Middlemen and Marriage in Mary Davys's The Reform'd Coquet

ddl n nd rr n r D v Th R f r dtMichael Genovese

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 54, Number 3,Summer 2014, pp. 555-584 (Article)

P bl h d b Th J hn H p n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/sel.2014.0026

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Michael Genovese 555SEL 54, 3 (Summer 2014): 555–584ISSN 0039-3657© 2014 Rice University

555

Middlemen and Marriage in Mary Davys’s

The Reform’d Coquet

MICHAEL GENOVESE

Commonly discussed for its treatment of gender and disguise, Mary Davys’s The Reform’d Coquet; or Memoirs of Amoranda (1724) remains untouched by recent scholarship on the economic con-cerns of early eighteenth-century literature.1 Yet Davys’s prefacing admission that “my Purse is … grown wholly useless to every body” (not to mention her confession to being “a Lover of Money”) does more than just associate her with others who justified author-ship as a defense against penury (pp. 5 and 11).2 Her statement foreshadows the broader issues of money and compensation that govern the novel’s plot and originate in the protagonist Amoranda’s indebtedness to her Uncle Traffick, an “East-India Merchant” who settles “the whole [of the family Estate] upon her” and becomes her guardian after her parents’ deaths (p. 12). A participant in Britain’s growing commercial empire, this London-based relative provides the money that makes Amoranda a viable candidate for marriage and puts her person and fortune under the care of the (supposedly) elderly and watchful Formator.3 Charged with protecting Traffick’s ward from seduction, Formator is his agent “in the Country” (p. 14). He acts “in [Traffick’s] stead [to] inter-est himself in all [Amoranda’s] Affairs” and proves his worth by fending off ill-natured suitors and turning Amoranda from her coquettish ways (p. 24). Eventually, the revelation that he is the rich, young Alanthus in disguise leads to his marrying her himself.

Michael Genovese is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. His work has appeared in journals such as The Eighteenth Cen-tury: Theory and Interpretation, The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, and Eighteenth-Century Studies, and he is completing a book manuscript titled “The Problem of Profit: Feeling and Finance in the Eighteenth Century.”

556 Middlemen and Marriage in Mary Davys’s The Reform’d Coquet

Such a plot twist raises the question of who reforms whom. Tiffany Potter suggests that Formator/Alanthus becomes at-tracted to “Amoranda’s fire and spirit” even as he alters her be-havior, and other critics have debated what Davys’s novel says about female independence before and after marriage.4 But when we attend to the economic circumstances of the plot (Traffick as the absent merchant, Formator as his representative, and Amo-randa as his fortune), a different story of reformation emerges concerning the capitalist figure of the middleman—that is, the agent or factor who acts in a merchant’s interest and who was generally met with distrust in the eighteenth century. I argue that The Reform’d Coquet transforms this figure from economic leech into social benefactor by incorporating the middleman (Formator) into a marriage plot that succeeds not in spite of but by means of his economic mediation. Finally unveiled as an eligible bachelor, Davys’s middleman overcomes the historically “insurmountable illegitimacy” of the merchant (to borrow Marcel Hénaff’s phrase) by making his mediation essential to domestic harmony, in the double sense of both household (as developed by his role in the marriage plot) and nation (as developed by his role in drawing together country and city).5

I

I remember the Trade when there was no Factors, the Cloth-ier sold his Cloth to the Merchant, and received ready Money; so they are Mushrooms.

—John Blanch, The Beaux Merchant (1714)6

Key to economic activity in and before the 1720s, middlemen went by various names in the eighteenth century; agent, factor, broker or brogger, and even servant were the most common.7 In general, the middleman was defined as the one “through whose hands commodities pass[ed] on their way from the maker or producer to the consumer.”8 Economic historians such as E. P. Thompson, Neil McKendrick, and Margaret Schabas have charac-terized him as a disliked but unavoidable agent in an expanding market economy.9 The middleman or merchant who interfered in the immediate sale of goods from producer to consumer car-ried with him “a notorious [reputation] for fraudulent business habits” that had a long history.10 Critics primarily complained of how “country shopkeepers and hucksters bought of the farmer

Michael Genovese 557

and sold again at an advanced price,” and attacks on middlemen appear to have been one aspect of nostalgia for face-to-face trade based on local knowledge.11

On the other hand, mercantile writers recognized the necessity of bringing together distant buyers and sellers.12 Daniel Defoe, perhaps the most adamant defender of “the general commerce of England,” puts communication and distribution at the heart of the nation’s commercial strength.13 He notably argues that the “home or inland trade” thrives because of middlemen, a group composed of “warehousekeepers,” “wholesalemen,” or “tradesmen in the country” who link England’s interior with its “great foreign negoce” by transferring goods among producers, merchants, retailers, and consumers.14 Defoe’s chains of trade draw atten-tion to how far the original merchant is from his final customer, a distance that causes anxiety. Nonetheless, Defoe worries not about middlemen as such but about “Men of no Principles,” who will ruin the “Inland Trade in England.”15 For, if they act appro-priately, intermediaries sustain the commercial network through “that Credit in Trade [which] is the Life and Soul of our general Commerce,” credit that Defoe defines in terms of “one Tradesman buying of another to sell again.”16 Only “the last Consumption, that is the Retailer,” from whom the customer buys the goods, has the dubious luxury of sacrificing reputation and credit, for he or she must “be all ready Money.”17 In Defoe’s twist on popular wisdom, middlemen become the trustees of commerce because they alone have aligned profitability with good credit and principled behavior rather than gold and silver, which reduce interpersonal relations to impersonal, material ones.18

Despite Defoe’s defense of their activities, middlemen were tolerated more than elevated. As David Hancock puts it, “The taint of trade lingered long after deportmental characteristics had been acquired.”19 John Locke complains in 1692 that “the multiplying of Brokers [who inflate prices to their own advantage] hinders the Trade of any Country” by retarding the circulation of money; and John Blanch’s 1714 comedy, The Beaux Merchant, mocks factors and brokers, specifically those active in the wool trade, for harming “the Farmer” who would “have double the Number of Buyers … and a better Price” if “Wooll-broggers were suppress’d.”20 Blanch waxes nostalgic for “Trade when there was no Factors” and when clothiers received “ready Money,” rather than credit, from merchants.21 This “ready Money,” which signifies to Defoe an end of trust, is the substance of real commerce in a comedy that yearns for the return of actual gold to the “Golden Fleece,” or the wool industry.22


Whether middlemen aided traders or stole profits was, thus, an open question. Criticized for “raising prices for services not rendered” and charging “profit-devouring commissions,” they re-mained “legally suspect,” contemptible people (or “Mushrooms,” as Blanch calls them), despite the “necessary, productive, and laudable role” they played in trade carried on over vast distances.23 The activities of middlemen and merchants were so entangled that the perception of deviousness or price gouging in a middleman could potentially ruin not only his reputation but that of every merchant with whom he did business.24 Yet if the middleman ever found himself embraced by the consuming public, then his enhanced reputation could polish all of the economic links held together by his mediation.

II

So if they hear but of a beautiful Woman, what contrivances, what designs do they lay, first to see, and then to corrupt her; make it a business to themselves, as well as a trade to their agents and factors, to spring such game?

—Richard Allestree, The Gentleman’s Calling (1660)25

In The Reform’d Coquet, the middleman proves he deserves an elevated status by correcting Amoranda’s coquettish tendencies and then marrying a woman who, by accepting improvement, joins virtue to desirability (she is from the beginning “address’d by all the Country round” and toasted “in every House for ten Parishes round” [p. 15]). However, his elevation from suspect agent to cherished husband benefits the men involved far more than it does the woman, as it validates the mercantile values they represent. Reminiscent of the “contrivances” and “designs” that Richard Allestree warned lay at the heart of much courtship, the strategies Formator/Alanthus and Traffick subtly use to manipu-late Amoranda suggest that “business” acumen will be revealed by how much they gain from “spring[ing] such a game.”

Before I discuss their plotting in detail, I want to highlight how this economic scheming participates in a general misogyny that scholars have identified in late seventeenth- and early eigh-teenth-century representations of financial matters.26 As Cath-erine Ingrassia has argued, the expansion of credit instruments during this period and the increase in women’s participation in markets contributed to women writers’ growing engagement


with commercial matters, as Eliza Haywood’s career exemplifies. But along with these increases came a general “cultural anxiety about women’s new financial interests,” and Davys’s novel mixes fiction and economics in ways that replicate an often disturbing treatment of women found across the period’s literature.27 Laura Mandell and Lisa Freeman, for instance, have demonstrated how plays such as Thomas Otway’s The Orphan (1680) and George Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731) used crimes committed by and against women to reconceive, in Mandell’s words, “business relations in a way conducive to an emerging market society,”28 and Laura Brown has argued that literature from the 1680s to the 1720s, especially that by Alexander Pope, positions women at the center of problems posed by early capitalism.29 As gender becomes a category through which theories of desire, money, and trade are contested, the manipulation and punishment of women come to serve the interests of merchants.

Such economic misogyny contributes to a “sex/gender system” that, as Gayle Rubin famously put it, operates within a “political economy of sex” that cannot be divorced from “arrangements … of human activity” used to reinforce the oppression of women.30 This oppressive, sexualized political economy appears in Davys’s novel as Traffick (whose name signifies commerce) and Forma-tor/Alanthus construct a courtship narrative around Amoranda to further economic purposes that depend upon but are hidden from her.31 Shaped by men, Amoranda’s process of choosing a husband reinforces and ultimately legitimizes market conditions and networks that connect city to country via merchants and agents. Within this market, she becomes little more than a com-modity whose happiness justifies the choices secretly made for her by men who further their economic goals by trafficking in her.

Such objectification of a woman whose wit and spirit have drawn readers’ admiration is misogynistic, but it is perhaps more subtly so than Jonathan Swift’s descriptions of the female body or Lillo’s execution of Millwood.32 Davys’s novel does, after all, close with Amoranda married to the man she loves. If Amoranda appears trapped in her love for Alanthus, she believes she has chosen her own fate: “I have given a Heart [to Alanthus] which is not in my power to recall … I cannot cease to love Alanthus” (p. 73). Yet this decision has been plotted all along by her uncle, who sent Alanthus (disguised as Formator) to her under a se-cret, conditional contract that underwrites the entire novel and is only revealed to Amoranda (and to readers) in the final pages: “[Alanthus] has … promised to make you the Partner of his Bed,


if he liked you when he saw you, and could find a means to win your Affections” (p. 79). Formator mediates between all of these characters (including his own alter ego) without Amoranda know-ing his true identity or amorous intentions, and his successful reformation of the coquette allows the uncle’s agreement with his new “Friend” to be realized (p. 79).

Less self-willed than she believes, Amoranda functions as the middleman’s commission for getting her to align her desires with her uncle’s, a job that the contract letter suggests will take effort and carries a risk of failure. Or, to be more precise, she func-tions as the former middleman’s payment, for when Formator is uncovered as the actually aristocratic “Lord Marquiss [sic] of W------,” he abandons his role as agent to become his own man, one worthy of marrying the landed heiress (p. 79). Yet unlike standard recognition scenes in romances and novels, in which former, humbler appearances are effectively nullified (the hero was never really a slave, or a commoner, or a gardener), this revelation certifies that he has been (not pretended to be or been mistaken for) a middleman all along.33

Davys affirms this distinctiveness of the middleman’s identity by taking the fairly unusual step of having the persona (Forma-tor) and the actual man (Alanthus) interact with Amoranda over the same period of time but in completely different ways. In other stories of courtship and disguise, such as William Congreve’s Incognita: Or, Love and Duty Reconcil’d: A Novel (1692), there is less of a division between mask and lover.34 In Incognita, men and women’s false identities do not develop into separate characters but instead serve as covers for courtships that only appear to be denied to the actual characters. For instance, Juliana (calling herself Incognita) and Aurelian (calling himself Hippolito) fall in love and plan to marry without either knowing the other’s true identity. They thus believe their love to be at odds with their fa-thers’ plans to unite the two families, but in the end their mutual desire (their “Loves”) coincidentally corresponds to this prear-rangement (their “Duties”).35 Acting as diversions rather than as mediators, the masks court and marry each other just as the characters who don them would.

However, in The Reform’d Coquet the disguised persona is not the suitor; Alanthus is. The middleman identity (Formator) actu-ally mediates among characters as if he is no suitor at all, and his ability to influence Amoranda and facilitate Alanthus’s courting of and marriage to her depends upon this disengagement from acts of courtship. Moreover, his significance as a separate actor lingers even after the middleman and aristocratic identities con-


verge at the novel’s end. For this convergence works ideologically to affirm that the middleman was exactly what he seemed to be: a virtuous, well-meaning, and necessary commercial intermediary who deserves to be of the class of men able to marry Amoranda. Premised upon the successful manipulation of a woman, this transformation that is no transformation—the newly ennobled middleman was always a man of honor—symbolically improves the dubious reputation of middlemen, and it fits the model of what Slavoj Žižek calls “ideological fantasy,” under which people “know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know.”36 To achieve his desire, the lord must act as the middleman but divorce himself entirely from the disguise (regardless of how fantastic this division seems). Conversely, the middleman must have already partaken in the lord’s honor with-out ever being a lord or his low reputation would have prevented his success. Readers must accept this fantasy because the mar-riage validates his activity, and such acceptance is worth more than gold to a figure desperate for a better character.

III

Did ever Villany so plain appear,In Impudence and Confidence, as here? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Wou’d it not therefore give a Man the Spleen,To see a Mushroom Factor with Liv’ry of Green?

—John Blanch, The Beaux Merchant37

The marriage between Amoranda and Formator/Alanthus has the potential to remove aspersions of “Villany” and “Impudence” from the “Mushroom Factor” by raising him above “Liv’ry of Green” (itself enough of an honor to have shocked Blanch) and putting him into the marriage bed.38 Even though Alanthus finally relin-quishes his identity as Formator, the former cannot disentangle himself from the commercial performance of the latter. The Forma-tor persona makes him the marriageable Lord he turns out to be, and Amoranda even admits that her affection was roused by the older form: “I can’t but love that Form … Formator’s Name shall always be dear to Amoranda, and shall for ever find a resting-place in her Breast” (p. 80). Consequently, Formator’s commercial performance remains integral to how the novel incorporates his character into the household as guardian and husband.


Traffick states in Formator’s letter of introduction to Amo-randa that he has sent the old man to protect what is “very dear to [him],” Amoranda herself (p. 25). A sentimental modifier, “dear” also carries the sense of valuable or high priced, meanings brought to the fore by Traffick’s station as a merchant and by his descrip-tion in this same letter of Formator as a man of “the greatest value” (p. 24). Formator’s role as the merchant’s representative comes through most clearly when Traffick calls him the “Bearer,” which could refer both to one who brings a letter and to one who car-ries a Bill of Exchange or Letter of Credit (p. 25).39 Traffick writes that he is “putting [Amoranda] into such hands as Formator’s,” a telling phrase that says less about her new mentor’s power as a man over a woman (she after all repeatedly resists his advice) than about his power as a factor “entrust[ed]” (Traffick’s word) with a merchant’s wealth (pp. 24–5).

Traffick’s letter functions, in other words, like a Letter of Credit, a financial instrument by which a merchant could give “Orders [to a correspondent he knows] to furnish [someone un-known to that correspondent], with such a Sum … And to charge it to his Accompt who gives the Letter of Credit,” as William Forbes describes in 1703.40 As Forbes clarifies, “general Letters of Credit … are given to any Friend … only to put honor upon him,” an honor that Formator justifies by declaring that he is motivated by his “Zeal for so good an Uncle to you, and so good a Friend to me” (p. 26).41 Amoranda is drawn into their economic arrangement when a letter in her “Uncle’s own hand” asks her to give “all [her] Affairs” (including, we assume, the management of her fortune) to a stranger (Formator) whose reputation rests on what Forbes would have termed the “unrestricted Credit” given to him by the merchant-uncle, who repeatedly calls Formator a “Friend” (pp. 78, 24, and 79).42 We trust with Traffick that he will not misplace Amoranda’s wealth.

With this letter, Formator officially becomes a merchant’s fac-tor, as Edward Hatton defines the term in his 1697 The Merchant’s Magazine: Or, Trades-Man’s Treasury: “A Factor is one that is imploy’d to buy and sell any kind of Merchandize for another.”43 For the remainder of the novel, Formator vets every suitor, includ-ing himself, to ensure that only a suitable consumer purchases Amoranda, a consumer defined in Traffick’s final letter by his abil-ity to “win [her] Affections” (p. 79). While this reduces her to a piece of property subservient to her uncle’s plan to shape her feelings, this objectification is hardly surprising for a time during which marriage among the wealthy still involved financial exchanges.44


What is surprising is that this arrangement for marrying off the niece should legitimize the operations of a middleman, who, after all, sidles into her house and could, for all anyone knows, be a scoundrel out to cheat his merchant.

Amoranda is certainly suspicious of her new guardian’s abilities. At first, she judges him to be little more than an aged guardian with a “feeble Arm,” unable to defend her against “robust Rascals” (p. 27). But Formator becomes increasingly acceptable as he mediates between Traffick and the many aspirants for his niece’s hand. Formator guides her away from villainous claim-ants to her person and wealth, and as Amoranda benefits from replacing her opinions with those of her guardian, she is drawn toward him and into her uncle’s plan. Formator’s low regard for the rakish Lord Lofty, for instance, leads Amoranda to shift from mocking one of his victims (a tenant’s daughter “who he, for a Night’s Lodging, promised Marriage”) for “think[ing], because he made a Fool of her, he has and must do so by all the Sex,” to sympathetically admitting that she had “this poor Creature’s Wrongs so much at heart, that I shall never rest till I recover her Quiet” (pp. 17 and 44). This sentimental conversion, inspired by Formator, convinces Amoranda of the justice of tricking Lofty into marrying his abandoned mistress, Altemira. But from her uncle’s economic perspective, it more importantly frees Amoranda’s “Per-son and Fortune” from a rake who, “resolved to be a Libertine,” potentially threatens both (p. 43). As the middleman whose in-tervention leaves everyone satisfied, Formator can claim success as the preserver of both her virtue and her related capacity for transmitting wealth.45

The modified bed trick used against Lord Lofty (Amoranda disguises Altemira as herself for the wedding, after which Al-temira follows her clueless husband into bed) demonstrates how a merchant’s financial desires, even when conveyed from afar, can triumph over the competing desires of the landed gentry (pp. 48–9). Formator represents this mercantile interest, to his ward’s benefit; Amoranda has no wish to become Lady Lofty (pp. 22 and 27). Later, he again upsets the libidinous and pecuniary desires of a country gentleman (Biranthus) who seeks to rape Amoranda. First, Formator protects Amoranda from a man attempting to “get into [her] Coach-Box,” whom we later discover to be Biranthus (p. 51). Then, as Alanthus, he preserves the value of his eventual bride by once more rescuing her virtue from Biranthus, who, af-ter isolating Amoranda in the woods, threatens her with sexual violence (p. 59).46 Alanthus’s purpose is avowedly to kill the vil-


lain and prevent the rape, but he also defends Amoranda from a financial predator; Biranthus’s declared motive for entrapping her is that his “Estate is not a great one, but your’s join’d to it, will make it so” (p. 59). Formator’s and Alanthus’s interventions against the same rake replace the forceful and heartless sexu-ality of the landed class with a model of salvation, retreat, and courtship that results from middleman and Lord reinforcing one another’s efforts.

These efforts lead Amoranda to desire exactly what her uncle wishes: a connection with Alanthus. After the second rescue, she reflects that “[Alanthus] is too God-like to be an Inhabitant of this World” and “long[s] to see him again” (p. 62). As we dis-cover at the novel’s end, this fortuitous surge of feeling occurs because Formator (disguised as Alanthus) followed her “to the Wood, where [he] knew the Scene would be acted, if [Biranthus] had any ill designs against [her]” (p. 80). As a middleman, he intervenes to protect his and his merchant’s interests by intro-ducing Alanthus as an object of desire to supplant Amoranda’s longing for local gentlemen. As in the adventure with Lord Lofty, the guardian’s thwarting of a suitor (Biranthus attempts rape only after Amoranda mocks his proposal to become “a Husband”) reinforces how mediation, not amorous competition, will preserve the economic and sexual welfare of the young woman (p. 59). Without her uncle’s middleman, Amoranda’s virtue would come under constant threat, which, in turn, would tarnish her reputa-tion and threaten her uncle’s ability to combine his fortune with another man’s. The novel’s movement toward matrimony would, at best, stall or, more likely, halt altogether if Formator were not simultaneously protecting his merchant’s and his own interests. In doing so, Formator is also protecting the interests of readers conditioned, as Paula Backscheider has put it, to see the “central subject” of the “eighteenth-century novel by and for women” as “the ideal of a happy marriage.”47 Everyone needs this middleman.

IV

[A] Factor doth Business for so much in every hundred Pounds worth of Goods he selleth or buyeth; which is called [his] Provision.

—Edward Hatton, The Merchant’s Magazine (1697)48

After the incident with Biranthus, Amoranda admits to For-mator that “I have now brought my self to an utter Contempt


for all [coxcombs]” and adds that while “the ground-work of this Reformation in me, came from [your] wholesome Lectures … the finishing stroke is given by my own inclination” (p. 64). Far from embodying the “modest woman … made for marriage,” a promi-nent figure in eighteenth-century conduct books and courtship novels, Amoranda proudly maintains her own agency and pro-fesses her love for Alanthus regardless of how such declarations disrupt contemporary standards of “reserve and humility.”49 Yet the triumph is actually Formator’s. He has successfully mediated between Amoranda and herself, and her reward of joyous “Nup-tials” carried out “to the very great Satisfaction of all Parties” is actually his reward (p. 84).50 For these nuptials also have economic consequences that compensate the middleman for his interven-tions, as becomes clear once Formator is revealed to be Alanthus.

Far from excising the middleman from the novel, this revela-tion strengthens the ties between lord and alter ego by aligning his profit with Formator’s. Because Amoranda’s marriage to Alanthus ultimately verifies her reformation under her mentor, their union represents the profits of both middleman and noble-man at the same time, even after Formator no longer exists. The profit made by buying “to sell again” historically led “practical men [to keep] a suspicious eye on the dealings of middlemen,” and this concern over supposedly unjust profit was still evident throughout the eighteenth century.51 It should be no surprise, then, that the mediating Formator would pursue his own inter-est while also serving Traffick’s, but his potentially suspect profit (whatever he might earn for improving Amoranda) is a prerequi-site for Alanthus’s legitimate profit (marriage to Amoranda based upon shared affection). What Theresa Braunscheider describes as “the process through which [a coquette] turns from a refusal to an embrace of marriage” is revealed to be a strategy by which a middleman might seek personal gain without aspersion.52 When the courtship narrative takes over to conclude the novel, its suc-cess (marriage in love) justifies the economic plot without which there would have been no profitable courtship at all.53

The Reform’d Coquet’s legitimization of the middleman-noble-man’s profit depends upon what Lawrence Stone describes as the transition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from patri-archal marriages based on lineage to affectionate marriages based on “intensified affective bonding,” “a strong sense of individual autonomy,” and “the right to personal freedom in the pursuit of happiness.”54 Amoranda’s certainty that she has freely chosen her romantic path aligns Davys’s novel with a growing tradition of writing that, as Christopher Flint relates, concerned itself “with


the affective experiences of young adults seeking conjugal bliss in a domestic environment.”55 Amoranda attests to having given her heart to Alanthus, and, in a sign of independent wit, she uses Formator’s argument that her uncle’s (still unnamed) choice is as good as her own against itself: “You your self say, my Uncle’s Choice is but as good as my own; and if there be an exact equality between the Men, why am not I to be pleased, who am to spend my Days with him; and why must I be forc’d into the arms of a Man I never saw?” (p. 73). Here, Amoranda implicitly claims that there can never be “an exact equality between the Men,” for she knows and loves one and has never laid eyes upon the other, which marks them as different. This defense of female choice and affection supports Tiffany Potter’s claim that Amoranda’s “early independence has entrenched her agency and self-knowledge” as it translates the freedom to flirt into the decision to love.56

The irony is that this appeal to willed affection corresponds exactly to what Formator and Traffick want: the marriage of Amo-randa to the wealthy, titled Alanthus. When we keep this economic subplot in mind, it is difficult not to see Amoranda as essentially the “pretty Play-thing” that suitors saw her as at the novel’s begin-ning (p. 15). Toni Bowers posits that many late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century women writers treated courtship as “a subset of seduction” because “courtship’s vaunted mutuality … relies on the gradual achievement of female consent to primary male desire.”57 In The Reform’d Coquet, the primacy of male desire is born out as Formator manipulates Amoranda’s sentiments while directing her toward marriage. Toward the novel’s end, he reveals that the novel’s entire plot has been a scheme: “Your Uncle, before I left him, had provided a Husband for you” (p. 73). This discovery almost breaks Amoranda’s heart—“I will die to oblige my dearest Uncle, but I cannot cease to love Alanthus” (p. 73)—which gives the middleman the chance to resolve and control the crisis: “[P]repare for Joy,” he states, “Alanthus is your Uncle’s Choice” (p. 73). The carefully managed and suddenly overjoyed Amoranda can now, from Formator’s perspective, become the factor’s “Provi-sion.” For Alanthus’s marriage to her is both “something provided, prepared, or arranged in advance” and “a commission … charged … by an agent or factor” for preserving his merchant’s (Traffick’s) interests, and Amoranda blesses the middleman’s contrivances with “the Sentiments of her Heart,” even if she does not realize she is doing so (p. 75).58 Her trust in her “own inclination” acquits the middleman of any suspicion that his self-interested pursuit of profit was disreputable, for regardless of the arrangement he had with her uncle, she chose to love him.


With Amoranda’s right to choose whom she marries (a right that Traffick’s contract letter grants her) apparently satisfied, the middleman liberates himself from accusations of unfair market fixing, but it remains unclear how much Amoranda benefits from her change in status. Keeping in mind Ruth Perry’s assessment of new forms of entrapment created by eighteenth-century ideals of “love-in-marriage” and “privatized marriage,” we can identify the effort The Reform’d Coquet takes to purge such unsettling rela-tions of power and gender from its narrative.59 Amoranda’s status as an orphan sidesteps problems concerning detachment from parents or siblings, and Alanthus’s status as an insider when in the guise of Formator codes marriage to him as an act of familial consolidation. The novel also expands Amoranda’s family rather than constricting it. Once informed that Formator is her brother in disguise and that he intends to marry his ward, Alanthus’s sister Lady Betty declares that “[f]rom the first moment I saw you, lovely Amoranda, I had an inward impulse to love you” (p. 83). Her words solidify a sisterly relationship that begins in the same “impulse to love” that sparked her brother’s affections, and Amoranda acquires a sibling.

This familial consolidation would seem to reward Amoranda for directing her feelings toward Alanthus. But the letter from Traffick that identifies Formator as Alanthus influences how final rewards must be assigned. In it, Traffick tells his niece that Alan-thus “promised to make you the Partner of his Bed,” and reviewing the novel through this contract requires us to transfer the reward from bride to groom (p. 79). Alanthus’s family is the one increased by the addition of merchant uncle and bride; his family gains a sister for Lady Betty. A loyal factor who has faithfully preserved and then passed on his merchant’s wealth in the person of his niece, Formator mediates among Traffick, Amoranda, and Alan-thus in ways that allow a traditional, patriarchal view of marriage to maintain its power within a vision of affectionate or compan-ionate marriage. In the language of factorage, “Hymen’s fetters” remain the “Provision” that Formator/Alanthus has earned for a charge fulfilled (p. 84). An avowedly affectionate marriage made for love has displaced any uneasiness about these profits.


V

[A] Set of Unlicens’d Higlers, Jobbers, Forestallers, Ingross-ers, Hawkers, and other Strolers and Iterlopers, have crept in upon us, who traverse the Country … and so forestal the proper Market.

—An Essay to Prove, that Regrators, Engrossers, Fore-stallers, Hawkers, and Jobbers of Corn, Cattle, and Other

Marketable Goods, Provisions, and Merchandizes, Are Destructive of Trade, Oppressive to the Poor, and a Common

Nuisance to the Kingdom in General (1718)60

Nonetheless, Formator’s character, and thus Alanthus’s, risks being tarnished by its ties to Traffick’s urban mercantil-ism. Resentment toward him by country residents hints at a growing fear that, as Raymond Williams has put it, a “traditional [country] order was being invaded and destroyed by a new and more ruthless [city] order.”61 To those who live “pretty deep in the Country,” Formator/Alanthus is an interloper trespassing on a courtship that men from the country believe is their prerogative (p. 12).62 Furthermore, his authority derives from an outsider, a merchant “just come from the Indies” (p. 14). Suitors treat him as little more than an “Unlicens’d” higgler—a term, as Vivienne Brown discusses, for “an itinerant dealer or middleman” who was held in contempt for his supposed contribution to price increases, represented in the novel by Formator’s successful attempts to make the wooing of Amoranda difficult or even impossible.63

To circumvent the possibility that this middleman might be nothing more than a “Forestaller” interfering with commerce to “the detriment of local consumers,” Davys imagines Formator as a figure of potentially national significance.64 By granting him a mobility that frees him from forms of mercenary corruption asso-ciated with city and country, the novel dissociates Formator from either locale and contrasts his intention to improve and sustain an heiress and her estate with the stereotypical middleman’s practice of squeezing higher rents out of tenants.65 His middle-man activities, delineated by a line of credit and a contract for exchange, culminate in a marriage that will unite and enrich, not isolate and impoverish, Britain’s capital city and its countryside.

By showing both locations to be already corrupt, Davys opens room for the middleman’s normally unwelcome mobility to serve a salutary function. Despite his ties to the merchant uncle, For-mator is never specifically attached to the city. Similarly, he is


never tied down to the country, which in Davys’s novel is a cor-rupt place diverging significantly from the superficial pastoralism that Williams argues allowed the innocent-country/debased-city dichotomy to persist.66 Amoranda’s grandfather, for instance, lost the original family fortune through “whoring and drinking … [and] gaming” (p. 12). Now riddled with debased suitors, the country economy has lost its order, in part due to an absentee landlord (the uncle) “whose Business would not admit of his go-ing into the Country” (p. 14). Remiss in attending to the family estate whose renewal he has financed, Traffick will not bring Amoranda to London because it is “a place of too many Tempta-tions” (p. 14). Yet he also neglects to follow the advice commonly given to gentlemen by writers such as Edward Laurence (1727) to regularly visit country holdings “if they will have their Estates to thrive,” an oversight that causes his fortune, in the person of Amoranda, to come under siege in the first place.67

When Formator arrives to work as Traffick’s agent in the country, his outsider status becomes an asset as his distinctive-ness from both country and city acts as a virtue instead of as a suspicious itinerancy.68 He boldly attaches his authority over Amoranda to the fact that he has come from elsewhere—“I am sent here by very good Authority … to enquire every Man’s Busi-ness that comes into this House”—and his mobility contributes directly to the mediation that eventually justifies his steward-ship of the entire estate (p. 29). For example, Formator arrives (presumably from the city) just in time to spoil a nefarious plot conceived against his charge by two country gentlemen (“impudent Rogues!” Amoranda exclaims [p. 24]). Alanthus subsequently ap-pears with impeccable timing to save Amoranda from being raped in the woods, which, as mentioned before, preserves her ability to unite fortunes in marriage by preserving her virtue. Formator later conveniently rides off “in the morning before seven a-clock,” not to “return till night,” so that Alanthus can unexpectedly visit Amoranda; here, the older man’s penchant for disappearing be-comes the younger’s opportunity to arrive from an undisclosed location “in a Chariot and two Horses” (p. 70). That same day, Amoranda admits her love for Alanthus to the returned Forma-tor, and readers recognize retroactively that his carefully timed excursion catalyzes the coquette’s journey toward marriage. The middleman’s mastery of movement aids him as he, contrary to his reputation for “anticipat[ing] or prevent[ing] sales,” establishes the groundwork that will make the sale/marriage happen.69


Indeed, without mobility the personal relationship between Amoranda and Formator/Alanthus would never have developed. Their intimacy begins, ironically, with an anonymous note (ac-tually from Alanthus) admonishing her for humoring so many suitors. The note arrives mysteriously via “a Glove [thrown in] the Window” by a gentleman riding by so quickly that Amoranda actually notes his disappearance “in a Cloud of Dust” (pp. 19 and 23). She immediately obsesses over this glove and its unflattering portrayal of her as “neither Angel, nor Goddess,” a turn of phrase reminiscent of how conduct literature, such as George Savile, Lord Halifax’s popular The Lady’s New-Years Gift: Or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), would attack vanity in order to urge women toward improvement (p. 23).70 Amoranda’s reaction reflects a newfound vulnerability that makes her available for reformation: “[W]hat vexes me most … is his Pity; I always thought a Woman of Youth, Beauty, and such a Fortune as mine is, might raise Envy in many, but Pity in none” (p. 23). Formator/Alanthus discomfits her because he remains unseen; his opinion sticks because his absence prevents her from using her significant wit to counter his discourtesy. Nothing more than pure motion at this point, he distinguishes himself and gains influence by not being what all other men in her life are—members of the country or the city.

Caught off guard (“Oh Lud,” she says), Amoranda admits be-ing angry and confused in language that justifies the narrator in lamenting, “What an unhappy Creature is a beautiful young Girl left to her own Management” (pp. 23 and 21). By directly criticiz-ing her “Management,” Davys draws attention to Amoranda’s poor economy, with respect both to the classical meaning of household management and to the modern meaning of market activity.71 A liability for her and for her uncle, Amoranda’s coquettishness endangers her family’s wealth as surely as her grandfather’s “whoring and drinking” did two generations before. Formator must correct this mismanagement, and as he comes to regulate Amoranda’s estate, his actions suggest a broader program of domestic management that could apply as readily to the nation as to a single property.

Under Formator, household economy becomes the responsi-bility not of the landed gentleman or urban merchant but of the mobile middleman. His first act as guardian by proxy is to excise parasites; in the anonymous note, he advises Amoranda to “dis-card three Fourths of [her] daily Attendants, who like so many Locusts are striving to devour [her]” (p. 23). She, at first, rejects the letter’s admonition and mocks its request that she “banish the


Bees, and live in the Hive by [her] self,” but her attendant, Jenny, clarifies the letter’s intent with a gloss that Amoranda cannot ignore: “’tis the Wasps he would have you discard, who come to sting and steal from those who have a better Title to the Sweets of your Favours” (p. 23). Jenny’s explanation derides the suitors by manipulating Amoranda’s own metaphor to transform “Bees,” lauded for their proverbial work ethic and social organization, into the far less praiseworthy “Wasps.”72 Moreover, because Jenny’s substitution of “Wasps” for the note’s “Locusts” puts these harm-ful insects in relation to each other, her commentary implies that bad suitors destroy not only the girl but also the land.

Unregulated and wild, Amoranda has yielded to the tempta-tions of “Youth, Beauty, Fortune, and flashy Wit,” and her home has consequently been overrun (p. 14). She does commit to ridding herself of some nuisances (as when she has Froth and Callid beaten by “sturdy Footmen, dress’d in mine and Jenny’s Clothes” for plotting to kidnap her), but her ire is raised by her professed suitors’ impudence, not by reflection upon the “greedy Desire of Flattery” that has left her exposed to insect intruders (pp. 26, 24, and 30). Her schemes are ad hoc attacks against others rather than a plan for self-management; it is mere chance that the housekeeper overhears Froth and Callid’s plan, which gives Amoranda the opportunity to counter it (p. 23). This reliance on luck diminishes when her uncle’s representative inserts himself, his “Crab-tree Cudgel,” and his “constant Care” into the house-hold (pp. 32 and 33). Formator ends up executing Amoranda’s plan to bludgeon Froth and Callid into submission. But her use of Formator’s brute strength suggests that his ability to get things done has usurped her own, and the narrator, who ascribes agency not to Amoranda but to Formator, seems to agree: “He had now pretty well cleared the House of the Caterpillars that infested in it” (p. 33). Transforming the coquette begins with Formator’s work of beating away potential threats that, like bugs, would “destroy,” “devour,” and “infect” whatever is valuable in the countryside.73

By analogy, Amoranda’s reformation becomes a georgic endeavor; each improvement made to her person corresponds figuratively to an economic improvement in her fortune. If, as Rachel Crawford argues, nation building and the georgic ideal of domestic improvement complement one another, then Forma-tor’s eradication of swarming parasites from the estate is akin to expanding the nation’s productivity.74 Locally, Formator sets himself against the insects as an agent of the absent uncle from whom unfit suitors seek to steal, not purchase, wealth. But he


also stands in for any middleman who secures the transfer of urban wealth to the country by guarding the nation’s domestic or inland trade against gentlemen whose economic motives chal-lenge those of merchants; as Froth and Callid admit, “Amoranda is not the Prize we seek after, it is her Fortune we want” (p. 20). Under Formator’s careful intervention, protecting Amoranda’s home comes to signify the protection of national commerce.75

In keeping with a tradition of resenting middlemen, Amoranda at times takes umbrage at Formator’s interference, yet eventually she must admit that his authority is legitimately familial. She con-siders that “she had a Father and Mother to please in the Person of her Uncle, and he such a one as made up the Loss of both to her,” and her uncle’s letter introducing Formator instructs her to “let him in my stead interest himself in all your Affairs” (pp. 24–5). Through a series of substitutions, Formator acts in loco parentis, and the middleman, already assigned to mediate between Traf-fick and his niece’s suitors, gradually becomes an intermediary between Amoranda and herself: “[T]he truth is, we foolish Girls are not to be trusted with our-selves, and he has taught me to believe we are the worst Guardians we can possibly have” (p. 52). No longer an outsider, Formator has been given control by both uncle and niece of the family’s land and fortune as they rest in the person of Amoranda. At the same time, he remains a visitor who, at the novel’s end, is married at (and to) the country estate yet transitions smoothly with his new wife to London, where, the narrator assures us, “the Reader, if he has any Business with them, may find them” (p. 84). Even as Alanthus, he can still hold together the nation as a middleman facilitating transportation and communication between country and city.

VI

I move, that this Gentleman [Factor] may be expell’d.—John Blanch, The Beaux Merchant76

The careful plotting of Davys’s novel makes this ending in domestic bliss both expected and desired; in a way, the ending finalizes the redemption of the middleman by turning the novel itself into a mediating form. The story of how Amoranda’s wishes are aligned with her uncle’s is also the story of how readers come to accept her prearranged marriage to the gentleman middle-man. Moments of resistance—for example, when Lord Lofty and


Amoranda object to having their lives plotted—are minimized as narrative maneuvers lead these characters to want what the novel gives them (Altemira and Alanthus, respectively [pp. 21–2, 46, 25, 73, and 78]). Each character’s voluntary submission to plotting encourages readers to reconcile emergent ideals of freedom, af-fection, and commerce with older norms of patriarchal authority that the middleman’s work supports.

Nonetheless, as the headings to each section have so far dem-onstrated, skepticism of middlemen and rhetoric calling for them to “be expell’d” was extensive. It would be naive to think that a novel that, as I have argued, appears committed to reconciling readers to the necessity of economic intermediaries would be able to free itself entirely from the widespread antipathy felt toward them. To conclude, I bring attention to this cultural distrust of the middleman that persists even as his reputation appears secured. As it turns out, a critique of the middleman’s methods rests in the same women whom he manipulates to achieve his economic triumph.

The subtle undermining of the middleman arises from the way in which Amoranda’s joy at expanding her family depends upon the retreat of her cousin and friend, Maria. Soon after Alanthus reveals his desire to court Amoranda, Maria comes to visit, and the two women unknowingly fall in love with the same man. Ma-ria, who claims to be “neither young enough nor old enough to be in Love,” becomes enamored of Formator but not Alanthus, a distinction maintained by the former’s false beard (p. 72). One night, a fire in the stables alarms the household, causing Formator to rush to Amoranda’s room but forget his beard; consequently, she is astonished when “[m]y Lord Alanthus” appears (p. 77). The strange coincidence of Alanthus’s arrival and Formator’s absence leads Maria (who has been present the whole time) to suspect that the two personae are the same man but for a “filthy Beard” (p. 77). She then sneaks away to retrieve the evidence for what she suspects: “Maria [came] laughing in with Formator’s Beard dangling at her fingers ends: Here, Madam, said she, Formator has cast his Skin, and left it me for a Legacy” (pp. 77–8). With the masquerade ended, Alanthus finally explains himself and shows Amoranda the letter from Traffick confirming their friendship. Maria, it would seem, has furthered her cousin’s marriage plot and should now step aside.

Yet she actually delays the wedding with a curious refusal to let go of the beard, and her turns of phrase betray some bitter-ness regarding her role in the plot’s endgame. She smilingly asks


Alanthus if he would “be pleas’d to oblige me with that engaging Beard” but calls it “a Legacy,” which suggests that she has re-signed herself to the death of the older identity she cherished (p. 81). By taking the beard, Maria embraces a fiction of sorrowful widowhood that belies her earlier assertion of happy maidenhood. In place of desire, Maria has a neutered beard, an object bereft of manhood that she can take back “into [her] own Country” and dishearteningly substitute for the original “grey Beard,” Formator (p. 81). Her laughter hides an unspoken loss that she jokes away by hoping to someday experience the language, but not the heart, of love: “I am resolv’d to … pick up some sweet Swain, to say a few of those fine things to me” (p. 81). This unknown, future man will have no substance of his own. Composed only of the fine words she has already heard Alanthus speak to her rival, this man will never live up to Maria’s fantasy. Even to approach her vision of love, she must beg the beard from Alanthus so that she might “clap it on [the Swain’s] face, and fancy him Formator” (p. 81). Alanthus gallantly fulfills her wish, but not without reminding her whom the beard has truly served: “[M]ay it contribute as much towards your Happiness, as it has done towards mine” (p. 81). His joy and hers are mutually exclusive because of Amoranda, and his words reveal to these women and to the novel’s readers that the middleman has always had his own preferences, even while pursuing his merchant’s goals.

Maria’s sudden entrance and quick exit reflect the artificial-ity of the plotting that brings respectability to the middleman. Amoranda and Alanthus’s happiness, complete with a returning uncle “full of raptures and tender sentiments” for his niece and “no less … transport[ed]” by the sight of his future nephew-in-law, is contingent on buying another woman off with a “filthy beard” and the promise of old maidhood spent away from a cousin she was inclined “to spend [her] whole Life with” (pp. 82–3 and 72). Maria’s ambivalent attitude toward her lot recalls the alienated families and broken companionships that Perry identifies as the corollary of privatized or affectionate marriages.77 And as a victim of merchant men’s secret motives and disguises, Maria testifies to the eighteenth-century distrust and resentment of middlemen that Davys’s novel cannot entirely expunge. In the end, Maria’s observation that Formator has “cast his Skin” like a serpent car-ries sinister implications for the conclusion of the novel.

Blakey Vermeule has noted that eighteenth-century readers were drawn to exposure, to knowing something by “opening it up, laying it bare, flushing it out, uncovering it, stripping it down.”78


At its conclusion, Davys’s novel is entirely about exposure—of Formator’s identity, his assignment, and his motives. In fact, his success depends upon his exposure; only as Alanthus can he maximize his profits. But the novel, especially in its treatment of Maria, also exposes its own willingness to punish women, which is in keeping with the widespread “Juvenalian misogyny [that] drove the culture’s discussion about women.”79 Indeed, the women suffer far more from having their desires and missteps exposed than Alanthus does. The coquette’s playfulness introduces her to kidnappers and rapists, while the middleman’s duplicity brings him a bride and a clean slate, for Maria’s removal of the evidence—Formator’s beard—ensures that the propriety of his disguise will not be overly interrogated. Furthermore, Formator’s declaration of honesty, authenticity, and affection for his bride alleviates the anxiety potentially produced by exposing the middleman as a fraud: “[A]s we are now bare-faced … we have determin’d to make each other happy” (p. 83–4). This inclusive “we” absorbs Amoranda into a new companionship, exposed for the world to approve, that his mediation and the sacrifice of Maria make possible.

Nevertheless, this absorption is not complete, as Amoranda demonstrates when, upon uncovering Formator’s months-long deception, she expresses apprehension that this undisguised gentleman might not be an approved lover. She had, after all, received him from her uncle “as a Guardian, not as a Lover,” and he might have “dexterously deceive[d]” her uncle, just as he did her (p. 78). She worries that “such a gross Imposition as this [the possibility that he conned his way into her home] might prove, would not only ruin my Fortune, but call my sense in question too” (p. 78). Invoking her wealth and powers of perception as possible victims, Amoranda raises the fear that a middleman might always be acting, in Hénaff’s words, as “a parasite between producers and consumers” rather than as the provider of “a service to his fellow citizens.”80 Alanthus immediately assuages her worry by handing her the contract letter from her uncle that confirms his true identity. When Uncle Traffick arrives soon after the revela-tion, he explicitly relieves Alanthus of his responsibilities as the agent—“But how comes it my Lord … that you are still Forma-tor?”—so that Alanthus might fully become the lover (p. 83). But Amoranda’s disquiet lingers—is not the middleman only retiring in order to receive the wealth that he professed to be protecting but not aspiring after? Is not his love part of a financial transaction that equates the ideal of companionate marriage, the “Nuptials solemniz’d that afternoon,” with profit (p. 84)? If the plot ends by


lauding a social order that the middleman made possible, it can-not completely silence women’s voices skeptical of an economic order based upon authorized, masculine deception. To lament Amoranda’s loss of self-determination is to confirm one’s own resentment of how the contested practices of early capitalism gained legitimacy in part from tales of women training their desires to match those of the market. That Davys could write so astutely about these matters exposes the irony behind her opening claim to be writing about “Love” only because “all Trade … [is] foreign to my Understanding” (p. 11). One wonders how any contemporary could walk away believing the two might be separated.

NOTES

I would like to give special thanks to Chloe Wigston-Smith, Marta Kvande, Michelle Sizemore, Jill Rappoport, and David Sigler for their insightful com-ments on early drafts of this article.

1 Mary Davys, The Reform’d Coquet; or Memoirs of Amoranda, Familiar Let-ters betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady, and The Accomplish’d Rake, or Modern Fine Gentleman, ed. Martha F. Bowden (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1999). Subsequent references to The Reform’d Coquet are from this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text and notes by page number. For treatments of credit and money in literature by Davys’s contemporaries, see Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998); Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994); James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1996); and Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998). Martha Bowden explores Davys’s uncertain income stream, but she elaborates mainly on the economic character of Davys’s prefaces, not her novels (“Mary Davys: Self-Presentation and the Woman Writer’s Reputation in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Women’s Writing 3, 1 [1996]: 17–33).

2 It is worth noting that testaments to virtuous or educational content seem to be more common than statements of financial distress in prefaces by contemporary female writers (for instance, Penelope Aubin, Eliza Haywood, Jane Barker, and Elizabeth Rowe). Penelope Aubin hints in her preface to The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil that she hopes her work sells well (The Strange Adventures of the Count “de Vinevil” and His Family. Being an Account of What Happen’d to Them Whilst They Resided at “Constantinople.” [London: Printed for E. Bell, J. Darby, A. Bettesworth, F. Fayram, J. Pember-ton, J. Hooke, C. Rivington, F. Clay, J. Batley, and E. Symon, 1721], pp. 5–8). But it is two decades later that Sara Fielding, like Davys, explicitly refers to the “Distress in her Circumstances” as a reason for writing The Adventures of David Simple (“Advertisement to the Reader,” in The Adventures of David


Simple: Containing an Account of His Travels through the Cities of “London” and “Westminster,” in the Search of a Real Friend, 2 vols. [London: printed for A. Millar, 1744], 1:iv). Much earlier, Aphra Behn embraced the literary marketplace, but by mixing the financial prospects of authorship with those of prostitution, she did little to improve the reputation of profit seeking (see Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Martketplace, 1670–1820 [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994], pp. 1–48).

3 For the primarily commercial imperialism of Britain’s early empire, see P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 60–102.

4 Tiffany Potter, “‘Decorous Disruption’: The Cultural Voice of Mary Davys,” in Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in Their Lives, Work, and Culture, ed. Linda V. Troost, 7 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 2001), 1:63–93, 75. In contrast, Jane Spencer writes that “[in Davy’s novel] the heroine must find an honest man, submit to his authority, and gain his protection” (The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986], p. 147). Janet Todd takes a similar view of the novel (The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800 [New York: Co-lumbia Univ. Press, 1989], p. 50). In contrast, Mary Anne Schofield finds a general tendency in Davy’s “female-centered texts” to strip “the disguise from the romance fiction” to “get at the true female self” (Masking and Unmask-ing the Female Mind: Disguising Romances in Feminine Fiction, 1713–1799 [Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1990], p. 82). Other notable studies of Davys’s interest in female autonomy and attitude toward, in Lindy Riley’s words, “the patriarchal view of women” include Riley, “Mary Davys’s Satiric Novel Familiar Letters: Refusing Patriarchal Inscription of Women,” in Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, ed. James E. Gill (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1995), pp. 206–21, 208; Ros Bal-laster, “Women and the Rise of the Novel: Sexual Prescripts,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 197–216, 205; and Theresa Braunschneider, Our Coquettes: Capacious Desire in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2009), pp. 105–19.

5 Marcel Hénaff, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy, trans. Jean-Louis Morhange with the collaboration of Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2010), p. 70. For the outsider status of merchants in Indo-European societies, see Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), pp. 113–8. For the unsavory association of merchants with profit and financial debt, see David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2011), pp. 196, 237–42, and 286–90.

6 John Blanch, The Beaux Merchant: A Comedy (London: Printed for R. and J. Bonwick 1714), p. 43; ECCO ESTC (2d edn.) T107485.

7 While there were differences among these titles, they can all be grouped together as middlemen. David Hancock mentions that “factor” and “agent” were synonyms only in Scotland (Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995], p. 124n11). Nevertheless, the two appear


together (along with servant) numerous times in London publications, and it is sometimes unclear whether the terms are in series or apposition. Ex-amples include Richard Hayes, The Negociator’s Magazine of Monies “and” Exchanges (London: Printed for W. Meadows, 1730), pp. 14, 17, 18, 46–7, and 73; Samuel Forster, A Digest of All the Laws Relating to the Customs, to Trade, and Navigation; with a Short Historical Dissertation Concerning the Nature, Extend, and Method of Collection of the Ancient Revenue of the Crown (London: Eliz. and R. Nutt and R. Gosling, 1727), p. 148; ECCO ESTC (2d edn.) T139479; Edward Hatton, The Merchant’s Magazine: Or, Trades-Man’s Treasury, 2d edn. (London: J. Heptinstall, 1697), pp. 208 and 212; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) H1148; and, especially, Giles Jacob, Lex Mercatoria: Or, the “Merchant’s Companion” (London: Eliz. Nutt and R. Gosling, 1718); ECCO ESTC (2d edn.) N019411. Jacob writes, “A Factor is a Merchant’s Agent re-siding beyond the Seas, or in any remote Part; and is constituted either by Letter, or Power of Attorney” (p. 151).

8 Ray Westerfield, Middlemen in English Business: Particularly between 1660 and 1760 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1915), p. 120. The middle-man’s economic importance cannot be overstated. As Westerfield writes, “The introduction of the middleman into economic life had a most profound influence in the social history of mankind. Instead of local self-sufficiency and separation, a broad economic interdependence and community of interests arose” (pp. 128–9). While the merchant was the actual middleman, various terms for his representatives encompassed the same idea of intermediation; factor, broker, and agent appeared most often in eighteenth-century writing (p. 354). The sense of brokering or mediating remains consistently present and is the core idea that holds these terms together.

9 E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Essential E. P. Thompson (New York: The New Press, 2001), pp. 316–77, 322, 327; Neil McKendrick, “Commercialization and the Economy,” in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercializa-tion of Eighteenth-Century England, by McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (London: Europa Publications Limited, 1982), pp. 9–194, 133–4; and Margaret Schabas, “Market Contracts in the Age of Hume,” in Higgling: Transactors and their Markets in the History of Economics, ed. Neil De Marchi and Mary S. Morgan, Annual Supplement to History of Political Economy 26 (Durham NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 117–34, 121–2, 125. See also Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 1998), pp. 35–59, for a discussion of local markets that depended upon personal reputation as distinct from national trade carried on by “middlemen … enmeshed in contracts on a national scale” (p. 50).

10 Westerfield, p. 399. Hénaff traces this poor reputation back as far as classical Greece: “Wherever [in the history of the West] merchants appeared, they aroused the same type of mistrust regarding the legitimacy of their profit and generated reactions of exclusion commensurate with this suspicion” (p. 75). W. D. Moriarty, focusing on business after the eighteenth century, identifies this bias against middlemen with Adam Smith’s appreciation for economic products over economic services (The Economics of Marketing and Advertising [New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1923], pp. 305–6).


11 Westerfield, p. 346.12 This responsibility was explicitly the job of factors, whose “function is

to effect exchanges of commodities by bringing buyer and seller together,” although brokers, agents, or jobbers could serve the same function (Wester-field, p. 152). See also Perry Gauci, Emporium of the World: The Merchants of London, 1660–1800 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), p. 82.

13 Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, in Familiar Letters: Directing Him in All the Several Parts and Progressions of Trade (London: Printed for Charles Rivington, 1726), p. 4; ECCO ESTC (2d edn.) T071959. Janet Blackman has discussed how important and problematic distribution continued to be to the British economy (especially its agricultural sector) well into the nineteenth century (“The Food Supply of an Industrial Town: A Study of Sheffield’s Public Markets, 1780–1900,” Business History 5, 2 [June 1963]: 83–97, 96). Her analysis also highlights how eager producers were to “short circuit the middleman” (p. 89).

14 Defoe, Complete English Tradesman, pp. 3–4.15 Defoe, “Saturday, February 23,” A Review of the State of the English

Nation 3, 24 (23 February 1706): 93–6, 94. 16 Defoe, “Tuesday, January 25,” A Review of the State of the British Na-

tion 5, 130 (25 January 1709): 517–20, 519.17 Ibid.18 Georg Simmel provides the classic discussion of money’s association

with impersonal relations that have both social advantages and disadvan-tages (The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby [Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, 1978], especially pp. 82, 321–6, and 427–30). Davys seems to have been very interested in the interdependence of credit and reputation. See Leslie Richardson, “‘Who Shall Restore My Lost Credit?’: Rape, Reputation, and the Marriage Market,” SECC 32 (2003): 19–44.

19 Hancock, p. 281.20 John Locke, Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering

of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money. In a Letter to a Member of Parlia-ment (London: Printed for Awnsham and John Churchill, 1692), pp. 41 and 119; and Blanch, Beaux Merchant, p. 42.

21 Blanch, Beaux Merchant, p. 43.22 Blanch, dedication to Beaux Merchant, sig. A2r. 23 Schabas, p. 122; McKendrick, p. 133; and E. P. Thompson, pp. 322

and 327. 24 An unscrupulous or simply incompetent agent could be financially

disastrous for a merchant, as Jacob noted in 1718: “[I]f a Factor shall buy Goods on Account of the Principal, where he is us’d so to do, the Contract of the Factor shall oblige the Principal to a Performance of the Bargain” (p. 153). According to Julian Hoppit, middlemen were so vital to “production and distribution” that they “were often known as merchant manufacturers” (Risk and Failure in English Business, 1700–1800 [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987], p. 6).

25 Richard Allestree, The Gentleman’s Calling (London: R. Norton, 1662), p. 109; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) A1117. Allestree’s text was reprinted well into the eighteenth century.


26 For instance, depictions of Lady Credit during this period are rife with “a traditional antifeminist rhetoric of inconstancy” as well as other unflattering attitudes toward women (Terry Mulcaire, “Public Credit; Or, The Feminiza-tion of Virtue in the Marketplace,” PMLA 114, 5 [October 1999]: 1029–42, 1031). See also Paula Backscheider, “Defoe’s Lady Credit,” HLQ 44, 2 (Spring 1981): 89–100; and John O’Brien, “The Character of Credit: Defoe’s ‘Lady Credit,’ The Fortunate Mistress, and the Resources of Inconsistency in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain,” ELH 63, 3 (Fall 1996): 603–31. For overviews of the economic transformations that occurred during this period, see P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975); and Pocock, Virtue, Com-merce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985).

27 Ingrassia, p. 30. For Haywood’s interest in commerce, especially as it relates to paper credit, see Ingrassia, pp. 77–103. Peter Earle also em-phasizes the importance of women to London investment markets in the early eighteenth century (The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society, and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989], p. 173).

28 Laura Mandell, Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1999), p. 38; Lisa Freeman, “Tragic Flaws: Genre and Ideology in Lillo’s London Merchant,” SAQ 98, 3 (Summer 1999): 539–61; Thomas Otway, The Orphan: Or, the Un-happy Marriage: A Tragedy, as It Is Acted at His Royal Highness the Duke’s Theatre (London: Printed for R. Bentley and M. Magnes, 1680); EEBO Wing (2d edn.) O552; and George Lillo, The “London” Merchant: Or, the History of “George Barnwell.” As It Is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in “Drury-Lane.” By His Majesty’s Servants (London: Printed for J. Gray, 1731): ECCO ESTC (2d edn.) T041160.

29 Laura Brown, The Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), p. 134. In a similar vein, Ingrassia notes that in the Dunciad, “Pope capitalizes on the recognized currency” of Haywood and exploits her “authorial person for his own gain” (p. 77).

30 Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2011), pp. 33–65, 34 and 63. Graeber goes so far as to place the exchange, enslavement, and sexualization of women at the origins of human economies of debt, credit, and money (pp. 127–90).

31 Whether Davys meant her novel to have elements of misogyny is of course impossible to know; what matters is that she engages with economics and marriage in ways that make it impossible for her novel to avoid these elements. For example, Traffick’s invisible control of the narrative bears an interesting relationship to what Katherine Binhammer calls the “misogyny of the forced marriage plot” in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. As Binhammer puts it, Clarissa’s “attempt … to plot her own story, fails miserably” (“Know-ing Love: The Epistemology of Clarissa,” ELH 74, 4 [Winter 2007]: 859–79,


871). In the case of The Reform’d Coquet, Amoranda’s failure is not knowing that she is not plotting her story at all.

32 Jonathan Swift, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” The Basic Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson (New York: Modern Library, 2002), pp. 869–73. Lillo, The London Merchant, p. 67.

33 Such recognition scenes typically depend upon preceding hints of true nobility or gentility that belie the appearance of low origins, which the character ultimately gets to jettison. A classic example is Henry Fielding’s description in Joseph Andrews of the title character’s elegance and air of nobility that he exudes even as a servant (Fielding, “Joseph Andrews” and “Shamela,” ed. Thomas Keymer [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008], pp. 18, 20, and 33). This portrayal is exemplary of Fielding’s treatment of character, in which, as Lynch notes, “nothing is ever lost” or, I might add, was ever there to begin with (p. 283n40). See also John S. Coolidge, “Fielding and ‘Conservation of Character,’” MP 57, 4 (May 1960): 245–59; Jill Campbell, “‘The Exact Picture of His Mother’: Recognizing Joseph Andrews,” ELH 55, 3 (Autumn 1988): 643–64; Scott Black, “Anachronism and the Uses of Form in Joseph Andrews,” Novel 38, 2–3 (Spring–Summer 2005): 147–64; and Patricia Meyer Spacks, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 59–91.

34 William Congreve, Incognita: Or, Love and Duty Reconcil’d: A Novel (London: Printed for Peter Buck, 1692).

35 Congreve, p. 127.36 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), p.

30. Žižek’s analysis of how “social-ideological fantasy” constructs “a society which is not split by an antagonistic division” is also highly relevant to the alliance between mercantile and aristocratic interests in The Reform’d Coquet (p. 142). See pp. 139–44 for the full analysis.

37 Blanch, Beaux Merchant, p. 46.38 Blanch continues to attack middlemen in The Naked Truth, in an Essay

upon Trade: With Some Proposals for Bringing the Balance on Our Side, Humbly Offered to the Parliament (London, 1696), p. 11; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) N86; and in “Speculum Commercii”: Or, the History of Our Golden Fleece (London: Printed for R. and J. Bonwick, 1716), p. 76; ECCO ESTC (2d edn.) N046806.

39 Examples of this use of “Bearer” include William Forbes, A Methodical Treatise Concerning Bills of Exchange (Edinburgh: 1703), p. 9; John Hill, The Exact Dealer Refined: Being a Useful “Companion” for All “Traders,” 6th edn. (London: Printed for H. Rhodes, 1706), pp. 24 and image 179; ECCO ESTC T122551; and The Law of Securities. Being a Methodical Treatise of All the Laws and Statutes Relating to Bills Obligatory, Bonds and Conditions, Judg-ments, Recognizances, Statutes, Mortgages, Securities Real and Persona, Col-lateral Securities, and All Manner of Engagements for Money (London: Eliz. and R. Nutt and R. Gosling, 1722), pp. 9 and 16; ECCO ESTC (2d edn.) N010428.

40 Forbes, p. 8.41 Ibid.42 Forbes, p. 12.43 Hatton, p. 208.44 See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–

1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 88. For the continuing importance


of economic factors on eighteenth-century marriage, also see Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300–1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 256–8.

45 As Leslie Richardson puts it, “[W]ho would trust a fallen woman to be the vessel for the transmission of his property?” (p. 24).

46 For the devaluing of fallen women, even when they have been raped, see Leslie Richardson, pp. 22–5 and 36.

47 Paula R. Backscheider, “‘I Died for Love’: Esteem in Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women,” Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens OH: Ohio Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 152–68, 152.

48 Hatton, p. 208.49 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the

English Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 33 and 9.50 For critical assessments of Davys’s novel that similarly highlight For-

mator’s agency but do not concentrate on how that agency is formulated, see Jerry C. Beasley, “Politics and Moral Idealism: The Achievement of Some Early Woman Novelists,” in Fetter’d or Free?, pp. 216–36, 231; and Todd, p. 50.

51 W. Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce During the Early and Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1890), p. 235.

52 Braunschneider, p. 105. 53 Katherine Sobba Green has suggested that “heroine-centered novels of

courtship” developed and flourished as a subgenre between 1740 and 1820 and that one of their defining characteristics was their focus on “women [who], no longer merely unwilling victims, became heroines with significant, though modest, prerogatives of choice and action” (The Courtship Novel 1740–1820: A Feminized Genre [Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1991], p. 2). Whether or not we follow Green’s literary history, the economic interpretation I am proposing for The Reform’d Coquet distinguishes the novel from the tradition that Green describes by reducing courtship to a supportive role in another narrative that restricts Amoranda’s agency.

54 Stone, pp. 8 and 390–1. Margaret Hunt sees it as likely that “mar-rying for love” was becoming more common at this time, and even if she is right that this change might only be “a real trend in aristocratic families,” her point would still apply to Davys’s upper-class characters (The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996], p. 94). However, Macfarlane asserts that romantic love and ideas of companionship are found in Western marriage long before the seventeenth century (pp. 157–9 and 206) and that parental will and economic factors remained powerful (if not legally binding) forces in choosing a spouse well into the eighteenth century (pp. 128, 256, 262, and 290). At the very least, the rhetoric supporting marriages based on affective individualism increased during the eighteenth century.

55 Christopher Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998), p. 15.

56 Potter, p. 75.57 Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem

of Resistance, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), p. 9.58 OED, 3d edn., s.v. “provision,” 4a and b.


59 Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 196–7.

60 An Essay to Prove, that Regrators, Engrossers, Forestallers, Hawkers, and Jobbers of Corn, Cattle, and Other Marketable Goods, Provisions, and Merchandizes, Are Destructive of Trade, Oppressive to the Poor, and a Com-mon Nuisance to the Kingdom in General (London: Printed for James Roberts, 1718), p. 17; ECCO ESTC (2d edn.) T056726.

61 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), p. 49.

62 See OED, 3d edn., s.v. “interloper,” 1a and b. 63 Vivienne Brown, “Higgling: The Language of Markets in Economic Dis-

course,” in Higgling: Transactors and Their Markets, pp. 66–93, 66.64 Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern

Britain, New Economic History of Britain (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), p. 174.

65 Davys possibly had firsthand experience with the corruptibility of the countryside as a young Irishwoman who might have been familiar with the almost tyrannical practices of Irish middlemen. Unfortunately, we know too little about her biography to be certain of this. For the middleman in Ireland and the problem of absentee landlords, see George O’Brien, The Economic History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London: Maunsel and Company, 1918), pp. 67, 84, and 125.

66 Williams, p. 54.67 Edward Laurence, The Duty of a Steward “to His” Lord. Represented

under Several “Plain” and “Distinct” Articles; wherein May Be Seen the Indirect Practices of Several Stewards, Tending to Lessen, and the Several Methods Likely to Improve Their Lords Estates (London: Printed for John Shuckburgh, 1727), p. 16; ECCO ESTC (2d edn.) T141258.

68 The mobility of tradespeople engaged in mediation between producers and consumers could certainly be used against them: “[Ingrossers, Forestall-ers, Jobbers, etc.] are a Vagabond Sort of People, without any certain Abode or Habitation … They have the Mark of Cain, and like him wander from Place to Place, driving an Interloping Trade between Fair Dealer and the Honest Consumer … they deal with the former upon Credit, and the latter for ready Money, and so make the Difference their Livelihood” (An Essay to Prove, p. 12).

69 OED, 3d edn., s.v. “forestall,” 2b.70 George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, The Lady’s New-Years Gift: Or, Advice

to a Daughter (London: Randal Taylor, 1688), pp. 134–47; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) H304. Savile specifically attacks the affectation of virtue and beauty which, when discovered, leads a man to cease “to worship that as a Goddess, which he seeth is only an artificial Shrine, moved by Wheels and Springs to delude him” (p. 146). It is notable, however, that Savile’s defense of a woman’s right to “Pride which leadeth to a good End” leaves room for Amoranda’s pride in her own abilities, which Formator/Alanthus manipulates but does not actively undermine (p. 153). Formator, for example, at one point applauds her “just and generous Design” and is willing to “be [her] Assistant to the utmost of [his] power” (p. 44).

71 Using the term economy to refer to national market activity is, of course, anachronistic when applied to Davys’s novel, yet I believe that the


importance of markets, exchange, and management to The Reform’d Coquet makes the term an acceptable shorthand here.

72 Wasps, unlike bees, were not typically seen as agriculturally beneficial but instead were associated with theft and parasitism. Charles Butler, for instance, describes how “the Wasps and robbing Bees will be stealing betimes, before the true Bees are stirring” and notes that “the Wasps prey upon the dead Carcasses [of bees] like Vultures” (The Feminine Monarchy; or the History of Bees; Shewing Their Admirable Nature and Property, Their Generation and Colony, Their Government, Loyalty, Art, Industry, Enemies, Wars, Magnanim-ity, &c. Together, with the Right Ordering of Them From Time to Time, and the Sweet Profit Arising Thereof … To which is Added Some Observations of Silk Worms, and How to Manage and Keep Them to Advantage, Never Before Made Publick [London: A. Baldwin, 1704], pp. 46 and 116; ECCO ESTC [2d edn.] T144308). For the “appreciative image” of bees in the early eighteenth century, see Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 3–6.

73 John Mortimer, The Whole Art of Husbandry: Or, the Way of “Manag-ing” and “Improving” of Land. Being a Full Collection of What Hath Been Writ, Either by Ancient or Modern Authors: With Many Additions of New Experiments and Improvements, Not Treated of by Any Others. As Also, an Account of the Particular Sorts of Husbandry Used in Several Counties; with Proposals for Its Farther Improvement. To Which Is Added, the Country-man’s Kallendar, What He Is to Do Every Month in the Year (London: J. H. for H. Mortlock, 1707), pp. 253 and 394; ECCO ESTC (2d edn.) T072675.

74 Rachel Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 93–6.

75 Davys’s commitment to commercial activity and growth may be related to her likely support of Whig politics, some aspects of which are explicitly defended in her 1725 novel, Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady. See Alice Wakely, “Mary Davys and the Politics of Epistolary Form,” in “Cultures of Whiggism”: New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. David Womersley (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2005), pp. 257–67; and Martha Bowden, introduction to The Reform’d Coquet, pp. ix–xlvi, xxxv–vii. For the dramatic increase of England’s inland trade in the early eighteenth century, see Wrightson, pp. 245–8.

76 Blanch, Beaux Merchant, p. 41.77 Perry, pp. 196–7.78 Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Balti-

more: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2010), p. 109.79 Vermeule, p. 124.80 Hénaff, p. 86.

Middlemen and Marriage in Mary Davys's The Reform'd Coquet

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