Professor John Sitter

For a critical study of a literary period, this book is a gem for readers who love history, literary insights, and good writing. This book is a well written investigation into a very small period of time—a very lonely little period of time—largely uncommented by scholars—lost in the background of two “more important” periods: after the “Age of Pope and Swift” and into the “Age of Johnson” (9). These are the years roughly between 1740 and 1760 in England.

Sitter starts with the philosopher David Hume and theological essayist William Law, and ends with novelists Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson. In-between, we meet poets from Thomas Gray to William Collins, William Shenstone to James Thomson, who mark the transition from Augustan to Romantic influences. In this period there is a lot of death in poetry, and as Sitter phrases it, a flight from history. It represents a movement towards rural innocence, nature and passion, and away from the corruption of ambition, wit and public history: poetry over politics.

Sitter performs fascinating analyses of his diverse cast of characters showing their singular uniqueness. Along the way, he highlights each one’s loneliness of style in various ways. “…these images of seclusion are also metaphors for the solitary poetic imagination itself” (102). There is a lot of solitude, time to think deeply and carefully about life, and then in quiet solitude, write it all down for others to read, so readers may contemplate further in their own solitude. These are the Pleasures of the Imagination indeed, as Mark Akenside’s poem suggests, as we each experience Heaven’s Eternal Destiny for ourselves (160).

Later in the book Sitter focuses on comparisons between Fielding and Richardson. This section is especially stimulating for novel lovers. Starting out as opposites, the two seem to meld into each other over time. The competition and contrast between them interestingly reverses in their last works, each taking the other’s style as though to acknowledge and respect the talents of their adversary, embracing the enemy as it were. Through the creation of thousands of pages, two brilliant novelists end with an artistic salute to each other. This is how two artists struggling in solitude for many decades finally find themselves in relation to each other.

The theme of loneliness becomes a set of bookends for the critical text, stated early in the Preface and restated later in the Conclusion. The book introduces its theme in the Preface, “…the particular consciousness mid-eighteenth-century authors had of themselves as solitary writers for solitary readers that I have tried to characterize as ‘literary loneliness’” (9). The Conclusion restates it as “…the relation of solitary writers and solitary readers to the theater of public life” (215). The book is about the shared aloneness of writer and reader; and about how a lonely mind steeped in complex literary experience stands in relation to public society. This is classic sentimentality that many avid readers cherish in the deepest throes of literary life.

Sitter’s book is a cozy little study that true literary obsessed readers could curl up with and read straight through, easily (only 225 pages). It is well suited for a rainy windy morning sitting alone near a window as the drops blow across the panes. Sitter is a concise, artistic writer, with elegant style and logical arguments. These qualities add to the enjoyment as well as the substance of the work. They make the experience of this book’s content reinforce the theme: literary loneliness, in the best possible sense.… (lisätietoja)