London Merchant Research

"Justly to Fall Unpitied and Abhorr'd": Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in Lillo's
"The London Merchant"

Author(s): David Mazella
Source: ELH, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 795-830
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30031996
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"JUSTLY TO FALL UNPITIED AND ABHORR'D":
SENSIBILITY, PUNISHMENT, AND MORALITY IN
LILLO'S THE LONDON MERCHANT
BY DAVID MAZELLA
INTRODUCTION: PULL OUT YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS!
When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu discussed the hero

London Merchant with her friends, she could not accept an
hesitation, or disagreement on the matter: she was fond of
"that whoever did not cry at George Barnwell must deserv
hanged."' An "observing Lady" quoted in the Gentleman's M
concurred: "such is the artful Contrivance of this Play; so d
the Texture of its Composition, that none, but a common Pr
can find Fault with it."2 According to Montagu and the oth
some kind of monster could view the tragedy of George Bar
remain unaffected by it. Any hint of disobedience on this t
outward sign of indifference, any failure to respond exactl
manner of Montagu, betrayed a serious flaw in one's ch
Because the only acceptable response to Montagu's tears wa
tears, those who failed to produce the requisite response "must
deserve" their punishment. In Montagu's desire for her emotions to
be mirrored, like can only be answered by like, tears can only be
answered by more tears, or else suffer the redoubled pains of
punishment and social exclusion.
Yet Montagu's hostility toward the indifferent members of the
audience only mirrors Lillo's summary treatment of the villain
Millwood, the one character in the play who will not pity the hero
Barnwell. In effect, anyone insensible or prejudiced enough to reject
Barnwell's pleas deserves no better than Millwood herself, who is
literally the "common Prostitute" marched off at the play's end to be
hanged. To the extent that Montagu and others could attribute
features of Millwood to the play's opponents, Lillo's dramatic strategy
seems to have succeeded. Indeed, as the accounts of the play's
opening night suggest, Lillo's strategy of circumventing potential
criticism seems to have triumphed beyond all expectation: "the play
ELH 68 (2001) 795-830 © 2001 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 795
was very carefully got up, and universally allowed to be well per-
formed... [and] in general spoke so much to the heart, that the gay
persons [who had brought copies of the old ballad the play was based
upon, intending to ridicule the play] confessed, they were drawn in to
drop their ballads, and pull out their handkerchiefs."3
This essay describes how The London Merchant participates in,
and reflects upon, a number of historical trends that caused an
anthropocentric concept of sensibility to emerge from older, more
theocentric notions of laws, norms, and society.4 This broad set of
historical transformations is generally grouped under the heading of
"The Enlightenment," a term that I will use for the remainder of this
essay to describe the international, self-consciously cosmopolitan
movement of linked intellectual reconceptualizations and political
reforms that overtook British and European culture during the
eighteenth century.5 As the rest of this essay should make clear, such
a notion of Enlightenment makes it easier to understand the peculiar
role of The London Merchant within both Anglo-British and Euro-
pean culture during this period.6 At the same time, I will also be
calling attention to certain local characteristics of English religious
politics-namely, the seventeenth-century disputes concerning Cal-
vinism in and around the Church of England-that heavily influ-
enced Lillo's treatment of punishment and the law in this play.7
The cumulative effect of these Enlightenment transformations,
however, was not to discard the practices of morality and punishment
entirely, but merely to recast these practices and concepts into their
recognizably modern, more individualized and individuating forms.8
The rise of eighteenth-century sensibility, if it accomplishes anything
during this period, certainly does not eliminate punishment per se
but instead helps to create new, more enlightened practices of
punishment that are better suited to a "polite and commercial
society."9 Hence, in the play's triumphant final scene-the double
hanging of Barnwell and Millwood-a theological, essentially com-
munal notion of sin and retributive punishment is confronted by a
juridical, essentially individualist practice of correction.'0 In this
respect, Montagu's simultaneously sympathetic and punitive re-
sponse is revealingly ambiguous, particularly her need to have her
own responses mirrored by those around her. Montagu announces
her voluntary/involuntary adherence to the normative response but
repeats the play's earnest moral lesson in the form of a comic threat:
anyone who does not exhibit the morally appropriate feelings will be
hanged.
796 Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in The London Merchant
Montagu's comment exhibits not only a mixture of sympathy and
aggression that we might find in much of the eighteenth-century
writing on sentiment, but also reveals the degree to which sensibility
and retributive punishment both depend upon a common logic of
"like for like," a logic enforced if necessary with the violence of the
law."1 Montagu displays not only the moist, mirroring eyes of
eighteenth-century sensibility, but also the mirroring, retributive
logic of "an eye for an eye." To recognize this coincidence, however,
is only to bring Foucault's Nietzschean, genealogical reading of the
history of morality to sensibility, that distinctive product of Enlight-
enment morality.'12 When read genealogically, eighteenth-century
sensibility, which answers tears with more tears and strives to
harmonize divergent emotions within an agreed upon social and
moral framework, is only the indispensable corollary of the "hard
treatment" traditionally measured out to offenders.13 Both sensibility
and hard treatment use the prospect of punishment instrumentally,
to fix social boundaries, firm up the community's ranks, and expel
those who don't belong. The intimate link, however, between the
imagined pains produced by a delicate sensibility and the physical
pains administered by retributive punishment becomes even more
apparent when we recognize how deeply the trope of punishment
determines the whole structure of Lillo's "moral Tale."
Punishment, whether figured as a continuous, omnipresent threat
or as a singular, defining event, operates throughout The London
Merchant, realigning or eliminating divergent feelings on behalf of
the society it serves. Yet that single term--"punishment"-- hardly
does justice to the variety of roles it takes on in this play, branching
out in a Nietzschean fashion under the guise of a single, static
concept.14 First of all, Lillo uses the certainty of juridical punishment
to force his hero and villain to exhibit their moral differences as
clearly as possible, in order to guide the audience's emotional
responses to their respective fates. At the same time, Lillo's senti-
mental insistence upon the extra-individual dimension of sin forces
him to wrestle with the problems posed by the notions of collective
guilt and punishment, notions that are ultimately abandoned as too
diffuse to regulate groups and too indirect to regulate individuals.
Finally, Lillo's concluding gallows scene contrasts Barnwell and
Millwood's respective attitudes towards a now certain death, reveal-
ing that Millwood has all along believed in a vengeful, Calvinist,
predestinarian God whose harshness she has in some sense mirrored
in her own amorality and violence. Hence, punishment as depicted in
David Mazella 797
The London Merchant functions as both a dramatic device and a
recognizable social institution, a social boundary mark designed to fix
the relations between audience and dramatic characters, between
Protestants and other Christians, and between human beings and
God.
In each of these instances, Lillo's dual strategies of sympathetic
emotional harmonization and punitive social exclusion are most
evident in his treatment of the play's villain, Millwood, who consis-
tently places herself outside the bounds of the moral community that
has formed around Barnwell. As the most articulate opponent to the
play's would-be consensus, Millwood resists the like for like of
sensibility as stoutly as Barnwell defends it, while arguing strenuously
for the retributive divine punishment that Barnwell denounces.'5 At
every opportunity for reconciliation, Millwood behaves so badly that
she can be blamed for her own social exclusion, becoming the play's
incorrigible, irreducible remainder, and a figure incapable of belong-
ing to any community at all.
In her abject state of exclusion, isolation, and blame, however, the
character of Millwood has undergone a notable transvaluation from
the time of the play's first triumphant performances. In dramatic
contrast with the judgments of eighteenth-century viewers like
Montagu, a number of Lillo's twentieth-century readers have in-
verted the traditional moral hierarchy of hero over villain and
regarded Millwood's crimes as a form of ethical heroism more
intrinsically interesting than Barnwell's rather "slavish" (Millwood's
term) desire to please his superiors.'6 By interpreting Millwood's
transgressions as a striving after autonomy, and by rejecting a
morality defined exclusively as obedience to divinely and socially
prescribed authorities, such twentieth-century readings show the
historical distance between the sentimental morality offered to the
play's first audiences and the post-Kantian morality that has suc-
ceeded it."7 In the increasingly hostile critical responses to Barnwell
that begin to appear in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
we can discern a paradigm shift in morality itself that gradually
deemphasizes morality as obedience and emphasizes morality more
and more centrally as the pursuit of autonomy.'8 The result is an
emancipation of the individual that can barely be distinguished from
the criminal's transgressions of the law. In the wake of such large
scale redefinitions of the concept of morality between the eighteenth
and the twentieth century, we would expect Millwood to become as
crucial a symbol for moral autonomy as Barnwell had once been for
moral obedience, and indeed, much of the twentieth-century com-
mentary on the play bears this out Yet the play's notions of morality
and freedom are inseparable from the scenes of punishment that
produce those moments of moral decision, and it is the certainty of
punishment that allows the consequences of differing beliefs ulti-
mately to be measured against one another. As Marcel Gauchet has
observed, "Penal justice, the natural scene for testing liberty through
its punishment, little by little becomes the stage for measuring the
relativity of self-determination."''19 So in Lillo's "moral Tale," the
institutions of "penal justice" literally serve as the "stage" where
different forms of "self-determination" can be measured and com-
pared against one another.
Though this paradigm shift of morality from obedience to au-
tonomy has irrevocably changed our notions about the relative
degrees of guilt between Barnwell and Millwood, what has remained
constant throughout all the years of discussion of the play has been its
underlying structure of didactic moral comparisons. In other words,
no matter what judgment we make of the individual characters, a
successful reading or performance of this play seems to demand a
thumbs-up or thumbs-down judgment for each character at its
conclusion. This structure of morally assessing and comparing diver-
gent moral traditions or perspectives is perhaps the play's most
important legacy from the Enlightenment, and it is a str

replicated whenever we decide to read this or any other literar
against the grain to yield a different set of heroes or valuations t
offered to its first audiences. In fact, such morally loaded d
comparisons offer a specific (and thoroughly partial) view o
entire notion of moral autonomy, depicting autonomy exclus
the result of an irrevocable moral decision made by an indiv
between preexisting alternatives. What Lillo's play reveals, ho
is the origin of this notion of autonomy in a specifically Pro
piety that can also be found in other didactic, sentimental writer
eighteenth century, such as Samuel Richardson or Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. Lillo's willingness to show the machinery of social punishment
on-stage, however, makes possible not just the original vilifying reading
of Millwood, but also the subsequent rereading of her character as
heroic. Lillo's own decision to place the machinery of punishment on-
stage reveals the human, institutional basis of the law and morality, a
displacement of authority that makes such instructive moral compari-
sons possible while establishing the grounds upon which moral
judgments so produced may subsequently be controverted.
David Mazella 799
I. DIDACTICISM: PUNISHMENT OR CORRECTION?
In his critical "Dedication" and "Prologue," Lillo announces his

didactic aims and shows the points at which he must revise existing
tragic theory to make his drama accomplish its moral and instrumen-
tal goals."2 Significantly, Lillo's favored metaphor for the desired
effect of drama upon the spectator is the medical one of "remedy," as
well as the criminal one of "correction," metaphors suggestive of
what Foucault has since called "normalization," the return of the
aberrant organism (or criminal) to a state of health and normality.21
In the play itself, Lillo closely aligns his didactic theory with dramatic
practice by creating a new kind of tragedy specifically designed to
follow Hamlet's instructions to his players: "I've heard that guilty
creatures at a play / Have, by the very cunning of the scene, / Been so
struck to the soul that presently / They have proclaimed their
malefactions" ("Dedication," 50-53).22 Lillo will therefore stage a
series of actions so "cunning[ly]" that the dramatic characters, when
they "proclaim[ ] their malefactions," will cause audience members to
confess theirs as well, another version of the coercive mirroring
found in Montagu's statement. Accordingly, the actions of the hero
Barnwell and the villain Millwood are thoroughly sifted and assessed,
so that the audience's emotional responses will proceed from the
appropriate moral judgments. To accomplish this end, Lillo therefore
depicts Barnwell as the rather empty-headed victim of his seducer
and manipulator Millwood."2 Lillo then shows how her cruel and
lawless behavior leads her servants, Lucy and Blunt, to turn her in to
the authorities. The desertion of Millwood by her servants is one of
the early and explicit signals to the audience to reject her and her
example, or else risk running the same punishments that she does at
the end of the play.
In keeping with the didactic aims of his "moral Tale," Lillo

employs a curiously symmetrical narrative form that favors the
mirroring and comparing of analogous situations over the linear
development of plot or character. By continually arresting the progress
of the action with occasions for moral reflection, Lillo emphasizes the
role of relatively uninvolved secondary characters such as Thorowgood,
Lucy, Blunt, Trueman, or Maria as moral spectators of Millwood and
Barnwell, providing an ongoing model for the responses of the play's
audience. The result is a process of continual moral comparison,
carefully weighing the relative guilt or innocence of each character as
he or she hastens towards final judgment.
When we view the play's cast of characters, we find that Lillo's
character doublings are stark and moralistic enough to resemble the
virtue/vice characters of medieval allegory.24 These doublings then
create the interlinked series of thematic pairs that dominate the play's
characterization and action: we have, for example, Barnwell/Trueman
(good/bad apprentice), Barnwell/Millwood (unwilling/willing evildo-
ers), Thorowgood/Millwood (merchant capitalist/conquering capital-
ist), Maria/Millwood (moral, marriageable girl/immoral, unmanage-
able prostitute).25 The opening scenes of act 1, for example, function
as deliberately contrasting images, almost a Hogarthean diptych
revealing how good and bad commerce can affect the young. The
opening leads the good apprentice Trueman to a reasoned apprecia-
tion of trade, while sending his best friend Barnwell down a slippery
slope to sin, guilt, and eventual death by execution.26 Each young
man's choice of company determines his future course, whether he
chooses the sententious merchant Thorowgood or the manipulative
mistress of a "house of entertainment," Millwood. Innocent curiosity
honest concern for one's reputation, prudent calculation of one
interests, loyalty and trust nurtured by friendship-all the worldl
things commended by Thorowgood in the first act-are later per-
verted by Millwood in her desire to enslave and destroy Barnwell.
To contrast their characters, Lillo leaves almost no moral ambigu
ity around the figure of Millwood, but rather derives all his suspen
from Barnwell's excruciatingly slow discovery that Millwood is no
just unchaste but also dishonest, a hardened hypocrite, liar, an
receiver of stolen goods. Yet their moral difference becomes appar-
ent even to Barnwell after he steals from his master for the first time.
The secret of his embezzlement prevents the guilt-wracked Barnwell
from speaking openly to his friends and master. At the same time, the
"Hypocrisy" that Millwood "naturally" practices makes Barnwell's
sense of his impending exposure unbearable: "Tho' Hypocrisy may a
while conceal my Guilt, at length it will be known, and publick
Shame and Ruin must ensue" (2.1.5-7).27 Consequently, the trans-
parent communication he used to enjoy with his friends and master
has been destroyed by this one horrible secret: "In the mean time,
what must be my Life? ever to speak a Language foreign to my Heart;
hourly to add to the Number of my Crimes in order to conceal 'em"
(2.1.7-9). In his desperation and guilt, he likens himself to Satan
before the discovery of his rebellion: "Sure such was the Condition of
the grand Apostate, when first he lost his Purity; like me disconsolate
he wander'd, and while yet in Heaven, bore all his future Hell about
David Mazella 801
him" (2.1.9-11). As the Miltonic allusion suggests, Barnwell's strongly
internalized sense of guilt destroys any possible pleasure he might
have in his companions, or any relief he might feel in the conceal-
ment of his crime. In effect, Barnwell's conscience has begun
punishing him long before his master is able to, and in ways that cost
him the ability to be a faithful friend, employee, or lover.
TR[UEMAN]: Something dreadful is labouring in your Breast, O give it

vent and let me share your Grief; 'twill ease your Pain shou'd it admit
no cure, and make it lighter by the Part I bear.
BARN[WELL]: Vain Supposition! my Woes increase by being observ'd,
shou'd the Cause be known they wou'd exceed all Bounds.
TR: So well I know thy honest Heart, Guilt cannot harbour there.
BARN: O Torture insupportable! [Aside]
TR: Then why am I excluded, have I a Thought I would conceal from
you?
BARN: If yOu still urge me on this hated Subject, I'll never enter more
beneath this Roof, nor see your Face again.
TR: 'Tis strange, -but I have done, say but you hate me not.
BARN: Hate you!-I am not that Monster yet. (2.2.45-55)
Barnwell's fear of communicating his shame prevents him from

fully unburdening himself with Trueman, but the burden of his guilt
is also too strong for him to lie to his friend. Instead, Barnwell is
painfully suspended between his private knowledge of guilt and his
fears of public exposure. Yet the mounting pain exhibited by Barnwell
at this moment of failed confession makes obvious his desire to
confess the truth fully and completely to someone else, if only so that
he can control his own sinning impulses. His passionate desire for
Millwood, however, prevents him from throwing himself upon his
master's mercy, and so all these warring impulses, "like Wind and
Tide in raging Conflict met, when neither can prevail" (2.3.11-12),
toss him about like the Merchant's ship he compared himself to in the
previous act (1.8.22-26).
Directly after this encounter, Barnwell is confronted by his master
Thorowgood about his recent behavior and prepares to confess the
truth fully to him. Yet this confession is also stymied, ironically
enough, by Thorowgood's well-developed sense of pity and prudence:
BARN: This Goodness has o'er come me. [Aside] 0 Sir! you know not
the Nature and Extent of my Offence; and I shou'd abuse your
mistaken Bounty to receive 'em. Tho' I had rather die than speak my
Shame; tho' Racks could not have forced the guilty Secret from my
Breast, your Kindness has. (2.4.7-10)
Barnwell's conscience has been reawakened into a pained aware-
ness of its guilt not by the physical violence of "Racks," but by the
"Torture insupportable" of Thorowgood's "Kindness." Yet this com-
monplace of eighteenth-century ethics, that the internal sanction of
the conscience works far better than any external one in "forc[ing]
guilty Secret[s] from the Breast," actually yields Barnwell no true
relief from his guilt because he believes that Thorowgood's generous
forgiveness is based upon an error that Barnwell has culpably
encouraged. At the same time, Thorowgood refuses to listen to his
apprentice and thus loses a crucial opportunity to correct his error
and prevent the consequences that follow from Barnwell's guilty
downward spiral. Although we cannot quite say that Thorowgood is
solely responsible for the concealment of Barnwell's secret, Lillo's
staging of this scene shrewdly takes most of the blame off of Barnwell
for his failure to disclose the crime:
THOR: Enough, enough, whate'er it be, this Concern shews you're

convinc'd, and I am satisfied. How painful is the Sense of Guilt to an
ingenuous Mind; -some youthful Folly, which it were prudent not
to enquire into. -When we consider the frail Condition of Humanity,
it may raise our Pity, not our Wonder, that Youth should go astray;
when Reason, weak at the best when oppos'd to Inclination, scarce
form'd, and wholly unassisted by Experience, faintly contends, or
willingly becomes the Slave of Sense. The State of Youth is much to
be deplored; and the more so because they see it not; being then to
danger most expos'd, when they are least prepar'd for their Defence.
[Aside] (2.4.11-19)
Thorowgood's undoubtedly estimable and, above all, prudent

qualities of benevolence, pity, and generosity do not benefit Barnwell
because they accidentally prevent a full discovery of the truth and
thus only defer the inevitable punishment of Barnwell. It is also
remarkable that Thorowgood's description of his apprentice's con-
tending passions seems to reflect accurately the battle going on inside
Barnwell but in no way leads to the discovery of the true source of
Barnwell's "folly." Barnwell's desire to recover his former relation to
the truth, even at the price of a severe punishment, is ignored by his
master's misplaced generosity. Pity, therefore, when unsupported by
a full confession of the truth, becomes at least partly responsible for
the crimes that follow.
The difference between Millwood's encouragement of murder and
Barnwell's successful execution of the act becomes even more
David Mazella 803
apparent in Lillo's treatment of the hero's guiltiest, least sympathetic
moment, Barnwell's resolution to murder his uncle. As already noted,
Lillo emphasizes moral discussion over plot development and dra-
matic tension and shows Barnwell resolving upon the act only
because he wants to rescue Millwood. Lillo describes rather than
depicts this moment of villainous resolution and uses Millwood's own
servants, Lucy and Blunt, to communicate this information while
complaining of their mistress's greed. The cumulative effect is to
interlard the report of his intended crime with plenty of blame for
their mistress as the true cause of his criminal actions. For these two,
who know "cruel, artful Millwood" better than anyone else in the
play, Barnwell's reason has simply been destroyed by his passionate
yet misguided love. Moreover, the very act of describing their
mistress's bad behavior and, incidentally, Barnwell's decision to
murder, begins to persuade them both that they must leave her
service soon and turn her in to the law.
Lucy: Speechless he stood; but in his Face you might have read, that
various Passions tore his very Soul. Oft he, in Anguish, threw his
Eyes towards Heaven, and then as often bent their Beams on her;
then wept and groan'd, and beat his troubled Breast; at length, with
Horror, not to be express'd, he cry'd, Thou cursed Fair! have I not
given dreadful Proofs of Love! What drew me from my youthful
Innocence, to stain my then unspotted Soul, but Love? What caus'd
me to rob my worthy gentle Master, but cursed Love? What makes
me now a Fugitive from his Service, loath'd by my self, and scorn'd
by all the World, but Love? What fills my eyes with Tears, my Soul
with Torture, never felt on this side Death before? Why Love, Love,
Love. And why, above all, do I resolve, (for, tearing his Hair, he cry'd
I do resolve) to kill my Uncle?
BLUNT: Was she not mov'd? It makes me weep to hear the sad
Relation.
LucY: Yes, with Joy, that she had gain'd her Point.-She gave him no
Time to cool, but urg'd him to attempt it instantly. He's now gone; if
he performs it, and escapes, there's more Money for her; if not, he'll
ne'er return, and then she's fairly rid of him.
BLUNT: 'Tis time the World was rid of such a Monster.- (3.4.77-93)
The pathos of Barnwell's misguided sacrifice helps to direct at

least part of the blame back onto the deceptive Millwood, whose
"Avarice, insatiate as the Grave" (Lucy's phrase, 3.4.54) drives him to
ever more desperate behavior. Barnwell's painful, guilt crazed no-
tions of "Love," however, are not quite as paradoxical as they seem to
him, since he suffers not from a reciprocal and fatal love, but from
her pitiless exploitation of his innocence and inexperience.
The very act of describing this exchange, however, gradually
awakens the heretofore quiet consciences of Blunt and Lucy, which
are moved by Millwood's lack of pity for Barnwell to begin "hat[ing]
her" as a "Monster." Millwood's behavior sparks a rebellion against
her authority, and they swiftly reach their own resolution to notify the
authorities:
BLUNT:... -But there is something so horrid in Murder, -that all

other Crimes seem nothing when compared to that. -I would not
be involv'd in the Guilt of that for all the World.
Lucy: Nor I, Heaven knows; -therefore let us clear our selves, by
doing all that is in our Power to prevent it. I have just thought of a
Way, that, to me, seems probable. -Will you join with me to detect
this curs'd Design?
BLUNT: With all my Heart. He who knows of a Murder intended to

be committed, and does not discover it, in the Eye of the Law, and
Reason, is a Murderer. (3.4.100-108)
The defection of Blunt and Lucy to the side of Barnwell

Thorowgood, and the law, caused at first by their outrage over thei
mistress's cruel joy at her victim's distress, allows the once separated
parts of the plot to begin to unite. The consciences of both Lucy an
Blunt are reawakened by their growing awareness of the seriousnes
of their crimes, as well as their fears of being caught. Hence, the tear-
filled eyes of Barnwell, though thrown "towards Heaven, and then a
often bent their Beams on [Millwood]," ultimately reflect a "Soul
filled with Torture, never felt on this side Death," which will in tur
be answered finally by the "Eye of the Law, and Reason." Wha
completes this circuit of weeping and punishment, however, is the
timely conversion of Blunt and Lucy, which allows them to communi
cate their mistress's actions to the impartial gaze of the law.
Thus, the abandonment of Millwood prepares the audience for
her exposure, trial, and execution and provides a model for th
audience to reject her. Millwood's lack of sympathy for Barnwell an
her utter rejection of the calls of conscience have turned her into a
"Monster" who must be betrayed by her own servants and destroyed
as a social menace. By viewing Lucy and Blunt's emerging reforma-
tion, a reformation only half-begun at this point, the audience can
begin to distance itself from Millwood's seductive evil. Lillo makes it
possible for the audience to move in this direction from motives
David Mazella 805
either of conscience or of prudence, and to clear themselves, not only
of possible guilt, but even the appearance of it. In the terms of Lillo's
"Prologue," the final, ever more certain punishment of Millwood
enables Blunt and Lucy to correct themselves before it is too late.
II. SENSIBILITY AND THE PROBLEMS OF COLLECTIVE GUILT AND
PUNISHMENT
In the discovery scenes of the fourth act, Lillo p

problematic instances of what we might call "collective guilt," the sort
of blame that attaches not just to individuals but to groups in the
aftermath of tragic events. The first instance is the murder that
Barnwell commits at Millwood's suggestion. Despite the extenuating
circumstances of her influence, he assumes full responsibility for his
acts and is hanged. The second case, more equivocal than the first, is
that of Millwood, who refuses to acknowledge her own involvement
in, or responsibility for, the murders she encouraged Barnwell to
commit. She, too, is hanged, though without her own confession or
acknowledgment of her crimes. Her refusal to confess the truth
makes her crime both more aggravating and more uncertain for those
who would punish her.
Because of its power to suggest criminal thoughts or feelings
among the innocent, and with its promises of speedy communication,
sensibility can spread feelings of guilt and complicity as widely as
those of sympathy and love. Blunt admits, "He who knows of a
Murder intended to be committed, and does not discover it, in the
Eye of the Law, and Reason, is a Murderer." This is why Millwood's
refusal of sympathy for Barnwell is treated as a conscious refusal of
moral responsibility for his punishment and death. Any acknowledg-
ment of feelings for Barnwell would only force her to admit her own
role in his downfall. There are also considerable moral risks in acting
too fast on one's own guilty or responsible feelings, as we find in
Barnwell's misguided efforts to rescue Millwood. At the same time,
Lillo also shows how the extraordinarily slow and plodding responses
of Thorowgood diminish his responsibility for the events unfolding
around him. Sensibility, therefore, has extraordinarily mixed conse-
quences in the crimes and punishments included in The London
Merchant.
On the one hand, sensibility insists on the extraindividual dimen-

sion of feeling. Feelings "sensibly felt" are thus considered true only
to the extent that they are shared by others; feelings of this type
would naturally include feelings of guilt and responsibility for others.
On the other hand, sensibility insists equally strongly on directing the
social and legal institutions of punishment at only certain individuals,
formally limiting blame to those persons who can concretely be
assigned responsibility for a particular crime. The remainder of any
blame for a public tragedy gets dissipated into a generalized sense of
regret that "things had to be that way." Thus, at least in Thorowgood's
view, Millwood should take upon herself some of the guilt that
Barnwell feels, to lighten his burden. As far as Thorowgood is
concerned, however, he is under no similar obligation to acknowl-
edge any role in her downfall at the hands of rich and powerful men
like himself.
Millwood's hostility to Barnwell following his murder of his uncle
completes the moral comparison between the two in Barnwell's favor.
Lillo makes her selfishness and betrayal of Barnwell seem worse than
his act of quasi-parricide. In keeping with the extraordinary moral
slipperiness of prudence throughout this play, however, Millwood's
prudent, rational, and calculating attitude towards Barnwell after the
murder is contrasted with his passionate desire for self-sacrifice. She
is blamed, in effect, for attempting to preserve herself when Barnwell
has ceased to care about remaining in this world.
Immediately following the fruitless efforts of Lucy, Blunt, Maria,
Trueman, and Thorowgood to save him, Barnwell appears at Millwood's
house, covered with the blood of his freshly murdered uncle.
Characteristically, Millwood's only concern is that he was not able to
follow through on her plan:
MILL: But he is here, and I have done him wrong; his bloody Hands
show he has done the Deed, but show he wants the Prudence to
conceal it.
BARN: Where shall I hide me? whether shall I fly to avoid the swif
unerring Hand of Justice?
MILL: Dismiss those Fears; tho' Thousands had pursu'd you to the
Door, yet being enter'd here you are as safe as Innocence; I have
such a Cavern, by Art so cunningly contriv'd, that the piercing Eye
of Jealousy and Revenge may search in vain, nor find the Entrance to
the safe Retreat; there will I hide you if any Danger's near. (4.10.1-
9)
There is a heavy dramatic irony in Millwood's grudging praise for

her would-be lover, since she cannot comprehend how Barnwell
could have the will to commit the deed without also exhibiting the
prudence to conceal it. She judges him by her own high standards of
David Mazella 807
dissimulation and hypocrisy. Yet Barnwell's failure to hide himself, his
unwillingness to defer punishment, once again works in his favor with
the audience in comparison with Millwood's more calculating atti-
tude. Millwood's secret Cavern, "by Art so cunningly contriv'd," is yet
another instance of her ability to defend herself with feminine arts
that are difficult for any male gaze, let alone that of the naive
Barnwell, to penetrate. Millwood's description of the "Eye of the
Law" as the "piercing Eyes of Jealousy and Revenge" both echoes
and modifies the earlier imagery of the law's impartial gaze that Blunt
had earlier discussed. Yet for Barnwell, these "piercing eyes" signify
not just the eyes of those who might judge and condemn them as
criminals, but those of the inner spectator who cannot escape vi

Barnwell's crimes, or regard them indifferently:
BARN: O hide me from my self, if it be possible; for while I bear

Conscience in my Bosom, tho' I were hid where Man's Eye ne
saw, nor Light e'er dawn'd, 'twere all in vain. For oh! that inm
that impartial Judge, will try, convict, and sentence me for Mur
and execute me with never-ending Torments. Behold these H
all crimson'd o'er with my dear Uncle's Blood! Here's a Sight
make a Statue start with Horror, or turn a living Man into a Sta
MILL: Ridiculous! Then it seems you are afraid of your own Shad
or what's less than a Shadow, your Conscience.
BARN: Tho' to Man unknown I did the accursed Act, what can
hide from Heav'ns all-seeing Eye? (4.10.10-20)
Barnwell's "inmate" and "impartial Judge," his conscience telli

rendered in juridical terms, will anticipate any subsequent con
nation that he might experience. In spite of Millwood's ridicule
without any further exposure of his guilt, Barnwell finds him
already a condemned man in the eyes of his own conscience, w
speaks for both divine and human law. When Millwood discov
however, that Barnwell "fled the Sight of what [his] Hand
done," (4.10.30, my emhasis) without securing any "advant
(4.10.21-22), she flies into a rage and denounces him to his fac
murderer and a hypocrite:
MILL: Whining, preposterous, canting Villain; to murder your Uncle,

rob him of Life, Natures first, last, dear Prerogative, after which
there's no Injury; then fear to take what he no longer wanted, and
bring to me your Penury and Guilt. Do you think I'll hazard my
Reputation, nay my Life, to entertain you? (4.10.33-36)
Millwood's accusations focus on the remorse that has overtaken
Barnwell ("Whining, preposterous, canting Villain") and register,
accurately, the depth of his guilt and the inadequacy of such
professions to atone for his crime. It is important to remember,
incidentally, that Millwood's accusation is true enough to have
genuine force. Why should we care about a "Villain" who repents
only after the injury is complete? Here Lillo seems to be inviting his
audience to find these accusations literally true, though too unsympa-
thetic to be accepted unreservedly. Once she is finished accusing
Barnwell, however, she reveals the greater crime, as far as she is
concerned, that of threatening her property, reputation, and life. The
prudential interest in maintaining one's reputation and entertaining
one's associates formerly praised in act 1 by Thorowgood now makes
it imperative that she betray Barnwell and accuse him of murder
before she herself is accused, simply for the sake of self-preservation.
"It must be done" (4.10.43-44), she reasons to herself, and calls for
an officer. "[S]hou'd I let him escape," she announces theatrically, for
the benefit of any onlookers, "I justly might be thought as bad as he"
(4.11.2). When Barnwell pathetically offers to turn himself in rather
than suffer the "Torture" of her "Ingratitude," she responds only,
"Call it what you will, I am willing to live; and live secure; which
nothing but your Death can warrant" (4.12.4-7).
At this point, Barnwell realizes that Millwood herself has become
a kind of scourge for his crimes:
If there be a Pitch of Wickedness that seats the Author beyond the

reach of Vengeance, you must be secure. But what remains for me,
but a dismal Dungeon, hard-galling Fetters, an awful Trial, and
ignominious Death, justly to fall unpitied and abhorr'd?-After
Death to be suspended between Heaven and Earth, a dreadful
Spectacle, the warning and horror of a gaping Croud. This I cou'd
bear, nay wish not to avoid, had it but come from any Hand but
thine.- (4.12.8-14)
Barnwell cannot conceive a worse fate than to be unpitied, to which

Millwood's only response is to hand over her lover to the officers with
the theatrical mocking of, "Heaven defend me! Conceal a Murderer?
here, Sir, take this Youth into your Custody, I accuse him of Murder;
and will appear to make good my Charge" (4.13.1-3). She no longer
bothers to pretend any sort of love or innocence for Barnwell and
performs only for the sake of the officers who are leading him away.
David Mazella 809
When Barnwell finally realizes the terrible events in store for him,
and even accepts the ignominious death and terrible fate of becom-
ing a "dreadful Spectacle" and "warning and horror" of a gaping
crowd, the hardest part is acknowledging Millwood's terrible cruelty
to him. It is at this moment that Barnwell directly addresses the
theater audience:
To whom, of what, or how shall I complain; I'll not accuse

her, the hand of Heav'n is in it, and this the Punishment
Lust and Parricide; yet Heav'n that justly cuts me off, sti
suffers her to live, perhaps to punish others; tremendous
Mercy! so Fiends are curs'd with Immortality, to be the
Executioners of Heaven.-
Be warn'd ye Youths, who see my sad Despair,

Avoid lewd Women, False as they are Fair;
By Reason guided, honest Joys pursue;
The Fair, to Honour and to Virtue true,
Just to her self, will ne'er be false to you.
By my Example learn to shun my Fate;
(How wretched is the Man who's wise too late?)
Ere Innocence, and Fame, and Life be lost,-
Here purchase Wisdom, cheaply, at my Cost.
(4.13.4-17)
Barnwell's exit shows his conscious assumption of a didactic role in

order to stop the circulation of accusations and punishments that
Millwood had put into motion. He has fixed his own identity and will
not redirect any blame onto his seducer. This fixity, though it brings
the certainty of punishment, also comes as a surprising relief to him,
a comforting return to the truth after his failures at concealment. Not
even the puzzling absence of heavenly retribution will faze him, since
he believes that Millwood lives now only as a providential mechanism
to punish others. He therefore preaches chastity to the youths in the
audience and offers himself as an example of one "who's wise too
late" and therefore "wretched" (4.13.15). The very act of viewing his
downfall is seen as a financial transaction, where the spectator can
cheaply purchase the wisdom that Barnwell has bought at such a
terrible price. To use the language of the prologue once again, the
dramatic punishment of one person allows for another to correct
himself in time.
After Barnwell's speedy fall into sexual license, embezzlement,
murder, and publicly proclaimed guilt, it is his master Thorowgood
who must finally hunt down Millwood. Interestingly enough, the
confrontation between Millwood and Thorowgood is staged as both
criminal investigation and free ethical debate. In this encounter,
Barnwell's earlier desire to reveal himself is contrasted with Millwood's
undampened enterprise and manipulativeness. During the final
debate between the master and mistress of Barnwell, Thorowgood
allows her a surprising amount of latitude in debate, addresses his
own concerns to the audience about the history of violence done in
the name of piety, and prepares the audience to forgive Barnwell's
errors and even contemplate some degree of pity for Millwood's case.
The capture of Millwood, as one of the least mediated moments in
the play, creates one of its most dramatically effective scenes. Lillo's
staging ensures that Thorowgood's discovery does not necessarily
coincide with her capture by the law, so the audience must wait to see
if Millwood can manipulate him as successfully as she has done
everyone else up to this point. Lillo has also introduced another
element of uncertainty into the scene by staging it as a debate that
Thorowgood is not able to control. To Thorowgood's surprise and
dismay, Millwood is able to turn his simple accusation of her into a
wide-ranging discussion of the power and inequities that underlie the
institutions of law, morality, and religion, the very institutions that
would punish her.
Unlike Barnwell, Millwood is perfectly capable of turning her
accusers' charges back against them and throwing the morality of
Trueman and Thorowgood into doubt along with Barnwell's Christian
humility. After she has been apprehended by Trueman and
Thorowgood, she says:
I know you and I hate you all; I expect no Mercy, and I ask for none;
I follow'd my Inclinations, and that the best of you does every Day.
All Actions seem alike natural and indifferent to Man and Beast, who
devour, or are devour'd, as they meet with others weaker or stronger
than themselves. (4.18.33-36)
Millwood rejects the mercy of men because she denies any moral
distinction between her inclinations and those of other people. Why
should she be punished for pursuing her desires, where others are
rewarded for following their own? In her experience, there is no
distinction between right and wrong, only eat or be eaten. By staying
true to her Hobbesean vision, Millwood alone of all the characters
rises up and attains an aura of ethical heroism with her consistency of
action and lofty disregard for consequences. At moments like this
David Mazella 811
encounter, Millwood defines morality not as obedience, but as
autonomy, the opposite of Barnwell's slavishness. Yet she, like Hobbes
himself, carefully distinguishes her materialism from outright irreligion:
I am not Fool enough to be an Atheist, tho' I have known enough of

Mens Hypocrisy to make a thousand simple Women so. Whatever
Religion is in it self, as practis'd by Mankind, it has caus'd the Evils
you say it was design'd to cure. War, Plague, and Famine, has not
destroy'd so many of the human Race, as this pretended Piety has
done; and with such barbarous Cruelty, as if the only Way to honor
Heaven, were to turn the present World into Hell. (4.18.39-44)
Surprisingly, Thorowgood accepts at least part of her remarks about

religion and addresses them as a question to the entire audience:
Truth is Truth, tho' from an Enemy, and spoke in Malice. You

bloody, blind, and superstitious Bigots, how will you answer this?
(4.18.45-46)
Thorowgood has been forced to admit that Millwood's observa-

tions on the history of Christianity are correct. For both Thorowgood
and Lillo, true Christianity must be distinguished from the bloody,
superstitious bigotry of its (chiefly Catholic) past. The first step, of
course, that separates Thorowgood's religion from mere bigotry is to
accept an unpleasant truth, even when it comes from an enemy. This
is a more dangerous concession than Thorowgood could ever imag-
ine. In his gesture we find the impulse that sent hundreds of
eighteenth-century Christian apologists off to answer the scoffers and
freethinkers in their own terms.28 The discourse of truth, which must
be equally accessible by either side in a dispute, places heavy
constraints upon the person determined to "prove" the truth of
Christianity.
Millwood's approaching moment of punishment produces this

brief, symptomatic exchange on truth and the evident difficulties in
both law and religion in following its dictates. Millwood asks, in
effect, how she can trust in the human institutions of law and religion
that have been so divided and destructive in the past? Lillo's
response, insofar as the figure of Thorowgood seems to represent an
answer to this kind of question, is for a tolerant, mercantile morality
that is broadly Protestant and nationalist, recognizably religious but
not sectarian in its orientation. Lillo's decidedly un-Calvinist version
of dissenting rational religion echoes the Latitudinarians' earlier
political goal of comprehension and results in a religion conceived
instrumentally, as a means to attain certain broadly defined eco-
nomic, social, and political goals. These kinds of political goals cannot
be reached if religious persecutions and punishments are given free
rein, as in Catholic Spain (or the less tolerant parts of the Church of
England). The only solution is a separation of law and religion that
diverts state authority away from "pretended Piety" and elaborates a
realm of moral discussion that can process these long-standing
differences as the problems of individuals who must learn to correct
themselves by watching the errors of other people.29
Lillo's discourse of moral inclusion, which is displayed in this little
dialogue between Millwood and Thorowgood on the dangers of
"pretended Piety" to true religion, consciously detaches itself from
the fixities of existing religious and political systems and reorganizes
historically conflicting positions into a larger, more abstract and
comprehensive moral system.30 As Michel de Certeau writes of the
historical evolution of Enlightenment ethics from the theological
conflicts of the seventeenth century:
A new system of axioms on thought and action moves initially into a

third position, between the adversary churches of Catholic and
Protestant denomination. It progressively defines the very ground
which is uncovered beneath the fragmentation of beliefs. An
autonomous ethics is thus established, one whose frame of reference
is either the social order or the conscience.3'
In the wake of interminable conflicts first between Catholics and

Protestants throughout Europe, and then between the Arminian and
Calvinist strains of Protestantism in the English Civil War and
afterwards, Lillo's recognizably Arminian stance posits sensibili
midway between argumentative poles, in de Certeau's "third po
tion."'32 Like the Latitude-men before him, Lillo and his increasi
Arminian, Dissenting cohort defined morality essentially as
refusal of certain historically grounded, adversarial roles. For a
those who wish to inhabit the third position of autonomous ethics, the
moral observer must treat such religious, sectarian divisions as
merely factitious or unreal, illusions that must be seen through for
true moral (and even religious) judgment to occur. In other words,
sensibility makes the paradigm for all moral discussion the gradual
discovery and removal of religious prejudices that blind and deceive
others. As an autonomous ethics liberated from advocacy of particu-
lar theological positions, sensibility sees little reason for pursuing
David Mazella 813
certain public, religious order if these cannot maintain and regulate
the whole of society. In this respect, Lillo's depiction of sensibility
could not be further from the championing of the individual con-
science by the more Calvinist sects of an earlier era. Unlike Millwood,
Barnwell indeed has an active conscience, but his inability to confess
the truth to others makes it impossible for him to act upon its
judgments until it is too late.
Millwood, however, concludes her harangue of her accusers with a
Nietzschean flourish, attacking the moral pretensions of those who
would represent the law and its will to punish:
What are your Laws, of which you make your Boast, but the Fool's
Wisdom, and the Coward's Valour; the Instrument and Skreen of all
your Villanies, by which you punish in others what you act your
selves, or wou'd have acted, had you been in their Circumstances.
The Judge who condemns the poor Man for being a Thief, had been
a Thief himself had he been poor. Thus you go on deceiving, and
being deceiv'd, harassing, plaguing, and destroying one another; but
Women are your universal Prey. (4.18.47-53)
Millwood describes the law from the point of view of the exploited,
who are punished mercilessly for their infractions but gain no
protection in return. As a woman, she is the "universal Prey" for every
man and most exploited when most "moralized": "A thousand Ways
our Ruin you pursue, / Yet blame in us those Arts, first taught by yo
(4.18.56-57). Thus, she consciously understands what Barnwell can
only enact, the theatrical power of powerlessness.
In her denials of responsibility for Barnwell's acts, Millwoo
speech ironically points to her history of exploitation as a po
woman, or the persecutions of Christians by fellow Christians, t
indicate the asymmetries of collective guilt: collectives may succe
fully blame individuals for particular acts, and even punish them
their crimes, but individuals seem to have no reciprocal right
direct blame upon those groups. For example, men may acknowled
the existence of abuses of women, and Christians may even attest
Christianity's history of persecuting other Christians, but no in
vidual, no matter how personally upright or "sensible of" such abu
ever expects to be personally punished for such historical cas
Problems, or perhaps we should call them crimes, such as the
historical exploitation of women, or the persecution of religious
minorities, or the conquest of indigenous peoples, for that matter,
have often been tacitly maintained, if not actively encouraged, by the
religious and juridical institutions of their own time and place. Yet, as
Millwood points out, those abuses continue and, in some cases, the
very agencies that perpetrated them flourish with their moral author-
ity intact. Millwood can attest to the indifference of the law to her
own exploitation. So why should she accept any punishment for
Barnwell's acts? Thorowgood's answer, and it is a strangely inad-
equate one, is that she is simply guilty of insensibility. By ruining a
youth and failing to acknowledge her own role in his downfall, she is
guilty of failing to reciprocate his gesture of self-sacrifice. If this
failure of sensibility seems less than criminal to us, it is because the
faded normative status of sensibility now allows its gaps and asymme-
tries to show themselves to us. As a criminal, Millwood is never
expected to possess sensibility in the first place, because sensibility
belongs not to the one being punished, but the one with the power to
punish, the person who represents the interests of society against the
lone, unrepentant criminal. As Foucault notes, "The body, the imagi-
nation, pain, the heart to be respected are not, in effect, those of the
criminal that is to be punished, but those of the men who, having
subscribed to the pact, have the right of exercising ... against him the
power of assembly."33 Barnwell, as an exemplary and exceptional
prisoner, is attributed a sensibility only insofar as he identifies himself
with the social and moral collective that is actively punishing him.
Lillo therefore uses this exchange between an already discredited
villain and a supposed paragon of commercial virtue to reveal the
discontinuities between a discourse of individual guilt in the manner
of Barnwell ("I now am, -what I've made my self' [5.8.2]) and the
more turbulent discourse of collective blame that Millwood uses so
expertly for her own ends ("I learn'd that to charge my innocent
Neighbours with my Crimes, was to merit their Protection; for to
skreen the Guilty, is the less scandalous, when many are suspected,
and Detraction, like Darkness and Death, blackens all Objects, and
levels all Distinction" [4.18.24-27]). Only a full confession of per-
sonal responsibility can close the gap between the individual's guilt
and the less-reliable blame directed at him by a community. Yet what
this exchange makes clear is that for Lillo, our pity for Millwood
should not affect our judgment of her crimes, or our sense of the
justice of her execution. Sensibility only neutralizes certain kinds of
blame and undoes particular kinds of prejudice while leaving others
untouched. Once Millwood has aired her objections, then, there is
nothing left to do but proceed with the executions, with Millwood's
final execrations upon justice still hanging in the air:
David Mazella 815
Women, by whom you are, the Source of Joy,
With cruel Arts you labour to destroy:
A thousand Ways our Ruin you pursue,
Yet blame in us those Arts, first taught by you.
O-may, from hence, each violated Maid,
By flatt'ring, faithless, barb'rous Man betray'd;
When robb'd of Innocence, and Virgin Fame,
From your Destruction raise a nobler Name;
To right their Sex's Wrongs devote their Mind,
And future Millwoods prove to plague Mankind.
(4.18.54-64).
Millwood's final threat, a new race of "future Millwoods" who

learn the wrong moral lesson from their maltreatment, is another way
to bring the audience to use another's punishment to correct their
own behavior before it is too late.
III. THEOLOGIES OF PUNISHMENT VS. THEOLOGIES OF MERCY,

SENSIBILITY, AND SELF-CORRECTION
Lillo's closing gallows scene allows a final contrast to be mad

between Barnwell and Millwood's respective attitudes towards a now
certain death and reveals the final identity of Millwood as a predesti-
narian Calvinist. We learn that Millwood's harshness and sensuality
has been motivated all along by her belief in an amoral and violent
image of the deity. In this respect, Lillo draws upon quite traditional
oppositions between Arminian and Calvinist theologies to structure
this final contrast between his hero and villain. No matter how
dissenting its mercantile characters, The London Merchant is none-
theless animated by a recognizably Arminian sense of theological
latitude. Lillo thus renders his hero even more acceptable (and his
villain yet more detestable) to a presumably orthodox Anglican
audience.
Lillo is particularly careful to show the

theological distinction between Arminian an
mained a crucial marker of difference between orthodox and hetero-
dox in and around the Church of England throughout the eighteenth
century. For Lillo, belief in an Arminian or Calvinist deity decides the
eternal fate of both Barnwell and Millwood, who embody not only
the distinctions between saved and damned, but also between the
pleasures of benevolence and those of egoism and sensuality. Here
we may see one of the origins of the eighteenth-century's obsession
with the moral comparisons of didacticism, the continual wrangling
between warring religious faiths, creeds, and sects during the seven-
teenth century. As with all didactic plots, Lillo's ending attempts to
secure the moral reading over the uncertain course of events that
have preceded it: Barnwell's death is intended to produce such
closure when he debates theology with Millwood the moment before
they are both about to be hanged. At the same time, Lillo is careful to
separate the moral implications from both the legal and the religious
by showing Barnwell and Millwood experiencing the same worldly
punishment-social disgrace and death by hanging-that they must
each struggle to confront, utilizing not just their faith but also the
moral character that their respective beliefs make possible. It is at
this level, at the level of character creation, morality, and sociability,
that the notion of moral pleasure takes on an important function for
Lillo and his theatre audience, ensuring that there are sensible
rewards for moral behavior.
In the final act, Barnwell has been sentenced to hang alongside
Millwood but remains optimistic about the future. A confessed
murderer and condemned criminal, he calmly sits and reads in his
little cell, confident of the heavenly berth he will soon occupy.
Thorowgood enters, points to Barnwell, then moralizes directly to the
audience:
There see the bitter Fruits of Passion's detested Reign, and sensual
Appetite indulg'd. Severe Reflections, Penitence, and Tears. (5.2.1-
2)
The moments leading to Barnwell's execution, which promise "severe

Reflections, penitence and tears," inveigh, as we might have pre-
dicted, against the force of the passions, especially those that led to
the satisfaction of the appetites. Barnwell is simply receiving the
punishment that anyone might expect after such crimes. Yet the
scene develops in unexpected directions. It swerves past a straightfor-
ward judgment of Barnwell and complicates the act of judging him.
When Barnwell and Thorowgood exchange their final farewells,
the master assures his apprentice, "-bear a little longer the Pains
that attend this transitory Life, and cease from Pain for ever" (5.2.53-
54). Then he leaves Barnwell alone.
Thorowgood's advice follows the conventional Christian wisdom of
contemptus mundi, but Barnwell's response, delivered in an aside
straight to the audience, deserves close attention:
David Mazella 817
I find a Power within that bears my Soul above the Fears of Death,
and, spight of conscious Shame and Guilt, gives me a Taste of
Pleasure more than Mortal. (5.3.1-3)
This is not mere stoicism in the face of death, not mere acceptance
of one's punishment for the sake of consistency in the moral universe;
Barnwell has discovered a positive pleasure in his situation. The
pleasure and the power of repentance have overcome his shame and
guilt. This "Taste of Pleasure" yet to come savors of heavenly joys,
feelings far above the "sensual Appetite" that once ruined him,
especially his desire for Millwood. Barnwell's discovery of pleasures
beyond the physical is of course a standard part of Christian doctrine
about the afterlife, but Lillo has insisted on showing his enjoyment
here in this world. As it turns out, this pleasure is the ascetic pleasure
of self-denial, something that his fellow sinner Millwood cannot
imagine.
In the final act, Lillo dramatizes their differences in the most
direct, literal-minded fashion, placing them in a grisly mise en scen
("The Place of Execution. The Gallows and Ladders at the farth
End of the Stage. A Crowd of Spectators. Blunt and Lucy") an
underscoring everything with the comments of Lucy and Blunt. H
former assistants in crime explicitly compare the behavior of thei
former master to her victim:
Lucy: They are here: observe them well. How humble and composed
young Barnwell seems! but Millwood looks wild, ruffled with Passion,
confounded and amazed. (5.11.6-8)34
At their entrance, Barnwell has left behind the lamentations and self-
accusations he displayed in previous acts and begs her to join him in
repentance. He repeats the process of his own temptation with a
difference, trying to tempt her into penitence:
BARN: Yet ere we pass the dreadful Gulph of Death, yet ere you're
plunged in everlasting Woe, O bend your stubborn Knees and harder
Heart, humbly to deprecate the Wrath divine. Who knows but
Heaven, in your dying Moments, may bestow that Grace and Mercy
which your Life despised?
MILL: Why name you Mercy to a Wretch like me? Mercy's beyond
my Hope; almost beyond my Wish. I can't repent, nor ask to be forgiven.
(5.11.20-25)
Millwood's refusal of divine mercy, surely the most compelling
dramatic element of the play's ending, emphasizes the link between
her theological position and her psychological state: her religion
merely reflects her partial view of divine power. Millwood cannot
imagine a merciful God because she herself lacks all mercy and
compassion. By extrapolating from her own principles, which refer all
questions solely to power, repentance is mere submission, mercy only
diffidence. Her malevolent image of both humanity and divinity leave
her with no choice but angry abuse of what she conceives to be an
angry God: "pour [some plague] now on this devoted Head, that I
may feel the worst thou canst inflict and bid Defiance to Thy utmost
Power" (5.11.17-19).
Barnwell's appeals fail because no matter how much Millwood
fears death, she still desires something other than salvation, a
resistant, isolated kernel of willfulness, a core of pleasure stubbornly
unintegrated even within a divine order: "Mercy's beyond my hope;
almost beyond my Wish" (5.11.24-25). Barnwell calls attention to her
egotism and how the same sin that spoiled her conduct now blocks
her repentance: "O think what 'tis to be for ever miserable; nor with
vain Pride oppose a Power, that's able to destroy you" (5.11.26-27).
Barnwell's struggle to save Millwood, and her stubborn refusal to
surrender her isolated self, even to God, under threat of a "Deluge of
Wrath" (5.11.28), reveal the defining difference in their personalities:
his altruism and her egotism, each associated with a particular kind of
pleasure.
We quickly discover, however, that there is a yet more recalcitrant
obstacle to Millwood's repentance than mere selfishness, which is her
reflexive belief in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Paradoxi-
cally, this devotee of pleasure and greed is equally dependent upon a
theology of despair:
MILL: O! I have sinn'd beyond the Reach of Mercy!

BARN: O say not so: 'tis Blasphemy to think it. As yon bright Roof is
higher than the Earth, so and much more does Heaven's Goodness
pass our Apprehension. O what created Being shall presume to
circumscribe Mercy, that knows no Bounds?
MILL: This yields no Hope. Tho' Mercy may be boundless yet 'tis
free: And I was doom'd, before the World began to endless Pains and
thou to Joys eternal.
BARN: O! gracious Heaven! extend thy Pity to her: Let thy rich Mercy
flow in plenteous Streams to chase her Fears and heal her wounded
Soul! (5.11.33-41)
David Mazella 819
Millwood, Faustian skeptic of human and divine justice, employs the
Calvinist language of predestination to justify her pessimism.35 She
refuses to beg for the mercy that has always been denied her. Quoting
the Calvinist doctrine of free grace, Millwood believes even bound-
less mercy to be the "free" (meaning arbitrary) gift of God to a
preexisting group of the elect: that is the meaning of her protest,
"Tho' Mercy may be boundless yet 'tis free: And I was doom'd, before
the World began to endless Pains and thou to Joys eternal."36 She is
not responsible for her own ultimate fate but is at the mercy of a
decision made long before she ever existed. Heaven or Hell are
external, literal places for her, places where her soul is headed.
Consequently, her conception of her own character is as fixed and
limited as her vision of heaven, so that both are immune to the
hopeful influences that have reclaimed Barnwell. For Barnwell, the
worst sin of all is precisely Millwood's Calvinism, because it attributes
a cruel arbitrariness to God, questions his benevolence, limits con-
ceptions of his goodness to a human scale, and encourages her
useless despair after the fact.37 As he pleads, "0! add not to your vast
Account Despair: A Sin more injurious to Heaven, than all you've yet
committed" (5.11.31-32).38
It may be interesting to note here, however, Paul Ricoeur's

strictures on "original sin," which focus precisely on the question of
the "individual" versus the "communal" dimensions of sin:
For the prophets this sinful condition is not reducible to a notion of

individual guilt like the one the juridical Greco-Roman mind
developed to give a just basis for the administration of sentence by
the tribunals. The sinful condition has from the outset a communal
dimension. Men are included in it in a body. It is the sin of Tyre, of
Edom, of Gilead, the sin of Judah. A "we" -the "we other poor
sinners" of the liturgy-is uttered in the confessions of sins. This
transbiological and transhistorical solidarity of sin constitutes the
metaphysical unity of the human race. It, too, is unanalyzable in
terms of multiple veerings of individual human wills.39
Millwood is resisting precisely the juridical notion of individual guilt

that Barnwell urges upon her. Instead, in an epochal act of transvalua-
tion, Barnwell's own enlightened individualism redescribes a tradi-
tional communal concept as the most destabilizing, most individualistic
theological attitude of all-predestination, a belief in a "transbiological
and transhistorical solidarity of sin." Sin now becomes redefined
precisely as that which resists the juridical operations of the law.
Barnwell, on the other hand, directs his prayers to a "gracious"
heaven that pities at least as much as it punishes, a heaven capable of
shedding tears in "plenteous streams" for sinners. In a recognizably
Arminian response, he reminds her of the unlimited supply of grace,
a result of "the infinite Extent of heavenly Mercy" (5.2.12), and
denies the founding assumption of predestination: that grace is fixed
and limited, available only to a tiny percentage of the human race.
His altruism and compassion go so far that he prays more for her soul
than his own and even hopes that she will escape punishment in the
afterlife:
MILL: Incompassed with Horror, whither must I go? I wou'd not

live-nor die-That I cou'd cease to be!- or ne'er had been!
BARN: Since Peace and Comfort are denied her here, may she find
Mercy where she least expects it, and this be all her Hell. (5.11.53-56)
Barnwell could not be further from the "abominable fancy," the

idea popular in Medieval Christianity that the saints take a positive
pleasure in the visible sufferings of sinners in Hell. Millwood,
however, is Christian enough to believe in the horrors of her own
punishment and must choose between a frightful Calvinist vision of
eternal torment or the Hobbesean solution of the annihilation of
damned souls: "that I cou'd cease to be." Yet her pains on-stage are
represented as psychological, not supernatural, the ravings of despair,
not the early pangs of eternal hellfire. The useless cruelty of eternal
punishment, once it was no longer considered a proper source of
pleasure for the saved (another sign that Christianity was being
reconceived ethically, as a universal system, not just a tiny band of
elect) made the doctrine of Hell inconvenient, an awkwardly irratio-
nal part of Christianity's past. Predestination therefore seemed all the
more monstrous, since it arbitrarily consigned the majority of human-

ity to its terrors for no discernible reason at all.
In the case of Millwood as well as Barnwell, the question of the
instrumental value of the suffering of others is to be calculated back
into the moral judgment made upon her. Barnwell hopes that the
present agony of Millwood might be enough to atone for her sins,
since her visible pain might dissuade others from similar actions.
Thus, evil actions, as long as they are punished in this life, might
benefit enough people in the hereafter to make eternal punishment
unnecessary. As Barnwell concludes,
David Mazella 821
-From our Example may all be taught to fly the first
Approach of Vice; but, if o'ertaken
By strong Temptation, Weakness, or Surprize,
Lament their Guilt and by Repentance rise;
Th'impenitent alone die unforgiven;
To sin's like Man, and to forgive like Heaven.
(5.11.58-61)
The London Merchant encourages discussion about conflicting

moral and religious values by embodying them in different characters
and allowing their action and dialogue to relativize the values of each,
setting them all upon the same discursive plane. Lillo has used the
theater to provoke a discussion in which the saved and the damned
can freely argue with one another, in a fictive space where theological
questions cannot be decided by coercive religious authority. As we
saw in the Thorowgood/Millwood exchange, the desire to deemphasize
the most painful aspects of religious worship (symbolized by the
doctrine of Hell) and to create a new category of religious pleasure,
are crucially allied to a more autonomous definition of the human
subject. Yet, much to our surprise, Lillo's model of the autonomous
subject seems to be the obedient Barnwell, not the infinitely more
challenging figure of Millwood.
Yet alongside this emphasis upon internalized moral autonomy
and self-correction are the equally powerful forces of punishment
and blame embodied in the collective influence of Trueman,
Thorowgood, and the rest of the onlookers who witness the execu-
tion. One of the most important differences between a Millwood and
a Barnwell is that Barnwell ultimately listens to the appeals ignored
by Millwood, allowing him finally to rejoin the group and restore his
moral/social standing in the last few moments before his final
punishment. For Barnwell, life is literally unthinkable without the
appropriate feelings for his friends and associates; any kind of
dissimulation, distance, or separation from this group costs him
severely and is a sign of his temporary moral depravity. Yet, as
Barnwell learns, to his own cost and to the audience's profit, the
appearance of disinterested sympathy often conceals other motives.
Millwood, for example, seduces Barnwell by flattering him into
believing he is doing a charitable act; Millwood's act of deception,
however, is unmistakably buttressed by Barnwell's own self-deception
about the nature of his assistance to her.
In contrast with Barnwell's rather pathetic susceptibility to others,
sentimental villains like Millwood function as the conscious enemies
of fellow feeling, a definitive outside to the moral order that
assimilates Barnwell at the last moment. As someone who knowingly
and freely rejects truth, she is the only person excluded from the
divine and moral order that can accept Barnwell. Her punishments
are not so much the literal agonies of the damned but the psychologi-
cal pains of guilt that overtake her at the end. In the exemplary
madness and despair that she exhibits before her death, she (or at
least her example) has finally been made useful to a community.
University of Houston
NOTES
I would like to thank Dorothea von Miicke and Michael Seidel for their advic
suggestions on the initial versions of this piece, and my colleague Jay Kaste
helpful reading of the final version.
1 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Letters and Works of Lady Mary
Montagu, vol. 1, 2nd rev. ed., ed. James Archibald Stuart-Wortley-Macken
Wharncliffe (London: Richard Bentley, 1837), 89, quoted in James L. Steff
introduction to The London Merchant, in The Dramatic Works of George
Steffensen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 128. The London Merchant is
cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number. I have also found W
McBurney's older edition of The London Merchant helpful, particularly fo
and introduction (The London Merchant, ed. McBurney [Lincoln: Univ. of
Press, 1965]).
2 "Some Remarks on the Play of George Barnwell," in The Gentleman's M
(London: 1731), 340, which reprints the 21 August 1731 review of the
Register, vol. 71, with the additional comment quoted above. The Weekly
review is also reprinted in Essays on the Theatre from Eighteenth Centur
cals, materials compiled by John Loftis, The Augustan Reprint Society, P
(Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1960), 33-34.
3 Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, quoted
in McBurney's introduction to The London Merchant: "The old ballad of George
Barnwell (on which the story was founded) was on this occasion reprinted and many
thousands sold in one day. Many gaily-disposed spirits brought the ballad with them
to the play, intending to make their pleasant remarks (as some afterward owned) and
ludicrous comparisons between the ancient ditty and the modern play" (xii). For
another account of this incident, see also the 21 August 1731 review in the Weekly
Register, cited above. The political implications of the play at the time of the first
performances are also treated in Loftis, The Politics of Drama in Augustan England
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), 124-27; and Laura Brown, English Dramatic
Form, 1660-1760 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press), 145-63.
4 For Lillo and the rise of sentimental drama and sensibility generally, see Ernest
Bernbaum, "The Rise of George Lillo: 1729-1732," in The Drama of Sensibility: A
Sketch of the History of English Sentimental Comedy and Domestic Tragedy 1696-
1780 (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1958), 141-62; George Bush Rodman, "Sentimental-
David Mazella 823
ism in Lillo's The London Merchant," ELH 12 (1945): 45-61; Raymond D. Havens,
"The Sentimentalism of The London Merchant," ELH 12 (1945): 183-87; Roberta F.
S. Borkart, "The Evil of Goodness: Sentimental Morality in The London Merchant,"
Studies in Philology 76 (1979): 288. For Lillo's biography, particularly his Dissenting
affiliations and its possible connections with his drama, see Michael M. Cohen,
"Providence and Constraint in Two Lillo Tragedies," English Studies 52 (1971): 231-
36; McBurney's introduction, and his "What George Lillo Read: A Speculation,"
Huntington Library Quarterly 29 (1966): 275-86; Stephen L. Trainor, "Context for
a Biography of George Lillo," Philological Quarterly 64 (1985): 51-68; Clay Daniel,
"The Fall of George Barnwell," Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre
Research 2 (1987): 26-37; and C. P. Burgess, "Lillo Sans Barnwell, or the Playwright
Revisited," Modern Philology 66 (1968): 5-29.
5 Hans Gumbrecht's definition of "Enlightenment" nicely captures the range of
historical meanings I would like to employ in this essay: "The concept Enlighten-
ment is an abstraction of those historical processes in which old stocks of collective
knowledge are replaced or revised by new ones, with the new knowledge presenting
itself as a more adequate representation of reality. On the other hand, as a name,
Enlightenment refers to a single strand of the various historical strands that went
into the concept's formation and that can be specified in four ways: (1) it occurred
mainly in eighteenth-century Europe; (2) by shifting the dominant images of society
from theocentric to an anthropocentric basis, it effected not only the contents of
collective stocks of knowledge but also and above all their basic principle of
constitution; (3) hence it established stocks of knowledge whose basic principles
have not undergone revision until the present and are still considered adequate; and
(4) in the eighteenth century the Enlightenment was understood first of all as a
historical development but at the same time as an effective orientation or motivation
for action." Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "Who Were the Philosophes?" in Making Sense
of Life and Literature, trans. Glen Burns (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
1992), 133. See also the important historiographical discussion in Roy Porter's "The
Enlightenment in England," in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Porter
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 1-13.
6 For a reading of Lillo as a crucial text of the European literary Enlightenment,
especially as he is championed by subsequent continental authors such as Diderot
and Lessing, see Peter Szondi, "Tableau and Coup de Theatre: On the Social
Psychology of Diderot's Bourgeois Tragedy," in his On Textual Understanding and
Other Essays (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1986), 115-32; Arnold Hauser,
"The Origins of Domestic Drama," in The Social History of Art, vol. 3 (New York:
Vintage, 1958), 84-98; Lawrence Marsden Price, "George Barnwell Abroad,"
Comparative Literature 2 (1950): 126-56; Stephan P. Flores, "Mastering the Self:
The Ideological Incorporation of Desire in Lillo's The London Merchant," Essays in
Theatre 5 (1987): 91-102; Stephanie Barbe Hammer, "Economy and Extravagance:
Criminal Origin and The War of Words in The London Merchant," Essays in Theatre
8 (1990): 81-94. David Wallace's "Bourgeois Tragedy or Sentimental Melodrama?
The Significance of George Lillo's The London Merchant," Eighteenth Century
Studies 25 (1991-92): 123-44, remains the most thoroughgoing attempt to discuss
Lillo within the Weberean framework of a rationalist protestant ethic. Recent work
on the political valences of religious distinctions (particularly de Certeau [compare
note 31] and the religious historians listed in note 32) has made Weber's historical
framework seem problematic at best, particularly in its undifferentiated approach to
English Protestantism. Instead, my account of the English Enlightenment takes as
its historical point of departure the tensions within English Protestantism that broke
out into open conflict during the Civil Wars, and which were never successfully laid
to rest during the long eighteenth century.
7 For the significance of English Protestantism in the "English Enlightenment,"
see J. G. A. Pocock, "Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in
England," in L'Etd dei Lumi, ed. R. Ajello (Naples: Jovene, 1985), 525-62, and
"Post-Puritan England and the Problem of Enlightenment," in Culture and Politics
from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1980), 91-111, esp. 93. I am deeply indebted to Pocock's account of
the religious and political stakes of Latitudinarianism in seventeenth- and eigh-
teenth-century England. See also H. R. Trevor-Roper, "The Religious Origins of the
Enlightenment," in The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries and Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1969), 193-236, which locates the
origins of Enlightenment specifically within Arminianism, not Calvinism.
8 Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish remains one of the best accounts of the
contradictory ramifications of Enlightenment penal reforms: "The real, corpora
disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties. The contract
may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power;
panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion. I
continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, in order to make
the effective mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal framework
that it had acquired. The 'Enlightenment,' which discovered the liberties, als
invented the disciplines." Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 222.
9 This phrase echoes the title of Paul Langford's social history of eighteenth
century England, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), which devotes an entire chapter to what he terms th
"sentimental revolution" of the 1760s and 1770s, describing the rise of numerou
humanitarian and philanthropic movements in the mid-century (see esp. 463-518)
Part of these reformist movements' legacy was undoubtedly humane, as it inspired
political actions as diverse as the efforts to abolish slavery, to offer charity to the
poor, sick, or abandoned, or to ban the physical abuse of children or animals. Insofa
as sensibility operates in the juridical sphere, however, there is a continual tension
between the sensibility to be inculcated within the would-be administrator, and th
presumed insensibility of the body of the criminal. Once again, Foucault is
particularly sensitive to this kind of contradiction within Enlightenment sensibility
"The formulation of the principle that penality must remain 'humane' is expressed b
the reformers in the first person. It is as if the sensibility of the speaker were bein
expressed directly; as if the body of the philosopher or theoretician had come,
between executioner and victim, to affirm his own law and to impose it finally on the
entire economy of punishment" (Discipline and Punish, 91).
10 The best account of this play within the context of eighteenth-century law is
Helen Burke's "The London Merchant and Eighteenth-Century British Law,
Philological Quarterly 73 (1994): 347-66.
11 As a crucial component of Enlightenment morality, sensibility offers a vision o
a large, self-correcting moral system in which the communication of feelings allow
people to regulate themselves and each other at all times. This open-ended moral
system continually expands when its members communicate with those outside
David Mazella 825
boundaries. Sensibility governs individuals (and allows individuals to govern them-
selves) with an image-stream of imagined, disembodied pleasures or all too physical
pains. My account of the mixture of sympathy and aggression embedded within the
concept of sensibility is indebted to more critics and historians of the concept than I
could list here, but these are the most important sources of my interpretation of
Lillo: for sensibility as a period-concept, especially in English literature, see the still-
indispensable Northrop Frye, "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," in Eigh-
teenth-Century English Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. James L.
Clifford (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), 311-18; Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen
and the War of Ideas (1975; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 7-28; and G. J.
Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century
Britain (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992). Most literary critics would identify
the age of sensibility with the mid-eighteenth century and the English and/or British
reception of the European Enlightenment, though it is also traditional to see
continuities, particularly in the area of religion, between seventeenth-century
religious and moral discourse and that of the eighteenth. For lexical investigations of
sensibility, see Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983),
under the word "sensibility," 280-83; Erik Erametsa, A Study of the Word "Senti-
mental" and of Other Linguistic Characteristics of Eighteenth Century Sentimental-
ism in England (Helsinki: Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, 1951); Susie I.
Tucker, Protean Shape: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Vocabulary and Usage
(London: Athlone Press, 1967), 247-51; and, most importantly, William Empson,
The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951; Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), 250-305. The best treatments of sensibility as an
episode in literary history include: John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The
Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988);
Louis I. Bredvold, The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit: Wayne State Univ.
Press, 1962); Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel:
The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993); Jean H.
Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980); and Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduc-
tion (London: Methuen, 1986). Finally, the best of these literary-critical treatments
of sensibility, particularly in its emphasis upon the moral ambiguities of the term, is
R. F. Brissenden's Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from
Richardson to Sade (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974).
12 See also Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in The Foucault Reader, ed.
Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 76-100. In this respect, however, I am
diverging from Foucault's own account of morality in Discipline and Punish. Rather
than treating morality as something to be unmasked and revealed as a set of
"physico-political techniques" (Discipline and Punish, 223), I have chosen to focus
instead on the historical instabilities surrounding the crucial term "morality," to see
how the religious polemics of the seventeenth century over the meaning of that term
complicated its use by Enlightenment writers such as Lillo.
13 For "hard treatment," see Marvin Henberg, Retribution: Evil for Evil in Ethics,
Law, and Literature (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1990).
14 This sense of internal tension and self-contradiction embedded within the most
normative concepts is the essential contribution of "genealogy," as adumbrated by
Foucault's reading of Nietzsche in essays like "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." See
also Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Genealogy of Morals," in On the Genealogy of
Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. and trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Vintage Books,
1969).
15 See Williams, under the word "consensus," 76-78. As Williams points out,
"consensus" in the eighteenth century has both legal and physiological meanings,
stemming from the Latin "consensus" [agreement or common feelings]. To "con-
sent" means literally to "feel with" and thus links "consensus" with the constellation
of physiological terms related to sensibility, such as "sympathy," yet the legal and
political meanings are also important. When people talk about the "need for
consensus," they are hoping (in the same sense that Montagu hopes, coercively) f
a state of agreement that would allow politics to absorb morality.
16 Interestingly, some twentieth-century male critics seemed to admire Millw

bad attitude long before the assimilation of feminism into academic lite
criticism. See, for example, McBurney's introduction; Robert W. Halli, Jr., "
Torrent of Domestic Misery': George Lillo's The London Merchant," in A Provisio
of Human Nature: Essays on Fielding and Others in Honor of Miriam Austin Lo
ed. Donald Kay (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press), 155-68. Beginning in
1980s, however, there has been a discernible shift in attitudes towards Millw
which treats her more and more as a protofeminist, and, as such, an exem
sacrifice to, and dissenting voice from, the triumphant forces of world capital
imperial commerce, and misogyny represented by Thorowgood. These antimisogy
readings focus upon her speeches in the fourth act, treating them as se
complaints about the condition of women, not simply the conventional rants
doomed villain. See, for example, J. Douglas Canfield, "Shifting Tropes of Ideol
in English Serious Drama, Late Stuart to Early Georgian," in Cultural Readin
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater, ed. Canfield and Debor
Payne (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1995), 212-15, and "Female Rebels
Patriarchal Paradigms in Some Neoclassical Works," Studies in Eighteenth Centu
Culture 18 (1988): 153-66; Jones De Ritter, "'The Storm that Lust Began Must
in Blood': The Physical Economy of The London Merchant," in his The Embodim
of Characters: The Representation of Physical Experience on Stage and in Pr
1728-1749 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press), 46-69; and, lastly, Burke.
emphasizing Millwood's exemplary (and therefore representative) status a
isolated rebel, and by making her stand in for uncounted others execute
excluded during this period, such readings actually work to preserve the did
logic of the play, only substituting Millwood for the now discredited Barnwell a
plot's "moralized" (meaning morally representative) individual. Inverting the m
values represented by Thorowgood still leaves the didactic structure of the
untouched. Nonetheless, the antimisogynist rereading of Millwood offers an im
tant advance on earlier criticism because it directs attention towards the moral
dissonance that her complaints introduce into act 4 and the conclusion. My own
interpretation therefore follows the revisionist readers of Millwood by examining the
difficulties that misogyny, as a "just prejudice" endorsed by Thorowgood (4.16.65),
presents to the play's own explicit values of sensibility and universal morality.
17 For a fascinating history of moral philosophy that is organized around the
growing importance of "morality as autonomy," see J. B. Schneewind, The Invention
of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1998).
18 The most extensive account of the reception of The London Merchant can be
found in George DeBoer's "George Lillo" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1965).
David Mazella 827
We can take Lamb's famous denunciation of the play as a "nauseous sermon," and
his equal contempt for Barnwell as totally unsuited for tragic representation, as
representative of the impatience the play inspired after the turn of the century:
"Barnwell is a wretched murderer; there is a certain fitness between his neck and the
rope; he is the legitimate heir to the gallows; nobody who thinks at all can think of
any alleviating circumstances in his case to make him a fit object of mercy," from "On
the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage
Representation," in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 1, ed. E. V. Lucas
(New York: Putnam, 1903), 106. Steffensen and McBurney's respective introduc-
tions both offer surveys of critical reactions to the play.
19 Marcel Gauchet, "The Democratic Malaise: An Interview with Marcel Gauchet,"
Thesis Eleven 38 (1994): 145.
20 Lillo's "Dedication" begins with the following definition: "If Tragick Poetry be,
as Mr. Dryden has some where said, the most excellent and most useful Kind of
Writing, the more extensively useful the Moral of any Tragedy is, the more excellent
that Piece must be of its Kind" (1-4). Lillo therefore makes a quantifiable usefulness
the sole criterion for judging tragic excellence.
21 For "remedy," see Lillo's justification for his nonaristocratic conception of
tragedy: "If Princes, &c. were alone liable to Misfortunes, arising from Vice, or
Weakness in themselves, or others, there wou'd be good Reason for confining the
Characters in Tragedy to those of superior Rank; but, since the contrary is evident,
nothing can be more reasonable than to proportion the Remedy to the Disease"
("Dedication," 18-22). For "correction," see his suggestive definition of the "Ends of
Tragedy": "the exciting of the Passions, in order to the correcting such of them as are
criminal, either in their Nature, or through their Excess" ("Dedication," 7-8). For
Foucault's description of "normalization" and how it interacts with concepts of rank
and class, see this comment: "Like surveillance and with it, normalization becomes
one of the great instruments of power at the end of the classical age. For the marks
that once indicated status, privilege, and affiliation were increasingly replaced-or at
least supplemented-by a whole range of degrees of normality indicating member-
ship of a homogeneous social body but also playing a part in classification,
hierarchization and the distribution of rank" (Discipline and Punish, 184).
22 Lillo explicitly apologizes for the "Novelty of [his] Attempt" at the outset of th
play ("Dedication," 64). Both Cibber and the reviewer of the Weekly Register were
anxious to defend the play against those who would dismiss it for its tragic approac
to low subject matter. See also Lillo's description of his attempt to "enlarge the
Province of the graver Kind of Poetry": "Plays founded on moral Tales in private
Life, may be of admirable Use, by carrying Conviction to the Mind with such
irresistable Force, as to engage all the Faculties and Powers of the Soul in the Cause
of Virtue, by stifling Vice in its first Principles. They who imagine this to be too much
to be attributed to Tragedy, must be Strangers to the Energy of that noble Species of
Poetry." Lillo then cites "Shakespear" as one "who has given such amazing Proofs of
his Genius, in that [species]" ("Dedication," 36-42).
23 Much of the debate conducted in Rodman, Havens, and Borkat over the role of
sentimentalism in the play focuses on Lillo's striking attenuation of Barnwell's guilt,
especially when compared with the Elizabethan source-ballad. What almost every
critic of the play has noticed is the degree to which Lillo has presented Barnwell as
literally guilty of his acts, but somehow less than responsible for their full moral
consequences. It is this discrepancy between the literal guilt (applied by himself)
and the full blame (applied by others) that allows audience sympathies to intervene
and grow in response to his pathetic self-accusations.
24 See also Steffensen's introduction, 118.
25 DeRitter's "The Storm that Lust Began" cites as its inspiration one of the best
recent treatments I have seen on the links between Augustan misogyny and
anticapitalist discourse, Laura Mandell's "Bawds and Merchants: Engendering
Capitalist Desires," ELH 59 (1992): 107-23.
26 See, for example, Wallace, 137.
27 She says, "I'11 e'en trust to Nature, who does Wonders in these Matters.-If to
seem what one is not, in order to be the better liked for what one really is; if to speak
one thing, and mean the direct contrary, be Art in a Woman, I know nothing o
Nature" (1.4.7-10)
28 See John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in
England (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976).
29 For the reduction of faith to opinion, see Pocock, "Within the Margins: th
Definitions of Orthodoxy," in The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing an
Cultural Response, 1660-1750, ed. Roger D. Lund (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ
Press, 1995), 47. For a treatment of the separation of law and religion at the latter
end of the eighteenth century, see Mark Canuel, "'Holy Hypocrisy' and th
Government of Belief: Religion and Nationalism in the Gothic," Studies in Roman-
ticism 34 (1995): 509.
30 Thomas Davies, one of Lillo's first biographers, asserts that "Lillo was a
Dissenter, but not of that sour cast which distinguishes some of our sectaries."
"Some Account of the Life of Mr. George Lillo," in The Works of Mr. George Lillo,
2 vols. (London, 1775), l:xlvii.
31 See Michel de Certeau, "The Formality of Practices: From Religious Systems to
the Ethics of the Enlightenment," in his The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), 149.
32 My account here has been taken largely from the school of intellectual historians
who have attempted to place English religious history within the context of the
Enlightenment. The most recent examples include Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace,
and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660-
1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991); and John Gascoigne, Cambridge
in the Age of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).
33 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 91.
34 Interestingly, the final scene at the gallows, which had been omitted in the initial
productions and printings, was restored in the fifth edition. See Steffensen's textual
note in his introduction, 135-39.
35 As defined by Article 17 of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England,
Predestination "is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations
of the World were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his Counsel secret to us, to
deliver from curse and damnation, those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of
mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting Salvation, as vessels made to
honour. Wherefore they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God, be
called according to God's purpose, by his Spirit working in due season. They through
grace obey the calling, they be justified freely, they be made Sons of God by
Adoption, they be made like the Image of his only begotten Son Jesus Christ: they
walk religiously in good works, and at length by God's mercy they attain to
everlasting felicity." From "Of Predestination and Election," in Gilbert Burnet, An
David Mazella 829
Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (London, 1699),
145.
36 For a good account of the role of Calvinism generally, and predestination
specifically, in the development of ethical thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, see Rivers. Schneewind also structures his entire history of moral
philosophy up through Kant on an opposition between "Voluntarist" and "Anti-
Voluntarist" stances, which correspond roughly to Calvinist and Arminian positions
in theology. For a fuller description of the seventeenth-century political and
religious context of predestination, which produced a separation of religious,
philosophical, and political spheres, see my "'The Very Dogs Licked the Sores of
Lazarus': Hobbes and Bramhall's Debate on Free-will," forthcoming in 1650-1850.
37 For the history of Hell, see D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-
Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964).
38 Lillo's depiction of Millwood's Calvinistic despair follows a long-standing anti-
Calvinist tradition that runs through plays such as Doctor Faustus, polemical
representations from the reign of Charles I and Civil War, and the religious
controversies following the Restoration. Even the Articles of Religion, themselves
Calvinist, acknowledge and applaud the destructive consequences of despair upon
the sinner: "As the godly consideration of Predestination and our Election in Christ,
is full of sweet, pleasant and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel
in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh,
and their earthly members, and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things,
as well because it doth greatly establish and confirm their Faith of eternal Salvation
to be enjoyed through Christ, as because it doth fervently kindle their love towards
God: So for curious and carnal Persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ, to have
continually before their eyes the sentence of God's Predestination, is a most
dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or
into wretchlesness of most unclean living, no less perilous then desperation" (Article
17, in Burnet, 145). Barnwell's distance from the doctrine of this Article is most
clearly registered in his discomfort with Millwood's damnation and active sympathy
and solicitation for her.
39 Paul Ricoeur, "'Original Sin': A Study in Meaning," in The Conflict of
Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern
Univ. Press, 1974), 282-83.

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"Justly to Fall Unpitied and Abhorr'd": Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in Lillo's

"The London Merchant"

INTRODUCTION: PULL OUT YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS!

When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu discussed the hero

796 Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in The London Merchant

David Mazella 797

798 Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in The London Merchant

important legacy from the Enlightenment, and it is a str

David Mazella 799

In his critical "Dedication" and "Prologue," Lillo announces his

In keeping with the didactic aims of his "moral Tale," Lillo

800 Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in The London Merchant

David Mazella 801

TR[UEMAN]: Something dreadful is labouring in your Breast, O give it

Barnwell's fear of communicating his shame prevents him from

802 Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in The London Merchant

THOR: Enough, enough, whate'er it be, this Concern shews you're

Thorowgood's undoubtedly estimable and, above all, prudent

David Mazella 803

The pathos of Barnwell's misguided sacrifice helps to direct at

804 Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in The London Merchant

BLUNT:... -But there is something so horrid in Murder, -that all

BLUNT: With all my Heart. He who knows of a Murder intended to

The defection of Blunt and Lucy to the side of Barnwell

David Mazella 805

In the discovery scenes of the fourth act, Lillo p

On the one hand, sensibility insists on the extraindividual dimen-

806 Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in The London Merchant

There is a heavy dramatic irony in Millwood's grudging praise for

David Mazella 807

criminals, but those of the inner spectator who cannot escape vi

BARN: O hide me from my self, if it be possible; for while I bear

Barnwell's "inmate" and "impartial Judge," his conscience telli

MILL: Whining, preposterous, canting Villain; to murder your Uncle,

808 Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in The London Merchant

If there be a Pitch of Wickedness that seats the Author beyond the

Barnwell cannot conceive a worse fate than to be unpitied, to which

David Mazella 809

To whom, of what, or how shall I complain; I'll not accuse

Be warn'd ye Youths, who see my sad Despair,

Barnwell's exit shows his conscious assumption of a didactic role in

810 Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in The London Merchant

David Mazella 811

I am not Fool enough to be an Atheist, tho' I have known enough of

Surprisingly, Thorowgood accepts at least part of her remarks about

Truth is Truth, tho' from an Enemy, and spoke in Malice. You

Thorowgood has been forced to admit that Millwood's observa-

Millwood's approaching moment of punishment produces this

812 Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in The London Merchant

A new system of axioms on thought and action moves initially into a

In the wake of interminable conflicts first between Catholics and

David Mazella 813

814 Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in The London Merchant

David Mazella 815

Millwood's final threat, a new race of "future Millwoods" who

III. THEOLOGIES OF PUNISHMENT VS. THEOLOGIES OF MERCY,

Lillo's closing gallows scene allows a final contrast to be mad

Lillo is particularly careful to show the

816 Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in The London Merchant

The moments leading to Barnwell's execution, which promise "severe

David Mazella 817

818 Sensibility, Punishment, and Morality in The London Merchant

MILL: O! I have sinn'd beyond the Reach of Mercy!

David Mazella 819