Signs of Secrecy: The Politics of Scandal in Eighteenth-Century Print Culture

Abstract

Early modem England experienced a number of political, social, and economic transformations that occurred alongside the growth in the seventeenth century of a religious doctrine of scandal, which enabled different sects to defend their right to worship against the authority of the state, to exhort members of their own community towards unity, or to persuade others of the benefits of general conformity to a national practice of worship. In addition to a continuance of the pamphlet controversies over conformity, the Restoration and early eighteenth century also witnessed the growth of a secularized culture of scandal, developed in conjunction with a flourishing print culture and a political system comprised of parties. This study focuses on the ways in which scandal as a discourse—with the attendant ideas of publicity and privacy and an uncertain epistemology of visible signs and hidden secrets—developed in England as an important language of political articulation, and suggests that scandal to some degree continues to mediate the production of modem subjectivity and social formations. An exploration of a variety of literary genres—religious treatises and pamphlets; dramatic comedies by Aphra Behn, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and others; Daniel Defoe’s periodical, A Review of the Affairs of France; and the Secret Memoirs of the New Atalantis and Memoirs of Europe by Delarivier Manley—emphasizes scandal’s cultural effects and outlines the central features of scandal literature by exploring its topicality, rhetorical secrecy, hermeneutics of social behaviour, transmission of “intelligence,” and negotiation of power relations. While observing and accounting for a shift in popular attitudes towards scandal over the course of the eighteenth century—a shift that ultimately results in scandal’s repudiation from polite social discourse—this study brings attention to scandal’s important role in constituting British identity through encouraging the development of a “normative grammar” for public interactions. A consideration of scandal suggests an alternative history for the formation of an eighteenth-century British public than the one provided by Jurgen Habermas’ influential model of the “bourgeois public sphere.” Finally, scandal literature that formally embodies as well as thematizes a “secret” narrative form—exemplified here by the secret memoir—becomes significant in the early eighteenth century as a means of political intervention while also structuring and animating readers’ curiosity and desire. In addition to critiquing the generic categories used to describe scandal literature to date, this study calls for a recognition of the historically specific conditions that produced a tradition and discourse of scandal in English print culture.