The twenty-six-page bibliography of works cited in Breeding includes, at the front of the alphabet, James Adams, The Pronunciation of the English Language Vindicated from Imputed Anomaly and Caprice (1799). At the alphabet's end, we find Slavoj Žižek, “Bring Me My Phillips Mental Jacket” (2003). The historical and conceptual distance between the two hints at the range of the material Jenny Davidson investigates and the imagination with which she deploys evidence in her bold study of intersections between nature and culture, primarily in eighteenth-century British thought.
As the book's arresting first sentence may suggest, the project here entails a discursive definition of breeding. “The word breeding,” Davidson begins, “sets a place for nature at culture's table” (1). With both biological and pedagogical import, the noun encourages reflection about relations between natural processes and human interventions as well as about complex and divergent attitudes toward both. The author, a literary scholar, brings to her enterprise the skills of an attentive reader and a sophisticated researcher. She considers an impressive body of literary, scientific, and philosophic texts that shed light on one another, and she points out that our belief in the diversity of the intellectual disciplines involved itself constitutes a relatively recent development. The pressing issues of the past that Davidson contemplates possess twenty-first-century urgency as well, in the form of debates about genetics. Breeding does not purport to resolve such debates, but it argues for the value of understanding their continuity with historically remote and frequently obscure controversies. In a graceful, often informal, style, the book supplies abundant information and provocative analysis. To read it is to become both enlightened and engaged.
Despite its primary concern with the eighteenth century, the book considers as its first literary text Shakespeare's late comedy A Winter's Tale, a work focused on matters of inheritance. The question of physical resemblance looms large in the play, as a jealous father worries about the true paternity of his avowed son, who looks like him. Such mirroring, however, does not, according to seventeenth-century medical theory, itself prove parentage: a woman might think of her husband while sleeping with a lover, and the thought could suffice to stamp the husband's image on her progeny. The dubiety about offspring in Shakespeare's play leads Davidson to ponder theories of generation, attitudes toward the imagination, the propriety of grafting as a horticultural practice, the parallels between people and vegetables, the meanings of family, the nature of eighteenth-century adaptations of Shakespeare, Locke's “blank slate” theory and its misuses, the theological implications of the debate about experience versus nature, and more—a typical concatenation, for this book, of apparently diverse concerns revealed as illuminating one another. To follow Davidson's complex train of thought proves an experience both exhilarating and instructive.
Gulliver's Travels and Humphry Clinker, the eighteenth-century imaginative texts that receive the greatest attention here, resemble one another in their intermittently sardonic tone and, it turns out, in their concern with breeding. The fourth book of Gulliver's Travels, delineating a land governed by perfectly rational horses, explores the problem of how those horses should deal with the irrational Yahoos living among them—brutal creatures that, Gulliver gradually realizes, are human in form and perhaps in nature. Should they be exterminated? Castrated? Gulliver's moral position in relation to them wavers: he does not know what species he himself belongs to. Davidson juxtaposes her discussion of Swift's reasonable horses with citations of contemporary recommendations about horse breeding, which in turn lead her to a range of treatises that employ the language of breeding, culminating in a dialogue by Diderot in which Tahitians offer their wives and daughters to European visitors for breeding purposes—thus suggesting, Davidson claims, “the extent to which European colonial projects might also be thought of as global experiments in breeding” (99).
A compelling analysis of Tobias Smollett's 1771 novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, brilliantly concludes the chapter entitled “Cultures of Improvement.” The horses in Gulliver's Travels wish to preserve and improve their race; horse breeders and philosophers also aim for improvement. But the word improvement, Davidson points out, could serve as a euphemism for manure. Smollett explores the tension between positive and negative meanings in constructing his curious tale, in which the titular character, a poor servant, is finally revealed as the bastard son of a gentleman. The revelation, however, hardly alters his status: his financial situation improves, but he happily marries a fellow servant. Breeding as a matter of blood, it seems, matters less than breeding as upbringing. Smollett sets Humphry's story in a context of widespread corruption, both urban and rural. He examines in detail the workings of two country estates, one “improved” by fashionable standards and thus led to economic ruin, the other properly managed and therefore productive of both wealth and happiness. Davidson points out the disjunction between the fable of agricultural improvement and the story of Humphry. On the one hand, we find a narrative of rising prosperity; on the other, a warning against social mixing. Humphry may be of higher birth than he knew, but he cannot be allowed to join the society of his betters: his “improvement” has to be kept in check.
My account barely skims the surface of Davidson's concerns. Her investigations lead her to consider pronunciation, elocution, brutality in Haiti, Steven Pinker (of whose views she is severely skeptical), and much else. One may feel irritated, on occasion, by the sheer miscellany of this book's topics, and its informal tone sometimes proves grating. But these are tiny objections. It remains true that Breeding provides a stimulating and clarifying guide to a complicated and important subject, as well as a fresh perspective on eighteenth-century Britain.
