by Steven Moore
IT NARRATIVES
Recapitulating the genre that Gildon inaugurated in The Golden Spy a half-century earlier were two novels that appeared in 1760: The Adventures of a Black Coat by Edward Philips and Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea by the Irish writer Charles Johnstone (1719?–1800?). In the first, a gloomy old black coat proposes to tell his story to a new white coat hung in the same closet, an impudent young sport who “laughed in his sleeve” at the proposition, but nonetheless listens as dutifully as Rasselas does to Imlac’s story of his life. (Freya Johnston detects several verbal and thematic parallels between the two short novels, implying Philips meant to take the piss out of Rasselas.) As the black coat is passed from owner to owner, the author satirizes a cross-section of London society, including a wretched playwright—an episode that recalls Melopoyn’s tale in Roderick Random—and a desperate Grub Street hack. It is deliberately short, “for were we inclined to enlarge this performance, the bare recital of numberless minutes, which we have and shall suppress, would extend it to volumes” (46). That’s what Johnstone did with his novel: the two volumes he published in 1760 proved so popular that he published an additional two volumes in 1765, swelling the episodic novel to the size of Tristram Shandy.
Chrysal is derivative not only of Gildon’s novel, but of Lesage’s Devil upon Crutches and the scandal-novels of Manley and Haywood. A bedraggled alchemist conjures up the spirit of gold, who calls him/herself Chrysal (Johnstone alternates pronouns); dug up as ore in Peru, formed into a golden crucifix, and eventually transmuted to a guinea, Chrysal tattles on everyone who possessed her over the decades, or more accurately, who was possessed by money. The story ends at the moment when Chrysal is about to reveal “the summation of human knowledge” to the alchemist—who farts. “The spirit started at the unpardonable offense to his purity; and looking at me with ineffable contempt, indignation, and abhorrence, vanished from my sight, without deigning a word more” (1.2.24). The novel is essentially an anthology of stories about greed, for although the large cast of characters commit all seven deadly sins and break all 10 commandments, the ravages of greed predominate. The stories lack subtlety, the style lacks style, and Johnstone complicated matters (but not in a good way) when he added the second two volumes in 1765, for instead of continuing with further examples of avarice, he expanded upon incidents in the first two volumes, sometimes contradicting himself, and making a chronological mess of things.278 Like Manley’s New Atalantis, Chrysal was appealing because it aired the dirty laundry of thinly veiled famous people, and because of its coarse realism and pandering sensationalism. (In one episode, Jewish bankers attempt to sacrifice Christian children for Passover, and in another, members of the Hellfire Club celebrate a Black Mass with a costumed baboon in Medmenham Abbey.) Reversing Tristram Shandy’s character index, 90 perceent of the people in Chrysal are odious, and the relentless scheming and scamming grows tiresome. On the other hand, Kevin Bourque persuasively argues in his excellent introduction to the recent Valancourt edition that Chrysal’s mash-up of “celebrity tabloid, journalism, moral philosophy, materialist science, conduct literature, political theory and bawdy trash” results in the “one text that fully epitomizes eighteenth-century England, in all walks of life and with its contradictions, bustle, noise and humanity intact” (li)—a world depressingly like our own.
The most outlandish example of the genre is Smollett’s penultimate novel, The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769), his shortest, densest, and most complex novel—but also his worst. The it-narrator is a foul-mouthed atom that transmigrated through numerous Japanese politicians centuries earlier before entering a grain of rice eaten by a Dutch sailor at Nagasaki who took the atom west until it eventually lodged itself in the pineal gland of a hack author in London named Nathaniel Peacock. One day, it begins speaking to Peacock, ordering him to write down what it experienced among those Japanese politicians during a time of conflict, which is essentially a coded account of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), a ruinous territorial spat among nations that nearly bankrupted England. The Atom is a virulent satire on the politics of war that brought out the Swift in Smollett: scatology was his weapon of choice, and he flings verbal feces at everyone involved in that idiotic war, literalizing the ass-kissing that went on as politicians used the war as an excuse to further their own careers. Smollett was inspired by Chrysal, which also dealt with the same war—“about a liberty of cutting sticks upon a desert shore,” the golden narrator scoffs (1.1.10)—and though he didn’t much care for Tristram Shandy, Smollett liked the genre it belonged to: channeling Rabelais and Swift, he used the Atom as an excuse to indulge in scatological humor and pedantic digressions on various topics (trousers, alchemy, sorcery, surnames, music, kicking and beating, etc.), as well as to show off his wide vocabulary. But the results are leaden rather than golden: the digressions are undermotivated, the cod-Japanese names are silly and often literally shitty (Nin-kom-poo-po, Fika-Kaka), and the story difficult to follow without recourse to the copious annotations that Robert Adams Day supplies in his definitive edition. (He appends 1,251 annotations to the 132-page novel.) The Atom is a fierce antiwar satire, a cartoonishly violent yet historically accurate account of the Seven Years’ War, but it lacks the comedic spirit that animates the literary tradition Smollett emulates. He thought he had united “the happy extravagance of Rabelais to the splendid humor of Swift”—as he wrote of the anonymously published novel in his own journal, the Critical Review—but its extravagance and humor are strained. (Arbuthnot did something similar in John Bull, with much happier results.) The quirkiest of the it-narratives, it might be better to split the Atom between a political allegory (à la Gulliver’s Travels) and an interior monologue by a hack writer (à la A Tale of a Tub) driven crazy by his country’s insane political system.
The it-narrative’s popularity and easy-to-follow formula (satirize society from the POV of a mobile object) inspired other novelists to write similar works, such as Thomas Bridges’s Adventures of a Banknote (1771), the anonymous Birmingham Counterfeit (1772), Adventures of a Corkscrew (1775), and History of a French Louse (1779), Dorothy Kilner’s Adventures of a Hackney Coach (1781), and Helenus Scott’s Adventures of a Rupee (1782), among many others. An anonymous reviewer of the last-named dismissed the entire genre: “This mode of making up a book, and styling it the Adventures of a Cat, a Dog, a Monkey, a Hackney-Coach, a Louse, a Shilling, a Rupee, or—anything else, is grown so fashionable, that few months pass which do not bring one of them under our inspection. It is indeed a convenient method to writers of the inferior class, of emptying their commonplace books, and throwing together all the farrago of public transactions, private characters, old and new stories, every thing, in short, which they can pick up, to afford a little temporary amusement to an idle reader.”279 But there were enough idle readers to keep the genre alive for another 50 years.
MODERN ROMANCES
No genre shows “a more deliberate and studied recapitulation of the same ground” as the romance novel, whose authors ring endless variations on the same story—chaperoning a young beauty across the minefield separating menarche from matrimony—with the same stock characters (strong-willed parents or guardians, loose-moraled men and/or unwanted suitors, with Mr. Right waiting in the wings), and harping upon the same half-dozen notes (reputation, virtue, delicacy, honor, prudence, decorum). During the last half of the 18th century, these novels became less sensational and more realistic, less humorless and more socially aware, less about courtship and more about marriage, but they show little innovation in form or language, so I’m going to speed-date those recommended by more sympathetic critics of the genre.
Charlotte Lennox followed her delightful Female Quixote with one entitled Henrietta (1758) that initially promises likewise to follow in Fielding’s footsteps. Looking over a boardinghouse library, Henrietta Courteney rejects Manley’s Atalantis and Haywood’s “love-sick, passionate stories” in favor of Joseph Andrews, which she has already read
three times with “much eagerness and delight” (1.6), and further distances herself from the older romance tradition by mocking a flighty new friend who insists on calling each other by the romantic names Clelia and Celinda. But the novel recapitulates the old story of an independent young woman who flees to London to escape a forced marriage and conversion to Catholicism, and who experiences the usual troubles there with men because she possesses “a form which it was not possible to behold without sensibility” (2.8). She keeps her wits about her and eventually finds true love, making some sharp observations about society along the way. A smart novel about a smart woman, Henrietta sets the tone for later novels by Frances Burney and Jane Austen.
Sarah Fielding, having struck “a little out of a road already much beaten” with The Cry and The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757), returned within sight of the beaten road for her final two novels, The Countess of Dellwyn (1759) and The History of Ophelia (1760), both dramatizing a sheltered girl’s entrance into the social world. The first concerns 17-year-old Charlotte Lucum, who is pressured by her ambitious father to marry a 63-year-old, wheelchair-bound aristocrat, the idea of which disgusts her until she travels to London for the first time and glimpses the dazzling life she’ll lead as a diamond-draped countess. In a brilliant move, Fielding opens the novel with the ludicrous wedding ceremony, Charlotte maintaining “an unalterable steadiness, rather inclined to the gay” as her infirm groom fails three times to slide the wedding ring on her finger. Predictably, their married life is a farce, and when she fails to produce an heir for Lord Dellwyn, he divorces her—an extremely rare event in novels of the time. By contrast, Fielding provides several examples of more sensible wives, with fewer financial advantages than Charlotte, who by way of virtue and hard work make a success of their marriages. The novel, like most romance novels, ends with wedding bells, but they ring for minor characters, not for the former Countess of Dellwyn, publicly disgraced and scraping by as a gambler. The multiple story-lines, nonlinear structure, and alternating tonal registers (from sardonic to didactic) differentiate The Countess of Dellwyn from other romance novels of the day.
Ophelia, another twist on the standard romance formula, is interesting partly for its effective use of what Shklovsky calls enstrangement, and partly as a response to Pamela and Clarissa. Taking the form of a long letter written by the title character in middle age, Ophelia Dorchester (née Lenox) describes her upbringing in wild Wales until age 16, when she is kidnapped by a visiting English lord who had stumbled across the orphan and her aunt a few months earlier. (She is kidnapped in error a little later, and kidnapped a third time in the middle of the novel, which surely must be a dig at Richardson’s overuse of that plot device. On the third occasion, Ophelia escapes from the countryhouse at which she is detained with the help of a smitten clergyman, as in Pamela.) Unlike the rakes in Richardson’s novels, Dorchester has no immediate sexual designs on her, though he often displays a lover’s jealousy during their first year together, and unlike Richardson’s heroines, Ophelia warms to her abductor rather quickly, though she too insists they are only friends. It’s a curious whitewashing of Richardson’s first two novels, draining them of their sexual tension and obsession with virtue.280 Ophelia Lenox has more in common with Charlotte Lennox’s female Quixote, for Fielding takes advantage of her heroine’s isolated upbringing to stage some comic responses—the first time Ophelia sees a carriage, she calls it “a small hut, as I thought, with two horses fastened to it,” and is as scared as a cat when it starts to move (chap. 5)—and to contrast natural with civilized behavior: when Dorchester takes her to visit Bedlam after a season in London, Ophelia is “surprised to find so few people confined in a place which I was told had been appropriated to the reception of such as were deprived of their reason, for I myself had seen a sufficient number to have filled it whom I should have judged well qualified” (39). Like Lennox’s Henrietta, Ophelia disapproves of female intellectuals, and fair Ophelia had an even more demonstrable influence than Henrietta on Burney and Austen.281
Ophelia was popular, but nowhere near as popular as a novel by another of Samuel Richardson’s female protégées, The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) by Irish dramatist Frances Sheridan (1724–66), mother of the more famous playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. An epistolary novel dedicated to Richardson, it too drains his novels of their sexual tension but is just as obsessed with the Christian idea of virtue. It concerns a priggish young doormat who admits to her correspondent (a childhood friend living in Europe) that “I have no will of my own. I never knew what it was to have one, and never shall . . .” and allows all her actions “to be determined by those to whom I owe obedience.”282 She submits first to the will of her domineering mother, who forbids Sidney from marrying her first love, and then to the will of her churlish, adulterous husband (who, to the reader’s relief, dies young), and throughout to the perceived will of her god. It is soap opera about a self-sacrificing woman who follows all the rules of the time (the novel is set between 1703 and 1708) and yet suffers as a result, which could be interpreted as a critique of those rules, especially since those who flaunt the rules—like her evil angel Miss Burchell, “a female libertine,” “a sly rake in petticoats” (392, 396)—certainly get more out of life than this stay-at-home prude. Like Pamela and Clarissa, Sidney is a moral absolutist among moral relativists, who question her “chimerical notions of honour,” her “delicacy of sentiments,” her overly “nice and punctilious” virtue, her “ridiculous nicety.” If Sheridan wanted to expose the impractical ludicrousness of such notions, she succeeded brilliantly. It goes without saying that Sidney is extremely religious, confident that her unexamined devotion to 17th-century Protestant theology will be rewarded in a mythical “afterlife,” but before that a sunburned deus ex machina appears in the person of Ned Warner, a previously unmentioned cousin who made a fortune in Jamaica and returns to England at the end to rescue Sidney and her children from ruin.
The novel was popular enough that Sheridan wrote a Conclusion of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (published posthumously in 1767). Reluctant to become the kind of domineering mother that ruined her life, Sidney passively allows her grown daughters to endure “abductions, lies, near rapes, madness,” though eventually “the evil male figures are cast out and rendered powerless without Sidney doing anything,” as Sheridan’s latest editors note in exasperation. Like Clarissa, “She dies in a kind of glorified inert state—the passive angel longing for the hereafter.”283 I’d like to think that Sheridan was mocking passive, Christian conformists like Miss Sidney Bidulph, but I suspect she hoped her readers would admire and even emulate this naïve, self-sacrificing martyr to prudence. That might have been possible in the 18th century, but not today, which renders Sheridan’s novels dated relics rather than living works of literature.
A livelier number named Frances Brooke (1724–89) also shows Richardson’s influence in her first novel, The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763), though it shows the greater influence of Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s Letters from Juliet, Lady Catesby, which Brooke translated (and which I discussed in chapter 2). Brooke is best known for her second novel, The History of Emily Montague (1769), which I’ll discuss in the next chapter because it was written/set in Canada, and for her delightful third novel, The Excursion (1777), which I’ll discuss right here. This is not a long Richardsonian epistolary novel but a short, Fieldingesque comedy that, in fact, pointedly repudiates the former mode: after young Maria Villiers, “a miss educated in shades,” convinces her uncle/guardian to let her visit London (for husband-hunting, though she doesn’t tell him that), “He cautioned her, not against the giants of modern novel, who carry off young ladies by force in post-chaises and six with the blinds up, and confine free-born English women in their country houses, under the guardianship of monsters in the shape of fat housekeepers, from which durance they are happily released by the compassion of Robert the butler; but against worthless acquaintance, unmerited calumny, and ruino
us expence” (1.7). Brooke quotes from Tom Jones a little later and obviously sails under Fielding’s flag. As soon as Maria hits town, she falls in with worthless acquaintances—card-playing, scandal-mongering socialites whom Brooke mocks relentlessly—and racks up “unmerited calumny, and ruinous expence” in her pursuit of a foppish lord. Rescued from social and financial ruin by an old family friend, Maria finds a more suitable husband back in the home counties. The Excursion reads more like a chick-lit novel of the 1990s than an amatory romance of the 18th-century, partly due to its modern title (not The History of . . . or Memoirs of . . . or even plain Maria Villiers), and partly due to its unusual surface: the text is broken into hundreds of short paragraphs, many only a sentence long, and gathered into short, purse-size chapters. Thoroughly modern Maria also tries to launch a career: while in London she hopes to find publisher for a novel, an epic poem, and a tragic play: only the latter is submitted for consideration—to the great actor/manager David Garrick, who comes off poorly here—and she’s already thinking ahead to her next novel (which may be the one we’re reading). Like Maria herself, The Excursion has “fine sense and sprightliness, mixed with a very interesting style of sentiment” (2.1), which is to say, worldly without indecency (it’s a very chaste novel) and intellectually sophisticated without repudiating traditional values. (Several times Brooke excoriates amoral, irreligious writers of the time like Lord Chesterfield and Voltaire.) The Excursion is one of the few novels of the period that tills new ground by adding French savoir faire to the English romance genre.
Georgiana Spencer, later Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806), made her fiction debut at 16 with what her modern editor calls a “sentimental and somewhat contrived” epistolary novel entitled Emma; or, The Unfortunate Attachment (1773), but she is better known for another epistolary novel, more sordid and artful, called The Sylph (1779), also about an unfortunate attachment.284 Like Sarah Fielding’s Ophelia, 17-year-old Julia Grenville was raised in the wilds of Wales by her father (who, like the father in The Female Quixote, has retired in disgust from the world) and is spotted by a traveling Londoner, a rake who marries her only because he can’t seduce her, takes her back to London, then resumes his libertine lifestyle, leaving Julia to write home to her sister about the shocking morals of the upper classes. About halfway through the novel, Julia begins receiving notes from a man who calls himself her Sylph—the description of sylphs from Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” serves as the novel’s epigraph—offering advice on how to deal with all the rakes, cheating wives, and scandal-mongers. Julia’s spendthrift husband incurs so many gambling debts that he’s willing to sell his wife to a fellow rake named Biddulph, then commits suicide. Julia returns to Wales, and is soon visited by her sylph, who turns out to be a childhood admirer who had been keeping an eye on her in London, and they marry: yet another novel suggesting that a woman’s second marriage is the one that counts, a departure from earlier romantic fiction. In the final letter, one of Julia’s correspondents writes her as if writing to the author: “Upon my word, a pretty kind of a romantic adventure you have made of it, and the conclusion of the business just as it should be, and quite in the line of poetical justice. Virtue triumphant, and Vice dragged at her chariot wheels” (196). The Sylph is rather derivative: in addition to Fielding’s Ophelia and Lennox’s Female Quixote, there are traces of Haywood’s sensational romances (an interpolated story includes a crossdressing female, which we haven’t seen in a while) and of Richardson’s epistolary novels: one character criticizes Pamela as “pernicious” (122) and a Lovelace-wannabe taunts Julia with rape. But it’s not bad for a 22-year-old, and offers an eye-opening view of London high-life by a true insider.