The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688-1848 part 2

INTRODUCTION
KATIE HALSEY AND JANE SLINN
Conversation, as concept and practice, arrived at pivotal, and
unprecedented, stages in its development during the historical period that
has come to be known as the long eighteenth century.1 The eighteenth
century’s attention to, and production of, conversational forms manifests
itself in the period’s plethora of texts and images that address themselves
to the description and conceptualization of conversation across a range of
disciplines and genres. The chapters in this book attest to this period’s
breadth of interest in conversation by their disciplinary range: there are
contributions from literary studies, art history, philosophy, history and
law. An exceptionally wide range of long-eighteenth-century authors,
artists, texts and works of art are also covered, with the volume containing
essays discussing artists, philosophers and lawmakers as different as Jane
Austen, Henry Ballow, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Gainsborough. Even
allowing for the rearrangement and rethinking of disciplinary boundaries
between the eighteenth century and today, the reach of conversation into
so many areas of the period’s life and thought is striking. Also striking are
the serious purposes and functions (for example, ethical, pedagogical or
political) with which concepts of conversation are imbued in the period.
Thus we find David Hume insisting that conversation “gives and receives
Information, as well as Pleasure”, and that the “conversible” world must
be brought into contact with that of the “Learned” to reinforce
conversation against triviality, or “gossipping (sic) Stories and idle
Remarks”.2 Michèle Cohen’s emphasis on the inextricable connections
between pleasure and improvement in domestic conversations (in Chapter
Six of this volume) demonstrates the reach of Hume’s philosophy into the
didactic literature of the period, and its corresponding influence on the
education of young people. Significantly, in the Oxford English
Dictionary’s definition of conversation, the only meaning that does not
include an eighteenth-century example is that which emphasizes
conversation’s triviality, as well as being the most familiar gloss of the
term to a modern reader: 7c, “to make conversation: to converse for the
sake of conversing; to engage in small talk.”3
x Introduction
Despite the breadth of conversation’s conceptual and semantic reach in
the eighteenth century, most existing scholarship on the subject tends to
focus on examining a limited set of generic forms, most notably
“Conversation Poems” and, in painting, “Conversation Pieces”, or to
identify conversation too easily with the sociability of the expanding
“public sphere” in the period. Further, the distinctiveness of conversation
as a concept and practice–and indeed the question of whether conversation
can be said to be distinct from its cognate concepts (dialogue, discussion
and argument, for example) is rarely examined in literature about the
period. This volume was inspired largely by the wish to redress these
deficiencies. Thus the introductory text will proceed by examining two
key places in which we can observe the development of conversational
concepts and practices in the long eighteenth century. First, we will
consider how, at the beginning of the period, notions of conversation were
forged in the “conversible” world of salons and coffee-houses, described
by David Hume and his near contemporaries, which cannot be made to fit
into Jürgen Habermas’s theorization of the public sphere. We will then
turn to reflect on the ethical content of conversation in the novels of Jane
Austen, a novelist who has gradually come to represent to many readers
the world of the long eighteenth century. In discussing these texts and
authors, we attempt to address and define some of the interactions between
conversational concepts and practices.
Our title for this volume draws attention to the fact that conversational
forms, concepts and practices developed, and continue to develop, in
dialogue with, in distinction from, and in the shadow of, each other. In
other words, language, practices and concepts are inextricably intertwined.
However, we currently lack a satisfactory theory and vocabulary for the
ways in which these three variables are interrelated. When we find
ourselves in such a situation, we can only begin, as it were, “from the
bottom up”. Suffice it to say, the relationships concerned are complex and
multifarious; and the essays collected here explore the contours of some of
these complexities, dealing with a range of different media, authors, subperiods, genres and languages. Although the focus of the work is largely
on eighteenth-century Britain, the volume takes note of the rich
relationships between continental European thought and British
intellectual life in the period, and of the influence of British ideas in the
newly independent American republic.