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Memory and Enlightenment
Cultural Afterlives of the Long Eighteenth Century
James Ward
Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

Series Editors
Andrew Hoskins
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK

John Sutton
Department of Cognitive Science
Macquarie University
Macquarie, Australia
The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends
that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to
that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes
in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory;
panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination
with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of
trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to
an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years.
Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect
what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This
groundbreaking new series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’
under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for
its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theo-
retical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14682
 James Ward

Memory and
Enlightenment
Cultural Afterlives of the Long Eighteenth Century
James Ward
School of Arts and Humanities
Ulster University
Coleraine, Northern Ireland, UK

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

ISBN 978-3-319-96709-7    ISBN 978-3-319-96710-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96710-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957458

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
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­institutional affiliations.

Cover Illustration: detail from A Fall of Ordinariness and Light: The Order Land by Jessie
Brennan. Graphite on paper (framed in aluminium), 57.5 × 71.5 cm. Commissioned for
Progress by the Foundling Museum, 2014. Courtesy the Victoria and Albert Museum,
2016. With thanks to Jessie Brennan.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

Chapter 3 of this book includes reproductions of works by Lubaina Himid,

Grayson Perry, Paula Rego, and Jessie Brennan. I am very grateful to each
of these artists for their generosity and I am particularly indebted to
Lubaina Himid for her help and to Jessie Brennan for allowing me to use
her work for the cover of this book.
Parts of Chaps. 3 and 7 appeared previously in Reading Historical
Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past, edited by Kate Mitchell and
Nicola Parsons (Palgrave, 2013).
At Palgrave, Heloise Harding, Lucy Batrouney, Carolyn Zhang, and
Felicity Plester have been helpful and encouraging throughout the com-
missioning and writing of this book.
Thanks also to my students at Ulster University who have taken mod-
ules and classes in eighteenth-century literature, adaptation and historical
fiction, and memory studies, where many ideas for this book were formed.
Catherine Bates, David Dwan, Adam Hansen, Moyra Haslett, and Greg
Lynall invited me to present my research at their institutions and I am very
grateful for the opportunity to try out my ideas, and for their hospitality
and good company.
Thanks above all to the Byrne and Ward families, with a special mention
to my parents Michael and Jo and my daughter Mina. This book is dedi-
cated to the number one: Kate.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction: Theatres of Memory   1

2 Restorations  33

3 ‘Ever-haunting Hogarth’: Remembering the Hogarthian

Progress  77

4 Emma Donoghue’s Enlightenment Fictions 117

5 Memory and Enlightenment in the Poetry of Eavan Boland

and Medbh McGuckian 149

6 The Recruiting Officer in the Penal Colony 181

7 Memory and Atrocity: Representing the Zong 199

8 Conclusion 223

vii
viii Contents

Bibliography 227

Index 247
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Theatres of Memory

Like other historical periods, the ‘long eighteenth century’ (1660–1800)

persists in our present through screen and performance media, writing,
and visual art. These afterlives are a form of cultural memory, whose
emerging and changing forms this book traces from the 1980s to the pres-
ent. The idea that ‘the past […] derives its meaning increasingly from the
present’1 is one of the central disciplinary tenets of memory studies, and I
begin with an encounter illustrating the currency of such representations.
On 18 November 2016, Mike Pence, then Vice President-elect of the
United States, attended a performance of Hamilton: An American Musical
at the Richard Rogers Theater in New York. When they realized who he
was, audience members began to boo Pence. They continued to do so
sporadically during the performance and again at the end as he walked
out. As Pence was leaving, he was called back from the stage by one of the
show’s lead actors, Brandon Dixon, who had played the part of vice presi-
dent Aaron Burr. Encouraging the audience to film and share the speech
on social media, he addressed the following words to Pence:

I see you walking out, but I hope you will hear us, just a few moments. […]
We are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new
administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or
defend our inalienable rights. But we truly hope that this show has inspired
you to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us.2

© The Author(s) 2018 1

J. Ward, Memory and Enlightenment, Palgrave Macmillan Memory
Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96710-3_1
2 J. WARD

Almost gratuitous in its potential for symbolism, the encounter between

the cast, the audience, and the politician can be interpreted in many ways:
as an affront to the new presidency to be denounced as such by Donald
Trump; as an object lesson in irony where a fictional vice president
addressed an unlikely one; and as an amusing but also sobering instance of
the combined power of social media and the traditional public sphere of
the theatre. From the point of view of this book, however, the encounter
represents a contest over and between its two central concepts: memory
and enlightenment.
Hamilton is an example of the kind of work that this book is about. A
retelling of the life of the United States’ founding father, initially inspired
by Ron Chernow’s biography Alexander Hamilton (2004), the play reme-
diates historical biography as musical drama. It works in ways typical of
those ascribed to historical fiction by Jerome de Groot in Remaking
History (2015). Like the texts discussed by de Groot, Hamilton performs
functions traditionally split between primary and secondary historical
sources, having at once ‘an almost pedagogical aspect in allowing a culture
to “understand” past moments’ but also providing through ‘reflection
upon the representational processes […] a means to critique, conceptual-
ize, engage with and reject the processes of representation’.3 Hamilton,
like the other texts I discuss, undoubtedly enables such reflective responses.
But to consider it as a memory text is to widen this reflective focus to
include not just the process of representation but also its motives and its
effects. Because it places a particular emphasis on the meaning for present
audiences of its narrated content, meaning which acquired a particularly
urgent charge during the encounter of November 2016, Hamilton is a
mnemotechnic text as well as an historiographic one. Cultural memory, as
defined by Astrid Erll, always includes ‘an expressive indication of the
needs and interests of the person or group doing the remembering’. As a
discipline, memory studies therefore directs its interest ‘not toward the
shape of the remembered past, but rather toward the particular presents of
the remembering’.4 In the case of Hamilton, these needs and interests are
explicitly political. According to Jeremy McCarter, who was closely
involved with its conception and commissioning, the play ‘doesn’t just
dramatize Hamilton’s revolution: It continues it’.5 In this reading, the
values which Pence was asked from the stage to protect and defend—
equality, diversity, and stewardship of the environment—represent mod-
ern, concrete expressions of the abstract principles underpinning the
historical foundation of the United States. In performance, Hamilton
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 3

reproduces and reframes a relationship of culture to politics instituted dur-

ing the revolutionary period and exemplified, for McCarter, in the effort
of General George Washington to raise the morale of his exhausted troops
with a performance of Joseph Addison’s Cato during the winter of
1777–78. Hamilton becomes a memory text in performance, commemo-
rating and continuing a set of previously existing historical conditions for
a new audience.
The cast and friends of Hamilton were not, however, the only ones
claiming in the winter of 2016–17 to extend and inherit the memory of
the American revolution. The Tea Party, to take one obvious example,
similarly appropriated a familiar revolutionary name to agitate for a radi-
cally different agenda. It is one broadly shared by right-wing Republicans
such as Pence, who is a climate change sceptic, opponent of LGBT civil
rights, and proponent of intelligent design. Some of these values and
beliefs can technically at least be aligned with those of the revolutionar-
ies—according to the document invoked and quoted from the stage of
Hamilton, for example, unalienable rights are endowed in humans ‘by
their Creator’. A more common response, however, has been to cite the
American political movement that includes Trump, Pence, and the Tea
Party as abandoning not just their republic’s founding values but the
broader philosophical dispensation from which they emerged. Whether
this is conceived as a reversion to ‘a pre-enlightenment form of thinking’
or a turn to a post-enlightenment worldview,6 it reflects a general anxiety
that recent political and cultural modernity has begun irreversibly to
diverge from traditions of political liberalism and scientific rationalism
associated with the period named in this book’s title. The idea that we may
be witnessing the end of enlightenment is voiced in Europe as well as the
United States. Emmanuel Macron, who is perhaps alone among world
leaders in having contributed to an important work in the field of memory
studies, saw his election to the French presidency in 2017 as a chance ‘to
defend the spirit of the Enlightenment, threatened in so many places’.7
Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s vote in 2016 to leave the European
Union was regarded as the beginning of a new politics of intolerance
which ‘set at risk fundamental liberal values and the universal, progressive
principles that Britain, since the eighteenth-century Age of the
Enlightenment, has been instrumental in spreading around the globe’.8
These expressions of fear and hope reveal a number of common assump-
tions. Western political modernity is based on values inherited from a
period called the (age of the) enlightenment, broadly identifiable with the
4 J. WARD

eighteenth century, but often encompassing the latter half of the seven-
teenth. These values are currently under threat from reactionary and
aggressive forms of individualism, intolerance, and anti-rationalism.
Although political change in 2016–17 made the issue newsworthy, debate
over enlightenment’s legacy and fate has preoccupied the academic
humanities for a much longer time. It has fallen across two areas of
research. On the one hand, much recent work looks at the cultural history
of the period and generally emphasizes its positive legacy, notably in high-­
profile books by Jonathan Israel and Anthony Pagden. Enlightenment
studies is enjoying a resurgence which is producing significant works by
public intellectuals aimed at general audiences as well as specialized treat-
ments by academic writers.9
This recent return to enlightenment comes partly in response to neo-­
reactionary politics’ destructive efforts, but it also addresses a much more
sophisticated and enduring critique launched by Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), and which initially
gained widespread currency with the rise to prominence of critical theory
in the 1980s. This critique has been caricatured as a reflex which tends
automatically ‘to lay responsibility for all injustices at the feet of technol-
ogy, progress, and the Enlightenment’.10 But even in the face of an increas-
ingly confident rejection of enlightenment as a single ‘monolithic edifice
[…] responsible for modernity’,11 this critique remains pertinent and com-
pelling. Any historically sensitive discussion of the period must address its
unsettling temporal compaction of progressive discourses and oppressive
acts. It is an era marked, as Carey notes by ‘a disjunction […] between a
politics of liberation and autonomy, which coincides at the same time with
imperial expansion and the subjugation of native peoples, and a new ethics
of equality which nonetheless occurs in an era of slavery unprecedented in
its scale and brutality’.12 The exact nature of these events’ co-incidence
and interrelationship is difficult to generalize, but their association and
connection is a permanent feature of enlightenment’s memory in the pres-
ent. Its most forceful and enduring articulation has been postcolonial
theory and criticism’s account of enlightenment ‘both as an eighteenth
century phenomenon and as a concept that bears on modern political
formations’.13 One foundational text of this position, Spivak’s Critique of
Postcolonial Reason, characterizes the philosophy of the German enlight-
enment as having produced ‘new representations of self and world that
would serve as alibis for the domination, exploitation, and epistemic viola-
tion entailed by the establishment of colony and empire’.14 Alibi is a par-
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 5

ticularly apt term because it evinces the importance of narration, a medium

through which individual memory becomes a forensic object to be col-
lectively interpreted and scrutinized. Alibi represents a memorial assertion
which proves in some cases true, in some cases false, and in yet others,
undecidable. If one role of intellectual and artistic history of the enlight-
enment was to establish alibis, then one function of memory texts is to
revisit the crime scene by using the period’s cultural heritage to engage its
political legacy.
Tracing some versions of these competing narratives, this book is struc-
tured around a fault line between nostalgic and post-traumatic visions of
enlightenment. The first three look at enduring legacies such as political
institutions (Chap. 2 on monarchy) and artistic forms (Chaps. 3 and 4 on
Hogarthian progress and the novel) which have traditionally been objects
of patriotic, reverential, or uncritical memory. I show how different texts
work to challenge and revise but also to affirm such traditions. Chapters 5,
6 and 7 address traumatic memory, focusing on the Atlantic slave trade,
Australia’s colonial past, and the contested history of Ireland. This dichot-
omous vision of enlightenment can also be seen to structure the encounter
between the Hamilton cast and Mike Pence. Echoing in its form the
eighteenth-­century theatrical tradition of frame-breaking epilogues,15 the
confrontation reveals a tension between the meaning in our present of
enlightenment as period and process. Enlightenment endures in contem-
porary memory both as the historic source of the liberal ideals embraced
by the cast of Hamilton, and as an historic plot to entrench the kind of
white, male Christian privilege embodied by Mike Pence. The ability of
these conflicting visions to make news in the meeting of November 2016
has been discussed at length in the media. The fundamental questions it
broached about our modernity and its relation to seventeenth- and
eighteenth-­century thought and action continue to fuel a debate across
the disciplines of history, philosophy, cultural, and literary studies. The
ability of creative works to focus and reframe this debate through the
political and emotional resonances of memory is the subject of this book.
The opening chapter looks at the presentist resonance of the concept of
restoration. This term is historically associated with the return of monarchy
to the four kingdoms of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales under
Charles II, following an experiment in republican politics under Oliver
Cromwell from 1649 to 1660. If our current moment is identified as one
in which ideals and values of the enlightenment are losing their traction,
‘restoration’ is a figure of speech which powerfully embodies some of the
6 J. WARD

reactionary countercurrents which are taking hold. Chapter 4 looks at two

novels by Emma Donoghue as instances of an alternative kind of restora-
tion—the recreation in exquisite detail of an historical artefact, in this case,
the eighteenth-century novel. This chapter investigates Donoghue’s fiction
as a product of her training as a researcher in eighteenth-­century English
fiction and argues that her work reworks the formalism of such fiction to
present a focus on temporality and memory as ways to encounter alterity
and resist narrative closure. Chapter 3 is similarly concerned with the rein-
vention of an enlightenment narrative form. It argues that modern rework-
ings of Hogarth’s graphic satires form a kind of ‘progress’ in Hogarth’s
ironic sense, from confident, and polemical appropriations to increasingly
elegiac memorial modes. Memory texts use Hogarth’s preoccupation with
markers of class, gender, and racial difference to question the assumption
that distance from a remembered past necessarily or inevitably equates to
social or political progress. The fifth chapter looks at the representation of
the eighteenth century in modern Irish poetry. Acknowledging the com-
plexity and difficulty involved in treating poetry as a medium of cultural
memory, as well as the overburdening of Irish poetry in particular by ques-
tions of history, it focuses on Medbh McGuckian and Eavan Boland’s pre-
sentation of what the latter poet calls ‘our darkest century’. Aleida
Assmann’s distinction between archival and canonical cultural memory
structures the final two chapters, which trace the cultural afterlife of two
events. A theatrical performance of George Farquhar’s play The Recruiting
Officer (1706) took place in the New South Wales Penal Colony on 4 June
1789 and has been recreated in two memory-making fictions, Thomas
Keneally’s 1987 novel The Playmaker, and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our
Country’s Good (1988), the well-known stage adaptation of Keneally’s
book. The play performed in 1789, Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, pro-
vides a powerful if disturbing illustration of the workings and creation of
memory. The second event is the murder of an estimated 132 African men,
women and children which took place on board the slave ship Zong between
29 November and 1 December 1781. The massacre has been subject
to two distinct waves of mediation in cultural memory, which came either
side of the 200th anniversary, in 2007, of the 1807 act abolishing slave
trading in the British empire, a moment identified as pivotal in the modern
memory culture of the Atlantic slave trade.16 This event has moved from a
marginal to a more central position in public memory. Cultural memory
replays not just the event but the ethical dilemmas that surround its repre-
sentation and increasing visibility as an object of memory.
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 7

Enlightenment and Memory

The remainder of this introduction works through a number of familiar
examples to argue that enlightenment shapes not just memories but mem-
ory itself. Enlightenment’s recent return to public discourse shows how
the period still informs the way we think about the present and the future.
The period is an historic source for concepts of secular duration, and other
ways individuals and communities think about themselves as subject to the
passage of time. Its emergence in memory is, however, part of a larger
preoccupation with the past. Andreas Huyssen dates its appearance:

One of the most surprising cultural and political phenomena of recent years
has been the emergence of memory as a key concern, a turning towards the
past that stands in stark contrast to the privileging of the future so character-
istic of earlier decades of twentieth-century modernity. […] Since the 1980s,
it seems, the focus has shifted from present futures to present pasts.17

This period of transformation, which Aleida Assmann regards as ‘not just

a theoretical “turn”’ but ‘a much deeper shift in the structure of Western
temporality’,18 encompasses the creation of this book’s primary materials as
well as the theoretical and methodological perspectives it applies. Whether
this shift is conceived as a change in tone and focus, or as something alto-
gether more profound, it is worth noting that its emphasis has tended to be
on pasts which postdate the period focus of this book. Although not tied to
any particular past, memory studies has with notable exceptions (e.g. the
work of Jan Assmann) tended to focus in practice on twentieth-century sites
of memory, as a look over the other titles published in this series will confirm.
When it comes to text-based studies in cultural memory, the nineteenth cen-
tury has also been an important object of interest, as the emergence of the
sub-discipline of neo-Victorian studies attests. Despite its relative lack of
prominence to date, the long eighteenth century is of particular value from a
memory studies perspective for two related reasons. First, as well as an object
of memory in itself, enlightenment represents an historic mode of modernity
which retains an ability to condition later modernities. Second, the period is
an important historic source for forms and processes which have become
fundamental to the operation of modern memory. The first of these qualities
is seen in recent conceptions of our present as a decline into either a post- or
pre-­enlightenment era, in references to the twentieth century’s paradoxical
combining of genocide with ‘enlightened modernity’, and to postmodern-
ism as a movement directed to ‘get rid of the uncompleted project of mod-
ernism, that of the Enlightenment’.19 Enlightenment retains a defining
8 J. WARD

presence in later periods. This is a memorial presence because it structures

relations between present and past. We evaluate the conditions under which
we live through their ability to live up or down to the memory of enlighten-
ment. In the three examples just quoted, enlightenment features in this pro-
cess as a part of intellectual history; my focus, however, is its encounter
through texts and performances as an object of cultural memory. Viewed
through these media, its importance lies not solely in measuring historical
change or progress but also in registering contemporary culture’s retention
and reworking of historic forms and concepts that supply the apparatus of
modern memory. I will detail the relevance of two such forms, the person
and the novel, before moving to a discussion of afterlives and, finally, of the
oppositions that structure this book.
Memory may not have been invented during the enlightenment, but it
was conceptualized in highly influential and historically enduring ways.
Svetlana Boym notes, for example, that the concept of nostalgia was
developed by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss physician, as a diagnostic category
in 1688.20 Memory came to define normative states as well as aberrant
ones, providing, in the epistemology of John Locke, a foundational
account of personal identity. Relying on a notion of identity which retains
the word’s primary sense of ‘sameness’, Locke presents memory as the
guarantor of a person’s existence over time. ‘[A]s far as any intelligent
being can repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness
it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present
action, so far it is the same personal self’. The extent of their personhood
depends on the ability to recall historic thoughts and actions: ‘As far as
this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or
thought’, Locke writes, ‘so far reaches the identity of that person’.21
Memory for Locke is in Udo Thiel’s words, ‘constitutive of identity’,
while, in Assman’s summary, ‘[t]he Lockean subject is, in so far as she/
he remembers’.22 And as Assmann further points out, this notion of the
memory-enabled self proved influential because it lent conceptual sup-
port to practical arrangements already taking place in the legal, political,
and financial spheres: Locke offered ‘a new concept of the individual that
fitted in neatly with the demands of middle-class society’.23 Private prop-
erty, to take one example, results from the actions of a private self able to
extend over time a record not just of sensory experience but also of rela-
tionships with the material world that include a claim to own parts of it.
Ownership of possessions,24 Locke insists, is enabled by the fact that
‘every Man has a Property in his own Person’. Locke uses two apparently
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 9

interchangeable terms, man and person, to denote the wielder and the
property they hold. Jonathan Kramnick asserts a distinction between
them, noting that in Locke’s terminology man ‘is a kind of object sup-
ported by life, whereas person is a kind of self, supported by conscious-
ness’.25 Private property is therefore an effect not just of physical
possession but also of conscious reflection underpinned by memory.
Locke’s vision of the possessive and self-possessive individual had an
obvious application in legal and commercial spheres but it also helped
populate imaginary ones. Eighteenth-century fiction is said to have
imported the concept wholesale to the point where the early history of the
English novel is routinely identified with the programmatic elaboration
and transmission of Locke’s idea of personhood. The form of the novel as
it emerged in eighteenth-century English literature, as Sandra Macpherson
notes, has been ‘persistently associated with the historical and cultural pro-
duction of self-conscious personhood’, to the point where it is habitually
regarded as ‘a technology for producing […] the “Person” or the “sub-
ject” [or] the “individual”’.26 Since their initial emergence in the 1950s,
narratives of a symbiotic ‘rise’ of the novel with the individual have been
enormously influential not just in literary studies but in philosophical
accounts of the enlightenment, notably the work of Jurgen Habermas.
They have also been subject to challenge and modification by successive
waves of criticism, including the recent reassessment which includes the
work of Macpherson and Kramnick. My fourth chapter uses the novels of
Emma Donoghue to show how works of fiction can add to this critique.
This introduction revisits an earlier wave of criticism and fiction which
zoned in on the animating forms and constructs of the novel and the self.
An implicit point of this earlier critique, which my analysis makes central,
is that the raw material of these constructs is memory.
Reading novels, today as much as in the eighteenth century, often
involves accessing the memories of another person readers know to be
imaginary, but whose experiences they accept as a plausible fiction which
can add to the store of their own experience and knowledge. This access is
granted either with the illusion that it is unmediated, or, as is much more
common in eighteenth-century fiction, presented to the reader as a prod-
uct of introspection and the physical production and assembly of written
materials—a work, in other words, of memory. Novels therefore provide a
version of prosthetic memory, defined by Alison Landsberg as the experi-
ence whereby someone takes on a personal, ‘deeply felt memory of a past
through which he or she did not live’, and which is able to ‘shape that
10 J. WARD

person’s subjectivity’.27 In this context, Locke’s theory of ‘consciousness

extended backwards to any past action’ is a theory of narration as much as
personal identity. Although open, as in the work of Samuel Richardson, to
sensational innovations such as narrowing the gap between an act and its
narration so as to produce an almost ‘live’ effect, prose fiction was and
remains a temporal medium whose events always take place in memory
even if they unfold in a future which postdates the time of writing or pub-
lication. As Erll states, ‘the distinction between an “experiencing I”’ and a
“narrating I” already rests on a (largely implicit) concept of “memory”,
arising from a split between ‘pre-narrative experience on the one hand,
and, on the other, narrative memory which creates meaning retrospec-
tively’.28 The memory work done by novels also extends beyond the pri-
vate history of individuals. The current resurgence of popular and critical
interest in historical fiction, another aspect of the ‘turning towards the
past’ previously identified, has lent considerable weight to the argument
that fiction can add to, and even create, public knowledge of a past era. On
this note, it is worth remembering that many early novels are also histori-
cal novels. Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, is set between 1651 and
1694, while A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), by reconstructing the
epidemic of 1665–66 in forensic but also emotionally resonant detail,
‘dramatises the operation of memory’ through affective registers as well as
empirical ones.29 Like many other historical narratives, Defoe’s novel of
the plague serves, to use Erll’s term, as a ‘memory-making fiction’: it
numbers among texts that ‘possess the potential to generate and mould
images of the past which will be retained by whole generations’.30 In addi-
tion to shaping specific memories of individual events, however, early nov-
els can be associated with the production of memory in a more foundational
sense. They are fictions that, by refining and retooling the textual appara-
tus and cultural production of memory, can reasonably claim not just to
have made memories but also to have made memory, shaping the forms of
memory that we apply and discuss today. Novels are one of those ‘forms
which draw attention to processes and problems of remembering’ and
thereby enable reflexive modes of memory.31 Centring on processes rather
than problems, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe calls attention to this reflexive
status. It dramatizes, almost to the point of absurdity, the centrality of the
remembering self to novelistic fiction.
Confining its focus to a single character for much of its duration,
Robinson Crusoe focuses in meticulous and sometimes tedious detail on his
day-to-day activities. Crusoe’s narrative is therefore a virtuoso performance
 INTRODUCTION: THEATRES OF MEMORY 11

of memory. Because Crusoe’s interaction with his environment and things

in it provides the dramatic focus that is usually supplied by interaction with
other people, the acquisition of things and the accurate recording of these
acquisitions while marking the duration of time becomes in effect the nov-
el’s plot. Crusoe ‘entangles identity in possession’ as Barbara Benedict
notes,32 and therefore embodies not just the reflective, introspective self of
Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding but also the active,
acquisitive self of Two Treatises of Government. The latter text’s account of
property hinges on the assertion that the processing and extraction of raw
materials vests ownership of the resulting commodities in whoever per-
forms these tasks. Every person, Locke writes, owns the ‘labour of his body,
and the work of his hands’; it follows that when a person takes something
‘out of the state that nature hath provided’, the finished p ­ roduct is an
object ‘he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his
own, and thereby makes it his property’.33 Individuals acquire property by
imparting something of themselves to stuff; this act of self-­expression is in
turn enabled by a sense of distinct personhood measured through the abil-
ity to form memories which are ‘imprinted by external things’.34 As Wolfram
Schmidgen notes, ‘Crusoe’s property is exclusive only by virtue of the fact
that it bears the imprint of his extended self’.35 This notion of imprinting
suggests that Locke’s theory of selfhood and property have common roots
in a process of memory-making. Categorized through written lists and
inventories, Crusoe’s things are part of the store of his memory. Robinson
Crusoe is therefore an iconic text of enlightenment subjecthood not just
because its hero embodies the specific relationships between identity and
possession theorized by Locke, but also because the ground of these rela-
tionships is memory. Crusoe represents a self in which memory and reflec-
tion are paired with, rather than opposed to, activity and acquisition. This
second set of attributes is particularly pertinent to the global and colonial
contexts emphasized in the seond half of this book.
For all his individuality, Crusoe is, as Edward Said points out, ‘virtually
unthinkable without the colonizing mission that permits him to create a
new world of his own in the distant reaches of the African, Pacific, and
Atlantic wilderness’.36 Such colonial ventures, as much as the project of
the self, he adds, ‘have always been associated with the realistic novel’.
This dual pattern of association shows that however Crusoe may be caught
up in recounting his own remembered experience, his story is equally
bound up with the memory of empire. Novels like Robinson Crusoe can be
12 J. WARD

classed among what Erll calls ‘media of storage, which allow cultural
memories to travel across centuries and even become themselves objects of
remembrance’.37 Crusoe is one of those texts that has become an object as
much as an agent of memory, functioning, according to Michel de Certeau,
as ‘one of the rare myths that modern Occidental society has been able to
create’.38 Cultural memory operates critically and reflexively upon such
myths. Afterlives, defined by Anna Holland and Richard Scholar through
their ‘capacity to probe the (often seductive) myths of origin attached to a
particular cultural object and unpick the status of its beginning’,39 are a
particularly important critical tool. The multifarious afterlife of Robinson
Crusoe has become a genre in itself, focused on the central character to
embody both individualism and empire. Robinsonades, as Erik Martiny
notes, highlight ‘the possibilities of the genre to explore the ravages of
solitude or colonisation’.40 One such text, J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986)
shows how memory texts challenge the tradition, whereby novelistic fic-
tion became a manufactory of the remembering self. The novel also exem-
plifies Holland and Scholar’s notion of afterlife as a critical return to myths
of origin.
Even though it subverts the canonicity of Defoe’s original, Foe has
become a canonical text of its kind, a reworking of literary history which
energized important responses in postmodern and postcolonial criticism
to the problem of the past. Spivak calls the novel an ‘historically implau-
sible but politically provocative revision’, and singles out its rewriting of
Friday, presented in Defoe’s original as a ‘prototype of the successful colo-
nial subject’.41 Linda Hutcheon emphasizes the strategic nature of the
historical implausibility remarked on by Spivak, arguing that Foe typifies
the approach of historiographic metafiction, where ‘known historical
details are deliberately falsified in order to foreground the possible mne-
monic failures of recorded history and the constant potential for both
deliberate and inadvertent error’.42 Hutcheon also touches on oppositions
between history and memory, and the ability of novelistic fiction both to
bridge and trouble the distinction between them, as seen in the reference
to ‘mnemonic failures’. This suggestive phrase can be expanded in light of
the considerable emphasis placed in Coetzee’s novel on failures and abdi-
cations of memory. The novel’s uptake by postmodern and postcolonial
theorists reflects its critique of enlightenment broadly conceived as a proj-
ect which interlinks modes of self, empire, and narration. From a memory
studies perspective, however, Foe is a critique of the production and dis-
semination of memory.
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push back a leather curtain for myself, I can ring a sacristan’s bell.
But the patriarch who relieves me of these duties has some dim,
mysterious right to stand in my way,—a right I cannot fathom, but will
not pretend to dispute. He is, after all, a less insistent beggar than
are the official guardians of galleries and museums, who relieve the
unutterable weariness of their idle days by following me from room to
room with exasperating explanations, until I pay them to go away. I
have heard tourists protest harshly against the ever-recurring
obligation of giving pennies to the old men who, in Venice, draw their
gondolas to shore, and push them out again. They say—what is
perfectly true—that it is an extortion to be compelled to pay for
unasked and unnecessary services, and they generally add
something about not minding the money. It is the principle of the
thing to which they are opposed. But these picturesque accessories
of Venetian life are, for the most part, worn-out gondoliers, whose
days of activity are over, and who are saved from starvation, only by
the semblance of service they perform. Their successors connive at
their pretence of usefulness, knowing that some day they, too, must
drop their oars, and stand patiently waiting, hook in hand, for the
chance coin that is so grudgingly bestowed. That it should be
begrudged—even on principle—seems strange to those whose love
for Venice precludes the possibility of fault-finding. The graybeards
sunning themselves on the marble steps are as much a part of the
beautiful city as are the gondoliers silhouetted against the sky, or the
brown boys paddling in the water. Such old age is meagre, but not
wholly forlorn. A little food keeps body and soul together, and life
yields sweetness to the end. “It takes a great deal to make a
successful American,” confesses Mr. James; “but to make a happy
Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility.... Not the misery of
Italians, but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases the
sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a beautiful race
that lives by the aid of its imagination.”
 THE PILGRIM’S STAFF

Thries hadde she been at Jerusalem;

She hadde passed many a straunge strem;
At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne,
At Galice at Seint Jame, and at Coloigne;
She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye.
Chaucer.

The spirit that animated the Crusader animated the pilgrim. Piety,
curiosity, the love of God and the love of adventure, the natural
sentiment which makes one spot of ground more hallowed than
another,—a sentiment as old as religion,—the natural restlessness of
the human heart,—a restlessness as old as humanity. With the
decay of the Crusades began the passion for pilgrimages, which
reached its height in the fourteenth century, but which at a much
earlier period had begun to send men wandering from land to land,
and from sea to sea, broadening their outlook, sharpening their
intelligence, uniting them in a common bond of faith and sympathy,
teaching them to observe the virtues of hospitality, courtesy, and
kindness. Much has been urged against the pilgrim, even the
genuine pilgrim; but it counts for little when contrasted with his
merits. His was not the wisdom of Franklin. He spent time, strength,
and money with reckless prodigality. He neglected duties near at
hand; he ran sharp risks of shipwreck, robbers, and pestilence. But
he was lifted, for a time at least, out of the common round of life; he
aspired, however lamely, after spiritual growth; and he assisted the
slow progress of civilization by breaking through the barriers which
divided nation from nation in the remoteness of the Middle Ages.
The universality of a custom is pledge of its worth. Pious
Egyptians speeding along the waterways to the temple of Bubastis;
pious Hindoos following from hermitage to hermitage the footsteps of
the exiled Rama; pious Moslems making their painful journey to
Mecca; pious Christians turning their rapt faces to Palestine,—from
the dawn of history to the present day we see the long procession of
pilgrims moving to and fro over the little earth, linking shore to shore
and century to century. Never without disaster, never without
privations, never without the echoes of disparagement, never wholly
discouraged nor abashed, the procession winds brokenly along. The
pilgrims who visit Lourdes in this year of grace are not mere victims
of a spasmodic enthusiasm. They are the inheritors of the world’s
traditions and of the world’s emotions.
Alexander, Bishop of Cappadocia, made a pilgrimage to the Holy
Land in the year 202. He was by no means the first ecclesiastic to
undertake the journey, but the records that survive from this period of
limited authorship are few and far between. It was not until a century
later that the Empress Helena stirred the hearts of Christendom, and
gave the impetus that sent thousands of pilgrims to follow the
footsteps of the Redeemer. Many who could not reach Palestine
travelled as far as Rome, to pray at the tombs of St. Peter and St.
Paul. From time to time the church gently checked an enthusiasm
which overstepped the bounds of reason. Women, then condemned
to much staying at home, showed an ardour for pilgrimage as natural
as it was disconcerting. Nuns joyously welcomed the opportunity to
leave, without broken vows, their convent walls, and tread for a time
the beaten paths of earth. They found shelter on the road in other
houses of religion, where all such devout wanderers were lodged
and generously entertained.
For the virtues which blossomed most fairly along the pilgrim’s
track were chivalry and hospitality. For him a brotherhood of knights
guarded the robber-haunted forests of Germany. For him the
Spanish nobles kept watch and ward over their mountain passes.
For him the galleys of St. John swept the Mediterranean in search of
Algerine pirates. For him the Hospitalers built their first asylum. For
him rang out the Templar’s battle-cry, “Beauceant! Beauceant!” as
the dreaded banner of black and white bore down into the fray. The
pilgrim paid no tithes nor tolls. Monasteries opened to him their
gates. In every seaport, and in many a royal burgh, houses were
erected and maintained for his accommodation. In Calais stood the
old Maison Dieu, with its wide, hospitable doors. Coventry was the
first of English towns to provide a similar shelter. These houses were
either endowed by pious benefactors or were supported by the
strong and wealthy guilds. In Lincoln, the Guild of the Resurrection,
founded in 1374, had the following rule: “If any brother wishes to
make a pilgrimage to Rome, to Saint James of Galicia, or to the Holy
Land, he shall forewarn the Guild; and all the members shall go with
him to the city gate, and each shall give him at least a half-penny.”
Other guilds lent weightier service. Turn where we may, we see on
every side the animosities of nations softened and the self-seeking
of the human heart subdued by the force of that esprit de corps
which bound hard-fighting Christendom together.
Rivalry there was in plenty, as shrine after shrine rose into fame
and fortune. Palestine lay far away, and the journey thither was
beset by difficulties and dangers. Rome held the great relics which
from earliest years had drawn thousands of pilgrims to worship at
her altars. Spain came next in degree, with the famous shrine of
Compostella in Galicia, where lay the bones of her patron, St.
James. So popular was this pilgrimage that in the year 1434 no less
than 2460 licenses were granted in England to travellers bound for
Compostella. Cologne claimed the relics of the Magi; France, the
Holy Coat of Trèves, the shrine of St. Martin of Tours, and the
beautiful pilgrimage churches of Boulogne and Rocamadour. The
last, fair still in its decay, was one of the most celebrated in Europe.
Great kings and greater soldiers, Simon de Montfort among them,
had come as penitents to its rock-built sanctuary; and so many
English were counted among its visitors that we find that arch-
grumbler, Piers Plowman, bitterly conjuring his countrymen to stay
away.

Right so, if thou be Religious, renne thou never ferther

To Rome ne to Rochemadore.
 In good truth there were shrines in plenty at home. Glastonbury,
the resting-place of Joseph of Arimathea, where grew the holy thorn-
tree; Bury Saint Edmunds, where all might see the standard of the
martyred king, and where, to keep it company, Cœur de Lion sent
the captured banner of the king of Cyprus; Waltham, or Holy Cross
Abbey, founded by that devout and warlike Dane, Tovi, to guard the
mysterious cross of black marble, of which none knew the history;
Edward the Confessor’s tomb at Westminster; Our Lady of
Walsingham, the best-loved church in England; and the ever-famous
shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. “Optimus aegrorum
medicus fit Thomas Bonorum,” was the motto engraved on the little
pewter flasks brought back by Canterbury pilgrims. “For good people
who are ill, Thomas is the best of physicians.”
Miracles apart, it was well to take the open road, and to live for a
few days, or for a few weeks, in rain and sunshine. It was well to
escape the dreadful ministrations of doctors, and trust to St.
Thomas, who at all events would not bleed and purge his patient’s
life away. It was well to quit the foulness of the towns, to push aside
the engrossing cares of life, and to see the fair face of an English
summer.

I think the long ride in the open air,

That pilgrimage over stocks and stones,
In the miracle must come in for a share!

Many a cure was wrought before the shrine was gained, and a
hopeful heart is ever a tonic for body and soul together. The most
constant and the most curious reproach cast by reformers at the
pilgrims is that they were cheerful, even merry, and that they went
their way in what seems to have been an irritating spirit of
enjoyment. One Master William Thorpe, a sour and godly man,
protested sternly in 1407 against the number of “men and women
that go on pilgrimages to Canterbury, to Beverley, to Karlington, to
Walsinghame, or to any such other places”! His accusations were
three in number. The pilgrims spent “their goodes in waste,”—which
was true. They boasted, not always truthfully, of what they had seen,
—a reprehensible habit of travellers since man first roamed the
earth. And, worst of all, they sang, rang little bells,—the Canterbury
bells,—and made a joyous clatter on the road. To this, Thomas
Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, deeming light hearts as near to
grace as sad ones, stoutly replied that pilgrims did well to sing and
be as cheerful as the hardships of the way permitted. If a man’s foot
were cut and bleeding, it were better for him to sing than to be silent,
“for with soche solace the travell and wearinesse of pylgremes is
lightely and merily broughte forthe.”
Not all pilgrimages, however, were undertaken in this jocund
spirit. Figures terrible and tragic loom up in the darkness of history.
Fulk Nerra, the black Count of Anjou, driven like Orestes by the
stings of conscience, wandered from shrine to shrine, seeking
pardon for nameless crimes. By his own command he was dragged
barefooted through the streets of Jerusalem, his blood running down
beneath the pitiless strokes of the scourge. From Guyenne to
Picardy walked two noble Breton brothers, their heavy chains eating
into their flesh, their heavier hearts burdened with unendurable
remorse. Even less sinful men were sometimes inclined to
penitence. The Lord of Joinville, before setting forth with St. Louis on
the Seventh Crusade, walked in his shirt to every shrine within
twenty leagues of his castle, imploring strength of arm and grace of
soul. In blither mood, the Viscount De Werchin, Seneschal of
Hainault, started upon a pilgrimage to St. James of Compostella.
The journey was long, and by way of diversifying it, the good
Seneschal despatched messengers announcing his readiness to
meet any knight, French, English, or Spanish, who would engage
with him in a friendly passage of arms. That none who coveted this
distinction might be so unfortunate as to lose it, he gave his itinerary
with great care, and even offered to turn aside from his road as far
as twenty leagues, for the felicity of a little fighting. Surely St. James,
the patron of soldiers, who has himself turned the tide of more than
one hard-fought battle, must have smiled kindly upon that brave and
pious pilgrim, when he knelt in his battered armour before the
glittering shrine.
 Kings and princes frequently went upon pilgrimages. The sprig of
broom, the planta genistae, destined to give its name to a great and
royal line, was worn by Geoffrey of Anjou—some said in token of
humility—when he journeyed to the Holy Land. Henry the Second of
England travelled piously to Rocamadour, and four English Edwards
knelt in turn at the feet of Our Lady of Walsingham. Jusserand tells
us that the royal fee on such occasions was seven shillings; the
ordinances of Edward the Second make especial mention of the
sum. It does not seem munificent, when we remember that Canute
took off his crown and laid it on St. Edmund’s shrine; but there were
occasions when even seven shillings were notably lacking. The
Chronicles of Jocelin of Brakelond, quoted by Carlyle in “Past and
Present,” relate minutely how King John came to St. Edmundsbury
with a large retinue, how he gave the abbot thirteen pence,
beseeching in return a Mass, and presented to the shrine a silken
cloak, which was carried promptly away by one of his followers, so
that the monks beheld it no more. When Henry the Eighth and
Catharine of Aragon visited Walsingham, the king hung around the
statue’s neck a string of pearls and golden beads, and perhaps was
not unmoved subsequently by a desire to have it back again.
“Of all our Ladyes, I love best our Lady of Walsyngham,” says Sir
Thomas More in one of his “Dyalogues,” reflecting the common
sentiment of the past three hundred years, and defending the
ancient custom of pilgrimages from the raillery of Erasmus. The road
to Walsingham, like the road to Canterbury, was called the “Pilgrims’
Way;” the town was full of inns and lodgings for the accommodation
of the devout, and “manye faire myracles” were witnessed at the
shrine. When the Norman knight, Sir Raaf de Boitetourt, fled from his
burning castle, he sought refuge at Walsingham, where for seven
years he had kept vigil on the eve of Epiphany. Hard pressed, he
reached the doors, and the Virgin, mindful of faithful service, opened
them with her own hands, and drew him swiftly and gently within her
blessed walls.
Frequent mention is made of Walsingham in state papers and in
family chronicles. The Paston letters contain numerous allusions to
this popular shrine. John Paston’s wife, troubled by the news of her
husband’s illness, writes to him lovingly: “My mother behested
[vowed] another image of wax of the weight of you to our Lady of
Walsingham; and she sent four nobles to the four orders of friars at
Norwich to pray for you; and I have behested a pilgrimage to
Walsingham and to St. Leonards for you.” Again, Justice Yelverton
thanks John Paston, “especially for that ye do much for our Lady’s
house at Walsingham, which I trust verily ye do the rather for the
great love that ye deem I have thereto; for truly if I be drawn to any
worship or welfare, and discharge of mine enemies’ danger, I ascribe
it unto our Lady.”
In proportion to the piety of the pilgrim flames the wrath of the
reformer. Denunciations from poets of a radical turn, like Langland
and Skelton, echo shrilly through English letters.

Pylgrimis and palmers plyghten hem togederes,

To seken seint James and seintes at Rome,
Wenten forth in hure way with many unwyse tales,
And haven leve to lyen alle hure lyf-tyme.

This sounds like the bitterness of the stay-at-home, resenting with

his whole soul the allurement of travellers’ tales,—tales to which
Chaucer lent a tolerant ear. A century and a half later, when reform
had had its way, when the relics of St. Thomas had been scattered
to the winds, when our Lady’s image had been flung from its altar
into the nearest well, and Cranmer in his “Catechism” had alluded to
vows and pilgrimages as half-forgotten errors, one poor faithful soul
was accused in 1542 of going to Walsingham,—not blithely, indeed,
with song and ringing of bells, but sad, fearful, and forlorn, to pray at
the defaced and empty shrine.
There was a little chapel built on one of the eastern piers of old
London Bridge, and dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket. Hither came
the pilgrims bound for Canterbury, or for the far-off shrines of
Compostella and Rocamadour, to beg a blessing on their journey;
and many were the curious eyes that watched them faring forth. To-
day, when no spot is remote, and nothing is unknown, it is hard to
understand the interest which once attached itself to the wanderer,
or to realize his importance as a link in the human chain. At a time
when the mass of mankind learned orally what it learned at all, when
news crept slowly over the country-side, and rumour passed from
one village ale-house to another, people were preserved from mental
stagnation by the “unwyse tales” which Langland found so
reprehensible. They heard how a fair and famous courtesan, smitten
with blindness, travelled to Rocamadour, beseeching a cure, and
how, kneeling outside the walls, she was withheld by an invisible
power from entering the sanctuary. Then, confessing her sins with
tears and lamentations, she cut off her beautiful hair,—

A net
Wherein no more shall souls be snared and slain,

and offered it to the Virgin in token of amendment. This being done,

the barrier was lifted, she hastened into the church, “giving praise to
the Mother of God,” and sight was restored to her eyes.
Many were the miracles related by pilgrims, and bewildering
were the wonders they described. The zeal for relics having far
outrun discretion, a vast hoard of heterogeneous and apocryphal
objects had been collected in every church, and were reverenced
indiscriminately by the devout. They were less grisly, but hardly less
marvellous than the weapons which Christian found in the house of
Prudence, Piety, and Charity, when these benevolent ladies
exhibited to their guest the “engines with which God’s servants had
done wonderful things.” Christian’s delight over the hammer and nail
with which Jael killed Sisera, the sling and stone with which David
killed Goliath, the jaw bone of an ass with which Samson killed the
Philistines, and the ox goad with which Shamgar killed six hundred
of his enemies, is but the reflection of a gentler sentiment which
stirred the pilgrim’s heart. Our ancestors were not wont to reason
very distinctly on these or on other matters; the abnormal offered no
obstacle to their credulity; and the complete absence of an historic
background annihilated for them a dozen and more intervening
centuries. The Holy Coat carried them in spirit to Nazareth, the Veil
of Veronica led them to the foot of the Cross. When told that the
head of St. John the Baptist reposed in a church at Amiens, they
neither calculated the probabilities of the case nor inquired into ways
and means. When a few far-travelled pilgrims heard that the same
relic was claimed by a church in Constantinople, they either became
partisans—a natural sentiment—or argued with the simple sagacity
of Sir John Mandeville. Which was the true head he could not tell. “I
wot nere but God knowethe; but in what wyse that men worschippen
it, the blessed seynte John holt him a-payd.”
This is the pith and marrow of the argument. Pilgrims, reaching
back dimly into a shrouded past, grasped at the relic which bridged
for them the chasm, and felt the mysterious blessedness of
association. If it were not what it was believed to be, the saints, well
aware both of men’s fallibility and of their good faith, would
undoubtedly “holt them a-payd.” The same sentiment hallowed
countless shrines, and found expression in the sygnys or medals
which then, as now, played a prominent part in pilgrimages. We
know how little such customs change when we read of the
fourteenth-century pilgrims at Rocamadour, and see the twentieth-
century pilgrims at Lourdes. The Rocamadour medals were made of
pewter, stamped with an image of the Virgin, and pierced with holes
so that they could be sewn to the cap or dress. The right to make
and sell them belonged exclusively to the family of De Valon, and
had been granted by the crown in return for military service. So large
were the sales, and so comfortable the profits, that the thrifty
townspeople constantly infringed upon the seignorial privilege, and
flooded the market, in defiance of all authority, with contraband
medals,—a pardonable offence, not without parallel in every age and
land.
The Canterbury sygnys were in the shape of little flasks; at
Compostella they were minute cockle-shells; at Amiens they bore
the head of St. John the Baptist: “Ecce signum faciei beati Johannis
Baptistae.” So pleased were pilgrims with these devices, and so
proud to wear the mementoes of their piety,—as the Moslem,
returned from Mecca, wears his green turban,—that we find
Erasmus mocking at their appearance “clothyd with cockle-schelles,
and laden on every side with bunches of lead and tynne.” There is
not a shrine in Europe to-day unprovided with similar tokens. At
Auray, medals of St. Anne; at Padua, medals of St. Anthony; at Avila,
medals of St. Theresa; at Prague, medals of the Holy Infant; at
Loretto, medals of the Santa Casa; at Genazzana, medals of Our
Lady of Good Counsel; at Paray-le-Monial, medals of the Sacred
Heart; at the charming old pilgrimage church of Maria Plain near
Salzburg, medals of the Blessed Virgin uncovering the Divine Child;
at Lourdes, more medals and rosaries than one can imagine all
Catholic Christendom buying in the next three hundred years.
Yet bought they are, and could Erasmus behold the pilgrims
leaving Lourdes, he would deem himself once more on the
Walsingham way. It is well to watch the French country people, laden
with the heavy baskets which hold their supply of food, grasping the
inevitable umbrellas, as big and bulky as folded tents, and burdened
furthermore with an assortment of pious souvenirs that require the
utmost care in handling. They move slowly in little groups from
image to image in the lower church. Some scholar of the party spells
out the name of each saint, and then all softly rub their
miscellaneous treasures—beads, scapulars, medals, bénitiers—up
and down the statue’s robe and feet. Some old, old, misty notion of
the blessedness of touch dwells confusedly in every mind. Their
contentment is beautiful to behold. They alone know by what
sacrifices and privations these days of pilgrimage were made
possible; but we know how much they have gained. New sensations;
the sudden opening of the world’s closed doors, revealing to them a
little corner amid wide mysterious spaces; the stirring of the heart in
the presence of sacred things; one keen experience in a
monotonously bucolic life; one deep breath of a diviner air;
something desired, achieved, and ever to be remembered,—what
generous mind doubts that all this is better than sensibly staying at
home? No observer could have stood at the doors of St. Peter’s in
the spring of 1900, when the pilgrims of every land thronged up the
sunlit steps, without learning once for all the value of emotions. The
crowd stared, jostled, chattered, as it swept along, and then, entering
those vast, harmonious aisles, fell silent, while there came into every
face a look that could never be mistaken nor forgotten. It was the
leaping of the human soul to the ideal. It was an inarticulate nunc
dimittis, as the pilgrim entered upon the inheritance of ages.
 A QUAKER DIARY
De tous ces titres, celui que j’aime le mieux est celui de
Philadelphien, ami des frères. Il y a bien des sortes de vanité,
mais la plus belle est celle qui, ne s’arrogeant aucun titre, rend
presque tous les autres ridicules.—Voltaire.

It is well for us who are interested in colonial days and colonial ways
that their leisure gave men and women ample opportunity to keep
diaries, and that a modesty now quite unknown made them willing to
spend long hours in writing pages not destined for publication. There
is something very charming about this old-fashioned, long-discarded
reticence, this deliberate withholding of trivial incidents and fleeting
impressions from the wide-mouthed curiosity of the crowd. Even
when the Revolution had awakened that restless spirit of change
which scorned the sobriety of the past, there lingered still in people’s
hearts an inherited instinct of reserve. Men breakfasted with
Washington, dined with John Adams, fought by the side of La
Fayette, and never dreamed of communicating these details to the
world. Women danced at the redcoat balls, or curtsied and yawned
at Mrs. Washington’s receptions, and then went home and confided
their experiences either to their friends, in long, gossiping letters, or
to the secret pages of their diaries. It was a lamentable waste of
“copy,” but a saving of dignity and self-respect.
As for the earlier, easier days, when the infant colonies waxed
fat on beef and ale, literary aspirations had not then begun to afflict
the hearts of men. It is delightful to think how well little Philadelphia,
like New York, got along without so much as a printing press, when
she had starved out her only printer, Bradford,—a most troublesome
and seditious person,—and sent him over to little Boston, which
even then had more patience than her neighbours with books. Yet all
this time, honest citizens were transcribing in letters and in journals
whatever was of daily interest or importance to them; and it is by
help of these letters and these journals that we now look back upon
that placid past, and realize the every-day existence of ordinary
people, nearly two centuries ago. We know through them, and
through them only, what manner of lives our forefathers led in
Puritan New England, in comfortable Dutch New York, in demure
Quaker Pennsylvania, before the sharp individuality of each colony
was merged into the common tide, and with the birth of a nation—“a
respectable nation,” to use the words of Washington, who was
averse to glittering superlatives—the old order passed away forever
from the land.
“It is to the pages of Judge Sewall’s diary,” writes Alice Morse
Earle, “that we must turn for any definite or extended contemporary
picture of colonial life in New England;” just as we turn for the
corresponding picture of old England to the diaries of John Evelyn
and of Mr. Samuel Pepys. Mrs. Earle does not add, though she well
might, that it is better discipline to read Judge Sewall’s records than
those of all the other diarists in Christendom; for, by contrast with the
bleak cheerlessness of those godly days, our own age seems
flooded with sunshine, and warm with the joy of life. And not our own
age only. If we pass from ice-bound Massachusetts to colonies less
chilly and austere, we step at once into a different world, a tranquil
and very comfortable world; not intellectual nor anxiously religious,
but full of eating and drinking, and the mildest of mild amusements,
and general prosperity and content. Even the Pennsylvania Quakers,
though not permitted to dally openly with flaunting and conspicuous
pleasures, with blue ribbons, coloured waistcoats, or the shows of
itinerant mummers, enjoyed a fair share of purely mundane delights.
If Judge Sewall’s journal tells us plainly and pitilessly the story of
Puritanism, what it really meant in those early uncompromising days,
what virtues it nourished, what sadness it endured, the diary of a
Philadelphia Friend gives us a correspondingly clear insight into that
old-time Quakerism, gentle, silent, tenacious, inflexible, which is now
little more than a tradition in the land, yet which has left its impress
forever upon the city it founded and sustained.
 Elizabeth Sandwith, better known as Elizabeth Drinker,—though
even that name has an unfamiliar sound, save to her descendants
and to a few students of local history,—was born in Philadelphia in
1735. She was the daughter of wealthy Friends, and her education,
liberal for those days, would not be deemed much amiss even in our
own. It included a fair knowledge of French and a very admirable
familiarity with English. She read books that were worth the reading,
and she wrote with ease, conciseness, and subdued humour. Her
diary, begun in 1758, was continued without interruption for forty-
nine years. It is valuable, not only as a human document, and as a
clear, graphic, unemotional narrative of the most troubled and
triumphant period in our country’s history, but because it contains a
careful record of events which—of the utmost importance to the local
historian—may be searched for in vain elsewhere. The entries are
for the most part brief, and to this brevity, no doubt, we owe the
persevering character of the work. It is the enthusiasm with which
the young diarist usually sets about her task that threatens its
premature collapse. She begins by being unduly confidential, and
ends by having nothing to confide.
Not so this Quaker girl, reticent even with herself; avoiding, even
in the secret pages of her journal, all gossip about her own soul, all
spiritual outpourings, all the dear and inexhaustible delights of
egotism. She notes down, indeed, every time she goes to meeting,
and also the date on which she begins to work “a large worsted Bible
cover,”—which Bible cover is in the possession of her great-great-
grandchildren to-day; but neither the meetings nor the worsted work
betray her into a complacent piety, and she is just as careful to say
when she has been drinking tea, or spending the afternoon with any
of her young friends. As a matter of fact, tea-drinking and kindred
frivolities are evidently more to her liking, though she will not confess
it, than serious and improving occupations. Philadelphia, dazzled by
Franklin’s discoveries, was pleased to think herself scientific in those
days; and young men and women were in the habit of attending
learned lectures,—or what were then thought learned lectures,—and
pretending they understood and enjoyed them,—a mental attitude
not wholly unfamiliar to us now. So keen was the thirst for knowledge
that men paid four shillings for the privilege of looking at a skeleton
and some anatomical models in the Pennsylvania Hospital. Our
Quaker Elizabeth, however, will have none of these dreary pastimes.
To electricity and to skeletons she is alike indifferent; but she pays
two shillings cheerfully to see a lioness, exhibited by some
enterprising showman, and she records without a scruple that she
and her family gave the really exorbitant sum of six shillings and
sixpence for a glimpse at a strange creature which was carried about
in a barrel, and which its owner said was half man and half beast,
but which turned out to be a young baboon, very sick and sad. “I felt
sorry for the poor thing, and wished it back in its own country,” says
the gentle-hearted Quakeress, who has always a pitying word for
beasts.
The fidelity with which this delightful journal is kept enables us to
know what sober diversions fell to the lot of strict Friends, to whom
the famous Philadelphia Dancing Assemblies and the equally
famous old Southwark Theatre were alike forbidden joys; who never
witnessed the glories of the Mischianza, nor the gay routs of the
redcoat winter; who, though loyal to the crown, shared in none of the
festivities of the king’s birthday; who were too circumspect even to
join the little group of Quaker ladies for whom M. de Luzerne
prepared a separate apartment at the beautiful fête du Dauphin, and
who, wistful and invisible, watched through a gauze curtain the
brilliant scene in which they had no share.
None of these dallyings with the world, the flesh, and the devil,
no glimpses into the fast-growing dissipation of the gayest and most
extravagant city in the colonies, find a record in Elizabeth Drinker’s
diary. Her utmost limit of frivolity is reached in a sleighing party on a
winter afternoon; in tea-drinking on winter evenings; in listening to a
wonderful musical clock, which cost a thousand guineas in Europe
and played twenty tunes; and in gazing at a panorama of London,
which most Philadelphians considered almost as good as visiting the
metropolis itself. When she is well advanced in years, she is
beguiled by her insatiable curiosity into going to see an elephant,
which is kept in a “small ordinary room,” in a not very reputable alley.
In fact, she is a little frightened, and more than a little ashamed, at
finding herself in such a place, until she encounters a friend, Abigail
Griffitts, who has come to gratify her curiosity under pretence of
showing the elephant to her grandchildren; and the two women are
so sustained by each other’s company that they forget their
confusion, and proceed to examine the mammoth together. “It is an
innocent, good-natured, ugly Beast,” comments Elizabeth Drinker,
“which I need not undertake to describe; only to say it is indeed a
marvel to most who see it,—one of the kind never having been in
this part of the world before. I could not help pitying the poor
creature, whom they keep in constant agitation, and often give it rum
or brandy to drink. I think they will finish it before long.” The presence
of an elephant in a small room, like one of the family, seems an
uncomfortable arrangement, even if the “innocent beast” were of
temperate habits; but an elephant in a state of unseemly “agitation”
must have been—at such close quarters—a disagreeable and
dangerous companion.
One pastime there is which dates from the days of Eden, which
no creed forbids and no civilization forswears. Elizabeth Sandwith
has not recorded many little events in her diary before Henry Drinker
looms upon the scene, though it is only by the inexpressible
demureness of her allusions to her lover that we have any insight
into the state of her affections. Quaker training does not encourage
the easy unfurling of emotions, and Elizabeth’s heart, like her soul,
was a guarded fortress which no one was invited to inspect. There is
a good deal of tea-drinking, however, and sometimes an indiscreet
lingering after tea until “unseasonable hours,” eleven o’clock or
thereabouts. Finally, on the 28th of November, 1760, appears the
following entry: “Went to monthly meeting this morning, A. Warner
and Sister with me. Declared my intentions of marriage with my
Friend H. D. Sarah Sansom and Sarah Morris accompanied us to ye
Men’s meeting.” Four weeks later this formidable ordeal is repeated.
She announces in the December monthly meeting that she
continues her intentions of marriage with her friend H. D. In January
the wedding is celebrated; and then, and then only, H. D. expands
into “my dear Henry,” and assumes a regular, though never a very
prominent, place in the diary.
 After this, the entries grow longer, less personal, and full of
allusions to public matters. We learn how sharply justice was
administered in the Quaker city; for Benjamin Ardey, being convicted
of stealing goods out of a shop where he was employed, is whipped
for two successive Saturdays,—“once at ye cart’s tail, and once at ye
post.” We learn all about the delights of travelling in those primitive
days; for the young wife accompanies her husband on several
journeys he is compelled to make to the little townships of the
province, and gives us a lively account of the roads and inns,—of the
Manatawny Tavern, for example, and the indignation of the old Dutch
landlady on being asked for clean sheets. Such a notion as changing
sheets for every fresh traveller has never dawned upon her mind
before, and, with the conservative instincts of her class, she takes
very unkindly to the suggestion. She is willing to dampen and press
the bed linen, since these fastidious guests dislike to see it rumpled;
but that is the full extent of her complaisance. If people want clean
sheets, they had better bring them along.
Most interesting of all, we find in this faithful, accurate,
unemotional diary a very clear and graphic picture of Philadelphia on
the eve of the Revolution and after the Declaration of Independence,
when deepening discontent and the sharp strife of opposing factions
had forever destroyed the old placid, prosperous colonial life. Every
one knows how stubborn was the opposition offered by the Quakers
to the war; how they were hurled from their high estate by the
impetuosity of a patriotism which would brook no delay; and how,
with the passing away of the Assembly, they lost all vestige of
political power. Scant mercy was shown them after their downfall by
the triumphant Whigs, and scant justice has been done them since
by historians who find it easier to be eloquent than impartial. There
appears to have been something peculiarly maddening in the
passive resistance of the Friends, and in their absolute inability to
share the emotions of the hour. The same quiet antagonism which
they had manifested to the Stamp Act, to the three-penny duty on
tea, and to all unconstitutional measures on the part of England, they
offered in turn to the mandates of Congress, and to the exactions of
the Executive Council. They would not renounce their allegiance to
the crown; they would not fight for king or country; they would not
pay the new state tax levied for the support of the troops; they would
not lift their hands when the tax collector carried off their goods and
chattels in default of payment; they would not hide their valuables
from the collector’s eyes; they would not run away when General
Howe’s army entered Philadelphia in the autumn of 1777, nor when
the American troops took possession the following June. They would
not do anything at all,—not even talk; and perhaps silence was their
most absolutely irritating characteristic, at a time when other men
found pulpit and platform insufficient for the loud-voiced eloquence of
strife.
In reading Elizabeth Drinker’s journal, we cannot but be struck
with the absence of invective, and, for the most part, of comment.
Anxiety and irritation are alike powerless to overcome the lifelong
habit of restraint. Her husband appears to have been a stubborn and
consistent Tory, though the restrictions of his creed compelled him to
play an idle part, and to suffer for a lost cause without striking a blow
in its behalf. He was one of forty gentlemen, nearly all Friends, who
were banished from Philadelphia in the summer of 1777; and his
wife, with two young children, was left unprotected, to face the
discomforts and dangers of the times. She was more than equal to
the task. There is as little evidence of timidity as of rancour in the
quiet pages of her diary. She describes the excitement and
confusion which the news of General Howe’s approach awakened in
Philadelphia, and on the 26th of September writes: “Well! here are
ye English in earnest. About two or three thousand came in through
Second Street, without opposition or interruption,—no plundering on
ye one side or ye other. What a satisfaction would it be to our dear
absent friends,”—of whom one was her absent husband,—“could
they but be informed of it.”
From this time, all public events are recorded with admirable
brevity and accuracy (Cæsar would have respected Elizabeth
Drinker): the battle of Germantown, the difficulty of finding shelter for
the wounded soldiers, the bombardment and destruction of the three
forts which guarded Franklin’s chevaux de frise and separated
General Howe from the fleet, the alarming scarcity of provisions
before the three forts fell. Despite her Tory sympathies and her
husband’s banishment, Elizabeth sends coffee and wine whey daily
to the wounded American prisoners; rightly thinking that the English
ran a better chance of being looked after in the hospitals than did her
own countrymen. She suffers no molestation save once, when, as
she writes, “a soldier came to demand Blankets, which I did not in
any wise agree to. Notwithstanding my refusal, he went upstairs and
took one, and with good nature begged I would excuse his borrowing
it, as it was by General Howe’s orders.”
Annoyances and alarms were common enough in a town
overrun by redcoats, who were not infrequently drunk. Elizabeth,
descending one night to her kitchen, found a tipsy sergeant making
ardent and irresistible love to her neat maidservant, Ann. On being
told to go away, the man grew bellicose, flourished his sword, and
used the forcible language of the camp. He had reckoned without his
host, however, when he thought to have matters all to his own liking
under that quiet Quaker roof. A middle-aged neighbour,—a Friend,—
hearing the tumult, came swiftly to the rescue, collared the rascal,
and wrenched the sword out of his hand; whereupon Elizabeth, with
delightful sense and caution, carried the carnal weapon into the
parlour, and deliberately locked it up in a drawer. This sobered the
warrior, and brought him to his senses. To go back to his barracks
without his sword would be to court unpleasant consequences. So
after trying what some emphasized profanity would do to help him,
and finding it did nothing at all, he grew humble, said he had only
yielded up his arms “out of pure good nature,” and announced his
willingness to drink a glass of wine with such peaceable and friendly
folk. No liquor was produced in response to this cordial
condescension, but he was conducted carefully to the step, the
sword returned to him, and the door shut in his face; upon which
poor foolish Ann, being refused permission to follow, climbed the
back fence in pursuit of her lover, and returned to her duties no
more.
Of the brilliant gayety which marked this memorable winter, of
the dinners and balls, of the plays at the old Southwark Theatre, of
the reckless extravagance and dissipation which filled the lives of the
fair Tory dames who danced the merry nights away, there is not the