In this compelling and theoretically subtle interdisciplinary study, Elizabeth A. Fay traces the cultural history of what she calls the “portraitive mode” in British Romanticism, which developed at a time when eighteenth-century empirical knowledge of the self started to be seriously contested by the new Romantic claim of a self no longer defined by external appearance but by interiority and an inner sense of identity. Fay examines the many artistic forms—from portraits, caricatures, miniatures, biographies, poems, and autobiographies, to fashion plates and jewelry—in which this newly developed sense of identity was expressed, as well as the anxiety created by the radical shift from exteriority to interiority that distinguishes the portraitive practices of the times. She aptly draws upon Michael de Certeau’s and Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of economic consumption and consumer ideology to examine portraitive practices in a consumer world. The focus of her theoretical discussion becomes the notion of congruence (different from collaboration, she insists) between entrepreneur and consumer.

A good number of studies have traced the complicated history of modern self-formation, and scholars have also scrupulously investigated the fears of objectification or, to use the other term coined by the author in her book, the “thingification” of self (21). To my knowledge, however, this is the first detailed analysis of the notion of congruence (in the sense in which Fay describes it, namely, as the dynamic relationship between the individual and the producer in the construction of identity) as a defining characteristic of the Romantic period. Among the major factors that encouraged the development of a new commercial culture, Fay includes Romantic self-fashioning and its reliance on entrepreneurial novelty. This interdependence is all rooted in the portraitive mode, which emerged at a time “when actively looking, gazing, and shopping were intertwined with displaying, ‘quizzing’ … and spectacle” (22).

Fay’s book has a useful and erudite introduction and five ample chapters, each functioning as clear thematic markers of various portraitive practices. Chapter 2 lays the theoretical parameters that inform the reading of the remaining three chapters. It establishes how portraiture and portrait collections displayed in large houses operated within a time-space framework largely similar to the experience of the eighteenth-century salons in Paris, where the shifting relations between private and public, traditional and innovative, ceremonial and entertaining, allowed for new, freer, and more creative ways to explore subjectivity. Since viewing during this era was practically the equivalent of shopping, both the reading of portraits and biographies and the reading of people moving through social spaces were equally informed by a consumption mentality. Various appetites were satisfied by various artifacts (see, for instance, her excellent discussion of caricature), but the painted portrait and the biography gradually became the dominant representational genres. The most popular form, however, for understanding the modern subject was the portrait sketch, combining the verbal and the visual in one revealing unity. Fay, invoking Kant’s notions of representation and perception, explains how portraitive objects manipulate both the many forms in which we perceive time and space and the aesthetic judgment: “Portraits and biographies endeavor to exploit this multiplicity in order to guide interpretation, to direct how the object of interpretation and the interpreting subject find each other within this reframed world” (46).

The portraitive productions of four energetic and inventive minds that combined imagination and artistry with social vision and merchandizing genius are thoroughly discussed in chapter 3. Fay explains how Wedgwood’s ceramic wares, cameos, and busts; Cosway’s miniature portraits; and Boydell’s and Ackerman’s reproduction of fine prints brilliantly exploited the self-reflexive spirit of the times, the period’s obsession with portraitive objects, and its excessive scopophilia by producing luxury items whose attractiveness, elegance, and distinction increased their desirability, influenced taste, and created style. As a result, she argues, these productions offered consumers new opportunities to reimagine themselves and to adopt fashionable gestures as part of their changing and changeable identity. Especially stimulating is her discussion of miniatures, including her comments on the influence of the “eye-miniature” on Cosway’s entire work. These comments could have benefited, perhaps, from a more nuanced distinction between eye-miniature portraits (which should be considered instances of being seen rather than of seeing and, as such, represent the foundation of an alternative model of vision—still a vexing issue in current debates on visual theory) and other types of portraits.

Chapter 4 turns its attention to the creation of time-space chronotopes in art collections and in both private and public museums. The emphasis moves from the mundane aspects of everyday life to the aesthetics of “collected space” and from models of private enterprise to ultimate collectors, such as Horace Walpole and Sir John Soane. Fay asserts that the notions of “curiosity” (redefined by Soane and Walpole as an object of knowledge) and “taste” account for the portraitive objects’ reflexive properties within collections. Fay also argues, rather convincingly, that this was a time of artistic freedom and profound redefinition that allowed collectors to use the creative power of the imaginative faculty in new and transformative ways in order to elevate materialist impulses and aspirations to the level of high art, an art that, in turn, invited viewers to access the object’s aura and develop a stronger, more intense sensitivity to essences. Fay’s analysis of the distinct ways in which Walpole’s and Soane’s particular conceptions shared the stage with the visitors of their collections is both substantial and instructive, although the notion of congruence does not emerge as clearly as it does in the book’s previous chapters.

The book’s final chapter examines the fashionability of commodity culture and its absorption in role playing and self-portraiture by concentrating on two culturally narcissistic writers, Lord Byron and Mary Robinson. Their careers revealed a uniquely effective ability to exploit self-representation and identity performance in order to construct, through image production, new social and artistic/textual identities and to challenge the publicly negative representations of their scandalous lives. Although stimulating in its review of key terms of performative theory, the first part of this chapter does not add significantly to what we already know from previous studies, including her own excellent book, Becoming Wordsworthian (Amherst, MA, 1995), in terms of theoretical application. Her readings of Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon (1796) and Byron’s Childe Harold (1818), Don Juan (1824), and Manfred (1817), however, reveal a strikingly original interpretative acumen and offer a useful analysis of the differences between Robinson’s metropolitanism and Byron’s cosmopolitanism.

Fay’s book, in which solid scholarship is very well organized and elegantly presented, is incontestably successful in analyzing the notion of congruence in eighteenth-century material culture. Her research is splendidly documented, and her grasp of the complexities of contexts firm. Perhaps the most commendable aspects of Fay’s ambitious and sophisticated study is her original synthesis (she uses an impressive variety of sources and is fluent in several discourses), the extraordinary diversity of portraitive practices she considers, and her ability to remain focused on the concept of congruence (in the same way she remained focused on the “collaborative model” developed in her study on Wordsworth) in order to complicate, indeed reconfigure, our understanding of identity construction in the eighteenth-century commodified culture. Fay’s powerful and scrupulous analysis also places her name in the company of influential scholars devoted to complicating the gendered divisions of private and public, such as Paula McDowell, Amanda Vickery, Lawrence Klein, Judith Pascoe, and others. Written with an admirable sensitivity to complicated cultural nuances, Fay’s book undoubtedly represents a timely and valuable contribution to the always intriguing field of eighteenth-century studies.