Since the publication of Neil McKendrick et al.’s book The Birth of a Consumer Society (Bloomington, IN, 1982), it has become a commonplace that during the eighteenth century the number and range of commodities grew at a prodigious rate. Wills, inventories, diaries, and letters reveal an increasing desire to possess and pass on material things. Historians of art, culture, design, economy, and society have over the past twenty years been quantitatively and qualitatively examining these goods.

In a period when interdisciplinary research is popular and well funded, it has remained an anomaly that the description of goods in literature has remained relatively unexamined. Cynthia Sundberg Wall's publication is therefore a timely and welcome addition to the field. In Gulliver's Travels (London, 1726) Jonathan Swift writes of “a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words,” which are to be replaced by things as a means of self-expression. This, as Swift comments, is a problem for the great Man of Business who “must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater Bundle of Things upon his Back” (quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian Things [London, 1988], n.p.). This intimate relationship among words, things, description, and self is the theme upon which Cynthia Sundberg Wall's book rests.

In The Prose of Things it is persuasively argued that it is possible to identify a cultural and perceptual shift in the nature of description during the eighteenth century. The status of description was transformed from Daniel Defoe's early eighteenth-century unvisualized cityscapes to the “excruciately elaborate landscapes” (1) of the Victorian novel. It is a movement from the general to the particular, from the broad sweep to the detail. The analysis also steps back in time to classical and Renaissance treatises and forward to twentieth-century theories providing a broad backdrop to the drama that unfolds.

The changes in the rhetoric about, and the employment of, description are related to four broader cultural changes: first, experientially, via new ways of seeing and appreciating objects through the new technologies of the microscope, telescope, and empirical analysis (chap. 3: “Seeing Things”), the world literally “leapt into new focus” (quoted from book jacket); second, economically, via the expansion of consumer culture and the increasing presence and awareness of things in the market, in the house, and in daily life (chap. 6: “Worlds of Goods”); third, epistemologically, via changes in attitudes toward the general and the particular, the universal and the individual; and fourth, narratively, in the perceptions and representations of domestic space, via country-house guides, Thomas Chippendale's pattern books for furniture, and the travel diaries of Celia Fiennes, Mary Delany, and John Byng (chap. 7: “Arranging Things”). A newly visible world was becoming apparent, via trade and travel, scientific discoveries, puritanical habits of self-examination, and the interest in collecting and classifying. This world needed to be mapped and described, via topographies, meditations, lists and diaries, fueling the need to fill the narrative space with description. In this way maps of London join maps of the underbelly of a flea, and John Strype unites with Robert Hooke, and Robert Boyle with John Bunyan in the wider pursuit of the description of things.

The focus is on the novel and authors as diverse as Bunyan and Aphra Benn. In Samuel Richardson's work, Sundberg Wall sees the role of things in transition. Between the publication of Pamela in 1740–41 and Sir Charles Grandison in 1753–54, the description of things becomes more complex. Ten years later Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) represents a culture obsessed by things. By the time Ann Radcliffe and Sir Walter Scott are writing, the visual world is given, no longer extrapolated, and the transformation is complete. We are now in a different literary and perceptual world.

The novel as a literary form is broadly and generously contextualized in the wider world of texts. Sundberg Wall's vista encompasses a huge range of written description from John Stow's Survey of London (1598) and the Philosophical Transactions to Humphry Repton's watercolors, which are covered with small written descriptions. This wide range of reference means the book will attract the attention of an extremely broad readership, each scholar of a specific literary form, seeking the connection of the particular subject to the general thesis. It is also hugely readable, not overencumbered with academic jargon, and therefore accessible to students of all levels. This book deserves to be in the libraries of institutions and individuals relating to the broadest span of interest in the humanities. A book that combines Samuel Pepys with Alexander Pope and Josiah Wedgwood and Virginia Woolf runs the risk of falling apart, but the strength of Sundberg Wall's argument holds the work together in a masterly tour de force. It will change the way you think about things.