by Steven Moore
Peter Wilkins reads more like a Walter Mittyesque daydream than a sociological critique, but despite some imaginative conceptions and H. Rider Haggard-type adventures near the end, the novel never quite gets off the ground. It lacks what Fielding would call genius. Nevertheless, the novel tapped into the reading public’s long dream of flight, and has attracted readers ever since. Coleridge and the other Romantics loved it, Leigh Hunt and George Saintsbury doted on lovely Youwarkee in particular, and Borges included her in his Book of Imaginary Beings. Appearing at the end of a decade that established the realist mode in English fiction, Peter Wilkins reminds us (as Turner reminds us in his introduction) there are “emotions, aspirations, and anxieties not always adequately expressed in ‘formal realist’ fiction” (vii).
By 1750, the English novel had achieved parity with those published on the continent, and was grudgingly recognized by some of the English intelligentsia as a force to reckon with, though there was much debate over how that force should be used. In 1749, Fanny Hill’s publisher Richard Griffiths founded the Monthly Review, the first periodical devoted solely to book-reviewing and to setting standards for good fiction. (Let us take a moment of silence to remember all the evils committed ever since in that cause. The Monthly Review panned the innovative Charlotte Summers and shrugged at Peter Wilkins.) And in 1750, the Great Cham (as Smollett later dubbed Samuel Johnson, meaning “khan”) passed judgment on the upstart realist novel in a famous essay published in The Rambler; under the obtuse, condescending assumption that novels “are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct and introductions into life,” fuddy-duddy Johnson tried to throw a wet blanket on the changing medium by arguing that novels should remain Sunday school lessons in morality, and that authors shouldn’t muddy matters by “ming[ling] good and bad qualities in their principal personages.”225 Regarding fiction merely as the entertainment wing of moral philosophy, not as an independent artistic endeavor, he doesn’t say a word about aesthetics, and it’s not surprising that his own effort at fiction, the faux-Oriental novella Rasselas (1759), is a dull, dispiriting lecture on resignation. By contrast, An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Henry Fielding (1751), probably written by Francis Coventry (1725–54), intelligently discusses Fielding’s use of characterization, style, plotting, chapter headings—he criticizes the authors of Roderick Random and Charlotte Summers for giving away too much of the plot in theirs—and encourages innovation: “A tolerable original is greatly preferable to the best copy, and it shows a greater genius in passing with some difficulty an untrodden path than to go without a slip through a broad, beaten track. And I do not think it one of the least of Milton’s excellencies that he treats of ‘Things unattempted yet, in prose or rhyme.’“226
As good as his word, Coventry published in February 1751 a tolerably original and totally delightful novel with a dog as its hero, Pompey the Little. (Pompey the Great was a human general of the Roman breed who lived during the 1st century bce). Since anyone can be the protagonist of a novel these days, the narrator argues in his first chapter—a country maid, a foundling, a parish girl, a prostitute—why not a dog? Attentive to his master’s voice, Coventry wags his dog’s tale in a bantering, educated, mock-heroic tone that owes as much to Pope as to Fielding. (Pompey’s literary pedigree includes Shock, Belinda’s lapdog in “The Rape of the Lock.”) The descendant of a long line of aristocratic canines, Pompey is born in Bologna in 1735 to a celebrated courtesan, whose English lover takes the lapdog with him back to England and gives him to the animal-loving woman he is trying to seduce, Lady Tempest. Thereafter Pomp experiences the same dramatic reversals as other fictional protagonists—abducted, rescued, loved, lost, mentored, mistreated, given away, threatened with jail and death—as he moves between the upper and lower classes, until he is eventually reunited with his first love, Lady Tempest, and dies on 2 June 1749. Sometimes he bewails his fate in the same lofty tones as Tom Jones, but mostly he just listens to his various masters and mistresses.
What he hears is what people talk about behind closed doors when they think there’s no one but the dog listening. In superbly rendered dialogue, Coventry gives us couples arguing, children fighting, sisters snickering, intellectuals debating, lawyers equivocating, servants gossiping, Methodists moping, fops fluttering, beaus boasting, college students pranking—a vocal cross-section of British society with special attention to women, particularly the idle rich who regard a lapdog as a must-have fashion accessory. Describing Lady Tempest, the narrator alludes to a line from Pope’s epistle “To a Lady” (“But ev’ry woman is at heart a rake”), and as in that superlative poem Coventry walks us through a portrait gallery of ridiculous women, capturing their frivolous lives to a T. One of his models, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, attests to the accuracy of Coventry’s dog act, writing in 1752 to her daughter to say, “It is a real and exact representation of life as it is now acted in London, as it was in my time, and as it will be (I do not doubt) a hundred years hence, with some little variation of dress, and perhaps government. I found there many of my acquaintance. Lady T[ownshend] and Lady O[rford] are so well painted I fancy I heard them talk, and have heard them say the very things here repeated.”227 Like a guy today who walks his dog to attract women, Coventry trots out cute little Pompey as an excuse for dozens of slash-and-burn character studies, and to do things a human couldn’t get away with doing or saying in polite society—as when Pomp poops on the memoirs of the founder of Methodism, or flirts with “bitches of the highest fashion” (1.6), which Coventry italicizes to drive home the point that humans and animals are not so different. In fact, Pompey is superior to all but three of the novel’s large human cast; despite the silly premise, Pompey the Little is a Swiftian indictment of British society.
Though primarily an homage/parody of Fielding’s novels and Pope’s poems, Pompey the Little is indebted to two novels written earlier in the century by Charles Gildon. In 1708, he published an adaptation of Apuleius called The New Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist is magically transformed not into an ass but into a Bolognese lapdog, enabling Gildon to recycle stories of romantic intrigue as Fantasio is passed around. The following year, he brought out the first volume of The Golden Spy, discussed earlier, which provided the template for the “it-narrative” that Pompey popularized, in which a mobile animal or object provides a similar secret view of society. Coventry doesn’t use this device as effectively as he could: Pompey is not told from the dog’s point of view, and like his owners, Coventry ignores the pooch for dozens of pages at a time. But no matter: Coventry didn’t intend to rival Fielding, just nip at his heels: when he revised the novel in 1752, Coventry added a prefatory dedication to Fielding in which he admits his “little work” is “unworthy to be ranked in that class of writings” that Fielding dominated. Only 25 when he published Pompey the Little, Coventry displays the potential for a greater work—he had an undeniable gift for comic dialogue and social satire—but unfortunately he died three years later.
The same month Pompey the Little appeared, Tobias Smollett published his second novel, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751). If Pompey is a petite, groomed lapdog, Peregrine Pickle is a huge, shaggy mutt that knocks you over and humps your leg. Smollett was apparently impressed by the size and especially the sales of Tom Jones, if nothing else. He dismissively refers to Fielding as “Mr. Spondy” at one point in the novel, and at another has the nerve to write: “I might here, in imitation of some celebrated writers, furnish out a page or two with the reflections he made upon the instability of human affairs, the treachery of the world, and the temerity of youth, and endeavor to decoy the reader into a smile by some quaint observation of my own touching the sagacious moralizer; but, besides that I look upon this practice as an impertinent anticipation of the peruser’s thoughts, I have too much matter of importance upon my hands to give the reader the least reason to believe that I am driven to such paltry shifts, in order to eke ou
t the volume.”228 This appears in volume eked out to 780 pages with all sorts of padding, including the 100-page “Memoirs of a Lady of Quality” by a socialite who may have paid Smollett to insert it, and which ruins any structural unity the novel might have had. (It worked sales-wise, for many bought the novel just for the scandalous confession.)
A brasher, vainer, lustier Tom Jones, Peregrine Pickle follows in the same trajectory as Fielding’s more upstanding protagonist: he is banished from his father’s house and raised by a sea-dog uncle—a marvelous comic creation—and during a childhood devoted mostly to pranking he falls for a livelier version of Sophia named Emilia. (He even has a Blifil-like brother.) He then goes off to college to party, to London for more tomfoolery, then tours France for a year and a half—following in Smollett’s footsteps in 1750, possibly to gather material for this novel—and after some low adventures in the Low Countries returns to London for further coxcombry, under full sail of his “ridiculous pride” and “the impetuosity of his passions” until the “pert jackanapes” invariably runs out of money, works on Grub Street for a while, and is imprisoned for debt. He is sprung after he inherits his estranged father’s fortune, and then marries his childhood sweetheart, mature enough now to settle in the country rather than return to the “world of scandal.”
The unoriginal story is essentially a vehicle for various pranks, revenge schemes, and sexual escapades, some very funny, others not so much. Pickle is clearly a surrogate for the author: Smollett is describing his compositional self when he writes, “Peregrine’s satirical disposition was never more gratified than when he had an opportunity of exposing grave characters in ridiculous attitudes” (24), and again when we’re told “his disposition broke out into those irregularities and wild sallies of a luxuriant imagination for which he became so remarkable” (25). Smollett wrote this novel quickly, and during the many times when Pickle “set his invention to work in order to contrive some means of” accomplishing something or other, we simultaneously witness Smollett setting his invention to work. The most metafictional moment occurs in chapter 38, when Pickle meets a Welsh apothecary and asks “if he was not the person so respectfully mentioned in The Adventures of Roderick Random”; he admits he is, and criticizes Random (not Smollett) for broadcasting his private affairs. Pickle has also read Gil Blas, presumably in Smollett’s translation (1748).
Among his “wild sallies” is another Joycean letter—“Prey for the loaf of Geesus keep this from the nolegs of my hussban” (45)—much hilarious use of nautical imagery (especially when applied to women), a number of comically alliterative names (Comfit Colocynth, Timothy Trickle, Jacob Jolter), moral advice expressed in mathematical terms (27), a farcical supper in ancient Roman style (48), and an episode that anticipates Shaw’s Pygmalion: Pickle buys a 16-year-old waif for coitus, then thinks it would be fun to clean her up and pass her off as a cultivated lady. All goes well until the night she plays cards with some aristocrats and catches a “real” lady cheating, “and burst open the floodgates of her own natural repartee, twanged off with the appellations of b― and w―, which she repeated with great vehemence in an attitude of manual defiance, to the terror of her antagonist and the astonishment of all present: nay, to such an unguarded pitch was she provoked that, starting up, she snapt her fingers in testimony of disdain and, as she quitted the room, applied her hand to that part which was the last of her that disappeared, inviting the company to kiss it by one of its coarsest denominations” (95). Edited down to half its size, Peregrine Pickle would be a successful comic novel, but as its stands, it’s a cross between a bloated Roderick Random and a boorish Tom Jones.
Another writer who took note of Fielding’s success and mocked him was the unsinkable Eliza Haywood, who in October 1751 published her longest novel, the 600-page History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. At a time when most novels still ended with marriage, Haywood took on the more difficult task of dealing with the first years of married life, an early contribution to the genre of domestic fiction. But that’s the best that can be said for a novel that its earliest critics rightly found dull and insipid. Betsy Thoughtless is basically a rewrite of Davys’s Reformed Coquette: the orphaned title character enters London social life at age 14 and feeds her vanity by collecting as many admirers as possible. She inadvertently encourages some who only want to have sex with her, and discourages more serious suitors, such as the decent Charles Trueworth. (Like Fielding and Smollett, Haywood gives her characters Restoration/allegorical names.) Her careless coquetting leads to several near-rapes, which cause her concerned brothers to push her into marrying a mundane suitor named Munden, a courtier looking for a suitable trophy wife. This is the point—about 140 pages from the end—where Betsy Thoughtless departs from earlier amatory romances, which concluded either in marriage or ruin. Betsy tries her best to be a dutiful wife, but when she learns her husband is having an affair with a French adventuress, she leaves him, privileging self-respect over conventional notions of marital duty. However, as Jane Spencer notes, “Haywood avoids pursuing the more radical implications of this story by arranging a convenient death for Munden” (151). As soon as Betsy learns he is dying, she rushes back to his side out of “duty” (the word appears often during this episode) and then dutifully buries herself in the country for a year of mourning for the jerk. Haywood arranges another convenient death of the woman Trueworth married after Betsy rejected him, and the novel reverts to type with a sappy wedding at the end.
Some critics see similarities between Betsy Thoughtless and Tom Jones—both protagonists are orphans, both are adviced that it’s as important to appear respectable as to be respectable, both are thoughtless rather than delinquent, both have villainous siblings—though Fielding’s influence strikes me as limited to the use of chapters—most of Haywood’s earlier novels are uninterrupted—and bantering chapter headings, beginning with the first chapter that “Gives the reader room to guess at what is to ensue, though ten to one but he finds himself deceived.” Sometimes these backfire, as when she accurately describes one chapter as “Containing very little to the purpose” (3.9), and toward the end she runs out of clever comments and makes do with “More of the same” and “Affords variety of amusements” (4.20, 21). But unlike Tom Jones, Betsy Thoughtless suffers from bland, first-draftish prose,229 reactionary platitudes, stagy monologues, incredible coincidences, and sketchiness: it’s all foreground, like a play performed on a bare stage, with little of the realistic background that had become the norm by this time. Haywood had written a number of conduct books over the decades, and Betsy Thoughtless is essentially a novelized conduct book for young misses, not a work of literature for adults. (In this regard, it’s more reminiscent of Pamela than Tom Jones.) One can sympathize with Betsy’s criticism of gender expectations:
“I wonder,” continued she, “what can make the generality of women so fond of marrying? It looks to me like an infatuation. Just as if it were not a greater pleasure to be courted, complimented, admired, and addressed by a number, than to be confined to one, who from a slave becomes a master, and perhaps uses his authority in a manner disagreeable enough.
“And yet, it is expected from us. One has no sooner left off one’s bib and apron than people cry, ‘Miss will soon be married.’ And this man, and that man, is presently picked out for a husband. Mighty ridiculous! They want to deprive us of all the pleasures of life just when one begins to have a relish for them.” (4.3)
Such criticism is undercut by Betsy’s wish simply to party thoughtlessly and be admired like her pet squirrel, and by the reader’s suspicion that she fears sex. In one of the few instances where Haywood employs imagery, Betsy is shaken by news that tall, dark Trueworth has married, but explains away her agitation to others by saying she “had been frightened as she came alone by a great black ox who, by the carelessness of the drivers, had like to have run his horns quite into the chair” she was riding in (3.22), an unmistakable phallic image.230 Some have made large claims for Betsy Thoughtless, su
ch as Christopher Flint, who feels it “bridges the fictional narratives of Behn or Defoe and the works of Burney and Austen” (219), but it does so only in subject matter, not in artistic sophistication.
Haywood makes a condescending reference at one point to “the little theater in the Haymarket then known by the name of F―g’s scandal shop” (1.8)—where Haywood worked in the 1730s—but Fielding had other reasons to mock Betsy Thoughtless in a piece he published shortly after its publication that takes the form of a court proceeding against the novel for the crime of dullness.231 Unfortunately, the same charge could be made against Fielding’s final novel, Amelia (December 1751), a competent but rather tedious novel about three difficult months in the lives of a perfect wife (based on Fielding’s first wife) and an imperfect husband, a decent man named William Booth who carelessly racks up enough debt to be committed to prison at the beginning of the novel. Further financial difficulties push the family to the brink of disaster when it is revealed that Amelia was cheated out of her inheritance, which is restored to her at the end. The novel realistically conveys the irritants and insults a financially distressed family must endure at the hands of incompetent magistrates, greedy bailiffs, crooked lawyers, corrupt bureaucrats, pawnbrokers, and various conmen, exacerbated by the efforts of a few characters to seduce the beautiful and innocent Amelia, who is aligned by way of numerous allusions to Shakespeare’s Desdemona. Instead of the boisterous, bantering tone he used in previous novels, Fielding lets his characters do most of the talking—the novel is exceptional in the amount of dialogue it contains—though the narrator often interrupts to point a moral, criticize people, or (most often) to explain why he’s leaving material out.