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Printing like a post-colonialist: The Irish piracy of Sir Charles Grandison
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2000 by Temple, Kathryn
Of course, both Grandison's national preoccupations and its eponymous hero's Englishness have been the objects of critical attention since the novel's publication.5 Almost immediately the novel itself became an emblem of the English nation; it was the only novel held at the newly national library at Cambridge prior to 1780.(6) Richardson positioned Grandison-who advocates Protestantism and proclaims the virtues of Englishness at every turn-no less carefully.7 But critical observations regarding Grandison's Englishness have been at the expense of any real analysis of Grandison's role in constructing a place for Englishness-as constituted through the authority of authorship and its textual productions-in the context of interpenetrating international and internal colonial relations.
Perhaps critics have under-emphasized internal colonialism in Grandison because while Richardson registers his concerns with intra-British relations in ways well recognized by postcolonial theory, bolstering Englishness by juxtaposing Grandison to infantilized Welshmen, brutal Irish, and Frenchified Scots, he consistently subjects Englishness to a seemingly separate and more complex threat in the international context. Certainly, Grandison's international operations have always intrigued critics. From the moment the book was published, the too-friendly relationship Richardson constructed between Grandison and Catholic Italy drew much critical fire from anti-Papists who argued that a loyal son of Britain should never consider marrying outside the Protestant faith. This tendency also appears in modern criticism. Those recent critics who have treated the book as having political significance focus on English-Italian relations while ignoring internal colonialism. Such a critical interest in English-Italian relations is in itself a continuing symptom of internal colonialism, a ratification of Grandison's direction of attention away from internal colonial strife and towards a sanitized version of international European relations. Grandison offers an already achieved transcendent internationalism that trivializes if not erases local difficulties with the British colonies. Indeed, Grandison's internationalism must have been deeply comforting to English readers eager to exoticize, displace, and thus distance the violent past of English oppression and the continuing vexation presented by Irish resistance in the 1750s. Demonstrating an internationalism that translated European cosmopolitanism into English tolerance worked particularly well in the international context. As Brett Levinson argues, the nation is dependent on borders, both metaphorical and actual: "For a nation to come into being ... it must already be in touch with another, since borders are precisely this being-in-touch: not enclosure but a foundational exposure of one nation to a different one. ( ... [I]t is at the border where nations are exposed to, rather than enclosed from, others.)" National imaginings that depend on the simplistic displacement of the self's rejected elements onto an "other" are subject to immediate dissolution given that national identity can occur only in the context of "liminality, exposure, relationality" (146). Richardson's appropriation of tolerance to Englishness and his reassignment of brutality to Italy may seem at first glance to fall into the category of simplistic displacement. But by choosing tolerance-an attribute only imaginable if directed towards another-as a way of defining English difference he puts the simple displacement model to work in the liminal context of boundaries, borders, and difference. Thus its adoption as a specifically English trait offers a powerful way of bolstering Englishness at the moment of its exposure to the other.
