Pugg's Portmanteau

by DM Bryan

  I stayed with Jane for the next twenty-five years, claiming the place beside her as my own. It was the fate of other dogs to be buried in the sombre angle of Chiswick’s canted garden, and if she observed that I did not similarly age and fail—well, she was Jane and I was Pugg, and our shared reticence on many matters brought mutual contentment. In silence we sat in the window seat of the upstairs parlour, watching Middlesex clouds pass west. Then even Jane left me to lie in the ground. Mary Lewis, that faithful cousin, took over the house and kept me also, not much noticing if I were Trump, or Pugg, or some bastard son. Those were overcast days, when the sky sagged like a water-bloated ceiling. Sometimes I wandered away from the house and went down to the grey river to howl. Or I went to the bone-yard off Church Street, where I sat on the family tomb and wished to turn to Portland stone. At last, when Mary died and I could stand the house no longer, I left for good, trotting toward Chiswick town, knowing there was no one left to call me home. There I begged for scraps and challenged bigger, milder dogs to fights I could not win. The year was 1808.

  In time, I took up residence with a widow who kept for her brother a house on the Devonshire Road. There I lived until I tired of the stink of his feet. The road to London was well marked, and I took it one wet morning, the lines of rain again suiting my mood. In London, I sought out all my Master’s old haunts: Covent Garden and Leicester Fields. The city teemed with dangers, but it also contained kind souls in quantity. Every now and again one called to me, told me I looked famished. I was. London had revived my appetite, and I was truly hungry for the first time in this new century. Like the lapdog in Mr. Coventry’s History of Pompey the Little, I went wherever I was welcomed, ate whatever I was given, answered to whatever name I was called. Many doors opened to me, and many arms. So many new masters, new mistresses, I struggle now to remember their faces, their smells. Some were gruff, while others approached me with caresses and kisses. Some lived in mansions and others in hovels. I dined on roast beef with some, while with others I shared scrag-end soup and turnip tops. But however I lived, I remained at heart a lost dog, always ready to wander away. Each time I wearied of one master, I followed another home. I tailed a parade of hospitable women and men out of that new century and into the next, but in all those years I never again stayed to outlive a master.

  In this manner I have trotted on my short, set legs for two hundred years and more. And so, I return to you, my reader, who is also my latest and last master. You sit on your sofa with a well-chewed portmanteau at your feet—that leather companion I’ve buried and dug up, again and again. Now I am dying and must either pass these papers on or have them vanish forever. They smell of my Master, even after all these years, and I am a faithful Pugg, determined to keep him in the world in any way my dog’s body can command.

  Long ago, in my Master’s day, when new printmaker’s shops and bookseller’s stalls appeared daily in London’s streets; when anybody might put pen to paper and nobody yet knew the rules—then it was that this portmanteau first took shape. In those days, authors wrote as seamstresses make quilts, sampling from whatever was on hand and trading in materials printed for a multitude of markets. The people were hungry to read, and writers served up reheated criminal proceedings, printed confessions, newspaper accounts, true histories, romances, poems serious and satirical, letters, political pamphlets—any kind of writing that might be pressed into service. The contents of my portmanteau share this character with my Master’s time, and between its leather covers, you will find a variety of documents, from various hands, for a diversity of purposes. I have put its pages into the best order I can find, but like the time from which it comes, my portmanteau makes variousness its delight.

  In these pages, my Master’s century takes on new life, and at its heels runs a little ^.^ The first of its borrowings picks the pocket of the prints that made my Master’s name: A Harlot’s Progress. Although sermons and spiritual biographies, sugared by repentance and redemption, sold a treat in those far-off days, the taste for printed stories included reversals and falls as well. In my Master’s version, the Harlot no sooner arrives in London than she forgets her Sunday school catechism—and worse is to come. By raiding the notebook of one Justice Gonson, who is the prosecutor of that lady’s crimes, my portmanteau makes common cause with my Master’s Harlot or with Mr. Defoe’s Moll Flanders.

  No less admired by the readers of my Master’s time was epistolary fiction, and so my portmanteau sprouts letters in abundance. The most celebrated of epistolary fictions was Mr. Richardson’s Pamela, which resounds with the immediate scratching of that lady’s pen. Mr. Richardson, himself a printer, asked my Master Hogarth for a pair of frontispieces to illustrate his novel. Alas, my Master drew a pair indeed, but he fixed them to the front of Miss Pamela. Mr. Richardson, appalled by my Master’s bad taste, elected to keep his Pamela modest. That lady, even today, remains famous for the immediacy of her letter writing. My portmanteau’s Mrs. Betty scribbles with an equal passion, but reader, you will meet her yourself—and who can tell how many worlds might be contained within a laundress.

  The History of Glossolalia—which appears next in my portmanteau—is a work that baldly names itself a novel. The rise of novels is a question at once vexed, debated, reviled, obscured, considered, theorized, celebrated, argued, avoided, and even forgotten. But what is undoubtedly the case is that the novel rose in my Master’s day and borrowed its character from that long-ago time. Novelists, who scarcely knew to term themselves such, again borrowed, copied, emulated whatever they liked best, pillaging continental romances, books of religious instruction, and conduct manuals, as well as the forms already mentioned. In short, novelists pirated whatever set the black ink flowing.

  No sooner does The History of Glossolalia find its slippered feet than it is interrupted. You will meet the lady who insists on appearing out of turn, but reader, before you make her acquaintance, you should know there was a real Sarah Robinson Scott, the author of Millenium Hall and other works. No scholar attributes The History of Glossolalia to her, but then that mutable work records nobody’s name upon its frontispiece beyond some “respectable lady of mature experience.” Scott’s known work blurs the critics’ line between romance and novel, between fiction and philanthropy, between innovation and conservation—frankly, between a lot of things. Sarah Scott once wrote to her sister, the bluestocking Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, I should have been born a man and a gardener, and I have no doubt that Sarah meant it. Many of Sarah’s letters to her sister survive still, and in them, she records genteel poverty and illness, charitable projects, and literary ones as well. So yes, there is a real Sarah Scott, but reader, you are unlikely to have heard of her. Why has she chosen my portmanteau to address that deficit? I cannot say. If you like, you may hear her out and make up your own mind.

  There were many literary females writing over the course of the eighteenth century, especially in the first half: Mrs. Jane Barker, Mrs. Penelope Aubin, Mrs. Eliza Haywood, or Mrs. Mary Davy. Females in hooped skirts and lace sleeves crawled, swarmed, and hatched their own kind of Grub Street, even if some of them rarely left the front parlour. In fact, the new media of the eighteenth-century produced so many lady novelists, that two-hundred years later a generation of critics and scholars of literature would grow embarrassed by novels like The History of Glossolalia. That slender volume’s breathlessness and passion, its earnestness and moral rectitude, reddened the cheeks of the gentlemen, and the few ladies allowed to join in. They were all exceedingly eager to establish the seriousness of their new scholarly enterprise, and in their minds, Glossolalia’s history led to a shameful line of housewives, charwoman, and shop assistants at the door of the lending library. Ready to the critic’s hand was a three-hundred-year feud carried out between those authors writing romances—unlikely tales set in impossible places—and those writers authoring novels—the stories of modern persons confronting everyday problems—and even now, some critics (and bookstores
too) preserve this antique debate, separating contemporary fiction from historical romance, or literary novels from fantasy.

  With a single rapier cut, the critics shaped the history of novels to suit their own needs, subsiding into a rhapsody on genius, originality, authenticity, and ownership. My Master, who wrote a book of his own called The Analysis of Beauty, taught the wisdom of blending variety with regularity. Alas, his ideas were laughed at and then forgotten, as were the patchworkers, the seamstresses, the author of The History of Glossolalia, and her sisters. So reader when you reach Glossolalia, treat her with generosity and kindness. She may be stiff as a corset, her history much altered, stitched and threadbare, but her way of telling tales—digressions, stories-within-stories—was loved in her own time and does not deserve to fall to dust in a pug’s paws.

  My portmanteau’s final tale, which concerns the adventures of Messieurs Quire and Gotobed, returns to another of my Master’s prints from The Idle ’Prentice, Betrayed. Quire and Gotobed are as ready a pair of thieves as you might ever hope to meet, and they, like my portmanteau itself, steal that picture from my Master, desiring to make something new for themselves. Whether or not they succeed is yours to decide.

  The spirit of my Master’s age is in these tales. My portmanteau chases an old way of telling stories, following dogleg turnings, skirting the well-plotted path of modern fiction. If you desire a signposted road, well graded, then you must put away my portmanteau. However, if your nose twitches inquisitively at the scent of ink, if you are willing to chew over the contents of a leather cover, then I do not mistake you, my reader.

  One final warning. The hundreds of years I have dragged my portmanteau from place to place have made their own alterations—torn pages, wetted pages, vanished pages, impossible pages even. Nothing can age without changing, and these portmanteau papers have been pressed forward through time, the contents seaming like Durham coal. They are not the pages they were, nor are they the pages they will be. You and they must work together to decide what they will become. And this, dear reader, is what you hold in your hand. Poor Pugg’s gift. A consolation snatched from death’s jaws. A capacious history masquerading as a leather case. A begging question delivered by an inky dog.

  Reader, will you begin reading?

  Chapter 2

  A printed transcript containing the testimony of two laundresses respecting evidence of wrongdoing contained within the first print of Mr. Hogarth’s popular series, A Harlot’s Progress.

  London. 1732.

  What is that scribbling fellow doing, Justice Gonson? Each time I open my mouth he scratches on his page with his quill. When I breathe, he dips his pen. Watch him there—I believe he’s taking down whatever I say. I don’t know I much like having my words locked down in black and white, but I will tell you what I know, for I’ve taken an oath to do so.

  I’ve seen that print you call evidence, the one from Mr. Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, and it is an astonishing bit of paper, to be sure. He has drawn us all a grand view of the yard of the Bell, where the York-London coach arrives with its hopeful cargo of maids in mobcaps. They’re country girls, all of them. Now, some might make a pun on country, but I won’t, and there’s no reason for me to make light of those poor little girls when the world will damn them soon enough.

  Justice Gonson, sir, you asked me what I see when I’m out there on that balcony that sits forever in the shadow of the Bell, where never so much as a ray of sunshine comes down to dry my poor garments. Still, a laundress must launder, no matter the weather. The mending I do, and the washing, and when I’m done I hang it out in the London gloom, and it waits to dry. The wind brings up the smuts, and sometimes a stocking falls into the street below where Betty, the girl, must be quick to fetch it before a horse tries it on (in a manner of speaking). Sometimes an apprentice scoops up that stocking before Betty can get down the stairs and out the door. Then she must beg to get it back, but she’ll no more exchange it for a kiss than would I. Our Betty’s no milkmaid but a city-bred miss, and she knows how a sweet beginning can quickly go sour. To Hades with you, says our Betty to them apprentices when they run at her, their mouths puckered like pockets. Hose-faced, she calls them, and worse. Betty’s not a big girl, but she’s foursquare and curved in the right places. Desirable as a chair is Betty, especially to them that’s on their feet a deal.

  Yes, thank you, I would like a seat. I’m none too steady, to tell a truth. I had a shock when the constables came. I’m an honest woman, as your Honour has had the goodness to say, but in our part of town the constables never bring good news—begging your pardon, gentlemen, but you’ll have to avow a truth or tell a lie. Where you come, sorrow comes soon after. But be that as it may, here I am, and you asked me a question, so I’ll answer it plain.

  I have, as I said before, a view of the Bell’s yard that gives me plain sight of the life of this city that finer folk must pay to see, if they see it at all. I mean the hurley-burley of a public house, which is as good as a play for entrances and exits. And as it happens, I’m often in my box seat when that conveyance, the York Coach, with its swollen canvas belly, comes trundling into the yard. I won’t say I’m not curious to see the little line of miller’s daughters as they come tumbling into the sunlight, a mess of babies, pink cheeked—each one bawling to leave behind some bosom friend made on the journey. A few of those girls have places already, some as maids and some to lend a hand in a lady’s kitchen, if they prove quick enough. The lucky ones have a clever mama who has squeezed, out of nothing, the twenty pounds premium for a milliner’s apprenticeship. But others have come from the countryside with no more of a plan than they have a map to mark their way through the crooked streets of this city. Those girls I pity, and so does Betty, in her way. Sometimes we lean out over the railings and lay friendly wagers on which ones will be met and by what kind of folk.

  “Betty,” I say, “I swear that clergyman on the white horse is here to take one of them Yorkshire lambs home to his wife to make a fine housemaid of her. I see the paper in his hand with Miss Molly’s name writ on it.”

  “Miss Molly’s name’s not on it,” says my Betty.

  “Indeed,” says I, “what’s it say then?”

  “I can’t see from here. He’s got it turned round the wrong way.”

  “Then you don’t know for certain that’s not Miss Molly’s name scrawled on that scrap.”

  “No more than you know for sure it is.”

  And so we argue, while the clergyman strains his eyes to read his paper. He takes so long, I think he must be parsing a tract, not a note, and if so, he surely is one of those Enthusiastic ministers come to preach hellfire to the coach girls and so save their souls. This I put to Betty.

  “Never,” says Betty, who goes regular to church, and to a regular church too. “Those Enthusiastic gentlemen are too busy saving their own souls to worry over much about misses like these.”

  “For shame, Betty. They’re Christians still.”

  “Well, the young ladies are, or at least they will be for a little while yet. But hush,” says Betty, “who’s that fellow coming out of the Bell with his hand in his pocket?”

  Justice Gonson, that man in the print, wears a commonplace face, and I know what name some people give him, but I say different. I’ve seen the man who goes by the notorious name of Charteris, and that so-called gentleman is a great one for taking from the girls the only treasure they bring to town—and I don’t mean the few coins they sew into the linings of their gowns. No, that Charteris has a deceitful, cozening face, and the fellow Betty and I saw was none of that. A plump, plum-pudding face he had, with an ample lower lip. He wore the very wig some folk designate as an Episcopal hairpiece. On the basis of phiz and wig alone, I can good as swear that this gentleman was no ravishing colonel but instead a well-meaning person, and an honest one too. As for other people and their idea of what his hand was doing in his pocket, why, their notion
s are like the gutter beside the street: not worth looking into. For my part, I believe the gentleman was searching for a copper with which to tip the man behind him, who’d provided a pretty piece of information.

  And what was that information? Why that must be obvious to anyone with eyes, begging your pardon, sir. The girl, fresh off the wagon, could only be the gentleman’s daughter. The long nose, the chin: one face is like a mirror to the other.

  I said as much to Betty, who loves to be a little saucy, although she is as good a girl as I ever met.

  “That’s a book, you’re thinking of there,” said Betty, “and not the kind of life we watch from the balcony.”

  “No indeed,” said I, for I loved to sauce her back. “The mistake’s not mine, Mrs. Betty. Why, you take us for a pair of ladies attending a performance in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. You think this is one of Mr. Gay’s own plays, stuffed to bursting with female cynics and attended by an audience of whores.”

  I do beg your pardon once more, Justice Gonson, but you know that sort of work as well as any. For my part, I see no reason why life should be as bad as some authors put about. As you can no doubt guess from my picture of her so far, my Betty takes a different point of view, and she’s not shy of expressing it.

  “He’s a stranger to Miss Molly,” she told me. “She no more recognizes that gentleman as her father than she knows the bawd chucking her under the chin as her own mother.”

  “She’s long lost is that Miss Molly,” I said. “She won’t know him yet, but she’s his own true daughter, raised by honest country folk. Happens all the time.”