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Palgrave Studies
in the Enlightenment, Romanticism
and the Cultures of Print
Series Editors
Anne Mellor
Department of English
University of California, Los Angeles
California, USA
Clifford Siskin
Department of English
New York University
New York, New York, USA
Palgrave Studies in The Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of
Print features work that does not fit comfortably within established
boundaries – whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely,
it combines efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with
explorations of gender, race, and class. By attending as well to intersec-
tions of literature with the visual arts, medicine, law, and science, the series
enables a large-scale rethinking of the origins of modernity.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14588
Bryan Mangano
Fictions of
Friendship in the
Eighteenth-Century
Novel
Bryan Mangano
Cornell College
Mt. Vernon, Iowa, USA
Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print

ISBN 978-3-319-48694-9 ISBN 978-3-319-48695-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48695-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963219
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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tional affiliations.
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For Anne and Charlie
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book grew out of a seminar paper on Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.

The professor for that course and afterward my advisor, Eric Gidal, has
offered invaluable support at every stage in the development of this
project. I cannot thank him enough for his sympathies with the project’s
aims and for his judicious guidance every step of the way. I wish to thank
Garrett Stewart, whose scholarship and stimulating courses have inspired
this study and who has been an immensely generous and discerning
advisor on every chapter. I am obliged to Garrett for giving me the chance
to participate in the Andrew Mellon Seminar “Story in Theory” in 2011. I
would like to thank the Mellon Foundation for supporting this seminar
and I wish to convey my gratitude to the seminar participants for their
feedback on drafts of what is now Chapter 4. Chapter 3 of this book
greatly benefited from research undertaken at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in London, supported by the University of Iowa’s T. Anne
Cleary International Dissertation Research Award.
A number of critical readers offered crucial advice on the project along
the way. My thanks to Lori Branch, Judith Pascoe, Naomi Greyser, Kevin
Kopelson, Takis Poulakos, Daniel Johnson, James Lambert, Craig Carey,
Blake Bronson-Bartlett, and Ross Salinas. Comments from anonymous
readers at the journals Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Texas Studies in
Literature and Language enhanced Chapter 4 and 5 respectively. Detailed
and sympathetic feedback from the anonymous reader at Palgrave
Macmillan helped to make the book’s argument more coherent and far-
reaching. I am also grateful to my students at the University of Iowa, Coe
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
College, and Grinnell College for their stimulating engagement with

various texts and ideas related to this project.
My thanks to the series editors Anne K. Mellor and Clifford Siskin, and
to the editorial team of Ben Doyle, Eva Hodgkin, and Camille Davies for
their stewardship of this book. A version of Chapter 4 has previously
appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Chapter 5 has appeared in
shortened form in Texas Studies in Literature and Language. I wish to
thank the University of Toronto Press and the University of Texas Press
for granting permission to include revised and expanded versions of these
essays in this book.
Finally, I wish to thank my wife Anne for her constant support and
editorial assistance.
CONTENTS
1 Introduction: “Errant Stuff” 1
Part I Forging Friendships in Print
2 Amiable Fictions; or, the Pedagogy of Friendship

in Enlightenment Media 23
3 Tragedy in Print; or, Epistolary Friendship and Clarissa’s

Divided Readership 53
Part II Female Authorship and Friendship’s Narrative

Economies
4 The Property of True Friends; or, Paradoxes of Narration in

Sarah Fielding’s David Simple 83
5 Institutions of Friendship; or, Anonymous

Authorship and Political Economy in Sarah Scott’s
Millenium Hall 109
ix
x CONTENTS
Part III Liberties and Limits of Fraternal Friendship
6 Enduring Oddity; or, the Friendship

of Fools in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 141
7 Infernal Fraternity; or, Alienated Readers

in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 177
8 Epilogue: The Novel as a Technology of Friendship 209
Notes 217
Bibliography 271
Index 287
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: “Errant Stuff ”
For what friendly heart can want a subject on such an occasion; when it must
be sensible, that the goings-out, the comings-in, the visit either meditated, paid,
or received, the visitors, the reading or musical subjects, the morning medita-
tion, the mid-day bower, the evening walk: what she hopes, what she wishes,
what she fears, are proper topics for the pen; and what friendship cannot be
indifferent to. For what one thing is there, that a friend does, or is concerned
in, or for, which can be too slight a subject to a friend.1
—Samuel Richardson to Sarah Wescomb, undated letter of 1746
Samuel Richardson advises a young female acquaintance that the pretense

of friendship liberates the epistolary writer from every standard of rele-
vance: whatever comes to mind merits inclusion simply because it has
come to mind. The “friendly heart” cares for anything that passes through
the consciousness of the writer. Written during Richardson’s composition
of his second novel of letters, Clarissa (1748–1749), his reflection on
epistolary friendship in this private letter not surprisingly echoes the
rhetoric of friendship exchanged between that novel’s heroine, Clarissa
Harlowe, and her close yet distanced companion, Anna Howe. That
Richardson often depicts the friendship between these young women
according to this code of intimacy does not fully account for his signature
prolixity. In a different sense, we might consider this relation between
epistolary writing and epistolary fiction as an analogy between the crafted
© The Author(s) 2017 1

B. Mangano, Fictions of Friendship in the Eighteenth-Century Novel,
Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism
and the Cultures of Print, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48695-6_1
2 1 INTRODUCTION: “ERRANT STUFF”
intimacy of letters and literary texts. It is as if Richardson expected readers

to tolerate the teeming volumes that make up his novels just as he reminds
Sarah Wescomb of what slight subjects a friendly heart should receive as an
object of curiosity. For Richardson, the quantitative limits of private letters
and public fictions, conceived as parallel discourses, knew no bounds.
Such remarks offer a glimpse of an unfolding analogy between the
performative intimacy of friendship and the construction of an ideal read-
ing subject by eighteenth-century fictions. Richardson’s deliberative
reflections on friendship, in the context of his prodigious activity as a
correspondent, printer, and novelist, also reveal a persistent tension in
the notion of communication between friends. Richardson identifies epis-
tolary converse as “more pure . . . because of the deliberation it allows,
from the very preparation to, and action of writing.”2 Remote commu-
nication involves a degree of freedom beyond the temporal strictures of
embodied conversation because it allows for a “prepared” expression that
comes closer to mediating the writer’s soul. Yet, Richardson also advocates
against self-restraint: between friends all topics are “proper” and no topics
too “slight.” Richardson recognizes how the pen itself (the materiality and
action of writing) propels writers toward a mental union that surpasses
conversation, asking “who then shall decline the converse of the pen? . . .
which makes even presence but body, while absence becomes the soul.”3
His admiring reader and friend, Lady Bradshaigh, puts this sentiment into
practice in a letter to Richardson describing her travels:
We had been at Richmond, and were oblig’d to wait for the Coach coming over
the Ferry. I cou’d not help thinking myself in a dream all the time I sat there.
What Stuff am I telling you? Cicero very often says to his Friends, To you I must
write what ever Comes uppermost, aye, say you, but every one’s uppermost
thoughts are not alike. But as great a man, and as fine a writer as he was, he
sometimes wrote as Errant Stuff as even I can write, never the less his manner is
what I admire, familiar, easy, and more like talking to a friend than writing.4
Bradshaigh’s relaxed disclosure of “Errant Stuff,” followed by the recog-

nition of having lost herself in a directionless train of thought, expresses
the tensions that animate Richardson’s own statement on epistolary style.
On the one hand, such rambling reveals a singularity of character, as
“every one’s uppermost thoughts are not alike.” On the other hand, as
the letters of Richardson’s heroines so often demonstrate, the intimacy of
epistolary friendship has a moral dimension that involves reflection and
INTRODUCTION: “ERRANT STUFF” 3
judgment. Eighteenth-century discussions of friendship summon confron-

tations between the divergent ideals of disorderly confession and orderly
moral discourse, of writing and conversation, of classical models and
modern practice, of masculine and feminine virtues, and implicitly of
fictional and actual friendships.
Another reader of Richardson, the French philosophe Denis Diderot,
expresses in hyperbolic terms the way notions of idealized friendship
translate into the performance of idealized novel reading. Although
Diderot did not meet Richardson in person, his famous printed eulogy
portrays Richardson’s death as the loss of a dear friend. Linking evocations
of Richardson’s actual death with the act of progressing through the
author’s finite literary corpus, Diderot exclaims, “How deliciously this
reading affected me! At each moment I could see my happiness shortening
by a page. Soon I was experiencing the same feelings undergone by great
friends who have lived long together and are on the point of separating.
At the end, I suddenly found myself alone.”5 Like Richardson and
Bradshaigh, Diderot connects friendship to issues of quantity and rele-
vance when he compares the English edition of Clarissa with the Abbé
Prévost’s abridged translation, and scoffs at readers who use the abridged
“elegant French translations.” To dramatize the inferiority of their reading
experience, he turns to the scene of Clarissa Harlowe’s death as it appears
in the English text. He addresses those readers who have missed out on
the mournful details that inspired in him an elevating sense of sympathy:
you do not know the unfortunate Clarissa; you do not know Miss Howe, her
dear tender Miss Howe, hair disheveled, stretched on the coffin of her
friend, wringing her hands, raising her eyes, drowned with tears toward
heaven, filling the Harlowe house with her piercing cries and pouring
imprecations on all the cruel family. You have no notion of the effect of
those circumstances suppressed by your petty taste, because you did not hear
the lugubrious peal of the parish bells, carried by the wind to the Harlowe
household and raising in their stony hearts a dull remorse; because you did
not see them wince at the sound of the hearse’s wheels carrying the body of
their victim. Then the gloomy silence which hung over them all was broken
by the sobs of the father and the mother; then the true torment of these
wicked souls began, and serpents stirred in the depths of their hearts and
rent them. Happy those who were able to weep!6
This scene from Clarissa serves as an emblematic image for Diderot.

The weeping friend Anna Howe becomes the central figure of authentic
affection, contrasted with the cruelty of the Harlowe family and their
belated remorse. When Diderot builds to his final exclamatory praise for
those happy that they could weep, he links the opening division between
Richardson’s readers to this fictional divide between Clarissa’s true and
false friends. In the same stroke, he associates the “dull remorse” of the
Harlowes’s “stony hearts” with the “petty tastes” of French readers who
cannot tolerate Richardson’s length or style. Diderot intriguingly does not
associate the Harlowes with Richardson’s critics, but, rather, with readers
who only know Richardson in abridged form, thereby dividing
Richardson’s audience between true friends and mere acquaintances.
The truly amiable reader possesses the bilingualism and attention span to
relish every word. In the context of a eulogy, Diderot makes not just
friendship but a form of quantitatively exhaustive reading into an urgent
moral obligation.7
This book presents and examines the way ideal friendship becomes a
paradigmatic category for linking specific novelistic techniques (such as
the epistolary mode) to the affective, ethical, and aesthetic responses of
readers in an age of societal uncertainty, literary experimentation, and
emerging mass audiences. The epistolary friendship between Richardson
and Bradshaigh, when placed alongside Diderot’s indirect, though public,
cultivation of familiarity with the same author, opens a window into the
ways early novelists and their readers invoke and transform friendship
ideals as a print mediation of aesthetic community. In this paradigm,
friendship defined by the sharing of copious and “errant stuff” projects
an economy of abundance onto the novel form. Epistolary intimacy
becomes a framework for justifying the totality of a lengthy narrative,
providing what Georg Lukács calls an “architectonic” of form. In Theory
of the Novel, Lukács argues that novels, as the defining literary form of
modernity, have a radical imperative to constitute their own unity in con-
trast to the epic form’s “indifference to any form of architectural construc-
tion.”8 Richardson’s commentary chiefly exemplifies how textual codes of
friendship provided an architectural logic for eighteenth-century fictions:
the ethical obligation of reading a friend’s letter serves as a metaphoric filter
for expansive, digressive, or otherwise taxing narratives. As Richardson’s
case implies, the amiable reader remains open to more letters and possesses
a sensibility that tolerates an abundance of digressive detail. While this
ethos may seem to authorize an open-ended form, a survey of diverse
techniques will show that novelists in the period drew on friendship codes
to create a sense of finality as well as to frame sequels and serializations.
In his book Friendship and Literature, Ronald A. Sharp argues that

“form functions in friendship, as it does in art, as something that promotes
rather than obstructs intimacy,” and, for both, “the issue is not how to
circumvent forms but how to use them creatively.”9 Whereas Sharp
focuses throughout his study on literary depictions of creative friendships,
Wayne Booth has explored the other side of this analogy in works of
literature that enact gestures of friendship. Discussing Henry Fielding’s
treatment of the narrator–reader relationship as a sub-plot in his novel
Tom Jones (1749), Booth fixes on a late passage in which the narrator
addresses the reader on more intimate terms. As Booth writes:
at a time when we know we are to lose him . . . [Fielding’s narrator] uses

terms which inevitably move us across the barrier to death itself, we find,
lying beneath our amusement at his playful mode of farewell, something of
the same feeling we have when we lose a close friend, a friend who has given
us a gift which we can never repay . . . The book and the friend are one.10
This conceit has greater import for a reading of Fielding’s form than
Booth pursues. In the passage that Booth has in mind, Fielding writes:
We are now, Reader, arrived at the last Stage of our long Journey. As we
have therefore travelled together through so many Pages, let us behave to
one another like Fellow-Travellers in a Stage-Coach, who have passed
several Days in the Company of each other; and who, notwithstanding any
Bickering or Animosities which may have occured on the Road, generally
make all up at last, and mount, for the last Time, into their Vehicle with
Chearfulness and Good-Humour; since after this one Stage, it may possibly
happen to us, as it commonly happens to them, never to meet more.11
What makes these closing remarks especially striking is the distance they
measure from the novel’s opening “Bill of Sale,” which positions the story
as a meal for consumption. In a sense, the work of the novel is to move us
from commercialized appetite to humanized obligation. By the final intro-
ductory chapter, Fielding addresses the reader as “my Friend,” apologizes
for any offense he may have given “thee or thy Friends,” and contrasts his
reader’s sympathies with the abuse heaped on his writings by “enemies.”
The narrator compares this shift in tone to a stagecoach journey, jesting
and digressive at the outset, but “usually plain and serious” toward the
end. Of the final portion of the novel, he declares: “The Variety of Matter,
indeed, which I shall be obliged to cram into this Book, will afford no
Room for any of those ludicrous Observations which I have elsewhere
made . . . All will be plain Narrative only.” The comic simile of traveling
companions, whose increasingly intimate conversation may be as errant as
their route, becomes a device for describing not just the form of the final
book but the temporal logic of the novel as a whole, in its movement from
pleasantry to sobriety. But this plain and serious intercourse involves the
final disappearance of the personalized narrator into pure storytelling:
“plain Narrative only.” The avowal of friendship indicates a new level of
trust that, at last, displaces the need for the narrator’s micromanagement
of our response, thereby equating friendship with the cultivation of reader
autonomy. This prefigured disappearance of the author has the paradox-
ical effect of humanizing the text as an embodied relationship between
mortals and figuring the superiority of purely textual friendship. While the
stagecoach trope evokes a fleeting, irreversible, life-like experience of
parting with a friend, in the same gesture, Fielding highlights the quasi-
immortality of texts. Speaking to a reader now located in some distant
future, the narrator concludes that his enemies will “be dead long before
this Page shall offer itself to thy Perusal.”12 The pathos of the author’s
mortality and the perceived durability of texts converge to frame literary
friendship as an enduring yet melancholic tie, one that is bound by the past
yet anticipating the approval of posterity.
Booth’s approach invites us to connect Fielding’s rhetoric with a wider
discourse of friendship in eighteenth-century fictions and aesthetic debates
in the period that draw from friendship ideals.13 In Laurence Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), Tristram employs this gambit at the very
outset of the novel, writing:
Sir, as you and I are in a manner perfect strangers to each other, it would not
have been proper to let you into too many circumstances relating to myself
all at once . . . As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which
is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one
of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.—O diem praeclarum! —then
nothing which has touched me will be thought trifling in its nature, or
tedious in its telling.14
Striking the same pre-emptively self-eulogizing note as Fielding, Tristram

imagines this bond with readers as one that culminates and ‘terminates’ in
friendship. Yet, while Fielding promises to set aside trifling jests to make
way for his virtuosic knotting-up of plots and sub-plots in concluding

chapters, Tristram warns the reader in advance of trifles and tedium that
will defy the proprieties of storytelling, with the promise that all shall find
retrospective transformation through the miracle of friendship. This open-
ing promise of intimate friendship with the reader (a perfect stranger)
announces the underlying framework of narrative details, which, in Lukács
terms, “can never be justified by their mere presence.”15 The pretense of
elegiac friendship is meant to stimulate reader attentiveness toward all
seemingly irrelevant detail.
In Sterne, as in Richardson, Bradshaigh, and Fielding, friendship
becomes a category of remote communication that mediates between
order and disorder, errancy and trajectory, preparation and openness,
jocularity and sobriety. The conjunction of friendship ideals with eight-
eenth-century textuality (defined by the cross-fertilization of coterie writ-
ing and expanding print venues) leaves novelists grappling with a literary
and philosophical tension: does the value of friendship reside in its ability
to promote the individual pursuit of a well-ordered, rational mind and
properly managed public identity? Or, does the value of friendship reside
in the pleasure and self-knowledge that can spring from a more chaotic,
confessional, and creative form of intimacy? These questions manifest
on the level of narration in eighteenth-century fictions, as friendship
becomes the rhetorical framework for justifying all that might seem to
depart from the orderly, while it also may serve (even in the same novel) as
a principle of social and narrative order. By equating the discourse of
fiction with the letters and conversations of intimate friends, writers foster
the notion that the novel, like the errant talk of a close friend, is an
imperfect and searching genre, one that solicits the patience, toleration,
and collaboration of an amiable reader.
***
The title of this book is meant to evoke the ways that eighteenth-century
writers portray friendships and solicit a kind of friendship with amiable
readers. In another sense, though, these fictions of amiable readerships
belie the fraught divisions among writers and readers in practice. The
authorial rhetoric meant to evoke an amiable relation with readers was
always a fiction of the second order: a meta-plot in Booth’s terms. It may
not be surprising to find that writers seek to characterize their relationship
with readers in the terms of amiability. More unexpected is the way these
links between friendship and reading ideals emerge out of divisive
controversies surrounding specific narrative forms, fictional scenes, and

print cultures. Friendship moves from literary theme to aesthetic frame-
work as eighteenth-century authors invoke the tensions and temporalities
of friendship to model reading practices for increasingly wide and divided
publics.
Roland Barthes’s semiotic distinction between characters and figures
provides a useful framework for identifying the signs of friendship in
fiction.16 In his famous reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine in S/Z, Barthes
defines figures as transferrable roles (for example, queen-woman or
castrated lover) that attach to specific characters and things in the plot,
forming a larger symbolic pattern in the work. Adapting this model to the
Victorian novel, Garrett Stewart’s study of the “dear reader” trope takes
up the relationship between the addressed (interpolated) reader and
plotted (extrapolated) scenes of reading. Stewart approaches the abstrac-
tion of reading or receptivity as a Barthesian figure that circulates in a text,
characterized in different works (or within a single one) by represented or
invoked states of “heightened attentiveness, of passive reception, of vicar-
ious subjection.”17 Backtracking to the eighteenth century, we shall see
just how frequently such figures of “receptivity” in fiction emerge in
reciprocity with the developing roles of friendship.
The diverse and ambiguous uses of the word “friend” and “friendship”
in the wider culture can complicate the study of friendship in eighteenth-
century literature. Naomi Tadmor’s study of the friendship and family
in eighteenth-century life poses the difficulty of deciding exactly what
counts as part of the discourse of friendship in the period.18 As Tadmor
demonstrates, the language of friendship saturated nearly every sphere of
eighteenth-century life, signifying political support, economic patronage,
and fond kinship perhaps more often than it signified an elective, intimate
bond between two unrelated individuals. Yet, within this diffuse idiom of
friendship, writers continued to invoke a narrower discourse of ideal
friendship, a tradition that included philosophical and narrative texts that
sought to define and elevate friendship above all other social ties. The
authors I examine are not bound by a single shared definition of amity,
but, rather, by their conscious participation in this ongoing conversation.
They also share a set of referents (the biblical story of David and Jonathan,
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero’s Laelius de Amicitia, to name just
a few), which they draw upon to prioritize the intimacies of friendship and
enhance its claims relative to other institutional authorities.19 In doing so,
they participate in a longer conversation about the political dimension of
friendship, one that Jacques Derrida has traced through the Western
canon from Aristotle to Carl Schmitt. In The Politics of Friendship,
Derrida explores how this Western textual canon of idealized friendships
harbors a persistent logic of fraternal exclusivity that reverberates through
its early modern citations.20 Laurie Shannon expands on a dimension of
fraternal sovereignty noted by Derrida, demonstrating that “sovereignty
amity” derived its power during the early modern period by claiming an
alternative plane of value more precious than the one ruled by a king.21
Because early modern friendship in Britain aspired to a kind of parity
between friends, it implicitly excluded the sovereign, and, by extension,
the political. Yet, at the same time, as Shannon notes, the performance of
virtuous friendship in classical stories (Damon and Pythias, Orestes and
Pylades, David and Jonathan) not only stands in tension with the sover-
eign’s power, but also becomes a means of reforming that power.22
Friendship’s paradoxical mediation of the private and the political
remained urgent for eighteenth-century writers, though the shifting con-
texts of gender and politics presented writers with new challenges in the
pursuit of ideal friendship. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries, a range of theologians, poets, essayists, and novelists turned to
biblical, classical, and early modern idealizations of personal (primarily
male) friendship as a kind of cultural lineage for defining what modern
British relationships of various forms (from kinship to readerships) should
aspire toward. In extending this ethical norm to their imagined bond with
readers, novelists participated in a broader process through which British
writers and pedagogues sought to reconcile canonical friendship ideals
with various facets of society as a means of resisting or fostering the
transformation of political, economic, and familial institutions.23 The
figuration of print textuality and novels as mediums of friendship was
both a subset and agent of this broader cultural activity.
Literary scholars have taken various approaches to the unwieldy subject
of friendship. Biographical studies of author-friends (Johnson and
Boswell, or Wordsworth and Coleridge, for instance) tend to work induc-
tively, generating a sense of friendship ideals through the actual statements
and practices of particular writers with their friends. I pursue this inductive
approach to defining friendship and draw on biographical and professional
contexts insofar as they figure in the author’s textual rhetoric of friendship
with readers. An alternative approach, one that is broader and more
taxonomical, appears in Janet Todd’s foundational study of women’s
friendship.24 Todd breaks down female amity into the sentimental,
manipulative, erotic, political, and social. I do not replicate or challenge

this taxonomy, though it presents useful distinctions for defining the scope
of this project. Closest to the friendship ideal that I will explore is Todd’s
notion of sentimental friendship, defined as a “close, effusive tie, reveling
in rapture and rhetoric,” an image of amity that “becomes a means of
befriending the reader.”25 Yet, I also mean to show how the political and
social aspects of friendship play a role in “befriending the reader.”26 The
schematic division that structures my analysis springs from the tension in
Richardson’s and Bradshaigh’s formulations and involves a recurrent gen-
dering of those dichotomies: the representative selections I analyze reflect,
on the one hand, a conception of friendship rooted in a female ideal of
rational friendship and, on the other hand, one rooted in the male privi-
lege of playful disorder and singularity. This pattern emerges through
careful consideration of individual authors, shaped by their professional
circumstances, who create unique conceptions of amity through a dialo-
gue with one another, as they work to construct a model of friendship that
can address the forms of resistance they anticipate among readers.
My method is to connect plots of ideal friendship to the idiom of
friendship that animates the professional circumstances of authors as
reflected in letters, literary advertisements, prefaces, and reviews. This
extra-literary or para-literary idiom may necessarily involve the less idea-
lized connotations of amity that Tadmor details, specifically the role that
friendships play in forming and sustaining literary careers. Novel concep-
tions of ideal amity derive from each author’s negotiation of the commer-
cial dimension of literary networks as well as their commercial dependence
on publishers, subscribers, and paying readers. The shifting dependence of
novelists away from patrons and toward booksellers, the circumstances of
copyright sales, and for female authors the choice of anonymous publica-
tion, all bear directly on the complex ways particular authors represent
themselves to readers as amiable friends and address their audiences as
potential friends. The language of friendship in each case reflects both
financial circumstances and social relationships, whether they be relations
with friends and fellow authors, as in the case of Samuel Richardson, Sarah
Scott, and Laurence Sterne, or with brothers and husbands, as in the case
of Sarah Fielding and Mary Shelley.
Whereas Booth measures Tom Jones according to a pre-existing notion
of receiving a literary work as a “gift of friendship,” I wish to pry open how
the novelty of print along with authorial circumstances influenced the
eighteenth-century rhetoric of amity in these fictions, and conversely,
how this rhetoric became a means for authors to cope with changing
circumstances. The ongoing interplay between practical and idealized
facets of friendship inevitably raised the specter of “false” friendships,
relationships that use a nearly identical vocabulary as a strategy for manip-
ulative self-advancement. Because the pursuit of ideal friendship makes
professions of friendship a greater object of anxiety, authors walk a fine
line between trust and skepticism in soliciting the patronage of readers
overtly as “friends” or allowing their fellow authors to recommend and
praise their works to the public. In another sense, this issue of trust may
involve not only the question of whether authors are merely flattering their
public for financial gain, but also the question of whether they are “speak-
ing as friends” to exert a didactic power that may be tacitly tyrannical.
In treating the discourse of friendship as a function of “enlightenment”
media, this study builds from Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s provi-
sional redefinition of the Enlightenment as “an event in the history of
mediation.”27 In examining “true” friendship as a category central to the
reflexivity of novels, I take a cue from Siskin and Warner (who take their
cue from Geoffrey Bowker) regarding the ontological priority of media-
tion that produces epistemological categories (human/nature, self/other
orality/writing).28 I build from Marta Kvande’s contention that “the need
to authorize print” should be understood as shaping the novel genre’s
development.29 The authors I discuss in the following chapters collectively
highlight qualities of amity that idealize the print mediations upon which
their acts of storytelling rest, set in contrast to other “mediums” of friend-
ship. I seek to demonstrate that the representation of friendship broadly
symptomizes this “need to authorize print” even through images of
friendship that remain at the oral or epistolary levels or appear structured
by domestic relations. The qualities of ideal friendship, drawn from classi-
cal virtues and modern epistemologies of personhood, which authors hold
up for reflection, are conditioned by this media context. Springing from
anxieties of print mediation, friendship becomes interpenetrated by a
paradoxical play of opposites: intimacy and detachment, trust and skepti-
cism, familiarity and anonymity.
Uncovering new links between Richardson, Fielding, Scott, Sterne,
and Shelley yields an alternative formation of novel genre history, one
that surely might include more authors than those who find their way into
my account. In separate studies, Lorri Nandrea and Jody Greene have
posited that eighteenth-century fictions contain formal possibilities
unexplored by modern literary history. Nandrea identifies different paths
eighteenth-century fictions might have followed, defining the “path

taken” by early novelists as a gradual embrace of unified, teleological
plots, exemplified by the marriage plots of Victorian fiction.30 Likewise,
Greene asks how novel history might look differently if Ian Watt read
Captain Singleton instead of Pamela as an answer to Robinson Crusoe’s
untenable isolation.31 She speculates that Watt would have been forced to
imagine “an alternative genealogy for the genre, a path not taken, admit-
tedly, but a path imagined and even haltingly sketched.” For Greene, the
alternative path exemplified by Defoe’s novel involves the pursuit of the
Heideggerian concept of Mitsein (being-with others) through relations of
friendship. My effort here is to uncover a similar path that was not just
“haltingly sketched” but frequently actualized. Beyond Captain Singleton,
eighteenth-century novelists widely use character friendships to address
what Michael McKeon has identified as the “questions of truth” and
“questions of virtue” shaping the ideology of fictions. Yet, in representing
friendship ideals, many narratives exceed the “individual versus society”
premise that guides McKeon dialectic analysis and perpetuates the limita-
tions of Watt’s model.32 In the cases I discuss, authors depict the extent
to which a character can be trusted to credit, paraphrase, or distribute
their friend’s story. Whether through the epistolary mode (Clarissa,
Frankenstein), third-person narration (David Simple, Millenium Hall) or
autobiography (Tristram Shandy, Frankenstein), friendships between
characters work as guiding pretexts for the way the larger plot involves
readers in questions about its credibility and didacticism. In this manner,
authors deploy fictional friendships to shape codes of credit and virtue that
will define and bind their readerships.
In eighteenth-century fictions of friendship, the question of whether
one should pursue friendship or trust particular friends almost always raises
the specter of quixotism. As studies of Quixote in eighteenth-century
England have shown, many novelists continued to treat Cervantes’s Don
Quixote as a humorous cautionary tale about the consequences of halluci-
natory perceptions, while others used Quixote to unsettle the idea of
objective reality altogether.33 As Scott Paul Gordon suggests, Quixote
had a specific meaning for female novelists because of the perceived
susceptibility of women to imaginative excesses. Satires on quixotism
cast suspicion on educated women as readers and novelists, imposing
“cures” that often involved the re-education of women for constrained
domestic roles.34 The risky idealism required by all women writers in this
period is an emblem of the optimism that authors of both sexes share
regarding the possibility that their narrative forms can overcome resistance
and division among their readerships.
The novelists discussed in this book share an optimism about friendship
that cynics might regard as quixotic. This optimism expresses itself in their
use of ideal friendship as a rhetoric for soliciting a “correct” reader
response and reconciling literary communities with the codes of ideal
friendship. While not oblivious or immune to fears about print culture in
the period, they are bound by a belief that fictions can tutor readers in a
kind of reading that will bind audiences in friendship with characters and
authors and mobilize friendship ideals to critique aspects of society. By
assessing these authors’ efforts in relation to professional circumstances
and reader tastes, however, this study adds another important complicat-
ing layer to Booth’s model: a recognition of the way authors shape their
“gifts” (which are always at the same time commodities) under historical
conditions and with self-consciousness about the possible reactions of real
readers. In considering how “gifts of friendship” were not always recog-
nized as such by readers, I reveal how this trope of authorship manifested
to address the antagonisms presented by divided readerships. The dialogue
between authors and readers offers insight into the commercial pressures
shaping the discourse of friendship as well as the way authors drew on this
discourse in their efforts to challenge proto-capitalist principles. In attend-
ing to this reciprocal influence, my approach willfully blurs the line
between the agencies of author and reader.
Inhabiting this commercialized professional context, the eighteenth-
century novelists I examine are each grappling with the same question:
can authors genuinely befriend their readers and vice versa? Each chapter
explores what I take to be an author working to answer in the affirmative,
though not without his or her moments of doubt or ambivalence. I reveal
how their formal experiments are ways of pursuing, if not always arriving
at, an answer. Examining this rhetoric depends on understanding how
historical shifts in social identity and the expansion of textual culture
combine to centralize friendship as the recurring term for textual relation-
ships. The idiom of friendship in the eighteenth century serves diverse
conceptions of proper reading practices because it offers leverage for
grappling with a widely shared social anxiety that cuts across economic
and politic spheres. The historian J.G.A. Pocock has described this anxiety
as a modern crisis of value, brought on by the expansion of banking, the
introduction of paper money and credit transactions, the founding of the
national debt, and the de-centralization of landed property.35 As Emrys
Jones also demonstrates in his study of friendship and political loyalty, this
underlying sense of uncertainty involves the coincidence of public crises in
the commercial realm, the instantiation of partisan politics, and the
increasing prime ministerial authority under Robert Walpole’s tenure.36
The question of discerning “true friendship” binds literary culture, com-
merce, and politics as spheres of pervasive deception and skeptical scrutiny.
As mid-century fictions become “depoliticized,” as Catherine Gallagher
suggests, the lack of overt political loyalty may heighten the perception
that literature is also becoming a purely commercial enterprise.37 The
trope friendship thus provides authors with a language for connecting
literary economics to morality and taste, as novel authorship moves toward
a dependence on paying readers through copyright sales, subscriptions,
and self-financed publications.38
As a site of extreme hopes and fears, the operative notions of friendship
in this period reflect a contradictory placement of personal friendship vis-
à-vis the totality of society. Intellectuals and literary artists privilege ideal
friendship above other bonds because they see friendship, simultaneously,
as a modern zone of humanized privacy set apart from the increasing
instrumentality of commerce and politics, and, by way of classical rappro-
chements, as the mythic origin of all political and economic community:
friendship becomes a site of alienation and utopian hope. In this vein,
many novelists advance a view of friendship as a form of intimacy distin-
guished from that of kinship and marriage, and their respective political
valences. Allan Silver has argued that Scottish Enlightenment philosophers
idealize private friendship as that which remains outside the instrument-
alism of economic and political spheres: in friendship, the individual
appears as an end in his or herself.39 Friendship, specifically the extra-
familial variety, thus gets prized as a refuge from family, politics, and
economics. The antagonism between non-familial friendship and kinship
in Richardson’s Clarissa resonates in several other examples, though it
may not signal a long-term historical “dislocation,” in Tadmor’s sense.40
Texts ranging from Sarah Fielding’s David Simple and Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility,
show the way friendship and kinship were imagined as complementary
configurations within popular fictions. Yet, even in such cases, ideal friend-
ship operates as the reformative principle, set in contrast to older forms
of kinship or spousal intimacy. For these authors, the Western discourse
of friendship shapes notions of textual intimacy more than do familial
relations.
Whether friendship appears separated from or conflated with family ties

in a given text, representations of ideal friendship all tend to dramatize
some form of social alienation. The representation of characters alienated
from society on account of their sex (Clarissa, Millenium Hall), excessive
sensibility (David Simple), oddity (Tristram Shandy), or monstrosity
(Frankenstein), are central to depictions of friendship as an alternative
to the perceived self-interest that corrupts eighteenth-century political,
economic, and domestic systems. At the same time, authors draw on the
Aristotelian notion of friendship as the essential political tie of a healthier
and more expansive future community. Authors allude to a canon of
classical friendships to construct cultural identity, while utopian plotters
locate the seeds of social reform in the virtuous ties of private friendship.
By bringing together classical evocations and modern political reformism,
novelists mobilize a politics of nostalgic republicanism and civic virtue to
critique economic interests underlying bourgeois civil society. In both
cases, the proliferation of virtuous friendships becomes a means of staving
off social and moral corrosion seen to result from economic modernization.
In portraying the desire for friendship as an effect of societal alienation,
authors allegorically develop a complex image of textual community figured
as an elect and open body regarding matters of aesthetic taste and moral
sensibility.
The formal implications of ideal friendship that I uncover contribute
to the ongoing re-evaluation of public and private spheres in eighteenth-
century life and challenge recent critical accounts that prioritize domes-
ticity as the nexus of public and private within fictional forms. In the
political sphere, Jones has shown the extent to which friendship becomes
a crucial rhetorical link between cultural conceptions of public and private
life. Whereas Jürgen Habermas famously conceives of the familial sphere as
that which provides the “humanizing” foundation of the public sphere,
this tends to undervalue the “humanizing” privacy that arises in the
marginal spaces of personal friendships and their role in the genealogy of
public and private spheres. Because eighteenth-century novelists often
ascribe to extra-familial friendship a level of intimacy greater than that
of romantic, marital, and familial ties, the literary significance of their
engagement with friendship exceeds the scope of critical paradigms taking
their cue from Habermas’s dichotomy. For instance, in her seminal study
of eighteenth-century domesticity, Desire and Domestic Fiction, Nancy
Armstrong argues that early novels construct the cultural centrality of
the domestic woman, a figure who attains a privileged ethical interiority
in a system of surveillance and self-discipline that structures modern sub-

jectivity.41 In The Secret History of Domesticity, Michael McKeon tracks the
interpenetrating epistemologies of domestic and public spaces and their
influence on literary forms.42 These compelling studies largely advance
Habermas’s premise that domesticity defines eighteenth-century notions
of privacy.43 Without undervaluing the role of domesticity, this book shifts
the focus to the sphere of idealized extra-familial friendship to consider its
role in the history of fictional characters, narrative forms, and public and
private knowledge.
More than bolstering domestic ideology, authors appeal to friendship
as a reaction to the political inadequacy of domestic obligations, while
underscoring alternative qualities of textual exchange. Unlike domestic
intimacy, which often involves household proximities, ties of blood, and
patriarchal authority, friendship tropes evoke remote and anonymous
contact, extra-familial affection, and reciprocal authority. By grounding
these qualities of literary commerce in the logic of friendship, authors
acknowledge the emerging identity and power of British readers in
the literary marketplace while still attempting to guide them, often in
the face of countervailing tastes, to view fictional characters, narratives,
and authors not just as consumable commodities but as objects of ethical
obligation. Conversely, it will be seen that this interplay of friendship and
textuality in eighteenth-century fictions frequently works against the grain
of a contradictory co-ordination of friendship in philosophical discourses.
These discourses, running from the philosophy of Locke to that of Hume
and Smith, tend to marginalize friendship by privileging domestic ties of
kinship and property as the foundation of sympathetic imagination and
normative sociability.44 Alternatively, through a logic of secularization,
these theorists seek to protect friendships by keeping them private and
thereby uncontaminated by self-interest, yet consequently make friend-
ships incapable of engaging political or commercial crises. By contrast,
novelistic depictions of true friendship overtly critique the notion that
bonds of kinship and structures of domesticity provide the foundation
for other forms of sympathetic attachment, or that friendship should
remain detached from economic or political considerations.
In examining this phenomenon across a range of authors, this study
expands on past approaches to the homosociality of eighteenth-century
friendships, insofar as recent scholarship has focused separately on
friendships between women (Todd, Faderman, Moore, Haggerty) and
men (Sedgwick, Haggerty, Jones). Although these accounts all inevitably
grapple with the way friendship practices exist in the historical context of
divided sexual identities, they are empowered and limited by their orga-
nizational conceits. Because the rhetoric of friendship draws male and
female authors and readers into conversation, and because the virtues
of true friendship circulate and transform across lines of sexual identity,
I here focus, as often as possible, on the moments when the virtues of
friendship are defined at the limits of gendered behaviors, or when they are
transformed or ironized through the imitation of one sex by the other.
Partly, this move seems authorized by the very breadth and depth of work
that already focuses on male or female friendship separately; there are
abundant opportunities for connecting threads of this scholarship and
for drawing out new insights about the circulation of friendship codes
across male and female authored texts and representations of women’s and
men’s friendship in fiction.
While friendship figures in eighteenth-century negotiations around
sex, it also speaks more indirectly to the role of class. The novelists
examined in this study have been selected foremost because they
engage deeply with the idiom of friendship on the level of literary
form, though, as a group, they exhibit a limited range in terms of
social standing. The professional and financial circumstances these
authors share are significant motivating factors in their varying deploy-
ments of friendship ideals to solicit and sustain an audience. Certainly,
there are important distinctions to make between the financial circum-
stances that motivated Sarah Fielding and Sarah Scott to write fiction
and the economic security enjoyed by Richardson as he wrote Clarissa.
Conversely, we should keep in mind Richardson’s unique distinction as
an author whose working-class origins inflected his view of friendship
and the commerce of novel writing. Nonetheless, all of these novelists
were at some point drawn to the profession of writing fiction as a
profession, which is to say, as an opportunity to sustain or enrich
themselves. Each of these authors wrote in order to complement
other sources of income or (in Fielding and Scott’s case) to comple-
ment their social status with actual funds in the absence of inherited or
espoused wealth. All of these authors possessed a minimum amount of
social capital to advance their careers. The idioms of friendship they
produced reflect their distresses as well as their substantive privileges.
Although their characters often act charitably toward the poor, they
never welcome those who are living in destitution or lacking in cultural
capital into the circle of friends. Ultimately, such condescension marks
the limit of friendship as a trope for tutoring readers: the charity cases
presented within these fictions do not serve as analogies for the reader.
For the reader’s convenience, I offer here a brief outline of the book’s
subsequent chapters.
Chapter 2, Amiable Fictions; or the Pedagogy of Friendship in
Enlightenment Media traces the way authors combine classical and
early modern views of true amity with new attitudes about friendship
brought on by changes in the forms of public and private communication.
I discuss how the essays of Sir Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne
prefigure divergent philosophical views that later novelists borrow, synthe-
size, and transform in the realm of print narrative. In combination,
Montaigne and Bacon anticipate the social and epistemological authority
granted to friendship ties in the expanding print culture of the eighteenth
century. I trace these developments as exhibited in works by Daniel Defoe,
Joseph Addison, Elizabeth Rowe, Mary Astell, Lord Chesterfield, and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Chapter 3, Tragedy in Print; or, Epistolary Friendship and
Clarissa’s Divided Readership explores how Samuel Richardson’s
novel elevates friendship ideals as a frame of narrative reception.
Through the correspondence between Clarissa and Anna, Richardson
pushes public and private faces of friendship to new extremes at the
same time as he synthesizes contradictory ideas surrounding masculinity
and femininity, secularity and religion, and classical and modern heroism
in friendship. Exploring the diverse reactions of his readers, the chapter
provides a new explanation of the controversy among Richardson’s readers
and shows that the rhetoric of friendship was a touchstone of authority in
this early debate over one’s taste in fiction.
Chapter 4, The Property of True Friends; or, Paradoxes of
Narration in Sarah Fielding’s David Simple connects Sarah Fielding’s
public defense of Clarissa, in her pamphlet “Remarks on Clarissa,” to her
sense of authorship, friendship ideals, and narrative form. Fielding’s
Adventures of David Simple (1744) and David Simple, Volume the Last
(1753) evoke the notion of “reading as friendship” to engage ideas about
literary property and the vexed, evolving question of to whom, finally, do
characters and their stories belong. I contend that, for Fielding, the
rhetoric of friendship serves a conscious strategy for coming to terms
with the ethical tensions generated by the commodification of literary
property, the expanding power of readers, and the crystallization of diver-
gent attitudes toward fictional characters.
Chapter 5, Institutions of Friendship; or, Anonymous Authorship

and Political Economy in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall examines
Scott’s novel, Millenium Hall (1762), about an exclusive female utopia
founded on Christian friendship. Although Scott published anonymously,
her opening depiction of two male friends, the work’s editor and narrator,
cues the reader toward a critical reading of the ideological contradictions
that promote the division of private affect from public commerce and the
gendering of each sphere. The stories of Scott’s heroines develop the idea
of a benevolent providential fortune that brings together female friends
and helps them recover maternal inheritances. The novel consciously
utilizes and critiques the dynamics of semi-anonymous authorship, a
condition shaping the careers of many female novelists in the period.
Chapter 6, Enduring Oddity; or, the Friendship of Fools in
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy takes up Laurence Sterne’s serialized publica-
tion of Tristram Shandy as a radical alternative to the rational friendships
established by earlier authors. In embracing oddity and particularity, the
novel exemplifies how notions of privacy in male friendship serve to
distinguish literary originality from the perceived commercialism of mere
novelties. I reframe the dialogue between Sterne’s fiction, Locke’s psy-
chology, and Addison’s view of friendship to illuminate a wider conjunc-
tion of friendship, male intimacy, and originality as an aesthetic ideal. I
conclude that Sterne points up limitations of the rational friendship model
developed by Richardson, Fielding, and Scott, though his model is one
that cannot be easily embraced by female readers or authors.
Chapter 7, Infernal Fraternity; or, Alienated Readers in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein illuminates Mary Shelley’s critique of fraternal
friendship in Frankenstein. The novel portrays this idealized, sensible,
male friendship arising from the friend/enemy binary and an anti-media-
tional logic, which positions the creature and Walton’s sister Margaret as
alienated “readers” of male intimacies. Yet, by allowing the creature to
have the last word, Shelley transforms the elegiac patterns of friendship by
placing the enemy in the traditional site of narrative mediation and cultural
memory. The novel makes textual mediation into an ethics of difference,
distance, and delay by correlating the creature as alienated reader with
female characters excluded from the fraternal face-to-face ideal of male
friendship.
Chapter 8, Epilogue: The Novel as a Technology of Friendship
leaps forward in time to Marcel Proust’s contentious claim, in response to
John Ruskin, that books cannot stand in as a form of friendship. Passages
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of H.P. Lovecraft,
an evaluation
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Title: H.P. Lovecraft, an evaluation
Author: Joseph Payne Brennan
Release date: November 1, 2023 [eBook #72004]
Language: English
Original publication: New Haven, CT: Macabre House, 1955
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK H.P.

LOVECRAFT, AN EVALUATION ***
H. P. LOVECRAFT, AN
EVALUATION
by
Joseph Payne Brennan
Copyright 1955
by
Joseph Payne Brennan
MACABRE HOUSE
55 Trumbull St.
New Haven 10
Connecticut
Since the publication of my “H. P. Lovecraft: A Bibliography” (Biblio
Press, 1952), I have been repeatedly urged to write out my opinion
of Lovecraft’s work. I have been kept from doing so by the pressure
of a full-time library job, plus my own creative work in the diverse
fields of the horror story, the western story, and poetry, as well as the
semi-annual publication of ESSENCE and other time-consuming
activities such as an unending struggle against censorship groups
which are violating Constitutional rights on both a local and national
level.
The following brief essay is an admittedly hurried and incomplete
attempt to meet demands for a Lovecraft critique. An entire book,
requiring many months of uninterrupted work, could be devoted to
the project and I sincerely regret that circumstances do not permit
me to undertake such a task. But I hope that my comments, in spite
of their brevity, will be of some interest.
Nearly twenty years have passed since Lovecraft’s death, but,
unfortunately, a final evaluation of the man and of his work is still not
possible. His collected poems, though due to appear shortly, have
not yet been published. His letters, either selected or collected, have
not appeared. Probably some of the pieces which he contributed
under pseudonyms to “little” magazines have never been reprinted.
And of course no complete and carefully written biography of the
man has ever been published.
With the important exception of the poems and letters however, all
of Lovecraft’s work of any significance has been in print for some
years. It seems doubtful, therefore, that an evaluation of his work, at
this time, will be seriously qualified by future publication.
In his essay on Lovecraft, “Tales of the Marvellous and the
Ridiculous”, which originally appeared in “The New Yorker” and was
later reprinted in his book, “Classics and Commercials”, Edmund
Wilson states flatly: “Lovecraft was not a good writer.” (Before
Lovecraft admirers reach for their shotguns, I might point out that
Edmund Wilson also refers to no less a literary figure than Somerset
Maugham as “second-rate” and “a half-trashy novelist.”) Even
though his criticism is far too severe—too much of a generalization—
Wilson does call attention to two Lovecraft faults which I must
reluctantly acknowledge: his frequent prolixity and his tendency to
lean on shopworn adjectives such as “terrible”, “horrible”, “hellish”,
etc. to achieve eerie effects. In a good horror story, adjectives such
as this are best omitted or at least introduced very sparingly. Beyond
these criticisms, Wilson emphasizes the essential weakness and
lack of verisimilitude of the “Cthulhu Mythos” episodes. With this, too,
I must grudgingly agree. And at this point I would like to call attention
to the fact that the two specific faults mentioned immediately above
—prolixity and adjectivitus—are more frequently encountered in the
“Mythos” stories than in any others.
The “Cthulhu Mythos” has raised a great commotion. Over a
period of years, enthusiastic collaborators, imitators, friends and
admirers have elevated the Cthulhu myth to a pedestal of
importance which it scarcely deserves. The “Mythos” did indeed
become the frame for Lovecraft’s later tales, but they were not his
best tales. Lovecraft also amused himself by employing Cthulhu
terminology in some of his huge correspondence, but it now seems
doubtful that he attached as much importance to the “Mythos” as do
some of his disciples!
Many of the Cthulhu stories, such as “The Dunwich Horror” and
“The Whisperer in Darkness”, are actually tedious. They are too
long; our interest is apt to flag; our “willing suspension of disbelief”
may not hold to the final page. All too often we read on without
compulsion, without belief, without very much actual enthusiasm.
Lovecraft often seems so intent on introducing and exploiting the
“Mythos”, he loses sight of some of the basic elements which are
essential in a good short story: economy of wordage, verisimilitude,
mounting suspense sweeping to a single climax followed quickly by
the final denouement.
Referring to the “Mythos”, Edmund Wilson concluded: “It is all
more amusing in his letters than it is in the stories themselves.” Of
course it was not intended to be amusing in the stories, but I think
Wilson’s meaning is clear.
When it still possessed the freshness of novelty, the Cthulhu
Mythology afforded a vast amount of entertainment. But with the
passage of time the novelty has evaporated and the myth has
become threadbare. Lovecraft used it in story after story and his
disciples have exploited it since his death and it now seems wrung
nearly dry of interesting effects.
It remains, of course, an integral part of the bulk of Lovecraft’s
work. To attempt to dismiss it as incidental or unimportant would be
to close our eyes to the facts.
In my opinion however, Lovecraft’s future reputation as a writer of
fine horror stories will rest on a very few of his early tales in which
the Cthulhu Mythos is either entirely absent or at most still in its
formative stages in Lovecraft’s own mind. These early stories which I
mean to mention were published prior to the appearance of the first
generally accepted “Mythos” story: “The Call of Cthulhu” (WEIRD
TALES, February, 1928)
These stories are: “The Hound” (WEIRD TALES, February, 1924);
“The Rats in the Walls” (WEIRD TALES, March, 1924); “The Music of
Erich Zann” (WEIRD TALES, May, 1925); “The Outsider” (WEIRD
TALES, April, 1926); “Pickman’s Model” (WEIRD TALES, October,
1927)
Of these I think the best of all is “The Music of Erich Zann.” This
piece, which might have been written by Poe, has everything which
many of the “Mythos” tales lack: compression, sustained and rising
suspense culminating in a powerfully effective climax followed
almost immediately by the end of the story. Stylistically and
structurally, I think Lovecraft never surpassed it. I think it probable
that the old German mute will go on sawing his accursed viol in that
ghoul-infested garret long after great Cthulhu has lapsed into
silence! This story, like Poe’s masterpiece, “The Cask of
Amontillado”, seems literally above criticism. There are no wasted
words. The brief story unfolds with a remorseless inevitability.
Nothing could be omitted, nothing added, nothing changed which
would improve its quality. In its particular genre it remains a pure
masterpiece.
After “The Music of Erich Zann”, I would cite “The Rats in the
Walls.” Actually, I very nearly voted it first place because it achieves
a pitch of sheer grisly horror which exceeds the taut terror of “The
Music of Erich Zann.” On the other hand, it does not possess quite
the same degree of purity and compression. But it is a masterpiece
of its type, and again I can think of no Lovecraft story after “The
Music of Erich Zann” which equals it. As a matter of fact, one almost
feels that Lovecraft has gone too far in this particular story.
Something inside one rebels as the ghastly eldrich grottos reveal
their loathsome secrets. Perhaps it is simply that one instinctively
refuses to believe that homo sapiens could ever descend to such a
hellish sub-level. But this is a philosophical comment, not a criticism
of the story.
“The Rats in the Walls” begins in the somewhat leisurely manner
which has come to be associated with rather old-fashioned gothic
ghost stories, and for some little time nothing really hair-raising
happens. But once the full horror comes to light, it simply
overwhelms us. We see at once that the leisurely start was intended
to lull us a little. Certainly it kept us interested enough to continue,
and we did perhaps expect some pretty formidable horrors—but
nothing like what we finally encounter! For sheer inhuman horror
those twilit grottos under the evil foundations of Exham Priory have
yet to be surpassed.
In his introduction to “Best Supernatural Stories of H. P. Lovecraft”,
August Derleth states: “It has been said of “The Outsider” that if the
manuscript had been put forward as an unpublished tale by Edgar
Allan Poe, none would have challenged it.” Perhaps this is not
literally true, but I agree with the spirit of it. “The Outsider” is one of
Lovecraft’s finest stories. It possesses the merit of compression; with
rising intensity it achieves its single shuddery effect—and ends.
Some aspects of this story call to mind Poe’s “The Masque of the
Red Death”; both stories achieve their effects with a minimum of
wordage, both linger in the mind.
“Pickman’s Model” is one of Lovecraft’s strongest stories. It has
unity of effect, suspense, a highly original plot idea, and a climax
which neatly and forcefully ends the story. It is not quite as tightly knit
as “The Music of Erich Zann” or “The Outsider”, but it is still
Lovecraft writing at his top-level best. The “nameless blasphemy with
glaring red eyes” gnawing at a human head would probably feel at
home in one of those unspeakable grottos under the infamous walls
of Exham Priory!
I have mentioned Lovecraft’s “The Hound” because it has
remained in my mind after I first read it many years ago. Its structure
is somewhat slight and it does not have the power of Lovecraft’s very
best tales, but it has splendid atmosphere and, again, brevity and
unity of effect. It might have been written by the early Poe. But I cite
it primarily because it has lingered long in my mind.
The limitations of this little critique do not permit me to touch on
many other good Lovecraft stories. I have mentioned only five which
I think are the best. I am merely expressing a personal opinion—a
personal taste—and I am more than willing to admit of other opinions
—no matter how they may differ from my own. Time alone will decide
who is right!
I have not yet seen all of Lovecraft’s poetry, but I think I have seen
enough to comment briefly. Much of the poetry falls into two main
categories: deliberately archaic work imitative of eighteenth-century
verse, and a group of weird sonnets known as “Fungi from Yuggoth.”
The imitative verse is interesting and often competent, but I think the
“Fungi” sonnets are far more arresting and effective. A few of the
very best of them may survive.
Any criticism of Lovecraft’s work, no matter how brief, would be
incomplete if it omitted mention of his famous essay, “Supernatural
Horror in Literature.” Even Edmund Wilson concedes that the essay
is “a really able piece of work.” In my pamphlet, “H. P. Lovecraft: A
Bibliography”, I commented: “The background and evolution of the
horror tale—a “must” for anyone seriously interested in the genre.”
The comment still holds. Apart from the letters, I think it is probably
the finest piece of non-fiction which Lovecraft ever wrote.
Judging from the few letters and extracts from letters which are in
print, Lovecraft’s “Selected Letters” (or “Collected”) will definitely
enhance his reputation. It is probable that their publication will revive
and intensify interest in both the man and his work. Lovecraft’s
erudition, humor and style is such that it is even possible they will
eventually tend to eclipse his other work! At this point we can only
wait and see.
Lovecraft’s final place in American literature has not yet been
determined. It is too early for that. But it seems certain that the very
best of his work will endure, that it will remain important in the
particular field which he chose. If he did not reach the summits
attained by Poe, or Bierce, at his best he scaled some dizzy heights.
This is an edition of 75 copies.
This is copy number:
30
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Textbook Fictions of Friendship in The Eighteenth Century Novel 1St Edition Bryan Mangano Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF

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Fictions of Friendship in the

Eighteenth-Century Novel 1st Edition

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More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963219

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This book grew out of a seminar paper on Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.

College, and Grinnell College for their stimulating engagement with

1 Introduction: “Errant Stuff” 1

Part I Forging Friendships in Print

2 Amiable Fictions; or, the Pedagogy of Friendship

3 Tragedy in Print; or, Epistolary Friendship and Clarissa’s

Part II Female Authorship and Friendship’s Narrative

4 The Property of True Friends; or, Paradoxes of Narration in

5 Institutions of Friendship; or, Anonymous

Part III Liberties and Limits of Fraternal Friendship

6 Enduring Oddity; or, the Friendship

7 Infernal Fraternity; or, Alienated Readers

8 Epilogue: The Novel as a Technology of Friendship 209

Introduction: “Errant Stuff ”

Samuel Richardson advises a young female acquaintance that the pretense

© The Author(s) 2017 1

intimacy of letters and literary texts. It is as if Richardson expected readers

Bradshaigh’s relaxed disclosure of “Errant Stuff,” followed by the recog-

judgment. Eighteenth-century discussions of friendship summon confron-

This scene from Clarissa serves as an emblematic image for Diderot.

In his book Friendship and Literature, Ronald A. Sharp argues that

at a time when we know we are to lose him . . . [Fielding’s narrator] uses

Striking the same pre-emptively self-eulogizing note as Fielding, Tristram

way for his virtuosic knotting-up of plots and sub-plots in concluding

controversies surrounding speciﬁc narrative forms, ﬁctional scenes, and

manipulative, erotic, political, and social. I do not replicate or challenge

eighteenth-century ﬁctions might have followed, deﬁning the “path

Whether friendship appears separated from or conﬂated with family ties

in a system of surveillance and self-discipline that structures modern sub-

Chapter 5, Institutions of Friendship; or, Anonymous Authorship

Title: H.P. Lovecraft, an evaluation

Author: Joseph Payne Brennan

Release date: November 1, 2023 [eBook #72004]

Original publication: New Haven, CT: Macabre House, 1955

Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK H.P.

Joseph Payne Brennan

This is an edition of 75 copies.

This is copy number:

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

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