“No people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous”—so reads the epigraph to Bethany Williamson's Orienting Virtue: Civic Identity and Orientalism in Britain's Global Eighteenth Century (vii). She uses Samuel Johnson's observation, made in 1756, to direct the reader to her focus on virtue as a national quality. Williamson is less concerned with virtue as a personal category of analysis and more with virtue as a political idea. This is a preference heartily welcomed in eighteenth-century British studies, which has not taken late twentieth-century debates about civic humanism nearly far enough out of their home in intellectual history and tested them in literary, imperial, or cultural history. Williamson offers a timely, fascinating, and deeply serious study of how virtue was discussed in relation to the state and its global reach in different modes of British discourse between the 1660s and 1790s.
As Williamson makes clear in her introduction, virtue was a confoundingly difficult thing to define in this period—it was not just the ubiquity of the term that was the problem but also its use in an expanding empire when expansion itself was often associated with the opposite of virtue. Her opening contention is “the problem of defining national virtue hinges on the difficulty of articulating an absolute concept of moral value in the context of dynamic global networks” (1). Writers of the period, she suggests, invoked virtue as a way to express simultaneously their dissatisfaction with Britain's present lack of greatness compared to the past and their belief in Britain's imminent potential to reclaim greatness. In this way, virtue always conjures three phases of time: before, now, and after.
What Williamson sees as particular to the eighteenth century is how the idea's multi-temporal expression was “predicated on . . . difference from other nation's peoples” (2). The other nations here cohere under the broad notion of “the East” (25)—not a “single representative Asian region” but the more encompassing (though proportionately, of course, empty) collective of what used to be termed the Orient (25). The Orient for eighteenth-century Britons, Williamson argues, put pressure on the idea of virtue not only because it self-evidently showed abundant signs of its own moral righteousness—social stability, political independence, philosophical discipline, and so on—but also because any proof of Britain's expansion into the Orient by markets or by arms was a sign of the nation's transition into relations of exchange, which in turn—many believed—created unstable societies, dependent politicians, and, possibly, intellectual vacuity.
Williamson explores the concept of virtue in eighteenth-century British literature to show how it both helped writers pinpoint their anxieties about their burgeoning imperial state and offered them ways to expunge anxieties. In each of five chapters, she examines a main text and a main crisis. In the first chapter, Williamson analyzes Henry Neville's Isle of Pines (1668) in relation to the restoration settlement; in the second she focuses on John Dryden's Aureg-Zebe (1675) in the context of debates about monarchical succession; in the third she looks at how works by Jonathan Swift in the 1720s engaged in Walpolean warmongering. In the fourth chapter, she widens the focus to analyze texts from throughout the 1700s by the women writers Mary Pix, Charlotte Lennox, and Jemima Kindersley as they discussed the entanglement of feminine chastity with national greatness. The final chapter is similarly broad, as Williamson explores the way that Johnson, John Brown, Adam Smith, and Catharine Macaulay each tackled Britain's clear elevation to superpower status after the Seven Years’ War.
The most unusual and perhaps controversial aspect of Williamson's argument is her insistence on continuity through the texts rather than on any significant change. “Across the eighteenth century,” she argues, “writers deploy . . . deferred virtue claims to point to a ‘middle way’ between conserving ancient ideals [stability, independence, philosophy, for example] and celebrating the realities of their globalising society [the wealth and power, in other words, that is recompense for the loss of old certainties]” (31). Williamson is invested in proving the relative sameness of this middle-way theme in the works of all her chosen authors. This sets her argument apart from those of other scholars working on early British attitudes toward the East, who generally like to trace an arc from, for example, “aristocratic cosmopolitanism” to “orientalist nationalism” (Eugenia Zuroski, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism [2013], 7). Williamson does not see a noteworthy shift from a general criticism of Britain's expansionist moves to overall endorsement (by Britons “looking outside of themselves, only to internalise what they find” [25]). Instead, she discovers in each of the examined texts evidence of both at the same time. Paradox rather than clear argument, one way or the other, surfaces most evidently in the works for her.
The fineness and detail of Williamson's analysis makes it hard to argue with her thesis of continuity in any given chapter. The effect, however, is that a grand directing point about eighteenth-century British imperial culture is missing. This lack may be more frustrating for historians than it is for literary critics. Without a sense of change over time, it is impossible to understand how Britain's peculiar eighteenth-century problem with virtue arose in the first place or how it mutated into something else in the nineteenth century. (Well, it is possible—one has to assume it is due to factors beyond culture, which is somewhat limiting for a culturalist theory of history.) Perhaps more pertinently, the lack of a meta-differentiation among the texts means that the East itself—the foil for all Williamson's writers—recedes even further into the distance than it might otherwise. Eastern regions and peoples never really come into view in the book—maybe not so surprising in an examination of orientalism, but it does inadvertently reinforce the erasure of the Eastern challenge to the West that scholars in this field usually like to critique. That said, Williamson has surely served scholars of her era well with five profound and moving discussions of illuminating texts and a welcomed re-direct to the neglected topic of political virtue in accounts of eighteenth-century imperial culture.
