The Novel

by Steven Moore

  Same goes for The Adventures of Rivella (1714). Manley learned that Charles Gildon had begun to write a biography of her, as he had done for her idol Aphra Behn in 1692, so she offered his publisher an autobiography instead. Dashing it off in less than a month to meet the deadline, she hits the highlights of her life from birth up to shortly after the publication of The New Atalantis. In a sense, the novella is an expansion of the Delia section in the earlier novel, which covered her early marriage and bigamous second marriage, and in fact at one point the rushed narrator of Rivella refers the reader to that book for details rather than recreate the episode for the new one, irreparably damaging the novella’s autonomy. Mostly mined these days by specialists for biographical details, Rivella does have a few points of interest. Rather than organize it as a straightforward narrative, as most writers in a hurry would have done, Manley decided to complicate matters by pretending the text was originally written in French by the young Chevalier d’Aumont, who heard the story from his English friend Sir Charles Lovemore, an unrequited lover of Rivella since she was a teen, and that the text has now been “translated” into English. By way of these smokescreens, Manley first warns that this is fiction, not strict autobiography, and second pretends to guarantee its validity and authenticity via a male narrator—as though a silly woman could not be trusted to tell the truth.116 In reality, Manley manipulates her two male “authors” like puppets: the randy young chevalier is excited by Manley’s sex scenes in Atalantis and figures “if she have but half so much of the practice as the theory in the way of love, she must certainly be a most accomplished person” (45), which is the 50-year-old Manley’s way of telling young male readers that she’s still got it going on. The older Lovemore, on the other hand, claims to be “an impartial historian, neither blind to Rivella’s weaknesses and misfortunes, as being once her lover, nor angry and severe as remembering I could never be beloved; I have joined together the just and the tender, not expatiated with malice upon her faults, nor yet blindly overlooking them” (74), which appears to guarantee an evenhanded account, which it isn’t.

  Manley cleverly turns these “faults” to her advantage. Lovemore begins his account with: “I have often heard her say, if she had been a man, she had been without a fault,” exposing the double standard by which “what is not a crime in men is scandalous and unpardonable in women” (47). But Manley turns that frown upside down in the novella’s jolly closing line when d’Aumont admits “that it would have been a fault in her not to have been faulty” (114). A few pages earlier, Lovemore had chastised her for publishing The New Atalantis and asks, “Who bid her to write? What good did she do? Could not she sit quiet as well as her neighbours and not meddle herself about what did not concern her?” (109). The Adventures of Rivella is a defense of Manley’s decision to write and her refusal to “sit quiet.” Even though it’s a novella for Manley fans only, Rivella is a significant declaration of independence for British women writers.

  But before such women exchanged their sewing needles for pens, there appeared a novel claiming to be published by “the author of the New Atalantis” (per its title page) and attributed to “the worthy author of a Tale of a Tub” (per a sarcastic critic). The Law Is a Bottomless Pit, better known as The History of John Bull (1712), was in fact written by Dr. John Arbuthnot (1667–1735), a founding member of the Scriblerus Club, which included Swift, Pope, John Gay (author of The Beggar’s Opera), and other enemies of pedantry. Though Manley’s Atalantis and Swift’s Tale were among its immediate sources of inspiration, John Bull is a coded political allegory in the manner of Barclay’s Argenis, Wroth’s Urania, and the royal romances of the Civil War—only funny. Taken straight, it reads like a light-comic business novel in the tradition of Thomas Deloney (see pp. 383–90 of my previous volume). After the death of Lord Strutt, a parson and a lawyer underhandedly settle his estate on his cousin Philip Baboon, who intends to give all his future business to his grandfather, Lewis Baboon. This alarms clothier John Bull and linen-draper Nicholas Frog, who don’t want to lose such a profitable account. They decide to sue Lewis, initiating a lawsuit that drags on for years, enriching their lawyers but nearly bankrupting John Bull. He eventually learns that his “extravagant bitch” of a wife is colluding with his lawyer, and that shiftless Frog has stuck naive Bull with most of the legal bills. (As critics have noted, the names Frog and Bull allude to Aesop’s fable “The Frog and Ox,” in which a vain amphibian tries to puff himself up to the size of his bovine neighbor.) After his wife dies, Bull marries a more reasonable woman who encourages him to take matters into his own hands, and he eventually settles advantageously out of court with Lewis Baboon. A subplot involves his Scottish sister Peg and the ludicrous preacher she likes, none other than Jack from A Tale of a Tub. True to its original title, the novel seems to be an amusing legal satire populated by a cast of colorful English eccentrics.

  However, Arbuthnot’s shorthand footnotes—e.g., “Late K[ing]. of S[pain]”— reveal “there is a mystery in all this, my friend, a piece of profound policy.”117 What seems to be a local quarrel among businessmen is an elaborate allegory of English history from 1698 and 1712, centered on the War of Spanish Succession. (Lord Strutt = King Charles of Spain, who died in 1700; Philip Baboon = his successor, Philip, Duke of Anjou; Lewis Baboon = Louis XIV of France; John Bull = the English people; Nicholas Frog = the Dutch; their lawyers = military leaders; Bull’s first wife = the Godolphin ministry [1702–10] and its Whig supporters; Bull’s second wife = the Harley ministry [1710–14] and its Tory supporters, as well as Queen Anne of England: Arbuthnot was her favorite physician.) The allegory is so elaborate and detailed that in Bower and Erickson’s scholarly edition of John Bull, the 121-page novel is preceded by a 103-page introduction, and followed by 140 pages of annotations in small type. Even though the creative intricacy of the allegory is the work’s primary claim to fame—Lord Macaulay called it “the most ingenious and humorous political satire extant in our language”—it has been overlooked as an important contribution to the English comic novel.

  Unlike the statelier political allegories of the 17th century, John Bull is written in bumptious British prose, rich in idioms, slang, dialect, and funny accents. This may be the first English novel in which a wife calls her husband “honey,” the first to use the rude intensifier “bloody,” the first in which a protagonist is easily distracted by “a football, or a match at cricket” (109). Listen to the first Mrs. Bull taking the piss out of a minor character named South ( = Archduke Charles of Austria, pretender to the Spanish throne):

  A very fine spark, this Esquire South! My husband took him in, a dirty, snotty-nosed boy, it was the business of half the servants to attend him, the rogue did bawl and make such a noise. Sometimes he fell in the fire and burnt his face, sometimes broke his shins clambering over the benches, often pissed a-bed, and always came in so dirty as if he had been dragged through the kennel at boarding school. He lost his money at chuck-farthing, shuffle-cap, and all-fours; sold his books, pawned his linen, which we were always forced to redeem. Then the whole generation of him are so in love with bagpipes and puppet shows; I wish you knew what my husband has paid at the pastry cooks and confectioners for Naples biscuit, tarts, custards, and sweetmeats. (29)

  For the historian, the final sentence is a coded reference to “the early and successful years of the war when Emperor Leopold [of Austria] steadfastly refused to consider a French proposal for a negotiated peace under which Charles would take the bulk of the Spanish inheritance if he would concede Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia to Philip of Anjou” (161); but for the literary historian, the passage evokes the comic low road of fiction some English novelists had been traveling ever since William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (1553). The comic style and Menippean form give the Arbuthnot the freedom to refer to the Church of England, for example, as “a troublesome fiddle-faddle old woman” (38) and to reduce the leading kings and statesmen of the day to cutthroat businessmen. As in Manley’s scurrilous s
atires, “the secret springs of great actions” (93) originate in the self-serving actions of scoundrels. The novel purports to be the work of a proud graduate of the “University of Grub Street” named Sir Humphrey Polesworth, which enables Arbuthnot to make Swiftian swipes at historiography—Polesworth was partly based on legal historian Sir Humphrey Mackworth—and at literary sacred cows: Polesworth is a great admirer of The Pilgrim’s Progress (93), but earlier he unwittingly brackets it with subliterary trash when he informs the reader that the second Mrs. Bull “would not allow her maids and apprentices the benefit of John Bunyan, the London Apprentice, or the Seven Champions” (63).118

  Although Arbuthnot didn’t invent John Bull, he popularized the British icon—“ruddy and plump, with a pair of cheeks like a trumpeter” (49–50)—who is introduced as “an honest, plain-dealing fellow, choleric, bold, and of a very unconstant temper, . . . very apt to quarrel with his best friends, especially if they pretended to govern him: If you flattered him, you might lead him like a child. John’s temper depended very much upon the air; his spirits rose and fell with the weather-glass. John was quick, and understood his business very well, but no man alive was more careless in looking into his accounts, or more cheated by partners, apprentices, and servants” (9). Over the course of the novel, however, John learns to become more responsible and mature, just as (Arbuthnot implies) the English nation learned how to govern itself better at the end of this tumultuous period. Like all political satires, John Bull is so dependent on period detail that a full appreciation of its merits is attainable only by someone willing do some homework, but any reader can appreciate its colorful characters and vigorous, demotic prose style.

  A different kind of political allegory, tragic rather than comic, appeared in 1716 under the title Irish Tales, a novella by the otherwise unknown Sarah Butler, reportedly dead when it was published.119 The title is misleading, for the novel is a continuous narrative, not a collection of tales; Butler herself calls it a “novel” twice in her preface. Set in the early 11th century, it dramatizes the Irish reaction to the Viking occupation and the compromises some made with the foreigners. The politically savvy reader of 1716 would have intuited the parallel with the situation in Ireland: after 1691, the Catholic Irish had to knuckle under to the “heretic” English Protestants just as they had to the heathen Vikings in the Middle Ages; in both eras, some Irish collaborated with the enemy while others resisted. In Irish Tales, the father of a beautiful woman named Dooneflaith seems to be willing to sacrifice her to the lust of the occupying Viking ruler Turgesius, which infuriates her ardent admirer Murchoe, son of the Irish resistance leader Brian Boru. Both Dooneflaith and Murchoe are wracked by guilt over the compromises they make to stay together, especially Murchoe, who forgoes several opportunities to kill Turgesius and liberate his country because he’d probably die in the effort: he’d rather be a live lover than a dead hero.

  The centerpiece of the novella is a sexually charged undercover mission in which 15 beautiful Irish virgins are forced to service the lusts of Tugesius and other Danish occupiers. But the lasses are actually lads, each dressed in “female apparel, and each a short sword under his gown” (69). Dooneflaith, the only biological female among them, is encouraged by her father (not the collaborator he seemed to be) to penetrate the king before he does her: “strike home, my girl, and dip thy dagger to the hilt, then let him take his fill of love, caress and court thee then” (67). The planned orgy turns into an orgy of death as “the blood of the Danes, with that of the grape, promiscuously mingled” (72), followed by a larger conflict that enables the Irish to take back their country. Butler doesn’t allow her virginal heroine to participate in the blood orgy—her partner for the night is led off and drowned later—nor does she allow her to marry Murchoe. Both are kept apart by their feuding fathers, suggesting parental tyrants are as bad as foreign ones, and while there’s a happy ending for Ireland, there isn’t one for them.

  Unlike the author of the earlier novel Vertue Rewarded, which also dealt with the English occupation of Ireland in the 1690s, Butler doesn’t compromise with characters’ names, giving us authentic monikers such as Dooneflaith, Maolseachelvin, and Huaghaire Mac-Duniling Mac-Tuatil (all taken from original sources: Butler did her homework). The prose blends the poetic style of old Irish tales with 17th-century heroic romance, and the dialogue of the lovers often scans as blank verse. The novella is wryly subtitled “Instructive Histories for the Happy Conduct of Life,” the implications being (a) that Erin’s children should be prepared to sacrifice personal desires to national interests, and (b) that Irish readers can take comfort in these tales until the happy day when the English are expelled, just as the Vikings eventually were. Which is to say, Irish Tales has not yet outlived its original purpose.

  The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719) is not the first novel, as sometimes claimed, nor the first desert-island novel, the first realistic novel, the first middle-class novel, the first capitalist novel, nor the first novel to assert “the primacy of individual experience” (Watt, 15). It is, however, the first major novel of 18th-century English literature, largely because Defoe devised a winning combination of those elements and geared them to the tastes of the growing reading public. Its extraordinary success is due not to its originality but to its accessibility and compelling immediacy.

  There had been desert-island novels as far back as Ibn Tufayl’s 12th-century Hayy ibn Yaqzan (see pp. 489–91 of my previous volume), but only a few middle-class readers encountered the English translations of it that began to appear in the 1670s (though Defoe was evidently one of them). Only the literati read it, or Godwin’s Man in the Moon—which, you’ll recall, begins with an inventive European stranded on an island with a black servant—or Neville’s Isle of Pines, Grimmelshausen’s Continuation, or a Dutch novel by Hendrik Smeeks entitled The Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes (1708).120 Some Londoners, including Defoe, would have read Richard Steele’s popular article on the Scotsman Alexander Selkirk in the 3 December 1714 issue of The Englishman, about a man who ran away to sea to avoid a court summons (for indecent behavior in a church!) and was left behind on an island west of Chile for five years. And those with a good memory (again probably including Defoe) may have recalled a pamphlet published in 1689 entitled A Relation of the Great Suffering and Strange Adventures of Henry Pitman, a nonfiction account of an Englishman marooned on a Caribbean island that has a remarkable number of similarities to Robinson Crusoe’s adventures.121 Defoe went further than any of these authors in imagining how a man might survive on a deserted island, but the basic idea was an old one.

  Similarly, there are realistic novels stretching back to the crime novels of the ancient Greeks, Petronius’s Satyricon, all the way back to the ancient Egyptian business-traveler novel The Report of Wenamun. Deloney wrote middle-class capitalist success stories in the 1590s, and we’ve seen many other novels during this early modern period dealing with characters from the middle classes. The “primacy of individual experience” had been petulantly asserted as early as Boccaccio’s Elegy of Lady Fiammetta (c. 1344), if not earlier, and was a growing trend in novels from the Renaissance onward, up to an intensely self-directed novel published anonymously in 1708 as An Account of Some Remarkable Passages in the Life of a Private Gentleman.122 Defoe didn’t invent any of this; pushing 60 after nearly 30 years in the writing business, what he did was figure out a way to repackage all these trends and genres in a form that would appeal to readers high and low.

  The novel’s formal design is crude but efficient, like the chair Crusoe makes for himself on his island. The first 30 pages (in the Norton Critical Edition I’ll be citing) deals with his life before he was marooned on an island in the Caribbean, and the last 30 pages begin with the arrival of the English ship that will take him back to Europe. Rousseau called these opening and closing sections “rigmarole” and wanted his Emile to study only the middle 160 pages, and indeed most readers soon forge
t the frame. (When I returned to it after 35 years for the purpose of this book, I couldn’t remember how it began and only vaguely recalled a tense winter scene at the end.) At the very center of the novel, Crusoe spots the footprint on the sand, just at the point when he and the novel had become too comfortable. Also framing the novel are biblical allusions that underscore the spiritual dimension of Crusoe’s adventure: at the beginning there are a few references to the parable of the prodigal son, and near the end, safely back in Europe and now rich, Crusoe comments, “that the latter end of Job was better than the beginning” (205). Pirates and wild animals play important roles at the beginning and the end, and those neglected bookends help us decide how we should interpret Defoe’s novel: is it a celebration of self-reliance, capitalism, and middle-class morality, or a condemnation?