures whose suffering was “heroick” and whose fall was thought to
“powerfully strike upon the public sympathy,” tragedy in Georgian London
increasingly found space to enact the misfortunes of everyday people with a
measure of seriousness and dignity.1 A number of conditions had to be in
place to bring this “bourgeois revaluation” about, and though many of the
aesthetic and social changes that accompanied this shift weren’t embraced
immediately, only becoming apparent in the century that followed, their
possibility can be traced to a specific moment in cultural history. This chapter
narrates the beginnings of this change, snatching George Lillo’s The London
Merchant (1731) from much later traditions of sentimental and melodramatic
theatre in order to place it in dialogue with its grittier contemporaneous
context, where the miseries of ordinary folk were more likely to be the butt
of the joke than an occasion for mourning.2
Drawn from real life, the first bourgeois tragedies were written by and for
the people they depicted. Lillo, for example, was a hustler, a merchant, and a
Citizen. Almost everything we know about him has been pieced together
from Theophilus Cibber’s 1753 Lives of the Poets, Thomas Davies’ “Account
of His Life” in the collected Works of 1775, and a thin trail of archival records;
almost every detail confirms a stereotype of the early modern capitalist.3
Born to a Dutch father and an English mother, Joris van Lilloo was baptized
in 1691 at the dissenting Reformed Church of Austin Friars, a haven for
1 Reynolds, Seven Discourses, 103.

2 Lillo, London Merchant, 114–210. Subsequent citations refer to this edition and appear
parenthetically in the text.
3 Cibber, Lives of the Poets, 5:338–40; Davies, “Life of Mr. George Lillo,” ix–xlvii.
The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering. Alex Eric Hernandez,
Oxford University Press (2019). © Alex Eric Hernandez.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846574.001.0001
refugees fleeing religious persecution on the continent.4 A creature of the

City, Lillo likely grew up in what was then called Moorfields, an unfashion-
able section of east London in the shadow of the financial district, bordered
on one end by Grub Street, and popular with prostitutes and thieves (the
notorious highwayman and one-time apprentice, Jack Sheppard, would
retreat there on at least one of his escapes from prison in the 1720s). Lillo
seems to have determined to make good, however. He took up the family’s
trade in jewelry, grew its business, and began showing up at a relatively new
civic fraternity, the Order of Free and Accepted Masons. Possibly through
connections made there, Lillo—whose name had been Anglicized some years
before, masonic rolls indicate—began writing for the stage in the 1730s,
accumulating an impressive £800 for his efforts at a time when authors were
lucky to profit from the earnings of a single benefit show. Contemporaries
paint a picture of an active playwright, stout and blind in one eye, who
offered close direction to his actors and had a natural touch for dialogue, if
not at the risk of an occasional overstep in decorum. Though he later moved
to the commercial docklands of Rotherhithe on the south bank of the Thames,
at his death he was laid to rest among Richard Burbage and the Elizabethan
players buried in the churchyard of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch (fitting for a
man who so highly venerated Shakespeare). A savvy print capitalist, com-
mitted to low church Protestantism, yet by all accounts jovial and good-
hearted, Lillo’s life was a model of upwards mobility, practically a cliché of
the bourgeois “sliding silently and smoothly thro’ the world.”
In point of fact, however, Lillo’s rise in status was incredibly exceptional.
For decades now, scholars have chipped away at boilerplate accounts of the
indomitable middle class and their “drama of sensibility,” leaving us a much
richer sense of the realities of living and writing in the City. Taking aim
at what he calls the “politeness-sensibility paradigm” dominating our his-
tories of the period—a paradigm Lillo and other bourgeois tragedians are
often uncritically lumped into—Simon Dickie notes that eighteenth-century
Britain was a mean-spirited and unforgiving place for common people,
hardly the setting in which one would expect to see the serious depiction
of ordinary people in distress.5 In London especially, burlesques, low-life
humor, and everyday cruelties made the middling and lower sort the stuff of
laughter, amusements for a public largely indifferent to their personal
4 Pallette, “Biography of George Lillo,” 263.

5 Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter, chap. 3; Bernbaum, Drama of Sensibility, chap. 1; Dobrée,
English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, 254.
The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy 31
misfortune. Long-held assumptions about social order and the capacity of

inferiors to feel pain meant that these indignities were strikingly common-
place, reifying the operative hierarchies of power and status even within
similar social strata. “It is hard for modern scholars to appreciate how absurd
it could be, in 1740 or even 1800, to suggest that ordinary people had fine
feelings,” Dickie reminds us, drawing out the implications for the era’s
literature: “neoclassical aesthetics allowed common people to be represented
only as objects of laughter.”6 More strikingly, the principal figures in many
of these early domestic dramas move in and among the underclass, in
scenes whose bloody-mindedness belies any notion of the era’s “softening”
or “genteel” morality. Given the rough-and-tumble milieu from which
bourgeois tragedy arose, its attempt at dignifying the ordinary would seem
itself to be an achievement, a strangely humanitarian outlier in comparison
to the status quo.
Nevertheless, many present-day readers of the play have seen a less benign
process unfolding. John O’Brien’s sophisticated reading of The London
Merchant, for example, situates its debut (though not necessarily the genre’s)
within the lax regulatory environment of the 1720s and 30s that turned the
playhouse into a site of harlequinade and pantomime entertainments. In
his view, Lillo’s play was a “counterattack” to this manic comic energy from
below, an attempt at policing labor by a “self-aware bourgeois class” con-
solidating its authority.7 Consequently, Samuel Richardson’s handbook for
would-be tradesmen, The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1734), cites The London
Merchant as the only exception to the rule against theatregoing (and even
that, only very rarely). George Barnwell’s true-to-life story offered a lesson,
in his view, aimed at all those idle apprentices who had knocked off early to
see a show. Lillo’s play has thus been taken as the inspiration for a number
of similar moralizing works of the period, such as William Hogarth’s 1747
series, Industry and Idleness, which at one point was to name Idle, its fallen
apprentice, after his tragic theatrical precursor.8 In line with this, a number
of critics over the past several decades have faulted the play’s glorification of
the patriarchal, the mercantile, and the pious as the nefarious work of bour-
geois ideology. These readings at least appear to make sense of the drama’s
institutionalization at midcentury as the annual Christmas performance for
6 Dickie, 111.
7 O’Brien, Harlequin Britain, 158. See also Burke, “The London Merchant and Eighteenth-
Century British Law,” 362.
8 Paulson, Hogarth, 2:308.
London apprentices, not to mention Charles Lamb’s verdict in 1811 that

the play was reduced to a “nauseous sermon.”9 A dire warning for all those
assembled—one which, if the Biographia Dramatica can be believed, occa-
sionally succeeded—The London Merchant offers a prescient illustration
of the Foucauldian carceral mindset at work through the regulation of
ordinary feelings.10
From the vantage point of ideology critique, then, Lillo’s play becomes a
very different sort of intervention, less about the rising cultural standing of
the middling than about a downward pressure exerted against those clam-
oring underneath. Yet though many of the details here are compelling, the
picture remains incomplete in ways that obscure a broader account of the
genre. For one, assuming the play’s reception after its institutionalization
in the 1750s to be typical downplays its originality, retroactively diffusing
the political and aesthetic subversiveness of representing London Cits as
objects worthy of metaphysical handwringing decades earlier. By midcentury,
this notion would have been much less controversial, even if (as Dickie and
others remind us) it would remain under negotiation well into the next
century. These readings also tend to emphasize the way tradesmen like
Richardson came to appropriate the play’s moral, downplaying the contra-
dictions between law and desire that the play explores, especially in the
figure of Millwood, the charismatic confidence woman who precipitates
Barnwell’s fall. And though a top-down carceral logic might explain why
apprentices were allowed to indulge in the play, it doesn’t answer why they,
tradesmen, and other middling sorts of people (to say nothing of countless
others, from gentlemen to Queen Caroline herself) flocked to its performance
in the first place—or more puzzlingly, why they kept coming.
Stranger yet, if The London Merchant came to be enlisted in the
maintenance of a middle-rank cultural hegemony (whose very existence as
a “self-aware” bloc is one of the most hotly debated topics among social
historians of the period, and a critical problem for theatre scholars since at
least Lisa Freeman’s work on the play11), that fact tells us little about the initial
skepticism that met its debut in the summer of 1731, when it wasn’t at all
clear that the play even was a tragedy. Its later canonization notwithstanding,
the question raised in those first performances—could the life of an appren-
tice be properly understood as tragic?—aligned it closely with, and not
9 Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” 4:43.

10 Baker et al., Biographia Dramatica, 2:376–8.
11 Freeman, Character’s Theater, chap. 3.
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Title: Häpeä
Romaani
Author: Veikko Korhonen
Release date: October 25, 2023 [eBook #71956]
Language: Finnish
Original publication: Helsinki: Kust.Oy Fundament, 1918
Credits: Juhani Kärkkäinen and Tapio Riikonen
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HÄPEÄ ***

HÄPEÄ
Romaani
Kirj.
VEIKKO KORHONEN
Helsingissä, Kustannusosakeyhtiö Fundament, 1918.

I.
Kesäkuun sunnuntaiaamu valkeni poutaisena ja kirkkaana. Kaste oli

maasta haihtunut auringon paisteessa ja hiljainen etelätuuli värisytti
puiden lehtiä. Heinämäen Tuomas käveli morsiamensa Annan
kanssa kirkkomaan aitaviertä mietteisiin vaipuneena.
— Tänään siis meitä ensikerran kuulutetaan, virkkoi Anna

naurahtaen.
— Niin.
Tuomas sanoi sen alaspainetuin katsein ja hieman masentuneella

äänellä.
— Mikä sinun on? kysyi ihmetellen Anna. Sinähän näytät niin

kovin alakuloiselta.
— En ymmärrä itsekään, mikä minua vaivaa. Se on jokin outo

ahdistus, jota minä en ymmärrä. Olethan sinä, Anna, minun aivan
yksin, aivan kokonaan?
Tuomas käänsi katseensa Annaan ja hapuili tämän kättä

omaansa.
Anna naurahti iloisesti, melkeinpä vallattomasti.
— Etkö sinä nyt sitä tiedä? Kenenkäs muunkaan minä nyt enää
olisin.
Kuulethan sen kohta kirkossa, jollet muuten usko.
Tuomaankin täytyi jo naurahtaa. Mitä hän turhia kyselikin.

Hänenhän oli kaunis, Rotkan mökin kaksikymmenvuotias Anna.
Kohta hän tulisi liitolleen saamaan vahvistuksen, jota hän oli
odottanut rauhoittuakseen. Tästä huolimatta hän ei voinut vapautua
kokonaan painostavasta tunteestaan. Niinkuin jokin näkymätön,
raskas käsi olisi häntä painanut. Ja niinkuin jokin salainen ääni
hänen korvaansa kuiskannut outoja, selittämättömiä aavistuksia.
Anna pyörähti portista kirkkotarhaan ja Tuomas seurasi hänen

perässään.
— Vieläkö sinä yhä vain murjottelet? virkkoi Anna happamesti.

Tällaistako se nyt onkin? Toisenlaiseksi minä tämän päivän
kuvittelin.
Anna käveli ripeästi nurmettunutta käytävää ja heitti olkansa yli

halveksivan katseen Tuomaaseen.
— Kuulehan! ehätti Tuomas hänen rinnalleen. Enhän minä sillä

mitään tarkoittanut. Et nyt suuttuisi tuommoisesta. Olenhan minä sitä
jo niin monesti sinulta ennenkin kysynyt.
Anna katseli Tuomaaseen epäluuloisesti.
— Etkä vieläkään sitä tiedä?
— Kyllähän minä sen jo…

— Niinpä elä sitten…
— Ka, kun ihan suuttui.
Tuomas koetti naurahtaa ja laskea kätensä Annan vyötäiselle.
— Mitäs kun aina sitä samaa…
Anna pyörähti edelleen kävelemään Tuomasta odottamatta.
— Anna.
— Mitä?
— Muistatko illan siellä Halmeahon rinteellä? Silloin lupasit, ettei

enää milloinkaan riideltäisi.
— Itsehän sinä riitaa rakennat aina epäilemällä minua.
— Mutta itsehän sinä olet sanonut…
— Mitä?
— Että sinulla on ollut muitakin…
— Eikö sinulla sitten ole ollut?
— Ei. Sinä saat minut aivan koskemattomana. Kaikki unelmani ja

tuulentupani olen sinun kanssasi rakennellut.
— Niin mitä sitten?
Annan kysymys oli särmikäs eikä Tuomas ehtinyt siihen mitään

vastaamaan, kun kellot tapulissa helähtivät soimaan. Hän paljasti
päänsä ja seisahti Annan rinnalle. Hänen vakavat kasvonsa
värähtivät liikutuksesta ja hän etsi Annan käden omaansa ja puristi
sitä lujasti.
— Meidän on mentävä kirkkoon, sanoi Anna hiljaa.
Kirkkomäellä kulki heidän ohitseen Topias Isotalo hymyillen ilkeästi

morsiusparille. Anna huomasi tämän ja punastuen kiirehti Tuomaan
edellä kirkon ovelle, josta kuului ulos urkujen humina ja virren
veisuu.
Kirkonaidan luona seisoi ryhmä miehiä verkkaisesti keskustellen.
Hekin olivat huomanneet Heinämäen Tuomaan morsiamineen

kirkkoon menevän ja vaikenivat hetkeksi.
— Nuorenpa se Tuomas vielä saikin, virkkoi vihdoin yksi joukosta.
— Vaikka itse on jo yli kolmenkymmenen…
— Muuten on kunnon mies.
— Miesten parhaita. Saa syntymään käsistään mitä vain tahtoo.
— Olisi Tuomas ollut paremmankin vaimon veroinen, virkkoi

Isotalon vanha isäntärenki.
— Miten niin? kysyi joku.
— Niin vain, että pietyn piikaisen taisi Tuomas saada, virkkoi

edellinen.
— Olisikohan…?
— Isotalon palveluksessa ei kukaan säily koskemattomana. Omin
silmin sen olen tullut näkemään, vahvisti isäntärenki ja lähti
astumaan kirkkoon.
— No sen korvaa nuoruus ja kauneus. Anna on pulskin tyttö

paikkakunnalla, virkkoi siihen joku miehistä ja keskustelu raukesi.
II.
Tuomas kyntää paloa helteisenä kesäkuun päivänä, yllään hurstiset

housut ja paita, hattu kannon nenään nostettuna, jaloissa paikatut
lapikkaat, saumoista auenneet.
Jo varhain aamulla on Tuomas käynyt työhönsä ja raatanut

levähtämättä joskus hihallaan hikeä otsalta pyyhkien.
Taloissa on ruokakello kutsunut aamiaiselle, mutta Tuomas ei ole

sitä huomannut. Vasta keskipäivällä hän seisottaa ruunansa, painaa
sahrat kannon juureen ja istuu kärventyneen koivunrungon tyvelle
lepäämään.
Kohta kaksi vuotta ummelleen on Heinämäen Tuomas raatanut

isältään Korpi-Tuomaalta perimässään mökissä Isontalon
takalistolla. Parannellut kartanon, perkannut peltoja, lisää raivannut
niittyä koskemattomaan korpeen ja iloinnut työnsä tuloksista. Anna,
hänen vaimonsa, ei vaan osannut iloita. Pyrki mukisemaan muka
puutteista, joita ei ollut, ei edes torppaa rakennellessa. Valitteli aina
paljoja töitä, vaikka Tuomas oli vuosi sitten, kun pikku Matti syntyi,
ottanut palvelijan vähentääkseen työtä vaimoltaan.
Tuomas pyyhkieli hikeä otsaltaan koivunrungolla istuessaan ja
mietti sitä yhtä ja samaa, mitä oli jo viikkokausia miettinyt.
Miksi Anna oli yhtämittaa pahalla tuulella ja tyytymätön oloonsa?

Mikä häntä vaivasi? Olihan kaikkea mitä tarvitsi, leipää yltäkyllin ja
koti semmoinen, josta olisi saattanut moni ylpeillä, toki olla ainakin
kiitollinen. Anna vaan ei ollut. Yhtämittaa mutisi, milloin mistäkin.
Viimeksi tänä aamuna siitä, että hän vaati joka aamu varhain
nousemaan. Ja siitäkin, ettei saanut kylissä käydä, vaikka mieli teki.
Tuomas puraisi piippunsa vartta. Hänen sisässään kuohahti.

Maatkoon, maatkoon vaikka päivät läpeensä. Juoskoon kyliä, kun
haluttaa ja kun ei koti miellytä. Menköön, menköön vaikka hiiteen.
Moni tyttö olisi varmaankin ollut kiitollisempi saadessaan semmoisen
kodin kuin Heinämäki. Anna ei vaan ollut.
Kylillä häntä kiitettiin uutterimmaksi ja kykenevimmäksi mieheksi

paikkakunnalla, mutta tuskin sitä Anna huomasi, koskapa yhtämittaa
kohteli olantakaisesti.
Semmoiseksiko se elämä nyt muuttuikin? Ainako vain saisi

Annalta nurjan mielen palkaksi vaivoistaan ja hyvyydestään?
Tokkohan Anna enää rakastikaan häntä?
Se ajatus sattui kipeänä ja vihlaisevana.
Tuomas tuli tahtomattaan muistelleeksi menneitä päiviä. Valoisat,

vuoroin synkät kuvasarjat alkoivat kulkea hänen ohitseen.
*****
Keväinen lauantai-ilta.
Koivuissa on lehti hiirenkorvalla ja hakametsässä laulaa rastas.
Poika kävelee karjapolkua mietteisiin vaipuneena. Takaapäin kuuluu
askeleita. Mökin Anna on lähtenyt vispilänvarpoja taittamaan. Poika
kääntyy katsomaan ja jää odottamaan. Tytöllä on kimppu
koivunvarpoja kainalossa, joista hän yhtä kuorii huomaamatta
poikaa, joka odottaa hymy suupielissä.
— Hyvää iltaa, sanoo poika.
— Hui, kun minä säikähdin!
Ja tyttö nauraa niin, että valkoiset hampaat välkkyvät.
— Mitä sinä täällä teet?
— Tulin vain huvikseni kävelemään ja etsimään variksenpesiä,

sanoo poika.
— Näytänkö minä sinun mielestäsi nyt niin variksenpesältä? kysyy

tyttö suupielessä veitikka värähdellen.
Poika hämmästyy.
— Enhän minä sinua… enkä minä luullut sinua täällä

tapaavanikaan.
Molemmat nauravat. Hakametsä tuoksuu, rastas katkonaisia

säveleitään kaiuttaa.
Poika kävelee tytön rinnalla, joka vikkelästi kuorii varpujaan ja

silmää joskus salaa poikaan. Tiesiköhän tuo minun tulevan? Mitähän
tuo aikoo?
— Tuossapa olisi hyvä torpan paikka, sanoo poika ajatuksissaan
katsellen sileää rinnettä, jossa kasvaa muutamia nuoria koivuja.
Antaisikohan Isotalo rakentaa tuohon torpan?
— Rakentaisitko?
— Kyllä, jos vain…
Ja poika katsoo naurahtaen tyttöön.
— Jos mitä?
— Eipä mitään. Ajattelin vain, että kukapa siihen sitten emännäksi

tulisi.
Tyttö saa uuden lämpimän silmäyksen pojalta.
— Hui hai, eihän sinulla ole mökkiäkään vielä, sanoo tyttö

helähtäen nauramaan ja lähtien juoksemaan karjapolkua lehtoon.
Poika juoksee jälessä, koppaa tytön syliinsä ja sanoo läähättäen.
— Tulisitko…? sinä…
— Tulisin, sanoo tyttö ja karkaa metsään.
*****
Toinen kuva.
Juhannus-yö. Kyläkeinulta ovat kokkotulien viimeiset liekit

sammuneet ja nuoriso parvittain hajaantunut kyläteille. Tanssiin on jo
kyllästytty ja soittajan hanurin sävelet kaikuvat kastepisaraisessa
metsässä.
Muuan pojista on istunut syrjässä tanssia katsellen, palannut yksin
hämärään pirttiin ja painunut penkille pää käsien varaan. Hän on
saanut istua koko illan yksin. Mökin Anna on lentänyt käsivarrelta
käsivarrelle tanssin pyörteessä. Tuskin yhtään sanaa on häneltä
riittänyt pojalle koko iltana. Joku pojista on osoittanut häntä
sormellaan: "Kas, mikä körri tuo Takalan Tuomas, kun ei puhu eikä
pukahda".
Pojan sydäntä raastaa pakahduttava tunne ja kurkkua kuristaa

pidätetty nyyhkytys. Toinen käsi on nyrkkiin puristettuna ja toisella
tukee hän päätään, jossa suonet takovat niin hurjasti.
— Kurja nainen!
Kello tuvan mustuneella seinällä lyö rämisten. Montako? Poika ei

sitä huomaa. Hänen päänsä painuu yhä alemma ikkunalautaa
vasten ja kuumat pisarat putoilevat penkille.
Tuvan ovi aukeaa hiljaa ja tyttö astuu sisään hiljaisin askelin.
— Tuomas… täälläkö sinä oletkin?
Poika ei vastaa mitään. Hänen povessaan värähtää oudosti ja käsi

pusertuu nyrkiksi.
Tyttö tulee lähemmäksi ja istuu penkille. Raollaan olevasta

ikkunasta kuuluvat hanurin mollisävelet jostakin hyvin kaukaa, yli
hiljaisien vesien.
— Oletko sinä minulle vihainen? kysyy tyttö hiljaa koettaen olla

vakava, vaikka toisessa suupielessä nytkähtelee pidätetty nauru.
— En minä sinulle voi vihainen olla, sanoo poika nostaen kostean
katseensa tyttöön, joka siirtyy lähemmäksi istumaan ja tapailee
pojan kättä omaansa.
— Kyllä sinä olet suuttunut minuun, minä näen sen. Mutta enhän
minä voinut olla tanssimatta, kun minua aina vain pyydettiin.
— Eikö sinulla siellä olisi ollut yhtään ystävällistä sanaa minulle?
— Elä viitsi nyt enää… Voinhan minä olla vasta tanssimattakin.
— Mitäpä nyt siitäkään…
Aurinko nousi ja värähteli tuvan ikkunassa ja kukkaan puhjenneen

verenpisaran lehdillä. Poika painoi päänsä tytön syliin ja puhkesi
rajuun nyyhkytykseen.
— No mitä nyt…?
Painava, hiljainen äänettömyys.
Hetken kuluttua kohotti poika kirkastuneen katseensa tyttöön ja

virkkoi.
— Minä olen antanut sinulle kaikki parhaimpani. Unelmani ja mitä

kauniita ajatuksia minulla on ollut. Ja tämä kaikki on minulla ensi
kertaa niinkuin tuolla kukkasella tuossa ikkunalla, mutta sinä leikit
vain minun kanssani ja lennät milloin minkin käsivarrella. Minä näin
nytkin, kenen kanssa sinä läksit kokoilta ja nyt… nyt sinä jo istut
tuossa. Voinko minä enää koskaan sinuun luottaa?
— Voit. En minä enää koskaan…

Aurinko hymyili yhä kultaisemmin. Tyttö koetti hänkin hymyillä ja
kurotti punaisen suunsa suudeltavaksi.
Poika ei voinut enää vastustaa, vaan nosti tytön syliinsä.
— Oletko sinä sitten yksin minun?
— Olen, virkkoi tyttö miettien äskeistä saattajataan.
— Kun minä sen vain oikein varmasti tietäisin, niin minun onneni
olisi niin suuri ja kokonainen. Mutta sano minulle, onko sinulla
koskaan ennen ollut tällaista? Onko tämä sinulla ensimäistä kertaa?
— On, virkkoi tyttö miettien kyläsoittajaa, joka oli ollut hänen

luhdissaan viime yönä. Voiko sitä tällaista olla muuta kuin yhden
kerran vain, jatkoi hän.
Poika puristi tytön lujasti syliinsä.
— Nyt minä aloitan jo huomisen päivän perästä tupani veistoksen

ja laulaen käyn työhöni ja pian nousee yhteisen pesän seinät.
Kuulehan, virkkoi poika hetken kuluttua, nyt minä vasta käsitän,
miten suuri onni on antaa koskemattoman suoruutensa
koskemattomalle, niinkuin sinä nyt olet.
Tyttö katseli ulos eikä puhunut mitään.
— Syksyn tullen minä sitten vien sinut omaan tupaani, niinhän?
— Ehtiihän siitä nyt vielä…
— Etkö sinä tahtoisikaan vielä niin pian?
— Kyllä, mutta…
— Mitä?
— Puhutaan sitten toiste siitä. Sinun täytyy nyt jo mennä. Isäntä

voi pian nousta.
*****
Muutamia kuukausia myöhemmin.
Tuomas on saattanut häätaloon morsiamensa. Viulut vingahtelevat

ja lattia notkuu tanssivien parien alla. Anna on kiitänyt koko illan
Isontalon nuoren isännän Topiaan käsivarrella. Kun Tuomas pyytää
häntä jo lopettamaan tanssin, vastaa Anna niskojaan nakaten.
— Minä tahdon nyt tanssia vielä tämän kerran etkä sinä saa nyt
minua kiusata. Mene yksin kotiin, jos et jaksa, minua odottaa.
— Mutta enhän minä nyt hääyönä yksin…
— Istu sitten nurkassa ja odota.
Topias vie Annan uudelleen tanssiin ja väläyttää ilkeästi silmää

Tuomaalle.
Tuomaan kädet puristuvat nyrkeiksi ja uhkaava tuli pajaa hänen

poskipäillään.
*****
Ruuna kuopi maata ja hirnahteli. Tuomas heräsi ajatuksistaan.

Kuinka kauan hän siinä lienee istunutkaan. Kädet olivat tiukasti
nyrkeissä ja hengitys kulki raskaasti. Mitäs jos Anna ei pitäisikään
hänestä enää? Jos ei olisi pitänyt ennenkään? Mitä varten Isotalo
kävi heillä niin usein? Ja aina sillä oli vielä se ilkeä katseensa, josta
ei saanut selvää, mitä se oli. Eihän se nyt sentään Annaa katselle,
toisen vaimoa? Eihän toki. Mutta miksi Anna on yhtämittaa
nyreissään, eikä salli itseään hyväillä niinkuin ennen. Ja
mietteissään kulkee kesken askareittensa ja seisahtelee
tuijottamaan. Mitäs jos Anna ja Isotalo…?
Veri nousi Tuomaan päähän, niin että silmät säkenöivät, kun sitä
ajatteli. Uskaltaisiko se nyt semmoista? Olihan kyllä tapahtunut
ennenkin samanlaista.
Tuomas nousi, riisui ruunan, laski sen veräjästä hakaan ja läksi

miettien kävelemään pihaan.
— Minkä tähden sinä et tullut aamiaiselle, kysyi Anna Tuomaan

tupaan tultua.
— En muistanut. Ruuna viimein rupesi tahtomaan…
— Et muistanut… On siinä mies, kun ei muista syömään tulla…

Kun nyt ruunan piti ihan muistuttaa.
Ja Anna nauroi hytkähdellen.
— Mitä siinä nyt on virnuamista, virkkoi Tuomas kärsimättömästi.
— No eikö sinulle saisi yhtään nauraa?
— No jos niin haluttaa. Onko sinulla voita?
Ei jaksaisi paloa kyntää suolavesileivällä.
— Eipä sitä kannattaisi.
— Syöthän sinä itsekin. Miks'en minä saisi?

— Ei sinun tarvitse minun syönnistäni sanoa. Saanhan minä olla
syömättäkin, jos se niin on.
— Enhän minä ole kieltänyt.
— Vai et. Kun sanoit, että syöthän sinä itsekin.
— Niin niin. Ei se nyt kieltämistä…
Anna toi voilautasen ja heitti sen kolisten menemään pöydälle.
— Siin' on!
— Elähän nyt noin vihassa…
— Mitäs sinä aina…
Tuomas söi vaieten ja Anna pesi karsinapuolella astioita. Pikku

Matti, ensimäisen vuotensa täyttänyt poika, leikki lattialla. Tuomas
katseli pojan piirteitä. Sillähän olikin melkein mustat silmät, nyt hän
sen vasta tuli oikein huomanneeksi. Heidän suvussaan ei ollut
kellään mustia silmiä. Annalla oli tosin tummat, mutta…
Poika jokelsi ja katsoi tuottavasti isäänsä. Mitä hän oli

ajatellutkaan. Tuomas tunsi häpeävänsä. Kaikkeakin sitä… Oma
poika…
Anna liikkui askareissaan mitään miehelleen virkkamatta.
Yhtämittaa se on vain äkeissään, mistä lienee. Onhan se kaunis

ihminen, kun vain olisi hyväluontoisempi. Tulleekohan tuo minun
aittaani ensi yöksi nukkumaan, vai menneekö omaan aittaansa.

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The Making of British Bourgeois

Tragedy Alex Eric Hernandez

The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

The Making of British

To Kelsie, Eliana, and Charlie, for together we make CAKE

One happy consequence of a years-long steep in tragedy has been a

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy: Or, “Silently

I don’t want a grand life for myself—

2 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

2 Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 68.

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy 3

countless anecdotes confirm a sense of the expanding material comforts

4 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

more ordinary, tragedy loses the possibility of transcendence so that finally

11 Steiner, Death of Tragedy, 194.

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy 5

6 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy 7

8 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

drove capitalism in the nineteenth century.22 (Even the decidedly British

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy 9

26 Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances, 15. 27 Williams, Modern Tragedy, 28; 45.

10 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

elements of the grandly heroic, sometimes exotic worlds they ostensively

29 Nicoll, History of Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, 114–15.

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy 11

12 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

emergence—and in many ways rightly so—to claim it as the sufficient

33 Watt, Rise of the Novel, 60.

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy 13

Auerbach’s still-indispensable Mimesis: “the serious treatment of everyday

14 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

re-situating bourgeois tragedy in the messy context of these early attempts

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy 15

popular domestic drama, Isabella (1757). If these literary migrations seem

16 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

45 Macpherson, Harm’s Way, 61.

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy 17

18 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

one receives is of a genre whose cultural energies remained vital and

50 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 207.

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy 19

52 Frye, Notebooks on Renaissance Literature, 20:282. 53 Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:289.

20 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

57 Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, 1. 58 Hoxby, What Was Tragedy?, chap. 1.

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy 21

masculine state (pace Antigone) is always to be distinguished from “mere

22 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

65 Worrall, Celebrity, Performance, Reception; O’Quinn, Staging Governance; Swindells,

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy 23

have continued Williams’ foundational work on structures of feeling. Williams

66 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 133.

24 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

to take bourgeois tragedy on its own terms is not necessarily to reject

69 See McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity. On the concept of the “revaluation” as opposed to

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy 25

70 Cavell, “Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” 172.

26 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

eighteenth century as well as the gritty world of London’s commercial

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy 27

28 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

implications of the genre for the continental Enlightenment, connecting the

1 Reynolds, Seven Discourses, 103.

* START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HÄPEÄ *