by Steven Moore
75 John Dod and Robert Cleaver were early 17th-century theologians. There is a similar mashup of the sacred and profane later when a character needs a piece of paper and “his hostess was forced to tear a blank leaf out of The Practice of Piety or some such book; or, for aught I know, it might as well be torn out of The Famous History of Valentine and Orson, which indeed is the most likely of the two” (93).
76 The page numbers are misnumbered at this point, which furthers the novel’s resemblance to Tristram Shandy, though they are probably printing errors rather than deliberate disruptions.
77 That is, in the Protestant, financial district of London.
78 See Principe’s essay for more on the origin of Boyle’s novel and its place in his thinking.
79 The original Theodora wasn’t discovered until 1994 and was published in 2000 in volume 13 of Boyle’s Works (5–41). The 1687 revision appears in volume 11 (5–76) and will be cited by page number.
80 Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, 194.
81 Page 56 of the preliminaries, in Larsen’s invaluable critical edition (unfortunately available only as a dissertation). The body of the novel will be cited by volume/chapter.
82 Frenchman Jacques Gaffarel (1601–81) wrote a book called Unheard-of Curiosities; the Swiss physician Paracelsus (1492–1541) wrote about alchemy and other metaphysical matters.
83 Admittedly, this had become a commonplace by Dunton’s time; cf. Bunyan’s Sunday-school doggerel: “Hard texts are nuts (I will not call them cheaters),/Whose shells do keep their kernels from the eaters;/Ope then the shells, and you shall have the meat,/They here are brought, for you to crack and eat” (The Pilgrims’s Progress, part 2, 206).
84 Dunton acknowledges this is based on a couplet by Abraham Cowley (1618–67), whom he admired and often quotes.
85 The same Howell who wrote Dodona’s Grove.
86 The similarities between the Voyage and Tristram Shandy are so obvious that after the publication of the first volumes of Sterne’s novel, one bandwagon-jumping publisher reissued volume 1 of Dunton’s novel as The Life, Travels, and Adventures of Christopher Wagstaff, Gentleman, Grandfather to Tristram Shandy (1762).
87 Dunton stole this from Head’s English Rogue, substituting “author” for “rogue” and thereby conflating the two occupations.
88 From The Pilgrim’s Guide from the Cradle to the Grave (1684), attributed to his father but probably written by Dunton himself, quoted on pp. xix–xx of Larsen’s introduction.
89 The clearest reproduction of this is on p. 160 of Ord’s Travel and Experience in Early Modern English Literature.
90 For more on this fascinating novel, see chapter 1 of Sherbert’s Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit and chapter 5 of Ord’s book cited above.
91 This minor French novelist (1647?–1720) also wrote a fairytale collection with the rather postmod title Contes moins contes que les autres (Stories Less Storylike than Others, 1698). Many of Préchet’s conventional novellas were translated into English, but neither this one nor La Valize ouverte.
92 Nonetheless, Gildon’s book was popular enough that another publisher brought out an abridged edition in 1706, and Gildon published a sequel in 1719 entitled The Postman Robbed of His Mail, which contains a novella entitled The Lover’s Sighs amidst miscellaneous letter-essays.
93 Page 5 in the Hesperus edition. The novella is also available in Salzman’s Anthology (473–525).
94 Written 1740–41?, quoted in McDermott’s Novel and Romance, 126. He discusses this issue at length w/r/t Congreve’s short novel.
95 Congreve owned two copies of his Comical Romance (as it was translated, not Novel), and in his first play, The Old Bachelor (1693), a character calls “Scarron’s novels my prayer-book” (4.6).
96 By “literary” I’m excluding pulp fictions like The Irish Rogue; or, The Comical History of Teague O’Divelly (1690) and The Wild-Irish Captain (1692). I will be citing Ross and Markey’s model scholarly edition of Vertue Rewarded. (And keep the title in mind when we reach Richardson’s Pamela.)
97 End of letter 1 in Kelley’s facsimile edition, hereafter cited by letter. (She reprints the original 1693 version; the 1718 edition was attractively retitled Olinda’s Adventures, and is also available in a facsimile edition with a good introduction by Robert Adams Day.) Most sources spell Trotter’s first name Catherine, but Kelley opts for Catharine, and she’s the expert. (She has also written a biography of this amazing prodigy who later wrote plays—tutored by Congreve—and a book on Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1690], which resulted a letter of thanks from the philosopher.) Kelley also notes there is some evidence that Trotter may have been born in 1674 rather than 1679, making her 19 when she published her novel, which is still impressive.
98 Page xii of her introduction to the facsimile edition I’ve been quoting.
99 See Levine (217–27) on the similarities between Pale Fire and A Tale of a Tub.
100 Donoghue, 1–2. Including Gulliver’s Travels in his dismissal of Swift as a novelist, Donoghue finds “that he is careless, casual, if Jamesian standards are recalled” (2). But why not measure him by Rabelaisian standards, or Petronian, Sternean, or Joycean standards, not to mention Cao Xueqinean? Who made James the gold standard?
101 It wasn’t always so: its first readers regarded it as fiction, and a character in Clara Reeve’s Progress of Romance (1785) doesn’t hesitate to put the Tale at the top of her “list of novels and stories original and uncommon” (evening 11).
102 Further parallels are noted by Stedmond in “Another Possible Analogue for Swift’s Tale of a Tub” (1957).
103 An opportunistic writer/bookseller like Dunton is who, author of such publications as The Double Life, or A New Project to Redeem the Time by Living over Tomorrow before It Comes; The Funeral of Mankind: A Paradox Proving We Are All Dead and Buried; and The Spiritual Hedgehog, a Project (or Thought) Wholly New and Surprising (Hunter, 104–5). Dunton published one of Swift’s earliest poems in his journal, the Athenian Mercury, which may or may not be a satire; Hunter suggests that Swift “got revenge in an elaborate attack on Dunton in A Tale of a Tub,” adding “The historical Dunton bears a lot of the features of the Tale-teller, and if the figure is a composite (as seems most likely), Dunton was almost certainly one of the models. Certainly, he is a more significant presence in the Tale than he has usually been recognized to be” (13, 358n12).
104 The opinions of Claude Rawson and Gardner Stout, respectively, quoted on pp. lii–iii of Marcus Walsh’s introduction to his superb new critical edition of the Tale, hereafter cited by page number. Both Rawson and Stout were responding to John Clark’s Form and Frenzy in Swift’s Tale of a Tub, which I warmly recommend.
105 He claims he has been a writer “under three reigns” (44), meaning since at least 1665, so if he was say 20 when he began, he’d be at least 52 in 1697.
106 In Swift’s Tory Politics, Lock writes, “But taken as a whole and in context, his writings reveal a deeply conservative, even reactionary, political thinker” (vii).
107 Cf. Kainophilus’s boast “Of the admirable and surprising novelty of both matter and method” in Dunton’s Voyage, “representing a book made, as it were, out of nothing, and yet containing every thing . . .” (2.1, his italics). Dunton also wrote a pamphlet entitled Nonentity, or A Grave Essay upon Nothing.
108 By “new” religions Swift of course meant those subsequent to early Christianity, once again forgetting/ignoring/suppressing the fact that Christianity was a “new” religion to the ancients he admires, many of whom regarded it with as much contempt as he heaps on Catholics and Puritans.
109 The solipsistic digressions in the Tale may be a friendly swipe at Incognita’s narrator, who states “when I digress, I am at that time writing to please myself; when I continue the thread of the story, I write to please [the reader]” (14).
110 Letter 3 in Boyce’s modernized edition, cited by letter (and his introduction by page number).
112 For a lengthy discussion of the Essay, see chap. 2 of Sherbert’s Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit.
113 See Blackwell’s collection of essays, The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. We’ll meet a few of them later in this chapter.
114 Manley continued the story in another roman à clef, Memoirs of Europe (1710), though she dropped the supernatural frame. An earlier novel was formerly ascribed to her, The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians (1705), but this is now thought to be written by someone else.
115 Manley collaborated with Swift on some pamphlets between 1710 and 1714; for an account of their relationship, see Rabb’s “Swift and the Spider-Woman.”
116 A third reason for this subterfuge is given by her publisher, who claims Manley said in a letter to him, “though the world may like what I write of others, they despise whatever an author is thought to say of themselves” (quoted in an appendix to Rivella, 117).
117 Page 83 in Bower and Erickson’s extensively annotated edition. The novel originally appeared as five pamphlets published between March and July 1712; they were not collected into book form until 1727.
118 For The Seven Champions of Christendom, see n53 above. According to its title page, John Shirley’s London’s Glory; or, The History of the Famous and Valiant London ’Prentice (1686) is “an account of his birth, his brave exploits in his childhood, his coming to London, and being put apprentice to a Turkey merchant; the story of his love to his master’s daughter; and how, going for Turkey, he slew a tiger and rescued the Great Turk’s daughter; after that, killed two lions prepared to devour him; and, gaining the princess’s love, brought her to England, marrying her in great splendour; with many other memorable things, to the honour of the famous city of London and the whole English Nation. Adorned with songs, love letters, and verses”—all in a brisk 20 pages. If interested, you can find it in Mish’s Restoration Prose Fiction, 236–56.
119 Reported by the ubiquitous Charles Gildon in his “Epistle Dedicatory.” Some scholars have attributed the novella to him, but the editors of the recent Four Courts edition consider his authorship highly unlikely.
120 For the last title in particular, see chap. 6 of Fausett’s Strange Surprizing Sources of Robinson Crusoe.
121 See chap. 5 of Severin’s Seeking Robinson Crusoe. But Hunter warns us in The Reluctant Pilgrim not to put much emphasis on these sources, for Defoe was more interested in writing a religious allegory than a travel/adventure story, something closer to The Pilgrim’s Progress than to The Isle of Pines.
122 See chap. 2 of Starr’s Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography for an account of this little-known novel, which is way too religious to take seriously. Like Hunter, Starr argues that Robinson Crusoe belongs primarily to the genre of spiritual autobiography.
123 Myself with Others, p. 64. Comparing Defoe’s novel to Don Quixote, the Mexican novelist argues that Crusoe is an icon of success while Quixote is an icon of failure.
124 From a 1912 lecture, excerpted in the Norton Critical Edition, 323.
125 Such readers should check out Joseph Campana’s essay “Cruising Crusoe: Diving into the Wreck of Sexuality,” in Mounsey and Gonda’s Queer People, 159–79.
126 But for stimulating readings of Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack, see chaps. 3 and 5 of Defoe’s Narratives by John Richetti. (He dismisses Memoirs of a Cavalier as “lumpish.”) I had the pleasure of taking a seminar from Dr. Richetti on Swift and Pope at Rutgers in 1985. I remember him as an urbane teacher and a dapper dresser, and now wish I had saved my notes.
127 It’s surprising to come across that date on the final page, for Defoe has been describing life in the early 18th century, not life during the English Civil War, when much of the first half of the novel would take place. There are anachronisms as a result, such as the reference on p. 220 to the criminal exploits of James Whitney: this scene occurs when Moll is 60, meaning around 1673; but Whitney was only 13 at the time and had not begun the criminal career that would end with his hanging in 1694.
128 Much is made of young Moll’s superior needlework, yet when she’s older and needs to make money, she ignores this marketable skill in favor of thievery and prostitution.
129 The equivalent of nearly $200,000 today. The greedy gold-digger isn’t satisfied with that!? Throughout the novel Moll always has the equivalent of at least $20,000 on hand, making her claims of financial insecurity and poverty ridiculous.
130 Arnold Kettle, “In Defense of Moll Flanders” (1964), reprinted in Kelly’s Norton Critical Edition, 391. Paula Backscheider says “we cannot dislike her or wish her hanged” (166), though I suspect she’d change her tune if someone had briefly contemplated murdering her child after stealing her necklace and then ripped off her family heirlooms.
131 See Bjornson’s Picaresque Hero for a rap sheet on the many ways Moll deflects “the reader’s attention from her own culpability” (194).
132 In the appendix to the Norton Critical Edition, there is a vivid description of Newgate entitled Hell upon Earth (1705), written by a burglar named John Hall; Moll can’t write as well as a fellow criminal?
133 One of the first pieces the gay magazine Christopher Street ran on the virus was entitled “Journal of the Plague Year,” by the admirable novelist Andrew Holleran (no. 70, March 1983, 15–21).
134 Backscheider provides an excellent account of the relationship between Roxana and women’s fiction of the day in chap. 7 of her book.
135 Page 45 in The Galesia Trilogy, where Love Intrigues occupies pp. 1–47.
136 After alluding to Coke upon Littleton in Tom Jones, Fielding boasts he’s the first novelist to cite it “in any but a law-book” (2.6), but Barker beat him to it by 36 years.
137 Quoted in Spencer’s Rise of the Woman Novelist, 28. “Punk” meant a prostitute up until the 1920s, when it began to acquire its current meaning.
138 You may recall her from chap. 2: she translated Boursault’s Letters from a Lady of Quality, and unwittingly collaborated with Crébillon on The Happy Orphans.
139 Part 3 was published a year after parts 1 and 2, written to cash in on their success, and perhaps should be regarded (and discarded) as a sequel rather than part of the original novel, for part 2 ends on a beautifully bitter note: “Melantha, who was not of a humour to take anything to heart, was married in a short time, and had the good fortune not to be suspected by her husband, though she brought him a child in seven months after her wedding” (159).
140 Popular Fiction before Richardson, 207. Richetti’s 25-page analysis of Love in Excess has been criticized by some for being too harsh and condescending, but it strikes me as just.
141 Page 15 of her introduction to Masquerade Novels of Eliza Haywood, where Idalia occupies the final 162 pages.
142 The former can be found in Fantomina and Other Works, and the latter in Backscheider’s edition of Haywood’s Selected Fiction and Drama.
143 See notes 152 and 204 below.
144 See chap. 5 of Ballaster’s Seductive Forms for details on this incident along with an interesting analysis of Haywood’s writings.
145 Also like Haywood, Aubin translated novels from the French, most surprisingly Challe’s Illustrious French Lovers, which couldn’t be more different from her own novels.
146 Reprinted in Nixon’s Novel Definitions, 107–9.
147 See Mounsey and Gonda, 246–60. Predictably, Richetti offers a fine if heteronormative assessment of Aubin’s work in Popular Fiction before Richardson, 216–29.
148 Page 74 in The Galesia Trilogy, where the Screen occupies pp. 49–173.
149 Page 272 in The Gale
sia Trilogy, where the Lining occupies pp. 176–290. Editor Wilson explains that Dykes was “one of the most prominent compilers of ancient and modern proverbs, accompanied by illustrative tales or fables. Barker appears to have drawn on his explanations in Good Manners for Schools (1700), Moral Reflections upon Select English Proverbs (1708), and The Royal Marriage (1722). She also appears to have consulted The Fables of Aesop (1692), compiled by Sir Roger L’Estrange (1616–1704) and Dykes, his assistant at Oxford” (272n1).
150 Rivka Swenson suggests “the political intentionality behind Barker’s avant-garde strategies seems similar to that which informed the twentieth-century Expressionist revolt against Realist comfort-food” (74n14).
151 Barker’s trilogy anticipates some recent novels that likewise derive their structure from female activities like dressmaking (Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s Red Shoes), recipe-swapping (Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel’s Recipe Club), and scrapbooking (Caroline Preston’s Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt.)
152 In 1725, copycat Eliza Haywood published a novella called The Tea Table; or, A Conversation between Some Noble Persons of Both Sexes that imitates the heterogeneous contents of Baker’s Screen (poems, an inset romantic “novel,” proverbs, etc.). See Fantomina and Other Works, 73–106. (The same volume contains an epistolary novella entitled Love Letters on All Occasions that rips off Gildon’s Postboy Robbed of His Mail.) I skipped over her second novel, The British Recluse (1722), because it too closely resembles Aubin’s early novels.
153 Davys’s editor, Martha Bowden, compares this to Lady Booby’s ephemeral grief in Joseph Andrews (1.5), and notes that a “dark room” is where madwomen were confined.
154 Alexander Pope was a subscriber to Davys’s first novel, and she apparently returned the compliment by naming the most sensible female character in the Rake Belinda, who, like her namesake in “The Rape of the Lock,” knows how to play ombre.
155 For a good essay on these and Davys’s other novels, see chap. 6 of Schofield’s Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind, which treats all the major British “amatory” novelists of the 18th century.