Fictions of Character

This essay asks what happens to theorizations of literary character when we consider the formally complex treatment of character within the pornographic or otherwise disreputable texts that proliferate across eighteenth-century print. Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1760–94), a catalogue of women involved in London’s sex trade, is a piece of character writing; its characters are the marginalized, racialized, and sexually commodified. We examine how repetition operates in the treatment of two women of West Indian origin, in separate annual editions, and show how Harris’s List embeds its characters in sexual and racial economies of reiteration and circulation. We demonstrate how characterization in such texts has implications for scholarship on the eighteenth-century novel and our understanding of novel characters, showing how Frances Brooke’s The Excursion (1777) and Thomas Holcroft’s The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794–97) ambivalently incorporate the forms of character writing that Harris’s List deploys.