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UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
Modernity and Affliction: The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1377q724
Author
Hernandez, Alex Eric
Publication Date
2014
Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles
Modernity and Affliction:
The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy
in English
by
Alex Eric Hernandez
2014
© Copyright by
Alex Eric Hernandez
2014
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
Modernity and Affliction:
The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy
by
Alex Eric Hernandez
Doctor of Philosophy in English
University of California, Los Angeles, 2014
Professor Felicity A. Nussbaum, Chair
The middling sort was often thought to be immune or ill-suited to tragedy, its modest,
commercial way of life ensuring, in the words of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719),
that those in the middle station went “silently and smoothly thro’ the World.” This project
assembles an archive of eighteenth-century text and performance that contradicts this
optimism. In contrast to the familiar critical narrative of tragedy’s demise or stagnation in
the eighteenth century, Modernity and Affliction argues that a body of work depicting the
afflictions of the middling sort was vital to a series of cultural debates concerned with
imagining modes of ordinary suffering and collective grief. Whereas heroic and neoclassical
tragedy had rarified and idealized the afflicted subject, bourgeois tragedies probed the
relation between existential misfortune and the emerging values that would define the
everyday experience of the middle rank in Britain—among them domesticity, privacy,
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capitalism, and Protestantism. Far from triumphalist or complacent in its ideology, the very
emergence of the genre suggests that the Crusoevian “rise of the middle class” was met with
ambivalence, haunted by the possibility of that newfound value’s loss and anxious about
suffering’s lurid portrayal in various experimental forms of early realism. The dissertation
ranges across a body of works that includes George Lillo’s pioneering domestic dramas, The
London Merchant (1731) and Fatal Curiosity (1736), Samuel Richardson’s landmark novel,
Clarissa (1748), Edward Moore’s prose tragedy, The Gamester (1753), Sarah Fielding’s
sentimental novel, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Laurence Sterne’s ironic
exploration of bourgeois mourning in A Sentimental Journey (1768), and several others
largely absent from our critical histories, redefining bourgeois tragedy in order to better
account for its energetic movement between page and stage, as well as the changing
aesthetic conventions that governed the archive’s production and reception in the period.
Modernity and Affliction thus ultimately historicizes modes of bourgeois affect through
which suffering was embodied, represented, and consumed in the period, tracing a process
whereby the narrowly defined poetics of tragedy gave way to a broader, melancholic sense of
the tragic as a condition of all modern life.
iii
The dissertation of Alex Eric Hernandez is approved.
Helen E. Deutsch
Lowell Gallagher
Jonathan Sheehan
Felicity A. Nussbaum, Chair
University of California, Los Angeles
2014
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CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
CURRICULUM VITAE x
AN INTRODUCTION TO BRITISH BOURGEOIS TRAGEDY 1
CHAPTER
1. Bourgeois Tragedy, Reconsidered:
Pitying the Ordinary in a Cruel Eighteenth Century 36
2. Household Gods:
George Lillo and the Domestic Tragic Imagination 76
3. The Economics of Providence:
Poetic Justice and the Traumatic Sublime in Clarissa 121
4. Prosaic Suffering:
Tragedy and the Aesthetics of the Ordinary 168
5. Sympathy Pains:
Melancholy, Middling Tragedy, and the Sentimental Novel 222
CONCLUSION: THE PARADOX OF (BOURGEOIS) TRAGEDY 266
BIBLIOGRAPHY 287
v
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure Page
1.1. Isaac Cruikshank, Illustration from The Tailors, 1836 (Courtesy of The William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles) 49
1.2. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, 1784, oil on canvas
(© Courtesy of the Huntington Art Collections) 73
2.1. Woodcut image from Newes from Perin in Cornwall, 1618 88
2.2. [François Boitard?], Illustration depicting act 5, scene 2 of Othello in Jacob
Tonson’s The Works of Wiliam Shakespeare [sic], 1709 (By Permission of the
Folger Shakespeare Library) 98
2.3. [Engleman?], Plate depicting act 3, scene 2 of Fatal Curiosity (after Thomas
Stothard) in Inchbald’s The British Theatre, 1807 100
4.1. J. Alais [printmaker], Engraving depicting the death tableau from The Gamester
printed for J. Roach, [early-nineteenth century?] (By Permission of the Folger
Shakespeare Library) 218
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Like so many of the tragic figures this project considers, I enter this stage having
amassed several debts; unlike them, my experience ends in comedy. Indeed, and ironically,
accumulating these debts has been the source of so much happiness, of so many pleasures
derived from hours of work and study and play, from knowing so many good and intelligent
people. Together, they have reminded me repeatedly of the tremendous value to be found in
ordinary conversation and the everyday rhythms that make up our day-to-day lives. Here
then, is some of what I owe.
This dissertation would not have been possible without the patient guidance,
frequent encouragement, and sharp criticism of Felicity Nussbaum, who saw what this
project could be well before I did. I only hope this work reflects adequately her wise
influence. Helen Deutsch pushed me to think about the theoretical stakes of the project
early on in its development, and on more than one occasion offered a suggestion that was so
perfectly timed that it seemed fateful. Lowell Gallagher’s honest, perceptive reading of my
work challenged me constantly to do better. Jonathan Sheehan kept me historically honest,
and was pivotal in turning a five-page idea into what it now is. Several other mentors I’ve
come to know at UCLA—among them Sarah Kareem, Anne Mellor, Debora Shuger, and
Kenneth Reinhard—have helped me more than they realize, I’m sure. Vivian Davis,
Christian Reed, Cristina Richieri Griffin, Tara Fickle, Jack Caughey, Ian Newman, Fuson
Wang, Michael Nicholson, Julia Callander, Taylor Walle, Cailey Hall, Katherine Charles,
James Reeves, and Angelina Del Balzo provided feedback on earlier versions of several
chapters and listened to me rattle off ideas on several occasions. I am better for having
known them all.
vii
Several institutions have also aided in this project’s completion. I am grateful to the
Social Science Research Council for their timely support of an interdisciplinary working
group on “New Approaches to Religion and Modernity.” I owe much to Vincent Pecora, my
cohort of brilliant colleagues, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through which that
period’s research was funded. Support and research assistance provided by Yale University’s
Lewis Walpole Library and its staff was similarly formative. A great debt is owed to the staff
of The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and UCLA’s Center for 17th- and 18th-
Century Studies, who supported me through a dissertation fellowship and copious research
help. Becky, Jennie, Scott, Nina, Shannon, and Gerald were essential to getting the work
done—even rarer, they became friends. Funding for this work was also provided by UCLA’s
Graduate Division, for which I remain thankful. A portion of chapter three was published in
an earlier form as “Tragedy and the Economics of Providence in Richardson’s Clarissa,” in
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22 (Summer 2010): 599-630. I appreciate their permission to
reuse some of that material here.
My greatest debts, however, are owed to family and friends, whose household labor
is present, silently, on every page of this manuscript. My parents, Alex, Alicia and Chris,
Pam and Vince all nurtured me and provided more support than I can repay. I thank them
for their indefatigable encouragement and profound influence in my life. Likewise, Abuela,
Abuelo and Tati remain a constant reminder of what it means to strive against the pressures
of economic precariousness by risking it all. Inspiration and mirth came courtesy of my
siblings and their families: the Spitzers, Lesters, and Powells. Most of all, I thank my
partner, Kelsie, and our little ones Ellie and Charlie, to whom this manuscript is dedicated
and in whose presence it was written, my doorless office space permeated by the delightful
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