Sophia Lee and the Genre Sérieux

Sophia Lee and the Genre Sérieuxjecs_209 37..48

P E T E R H Y N E S

Abstract: This article measures the influence of Denis Diderot’s theory of thegenre sérieux on English drama of the later eighteenth century, using SophiaLee’s The Chapter of Accidents as its principal test case. It concludes that, whileLee borrowed extensively for plot devices and character types, she did notadopt many of the innovations that in Diderot’s view constituted the heart ofhis programme of reform. A number of reasons for this neglect are suggested,foremost among them the practical demands of English stage production inthe 1780s.

Keywords: English literature, English drama, Sophie Lee, Denis Diderot,bourgeois drama, eighteenth-century drama, Anglo-French literary relations

It is well known that Denis Diderot’s innovative approach to theatre, withits emphasis on the genre sérieux, is one of the striking features of thedevelopment of drama in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Buildingon elements pioneered in the English sentimental tradition from Steele to Lilloand Moore, Diderot championed a drama that would work out subtleremotional shadings than the traditional laughter, pity and fear of the ancientdramatic system, that would replace the ‘humours’ characters of Molièrewith people whose fundamental orientation is to their ‘condition’ or place insociety, and that would break with the oratorical flavour of neo-classicalwriting by emphasising pantomime, gesture and the arrangement of peopleon stage. These notions were developed at length in theoretical writings, mostnotably the Entretiens sur le fils naturel (1757) and the Discours sur la poésiedramatique (1758), and exemplified in two important plays: Le Fils naturel(1757) and Le Père de famille (1758). Taken as a whole, this was an ambitiousprogramme of dramatic reform, undertaken by a prominent luminary whocould command a European audience for his ideas.1

But what was the practical impact of Diderot’s work on other writers,especially dramatists working abroad? Existing scholarship on the subjectsuggests an echo in France, where sentimental drama did take root, but notnecessarily along lines explicitly laid out by Diderot, and a major influencein Germany, where Gotthold Ephraim Lessing became an enthusiasticpromulgator and imitator.2 English writers had furnished explicit precedentsfor Diderot’s new approach, but what about the cross-channel reflux onemight expect in the aftermath of his work? To suggest an answer to this

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 33 No. 1 (2010)

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question I will look at The Chapter of Accidents, an avowed remake of Diderot’sPère de famille by the English novelist and playwright Sophia Lee. In discussingher play’s indebtedness to both the theory and the practice of the genresérieux, I will show how Lee borrows freely for plot and characterisation but,disappointingly perhaps, does not seem very interested in Diderot’s technicalinnovations or in his new aesthetics of the stage. I will review in detail thepoints of contact between her play and Diderot’s, outline the main areas ofdivergence and then speculate as to the reasons that may have induced Lee toavoid a wholehearted appropriation of her predecessor’s programme.

The Chapter of Accidents is a sentimental but brisk comedy first performed inAugust 1780 at the Haymarket theatre.The initial run lasted seventeen nights,and the play was regularly revived thereafter.3 Although the performancerecord suggests that this was a very successful piece, there has never beenmuch in the way of critical assessment. Ernest Bernbaum accorded the play aplace of honour in his history of English sentimental drama, claiming that ‘itmarks the final triumph of sentimental comedy’, but even a detailed historicalsurvey such as Richard Bevis’s volume for the Longman series omits anymention of Lee at all.4 Her reputation today rests on her groundbreaking workas a historical novelist and her contributions to the Gothic mode, while hercareer as playwright has remained very much in the shadows.5

The plot of The Chapter of Accidents revolves around a basic, and ratherunusual, sentimental point. The moral centre of the play is the redemption ofa technically ‘fallen’ woman (Cecilia) who is able after all to marry herseducer, the virtuous but not impeccable young Woodville. The play alsoincludes a complex array of subplots: Harcourt loves Sophia Mortimer,although her guardian, Lord Glenmore, has promised her to his own sonWoodville; the Governor plans to marry Woodville to his daughter, whom hehas brought up in total seclusion in Wales. He is unaware that Woodville’smistress is in fact his own child. Harcourt and Sophia conspire to bring Ceciliainto Glenmore’s home, hoping to rescue her from persecution; and Glenmoreand the Governor forcibly remove to Glenmore’s house a woman they thinkis Cecilia but who is really Cecilia’s maid. Vane, Lord Glenmore’s servant,clandestinely marries the maid under the mistaken impression that she isreally the Governor’s daughter. On top of all this, Glenmore meets Ceciliawhile she is at his house and, not knowing that she is his son’s mistress, fallsin love with her himself. Needless to say, the appropriate sets of lovers arecoupled at the end, and the appropriate family ties reaffirmed.

In assessing Lee’s debts to Diderot we should first of all take seriously whatshe says herself about the sources and inspirations for her play. The Prefaceto The Chapter of Accidents is in itself a remarkable document, much moresubstantial and original than the usual run of such introductory remarks. Init Lee explains how her starting point for The Chapter was a short story byJean-François Marmontel entitled Laurette. In this tale, first published in 1761,a country girl is led astray by an urban beau, moves with him to the city as hismistress but suffers enough remorse to break with her new lifestyle and

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© 2009 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

return to her father in the country. Her lover follows her there, protests hisgood intentions and proposes actual marriage.6 The somewhat daring themeof the redemption of a fallen woman may derive from the example set byRousseau in his Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), but Lee does not mention anythingfurther back than Marmontel’s tale. According to Lee’s account, Le Père defamille made its impact rather late in the process of composition: she hadapparently already written most of the piece but was charmed enough byDiderot’s character of the Commandeur D’Auvilé that she thought itworthwhile to include a version of him in The Chapter. He took shapeeventually as the Governor, a crusty Nabob with odd views on femaleeducation who fills much the same structural position as Diderot’s original.

Lee’s account in the Preface is straightforward, although difficult to assess.Her indebtedness to Diderot appears to be much greater than she is willing toadmit. It takes only a little sifting to realise that her plot, when stripped ofsome of its secondary detail, owes more to Le Père de famille than just theadoption of a character modelled on Diderot’s Commandeur. The two playsshare the fundamental premise of the virtuous young man in love with amysterious incognita (a motif that ultimately goes back to Terence’s Andria),the family conflict between father and uncle, the romantic subplot involvinga second young man attached to the father’s household and a woman alsobelonging to the family, the sequestration of the hero’s mistress in his ownfather’s house and the final revelation that the mistress is related by blood tothe obstructive uncle. None of these elements is to be found in Marmontel’stale. An efficient summary of Lee’s procedures here would be to say that shesuccessfully grafted Diderot’s plot about a young man’s love for a mysteriousstranger on to Marmontel’s theme of the redemption of a fallen girl.

There is, then, a lot of Diderot in The Chapter of Accidents. Lee borrowedheavily for her plot, and in committing to a basically serious, even tearful,emotional tone she showed both a general allegiance to the sentimentaltradition – both native and imported – and a particular attention to theflavour of her immediate sources. But the genre sérieux, as Diderot saw it, wasto involve much more than a set of plot possibilities and a general emphasis onvirtue and feeling. Accompanying these fundamental requirements was alist of proposed technical reforms that was intended to influence bothplaywrights and producers. For example, Diderot hoped to see less emphasison the traditional ‘humours’ characters of the stage and a new approach tocharacterisation based on social standing or even profession. These were the‘conditions’ of the Essai and the Discours. In Le Père de famille this doctrine isembodied in the character of M. D’Orbesson, the ‘père de famille’ of the title.Diderot includes scenes to show D’Orbesson’s kindness to his tenants andhis general probity, but throughout the play the accent is placed on hisrelationship with his children. His constant preoccupation with his son’sstrange behaviour and the apparently motiveless pining of his daughter keepsthe play alive from the beginning, and his last words on stage reflect thecentrality of the paternal theme: ‘Qu’il est cruel [...] qu’il est doux d’être

Sophia Lee and the Genre Sérieux 39


père!’7 This emphasis on fatherhood as an institution or ‘condition’ wasclearly deliberate: in the Entretiens appended to Le Fils naturel, Diderot has hischaracter Dorval exclaim that paternity is the great unsung theme of theeighteenth century, and that it is time dramatists rose to the challenge: ‘Lepère de famille! Quel sujet dans un siècle tel que le nôtre, ou il ne paraît pasqu’on ait la moindre idée de ce que c’est qu’un père de famille.’8 Anothermajor innovation was to be the substitution of tableaux for coups de théâtre – inmore mundane terms, a preference for static arrangements of characters onstage over surprising turns in the plot – and the adoption of the simultaneousscene where several conversations or items of stage business could be carriedon at once. Gesture and pantomime were to be used as much as possible, andthe verbose tendencies of French theatre held firmly in check. Finally, thetraditional tricky servants taken over from Roman comedy were to bedownplayed or eliminated altogether, as Diderot held that they spoiled themoral tone of the work.

How much of this ambitious programme is exemplified in Lee’s comedy?The answer is, very little. There is, it is true, an example of a tableau at thebeginning of Act III, where the family is seated together in an arrangementstrongly reminiscent of the corresponding scene in Diderot. The stagedirections read:

Miss Mortimer pouring out Coffee sends it to the Company; Captain Harcourtleans against a Pannel near her, sipping it; at a little Distance the Governor andWoodville playing at Backgammon, while Lord Glenmore leans over his Chair,thoughtfully observing the Behaviour of his Son, who loses merely to make hisUncle leave off. (CA, p.39)

This set piece evidently corresponds to the tric-trac scene in Le Père de famille,where the stage directions specify the arrangement of characters and theirdifferent occupations:

Sur le devant de la salle, on voit le Père de famille qui se promène à pas lents. Il ala tête baissée, les bras croisés, et l’air tout à fait pensif. – Un peu sur le fond, versla cheminée qui est à l’un des côtés de la salle, le Commandeur et sa nièce font unepartie de tric-trac. – Derrière le Commandeur, un peu plus près du feu, Germeuilest assis négligemment dans un fauteuil, un livre à la main. Il interrompt detemps en temps sa lecture, pour regarder tendrement Cécile, dans les momentsoù elle est occupée de son jeu, et où il ne peut en être aperçu. – Le Commandeurse doute de ce qui se passe derrière lui. Ce soupçon le tient dans une inquiétudequ’on remarque à ses mouvements. (Act I, scene i, stage direction)

(In the foreground one sees the Father slowly walking back and forth. His headis bowed, his arms crossed, his air thoughtful. A little to the rear, towards thefireplace that is on one side of the room, the Commandeur and his niece areplaying tric-trac. Behind the Commandeur, a little closer to the fire, Germeuil issprawled in a chair, a book in his hand. He interrupts his reading from time totime to glance tenderly at Cecile, at moments when she is preoccupied by the

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game and does not notice him. The Commandeur suspects what is going onbehind him. This suspicion imparts an uneasiness that is noticeable in hismovements.)

The tric-trac setting in Diderot, however, serves to launch a major example ofsimultaneous scene construction, as the ensuing dialogue cuts acrosscharacters and their different concerns: D’Orbesson sighs over his missingson, the Commandeur makes tart observations about Germeuil’s play as wellas his brother-in-law’s family problems and so on. In Lee’s backgammonscene there is a central conversational thread, but the secondary material iscovered in the traditional manner – in asides. There is no attempt to mix upthe presentation by having several lines of communication intersect andclash with one another.

Beyond this small and somewhat half-hearted item, then, there is little inThe Chapter to suggest deliberate compliance with Diderot’s new ideas. Butmore significant, perhaps, than her reluctance to adapt to Diderot’s theoryare the ways in which Lee apparently goes out of her way to flout it. Forexample, her treatment of fatherhood is quite different from Diderot’s.Diderot’s D’Orbesson suffers and complains, but does very little. His role is toexemplify the feelings of a father and so to demonstrate that fatherhood is a‘condition’. Far from dwelling on Lord Glenmore’s paternal emotions, incontrast, Lee gives him a very active role in the plot. He is instrumental in thescheme to kidnap Cecilia and keep her away from his son – an aspect of thestoryline that in Le Père de famille is handed over entirely to the Commandeur,whom Diderot aptly describes as the ‘machiniste’ of the piece.9 Furthermore,Lee deepens the intrigue by having Lord Glenmore fall in love with his son’smistress. Lee’s Glenmore and her Governor are both fathers, to be sure, butthe emphasis on their comparative strategies as parents (one believes in socialindulgence, the other in strict separation from the world) better reflects thesimilar framework of Molière’s Ecole des femmes than anything in Diderot.Interestingly enough, English adaptors in general seem to have been wary ofthe rather bland personality of D’Orbesson. This hesitation is even morepronounced in Charles Jenner’s earlier The Man of Family than in The Chapterof Accidents: Jenner’s Sir Orlando Vavasor is a full-blown humours charactercompletely wrapped up in his obsession with rank.10 It seems that ‘condition’was not enough, in the eyes of these English writers at least, to guarantee anykind of dramatic interest. The bare status of father needed enhancementby either greater activity in the plot or a more pronounced personalityindependent of the character’s social role.

One facet of The Chapter where the dismissal of Diderot is most glaringconcerns the use of servants. Lee plays up her servant characters formaximum comic effect, multiplying their number and their appearances wellbeyond the somewhat modest role they play in Le Père de famille. For example,one of her major plot developments turns on a case of mistaken identity:Cecilia, the mistress of young Woodville, is impersonated for a while by her



maid Bridget, with calamitous results. Lord Glenmore, thinking that Bridget isin fact his son’s beloved, arranges for her to be imprisoned in his house andeventually consents to marry her off to one of his own servants. The playopens with some repartee between the manservant Vane and a cook, and ActII begins with Bridget’s cheeky conversation with a melancholy Cecilia. Thesecond scene of Act II involves a long and ‘comical’ discussion between twoservants, replete with country dialect and oaths of the ‘Oddsbodlikins’ and‘Od rabbit it’ kind. Lord Glenmore is dependent on Vane for spying and otherforms of active service and complains in terms reminiscent of Diderot himselfabout how ‘this is the certain consequence of entrusting low people – and yetthere is no doing without them’ (CA, p.34). The Governor is followed aroundby a train of black servants, who are included mostly for the visuals. In fact,there are few eighteenth-century plays where servants – or ‘inferials’, asBridget puts it (CA, p.36) – figure quite as prominently as they do in TheChapter of Accidents. Part of this predominance is evidently designed toenliven the otherwise stuffy tone of the work, much in the fashion of RichardSteele, who brought in servants to carry the humour in his Conscious Lovers(1722). But whatever the rationale, Lee certainly departed from Diderot’sexample when she decided to use servant characters so freely.

It seems clear, then, that Lee’s recourse to Diderot was not prompted by anyinterest in bringing on wholesale dramatic reform or in conducting daringnew experiments. In The Chapter of Accidents there are few and perfunctorytableaux, there is little reflection on the ‘conditions’ and there is no discerniblyenhanced preference for gesture and pantomime over dialogue. Seriousaction and feeling are accompanied by large infusions of servant-based farce.In other words, this adaptation of a highly programmatic play maydemonstrate no more than that late eighteenth-century dramatists wereready to pillage any other work for its readily exploitable elements but notespecially ambitious to become partisans of a new dramaturgy. It remainsnow to speculate about the reasons that may have held Lee back.

A very evident reason concerns Lee’s access to the relevant theory. One ofthe difficulties facing her, assuming that she was at all interested in generalprinciples, is that Diderot’s views on the drama are embodied very imperfectlyin his own plays. Most of the original notions are fully expressed only in theperipheral commentaries, in the Entretiens and the Discours. Now Englishtranslations of the plays do not include the theoretical texts. Jenner’sadaptation of Le Père de famille features a polemical preface, but the polemichas nothing to do with the aesthetic of the genre sérieux; and the 1767

translation of Le Fils naturel (Dorval, or the Test of Virtue), while it includes thefull Preface from Diderot’s original publication, drops the extended Entretiensafter a mere half-page.11 Her own preface suggests that she did not readFrench, so it would have been hard for Lee to absorb the doctrine frompublished English sources. Furthermore, she makes very puzzling assertionsabout the version or versions of Le Père de famille that she did see. In herPreface she mentions that at one time a friend had lent her a translation but

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does not specify which one, and she claims that her second perusal was ofanother, unrelated version. It is practically impossible to infer which versionsthese may have been. There were only two adaptations available in print whenshe wrote The Chapter of Accidents: a version called The Father, printed by theKing’s Lynn publisher William Whittingham in 1770,12 and Charles Jenner’ssomewhat free remake of 1771 (The Man of Family, mentioned above). TheFamily Picture stays fairly close to the original, but it was not printed until1781.13 Possibly Lee’s proximity to theatrical life (her father was an actor)meant that she was aware of projects and manuscripts circulating amongtheatre people, projects that may never have reached either performance orpublication. This seems to be the case with a lost version prepared by CharlesMacklin – and rejected for the stage by Thomas Harris – and a version by anElizabeth Griffith mentioned by Diderot himself in his correspondence.14 Weare quite in the dark, then, as to the exact sources that Lee used. Whateverthey were, they were unlikely to have included the theoretical essays, and soher exposure to Diderot’s innovations would have to come mostly from herstudy of the play-texts alone.

Second, it is necessary to weigh the relative importance in The Chapter of theborrowings from Diderot and the basic inspiration culled from Marmontel.Lee’s account of her own composition process is clear on this point: she beganwith Marmontel and added the Diderot later on. This in itself does not meanthat Laurette contributed the fundamental theme of the play and that thematerial from Le Père de famille is mostly embroidery; it is common enough fora literary work to outgrow its initial inspirations, but here a supplementaryconsideration intervenes. The motif of the reclaimed mistress was in the lateeighteenth century a remarkably bold one. When Rousseau pioneered thenotion in La Nouvelle Héloïse, his readers responded with surprise.15 It is difficultto believe that either Marmontel or Lee would have adopted such explosivesubject matter with the express view of burying it under a mass of secondarydetails. Hence it seems reasonable to conclude that Lee’s thematic focus was onher moral point: that even a sexually experienced young woman can become avirtuous wife. Too much attention to Diderot’s prescriptions for a new theatrecould have clouded that point entirely.

Another point to consider is that some of the habits that Diderot kickedagainst were peculiar to French theatre, or at least more current in Frenchwriting than in English. For example, English writers of the eighteenth centuryhad indeed to deal with a powerful tradition of ‘humours’ drama, but the vogueof Jonson, although it provoked intense quarrels in the Restoration period, wasnot so restrictive as Diderot evidently felt the dominance of Molière to be onFrench drama of his time. The fight for ‘conditions’ would therefore be lesstopical in England than in France. Diderot’s complaints about excessivespeechifying may well have sounded strange to English readers accustomed toa less declamatory style. In more general terms, the lesser grip of neo-classicalprescription in England meant that attempts to get free would be lesscompelling or worthy of note. Besides, England was the original home of



sentimental theatre, and domestic precedents loomed large enough in thecontemporary literary consciousness for imports to be seen as secondary orignored outright. In other words, part of the reason for English incom-prehension (including, of course, Lee’s) may have been that Diderot’s Frenchcontext was in important ways alien to local conditions and local sensibilities.

The final reason for Lee’s indifference to the theory of the genre sérieuxconcerns playability, or at least what contemporary managers, actors andaudiences regarded as playability. This had already been an issue for Diderothimself. Neither of his experimental drames found an easy path to production:Le Fils naturel was performed privately soon after it was written, but notaccepted by the Comédie Française until 1771. Le Père de famille was in factproduced earlier, in February 1761, but even so there was a gap between thepublication of the play and its first performance. Furthermore, Diderot wasextremely unhappy with the way the actors at the Comédie Française had dealtwith his work, blaming their hostility and failure to adapt for the relative lackof success.16 The facts of publication before performance and of an uncertainsuccess on stage meant that these plays were already a form of closet drama.

Lee herself endured tremendous pressure to conform to accepted standardsof stageworthiness. In her Preface she tells the story of her struggles with thetheatrical establishment to get The Chapter of Accidents performed. At first, aswe have seen, the play was conceived as a dramatisation of Marmontel’sLaurette. When a friend lent her a translation of Le Père de famille, Lee addedthe character of the Governor (and a great deal besides, although she does notexplicitly mention this) and, after considerable revision, finished the piece asa three-act opera. She sent this version of the work anonymously to ThomasHarris, manager of the Haymarket theatre, who was impressed. At least, hewas impressed until he found out the identity of the author, upon which hebegan to make difficulties for Lee. Harris suggested eliminating from the playeverything connected with Le Père de famille (on the interesting grounds thatan adaptation of this play would not do well; he had already turned down aversion by Charles Macklin) and reworking the rest into a short, comicalafterpiece. Pressed by financial necessity, Lee complied, only to be told thatfurther cuts were in order: her four acts had to be reduced to two. At this pointLee decided not to bend any more and withdrew the play from consideration.Her luck began to change with the advent of George Colman as the newmanager of the Haymarket. She resubmitted her manuscript, and it wasaccepted. Colman then supervised a final series of revisions, including thedeletion of the songs and the addition of a fifth act.

This is a remarkable story in many ways. It certainly illustrates the courageand persistence of the author and highlights the enormous influenceexercised by managers of the eighteenth-century theatres. From my ownpoint of view, however, two facets of the saga stand out. First, the extremefluidity of Lee’s basic inspiration: her kernel could be amplified into a farce, anopera and a sentimental main piece. Cutting and stretching were feasiblemore or less on demand. In such circumstances a sceptic may well wonder if

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there really was a kernel, a specifiable core identity to the play rather than ageneral ambition to write something – anything? – and have it performed.Second, it is clear that playability was foremost in everyone’s mind, as they alltinkered with the successive versions of The Chapter. This was the case withLee herself: even before she ran into obstruction from Harris she wrote withan eye to the audience and to current fashions, infusing, for example, abroadly comic spirit into a basically serious framework. As she says in thePreface, ‘Sentiment was now exploded, and I therefore thought to diversify itwith humour’ (CA, p.iii). The contortions she went through to please Harris,and the much more pleasant business of collaborating with Colman, havetheir source in the same drive to shape the work in a way most acceptable toa London theatre audience in 1780.

It must not be forgotten, too, that as a woman dramatist Lee was in noposition to dictate terms to management. While the personal interest ofGarrick had made life a little easier for women writers in the 1770s, uponGarrick’s retirement a less favourable regime set in.17 Any writer worked at adisadvantage vis-à-vis the powerful theatre managers, and artistic integritywas a luxury for everyone. In this harsh climate it would, of course, be doublydifficult for a female dramatist to spearhead adventurous artistic reform.

Lee’s dilemma can be illustrated by the comparative example of an earlieradapter of Diderot: the sentimental parson Charles Jenner. Jenner’s The Manof Family pre-dates The Chapter of Accidents by a decade and, like Lee’s play, ismore a creative variation on Le Père de famille than a translation. Whileretaining the basic armature of the young hero’s love for a virtuous incognitaand the ensuing conflicts with his father, his uncle, his sister and his friend,Jenner adds a silly bourgeois wife to make trouble for the tender-heartedfather of the family and a new twist on the final recognition scene: Charlotte(the Sophie of the piece) is not a distant relative of Mr Solomon (theCommandeur) but actually his daughter. The most interesting aspect of thiswork, however, is not its fairly trite debts to Diderot’s example or its equallyunadventurous departures from precedent. In his dedication to Garrick,Jenner makes it clear that this is a closet drama, entirely unsuitable for thestage. Citing Diderot himself as his authority, he distinguishes two kinds ofplay – the satirical and the sentimental – and then laments that currentfashion has replaced both of these deserving types with what he calls ‘thecomedy of Stage-trick and Decoration’. Of this low form he says, ‘Itscharacteristic marks, with regard to the poet’s share in it, seem to be anintricate plot, a continued hurry and confusion of incident, a profusion ofbusiness and intrigue, detached scenes of flippant dialogue, and anuninteresting catastrophe, foreseen from the first opening of the business’(MF, p.iii-iv). Hence Jenner’s shyness about actually staging his play has moreto do with the supposed corruption of taste than with the inherentunplayability of his work. Shut off from actual performance, he resorts to thereader for consolation: ‘He therefore wishes his piece [...] to be introduced tothe closet alone; and judged according to its merit or demerit, by the cool and



unbiased reader’ (MF, p.v). There is no evidence, either, that The FamilyPicture was ever produced or even intended for production.

The examples of Lee’s experiences and Jenner’s suggest that the lateeighteenth-century English stage was less in thrall to the sentimental modethan previously received notions implied. Each of these writers felt thwartedin the attempt to bring a version of Diderot’s genre sérieux to the boards, withJenner abandoning all hope of production and Lee submitting to a great dealof discipline, both internal and external, before seeing something she wrotecarried over into performance. The picture generated here confirms RichardBevis’s general argument that the ‘laughing tradition’ did not die out aftermid-century and that action-packed, farcical entertainment still had a verylarge place in the repertoire.18 The chances of presenting a dramaticrevolution based on a new kind of serious writing would have been very poorin this environment.

In conclusion, the study of Diderot’s influence on late eighteenth-centuryEnglish theatre points to a very minor impact indeed. Sophia Lee was one of ahandful of translators and adaptors, and the complex process leading fromher reading of Le Père de famille to the performance and publication of TheChapter of Accidents demonstrates the tenuous hold that Diderot’s ideas hadon subsequent dramatic theory and practice in England. It is tempting tobelieve that the ambitious ideas of a leading Enlightenment figure would havefound a sympathetic audience and a troop of practical followers; instead, itlooks more as though the lines of affiliation leading from Diderot to thepresent day are more attenuated – the call of one individual sensibility toanother. In this sense the absorption of Diderot’s ideas by Lessing mustremain the exemplary case of productive influence as far as serious drama isconcerned. Sophia Lee, for her part, showed an acute practical sense whenshe borrowed from Le Père de famille; but she was a working dramatist, not adisciple. Her reputation must stand on her merits as a playwright and not onher role in disseminating another writer’s work.

NOTES1. General studies of sentimental drama include: Ernest Bernbaum, The Drama of Sensibility

(1915; repr. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1958); Félix Gaiffe, Le Drame en France au XVIII siècle(Paris: Armand Colin, 1910); Arthur Sherbo, English Sentimental Drama (East Lansing, MI:Michigan State University Press, 1957); Frank H. Ellis, Sentimental Comedy: Theory and Practice(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and, for the history of early eighteenth-centuryEnglish drama as a whole, Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the LateSeventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). Diderot’s work in drama and the spread ofhis European reputation are documented in Arthur Wilson, Diderot: The Testing Years (New York:Oxford University Press, 1957), and in P. N. Furbank, Diderot: A Critical Biography (London:Secker and Warburg, 1992); more specialised studies include Diana Guiragossian Carr, ‘Le Pèrede famille et sa descendance anglaise’, in Enlightenment Studies in Honour of Lester G. Crocker, ed.Alfred J. Bingham and Virgil W. Topazio (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1979), p.49-58; AiméGuedj, ‘Les Drames de Diderot’, DS 14 (1971), p.15-95; W. D. Howarth, ‘The Playwright asPreacher: Didacticism and Melodrama in the French Theatre of the Enlightenment’, Forum forModern Language Studies 14 (1978), p.97-115; Robert Niklaus, ‘La Portée des théoriesdramatiques de Diderot et ses relations théâtrales’, Romanic Review 54 (1963), p.1223-61;Samuel S. S. B. Taylor, ‘The Moral and Social Significance of Diderot’s drames’, Forum for Modern

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Language Studies 14 (1978), p.129-42; and Derek F. Connon, Innovation and Renewal: A Study ofthe Theatrical Works of Diderot, SVEC 258 (1989).

2. Diderot’s influence in Germany is documented in Roland Mortier, Diderot en Allemagne(Paris: PUF, 1954). For the reception of his dramatic theory in France, see Félix Gaiffe, Le Drameen France au XVIII siècle, and the thorough study by Anne-Marie Chouillet, ‘Dossier du Filsnaturel et du Père de famille’, SVEC 208 (1982), p.73-166. A biographical account is found inArthur Wilson’s Diderot: The Testing Years, especially Chapters 20 and 24.

3. My text is Sophia Lee, The Chapter of Accidents (London: Cadell, 1780). Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Gale. University of Saskatchewan, http://galenet.galegroup.com,accessed 15 August 2008. Subsequent references in the text are to this edition, abbreviated asCA. The performance history of the play is available in The London Stage, 1660-1800, Part V, vol.I, ed. Charles Beecher Hogan (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968).

4. Bernbaum, The Drama of Sensibility, p.265; Richard Bevis, English Drama: Restoration andEighteenth Century, 1660-1789 (London: Longman, 1988).

5. The Recess (1783-85) has recently been edited by April Alliston (Lexington: UniversityPress of Kentucky, 2000) and before that was reprinted with an introduction by DevendraP. Varma (New York: Arno, 1972). Critical commentary includes: Jane Spenser, The Rise ofthe Woman Novelist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); April Alliston, ‘The Value of a Literary Legacy:Retracing the Transmission of Value through Female Lines’, Yale Journal of Criticism 4 (1990),p.109- 7; Megan Lynn Isaac, ‘Sophia Lee and the Gothic of Female Community’, Studies in theNovel 28 (1996), p.200-18; and Janina Nordius, ‘A Tale of Other Places: Sophia Lee’s The Recessand Colonial Gothic’, Studies in the Novel 34 (2002), p.162-76.

6. Jean-François Marmontel, Laurette, in Oeuvres complettes (Paris: Née de la Rochelle, 1787-1806), vol. II.

7. Denis Diderot, Le Père de famille, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. X, ed. Jacques Chouillet andAnne-Marie Chouillet (Paris: Hermann, 1980), Act V, scene xii, p. 322.

8. Denis Diderot, Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel, in Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris:Garnier, 1988), p.154.

9. Denis Diderot, De la poésie dramatique, in Oeuvres esthétiques, p.208.10. Charles Jenner, The Man of Family: A Sentimental Comedy (London: Cadell, 1771).

Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Gale. University of Saskatchewan. http://galenet.galegroup.com, accessed 15 August 2008. Subsequent references in the text are to thisedition, abbreviated as MF.

11. Dorval, or, The Test of Virtue (London: Dodsley, 1767). Eighteenth-Century CollectionsOnline. Gale. University of Saskatchewan. http://galenet.galegroup.com, accessed 15 August2008.

12. The Father (King’s Lynn: Whittingham, 1771). I am grateful to the staff at the University ofEdinburgh library for providing a copy of this rare book.

13. The Family Picture, Taken from the French of Mons. Diderot’s Pere de Famille (London:Donaldson, 1781). Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Gale. University of Saskatchewan.http://galenet.galegroup.com, accessed 15 August 2008.

14. Chouillet, Dossier 150, seems be confusing this translation with a translation of Le Filsnaturel, by Mrs Young; Denis Diderot, Correspondance, ed. G. Roth (Paris: Minuit, 1955-70), Vol.VI.289, includes a mention of Mrs Griffith’s interchanges with Garrick about Le Père de famille.

15. A synthesis is provided in Claude Labrosse, Lire au XVIIIe siècle: La nouvelle Héloïse et seslecteurs (Lyon: Presses de l’Université de Lyon, 1985), and Anna Attridge, ‘The Reception of LaNouvelle Héloïse’, SVEC 120 (1974), p.227-67; most of the raw material is collected in Rousseau’sCorrespondance complète, ed. R. A. Leigh (Oxford: Taylor Institute, 1965-89), especially in vols VII,VIII and IX.

16. Information on the publication and the production of the plays is available in Chouillet’sDossier and in Arthur Wilson’s biography, cited above.

17. See Ellen Donkin, Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776-1829 (London:Routledge, 1995).

18. Richard Bevis, The Laughing Tradition: Stage Comedy in Garrick’s Day (Athens: University ofGeorgia Press, 1980).

peter hynes teaches in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan. Hisinterests include epistolary fiction, sentimental drama and the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.He has published on Wycherly, Lillo, Steele and Voltaire’s comedies.



Sophia Lee and the Genre Sérieux

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