As she recalls her own memories of Aunt Jane to help brother James Edward Austen Leigh construct his Memoir of Jane Austen, Caroline Austen questions the possibility of ever representing a ‘life’ that already seems too obscure to recover. ‘I am sure you will do justice to what there is – but I feel that it must be a difficult task to dig up the materials, so carefully have they been buried out of our sight by the past generation.’ She dismisses the more obvious ‘materials’ at hand: ‘There is nothing in those letters which I have seen that would be acceptable to the public – They were very well expressed, and they must have been very interesting to those who received them – but they detailed chiefly home and family events: and she seldom committed herself even to an opinion – so that to strangers they could be no transcript of her mind – they would not feel that they knew her any the better for having read them –.’

As she recalls her own memories of Aunt Jane to help brother James-Edward Austen-Leigh construct his Memoir of Jane Austen, Caroline Austen questions the possibility of ever representing a 'life' that already seems too obscure to recover. 'I am sure you will do justice to what there is - but I feel that it must be a difficult task to dig up the materials, so carefully have they been buried out of our sight by the past generation.' She dismisses the more obvious 'materials' at hand: 'There is nothing in those letters which I have seen that would be acceptable to the public - They were very well expressed, and they must have been very interesting to those who received them - but they detailed chiefly home and family events: and she seldom committed herself even to an opinion - so that to strangers they could be no transcript of her mind - they would not feel that they knew her any the better for having read them -'.

What I find so compelling about Caroline Austen's scepticism is its applicability to Austen studies in every generation. Readers coming to her letters usually find something 'missing' that vexes them. In his introduction to the first edition of the letters, R. W. Chapman recites what will continue to be 'a familiar defence' of the letters. They have been 'robbed of their general interest by Cassandra Austen's pious destruction of all that she supposed might possibly excite general curiosity'. By blaming Cassandra for keeping us from the 'real' Jane Austen, we are able to sustain an idea of the writer regardless of materials, or lack of materials, that occlude the portrait of the artist. We look to the letters for deep feeling, but are kept relegated to the surface of things, rewarded with 'small matters' and 'momentous minutiae'.

When the “fat unwieldy Fellow” makes his notorious complaint against the filthy crowd, he is reacting to the literal press of bodies always on display in the urban arena.

It could have been his dripping nose, “the first time I ever got a new cold before the old one was going,” or it could have been the more pressing uncertainties of the Tory ministry, but in spite of Christmas, Swift sounds less than charitable in his estimation of post-partum joys:

Lady — might possibly be Lady Pembroke, around forty-three years of age, but her situation more than her identity is the issue, for her bare corporeality offends. Paint, Swift suggests, can cover over her flaws, turning her into a “beauty” once again, but beauty so restored reveals itself to be rotten, the (dead) body beneath the varnish always retaining a certain stench.

Notable here is the neutrality, the flatness of the description. Swift is perfectly capable of lashing feminine offenders for any number of vices he longs to root out.

The insular life possesses its simple virtues, as Crusoe and Gulliver readily admit. Fish are jumping, the Yahoos are nigh, and so long as you are able to content yourself with rough fare, Gulliver's oats and whey, Crusoe's goat stew, with an occasional enemy thrown in for variety (Yahoos melt down into a rather serviceable tallow), you will agree that on the whole “Nature is very easily satisfied.” Swift and Defoe, on the other hand, fleshing out the more problematic aspects of such modest economies, do not allow such pastoral dodges. They call attention in their fiction to “the Dearness of things necessary to Life.”

Two such oddly representational pieces, written only six years apart, reveal a shared uneasiness about the physical body as material not just in the way, but as material that when “fired,” becomes impossible to manage. Their authors confess the difficulties of reconciling desire and necessity, the impossibility of attaining what they both call “justice” in a system of physical economy that depends upon an injustice that can only be addressed indirectly. While both Defoe and Montesquieu write for an audience that supports views both patriarchal and capitalistic, their individual interpretations of the system they buttress expose its contradictions.

As he runs away from the needs of his harem, Usbek demonstrates an alienation typical of his age. The eighteenth century might not have invented loneliness, but it certainly refined it. Wondering why English pornographers of the late seventeenth century were compelled to make sexuality mechanical, disgusting, and shocking, Roger Thompson considers the social and intellectual changes that were to form the period. Taking into account the growth of commercialism, the shift from communal to self interest, the rise of the nuclear family dependent upon mutuality and privacy, he suggests the strains of private, and therefore diminished, lives existing between states of connection and dislocation. While

Loneliness could also become public spectacle. For at the moment that the body politic was being measured and found monstrous, the body personal was becoming, by virtue of its urban, commercial connections, an entity best studied in the street.

Unlike Defoe dreaming Moll's escape from Roxana's nightmare, Swift cannot even begin to imagine women from the inside. Keeping his ironic distance, he flails and strips “the sex” to get at the truth of its loathsome condition. The knowledge he produces is always external and judgmental. For reasons cultural as well as psychological, Swift defines women according to a physicality that is gross, filthy, and lasting. Women threaten to scatter reason, waste energy, and destroy the possibility of civilization. The disorderly energies that Swift so actively invokes in his fictional explorations of women must be repressed or denied to be endured. In the end, he can only run from the engrossing feminine temptations of unreason that he has both exposed and invented.

Swift's consciousness of the absurdity of his position produces an ironic detachment that serves to protect him from the hysterical implications of his misogyny. Strephon, silly Strephon, is the cracked one, he blandly reassures his gentle reader, not me. I stuff rue up my nose. Indirectly, he displaces the burden of sexual detection upon the reader, so often blamed for all the filthy imaginings Swift both invents and attacks. His retreat from women is complicated even further by his need for them. He demonstrates repeatedly a fearful attraction for the nurse figure, that maternal surrogate who nourishes and punishes.

The Earl of Orrery had little use for Gulliver's Travels, that “irregular essay” full of trifles and optical deceptions. He particularly disapproved of what Swift does with proportion in the Travels:

Swift, Orrery complains, accentuates the deformities rather than the beauties of nature, and debases in the process a human nature that an enlightened dean of the Church of Ireland should be exalting. He is right to be uneasy, for Swift indeed employs his optical “deception” not to regularize and harmonize nature, but to deform it, and he does so not out of perversity but out of necessity.

Once Locke reduced, almost inadvertently, thought to matter in an attempt to address the more insistent materialism of Hobbes, it was inevitable that the body would intrude upon the most sanguine attempts to render form and meaning out of substance. The body had always complicated the very human desire for spiritual certainty. Idealists for centuries scourged it, refined it, shed it altogether in attempts to link it into larger patterns of coherent meaning. But after Hobbes, after Locke, and in spite of Descartes, the body, at least in eighteenth-century England, would not go away easily. It became instead matter difficult, perhaps impossible, to idealize – matter in the way. The epistemological bind of the age, the confinement of thought to matter that could only be patterned self-consciously, made knowing the body at best problematic. The urban bind of the age, the confinement of too many bodies into crowded, diseased cities, made not knowing the problem of the body impossible.

One of the central concerns of the Journal is epistemological. Defoe's narrator, the curious, skeptical H.F., spends much of his time trying to interpret the phenomenon of the plague year. He addresses problems of perception – how can he see anything at all – and problems of interpretation – how can he understand what he is trying to observe. In his compulsion to make sense of the materials in his way, he demonstrates the problem of his age, the difficulty of reconciling a yearning for large patterns to the resistance the materials themselves bring. H.F. stands as a man of religious faith crossing warily over into the age of enlightenment, a man who consults his bible to plan his course but demonstrates at the same time that providential patterns cannot quite hold the plague in place.