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Sentimental novels are cluttered with things. The emotional attachments that people form with possessions in these mid-eighteenth-century fictions can seem as freighted with consequence as the emotional attachments that people form with each other. Indeed, modem readers of Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality or Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey might be pardoned for finding it hard to distinguish one sort of relationship from the other-even if normal notions of the folly of fetishism predispose us to believe that the difference between, say, ownership and friendship is a difference worth preserving. The keepsakes that clutter sentimental fiction (the lockets that protagonists wear next to their hearts; the sleeve buttons or snuffboxes that pairs of characters exchange to memorialize their first meeting or last, teary-eyed parting) work instead to collapse that difference. While they instructed their readers in emotional responsiveness, sentimentalists were more than ready to make objects of this variety-objects particularly valued because they are the surrogates for particular persons-their props. This practice marks the novelists' fashion-consciousness. On the testimony of the OED, which dates the word keepsake to 1790, it was only in the eighteenth century that keepsakes came to be identified as a distinct kind of material good. The fact that by 1 790 members of the propertied classes had learned to want to give and to receive keepsakes from one another bespeaks the reciprocal influence

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