Nature and Art

Two brothers, two sons: one raised in London society, one on an island among people with no laws at all - and the natural man, brought home, asks the questions polite England cannot answer. Inchbald ran away from a Suffolk farm at eighteen to go on the stage, despite a stammer that never left her, and acted seventeen years before writing; this 1796 novel is a Jacobin argument in the form of a fable, and the courtroom scene at the end is savage. Fifty-seven plates after Hogarth and Gainsborough carry the novel's argument in paint, setting its questions of nature and artifice among the faces and assemblies of eighteenth-century England.