Catherine Ingrassia. Domestic Captivity and the British Subject 1660-1750. Charlottesville & London: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. 301. Bibliography, Index. ISBN 978-0-8139-4809-9. Paperback lists for $9.99. The important purpose of Catherine Ingrassia's study of 18th century writing from the first half of our long 18th century is to explore what was it like to live in societies pervaded by the controlling assumption that most people must spend their lives in varying forms of subjection to other people. In this pre-revolutionary world almost everyone at some point in their life was enjoined to perceive themselves as invisibly imprisoned by, or worse, literally an unfree captive of, someone else with no recourse to some standard of justice exercised by personally uninvolved and respected authorities. Modes of captivity varied; some were far worse than others, e.g., chattel enslavement whereby an individual loses all control over his or her body, time, place, relationships, and endures a stark dehumanizing down to the level of a thing. These modes of legal servitude included for all women marriage; for all indentured people, conditions of life imposed by a press gang, military and civil law, or a local parish (in England), imprisonment (a form of loss of fundamental rights still with us) which at the time included the workhouse, and transportation (which could result from debt); and for people placed in invented categories, the automatic deprivations of developing colonial and national laws. Ingrassia’ intent is to look at the writing selected as work that has come out of “cultures of captivity” (Prologue, Chapter 1). The point is these modes of subjection reinforced one another, and explain how, beyond religious ideologies that justified them, and military and judicial punitive powers that enforced them, these unwilling subjections (sometimes referred to as “dependency”) depend on an implicit or assumed attitude of mind. These assumptions enabled a minority of white and/or high ranked people to compel the behavior of so many to their will. Chattel slavery could have seemed an extreme end of a continuum of compelled servitude involving almost everyone. Ingrassia's decision to “focus primarily on white subjects whose captivity originated or occurred in England” (2) allows her to engage fully with “the domestic captivity of women,” women not literally enslaved, not categorized as servants, and, beyond their family authorities, not someone subject to the individual laws of institutions (churches, medical establishments, orphanages, punitive places for unmarried pregnant women). We see how these “privileged” women seen visibly alongside racially other and enslaved people are themselves vulnerable to immediate forms of dispossession, disempowerment, punishment and confinement. Although Ingrassia doesn’t mention this, far more documents got into print, were written down and/or saved when the cases were people seen as people and mattering to those in power who could conceive of themselves, or people attached to them as in such positions. It is very hard to get beyond the statistical account (or rare court interview) of impoverished illiterate women (e.g., agricultural workers) seen as potentially vagrants (and therefore easy to arrest). Thus Chapter One is foundational as it’s based on non-fiction letters, verse and documents. From a study of 350 letters by Martin and Judith Madan, his wife (her years were 1702-81) and her poetry (most of it unpublished in her lifetime), Ingrassia demonstrates that both Madans saw themselves from some angles as “captive subjects.” Judith Madan’s self-perception and view of her life may be more convincing to us today than her husband’s, who, with impunity, spent all the money and income from their property (which included people) which were supposed to go to fulfill her desires, for his own aggrandizement or pleasures. He inflicted on her repeated economic distress, and aroused in her, however qualified by her love for him, resentment. This view of themselves enabled their indifference to the daily hard suffering of the enslaved people they bought, sold and had cared for (mostly at a distance, in the Caribbean), as if they were animals (if the Madans thought of them at all). In the same chapter, we meet the Dublin poet, Mary Barber (ca. 1685-1755), widowed by 1733, and as to money nearly destitute, who in her poetry sees herself, and white people kidnapped in North Africa, and now brought home as “freed,” as in reality “wretched captives” since they will now live within the “chains” of economic straits (that she knows) as “forced labor.” Ingrassia suggests that Thomson’s “Rule Britannia,” sometimes subtitled “an ode to liberty,” exhibits similar intense anxieties in the line “Britons will never be slaves.” She then argues that other semi-autobiographical poetry by later 17th century middling to upper class women, and by early 18th century laboring poor ones (e.g., Mary Collier, best known for The Woman’s Labor, 1739) complain of living like “Prisoners” all their lives. While we may see these women as free to come and go if they have money enough and as educated enough to write such poems and get them into print, we need to recognize they felt unfree or were without some essential liberty they craved. For this reader there is a recurring problem with the ostensible focus on white people, many of whose lives were economically precarious. African and fully enslaved people are taken into account; they are frequently shown to have individually and as a group endured horrific and barbaric punishments and deaths, though they are hardly ever rendered in Ingrassia’s chosen texts as individuals with full subjectivity. The texts, though are most of the time highly enigmatic, and seem to have been chosen because they were commercially successful. We are asked to read them against the grain or as ironic and treat the author as someone very distanced from the content of the work. Ingrassia dismisses modern readers like Linda Colley who dismisses Barber and other writing from the period which Colley uses as documentary evidence as “dreadful” (p 39, 212n53.) Some of it is dreadful: older valid aesthetic and evaluative criteria were (however indemonstrable) felt as guarantees of some sincerity or authenticity in the authors’ relationship to their texts. This reviewer finds somewhat problematic Ingrassia’s chapters focusing on Aphra Behn’s late hit, The Emperor of the Moon and two plays written while she was in or had fresh memories of Surinam, The Young King and The Younger Brother (Chapter 2, “Captivating Farce”); on Penelope Aubin’s commercially successful narratives, especially The Noble Slaves, which text Ingrassia sums up as “marketing captivity” (Chapter 4, “Barbary Captivity”); and on Eliza Haywood’s Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman and Edward Kimber’s The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr Anderson, whose popular success can be attributed to their being partly based on the life of James Annesley (1715-60). The orphaned son of a wealthy Baron, Annesley was sold by his uncle into slavery for 13 years, but managed to escape and return home, and sue successfully in a court for his inheritance, which however he never received because of the “ongoing process of appeals and strategic delaying tactics” of the same uncle (Chapter 5, “Indentured Slaves”). What unites these texts (and indeed most of the texts in Ingrassia’s book) and central to Ingrassia’s description of them is her assumption that the enigmatic nature of the texts is due to the authors using “savvy marketing” tactics (166) to make these texts money-makers for someone. We are asked to admire the authors for making money or achieving fame or celebrity without looking into what has been the particular moral cost. In the case of Behn, for the plays under discussion it seems spectacle, won over audiences; in the case of Aubin, sexual voyeurism and titillation justified as pious lessons; and in the case of Haywood and Kimber, a publicized trial and the action, some of it set in America, felt therefore as exotic (i.e., an “American” form of servitude, 173). There seems also to be something particularly fascinating for a wide swath of readers if the victim is an upper-class white male deprived of his caste status. The chapter on Behn is invaluable because it is dense with information having to do with Behn’s own stay in Surinam. Ingrassia also sets these three texts in the contexts of other of Behn’s writing where the colonialist and critical stance and a genuine superiority or originality is self-evident, and together with documents that demonstrate Ingrassia’s thesis about the continual subjection of all sorts of people (here though especially women) to powerful men in ambiguous colonialist and British settings. Ingrassia concedes it is not clear if the dominant tone of The Emperor of the Moon is celebratory (and frivolous) or seriously critical. However personally involved Behn was as a vulnerable white woman and unpaid spy, the ways in which her play was produced (as described by Ingrassia), the people chosen to participate in the spectacles (African people function as statues), makes this reader feel their sustained public popularity functioned as an endorsement of ruthless mercenary colonialist practices and was titillatingly voyeuristic. Similarly, the indisputable strong value of the chapter on Aubin’s “market savvy” narratives, lies in all the material Ingrassia brings to bear upon Aubin’s uses of a “savvy knowledge of business, empire and popular culture” in her texts. (The word “savvy” is used repeatedly, e.g., 119, 125). We are told of somewhat documentable stories of real calamities inflicted on women, on their children, and on a few subaltern white and enslaved African men. Ingrassia suggests that abduction, enslavement, and abuse of European people was more widespread than 21st century readers might think. She falls back upon Linda Colley’s thoroughly researched Captives. It’s impossible to know what percentage of voyagers or sailors and colonial traders underwent enslavement, much less how many of them were women, or survived, but both Ingrassia, Colley and other historians think we have underestimated the count. It appears also that “corsairs operated not as random, renegade actors, but often as part of a concerted state effort” (121). There is evidence to show these same states were most of the time indifferent to the fate of these subalterns and victims. Many never returned home. What we might read and dismiss as semi-fantastic repetitive and parallel stories of women captured, raped, bought and sold, traded and humiliated in an imaginary North Africa are said for British women readers to have stood in for the prosaic dependent and powerless lives of English women in the everyday world of England. Ingrassia tells of how Aubin’s male family members were deeply involved in colonialist slaved-based enterprises, that Penelope herself acted as a businesswoman for the firm. Ingrassia argues that Penelope meant to use her sex-drenched stories to speak to a female readership about their personal miseries at the hands and under laws made by European men. The stories seem repeatedly to present the European male controllers as far worse in their treatment of women than the native Middle Eastern men. Among the feminist interpretations Ingrassia infers as she dwells in these situations, is that the women who end up blind or crippled or somehow maimed for life are practicing self-harm (sacrificial and or self-mutilation, terrible violence inflicted on themselves). The lurid masochism of these texts provides for outward signs on woman and vulnerable men and children, which destroy any chance they might have for a decent life, not as a punishment for the woman’s loss of virtue but to make visible to others evidence of the terror and pain and despair they have experienced. She says and shows that men can recover, and women cannot. I found myself remembering the Ovidian story of Philomela and Procne as an archetype but am not convinced Aubin meant her readership to come away from her texts with an awareness that she or he has read a serious critique of English society in the most intimate phases of people’s lives. The texts are frequently lascivious or prurient; the one example of (an apparently rare) “authorial interjection,” that Ingrassia offer us is a passage where Aubin asks the reader not to “condemn” one of her European male characters since “life is sweet” and “what brave, handsome young Gentleman would refuse a beautiful Lady, who loved him, a Favour” (151). The final chapter is united by what is one of the source stories for two of the texts, the male-centered nature of the narratives, and the use of a white woman (herself victimized, in servitude) as a kind of mentor or tutor to the hero. We again read about non-fictional and (this time) semi-autobiographical texts, e.g, The Infortunate: The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, an Indentured Servant (1743). Although often treated as a writer of erotic fictions (with women at the center of her stories) and early domestic realistic novels, Haywood’s book was her fourth most popular. Kimber’s Tom Anderson (the hero is called Tom, pp. 180-195) is astonishing. Its male-centered picaro nature makes it read like a crude Tom Jones where the individualized characters are far more genuinely and egregiously treated with horrific injustice in colonialist plantation situations than we find happens to any of the basically genteel central characters in Fielding’s masterpiece. One should note some striking similarities between Kimber’s and Haywood’s texts and some recent popular and respected texts because they are troubling. The ambiguous patterns in these 250-year-old texts are recurring in some of today’s attempts to make earlier history (as it has been understood) and the matter of the older classic text palatable or appealing to new audiences. For example, Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1992) and Crossing the River (short-listed for the Booker Prize, 1993) feature white people, and in the case of Cambridge, a white woman, who dominates the text more than its black African hero (for which it has been criticized). Some aspects of the TV serial adaptation of Fielding’s text in the 2023 Tom Jones (scripted Gwyneth Hughes, directed by Georgia Harris) with its West Indian Sophie Western (played by Sophie Wilde) as the female narrator of the story, are delightful, but Ingrassia’s book and Kimber’s text can alert us to how, the new wise “mulatto” Sophie, and a white woman character (Hannah Waddingham as Lady Bellaston caricatured as a female giant) are made to be a teachers of a country bumpkin-like and “innocent” Tom (Solly McLeod); and how he is presented as guiltless of any wrong-doing (as opposed to Tony Richardson and John Osborne’s hard violent sexualized supposed comic males). In 2023 the Western and Allworthy adults are presented as benign except for their unfortunate propensity to try to pressure their adult children to marry for money and status; we are shown how life is not unpleasant for free African people living in England since they seem easily to assimilate as versions of working-class whites. In both these film adaptations (as well as the 1997 BBC serial) despite the risk of loss of status and death, the central characters are re-elevated into the top dominating positions of the community. So Kimber’s Tom Anderson. (1). It seemed appropriate to reserve the matter of Ingrassia’s third chapter (“Domesticating Captivity”) for the last and a separate individual treatment. There is little doubt that Richard Steele intended to write reformist and (to some extent) serious protest or moral or moralizing plays. His first play, also a hit, The Funeral; or, Grief a-la-mode does not depend on ridicule for its central effects; it exposes hypocritical behavior from a moral and earnest point of view. Steele was a centrally influential writer of his era, an independent minded Whig politician, a Drury Lane governor: beyond his involvement with the invention of journalistic essays and his plays, he initiated theater criticism. The excellence, originality, and sincerity of much of his work is (I take it) beyond dispute. Ingrassia presents his life and careers -- including as soldier involved in active fighting, as an owner of a plantation in Barbadoes which depended on the labor indentured people and enslaved people he had by law “a share” in. This life experience, she feels, is central to how he came to write and what he put in the famous highly successful The Conscious Lovers. The question is, how this play, long in gestation and then for a long time holding a respected place in the English repertoire, was understood by contemporaries and what is its importance today? Using allusions to colonialist slave society places in the play and Indiana’s previous experiences as re-told by her, Ingrassia argues the central forbidden love between Indiana, a lost white woman who had been held captive in the Indies, and the exemplary sentimental hero, Bevil, Jr makes visible to us a “largely invisible world of enslavement, brutality and oppression.” The secondary exemplary couple, Lucinda and Myrtle provide a domestic life parallel as Lucinda is at risk of being forced to marry Cimberton who makes it clear he will treat her like a breeding animal. Steele himself talked of the anti-dueling scene and seems to have regarded the substitution of earnest emotionally somber characters for characters exposed to ridicule as his central innovations, but then he never writes with any sense of any responsibility towards the human beings whom he is using to pay off his debts (or even awareness of such people as enslaved property). It is possible that audiences were responding silently or unconsciously in the way Ingrassia explicates, but one wishes that there had been some acknowledgement of this somewhere before the 21st century. There were 18th writers who did talk about enslavement explicitly (Johnson, Cowper), the brutal practices of colonialism (Charlotte Smith in her novels) and writers who at least referred in a positive way to those who wrote against slavery and brutal colonialist practices (Jane Austen on Clarkson). Ingrassia’s Domestic Captivity is a significant and unexpectedly enlightening book in all sorts of ways. The implicit assumption is that in this era where nearly all people were coerced into forms of disciplined dependency or outright servitude, imaginative and autobiographical artists will protest against this whether consciously or not. In addition, she assumes many readers may be drawn to such art because of this protest. Ingrassia brings before readers texts they may not have encountered before and provides a perspective that may enable us to read other eighteenth-century texts in innovative ways relevant to our society today. These texts also shed some uncomfortable light or provide an unexpected heuristic context for understanding some of the anomalies of popular and respected 21st century texts. Notes: 1 See Gail Low, “A Chorus of Common Memory: Slavery and Redemption in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and Crossing the River,” Research in African Literature, 29:4 (1998):122-141; also my blog review for a comparison of the 1963, 1997, and 2023 movie adaptations of Fielding’s Tom Jones: https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2023/06/03/three-tom-jones-films-1963-1997-and-2023-and-one-book/ (June 3, 2023) 5