by Steven Moore
The world’s a printing house, our words, our thoughts,
Our deeds are characters of sev’ral sizes;
Each soul is a compositor, of whose faults
The Levites are correctors, heaven revises.
Death is the common press, from whence being driven,
We’re gathered sheet by sheet, and bound for heaven.88
The “voyage” of the book’s title is really a voyage round the world of books: by way of quotation, citation, and allusion, Dunton tells us more about his reading than his living. His life is almost literally an open book, and he’s proud of his bookishness: “It has been said of accomplished persons that they have read men as well as books; and why is there not as great a commendation belongs to those who have traveled books as well as men, and brought thence the gold and precious jewels . . .” (43), which is partly Dunton’s way of justifying his plagiaries, but largely a justification for a life spent reading rather than traveling. Even though he did in fact travel a good deal—including a voyage to Boston—he filters almost everything he sees through books he has read, as in the example above about London. And finally, he compares writing to voyaging: “when I have my pen in my hands and subject in my head, I look upon my self as mounted my horse to ride a journey” (3.1).
Not surprisingly, Dunton dresses his novel in every fashion of bookish finery. There are 60 pages of preliminaries before the reader gets to the first chapter of the novel: (1) a foldout frontispiece depicting 24 scenes from the original conception of the novel;89 (2) a poem “In Praise of the Ensuing Design”; (3) a 97-word title page, excessive even by 17th-century standards; (4) “A Poetical Explanation of the Frontispiece,” summarizing the complete novel in 24 stanzas; (5) nine “Panegyric Verses, by the Wits of Both Universities” (i.e., by Dunton) praising the first volume; (6) the two-line poem “To the Reader Instead of the Errata”; (7) “Introduction”; (8) “The Impartial Character of a Rambler”; (9) “Evander’s Character”; and (10), a preface by “Evander alias Kainophilius.” (Volume 2 begins with a “Preface to the Booksellers of London” and further “panegyric verses”; volume 3 limits itself to an “Epistle Dedicatory.”) The text itself sports different fonts and point sizes, excessive italics and dashes, footnotes and marginalia. “In its use of developments in print technology,” J. Paul Hunter observes, “mixing of narrative and expository strands, inclusivity of other quasi-related documents, didactic insistency, and playful refusal to move the story forward while savoring its own obsessive reflexivity, Voyage is technically way ahead of its time” (336). “But the Voyage is not an artistic success,” he concludes, which I hate to admit is true. The first volume is terrific, but the second is a bit of a letdown as Dunton wastes too much time at the beginning responding to critics of the first who didn’t “know what to make on’t” and denying he’s the author; in the third, the conventional John Evander has taken over from the logomaniac Kainophilus, and by the end of the volume, Dunton is recycling magazine articles he had written a few years earlier (the first incarnation of this project). There’s some great stuff in the second two volumes, but Dunton was probably right to abandon ship at that point. A Voyage round the World is not a great novel, then, but it’s great fun and has great implications for the future of literary fiction.90
In his capacity as bookseller, Dunton published the following year a novel even bigger and almost as eccentric as his. An employee of his named Charles Gildon (c. 1665–1724), a Grab Street hack later skewered by Swift and Pope (as Dunton himself was), proposed an unusual sort of epistolary novel: not a monologic one like Letters from a Portuguese Nun, nor a dialogic one like Behn’s Love Letters, but a polylogic collection by over a hundred correspondents. Gildon “borrowed” the idea (as Dunton acknowledges in his preface) from an Italian novella entitled Il Corriere svaligiato (1643) by Ferrante Pallavicino (1615–44), where a nobleman orders his courtiers to steal a packet of politically sensitive letters, which they read and discuss before passing them along to their master. It was later imitated in Jean de Préchac’s novella La Valize ouverte (1680), which Gildon may also have known.91 Scribbling furiously up in his garret, Gildon compiled The Postboy Robbed of His Mail (1692–93), an 800-page epistolary novel consisting of nearly 200 letters. It opens with an introductory one from a young spark named Timothy Weleter to his grave mentor, defensive at first but growing defiant, in which he explains how the collection came about: one of the members of his all-male social club recently received a letter misaddressed to him in which a young girl repulses the sexual advances of an old lecher considered a pillar of the community. After reading it aloud to his mates, he is topped by another club member who confesses that after a postman accidentally bumped into him, he stole his mailbag and read some of the contents with an equal amount guilty pleasure. Bored because of the rainy weather, all 10 members of the club decide to mug 10 postal carriers, dump the mail on a table, and spend a day going through them, forwarding those that are worthy and urgent, and publishing the rest of them in this book.
Weleter’s defense of their criminal actions doubles as a defense of fiction (which some critics then, as we’ve noted, regarded as a crime against decent society). He argues by implication that novelists are doing more valuable work than the serious scientists his mentor wants him to emulate: “For while your virtuosi are poring over the unaccountable secrets of Dame Nature, we are busy in searching into full as intricate a subject, the humors and natures of men. While they are conversing with labor and study with the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, our pleasure leads us in chase of the secrets of the rational world. Their studies may have the face of more harmless innocence, but I’m sure our delights are more profitable, and more to the purpose of living” (1:4). Defending the literary novel’s turn toward interiority (but mindful of the “more profitable” fad for scandalous “secret histories”), he lectures his elder: “No man almost is what he appears to be; we are all Januses and have two or more faces in all our actions, as well as designs” (5); he goes on to quote a fellow member, the serious Mr. Grave, “That the world being a masquerade, where borrowed visors so disguised every one that none knew even his own acquaintance if not privy to his dress, letters were the pulling off the mask in a corner of the room to show one another their faces” (9). In the context of Gildon’s tabloid-spirited novel, this is all merely a cheeky defense of what Mr. Grave and Mr. Winter admit is a serious crime that may land them in jail (all the members have symbolic names), but in the context of the debates over the purpose and value of fiction at the time, young Weleter posts a warning to his mentor’s generation that the novel—especially the epistolary novel, “for we are apt to write that in a letter to a friend which we would not have all the world know of” (9)—is no longer just escapist entertainment but an instrument for unmasking hypocrisy and plumbing “the unaccountable secrets” of human nature.
Volume 1 begins boldly: the first letter the boys pluck from the pile is “From an Atheist or Modern Wit, Laughing at All Religion,” in which a man named Wilson tries to dissuade his friend from taking holy orders. It is impudent and funny, and is followed by a few pages of commentary by the club, setting the pattern for the rest of the volume. The second is from a misanthropist, the third from “a mighty affecter of similes,” the fourth from an aspiring poet to an editor (including samples of his work), and the fifth is actually to one of the club members, who is forced to read it aloud. This is followed by a dizzying array of other letters, all dated June 1692, in wide variety of styles: begging letters, letters of condolence, of recommendation, complaints, job applications, business advice, gossip, accusations, legal notices, travel accounts, a report of a ghost sighting, of a dream, philosophical speculations, theological arguments, fashion bulletins, authors asking publishers for more money, and love letters between almost every imaginable pairing (a dwarf and a tall lady, a black man and white woman, a hermaphrodite and a female lover, a mother and her daughter’s fiancé, a Quaker and a Quakeress, et al)
. There are letters in dialect, in astrological doubletalk, and even one in numerical code, with an editorial promise that the key will be provided in volume 2. Toward the end we get letters that are essentially mini-essays on various topics (against nuns, against the vices of the French court, the frailties of women, in defense of cuckolds, the education of boys, etc.), with commentary from the group. The longest is an Italianate novella “Containing Several Accidents Which Happened to a Young Man in Rome,” by which point we realize Gildon was a hack tossing in everything he could lay his hands on. But at the end of the day (and of volume 1), the members are “highly pleased with the variety of humors, multitude of follies, and diversity of fancies and caprices which had come to our knowledge in so many different letters” (370), which is likely to be the game reader’s assessment as well.
After the first volume is published, the club meets again to prepare a second volume, this one consisting mostly of packets of related letters instead of separate ones, and as a result is more derivative and less successful. Capitalizing on the success of Marana’s Turkish Spy, Gildon begins with a 13-letter sequence from an Asian named Honan about his tour of Spain in 1686, follows this with “ten letters full of a great deal of wit and satire” (2:117) from an unnamed correspondent to his friends, then a lengthy letter containing The Secret History of Cornaro Villicano, Doge of Venice, a novella of romantic intrigue that is thankfully interrupted by the dinner bell and never finished. The club resumes with 10 love letters between “Lysander” and “Belvidera” (as the club members decide to call them), then 14 miscellaneous essay-letters like those near the end of volume 1 on a variety of topics (hypocrisy, kissing, Christian sects, a history of English beggars, a two-line letter in faux Greek, etc.) including a deciphered version of the coded letter earlier (which turns out to be merely a note from a girl telling her sister she’s left some porn in a box beneath her window: The School of Venus and my Lord Rochester’s poems). At this point, a constable shows up investigating a report of mail theft; after they smooth-talk their way out of that, the lads leg it for London to put the finishing touches on volume 2. It concludes with 18 love letters sent in response to publisher Dunton’s request in the preface to volume 1 for romantic correspondence (which will remind some older readers of the premise of The Red Shoe Diaries). Although these 70 or so letters are interlaced with the club’s sharp comments as in the first volume, and even though they likewise expose the “great variety of the follies and vices of mankind” (2:101), they read less like the human comedy of volume 1 than the work a hack who “strangely faggoted up diverse pieces,” as Dunton would say (Voyage 3:1). Although the announced plan was to publish 6 volumes totaling 500 letters, Dunton abandoned the project at this point and later added it to the short list of books he wished he had never published, along with his Voyage round the World.92
In early 1692, the year former dramatist Alexander Oldys published The Female Gallant, the future dramatist William Congreve (1670–1729) anonymously published a novella entitled Incognita, which is better known for its preface than for its narrative. There, Congreve makes an oft-quoted distinction between romances and novels:
Romances are generally composed of the constant loves and invincible courages of heroes, heroines, kings and queens, mortals of the first rank, and so forth, where lofty language, miraculous contingencies, and impossible performances elevate and surprise the reader into a giddy delight. . . . Novels are of a more familiar nature, come near us, and represent to us intrigues in practice; delight us with accidents and odd events, but not such as are wholly unusual or unprecedented, such which, not being so distant from our belief, bring also the pleasure nearer us. Romances give more of wonder, novels more delight.93
But this isn’t very helpful, for Congreve refers only to the degree of realism in book-length fictions—novels can be “unusual or unprecedented,” just less so than romances. There was also the question of length: for many at the time, the term novel simply meant a work of fiction shorter than the longer (French) romances; the Earl of Chesterfield put it this way in a letter to his son: “A novel is a kind of abbreviation of romance.”94 Consequently, the two terms continued to be used almost interchangeably into the 19th century. The full title of Congreve’s fiction is Incognita; or, Love and Duty Reconciled: A Novel, but in the sense most people today use that final word, the novel reads like a romance. Hark ye:
Two teenage aristocrats residing in Siena, Aurelian of Florence and Hippolito of Spain, return to Aurelian’s hometown to learn that he has been engaged by his father to a young lady named Juliana. Hiding out from Aurelian’s father, the young men switch names, don disguises, and attend a masked ball, where Aurelian falls in love with a witty beauty who calls herself Incognita. The next day, Aurelian further curries her favor by performing in a joust, and later assists her when, learning that her father has engaged her to a relative stranger, she disguises herself in men’s clothes and heads to a monastery, where Aurelian just happens to be wandering and rescues her from a ruffian. His friend Hippolito has fallen for a girl named Leonora, who is now jealous that her friend Juliana is engaged to Aurelian (as Hippolito is now calling himself), so she agrees to a quickie marriage with him. Eventually, the disguised lovers and their baffled fathers confront each other, and of course Incognita turns out to be Juliana, as the experienced reader already guessed back during the masked ball. True, the lads don’t battle any giants or get abducted by pirates; and true, a comedy of errors like this could conceivably happen in real life, but any reader expecting a realistic novel on the basis of Congreve’s preface would be grievously disappointed.
But he’s right that novels “delight us,” for Incognita is a delightful, urbane performance. As one might expect from the future author of The Way of the World, it is cleverly plotted and well paced—the entire novella elapses over three days—and features scintillating dialogue (though not as much as in Oldys’s novels). Incognita is not a milestone in the transition from romance to novel, as sometimes claimed, but a winking homage to older forms of fiction, specifically the French nouvelle and the Spanish novella as adapted by Paul Scarron.95 The novel often parodies romance diction, as when the two teens “sallied or slunk out of their lodgings and steered towards the great palace whither, before they were arrived, such a prodigious number of torches were on fire that the day, by help of these auxiliary forces, seemed to continue its dominion. The owls and bats, apprehending their mistake in counting the hours, retired again to a convenient darkness; for Madam Night was no more to be seen than she was to be heard, and the chemists were of opinion that her fuliginous damps, rarefied by the abundance of flame, were evaporated” (14). The narrator follows this immediately with: “Now the reader I suppose to be upon thorns at this and the like impertinent digressions, but let him alone and he’ll come to himself, at which time I think fit to acquaint him that when I digress, I am at that time writing to please myself; when I continue the thread of the story, I write to please him. Supposing him a reasonable man, I conclude him satisfied to allow me this liberty, and so I proceed” (14). It is metafictional remarks like this that make Incognita a delight, for after defining the novel in his preface, Congreve continues to comment on novelistic conventions as he proceeds. Well into the masked ball, he remembers he has not yet told us what Incognita is wearing, as a more conscientious novelist would have done earlier: “I should by right now describe her dress, which was extremely agreeable and rich, but ’tis possible I might err in some material pin or other, in the sticking of which maybe the whole grace of the drapery depended” (20). When she unmasks herself, he proclaims her beauty “is not to be imagined till seen, nor then to be expressed,” then pauses: “Now see the impertinence and conceitedness of an author who will have a fling at a description which he has prefaced with an impossibility.” But he gives it a fling anyway, a bizarre one at that: “One might have seen something in her composition resembling the formation of Epicurus his world, as if every atom of beauty had concurred to
unite an excellency” (31). After one too many digressive asides, he promises the reader, “I do not intend to do it again throughout the story” (45), but these asides are Incognita’s best features. It’s as though we’re not reading a novel but listening to a charming raconteur, snifter of brandy in hand, tell us a story he once heard in his younger days: his manner is more entertaining than the matter. It’s a winning performance, especially if it’s true that Congreve was barely 18 when he wrote it.
Incognita has much in common with a short, anonymous novel published the following year, Vertue Rewarded; or, The Irish Princess (1693), the first literary novel set in Ireland in the modern era.96 Specifically, it is set in the town of Clonmel, County Tipperary, in the summer of 1690 just after the Battle of the Boyne, in which the English Protestant army defeated the Roman Catholic forces of the deposed James II. A German prince fighting for the English passes triumphantly through Clonmel and spies an Irish beauty named Malinda. Both are attracted to each other, but since he’s an aristocrat and she’s merely a member of the local gentry, he’s interested only in a brief affair, while she holds out for a marriage proposal. The wartime setting lends itself naturally if predictably to martial imagery, giving an edge to his talk of assaults and conquests, and hers of conditions and honorable terms. Eventually, love pulls rank on ambition, and the prince marries Malinda on the final page of the short novel. Her virtue is rewarded, of course, but so is his: the novel is more concerned with his struggle to act virtuously than with hers, bucking the double-standard of much romantic fiction.