by Steven Moore
Like the 1960s, the 1750s was a remarkable time in England for innovation and experimentation.246 In addition to the novels I’ve discussed so far, there are minor examples like the anonymous History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes (1754), “Written by Themselves,” as the title page claims. The amusing novella begins with a “Preface, Introduction, Dedication, or Advertisement” only because the author notes that “every book of consequence has one,” and is followed by an explanation of how the author learned from a rabbi how to listen to inanimate objects. Recording “a formal colloquy between a pair of women’s shoes and slippers” (2), the novella is laced with learned wit and literary allusions, and appropriately for a story about footwear, footnotes abound. Confined neither by gender nor geography, The Scotch Marine (1754) is a another anonymous novel, this one concerning (per the title page) “A young lady who, secretly deserting her family, spent two years in strict amity as a man with her beloved Castor. Containing,” the carnival-barking title page goes on to report, “a relation of the various fortunes she ran with him in that time, without a discovery or suspicion of her sex; her marriage afterwards with Cario, a North Briton [Scotsman] in New England; her voyage with that gentleman to this kingdom; and their adventures here, till their return to Scotland. Including a great diversity of surprising incidents.”
A similar geographic range can be found in Lydia, or Filial Piety (1755), the second novel by a Tory satirist named John Shebbeare (1709–88). It opens “On the banks of the great river Catarakui, near the cataracts which fall with foaming thunder from the cloud-capt mountains deep embosomed in the eternal woods of America,” and lingers there for a few chapters before taking ship for England. There are Fieldingesque digressions and chapter headings (e.g., chap. 15, “Introduced by a most magnificent simile, which is followed by a very learned debate, which drives two different stories out of two very indifferent heads”), and an attempt to find yet another simile for novel-writing, namely uniforming an army: that is, an author doesn’t base his characters on specific individuals, just as an army tailor doesn’t measure individual soldiers; both cut a variety of sizes, and “we let people choose for themselves till they are fitted” (chap. 27). In the 133rd and final chapter, Shebbeare imitates the author of Charlotte Summers by imagining the negative reactions of readers with names like Lord Bubblebett and Lady *****.
An unknown Englishman went even further afield for a setting in A Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth (1755), in which a man exploring the crater of Mount Vesuvius slips and falls down into the inner earth (or the Central World, as its inhabitants call it), where he meets with other upper worlders whose ancestors arrived there after an earthquake. (Confined to an area called the Earthly Quarter, they are naturally planning to rebel and take over the Central World.) A good third of the short novel consists of the fantastic story of an “aerial spirit” named Mr. Thompson, who was born on Jupiter, then died and went through various reincarnations—a comet, a snake, a slave on Saturn, a Yorkshire servant, a Martian—until he was reborn in the Central World as a kind of guardian angel. There are some learned footnotes, and even the kind of facetiously considerate chapter breaks used by the authors of Charlotte Summers and Captain Greenland; chapter 5 ends with: “if this is your hour of dining or supping, I will give you a fair opportunity by concluding this chapter.”
The most ludic novel of the mid-1750s is The Card (1755) by a disreputable clergyman named John Kidgell (1722–c.1780), which in the opinion of Thomas Keymer “shares with Tristram Shandy the distinction of playing more systematically on its own material format than any other novel before the flurry of single-minded metafiction that developed in the 1960s” (69). The Card is a comedy of manners written in an archly sophisticated style about the wealthy Evelyn family, specifically two young members: Archibald, who has just left for his grand tour at the beginning of the novel, accompanied by a tutor/governor named Molesworth, and who after some youthful misadventures meets and marries a Venetian woman at the end; and his sister Evelyn, who has an understanding with Molesworth and fends off marriage proposals until he returns. (Their relationship is left unresolved; Kidgell says he’ll deal with them in a sequel if this novel is successful, which it wasn’t.) There’s more to the story, but The Card is more memorable for its special features. It begins with a hand-colored frontispiece captioned with an enigmatic “explanation,” followed by a 7-page poetic “Epistle to the Maker of The Card”—the expected Table of Contents is moved to the end as an index—and then a preface in which the author postpones explaining the title of the novel and instead offers a preview of his stylistic diversity by retelling an anecdote in five different styles, ranging from slang to poetic fustian. Like Richardson, he provides a lengthy cast of characters, and like Fielding he indulges in facetious chapter headings. The novel even has its own theme song: near the end, the author prints the score to an Italian minuet entitled “Lo Carta,” and then rearranges it as an English country dance called “The Card.”
One subplot of The Card is launched by a notecard that one character sends to another written on the blank backside of a playing card, which the author reproduces in the hope that this novelty will save him “from total oblivion” (1.2):
On two occasions Kidgell switches from prose to poetry for half a page (1.35, 2.16), for no discernible reason other than he felt like it, and he also inserts two sequences of numbered letters between young woman “in imitation of an admirable writer of the present age” (2.4), one of many references to Richardson. There are numerous allusions and quotations from classical literature throughout, including one to “a curious novel called the Iliad” (1.33), but the most surprising allusions are to contemporary fiction. At Archy’s wedding party in Venice, the author (imitating a master of ceremonies) announces the names of some distinguished English guests:
Roderick Random, Esq; with Mrs. Booby, late Miss Pamela Andrews.
Joseph Andrews, Esq; Brother to Mrs. Booby, with Miss Harriot Byron.
Mr. Thomas Jones, with Miss Clarissa Harlowe.
David Simple, Esq; with Miss Betsy Thoughtless.
Sir Charles Grandison, Bart; with a lady of an illustrious family in Spain, distinguished by the name of Donna Dulcinea del Toboso. (2.27)
All goes well until they leave, at which time “Mr. Thomas Jones, in waiting on Miss Harlowe to her chair, had the imprudence to be rude to her, and Sir Charles Grandison, for interposing, the misfortune to have his ears boxed.”247 It’s a charming conclusion to a rather inconsequential novel, but reason enough to rescue The Card “from total oblivion.”
And then there’s the anonymous Life and Memoirs of Ephraim Tristram Bates (1756), a short and snappy satire of the British army remembered today because of a few aspects that anticipate Tristram Shandy. These include an inauspicious birth in which he is saddled with the names Ephraim Tristram, and the innovative use of asterisks to denote whispering (cf. Tristram Shandy, 3.17, 5.37, and 7.29), as when a senior military official warns young Bates about the politics of promotion: “Your family are first inquired into, not for their antiquity, honour, or dignity, but whether they have ever opposed certain schemes above, * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * here a whisper ensued, though a mile from town” (chap. 6). Bates is a gung-ho military boy who only wants to serve his country and attain glory, but he is thwarted at every step by a corrupt system in which commissions are sold, not earned, promotions awarded based on influence, veterans ignored, and rich teenage boys put in charge of experienced officers. Literally dying of disappointment at the age of 35 after failing to obtain a hoped-for commission, Bates leaves a will instructing his wife (hidden from the reader until the end) to publish his memoirs; this novelistic gesture of veracity is pushed as far as the title page, which reads at the bottom: “Printed by Malachi ****, for Edith Bates, relict of the aforesaid Mr. Bates, . . .”
We’re told early on tha
t Bates “had a little love, among other things, for plays and poetry,” and his memoirs are sprinkled with quotations from his favorite authors (Pope, Milton, Shakespeare); there’s a brief salute to Joseph Andrews and even a quotation from Oroonoko. Regardless of what Sterne may have picked up from it, the most radical thing about Ephraim Tristram Bates is a passage that occurs in the first chapter: after the clergyman christens baby Bates, a young female guest named Betsey (later vilified as “an atheist, if not a papist”) decides to “turn priestess” and, after gathering all the other “blooming girls and maidens fair,” sneaks the baby to a deconsecrated chapel to perform a feminist christening to counteract the male one:
The jest took, the circle was immediately formed, and off hand she made an oration, by way of parody to the doctor’s prayer, that would not have disgraced even a barrister from the north for eloquence, persuasion, and harmony; and when it was necessary to sprinkle the babe of grace, still to imitate the whole ceremony, she produced a china basin of her own water, which the first peer of this kingdom would then, and now, have been glad to be sprinkled with. She touched him gently, in opposition to the hard-fisted doctor, and said, “Be wise, be happy, be brave, and be as tender to our sex, when a man, as now I am to you; be as silent of favours you may receive from us hereafter as you now are, though not so insensible and unfeeling of them; never be cruel to her who shall then be kind to you, and you will meet with kindness enough.”
Bates takes this lesson to heart and becomes a man too decent to survive in a corrupt world run by men, and in the novel’s final paragraph we’re told “Bates’s mother still says Betsey’s wicked scheme ruined her son.”
Facing the final page of Ephraim Tristram Bates is an advertisement for a forthcoming novel entitled The History of Two Orphans by William Toldervy (1721–62), published later in 1756. Clarissa had one page that folded out to a music score; this one has nine scattered throughout its four volumes, like having its own soundtrack, along with a short anthology’s worth of famous and not-so-famous poems. (One of the latter, a couplet from Allan Ramsay’s Gentle Shepherd, taught me a fun new word: barlikhood, defined by Toldervy as “a drunken passion” [3.34].) The first half of the story concerns village life in Devonshire, followed by an adventurous road trip by three fellows east to London.248 This rambling comic novel is another manifestation of the freedom novelists felt Fielding had granted them: Toldervy imitates the master with occasional asides to readers and critics, gentlemanly erudition, mock-epic descriptions, and facetious chapter titles (e.g., vol. 3, chap. 37: “Exhibits part of a visit at the house of Mr. Nightley; much description, and more disputation; but, like one of Butler’s cantos, it breaks off in the middle”). He also felt free to indulge his interest in funerary inscriptions by giving examples at every opportunity—Toldervy had published a book a year earlier entitled Select Epitaphs—and to insert a chapter criticizing various English translations of the Psalms, mostly as an excuse to provide advance publicity for his mad friend Christopher Smart’s version, which wouldn’t appear until 1765. Like other mid-Fifties novels, Two Orphans is an example of how quickly once-radical innovations were added to the mainstream novelist’s toolkit—Toldervy was a traveling linen salesman, not an avant-garde writer—and yet another example of the growing conviction that a “novel” could do anything and include anything the novelist wanted it to.
No one held that conviction more firmly than the Anglo-Irish writer Thomas Amory (1691?–1788), author of one of the most eccentric novels of the 18th century, The Life of John Buncle (1756; part 2, 1766). Alerting the reader on the first page that “he will meet with miscellany thoughts upon several subjects,” the eponymous narrator lectures us on Hebrew grammar and etymology, conchology, geology, anatomy, Irish history, gardening, alchemy, mathematics, vivisection, spelunking, politics, tourism, microbiology, philosophy, antiquarianism, medicine and medicinal springs, pathology, chemistry, premature burial, diet, literary translation, botany, pharmacology, but mostly antitrinitarian theology. Amory quotes, paraphrases, and plagiarizes from hundreds of books ranging from The Grub Street Miscellany to Arthur Young’s Historical Dissertation on Idolatrous Corruptions in Religion from the Beginning of the World. Like a scholarly textbook, it is divided not into chapters but into numbered memoranda, employs marginal headings, cites passages in Latin, Greek and French, includes mathematical equations, and appends dozens of erudite footnotes, some with their own footnotes. (There’s one Wallace-size monster spread over 17 pages in the original edition, with two huge footnotes of its own.) While over in France Diderot headed a team to produce his encyclopedia, Amory single-handedly produced an encyclopedic novel that encapsulates a staggering range of 18th-century topics, all filtered through the head of an admittedly “odd man,” who is happy to be called so “if oddness consists in spirit, freedom of thought, and a zeal for divine unity; in a taste for what is natural, antique, romantic, and wild; in honouring women who are admirable for goodness, letters, and arts; and in thinking, after all the scenes I have gone through, that every thing here is vanity except that virtue and charity which gives us a right to expect beyond the grave and procure us, in this world, the direction of infinite wisdom, the protection of infinite power, and the friendship of infinite goodness.”249 He’s a Unitarian geek, and proud of it.
Part 1 is set mostly in the remarkable summer of 1725, when young Buncle meets and marries his first wife. After five years at Trinity College in Dublin, where he amassed a huge amount of knowledge and fell in love with an intelligent woman who died of smallpox weeks before their wedding day, Buncle returns to his home in the west of Ireland, where his father’s new wife and his opposition to his son’s Unitarian views drive him away. Uncertain what to do with himself, Buncle decides to visit an older college friend now living in the north of England. On the sea voyage from Ireland to England, he is impressed by a self-possessed young woman named Charlotte Melmoth, the only passenger who keeps cool during a storm at sea; she goes to bed naked during the tempest, and when her berth is flooded, Buncle rescues her and carries her “almost senseless and naked” to the deck, the beginning of a mutual admiration. After three chaste weeks on shore discussing things like “the paulo post futurum of a Greek verb” (96), they part, hoping to meet up north, where she also has a friend.
At this point, the novel transforms from bildungsroman to fantastic journey as Buncle begins exploring the mountainous wilds and bottomless lochs of Westmorland and Yorkshire in a fairytale mood. Comparing himself to “the wandering prince of Troy” (Virgil’s Aeneas) and to a pre-Romantic “wanderer upon the face of the earth,” Buncle encounters various utopian communities, beginning with a group of 100 women living in a kind of Shangri-la. Another community consists of 20 scientist/mathematicians, who introduce him to the wonders revealed by the microscope and discuss algebra with him. Imagine yourself a novel-reader in 1756 and encountering a page like the one reproduced on the next page! Virtually all the women Buncle meets are pious braniacs; while characters in other novels of the decade (Sir Charles Grandison and The Cry in particular) debated whether women even needed to be educated, John Buncle celebrates such “Glorious women! to letters, arts, and piety they devote those hours which others waste in vanities the most senseless and despicable . . .” (222).250 Motherless Buncle wanders through a feminine geography filled with caves, grottoes, lakes, and caverns, and is symbolically reborn when he tumbles out of a hole at the bottom of a mountain practically at the feet of two women. Under their direction, he finally makes it to his college friend’s house, only to learn from his smart, beautiful sister that he’s away in Italy. Deciding to find Miss Melmoth, he serendipitously runs into her near an ancient Roman monument once dedicated to a nymph—she has been searching for him too—and part 1 ends with their fairytale wedding.