Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 The Reform Era: An Ethological Age
- 2 From Person to Text: Character and the Problem of Representation
- 3 Representing Representation: Walter Scott and Charles Lamb
- 4 The Politics of Unity: Hazlitt and Character Revisited
- 5 ‘The Loved Abortion of a Thing Designed’: Hartley Coleridge and the Drive for Dissolution
- 6 ‘A Series of Small Inconstancies’: Letitia Landon and the Politics of Consistency
- 7 Character and Paranoia in Beddoes’ Death's Jest-Book and Peacock's Crotchet Castle
- Afterword: Meta-characterisation – Dickens’ Sketches by Boz and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2021
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 The Reform Era: An Ethological Age
- 2 From Person to Text: Character and the Problem of Representation
- 3 Representing Representation: Walter Scott and Charles Lamb
- 4 The Politics of Unity: Hazlitt and Character Revisited
- 5 ‘The Loved Abortion of a Thing Designed’: Hartley Coleridge and the Drive for Dissolution
- 6 ‘A Series of Small Inconstancies’: Letitia Landon and the Politics of Consistency
- 7 Character and Paranoia in Beddoes’ Death's Jest-Book and Peacock's Crotchet Castle
- Afterword: Meta-characterisation – Dickens’ Sketches by Boz and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I often feel, and ever more deeply realize, that fate and character are the same conception.
Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802)Knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of … analytical investment.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975)Character: Critical Contexts
In the first edition of his Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), William Godwin says the following about character:
The idea correspondent to the term character inevitably includes in it the assumption of necessary connexion. The character of any man is the result of a long series of impressions communicated to his mind, and modifying it in a certain manner, so as to enable us, from a number of these modifications and impressions being given, to predict his conduct. Hence arise his temper and habits, respecting which we reasonably conclude, that they will not be abruptly superseded and reversed; and that, if they ever be reversed, it will not be accidentally, but in consequence of some strong reason persuading, or some extraordinary event modifying his mind. If there were not this original and essential connexion between motives and actions, and, which forms one particular branch of this principle, between men's past and future actions, there could be no such thing as character, or as a ground of inference enabling us to predict what men would be from what they have been.
The sense of this passage is at once obvious and not so obvious. It is obvious if you believe that most people think and behave in predictable ways. I cannot always predict exactly what a given person will say or do under a particular set of circumstances, but I will usually approximate the truth if I have enough information about that person and the circumstances involved. David Hume (whose arguments about character Godwin seems to condense here) had maintained more or less the same position in his Treatise of Human Nature (1738–40), Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) and other, minor essays in between, such as ‘The Sceptic’ (1742). And yet the passage above is not as perfect a piece of late Enlightenment confidence as it initially seems.
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- Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018
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