by Steven Moore
Unhappy sex! forbid by prudent thought
to breathe a sigh, or dart a meaning look,
lest a censorious world name it a crime;
and when the sad relief of words would ease,
nay calm, and cessate woes, dread to unfold them,
and have we aught of conduct, must deceive,
lie to the friend we hug, yet call them dear.
Such are the base reserves of modern friendship.
O Jupiter, forbid the foul injustice!
Defraud of thought, and perjury of souls!
yet, so much she who hath a fame to lose,
or any spark of modest thinking act,
or be the laugh of crowds, the fop’s remark. (102)
The quaint, almost Elizabethan prose is the most arresting feature of this odd novel: I had to slow down while reading it, and often needed to reread a sentence to comprehend what Boyd was saying; when an old woman is “suddenly seized with convulsive pangs” during church, Boyd writes, “Many of no mean figure left devotion to help, if possible, where Death seemed busy; amid the friendly throng, a young lady of uncommon look showed deep concern, and told our Felix from that hour her slave, there is a fated minute to undo us” (131–32). Pardon? Until one rereads and realizes a comma is missing after “Felix,” the last part seems to mean, “and told our Felix [that] from that hour [he would be her] slave, [for] there is a fated minute to undo us,” with possibly a pun on “told,” as though at that fated minute the church bells tolled he would be her slave—which may sound like a stretch but is consistent with Boyd’s elliptical, Donnish diction.
Felix is the brother of Amanda, the happy unfortunate of the title, who (as the subtitle reveals) disguises herself as a page to be next to the man she loves, the Duke Bellfond of the opening sentence, a married man pushing 50. Even without the half-dozen appearances of the phrase “love’s excess,” Boyd was obviously inspired by Eliza Haywood’s early novels and uses many of the same plot devices (disguises, attempted rapes, bedtricks, husbands accidentally stabbing wives, etc.), but departs from her linear form. The Happy Unfortunate begins with Amanda already disguised as “Florio,” and teases the reader with hints of homosexuality between the page and his master, especially after the duke penetrates her disguise and makes out with the page, which leads one ignorant observer to call the duke “a what d’ye call it—an eunuch” and the page “my lord’s man-mistress” (51). A third of the way through the novel, Boyd puts this sticky situation on hold to explain how it all came about, which entails long stories about Amanda as a 14-year-old pursued by unwanted suitors, her brother Felix, Felix’s wife (the “young lady of uncommon look”), and her female companion Luvania, the heroine of a Behn-like novella of sensational adventures. (The author quotes Behn at one point in acknowledgment of her influence.) Boyd then returns to the present for the final third of the novel, in which Florio, now unmasked as Amanda, guiltily serves as the duke’s mistress until his wife conveniently dies, leaving him free to marry Amanda mere days before she gives birth to a girl (whom the duke names Florio). Defying the romantic genre’s traditional happy ending along with its linear form, Boyd quickly kills off Luvania, Amanda’s brother, the duke’s creepy brother (who tried to seduce Amanda), and then Amanda herself after she gives birth to a second child. The duke dies of grief.
Boyd also defies conventional morality. Virtually all the characters indulge in premarital sex and/or adultery, and the principals reject the idea that a loving couple requires a wedding license before they can have sex. Boyd marries off her lovers at the end as a sop to convention, but not before arguing that coitus between two people who truly love each other “is the gratefullest charm the god of nature gives” (113); “real love was never sin, they loved sincerely, and marriage lived in hearts,” not in “form and ceremony that join the hand for title, or for wealth, or perhaps ends more vile” (316). “Where’s the guilt of happy, mutual love?” the duke asked Amanda earlier (113), and by the end, she agrees that “mutual love is all we know of heaven” (337).167 It’s bluntly realistic at times: the duke’s brother not only has syphilis, but passes it onto his wife, who dies as a result. Many characters are described as plain-looking, and a maid named Lucinda, “one of those thoughtless half-souled wretches,” is dismissed by the narrator as an “animal” (42–43). But for all its unconventionality in attitude and technique, The Happy Unfortunate is a successful failure (to echo its oxymoronic title) rather than a successful novel, marred by chronological inconsistencies, tired tropes, and lazy plotting, not to mention labored diction that occasionally lapses into incoherence.168 We shouldn’t be too hard on it: Boyd claims in her preface she wrote this when very young, and was now publishing it only because she needed money to open a stationery shop, not because she was trying to reinvent the novel. (Like Barker’s novels, it was published by subscription.) Brigid MacCarthy calls it “the dying gasp of the tradition of gallantry” (223), and at best The Happy Unfortunate is an offbeat transitional work between the older novels of Behn, Haywood, and Manley (Atalantis is quoted on the title page) and some iconoclastic novels published later in the 18th century.
Some of those tired tropes were given a fresh look in the graphic novels of William Hogarth (1697–1764), which are even more important in the transition from the amatory fictions of the 1720s to the more realistic novels of the 1740s. A Harlot’s Progress (1732) consists of six engravings that were sold as a set and intended to be “read” like a novel. It tells the sad if clichéd story of a smalltown girl, Moll Hackabout, who comes to the big city of London to become a seamstress, gets sucked into prostitution, and dies at the age of 23 from venereal disease. We know these details because of the texts that appear in Hogarth’s engravings—various documents, letters, book covers, luggage stamps, etc.—meaning we literally need to “read” these plates rather than merely view them. Each one is like a chapter in a novel, for the wealth of detail allows the reader to infer Moll’s backstory, construct the plot, assess Moll’s character and that of the other figures that surround her, decode the allusions made via books and paintings in the background, and to note foreshadowings of her fate. The six engravings are not merely isolated moments in the harlot’s progress, “but a series of closely knit events in which each follows almost deterministically from the other,” as Sean Shesgreen writes in the introduction to his edition of Hogarth’s works (xvi).
A Rake’s Progress (1735) features a character similar to Davys’s “accomplished” rake, and like her novel, it can be called a tragicomedy. Its protagonist, Tom Rakewell, inherits his father’s estate and follows the usual path to perdition, but in a comically grotesque fashion. It is longer (eight plates, as opposed to six) and more complicated than its predecessor, for it includes a subplot concerning a naïve girl named Sarah, impregnated before the novel begins, who has followed Tom to London in the vain hope he will keep his promise of marriage. Instead, Tom ignores her, goes broke, and marries an old woman for her money, blows that, and winds up mad. Each of Hogarth’s pictures is worth a thousand words, converting the verbal, temporal orientation of novels into a visual, spatial one while retaining the same subject matter.
Marriage à la Mode (1745), considered by many to be Hogarth’s finest graphic novel, dramatizes the same corrupt practice Elizabeth Boyd railed against, a forced marriage made solely for economic and social gain. The ill-suited husband and wife pursue their pleasures separately after marriage—they are not depicted together after the second plate—and both die within a few years, but not before Hogarth indicts an entire society for colluding in such charades: the six engravings are crowded with opportunistic parents, merchants, lawyers, financiers, musicians, quacks, and hangers-on. All three of these graphic novels are didactic works, their protagonists object lessons in selfish, reckless behavior, but they exhibit the complexity of novels rather than religious tracts. For that reason they were admired by novelists like Swift (who wrote a poem praising Hogarth), Richardson (who asked Hogarth fo
r a frontispiece to Pamela, never published), Smollett (who depicts him as Mr. Pallet in his Peregrine Pickle), and especially Fielding, who had not yet written a novel, but who would cite Hogarth often when he did. After noting “Hogarth gets no mention in Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel,” Ronald Paulson goes so far as to claim “he is the significant other of the novel’s rise in Richardson’s Pamela and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. Chronology alone tells us that without his graphic work in the 1730s both Richardson and Fielding would have written somewhat differently in the 1740s” (36).169
Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733) by the Irish clergyman and writer Samuel Madden (1686–1765) recalls Manley and Swift, but instead of mocking current affairs from a fantasy island like Atalantis or Lilliput, Madden does so from 270 years in the future. The bulk of the novel consists of 17 lengthy letters exchanged in the years 1997 and 1998 between the new British prime minister and his ambassadors to Turkey, Italy, Russia, and France, discussing the latest developments. Unlike Swift—who in part 3 of Gulliver’s Travels anticipates the use of aerial warfare and computer language, among other inventions—Madden doesn’t describe any technological advances or even try to imagine what the 20th century might be like. Things are more or less the same as they were in the 1730s, except the Jesuits exert greater control. The nations of Europe are still kingdoms (France is up to Louis XX), the borders of the Ottoman Empire are a little smaller, and America is still populated by “naked savages” (504). He does make a few accurate predictions, such as the Catholic bull dogmatizing the Immaculate Conception, the making of the Suez Canal, the growing power (and danger) of Russia, the Y2K scare, and the return of the Jews to Israel and the political troubles that would ensue. (He also made a lucky guess that a George VI would be on the throne of England, though he placed him at the end of the century rather than during His Majesty’s actual reign [1936–52].) The futuristic setting is merely a smokescreen behind which Madden satirizes religions (all but his own Protestantism), rails against the abuses of monarchy, warns against certain trends, and offers solutions to some contemporary problems. Much of this is reasonable: the ambassadors accurately analyze the mess France was in (in 1730, that is), make excellent policy recommendations in medicine and economics, and promote some useful philanthropic projects (as Madden did in real life).
But all this is complicated by the fact that the 18th-century narrator claims these letters were delivered to him by an angel in a vision in 1728, after a long period of immersion in occult studies. In the first of three long prefaces—one at the beginning, one in the middle of the book, and one at the end—he tips us off to his mental state when he confesses “I have been as much perplexed how to introduce them [these letters] properly by a preface worthy of them as Cervantes himself, when he fell on that which stands before his inimitable Don Quixote” (1). Our suspicion that he too has been reading the wrong kind of books is confirmed when he proclaims “I am descended in a direct line by the mother’s side from a son of that famous Count Gabalis in the 17th century, whose history is in everyone’s hands, and whose wife, as all true adepts know, had carnal knowledge of, and was impregnated by, a certain invisible demon that called himself Ariel” (9–10). After failing as a politician, he retired to Yorkshire and studied magic and became “in some degree skilled in the Anthropomantia, or divining of men; the Cyathomantia and Oenomantia by cups and wine; the Chiromantia by the line of the hand or Palmistry; the Arithmantia or divining of figures; the celestial Astrologia by the stars; the Cleidomantia or Bible and key; the Stichomantia by different kinds of verses; . . . not to mention the Copromantia, as the Greek calls it, or in plain English, the art of divining from the dung of creatures: a matter I wish from my soul the sage inspectors of our close-stools were a little better skilled in than our weekly Bills of Mortality show they are” (247–48). Like Bordelon’s Monsieur Oufle, the nameless narrator has obviously been driven mad by his occult books, many of which are named—Madden’s wide erudition is everywhere in evidence in this novel—and he sounds like a cross between the narrators of A Tale of a Tub and Polite Conversation. Memoirs of the Twentieth Century could be a publication of the Scriblerus Club: he claims to reveal the “secret springs” behind politics (268), the same phrase Arbuthnot used in The History of John Bull (93).
What then are we to make of this madman’s astute political commentary and Enlightenment values? Like Swift, Madden performs a clever ventriloquist act in which his dummy narrator mixes valid with outrageous remarks, and leaves it to his readers to distinguish between the two. The reader’s irony detector gets quite a workout during this novel. For example, there are virulent expressions of antimonarchism throughout the novel, claiming that most kings’ “title to their empire are only founded in blood and violence and a few sorry laws which their swords have cut out for their own purposes” (357) and calculating “that since the 16th century to the 20th, the princes of Europe have sacrificed the lives of above 100 million of the bravest of their subjects to wars, begun and carried on for the most frivolous, silly excuses imaginable” (461). The ambassador to France furnishes some scandalous pages from Louis XX’s diary that expose him as a stupid, gluttonous sot, and the other kings and emperors encountered in these pages aren’t much better. Are these Madden’s views, or are these intended to be taken as the ravings of a madman? Much of the novel satirizes religion, a dangerous game for a clergyman like Madden (and like Swift) to play; anticipating objections to his claim that an angel revealed these letters to him, the narrator cites biblical precedents and implies that anyone who believes, say, in the prophecies of Micah and the book of Revelation should have no problem with his, nor should readers doubt the reality of his angel if they believe in those of the Bible. At one point, Madden presents what are probably his own views on religion—“the best and surest way to please God is by a plain, honest, moral conduct without regarding particular systems of revelation and rules of faith” (263)—but that recommendation can go unnoticed in the hundreds of pages of religious satire, where occult and theological books are indistinguishable and superstition and religion represent two sides of the same coin.
Some of the letters, like the treatises the ambassador of France sends to the PM, are “remarkable for their oddness and novelty” (91). One describes the methods by which Laplanders create sunlight in the middle of a Russian winter; another concerns a Russian Jew who has traced his genealogy back to Adam and thus considers himself the rightful heir to every throne in the world; and in another we are treated to a 26-page description of all the relics the Vatican plans to auction off on 25 April 1998, beginning with “The Ark of the Covenant, the cross of the good thief, both somewhat wormeaten. Judas’s lantern, a little scorched. The dice the soldiers played with when they cast lots on our savior’s garment,” and ending with “A tear which Christ shed over Lazarus, enclosed in a little crystal by an angel, who made a present of it to St. Mary Magdalen. Another from the Benedictines’ convent, at Vendôme in France. N.B. This is the very tear which the learned Père Mabillon writ so admirable a treatise in defense of, to the honor of God and holy church” (103–28). But most of the long letters grow tedious, and one is grateful that Madden stopped here and did not fulfill his promise to publish 5 more volumes of Memoirs. In fact, he recalled most of the 1,000-copy first edition a few days after publication, reportedly at the request of the real prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who brooked no criticism of his despotic regime. This may have been Madden’s plan all along, for near the end of the novel the 18th-century narrator confesses “I am in much less pain for the verification of any predictions in these letters than I am lest the few copies I print of them may—through envy or folly, or an utter ignorance of their worth—be entirely lost or suppressed before those times when their truth and value will be confirmed” (519). Did Madden suppress his own book to make its claims appear real? If so, that’s what comedians call commitment to a bit. Sometimes considered the earliest example of British futuristic fiction, Memoirs of
the Twentieth Century now belongs to the genre of alternative history, though it’s best viewed as Madden’s attempt to emulate the learned, ironic satires of his fellow Irishman, Dean Swift.170
The much-hated Sir Robert Walpole—a corrupt, corpulent, conservative, censoring anti-intellectual—is also the satirical target of Eliza Haywood’s most inventive novel, The Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo: A Pre-Adamitical History (1736). The premise is obviously taken from Crébillon’s Skimmer, published two years earlier and translated anonymously into English in 1735 (by Haywood?—she later translated his Sofa). As you’ll recall, The Skimmer purported to be a translation from the Chinese of an old Japanese novel that was translated from an extinct language. Eovaii is a translation made by a Mandarin in London of a 5th-century Chinese novel that was translated from the lost “language of nature” spoken by a country that existed in prehistory. That earlier translation, made by 70 scholars (winking at the Septuagint), was accompanied by notes from a variety of commentators, which the Mandarin summarizes, along with notes of his own, in a manner resembling The Dunciad Variorum, in which Haywood ignominiously appeared. The first female novel to write this sort of critifiction, Haywood tells her story the way she wants on top and lets the boys argue about it down in the footnotes. (She gives the most serious of them the laughing name Hahehihotu.)
The story concerns a 15-year-old princess named Eovaai, heir to the throne of Ijaveo, a country located between Australia and the South Pole. An exotic classic coming-of-age story, Eovaai loses her virtue and her country when she loses a jewel her father had given her, and is nearly seduced—sexually and politically—by an evil magician named Ochihatou (Walpole), chief minister of a corrupt, absolutist monarchy nearby. Eovaai is forced to abandon Ijaveo, but after obtaining a magic spyglass that not only allows her to see things as they really are, but also to see in the dark, she sees through his machinations, recovers the virtue she had lost when a bird stole her magic jewel (which Haywood stole from The Arabian Nights), and marries the handsome heir to Ochihatou’s kingdom, joining their nations into the kind of limited, constitutional monarchy that Walpole’s opponents favored.