Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760-1830

Friendship, Not Freedom: Dependent Friends in the Late Eighteenth-Century Novel

“…She emphasizes this point with a epigraph from the Swiss thinker Ernst Halter: "There is no friendship without equality." 1 Bryan Mangano likewise considers how eighteenth-century novelists use the "dear friend" trope to establish relationships between readers and writers situated in the morality of ideal friendship. Mangano argues that this relationship allows the novel to function as a space where virtues like loyalty and benevolence are tested and upheld.…”

“…Hutcheson's conception of friendship provides a "double significance … it is understood both as nourished by an innate virtue and as a form of relationship that allows people to put into practice this inherent beneficence." 3 Thus, novelists are able to develop the psychological complexity of their characters by providing conflicts between innate benevolence and real-life scenarios. Smith likewise emphasizes the importance of friendship to the modern reader when he explains that sympathy allows people to "encounter strangers as potential friends."…”

“…Smith likewise emphasizes the importance of friendship to the modern reader when he explains that sympathy allows people to "encounter strangers as potential friends." 4 Neither of these theorists require friends to be social equals. In fact, Daniel M. Gross's The Secret History of Emotion reminds us that moral sense theory invited the commercial class to understand their moral responsibility as integral to their self-interest and that it also worked towards codifying hierarchies of gender by assigning selfhood to masculine emotions.…”

“…Berndt claims that, with the exception of Wollstonecraft, philosophers substituted talk of freedom for their previous talk of friendship in intellectual discussions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 14 Berndt's passing acknowledgment of Wollstonecraft as an exception signals an opportunity for considering friendships where inequalities are brought on by gender and racial difference. The principal threat to Lady Delacour and Belinda throughout the novel, Harriet Freke, appears as a shape-shifting post-revolutionary false friend representative of upper-class feminist privilege: she woos like a rake, pontificates like a romantic philosopher, and conjures like an obeah woman in order to gain control over every character in the novel.…”