The Young Philosopher , and: Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (review) (2000)

98 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 effet, d'esquisser «un nouveau visage de Robert Challe» où «vigueur protestataire» et vertiges de l'inquiétude religieuse s'expriment avec bien plus de force. Qu'on en juge par un exemple. Jusqu'à présent, lorsqu'on lisait: «je retombais toujours dans les travers que donnent les affreuses terreurs dont on a été bercé», on ne s'imaginait pas que le texte était: «je retombais toujours dans les transes que...». On voit ici à quel point la confrontation avec le manuscrit nouvellementmis aujour est fructueuse et «donne un sens à des détails qui, autrement, passeraient inaperçu». C'est d'ailleurs l'un des mérites de cette édition nouvelle: outre une pagination qui permet de se reporter sans peine aux éditions antérieures et au manuscrit luim ême, on retrouve un index où figure une liste des variantes les plus significatives, une bibliographie critique, un glossaire, en bref, tout un apparat critique qui font de cette édition un ouvrage de référence et le compagnon indispensable des études sur Challe et sur l'histoire de la philosophie clandestine de l'âge classique. Marc André Bernier Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières Charlotte Smith. The Young Philosopher. Ed. Elizabeth Kraft. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. xxxv + 397pp. US$47.50 (cloth); US$17.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8131-211-6 Elizabeth Hamilton. Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. Ed. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1999. 339pp. $15.95. US$12.95; £8.95. ISBN 1-55111-175-6. Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Hamilton are conventionally positioned as ideologically opposed by critics who make the authors' responses to the revolutionary debate symptomatic of a pervasive and entirely adversarial radicalism and conservatism . These two novels, along with their excellent introductions and notes (and, in the Hamilton edition, appendices that provide a range of contemporary materials), should do much to disallow the reductiveness of such a narrowly political approach, and to encourage a more comprehensive estimate of their authors' strengths. More particularly, both fictions reveal, in very different ways, how seemingly incompatible strands of orthodox and iconoclastic opinion can comfortably, and sometimes creatively, coexist in a single work. By 1798, the year in which The Young Philosopher was published, Charlotte Smith's support for revolutionary principles was more muted than it had been in the earlier Desmond (1791). She still works here with radical metaphors, however, brilliantly literalizing, for example, Godwin's representation in Political Justice of the old order as a small group of custodians oppressing the unawakened masses, through the device of the madhouse to which the heroine's mother, Mrs Glenmorris , is confined by her parody of an aristocratic mother, Lady Mary. And the contrast between the virtuous George Delmont and his dissolute brother Adolphus Delmont is characteristically established through their respective affiliations REVIEWS 99 with radical and anti-Jacobin positions. But many of the narrative innovations in The Young Philosopher—especially the deviations from standard English— reveal a hierarchical frame of mind that sometimes verges on the reactionary. These deviations—of dialect, of class affectation, of false learning—do not affirm aspects of a distinctive culture, as idiomatic speech in Walter Scott does. Instead, as we see in the hero's mediations on the suffering of the heroine from her contact with "the inferior ranks of people, whose grossness must shock her, whose licentious freedoms terrify her" (p. 278), they mark out for condemnation or patronizing those outside the landed gentry, especially the newly rich. Elizabeth Hamilton, too, works at once within and against a numberofdiscursive conventions associated in this instance with her conservative politics. An antiJacobin on subjects relating to religion, she held views on women's education that intersected at key points with those of the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Rejecting an older reading ofHamilton as party political hack, Perkins and Russell apply the insights of feminist, historicist, and postcolonial theoreticians to show the ways in which, both formally and conceptually, Translations ofthe Letters ofa Hindoo Rajah develops its didactic impulses without tendentiousness. Preserving and, where necessary, extending Hamilton's notes (a rich source of references to contemporary antiquarian and orientalist commentary...