Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions

Abstract

Sentimental novels are cluttered with things. The emotional attachments that people form with possessions in these mid-eighteenth-century fictions can seem as freighted with consequence as the emotional attach-ments that people form with each other. Indeed, modem readers of Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality or Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey might be pardoned for finding it hard to distinguish one sort of rela-tionship from the other—even if normal notions of the folly of fetishism predispose us to believe that the difference between, say, ownership and friendship is a difference worth preserving. The keepsakes that clutter sen-timental fiction (the lockets that protagonists wear next to their hearts; the sleeve buttons or snuffboxes that pairs of characters exchange to me-morialize their first meeting or last, teary-eyed parting) work instead to collapse that difference. While they instructed their readers in emotional responsiveness, sentimentalists were more than ready to make objects