by Steven Moore
The 1704 publication of A Tale of a Tub left its mark on several novels that appeared later in the same decade, beginning with the first British science-fiction novel of the 18th century.111 The Consolidator; or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon (1705) is the first novel by a businessman born Daniel Foe (1660–1731), who ennobled himself Defoe shortly before embarking on a prolific writing career. The unnamed narrator begins with an account of how much the Russian tsar learned from his recent tour of Europe and his willingness to apply what he learned to his own country—the same open-minded attitude the narrator hopes his readers will bring to his account of what he learned on the moon. He then describes his time in China, the most technologically advanced people on Earth in his opinion, and of a feather-powered vehicle they use to journey back and forth to the moon called the consolidator. Next, the narrator takes the consolidator to the moon, which is nearly identical to Earth: “all was exactly as it is here, an elementary world people with folks as like us as if they were only inhabitants of the same continent, but in a remote climate” (24). The only novelties he finds are a telescope that allows him to view activities back on Earth, a (mood) elevator that encourages fanciful thinking, and a cogitator: a chair that forces a person to think clearly. All of these give him a perspective on events back home, supplemented by his discovery that the moon people have gone through the same tedious tangle of war, political conflict, and religious persecution as Europe had after the restoration of Charles II in 1660. At that point, a third through the novel, the narrator gives the fiction game away:
And since the allegoric relation may bear great similitude with our European affairs on this side the moon, I shall for the ease of expression, and the better understanding of the reader, frequently call them by the same names our unhappy parties are called by in England, as Solunnarian churchmen [Anglicans], and Crolian dissenters [Defoe’s party], at the same time desiring my reader to observe that he is always to remember who it is we are talking of, and that he is by no means to understand me of any person, party, people, nation, or place on this side the moon, any expression, circumstance, similitude, or appearance to the contrary in any wise notwithstanding. (51–52)
The remaining two-thirds of the novel is a journalistic account of recent history with no attempt to dramatize or fictionalize events. The narrator includes the story of the trouble Defoe experienced after the publication of his ironic essay “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters” (1702), and I suppose some of this is of value to historians of the period, but as fiction it fails. Evidently aware of the lunar journeys of Godwin and Cyrano de Bergerac, Defoe chose not to pursue the imaginative possibilities of an alien culture as they did, or to give his narrator much personality. Except for the few machines mentioned at the beginning, there’s little imagination or ingenuity here, which is apparently deliberate. Defoe wanted to keep things simple, for “wiser men than I have taken as unwarrantable flights, and gone a great deal higher than the moon into a strange abyss of dark phenomena, which they neither could make other people understand nor ever rightly understood themselves, witness Malebranche, Mr. Locke, Hobbes, the Honourable Boyle and a great many others besides Messieurs Norris, Asgil, Coward, and the Tale of a Tub” (14). He takes another swipe at Swift by accusing his book of displaying “a livid flame called blasphemy, which burnt up all the wit and fancy of the author, and left a strange stench behind it that has this unhappy quality in it, that everybody that reads the book smells the author, though he be never so far off” (27). That took some nerve, for The Consolidator shows almost no “wit and fancy” and leaves behind “a strange stench” of a hack who doesn’t know how to convert his material into art. Defoe would learn that lesson later, but his first novel is deservedly forgotten.
The Norris mentioned above is John Norris, author of a philosophical treatise that inspired a more blatant imitation of A Tale of a Tub that appeared (per its title page) in “the year one thousand and seven hundred, &c.” An Essay towards the Theory of the Intelligible World (1708?) is a learned satire on Norris’s book of same title (1701–4), pseudonymously written by one Gabriel John, aka dramatist and songwriter Thomas D’Urfey (1653?–1723). He is satirically praised in the Tale as “a poet of vast comprehension, an universal genius, and most profound learning” (23); though he was nettled by that reference, and like Defoe considered the Tale blasphemous, D’Urfey found the format of Swift’s novel to be the perfect vehicle for his own attack on the abuses of learning, especially in philosophy. His author/narrator is a Grub Street hack drawn to the idea of Norris’s “intelligible world,” the realm of the platonic ideal that Norris insists is as real as the material, “sensible” world. Norris’s inspiration, the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), appears in Gabriel’s garret one day and whisks him off on a fantastic journey to this ideal realm, which Gabriel describes in dizzying detail. For his discovery of this new world, he hopes to be rewarded with the governorship of a country, and limply concludes his rambling book (as does Swift’s narrator) by apologizing for all the good stuff he had to leave out, and by offering other books of his for sale, including “two various lections of great importance to history upon the famous Garismachides, a lost author who is thought to have written on nothing” (214, his italics).
D’Urfey’s “philosophical romance” (210) is a rude attack on philosophical idealism, neoplatonic mysticism, and speculative metaphysics, all of which he dismisses as the results of “visionary imaginations, double-minded sophisms, shadows of echo, and sick men’s dreams” (208), stemming from the narcissistic tendency of philosophers to gaze at their own reflections in their watery schemes. The narrator compares Norris’s ideal realm to a carnival raree-show (peep show), but given the awfulness of his life—he’s old, poor, and nearly blind—he’s happy to be suckered in: “And as ’tis sung of the former Narcissus that his idea in the water, as cruel as he found it, never refused to smile when it saw that he smiled in return, I on the other side, Narcissus alter, could not choose but rejoice to see my idea so joyful” (198). Like all metaphysical schemes, all religious fantasies of paradise, this is merely an attempt to wish oneself somewhere over the rainbow, far away from Kansan reality: a dreary, conflicted world compared to the technicolor spiritual realm dreamed up by quack metaphysicians and other “theorists! foliographers! cosmarchitects!” (148).
D’Urfey represents our messy material world in the form of a chaotic text that visually exceeds Swift’s and anticipates Sterne’s. Although Gabriel protests near the end that he is not mocking “the professors of title-page learning” (215), his is a wordy billboard claiming to be part 3 of “the archetypally second edition,” “designed for forty-nine parts,” with the requisite Latin epigraph and an assurance his book is enriched with “strange things not insufferably clever, nor furiously to the purpose.” The table of contents runs 11 pages, and previews chapters on “The great use of defamation and of flattery, when dexterously administered. His ill success therein”; “A copy of verses upon I don’t know what”; “A section treating of myself, one of the best subjects” (cf. Dunton’s Voyage); “A section following the former”; and “Of the full moon, intimations, the building of Babel, the will of destiny, and how Oliver Cromwell, in a passion, shot off a gun at the solstice.” (A few of the announced chapters never appear.) The entire first half of the book consists of preliminaries—a lengthy extract from Norris, testimonies from other authors, a section “Of Prefaces” (not the preface itself, which doesn’t appear until page 189), an argument for the importance of this book, and copious samples of Gabriel’s writings (including many bawdy poems)—and after he finally takes off on his voyage with Malebranche halfway through the novel, we’re treated to more poems, mathematical demonstrations, random chapter titles from unidentified novels, and a page-long gap like those asterisked chasms in A Tale of a Tub (except he uses dashes). The text is strewn with Greek and Latin passages, footnotes, marginalia, learned citations, and all the other p
araphernalia of scholarship, which must have driven the typesetter mad. A promised index doesn’t appear, but we are given 6 pages of facetious errata and second thoughts: instead of calling his book “a satirical fable,” as he did on page 1, the author wants to replace that with “an epic poem, or anything else that you shall think better” (224).
Although Gabriel is mostly right that his book contains “flights and metaphors, quaint conceits, grave apothegms, politic sayings, and learned dissertations” (62–63), and though the parodies of metaphysical writings are well done, D’Urfey doesn’t rise to the same level of Swift or Sterne: the Essay has all the bells and whistles of their novels, but not their genius and profundity. It is closer to Dunton’s Voyage, which doesn’t detract from its anarchic fun, its pointed criticism of the psychology of metaphysical beliefs, or its contribution to the genre of learned wit. One of Sterne’s biographers notes that during a book-hunting expedition, the future author of Tristram Shandy “caught sight of two books as mad as any he himself was destined to write”: one was Dunton’s Voyage, and the other D’Urfey’s Essay (Cross, 1:132). His novel probably did little to cure readers of their metaphysical fancies—such people are immune to irony and reason—but if it inspired one of the greatest novels of world literature, it served a purpose.112
Charles Gildon, who got religion after his freethinking, libertine days when he wrote The Postboy Robbed of His Mail, published in 1709 the first volume of a bitter, moralistic novel that begins with an “Epistle Nuncupatory to the Author of A Tale of a Tub,” one of many literary coattails he rides in The Golden Spy, or a Political Journal of the British Nights Entertainments of War and Peace, and Love and Politics (1709–10). As in his earlier novel, he banks on the continuing popularity of Marana’s Turkish Spy as well as on The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, which had recently been translated into English. One night, a Londoner discovers that his golden coins can speak, and in his bedroom over the next six nights, his shiny Scheherazades tell him tales of the corrupting influence of money. It’s an ingenious concept, and started a century-long trend for what are now called “it-narratives,” in which an object or an animal speaks out.113 But in Gildon’s inky hands, his gold turns to dross. The novel is filled with familiar tales of misers and spendthrifts, of women who sell their favors for money, of the dangers of gambling, and the bribery-prone judicial system. The listener is a naïf who is shocked to learn that the great and the virtuous are so money-hungry, but as he admits, such people “have been so often on the stage, and so long the anvil of satire to no purpose, that ’tis hard to produce any new thing on such a subject” (31). There is one clever story involving a gigolo who steals a loose woman’s pearls by swallowing them that plays with symbolism equating commodity with excrement and theft with rape. Some are surprisingly lurid and violent, such as one told of a rich merchant who lusts after an employee’s wife: after ruining him by cheating at cards and sending him to the galleys, the merchant repeatedly rapes the wife, sometimes enlisting the help of his servants to hold her down. One night after he has fallen asleep, she cuts his throat with a razor, “and not satisfied with this, she cut off the offending parts . . .” (123). But most of the tales are derivative – there’s one on Donna Olympia, the same papal procurtrix Pix nixed – and Gildon is too lazy to orient the tales to the coins’ point of view (as Crébillon would do with his sofa). The impression he leaves is that the talking-object concept was just an excuse to unload some of his unpublished work. Money talks, but Gildon fails to cash in on the idea.
In his introduction to a modern facsimile edition of The Golden Spy, Malcolm Bosse suggests the 1708 translation of Lesage’s Devil upon Crutches may have influenced Gildon, but that seems much more applicable to The New Atalantis (1709) by Delarivier Manley (1663–1724), one of the three “female wits” (along with Trotter and Pix) who staged their first plays in 1696. She also published two short epistolary novels, but The New Atalantis is the one that attracted major attention, including that of the police, who arrested Manley and her publisher for it. Like the semisupernatural observers in Lesage’s novel, the goddesses Astrea and Virtue visit the Mediterranean island of Atalantis (England) to see if humankind has improved since the Golden Age, when a disgusted Astrea left Earth for the stars. She and Virtue soon learn things haven’t improved as the allegorical figure Lady Intelligence shows and tells the secret lives of the Atalantean upper classes, based so closely on actual figures of Manley’s time that the scandalous novel was suppressed shortly after publication.
Beginning at the coast of the island, where Intell (as her name is abbreviated) shows her divine visitors some debauched naval commanders, the party moves inland, eventually arriving at the capital city of Angela (London), where the novel breaks off in the middle of a satiric review of members of the Divan (House of Commons).114 The bulk of the novel consists of endless episodes of Whigs Behaving Badly: from the standard vices of vanity, ambition, treachery, greed, and gambling addiction, to less-reported ones like alcoholism, bigamy, homosexuality (especially lesbianism), rape, and incest. A few of the episodes are old-fashion histoires in the 20-page range, but most are shorter, scandal-sheet exposés. After many of them, one of the goddesses will draw the obvious moral: “My Lady Intelligence,” Astrea says after one of them, “you have shown us in this your relation how foolish a sin is that of covetousness” (210). These platitudes are suspiciously pat; though the author claims to be following in the footsteps of classical satirists like Lucian, Varro, and Juvenal in the “scourging of vice, and exhortation to virtue” (132, dedication to volume 2), Manley implies that such black-and-white distinctions aren’t realistic when examining the gray area in which most people conduct their lives. Too often Astrea and Virtue sound like provincial prudes who don’t want to acknowledge the complexity of human behavior; their solution to the many cases they witness of the seduction of virgins is to keep them dumb and isolated, and to marry them off as early as possible. They disapprove of any girl who departs from the norm, specifically those “rude of mind, void of languishments and softness, insensible, hoydening, ungainly brisk, robustly gay, excessively masculine,” urging their mothers “To watch the ascendancy of their temper and perpetually ply ’em with the antithesis . . .” (150–51). Since Manley is describing herself and her livelier friends, she’s either being hypocritical or indulging in Swiftian irony.115 Probably the latter, for a few pages later, Astrea spots some fun-loving women who “laugh loud and incessantly” and puritanically sniffs, “Sure these seem to unknow that there is a certain portion of misery and disappointments alloted to all men, which one time or other will assuredly overtake ’em. The very consideration is sufficient, in my opinion, to put a damp upon the serenest, much more a tumultuous joy” (153–54). Intell tells her to get real—“That is afflicting themselves unprofitably” (153–54)—then goes on to explain that these hoydens are a “cabal” of lesbians.
Manley’s high moral stand is further undercut by her uneven treatment of vice: she focuses only on Whigs, letting most of her fellow Tories off the hook, fudges some facts, and indulges in some score-settling against enemies and catty remarks about other female writers. Late in the novel she even inserts a brief defense of her own scandalous life in the person of Delia (222–28), which certainly doesn’t meet the standards of virtue expressed throughout the novel. Significantly, Astrea responds to Delia’s story by saying “I am weary of being entertained with the fopperies of the fair” (228), unwilling to acknowledge moral relativism.
She could be speaking for the reader, for after a while the endless anecdotes become wearying. It doesn’t help that the style has a dated, 17th-century feel to it; Delia notes that as a girl she had to stay with “an old out-of-fashion aunt, full of the heroic stiffness of her own times, [who] would read books of chivalry and romances with her spectacles. This sort of conversation infected me and made me fancy every stranger that I saw, in what habit so ever, some disguised prince or lover” (223–24). Those romances also in
fected Manley’s style, especially her stagy dialogue. Other 17th-century genres come to mind: although The New Atalantis formally resembles The Devil upon Crutches, its primary inspiration were Spanish novellas and especially the scandal-novels of Madame d’Aulnoy and other French writers. And as Rachel Carnell points out, the novel’s title evokes “the genre of a dystopian travelogue, in a dark echo of Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis” (168). Manley sounds modern only during some of the sex scenes (that is, the kind of scenes you wouldn’t find in 17th-century romances): one seducer, after sharing his porn collection with his young ward, jumps her and “nailed her down to the bed with kisses” (39). “Warranted by the soft play and touches of a young willing coquet,” another rake “followed her in good earnest and pulled her down by main force upon a bed of greens in an arbor where they were, till he had almost kissed and ruffled her to pieces” (67). The 17th-century tone would be appropriate if Manley were satirizing the 17th-century attitudes of Astrea and Virtue, but mostly it gives a musty odor to the novel. That and the repetitiousness of many of the anecdotes (so many betrayed virgins and corrupt politicians) reduce the appeal of The New Atalantis for the modern reader, as does its dated topicality: Ros Ballaster admits in her introduction that Manley’s “scandal fiction had a certain built-in obsolescence in that its political references would become less obvious and retrievable to its readers as time passed” (xix). After the ban on the novel was lifted, The New Atalantis did its part to bring down the Whig ministry and continued to scandalize readers for another generation or two, but that built-in obsolescence is what Alexander Pope had in mind when he sarcastically claimed his “Rape of the Lock” would last “As long as Atalantis shall be read” (3:165); he knew that his perfect poem would transcend its topical references while hers would survive only as footnote to his greater achievement. A modern edition was published in 1991, and reprinted as a Penguin classic the following year, but the latter is long out of print and the novel’s appeal is largely limited to specialists (mostly women) of the period.