Christopher Smart and Satire

CHRISTOPHER SMART AND SATIRE

To all those who have braced, and not leapt in

Christopher Smart and Satire ‘Mary Midnight’ and the Midwife

MIN WILD University of Exeter and the Open University, UK

© Min Wild 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Min Wild has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Wild, Min Christopher Smart and satire: ‘Mary Midnight’ and the Midwife 1. Smart, Christopher, 1722–1771 – Criticism and interpretation 2. Smart, Christopher, 1722–1771 – Authorship 3. Midwife, or Old woman’s magazine (London: 1750–1753) 4. Satire, English – History and criticism 5. English periodicals – History – 18th century 6. England – Intellectual life – 18th century I. Title 821.6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wild, Min. Christopher Smart and satire: ‘Mary Midnight’ and the midwife / by Min Wild. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6193-1 (alk. paper) 1. Smart, Christopher, 1722–1771—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Midwife, or Old woman’s magazine (London: 1750–1753) 3. Smart, Christopher, 1722–1771—Authorship. 4. Satire, English—History and criticism. 5. English periodicals—History—18th century. 6. England—Intellectual life—18th century. I. Title. PR3687.S7Z85 2008 821’.6—dc22 2007039641 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6193-1 Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction

vi vii 1

1 Personal Identity and Personae in the Eighteenth-Century Periodical

15

2 ‘The Jakes of Genius’: The Nature of the Midwife

43

3 A ‘Terrible Old Lady’: The Persona of ‘Mary Midnight’

73

4 ‘A Perfect Swiss in Writing’: Literature and Authorship in the Midwife

103

5 ‘Inwardly Working a Stirre to the Mynde’: Political Satire in the Midwife

133

6 The ‘Kind Juggler’: Social Satire and Enlightenment in the Midwife

165

Appendix 1

197

Appendix 2

199

Bibliography Index

203 219

Acknowledgements In academic terms, the following scholars have been extraordinarily helpful: Dr. Michael Nath, Professor Jane Spencer, Dr. Paul Hendon, Charles Page, Professor Philip Smallwood, Dr. Karen L. Edwards, Professor Colin MacCabe, Dr. Clare Bainbridge, Professor Ashley Tauchert, Dr. Laura Salisbury, Professor Chris Brooks, Dr. Alan Munton, Professor Nick Groom, Dr. Daffyd Moore, and Dr. Peter Hinds. Dr. Chris Mounsey has been both genial and generous. Dr. Stacy Gillis of the University of Newcastle and Dr. Andrew Shail of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, know why they need a special sentence to themselves. My debt to the work of all previous—and indeed all future—Smart scholars must be obvious, but it is greatest of all to that of Karina Williamson, Betty Rizzo, and Robert Mahony. In terms of practical help, and in diverse ways impossible to describe here, I am also grateful to the following: Rosa Wild, herself an intrepid hack who knows a lot about comedy, Barbara and Stanley Smith, Julian Wild, Trevor Smith, Marjorie Wild, Marjory Halliwell, Steve Sims, Jenny Start, and Peter Hamilton. I should also like to record thanks to Julia Davey from the Dept. of English at the University of Exeter. I must register especial thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for providing me with a studentship for full-time PhD study. I also am deeply indebted to the Ashgate editors Erika Gaffney and Ann Donahue, to their immensely helpful anonymous readers, and to the Ashgate desk editors and proofreaders. Lastly, a debt of both friendship and intellect is owed to all those who attended the town/university reading group at the Jolly Porter, St. David’s Hill, Exeter, 1996– 2001, and to Tracey, who provided a beery forum where the writings of Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, Freud, Heidegger—and, on memorable days—Milton, Byron and Joyce, could be explored in the best of company.

List of Abbreviations Ann. Bib.

Christopher Smart: An Annotated Bibliography 1743–1983. Eds. Robert Mahony and Betty Rizzo. New York and London: Garland, 1984.

Ann. Lett.

Smart, Christopher. The Annotated Letters of Christopher Smart. Eds. Betty Rizzo and Robert Mahony. Carbondale and Edwardville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.

PW1

Smart, Christopher. Jubilate Agno. Poetical Works. Ed. and intro. Karina Williamson. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.

PW2

Smart, Christopher. Religious Poetry 1763–1771. Poetical Works. Eds. Marcus Walsh and Karina Williamson. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983.

PW4

Smart, Christopher. Miscellaneous Poems English and Latin. Poetical Works. Ed. and intro. Karina Williamson. Vol. 4. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.

PW5

Smart, Christopher. The Works of Horace, Translated into Verse. Poetical Works. Ed. and intro. Karina Williamson. Vol. 5. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.

PW6

Smart, Christopher. A Poetical Translation of the Fables of Phaedrus. Poetical Works. Ed. Karina Williamson. Vol. 6. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.

SB

Walsh, Marcus. ‘A Cambridge College Library in the Eighteenth Century: Smart’s Borrowings at Pembroke College.’ The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 12, no. 1 (1990): 34–49.

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Introduction A Letter from Mr. Smart to Mrs. Midnight in London Madam

Islington, March 1751.

Mr. Carnan [the printer] has this Day communicated to me, your Intentions of inserting my occasional Prologue and Epilogue in the next Number of your Magazine; and as to my Threats of Prosecution (he says) you are by no means intimidated by them, but depend absolutely on my Politeness, which, you may imagine, will restrain me from any offensive Act against a Person of your Age and Sex, how justifiable soever. I am very much obliged to you for the good Opinion you have express’d for me on this and many other Occasions, and the more so, because I was sure in this Case you are incapable of Hypocrisy. But yet I am not at present in a humour to be complimented out of my Property, and tho’ I am greatly above using any Menaces to a Lady, however Dissuadere licet. But if I cannot coax you into a compliance, I shall not attempt to frighten you. I shall be proud at any other Conjuncture to see any Thing of mine in your Work, tho’ I cannot without extream Mortification see myself plunder’d by those incorrigible Thieves your Contemporaries. For when they insert my Pieces, it is putting them into a Dunciad, and consigning them to Infamy; but when a Work of Merit is printed in your Magazine, it is a Brilliant set in Gold and increas’d, not diminish’d in its Lustre. I am, Madam, Your most sincere Admirer, C. SMART.

Mrs. Midnight’s Answer SIR

St. James’s Place, March 9.

I received yours, which pleases me so well, that I shall not only print your Prologue and Epilogue, but that also. – I am glad to see by the Date of your Letter, that what was said of a very great Man is likewise applicable to you. Not only London is full of thy Fame, But Part of Islington has heard the same. Yours, good Mr. Smart, M. MIDNIGHT. (Midwife, 2: 269–71)

2

Christopher Smart and Satire

The combination of gallantry and menace in this exchange between Christopher Smart and the editor of a popular periodical calls attention to a set of social and cultural pressures that were complicating the work of those who wished to make a living by their writing in the eighteenth century. As an ambitious and talented young scholar–poet, whose translation into Latin of Pope’s Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day was commended by the great man himself, Smart must guard his reputation from accusations that he is prostituting his talent by allowing his work to appear in the ‘low’magazines, miscellanies and compilations that crowd the bookstalls.1 Yet for some reason, although he has announced in his advertisement for his own printed prologue and epilogue to Othello that he will prosecute ‘whoever presumes to pirate it’, and despite his apparent tenacity on this point, he is at pains to compliment this particular editor.2 His problems appear compounded by the fact that she is complicating matters by reason of her age and sex, and his anxiety seems justified by her insolent decision not only to disobey his injunction, but to print his letter publicly as well. The twentyfirst-century reader might be puzzled, however, by his conviction that in her good opinion of him this editor is ‘incapable of hypocrisy’. The sly wit in this statement becomes apparent, as we shall see, once one posits a healthy and assertive self-regard on the part of Smart. The fact is that Christopher Smart and Mrs. Mary Midnight were the same person: Smart wrote both of the letters, the first as himself—poet, scholar and gentleman— and the second under the assumed character of this imaginary elderly woman who edited, and wrote most of, the monthly periodical The Midwife, or Old Woman’s Magazine (1750–53) for the bookseller John Newbery. The persona of Mary Midnight was invented with a bizarre and colourful theatricality which sits well with Donald Greene’s description of the eighteenth century as an ‘age of exuberance’.3 She still practises as a midwife; she runs on, rather, in a gossipy way, and often tends towards vulgarity, for she is something of a ‘feminine rattle’. She has a militant social conscience, a command of Greek and Latin, a gift for excoriating satire, an extensive knowledge of the classics and a thirst for literary criticism, all presented with needle-sharp wit and a hyperbolic, impudent self-confidence which, both then and now, is nothing short of breathtaking. Adopted for rhetorical purposes, she is sister under the skin to the modern ‘Hack’ who made such an exhibition of himself in Swift’s Tale of a Tub: sister in that her stridency is often deployed rhetorically, as

1 Ann. Lett., 1–5. 2 The Gentleman’s Magazine list of ‘Books Publish’d March 1751’ includes Smart’s Prologue and Epilogue to Othello and continues: ‘Mr. Smart has added this remarkable note to his advertisement –“This prologue and epilogue are enter’d in the hall-book of the stationer’s company, and whoever presumes to pirate it or any part of it will be prosecuted as the law directs.” ’ The editors go on to relate parts of the Smart/Midnight correspondence, without making the fact of their true relationship plain, but at the same time hinting that it is known. They are also sarcastic about the quality of the lines Smart wishes to protect: Gentleman’s Magazine 21 (1751): 143. 3 ‘Eighteenth-Century Miscellanies’ in Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1969–70): 423.

Introduction

3

ridicule by exaggeration of her ‘Brother-Magaziners’ and in this sense she is often Paulson’s ‘first-person speaker who damns [her]self out of [her] own mouth’.4 The Midwife itself is also an exuberant magazine, for rather than deploying the unifying and totalising format of a single essay periodical, like the still-influential Spectator and Johnson’s concurrent Rambler, Smart chose to structure it as an essaymiscellany. The Midwife was a fifty octavo-page monthly publication, priced at the moderate sum of three pence.5 It ran consecutively for thirteen numbers without a break, from 16 October 1750 to 31 October 1751: the final three numbers appeared after increasingly lengthy intervals. The contents were of a heterodox, and not predominantly literary nature: ingenious satire (often in the guise of letters from clearly fictional readers) concerning the pomposities, social injustices and cultural idiocies of the day, ludicrously hyperbolic self-advertisement, literary criticism, proto-novelistic accounts of Mrs. Midnight’s activities, poetry, bad jokes, and parodic derision of worthy competitors like the Gentleman’s Magazine. A regular feature of the magazine for most of the run was the inclusion of ‘The MIDWIFE’S POLITICKS: Or, Gossip’s Chronicle of the Affairs of Europe’, a six-or seven-page final section which concealed astringent commentary on Britain’s foreign policy under apparently innocuous banter. The major purpose of this book is to demonstrate, through the specific and particularly revealing example of Smart’s Midwife, how attention to the use of the persona in the eighteenth-century periodical has a particular value, in that it can broaden our understanding of print culture in the eighteenth century, and most especially, conflicts over the concept of authorship. Further to this, the incoherent and indeed outrageous nature of ‘Mary Midnight’, and the traditions of satire which helped to create her, will be shown to illuminate wider debates in the period: questions about the nature and status of gender, of political engagement, of personal identity, and ultimately of the cultural reception of aspects of Enlightenment thought. Of course the Midwife, as cultural artifact and as commodity, arose out of a certain set of historical circumstances, and it stands as a dialogue, not only between Christopher Smart and Mary Midnight, but between itself and the cultural anxieties of its day; it is my work here to show as fully as possible both the nature of the periodical itself and of those dialogues. Whilst unavoidably producing another ‘version’ of Smart, to add to those already generously itemized by Chris Mounsey, this study is not intended to be biographical.6 The Smart I read, however, from the pages of the Midwife and its sister magazine the 4 Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 136. 5 Robert D. Mayo defines the essay-miscellany as ‘a type of hybrid periodical combining features of both the essay-serial [in which a single essay carried the content, as in the Spectator and Rambler] and the miscellany’, which ‘offered a flexible combination of poems, stories, essays, letters and informational articles’, as in the Gentleman’s Magazine: The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962), 426–8. This was a reasonable price for a monthly magazine: most weekly magazines were priced at 2d.: The Covent-Garden Journal, and a Plan of the Universal Register Office, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 16. 6 Christopher Smart: Clown of God (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 14.

4

Christopher Smart and Satire

Student is, in both literary and political terms, a more ‘radically conservative’ figure than other studies have suggested; in its more strictly political sense, the implications of this phrase will be explored most fully in chapter five. I also present a scholarly Smart whose satirical practice is rooted in past literary tradition—this, indeed, is what enables his apparently novel linguistic fireworks—and a young Smart who, though his eclectic radicalism could only use those languages and models of opposition available to him at the time, found rich and subtle ways of conveying meaning. The letters we have just seen, however, were written to an immediate purpose apparently far removed from considerations of personal identity. They were an exercise in the art of ‘puffery’, for the sale of periodicals depended upon verbal, not visual, advertisement, and by the mid-eighteenth century the art of persuasion had become ingenious. The ‘Puff by Opposition’, where a spurious disagreement between offended parties could provide the occasion for some entertaining invective, was a well-proven example, and here Smart had invented a version of it in which he could flatter or threaten himself for the purpose of profit to good effect; the technique worked as a joke for those in the know, and as mild drama for those who were not.7 Wit is the basic currency of the Midwife, but equally the presence of a comedy which sometimes pushes beyond the limits of the rational will both complicate and delight our readings of the periodical. Equally, I will not be claiming that the magazine employs ‘nonsense’—in the strict sense of this as a literary genre, as described by Noel Malcolm. Rather, where it seems to teeter on the brink of nonsense, Mrs. Midnight is usually using the rhetorical trope of adynaton, or impossibilia, as a weapon of ridicule or satire against some specific target.8 The art of persuasion has classically been known by another name, and also it will be a task of this book to acknowledge, within the eighteenth-century periodical, and the Midwife in particular, the constitutive nature of the techniques, tropes, and habits of argument formed by the traditional study of rhetoric. For Christopher Smart received a humanist classical English education, at Durham School and at Cambridge; he learned the arts of rhetoric as eloquent persuasion, where exercises taught boys and young men to argue from positions they did not necessarily hold themselves, and to say the thing which was not.9 Both rhetoric and advertisement aim to persuade their audience towards action, and this similar goal exemplifies a foundational preoccupation of the work here. This is the intense tension, which I shall argue is made visible in the person of Mary Midnight, between the requirements of financial necessity—of cash in hand or credit on paper—and the perceived obligations of the dedicated and disinterested scholar-poet. The temptations to read the Midwife though a diagrammatic series of binary oppositions are strong: Christopher Smart/Mary Midnight; male scholarship/female 7 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa, 1982), 149. 8 Noel Malcolm, The Origins of English Nonsense (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 3–4, 80–86; also see A.D. Nuttall, ‘Fishes in the Trees’, Essays in Criticism 24, no. 1 (1974): 20–38. 9 Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1971), 65.

Introduction

5

gossip; ‘high’ culture/street vulgarity; serious political satire/knockabout burlesque; patronage/commercial literary marketplace; Ancient learning/Modern Grubstreet; the artist versus the mountebank. It would be a relatively simple matter to place Smart and his chosen persona on to this grid of oppositions, and to present a tidy portrait of Smart the schizophrenic, whose commercial self became the crowd-pleasing Mary Midnight, thus enabling him to keep his name as a scholar-poet unsullied by the sordid demands of booksellers and Grub Street.10 Lawrence Klein, however, has suggested that a dependence on using binary oppositions as a shortcut to the understanding of the ‘conceptual equipment’ of an era runs the risk of obscuring valuable cognitive distinctions familiar to that era but not to its present-day students. His caution may be taken to indicate the theoretical underpinning of this book, along with Theodor Adorno’s philosophical insistence on the importance of particularity: ‘The whole is the false’.11 Laurence Sterne understood the insufficiency of categories of two. Here he is, granting Walter Shandy a generous allowance of subject positions, but regretfully finding himself unable to do the same for his wife: What could my father do? He was almost at his wit’s end; —talked it over with her in all moods;—placed his arguments in all lights;—argued the matter with her like a Christian;—like a heathen,—like a husband,—like a father,—like a patriot,—like a man:—My mother answered everything only like a woman; which was a little hard upon her;—for as she could not assume and fight it out behind such a variety of characters,— ’twas no fair match;—’twas seven to one. (Tristram Shandy, 1: 18)

‘Mary Midnight’ was not in fact—any more than was Mrs. Shandy—reducible to a single identity, and neither was Smart himself, or the mental equipment he employed to give her a voice. Binary oppositions will be found in this work, but only as startingplaces from which the ingenuity of the Midwife can begin to be addressed. This book, then, wishes to play its part in a task aptly identified by Frank Donoghue: ‘[i]t is a given that the increasing commercialization of literary production makes eighteenth-century literature fundamentally different from other periods, but all of these differences have yet to be explored adequately.’12 Christopher Smart is not Mary Midnight, but she is of him, so that, in demarcating the male poet seeking the approbation of his peers through older models of authorship and the female hack dependent upon the commercial marketplace, it is also necessary to show how in practice they could not be separated thus neatly.

10 For this sort of will to tidiness see for example Kathy MacDermott, ‘Literature and the Grub Street Myth’, Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History. Eds. Peter Humm, Paul Stigant and Peter Widdowson (London: Methuen, 1986), 18. 11 Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 1 (1995): 99. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 50. 12 Frank Donoghue, The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 17.

6

Christopher Smart and Satire

The Untimely Midwife The Midwife stands out in a number of ways as a notable anomaly in the world of the mid-eighteenth-century periodical as it is often described by scholars. A crucial factor about the content of much of the writing about literature in the magazine is its untimeliness; it comes late, often like a ludicrous Falstaffian afterthought, to the deserted battlefield of the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. If Brean Hammond can describe the Dunciad of 1743 as ‘an old man’s poem, referring back to the (by then) archaic disputes of the ancients and moderns’, then Mary Midnight’s literary criticism of 1750–53 must indeed be venerable, for it combines the techniques of Pope’s satirical eulogy and Swift’s parodic prosopopoeia in a familiar crusade against ‘dulness’ in all its forms.13 Not for nothing does Mary Midnight stubbornly wear her old-fashioned, high-crowned hat and subtitle the periodical ‘The Old Woman’s Magazine’. Yet what is apparently untimely sometimes can recover a sudden contemporary relevance, and more than once in this study we shall see residual elements—as Raymond Williams suggested they might—unexpectedly begin to look like the starkest of oppositional ones.14 The Scriblerian legacy shows itself also in the Midwife through its unrepentant insistence on the indissoluble links between literature and politics. In the eighteenth century, Terry Eagleton insists, ‘the literary is the vanishing point of the political and its dissolution into polite letters’. Yet the literary criticism in the Midwife is time and again bound up with class animus; the first number sets the tone, for here Mary Midnight, in her piece ‘On Poetry’, is scathing about the undiscriminating taste of ‘the Vulgar’, and the moronic poetic lucubrations of a parish clerk (1: 34–5). This policing of the boundaries of literature is nothing to do with a ‘dissolution into polite letters’: it is the vigorous retention of the Augustan insistence on poetry as a difficult art which requires prolonged study of the classics, the converse of which would be Ned Ward in the London-Spy: ‘a Fart for Virgil and his Elegancy’.15 Mrs. Midnight is perfectly capable of fighting back against such refinement in the same coin. She works with the idea of language that was central to classical rhetoric: language as praxis, as the instrument of human subjects in their relation to one another and their involvement in social activity.16 Whatever one may think of her stance, it is by no means the subsumption of politics into gentility, any more than it was for Swift or, indeed, Juvenal. Furthermore, such disdain for the intellectual abilities of the 13 Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 3. I should note that Henry Fielding also sometimes used Scriblerian techniques of satire in his periodical writings. Throughout this study I use the word prosopopoeia in its strictest rhetorical sense, as ‘the representation of an imaginary or absent person as speaking, or acting; attributing life, speech, or human qualities to dumb or inanimate objects’: Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 498. 14 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 122. 15 Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984), 25. Ned Ward, The London-Spy Compleat (1700; repr. London: Casanova Society, 1924), 3. 16 Vickers, Defence of Rhetoric, 2–5.

Introduction

7

‘vulgar’ might lead one to expect a corresponding aristocratic hauteur about their lives, but this is not the case here. What we are dealing with in the Midwife is a radical conservatism which repays close attention with an unhysterical eye. For time and again the reader encounters a preoccupation with the poor and the dispossessed; in the powerfully-written and theatrical first article of that same opening number, Mary Midnight, out like a nocturnal Diogenes with her ‘Boy’ and lanthorn, can find no ‘honest’ men, only ruined servant girls who ‘lodge themselves on the Bulks, and lay naked at the Shop Doors’, or watchmen who are paid ‘a penny an Hour for freezing’ (1: 7). Later she responds sympathetically to a letter from a farmer’s wife, presented as an old friend from the country, who is outspoken in her plea that debtors should not be jailed: this was a cause later taken up by Samuel Johnson, and it is painful to remind ourselves here that Smart himself died in debtor’s prison.17 ‘Martha Johnson’ recounts graphic instances of the inhumanity of her local squire, crying in noisy italics: ‘Take notice of that Mrs. Midnight! Did you ever know such a Villain? But we must not say so’ (1: 14). Opposition writers earlier in the century often registered their distrust of certain aspects of modernity and progress, and so indeed did Mrs. Midnight. For Smart the working conceptual model at hand was the backward-looking one of a stable, ordered society with an actively benevolent aristocracy, for whom Pope’s Man of Ross might stand as an exemplary figure. The Midwife is studded with effective satires on a bewildering array of contemporary social malpractices and brutalities, and it is my wish to present some of Mrs. Midnight’s writing as refuting claims that political satire had ‘virtually stagnated’ in the mid-eighteenth-century.18 Opposition to hegemony takes many forms, and it is, after all, at the least only courtesy in us to attempt to particularize the past, rather than to dismiss those forms of reaction which do not square neatly with a model of the triumph of progressive thought. The role allotted by critics and historians to the periodical in the eighteenth century often seems formulaic: it is seen to adopt a hectoring and restrictive position towards eighteenth-century currents of thought. The emphasis on politeness and gentility in the Spectator is considered as a template for the rest of the century’s periodicals, and according to these accounts we would not expect to find a mid-century periodical describing the discovery of a petrified turd, using the word ‘arse-gut’, or including a poem which graphically recounts the wiping of a bum in a Vauxhall boghouse. There is no ‘pretence of gentility’ in the Midwife.19 The traditions of learned wit out of which the magazine emerges provided sanction for such calculated vulgarities: 17 Samuel Johnson, The Idler, nos. 22 and 38. 18 Howard Erskine-Hill, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example and the Poetic Response (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 15–33, 292–307. ‘virtually stagnated’: Vincent Carretta, The Snarling Muse: Verbal and Visual Political Satire from Pope to Churchill (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 177. 19 ‘the role allotted’: see, for example Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 150–91, esp. 154. For the Midwife articles, see respectively, 1: 151–4; 2: 28; 2: 228–34. ‘pretence of gentility’: Iona Italia, The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment (London: Routledge, 2005), 7.

8

Christopher Smart and Satire

we might think of Gulliver’s ungenteel preoccupations here. All periodicals did not conform to the tenets of ‘politeness’; indeed, as I shall show, Mrs. Midnight is more often scornful of these than compliant with them. Thus, by the end of this book I hope to have made clear how much distance Smart placed between the Midwife and journals such as Mark Akenside’s Museum (1746– 47). The preface of that sober organ declared it to be looking for ‘Correspondence’ from the ‘Learned and Ingenious’, for ‘by that means the MUSEUM may become a general Vehicle by which the Literati of the whole Kingdom may converse with each other, and communicate their Knowledge to the World’. This, Akenside declares, will be ‘agreeable’ and ‘highly conducive to the Advancement of Polite Literature’.20 In contrast, the Midwife’s editor provided his own wild version of ‘Knowledge’, penning facetious letters under improbable pseudonyms in order to parody the moderate Enlightenment attitudes of the Museum and magazines like it. Mrs. Midnight disturbs tidy accounts in the field of gender also: most specifically those which insist upon the containment of female voices in the eighteenth century. Kathryn Shevelow describes a process whereby the early eighteenth-century periodical ‘played a key role in expanding women’s participation, as readers, as writers and as textual figures: and in so doing, the periodical was simultaneously a principal site of the normative construction of femininity in writing’.21 Her account is of the periodical offering a textual voice to women at the same time as prescribing the nature of that voice; private, domestic, virtuous, polite and decorous. The persona of Mary Midnight was not given voice by a woman, but nonetheless she is one. She has concerns about decorum, certainly, but in much the same way as did Juvenal—here is no timid cipher, but a zestful and iconoclastic old campaigner who is more concerned about social justice than decrying the deplorable habit of flirting in church. She has both real and fictional antecedents—women who spoke out with trenchant voices about public and political issues—and in the same way she concomitantly has an effect upon important women, both real and fictional, who followed her. Adopted for rhetorical reasons far removed from anything like feminism, both the character of Mary Midnight and the overall tone of the Midwife have nevertheless little truck with conduct-book femininity. Mrs. Midnight drives the coach and six she would never have been able to afford through the ‘normative construction of femininity in writing’ in the eighteenth century. As a powerful female figure, speaking authoritatively and with wit on the highest matters of politics and learning, Mary Midnight has antecedents and also sets precedents. Neither the comic drive of the persona, or her origin from a masculine source, should be allowed to detract from the fact of her noisy and effective textual presence, or her significance as a woman whose mind, behaviour and attitudes are so startlingly at odds with those which the conduct books and genteel periodicals would lead us to expect.

20 The Museum, or the Literary and Historical Register (1746–47), ed. Mark Akenside (London: R. Dodsley), 2. 21 Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge, 1989), 6.

Introduction

9

Mrs. Midnight On Her Own Abilities It will already have been seen that the areas of concern of this study are hardly reducible to discrete zones: in discussing the writing and literary criticism in the Midwife, for example, one ignores at one’s peril questions of politics and gender. In order to demonstrate how busy an experience a reading of just one short piece from the periodical can be, in terms of the multiplicity and interrelation of tone, styles of discourse, and allusions, please consider briefly this beginning of a characteristic piece of Midnightiana: Mrs. MIDNIGHT’S Account of her own Abilities. In Imitation of several Authors. The Reputation I have acquired by my Wit and Humour in my younger Days, and the Candour I have discover’d since I commenced Critic, added to the Judgement which I have shewn in my maternal Profession, have given all people a prodigious Opinion of my Abilities. And really, if I may be allow’d to do myself Justice, and to speak myself for myself, I don’t believe that the whole Race of Lawyers, Divines, or even Physicians themselves can produce a greater old Woman than I am. People flock to me from every Quarter, and I find, tho’ too late, that a superb and exalted Reputation is but an Encumbrance, a sort of Rut in the Road to Happiness; for besides my own Business (I mean that of my Profession) and the Care of my Magazine, I am continually pester’d with Cases and Questions from the Literati of all Nations. No Casuist ever had so many cases of Conscience as I when Consciences were in Vogue; indeed since the use of Doubt and Scruple have been dropt by the better Sort, and consider’d as old fashion’d Furniture, I have been eas’d in this respect … (Midwife, 2: 128)

This self-promotional exercise continues into an attack on the degeneration of ‘all Sense of Religion, of Conscience, of Honour, and of Honesty’ among the aristocracy, and culminates in an extended gibe at the expense of one of Mary Midnight’s— and the Scriblerians’—favourite targets, the professions, those ‘Fumblers of all Faculties’. This piece, as we see from the title, is fuelled by parodic intent at the expense of other authors; one of the targets is almost certainly the arrogant voice of John Hill in his pompous Inspector, an essay-series printed from March 1751 in the London Daily Advertiser. There is a joke, too, about the aged cliché of the popular periodical as always being deluged by readers’ letters and comments.22 The piece should be recognized as parody, but without allowing this recognition to weaken the satiric force of that barbed reference to a time ‘when Consciences were in Vogue’, for Mrs. Midnight, though capable of both contradicting herself and indulging in self-parody, remains generally consistent in her opposition to most aspects of modernity. Lying behind the humour here is a key problem for this periodical: how is Mrs. Midnight going to retain the moral force she needs in order to render her satire effective, when she is writing to commercial ends, to please, and go on pleasing, as large a section of the reading public as possible?

22 See for example Spectator 16.

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If one allowed the presence of comedy in a text to preclude intelligent study of its tone, content and its contexts, then one might as well be simply replaying the familiar eighteenth-century equation of comedy and vulgar worthlessness. The most cursory glance at this piece will show that a subtle and considered skill with words is at work here, and should be credited. There is much care taken with this writing, and craft in its production of effects: we might note the edgy comical discomfort resulting from the juxtaposition of the balanced eloquence of the first sentence—carrying its elegant triplet of ‘Wit’, ‘Candour’ and ‘Judgement’—with the colloquial tone of the second. Likewise, the Johnsonian majesty of ‘a superb and exalted Reputation is but an Encumbrance’ might be noted in its proximity to the bathetic ‘sort of Rut in the Road’. The burlesque is a textual ploy that cannot be divorced from considerations of class, so that even in this brief exegesis of style the political is implicitly present. At the same time the content of the article is valuable on a number of related fronts as an indicator of some significant mid eighteenth-century bones of cultural contention. The piece cannot be approached without reference to its immediate political context as part of the discourse of civic humanist excoriation of luxury and corruption, or to its Christian humanist preoccupation with control of the passions, or even to its place as a cod document of international Enlightenment: ‘the Literati of all Nations.’23 Akenside’s Museum had at least the modesty to limit its scope to ‘the Literati of the whole Kingdom.’ It is also important to register the effect of such pronouncements as coming apparently from a woman, and one of low origins at that: as well as the fact that there is material here of interest to those who pursue the debate about the cultural importance of the figure of the midwife. One must consider, however, the implications of Mrs. Midnight’s loaded self-parody: ‘a greater old Woman than I am.’ How much of the laughter in this periodical is being produced at the expense of women? Indeed, the relation of that phrase to the telling ‘to speak myself for myself’ opens out onto wider questions of eighteenth-century perceptions of identity, and of the use, function and possible containment of a female ‘I’ in an arena such as this. Outline of Chapters The first chapter adopts a broad focus and provides the remainder of the book with a foundational base which places the persona of Mary Midnight as part of what was, by the time of her genesis, an established tradition for both essay and essaymiscellany periodicals. Seeking some answers to the question of why the use of some sort of persona, however sketchy, was endemic to the periodical, it will listen attentively to the originary voice of Swift’s ‘Isaac Bickerstaff’ in 1709, and then demonstrate how that voice changes when it passes to Richard Steele. The chapter traces the difference between the use of personae as specific, local and strongly 23 ‘civic humanist excoriation’: see, for just one of many examples of treatments of this topic, and for his own list of sources, J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History, (London: Methuen, 1972), 93–4. ‘Christian humanist preoccupation’: Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 7–8, and see chap. 5.

Introduction

11

rhetorical, and as more stable representations of particular characters with a fixed identity: the implications of Locke’s thinking on personal identity are a factor here. ‘Mary Midnight’ is shown to owe more to Swift’s Isaac than Steele’s, unlike many subsequent personae such as the influential ‘Mr Spectator’. The chapter will establish the terms for all subsequent discussion of Smart’s use of Mary Midnight, and explore the basis of this in prosopopoeia—the rhetorical device which underpinned all eighteenth-century use of personae. The concern is with the continuity of writing’s concern with itself, for there are influential classical precedents for the use of personae and, indeed, for the understanding of what ‘character’ in writing was. Suggested answers also have a great deal to do with politics, but very specifically; I argue that the roots of the use of personae lie in the Whig and Tory war of words over the instability of credit at the beginning of the eighteenth century, rather than in any broader and more hazy anxieties over personal identity instigated by the ‘financial revolution’. Having placed Mary Midnight as part of an established convention in the eighteenth-century periodical, the second chapter will return her to her immediate environment in the Midwife, and give as full an account as possible of the nature, provenance and preoccupations of the magazine itself. I think that the Midwife should be placed in the broad tradition of acerbic humorous dissent which runs from Aristophanes to Lucian to Rabelais to Swift. It seems that Smart hoped this would be so, judging by Mrs. Midnight’s admiring reference to ‘the Wit of Fielding, Lucian, Swift, Butler, and Erasmus’ (2: 118). Smart himself could not foresee the writers, from Sterne to Beckett, who would follow in this genealogy. The satiric, prosopopoeic writings in the Midwife, I will want to show, ought not to be reduced anachronistically to a version of Bakhtinian carnival. The humanist rhetoric the magazine employs allows it, through comedic use of allegory, hyperbole, satirical eulogy, ironic reversal and adynaton, to achieve a status of more literary and historical importance than any reading of it as evidence of the madcap resentment of its progenitor.24 The groundwork done here will help to clarify my case in subsequent chapters, for here we encounter for the first time Mrs. Midnight about her impossible appointed tasks: using irony to try to maintain scholarly credibility in a commercial magazine; attempting to undermine the (by now substantial) professionalization of society, as represented by antiquarians and literary critics; and trying to stem perceived corruption in government by publishing a letter from a dog. The knotted tangle of elements at which we glanced earlier will provide the matter for chapters three and four; these will separate out under the rough headings of gender—Mrs. Midnight’s status as female social critic, midwife, and gossip— and of the literary, dealing with her position as literary critic and elderly coquette. Chapter three will take as its task the solution of the problem of why Smart chose to use a female persona completely different in age and class from himself, using as evidence Smart’s previous employment of personae in the Student. It concludes that his reasons were based in rhetorical strategy—with the aim of attacking specific shortcomings of his society—rather than in sympathy for women’s aspirations, 24 See Lance Bertelsen, ‘Journalism, Carnival, and Jubilate Agno’, ELH 59, no. 2 (1992): 357–84.

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although there are qualifications to this. Addressing the frequent positioning of women in the eighteenth century as dunces and gossips, and opening out to questions of Enlightenment versus tradition (in the form of medical practice and attitudes to witchcraft) the chapter takes eighteenth-century gender assumptions as the bedrock for its discussion. Broadening the focus from that of the second chapter, the third pays particular attention to the nature of the voice of Mrs. Midnight, and how it is established over the earlier numbers of the magazine. It looks searchingly at what Smart-as-Mary Midnight can achieve in terms of social criticism, in contradistinction to what would have been possible had he written under a persona more nearly similar to his own. The fourth chapter re-enters the charged arena familiar to students of Pope and Swift, an area where the clashes and interactions between the venerable tradition of learned wit and the commercial drive of post Licensing Act print culture become sharply apparent. ‘High’ literary endeavour and the ‘low’ commercial literary marketplace stood in apparent opposition to one another, and the chapter considers the significant literary criticism in the magazine. Here we see the ‘novelized’ Mrs. Midnight, who sometimes elbows aside the rhetorical persona, thus again demonstrating the insufficiency of the binary. The nub of my material argument is laid out here: the nature of the persona in this periodical allows us clearly to perceive the strain of the ideological burden Christopher Smart was attempting to carry. He could not—under the conditions of the shift from a patronage-based to a commercial public-based literary economy—retain his credibility as a disinterested, distinguished scholar-poet and at the same time blithely earn his bread as a cross-dressing verbal acrobat. The Midwife, after all, was written by a man who barely bothered to hide his disgust with what he was doing; Smart’s ‘Castle-Builder’ persona in the Student declared, while the Midwife was in full production, that ‘I am determined to be as stupid as my contemporaries, in order to make myself POPULAR.’25 Mrs. Midnight was unique among periodical personae in that she actually appeared in the flesh, and Smart, in petticoats, was to be seen in the Haymarket Theatre in 1753, using his rhetorical and poetical skills to introduce the wooden-legged dancer ‘Monsieur Timbertoes’ (3: 89–92). He had been running a successful and popular magazine crammed with literary and political satire for more than two years when he announced in a published letter that he would ‘rather be recommended to posterity by the elegant and amiable muses, than by the satyric sister … called ‘the least engaging of the nine.’ 26 Chapter five looks to place these conclusions into a more particularized political dimension. The radical conservatism of Smart’s political stance, I will argue, led him to produce in the Midwife scathing and effective social and political satire. Lance Bertelsen’s comment that ‘surveys of Smart’s literature have tended to dismiss the irreverent phenomenon of Mary Midnight as something of an embarrassment’ is perfectly true, and it is surely time that the writings in the Midwife should be recognized 25 Student, 2: 301. 26 For the ‘Oratory’ see Arthur Sherbo, Christopher Smart: Scholar of the University (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), 75–81, and chap. 2 below. ‘rather be recommended’: prefatory letter to the Hilliad, PW4, 216.

Introduction

13

as the carefully-crafted and effective imaginative satire that they undoubtedly are. Marcus Wood asks where the prosopopoeic, parodic satire in Thomas Wooler’s 1817 Black Dwarf comes from; one of the answers to that question is, demonstrably, from the Midwife.27 The hitherto little-examined and underrated antic asp that was the Midwife merits and rewards careful attention, arising as it does out of a period normally characterized as one of the sleepiest, politically speaking, of the century. Here I will try to show how the rhetorical skills Smart brought to bear on the creation of Mary Midnight also enabled him to attack the ‘present happy Establishment of Church and State’ (2: 236) with an irony none the less savage for the necessity of its partial concealment behind the mask of its persona. This chapter will engage with the work of J.G.A. Pocock, Bertrand Goldgar, Gerald Newman, Christine Gerrard and others to place Smart as standing in stark opposition to the Georgian literary and political status quo, and doing so alongside a loose group of similarly alienated intellectuals. The chapter shows Mrs. Midnight providing a popularized version of Bolingbroke’s writings in his Idea of a Patriot King, and tackles the question of the position of Jacobitism in the magazine, through consideration of one of the most complex and layered pieces of satirical innuendo to be found in eighteenth-century political periodical writing. Working on the basis of the allied conclusions so far established, chapter six completes a case which I have been building alongside my arguments about the use of persona in the magazine: a case which suggests that the Midwife is an important document in our understanding of one way in which the intellectual might attempt to come to terms with the forces of modernity. In this chapter I will emphasize the magazine ultimately as critical of aspects of Enlightenment itself. The Midwife carried parodies of Enlightenment projects as reported in the Gentleman’s Magazine, like Diderot’s ‘Improvements on the German Organ’ and ‘The Duke of Argyll’s horizontal Windmill for raising Water’. It also satirized the writings of the philosophes as represented by La Mettrie, and it attacked forms of intransigent materialism that attempted to reduce the universe and its inhabitants to mechanistic, mathematised engines. Scholars of Smart the poet will discover in this study a writer more akin to the visionary praise-singer than we find in most previous accounts of Smart the journalist, not only in terms of breadth of content, but also in his ingenious manipulation and extension of the learned wit tradition. The prologue and epilogue to Othello—the subject of the correspondence between Smart and himself at which we initially looked—was a matter of concern for more of the literati than merely Smart himself.28 As a coda to this introduction, consider the Gentleman’s Magazine for March 1751, in which appeared the following letter. Signed ‘B.C.’, and addressed from Cambridge, its writer, though an unidentifiable figure, was—despite the bonus of additional publicity which he granted to Smart— apparently no friend to the gentleman. It appears that it was both the quality of the Othello verses and their use in a public commercial arena which roused B.C.’s ire, 27 Bertelsen, ‘Journalism, Carnival, and Jubilate Agno’: 362. Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790–1822 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 1–3. 28 For an account of the production of Othello for which the prologue and epilogue were written, see Sherbo, Scholar of the University, 73–4.

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and the letter will serve to show the cultural climate in which Smart, in part himself a wit at war with a scholar, would have to make his way: I wish the world had not known that this prologue and epilogue were written by a gentleman, who has hitherto been esteem’d a genius and a scholar; for nothing but the publication of them with his name, would have convinced the world that he was the author; and it is to be hoped that he will consider before it is too late, that even genius and learning, prostituted to such service, must at length lose their dignity, and be regarded only as the tools of those who hire them for their use. (21: 122)

Chapter 1

Personal Identity and Personae in the Eighteenth-Century Periodical But why Champion, and Vinegar, and Stuff? If you will not acquaint us with your own Name, why not subscribe Algernon Sidney, or Osborne, or Walsingham, or some other grave Man’s which might avoid the least Appearance of a Jest. I hate all Wit and Humour and such Nonsense. The Champion, no. 9, 4 December 1739.

The stodgily literal ‘Paul Serious’ writes thus to ‘Hercules Vinegar’, who is Henry Fielding’s persona in his periodical The Champion. Mr. ‘Serious’ is not especially outraged at the use of a persona in a periodical per se; it is the comic, insubstantial nature of Fielding’s choice that troubles him. Yet, as is so often the case with correspondence in the eighteenth-century periodical, we cannot take this letter at face value. ‘Paul Serious’ is almost certainly Henry Fielding, enjoying himself with a bit of puffery via the classical satiric technique of creating an adversarius—a longstanding periodical writer’s ploy. The choice of ‘grave Men’ whose names would have been more appropriate in the correspondent’s eyes is telling: Algernon Sidney was real—a Whig martyr, who was executed for his part in the Rye House Plot—but ‘Osborne’ and ‘Walsingham’ were the personae of Whig ministerial apologists, and thus fictitious.1 Fielding, with the help of an imagined ‘Paul Serious’, is lampooning the kind of Whig humourlessness which prevents its possessor from grasping the difference between real people and personae. ‘Hercules Vinegar’ then answers the ‘absurd Cavil’ of ‘Paul Serious’: It is methinks of a Piece with the Surliness of those angry Gentlemen, who once infested the Town, and were wont to take a dislike to a Man’s Face; or to the Antipathy of that whimsical Person, who sicken’d at a Tavern, because there was a Cat painted on the Sign. If these Cavillers were much acquainted with History, they would know many Instances where great Talents have been concealed under mean and contemptible Appearances …

It is through and alongside the political that Fielding here raises the question of identity; an attack on the tiresome earnestness of political opponents also raises the question of how outward signs are to be understood in relation to an inner core. It 1 Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding; A Life (London: Routledge, 1989), 184. James Pitt, writing in the London Journal, was ‘Francis Osborne’, and Francis Arnall (in the Free Briton) was ‘Francis Walsingham’: Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 116–17.

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is the absurdly naïve habit of taking appearance for substance, of expecting that the two will coincide, that ‘Vinegar’ finds irksome in his imagined correspondent. Fielding’s exchange has been placed at the start of this chapter to illustrate the close relation in many eighteenth-century periodicals between the political and questions of personal identity, between the strategic necessities of polemic and ontology itself.2 Fielding seems to me to be jovially suggesting that too literal an understanding in either category will lead to misrecognition of reality. This interaffective link between politics and ontology, I will suggest, is fundamental to the understanding of the use of personae in the eighteenth-century periodical. That understanding is in turn necessary to gain a fuller appreciation of exactly what it was that Smart was doing when he impersonated an old woman, at first on paper and later on the orator’s rostrum. The textual fiction that was Smart’s ‘Mary Midnight’ should be considered in the light of her predecessors, antecedents and contemporaries, that multitude whose existence was always only on paper, for the use of authorial personae was virtually endemic to the eighteenth-century single-essay and miscellany periodical. The question of why this was so is central to this chapter; it cannot be answered in the tidy way in which it can be asked, and it is not a question which has been addressed previously in any sustained way. In the nineteen-fifties and early sixties there was considerable critical attention to the persona in eighteenth-century verse, to the point where, as Ehrenpreis testily observed, it had become a way of avoiding serious engagement with the text.3 Pope’s persona in his ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, however, is not the sort of animal with which this study is concerned. The query here is a specific one: why did nearly every early and mid eighteenthcentury periodical writer or editor in England choose to write behind a mask, impersonating another—imaginary—human being? Why did they find it necessary to live on the page, in borrowed garments, the life of someone they were not? In each case, of course, the answers are more or less subtly different, and my task here cannot be to examine each in detail. That a fictitious identity was sometimes necessary for outspoken political comment, that there were peculiar advantages for women writers in the adoption of personae, that the persona could provide a useful screen for reputable scholars who would rather not be caught out doing hack writing, and, perhaps most importantly, that there is a force of custom and common usage at work here are all undeniably important factors. These reasons, though, are not complete in themselves; they are merely preliminary steps towards a fuller understanding of what is happening in this tradition. It is not my intention to provide definitive answers to the question, but it is my aim in this chapter to indicate those interrelated areas of concern in eighteenth-century writing and thought where answers most fruitfully can be sought, and to suggest a way in which we might read the drive to employ a

2 I use this term in the classic philosophical sense of the exploration of being in general, and the nature of existence. 3 Irvin Ehrenpreis, ‘Personae’, Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature: Essays in Honour of Alan Dugald McKillop, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 25–37, see esp. 31.

Personal Identity and Personae in the Eighteenth-Century Periodical

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persona in order better to understand both that drive and those social preoccupations which shaped it and which it helped to shape. We are accustomed nowadays to the idea of textual, fictional voices speaking directly to us from the fullness of their richly characterized selves: this chapter seeks to dig a little at the foundations of this really rather strange phenomenon. The principal focus will be upon a particular conflicted field at the beginning of the eighteenth century, where creative differences in ways of representing the self in writing were to be seen in opposition. For the crux of my argument is that it was through an opposition between classical rhetorical modes of self-presentation— modes which were designed to be used in attacking specific and local targets in the civic arena—and other, more recently available ways of writing about personal identity, that the persona arose and gained its ascendancy as the preferred way of addressing the periodical reader. In close dialogue with relevant extracts from early periodicals, I shall be engaging with the following topics: the new economic order (sometimes referred to as the ‘financial revolution’); Protestant self-examination and increased attention to the state of one’s inner self; John Locke’s writings on personal identity; rhetorical practice in the form of prosopopoeia; specific changes in the use of the term ‘character’; and—throughout—the political considerations which underpinned and shaped the use of the persona. 4 It has long been recognized that fiction may allow some truths to show themselves, so to speak, by the back door. Sterne wondered at the way humans seem to need duplicity in order to uncover truth: ‘Is the heart so in love with deceit, that where a true report will not reach it, we must cheat it with a fable, in order to come at truth?’ If in the eighteenth century, as we shall see later with Locke, a consciousness can so easily slip into borrowed clothes, it does not take a great leap to arrive at Hume’s position of scepticism regarding the entire nature of the subject, or to perceive deception at the heart of social prescriptions about oneself and one’s place in society.5 This chapter, then, seeks not only to situate Mrs. Midnight in her place as part of an established practice with a colourful history, but also to enable the use of personae to be understood as exemplary of the ingenuity of human attempts to solve, or indeed to dissolve, the problems of writing the self and reading the other.

4 P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688–1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967), 12. ‘Protestant self-examination: see for example Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930), 104–7, 119; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1963), 77–9; Roger Smith, ‘SelfReflection and the Self’, Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 49–57; Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 159–64. 5 Laurence Sterne, vol. 2 of The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (Oxford: Blackwell, 1927), 227. For Nietzsche on the revelatory deceptions of art, see The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 141. David Hume, A Treatise Of Human Nature, ed. L.A. SelbyBigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 251–63.

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The Financial Revolution and the Periodical Persona It was in 1709 that what is generally recognized as the first fully realized periodical persona in England appeared on paper, in the form of one ‘Isaac Bickerstaff’ who held the reins of Richard Steele’s Tatler in his carefully genial hands: ‘the Tatler ... became the first essay journal to use in a subtle and substantial way the device of assumed author-editorship.’6 During the ‘print explosion’ of the English Revolution in the 1640s, mercury writers had experimented with writing from behind tactical masks, in direct engagement with the turmoil of the political events of the time, and Joad Raymond has argued that the ‘mercury’ itself became personified as a particular assumed voice. Perhaps Roger L’Estrange’s ‘Observator’ of 1681–87 came close, but none of these writers had attempted to deploy the sort of richly-characterized persona, with a full inner life of reflection and a carefully-described personal and family history, that ‘Isaac Bickerstaff’ was the first to represent: nor did they address those questions of socialisation—of manners and mores in society generally—which preoccupied Steele in the Tatler.7 With the rise of the deployment of personae in mind, readings in present-day historical, literary and political writings on social and cultural change in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, at first led me to considerations of one particular development in that period: the socio-economic changes brought about by the ‘financial revolution’, and the claims that those changes altered previous untroubled understanding of what grounded the self. Scholars have been arguing since at least the late 1960s that the formation of the Bank of England in 1694, the subsequent establishment of a system of public credit, and the beginnings of the stock market had consequences that affected every branch of cultural endeavour, because these innovations affected the very permanence and stability of a personal sense of identity. The scale of the change that began in the late seventeenth century, it is suggested, when people were becoming unable any longer to understand land and property as tangible guarantors of personal identity and worth, is often figured as a crucial step towards the emergence of something like a fantasy self, where, as John Richetti says, ‘identity is subject to the fluidity and fluctuations of the market’. 6 Bond does not consider Defoe’s ‘Mr. Review’ (1704–13) to display the characteristics of a full persona: Richmond P. Bond, ‘Isaac Bickerstaff Esq.’, Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature, 113. Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (1691–97) and Ladies Mercury (1694) were represented as being a matter of group editorship. Morris Golden is only one among many who credit Addison and Steele with the ‘invention or bringing together’ of the persona as a device: Morris Golden, British Literary Magazines: The Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson 1698–1788, ed. Alvin Sullivan (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983), xx. 7 After the Long Parliament abolished the Star Chamber in 1640, press censorship was loosened: ‘the period from late 1641 to the end of 1642 must surely rank as one of the most confusing in the whole history of the Press’: G.A. Cranfield, The Press and Society: From Caxton to Northcliffe (London: Longman, 1978), 10. Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks of 1641–49 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 152. For Roger L’Estrange see Peter Hinds, ‘The Horrid Popish Plot’: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century London (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), chaps. 1, 2, 3 and 10.

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J.G.A. Pocock puts it thus: ‘The emergence of classes whose property consisted not of lands or goods or even bullion, but of paper promises to pay in an undefined future, was seen as entailing the emergence of new types of personality, unprecedently dangerous and unstable.’8 Do the roots of the periodical persona lie, then, in this configuration? For if we are looking at a period comprehending what Colin Nicholson calls the ‘demise of classical notions of selfhood’, then surely this would be exactly the time when one might boldly take upon oneself a different kind of ‘paper self’?9 Setting aside for the moment the uneasy questions raised by that abrupt ‘demise’, the argument bears further examination. Consider then a world of exchange and investment where, instead of being based upon solid land or specie, personal fortune is tied up in scraps of paper whose worth rises and falls through a series of irrational, and even fantastical currents of affect, whose nature is unpredictable and unknowable. Pocock again has the definitive explanation: Once property was seen to have a symbolic value, expressed in coin or in credit, the foundations of personality themselves appeared imaginary or at best consensual: the individual could exist, even in his own sight, only at the fluctuating value imposed upon him by his fellows, and these evaluations, though constant and public, were too irrationally performed to be seen as acts of political decision or virtue. 10

One cannot help wondering where women figure in all this—presumably as, in the main, they were unable to possess property in the form of land, they were inured to coping without a foundation to their personality. Smart’s Mary Midnight draws attention to the fact that concerns like these were still current later in the century. Mrs. Midnight, as a tradeswoman with her labour as midwife to sell, is scathing about the corrupting effects of elastic credit upon the gentry. In her second Juvenalian ‘Prowl’ through the London streets, she imperiously calls her boy to look upon and consider well the personifications of ‘Sincerity’, to whom no-one will give shelter in his threadbare coat, and ‘Merit’, returned from transportation, who had better go back into exile again, for this ‘poor Creature’— of unspecified gender—can expect no mercy in London. The garrulous midwife continues: Boy dost see that fine Gentleman yonder? He is going to the Gaming-Tables, with my Money in his Pocket. He has been in my Debt, let me see, these five Years, and always pays me with Promises. Upon my Honour, Madam, I am out of Cash, – You are 8 ‘claims that those changes’: for the classic account, see J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) chaps. 13 and 14. John Richetti, Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7l. J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 235. 9 Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 8. 10 J.G.A. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 464.

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unfortunate, – If you came a little sooner you might have had it, – But next Week Madam upon my Honour. And this Honour has been passed upon me for Stirling Gold, ’till it is not worth a rotten Egg. (1: 90)

Smart in some ways supported Bolingbroke, as we shall see in chapter five, and that explosive politician blamed widespread national corruption on the ‘cancerous humor’ of stockjobbing: he ‘spoke of the new financial world with a bitterness not heard since the closing of Swift’s Examiner.’11 ‘Honour’ and authenticity were still being questioned in these terms at mid-century, then; but what of the genesis of the first persona in 1709? The Two Bickerstaffs In what follows I shall be discussing Swift and Steele’s ‘Isaac Bickerstaff’ with an eye both to drawing attention to his history and to investigating the terms and structures in which his creators choose to introduce and account for his presence. Richmond P. Bond has scrupulously examined Isaac Bickerstaff’s provenance: it was Jonathan Swift who brought him first to the page in a brief existence as the author of two pamphlets satirising the practice of astrology. The first Bickerstaff was an astrologer himself, an acerbic, indignant, and somewhat severe individual, who considered his own practice so infallible that he undertook to predict the death of a fellow-astrologer named Partridge, and announced, in a second pamphlet, that this had indeed happened much as he had predicted, for though ‘an uninformed Carcass walks still about, and is pleased to call it self Partrige’, to Bickerstaff this hardly constituted living.12 In the first Bickerstaff pamphlet, however, whilst pursuing his attack upon inferior charlatans in his own trade—most notably the unfortunate Partridge—he effectively demolished its pretensions altogether: I know, several learned men have contended, that the whole is a Cheat; that it is absurd and ridiculous to imagine, the Stars can have any Influence at all upon human Actions, Thoughts or Inclinations: and whoever hath not bent his Studies that Way, may be excused for thinking so, when he sees in how wretched a manner this noble Art is treated, by a few mean illiterate Traders between us and the Stars; who import a yearly Stock of Nonsense, Lies, Folly and Impertinence, which they offer to the World as genuine from the Planets; although they descend from no greater a Height than their own Brains. (141)

Here the eidolon who played a foundational role in the establishment of the periodical persona, in the second sentence of his own first appearance in print, couches his objections to a certain prevailing deception in terms of dishonest ‘Traders’ who deal in worthless ‘Stock’ which is not what it appears to be. We should be careful, 11 Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, 36–7. 12 Richmond P. Bond, ‘Isaac Bickerstaff Esq.’, Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature, 103–24. Jonathan Swift, Predictions for the Year 1708, by Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. in The Bickerstaff Papers and Pamphlets on the Church, vol. 2 of Prose Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), 162.

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however, before we link this particular metaphor to the ‘financial revolution’: traders were in bad odour with educated gentlemen long before the foundation of the Bank of England.13 This piece does draw attention indirectly to the impact of the rise of finance, but more as a matter of content than of the technique of the use of personae: what is demonstrated here is that the use of the periodical persona was from its very inception concerned about what is fundamentally a political matter. For to the first Isaac Bickerstaff what is influencing ‘human Actions, Thoughts or Inclinations’ is a matter of class: of the gentlemanly vita activa and true learning versus popular culture in the form of witless dependence on ‘low’ charlatans. What Bickerstaff later calls the ‘common Dealers’ in the art—the ‘Tribe’ of ‘Students in Astrology’—are ‘mean’ and ‘illiterate’, you’ll note, and he goes on to claim that ‘they do not so much as understand Grammar and Syntax; that they are not able to spell any Word out of the usual Road; nor even in their Prefaces to write common Sense, or intelligible English.’14 Bickerstaff designates himself in contrast as a learned gentleman, one of the Latin-speaking elite of the international world of letters.15 A key reason for Isaac’s existence lies in Swift’s desire to attack the influence which the ‘mean unskilful Hands’ of the common astrologers have gained over the class which should be pursuing an active, informed life in the political arena: ‘I rather wonder, when I observe Gentlemen in the Country, rich enough to serve the Nation in Parliament, poring in Partrige’s Almanack, to find out the Events of the Year at Home and Abroad; not daring to propose a Hunting-Match until ... he hath fixed the Weather.’ Landowners should be pursuing the public good; if Swift does not directly voice his disquiet here about what is happening in Parliament while the gentry are being misled and suborned by the almanac-writers, he was shortly to do so vociferously in the Examiner, for there it is the ‘monied interest’ which is gaining unprecedented power in government.16 Crucially here, he is using this persona for an immediate, polemical and specific end. 13 See for example Cicero and Erasmus: Cicero: On Duties, eds. M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 58; Panegyricus Moria, vol. 27 of Works, trans. Betty Radice, ed. A.H.T. Levi (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 121. 14 Quentin Skinner traces the belief in the ‘strongly entrenched humanist value’ of ‘negotium’—the active involvement in political affairs—from Cicero, through the humanists of the Renaissance Italian city-states, to Tudor England: The Renaissance, vol. 1 of The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 108, 218. Jonathan Swift, ‘Predictions for the Year 1708’, The Bickerstaff Papers, 142. 15 Ibid., 150. Also see the second pamphlet, A Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff Esq.; here Swift emphasises his international standing and disclaims financial need: ‘My Fortune hath placed me above the little Regard of writing for a few Pence, which I neither value nor want’: The Bickerstaff Papers, 159, 162, 149. For civic humanist emphasis on ‘disinterestedness’, see for example John Barrell, The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 51. 16 ‘the Wealth of the Nation, that used to be reckoned by the Value of Land, is now computed by the Rise and Fall of Stocks.’ Jonathan Swift, Examiner 13, in vol. 3 of Prose Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1940), 6.

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Richard Steele, with Swift’s encouragement, took over the persona of Isaac Bickerstaff to write and orchestrate his Tatler in 1709, and indeed Swift may well have been of practical assistance to Steele in the early days of the periodical. Steele was unapologetic about having taken advantage of public interest in the Bickerstaff controversy: ‘the name of Bickerstaff’, he explained, had ‘created an Inclination in the Town towards any Thing that could appear in the same Disguise’. Isaac, however, underwent a major transformation in the Tatler. Though still an astrologer, he became the first of the many eighteenth-century periodical personae who was to take on a reforming role for society as a whole. His first number announced that he would undertake the ‘charitable and necessary’ work of offering something whereby ‘worthy and well-affected Members of the Commonwealth may be instructed, after their Reading, what to think’ (Tatler, 1 April 1709). Steele’s Bickerstaff, then, had a broad cultural mission, which has most often been viewed as that of altering aristocratic standards to incorporate more inclusive ideals of bourgeois politeness. While pursuing this aim, over the course of nearly a year in his thrice-weekly periodical, Steele could grant Isaac a credible long-term personality: Iona Italia has provided a sharp overview of his consistent character traits.17 Steele also had the space and leisure to become sportive, for his Bickerstaff, unlike Swift’s dour and irascible Isaac, seemed ready to play with readerly assumptions about his existence in a way that many later personae would profitably follow. In his first number Steele assured continuity of the persona by driving a few more nails into the Partridge coffin: I have in another Place, and in a Paper by itself, sufficiently convinced this man that he is dead, and, if he has any Shame, I do not doubt but that by this time he owns it to all his Acquaintance; for though the Legs and Arms and whole Body of that Man may still appear, and perform their animal Functions; yet since, as I have elsewhere observed, his Art is gone, the Man is gone. I am, as I said, concerned that this little Matter should make so much Noise, but ... I take myself obliged in Honour to go on in my Lucubrations, and by the help of these Arts, of which I am Master, as well as my skill in astrological Speculations, I shall as I see occasion, proceed to confute other dead Men who pretend to be in being, although they are actually deceased. (Tatler 1, 12 April 1709)

There are shells of people walking about, it seems, who are not articulated by an inner core of living identity—appearances are not conforming to substance—and this too is the concern of the next paper in which Bickerstaff reflects on his own being. It is the language of the new financial markets, coupled with the deceptions of the theatre, that Steele chooses to use in Bickerstaff’s next exploration of the disjunctions between appearance and reality. ‘Man is a Creature very inconsistent with himself’,

17 ‘of practical assistance’: see for example Irvin Ehrenpreis, Dr. Swift, vol. 2 of Swift: The Man, his Works and the Age (London: Methuen, 1962), 241–2. ‘the name of Bickerstaff’’: Steele, preface to vol. 4 of the Tatler, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 3. ‘altering aristocratic standards’: see for example John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 91, 99–100. Iona Italia, The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment (London: Routledge, 2005), 23–43.

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he tells us, like a Sartre avant la lettre, in Tatler no. 7, and then goes on to inscribe his mock will.18 After leaving all his ‘Real Estate’—glorious, this, because of course it isn’t—‘to the Stock-jobbers about the Exchange of London, as a Security for the Trusts daily reposed in them’, he goes on to elaborate: Therefore, as there are those who dispute, whether there is any such real Person as Isaac Bickerstaff or not; I shall excuse all Persons who appear what they really are, from coming to my Funeral. But all those who are, in their way of Life, Personae, as the Latins have it, Persons assumed, and who appear what they really are not, are hereby invited to that Solemnity. (Tatler 7, 26 March 1709)

He proceeds to list the personae who are to hold up his pall: they are real-life ‘Pretenders to Honesty, Wealth and Power, who are not possessed of any of them’, namely a ‘Half-Lawyer and a Compleat Justice’, a ‘Chymist and a Projector’, a ‘Treasury Sollicitor and a Small Courtier’. The other mourners, ‘since all Mourners are meer Actors on these Occasions’, are to be a mixture of real actors, such as Mrs. Barry, and dramatic characters—most notably Falstaff. So that in this early game that a writer played with the fantastical possibilites inherent in the use of written personae, we should note several things: that Bickerstaff, although he deplores the duplicity of others, is himself—like Swift’s Isaac—a fiction, that he associates instability of identity with the fluctuations of finance, and also that the theatre plays a prominent part in the jest. The argument that expanding functions of capital can be linked with flexible notions of the self in the broad field of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century culture, and that the rise of the use of personae in periodicals is part of this conjunction, has not so far been ruled out. Steele has provided what looks like early textual confirmation of E.J. Hundert’s contention that ‘eighteenth-century thinkers were ... faced with the argument that character itself in essence was a social artefact’, that this argument arose from ‘a form of perplexity about moral agency in commercial society’ and that the figure of the actor was a representative individual in this changing view of the self.19 It would be doing injustice, though, both to the complexity of the subject and of the practice of writing if we were to bolt too hastily into the den of the bulls and bears. Locke and the Use of Personae The animated ‘Carcass’ of Partridge and Steele’s ‘Persons who appear what they really are not’ may indicate contemporary anxiety about the integrity of the inner self, but it is the fact that this very anxiety is being articulated by fictional voices which 18 ‘The self ... represents ... a way of [the subject] not being his own coincidence’: JeanPaul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 1969), 77. Also see M.M. Bakhtin on the mask’s importance to the development of the novel, especially its ‘noncoincidence’ with itself: The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 36. 19 E.J. Hundert, ‘The European Enlightenment and the History of the Self’, Rewriting the Self, 81, 73.

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most concerns us here. The condemnation of a fair exterior masking foulness within was not new: Quentin Skinner, for example, enlists Shakespeare, Sidney and Nashe, among others, to help demonstrate how English Renaissance writers worried away at the ‘propensity of wickedness to mask itself behind a veil of virtue’.20 If we are to understand better the phenomenon of a mask which condemns concealment, the field of enquiry must now widen out, and it is appropriate to move on to the Spectator (1711–14), for Addison and Steele’s ‘Mr. Spectator’ extended and firmly established the use of personae in the essay periodical. No. 578 begins promisingly: ‘There has been very great Reason, on several Accounts, for the learned world to endeavour at settling what it was that might be said to compose personal Identity’. Infuriatingly, Mr. Spectator fails here to specify exactly what those ‘several Accounts’ are, for he then uses a brief but accurately paraphrased account of Locke’s explanation of the transferable nature of personal identity as the precursor to a ‘Persian Tale’ of metamorphosis. The extent to which Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding affected eighteenth-century thinking is still a matter of debate in various academic disciplines. If we think, though, of philosophy as both rooted in its cultural milieu and affecting it, as a matter of current ‘structures of feeling’—as Raymond Williams called them—then it is interesting that Locke’s Essay only predates the appearance of the first fully-realized persona by some twenty years. For in it Locke bases the nature of personal identity in consciousness and thought, and radically separates its definition both from that of ‘substance’, and from that of ‘man’, which is ineluctably linked to perceptions of the body:21 This being premised, to find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking and, as it seems to me, essential to it ... Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions, and by this everyone is to himself that which he calls self: it not being considered in this case whether the same self be continued in the same or divers substances (my emphasis). For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that that makes everyone to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things: in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being. (280–81)

What is happening here is that consciousness is not firmly anchored to individual bodies, but appears as thought, as knowledge of itself, and even, perhaps, as imagination. Hume later stated that ‘the identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one’, held together by the ‘operation of the imagination’. Locke’s conclusion was to lead the Scriblerians to parody him, hooting over a notion

20 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 158–60. 21 John Locke, vol. 1 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by J.W. Yolton (1690; repr. Letchworth: Dent, 1961), 278. Descartes’ separation of the body and the self had been even more drastic than Locke’s: see ‘Discourse on the Method’, in vol. 1 of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 127.

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of personal identity which suggested that it could be taken out and examined as if it were a pair of stockings. However—and this is the nub—if personal identity can be thought of this way, as untethered consciousness, then may one not write oneself as somebody else? ‘I am resolved to Print my self out, if possible, before I Die’, says Mr. Spectator in his first number, but the self that is ‘printed out’ is designedly and specifically not that of Joseph Addison—who has been described as ‘one of the most faithful of all Locke’s disciples in literature’.22 It is perfectly possible to read this section of the Essay, I am suggesting, as in many respects a charter for the use of personae. Locke explains that there would be no problem about seeing this ‘self’ as a fixed continuing identity, were it not for the interruptions of sleep and forgetfulness. Addison and Steele’s ‘Mr Spectator’ can be conceived of very easily as ‘conscious’ when his creators are writing and thinking him, and when his readers are reading him, and, in the same sense, he can be ‘asleep’ when they are not. ‘Personal identity can by us be placed in nothing but consciousness (which is that alone which makes what we call self)’, says Locke, and goes on to illustrate by suggesting that were one single consciousness to ‘(act) by intervals, two different bodies’, it would be the same person ‘in two distinct bodies, as much as one man is the same in two distinct clothings’.23 In this part of the Essay as a whole, Locke occasionally seems to consider the body merely as a form of garment for the inhabiting consciousness. Furthermore, he even seems to cover the possibility of the free appropriation of personae by those who were not their original creators: ‘For, it being the same consciousness that makes a man be himself to himself, personal identity depends upon that only, whether it be annexed only to one individual substance, or can be continued in a succession of several substances.’24 Mrs. Midnight’s complaint that her fine gentleman ‘always pays me with Promises’ here begins to look like more than a simple financial grumble. Temporality, particularly in the context of the law, is at the heart of Locke’s discussion of personal identity, for civil society can only operate if most people will indeed carry out in the future what they pledge in the present, and are going to be ‘justly accountable for any action’. In 1750 Johnson declared that ‘the faculty of remembrance … may be said to place us in the class of moral agents’ (Rambler 41). Yet there were many early readers of Locke who, like the Scriblerians, found his conclusions uncomfortable; is it really only consciousness, divorced from its stable housing in the body, which ‘unites existences and actions very remote in time into the same person’? Nietzsche made the faculty of pledge-keeping central to the emergence of human consciousness: ‘To breed an animal with the right to make promises—is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man?’ It is significant that

22 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 259. ‘the Scriblerians’: The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 140. ‘one of the most faithful’: Kenneth Maclean, John Locke and English Literature in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 29. 23 Locke, Essay, 288–9. 24 ‘form of garment’: ibid., 291—here Locke seems calmly to anticipate organ transplants—and 292. ‘it being the same consciousness’: ibid., 281.

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his conclusion of this problem is couched in financial terms, positing those who can ‘see and anticipate distant eventualities’ as ‘able to stand security for [their] own future’—unlike those whose ‘Stirling Gold’ is worth no more than a ‘rotten Egg’.25 What are the guarantees, in other words—referring back to Fielding and Steele’s problem discussed earlier—that there is substance behind appearances? Writing, though, has to come to terms with its own past, as well as the present day of its immediate social and economic context. Mrs. Midnight’s lament over the etiolation of the concept of ‘Honour’ should direct us back to the question of a literary inheritance which is going both to complicate and enrich this examination of the factors that were to give birth to the midwife. Swift’s Bickerstaff: The Persona and Prosopopoeia When northern humanists in the sixteenth century came to adapt the ideas and ideals which were the subject of intense debate among the Italian thinkers who gave the Renaissance city-states their theoretical foundations, they ‘tended to endorse the familiar quattrocento assumption that the highest ambition for any leading members of a commonwealth should be that of attaining, honour, glory and fame.’26 When Mary Midnight, the learned and elderly midwife, uses the word ‘honour’ and expects promises to be kept, she is speaking of a virtue about which every eighteenthcentury grammar school boy should be capable of discoursing knowledgeably, and preferably in Latin. The humanist education that a large majority of the male creators of personae in periodicals were given at their schools and universities was based on the study of the classics and classical rhetoric: it is to the techniques and traditions in writing inherited from Greece and Rome that I would now like to turn. John Richetti, in the introduction to the Cambridge Companion to the EighteenthCentury Novel, briefly outlines the argument about the drastic effects on human perception of the financial revolution: ‘In [the] emerging socioeconomic order, in fact but also in imagination, status is for sale like everything else, and identity is subject to the fluidity and fluctuations of the market.’ Stated in this way, and in this place, this formulation is beginning to look like a new orthodoxy. Consider this, though: ‘... this self-advertisement works. The expensive clothes/ of purple and violet sell the barrister; therefore it pays him/ to live in the loud flamboyant style of wealthier people;/ his exotic purple, with its Tyrian thread, secures him credit.’ This is Juvenal, writing in the second century AD. He bitterly complains that barristers can be successful only if they can convince people by fine clothes and duplicity that they already are: ‘They brag, above all when a creditor’s listening.’ There is no credit to be had for sincerity if it does not dress the part, for ‘eloquence rarely appears in rags’.27 To recall Mrs. Midnight’s ‘Prowl’, there were ‘fine Gentlemen’ 25 ‘unites existences’: ibid., 286. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), 57–8. 26 Skinner, The Renaissance, 234. 27 John Richetti, Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 7. Juvenal, Satire 7, lines 135–8, 108: The Satires, trans. Niall Rudd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 64–5.

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living on self-advertisement, and ‘Sincerity’ wore a threadbare coat, and appearance belied substance a long time before the eighteenth century. Satirists used the masks of personae and adversarii, and ‘it seems that the Romans thought of life, perhaps more than we do, in terms of roles performed and the variety of personae adopted in differing circumstances.’28 When Jonathan Swift attacked the ‘Cheat’ of astrology, he used, as we have observed, a duplicitous form with which to do it, and he continued in the supple, creative and ingenious use of personae throughout his writing career. But his use of the device in the Bickerstaff Papers was only going to serve its intended purpose if it was seen through, and seen through at once. Ehrenpreis is acute about the use of personae in satire: ‘Surely the kind of literary disguise that is deliberately intended to be penetrated is a method of stating, not hiding, what one thinks.’ We are dealing here with the long-established practice of rhetoric as persuasion, and of men whose education was founded squarely upon it: ‘Rhetoric was a central element in education ... from before Plato to after the Romantics.’ In Tudor rhetorical training, and throughout the seventeenth century and on into the eighteenth, boys and young men were required to write exercises in utramque partem, to argue for both sides of a case and support positions they did not themselves hold.29 The deployment of personae as a tactic in both spoken and written rhetoric is a function of the rhetorical trope called prosopopoeia. Brian Vickers defines it as the representation of ‘an imaginary or absent person as speaking, or acting; attributing life, speech, or human qualities to dumb or inanimate objects’. George Puttenham wrote in 1589 that ‘if ye wil attribute any humane quality, as reason or speech to dobe [dumb] creatures or other insensible things, and do study … to give them a humane person, it is … Prosopopeia, because it is by way of fiction.’ Hence the figure of prosopopoeia gives an accepted cultural legitimacy for the use of personae in eighteenth-century writing: it is a longstanding practice and may form a part of any well-educated man’s rhetorical armoury.30 Prosopopoeia was a versatile figure, and its function in the deployment of personae was not the only way in which it was used. Apart from its ubiquitous use, particularly in poetry, as the ‘personification’ of qualities, ideals and emotions, it was unrestrainedly produced throughout the eighteenth century in more specific and local contexts, to give voice to the unlikeliest of speakers. The Tatler had its ‘Adventures of a Shilling’; the Spectator ‘the Letter from a Monkey’; in the middle of the century a voluble lapdog writes the novel Pompey the Little (1751); and prosopopoeia features very prominently indeed in the Midwife. We will see it in 28 Susanna Morton Braund, The Roman Satirists and Their Masks (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1996), 2. 29 Irvin Ehrenpreis, ‘Personae’, 36, and see Martin Price, Swift’s Rhetorical Art: A Study in Structure and Meaning (Hamden: Yale UP, 1963), 63. ‘Rhetoric was a central element’: Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 12. ‘in utramque partem’: Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 9, 27, and Christopher Robinson, Lucian and His Influence in Europe (London: Duckworth, 1979), 15. 30 ‘imaginary or absent’: Vickers, Defence of Rhetoric, 498. George Puttenham, The Arte Of English Poesie, eds. Gladys Willcock and Alice Walker (1589; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 239.

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action throughout this study, but most arrestingly in chapter five: here the power of authorship is granted to tie-wigs, tobacco-pipes, and the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul’s, among other things.31 In later eighteenth-century periodicals the figure seems to have lost its satirical bite, with, for example, the Westminster Magazine allowing the cat ‘Mopsey’ to take pen in paw. The tradition of ‘Dialogues of the Dead’, most notably those of Thomas Brown, Lyttelton and Elizabeth Montagu, come into this category, and they owe their existence to Lucian, the Syrian rhetorician of the second century AD, whose ebullient satirical stratagems Swift admired and adapted to his own needs. Lucian’s connection with Menippean satire has been questioned, but some have placed prosopopoeia as important in this tradition.32 Thus, the venerable practice of prosopopoeia, I would argue, enables Swift’s assumption of personae, and his deployment of it should be understood carefully as part of a long tradition, to at least the same extent as it is celebrated as excitingly dissident ‘shape-shifting’ or ‘transvestiture’.33 This is not to undermine appreciation of the skill, wit, and devastating effectiveness with which Swift used the device, but to emphasize that it is a device, and one with a long pedigree, rather than evidence of transgressive infringement of eighteenth-century literary practice. Steele’s Bickerstaff: Lying and Acting What happens, then, when Swift’s Isaac migrates from his temporary and polemical home in two pamphlets into the voluminous pages of the Tatler? He becomes something more than—and something different from—a tactical rhetorical device. Swift’s immediate purpose in the Bickerstaff Papers was not exclusively to attack the seductive attractions of astrology for the gentry: Herbert Davis adds that it also was Partridge’s use of popular propaganda against the established church that made him in particular Swift’s target. The use of persona in the periodical, then, arose as a personal attack on ‘a bitter Protestant and excitable Whig’, and was, as I have said, only going to be effective if it was seen through at once.34 For the stratagem to 31 Tatler 249; Spectator 343. Mayo categorises such articles as ‘satirical adventure stories’, and understands them as a subgroup within the periodical: Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962) 38, 428. For his list of these, see ibid., 442–3. 32 Lucian: see the introduction to vol. 1 of Works, trans. H.W. Fowler and H.G. Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905) esp. xxiv. For Swift and Lucian, see Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 31, and Robinson, Lucian and His Influence, 137–40. For Lucian’s debatable status as Menippean, see Ingrid A. R. De Smet, Menippean Satire and the Republic of Letters 1581–1655 (Geneva: Librairie Droz S.A., 1996), 56, and chap. 6 below. In Eugene Kirk’s terms, it seems to be the Menippean tradition which lends Swift a seventeenth-century precedent for the strategy of announcing the premature death of an adversary: see Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism (New York: Garland Pubs., 1980), items 713, 216. 33 Nora F. Crow, ‘Swift and the Woman Scholar’, in Pope, Swift and Women Writers, ed. Donald C. Mell (New York: Assoc. University Presses, 1996), 223. 34 Herbert Davis: introduction to vol. 2 of Swift, Prose Works, x–xi. ‘bitter Protestant’: Richmond P. Bond, ‘Isaac Bickerstaff Esq.’, 108.

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succeed, all that the first Isaac Bickerstaff had to be was a very confident astrologer, and Swift took care to establish the character’s overweening pretensions to superiority in the craft. Steele’s Bickerstaff, though, had a very wide brief indeed. It is no wonder that Swift and Steele parted company very early on in the history of the Tatler, for it is clear that two opposing views of society, and, arguably, of personal identity itself, were clashing in the translation of Isaac the astrologer into Isaac the reformer of manners. This opposition is akin to Lawrence Klein’s model, where the antipathy between ‘land and commerce’ is ‘one between two modes of social organization and two sources of political personality.’35 This is most clearly borne out by a close look at Richard Steele’s last number, to which he appends his own name in capitals at the end. ... (I) have nothing further to say to the World under the Character of Isaac Bickerstaff. This Work has indeed for some Time been disagreeable to me, and the Purpose of it wholly lost by my being so long understood as the Author. I never designed in it to give any Man any secret Wound by my Concealment, but spoke in the Character of an old Man, a Philosopher, an Humorist, an Astrologer and a Censor, to allure my reader with the Variety of my Subjects ... The general Purpose of the whole has been to recommend Truth, Innocence, Honour and Virtue, as the chief Ornaments of Life; but I considered, that Severity of Manners was absolutely necessary to him who would censure others, and for that Reason, and that only, chose to talk in a Mask. I shall not carry my Humility so far as to call myself a vicious Man, but at the same Time must confess, my Life is at best but pardonable. And, with no greater Character than this, a Man would make but an indifferent Progress in attacking prevailing and fashionable Vices, which Mr. Bickerstaff has done with a Freedom of Spirit, that would have lost both its Beauty and Efficacy, had it been pretended to by Mr. Steele ... But to enquire into Men’s Faults and Weaknesses has something in it so unwelcome, that I have often seen People in Pain to act before me, whose Modesty only makes them think themselves liable to censure. This, and a thousand other nameless Things, have made it an irksome Task to me to personate Mr. Bickerstaff any longer … (Tatler 271, 2 January 1710)

This is not prosopopoeia in any sense that a classical or Renaissance rhetorician would have recognized. It is looking like a modern personal psychological dilemma, with the blurring of the categories of fact and fiction becoming so acute that people are afraid to behave unselfconsciously in front of somebody who, strictly speaking, does not exist except on paper. Though Steele does not state the nature of those ‘thousand other’ reasons for his abandonment of Isaac (and indeed of the Tatler itself), the very fact of his decision to explain his actions in terms of the effect that awareness of his persona is having upon others is telling, for he could have excused himself from the task in a multitude of ways. Steele’s choice of the verb ‘act’, with its dual significations of performance and praxis, indicates the rich significance of the field we are now positioned to explore. The attack on vices would have lost ‘Beauty and Efficacy’ ‘had it been pretended to by Mr. Steele’, for he has not the ‘Freedom of Spirit’ of Bickerstaff. Is it amusing 35 Lawrence E. Klein, ‘The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 18, no. 2 (1984–85): 187–8.

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or painful for Steele to reflect that, for the most part, it was ‘pretended to by Mr. Steele’? The measure of the difference between the two Isaacs is that one would not even think of asking such questions about Swift’s use of his persona. One of the ‘thousand other nameless things’ may well have been the difficult nature of recommending the absolutes of ‘Truth, Innocence and Honour’ from behind a mask—contemporaries noted this hypocrisy.36 A form inherited from a humanist rhetorical tradition, which sees personality as less a matter for introspection than for provisional action in the civic arena, has been adapted for a longterm purpose which has the effect of involving it in the sort of questions about interiority and integrity, about appearance and substance, which it had never previously been required to handle. Here, indeed, Steele’s discomfort can be seen as a consequence of his being thus awkwardly placed in the ‘age-old debate between those who stand for truth and those who stand for opinion, between philosophers seeking the absolute and rhetors involved in action’.37 Yet the practice continued and flourished, and Steele went on to be (roughly speaking) half of ‘Mr. Spectator’; a successful gentleman whose fictional status did not deter him from recommending truthfulness and sincerity with the regularity of a metronome, or pointing out that ‘no other Vice implies a Want of Courage so much as the making of a Lie’ (Spectator 99). ‘Want of Courage’ was a charge that could have been levelled against Steele in the Tatler, which is perhaps why we saw him pointedly italicising his sole reason for taking on the persona. In the Spectator, says Michael Ketcham, in a productive account of the journal, ‘a distinction between the “inward” and “outward” man is perhaps the single most important metaphor’, yet, in his discussion of Mr. Spectator as undertaking the dual roles of ‘author’ and ‘actor’, Ketcham does not register an awareness of the anomaly inherent in being lectured about self-knowledge by a composite fiction.38 What needs emphasis here, again, is the timing of all this. The earliest sustained use of personae in periodicals coincides with the rise of what Charles Taylor has called the ‘punctual’ or ‘neutral’ self, which stands back from itself and its own involvements, to become ‘disengaged’ and examine its own experiences, as if they were ‘experience[s] which could just as well have been someone else’s’.39 Steele, 36 John Dennis noted that Steele’s manifold capabilities in diverse callings were all ‘perform’d ... by Proxy, and by Deputy’: Addison and Steele: The Critical Heritage, eds. Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom (London: Routledge, 1980), 147. ‘He’s now a famed Reformer grown, / Correcting all Men’s Manners, but his own’: ‘The British Censor’ (1712), ibid., 49. 37 C.H. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 26. 38 Michael G. Ketcham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance and Form in the Spectator Papers (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1985) 9. Ketcham’s double reading of the persona of Mr. Spectator seems to register the problem that the creators of personae had with the conflicting demands of rhetoric and interiority. See, though, Mr. Spectator in conversation (no. 34), where it is impossible to extricate the social actor from the contemplative author without doing violence to both: ibid., 10–13. 39 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 162, 159–76.

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you’ll remember, observed that ‘man is a creature very inconsistent with himself’, and, as we have seen Locke explain, consciousness may be considered an abstractable entity. ‘By the turn of the eighteenth century, something recognizably like the modern self is in the process of constitution’, says Taylor, placing Locke as a significant milestone in his description of the long philosophical journey towards twentiethcentury ideas of personal identity. Taylor presents this neutral ‘radically-reflexive’ self of Descartes—later to be refined by Locke—as arising alongside the welldocumented ‘Protestant culture of introspection’ which ‘becomes secularized as a form of confessional autobiography’.40 Ian Watt drew on this Puritan ‘internalisation of conscience’ in his classic account of Robinson Crusoe and found Pepys, Rousseau and Boswell’s ‘fascination with self-analysis’ to be a part of the same movement. Weber described one of the fundamental effects of ‘Puritan ascetism’ as ‘trying to make’ the person who practiced it ‘into a personality’. It is, I suggest, the eddyings of cultural currents such as these which trouble and complicate Steele’s adaptation of the rhetorical trope of prosopopoeia.41 Thus, the difference between Steele’s Isaac and Swift’s is that the first Bickerstaff didn’t feel he had to justify or, indeed, mind his own duplicity. In the world of humanist rhetoric ‘character’ always was, in a strong sense which we are about to examine, ‘a social artefact’.42 In the forty years which separated the Bickerstaffs from Mrs. Midnight, scores of periodical personae were to explore and exploit the potential inherent in the form which arrived on paper with such ill-assorted parents. Drama and the Use of Personae So far, early usages of personae have been examined in some detail, through an initial, cautious engagement with possible cultural repercussions of the ‘financial revolution’, and then through the influence of the writings of Locke. This discussion was then qualified, questioned and enriched by the consideration of the way that rhetoric, working within the writings of the eighteenth-century classically-educated male élite, provided a precedent for the impersonation in writing of an imaginary character—the trope of prosopopoeia. I turn now to the practice of pretending to be someone else on the stage, for from the outset the theatre was ubiquitous in periodicals, not only as a source of content in the form of discussions of performances, and as a place where public behaviour could be scrutinized, but also, I will argue, as constitutive of the understanding and deployment of personae themselves. We have seen Steele’s Bickerstaff inviting actors and dramatic characters to his funeral 40 Ibid., 184. For the influence of personal writings upon the novel, see for example J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 303–23. 41 Taylor is indebted to Ian Watt in his account of this: The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 77–9. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 119. The use of personae in the periodical in relation to the history of the novel is a neglected topic, and mostly beyond the scope of this study, but see chap. 4. 42 E.J. Hundert, ‘The European Enlightenment and the History of the Self’, Rewriting the Self, 81.

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in 1709: Bond had good reason to speculate that Steele may have appeared himself among the audience at a public theatre, as Isaac Bickerstaff.43 In late 1750 Christopher Smart, Scholar of the University, put on a skirt, a high-crowned hat, a pair of spectacles and the persona of Mary Midnight, and was transported in a hackney carriage to take breakfast with the successful actor-manager David Garrick. The latter had sent a letter to Newbery inviting ‘Mrs. Midnight’ to discuss the elderly lady’s trenchant criticism of his choice of repertoire. In her Midwife letter to him (1: 87), she had lauded both his acting and his charity in giving benefit plays, but had continued that ‘notwithstanding all this, I do assert, that, with regard to your Character as a Manager, you are, in some Respects, deficient and culpable’. ‘What is the reason of the total Neglect of the incomparable Fletcher?’ she asked, castigating the worthless crowd-pleasing ‘paltry Interludes’ he insisted upon staging. Incidentally it is a measure of the contradictions already apparent in the elderly lady (to be further explored in later chapters) that she herself would later be appearing on stage introducing a man who ‘imitated farting and curtseying to a French horn’. The visit was apparently an amicable success: introduced to Garrick’s wife, the lady was taken in, ‘as he was of low stature and had delicate arms and hands’, but when ‘the gentleman thought fit to reveal [the joke], Mrs. Garrick observed that she thought Mrs. Midnight in saluting her kissed very close’.44 Smart’s interest in and involvement with the theatre is well documented. He introduced this book as the author of a new prologue and epilogue to Othello, and in fact was instrumental in the much-discussed production of that play, which used aristocrats as amateur actors; he wrote and produced a play at Cambridge (and would have liked to have acted every role in it, according to Thomas Gray’s acid but plausible account) and we are about to encounter him defending Mary Midnight’s existence in costume on the stage of the Haymarket theatre. In the Midwife (following an early precedent in Tatler No. 12) he twice wrote articles as small playlets with stage directions; he presents Mrs. Midnight’s speech directly as play dialogue on her second ‘Prowl’, as we previously saw.45 The theatre, then, is a potent and continual presence in the Midwife, not least in the vivid character presentation of Mrs. Midnight herself. As a late and baroque flowering of the periodical persona, her intense theatricality draws attention to ways in which one can rethink—and redraw certain connections between—the previously discussed possible factors in its birth. In this latter part of the chapter, I will propose a way of thinking of character as written performance, drawn from the work of Edward Burns, which affects all of the foregoing discussion. 43 Richmond P. Bond, ‘Isaac Bickerstaff Esq.’, 120. 44 ‘imitated farting’: this is taken from Horace Walpole’s jaundiced account of the ‘Old Woman’s Oratory’: Arthur Sherbo, Christopher Smart: Scholar of the University (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), 80. The sources for the anecdote are to be found in Ann. Bib., 426–7, and see Sherbo, Scholar of the University, 77–8. 45 Gray: PW4, 426. The two playlets are: ‘A Political Dialogue between a Mr. Crib, a Taylor, Mr. Patch, a Cobler and Jerry Pickbone, a Footman taken in short Hand by Mrs. Mary Midnight, 1745, at a Gin-Shop in St. Martin’s Lane’, 1: 51–4 and ‘Enter the Old Woman, her Boy and her Lanthorn’, 1: 89. For a complete list of theatre pieces in the Midwife, see Appendix 2.

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Rhetoric and drama are intimately linked, in classical, in Renaissance, and in eighteenth-century thought. Here is the sixteenth-century scholar J.C. Scaliger: ‘Is there not one end, and one only, in philosophical exposition, in oratory and in the drama? ... All have one and the same end – persuasion’. Smart read Scaliger’s Poeticae (1561) at Cambridge: he is referred to in the Midwife, and in Smart’s preface to his Horace translations.46 Quite late in her life as orchestrator of the Midwife, Mrs. Midnight (Smart in full female attire) mounted the rostrum at the Haymarket Theatre to defend herself against the incontinent accusations of the eccentric ‘Orator’ Henley: Mrs. MARY MIDNIGHT in Defence of her own Existence. Ladies and Gentlemen, I now ascend to harangue you on a Subject of immediate Concern and immense Importance to myself. This is no less than the Defence of my own Existence, which the Stentorian Orator has barbarously endeavour’d to annihilate, or rather to metamorphose, which is every whit as bad. He has made a Printer of me, a Bookseller, a Fiddler and a Fellow of a College, to the Confusion of all Persons, and the utter Subversion of all Identity. He has likewise bestow’d upon me a great many Masculine Epithets in the Polite Style; such as Rogue, Rascal, Scoundrel, Villain, with several similar Appellations, which he has learned in the University of Clare-Market. – Is this fair, is this honest? – No, I’ll neither suffer Logick to destroy my Being, nor will I be chous’d out of my Sex by all the Figures of Rhetoric. (3: 49–50) 47

The stamp of the Midnight character is clear in this, in her strident insistence on her own femininity and her rejection of Henley’s blockheaded logic, which expects the outward garb of Christopher Smart to match his stable inner nature. It is through a piece such as this that Smart’s kinship with Swift and his distance from Steele becomes luminously apparent. The sort of outrage that a figure like Mary Midnight represents to Orator Henley is indeed ‘the utter Subversion of all Identity’, and she can delight in teasing him about that because she, like the first Bickerstaff, is character as stratagem, and because Henley, like the second Bickerstaff, muddles himself by looking for transparency, for some sort of authentic conformity between appearance and reality, in a place where it was never intended to be. Politics, religion, and the need to attract a paying public animate the quarrel between Smart and Henley, but I suggest that their mudslinging also is based in opposing views of the representation of human identity in writing.48

46 Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Frederick Morgen Padelford (New York: Henry Holt, 1905), 3. SB, 39 and 42. Also see 3: 119, and PW5, 9. 47 ‘Chous’d’ here signifying ‘defrauded’: Smart used it thus in his Phaedrus: PW6, 120. 48 For Graham Midgley’s description of Henley as a government spy in the pay of Walpole, and his vilification of Pope and Bolingbroke (both of which, together with Henley’s outré version of Christianity, would make him a prime target for Smart’s ridicule) see The Life of Orator Henley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 51–4, 179–80, and 185–92.

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‘Transactional’ Personae and the Stamp of Character Edward Burns, in his exceptionally helpful Character: Acting and Being on the PreModern Stage, offers an explanation of the essential difference between pre-modern and modern understandings of the work that the word ‘character’ did. He suggests that a shift to the modern concept of ‘character’ as ‘individual moral essence’— or simply ‘what one is’—took place in the mid eighteenth-century, and most particularly so in the field of drama. Previously, he argues, notions of character were ‘transactional’, based in rhetoric, and involved a particular sort of conceptual activity between writer/performer and reader/viewer. The idea of character was for/about something specific, and worked to construct both writer and reader.49 Support for his argument comes from Johnson’s Dictionary, where during this period of transition, the Doctor differentiates, in his definition of ‘character’, between ‘the person with his assemblage of qualities’ and ‘personal qualities: particular constitution of the mind.’ Burns explains the derivation of ‘character’ from a constitutive metaphor: that of the stamp, mark or seal ‘by which something is known as what it is’: Within the study of rhetoric ‘character’ comes to refer to a particular use of language to be identified with a particular writer/speaker... Attempts are made to establish ways of speaking and writing proper to particular kinds of people, on whose behalf an orator may speak, or whose action and words may have to be represented in speech and writing. The rhetorician must understand such signs and be able to reproduce them through an adaptation of his own style to a style fitting to broadly describable categories of person – old or young, male or female, vicious or virtuous... The ‘stamp’ of this other subject on the writer’s own command of language is seen as an aspect of the need to fit style to matter. (5)

Burns describes the exercises in character which rhetorical treatises and classroom texts recommended throughout the post-classical period, the middle ages and the Renaissance: they asked nascent rhetoricians to consider ‘what would it be proper for a particular person to say in a particular situation? How would one give voice to an inanimate object?’50 The ‘transactional’ notion of character, according to Burns, is a three-person interaction, with the crucial element being the direct writer/reader relationship in which the former attempts to persuade the latter to some form of action or agreement. The ‘stamp’, however, of another character imported from outside this relationship (‘by means of a “mimesis”—the “performance” or “imitation” of their voices, of their “characteristic” use of language’) will alter the writer’s discourse to render the rhetoric even more effective. Bakhtin drew attention to an alternative, and ancient, way of conceiving this relationship, and suggested that ‘the representation

49 Edward Burns, Character: Acting and Being on the Pre-Modern Stage (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 2. I would like to thank Michael Nath for introducing me to this key text. 50 Ibid., 6.

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of another’s ... language in intonational quotation marks’ was part of the prehistory of the novel.51 It is not difficult to see how important this transactional, active and practical notion of character is to the development and use of personae in the eighteenthcentury periodical. Looking back to the previous discussions of the two Bickerstaffs, it seems clear that Swift is working to this longstanding prescription, using prosopopoeia to construct the character stamp of an elderly and outraged astrologer which marks and inflects Swift’s own style, his own inimitable ‘command of language.’ With Bickerstaff’s farewell to his readers, it seems to me that Steele, in trying to disentangle an alien sensibility which has become embarrassingly conflated with his own, has again allowed other, more recent, discourses of self and notions of personal identity—of Johnson’s ‘particular constitution of the mind’—to clash with the specific and practical usage of a transactional version of character. The shift that Burns places in the middle of the eighteenth century and associates with the more ‘natural’ or authentic acting styles of Garrick and his associates, involves, as far as writing is concerned, a move away from the direct reader/writer relationship, and the presentation of ‘other human subjects as if they were the autonomous sources of the languages that make up the text’. He suggests that both Fielding and Richardson are still working within transactional notions of character, but that Fielding relies on the ‘theatrical and the visual’ to pose questions about the readability of character; in fact, rather than ‘novelistic’ ideas of character seeping into the theatre, it was the other way round.52 Even though this aspect of his theory may not find adherents in many university literature—as opposed to drama— departments, it seems worth pointing out that Fielding was a successful playwright before he was ever a writer of what he did not call ‘novels’. The value of Irvin Ehrenpreis’s comment that ‘the kind of literary disguise that is deliberately intended to be penetrated is a method of stating, not hiding, what one thinks’ now becomes clear.53 The adoption of personae in the periodical began as heir to this sort of literary disguise, with Swift aware that the irony behind his prosopopoeia would speedily become apparent, and that his rhetoric would expose Partridge as a worthless and bigoted charlatan. In an age which was sophisticated in its understanding and interpretation of irony the direct reader/writer relationship operating in the Bickerstaff Papers remained intact.54 51 Ibid., 31. M.M. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press), 50. 52 Burns, Character, 32, 192. Burns’s ‘transactional’ use of the word ‘character’ is employed in Fielding’s Jacobite’s Journal: he dropped the persona of ‘John Trott-Plaid’, after seventeen issues, saying ‘I am weary of personating a Character for which I have so solemn a Contempt’: The Jacobite’s Journal and Related Writings, ed. W.B. Coley (Oxford: Clarendon), 210. Also see Johnson’s Adventurer, 84. 53 Irvin Ehrenpreis, ‘Personae’, 36. Also see Martin Price: ‘We must not only recognise the mask, we must also recognize that it is a mask’: Swift’s Rhetorical Art, 63. 54 Such sophistication may have been local, though: Archbishop King wrote to Swift from Dublin in 1708 that ‘The generality of the world writ[e] in a mask and the want of a true knowledge of the humour of people on your side the water, may cause many errors on this’: ibid., 62.

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Burns places the beginning of the blurring and fading of the transactional usage of ‘character’ in the mid-eighteenth century, but I would suggest that attention to the concept of the persona in periodicals suggests an earlier timing for this change. Steele, over the course of what was nearly a year, used his Bickerstaff as an instrument to acquire the textual ‘Severity of Manners’ (Tatler, 271) he felt he needed in order to have enough credible moral stature to censure the behaviour of others. To assume authority over a wide range of differing social practices in a secular context called for a strong intransigent ‘I’, and one with the advantage of the gravitas that age brings. The shift in temporality and motivation of the Bickerstaff persona, together with those factors of Protestant introspection and Locke’s equation of personal identity with consciousness which have been previously addressed, meant that Steele was in effect, in Burns’s terms, doing something quite new. He was presenting ‘another human subject as if he was the autonomous source of the languages that make up the text’, ‘circumventing the direct reader/writer relationship’ and thus moving towards the method of expression which Burns explains as typifying the modern concept of character.55 It seems to me that Smart’s conception and use of the persona of Mary Midnight owes more to the rhetorical foundations of Swift’s Bickerstaff, to transactional notions of character, and to prosopopoeia, than to notions of the representation of a fullyrounded authorial subjectivity which threatened to dissolve the boundaries between persona and writer and thus, according to Steele, played a part in his abandonment of the second Bickerstaff. Mary Midnight is as untimely in this fundamental matter as she is in her choice of attire. Smart, as we saw, was conversant with Scaliger, whose Poeticae was a ‘carefully revisionary attempt’ to rationalize classical writings on persona and character. He also had read Theophrastus at Cambridge, and Theophrastan notions of character fall under the transactional heading.56 His allusion, which we saw at the beginning of the previous section, to Garrick’s ‘Character as a Manager’ is transactional. Smart may have been directly referring to this direct writer/reader relationship—which is mediated by a third—in Jubilate Agno, when he says: ‘For my talent is to give an impression upon words by punching, that when the reader casts his eye upon ’em, he takes up the image from the mould which I have made’ (B404). The culturally impossible nature of Mrs. Midnight as a midwife who also was a learned, classically-educated critic of poetry was from the very first number of the Midwife an unmistakable barrier to any reader who might have been tempted to accept, in Burns’s words, ‘another human subject as if [s]he was the autonomous source of the languages that make up the text’. Mrs. Midnight’s satire is locational,

55 Burns, Character, 32. Just as Steele’s Tatler writings can be placed on the fulcrum between transactional and modern ideas of ‘character’, so they also lie in between what Bakhtin designated as ‘rhetorical double-voicedness’ and ‘double-voiced representation’: the distinction seems a similar one: see Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 354. 56 Burns, Character, 33: SB, 39, 42. For the Theophrastan ‘character’, and its adaptation by La Bruyère, see J.W. Smeed, The Theophrastan ‘Character’: The History of a Literary Genre (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). Smart wrote to Dodsley in 1747 requesting that he send ‘Bruyere’s characters in English’: Ann. Lett., 25.

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immediate, directed towards persuading the reader, and, like Swift’s, in no way ‘circumvents the direct writer/reader relationship’.57 Even when she is at her most personal and ‘novelistic’ she leaves scattered markers which make it impossible to seek for any unity and coherence of self-narrative. Her defiance in the face of Henley’s ‘Logick’ is perfectly possible if she is acting as the imported ‘third person’ in the writer’s direct communication with the reader/audience, rather than trying to assume full autonomy as a credible being. Having thus introduced two techniques of rhetorical practice in the form of prosopopoeia and the ‘transactional’ definition of character, and shown how these already could provide the appearance of an unstable and deceptive self through the classical art of writing to persuade, I would like to conclude this chapter by returning to and re-assessing the argument that one could expect the use of personae to flourish in a society where selves had become unstable through the operations of credit and speculative finance: where ‘identity is subject to the fluidity and fluctuations of the market’, and where Colin Nicholson suggests that we see both the ‘demise of classical notions of selfhood’ and ‘the demise of civic humanism’s classical ethos’.58 The question is an ontological one, about the extent to which uncertainty was really undermining the eighteenth century sense of self: it is possible to write and to represent the incoherent, fantastic or unstable self without feeling one’s own self to be ‘at risk’. Mary Midnight, who fondly remembers visiting her old friend Sir Roger de Coverley (1: 262), and who is at once single and married with children, could afford to mock those who expected certainty in the form of a coherent self behind a persona, because Smart is certain of the customs of rhetoric which allowed her to exist. Personae: Provisional Selves versus Whig Reform of Manners It was after all Steele’s Bickerstaff who invoked the classical roots of the great humanist trope of the world as theatre. In Tatler 69 he reminded his readers that ‘Epictetus has made use of the similitude of a stage-play to human life with much spirit. “It is not,” says he, “to be considered among the actors, who is prince, and who is beggar, but who acts prince or beggar best.” ’ He was busy establishing the principle that what mattered was not where fortune had placed you, but how you behaved in that position;59 it is a principle whose radical potential must be handled carefully, as of course it was by Steele, who went on to say that ‘Thus a wise man should think no man above him or below him, any further than it regards the outward order or discipline of the world: for, if we conceive too great an idea of the eminence 57 Rizzo and Mahony refer to Smart’s ‘invariable compulsion to establish direct contact with his reader’: Ann. Lett., xxiv. 58 John Richetti, Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 7. Both ‘demises’ are Nicholson’s: Writing and the Rise of Finance, 8, 201. 59 Mrs. Midnight concurs in ‘A Few Thoughts on Family’ (2: 177–9), but we may not assume egalitarian fervour in either writer: Quentin Skinner has traced the ‘humanist commonplace’ that ‘wherever virtue is, there is nobleness’ back to Latini: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 45–6, 81–2.

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of our superiors, or subordination of our inferiors, it will have an ill effect on our behaviour to both’. By wrenching Isaac Bickerstaff from his recognized transactional role and giving him the weight of a full fictional subjectivity, Steele exposed the anomalous nature of the persona as it subsequently developed. Michael McKeon has demonstrated the growing attention to truth-claims in spiritual autobiography, and the emergence of a modern sense of historicity in this period. His work is relevant to the study of the periodical persona, for this must by its nature exclude itself from the trend towards attaining a form of truth in personal writings: it need not trouble to do so if it is rhetorically based and transactional, but personae like Steele’s Isaac are on less secure ground.60 In Bickerstaff’s farewell we saw Steele censuring the duplicity of social actors whilst sheltering uncomfortably behind a mask, and thus demonstrating the fundamental peculiarity of the use of personae, which operated as fictional identities outside the novel, poetry, fable or drama and yet were used to speak in and directly regulate the world of social experience. There is a difference, then, between the long-established practice of the strategic use of rhetoric for local purposes, from a firm basis of a venerable consensus over the functioning of the civically-active self, and Addison and Steele’s new reformative Spectatorial work of describing Britain as a sort of social theatre in which anyone might act, if the signs were explained to them, and provided they avoided ‘Disguise and Imposture’ (no. 370): in which anyone might take a pen and ‘write themselves out’ even though it was somebody else they were writing—‘it not being considered in this case whether the same self be continued in the same or divers substances’.61 Swift, and indeed the Scriblerians, and following them Johnson, understood and wrote of human personality as a matter of externality: as action in the civic arena, informed by the mind’s capacity to reason which provided a guide to an essentially hierarchic ordering of priorities in the everyday world of involvements.62 Swift considered the taking of one’s moral temperature to be a private matter, and attacked ‘modern garrulities of self-revelation which for him amount[ed] to a form of indecent exposure’.63 Your educated capacity to reason correctly led you to comport yourself to the advantage of your nation, and you kept a seemly silence over the state of your soul: ‘I am not answerable to God for the doubts that arise in my own breast,’ said Swift, ‘since they are the consequence of that reason which he hath planted in me, if I take care to conceal those doubts from others, if I use my best endeavours to subdue them, and if they have no influence upon the conduct of my life.’ You may have considered your soul to be fractured, endangered or depraved, but what 60 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 90–96. For a different perspective on Steele’s Bickerstaff and theatricality, see Italia, The Rise of Literary Journalism, 26–30. 61 ‘if the signs were explained’: Ketcham, Transparent Designs, 5. Locke, Essay, 281. 62 Smart referred to ‘the foolish knavish tribe’ who ‘put all vices on a par./ From this fair reason her assent withdraws’: ‘The Horatian Canons of Friendship’, PW4, 125. 63 Claude Rawson, ‘Gulliver and the Gentle Reader’, Imagined Worlds: Essays on Some English Novels and Novelists in Honour of John Butt, eds. Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor (London: Methuen, 1968), 3.

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mattered was that reason enabled you to control yourself, your passions and your outward actions.64 The ‘stability of the ego’ which ‘new forms of capital liquidity’ were supposed to have overturned was, it appears, neither unified, monolithic nor under any more immediate danger of ‘demise’ than it ever had been.65 The Midwife allied itself with this earlier disapproval of the new financial markets; their instability threatened the necessary disinterest which the possession of land was understood to guarantee for those gentlemen pursuing the vita activa. Addison, in Spectator 69, however, commended the Royal Exchange as a spectacle, and Trade as ‘a kind of additional Empire’. Directly contradicting the notable distaste Cicero voiced for traders in the eighteenth-century humanist bible which schoolboys knew as ‘Tully’s Offices’, Addison affirmed that ‘there are not more useful members in a Commonwealth than Merchants’. Later in this study we shall see the Midwife to be in favour of trade, but not of the money-markets and financial speculation.66 Pocock warns against seeing simple antitheses in the early Augustan battle between the moneyed and the landed interest, which Steele and Swift can be thought of as representing: after all, we have seen them in amicable agreement in the early days of Isaac Bickerstaff. We should think, he directs, not in terms of ‘a politics of crudely distinguished interest groups, but of politicans, publicists and their followings maneuvering in a world of common perceptions and symbols’. What must be emphasized, though, for an understanding of Isaac Bickerstaff’s genesis, is Pocock’s statement that Whig distrust of credit, as evinced by Defoe and Addison, lay not in it as a matter of principle, but in its capacity for manipulation by the ‘spirits of popery, tyranny, and republicanism’.67 In his dream vision of Spectator no. 3, Addison’s ‘Lady Credit’ may be prone to alarming shrinkage when faced by the figure of the Pretender, but this does not render her an unwelcome figure per se, especially when Liberty, Monarchy and the Protestant heir apparent miraculously revive her fortunes: ‘the Piles of Faggots and Heaps of Paper changed into Pyramids of Guineas’, and Mr. Spectator was ‘transported with Joy’. This Whig position, openly eager for the benefits of the activities of ‘’Change’, is in clear opposition to Swift: J.A. Downie tells us that he was by 1710 ‘the principal spokesman of the landed interest against the City’.68 Here is the crux of the matter, which returns us to the strong links between the tactical needs of political and social comment and ontological representations of self. 64 Swift, ‘Thoughts on Religion’, in Sermons, vol. 9 of Prose Works, ed. Louis Landa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), 262. The Midwife reprinted Johnson’s praise for Samuel Richardson (Rambler 97), who ‘taught the Passions to move at the Command of Virtue’, 1: 252. Smart admired Johnson: Sherbo, Scholar of the University, 101 and Ann. Bib., 437. 65 Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance, 89. Note also Adam Rounce: ‘there are few decades in the history of literature now where “self-division” hasn’t apparently become the norm’: review, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 1 (2000): 118. 66 For the Midwife, see for example Mrs. Midnight’s letter to Hoyle, 2: 196. Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance, 51–91. Cicero: On Duties, 28–9, and see chap. 5 below. 67 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 449, 456; also see 448. 68 J.A. Downie, To Settle the Succession of the State: Literature and Politics 1678–1750 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 85.

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Whig commentators were aware that Tory, or Catholic, or Jacobite polemicists would carry out manipulations of the public mood through the deceptions of rhetoric and its direct writer/reader interaction. I suggest that, to a strong degree, the roots of the use of personae lay in the Whig writers’ need to counteract the strategic, locational deployments of Tory rhetoric by a different tactic, and that this resulted in the creation of fully-rounded personae, which established themselves meticulously carefully as good-natured, transparent, virtuous, trustworthy commentators on the body politic. That this, in a manner of speaking, ‘out-rhetoricked’ the rhetoricians is an outcome with which we have seen Steele struggling: prosopopoeia had turned into something like full-blown fiction, and transactional character was blurring into a version of coherent interiority. The untangling of appearance and substance became less, rather than more, feasible, and for the later creators of persona both the strengths and the instabilities of the practice were open for exploitation. In the end the question boils down to who was worried about what, and why; and that is an impossible one to answer with certainty. Study, though, of the genesis and use of personae in the early eighteenth century suggests that it was the Whig reformers of manners and apologists for the new commercialism who found themselves needing to ask questions about the interiority, persistence and integrity of the self, in their struggle to present themselves as credible mentors and censurers. Old-style humanists like Swift and the Scriblerians, though, understood the human self—as ruled by reason and active in civil affairs—always to have been a somewhat provisional, cobbled-together affair, struggling under God’s eye to resist outside forces of passion, interest and duplicity. Swift’s concern was not with the collapse of integrity of the self in his society, but with the daily, specific collapses of the integrity of those in power, as they took action or failed to do so in the public arena. The ‘financial revolution’ was merely new trappings for a very old enemy: radix malorum cupitidas est. Swift referred in the much-quoted Examiner no. 13 to ‘those pernicious Expedients of borrowing Money by vast Premiums … at exorbitant Interest’ as being ‘a Practice as old as Eumenes, one of Alexander’s Captains’: the ‘Knavery and Couzenage’ brought in by the ‘Stockjobbers’ was unprecedented, certainly, but the root deception was ancient—his concern was with the effect on the nation’s administration of such practices. In her investigation of the links between paper credit, authorship, and gender perceptions, Catherine Ingrassia avoids suggesting that eighteenth-century concepts of the self were undermined by the ‘financial revolution’. It is perfectly possible to discuss, as she does, certain changes to individuals’ ‘imaginations’, or ‘emotions’ without invoking ‘the demise of the classical notion of selfhood’. Swift’s real anxiety, I suggest, was not about the perversion of the self, but the perversion of the government.69 After the success of the Tatler and the Spectator the use of personae in the periodical became almost mandatory, and much work still waits to be done in researching the how and why of each individual use of the device, though Iona Italia has recently 69 Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) esp. see 2, and 141–2. Jonathan Swift: also see nos. 14 and 24 for his rhetorical tactic of presenting reality as under fire from Whig ‘Political Lyes’: Examiners 13, 14, 24, Prose Works 3, 6–7, 12, 66.

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made a helpful start to this in her Rise of Literary Journalism. Throughout the longer or shorter duration of their particular periodical, women could now write as men and evade gender restrictions, reputable learned gentlemen need not put their own names to the shameful hackwork sometimes necessary for their sustenance, oppositional writers could make it difficult for themselves to be identified as the perpetrators of seditious discourse, the young could grant themselves an elderly gravitas, and the playful could comically exploit the contradictions and hypocrisies inherent in the practice of social comment from behind a mask.70 Beyond all this also is real radical potential in the use of personae, as I have earlier indicated, in that it allows writers—and conceivably readers too— consciously or unconsciously to address the question of how we perceive ourselves, and the formative pressures of society and practices of self-representation upon that perception. Kathleen Wilson has recognised the constructiveness of this: ‘print culture ... provided crucial spaces in which women could enact or imagine their own claims to subjectivity’.71 Undoubtedly the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 and the ensuing proliferation of printed matter was ultimately instrumental in that it provided physical, practical opportunities for the exploration of personal identity on paper, of which the use of personae stands as one example: much more instrumental, I would conclude, than certain current notions of an eighteenth-century fear of instability of self caused by fluctuations in the stock market. ‘Roxana Termagant’, the female persona of Bonnell Thornton in his Drury-Lane Journal, gave a bravura performance of the ‘Puff by Hermeneutics’, in which she teased the reader with unrelenting flirtatiousness concerning her real identity. She shall have the last word here, relishing her metaphor which links theatre with the periodical, and serving as a reminder that it is time to give some particular account of Mary Midnight and her magazine: ‘Custom immemorial has establish’d it as a law, that all who enter on the Stage of diurnal or hebdomadal Authorism, should in the prologue or first lucubration (as it is call’d) give some account of themselves.’72

70 See respectively the following examples in order of reference: Eliza Haywood’s Parrot (not only a bird but a male one too: see chap. 4, p. 130) (1746), Smart’s Midwife, the Duke of Wharton’s True Briton (1723–24), Frances Brooke’s Old Maid (1755–56) and Henry Fielding’s Champion (1739–40). All of these categories are in certain ways applicable to the Midwife: see this study, in which there is particular reference to the gender advantage in chap. 3; to the hackwork advantage in chap. 4; and to the political one in chap. 5. 71 ‘self-representation’: the periodical persona, as a subject writing about the material world whilst being, to a greater or lesser extent, a fiction, well illustrates Benveniste’s work on the ‘subject of the enunciation’: the deictic ‘I’ as a ‘shifter’, a temporary staging post in the flow of language. See Anthony Easthope, Poetry As Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), 44, 40–47. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 53. 72 ‘Custom immemorial’ here stretching back only as far as the Spectator, but she will have her little joke: Drury Lane Journal, 1 (16 January 1752).

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Chapter 2

The ‘Jakes of Genius’: The Nature of the Midwife There is nothing particularly unusual in poets editing and writing periodicals: Coleridge’s Watchman, or T.S. Eliot’s Criterion, for instance, can be presented in terms of deliberate proselytism of one type or another, as making sense as part of the poet’s intellectual aims or development. The disjunction, though, between the devout, compactly learned, rapt poetry of Smart’s later Song to David and Jubilate Agno, and the earlier ‘strident buffoonery’ of the prose in his Midwife has left scholars at such a loss that they have tended either to explain away the latter as youthful aberration or as enforced hack drudgery, or they have ignored it altogether. If, as Donald Davie suggested, it is possible to see Smart as ‘the greatest English poet between Pope and Wordsworth’, then what—the agonised question has tended to run—was he doing 1 among the trivial ephemera of Grub Street? Such careful guardianship of the category of literature, as Raymond Williams has shown, is of historical interest in its own right. Marilyn Butler has argued, not only for the periodical as the ‘matrix’ of changes to print culture and ideas of authorship in the eighteenth century, but also for a ‘new and more functional style of criticism’ which would more fully understand its position in the ‘relationship between literature and culture.’2 The Midwife has long deserved close attention as writing—writing as craft, and writing which has much to tell us about being a writer in eighteenthcentury England. Economic necessity may have been the principal factor behind Smart’s prose, but constraints do not inevitably result in banal or redundant writing: in peculiar and interesting ways, and in every sense, there is art in the Midwife. Eighteenth-century readers valued Smart’s earlier devotional poetry and his light verse, nineteenth-century poets—led by Robert Browning—found delight in his ‘Song to David’, and twentieth-century literary critics devoted themselves to the energy and esoterics of Jubilate Agno. A reassessment of his prose, I suggest, is a

1 ‘strident buffoonery’: Christopher Devlin, Poor Kit Smart (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1961), 68. Also, note the paucity of comment on Smart’s prose in Ann. Bib. Donald Davie: Ann. Bib., 363. Karina Williamson, in the 2004 DNB, concludes that Smart’s ‘status as a major poet now seems assured.’ 2 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), 183–8. Marilyn Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium: the Role of the Review’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 121, 147.

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courtesy that twenty-first century scholars might extend to the man who found good 3 nature to be ‘the grace of God in grain’. The focus of this chapter is the Midwife itself: the nature, contents, character and form of the magazine will be placed, not only within the tradition of periodicals from which it came, but also within the network of intellectual, social and political ideas of which it saw itself as a part, and to which it frequently offered an impudent challenge. It will be noted that the work here is an attempt to take up John and Deborah Sitter’s suggestion that ‘the Midwife would repay more attention than it has received’, for 4 this remarkable magazine has long suffered from condescension. I would like to begin redressing this here with a description and analysis of the periodical as a whole, which in turn will furnish a basis for the discussions of persona in the rest of the study. The chapter begins with a brief overview of twentieth and twentyfirst century critical comment on the Midwife, and then provides concrete practical details, both of its dating and production: the troubled question of attribution within the magazine is also raised (close examination of this question may be found in Appendix 1). Thereafter will come the pleasure of discovering and uncovering the sharp wit, garrulous ingenuity and overt and covert radicalism of the three volumes that comprize this too often misunderstood body of writing. Critical Reactions to the Midwife In 1939 Roland B. Botting set the tone for twentieth-century literary and biographical comment on the Midwife, which was chiefly one of pained dismissal: Smart ‘possessed... a ready pen and a fertile brain, with which he could produce an almost unlimited supply of marketable, chiefly ephemeral nonsense’. Botting declared that ‘[a]s a whole, the magazine contains considerable lively, amusing material ... ; in that respect it is a tribute to Smart’s abilities as a humorist and to his industry. The reader finds, however, little of much literary import’. Smart’s two most thorough twentiethcentury biographers later presented variants on the Botting theme. Arthur Sherbo (1967) was accurate in placing the magazine as ‘partly in the tradition of learned humor exemplified by Rabelais, Fielding and Sterne’ and in drawing attention to its ‘wit and wordplay’. Sherbo’s approval was, however, tempered by a tone of avuncular 5 indulgence: ‘there is some parade of learning, albeit clothed in facetiousness’. Christopher Devlin (1961), on the other hand, found the existence of the Midwife difficult to stomach in toto. He did attempt to describe the magazine, referring to it colourfully as ‘an exotic hotch-potch of nonsensical titbits, scholastic, topical, medical, philosophical, the whole flavoured with a very pungent, earthy seasoning and stirred with unfailing flippancy and zest’. He evidently needed, however, to 3 Christopher Smart, preface to The Works of Horace Translated into Verse (1767), PW5, 18. 4 British Literary Magazines: The Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson 1698–1788, ed. Alvin Sullivan (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 226. 5 Roland B. Botting, ‘Christopher Smart in London’, Research Studies of the State College of Washington 7, no. 1 (1939): 7, 12. Arthur Sherbo, Christopher Smart: Scholar of the University (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), 70.

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express his exasperation: ‘after a while the modern reader begins to be appalled by its deliberately ephemeral juvenility: never once the keen bite of intellectual satire, never the thrill of creative fantasy that can play on different levels, no sign that the author is a poet’. Smart ‘blur[red] the edges of his sensitivity’ with the 6 ‘determined triviality’ of the Midwife. Careful attention, however, will show that ‘intellectual satire’ and ‘creative fantasy’ are indeed present in the magazine. Many of its eighteenth-century readers were aware of this, but we are now only beginning to appreciate again the degree to which it is true. It is noteworthy that those critics who have turned their attention more comprehensively towards the eighteenth-century periodical have not found themselves bound by a code that demands attitudes of dismissal, indulgence or reproof towards the Midwife. To the admirably painstaking historian of the English literary periodical, Walter Graham (1930), wading through the endless piracies and reprintings of periodical articles in the 1740s and 50s, the Midwife was ‘an original and notable miscellany’, which was ‘enough to give Smart a place with the foremost humorists of the century’. His later comment, however, that ‘Smart’s Midwife was purely comic, with no political or social purpose, as far as may be discerned’ is ripe for revision. Deborah Ayer Sitter and John Sitter (1983) have provided the most level headed and accurate account of the richness to be found in the Midwife to date. They salute, like Sherbo, the Midwife as part of a particular tradition of literary wit: ‘one of the styles [Smart] employs ... suggests a rhetorical continuity between Swift and 7 Sterne’. Alongside the changing fashions in literary criticism and cultural studies, one might expect more recent studies of the magazine to take a different view from those at which we have just looked. The critic Lance Bertelsen justly described it in 1986 as ‘one of the most original and frenetic [magazines] of the eighteenth century’. In a later piece, though, his commendable desire to link Smart’s journalism to Jubilate Agno led him to present what is arguably a somewhat limiting view of the Midwife. To Bertelsen it is a ‘subversive and irreverent journal ... filled with wild transformations, parodic history, mad schemes, and paradoxical commentary of the plight of the oppressed’: it is ‘madcap popular journalism’. It seems to me, though, that this emphasis on the lunatic and the ludic does not place it within the traditions of rhetoric, of political satire and of periodical practice that are crucial to 8 our understanding of its character. Chris Mounsey’s twenty-first century work on Smart covers the Midwife more generously than any so far. He reads some parts of the periodical in exemplary detail as pursuing what is ultimately an exclusively political agenda. Both the overt and covert political comment in the magazine has indeed been woefully disregarded 6 Devlin, Poor Kit Smart, 53–5. 7 Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals (1930) (New York: Octagon Books, 1980), 171–2, 358. Deborah Ayer and John Sitter, British Literary Magazines, ed. Alvin Sullivan, 225. 8 Lance Bertelsen, The Nonsense Club: Literature and Popular Culture 1749–1764 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 18, and ‘Journalism, Carnival, and Jubilate Agno’, ELH 59, no. 2 (1992): 361.

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until now, and his work is often fruitful and instructive. It seems to me though, that Mounsey’s decoding of the Midwife into local and very specific political comment does not fully represent its nature as real and committed, but general—and genuinely comic—social and literary satire. The Nature of the Midwife: History and Attribution The Midwife, I shall argue—following the direction indicated by John and Deborah Sitter—should be placed in the broad tradition of acerbic humorous and learned dissent which runs from Aristophanes to Lucian to Rabelais to Swift. The magazine employs a humanist rhetoric which has associations with Menippean satire, and these links will be explored further in chapter six. This chapter only marks the beginning, however, of the process of looking at the comedic use of allegory, hyperbole, satirical eulogy, and ironic reversal in the magazine: one aim of this attention to the linked legacy of satire and rhetoric with which Smart was working will be to draw attention 10 to the limitations of most previous assessments of the Midwife. The preface—allegedly written by one ‘Fardinando Foot’ and bound in with the first collected volume of the Midwife—gave notice of the nature of its material to those 11 encountering it for the first time, and indeed of its status as an ‘anti-magazine’: A Gentleman who has read the Great Grammar of the Universe, and obtained an intimate acquaintance with Men and Things, sends me Word that there is no Sense in my Book; but assures me at the same Time, that I need not be dishearten’d on that Account, for it is the more likely to sell; and to verify this, he refers me to several senseless Pieces that have been publish’d lately with Success, and to the Taste of the Times. (1: iv–v)

The Midwife’s province, then, was announced as wit, arrant nonsense, and subScriblerian literary and social satire, yet the magazine was never to diverge too radically from common practice among the periodicals of its day. In this chapter I will be concentrating on those of its aspects which speak most trenchantly, through the persona of Mrs. Midnight, to the larger political and cultural issues of the day, but every number had its share of the run-of-the-mill articles readers would expect from 9 Chris Mounsey, ‘“To the Women of both sexes”: Christopher Smart, Mrs. Mary Midnight and the Voice of the Dissident Woman Writer’, Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early Modern Culture (New York: Assoc. University Presses, 1999), and Christopher Smart: Clown of God (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 99–113. The exceptions to this are Mounsey himself, and Philip. L. Strong’s dissertation, which works with some of the social and political content of the magazine: ‘Social, Political and Intellectual Commentary in Christopher Smart’s Midwife’, unpub. PhD. dissertation, University of Nebraska, 1970. There also is some helpful comment on the Midwife in Iona Italia, The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment (London: Routledge, 2005), covered elsewhere in this study. 10 Peter Flint Perreten has gone some way towards recognising this element of the Midwife: ‘Satire in Christopher Smart’s Midwife’, unpub. PhD dissertation, University of Delaware, 1972. 11 This is Perreten’s apt phrase: ibid., 8.

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the mid-century periodical, even though their moralising impact could be undermined by the outrageous vulgarity or scatology of an neighbouring piece. For example, in the number for April 1751, the ‘Letter from a Lady to a Maid Servant who had left her: In which is contained an useful Lesson for all Persons in that State of Life’ (2: 7–8), is shortly followed by references to ‘PIDDLING ELEGIES’ and an ‘Arsegut’ in Mrs. M.’s ‘Thoughts on Elegy-Writing’ (2: 27–9). The magazine includes plenty of the stock preoccupations of periodicals since the Tatler and Spectator, such as letters condemning the practice of duelling and anti-gaming diatribes; any full account of it should register their presence (see Appendix 2). Conversely, if the reader finds little mention of religion in this book, that is because there is no mention of it in the magazine beyond the occasional dig at dull sermonizers, or a passing note of it as something now lost to modern manners. There is no question about the popularity of the Midwife among its eighteenthcentury readers. This publication—described by Mary Midnight as ‘our imperial, superb and pompous Magazine’ (1: 66)—first appeared on 16 October 1750 and immediately went into four editions; thereafter article and poems from Smart’s periodical were pirated and reprinted in the numerous magazines, both metropolitan and provincial, that survived by presenting themselves as digests and taking material 12 from other journals. Seven months after the publication of the first number, the bookseller John Newbery printed the first volume of what was to become a threevolume collected edition of the entire sixteen numbers. The magazine ran monthly with admirable regularity, until October 1751, but after this the last three numbers appeared erratically. On 3 December 1751, ‘Mrs. Midnight’s Oratory’—sometimes advertized as ‘The Old Woman’s Oratory’ (and later as other bizarre, loosely associated titles)—began its idiosyncratic career. First shown at the Castle Tavern, this was a remarkable series of public performances consisting typically of oratory from ‘Mrs. Midnight’ (almost certainly, in its early days at least, Smart himself in petticoats), ‘British’ music played upon street instruments, performing animals, musical child prodigies 13 and terpsichorean wonders. It is suggested that the reason for the staggered and unreliable appearance of the periodical thereafter was due to Smart’s involvements in the performances, for the November 1751 number was not published until 7 January 1752, and then there was nothing until 4 August 1752, with the very last 14 number, largely a makeweight affair, appearing only on 16 June 1753. After the opening of ‘Oratory’ the character of the Midwife changed quite considerably, becoming a vehicle for puffing the show, and including some of Mrs. Midnight’s orations ‘From the Rostrum’. The added element of performance makes it almost 12 Mounsey, Christopher Smart, 99, and Ann. Bib., 145–90. 13 See for example the accounts in Sherbo, Scholar of the University, 75–81, Botting, ‘Christopher Smart in London’, 23–8, Mounsey, Christopher Smart, 119–29, and Graham Midgley, The Life of Orator Henley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 185–92. Also see Raymond Rizzo, ‘Christopher Smart’s Show, Mrs. Midnight’s Oratory’, SVEC 305 (1992): 143–4; Betty Rizzo, ‘Christopher Smart’s Burlesque Cantata, “The Dust Cart”, Notes and Queries 31 (1984): 11–13. 14 For a comprehensive picture of the publication history of the Midwife, see Ann. Bib., 145–90 and British Literary Magazines, ed. Sullivan, 225–8.

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impossible reliably to affix meaning to these orations, for such stage business as a well-timed wink could have played havoc with the sense of the words as we read them. Though at times in this study I will refer to pieces from the last three numbers, they will be approached with caution for this reason. Also, the last number contains a series of quite poisonously misogynist poems, most of which were not Smart’s: if he did edit this number himself, it marks a distinct change from the often inclusive and sympathetic attitude displayed towards women in the bulk of the magazine, as we shall see. The question of attribution of material in the eighteenth-century periodical is a 15 heartbreaking business. The practices of using casual or long-term pseudonyms, writing letters under assumed names, printing unacknowledged material from other periodicals, signing articles by a single letter, and even inventing the fictitious 16 names of printers, were of course useful to writers for reasons similar to those suggested for the use of personae in my first chapter, but make things difficult for the traditional literary historian. To the unhampered cultural critic, freed by Barthes or Foucault from the need to anchor text to individual, this need not be a problem, and certainly the Midwife can stand as an entity in its own right under the byline of ‘Mary Midnight’; to some extent this will be my approach throughout the rest of this chapter, although here I may be justly accused of trying to make a virtue out of a necessity. Detaching Mrs. Midnight entirely from Christopher Smart, however, will not help us to understand new things about the use of persona in the eighteenthcentury periodical, and therefore needs them both to act in concert, as they did. Key to this book, however, is the fact that Smart almost certainly—as well as having extensive editorial control—‘was the principal supplier of material’ for the Midwife, and this has been agreed by all those who have studied the matter (a closer study of possible contributors and related matters can be found in Appendix 1).17 In the frontispiece to the first collected edition of the Midwife Mary Midnight and her elderly lady friend are depicted sitting in a stark room, in front of a fireplace which holds not coals but quill and parchments, and prominent in the picture is a commode clearly labelled ‘The Jakes of Genius’. Whether or not Smart thought of his magazine in such a way we do not know, though judging by a comment of his persona in the Student it could be so assumed: ‘I am determined to be as stupid as my 18 contemporaries, in order to make myself POPULAR.’ For the rest of this chapter attention will be focused on the nature of the material which made up the Midwife, so that we may get a better idea of where the ‘Genius’ went. 15 For a close look at the difficulty of attributing poetry in the periodicals, see Karina Williamson, ‘Christopher Smart: Problems of Attribution Considered’, The Library 5th Ser. 28 (1973): 116–23. 16 William Kenrick, in order to add verisimilitude to his appropriative Old Woman’s Dunciad, gave the printer as an imaginary ‘Theophilus Carnan’, taking advantage of the fact that most people would not know that the ‘T. Carnan’ who was advertized as the printer of the Midwife was a Thomas. Newbery was not publicly associated with the magazine: Thomas Carnan was his nephew: Botting, ‘Christopher Smart in London’, 20. 17 Karina Williamson, PW4, xlvi. 18 Student, 2: 301. For full discussion of Smart’s attitude to his own magazine, see chap. 4 below.

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The Midwife, Or, The Old Woman’s Magazine: vol. 1, no. 4 (17 January 1751) The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to a description of the contents of one particular number of the Midwife. In describing the nature of the individual pieces within that number and explaining their connection with other articles and common themes elsewhere in the periodical, I hope to convey a reasonably inclusive impression of the magazine as a totality. The process will act as the construction of a web of references, with my chosen representative number in a central position: although it may be risky to invoke the figure of the spider in this context, I will be 19 arguing that ultimately the ‘Ancient’ bee is the tutelary genius of the Midwife. In the absence of a fully annotated edition of the three volumes of the periodical, and being unable here to give a completely comprehensive account of it, my aim is to furnish the reader with an adequate conspectus of the periodical (Appendix 2 lists subject clusters across the magazine as a whole). Attention will be drawn to its character and major preoccupations, and those social, political and cultural themes which recur will be indicated—where possible I will try to show Mrs. Midnight’s debt to other periodicals and writings of the time, as well as her originality. Poetry— that of Smart and others—makes up a substantial part of the Midwife, and it will be dealt with as part of the body of the magazine, but it is prose that principally concerns us here. By the end of the chapter, then, I would like to have communicated not only the nature of the contents of the Midwife, but also something of the protean subtleties of its comedic style. No number of the Midwife could be selected as fully representative of the whole, but the fourth, that of 17 January 1751, will act as an excellent introduction to the rest. I have chosen an early number, because the vigour and integrity of the periodical becomes somewhat diffused as it progresses: such enterprises usually lose impetus after a time, and, as we have already seen, this was true of the Midwife. The fourth number certainly inclines towards politics, but it also contains what must be one of the funniest and finest pieces of eighteenth-century post-Scriblerian scatology. It carries, too, a Midnightian attack on pedant critics (which stands on its own terms as a inventive example of linguistic virtuosity), a representative example of satirical prosopopoeia, and a description of Hogarth’s painting the March to Finchley which is significant as early art criticism, as loosely-disguised political dissent, and as an example of the mobility and versatility of such periodical articles after their release into the public domain. In terms of personae, Mary Midnight develops in this number, being granted a clandestine love affair in her youth, and the beginnings of a rather more public one in the future. But, for now, we begin at the theatre.

19 The spider in Swift’s Battle of the Books is a ‘modern’ scholar who ‘turns all into Excrement and Venom; producing nothing at last, but Fly-bane and a Cobweb’: Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, With Other Early Works 1696–1707, vol. 1 of Prose Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965) 150. Also see Smart’s poem ‘The Blockhead and the Bee’ (1754) in which the poet is of the bee party: PW4, 281–4.

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Pantomime, Puffery and Public Taste The first article in the number is announced thus: ‘A Dissertation on DUMB RHETORIC: Or, the Language of the Limbs, with some Account of Queen MAB, which is now acting with astonishing Applause, at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane. By Mrs. Midnight’ (1: 145–51). ‘Dumb Rhetoric’ belongs within the family of theatrically-based articles in the magazine, which is a large one if the various printed prologues and epilogues are included (see Appendix 2). The practical reason for the existence of the piece is to advertise this pantomime, for which Smart’s friend Charles Burney wrote the music: it is possible that Garrick asked Smart to write it. Mrs. M. expects, she explains, ‘the Thanks of my Friend Mr. Garrick, who has now got his Old Woman, as well as Moliére, and I desire he’ll pay the same Regard to my 20 Judgement, as his Rival of France did to that of La Forêt’ (1: 146). Generically, it must come into the category of local puffery on behalf of self, friends or family, and thus allies itself to a group of articles including Mrs. Midnight’s praise for the 21 Fielding brothers’ ‘Universal Register Office’ (1: 225–8). In a characteristic move of Mrs. Midnight’s creator, practical puffery becomes a satiric vehicle for attacking ignorance, dullness or bigotry in the population at large. Another sense in which ‘Dumb Rhetoric’ is characteristic in that it illustrates a predicament for Smart: that of his invidious position as a former ‘Scholar of the University’ who must now turn his attention to cultural fields which, in the literary world which Christopher Smart the poet seeks to inhabit, are deemed unworthy of scholarly consideration. Consider Mrs. Midnight’s letter to Garrick, complaining of his theatre’s tendency to pervert ‘the fine Talents’ of his ‘excellent Comedians’ into ‘the Vehicles of Nonsense to the Publick’ (1: 88). Mrs. M. shows herself as a ‘transactional’ persona in ‘Dumb Rhetoric’, for in that earlier letter she complained of ‘Bawdry’ on the stage, and yet here she is explaining that in Queen Mab ‘the good-natur’d Fairy is determin’d the young Lady shall not die an old Maid, but that honest Harlequin shall have the towzling of her’ (1: 147). The tension between ‘high’ literary endeavour and ‘low’ crowd-pleasing entertainments exhibited in ‘Dumb Rhetoric’ is crucial to arguments later in this book: this is only one of many places in the magazine where it becomes apparent. Deborah and John Sitter chose their words judiciously when they described this 22 piece as ‘an apparently whole-hearted defense of pantomime’. Most of it consists of a lengthy description of the action of Henry Woodward’s pantomime. ‘Dumb 20 ‘Smart’s friend’: Botting, ‘Christopher Smart in London’, 13. Boileau remembered that ‘Moliére had often shewn me an Old Maid of his, to whom ... he read his Comedies; assuring me, that when any Part of the Pleasantry did not strike her, he corrected it; because he frequently found at his Theatre, that these very Places did not succeed’: Boileau on Longinus … trans. J. Ozell, ed. I.D. Mackillop (1713: repr. Sheffield: University of Sheffield Press, 1972), 19. I have Charles Page to thank for this reference. 21 See for example Mrs. M.’s puff for a new translation of More’s Utopia (a Newbery publication): ‘Reflections on Matrimony’, 2: 99, and for Thomas Warton’s ‘Newmarket: A Satire’ (published by Newbery in December 1750) 1: 124. For further discussion of the group of ‘Office’ articles, see chap. 6 below. 22 British Literary Magazines, ed. Alvin Sullivan, 226.

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Rhetoric’ is clearly designed, somewhat dutifully, to encourage readers to attend: ‘the Fairy Dance, which is perform’d by several little Boys and Girls, gives a general Satisfaction, to People of all Ranks and Tastes’ (1: 150). Mrs. M. assures her readers that, though ‘there are many Particulars omitted’, she has done this on purpose, lest ‘I shou’d satisfy the People’s Curiosity, so that they would not be at the Expence of seeing the Show’ (1: 149). Mrs. Midnight is struggling though, because her task runs counter to Augustan literary distaste for ‘low pantomimic entertainments’: to Dryden and Pope, ‘drolls 23 were to legitimate drama as birthday odes were to Homer’. Her attempt to manhandle Queen Mab into a higher cultural echelon exemplifies the way that she habitually employs irony throughout the Midwife, keeping to the letter of her task whilst indicating a very different spirit: ‘I must not conclude without observing, that there is a Degree of Merit even in the Name of this Entertainment; for Queen MAB was a very great Favourite both of Shakespeare and Milton, wherefore there could not have been any Appellation more likely to prejudice the Audience in its Favour’ (1: 151). This apparent compliment to the cultural standards of the theatre-going public may also be read, with a snort of ironic derision, as signifying its exact opposite. In the Midwife we see the demands and constraints of commercial necessity repeatedly coming into conflict with what Smart really wants to write about, and most often it is the invaluable doublespeak of irony that gives him a way of doing both. ‘Dumb Rhetoric’ provides another example of this, which can be explained by recourse to a related—but not subtle—attack on rowdyism in the theatre. In the second number of the periodical Mrs. Midnight published her ‘ORATION spoken to the Clappers, Hissers and Damners, attending both Theatres’ (1: 79–80), in which her evident rage at the ignorance of theatre audiences—particularly that of the occupants of the gallery, who were spatially placed highest in the theatre though socially of the 24 lowest class— was expressed in naked sarcasm: Aristotle was an Ass, Dionysus a Driveller, Longinus a Leatherhead, and all the antient Critics collected in a Body, a Parcel of Giddy-heads, Goose-Caps, and Hum-drums, who would have been three Days in reading, considering and revising a Play, which you can judge and condemn, without any Consideration in the World, and without either hearing or seeing a Syllable, in three Minutes. Wonderful Abilities indeed! – Oh mighty Sirs! You especially, who lord it in the Regions above, and are seated next the Stars, how shall I enough admire your Wisdom and Sagacity? Proceed, great Sirs, and prosper! Reform the World. Riot! Riot! Tear up the Benches, break down the King’s Arms, demolish the Orchestre and the Fiddles, pelt the Players and hiss the Author! Clamour, clamour, I say! and display your Bravery as usual in a Storm of Nut-shels, Apples and Oranges. It has been a Maxim, Time out of Mind, that the most noisy are the most knowing; and this you have sufficiently verified, who are ... Enemies to Taciturnity, and that other dull useless thing called Thinking. (1: 79–80) 23 Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen, 1972), 69. 24 For a contemporary explanation of the class-based spatial arrangements in the London theatres, see Oliver Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, Letter 21, in vol. 2 of Works, ed. A. Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 89. Smart’s 1754 poem ‘The Snake, the Goose and the Nightingale. Humbly addressed to the Hissers and Catcallers attending both Houses’ provides a poetic parallel to this piece: PW4, 296–7.

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Complaints about the behaviour of theatre audiences had been a staple of periodical 25 writing since the Tatler, but this piece is exceptional for its venom. It is also representative of the ridicule at the expense of the ‘Vulgar’—specifically aimed at their ignorance and crassness of speech—which runs throughout at least the first two volumes of the periodical (see Appendix 2), and its tone and character, it seems to me, preclude the enlistment of Mary Midnight into the ranks either of Bakhtinian carnival 26 or any nascent proto-egalitarianism. There are ways—explored in chapters five and six—in which she embodies a type of radical dissent, but they are not apparent here. It ought also to be noted that Mrs. Midnight is not necessarily expecting the denizens of the gallery to be familiar with Aristotle; it is, at the start of the piece, the ‘court of critical jurisdiction’, in other words the educated gentry in the pit, who come under attack, and there is a parallel here with the constant insistence of Smart—in his poetry, in the Student and in the Midwife—upon the value and importance of study 27 of the ancients as hard work and personal discipline. This is not an aspect of Smart commonly mentioned in his biographies, but it is apparent in his ‘low’ journalism, and it will recur as we proceed. To return, then, to ‘Dumb Rhetoric’ it is not surprising to find the popularizer of pantomime slyly proclaiming his true allegiance through ironic distancing. Mrs. Midnight equates the ‘Arabian Tales’ with pantomime in an attempt to legitimate the latter, explaining that she enjoys the stories (they ‘afford Delight to young Readers, and I own I like them to this Day’, 1: 146) and, of course, as a transactional persona she may do so. The ‘surprizing Mutation and Variation of the Scenery’ in pantomime, she says, is equivalent to the operations of ‘the Genii and the Talisman’s Power’ in Oriental tales. Read, however, in the context of her habitual Scriblerian and humanist dislike for both the mechanical and the quest for ‘Novelty’, the following statement can be taken as masterpiece of faint—indeed, offensive—praise: ‘As the Imagination is naturally delighted with whatever is new and surprizing, it is impossible not to be struck with the Machinery, which will always please more with its Novelty, than offend with its Absurdity’ (1: 146). Brean Hammond, we might observe, notes mid25 See Bertrand Goldgar’s useful compendium of periodical items on this topic: CoventGarden Journal & A Plan of the Universal Register Office, ed. Goldgar (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 45, and to which add Frances Moore Brooke’s Old Maid, 26. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White see the beginnings of a ‘will to refinement’ of the theatre as a public space in the Restoration period: The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 94, 87. 26 Or indeed, Christopher Smart: see his ‘Castle-Builder’ essay in the Student, where he contemplates a democratic hell in which ‘People of all ranks shall measure every thing by the level of their own understandings, and the plumb rule of their own judgements’: Student, 2: 187. 27 Cecil Price, Theatre in the Age of Garrick (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), 91. For poetry, see Smart’s ‘The Wholesale Critic and the Hop Merchant’ as one example among many: PW4, 370–72. For the Student, see the edition issued on the same day as this number of the Midwife, in which Smart’s persona tells University students that they need ‘a good knowledge of moral and natural philosophy; a complete skill in the Latin; but above all things, the Greek language, without which no man can be a scholar’, Student, 2: 143. For the Midwife, see inter alia ‘Some Reflections on the Neglect of the Greek Language’, 1: 65, discussed in chap. 3 below.

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century pantomime as a ‘toyshop farrago of special effects, brainless spectacle, and 28 supernatural quackery’. The events of the pantomime are related somewhat drily: she is clearly not amused by Harlequin, who gives the footman ‘a good Slap with his Sword, the Wooden Wit of which always meets with extravagant Applause from the Gallery’ (1: 148). We now know what Mrs. Midnight thinks of the gallery. Though she ‘expects the Thanks of Mr. Garrick’ for having spoken ‘in Behalf of Pantomime’ (1: 146), the writer of this piece is hardly entering into the spirit here: ‘Next in order comes the Pursuit of Harlequin, in which the old Gentleman and the young one, the tall Servant and the short one, distinguish themselves by beating and tumbling over one another thro’ Mistake; which ... gives incredible satisfaction to the Populace’ (1: 149). There is enough dour comment of this sort to allow for two very different readings of the piece, as a perfectly straightforward encouragement to potential theatre-goers, or as companion to the letter to Garrick and the ‘Oration to the Clappers and Hissers’ in its despair at the present state of the stage. The last thing to note here about ‘Dumb Rhetoric’ is actually the way that it begins: Nature designing Man for a social and conversible Creature, gave him diverse Methods of expressing his Ideas; and the mental Traffic of the Mind may be registered by many Signs and Tokens, besides Words and Sounds. A certain Modification, and curious Disposition of the Fingers only, will constitute a very intelligible Language, as I myself can testify, for when I was a young Girl, one of my Lovers taught me to speak with my Hands, and we have call’d one another by the tenderest Names, unperceiv’d, in the presence of a very austere and suspicious Guardian. Ten thousand Ideas may be express’d by the Gesticulation of the Body, and there’s scarcely a Muscle about us, but at certain Times speaks something to the Purpose. (1: 145–6)

The drive to remove Queen Mab—which was performed entirely with actions, music and song, but no speech—from its associations with ‘low’ popular iconography, and place it on a more intellectualized plane, has led the writer to an interesting and early 29 articulation of sensibility as meaning conveyed by the body. He chooses to do this (via a Ciceronian reference to man as a social animal) through Mrs. Midnight’s vivid account of her youthful dalliance, and it would be surprising if the modern reader was not reminded of Sterne here. Sensibility as the language of the heart does have a place in the Midwife, although its appearances are infrequent, it is noteworthy that the two pieces in which it is most apparent are also the most directly novelistic 30 ones. In the main, however, the staple of the Midwife is the satirical letter, which, as I wish to show, has less to do with Richardson’s epistolary zeal and the developing 28 Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 280–81. For Mrs. M’s animus against the mechanical, see chap. 6 below. 29 See John Mullan on gesture in Sterne: ‘perfectly intelligible conversation depends on gestures rather than words, on sensitivity to the non-verbal’: Sentiment and Sociability: the Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 158. 30 See the ‘Survey of BEDLAM’ including ‘The History of Hannah ****’, and ‘Survey of BEDLAM continued’: 1: 215–24, and 260–69, discussed in chap. 4 below.

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fiction of sensibility than with older tactics of prosopopoeia and the legacy of Swift. Indeed, Mrs. M elsewhere mocks the discourse of sensibility: ‘I was this Morning obliged to swim thro’ a whole Flood of my own Griefs to procure from thy bright Eyes one Dawn of Comfort’ (2: 125). Ancients, Antiquarians and the Cornish Fossil The second article in no. 4 is a joy—the word is chosen with care. Entitled ‘A Letter from Mrs. Mary Midnight, to the Society of Antiquarians, giving them an Account of a very curious Petrifaction found near Penzance, in the County of Cornwall’, it manages to sink a whole raft of eighteenth-century shibboleths, both ‘Ancient’ and ‘Modern’, in a considered and effective example of Mrs. Midnight’s comic ridicule by exaggeration (1: 151–4). This piece belongs generically to a large corpus of writings in the Midwife devoted to attacking professionalization, specialization, and, indeed, the division of knowledge itself. In this, Mrs. Midnight is an old-fashioned humanist, and her choice of targets in the magazine is not the sole, but a significant, indicator of its place within a Scriblerian frame of reference. Pope’s inverted advice to poets in Peri Bathous included the ironical injunction to ‘employ Technical Terms, which estrange style from the great and general Ideas of nature, and the higher your 31 subject is, the lower you should search into mechanicks for your expression.’ Mrs. Midnight handles antiquarians with a tenderly vicious regard, but under this heading her most vitriolic satire is reserved for physicians and lawyers (see Appendix 2). The nascent profession of archaeology also undergoes substantial satirical surgery in no. 6, where, in another letter ‘To the venerable Society of ANTIQUARIANS’ (1: 248–51), she hears more than she wants to about an elderly horseshoe from the pedantic and ludicrously speculative ‘Mr. Mouldy’ (who ‘don’t like to be contradicted’), and sends a gift to the Society: ‘there was a great deal of valuable Rust at one end ... and as I know Rust is of all Things the most acceptable to your 32 Society, I have preserv’d that in a Box for you’ (1: 250). Two other things should be noted here: that this second major attack on antiquarianism appears also to carry a political message, for the discoveries Mrs. M. discusses were made in Windsor

31 In vol. 2 of Prose Works, ed. Rosemary Cowler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 218. Paul Fussell discusses Swift and Johnson’s dislike of ‘professional jargon and local terminology’: The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 56. 32 Also see ‘Extract of a Letter from Mrs. Susannah Rowe to her Sister Mary Midnight, from Naples’ (1: 127–9). Thornton and Colman’s Connoisseur later followed Mrs. Midnight’s scornful attitude towards the ‘Vertuosi’: see Connoisseur 2, and also Lance Bertelsen in British Literary Magazines, ed. Sullivan, 47–8, and The Nonsense Club, 39–40. The locus classicus for ridicule of the antiquarian attachment to rust is The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 102–4.

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Forest, and that the Society of Antiquarians was incorporated in 1751, so that these 33 writings also have a directly contemporary relevance. Parody of other extant journals was a stock-in-trade of literary periodicals as soon as they began: a large proportion of Bonnell Thornton’s Have-At-You-All (1752) was devoted solely to it. The Midwife does its fair share, though seldom signposting 34 its victims in Thornton’s helpful manner. The letter concerning the ‘Curious Petrifaction’ is a clear parody of the sort of earnest popularisation of knowledge indulged in by the Gentleman’s Magazine. For example, in the January 1751 issue of that journal—which appeared just prior to this number of the Midwife—was a letter describing, with illustrations, the ‘trochitae stones, or fossil flowers’ to 35 be found in parts of Derbyshire. In a number of important Midwife pieces Mrs. Midnight parodies the explanations of mechanical contrivances that magazines like the Gentleman’s habitually carried, and in these, in the same way as the ‘Curious Petrifaction’ derides both antiquarians and the way their findings are reported, she attacks both the practice and its textual representation. Mrs. M.’s targets for ridicule, then, are often modern ‘enlightened’ scientific and technological practices, as presented in their classic form on the pages of the great Encyclopédie, and in this she shows herself again to be an epigone, working from the basis of a traditional humanism for whom mechanism is the foe of all that is distinctive about the free 36 will of mankind. The piece begins with a typical joke at Mrs. Midnight’s own expense about her own special right to address the Society, being herself a ‘most extraordinary Piece of venerable Antiquity’: this is a familiar example of the kind of apologetic defensiveness eighteenth-century women had to assume as a matter of course when they ventured to speak in august fields such as this one. Mary Midnight does not habitually feel the need to excuse herself about anything much. She then recounts the experience of a Mr. Powallis (is there a play on ‘powerless’ here?) of Penzance, who, when walking in the fields ‘accidentally trod upon something, which, having

33 There is conceivably a Jacobite subtext to this piece: see Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 116–18. ‘Society of Antiquarians’: Gentleman’s Magazine 21 (1751): 474, 570. A fictional antiquary of 1751 used the taste of rust as his guide: Tobias Smollett, vol. 4 of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751; repr. Oxford: Blackwell, 1925), 107–09. 34 For early parodies of the Tatler, see Graham, English Literary Periodicals, 90. HaveAt-You-All parodies the Inspector, the Midwife and the Rambler, as well as the Covent-Garden Journal. 35 Gentleman’s Magazine, 21 (January 1751): 21. Johnson’s current Rambler 83 attacking the civically redundant practices of ‘virtuosi’ and collectors is reprinted in the same number: 27–9. Perreten has noted that in the Gentleman’s Magazine for March 1751 (21: 108) there is an account of ‘stone-snakes’, and other petrified matter discovered at Whitby: ‘Satire in Smart’s Midwife’, 105. Also see the woman’s petrified foot and sandal found in Lincolnshire: Gentleman’s Magazine 19 (May 1749): 203. 36 Fussell, Rhetorical World, 9, 76, 84-95, and see Appendix 2, as well as further discussion of this in chap. 6 below.

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all the Appearance of an human Excrement, made him immediately congratulate 37 himself upon his good Luck’. It turned out to be a ‘Pebble’, and Mr. Powallis carried it Home to his Lady, who at first Sight cried out, my Dear, you have brought Home a ----, mentioning a Word, which I am sorry shou’d ever drop from a Woman of her Decency and Discretion. However, upon handling it she was pacify’d, and she diverted herself by now and then depositing it in the Parlour, to the Confusion of the House-Maid, and sometimes dropping it in Company, for the Entertainment and Astonishment of her Friends.

‘Mr. Fondledust’ the antiquarian was consulted, and declar’d with Transport, that it was the greatest Curiosity in Europe. “This (says he) is really and bona fide, a petrified Excrement, and as it was found in the Fields, is a valuable Monument of ancient Simplicity; when our Fathers (how unlike the Effeminacy of our Moderns) used to do their Business in the most pastoral and unaffected Manner, and (as the Divine Milton sings) Every Shepherd Laid his Tail 38 Under the Hawthorn in the Vale.” (1: 152)

Mr. Fondledust purchased the object for a hefty £50, and Mrs. M. proceeds to describe it to the learned gentlemen: ‘This Rarity then, which you may either call an Artificial piece of Nature or a natural Piece of Art, is about seven Inches long, and about three and a half Diameter; (I mean in the Centre) for, towards the End, it’s taper’. It is uniform in colour ‘to a surprizing Exactness, which Dr. Bolus assures us is a strong Proof that the Ancients lived upon a Milk and Vegetable Diet, and were free from those luxurious Compositions that discolour the Excrements of this degenerate Age.’ Mr. Fondledust says that ‘after a few years Study he could find out the Age, Condition, Sex, Situation, Country and Constitution’ of ‘this remarkable Relict to Posterity’, and even determine if it was a ‘Jewish, Pagan or Mahometan Business’ (1: 153). Fortunately for the scholar there is more at issue here than lavatorial humour, though of course, as so often in life, one risks treading the comedy underfoot with pedantic explication. It may appear as though the ‘ancients’ and their devotees are the principal butt, it seems to me, however, that the opposite is the case. What underlies the ‘Curious Petrifaction’ is the epistemological battle which raged at the end of the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, in which Sir William Temple, and later the Christ Church wits led by Atterbury, and later still Swift, fought with all the weapons of rhetoric at their command against the painstaking Richard Bentley and 37 A reference to the compensatory superstition that good luck should befall the involuntary encounterer of ordure—or he may have sworn. 38 This is a frightful misquotation from Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’: ‘Every Shepherd tells his Tale/ Under the Hawthorn in the Dale’. Also, see Ned Ward, always to be relied upon in matters carnal, referring in 1700 to cellars along the Fleet Ditch being ‘wholly useless, except for Lightermen to lay their Tails in’: Ned Ward, The London-Spy COMPLEAT, in Eighteen Parts, ed. Ralph Straus (London: The Casanova Society, 1924), 136.

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his followers who championed philology and antiquarianism as the path to a better understanding of classical civilisation. Joseph Levine has lucidly explained the progress of—and reasoning behind—this ‘battle of the books’, ‘Ancient’ scorn for the ‘modern’ scholars was based in a classical, Ciceronian belief in the importance of learning as ultimately practical, as designed to assist in the moral and ethical choices of a gentleman active in civic affairs. This should come about, they insisted, through study and imitation of the classics, whereas a lifelong grubbing amongst the messy particulars of evidence and rebuttal seemed to pose a challenge to ‘the very integrity and usefulness of the classical ideal.’ It was essentially what they perceived as the pointlessness of the modern approach to learning that offended the ‘Ancients’: ‘They [‘modern’ scholars] have a Vain, Dry, Insipid sort of Knowledge, 39 that is Disagreeable and Useless’. Mrs. Midnight, then, is weighing in with satiric zest on the side of what was already a lost cause. To the Ancients, the modern scholars loved their petty tasks too well, with an immoderate enthusiasm for the quotidian objects which concerned them, and the Swiftian reductio ad absurdum of this might well be a ‘Mr. Fondledust’, exclaiming with delight over a fossilized turd, and happily ready to devote himself to ‘a few Years Study’ to support a nugatory and unsavoury speculation. The impolite parody of Milton is not gratuitous, but is there to support another Ancient charge: ‘Mr. Fondledust’ typifies the Moderns also in that as a self-appointed specialist, he is ignorant of the civilising arts of poetry and rhetoric. Mrs. M. complains about effeminacy herself, but her bête noire in the Midwife is political and moral corruption of a different kind, and she can afford to ridicule the dreary ubiquity of complaints 40 about unmanliness and luxury in modern society. Taking the ‘Curious Petrifaction’ in tandem with her later ‘Letter to the venerable Society’, there seems little doubt that Mary Midnight’s animus against antiquarianism is inherited from Temple, Swift and the gentlemanly enemies of dusty pedantry.41 Encountering the Midwife, one quickly starts asking the paradoxical question inherent in any sort of comedy—‘how serious is it?’ In parodying and mocking certain shopworn tenets and discourses Mrs. Midnight’s attitude can be seen as one of simple exasperation—‘a plague on both your houses’: and sometimes it is. Perhaps, though, one should be careful where one assumes that this is the case. For instance, 39 Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 61 and passim. ‘Vain, Dry, Insipid’: La Bruyére, ibid., 62. See also Rambler 83 (1 January 1750). Smart asks in Jubilate Agno that God may ‘make the professorship of fossils in Cambridge a useful thing’: D93. 40 See ‘A Letter from Mr. Williams containing some Account of Mr. Jemmy Gymp’: 1: 203, and 3: 76. Also see ‘Nelly Pentweazle’s ‘Ballad’, 1: 36 (published as ‘The Distressed Damsel’ in Student 1: 310 and PW4). Smart ‘cross-dressed’ to play Mrs. M. in her ‘Oratory’, and both ‘Jemmy Gymp’ and the gnomic ‘MARY MIDNIGHT, to the Sons of Urania, Greeting’ (3: 31–2) would repay attention from scholars of homosexual or ‘molly’ subcultures. Chris Mounsey’s ‘ “To the Women of both sexes” ’ partly addresses the issue of Smart and homosexuality, as does his Christopher Smart, esp. see 191–3. 41 This animus is of course at odds with Mounsey’s portrayal of Smart as in some ways a ‘modern’— see Mounsey, Christopher Smart, 48, 78 and, on Smart’s possible friendship with the antiquarian Stukeley, 175–9.

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in this piece, her comment about the find being ‘an Artificial piece of Nature or a natural Piece of Art’, clearly takes no more than a dismissive sideswipe at the cultural tussle over the use of these categories, investigated by Martin Battestin in 42 The Providence of Wit. Conversely, I read the underlying hostility towards pedantic specialization to be a matter of importance to the writer. Ultimately it is a case of becoming familiar with recurring attitudes and positions over the course of the whole periodical, noting the vehemence and frequency of specific attacks, and constantly bearing in mind that, particularly in the case of political comment, an appearance of antic even-handed jeering can effectively disable potentially disastrous charges of subversion. Uncomplicated derision which is not assignable to any fixed position is certainly a feature in the periodical: but to assume that it is invariably present is simply reductive, and serves to dump the Midwife back in the limbo of intellectual dismissal described at the start of this chapter. Before she signs her letter ‘Your most humble Servant’, Mrs. Midnight takes one more dig at the Gentleman’s Magazine and the technical illustrations which adorned its pages, explaining that she cannot furnish her readers with a picture of this curiosity. Her engraver refused the task, and ‘swore he wou’d not draw the 43 Picture of a damn’d ---- for any Man’. Or any woman, Mrs. M. forgot to say, and also momentarily lost sight of the drive to gentility that, it is so often claimed, defined the eighteenth-century periodical. Manners, Prosopopoeia, and a Ciceronian Dog There follows next a letter from ‘Maria’, the article as a whole entitled ‘The Amours of Mr. H. Lovewell and Miss E. Goodwill’ (1: 154–62). This item is not included by Mahony and Rizzo as possibly from the pen of Smart, as it nowhere carries the Midnight signature, and internal evidence strongly suggests that the central story, 44 which reads as stock periodical fodder, is largely borrowed from another source. It therefore stands as an example of the kind of makeweight material that is inserted from time to time in the Midwife and sometimes may run against the grain of Mrs. Midnight’s sentiments and proclaimed positions. Since the days of the earliest epistolary periodicals, it has been impossible to evaluate the authenticity of the letters therein: frequently they reinforced an editorial viewpoint, a hardly mysterious 42 Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 1–57. Mrs. M. allows herself a similar aside in the poem celebrating the pulling power of the wooden-legged dancer ‘Mons. Timbertoe’: ‘Each Fair is dubious, which should win her Heart, / The Limb of Nature or the Stump of Art’: 3: 108. Moira Dearnley notes this as ‘Smart simply jok[ing] about one of the most widely discussed aesthetic principles of the age’: The Poetry of Christopher Smart (London: Routledge, 1969), 43. 43 Apart from the frontispiece to the first and second volume of the collected edition, there are no illustrations in the Midwife. The ‘Curious Petrifaction’ ends with a reference to human excrement as ‘Sirreverence’: Ned Ward—again assisting in matters scatological— reveals it to have been a common epithet for the substance in his day: The London-Spy, 26. 44 Ann. Bib., 156.

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circumstance. In this case it is not so, and furthermore it would be unwise to try to read pieces of this type as evidence of a madcap postmodern cultural relativism which characterizes the magazine. It may not be fanciful to suggest that, as much of the remaining material in this number is contentiously political, this article could have been included as prudent confirmation of a safe, Spectatorial reforming intent behind the magazine. Over the full run of the Midwife there are other articles which do advocate reforms of manners and social conduct in the mode of the Tatler and Spectator, but proportionately they are few, and either carry a covert dig at this very practice, or contain a suitably old-fashioned insistence on a stern and Roman virtus or a 46 Ciceronian ‘decorum’, rather than a modern ‘politeness’. On decorum, here is Mrs. M. in full flight: ‘in the present Age, the idea of the true Decorum seems to be utterly extinct, and even the Dignity of human Nature seems to be quite over run with the false refinements of affected Elegance, and all the inconsistent Fopperies 47 of a studied Folly’ (1: 126). Mrs. Midnight’s strictures in this regard are against duelling, gaming, effeminacy, hasty choice in marriage (including a diatribe against the ‘Bargain and Sale of Children and Orphans of both Sexes, to the best Bidder’, by which she means the profit-driven marriage market—2: 133) and masquerades. It should be noted that these stock topics (see Appendix 2) had been standard periodical fare since the Tatler. Whoever wrote the letter which frames the story in the ‘Amours of Mr. Lovewell’, presumably to disguise its foreign provenance, presents the reader of the Midwife with a particularly blatant example of editorial self-contradiction, for the message of the tale is one of severe disapproval of an older woman’s sexuality. ‘Maria’ introduces the story—how a woman of sixty tricked a young man into marriage—by averring that ‘when the Infirmities of Age are on the Side of the Woman’, she can expect only ‘Contempt and Disregard’ for undertaking such an ‘unnatural Union’ (1: 154–5). She concludes by suggesting that Mrs. Midnight ‘might know the Parties concern’d’ (1: 162), but Mrs. Midnight remains silent, which is hardly surprising, because her

45 Shevelow’s point about letters in periodicals is that they will be chosen and framed to convey the required editorial picture of the journal’s readership: Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge, 1989), 38. 46 See for instance Mrs. M.’s parody of conduct literature: ‘A Dissertation on the following most excellent old English Rules, videlicet, COME WHEN YOU ARE CALLED, DO AS YOU ARE BID, and SHUT THE DOOR AFTER YOU’, 2: 212–15. Her two ‘Prowls’ demonstrate this classical ideal of virtue in operation: 1: 6–8, 89–90. For Cicero on ‘seemliness’ (what is ‘fitting’ is true decorum) see Cicero: On Duties, eds. M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7, 43. 47 Tom Furniss usefully explains the distinction between ‘decorum’ and artifice in the Renaissance, and I think it is this distinction—made clear in Cicero—which Mrs. M. is making here: Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 70–71. Also see, on a similar distinction, Lawrence E. Klein, ‘The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 18, no. 2 (1984–85): 186–214, and chap. 4 below.

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own love affair is in full swing by no. 6 of this volume (1: 260). Admittedly, it is with a gentleman of her own age or older, but the zest with which she approaches the role of coquette certainly sits awkwardly with the moral censure of this piece, and it is noteworthy that her creator did not choose directly to associate Mrs. M. with its sentiments. The fourth article in number four is divided into two parts, and consists of ‘A LETTER from Farmer TRUEMAN’s Dog TOWZER, to Squire HEAVISIDE’s Dog PONTO, in Relation to the Act said to be preparing to lay a Tax on that useful Animal’, followed by ‘Towzer’s Scheme for a Poll-Tax on that Part of the human Species, who are distinguish’d by the Appellations of Sad-Dogs, Lazy-Dogs, and Puppies’ (1: 162–165): it exemplifies that Midnightian version of virtue to which I have just referred, albeit in canine form. Again, however, the lady herself does not appear; nevertheless, it is almost certainly original to the Midwife, and its style and targets are those of Mrs. Midnight. It is an instance of extended prosopopoeia, a figure which not only underwrites the presence of Mary Midnight herself, but is also by far the most dominant rhetorical mode in the magazine. It is sometimes, but not always, in the form of letters: more frequently from invented humans under ludicrous synecdochic cognomens, such as ‘Charles Coffin’ the undertaker, but also from non-human correspondents such as this one. It also underwrites a number of Smart’s poems: some of his satiric fables are included in the periodical. Prosopopoeia is an effective form of persuasion which asks of its readers an exercise of the imagination, as we saw in chapter one. It falls under the category of an ‘argumentative’ figure, and is one of the ‘figurae sententiae’, being adapted for the ‘arousing of feeling’. In this sense it is peculiarly appropriate to the eighteenth century, which placed so much importance on the value of pathos as ‘sympathy’. It is also appropriate to Smart, who, in his ‘Castle-Building’ essays in the Student, advocated a particularly robust and civically-active version of imagination as the source of benevolence, through its capacity to enable empathetic identification with others’ suffering. The inventive, unrestrained, repeated use of this figure, it may be suggested, marks the principal writer of the magazine as a poet: Bacon’s ‘Poesy’ uses the ‘imagination’ to ‘join that which nature hath severed … and so make all 49 unlawful matches … of things’. Towzer is an eloquent dog, of impeccable rectitude, a patriot, and a bearer of the sturdy virtues of simple and dignified loyalty, honest integrity, and courage in upholding the right: ‘There is not a Dog in the Nation that will fight more desperately 50 or bark louder, in a good Cause, than your old friend Towzer’. Though of an amorous 48 For the fullest discussion of Mrs. Midnight’s own amours, see chap. 4 below. 49 ‘figurae sententiae’: C.H. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 169 and Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 284. ‘pathos as sympathy’: John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 18–56. Student, 1: 332–3, and see chap. 3 below. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. G.W. Kitchin (London: Dent, 1973), 82. 50 For the ‘English Dog’ as vehicle for populist satire, see Ronald Paulson, Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 51–63. A close relative to this piece may be Pope’s prosopopoeic ‘Bounce to Fop: An Heroic Epistle from a Dog at Twickenham to a Dog at Court’.

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disposition, he is Ciceronian in his devotion to duty: ‘it is not in the Power of the most charming of that bewitching Sex’ to make him desert his post. He distinguishes himself from the politics of interest and personal profit: ‘Let your sneaking Puppies follow low mercenary Views: let them wag their Tails at every Scoundrel, and nuzzle in Dunghills for half a Bone; I am a British mastiff, and scorn such paltry Actions’. In a companion article to this in the following number, ‘Ponto’ answers ‘Towzer’ in similarly patriotic vein, quoting classic authors (untranslated, and somewhat dubiously) to support his case. This piece is an example of Mrs. M.’s ingenious ability to arrive circuitously at a seemingly artless bit of puffery, for she goes on to advertise the time and place where readers might see the French ‘CHIEN SAVANT’. Thus, she, in turn, distracts attention neatly away from the widely applicable political point with which ‘Ponto’ concludes: ‘I make no Doubt that our Merit will be too well-weighed by our Superiors, to let us ever be the Subjects of Oppression’ (1: 200–02). Towzer, this beast of the opposition, has heard through his acquaintance with ‘Phillis, the parson’s speckled Bitch’ about the parliamentary proposal for a tax on dogs, and fears the consequence: that ‘three parts in four of our Species will 51 be knock’d o’ the Head’. His is a disinterested dread, for he knows that he and Ponto will be safe on account of their ‘Usefulness’, ‘since Men (tho’ they are by far the most ungrateful of all other Animals) seldom chuse to destroy what is of real 52 Benefit to them’ (1: 163). Towzer, a most rational creature, pinpoints the source of the problem—‘notwithstanding our almost innumerable Taxes, the Ministry want Money damnably’—and suggests an alternative source of revenue. To this end he proposes, in an archaic and formal diction of ‘thees’ and ‘thous’, a solution of Machiavellian cunning, the mechanics of which require the leap of imaginative faith which prosopopoeia demands. Ponto, using his ‘Intimacy with Miss Biddy’s LapDog’, must ‘engage Shock to communicate my Proposals to his fair Mistress’ who will then use her power over ‘Sir Nathan Nimbletongue, the Member for the County’ to forward the canine scheme, ‘for she has a Pair of Eyes that would dazzle a Roman Senate ... and corrupt the Integrity of a Cato’ (1: 164). Towzer may have a named target in mind for Sir Nathan, but prosopopoeia obscures the reference, and leaves the principle of the attack intact in the manner of classic satire. Prosopopoeia here enables the human writer of this letter to hide a wealth of scorn for the actions and members of the legislative body under the cloak of apparent whimsy. This technique is used again later, and more ferociously, in a letter from the 53 ‘Whispering Gallery in St Pauls’ to ‘a certain Chocolate-House’ (2: 241). Towzer’s ingenious solution is to tax those humans who contribute nothing to the body politic: the ‘Sad-Dogs’ who lack the signal virtue of good humour, and the ‘Lazy-Dogs’ who 51 ‘Towzer’s Letter’, like ‘Dumb Rhetoric’, has immediate contemporary relevance: see for example the letter written to the Gentleman’s Magazine in December 1750 supporting the proposal: 20: 538. A strong sympathy for animals is detectable in a number of Smart’s poems: note especially ‘The English Bull Dog, Dutch Mastiff, and Quail’: PW4, 299–302. For more on sympathy for animals in the Midwife, see chap. 6 below. 52 Scholars of Smart’s poetry will recognise this emphasis upon gratitude: see for example Dearnley, Poetry of Christopher Smart, 30–37. 53 For a sustained analysis of this article, and political satire in the Midwife generally, see chap. 5 below.

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merely consume, described as ‘those Expletives of Nature, which seem only formed to devour her Works’. Towzer’s last category of the useless is a ranting Rabelaisian list of ‘Puppies’, and the choice of targets owes not a little to Pope’s Dunciad: ‘Fops, Coxcombs, Witlings, Pedants, Poetasters, Criticasters, and Grammaticasters’ (1: 165). The revenue from this ‘Soil, which has hitherto brought forth Nothing; but has been buried in the Weeds of Corruption and the Dearth of Barrenness’, Towzer calculates, will be ‘One Millon Two Hundred Pounds Sterling’: q.e.d., and worth advocating to our present legislators. ‘Mr. Semicolon’: Literary ‘Grammaticasters’ ‘Pedants, Criticasters, and Grammaticasters’ provide the objects of ridicule for the next two connected items, which are another prosopopoeic letter, ‘from Mr. SEMICOLON the CRITIC, to Mrs. Midnight’, and ‘Some Remarks on the CRITICS and CRITICISM of the Age, by Mrs. Midnight: Occasioned by the above Letter’ (1: 165–9). These pieces belong in the large category of literary criticism—which I should more nearly call ‘writing about writing’—within the periodical, and there are few numbers which do not address the topic in some way (see Appendix 2). Mrs. M. is forthrightly Popean in her approach to criticism, sometimes adopting his ironic techniques in Peri Bathous, and at others voicing a Dunciadic outrage. Smart relished his running battles against literary folly, and published satirical attacks on Warburton, ‘the literary dictator of mid-century England’, and John Hill: in both cases under his own name. Some of Mrs. Midnight’s sallies in the Midwife are related to these, though I would hesitate to ascribe a named target for 54 ‘Mr. Semicolon’. In any case, as just noted in connection with Towzer, the satire is usually constructed to be effective in a generalized way, so that the corrective lash will still descend, even if there is a local reference which remains unrecognized. It will be seen that some of the shortcomings of the pedantic hack-critic are also those of the ‘modern’ antiquarian, so that these articles also relate back to the humanist distrust of specialization already discussed. It is a pure delight for the editor of the Midwife to parody idiotic pomposity of diction, and there are several other intensely enjoyable instances of this in the magazine (see Appendix 2). It is a crime to truncate Mr. Semicolon’s masterful letter, but it must be done. Beginning with a peremptory ‘Madam’, he plunges in medias res: ‘Before Authors begin to voluminate and exhibit their Lucubrations to the Publick Speculosity, they would do well to ruminate on the Texturability and Construction of their Discourse, in order to stemmify and prohibit publick Animadversion and Censure’ (1: 165–6). There are four hideous Latinate neologisms, a pleonasm, and a wilful obscurity of diction in this first sentence. The letter is a beautiful and carefully crafted parody of ignorant hack criticism, and to create it required classical scholarship and a reckless

54 ‘literary dictator’: Bertelsen, Nonsense Club, 220. For an example of Smart v. Warburton see the dedication to Smart’s ‘Horatian Canons of Friendship’, PW4, 114–15, and Smart’s Hilliad, ibid., 213–60. Mrs. M. questions Warburton’s abilities as an editor: 2: 169. For the viciously witty parody of Hill’s Inspector see 3: 83–8.

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fertility of imagination, both of which were possessed by Christopher Smart in 55 abundance. Mr. Semicolon scolds Mrs. M. for minute ‘Errors of Punctuation’: ‘a superfluous Comma’ on page 34 ‘ought to be Castrated’, and ‘in Page 42. a Semicolon is omitted, which is an abominasious Blunder, and enough to intoxicate the Reader.’ His own punctuation is deficient, his grammar more so, and his reference to the punctuation of ‘Maro, Tully, Virgil and Cicero’ (1: 166) leads Mrs. Midnight to note that ‘Mr. Carp the Critic’ had intervened to point out that these four authors were actually two. He is little better than his colleague, however, for he avers that ‘Maro’ and ‘Tully’ are these authors’ ‘Christian’ names. Mr. Semicolon, it transpires, is looking for employment: ‘You should procure Somebody to inspecticate the Work for you, in order to obviate such Heteroclites for the Future’ (1: 166–7). Mrs. Midnight, if the length and fervency of the sentences in her reply are anything to go by, is incensed by this letter, which of course is probably from the pen 56 of her own begetter. The burden of her response is the disinterested, judicious and generous criticism of the ‘ancient Critics’, and here she refers to three of the great rhetoricians—‘Dionysus, Longinus and Quintilian’—in support of her case against ‘our modern Critics’, who have not the ‘generosity’ to ‘admire Merit’ where they find 57 it. They are ‘a Pack of unmerciful Fault-Finders, Creatures whom neither Homer, Virgil or the Midwife herself can please’. She forgets herself as she continues: ‘Were these Wretches capable of writing themselves, common Prudence would teach them to treat their Brother Authors with Generosity.’ The educated midwife accuses the critics of ‘affected foolish Pomp of Style’, ‘misapplication of Words’, introducing ‘Terms which have no Being in any Language’ and caps her tirade by explaining that for them to refer to the way ‘the Classic Authors pointed’ is the height of ‘Ignorance and Stupidity’, ‘when ’tis evident that the Ancients used no Points at all’ (1: 168–9). The finicky compass of the critics’ attention, their absurd pretensions to learning, and their debasement of language and 58 knowledge are classic Scriblerian butts. Mrs. M.concludes her reply with a return to the theme of the previous articles, for whosoever does not acknowledge ‘that this 55 Critics have noted a fondness for Latinate neologisms in Smart the poet. A distinguished precedent for this type of Latinate gibberish is in Rabelais, The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, vol. 3 of Works, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Motteux, (London: Gibbings and Co., 1903), 167–8. For a similar (sixteenth-century) example of such ‘fustian’ prose, see Noel Malcolm, The Origins of English Nonsense (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 30–31. 56 Smart’s Student persona puts any number of carps against himself into the mouth of ‘Mr. Critick CATCHUP’: see for instance Student, 1: 250, 285, and also see Smart’s second dedication to his ‘Horatian Canons of Friendship’, PW4, 116. 57 This comment is exemplary of a constant and long-running theme of Smart’s, that true literary merit is no longer rewarded: it is found in the Student ‘Castle-Builder’ essays (see for example 2: 7) and in the poetry: ‘orphan merit has no guardian now!’: ‘The Hop-Garden’, PW4, 63. Also see elsewhere in the Midwife: 2: 58, 220. Also see chap. 5 below, where the political dimension to this complaint will be addressed. 58 For Swift and Pope’s association of the ‘mercenary hack’ with linguistic decay, see Pat Rogers, Grub Street, 201.

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my Magazine is ... the best Thing wrote in the World, the Classics themselves not excepted, shall be deemed a Driveler, a Coxcomb and a Puppy’, and she gives ‘any Gentleman’ leave to ‘kick that Fellow into the Kennel’ (1: 169). As so often, the over-weening vanity of Mrs. M.’s hyperbole serves as a device to remind readers that they are dealing with a transactional, rhetorical creation. The Rambler in the Midwife It is not simply a coincidence that the tenor of Rambler no. 84 (1: 169–75), the next item in this number, is one of tempered sympathy for female education, for Smart, faced with a large corpus of Rambler material from which to select, clearly chose to reprint those numbers which most nearly fitted with the tone and concerns of the Midwife. The fact that the first three pieces Smart selected were sympathetically presented letters from ‘women’, is surely significant: the Midwife reprints, over its whole run, Rambler numbers 55, 75, 84, 91, 97, 107, 120 and 131. Of these, four show sympathy for the plight of ill-treated women, one points out the deficiencies of the patronage system, and three are concerned with virtue in opposition to avarice (nos. 120, 131) or custom (the letter from Samuel Richardson, no. 97). The cumulative effect of this Midwife number, by the end of Johnson’s prosopopoeic letter from ‘Myrtilla’, is undoubtedly to reinforce in the reader a sense of numbed familiarity with the notion that women have brains. This is a point concerning the persona of Mary Midnight—dealt with fully later—but it is important to note here that the letter from ‘Sarah Maria Smith’ included later in the magazine’s run and entitled ‘An Attempt to Prove that the Fair Sex have every Qualification necessary for Learning’ (2: 223–8) is a sustained, serious, eloquent and reasoned plea for the education of women. It is outspoken, and both owes to Mary Astell and prefigures Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman: ‘that we have the Capacity for attaining the height of Wisdom ought not to be denied, for why was the bright Spark of Reason implanted in our Souls?’ (2: 227) It is conceivable that this letter was written by Smart: at any rate, and simply on its own account, the fact of its inclusion in the magazine is enough to indicate that the editor of the Midwife was in strong sympathy with women’s desire for education. There is a distinction between this point, and the general assumption that women were in some sort—at the time—‘dunces’; this will be explored in chapter three. Bedlam: Power, Love and Madness The readers of the Midwife, and this book, are now asked to turn their attention to Bedlam. ‘A Survey of Moorfields, humbly address’d to the Whigs and the Tories, by Mrs. Midnight’ (1: 176–82) is the first of a series of three long articles on the 59 asylum, all of which posit strong environmental reasons for madness. This one owes the most to Roman social satire, and its gist is that ‘Love of Power’, ‘Love of 59 Also see ‘Survey of BEDLAM’, and ‘The History of Hannah’, 1: 215–24 and ‘The Survey of BEDLAM continued’ and ‘The Case of Mr. WILL. WIMBLE’, 1: 260–69.

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Money’, and ‘Love of Fame’ are the principal goads driving men to Bedlam. The second piece employs madness as a route to the arraignment of a specific social evil, whereas this first ‘Survey’ uses, more generally and in a classically satirical sense, the mad as rhetorical tools. The ‘Survey of Moorfields’ serves to illustrate Alan Ingram’s description of this technique: ‘madness ... is not madness at all, but a strategy for enforcing understanding of what is being satirized and what is being 60 endorsed’. The third does both. All three place Mrs. Midnight in a first-person novelistic setting, describing her adventures and the progress of her flirtation with a fantastical elderly gentleman, which aspect of the use of persona is properly to be dealt with in chapter four. The proximity of Grub Street to Bedlam, as has been well explained, provided 61 the Scriblerians with a heaven-sent theme for satire. Around ‘The Survey of Moorfields’ hover the spectral presences of Swift’s ‘Digression on Madness’ from the Tale of a Tub, Pope’s Dunciad and Gay’s ‘Panegyrical Epistle to Mr. Thomas Snow’, in which banker and poet share adjoining cells. The piece begins in the environs of Moorfields, with a good joke and a gibe at the sombrely educative function of other 62 magazines: Moorfields is situated partly to the North, partly to the South, partly to the East, and partly to the West; that is, if we suppose the Observator to stand in the Middle – I was thus going on in the Manner of my Brother Magaziners, and propos’d like them to have publish’d a Map of this Place, but was all of a sudden interrupted with a loud Cry of Pick and Chuse for a Penny! (1: 176)

This encounter with a purveyor of bad magazines and ‘other sorts of Trumpery’ at a bookstall gives Mrs. M. the chance to indulge in some high-spirited puffery, and to produce a vividly realized example of the demotic. She is pleased to discover that copies of the Midwife and Student are all sold—although the measure of the difference between Smart and the Scriblerians (to be further explored in chapter four) is that she expects to find her product in such a setting. The Old Woman’s Dunciad, which featured her ‘Brother Magaziner’ William Kenrick’s cloacal appropriation of her persona, is to be had by the cartload, however, and Mrs. M. crossly adds the 63 publishers to the ‘List of Drivellers’ in her ‘Pocket-Book’ (1: 177). An ‘old Gentleman in an antiquated Dress’ courteously then offers to escort her to ‘the Hospital’ and to give her an account of it. Mrs. M.’s new friend then explains

60 Alan Ingram, The Madhouse of Language: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1991), 88. 61 Pat Rogers, Grub Street, 44–56. 62 For a Midwife lampoon of the geographical articles in the Gentleman’s Magazine and others—although of course it is not only that—see ‘The Midwife’s Politicks’, 1: 137–42. 63 It is possible, as Mahony and Rizzo suggest, that Kenrick and Smart cooked up a fake ‘paper war’ for purposes of puffery, see Ann. Bib., 153, Lance Bertelsen, ‘ “Neutral Nonsense, Neither False nor True”: Christopher Smart and the Paper Wars of 1752–53’, in Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment, ed. Clement Hawes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 139, and the discussion of paper wars in chap. 4 below.

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that the celebrated statues—of ‘Melancholy Madness’ and ‘Raving Madness’—at the iron gates to the institution ... were copied exactly from two Gentlemen of my Acquaintance, who are both Politicians (you may observe they are chain’d to prevent Mischief). The melancholy Gentleman is still imploy’d by the Government, but can’t get to the Summit of Power; and on that Account has been many Years sullen and dissatisfied. The other was once Fortune’s Minion, her peculiar Favourite, her very Topknot; but for grasping at Thunderbolts, and attempting the Chariot of the Sun, he was hurled down like Phaeton, and ever since has done nothing but rave, grin, and distort his Muscles in the manner here exhibited. (1: 178)

The first is probably Newcastle, and the second undoubtedly Walpole, who was, it seems, still providing material for satirists even though his days as ‘Skreenmaster General’ were over. The old gentleman then tells Mrs. M. about a ‘Doctor of (his) Acquaintance, who keeps a private House of Entertainment for these Sorts of People’. He it was who classed the madmen according to the categories previously mentioned, and he soothed each class of sufferer by telling them what they wanted to hear. The lovers of power were placated by the news that ‘their Interests were greatly advanced at Court or in the Country’. The lovers of money, the old gentleman explains to Mrs. M., were told, ... which a little surpriz’d me, for to be sure ’twas a rash Thing, he affirmed, That all the Brokers and Jobbers in the Alley were grown honest, and the Stocks would be in a State of Stability, and be no more fluctuated like the Tide at London-Bridge, by Means of their Chicanery and artful Contrivance. (1: 180)

Love of money, Mrs. Midnight is suggesting, is only one of the major trinity of causes of madness, and incidentally—thinking back to arguments about the ‘financial revolution’—those who suffer from this have not lost their identity but had it ludicrously enhanced. Seekers after fame were assured of their lasting glory, and the category of distracted lovers, which Mrs. M. was startled to find much smaller than the others, were easily calmed by trite ‘poetical Descriptions’ of ‘purling Streams, cooling Grotts’ and other cliches of stock amorous verse. The human capacity for self-delusion had a horrid fascination for Smart, and this ubiquitous theme of philosophers and satirists is tackled with originality and acute bitterness in the Midwife; it is explored further in chapter six. The old gentleman’s doctor friend had much trouble in his establishment with demented Whigs and Tories: ‘People who were preposterously infatuated with Party Principles, and had been made the Tools and Butts of others of their Persuasion, who had more Art than themselves.’ Some would not ‘take any Medicine nor eat any Thing but what had the Letters G.R. on it’, and their opponents refused anything unembellished ‘with the Characters J.R.’. If the reader was reminded here of Swift’s 64 ‘Little and Big-Enders’ Mrs. Midnight would not be unpleased. Proclamations 64 See ‘To the Keeper of the Curiosities at Gresham College’, in which Gulliver’s Travels is liberally quoted, and ‘An Extract from the Will of Capt. Lemuel Gulliver’ in which Mrs. M. writes herself into that document, 2: 151–5.

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of neutrality in politics had been endemic to periodicals since the Tatler and the Spectator, but since even the most rabidly oppositional papers trotted them out they 65 usually carried little weight. At the close of the old gentleman’s discourse Mrs. Midnight excuses herself, but arranges to hear more of his accounts of Bedlam: in her next visit she will enter the gates and meet a pathetic victim of masculine intransigence, and here satire will give way to a brief flurry of sentiment from Mrs. M.’s quill before she calls for legislation to redress the injury to honour and property that bigamy represents: ‘Should a poor Man steal my Sheep, he is to be hang’d; but an artless faithless Fellow, glutted with Ambition, Avarice or Lust may betray me, steal my Daughter, and seize upon her Fortune with Impunity’ (1: 224). Hogarth’s ‘March to Finchley’, Jacobitism and the Radical Midwife The last prose item in the number proper is a piece of art criticism—very rare in journals of this time—and is entitled ‘A Description of Mr. Hogarth’s original Painting, from whence was copied his curious Plate of the March to Finchley’ (1: 182–5). It is an unsigned letter, superscribed ‘SIR’, and much of it is a direct translation of parts of ‘an authorized pamphlet’ by Jean Andre Rouquet describing 66 the painting: the pamphlet was published—in French—in England, in 1746. The Midwife piece begins with Rouquet’s ironic denigration of the painting’s ‘despicable Freshness ... Time has not yet obscured it with that venerable Smoak ... which will one Day conceal it from the prophane Eyes of the Vulgar’ (1: 182). The crowded events of the picture are described in detail, and its creator praised for his ‘Sagacity’ in noting ‘a Thousand little Circumstances which escape the Observation’ (1: 183). Rouquet’s work was evidently still acceptable more than a hundred years later, for the handsome Edwardian Works of William Hogarth carries a short uncredited explication of the March to Finchley, which often follows the Midwife translation of 67 Rouquet verbatim. 65 ‘The first essential Ingredient necessary to form a PATRIOT, is, Impartiality; For if a person shall think himself bound by any other Rules but that of his own Reason and Judgement, or obliged to follow the Dictates of Others, who shall appear the Heads of the Party he is ingaged in, he sinks below the Dignity of a Human Creature’: thus Philip, Duke of Wharton, beginning his Jacobite paper of 1723, the True Briton: Memoirs of the Life of his Grace Philip Late Duke of Wharton, by an Impartial Hand (London, 1731) no. 2 of the True Briton run. 66 Lettres de Monsieur ** A Un de Ses Amis a Paris Pour Lui Expliquer les Estampes de Monsieur Hogarth (London, 1746). Ronald Paulson has mentioned an English translation of it, although it is not clear if the Midwife’s is the one he means: Paulson, Popular and Polite Art, 24. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the witty and wise Hogarth critic, claimed Rouquet to have been a friend of Hogarth’s: we may justifiably conjecture that the painter assisted Rouquet in his description. See Lichtenberg’s Commentary on Hogarth’s Engravings, trans. and intro. Innes and Gustav Herdan (1794–1799; repr. London: Cresset Press, 1966), 5, and Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World (London: Faber, 1997), 390. 67 John Trusler, John Nichols and John Ireland, The Works of William Hogarth, with Descriptions and Explanations (London: Simpkin, Marshal, Hamilton, Kent & Co, n.d.), 197. I would like to thank Clare Bainbridge for enabling me to cite this book.

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So far this is all very innocent. The picture was, however, something of a political embarrassment to the Government, in that it portrayed the British soldiery as an uncouth, lecherous and drunken rabble at the time of the 1745 uprising, when Charles Edward Stuart’s army had reached as far south as Derby and caught the nation’s defending army with its breeches down: a circumstance clinically recorded in this picture—literally, in the case of one gallant defender. George II was unimpressed by 68 it: ‘A painter burlesque a soldier? Take his trumpery out of my sight!’ Neither would he have taken to the irony in the Midwife letter, which, in an accurate translation from the French article, completes its second paragraph thus: The Scene is placed at Tottenham-Court, where in a distant View is seen a File of Soldiers, marching in tolerable Order up the Hill; Discipline is less observed in the principal Design, but if you complain of this, I must ingenuously inform you, that Order and Subordination belong only to Slaves; for what everywhere else is called Licentiousness, assumes here the venerable name of Liberty. (1: 183)

What follows in the Rouquet piece, and consequently in the Midwife ‘Description’, is couched in objective and faintly ambiguous terms; it manages to convey clear disapproval of the ‘Foot-Guard’s’ behaviour, noting particularly the soldier with the pox, the ‘Women of Pleasure’ (‘Filles de joie’) leaning from the inn windows, and the ‘Soldier who has carried Things a little too far’ in his assault on the woman taking down linen (1: 184–5). The French commentator may have chosen to emphasize the lack of preparedness and the licentiousness of the British army, but why should the Midwife so slavishly have followed him? A dig of the writer’s own is even included at the end, departing from the original to end the piece: ‘Besides these [the ‘Women of Pleasure’], there are two Men fighting, and several other Objects which contribute to diversify and heighten the Humour of the whole’ (1: 185). This tone is identical to the one in which Mrs. M. ironically praises the ‘Wooden Wit’ of the slapstick in Queen Mab. Before leaving the ‘Description’ there remains an aspect of the Midwife as yet undiscussed, and that is the question of Jacobitism within the magazine. There has recently been much historical and critical attention to the presence of ‘emotional Jacobitism’ in eighteenth-century writings; clearly caution is important here, but 69 to consider the Midwife in the light of some of this recent work is instructive. We have encountered Towzer, with his impeccable oppositional pedigree, but to support Bolingbroke and a general anti-corruption ‘Patriot Opposition’ stance, as Mrs. Midnight so often overtly does, is not to be a Jacobite. Suffice it to state here, however, that there are a number of references and comments—and one complete piece—that indicate a substantial reservoir of sympathy for the Stuart cause within 68 Eveline Cruickshanks, Political Untouchables: The Tories and the ’45 (London: Duckworth, 1979), 38. Paulson notes that ‘The King saw straight to the popular point of the picture, that Hogarth was ridiculing the royal grenadiers’: Paulson, Popular and Polite Art, 24. 69 I refer to the exploration of Jacobite symbolism in popular and élite literature undertaken by Paul Monod, Howard Erskine-Hill and Murray Pittock. For adverse reactions to their work, see ELH 64, no. 4 (1997).

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the Midwife. Richard Rolt, discussed in Appendix 1 as a likely contributor to the periodical, may have fought with the Jacobite army in 1745, and the substantial evidence for attributing a cautious, and generally covert, pro-Stuart position to the Midwife will be considered in chapter five. It is notable that a month after the Midwife ‘Description’ appeared, the Student ran a similar piece on the same painting, but clearly by a different hand, and playing it safer than the Midwife, in that the language of art criticism was more extensively employed, and the misdeeds of the soldiers were tolerated with amused indulgence rather than submitted to censorious 70 scrutiny. Unusually for the Midwife, there are only two poems in the whole number for January 1751, and the longer is the last major item within the main body of the issue. It has never been credited to Smart, but as editor it must have been his decision to 71 include it. ‘An ODE on the NEW YEAR’ (1: 185–8) is substantial in length, and owes something in attitude and subject matter, if not in formal excellence of style, to Johnson’s imitations of Juvenal. Where it could have been, and in places is, a fairly stock attack on luxury and corruption within the state and a call for benevolence from the ‘Great’, it is also, however, a forthright, risky and radical attack on the monarchy: See there in various Heaps combin’d, The vast Designs of human Kind; Whatever swell’d the Statesman’s Thought, The Mischiefs and Ambition wrought … What Avarice, to crown his Store, Stole from the Orphan and the Poor; Or Luxury’s more shameful Waste, Squandered on th’ unthankful Feast. Ye Kings, and guilty Great, draw near; Before this awful Court appear: Bare to the Muse’s piercing Eye The Secrets of all Mortals lie; She, strict Avenger, brings to Light Your Crimes conceal’d in darkest Night; As Conscience, to her Trust most true, Shall judge between the oppress’d and you. (1: 186)

70 Rolt’s Jacobite involvement was claimed in the 1885–1900 DNB, but the 2004 edition makes no such association. It is conceivable that Rouquet’s piece provided a basis for the Student article too, but the latter diverges markedly from Rouquet in nature and tone, and nowhere quotes him directly as the Midwife piece does. The Student article explains, with uncompromisingly anti-Jacobite and Gallophobic irony, Hogarth’s depiction of a Frenchman showing a letter to an Independent Elector of Westminster (Rouquet has him a Scotsman), whereas the Midwife article merely reproduces Rouquet’s non-committal introduction of the incident: Student, 2: 161–8, see 164, and cf. Midwife, 1: 184. 71 A stanza of Smart’s poem of 1750, ‘To the reverend and learned Dr. Webster’ (published in the Student of a month previously, 2: 112) has similarities in terms of savagery of tone with this ‘Ode’: PW4, 163.

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Many of the social evils that furnish the targets for the Midwife’s prose also are castigated in this poem, such as the decline of learning in the Universities, and forced marriage for gain. It is rare in mid eighteenth-century poetry to encounter this directly political and polemical tone, which is Shelleyan in outrage if not in craft. It bears small relation to any commonwealthsman or Protestant tradition of dissent; its ‘Virtue’ is indistinguishable from that of Juvenal. The poet has asked Janus to arrest briefly the ‘strange Farce’ of society’s drive to wealth and preferment (in which ‘Harlequin diverts the Mob’, as he did in ‘Dumb Rhetoric’) and this is how the poem ends: Will Time indulge one Hour’s delay, Or give the Wretch intent on Pelf One Moment’s Credit with himself? Virtue, that true from false discerns, The vulgar courtly Phrase unlearns, Superior far to Fortune’s frown, Bestows alone the stable Crown, The Wreath from Honour’s Root that springs, That fades upon the brow of Kings. (1: 188)

If you are going to suggest that virtue is incompatible with kingship, it might be wise to bury such a charge in a heap of ‘nonsensical titbits’, and so the very last item in the number reverts to the facetious—and in this case downright execrable—drollery 72 that has for so long offended Smart’s critics: An EPIGRAM on Mr. Timothy Grouse, who has a remarkably long Nose. – The Hint from the Greek. In search of Tim Grouse I’ve been taking a Tour, Yet still I am much at a Loss: Quoth Jack he’ll be here at the Park in an Hour, For his NOSE is now at Charing-Cross.

The section entitled ‘The MIDWIFE’S POLITICKS: Or, Gossip’s Chronicle of the Affairs of Europe’ concluded each issue of the periodical (excepting the last). It was an apparently lighthearted version of the ‘current affairs’ or—in eighteenth-century parlance—‘history’ sections included at the end of many miscellanies and essayperiodicals: however, in amongst the many jokes dependent on Mrs. Midnight’s persona (such as her admiration of Pope Joan, 1: 42) was a great deal of serious and reasoned comment on Britain’s foreign policy, which in more or less covert ways, entered in debate with other periodicals and with the government itself. The material in this large body of writing will not be covered minutely here, but I would suggest that a considerable amount of historical study remains to be done in untangling its local and specific preoccupations: work already admirably set in train by Chris 73 Mounsey. 72 Devlin, Poor Kit Smart, 54. 73 In the main these sections are the best evidence to support Mounsey’s case that commentators have failed to see the Midwife as a ‘crucial source of political comment on

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The contents of the January 1751 number of the Midwife, then, are varied, idiosyncratic—but not in the main bizarrely so, taken in the context of contemporary magazines—and combatively engaged with current intellectual preoccupations. Its comedy, ingenuity, and zestful invective should reinforce rather than detract from its status as an outstandingly interesting document of mid eighteenth-century culture and politics. Now that the nature of the Midwife has been demonstrated as comprehensively as is possible here, I would like to move on to examine the extensive considerations that follow on from much of the material so far discussed. Mary Midnight, who describes herself as ‘a Woman of prodigious Vivacity, of fine fertile Fancy, of profound Learning, of good sound solid substantial Sense’ (2: 147), has much to tell us, in her garrulous way, about Christopher Smart and the shifts to which impecunious scholars were driven in 1750. The choice and use of this remarkable woman as a persona reveals a great deal about popular and élite culture, about perceptions of gender, and about the status of authorship during the long decline of the patronage system, and it is she—in Edward Burns’s terms, an unusually talkative and revelatory ‘third person’—who will help me explore these matters in the following two chapters.

the events leading up to the Seven Years’ War’. He shows illuminatingly how they may have functioned as coded radicalism, particularly with reference to foreign policy: Chris Mounsey, Christopher Smart, 99–105.

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Chapter 3

A ‘Terrible Old Lady’: The Persona of ‘Mary Midnight’ Writing, when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy. ...since the kings are on their travels and the laws are too hard, the only thing that counts at the moment is gossip. 1 Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto … ’

Attention to the use of personae in eighteenth-century periodicals, I have argued, can broaden our understanding of perceptions of gender, the tension between popular and élite cultures in the period, and the status of authorship in relation to those two factors: in this chapter and the next Mrs. Mary Midnight will act as an exemplary guide in an exploration of this claim. The previous chapter gave a small sample of the variety of her written voices, yet her original introduction to the public, her modus operandi, her styles and her origins remain to be explored. This chapter, too, suggests some of the reasons why Smart may have chosen to use this extraordinary imaginary woman as his principal persona. One important determining factor has been pinpointed by Chris Mounsey: as a woman Smart could ‘write the most outrageous double entrendres about government policy and claim [he was], as [a woman], not intelligent to enough to write with two meanings at once.’2 Yet this is not the whole story, for by the middle of the second number Mary Midnight had established incontrovertibly her impeccable intellectual credentials with ‘The Neglect of the Greek Language’, as we shall see. The sheer multiplicity of her literary, cultural and social preoccupations indicates that Mounsey’s may not be a fully adequate explanation, or indeed, necessarily the decisive one. The way that Mary Midnight’s character and preoccupations become established over the first three numbers of the magazine will be my initial concern. Then, linking her persona loosely to Christopher Smart via the two personae which he was concurrently deploying in the Student (‘Chimaericus Cantabrigiensis’ and the

1 Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 2:11. Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto on Feeble and Bitter Love’, Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries (1918), trans. Barbara Wright (London: John Calder, 1977), 34. 2 Chris Mounsey, Christopher Smart: Clown of God (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 15.

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‘Female Student’), I will go on to ask the initial, most important question: what does the persona of Mary Midnight say which Christopher Smart, Cambridge scholar and aspirant poet, feels he cannot? This is also—more broadly—a way of ascertaining what her presence enables Smart to do. Answering this question will also go some way towards answering the question of why he chose to deploy her, for Smart’s decision to write in the persona of a woman was a remarkable and a revealing one: there was scanty precedent for a man deciding to allow an imagined woman to write and edit his magazine. Paying close attention to two major ways in which Mary Midnight’s gender is used to lend power to the writer’s arguments, this chapter is also intended as a demonstration of how one may gain insight into certain ideological assumptions and givens of eighteenth-century society through studying the choice and deployment of personae in periodicals. Before we begin to see the character of Mrs. Midnight establishing authority over the material which makes up the Midwife, and marking it with her own stamp, it is useful to draw attention to John and Deborah Sitter’s perceptive description of 4 Mary Midnight as a ‘loose-fitting’ persona. Indeed, one of the important revelatory aspects of Mrs. M. is in fact her manifest impossibility as a consistent or functioning being within her society. So although her character—her bumptious, sagacious, witty character—stays loosely coherent throughout at least the first two volumes of the Midwife, her circumstances of life and her multiple occupations (scholar, editor, midwife, projector, and adviser to government ministers) signal her rhetorical origins and nature: her distance from what here can most helpfully be called fictional realism. It is through her very unfeasibility that she tells us most about eighteenthcentury culture, and it is at the points where we encounter the contradictions and antinomies of her presentation that we can most clearly appreciate Mrs. Midnight as transactional, rhetorical and therefore working to indicate most clearly her creator’s 5 meaning. Establishing ‘Mrs. Mary Midnight’ How, then, were new readers of the first number of the Midwife on or soon after the sixteenth of October 1750, introduced to a person called Mrs. Mary Midnight? The first piece would have given initial and powerful notice of a politically engaged and bitter voice of protest, speaking with an especial sympathy for lower-class women. Without preamble or introduction the written voice of Mrs. Midnight’s boy servant theatrically supplies the superscription for this night-piece: ‘Come Dame, light up your Lanthorn, and let us prowl.’ Mary Midnight—not named within the article or assigned as its author—addresses her ‘Boy’, giving in direct and theatrical speech her thoughts on what she sees in the night streets of London. She begins thus:

3 Mahony and Rizzo accept both of these essay-series as being by Smart: Ann. Bib., 139, 153. 4 British Literary Magazines: The Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson 1698–1788, ed. Alvin Sullivan (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1983), 225. 5 ‘transactional’: see chap. 1 above, 34–7.

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Now fie upon seeking honest men in Knaves Skins. There’s not a Street, Lane or Alley, in all the City, but I have trod, and can hardly find a man worthy of giving the Good Morrow to. Why what Rascals are these? Have they banish’t honest Men out of the Town quite? Alas, poor Virtue! What hast thou done to deserve this Contempt? Thy Company is out of request, and thou hast walk’d so long alone, that thou art, even, at last walked away with thyself. (1: 6)

There would be few of the Midwife’s earliest readers who would recognize parts of this piece as being directly quoted from a much longer article in the October 1746 number of John Hill’s British Magazine. Even if they did, and were able to check the Midwife version against the British Magazine’s, they would find as they read on that the piece had been radically changed. The introductory letter to the earlier article—entitled ‘Diogenes’s Lost Labour’, and indeed in early seventeenth-century pamphlet satire Diogenes did assume the status of the truth-telling, admonitory philosopher—explained it as being a found manuscript, an ‘old piece of Satire on the Manners of the then Times’, but, impossibly, as being more than two hundred 6 and twenty years old. The editor of the Midwife took this piece, transformed it, and used it as the raw material for an updated, pointed and Juvenalian satire on the London of 1750. The powerful are out in the streets alongside the powerless: the exploitative Common-Councilman, the corrupt scion of an ancient family (who buys his interest at Court for an inflated price by rigging elections), and the fashionablydressed woman are contrasted with the underpaid, and exploited men of the Watch and homeless and misused young women: Boy, snuff the Candle, and see who these are that lodge themselves on the Bulks7, and lay naked at the Shop Doors. Oh! I see myself now, they are poor Orphans, young helpless Girls, that have been debauch’d and ruin’d by the Sons, and ’Prentices of the honest Citizens, and after that turn’d out by their generous and compassionate Masters ... However that may be, it need not affect us Boy. Lay still my Heart! Women are not of the Human Species, so down with them, down with them. Boy, if ever thou livest to be a Man (as in all probability thou wilt, if the Halter don’t catch thee soon) do thou, whenever the poor Creatures tumble down, kick them about, ’tis the Way of the World, Boy, and all must conform to Custom. In this case, you are to imitate the Dogs, who all take a snap at that Cur, that is calling for Mercy. (1: 7)

None of this material is in the original piece, which employs personifications such as ‘Usury’, and when we note that the mid eighteenth-century saw the first organized charitable attempts to combat female homelessness, disease and prostitution, the contemporary force of this is undeniable. Indeed, the irony here—remarkable for its outspoken proto-feminism—is coldly directed and carries a radical charge. Lance Bertelsen has given a valuable reading of this piece which justly praises its ‘sardonic 6 The British Magazine 1, ed. John Hill, (1746): 293–8. For Diogenes, see Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 101–2. 7 This is the ‘framework projecting from the front of a shop: a stall’ (OED). Congreve’s 1700 Way of the World has Lady Wishfort consigning her servant to a life of prostitution ‘under a brandy-seller’s bulk’ (act 5, scene 1).

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power’. Goldsmith’s 1759 version owes much to both Mrs. Midnight’s ‘prowl’ and 8 its progenitors, but favours sentiment over satire. The first ‘prowl’ is fundamental to the establishment of the Midnight persona: the twin hallmarks of the lady’s presence, throughout the run of the magazine, will be a tone of gossipy immediacy—in the form of an old-fashioned diction which establishes her as belonging to an older society of oral modes of communication— and the assumption of a tart, compassionate authority which makes few concessions to any available models of femininity, domesticity or gentility. The author grants his persona a keen but ineffectual eye to the charms of the opposite sex: ‘What wondrous little Legs the Men have here, I can’t see ’em even with my Lanthorn, and my Spectacles.’ The expectations raised by this opening article, however, of a bitter radical severity are to be subverted by the end of this number, for, over the run of the magazine, it is often the case that Mary Midnight tempers her astringency with milder, more apparently nonsensical forms of ridicule. The impossible inflations of hyperbole, the punning figures of syllepsis and paronomasia, and the fantasies of prosopopoeia are her pleasures and her shields. In her next appearance Mrs. Midnight, again without affixing her name, comments 9 upon the letter from ‘Martha Johnson’: I have inserted this Letter of Mrs. Johnson’s, verbatim, without the least alteration: Her Diction is the pure Language of Nature; and her Sentiments carry more Weight in her own Words, than they would do mangled by the most masterly Hand. The Contents of her Letter are too true for I personally know the poor deceased Woman she speaks of. (1: 15)

The effect of this introduction is to reinforce the authority of the persona, as a rational judge of rhetoric and a reliable and sober witness. It also establishes her as the member of an active but subordinate—and in this case rurally based—female community: ‘Mrs. Johnson’ has appealed to her (in a case detailing the brutal actions of a local squire) as an experienced and knowledgeable figure of some importance to that community, by virtue of her position as a midwife. ‘Throughout Europe’ says Olwen Hufton, ‘the licensed or established midwife in a community was a person of 10 good repute who could be called upon to appear in court and give evidence.’ Mrs. Midnight’s writing here provides an example of what Carey McIntosh has described as the ‘loose’, ‘open’, oral style which by this point in the eighteenth century was 11 starting to be proscribed by grammarians and rhetoricians. This also serves to place 8 ‘the first organized attempts’: A.D. Harvey, Sex in Georgian England (London: Duckworth, 2001), 101. Lance Bertelsen, ‘Journalism, Carnival, and Jubilate Agno’, ELH 59, no. 2 (1992): 366. Goldsmith, ‘A City Night-piece’, The Bee 4, in vol. 1 of Works, ed. A. Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 430–33 (reprinted as Letter 118 of The Citizen of the World). 9 For the import of this prosopopoeic letter, see introduction above, 7. 10 Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 184. 11 Carey McIntosh, The Evolution of English Prose 1700–1800: Style, Politeness and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), see esp. 23, 27–8, 31.

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her as an untimely, and not over-educated figure, writing for a wide audience: she needs to explain to her readers, for instance, the meaning of the word ‘verbatim’. When she next writes, however, Mrs. M.—as editor, but again not named here— situates herself as part of a very different community, for she introduces an essay reprinted from Johnson’s Rambler (the letter from ‘Parthenia’, no. 55) in urban and literary terms. The Rambler is ‘a Paper Publish’d every Tuesday and Saturday, price 2d which is worthy the Patronage of all Gentlemen of Taste and Genius’ (1: 16). Already the telling disjunctions are appearing: to whom—and, concomitantly, for whom—does this person speak? For the masculine, polite world of the town and of Enlightenment belles lettres, or for a more traditional, rural, and feminine subculture of the oppressed? It seems that the latter is to be the case, for the following Rambler story, ‘The Villain: a True History’ is the account of an innocent woman’s downfall through a false marriage to an aristocratic bigamist. Mary Midnight for the first time affixes her own name to her comments as she introduces the story, and here she is more uncompromisingly proto-feminist than at any other point in the whole run of the magazine: ‘As we have many more Male than Female Writers, it is not to be wondered at, that the Vices and Foibles of the Women are most maliciously satyrized; it shall be my Province sometimes to give my Sex their Revenge, by laying open the Villainy of these our Masters, these Lords of the Creation.’ As in her first ‘prowl’, she lays the blame for such villainy upon ‘Custom’: ‘But why should it be a less Crime to deceive an unexperienced Girl, whose Age and Situation render it impossible she should know the World, than it would be to direct a blind Man to the Brink of a Precipice, I am at a loss to imagine, yet Custom, that Tyrant Custom, has taught us 12 this and many more Absurdities’ (1: 22–3). Mrs. Midnight, however, is about to show her hand as a fully literary being, and the next article to appear under her own byline owes more to Alexander Pope than to Mary Astell. In ‘On Poetry’ (1: 32–5), Mary Midnight proves to be the critical possessor of a sarcastic wit and considerable education. Whilst her subject matter is the Scriblerian target of mass unaccomplished authorship, her style, far from being ‘loose’, is balanced and rhetorically sophisticated: ‘Every man scribbles Verses, and attempts at Poetry, as every Woman curls her Locks, and endeavours to appear beautiful, and both seem willing to deceive themselves; for the one is as fondly prone to be acknowledged a Wit, as the other to be celebrated for a Beauty’ (1: 33). This Mary Midnight is personally acquainted with published poets, derides the false sublime in the manner of Pope’s Peri Bathous, and chooses for chief butt an uneducated parson’s clerk with the temerity to try his hand at verse. Though Mrs. Midnight does not in this piece brandish the most impressive weapons in her scholarly armoury, she will do so shortly. By way of a comic ‘Ballad’, composed by ‘Nelly Pentweazle’ (now accepted as Smart’s), which accomplishes the twin aims of puffing the Student and demonstrating 12 For appeals to ‘custom’ as a regulatory and suppressive force in eighteenth-century English language and law, and the reaction against it at mid-century, see John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730–1780: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 112, 143.

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the sexual and social redundancy of the ‘Fop’, the number proper finishes with 13 Garrick and Barry’s warring ‘Occasional Prologues’. These are followed by the first example of Mrs. Midnight’s own poetry, which introduces the aspect of her persona as theatrical crowd-pleaser, thus leaving readers with the impression of a lighter, less acerbic and more exuberantly comic woman than they might hitherto have been led to expect. Containing an old-fashioned sledge-hammer pun, Mrs. Midnight’s fantasy attempt at mediation between the two parties is announced thus: ‘An Occasional Prologue. Occasion’d by the two Occasional Prologues: to be spoken either by Mr. Garrick or Mr. Barry, or both, assisted in the Delivery thereof by Mrs. Midnight, 14 being the first Time of her appearing on any Stage’. Giving one of the celebrated actors shrewd lines referring to Gay’s Beggar’s Opera—Peachum and Lockit as exemplars of the quarrel which produces pecuniary profit—Mary Midnight writes herself onto the stage: ‘Enter Mrs. Midnight in haste’. She then deftly manages to depreciate herself, to convey unequivocally her own authority as moral and literary arbiter, and to allow herself to dismiss two illustrious figures of great cultural importance, all in four short lines: ‘I, even I, old Woman as I am,/ Have just Pretence your Poetry to damn;/ To fix the Standard between wrong and right,/ And call you both a Couple of—Good Night.’ Faced with this, the outgunned actors ‘bow to Mrs. Midnight, and then retire; after which, the old Lady sings the following Simile’: While Garrick smart, and blustring Barry jar, Like rough and smooth, or Oil and Vinegar, I, like an hard-boil’d Egg come in between, And mix their Matters, as I intervene; I form, (for Rhyme’s sake add, with JUST INTENTION) Betwixt the fighting Fluids a Convention; Which being thus conjoin’d, please every Palate, And make a pretty Figure in a Sallad. (1: 40)

At this point readers could no longer be in doubt that the name of ‘Mary Midnight’ would guarantee amusing, accessible and sometimes formidably satirical reading matter. Matters social and literary would be envisaged in a distinctive voice which, impossibly and entertainingly, had command of the male prerogatives of wit, rationality, learning and judgement, and yet at the same time could employ the traditionally female attributes of loose, unlicensed chatter and common-sense domestic practice, which in turn were linked to older, orally-based forms of rural community and mutual benevolence.15 Readers must accustom themselves to finding 13 The poem is entitled ‘The Distressed Damsel’ in PW4: 156. Also see Karina Williamson’s explanation for these prologues: PW4, 380. 14 Mrs. M. is untimely: punning had been unfashionable for many years: ‘now it is banished the Town and all good company’: Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (1711; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 31. 15 As described by Bernard Capp in ‘Separate Domains? Women and Authority in Early Modern England’, The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, eds. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hundle (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 117–45.

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the persona to be a dynamic and active one, rather than—like ‘Mr. Spectator’ and many of his lesser epigones—a passive bystander. Furthermore, they are being asked to recognise that they are dealing with a writer to whom the underlying message of each article takes precedence over attempting faithfully to represent a person whom they might meet on the street. This would mean that they should be aware of ‘Mary Midnight’ not so much as a coherent personality, but as a fluid, unfixed, rhetorical method, moving to persuade in different ways, and likely to employ Juvenalian invective as well as to undermine the authorial voice itself, as Swift did in his Tale of a Tub characterisation of the ‘Hack’. The satirist, in the words of Ronald Paulson, ‘demands decisions of his readers, not feelings’: the implications of such demands 16 being made by a woman are mapped in this chapter and beyond. Matters directly political were also on Mrs. Midnight’s agenda, for ‘The MIDWIFE’S POLITICKS: Or, Gossip’s Chronicle of the Affairs of Europe’, a substantial section of some seven or eight pages, which closed every issue of the magazine, cloaked serious political comment on Britain’s foreign policies under 17 quantities of apparently frivolous and often indelicate Midnightian badinage: My Readers will see I am somewhat of a Geographer, by the Order in which I place the several Countries; For taking Europe in three Ranges, of three Divisions each, and proceeding with them all from the Left Hand to the Right, any Woman, or even any Beau, may trace my Method upon a Map—if it be objected, that other monthly Histories begin at the Top, or with the Northern Countries: My Answer is, that I have a great Affection for the warm Regions, and that it would be no Disadvantage to your male Historians if, like me, they took pains to examine the Bottom of all Things with which they had any 18 Concern. (1: 41–2)

It would be priggish to miss the snigger quotient of this declaration, but one ought to look closely at what is happening here. Here speaks an educated old woman of acerbic but vulgar wit, who knows her own mind as well as she knows both the female body and the deceptions of language, and is not afraid to criticize ignorance, from whatever sex it may come. She is a rara avis: at this time there were surely few such beings extant, either in reality or on paper. The way that the persona commonly operates in the ‘Midwife’s Politicks’ section is to obscure contentious—possibly seditious—comment on European political affairs with facetious, obfuscating reference to gender, as Mounsey has shrewdly demonstrated.19 This is clearly exemplified by Mary Midnight’s early strictures on Italy: ‘The Papacy carried it with a much higher Hand when the holy Mother Joan filled the sacred See: But the male Sovereigns use her present Successor, who I doubt wants some good female Advice, just as they would a mere old Woman, in their own 16 Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 15. 17 Discussed above in chap. 2, 70. 18 Smart scholars may note that this reference, together with the ‘map’ of Europe presented as the figure of an old woman which forms the ‘Midwife’s Politicks’ in no. 3 (1: 137–42), seems to have been remembered by Smart in Jubilate Agno, C101–5. 19 Mounsey, Christopher Smart, 102–5.

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ironical and profane Sense of that venerable Title’ (1: 42). The epithet of ‘old woman’ was hurled about with undiscriminating vigour in eighteenth-century journalistic comment: Fielding, in 1734, provided in the Craftsman ‘an hilarious demonstration that James Pitt [‘Mother Osborne’, the Whig government apologist] was in fact an old woman.’ The Duke of Newcastle, Pelham’s brother, later to became prime minister, was noted for his ‘extreme timidity’ and ‘constant chattering’, and was thus an ‘old woman’ to coffee-house wits, but I would suggest that Mrs. M.’s robust self-confidence precludes her from being seen as a satirical portrait of Newcastle.20 A political and religious comment has just been made here about the Papacy, but is liable to be overlooked among the fall-out from the battle of the sexes, with Mrs. Midnight introducing the bizarre figure of Pope Joan, and then parading the usual pejorative epithet for those of her age and gender, only to reclaim it with vigour for the forces of light. Elsewhere, the pugnacious garrulity of the persona can work to point up deficiencies of masculine courage, in this case referring to one of the fairly frequent incidences of British sailors being captured by pirates from the Maghreb: With regard to the lesser Mahometan states on the Coasts of Africa, I do not think any Woman would have borne from them, what some Heroes of the other Sex have lately been submitted to. But as I am not so credulous, whatever may be said to the Disparagement of my Sex and Age, as to believe any Story at first Hearing, I shall wait ’till we have more authentick Advices ... before I pass my Verdict on that Business. (1: 43)

By the end of the first number then, the workings of the persona are substantially in place; the success of the magazine and the popularity of Mrs. Midnight were 21 immediately beyond doubt. She has, however, other interests and talents which are only later to be revealed. The full, stunning extent of Mrs. M’s learning will only become clear in the middle of the following number, when in her next appearance she announces ‘Some Reflections on the Neglect of the Greek Language. By Mrs. Midnight; humbly address’d to all the Universities in Europe’.22 The nerve of that ‘humbly’ is breathtaking: As the Greek Language is at length a dead Language with a Vengeance, since few Scholars living understand the very Elements of it, I thought a Proposal for its Revival, would be no means unworthy either of me or you. – The almost universal Ignorance of this Tongue, is the more astonishing when we reflect on the surpassing Skill and unwearied Diligence of its Professors, in all the Universities of Europe, but more especially in our own. (1: 65) 20 ‘an hilarious demonstration’: Martin C. Battestin, with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Routledge, 1989), 174. ‘the Duke of Newcastle’: W.A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England 1714–1760 (London: E. Arnold, 1977), 258, and Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 206, 226. 21 See chap. 2 above, 47. 22 Margaret Cavendish dedicated her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668) ‘to all the Universities in Europe’; she may be a target here: A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ed. Stephen Clucas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 1.

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One might wonder what the ‘Professors’ are actually doing, for despite the ‘diligence’ of their ironically eulogized efforts, they cannot all be included amongst the number of the ‘few Scholars’ who actually comprehend the language fully. The midwife then goes into vigorous battle, revealing for the first time the extent of her unlikely familiarity with the ancients, and brandishing it as shield, sword and buckler: Homer in poetry, Hippocrates in Physic, Herodotus in History, Plato in moral Philosophy, Aristotle in natural Philosophy and Criticism, Plutarch in every Thing, have no Equals of any other Nation or Language. Let us rouze therefore, my dear Brothers and Sisters, let us rouze, and let my Example fill you with Emulation. I have here sent you a Greek Translation of Virgil’s famous Epigram on Augustus, done literally, very literally indeed, that you may the better understand it. (1: 65–6)

Mrs. M. then prints the epigram in Latin, followed by her (able) translation into Greek, without making the concession—to any of her ‘Brothers’ or ‘Sisters’—of 23 printing it in English. By thus triumphantly establishing her academic credentials and out-scholaring the scholars, Mary Midnight as learned exemplar and malapert (she closes her letter ‘Yours affectionately, M. MIDNIGHT’) has now added another arrow of competence to her already overfull quiver. To those in the know, the writer of this piece has delivered a vigorously sarcastic criticism of the decline of learning in the universities, and for everyone else he has provided a bit of entertaining knockabout nonsensical impertinence: more Swift’s Bickerstaff than Steele’s, you might say. Politics are present here too, for neither Mrs. M. nor Smart thought a great deal of the appointment of the Whig Duke of Newcastle to the Chancellorship 24 of Cambridge in 1749. During the course of the second and third number Mary Midnight continues to reveal new aspects of her formidably capable and energetic personality. In the piece following this one she claims a sub-Dunciadic position as an Empress of ‘Dulness’ (‘M. MIDNIGHT, to all the Empresses on Earth, Greeting’, 1: 66–8), commencing this exercise with a sentence marked both by her trademark hyperbole and her (parodic) tendency to stray into a sort of misbegotten, bombastic lyricism: Tho’ it be well known to all nations, as far as the glorious Sun, which is the Eye of the Universe, hath darted his enlivening Beams, and wherever his pale Mistress the Moon hath spread her modest Mantle, that the first Number of our imperial, superb and pompous magazine was published no longer ago than the 16th of October, 1750, O.S. (1: 66)

23 Williamson gives a contemporary translation: ‘Rain all the night, with sport returns the day;/Great Caesar thus with Jove divides the sway’: PW4, 381. 24 Smart’s persona ‘Chimaericus’ is almost certainly referring to this appointment in a Student piece: a ‘certain great man’ is going to start ‘a Professorship of Dancing in both the Universities ... Indeed, there is a report that the same great personage intends also to introduce a Professor of Tumbling. This (they say) is contrived to promote a quickness of succession, viz. that while one set of men are bowing themselves into preferment, another may be obliged to tumble out of it’: Student, 2: 330. In Jubilate Agno, Smart once again reproved the university: ‘For I pray God for the professors of the University of Cambridge to attend and to amend’: Jubilate Agno, B69.

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She is an empress, then, here, and only later in the Midwife do we meet her, in her second ‘prowl’, as a working midwife having trouble getting her clients to pay their bills (1: 90). Somehow, too, she is a projector, with time to ‘shut (herself) up for seven Years, to study some Improvements and Additions’ to her strange and 25 suggestive ‘Cat-Organ’ (1: 98). In the second ‘Midwife’s Politicks’, Mrs. M. encrypts an unregenerate disdain for the absentee kingship of the house of Hanover, showing that she also can devote time and thought to both internal and European politics (1: 93–5), and in the reply to her ‘Cousin Reynard’ she displays a disconcerting familiarity with the workings of 26 provincial law-courts (1: 112–15). Readers will come to realize that it is pointless to consult the Midwife for details of births and deaths or stock-market figures—thereby being shown that a battling willingness to tackle the pretensions of other magazines is also one of Mrs. M.’s attributes—for she concludes the second number with the following N.B. in small print There are many People married since our last, and a great Number have died; but as it is impossible with all our Arts to unmarry those, or to bring these to Life, we should leave that Part to the Miners and Magaziners. The STOCKS stand just where they did, and SAINTS in Change-Alley, are as righteous as ever. Sing Tantara, ra, ra, Rogues all, Rogues all &c. (1: 96)

The final aspect of Mrs. Midnight as persona to which I would like to draw attention here is her capacity as tradeswoman: she has an ingenious ability to combine puffery with social satire, as evidenced by her letter to ‘the Right Honourable the Lady *****’ in the third number: Ever since I commenced Author, I have listned [sic] with due Difference to the Opinion of the Publick, and I have the Honour to inform your Ladyship that all our Sex, and the more sensible Part of the other, have deign’d to give me a Reading, and placed my Lucubrations among their most curious Manuals. My Publisher has, this Week, receiv’d letters from two hundred and ninety nine different People; and the Purport of them all is to enquire when a Volume will be completed ... (1: 122–3)

Note that splendid ‘Difference’, where ninety-nine out of a hundred of her ‘BrotherMagaziners’ would have professed the ‘Deference’ which the sentence expects. Mrs. M. explains that these petitioners are at variance as to how lavishly such a volume

25 The quotation demonstrates Mrs. M.’s trademark alliteration, parodied by Bonnell Thornton. It should also be noted that ‘parodic hyperbole’ was an element of Smart’s writing as early as his (1742–43) Hop-Garden: Mounsey, Christopher Smart, 77. For more on the ‘Cat Organ’ see chap. 6 below, 191–4. 26 Noting that the kings of Poland and Prussia don’t spend much time in their own ‘Royal Dominions’, she continues with heavy sarcasm: ‘His Britannic Majesty is more just to his Kingdoms, tho’ his Absence from them has been usually lamented six or seven Months in every two Years. We do not yet know all the Effects of his late Visit to Hanover, from which such Benefits are expected to the House of Austria, and the Germanic Union’, 1: 95. For more on ‘Reynard’, see chap. 6 below, 170–173.

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should be bound, as to how often the Midwife should appear and at how much it should be priced. She continues: But, notwithstanding their Remonstrances, I shall never alter my Price till the whole Body of my monthly Purchasers, which are, at least, twenty thousand, are, in this Respect, of one Mind; and, as they live, many of them, at a great Distance, and some are gouty and infirm, I don’t suppose such general Agreement can be effected before Lady-Day next; and, to that Period of Time, all your Ladyship’s Friends will be served at Three-pence per Number as usual. (1: 123)

The deft manipulation that successful puffery requires is demonstrated here, the Midwife being associated with both a nationwide and an aristocratic readership. It is not only the ‘Difference’ that is different from other such claims in periodicals, however, for behind this nonsensical suggestion of national agreement being reached by ‘Lady-Day next’ lies a wry comment about the fickle and unresolvable nature of 27 public opinion as decision-making agent. By the beginning of the fourth number, then, the persona of Mary Midnight is completely established: she is a writer—an acute and witty social and political satirist—but subsumed within that role are the transactionally used, locally required ones of working midwife, literary critic, poet, actress, prodigious scholar, projector, and shrewd businesswoman at home in the practical world of the new print culture. Such a protean figure is, of course, impossible, but that very fact is constructive: it allows the writer access to comedy—the impossible is sister to the absurd— and grants him an effective eidolon with which to observe and comment on the contradictions of the society in which he moves. Indeed, hers is an ‘equal wide survey’, John Barrell’s phrase for the difficulty he sees eighteenth-century writing having in providing an eagle’s eye view of a rapidly expanding society. The Midwife sometimes seems to satirize this very dilemma, including panoramic references within one article: the best example is the prosopopoeic ‘[G]enuine Memoirs ... of a very unfortunate TYE-WIG’, who has graced the heads of a physician, a lawyer, an actor, a Chelsea pensioner, a farmer, a scarecrow, a beggar, and now found his true 28 destiny with a boot-black (2: 1–6).

27 Smart was valued at the time for his skilful practice of puffery: Arthur Sherbo suggested that Arthur Murphy, Smart’s friend, a playwright and journalist, learned effective puffics from Smart: Ann. Bib, 36, and see Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 69. In this article the puffery is dual purpose, for Mrs. M. then praises Thomas Warton’s New market—published by John Newbery—and prints a section. 28 Barrell argues that imaginative literature in this period was seeking to find a position from which the full diversity of English society could be comprehensively represented: see John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730–1780: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 19–21, 29.

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Christopher Smart, ‘Chimaericus Cantabrigiensis’ and the Student Use of Personae In 1749 the twenty-seven year old Christopher Smart, after a distinguished but increasingly dissolute ten years at Cambridge and ‘remaining very much in debt and without any known promise of income’, moved to London, embarking upon a precarious attempt to make a living as a professional author. He was abandoning a secure position as ‘the pride of Cambridge and the chief poetical ornament of that university’, and scholars have speculated at length on the reasons for his decision to do so. The biographical consensus is that as a convivial and exuberant figure, he found the constraints of life as a college fellow intolerable: he could not marry, and was debarred for lengthy periods from the intellectual and social life of London, where he was already established as part of a lively group of playwrights, musicians 29 and wits. Smart’s journalism just prior to the appearance of the Midwife proves a revealing locus for tracing signs of the imminent conception of Mary Midnight. She was not the first mask Smart chose to assume, for by the time of her print debut he had already written six essays for the Student, a magazine which, since June 1750, he 30 had been co-editing with Bonnell Thornton for John Newbery. This series of essays was conducted under the persona of ‘Chimaericus Cantabrigiensis’, and in the form of an introduction and fourteen chapters, eventually comprised a substantial body of accomplished literary and social satires. The ‘Castle-Building’ pieces, which also began in June 1750, stand as magnificently unbuttoned verbal play: written in an inventive admixture of acid, comedy and polemic, they are useful to enquirers after Mary Midnight for a number of reasons. Chief among these is the fact that they are firmly attributable to Christopher Smart, and that many of the sentiments voiced by Chimaericus are quite undoubtedly Smart’s also, and thus furnish us with some revealing insights into his state of mind at the beginning of Mrs. Midnight’s 31 existence. It is instructive to place Chimaericus’ work next to Mrs. Midnight’s, and note how frequently their preoccupations coincide. As an example of this, consider the gentleman’s dim view of the state of learning in the two universities: ‘After a man has been some ten or a dozen years of the University, he has a least a chance of understanding the vernacular’ (Student, 2: 42). In a later piece, which has all the appearance of also being by Smart, an anonymous lady writer desires that ‘all the BUCKS and BLOODS of both universities would peruse this paper ... and that such

29 ‘remaining very much’: Ann. Lett., 41. ‘the pride of Cambridge’: Charles Burney in PW4, xxxviii. For Smart’s early days in London see especially Roland B. Botting, ‘Christopher Smart in London’, Research Studies of the State College of Washington 7, no. 1 (1939): 3–15; Ann. Lett., 14–15; Arthur Sherbo, Christopher Smart: Scholar of the University (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), 35; Mounsey, Christopher Smart, 81–144. 30 See for example Ann. Lett., xxxiii. 31 Mahony and Rizzo agree with Botting and Sherbo that Smart wrote the ‘CastleBuilder’ essays: Ann. Bib., 139; Botting, ‘Christopher Smart in London’, 10; Sherbo, Scholar of the University, 68.

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as can’t read would get a friend to read it to them’ (2: 203). Though the topic was not of course Smart’s copyright, it will be already familiar in its Midnightian guise as the ‘Neglect of the Greek Language’. Furthermore, the tone and type of Mrs. M.’s scorn for ignorance—particularly in conjunction with a slavish dependence upon received rote opinion—is exactly Chimaericus’ own: ‘Castle-Building’ is not only for the ‘improvement’, but, more importantly, for the ‘employment’ of the understanding. The six pre-Midwife ‘Castle-Building’ pieces, as we are about to see, demonstrate at work not so much an experimental persona, as a rationale, justification and blueprint for the deployment of one. In the first essay Chimaericus describes his personal appearance—low in stature, with eyes of an ‘amorous kind, for they are always looking at each other’ (1: 249)—which was Smart’s own; apart from this there are no allusions to the personal history or situation of the persona. One is left to infer from his knowledge of and love for the ancients that he is an accomplished scholar, from his bitterness at the neglect of patrons that he has not been successful in attracting their generosity, and from his imperfectly-reined exuberance that he is 33 a trammelled wit. This is in fact a close approximation of the position inhabited by Christopher Smart in 1750: he uses the essays as a vehicle for satirizing the follies and pretensions of both academic and lay society. Chimaericus takes the name for his chosen activity from Spectator 167, but dispenses with Steele’s lofty moral attitudinising in order to make his own ‘Castle34 Building’ lucubrations do more than one job. Where Steele condemns ‘Vitruvius’ as a ‘Liar in Soliloquy’, Smart makes his ‘New System of Castle-Building’ into an original and forceful argument for the exercise of the imagination as father to the exercise of benevolence: ‘I would have therefore, those people, who are in affluence, and whom providence has appointed the treasurers of the poor, conceive for a few moments, that they are distress’d themselves, and level their Castle to the humility of the Cottage’ (1: 332–3). Chimaericus defines ‘Castle-Building’ as ‘the science of aerial architecture’ which ‘is of much too vague a nature to be comprehended in a concise regular definition’. However, it can be called ‘the craft of erecting baseless fabrics in the air, and peopling them with proper notional inhabitants for the employment and improvement of the understanding’ (1: 223). Smart’s description of the practice of ‘Castle-Building’ can be read as a metaphor for the business of conducting a journal through an imaginary persona, and, indeed, for any exercise in which people might find themselves representing ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’. Chimaericus also inadvertently indicates the duplicity inherent in the use of personae, for what are 32 For Midwife pieces on the decline of learning in the universities, see Appendix 2. 33 ‘Smart’s own’: see Sherbo, Scholar of the University, 61. Chimaericus’ admiration for the ‘ancients’ is exemplified at 1: 285–286. For neglect by patrons, see the ‘Castle-Building’ essays 4 and 5 which share the topic ‘That those who encourage learning the least are the greatest Maecenas’s’, 1: 379–81, 2: 6–7. 34 Smart admired the Spectator: see the references to ‘the peerless Addison’ in his poem ‘The Wholesale Critic and the Hop Merchant’, PW4, 370, and to ‘Will Wimble’ as an old friend of Mrs. M.’s in the Midwife: 1: 260–69. Vitruvius’s treatise, De Architectura, was written in ten books: Chimaericus closes the first of his books after ten essays (2: 245–6).

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Steele and Addison when they assume the mantle of Mr. Spectator but ‘Liars in 35 Soliloquy’? The third chapter on the science of Castle-Building begins thus: Whoever is a CASTLE-BUILDER of any sort of eminence, is possess’d of a Talisman, by virtue of which he may transform himself into what shape, size or condition he pleases. If he has but wit enough to forget himself, he may be considered as a ductile piece of matter, which his imagination can mould and diversify, as much, and as often as he listeth. (Student, 1: 331–2)

There surely is a contradiction here: for what agent has control of his imagination if 36 he has truly ‘forgotten himself’? The apparent contradiction, though, works to the same end as the one inherent in the rhetorical, transactional use of personae, where writers can mould their writing to convey their intended meaning, while at the same ‘forgetting themselves’ enough to employ a third, imagined person as a companion in persuasion. I do not mean to suggest that Smart was using the Castle-Building essays to theorize the use of personae, for it was not so, but that the language and processes of reasoning they deploy in behalf of the constructive uses of the imagination are sometimes based, most suggestively, in terms which also cover the transactional uses of personae. It is as if Smart’s first major persona was generously providing his second with her modus operandi. Another way in which Chimaericus gives notice of and prepares the ground for Mary Midnight is in Smart’s experimentation with the comic disjunction between a lofty academic discourse and the everyday flow of the vernacular of the street and coffeehouse, which also is a way of presenting entertaining mock-battles between yourself, as it were—we saw the technique in action in the introduction to this book. 37 In the second chapter he introduces the figure of ‘Critic CATCHUP’, who speaks as a ‘modern’ in opposition to Chimaericus’s enterprise. In direct speech, Catchup objects informally to Chimaericus’s lengthy quotation from Fontenelle: ‘ “when your hand was in, I wonder you did not quote the whole book” ’ (1: 285). The sudden and surprising juxtaposition of everyday conversational styles with elevated learning is one of Mrs. Midnight’s most frequently employed manoeuvres: I shall explore this tactic, in the context of gender, later in the chapter.

35 ‘imaginary relationship’ is Louis Althusser’s definition of ideology: see Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984), 36. The relevance of this to my arguments in chap. 1 should be clear, 38. 36 The emphasis here on forgetting runs entirely counter to both Locke and Descartes’s placing of reason as paramount in consciousness. Smart seems out of step here, and even to be groping towards a Keatsian idea of ‘negative capability’. Dennis Todd has discussed the way that many eighteenth-century writers distrusted the powers of an ungrounded imagination: Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 106–7. 37 In this context one thinks of Shaftesbury recommending dialogue with the self as a way of ‘growing wiser’ but the epigram to his piece ‘No need to inquire outside yourself’, indicates the distance between his argument and the Scriblerian ‘Ancientism’ which the Midwife generally espouses: ‘Soliloquy, or, Advice to an Author’, in Shaftesbury, Characteristics, ed. Klein, 162, 70. ‘Catchup’ also appears in Smart’s poetry: PW4, 116, 370–72.

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The final point to note about these early Student essays is Chimaericus’s promise in his introduction that ‘in the course of this system I shall have the assistance of a very ingenious person of the lovelier and better sex: so that … the ladies may be certain of a great deal of pleasure every now and then from a charming authoress’ (1: 224). This early warning of Smart’s intent to deploy a female persona is of interest on its own account, not least because it was not to be fulfilled until later, and mercifully in a manner very different from the expectations raised by the courtly, Spectatorial gallantry of this announcement. Extensive discussion of this second Student persona—the correspondent who signs herself the ‘Female Student’—does not properly belong here, as she took to print only after Mrs. Midnight had been fairly launched, and though she claimed herself to be that same lady, her story and her ‘character’—in both senses—are very different from Mrs. M.’s. She is certainly learned: I am mistress of the Latin language, I have sounded the depths of philosophy, and perhaps have made much greater progress in academical erudition, than many of your matriculated dons, whose profound knowledge solely consists in a little cap with a short tuft, and a large pompous grizzled wig. (2: 49)

At the end of her letter she declares that ‘to tell you a secret, I am that very same MIDWIFE, who publishes THE OLD WOMAN’S MAGAZINE, which makes so much noise in the world.’ This is rank puffery, of course, but it helpfully demonstrates 38 the complexity of the use of personae in skilful hands. The literal-minded may compare her life to Mrs. Midnight’s and note the anomalies, but more importantly, readers accustomed to the kind of transactionality explored in the first chapter of this study will have to dig deeper to discover the point of the satire. For if the ‘Female Student’ is behind the mask of Mary Midnight—and she is only slightly less culturally impossible than Mrs. M.—then readers of the Midwife have to deal with meaning filtered through not only an imported third person, but a fourth as well. Well might Chimaericus invoke ‘the craft of erecting baseless fabrics in the air, and peopling them with proper notional inhabitants.’ ‘Mrs. Midnight’: Practical Mask and Rhetorical Stratagem Having made better acquaintance with Mrs. Midnight and the circumstances surrounding her appearance, we are now in a position to return to the matter of why Christopher Smart, disaffected scholar and wit, felt the need of such a person to assist him. In the first part of this chapter, certain cultural oppositions were noted as part of her writing style, and in choosing Mary Midnight Smart seemed to have looked for an eidolon diametrically opposed to his own character and circumstances. She differs from him in class, gender, and age: only in academic prowess do the two 38 Both magazines were published by Newbery. Though the Student appeared as a Newbery publication, he was more cagey about his connection with the Midwife. For the Female Student’s full story, see Student, 2: 49–52, 104–10, 187–90, 224–8, 348–52, and the discussion later in this chapter.

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coincide. So what does her presence enable Smart to do? He could have elected to write as a version of himself, as with Chimaericus, but we are dealing here with the possessor of ‘a powerful and original imagination’, and it behoves us to remember this as we note the practicalities as well as the cultural exigencies that led to her genesis. In this regard Stallybrass and White’s discussion of the practice of ‘symbolic inversion’ might appear germane, but to place Smart’s use of Mary Midnight into this category would be to efface much of the specific and revealing aspects of the rhetorical deployment of personae. For this reason, and because of the evident antipopulism in the Midwife, I am also wary of using, as Lance Bertelsen does, the ‘woman-on-top’ category in describing Mary Midnight.40 Christopher Smart did not want his popular journalism to appear under his own name. He was looking for recognition from his peers: for the status and the pecuniary rewards that should, he thought, accrue to a man of serious literary and scholarly merit (this aspect of Smart is further addressed in chapter four). Complicating this, though, is another crucial factor: the Midwife was not to be a purely crowd-pleasing enterprise, for it appears that he wanted it to be viable as directed political, literary and social satire, with the Scriblerian heritage and traditions of learned wit at his back to grant it intellectual respectability. We will not know to what extent or how far the Midwife arose from the impulse to satire as opposed to the need to make money, or to what degree the satirical purpose of the magazine helped Smart to live with the full implications of his arrival in Grub Street. We also will never know to what extent the magazine and persona took shape as a result of collaboration with 41 Rolt, or Thornton, or Newbery himself. Smart needed a persona for two important reasons besides the obvious one of falling in with established periodical practice. He wanted, at the beginning of the journal at any rate, to keep the name of Christopher Smart, ‘Scholar of the University’, free from association with popular buffoonery, and he had to be careful—as Mounsey has shown—that his political satire did not draw the attention of the Whig government and result in fines, imprisonment or closure of the magazine.42 It is impossible to pronounce with any certainty which of these causal factors predominated in his decision to create Mary Midnight. The task of the magazine, given this situation, was to be effective as political and social satire, and also to be successful as a commercial enterprise. It managed this magnificently, because Mrs. Midnight was immediately recognisable as an absurdly 39 Midwives were often ‘unusually literate and generally well-educated; in the case of ... Jane Sharp and Elizabeth Cellier, both were well-versed in the classics too’. However, it is hard to imagine any midwife reaching a position from which she could credibly question the scholarship of university dons. See Lisa Cody Forman, ‘The Politics of Reproduction: From Midwives’ Alternative Public Sphere to the Public Spectacle of Man Midwifery’, EighteenthCentury Studies 32, no. 4 (1999): 481. 40 ‘powerful imagination’: Karina Williamson, PW5, xxiii. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 17–18, and Lance Bertelsen, The Nonsense Club: Literature and Popular Culture 1749–1764 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 26. 41 See Appendix 1, and for more on the magazine’s aims, see chap. 4, 105. 42 Mounsey, Christopher Smart, 15.

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impossible creature to those educated people who understood the rhetorical use of personae and the practice of—if not necessarily the classical tradition behind— prosopopoeia, and was thus unmistakably a literary device intended to allow flexible comment on society. At the same time though, the very absurdity that marked her as rhetorical provided infinite opportunity for knockabout farce, laboured puns, and more or less salacious foolery, as we have already seen, and could thus appeal on a popular level. Individual readers could consult, understand and laugh at the midwife they preferred, or move between one level and the other for profit and delight. This bizarre persona had yet another function: for how could the Whig authorities seriously take offence at such foolery, without themselves becoming a laughingstock? We have seen a dramatic example of this principle at work in the fourth number, where the bite of the bitter ‘Ode on the New Year’ was quickly dissipated in hilarity over Tim Grouse’s nose, but Mrs. M. herself served the same function: in the first number, one could hardly take offence at her early attack on the practice of election-rigging without also finding oneself in the position of objecting to the imagined spectacle of an old woman upstaging Garrick and Barry by declaring herself ‘an hard-boil’d Egg’. Such were the immediate practical uses of choosing such an unlikely persona. Yet Mary Midnight, in her own specific person, offered Smart other opportunities, which we are now in a position to explore. The impossibility of the persona lay, first and foremost, in her gender: most particularly in the conjunction of her lowly calling 43 and her scholarly accomplishments. How could adopting a female persona possibly have assisted him? After all, we are accustomed to being told that the eighteenth century was a time of increasing social and cultural restriction for women, so why should a gentleman apparently abrogate his position of power and take a voice ‘from below’? One way of answering this question is to suggest that in fact women did have certain limited opportunities to speak in public on public affairs, and that some women could and did engineer ways to use them, often enabled by the licence 44 afforded to their ‘sentimental’ and instinctive maternal patriotism. If this was the 43 Extravagant learning in a periodical, ostensibly written by a woman, did direct attention to gender imposture. See the letter to the Old Maid: ‘You ... have often been so wise and so learned, that I began to be afraid you … was some fellow who had taken the petticoat for a disguise, but ... I am now satisfied you must be one of the sisterhood’: Frances Moore Brooke, The Old Maid 23 (1756): 33. 44 For revisions to the orthodox model of women’s inexorable restriction to the ‘private sphere’ of domesticity, see Lawrence Klein, ‘Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenth-century England’, in Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices, eds. Judith Still and Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 100–15; Sarah Prescott and Jane Spencer, ‘Prattling, Tattling and Knowing Everything: Public Authority and the Female Editorial Persona in the Early Essay-Periodical’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 1 (2000): 43–57, and Ruth Herman, The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley (University of Delaware Press, 2003), 225–36. For patriotism see Louise H. Marshall, ‘Women and Politics in Adaptations of Shakespeare’s English Histories: Re-enacting the Nation, 1719–1745’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 2 (2006): 65; Min Wild, ‘ “Prodigious Wisdom”: Civic Humanism in Frances Brooke’s Old Maid’, Women’s Writing 5, no. 3 (1998): 421–5.

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case—and some important evidence does seem to support it—it does not, however, tell the whole story. The answer to the question of why Smart abrogated his masculine power is, I think, this: it was because he had the power to do so. It was because he was not a woman that he could afford to be one, and there are advantages in assuming a female voice without having to inhabit concretely the situation of being a woman. The main impulse behind the choice was not, as I intend to show, a gesture of proto-feminism or sympathy for the subaltern, although some of the language at which we have already looked may make it seem so, and the inclusion of the letter from ‘Sarah Maria Smith’ and the choice of Rambler pieces indicate some general sympathy 45 for the position of women. Nor was it simply to court popularity with women readers, although it is important to remember the growing importance of women as a consumer group (of one sort or another): ‘all your Ladyship’s Friends will be served at Three-pence per Number as usual’; ‘the ladies may be certain of a great deal of pleasure.’ With this sort of comment, the Midwife, in its role as an ‘anti-magazine’, is at once satirising the ‘feminisation’ and the ‘gentrification’ of the mid-century 46 periodical: most particularly, perhaps, Haywood’s Female Spectator. It helps most, I suggest, to think of gender in the Midwife being used as stratagem: just as we have now come to understand Mary Midnight herself as transactional, as in the service of the writer’s need to communicate with his reader for the purposes of persuasion, so we will best comprehend the use of her gender as, forgive me, a rhetorical tool. Contemporary understanding of what constituted the feminine provided a means for the writer to further his own arguments. He summoned up the perceived qualities, defects and advantages of what Chimaericus called the ‘lovelier and better sex’, and employed them at will and in varying ways in order to make specific points at different times. This is what prosopopoeia could do, by making an assumed voice from outside the charmed circle of rational, civil society into a vehicle for comment upon that society: Goldsmith’s ‘Chinese Letters’, for example, 47 performed this function from the point of view of a visitor from the East. We have already seen how madness in satire can function in a similar way, and in this context it might help to reword Alan Ingram’s description of this technique: ‘gender ... is not

45 For sympathy towards women’s education in the Midwife, see above, chap. 2 above, 64. 46 For women as an important new group of print consumers, see for example G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 161–70. For ‘feminisation’ and ‘gentrification’, see Iona Italia, The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment (London: Routledge, 2005), 6 and for her discussion of the Female Spectator, 123–39. 47 Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, in vol. 2 of Works. This also was the device used in Spectator 50, and in the Craftsman of 18 October 1729, which carries a ‘Persian Letter’ criticising Walpole as a tyrant ‘Robinarch’: British Literary Magazines, ed. Sullivan, 69.

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gender at all, but a strategy for enforcing understanding of what is being satirized 48 and what is being endorsed.’ The rest of this chapter will be devoted to examining two major examples of the way that gender is used as a rhetorical strategy in the magazine: it is a question of longstanding, socially-constitutive metaphor. A long cultural tradition can be summed up in the phrase ‘Woman is a Dunce’; most people know—and have known at least since the Bible took shape—that ‘Woman is a Gossip’. Some believe in these metaphors as articles of faith, others demur to varying degrees: but both equations are firmly established, and part of the generally-accepted furniture of masculine minds. So much so that the two metaphors are, in a sense, concretized within everyday understanding, and so available as counters in the process of suing and bargaining that is the rhetorical art of persuasion. The extent to which they were universally fixed as immutable tenets of ‘common sense’ has a great deal to do with the extent to which the Midwife—speaking specifically in terms of gender—was shocking, or funny, or bizarre, or absurd in 1750. Mary Midnight is going to allow Smart to flesh out these assumptions: to make use of them, for endorsement or for ridicule, as we are about to see. Woman as Dunce ‘Woman is a Dunce’: how does gender as rhetorical strategy work with this metaphor? When Mrs. Midnight questions behaviour in the theatre, for example, she is saying what her creator wants to say himself. Very few readers are going to deride her conclusions because she is a woman, for the presence of the male writer is clearly behind her and endorsing her conclusions, some of which are commonplaces in maleauthored journalism—as we saw in chapter two, for example, with the ‘Clappers and Hissers’. The fact of her gender works of course in different ways to add frissons or groans or colour to her assertions, but above and beyond this we have to consider how much it is providing satirical edge to the statements in itself. The ‘Neglect of the Greek Language’ provides a clear example of this. The subtext works like this: things must indeed be in a parlous state in our Universities if a woman—a simple midwife— 49 can do a better job at reading and translating Greek than our professors. This is the tactic behind the letter from ‘Mrs. Coxeter’, a name which bears a little examination, in the light of my arguments in the next chapter that Smart was often fatally tempted to undermine the force of his own satire by overstepping marks of propriety. This lady successfully reteaches her own son ‘his Latin and Greek, and English, together with as much of Logic, Rhetoric, Geography, Astronomy, Mathematics and Morality, 48 Alan Ingram, The Madhouse of Language: Writing and Reading Madness in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1991), 88. Women could, and did, use their own gender as a rhetorical device: see the useful discussion of Elinor James’s polemics: Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 208. 49 Iona Italia has recently concurred: ‘Smart’s primary purpose in the Midwife seems to be to satirize the incompetence of the male intellectual establishment’. I think, though, that ‘primary’ may be too strong: Rise of Literary Journalism, 180.

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as learned Men generally know’ (2: 215–19) after he had lost all of this knowledge at University. During the battle of the Ancients and Moderns, Theobald attacked Bentley in illuminating terms: ‘he has dabbled in a Province, where even the Ladies are prepar’d to laugh at and confute him’. A later periodical by a different hand provides an explanatory reductio ad absurdum of the rationale behind this: the Old Maid’s correspondent ‘Anti-Gallican’, on the brink of the Seven Years War, has a lot of misogynistic fun playing with the suggestion that even women could hardly be 50 more ineffectual as soldiers than our present demasculinized military. Things are working with much more subtlety, though, in the ‘Neglect’. It would be misreading the Midwife, I feel, to fail to remark the possibility of this stratagem being present, not just in the ‘Neglect’ but also in other articles where Mrs. M. takes the road of the learned critic—‘our modern authors are so inept that they may even be criticized by women’—and scholar. The amount to which this is the case is difficult to assess nowadays, and I suspect it was not straightforward in 1750 either. But if it is used extensively perhaps we should ally Smart with those critics who—to adopt John Brewer’s formulation—protested at ‘the feminization 51 of a culture they believed should embody masculine values.’ If you are going to satirize the deficiencies of universities by enlisting a woman to point them up, then it is hardly complimentary to the sex, any more than it is to attack the effeminacy of the army by suggesting that they are worse than a bunch of females. Swift’s Tale of A Tub was not a paean to the modern writer, and that work was father to the eighteenthcentury practice of adopting a persona for the purpose of mocking it, as Fielding did later with ‘John Trott-Plaid’ in his Jacobite’s Journal. That this may be the tactic adopted here to a greater or lesser extent is likely, especially in the light of the letters from Smart’s persona the ‘Female Student’; these present a less ambiguously positioned version of this strategy than does Mrs. M. The Female Student’s life story, as she retells it through a series of later letters, provides a vehicle through which Smart can satirize male inhabitants of a university town through the familiar tale of a woman too proud to accept suitors and thus doomed to spinsterhood. She pitifully explains at the end of her first letter that she has been ‘reduced by [her] vanity’ to struggling to subsist as a hack writer; she is uncompromisingly presented as being in distress through nothing but her own reprehensible female fastidiousness (Student, 2: 52). This is an old story and bears no mark of any special sympathy or understanding for a woman in her position— quite the contrary, in fact. The poetry in the Midwife is another reason for my reluctance to consider Mrs. M. as a gesture of proto-feminism on the part of her creator. On three separate

50 ‘he has dabbled’: Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 80. For the ‘AntiGallican’ letters, see the Old Maid 27: 157–62; 30: 175–80; 33: 193–8: also see, 24. In the insolent dedication to ‘The Horatian Canons of Friendship’, Smart compared Warburton to an ineffectual female Pope (in the religious sense), and made the term ‘mere old woman’ do the derogatory job that we earlier saw Mary Midnight resisting: PW4, 114. 51 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 80.

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occasions in early numbers of the Midwife poems of varying degrees of misogyny— from the jestingly dismissive to the downright brutal—are published: in every case Mrs. Midnight draws attention more or less indignantly to the way they denigrate her sex, and promises later redress, which is only actually forthcoming in one case, and that ineffectually. The ‘SONG’ (1: 83) entitled elsewhere ‘The Talkative Fair’ is introduced by Mrs. M. as having been sent in by a male reader; she complains that it is ‘evidently intended to affront our Sex; and therefore it should not have been inserted, but that we are promis’d an Answer to it, for our next Magazine.’ The ‘answer’, when it eventually appeared, came in the form of ‘The Silent Fair’ (2: 168), and scarcely improved matters: ‘Your Silence wou’d acquire more Praise/ Then [sic] all you say or all I write; / One Look ten thousand Charms displays; / Then hush—and be an Angel quite.’ Also relevant here are ‘Apollo and Daphne: An Epigram’ (1: 137), and ‘To the Ladies of Quality’ and its sequel ‘An Epigram, On a Woman who was singing Ballads for Money to bury her Husband’ (1: 228–9). This last should be noted: Mrs. Midnight’s affecting and apparently sincerely benevolent account of a destitute woman whose husband had died the day before, and who was singing a facetious drinking song, the words of which ‘she tortur’d into a thousand disagreeable Tones, the Tears all the Time running down her Cheeks plentifully’, is followed by ‘Mr. Pentweazle’s’ nasty little epigram, which concludes: ‘But (I doubt) since she sings for a dead Man to Day, / She’ll cry for a live One Tomorrow.’ These light, humorously-intended poems are firmly attributable to Smart: it is only natural that he should wish to use them to provide material for his magazine, and just as obvious that given the sex of his persona, he would need her to express 52 her distaste for them. Morris Golden has claimed that in Smart’s poetry his attitude to women ‘combines sexual delight with intellectual contempt’, and in many poems 53 this is undoubtedly so. It would be overhasty and misleading, though, to leave Mary Midnight thus, a puppet in the service of a misogynistic purpose, for there is much evidence to the contrary: some of it has been already advanced, and there will be more. The proof of the pudding, too, is in the eating, and even if Mrs. M. did indeed owe at least some of her existence to the requirements of a rhetorical stratagem, the question about where she came from may be ultimately of less importance than the one of what she did when she got there. Accordingly, I would like to reclaim a little ground for the way that gender is working in the Midwife here, and here it scarcely matters, in terms of the magazine itself, whether or not intentionality plays a part. For may it not be that at those very times when the writer seems to be underlining the cultural equation of women with duncehood in the way I have described, he may also be mocking it? The Midwife

52 See Ann. Bib., 150, 153, 158, and PW4, 130, 176. It is worth that all three of these were reprinted in other journals, where of course they never carried Mary Midnight’s admonitory ‘feminist’ riders. 53 Morris Golden, ‘The Imagining Self in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1969): 21. It is remarkable how often Smart returns to the theme of over-loquacity in women, and yet his enjoyment in reproducing their volubility is patent. See ‘Madam and the Magpie’: PW4, 366–9, and Moira Dearnley, The Poetry of Christopher Smart (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 279.

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again and again acts as a strident call to all its male and female readers to cease being ‘Enemies to... that dull useless thing called Thinking’ (1: 80). Mary Midnight repeatedly asks her readers to think for themselves, and to reject secondhand opinions and readymade concepts. For instance, in the ‘Neglect of the Greek Language’, behind and beyond the surface message attacking the decline of learning in the universities is also one that goes in simple terms like this: ‘Here is a woman who can translate Latin into Greek and accuse university professors of dereliction of duty. She is doing this in print, in public. She is not a dunce. Have the skies fallen? No, they have not.’ How much, in making use of the rigidity of cultural assumptions about the feminine as a rhetorical tool, is the writer also mocking that rigidity and, by implication, those assumptions? That this is a distinct possibility is borne out by the conclusion of some scholars that in the 1750s the cultural prohibition against female scholars began to lose some 54 of its force: the Midwife writings relate to this with subtle reciprocity. There is no doubt that long before the eighteenth century, throughout it and beyond there was widespread distrust of the figure of the learned woman, but equally there were certain ways in which women of high social standing could partially circumvent the restrictions placed upon them. Humanism ‘gently encouraged the aristocratic learned lady’, women were important in French salon culture, and Sylvia Harcstark Myers points out that it was to some extent periodicals themselves which fostered a relatively generous attitude towards women’s learning, so that the figure of the ‘bluestocking’, if not universally admired, was at least culturally possible by the 55 later eighteenth century. Johnson remarked in Rambler 173 (12 November 1751) that ‘[w]hatever might be the state of female literature in the last century, there is now no longer any danger lest the scholar should want an adequate audience at the tea-table.’ Mary Midnight is interestingly and invidiously placed in relation to all this: not only female, but also of humble origins, her very existence also served to ridicule received wisdom about the boundaries of the feminine. The thing works both ways, I would like briefly to point out here. If Mary Midnight enabled Smart to say things in ways which he otherwise could not, he enabled her to say things and behave in ways in which a woman could not: as I have suggested, it was because Smart was not a woman that he could afford to be one. Secure in his authority as a gentleman and a scholar, he was free, as a woman would not have been, from the ‘anxiety of competence’ which bedevilled women

54 See for example Johnson’s Idler No. 39. Sylvia Harcstark Myers pinpoints the early 1750s as an especially important time in this shift: The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 129, and see Gary Kelly’s introduction to vol. 1 of Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle 1738–1785, ed. Elizabeth Eger (London; Pickering and Chatto, 1999), ix–li, esp. xlv. 55 ‘humanism gently encouraged’: Olwen Hufton, Prospect Before Her, 421. Myers notes the relatively generous attitudes of periodicals, particularly the Gentlemen’s Magazine, towards women’s learning: Bluestocking Circle, 123–5. Klein has drawn attention to the privileged position of some women as arbiters of the French salon: Lawrence Klein, ‘Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere’.

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taking up the pen in public. In particular, he could flout two other cultural givens in a manner which serves to indicate the extent of their power in the very starkness of the contrast between the prose of Mary Midnight and much of the public writing by actual women in the eighteenth century. Firstly, he could let his persona ignore the convention barring women writers from seeking public recognition: as Elizabeth Montagu had Plutarch declare in her Dialogues of the Dead, ‘the virtues of women are blasted by the breath of public fame’. Similarly, Mrs. M. could insolently disregard the demand for a modest self-effacement on the part of the writing woman: ‘above all else, [women writers] were accepted on condition that they did not want to push 57 themselves forward.’ Throughout the run of the magazine, if it suited in the making of a polemical point, Smart could cheerfully allow Mary Midnight to scorn gentility, become vulgarly indecent, or refuse the domestic: ‘Every little helps, as the old Woman said when she did something in the Sea’ (1: 193). Even if the purpose behind this brutal rejection of the polite was wholly to protest against ‘the feminization of culture’, we nevertheless cannot ignore the way that much of it exposes through rhetorical means the culturally-constructed nature of gender assumptions. ‘When do we hear’, asked Mary Wollstonecraft in her 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ‘of women who starting out from obscurity, boldly claim respect on account of their great abilities or daring virtues?’ Well, it is possible to answer, we heard one in 1751, giving an ‘Account of her own Abilities’ every bit as forthright as Wollstonecraft would have wished. Kathryn Shevelow discusses the restrictions placed on representations of feminine ‘authority’ in the eighteenth century periodical. Such authority she defines as ‘the process through which a print culture sanctions certain linguistic representations and gives credibility to certain textual constructions 58 of the writing subject’. It is ‘linguistic representation’ in the form of prosopopoeia which enables Mary Midnight, and it is because she ‘is’ a man that she can afford to ignore gender prescription. The origin of the voice, though, does not negate its presence—incontrovertibly, it is a powerful, determined and flamboyantly female one. So, what sort of effect might this have? It is far from my aim to make any claims for Mary Midnight as an ersatz member of what is, after all, a female genealogy of clever, courageous and resourceful 59 writing women. It is, however, a matter of a borrowed—and even, perhaps, newly 56 Examples of Mary Midnight behaving thus include her going to a ‘publick Minister’s [house]’, to ‘confer about the affairs of Europe’, and meeting a gentleman alone at a coffeehouse: see for example 1: 228; 1: 215; 2: 47. ‘anxiety of competence’: Myers uses William McCarthy’s phrase, discussing the early bluestockings’ own internalised sense of society’s disapproval: Bluestocking Circle, 155. 57 ‘virtues of women’: ‘Elizabeth Montagu’, vol. 1 of Bluestocking Feminism, 130. ‘above all else’: Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 81. 58 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, intro. Barbara Taylor (London: Everyman, 1992), 62. Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge, 1989), 14. 59 For accounts of women’s ‘genealogical’ interaction with previous women writers, see Cheryl Turner, Living By the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London:

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legitimated—tone. As an example, consider the opening number of Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator in 1744, where we find the voice of the editorial persona to be strong in certain ways—for example, she allows herself to ‘judge’ and to ‘distinguish’, and boldly states her ‘ambition’ to be as ‘universally read as possible’—but also she finds it necessary to hedge herself about with the careful establishment of her present morality and modesty, as well as to adopt the periodical role of censor. Haywood’s 60 1746 ‘Parrot’ escapes from these requirements by being a masculine bird. Yet in 1755 Frances Moore Brooke opens her essay-periodical the Old Maid, speaking as ‘Mary Singleton’, with a newly bold feminine attack: ‘in defiance of all criticisms I will write; every body knows an English woman has a natural right to express herself as she pleases ... and since I feel a violent inclination to show my prodigious wisdom to my cotemporaries, I should think it giving up the privilege of the sex to desist from my purpose’. Janet Todd has noted how much more ‘robust’ a figure is Mary Singleton than the heroines of Brooke’s novels. In between 1744 and 1755 there were no notable new periodicals by strong-voiced single women, but there was Mary Midnight, whose works were read and enjoyed by at least one celebrated woman writer, and it seems to me likely that Smart’s persona assisted Frances Brooke in the creation of her own.61 The foundations of civilization were not shaken when a fictional midwife bellowed her academic and political superiority from the rooftops, but it began nevertheless to look as if they could be questioned in interesting ways. Woman as Gossip The double-edged quality, then, of the way that gender is used in the Midwife is becoming plain. Moira Dearnley accuses Smart of ‘using the vagaries of the female sex to serve a satirical literary purpose’, but, as this discussion is intended 62 to demonstrate, there is more to it than that. For what may be seen as vagaries may also be seen as strengths, and in this final part of the chapter I would like to draw attention to the most strikingly positive way in which Mary Midnight allows Smart access to a form of power from which, as a male writer, he would have been debarred. Kathryn Shevelow, as we saw, notes the restrictive and restricting version of the kind of authority which women were sanctioned by print culture to possess. Mary Midnight allows Smart to tap into an officially unsanctioned form of female authority very different from, but allied to, that of the ‘wife-mother’ which Shevelow 63 invokes. ‘Woman is a Gossip’: the frontispiece to the first two volumes of the collected Midwife, which, as we have seen, depicts two old ladies in conversation beside the Routledge, 1992), 129 and Jane Spencer, Literary Relations: Kinship and the Canon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 60 See chap. 4 below, 130, n. 64. 61 Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989), 115. Fanny Burney twice indicated her knowledge—and enjoyment of—the Midwife in correspondence: Ann. Bib., 428–9. 62 Dearnley, The Poetry of Christopher Smart, 26. 63 Shevelow, Women and Print Culture, 14.

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‘Jakes of Genius’, carries the revealing subscription that ‘De la Riviere Invenit’. Paula McDowell has explained how Delarivier Manley could draw upon ‘longstanding female oral political traditions’ in the hermeneutics of her politically encoded ‘romantic’ fictions: she credits Manley for showing how ‘women could use their own marginality in political life to serve their interests’. Manley was a Tory and a polemicist; in her work she had had to encode her references to prominent actors on the early eighteenth-century political stage, and was prosecuted for approaching a little too near the knuckle. Here again, though, perhaps Mrs. M. is untimely: Ruth Herman suggests that by 1754, Manley’s New Atalantis ‘had already 64 been forgotten’. I have already touched upon the extent to which sharp political comment was encoded in the pages of the Midwife, and will do so again: and the ‘key’, for those in the know, was there in the frontispiece of the collected edition. Where better to hide the trees of scandalous or inflammatory political innuendo than in a forest of seemingly inconsequential female copia? Yet the persona of Mary Midnight as representative of the equation between women and gossip also was required by Smart to other ends than those directly political. Could it be suggested that it is Smart, the Cambridge scholar and rhetorician, who can adopt a conversational freedom of tone with such ease? The adjectives which Tony Davies chooses here are tailor-made for Mrs. Midnight: ‘early humanism is all talk: voluble, intimate, opinionated. Like its own favourite reading matter, the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon, the letters of Cicero and the satires of Horace, humanist discourse dissolves writing itself into the relaxed conviviality of conversation.’ Yet this classical tradition may only be assisting with, rather than providing, the energy and drive behind the voice of the persona: what is first and foremost furnishing that is the power of gossip. Mary Midnight, untimely heir to the Scriblerians, is needed by her creator to assist him in his opposition to certain mechanistic, formulaic, scientific, professional and modern turns of mind, and here 65 her gender proves an undoubted asset for—rather than against—its own sake. In order to demonstrate this principle in action, this chapter will come to a close in the company of ‘A LETTER from Mrs. MIDNIGHT to the College of Physicians, in which is proved that Old Women and Nature are their greatest Enemies. To which is added, a modest Proposal for extirpating the one, and for preventing the Operation of the other’ (2: 17–22). This attack on the techniques of modern medicine is the only occasion in the magazine that Mary Midnight, as a working midwife, actually makes 66 her calling the central issue of the piece. Here, in a satirical eulogy of modern physicians, she opposes the shifting of the practice of medicine into a scientized male enclave; a potent and effective alliance is forged between a Swiftian suspicion 64 Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: 225–84, and see 257, 284 for these quotations. Herman, The Business of a Woman, 238. 65 Tony Davies, Humanism (London: Routledge, 1997), 80. For anti-mechanistic pieces in the magazine, see Appendix 2, and chap. 6 below. Aristophanes also parodied and enjoyed female gossip, seemingly—like Smart—both with evident authorial enjoyment and awareness of its subversive potential: we know that Smart was familiar with his plays: see SB, 45. 66 More often, she will use it as a convenient way into the topic which is her real concern: see for example ‘The ITCH of SCRIBBLING’, 2: 23–7, and ‘The Virtues of LAUGHTER’, 3: 79–81.

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of sunny claims for science and mechanism as universal cure-alls, and a vociferous feminine subculture with no practical legislative power, but the authority to speak from countless years of experience and knowledge. An example of Mrs. M. at her most ‘voluble, intimate, and opinionated’, it also employs an arresting voice which is able to draw upon the authority of women who, for thousands of years, had kept human beings alive with the sole aids of ‘Nature’ and ‘Experience’. Here is Mrs. M. getting well into her stride: I am, Gentlemen, (and I wou’d have every Body know it) under the greatest Obligations to your Fraternity; and if, as a certain Author says, Ingratitude be worse than the Sin of Witchcraft, sure Gratitude will be a sufficient Plea for my taking upon me the Defence of your Characters, and your Profession; Characters that stand full in the Front of Fame, and a Profession that has rais’d and supported itself meerly by Art, has no Connection with, or Dependance [sic] on Nature, but is self-existent, and like a true Noun substantive stands alone. (2: 17–18)

In terms of style this sentence is a shining example of Mrs. Midnight’s familiar idiolect: the Celtic touch—with ‘sure’—and the flourish of alliteration. Most importantly here though, we see how style helps understand substance, for the copiously ‘loose’ nature of the sentence proclaims, as it does so often, Mrs. M.’s allegiance to an oral world and a conversational subculture whose voice was becoming more and more silent in the impersonal world of Enlightenment print culture—the Gentleman’s Magazine world of diagrams and rational explanation. It is the male writer who, in invoking the ‘Noun substantive’, is making the educated point about the increasingly detached nature of the medical profession from its foothold in ‘Nature’: if one were to translate what is happening here into present-day theoretical terms, one might say that Mrs. Midnight’s creator is drawing attention to the way that discourses tend to form freefloating signifying systems that eventually subsist in an environment of 67 their own. He gains an extra force for his point, however, by using the persona of an elderly midwife to make it. The words ‘power’ and ‘gossip’ are not being tossed about lightly here. Patricia Meyer Spacks has asked us to think of gossip as a way for subordinated people to temporarily escape from their positions of powerlessness. Lisa Cody Forman goes so far as to suggest that the authority vested in midwives, not only during the lying-in ceremony but also generally, constituted an ‘alternative public sphere’, and she also explains that the element of gossip in that female world was feared and distrusted by the ‘rational-critical’ world of Enlightenment scientism. Bernard Capp, in his work on the ‘separate domain’ of women’s authority in seventeenth-century provincial life, suggests that gossip could sometimes form a body of ‘female public opinion’, which might ‘encourage a more complex response to male authority, helping women to contain and negotiate male domination as well as providing a temporary refuge

67 See Stuart Clark’s introduction, Thinking With Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). For an overview of the technologising trends in medicine during the eighteenth century, see, for example, Medicine in the Enlightenment, ed. Roy Porter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995).

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from it.’ Mary Midnight’s gender, and also of course her class and age, as well as her established links to village and provincial life, give Smart access to a partially submerged, traditional world of female expertise, of which gossip is both a sign and an integral part. Mary Midnight uses ferocious irony in her address to the College of Physicians: ... and I am sorry to say it, there are certain old Women who have had a Description of Diseases and Remedies for them handed down from their Predecessors, with which they cure Patients after they have been carried through the regular Forms of Physick, and have been consign’d to Death by the most knowing of ye all. (2: 19)

She reminds the doctors that ‘when the Dawn of true medical Knowledge’ had appeared, they—the ‘invincible Heroes of [the] Science’—had ‘immediately called in the mechanical Laws, and an ingenious and useful Application was made of the Momenta of the Fluids, Cylinders, Triangles, Sines, Tangents and Secants, Levers, Ropes and Pullies’.69 So that subsequently ‘People began to die in a reasonable Time, and the Son had some Hopes of enjoying his Father’s Estate before he himself was an old Man’ (2: 19). She goes on to describe, in colloquial and expansive terms, her personal involvement with medical cases where the common sense and pragmatic rationality of ‘old Women’—emphatically here, not witches—had cured the sick against the best efforts of members of the medical profession, whose shortcomings led her elsewhere to describe as an ‘abandoned Race; among whom the Satyrist will always do more good than the Sage’ (2: 257). Mrs. Midnight is constantly engaged in a complicated balancing act between the need to appear shrewd and sagacious in order successfully to persuade, and the need to clown and posture in order both to sell the magazine and obscure what is most politically sensitive in it. The writer of the Midwife is too clever to allow her to inhabit any fixed position for long, and therefore, to avoid giving the impression of her as an implacable opponent of all aspects of Enlightenment I should, finally and briefly direct attention to what is in a way a companion-piece to the ‘Letter to the College of Physicians’. Mrs. Midnight’s attack on the stupidity and ignorance which led to an elderly couple being murdered as witches will also—as a coda to our exploration of what Mary Midnight enables Smart to say—furnish an example of what she does not do for him. In her condemnation of the credulity and brutality of those who believe in witchcraft (‘To the wise Inhabitants of Tring, in Hertfordshire …’, 2: 61–9), Mary Midnight first prints a letter graphically describing the deaths of Gaffer Osborne and his wife who—suspected of being witches—were killed by a violent crowd in Hertfordshire. At her most militant and outraged, and forsaking even her customary use of irony in her wrath, she apostrophizes her readers: ‘Pray, (for God’s Sake) if 68 Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 5–6, 30, 103. Forman, ‘The Politics of Reproduction’, 477–95. Capp, ‘Separate Domains? Women and Authority in Early Modern England’, 131. 69 In the early 1750s Boerhaavian systems of Newtonian physics had gained the ascendancy in advanced medical thought: Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Friends who Made the Future (London: Faber, 2003), 38.

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you have any Sense at all, if you are not meer Idiots and Lunaticks, let me tell you 70 a Story’ (2: 63). Mrs. M. then recounts the story of ‘Jane Gilbert’, accused of witchcraft and virtually starved by a village community who turned against her. ‘Goody’ Gilbert’s distress is depicted with a wealth of circumstantial detail: Mrs. M. was friends with the parson who rescued her, and describes in sympathetic and humane terms seeing the famished and confused old woman in her ‘little Hovel’, spinning ‘by a small Peat Fire, which I could have covered with my Hand’ (2: 64). Throughout this lengthy piece enlightened benevolence is the driving force: ‘I could recite many ... Circumstances in Jane Gilbert’s Behaviour ... which I think prov’d she was not a Witch, but a pious and good Christian; unless you suppose Witchcraft to consist in true Wisdom, Morality and Religion, and that wou’d be too absurd even for yourselves to suppose’ (2: 67). The article stands as an impressive indictment of the way that a community 71 can rip slight eccentricity into stigmatized and starving tatters. Mary Midnight’s own age and sex—as well as the warm account of her personal involvement with Jane Gilbert’s case—give this argument a special force, but both of these pieces sedulously avoid the implication that Mrs. M. herself is in any way a witch or ‘wise woman’. The persona of Mary Midnight is not—and here I must differ from Lance Bertelsen—allowed on the page to gain impact or glamour from the equation of old women with witches: ‘Antient, Female and plain as I am, I would not willingly pass for a Witch’ (1: 93).72 Though the name that was chosen for the persona may have been selected for its associations with the ‘Mother Midnight’ figure, which, as Robert Erickson has shown, had a place of its own in eighteenthcentury society and carried connotations of both witchcraft and prostitution, Mary Midnight on the page takes pains not to reinforce either of those associations. Smart, it should be stressed, could have done so in a myriad of ways, but he chose not to. She only once calls herself ‘Mother Midnight’ in the Midwife (1: 193). It is legitimate to speculate about the extent to which associations with the figure of the bawd shaped the persona, particularly in view of her garrulity, self-assurance, vulgarity and the 70 For an account of this case, see Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 282. Mrs. Osborne had told her chief persecutor that ‘the pretender would have him, and his hogs too’, so that there was in some sort a Jacobite element to the affair: see the Gentleman’s Magazine 21 (1751): 186, 198. Reprinted in 1802 under Smart’s name as The Genuine History of the Good Devil of Woodstock, this piece is included by Porter as exemplary of sympathetic enlightenment attitudes to the witch: Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2000), 223–4. 71 Mrs. Midnight hopes that her readers will understand from the story of Jane Gilbert that ‘the true source from whence Witchcraft is reputed to spring, is Poverty, Age, and Ignorance; and that it is impossible for a Woman to pass for a Witch, unless she is very Poor, Aged and lives in a Neighbourhood where the people are also void of common Sense’ (2: 67). Mr. Spectator similarly urges benevolence to those accused of witchcraft, though his musings do not carry the force of Mrs. M.’s strictures: Spectator 117. 72 Lance Bertelsen, ‘ “Neutral Nonsense, neither false nor true”: Christopher Smart and the Paper War(s) of 1752–1753’, in Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment, ed. Clement Hawes (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 141, 146–7.

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inconsistencies of her life-story, but the connection is never made explicit. She is not her own woman, and, as we have seen, is asked to inhabit many roles, but certainly the witch is never one of them. Some of the resonances of the ‘Mother Midnight’ figure may certainly have helped Smart in his creation of the persona, but to focus exclusively upon it is to divert readers from an understanding of the transactional role of the rhetoricallygifted, intelligent, and learned Mary Midnight. Erickson draws attention to the Midwife in a footnote, stating that ‘Smart recognized the multifarious roles of the old “midwife” as physician, wise woman, gossip, fortune-teller, bawd, whore, Gypsy, and authority on sex, and put them together into an effective Scriblerian persona 73 for his “Magazine”’. This description stretches the case: no evidence can be found to support his association of Mrs. M. with the ‘Gypsy’, and though she flirts with astrological implications, she would like her predictions to be recognized as the result of ‘natural Sagacity’, and usually damns the practice (1: 93, 142–3). Her attitude to astrology, and supernatural manifestations—see for instance the glorious parodic account of a ‘Spirit’ which ‘generally came in the Figure of a boiled Scragg 74 of Mutton’ (2: 54–5)—is always one of stoutly rational ridicule. Mary Midnight, then, is used to allow Smart to reject or accept those aspects of Enlightenment which appal or assist him. This chapter has shown what it was that her persona enabled the ‘Scholar of the University’ to achieve: Mary Midnight allowed Smart, particularly through her gender, but also through her age and position in society, to add weight, colour, or comedy—and sometimes all three at once—to his writing. Smart had found a successful and flexible persona that proved a congenial and enjoyable companion in writing. Delight in the liberation from weighty academic discourse is patent in much of the Midwife, but enjoyment, however, was only part of the story, and we are now in a position to examine the darker side of Smart’s abandonment of his University career—for there were pressures as well as pleasures that went into the assumption of this remarkable persona.

73 Robert A. Erickson, Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex and Fate in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 277. Pace Iona Italia and Lance Bertelsen, the hat hanging in Mrs. M.’s room in the frontispiece of the Midwife is not a witch’s: it is a seventeenth-century Puritan ‘high crowned’ hat, with a round, flattened top, as still seen in Welsh national costume. See chap. 5 below, 161–2; The Rise of Literary Journalism, 17–8, and Bertelsen, Henry Fielding at Work: Magistrate, Businessman, Writer (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000), 111. 74 This contrasts markedly with the attitude in Jubilate Agno: ‘the Laws of King James the first against Witchcraft were wise ...’, B299.

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Chapter 4

‘A Perfect Swiss in Writing’: Literature and Authorship in the Midwife The Taste of England is infamously corrupted by the Sholes of Wretches who write for 1 their Bread. Jonathan Swift

The Midwife pays homage to Swift directly more than once, and Swiftian prosopopoeic letters form the satiric backbone of the magazine: indeed, we have explored the way that the Mary Midnight persona works as a rhetorical ‘transactional’ device in the 2 manner of Swift’s Isaac Bickerstaff rather than that of Steele. It is difficult, though, to present Christopher Smart as an honourable acolyte of Swift in that gentleman’s own terms, for Smart undeniably fell under the category of one who ‘wrote for his Bread’. He was unable to subsist upon the earnings from the verses and song lyrics he published under his own name: therefore, to use a contested term in the way it 3 has become generally accepted, he became a ‘hack’. Though Mrs. Midnight blithely misquotes Gulliver’s Travels (3: 7), declaring that she, Solomon, Socrates and Sir Thomas More are four persons ‘to which all the Ages in the World shall never be able to add a fifth’, it is unlikely that the Dean would have agreed with her (2: 102). Mary Midnight, it has been argued, cuts an oddly belated sort of figure in her attempts to wrestle Scriblerian literary and cultural values back into prominence: yet the very fact of her trying to do so in a periodical rife with unfettered puffery would scarcely have endeared her to the Scriblerus circle. Pope, in his Peri Bathous, pointed up the civic humanist tenet underlying the distrust of commercial authorship: just as it is necessary for politicians to have an uncontaminated source of income which will render their service to the state disinterested, so must writers have other ends than 1 Jonathan Swift, Correspondence, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 4: 53. 2 Swift is included in Mrs. M.’s list of exalted wits: ‘Fielding, Lucian, Swift, Butler and Erasmus’ (2: 118). She claims that Gulliver bequeathed to her all the curiosities he found (2: 153); she refers to ‘my facetious Friend Dean Swift’ (3: 80) and he furnishes the motto for vol. 2, which is apposite here: ‘As for my Works in Verse and Prose,/ Perhaps I am no Judge of those,/ Nor do I care what Critics thought ’em/ But this I know, the People bought ’em’: ‘Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift’, lines. 311–12. 3 Karina Williamson states that he ‘entered the role of Grub-street hack’: PW4, xxiii. Blanford Parker has usefully noted that it is possible to ‘show the significance of Augustan hostility’ to the writing of ‘hacks’, without ‘falling back on the uncritical acceptance of Augustan values’: The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9.

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pelf in view. He ironically explains that ‘our wiser authors’ have a more immediate end than ‘Posterity’: ‘[t]heir true design is Profit or Gain; in order to acquire which, 4 ’tis necessary to procure applause by administring pleasure to the reader’. The use of a female persona is suggestive when put in the context of Shaftesbury’s charge that a modern author, ‘who writes in his own person’, will flatter and cajole the reader into accepting ‘the figure he ... hopes to make in the fashionable world’: ‘[t]his is the coquetry of a modern author’. Bonnell Thornton’s ‘Roxana Termagant’ of 1752—in the guise of ‘a scribbling Haberdasher of small-Wares’—claims that her readers will ‘see for love and buy for money’, thus unmistakably trading upon 5 an allusion to prostitution. She is, in a markedly ‘transactional’ way illustrating Pope’s suggestion that the true aim of many writers is simply profit, to be accrued by ‘administring pleasure to the reader’. As with Smart and Mrs. Midnight, Thornton can use this risky persona—probably adopted to ridicule Fielding’s attempted seductions of the public—because he is not a woman. Eliza Haywood’s persona in the 1744 Female Spectator—in tone and whiggish aim closely modeled on Steele’s Bickerstaff and Mr. Spectator—was ‘now very far from being young’, and protected herself with scrupulously virtuous discourse, and the company of three other woman contributors, heralded in the first number.6 Mary Midnight, however, though signalled as an ‘old woman’ in the very title of her magazine, essentially begins by using only her sagacity, transactionality and wit as allurements to the reader. ‘How could the writer be paid but respectable?’ John Brewer thus neatly encapsulates the dilemma. The basic matter of this chapter is the problem facing the eighteenth-century writer of scanty means: he was ‘damned if he did take the 7 money and poor if he didn’t’. Reconciling the notions of writing as an honourable and disinterested calling with writing as commercial expedient was not even an easy matter even if one had, like Thomas Gray, an independent source of income. Alvin Kernan has suggested that Samuel Johnson, unlike Smart, successfully ‘lived out ... the social mutation of writers from an earlier role as gentlemanamateurs to a new authorial self based on the realities of print and its condition of 8 mechanical reproduction.’ Most writers of prose in the periodical, following the Tatlerian model, found their justification for existence in adopting the role of social arbiters—giving themselves licence to censor current manners and attempting to instil habits of gentility in their readers—but I have been arguing that Smart’s aims in the Midwife were substantially different from theirs, and shall contend here that 4 Alexander Pope, Peri Bathous, in vol. 2 of Prose Works, ed. Rosemary Cowler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 188, 226. 5 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, ‘Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author’, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 90. Have-At-You-All, or The Drury-Lane Journal 1: 3–4. 6 The Female Spectator, no. 1 (April 1744). 7 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 149, and see 144–51. 8 For Gray see R.W. Ketton-Cremer, Thomas Gray: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 18, 102–10. Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), 5–6.

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the strains engendered upon the magazine by this uncomfortable fact are palpable within it. Smart’s particular position as writer and editor of the Midwife, the use of personae within it, and Mrs. M.’s strictures on literature form three intersecting areas, which, taken together, undoubtedly throw light upon the general situation facing mid-century writers of limited means and grand ambition. My hope for this chapter is that it will further our understanding of that situation, by showing the expediencies adopted by Smart within a cultural field of much doubt and insecurity. Brean Hammond calls for a measured approach to the phenomenon of literary professionalization, which would encompass the specific and distinctive ‘cultural politics’ of individual texts 9 and writers. Although the Midwife appeared ten years after Hammond’s endpoint of 1740, this chapter is intended to show that, certainly in the case of Smart’s magazine, the difficulties Hammond describes seem to have intensified rather than slackened: ‘in this period, conflicts between an older, patronage-based model of authorship as the result of prolonged study and immersion in the classics, and a newer model of 10 professionalism gradually being constituted, are at their most dramatic.’ Clearly, as stated in the last chapter, we shall never know to what extent the need to make a tidy profit and satisfy his bumbailiffs and his bookseller was balanced in 11 Smart’s mind by a desire to find a platform for his own views. One may assume, though, not least because of Mrs. M.’s vehemency of tone, and the acidity of meaning in which he so often saturated her satiric prose, that commercial considerations were not always uppermost in his mind. My broad contention is that Smart’s original aims for the magazine were multiple: to make money; to satirize ignorance, pomposity and the neglect of ‘that dull useless Thing called Thinking’ (2: 80) in his society; and to give voice to certain predominantly Tory, oppositional political notions—the slippery nature of which will be addressed most directly in the next chapter. Yet these aims are to some extent self-contradictory, and by the time Mrs. Midnight’s Oratory began at the end of 1751, I suggest that the second two motives had lost impetus, and the radical and satirical thrust of the magazine had begun to dissolve. The man who treasured his civil and mildly complimentary letter from Pope above almost anything else, was to be found presenting, in female dress, a burlesque show that at times approached in vulgarity the scenes over which the Goddess of Dulness 12 herself presided.

9 Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 12, 307. 10 Ibid., 5. An essay, possibly by Smart, ‘On the Multiplicity of MODERN AUTHORS’ repays attention in this context: The Universal Visiter, and Monthly Memorialist, eds. Richard Rolt and Christopher Smart (London: Thomas Gardner, 1756), 135–7. 11 Almost all of Smart’s biographers, commencing with his disapproving clerical nephew, mention his debt problems: Christopher Hunter (ed.), The Poems of the Late Christopher Smart M.A. (Reading: Smart and Cowslade, 1791), vi. The Midwife includes a telling list of those whom Mrs. M. could wish possessed a little more humility: they are ‘those who serve their Country in the Character of Taylors, Bumbailiffs, Booksellers and Excisemen’ (1: 199). 12 For the full story of Smart’s failed attempt to gain Pope’s patronage, see for example Ann. Lett. 1–5.

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‘Mary Midnight’ in this chapter offers us a different perspective on the problems of an impecunious author in the middle of the eighteenth century. Most particularly, in the light of recent scholarly work on the interplay between lofty cultural aspiration and those genres and ways of writing considered as ‘low’, the Midwife and its imaginary author are exemplary of the tensions which such an interplay could create in one small corner of the London literary marketplace. The magazine struggled to maintain itself as a viable entity, always in danger of undercutting its own reasons for being: it modelled itself on earlier Scriblerian writings that upheld ‘the amateur, gentlemanly, classically-trained, allusive model of authorship’ in a medium—the 13 commercial periodical—which itself was inadmissible under those very terms. The act of writing for money itself was tainted, then, but also it was complicated by questions of the nature of what was being written, and by whom. In the first three sections of this chapter I show a Scriblerian and transactional Mary Midnight who, despite her own precarious position, insists upon barring the doorway to authorship to those she feels unworthy of the calling. Pope, Swift and Gay, it has often been noted, borrowed an energy from the ‘low’ genres they derided: Mrs. M., however, seems, in her very derision of authors culled from the ranks of the ‘vulgar’, largely 14 to subsist upon that energy. As we shall see, employing the coarse and the vigorous to assist in persuading writers and readers to eschew the coarse and the vigorous held dangers for Smart, writing in a commercial magazine in 1751, that Pope, writing an epic poem as honourable satirist, had managed—mostly successfully—to evade in 15 1728. In the last three sections of this chapter a ‘Mary Midnight’ is introduced who finds, in the abandonment of her own status as rhetorical stratagem, a way out from the dilemma in which she has been placed. Barely able any longer credibly to attack those whose position as authors is little different from that of her own creator, she became less a figure of rhetorical, classically-based satire and more a representative of the fully-rounded type of characterisation associated with the novel: this is the Mary Midnight who can later appear on stage as a comic character with a family and a history. Via a discussion of Smart’s attitude towards the patronage system, which engages with the work of Dustin Griffin as well as that of Brean Hammond, and after consideration of Smart’s satirical piece on the ‘Prerogative of an Author’, I conclude that the shifts in the use of the Midnight persona show Smart finding it impossible

13 Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing, 8–9. 14 This paradox has frequently been noted as a feature of eighteenth-century literature: the locus classicus for this, in that here it has been interestingly theorised, is Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), see introduction and 80–124. Other sources are J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 171; Hammond, Professional Writing, 6, 11, 65, 209, 239; Pat Rogers, Grub Street, 164, 199; Ronald Paulson, Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 186. 15 Although, as J.V. Guerinot shows, there were attacks upon his ‘Billingsgate language’ and indecent imagery: Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope: A Descriptive Bibliography (London: Methuen, 1969), lvi, lix–lx.

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to uphold the cultural attitudes appropriate to a high-status poet and satirist in a medium suited to populist writing for a mixed commercial market. The Midwife itself will furnish us with examples to demonstrate this contention, but his work for the Student is also helpful here, in order to make plain Smart’s particular attitude to his periodical writings. The personae of ‘Chimaericus Cantabrigiensis’ and the ‘Female Student’ will assist, in that they give plentiful evidence of the nature of that attitude, which was at the least ambivalent, and— conceivably—almost unbearable for Smart. The figure of the mercenary soldier was anathema to those who shared the broadly humanist ‘cultural politics’ of the Midwife, yet the persona of the ‘Female Student’, who claimed to be Mary Midnight, described herself as ‘a perfect Swiss in writing’ (2: 49). I have been arguing that Mrs. M. should be understood as a transactional, rhetorical fiction, yet here the connection between Mrs. M. and the Duncely attribute of selling your pen to whomsoever will pay is nevertheless uncomfortably close. Finally here, we might recall ‘Dumb Rhetoric’—the piece on the Drury Lane pantomime discussed in the second chapter; there prior notice was posted of the manifestly impossible dilemma in which Smart found himself. For Newbery, and for his friends Burney and Garrick, he was obliged to give the show a resounding puff, and so we saw Mary Midnight summoning Shakespeare and Milton to the defence of an entertainment which in its nature was very far from King Lear and Comus in its form and function. It is not very surprising that Quintilian and Longinus and Thomas More should appear in the journalism of this former Cambridge don, but when Socrates is enlisted as a dancer of jigs to puff the appearance of a one-legged ‘French’ dancer at Mrs. Midnight’s Oratory, we have undoubtedly to register a clash 16 of cultural attitudes of some magnitude. Kenrick and the ‘ITCH of SCRIBBLING’ Let us turn now to two pieces, from the Midwife and the Student, which taken together, assume standards of high literary excellence at the same time as they descend to an absurdity which could be conceived of as destructive of those very standards. In both pieces the respective personae make it plain that in their opinion certain writers are nothing but pretenders to the mantle of authorship, for they have not undertaken the serious work of study which such a role demands: both consider, as did Pope and Swift, that the pursuit of writing is being undertaken by inappropriate individuals. The next two sections of this chapter will be taken up in examining this assumption, and the grounds on which it is made, and also in showing the ingenious lengths to which Mrs. Midnight is made to go in using irony to make this point. If the writings of Chimaericus can legitimately be used as an indication of what Smart himself thought—and it has been explained how they can—it seems very likely that 17 he felt this too. The ‘Castle-Building’ essay ‘On the Sublime’ (Student, 2: 184–7) is making the same basic point as the Midwife’s ‘Itch of Scribbling’; ‘On the Sublime’ 16 ‘And the divine Socrates, so far subscribed to this Opinion [the benefits of dancing], that he did not think it too late to learn a Jig in his old Age’, 3: 90. 17 See chap. 3 above, 84–5.

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predates the Midwife piece, but we will inspect the Midwife piece first, and then allow the former to help with the question raised by Mrs. Midnight: namely, on what grounds are some individuals unsuitable for authorship? Mrs. M. begins ‘The ITCH of SCRIBBLING proved to be catching’ (2: 23–7) by speaking in her medical capacity: the piece directly follows her letter to the College of Physicians, in which, as we saw, she challenged modern medical practice with humour, but also with effective acumen. She now turns this skilfully-won authority towards the world of literary endeavour: ‘That this Disorder, like many of the cutaneous Kind is catching, may I think be proved from a Multitude of Cases that have lately fallen under my Cognizance’. The piece is equally indebted to Pope, who suggested that ‘the Desire of Writing’ is ‘properly term’d Pruritus’ and causes unpleasant discharges from bad poets, to Spectator 582, and to Swift, who made superb sardonic capital out of exploiting ‘the Phoenomenon of Vapours’ and other 18 similarly mock-medical jargon in his Tale of a Tub. Mrs. M., however, has a more local and specific aim than her illustrious progenitors: the immediate reason for the inclusion of the ‘Itch’ is as a riposte in a small and lucratively vitriolic paper war with William Kenrick. This gentleman, who might be seen as an example of the unashamedly commercial hack, was described uncompromisingly in the 1885–1900 DNB as a ‘superlative scoundrel’. The ‘Itch of Scribbling’ appears to have been written in revenge for Kenrick having stolen a march on Smart by publishing his own mocking Old Woman’s Dunciad before Smart could 19 get his projected work of that title written. Smart also may have been annoyed by Kenrick’s drawing attention to the fact that the author of the ‘Castle-Building’ pieces in the Student and the author of the Midwife were one and the same—or perhaps, as Robert Mahony and Betty Rizzo suggest, the ‘Itch of Scribbling’ was a response to Kenrick’s pamphlet attacking Smart’s prologue and epilogue to the 1751 production of Othello. It is possible, as some have suggested, that this was a mutually contrived paper war, but in the light of the ‘Castle-Building’ article I discuss in the following section, it is arguable that there were also matters of principle at stake for Smart in 20 this exchange. From the ‘thousand Instances’ that Mrs. M. ‘has at hand’ of the pernicious spread of the itch of scribbling, she first selects this one, that of ... Mr. J. Honeysuckle, who was originally a Barber near the Temple, and a good honest Man, that had no more to say for himself than other People, till he became acquainted with the Master of George’s Coffee-house, and was called in to shave the WITS. There is something very powerful and astonishing in the Nature and Action of the Effluvia which ascends from certain Bodies, and I doubt not but it was the Effluvia that ascended from the Heads of these People while John was shaving them, that wrought this tickling Irritation in his Fancy, and brought on him the Itch of Scribbling. (2: 23). 18 Pope, Peri Bathous, in vol. 2 of Prose Works, 189; Swift, A Tale of a Tub, With Other Early Works 1696–1707, vol. 1 of Prose Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 105. Smart borrowed the Tale of a Tub while at Cambridge: SB, 45. 19 See Roland B. Botting, ‘Christopher Smart in London’, Research Studies of the State College of Washington 7, no. 1 (1939): 18–21; Ann. Bib, 373–4. 20 See Ann. Bib., 375. Smart was kinder to Kenrick later: PW4, 338, 463.

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Mrs. M. disapproves of John for taking up writing, and forsaking his decent selfreticence, but the matter does not end there. She continues: And perhaps it is also owing to the Effluvia that dropped from the Brains of John, which has affected many of the Members of that Society with the terrible Degree of Dulness they at present possess. When I look into my book of Mechanics, read over the Laws of Motion, and find that all Bodies act reciprocally on each other, that the Horse draws as much as the Log, and the Log as the Horse, I am confirmed in this Opinion ... (2: 23–4)

John has caught the ‘itch’ from the coffee-house wits, but in his head it undergoes a strange debilitating transformation, so that he then reciprocally re-infects them with his own ‘Dulness’. This transformation might have occurred because in terms of class he is an inappropriate person to follow the high calling of an author, or because he has not the education or the intelligence to undertake it effectively. Leaving this question to hover for a moment, Mrs. Midnight satirizes modern medical speculation in a splendidly ludicrous disquisition on the ‘Sort of Animalcula, or Maggot’, which, being very fine, can ‘insinuate’ itself ‘through both the Skin and the Skull’, and thus cause the ‘Itch’. Turning now to ‘Mr. Kenderico’, Mrs. Midnight explains that he too came of ‘honest’ tradesman stock, and began honourably as ‘Apprentice to a Rule-maker’: his parents hoped to have thus ‘provided for him, that he should have lived in the World, enjoyed a Cut from a hot Joint of Meat every Sunday, and have had a new Coat every 21 Easter in the Year.’ This sensible arrangement was ruined, however, when unfortunately for this poor Man, a Poet came into his Master’s Shop ... and, while he was bargaining for a black-lead Pencil, receiv’d a message from the Muses, that precipitated him away without his Hat, which was carry’d after him by Mr. Kenderico, who, as it then rained, very inadvertently put it on his own Head, and, by that Means, contracted this terrible Disorder ... (2: 24–5)

This was all the more unfortunate, explains Mrs. M., ‘on Account of his Trade; for the Effluvia of the Brass used in the Joints of his Rules, has so case-hardened his Face, that ’tis become absolutely callous’: Kenrick has lost the power to blush, and thereby gained the brass neck to pass off his poetry as legitimate. The ‘Effluvia’ from the lead in his pencils, also has, predictably, infected his writings with a ponderous weight, so that ‘every Thing he scribbles sinks into Oblivion’. Mrs. M. then uses parison in an attack on Kenrick’s partner in literary crime, Francis Stamper, whom she calls ‘STAMPERO’: ‘his Lines are as void of Meaning as his Advertisements are of Manners’. He contracted his itch from a different sort of effluvia: it was caused ‘only by packing up Magazines, the dullest Things in the Universe’ (2: 25). It would be cloth-eared not to register that this is a joke; it is, however, a significant one, in that Mrs. Midnight, the proud and indefatigable Mrs. Midnight, who suggests that her magazine influences the crowned heads of Europe, and that she will be remembered by all posterity, is pleased to label all magazines, 21 John Ginger says Kenrick was ‘apprenticed to a scale-maker’: the 2004 DNB concurs, and refers also to his ‘unwavering arrogance and irascible temper’: The Notable Man: The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith (London: Hamilton, 1977), 310–13.

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including her own, with the epithet which most of all signifies the stupidity, worthlessness and tedium of modern writing. The licence that transactionality offers a persona is here being stretched very far: perhaps indeed to breaking-point. The Midwife was always in danger of destroying its own reasons for being, and it is self-destructive, corrosive jokes like this that stand as evidence for this contention. The ostensible raisons d’être of the article—annihilation of Kenrick, ridicule of scientific discourses, censure of the invasion of the province of writing by illegitimate scribblers—have been undermined. This is a reckless move; it may well indicate to some that its author, unlike Kenrick, can feel shame, and is indeed ashamed of the genre in which he works. Steele may have grumbled that ‘the Art [of writing] is become merely mechanic, and Men may make themselves great … by as certain and infallible Rules as you may be a Joiner or a Mason’, but he did not simultaneously denigrate his own forum (Tatler 3). Satire, we have traditionally been told, needs a firm and universally understood set of values in order to achieve its aim; what are we to make of a satirist who believes that the very medium in which he is working is worthless, and, most damning of all, a contributory cause of the very ‘Dulness’ he attacks? It was only a month after this edition of the Midwife, in the May 1751 issue of the Student, that Smart as Chimaericus announced ‘I am determined to be as stupid as my contemporaries, in order to make myself POPULAR’ (2: 301). The reader might by now be losing confidence in Mrs. Midnight, but her next move in the ‘Itch of Scribbling’ is to ‘leave these Wretches, who are the Dross of Mankind’, and suggest that the itch-creating effluvia also may operate for the good, which gives her a chance to puff the minor poet Ben Sedgly, his poem on ‘Mr. Worlidge, the ingenious Painter’ and Sedgly’s ‘Observations on Mr. Fielding’s 22 Enquiry.’ To answer the question posed earlier, it seems from the (clearly not ironic) encomium to Mr. Sedgly, that the effluvia might work to beneficial effect, so long as they encounter men like him, to whom ‘Nature has given ... an extensive Proportion of solid Understanding’, and who ‘has long been a Companion not only for the Wits of the Time, but also the Men of Sense’ (2: 26). Mr. Sedgly’s social position is not mentioned, but from this it seems that even if he was from a ‘mechanic’ background his ‘solid Understanding’ would render him fit for authorship in Mary Midnight’s eyes. There is one more effect of the cacoethes scribendi to be registered: the dog ‘Colebrook’, who from ‘lying under the Table where the Wits usually meet’, has 22 Mrs. M. praises Sedgly’s ‘Observations’ for their ‘uncommon Spirit’ (2: 46–8). Smart’s relationship with Fielding, usually represented as amicable, is here put under question, for ‘Ben Sedgly’, whose ‘Observations’ were highly critical of Fielding’s ‘Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers’ was unlikely to have been a pseudonym of Richard Rolt’s, as Battestin claimed. Care should be taken in reading Kenrick’s Pasquinade, whence Battestin took his information, for both Rolt and Sedgly are listed separately elsewhere as having subscribed to Smart’s Poems on Several Occasions in 1752: see Wilbur L. Cross, The History of Henry Fielding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918), 266–7; Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 521 and n. 182; William Kenrick, The Pasquinade, with Notes Variorum (London 1753) 19–20. For the subscription list, see Arthur Sherbo, Christopher Smart: Scholar of the University (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), 82–3.

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also contracted the ‘Disorder’. Again in his case the results have been remarkable, for he has ‘become one of the most eminent Writers of the Age’: this is a puff for ‘Colebrook’s’ letter in the previous number of the Student. This is a startlingly wise and learned creature, even more academically inclined than his prosopopoeic cousin ‘Towzer’. The peroration of his rhetorically sophisticated essay begins thus: MARTIAL makes fishes sensible; and LUCRETIUS says that beasts, both wild and tame, have different voices, to express their different passions. Why then should man so vainly appropriate every faculty of reason, and sublimer sensation solely to himself? If men understood the language of dogs, their pride would receive a great mortification: and this I insist upon, that I am even superior to most of the insolent sons of divine similitude; because I can understand their language, while they are totally ignorant of mine. (Student, 2: 220)

The piece is unattributed: it may be Smart’s, for it would sit well with his opposition to experimentation on animals, discussed in chapter six. That Moira Dearnley has noted Smart’s obsession with the muteness of fishes may be remarked here, as well as his love for the celebrated cat ‘Jeoffry’.23 It is important to note that Colebrooke adds another nail to Kenrick and Stamper’s coffin, for even dogs may become decent authors, where they cannot; this strategy is uncomfortably close to the one already suggested as a reason for Smart’s choice of a female persona. I have invoked Pope and Swift in this discussion, but it should be clear by now that the hurling of epithets and bouquets in this piece hardly counts as literary criticism, for its author has sidestepped the necessity to back up his claims, either with principles or examples of their infringement. This is not the case, however, in the ‘Castle-Building’ article, to which we are about to turn, or in ‘A few Thoughts concerning ELEGY-WRITING’ which follows directly on from the ‘Itch of Scribbling’, and where, as we shall see, Kenrick again takes a pasting. ‘On the Sublime’ and Authorship as a Mechanical Art Chapter 9 of the ‘New System of CASTLE-BUILDING’—‘On the Sublime’ (2: 184–7)—appeared in the February 1751 number of the Student: two months before the Midwife number which carried ‘The Itch of Scribbling’, and very shortly after Kenrick had annoyed Mrs. Midnight with his own Old Woman’s Dunciad. At its head it proclaims its place of birth: ‘Written in the room above the garrett, at the CASTLE IN THE AIR, Islington’. A footnote explains that this is actually ‘a real publick house’, kept by Colley Cibber’s daughter, and the piece proper continues by way of a mock-encomium on ‘our inimitable Laureate’. Chimaericus’s old adversary ‘Mr. Critic Catchup’ (behind whom the figure of John Dennis may lurk) then objects that no new treatises on the sublime are necessary: ‘I am a plain man, and LONGINUS will make my turn.’ Chimaericus retorts that Longinus was all very

23 Moira Dearnley, The Poetry of Christopher Smart (London: Routledge, 1969), 279. ‘Jeoffry’: Jubilate Agno, B695–768. For a similar disquisition on the language of animals, see Mrs. M.’s ‘Panegyrick on Loquacity’, 3: 115.

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well, ‘but he would be nothing in earth nowadays; we are got into quite another way’, and proceeds, deliciously, to ridicule a scrap of French poetry in the manner of Pope’s Peri Bathous. It is when Chimaericus calls in an imaginary reader to ask why he need turn to France for examples that the true purpose of the article comes to light. He replies: ‘Why,—to shew my taste, and follow the steps of my superiors’, and then, agreeing 24 that there are indeed many indigenous versions of the sublime, continues: The Graecian and Roman writers had an absurd notion, that to arrive at the true sublime either in poetry, or even prose, genius and learning were requisite in their extreams. Poor souls, what notions they had!—Why, I’ll produce you a set of spice of either; and by an happy BOLDNESS (which expression LONGINUS uses as synonymous to the sublime) confidently ridicule all the possessors of those two unnecessary qualifications, while they go on flying without wings, and, with an incredible vivacity, pursuing ends without condescending to carry the means along with them. (2: 185)

Reading Longinus’s sublime as synonymous with audacity enables Chimaericus to attack the moderns root and branch for their neglect of proper learning and hard thinking. Here, with a vengeance, is Hammond’s ‘model of authorship as the result of prolonged study and immersion in the classics’. Smart’s Scriblerian position is patent here: Swift’s ‘Hack’ in the Tale is jubilant about modern methods of becoming ‘Scholars and Wits without the Fatigue of Reading or of Thinking’, and Pope has Martinus Scriblerus attempting to show that an ‘Epic Poem may be made without a 25 Genius, nay without much Learning or much Reading.’ Mechanistic, instrumental, scientific theories are under fire again in ‘On the Sublime’: Chimaericus argues that as there is an ‘allowed connection’ between dreaming and poetry, and ‘as the phaenomena of dreaming has by most philosophers been solved mechanically, from the diet, constitution and other habits of the body; so (it should seem) the productions of poets (modern ones especially) might be accounted for on the same principles.’ Sidestepping, on this occasion, the temptation to descend into the scatological quagmire which now seems inevitable, he says that ‘a volatile preparation’ may soon be found, which will enable poets to attain the ‘true SUBLIME’: ‘[W]hen this matter is effected, then shall the dunces triumph.— Matter and motion against art and nature!—Down with the schools!—and let every drivler be his own preceptor!’ For instance, ‘satyres’ may be produced by judicious consumption of ‘nettle-porridge and crab verjuice’: 24 For the suggestion that Smart should be included in Gerald Newman’s group of midcentury intellectuals who attacked the aristocracy’s infatuation with French manners, see chap. 5 below. Kenrick should be enlisted too; he approvingly quoted ‘the wit in the last war’ who said ‘he could never doubt of our success, if we could once bring ourselves to hate the French as heartily as we did the arts and sciences’: The Pasquinade, 7. 25 Hammond, Professional Writing, 5; Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. Davis, 91; Pope, Peri Bathous, in vol. 2 of Prose Works, 228. Fielding, in the Covent-Garden Journal 1 (4 January 1752) makes a similar point, deploring the presence of ‘Mechanics’ and ‘fine Ladies’ among the ‘Usurpers of the Realm of Criticism’: Henry Fielding, The Covent-Garden Journal, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Oxford: Clarendon 1988), 18. For Smart’s insistence on the importance of application to learning, see chap. 2 above, 52, n. 27.

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Then shall every little, half-inch, insignificant vender of pamphlets write odes; the printer shall compose an epic poem; and the very devil of the press, be the devil of an epigrammatist. In fine, all seminaries for polite, ingenuous and useful education will be needless: every man will cater for himself, and collect the manna of his own learning. People of all ranks shall measure every thing by the level of their own understandings, and the plumb rule of their own judgements. (2: 186–7)

This ‘Castle-Building’ essay, it can be suggested, provides the generalized rationale behind the apparently unfounded accusations against Kenrick in the ‘Itch of Scribbling’: ‘plumb rules’ were, after all, Kenrick’s trade, and not only has he abandoned the honest work of their manufacture, but he has also spurned the accumulated classical knowledge that, after a different sort of honest work, would have given him the means to claim the title of author. Brass-faced Kenrick is infected with the boldness which so disgusts Chimaericus, a brother to the ‘pertness’ which Pat Rogers defines as a ‘duncely characteristic’. Thus, Kenrick’s erstwhile trade has come as a rhetorical gift to both Chimaericus and Mrs. Midnight, allowing them to arraign boldness, wilful ignorance, and the simple cause-and-effect mechanistic 26 materialism of the moderns before the same court. Perhaps most importantly in both cultural and political terms, ‘Rule-making’ has also given Chimaericus a metaphor through which to condemn the practice of relying upon your own guts, like Swift’s ‘Modern’ spider, as a source of knowledge and inspiration—the practice that T.S. Eliot was still condemning in arguably Scriblerian terms in 1923 as ‘Whiggery’. Without venturing to comment about Pope, Swift, or Eliot’s position, these pieces, and those which we are about to encounter, leave us uncertain about whether Smart is implying that the ‘prentices and mechanics’ should be debarred from the practice of writing altogether, or whether, given the right ‘seminaries’, and, like Sedgly, ‘an extensive Proportion of solid Understanding’, 27 they might be allowed to sport upon Parnassus with the Muses. Education, Mrs. Midnight declares later in the Midwife, approvingly quoting de Busbeq, and emphatically not in ironic mode, is the only route to ‘virtue’, which quality is ‘partly ... the Gift of God, and partly to be acquired by a good Education with much Labour and Study’. Perhaps once one has attained ‘virtue’ from long and arduous study one may become an author, for in this piece the learned are the élite, rather than the aristocracy: after four lines of Gondibert proclaiming worth over birth,

26 Rogers, Grub Street, 270. Mechanistic reasoning in literary criticism was attacked by George Alexander Stevens, who arraigned Warburton for imagining ‘that Philosophy and Poetry are always to be examined by classical Scale and Compass, like the Mathematician, who only read Virgil, to examine by the Map, how, Navigator-like, he had conducted Aeneas in his Voyage’: Burlesque Plays of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Simon Trussler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 290. 27 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Function of Criticism’, in Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), 70–73. The Oxford English Dictionary lists two definitions of the word ‘mechanic’ which carry pejorative overtones, and cites Fielding for one of them: for his ‘mere Mechanics’ see the Covent Garden-Journal, ed. Goldgar, 15.

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Mrs. M. vatically apostrophizes the well-born: ‘Read, meditate, and digest, my dear 28 Neighbours of St James’s’ (2: 178–9). Finally here, we should briefly glance at the piece immediately following the ‘Itch of Scribbling’, where Mrs. M. at last furnishes us with a concrete example of Kenrick’s literary incompetence. In ‘A few Thoughts concerning ELEGY-WRITING. By Mrs. MIDNIGHT’ (2: 27–9), the lady, by way of Horace facetiously translated, proclaims the low status of the modern elegy, and the poor quality of the ‘present Monody-mongers’: ‘It is a strange thing that People will not reflect, that though this is the meanest Species of Poetry, ’tis still a Species of Poetry, and consequently requires very exalted Talents: No Matter for that—Away we go on, Neck or Nothing, without either Sense, Genius, or Learning ...’ (2: 27–8). Remarking briefly the cultural orthodoxies being disrupted by this female personage lecturing on literary rectitude in a loose sentence bearing an unfashionable colloquialism, note again that ‘exalted Talents’ are deemed vital to any ‘Species of Poetry’. Mrs. M. then cites two examples of solecisms from Kenrick’s ‘Monody to the Memory of ... Frederick Prince of Wales’: the first acidly queries his labelling of a personified ‘Fear’ with the 29 ‘Epithet’ ‘TIP-TOED’ (and indeed it does convey an hilariously bathetic flavour). We will visit the second in a moment. To conclude her piece, Mrs. Midnight has saved her most cutting sally, which will serve to underline the above discussion: ‘It must be acknowledged, in Justice to Mr. Kenrick, that his Piece is very equal, and tho’ he is an insufferable Poet, yet he’s a very commendable Rule-Maker, and understands black lead Pencils’ (2: 29). ‘Matter and motion against art and nature!’: Smart has found a way to proceed 30 from the particular to the general with perfect congruity. Once these three pieces are placed side by side, it becomes clear that the apparently unfounded and frivolous accusations against Kenrick proceed from a consistent and considered position which questions the progress of modernity. Those Smart scholars who discuss his attitude to Enlightenment scarcely take into consideration his early prose writings: there is strong evidence within them of a marked animus against Newtonianism and mechanistic reasoning, and this, surely, calls for acknowledgement in any account of 31 Smart as a critic of modernity. Here—with some subtlety—Kenrick’s wooden, brass 28 The article is ‘A few Thoughts on FAMILY’; most of it consists of a quotation in Latin, translated by Mrs. M., from a seventeenth-century letter by Gislenius de Busbeq, explaining that in Turkey leaders are not chosen for their ancestry, but for their virtue and education. I have to thank Chris Mounsey’s research skills for the provenance of ‘Busbequius’: see Christopher Smart: Clown of God (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 110. 29 The publication of Kenrick’s ‘Ode’ is listed in the April number of the Gentleman’s Magazine, close to Smart’s own ‘Solemn Dirge’ on the death of the Prince of Wales, ‘as it is sung at Vaux Hall’. The lapse of taste involved in juxtaposing this national tragedy with the ‘Arse-Gut’ in the Dragon of Wantley seems not to trouble Mrs. M..—see chap. 5 below. 30 In Gay, Pope and Arbuthnot’s Three Hours After Marriage Dr. Fossil declares that ‘the Cartesians [are] for matter and motion’ (act 4, scene 1): Burlesque Plays, ed. Trussler, 125. 31 For example, Clement Hawes discusses Donald Davies’s assessment of the poems of Smart as ‘of the Enlightenment’, as distinct from other critical work which addresses Smart’s ‘selective antipathy to a major Enlightenment icon, Sir Isaac Newton’, and comes to the conclusion that Smart’s poetry stands as ‘the simultaneous critique both of tradition and

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and lead rule-making instruments have been made to stand for the mechanical and scientistic determinism of the Enlightenment, for the neglect of classical learning, and the concomitant acceptance of all and sundry into the ranks of authorship. Ballad Poetry, Politeness, and Literary Criticism Mrs. Midnight’s attack on Kenrick and the ‘prentices and mechanics’ who think they can write extends in the Midwife to those who think that people even lower on the social scale than petty tradesmen can write. Those who sing and sell popular ballads on street corners are not themselves taken to task on the grounds that they illegitimately assume the exalted mantle of authorship—the sheer unthinkability of this is the comic engine of the piece we are about to encounter—but the educated gentlemen who profess to find literary excellence in the popular ballad are the targets 32 of three important Midwife pieces. In these Mrs. Midnight brings into promiscuous and bitter juxtaposition the differences between popular, ‘low’ street entertainment and the elevated, learned poetry which Christopher Smart wrote—for which he had gained important academic prizes, and for which he wished to be justly celebrated. I would like to show here how, in ironically conflating the two, Mrs. Midnight is attempting to render the barriers between them ever the more secure, and yet how she too is subject to the charge—sometimes levelled at the Scriblerians—that her writings derive much of their energy and zest from the low genres which they so vehemently deride. Once again, Mrs. Midnight is late upon the scene in this regard, carrying within her own person the contradictions inherent in the cultural arena which Smart is trying to police, and displaying them to arresting effect in her magazine. Our way into this different, but intimately linked area of Midnightian concern comes from the attack upon Kenrick at which we have just been looking—the ‘Thoughts concerning ELEGY-WRITING’. As an example of Kenrickian bathos, she chooses to castigate this quatrain of his monody, and reprints it thus: ‘Hard by a strange fantastic Group appear,/ Wan Cowardice, each Moment changing Seat;/ Weak Apprehension, PRICKED IN THE Rear,/ And sober Melancholy, Mother of Conceit. (2: 28) What offends the lady is not just the bathos, and the importation of low homely imagery into a tragic and lofty subject, but the similarity between his adjectival phrase 33 and the one in an ‘old Ballad’. In a move inherited from the tradition of learned wit which is so frequent in the Midwife that it qualifies as a Midnightian trademark, she modernity’: Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment, ed. Clement Hawes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 3–5. Also see chap. 6 below. 32 These are ‘To the Critics and the Poets’, 2: 174–80; ‘The little Lighterman … Chirurgically dissected’, 2: 197–204 (see chap. 5 below), and ‘To Mrs. MARY MIDNIGHT’ (a letter from ‘George Pilkinton’, extolling a ‘Poem in praise of Hackney’) 2: 274–7. 33 This is the very pattern of the choice of ‘low’ imagery for ‘high’ subjects which Pope derided in Peri Bathous: in vol. 2 of Prose Works, 192. For the satirical plot of the ballad ‘The Dragon of Wantley’, see Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 57, and for Henry Carey’s 1738 play The Dragon of Wantley see Burlesque Plays, ed. Trussler.

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exaggerates a practice into absurdity in order to point up its essential foolishness or illegitimacy—ridicule by exaggeration. Here she implies that if Kenrick’s pathetic effort can be called a monody, then so can this vulgar ballad: ... poor APPREHENSION! so inhumanly has he treated her, that she is exactly in the same disastrous Case as the Dragon of Wantley, in the old Ballad—PRICKED IN THE REAR—upon which he makes his Complaint to Mr.. More in the following Monody. Oh More of More-Hall Thou sad Ras-call I wish I had seen thee never; With the Thing in thy Foot, Thou hast PRICKT MY A---E -GUT And I am undone for ever. (2: 28–9)

Mrs. Midnight, suffice it to say, appears so intent upon maintaining literary standards that, in printing this inadequately-disguised bit of arse-guttery, she has herself been undone. The trouble is that she has adopted a certain old-fashioned satirical method and used it for the purpose of upholding the status of literature and the pursuit of excellence. That which, however, was apparently just about acceptable in Swift’s day was not necessarily so in hers: she has carried out this impeccably Scriblerian manoeuvre using unforgivable vulgarity combined with a gossipy, untimely form of diction, and both of these practices run counter to strong mid-century cultural trends: the encouragement of polite gentility and the standardisation of grammar. There has been much emphasis of late on the position of the periodical after the Tatler as guardian and establisher of ‘the polite’: John Brewer includes a classic version of this argument in his Pleasures of the Imagination. Shaftesbury, whom Lawrence Klein figures as the father of the later eighteenth-century drive to politeness, pointed out that gentlemen ‘[manage] pleasantry and raillery with good breeding, and [are] never gross and clownish’. If ‘company’ is extended to the readers of printed matter, as it so often is in modern scholarship, it is plain that Klein’s definition of politeness as ‘the art of sociability ... of pleasing in company, an art involving self-presentation, intersubjectivity, and self-love’ would hardly 34 cover the petrified turd and the arse-gut. The ‘Memoirs of a Pamphlet reflecting on the Miss G-[unning]-s’, an unattributed and very nasty prosopopoeic poem, has an incontinent poet employing the pamphlet in a Vauxhall jakes, and represents the unquestionable nadir of politeness in the magazine (2: 228–34). This aspect of the magazine may be popular with coffee-house wits, but the Horace Walpoles of this world will shut it with a frown. They are all for the maintenance of standards, but the 34 Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 99–111. Also see Lawrence E. Klein, ‘The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 18, no.2 (1984–85): 186–214: Hammond, Professional Writing, 145–91; Stephen Copley, ‘Commerce, Conversation and Politeness in the Early Eighteenth-Century Periodical’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 18, no. 1 (1995): 63–77. ‘pleasantry and raillery’: ‘Sensus Communis’, Characteristics, 32. Mrs. Midnight’s old-fashioned prescription for social conduct seems more based in Ciceronian ‘decorum’ than in ‘politeness’, see chap. 2 above. ‘the art of sociability’: Klein, ‘The Third Earl of Shaftesbury’, 191.

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means should support the ends, rather than appearing to be in tipsy collusion with them. ‘Humour’, Tully had declared in his Offices, ‘should be of a well-bred and witty type, neither extravagant nor excessive’: sometimes the Midwife appears to be 35 illustrating this remark by antithesis. Mrs. Midnight’s often informal ramblings—we have just seen a sample from earlier in the ‘Elegy-Writing’ piece—are frequently more redolent of Defoe’s Moll Flanders than Samuel Johnson. The writing in the Midwife runs wildly counter to Carey McIntosh’s invaluable description of the eighteenth-century process of the ‘gentrification’ of language. He cites colloquial and homely phrases used in early eighteenth-century manuals of grammar, such as Mrs. M.’s ‘Neck or Nothing’, and shows how later grammars in the same century proscribed them. It was not long after the publication of the Midwife that grammars began to point out the defects in Swift’s writings, which Mrs. Midnight so often and so clearly uses as an admired template. Her sentences more often than not display the rambling open-endedness McIntosh denotes as ‘loose’, as opposed to the Johnsonian ‘periodic’ sentences recommended later in the century, which were arranged so that their endings were 36 elegantly anticipated by their beginnings. The July 1751 number of the Midwife contains an article which works in a less compacted way than the ‘Elegy’, but is nevertheless also a version of the selfdefeating process I have just outlined. A close reading of it and an explanation of its provenance should serve to make plain, from a different angle, how it is that the Midwife can be said to undermine its own reason for being. Mrs. M.’s letter ‘To the Criticks and the Poets’ concerning the street song ‘On Jollity’ (2: 174–80) is the most substantial piece of literary criticism in the Midwife; here Mrs. M. presents a mock encomium in a style which veers calculatedly between severe academicism and armchair chatter. It is a vigorous attack on the shortcomings of criticism as a ‘Science’, and also on attempts to discover literary merit in ballad poetry. That certain sorts of poetic excellence can be found in ancient ballads had been Addison’s claim in Spectators 70, 74 and 85, where in 1711 he had praised the ‘extreamly Natural and Poetical Sentiments’ of ‘Chevy Chase’ (74) and seen similarities between a scrap of Horace and ‘The Two Children in the Wood’ (85). Once again Mary Midnight is late upon the scene, for Addison’s eulogies to the ‘inherent Perfection of Simplicity of Thought’ in ‘Chevy Chase’ (70)—often regarded as prefiguring interest in ancient or 37 primitive poetry later in the century —had already been comprehensively attacked, almost as soon as they had been published, and in a manner very like hers, if with a little more erudition and considerably more delicacy. 35 Cicero, On Duties, eds. M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 40. Smart borrowed this at Cambridge: SB, 40. Walpole found Mrs. Midnight’s Oratory ‘the lowest buffoonery in the world’: PW4, xlvii. 36 Carey McIntosh, The Evolution of English Prose 1700–1800: Style, Politeness and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Also see John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730–1780: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 110–75. For the proscription of the use of colloquial phrases, see McIntosh, Evolution of English Prose, 22–31. ‘loose’ sentences: ibid., 23–9, 31, and also see 43–5. 37 See for example James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature (Harlow: Longman, 1993), 137.

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In his 1711 pamphlet A Comment Upon the History of Tom Thumb, the Tory Dr. William Wagstaffe parodied Addison, using irony to invert his own apparent approval of Addison’s thesis. Wagstaffe absurdly took as his text the nursery poem he had discovered in ‘the Library of a School-Boy’, and compared it, as Addison did ‘Chevy Chase’, to the epics of Homer and Virgil, with many flourishes of Latin 38 quotation. Addison put up a hostage to fortune in his likening of Earl Douglas to Turnus and Aeneas, for Wagstaffe, anticipating Swift’s Lilliput, compared the antics of Tom Thumb to the heroic exploits of Achilles, and suggested parallels between the fifth book of Virgil, the circus tricks of Tom Thumb at the court of King Arthur, and the ludicrousness of Addison’s claims: This Canto concludes with the presents made by the King to the Champion according to the Custom of the Greeks and Romans in such Cases; only [Tom’s] tumbling thro’ the Queen’s Ring is observable, and may serve to give some Light into the Original of that ingenious Exercise so much practis’d by the Moderns, of tumbling thro’ an Hoop. (17–18)

Wagstaffe’s pamphlet appeared as an instant rebuke to Addison: in 1751 Mrs. Midnight may look like an embarrassing aunt arriving late at a family ceremony. The practice of finding merit in ballads, however, had not ceased and Smart may be responding to sentiments similar to those expressed in the Gentleman’s Magazine of October 1751, which carried a letter praising the ‘beautiful and natural turns of 39 thought’ in the words of an old Irish song. ‘To the Criticks’ begins with a sentence which bears the stamp of the Midnight character to perfection, carrying as it does an egregious fib, self-assurance of breathtaking audacity, and a cosily self-referential declaration: ‘In some of my former Papers I pointed out the Excellency and true characteristical Beauties of Pastoral and Elegiac Poetry, and I shall now, for your Instruction and Entertainment, give you my Sentiments on the Ode and the Song; two Species of Poesy that are of all others my 40 peculiar Favourites’ (2: 174). She insists upon the distinction between the two—‘I think with the greatest poetical and critical Justice’—and where at first one might think that she is making a Bolingbrokean point about the lack of distinction between parties by suggesting that ‘there is as much difference between an Ode and a Song, as between a high-heel’d and a low-heel’d Shoe, or indeed as there is between a Whig and a Tory’, this turns out not to be the case: the writer of odes ‘mounts Pegasus 38 William Wagstaffe, A Comment Upon the History of Tom Thumb, intro. W.K. Wimsatt (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1957). Fielding’s 1731 burlesque Tragedy of Tragedies, or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great does not acknowledge its progenitor. I am indebted to Nick Groom for drawing my attention to Wagstaffe. 39 Gentleman’s Magazine 21, 467. Nick Groom has noted the continuing popularity of ‘ancient vernacular Scottish songs’ through the eighteenth century, and in the 1740s and early 1750s several collections of Scottish ballads were published: The Making of Percy’s Reliques, 63. 40 A look at the articles in question shows that she did not do this: we have just seen the article on elegies, and as to the piece on ‘Pastoral’, Mrs. M. had promised her readers this in her second number (1: 81), but it never appeared. It is possible that her high-handed instructional tone here parodies John Hill’s insufferable and ponderously academic Inspector.

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upon the Withers, and for Fear of falling holds fast by the Mane; but the Balladmonger gets up behind, sits a Degree lower, and to save himself, clings close to the 41 Tail’ (2: 175). Mrs. M. does believe that a Pindaric ode is different from a street song, and so did the young Smart, for in the Preface to his translation of Pope’s ‘Ode for Musick on St Cecilia’s Day’ (1746), he takes both Dryden (in his ‘Song for St Cecilia’s Day’) and Pope to task thus: ‘In the first stanza of Dryden and in the fifth of Pope there is an air, which is so far from being adapted to the majesty of an Ode, that it would make 42 no inconsiderable figure in a Ballad’. If you are a very short man, as Smart was, there is a great deal of difference between high and low-heeled shoes, and if you are a critic of the current political establishment you would wish to maintain political as well as literary distinctions. Here also we are reminded that Mary Midnight is a woman who takes pains ‘to examine the Bottom of all Things’ with which she has any concern (1: 42). Mrs. Midnight suggests that ‘On Jollity’ was written by ‘one of our Poets of the last Century’. He was ‘a Sort of Mule in Verse’ who could ‘mix these two Species together, and make of them a true and poetical Hermaphrodite’. Comparing him favourably with Horace and Pindar, she then prints his deathless creation in full: On JOLLITY: An Ode, or Song, or both. I. There was a jovial Butcher, He liv’d at Northern-fall-gate, He kept a Stall At Leadenhall, And got drunk at the Boy at Aldgate. II. He ran down Houndsditch reeling At Bedlam he was frighted, He in Moorfields Be sh-t his Heels, And at Hoxton he was wiped. (2: 175–6)

Mrs. Midnight proposes to point out to the critics, ‘for the Dignity of (their) Science’, and ‘according to the Rules of Art’, ‘the Beauties, the Graces, and elevated Sentiments in this much-admired Piece’. She brings in a battery of authorities to defend her poet’s beginning in ‘the plain Stile’: such a tactic is ‘agreeable to the laws prescribed by Aristotle, Dionysus, Longinus, and Quintilian, and pursuant to the great Examples of Homer, Virgil and Milton.’ Following a line-by-line exposition, she grows excitable after the revelation of the butcher’s dwelling-place:

41 For Bolingbroke and the blurring of party labels, see for example Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry and National Myth 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 10. There is, of course, also a reference here to the parties in Lilliput in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. 42 PW4, 94. Mrs. M. could have been parodying Smart when she suggested that she herself made ‘a pretty Figure in a Sallad’, which would be delicious: see chap. 3 above, 78.

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Christopher Smart and Satire Hitherto we are peaceable enough, for Pegasus only trots; but now the Poet is all on Fire, and his Steed foams at Mouth: He kept a Stall At Leaden-hall, And got drunk at the Boy at Aldgate. And got drunk!—ay, got drunk! why that’s an Atchievement we little expected: It surprizes us, and therefore is extremely agreeable; for the Business of Poetry is to instruct, to elevate and surprize. And how amply is this effected? We are instructed, and that in a few Words, that, He kept a Stall At Leaden-hall: We are elevated with the Thoughts of his getting drunk, and extreamly surprized that it was at the Boy at Aldgate; for who the Devil would have thought of his getting drunk there ... (2: 177)

Some deliberately inaccurate historical exposition follows, which gives Mrs. Midnight a chance to parody the Addison passage on the ‘Baron’s Wars’, and also to take a swipe at female drunkenness in passing. ‘Our Author’—previously explained as wishing to remain anonymous, ‘through his excessive Modesty and abundant Wealth’—is then praised for his ‘Knowledge of Nature and the mechanic Laws’. These, she avers, exceeded that of Homer, as exemplified in the unknown poet’s understanding of the butcher’s mysterious ability to reel and run simultaneously. Homer, says Mrs. M., is not more admired for the Copiosity [Smart loved his Latinate neologisms] of his Invention, the Force of his Imagination, the Beauty of his Similes, the Harmony of his Numbers, or the Dignity of his Diction, than for his extensive Knowledge in Nature, and the several Arts and Sciences; He was a Philosopher, a Divine, a Mathematician, an Historian, a Geographer, and a Warrior as well as a Poet. (2: 178)

Here Mrs. M. borrows from and expands upon Pope: ‘Homer seems to have taken upon him the character of an Historian, Antiquary, Divine and Professor of Arts and Sciences; as well as a Poet’. Via an hilariously heralded quotation from Pope’s ‘Essay on our Science’, Mrs. M. congratulates the unknown poet for imitating Virgil— ‘Geor. IV. 457 &c.’—in his refusal to delay the ‘Catastrophe’ of the song— 43 in this case with a description of Bedlam. She proceeds to applaud the accuracy of his geography, and finishes by suggesting that he was born at Hoxton, which must have been the reason he decided to ‘bring the Jovial Butcher from Northern Falgate to enrich (Hoxton) with his Burthen.’ The joke of ‘To the Criticks’, then, is an old one, and so is its method of burlesque juxtaposition, but it is possible to lose sight of its major target. Addison’s praise of 43 Pope on Homer, ‘Postscript to the Odyssey’, in vol. 2 of Prose Works, 59, and see Henry Fielding’s 1745 True Patriot no. 8: ‘Homer … appears to have (at least) known the Principles of every Art and Science which were discovered in his Time’, The True Patriot and Related Writings, ed. W.B. Coley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 158. Mrs. M. quotes Pope’s Essay on Criticism: ‘False Steps but help them to renew the Race: / As, after stumbling, Jades will mend their Pace’: 3: lines 602–3.

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Chevy Chase had depended on an argument about popular taste; referring to the songs and fables he had heard in his travels ‘that are come from Father to Son, and are most in vogue among the common People’, he gave qualified assent to the notion that the taste of the ‘Multitude, tho’ they are only the Rabble of a Nation’ might have an universal application, for ‘Human Nature is the same in all reasonable creatures’ (Spectator 70). Wagstaffe’s pamphlet ridiculed Addison on the grounds that if we are to be taking instruction from the multitude we might as well take it from children: the Midwife piece, employing irony in a very similar mode, carries an exaggerated charge, for its scatological excesses suggest that what the common people in the London streets are singing is even more ludicrously inappropriate for literary exposition. Nevertheless, it is bad criticism that sits most squarely under the lash here: under the most sustained attack—as they are in Wagstaffe’s ‘Tom Thumb’—are Pope’s plodding ‘criticlings’, those whose criticisms are based in the ‘Rules of Art’ and in piecemeal textual shredding: Guerinot descibes their critical method as ‘consisting largely in minute attention to every phrase and word.’ Such formulaic criticism is also attacked, more subtly, by Johnson in his Idler papers (60 and 61) on ‘Dick Minim’; interestingly similar in point of attack to Smart’s (prior) onslaughts upon Kenrick, these pieces, as Philip Smallwood has noted, are goodnatured assaults on the ‘Practical Criticism’ of the day.44 It is worth noting the fact that—as with the ‘Register Office’ pieces to be discussed in chapter six—Smart and Johnson seem sometimes to be in interaffective dialogue through their journalism, and it is not inconceivable that topics might have arisen from mutual discussion. The small literary world of London, and its satellites in the provinces, will recognize the references to and the borrowings from Pope, the allusions and indeed the whole point of ‘To the Criticks’. Understanding the rhetorical use of the persona, they will appreciate the wit of her creator. However, there is another side to all this. We cannot know for certain how the Midwife was read, but we do know that it was popular, and it may well have been possible to read ‘To the Criticks’ in a very different, more literal way. What have we here, on the face of it? An elderly woman is presenting the coarsest of vulgar ditties and discussing fouled breeches and the nature of drunkenness. If the narrator of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey found the language of the Spectator reprehensible, what would she have made of this? I am certain, for example, that ‘To the Criticks’ was not reprinted in the 1761 New 45 Boghouse Miscellany for the justness of its literary argument. The satirical methods that Smart inherited from the Scriblerians depended upon ‘a sharp contrast’ between the ‘right’, the normal, and what is dressed up to appear as the foolish or demonstrably abnormal. One might say that the Midwife blurred that contrast: by delighting in and overdressing the latter category it made it possible to lose sight of the former. ‘It is a commonplace that irony is a dangerous weapon because two-edged’, said William Empson, and here Mrs. M. offers further

44 Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope, liii. Philip Smallwood, Johnson’s Critical Presence: Image, History, Judgement (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 23. 45 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1811), chap. 5. The New Boghouse Miscellany: or, a Companion for the Close-Stool: Ann. Bib., 236.

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illustration of that commonplace. What she has done in ‘To the Criticks’, as she so often did, is to overstep certain cultural marks, and though the overall meaning of the piece is impeccable in terms of its Scriblerian heritage, because of the very zest with which she sets about the task—‘for who the Devil would have thought of his getting drunk there’—it may sell copies by the cartload in 1751, but find itself confined to grieved footnotes in scholarly works on the poet Smart thereafter. Johnson may have been thinking of Smart when he referred to the ‘fault which writers deservedly celebrated frequently commit’: when ‘burlesque’ becomes over-exaggerated and resemblance to reality is lost, the reader ‘finds in himself no likeness to the phantom before him; and though he laughs or rages, is not reformed’ (Rambler 208). Smart was after all subjected to the charge of ‘prostituting’ his ‘genius and learning’ merely 47 for writing a prologue and epilogue for the theatre. Mrs. Midnight is an asset to Smart in terms of sales, but in terms of literary excellence a liability: if readers are unable or unwilling to penetrate past her brilliantly-characterized but essentially transactional voice, they will indeed be only too likely to consign the magazine to the ‘Jakes of Genius’. Mrs. Midnight, Smart and Patronage In the first chapter of this book I argued that ‘Mary Midnight’ was a rhetorical being from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet. In a sense, much of my argument in this chapter and the last would be redundant had she firmly stuck to her nature as a stock figure, imported into Smart’s journalism as a third, enlivening element between author and reader in his busy politico-Scriblerian work. ‘Martinus Scriblerus’ himself is such a figure: a butt, a straw man, placed wherever a situation or cultural dilemma required his presence to make a point—about antiquarians, or freethinkers, or the law. We are never told where he lives. Smart, after all, may not have needed to think of Mary Midnight’s deployment as anything other than a practice with a respectable pedigree from the rhetorical and classical tradition. Lucian used prosopopoeia, Aristophanes reproduced feminine gossip and dressed a poet in woman’s clothes, and Plautus specialized in coarse jokes, alliteration, puns and word-play: we know that Smart was familiar with all of these, as well as having an intimate acquaintance with the satirical techniques of Horace and the ‘Characters’ of Theophrastus and La 48 Bruyère. There were also the culturally acceptable examples of Erasmus’ Folly— who is not always stupid—and the shrewd and outspoken Widow who fights her corner so well in Smart’s beloved Hudibras. Comedy was necessarily a ‘low’ genre, and, even when not for ordinary people, was about them: as Aristotle explains in his Poetics, ‘comedy ... is mimesis of baser, but 46 ‘sharp contrast’: The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 317. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935; repr. London: Hogarth, 1986), 58. 47 For the full gist of this accusation and its circumstances, see the introduction above, 14. 48 Smart borrowed the first three at Cambridge: see SB, 37, 39, 41, 42, 45, and see chap. 1 above. For his love of Horace, see PW5, xxi–xxii.

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not wholly vicious characters’. Fielding concurred: ‘[t]he … lower spheres produce the great variety of humorous characters’. Much of Mary Midnight’s writing, not least her own self-parody and outrageous hyperbole, could be legitimated as a tolerable exercise for a scholar at play—if not impeccably respectable, then at least following classical precedents, and most readily identifiable as part of D.W. Jefferson’s ‘tradition of learned wit’. Lucian and Erasmus have both been identified as important figures in this: I will be considering both this tradition and that of Menippean satire, and their relationship to material in the Midwife, in chapter six. This is the world of erudite display, of schoolmen on holiday, where, in Dustin Griffin’s words, ‘scholarship becomes spectacle’. Often, then, we can identify Smart doing something Wyndham Lewis described with his customary force as ‘savouring the violent picturesqueness … of popular speech’, and ‘juggling with all the grossness of the gutter in which the 49 learned, when they have occasion to be pleased with life, are apt to indulge’. To use this tradition as original legitimation, however, does not necessitate a subsequent rigorous adherence to it. Indeed, I have come to think that Smart enjoyed writing Mrs. M. too much to maintain her solely as a rhetorical fiction. She began to appear less situational, less strategically placed in a transactional sense, and to show some evidence of becoming a rounded, fully-characterized, novelized fiction—rather more in the mode of the second Isaac Bickerstaff. She gained a history, she had an address of her own, and children: she was summoned by ministers of state, she dallied improperly with an elderly gentleman, and she confessed that at the sight of Garrick acting his stockings off, her ‘old Blood flow[ed] with a vivifying Swiftness’ through her ‘icy Veins’, even though it was she, apparently, who had delivered him 50 (2: 78–9). I have argued for her as impossible, and so she was, but in the end this did not prevent her from taking on some elements of the nature of Steele’s Bickerstaff, rather than Swift’s, as discussed in chapter one. She was real enough for Smart to be able to enjoy using her gossipy voice in a way that is patently obvious, real enough for him to relish the joke of writing letters to her and replying to them himself, and for him to be able to personate her in the street and on stage. Furthermore, it could be suggested that the Swift/Steele distinction explored in the first chapter is here being dissolved into something else: the kind of periodical writing which most approaches the style and functions of the novel. 49 Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 45. Fielding, Tom Jones, 14: 1. D.W. Jefferson’s ‘tradition of learned wit’: ‘Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit’, Essays in Criticism 1, no. 3 (1951): 225–48. Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington; University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 74. Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (Methuen: London, 1966), 52. 50 Mrs. M. on several occasions heads her letters with the address ‘St. James Place’—we have seen her addressing her ‘Neighbours of St. James’s’. She begins the ‘Genuine Memoirs ... of a Tye-Wig’, by saying ‘I was the other Day tempted ... to quit my House in St. James Place, without my Chariot’ (2: 1). Smart may have chosen this address not because of its connection with the nobility, but with midwifery: the first lying-in hospital in London was established in St. James parish, Westminster in 1739: Dorothy M. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 60, 67. Also apposite, perhaps, is the proximity to Mother Needham’s notorious brothel: Mounsey, Christopher Smart, 196.

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This Mary Midnight has not featured very prominently up until now, but we have seen her enjoying Arabian tales, arguing with a street bookstall vendor, and recalling youthful amorous ‘dumb rhetoric’. Before looking attentively at how she is presented, I would like to establish more clearly Smart’s anxious attitude towards the volatile new world of commercial authorship. So let us firstly reconsider Brean Hammond’s statement that, in the period 1670–1740, ‘conflicts between an older, patronage-based model of authorship ... and a newer model of professionalism gradually being constituted, are at their most dramatic’. This would suggest that the situation had settled into less ‘dramatic’ contours by 1750. Dustin Griffin, conversely, has provided scholars with a picture of a slower ‘decline of patronage’ than the one to which we have grown accustomed, but he nevertheless sees an ‘overlapping’ of systems: the growing power of the booksellers challenged traditional patronage over 51 the course of the century, but did not see it off entirely. Both formulations are useful for understanding the contradictions and self-invalidations of the Midwife, in that we see Hammond’s ‘conflict’ still raging, and Griffin’s ‘overlap’ coming into sharp relief. It was not as though Smart had not tried to achieve success using the ‘older, patronage-based model of authorship’. The Duchess of Cleveland had enabled him to attend university, he attempted to gain patronage from the Duke of Northumberland quite late in his career, and if, as Griffin considers, subscription can be seen as a form of patronage, then he carried on seeking it nearly all his life: though he had a regrettable tendency to spend the subscription money before the projected books were assembled. Quite near to the time of his death, a small government pension was secured for him by an influential friend. Various biographers have depicted him 52 as someone who arrogantly thought the world owed him a living. Yet the point here is that he was Scriblerian even in this, his ‘extremely old-fashioned ideas on the subject of patronage’ since, as Bertrand Goldgar explains, the Scriblerians ‘regarded patronage as their due, and honestly expected those in power to support them regardless of “party”, and as humanists they expected poets, the teachers of virtue, to play some role in the circles of power’. In this Smart belongs to the party of Savage and Gay, resenting what they saw as their lack of success at finding an aristocratic sponsor, rather than Goldsmith, berating himself for not having made his 53 Bee ‘low’ enough to attain commercial popularity. 51 Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing, 307. Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11. 52 The Duchess of Cleveland: Sherbo, Scholar of the University, 19. The Earl of Northumberland: Charles Ryskamp, ‘Christopher Smart and the Earl of Northumberland’, The Augustan Milieu: Essays presented to Louis A. LANDA, eds. W.K. Miller, Eric Rothstein, and G.S. Rousseau (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 320, 332, and ‘Ode to the Right Honourable the Earl of Northumberland’, PW4, 356–60. ‘subscription money’: Ann. Lett., 30. ‘government pension’, see Sherbo, Scholar of the University, 225, and Ann. Lett., 72–3. Also see Chris Mounsey’s view that Smart’s desire for patronage has been exaggerated, Christopher Smart, 164–5, 189. ‘owed him a living’: Smart’s nephew’s stuffy assessment is the fountain-head: Poems of the Late Christopher Smart, ed. Christopher Hunter, xxix. 53 ‘old-fashioned ideas’: introduction to Ann. Lett., xx. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

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The Student ‘Castle-Building’ essays resorted to unadorned sarcasm on the subject of neglected merit: ‘posterity generally speaks well of the dead, which is in a great measure owing to that goodness and generosity inherent in human nature, ever prompting us to bestow our favours on those objects that are the most sensible of them, and therefore the most affected by them’ (1: 249). Johnson remarked in Adventurer 138 that the complaints of authors were ever thus: ‘[t]he neglect of learning, the ingratitude of the present age, and the absurd preference by which ignorance and dullness often obtain favour and rewards, have been from age to age topics of invective’. Yet Smart’s ferocity had an especially political flavour as he rehearsed the arguments of the opposition satirists of the 1730s and early 1740s. Chimaericus’s arraignment of the ‘N[obili]ty’ as ‘negative Maecenas’s’ appeared on the same day as the first number of the Midwife: ‘the trifling requisites of meat and drink are so many spurs to make men excel; the poorer a man is kept, the more he’ll endeavour to merit the public favour ... Those therefore that encourage learning least are in fact the greatest MAECENAS’S ... , and sing Io triumphe, WE LIVE IN AN AUGUSTAN AGE’ (Student, 2: 7). Thus, I hope in the last two parts of this chapter to make clear the way in which the persona of Mary Midnight as she appears in the pages of her magazine can be said to exemplify the fluid situation both Griffin and Hammond describe. In her sub-Scriblerian guise she showed us what her creator thought about ‘mechanics’ as authors, about mechanical criticism, and his opinion of those who considered street songwriters to be authors: in the course of this we saw the strains upon the magazine in terms of credibility as Scriblerian satire. Now, though, the tightrope on which she herself as persona was made to walk can properly come into focus. The Tensions of Authorship and Escape into Novelization While the patronage system was a failing resource for Smart as a respectable poet, he may nevertheless have continued to hope for benefits from it, and to try to work within its limits. Concomitantly, evidence in the Student and the Midwife shows that despite his success at selling his magazine writings, and his talent for puffery, he still clung to the idea of the authorship as an exalted calling, and authors as culturallysanctioned beings, possessing impeccable status legitimated by their knowledge of the classics and their disinterested pursuit of excellence. To Pope, the ultimate horror was for a poet to apply to his bookseller for advice on how to use metaphor and 54 simile. The ‘Female Student’ letter Smart wrote describing the philistine activities of one ‘Brevier’, a bookseller whose identity as Newbery was barely disguised,

1976), 67. Goldsmith declared: ‘I should have written down to the … apprehension of the many ... Literary fame, I now find … generally begins among the vulgar’: The Bee 4, in vol. 1 of Works, ed. A. Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 417. 54 Frank Donoghue usefully points out that the patronage system had provided ‘a clear index of literary fame’, which was in the process of being lost at mid-century: The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 2, 7–8. Pope, Peri Bathous, vol. 2 of Prose Works, 230.

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puts the tradesman firmly in the Kenrick class of ‘mechanic’. The Female Student explains that though he eventually took to writing himself, Brevier was formerly a printer: He was an arrant pedant in typical erudition: all his talk was of forms, neat impressions, full and lean-fac’d capitals, points, spaces, justifications, and the like eloquent gibberish of his art ... Some time after, from being the mere mechanical instrument, he became the packhorse of literature; and from the inferior office of printing books, he advanc’d to the high employment of selling them. (Student 2: 227)

Having thus exhibited her humanist disdain of professional jargon, the Female Student goes on to say that ‘this animal’ used to ‘judge of a man’s learning by his library, and would say, such a one is a good scholar, he buys a great many books of me.’ She says that he has ‘very lately honour’d me with the offer of a garret at the 56 easy rate of writing sixteen hours a day’ (2: 227). A similar attitude crops up in the Midwife: disdain for printers and booksellers who claim the credit for successful writing is the subject of ‘To Mrs. SARAH ROWDEN, Senior Organist of St Paul’s Church ...’ (2: 244), and the following ‘A GENIUS restor’d …’ (2: 244–8). The second piece equates printers with those who pump the bellows for organists, and its gist is that the printers are trying to reap the rewards properly due to genius. It also, however, shows sympathy for the hard-pressed Goody Rowden, laboriously providing air for Handel for ‘Forty Shillings a Year’. Mary Midnight, then, comes from the pen of a man who considered that authorship required certain sorts of sanction, most particularly that of ‘immersion in the classics’. This is demonstrated most clearly in another of Smart’s ‘CastleBuilding’ pieces, where those moderns who assume the laurels of Homer and Milton with no foundational grounds of learning are mocked. The outrageously high-handed terms in which Chimaericus discusses ‘the prerogative of an Author’ indicate that he is attacking this new breed through irony. Speaking to antiquarians of the future, who will wonder why he chose to erect his ‘System of Castle-Building’ in ten chapters, he dismisses alternatives (not including Vitruvius) in order to declare that ‘the word because is impertinent’ in this matter: ‘it is merely from the prerogative of an author, and no other reason’ that he has ‘ordained’ the number of chapters necessary for the task. He continues, exposing the Whig provenance of such unfounded arrogance: It is universally acknowledged that every man is the lord of his own thoughts, “My mind to me a kingdom is,” says an old ballad; and in whatever state of servitude the body is, this 55 Smart’s attitude to Newbery is echoed by George Colman in ‘Mr. and Mrs. Folio at Oxford’, in John Rowe Townsend, Trade and Plumb-Cake for Ever, Huzza!: The Life and Work of John Newbery (Cambridge: Colt Books, 1994), 119–24. Samuel Johnson’s account of Newbery as ‘Jack Whirler’ is kinder: Idler 19. 56 Also see the Student letter, reminiscent of Savage’s ‘Author to be Lett’, from one ‘R.W***’, imitating a bookseller’s demanding voice: ‘I and you have been dealers a great while, but ... you don’t use me well. You have all along charged me six-pence for a poem of two hundred lines for my Magazine, and Mr.. GINGLE, who does another Magazine, charges no more than a groat’, 2: 8. For Mounsey’s account of the ‘Brevier’ piece, see Christopher Smart, 107.

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empire is inseparable from the soul. From these conditions it will necessarily follow, that every man has, or ought to have, an arbitrary sway over the productions of his own mind; and, seeing he directs her operations, he has an undoubted right to all her discoveries and conquests. Upon this basis is built the PREROGATIVE of an author; from which he derives the following advantages; I. He may write upon what subject he pleases. II. He may do this in whatever manner he pleases. III. He may choose his own man-midwife or publisher whom he may charge with all his miscarriages. IV. If his work does not sell, he may lay the blame on every thing but himself. (Student, 2: 246)

Chimaericus then lists the stock excuses for poor sales, thus exposing the concomitant absence of the faculty of self-criticism in these pert moderns. Crucially here, it seems to me that this piece is wholly ironic. Far from being the clarion call to the new race of commercial authors which it appears, it exposes what Smart perceives as their shallow egotism.57 We have just been discovering what Mrs. M. thought of ‘old ballads’: Shaftesbury, too referred to this ‘old ballad’ and quoted the line used here in 58 defence of ‘many an honest and free-hearted fellow, from the ranks of the vulgar’. Butler’s foolish Hudibras consoles himself in prison with a similar sentiment. In the language of oppositional politics ‘arbitrary sway’ signalled tyranny and corruption, and, if Mrs. Midnight’s opinions of Alexander the Great are anything to go by— in the Midwife she addresses a furious letter to that gentleman ‘at his Chambers in Hell’—the empire-building exercises of discovery and conquest were no more popular with Smart at this stage than they were with his admired Samuel Johnson, or 59 indeed with Henry Fielding for that matter. This brief examination of some revealing material in the Student, I hope, has now led to a clearer appreciation of the shaky ground upon which Mrs. Midnight herself stood. The explanation of her brazen stridency and her self-confidence is reinforced: rhetorically, she was undertaking the same role as Chimaericus’s modern author—and indeed Swift’s Tale of a Tub ‘hack’—trumpeting her unfounded selfsufficiency to the point of nonsensicality: ‘M. MIDNIGHT, to all the Empresses on Earth, Greeting’ (1: 66). Smart knows, and his bookseller probably reminds him whenever he forgets, that ‘wit is a sort of property’, but conceivably the Midwife

57 Mounsey reads this piece very differently: Christopher Smart, 98–9. 58 Shaftesbury notes that its author was the Elizabethan Sir Edward Dyer: Characteristics, 425. It seems to me that Smart is here mocking Fielding’s claim in Tom Jones to be ‘the founder of a new province of writing’, and so ‘at liberty to make what laws I please therein’ (2:1). This would again—despite evident lip-service in the Midwife—put Smart’s relationship with Fielding under question. 59 ‘Mrs. Midnight’s Letter to the Ghost of Alexander the Great’, 2: 29. Alexander is attacked in Lucian’s ‘Dialogues of the Dead’, Fielding uses him as a pattern of rapine in Jonathan Wild, and Johnson castigates him in Adventurer 99. Also see Min Wild, ‘Revisiting Christopher Smart’s Midwife: Alexander the Great and the Terrible Old Lady’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 27, no. 2 (2004): 279–92.

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displays a fundamental discomfort with that fact. This is demonstrated by the way that the persona of Mary Midnight cannot sustain itself securely in the transactional, rhetorical mode, but tends to veer off into a different literary field. Smart, then, is left with little secure ground upon which he can place his magazine. He dislikes what he sees as the ignorant, bold avidity of many of the moderns, and yet constantly is in danger of wrecking his own sub-Scriblerian enterprise with old-fashioned ribaldry. He has to a large extent avoided the available route of the periodical as polite censor of morals and castigator of manners, and we have seen how genteel the Midwife could be. Yet, though the educated readers who will understand precisely his satirical meaning in pieces like ‘To the Criticks’ are probably relatively few, the magazine is popular and sells ample copies. A crucial factor in this, I contend, is that of character, the character of Mary Midnight, and a way to understand what is happening must be to look beyond the traditions of the periodical, and towards a newer category: that of the novel. In instructive ways Mary Midnight’s generic place is less with Mr. Spectator and Hercules Vinegar, than with her more immediate contemporaries Tom Jones and Peregrine Pickle. She is more often a mother to Tristram Shandy, and Mrs. Selwyn in Burney’s Evelina, than a grandmother of Lamb and Hazlitt. Novelization at Work: Mrs. Midnight Visits Bedlam The three linked pieces concerning Mrs. Midnight’s visits to Bedlam in the company of the old gentleman we met in chapter two are of considerable interest to those studying eighteenth-century attitudes to madness, but for our purposes here it is the interlinked narrative of her romantic entanglement with the gentleman which will most effectively support my point about the character-driven sidestep into story that 61 the persona is made to take. It is difficult to divine a strategic, rhetorical purpose in the small adventure which Mary Midnight recounts with such relish: it seems to me that her creator is simply enjoying using her voice and spinning out the little narrative of her conquest. He makes her sketch with peculiar vividness and immediacy the circumstances of her adventure, and there is no doubt that a powerful imagination with the capability to produce assured and convincing fiction is at work here. It is, at the least, worth underlining the fact that the poet Smart had such a capability. The reason why this has never been acknowledged may be that, though it is most likely that they are his, these pieces have never been conclusively attributed to Smart (see Appendix 1). Surely, though, Smart scholars might at least recognize his authorship as a strong possibility, and consider the implications of this material. 60 Taken from Chesterfield’s speech in the parliamentary debate on the Theatrical Licensing Bill of 1737: Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing, 39. 61 In the second two ‘Bedlam’ pieces Mrs. M. presents madness as a socially-constituted phenomenon, and suggests that in both cases ameliorative legislation, good sense and benevolence would have kept the sufferers sane. The pieces have a painful bearing on Smart’s own later predicament, and perhaps Tom Keymer could have incorporated them into his ingenious piece on Johnson’s attitude to Smart’s madness: ‘Johnson, Madness, and Smart’, Christopher Smart and Enlightenment, ed. Hawes, 177–94.

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In the ‘Survey of BEDLAM’, and ‘The History of Hannah’ (1: 215–24), Mrs. M. meets again, in a coffee-house, the elderly gentleman who first escorted her to Bedlam. She is rather embarrassed by a long lecture he gives her on punctuality, ‘the Company all the Time staring at the Author of the Old Woman’s Magazine’. He squires her once more to Bedlam, where she perceives that he is enamoured of her, for in his haste to accompany her, he had suffered a telling lapse of memory: ‘Just as we had ascended the first Steps, and got into Bedlam, the Waiter of the Coffee-Room came running to him with his Hat and Cane, and the Change for a Guinea, which 62 he had left behind him’. Noting that he realizes with chagrin this revelation of his tendresse, she continues: ... indeed, I don’t blame him for it, for it is not altogether so prudent for a man to trust his Mistress with a Secret of this sort, and especially at the first Onset. We are but Women after all, and who knows but a Lady being possess’d of [it] might … lead her Lover a seven Year’s Dance, and expose him as her Jack-daw to all her Acquaintance, and at last never grant him the Favour. I am however at that Time of Life, in which there is no Time to spare ... (1: 216)

Here the lady wanders into a five-line quotation from Romeo and Juliet, and then 63 pulls herself up short: But whither am I going? —why one wou’d imagine now that I was in Love myself. This Digression is intolerable! and I’m to blame, like a young Parson, to run from my Text in this Manner. Well, but I’m an old Woman, pray consider that, and then let us return to our Story. (1: 216–7)

The remainder of this article concerns the case of ‘Hannah’, who was married against her will to a bigamist, but on her third visit to Bedlam Mrs. M. furnishes her readers with a further instalment of her own story. Her admirer—‘Charles Trusty’—has written her a fulsome letter, which she publishes in toto, and then indulges herself in a bit of robust logic which should serve to remove the Midwife decisively and forever from the ranks of the moralising journals. She is not a ‘young squeamish Girl’, and ‘[w]hen a Man of Merit makes his Addresses, good Sense may give him an Answer without either Scorn or Coquetry.’ Therefore, the fact that he loves her should ensure that she is seen out in public with him, for ‘why should I avoid any Man’s Company because he loves me? This much by way of Apology for my Conduct, and to avoid being thought a Wanton’ (1: 261–2). Well—we may say—it wasn’t a great deal. We hear no more about the progress of the elderly couple’s dalliance, but there is enough narrative uncertainty here to indicate that both readerly and writerly pleasure are being gained here from a storytelling, character-based, novelistic impulse.

62 Peter Flint Perreten suggests that Mrs. M. is the butt, in that she does not recognise the gentleman to be a strayed Bedlamite himself. His etymology of the word ‘Trusty’ is out, however, and he does not altogether convince: ‘Satire in Christopher Smart’s Midwife’ (unpub. PhD dissertation, University of Delaware, 1972), 70. 63 ‘He shall go no further than a Wanton’s Bird ... loving-jealous of his liberty’: Romeo and Juliet, act 2, scene 2, lines 178–82.

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That personae should be made to experience and relate certain personal events simply to introduce themes their devisers wished to discuss was, of course, nothing new in periodicals; the circumstances of the persona, though, had rarely been so 64 completely antithetical to the writer. Mr. Spectator and the second Isaac Bickerstaff, for example, were at least of the same gender and similar social standing as their begetters. Iona Italia is not entirely covering the case when she states that ‘Mary Midnight represents a distillation of all the stereotypes surrounding the figure of the female editor in their most extreme form: her sexuality, her ambition and her vanity’: I think we should look a little farther than this.65 It is almost as though, having chosen Mary Midnight for rhetorical purposes, her creator found that she could easily be made to step out of her strategic mode and enter an imaginative, fully-characterized one—and as though he immensely enjoyed allowing her to do so. Bakhtin’s analysis of the position of satire within the process of ‘novelization’ is germane to these changes in the deployment of Mrs. Midnight. Michael Holquist explains that the word ‘ “novel” ’ is the name Bakhtin gives to whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits, the artificial constraints of that system’: ‘… “novelization” is fundamentally anticanonical. It will not permit generic monologue. Always it will insist on the dialogue between what a given system will admit as literature and those texts which are otherwise excluded from such a definition of literature.’66 The writings I have been describing in this chapter demonstrate with startling clarity the force of this insight. Though the category of ‘literature’ was still under construction in the eighteenth century, Smart’s Midwife failed to meet the criterion of disinterestness required by his admired Scriblerians for published works, and perhaps the unease this generated made him more likely to indulge a novelizing impulse. Bakhtin himself directed attention to both Roman satire and Lucianic dialogue—the traditions out of which the rhetorical Mrs. Midnight works—as ‘authentic predecessors of the novel’. Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’ may be the single most helpful theoretical approach in considering the use of persona in the periodical. If, to Bakhtin, a mark of novelistic representation is the hero being ‘located in a zone of potential conversation with the author, in a zone of dialogical contact’, then surely an author writing to his own persona, as we saw Smart doing in the introduction to 67 this book, must be entering that novelistic realm? 64 The only comparable case, in terms of the persona’s circumstantial distance from the author, is Eliza Haywood’s male parrot of 1746, who is surprised at how quickly critical sallies come the way of a new journal: ‘the poor Parrot has but just peeped out his Head, and lo! two are already levelled at him’: The Parrot, no. 2. There is more than something of the eponymous ‘Parrot’ about Mary Midnight: I suspect that Haywood should be credited for assisting at her birth—and at hers, perhaps, Abraham Fraunce, who quotes from Tasso to illustrate the process of prosopopoeia: ‘He makes the Parrot to speak’: The Arcadian Rhetoric (1588; repr. Menston: Scolar Press, 1969), sig. G4. 65 Iona Italia, The Rise of Literary Journalism: Anxious Employment (London: Routledge, 2005), 17. 66 M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), xxxi. 67 Ibid., 21–2, 45.

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Bakhtin also differentiates between ‘rhetorical double-voicedness’, which, like Burns’s notion of character as transactional, is a less deep-rooted style of character representation (though it sometimes involves ‘some artistic aspects’) than the full 68 ‘double-voiced representation’ which is a mark of the process of novelization. The distinction he makes is demonstrably at work within the single persona of Mary Midnight, as it is, with markedly different emphases and in different circumstances, in the persona of Steele’s Bickerstaff. This then is the antinomy within the representation of Mrs. Midnight herself: she is both a rhetorical figure—so much a creature of satire that she can deride both herself and the medium in which she works—and a novelized, dramatized character who may be represented upon the stage. Paulson discusses the transition of Swiftian satire into the novels of Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, ‘in which the representational qualities appear in a new relationship with the rhetorical’: it seems to me that the persona of Mrs. Midnight should be seen as part of this process. Most especially, I suggest that she may have been influential in the transformation—so well described by Shaun Regan—of those puppets of rhetoric, the Scriblerus family, into the warm-blooded, fully characterized Shandy family. Regan and Hammond have described Tristram Shandy as reading as much like a ‘comic pseudo-autobiography’ as a novel: what phrase could be more apt for this 69 ‘novelized’ aspect of the Midwife? The rhetorical persona, then, looks to the satiric tradition to maintain her credibility, and to shield her creator, the poet Christopher Smart, from contamination with low commercialism: it represents Smart attempting to accommodate himself honourably within ‘the older, patronage-based model of authorship’. This was, though—as we saw in the ‘Itch of Scribbling’—a virtually impossible position to maintain in a magazine, that ‘dullest Thing in the Universe.’ The days when it was possible, as Pope did, to occlude one’s dependence on and manipulation of the marketplace were gone. In looking back, though, Mrs. Midnight’s begetter also is looking forward: it is in part the very ‘novelization’ of his character that keeps the Midwife afloat and popular, enabling him to take advantage of the ‘newer model of professionalism 70 gradually being constituted’. Finally it is clear that the particular situation in which Smart found himself whilst writing the Midwife must have been a virtually intolerable one: Alvin Kernan has suggested that it was only later, in his madness, that he created for himself ‘an authorial role which was totally beyond his grasp in the actual world where he was 71 only a hack and a joke.’ Making a profit by having to work in a medium you despise, and amusing one section of your readership by insulting another, calls 68 Ibid., 354. 69 Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 8–9. See also Martin Price, Swift’s Rhetorical Art: A Study in Structure and Meaning (Hamden: Yale University Press, 1963), 62–3. Shaun Regan, ‘Novelizing Scriblerus: Tristram Shandy and (Post-) Scriblerian Satire’, The Shandean 17 (November 2006), 9–33. Brean Hammond and Shaun Regan, Making the Novel: Fiction and Society in Britain, 1660–1789 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 166. 70 ‘older, patronage based’ and ‘newer model’: Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing, 5. 71 Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print, 83.

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for some nifty verbal footwork—Richard C. Taylor notes a similar dilemma as haunting Oliver Goldsmith’s periodical writings. That the Midwife lasted so long may have been due to Smart’s ingenuity in creating a persona flexible enough to take advantage of new cultural currents sympathetic to the creation of novelistic, fully-rounded character. Contemporary scholars of the poet Smart note his ability to write with a dual attention, and how his writing frequently may be read as attempting 72 to speak simultaneously to two differing audiences. The work that he did in the Midwife was surely a secular and very profane apprenticeship for the difficult tasks he asked his religious poetry to accomplish, but it was nevertheless grounded in the same traditions of rhetoric and active dialogue, of words used to arrest and persuade. Smart was not one to decline a grand challenge. Defending and emulating Pope and Swift, as Goldgar has summarily reminded 73 us, was not only an aesthetic but also a political act. This was as true for the Midwife in 1750 as it was for the Grub Street Journal in 1730; the politics of class has never been far from the discussions here. However, Mrs. M. frequently was made to act as the mouthpiece for a political position, which, if not always specific, is certainly firmly in the camp of opposition to ‘the present happy Establishment of Church and State’ (2: 236). The political satire in the Midwife, and the complex manoeuvres Mary Midnight performed to draw attention to corruptions and stupidities in that establishment, will be the subject of the next chapter.

72 Richard C. Taylor, Goldsmith as Journalist (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993), 76, 124–5. ‘contemporary scholars’: see most particularly the pieces by Marcus Walsh, Mark Booth, Todd Parker, and Betty Rizzo: Christopher Smart and Enlightenment, ed. Hawes, 29–46, 67–81, 83–97, and 121–34. 73 Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits, 94.

Chapter 5

‘Inwardly Working a Stirre to the Mynde’: Political Satire in the Midwife ... happy Britain, whose Monarch rules only by the Law of Justice, and in Concurrence of that Parliament which is the pure Representative of Liberty. Midwife, 2: 239.

Behold! — where poor unmansion’d Merit stands, All cold, and crampt with penury and pain; Speechless thro’ want, she rears th’imploring hand, And begs a little bread, but begs in vain; While Bribery and Dulness, passing by, Bid her, in sounds barbarian, starve and die. “Away (they cry) we never saw thy name Or in Preferment’s List, or that of Fame; Away— nor here the fate thou earn’st bewail, Who canst not buy a vote, nor hast a soul for sale. From Christopher Smart, ‘To the … Learned Dr. Webster’, 1750.

According to the Tudor rhetorician George Puttenham, ‘inwardly working a stirre to the mynde’ is the desired effect of the figurae sententiae, the ornaments of persuasive 1 speech and writing. Irony, prosopopoeia, and various of the ‘mocking figures’ are the common currency of the Midwife, but her favourite mental galvanizer is hyperbole, and especially in its specialized use as ridicule by exaggeration. What, then, does the magazine take as its targets for such ridicule, and why? In the close look at a single number which formed chapter two, single articles were taken as typical of general trends in the Midwife, and attention was directed to the following major objects of Mrs. Midnight’s derision: the practice of pedantic antiquarianism, and concomitantly the professionalization of knowledge; the crass stupidity typical of the public mind, as displayed by critics and theatre-goers; and lastly, political corruption. The way that the decline of learning and literature and the lack of reward for literary and scholarly merit come under attack in the magazine was considered in the third and fourth chapters. The nature and stylistic methods of the political engagement within the Midwife as a whole are the subjects of this chapter. The first section carries certain caveats about this exercize; in the second, I ascribe to the magazine an essentially Bolingbrokean and patriotic political stance; in the third, the question of Jacobitism within the 1 George Puttenham, The Arte Of English Poesie, eds. Gladys Willcock and Alice Walker (1589; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 142–3.

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Midwife is discussed, and in the last, by way of Mrs. Midnight’s godly, somewhat antiquated version of ‘Virtue’, I suggest that it is politics as well as literature that encourages Smart to present Mrs. Midnight as an untimely and old-fashioned figure. The chapter also aims to illustrate by example the accuracy of J.G.A. Pocock’s lament that ‘the word “Tory” and the word “reactionary” fail to do justice to the 2 ambivalence of contemporary political thought’. To try to abstract, and then to discuss ‘the politics in the Midwife’, though, is an exercise which in a sense is illegitimate, for the magazine is by no means solely a political one, and most frequently political points are made as part of articles which question general aspects of the society in which Mrs. Midnight finds herself. I hope she will forgive me for such a typically modern attempt at subject-division, for it would not be doing her creator justice to ignore the skilful way in which she is made to handle those varieties of oppositional political expression open to her. In reparation for this violence, in the next chapter the discussion broadens to include the major series of articles that may be said to question, not simply the malpractice of the governing oligarchy, but the ethos of an entire society where the ability of its members to think, to learn, to discriminate and to judge is being destroyed. Furthermore, I hope this chapter may continue to demonstrate the Midwife’s stylistic and comic merit, and act as additional grounds for the case that the writings within it occupy a position which has so far only been recognized by a tiny handful of critics: a position of importance as penetrating, intelligent, wide-ranging and effective satire. The magazine should be thought of as an energetic and popular political stimulant, in a period of British politics most often represented as dozily 3 consensual. The status of the Midwife as an efficient worker of ‘an inward stir to the mind’ depends upon the imaginative and original use of prosopopoeia and of the other instruments of rhetorical warfare that are deployed within it, and thus this chapter will be looking both outward to the society whose modus operandi is under attack, and inward to those powerful styles of writing, inherited from both classical and more recent satire, which enable such an attack.

2 J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 127. 3 Chris Mounsey, Lance Bertelsen and Philip Strong are readiest to acknowledge the magazine’s merit. H.T. Dickinson explains that although historians have disagreed about the extent to which political change or continuity characterized eighteenth-century politics generally, a period of marked stability in the 1740s and ’50s has never been in question: The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 3. See also W.A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England 1714–1760 (London: E. Arnold, 1977), 239, and Geoffrey Holmes and Daniel Szechi, The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-Industrial Britain 1722–1783 (Harlow: Longman, 1993), 267. Mounsey refers to the ‘precariousness of Smart’s position as a political gadfly’: this last phrase is most apt for the political satire in the Midwife: Christopher Smart: Clown of God (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 81.

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Puffery, Politics and Satire in the Midwife By way of a beginning, then, please consider this short untitled piece, which comes about two-thirds of the way through the run of the magazine: Mrs. Midnight thinks it extreamly hard, that she who values herself upon her Attachment to the present happy Establishment both in Church and State, should be accused, or even suspected, of doing any Thing which might render her Writings obnoxious to her Friends in Power; and in order to bring the Author of this malicious Paragraph lately inserted into the public Papers to Justice, she doth hereby promise a reward of TEN THOUSAND POUNDS, to any Person or Persons who shall discover the Author thereof. Witness my Hand St James’ Place, July 24, 1751

MARY MIDNIGHT (2: 236)

The ‘malicious Paragraph’ which provoked this apparently righteous outburst was, as Robert Mahony and Betty Rizzo point out, almost certainly written by Smart 4 or Newbery: the ludicrously large reward is indicative that this was the case. The problem is that what smelt excitingly of seditious libel and radical discontent is also what sold. By the time of Walpole’s fall in 1742, as Bertrand Goldgar has shown, the notion that effective wit and satire was always to be found in opposition to the 5 ministry was fully entrenched. Chimaericus in the Student offers a specimen excuse for the unsuccessful author: ‘he may hint (though he must not too openly assert it) that his work has been actually suppress’d by command from the people in power’. He teases his readers by withholding information on various tricks of the periodicalwriter’s trade—like a conjurer, he says, exposing them will spoil the illusions he wishes to create (2: 246–7). One of these tricks may indeed have been to invent accusations of sedition for the purposes of puffery, impure and simple. Thus, it behoves the reader of the Midwife to remember that political comment and innuendo may sometimes be less a matter of principle than of sales. Ultimately the answer to this question lies with the historian of politics: to suggest that references to political repression in the Midwife—for example, Martha Johnson’s letter suggesting that aristocrats may be villains ‘but we must not say so’ (1: 14)—are genuine evidence of ferocious censorship, is to fall in with the school of historians led by J.C.D. Clark who claim that the ruling oligarchy held a stranglehold on eighteenth-century 4 Here I elaborate on Mounsey’s useful analysis of the piece: Christopher Smart, 112–13. The paragraph appeared in the Daily Advertiser, and noted that the King’s messengers were searching for the ‘Authors, Printers and Publisher of the Old Woman’s Magazine’. Surely they could have found them quite easily, as it was no secret that ‘Carnan’, the advertised printer of the Midwife, was a family name connected to John Newbery. See Ann. Bib., 171–3. Mahony and Rizzo also cite Smart’s friend George Colman’s comment in his Terrae Filius that ‘An information in the King’s Bench, or a visit from a King’s messenger will carry off a dozen impressions’: Ann. Bib., 173. Another possible reason for the placing of this disclaimer is that it appeared in the same number as the most risky single article ever published in the Midwife: ‘The Little Lighterman’ is discussed later in this chapter. 5 Bertrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 20, 218.

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politics. To regard them as merely playing with lucrative alarmism, is to concur with those who, like H.T. Dickinson, suggest that those in power allowed some forms of 6 extra-parliamentary dissent as a safety-valve for popular discontent. Equally, though, in this disclaimer the typical Midnightian double—or even triple—speak is demonstrably going about its subtle work at the level of the lexicon itself. In the 1750s the word ‘obnoxious’ was in the process of changing its meaning from its most frequently-used—and now obsolete—one of ‘subject to the authority 7 of another’, into its present signification of ‘offensive’. So that where Mrs. M. appears to be stating that she does not want to offend ‘her Friends in Power’, to take the word in the older sense means to understand that she refuses to situate her writings in a position of craven slavery towards those ‘Friends’. Quentin Skinner has traced the older usage of this word to the ‘neo-roman theory of liberty’, later used by Harrington, and later still, in the 1730s, by the errant ideologue of the Patriot Opposition, Lord Bolingbroke: a Roman slave was ‘obnoxius’ in that he was totally dependent upon the benevolence of his master. Smart knew Tacitus, whose use of the word in this sense was frequent, and also that some of his readers would have 8 done so too. Thus, an alarmist piece of sales-gingering also carries a subtle paranomasic dig at those who are ‘obnoxius’ in their lucubrations, and stands as an indication of robust independence. The writing in this magazine repays careful attention to the way that words are working within it, which often is supple and inventive to such a degree that, in direct contradiction to Christopher Devlin’s claim that in the Midwife there is ‘no sign that the author is a poet’, the magazine triumphantly demonstrates 9 exactly that. It is not too much to say that this disclaimer could be understood on no fewer than three separate levels: at face-value as a sincere protestation of loyalty to church and state; ironically—via the ‘obnoxious’ pun—as an indication of the magazine’s actual oppositional stance (and we shall later see that the Jacobite Earl of Wharton, in his outspoken True Briton, sarcastically employed the same ‘happy

6 For Namierite and post-Namierite positions on this, see H.T. Dickinson, Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 2–5. 7 Three major groups of usages given by the OED are applicable: the last example it gives of the older usage (‘subject to the authority of’) is from Smart’s friend Arthur Murphy, in his Gray’s Inn Journal (1754). The newer usage of ‘offensive’ is listed as in use from 1675 onwards. The other sense in which it can be taken, as ‘liable, or exposed to harm’ was also current: Johnson does not give the ‘offensive’ definition at all in his Dictionary of 1755, but only the older two. Mrs. M. could be implying any or all of these three meanings. It is worth noting that in his late ‘Munificence and Modesty’, and his early Hop-Garden, Smart uses it in the sense of ‘liable to harm’—‘th’ obnoxious worm’: PW4, 350, 43. Bunyan (1666) uses it as ‘subject to the authority of’ and Olaudah Equiano (1789) as ‘vulnerable’: Grace Abounding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 27; The Interesting Narrative (London: Penguin, 1995), 190. 8 Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 42–9, 69–72, and 90. Also see SB, 38, 42. 9 Devlin, Poor Kit Smart (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961), 54.

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10

Establishment’ phrase in 1723); or, in certain knowledgeable quarters, as a cynical attempt to promote interest and thus sales. The most consistent political theme in the Midwife is glaringly evident in article after article: Mrs. Midnight stands as a Tory opponent of Whig corruption within the body politic, as did the Samuel Johnson of the early Juvenal imitations. Yet John Cannon has shown that the definition of Johnson as a ‘Tory’ is ‘not wrong but … inadequate’, and equally, with Smart a ‘Tory’ position is complicated by certain factors that we are about to explore.11 After all, already we have seen the way that meanings are put into question within the text, and how commercial considerations may trouble a straightforward reading of the magazine’s political position, so that to try to present the Midwife as maintaining a coherent and consistent political stance throughout the three volumes is an exercise inevitably open to frequent revision. If this is so for the magazine itself, still less is it possible confidently to extrapolate hard evidence concerning Smart’s personal political position from the Midwife. Quite apart from the slippery problems of attribution (see Appendix 1), Bertrand Goldgar makes a salient point in his discussion of the political writings of the Scriblerians: he points out that they ‘were not politicians, nor, except for Swift, even political thinkers; they were writers pursuing literary careers.’ We should register, he says, their ‘bias’ towards ‘traditional, Tory, humanistic and aristocratic’ values, without attempting to suggest that they were presenting any sort of coherent political manifesto: this point is equally applicable to Smart. Additionally, if the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1741 could not furnish its readers with an explanation of even the roughest indication of the political positions of the elected representatives in the House of Commons, then no wonder present-day scholars struggle to allot fixed positions to writers— Fielding, who tended to change allegiances with more frequency than was apparently consistent with honour, is a case in point. Finally in this context, it should be noted again that I differ here from Chris Mounsey, who sees the Midwife as a primarily political organ with solely political (though disguised) aims, and I would hesitate to ascribe any fixed political position to Smart himself. Mounsey conclusively shows, 12 however, the anti-Pelhamite nature of the magazine. It is not necessary or possible, finally, to confine the satire in the Midwife to any rigid party conformity, and this point in itself is indicative of its indebtedness to the writings of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, as we are about to see: ‘the extinction of unreal party divisions’ had ‘long been one of Bolingbroke’s principal aims’. The concern here is with the nature and style of that satire, and its status as effective satire in the mid-eighteenth century. There was an ‘interregnum’, Vincent 10 ‘there being so Glorious a Spirit in both Houses for the Support of our present happy Establishment’: The True Briton 3, 10 June 1723. 11 John Cannon, Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 117. 12 ‘not politicians’: Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits, 5, and see also 86. ‘House of Commons’: Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1992), 65. For Fielding’s most blatant volte-face, see Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Routledge, 1989), 317–23. Mounsey, Christopher Smart, 99–113.

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Carretta suggests, between the writings of the ‘great satirists’ of Walpole’s day and Churchill’s verse satire of the 1760s: ‘it is difficult’, he says, ‘to find satirists of any significance working between 1743 and the emergence of Charles Churchill’, for ‘the relative political stability of the period led to the virtual stagnation of political 13 satire’. If ‘satire of significance’ is to be distinguished by subtle and skilful use of irony and allegory—indeed by diverse rhetorical tools used with wit and ingenuity— powered by a strong sense of disgust with those aspects of your society perceived as abhorrent (and it is hard to imagine how else it might be distinguished), then surely the writings in the Midwife should be recognized as the important link between Pope 14 and Churchill that I believe they were. Bolingbroke, Patriotism and Liberty There is first and foremost a particular attitude which informs the political and social comment in the Midwife, and to identify and track its course is to understand in broad terms the bias of the magazine. Most importantly, its attitude is one of a general and acid opposition to most aspects of the political establishment, which most strongly emerges in a marked antipathy both to the aristocracy and to self-serving politicians: the obsequious ‘Toadeaters to a State-Mountebank’ who seek place without possessing merit (2: 98), and ‘my dear Neighbours of St. James’ who will 15 not understand that a man’s birth does not guarantee his worth. But it is important to note that this constantly-reiterated scorn for the well-born does not emerge out of a democratic, inclusionary impulse, and this is as true of Smart as it is of Mrs. Midnight: ‘despite his compassion … for the poor and underprivileged victims of society, he did not challenge the class system as such.’ It is not the institution of 16 the aristocracy which Mrs. M. questions, but their behaviour. The nobility are not attending to their responsibilities as disinterested legislators for the good of their country and as examples to their inferiors: ‘For when once my Lord puts off all sense of Religion, of Conscience, of Honour, and of Honesty, his Steward, his Gentleman, his Valet de Chambre, and indeed all his Family will do the same’ (1: 129). In this,

13 ‘the extinction’: H.T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke (London: Constable, 1970), 286, and also see Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry and National Myth 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 10. Vincent Carretta, The Snarling Muse: Verbal and Visual Political Satire from Pope to Churchill (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 177. 14 An astute Victorian noted Smart as a forerunner to Churchill: Smart ‘possessed considerable genius; as a satirist he anticipated the poignant vein of Churchill’: Robert A. Willmott, in vol. 2 of Lives of the English Sacred Poets (London: 1839), 209. 15 See chap. 4 above, 114. I think that Mrs. M. is being Juvenalian in this, rather than egalitarian: see his eighth satire, where ‘virtue is the one and only nobility’: Juvenal, The Satires, trans. Niall Rudd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 70. 16 Karina Williamson, ‘Surfing the Intertext: Smart Among the Moderns’, in Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment, ed. Clement Hawes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 258–9. See also the discussion of ‘A LETTER from … TOWZER’, chap. 2 above.

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Mrs. Midnight, that most extraordinary persona of all, is echoing her Swiftian 17 progenitor, Isaac Bickerstaff the first. This emphasis on the paternal obligations of the aristocracy is also recognisably that of Bolingbroke in his Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism. When Mrs. M. grumbles that: ‘our ’Squires are, for the most part, educated by their Grooms or their Huntsmen; and, perhaps, that is the Reason why our Great Ones study more the Affairs of the Stable than the Affairs of the Nation’ (1: 124), she undoubtedly is Midnightizing Bolingbroke’s strictures on those ‘of superior talents, and superior rank’ who ‘abandon the government of men for that of hounds and horses.’ The Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, and the Idea of a Patriot King were published in 1749, and if the political satire in the Midwife can be seen as having any one especial function, this may well be that it operates as a translation of many of the ideas in that volume onto a popular level of understanding. It has been noted that Bolingbroke’s oppositional stance would have found sympathy amongst certain urban as well as rural sectors of the population: the Midwife stands, even more than does the Patriot 18 King itself, as ‘a plebeian version of the Roman republican ideal’. This ideal is that of a virtuous, disinterested body of active legislators, chosen by frequent and uncorrupted election processes, and concerned solely for the welfare of their country and its inhabitants. Mrs. Midnight refers only once in the magazine to the Idea of a Patriot King, and that obliquely: this is in the preface to her lengthiest and most devastating parody of John Hill’s Inspector. She pretends that a number of Hill’s periodical has been ‘found’ at a pleasure garden, and ironically excuses her pirating of it by referring to ‘the Authority of Mr. Pope’s Conduct in relation to Lord Bolinbroke’—thus remarking with less than full approbation Pope’s unauthorized publication of parts 19 of the Patriot King (3: 82). It seems likely that Smart had read Letters on the Spirit and a Patriot King, and largely approved of their contents. As we have just seen, Mrs. M. supports his ‘call to the privileged to exercise the responsibilities and obligations encumbent upon their positions’, and in the ‘Midwife’s Politicks’ sections throughout the magazine she frequently reiterates Bolingbroke’s demand for an aggressive naval policy, consonant with his complaint in the Patriot King that, since the time of George I, ‘we have tamely suffered continual depredations from

17 Note the similarity to the complaint in the first ‘Bickerstaff Paper’, chap. 1 above, 21. Late seventeenth-century ‘Country’ writings also stressed the necessity for the aristocracy to set a proper example: see J.A.W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of SelfRecognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1983), 268. 18 ‘superior talents’: Henry St. John Bolingbroke, Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism and On the Idea of a Patriot King, ed. and intro. A. Hassall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 17–18. Goldsmith later took up the ‘dogs and horses’ theme: The Citizen of the World, Letter 32, in vol. 2 of Works, ed. A. Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 138. ‘a plebeian version’: Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, 260, also see 241–59, and Dickinson, Bolingbroke, 275. 19 For the furore Pope’s conduct caused, see Dickinson, Bolingbroke, 278, 280–81, 290–92.

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the most contemptible maritime power in Europe, that of Spain.’ She can grow apoplectic on this topic: Surely the British Nation is to be no longer liable to the Insults of Spain! My old Blood glows with Resentment when I recollect their former Depredations ... Was it not this important Matter that raised the Voice of every old Woman in England, both in and out of Ministerial Employment, to arm against the insolent Spaniard? It was; but what have we done? To our Shame, Nothing! (2: 182)

Mrs. Midnight, like Bolingbroke, also is tireless in her patriotic promotion of trade, as opposed to stockjobbing and the public credit system. In her ‘partly commendatory and partly objurgatory’ letter to Mr. Hoyle—in fact it is solely the latter—she praises that popularizer of the card game ‘Commerce or Traffick’ and satirically eulogizes it as good training for stockjobbers at the Exchange: ‘Here they have the earliest Impressions of the Advantage and pleasure of honest Industry, and learn that noble and most useful Lesson of doing Honour to their Country, at the same Time that they are enriching themselves’ (1: 193). Modern scholars have also noted the convenience 21 of this conjunction of interest. Contrast this, not only with the bullish rant in behalf of the ‘Herring-Fishery’ which follows it directly, but also with a later prosopopoeic letter from the surgeon ‘Valentine Vertebra’. This rebarbative, ghoulish gentleman cries ‘But what have we to do with Trade? Only let the French have our Wool, our Factories, our Plantations, our Shipping, and they will do the Business for us, 22 and save us the Fatigue’ (2: 256–7). When Mrs. M.’s devotion to trade is allied to her dislike of the chicaneries of the Royal Exchange the magazine takes on a very Bolingbrokean flavour indeed. In Jubilate Agno Smart twice calls for blessings upon Bolingbroke, and asks that ‘the Lord raise the landed interest’ (D17): Karina 23 Williamson states that Smart ‘admired’ Bolingbroke. 20 ‘call to the privileged’: Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 32. ‘tamely suffered’: Letters ... and a Patriot King, ed. Hassall, 119. 21 The letter to Hoyle was one of the most frequently reprinted of the political articles in the Midwife: Ann. Bib, 158, 160, 161, 162. Also see ‘Some Reflections on the State of the Stage’, where it is suggested that ‘Honesty’ is very seldom found ‘on the Change of Amsterdam’ (2: 77). ‘modern scholars’: Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 55. 22 For the most substantially pro-trade articles in the magazine see the story of ‘Doctor Dove and his Horse Nobs’, followed by ‘A serious Proposal for improving the Woollen Manufactory’, 3: 51–4. See also the ‘The Case of Mr. WILL WIMBLE’ in which Mrs. M. allows the benefits of trade to be greater than those of poetry: ‘for my Part I honour the Man who first invented a Mill, as much as he who compos’d the first Epic Poem; And hope without any Offence to the Poets, for, by their Leave, I shall always consider him as the greatest Man, who is of the greatest Service to Society’, 1: 268–9. ‘Transactionality’ must be invoked to explain the contradiction between this sort of ‘mill’ and the Guildford one; see chap. 6 below. 23 For the topics I have covered here see Bolingbroke, Letters ... and a Patriot King, as follows: paternal authority, 92–3, 102; patriotism, 62, 70; trade and commerce, 116–19; public credit, 119; corruption in government, 80, 110, 114. Williamson, PW1, 109.

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Yet the Midwife is not solely a political organ, and because its dominant tone is one of determined playfulness and ingenious exercise of wit, the writing seems to issue from the pen of Bolingbroke’s slightly crazed and irresponsible aunt. She will never quite keep to the script. Much more than Bolingbroke, the Midwife seems close to taking that crucial step from criticising aristocrats to criticising the institution of aristocracy itself. In the following article, Mrs. Midnight, at her most seriously Biblical and Blakean—sounding as near to the later Smart as she ever did—almost makes this move. It is the existence of pieces like this, carrying a whiff of religious dissent, which seem to demonstrate once again the difficulty of settling the Midwife into any political camp for very long. What they in fact do is illustrate with startling clarity J.G.A. Pocock’s contention that Bolingbrokean radical Tory discourse paradoxically retained a strong flavour of its ‘Old Whig’, Harringtonian, and even Puritan past. This was noted at the time: Hume remarked acidly that ‘the Tories have been so long obliged to talk in the republican style, that they seem to have made converts of themselves by their hypocrisy’. Pocock remarks that ‘the problem that Tory language which ought to have been and often was High Church and Jacobite, ought not to have been but often was radical and republican, Commonwealth as well 24 as country’. In this society, Mrs. Midnight says, the only friend one will ever want is the ‘Friend in one’s Pocket’—this is money, which will buy one all the friends one needs: The rich Man shall be cloathed in Scarlet, and purchase whatsoever his Heart can desire; and the People shall give him the Wall, and bow before him to the Ground; But the poor man shall be cloathed in Rags, and be obliged to walk in the Dirt, regarded by no Man; nor shall he be able to purchase himself any Thing, no not even a good Name, tho’ the 25 Composition thereof consisteth only of Air.

Apocalyptic satire, however, is not in the business of imagining change or providing remedy: This is the Way of the World, this is the State of modern Friendship; and since it is so, who that has a grain of common Sense, would not take Care of a Friend while he has him, especially if he be so portable as to be placed in his Pocket? (3: 30–31)

24 David Hume, Essays Literary, Moral and Political (London & New York: Geo. Routledge, n.d.), 45. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, 245, and also see 33, 79, 127, 216, and esp. 241–51, 257. The rhetoric in this piece links interestingly with Clement Hawes’s superb study of the language of seventeenth-century dissent in Smart’s later poetry: Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and see Karina Williamson, ‘Surfing the Intertext’, 259. 25 For a Renaissance version of this trope, see Nicholas Breton, ‘Wit’s Trenchmour’ (1597), vol. 2 of The Works in Prose and Verse, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1879), 13–14. The ‘Friend’ owes to the ‘Sympathy between the BREECHES-POCKET and the ANIMAL SPIRITS’ (Student, 2: 284) and it falls into Weinbrot’s category of ‘apocalyptic’ satire: Howard D. Weinbrot, Eighteenth Century Satire: Essays on Text and Context from Dryden to Peter Pindar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 53.

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To add to this atmosphere of ‘épater les aristocrats’, the magazine toys with motifs and topics particular to Jacobitism, to the extent that it is possible to conceive of it as crypto-Jacobite, as we shall see in the next section. As a final complicating factor, the Midwife seems also designed so as not to offend beyond recall the Patriot Whigs and those in the Prince of Wales’s circle: halfway through the run of the magazine Mrs. M. prints in its entirety, and with the warmest—and emphatically not ironical—commendations of his ‘Candour, GoodNature and Intrepidity’ in ‘The SPEECH of Mr. RICHARD GLOVER ... upon his declining the Poll for Chamberlain of this City’ (2: 70). Glover was a Patriot Whig and an ‘intimate of Prince Frederick’, and his pro-trade speech is couched in impeccably disinterested civic humanist terms. If Smart was indeed part of ‘the Opposition circle around the Prince of Wales’ then it is noteworthy that Mary Midnight only refers to him once during the run of the magazine, in May 1751—despite his sudden and momentous death in March. This is merely incidental to her attack on Kenrick’s ‘Monody’, and she is, as we saw in chapter four, on particularly irreverent and 26 scatological form in that piece. Though, as Christine Gerrard has shown, Pope shared with the Patriot Whigs ‘a Bolingbrokean language of virtue and corruption’, she sees the satirical edge of his poetry as symbolising his distance from their earnest proselytism, and similarly the ironic bite of Mrs. Midnight’s satire is the strongest indication that she is no Patriot Whig. Goldgar notes that in the 1730s and 40s there were two literary methods open to those writers sympathetic to Bolingbroke—either ‘satirical exposure of the present state of affairs in the tradition of the Tory wits’, or Whig patriotic 27 sentimentalism. The Midwife displays elements of both, but it is predominantly as Tory satire that the magazine achieves and maintains its sting. This may be seen as another evidence of Mrs. M.’s untimeliness, but Paul Langford draws attention to the alienation many young men of Tory background felt as the Pelham administration secured its hold: in its very unassailability that administration could enrage, and, in view of the popularity of the magazine, there clearly was still a felt need for that rage 28 to be expressed in print. It is most helpful of all, I think, to look at the Midwife with two distinct, but linked points in mind. The first is its determined, broadly oppositional nature. If Mrs. Midnight’s creator could only stray a certain distance from those oppositional languages available to him in his day, then it seems that he allowed this to be no disadvantage, but—along with the strongly Bolingbrokean cast of his writings—also produced scraps of Jacobite material to suit the immediate purposes of his articles. The second point is that the Midwife is edited by an alienated scholar and poet who

26 ‘intimate of Prince Frederick’: Gerrard, Patriot Opposition 17, 80–81. ‘the Opposition circle’: Ann. Bib., 55, and see Mounsey, Christopher Smart, 166. Smart himself, however, wrote two poems which appear to demonstrate loyalty to the Hanoverian settlement: ‘To the King’ (1748), and ‘A Solemn Dirge—Sacred to the Memory of His Royal Highness, Frederick, Prince of Wales’ (1751), PW4, 146, 179. 27 Gerrard, Patriot Opposition, 99: Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits, 86. 28 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 201, 205.

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felt that his country and his peers were culpable in not recognising his merits. What links these two points, though, is the strong patriotism of the magazine. To consider the first argument, one should hardly be surprised to find the magazine sounding Bolingbrokean, and echoing sentiments which recall the glory days of the Craftsman’s attacks on Walpole: after the fall of Walpole, Carretta says, ‘no new rhetorical strategy was developed to replace the essentially Country program espoused by Bolingbroke and the Craftsman’. That anti-Court Whig programme, H.T. Dickinson reminds us, ‘led the way to demands for constitutional change that were to be adopted by the radicals of the later eighteenth century’. We find Mrs. Midnight declaring in chorus with Bolingbroke that ‘while there are Parties in the State, there 30 can be no true Patriot Policy’ (2: 219). She also prints—and here is an example of the Midwife being a looser cannon than a sober sense of political responsibility would require—a grateful testimonial from ‘Mrs. PHILIP HUGBRIBE’ to the ingenious Guildford miller who runs the ‘new Mill to grind old People young’: Whereas I the Honourable Mrs. Philip Hugbribe was lately so superannuated, that I slobber’d in Company, and could by no Means give a rational Answer to any Question proposed; and whereas I drivelled to such a Degree, that I mistook ... Affirmatives for Negatives, and in a certain Place of publick Business said aye, when I should have said no; which had like to have carried a Point for the Good of my Country, contrary to both my Instructions and Inclination; this is to assure the World, that by being ground in the Guildford Mill, I am perfectly cured, and am as wise and upright as heretofore. (2: 194–5)

Mrs. M. allows herself a similar dig at the corrupt compliance of members in her second ‘Prowl’: referring to her ‘Lanthorn’, she tells her Boy that it is a ‘good Companion, and answereth me the same End that a mute Member of the Upper or Lower House, does a prime Minister. He is in, and out, just as Occasion require’ (1: 89). Mrs. Hugbribe’s testimonial is witnessed by ‘The Right Hon Mrs. Charles Courtly’ and ‘Mrs. Peter Pension’. Neither the deliberately provocative gender foolery of this, nor the joint ridicule by exaggeration of the Gentleman’s Magazine and fake testimonials to the efficacy of quack medicines, diminishes the force of the old ‘Country’ allegation that many members of Parliament gratify both their inclinations 31 and their private purses by voting against the interests of their country. Nor should the magazine’s gestures towards Jacobitism startle, when Holmes and Szechi have described that movement as becoming ‘a sink for all discontents with the powers that be’. They also state that Jacobitism, during the 1745 uprising, became a ‘neo-radical’ movement with a manifesto that Wilkes and his radical successors

29 For Smart’s theme of merit going unrewarded, see chap. 2 above, 63 and n. 57, and chap. 4, 125. Fielding also addressed this topic: The Champion, 27 November 1739, and Covent-Garden Journal 2, 7 January 1752. 30 Carretta, Snarling Muse, 185, and see also Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, 249. Dickinson, Politics of the People, 199. ‘party is a political evil, and faction is the worst of all parties’: Bolingbroke, Letters ... and a Patriot King, 93. 31 Also see 2: 148. The feminized names here imply that these people are all ‘Old Women’, in the pejorative sense explored in chap. 3 above.

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would have found congenial. Gerd Mischler stresses ‘that popular Jacobitism was not a sincerely felt loyalty for the exiled Stuarts, but a way in which social discontent with the Whig administration manifested itself’. Smart, in his later years, became a supporter of Wilkes, and readers of Jubilate Agno will recall his Christian sympathy 32 for the ‘House of Stuart’. Jacobites, too, with their cry of ‘Old England’, and reluctance to work in pragmatic alliance with the country sheltering their revered exile, could be as fiercely patriotic as the next Patriot Whig. Echoing the title of two Jacobite journals, in the first number Mrs. M. declares that she is ‘a true Briton’ (1: 46), and reiterates the phrase in the second (1: 93), and her instructions to the printer in that number are given ‘for the Sake of Old England’ (1: 96)—we will shortly 33 return to this aspect of the magazine. ‘In the eighteenth century patriotism was the legitimation of opposition’. That opposition, as Kathleen Wilson indicates, was by mid-century beginning to be directed more pointedly against the shortcomings of the aristocracy: ‘a virulent strand of anti-aristocratic sentiment had entered mainstream political discourse by 34 the mid 1750s’. Gerald Newman contends that an alienated group of mid-century intellectuals—including Hogarth and Smart’s friends Samuel Foote and Arthur Murphy—found common cause in seeing more than parsimoniousness behind the lack of support they were receiving from possible patrons. They often couched their objections to the aristocratic ‘theatre of greatness’ in patriotic and anti-Gallican terms: it makes sense to include the Smart of the Midwife among their number. Newman mentions Smart in the context of Jubilate Agno, but not as part of this group, a group instrumental in what he calls ‘the critical years in the launching of English nationalism’: he notes the appearance of, by the mid-1750s, ‘an emergent nationalist philosophy, anti-French and anti-aristocratic, linked to sharpening moral, 35 social and historical concerns as well as aesthetic and commercial ones.’ Nothing in the Midwife illustrates this ‘anti-French and anti-aristocratic’ attitude better than Smart’s own poem in Hudibrastic couplets—‘The Bag-wig and the 32 Holmes and Szechi, Age of Oligarchy, 92–3. Gerd Mischler, ‘English Political Sermons 1714–1742: A Case Study in the Theory of the “Divine Right of Governors” and the Ideology of Order’: British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 24, no. 1 (2001): 34. Smart and Wilkes: Ann. Lett., 137, 152. ‘For I pray God be gracious to the house of Stuart and consider their afflictions’: Jubilate Agno, B71. ‘God be merciful to the house of Stuart’: ibid., D206. 33 ‘old England’: see for example J.C.D. Clark ‘Religious Affiliation and Dynastic Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century England: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and Samuel Johnson’, ELH 64, no. 4 (1997): 1059. The Duke of Wharton’s Jacobite True Briton ran from 1723–24, and George Osborne’s True Briton (1751–53) was current: see Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 29. 34 ‘patriotism was the legitimation’: Hugh Cunningham, quoted in Linda Colley, ‘Radical Patriotism in Eighteenth-Century England’, in vol. 1 of Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity: History and Politics, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1989), 58. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 186. 35 Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: a Cultural History 1740–1830 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 67, 73, see also 38–9, 57–8, 63, 114. Also see chap. 4 above, 112, and n. 24.

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Tobacco-pipe’—anonymously published in the third number of the magazine. One of a number of prosopopoeic fables which are recognized as his, it records the complaints of a stylish and effeminate bag-wig, smelling of ‘the essence of Monsieur’, who is genteelly vexed at the proximity of an odiferous ‘black Tobaccopipe’: ‘Monstrous! again—t’woud vex a saint!/Susan, the drops—or else I faint!’ The pipe’s sturdy reply breathes anti-Gallican fervour along with the smoke: Why, what’s the matter, Goodman Swagger, Thou flaunting French, fantastic Bragger ? Whose whole fine Speech is (with a Pox) Ridiculous and heterodox. ’Twas better for the English nation Before such Scoundrels came in Fashion, When none sought Hair in Realms unknown, But every Blockhead bore his own. Know, Puppy, I’m an English Pipe, Deem’d worthy of each Briton’s gripe, Who with my Cloud-compelling Aid Help our Plantations and our Trade, And am, when sober and when mellow, An upright, downright, honest Fellow ... (1: 120)

The ‘Pipe of Soul’ finishes his stout rebuttal of foreign values with a call for simplicity and plainness in manners and dress, thus proving himself a fine spokesman for the moralising arm of this ‘emergent nationalist philosophy’. As further evidence of the Midwife’s patriotism, and indeed of a tendency towards xenophobia, Mrs. Midnight sometimes indicates her Tory opposition to the naturalization of foreign Protestants 36 attempted by the Whigs. Perhaps it could be suggested here that rather than seeing Smart’s prosopopoeic fables—we can add here the ‘Tea-Pot and the Scrubbing-Brush’ (3: 134–6)— as ‘the resentful folk view of society from below’, it would be more in keeping with the marked anti-populist nature of the Midwife to note that, consonant with Bolingbrokean thought, such ventriloquism on behalf of the humble and despised serves to stress that none of God’s creations has a more valued place than another in his universe. ‘To imagine oneself the object of God’s special concern is prideful,’ explained Isaac Kramnick, ‘since it places one above one’s place in the great chain, 37 all the links of which must be God’s special concern.’ Rather than emphasise the verticality of such a notion though, might we not stress its horizontal potential? An 36 As with the ‘Letter to Hoyle’, this was reprinted elsewhere, presumably for its popular patriotism: Ann. Bib., 154–5. ‘naturalisation of foreign protestants’, 1: 284, and 2: 55, 58, 95: though some of these pieces so specialize in irony, salaciousness, and attacks on other targets that a fixed position is hard to establish. 37 ‘resentful folk view’: Morris Golden, ‘The Imagining Self in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1969): 21. ‘anti-populist nature’: as well as the parodies of ‘vulgar’ discourse listed in Appendix 2, note Mrs. M.’s description of Bartholomew Fair as ‘a Riot’, where a ‘turbulent headless Mob’ are ‘let loose’, 2: 257. ‘to imagine oneself’: Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, 101. Also see Marcus Walsh, PW2, 18–19.

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oyster is of as much worth as an emperor in God’s eyes. Thus we might see a way in which the prosopopoeia of Smart’s periodical writing has a direct relationship with some of the more unlikely combinations in Jubilate Agno: ‘Let Joanna rejoice with the Anchovy’ (B185). To establish how patriotism links the broadly oppositional stance of the magazine with its editor’s sense of his own neglected merit, consider that part of the problem for this group of alienated writers, artists and dramatists was that those who should be providing patronage for British artists had fixed their gaze across the Channel. Smart makes this clear in a Student essay, noted in a different context in chapter four. Here Chimaericus blames ‘people of distinction’ for holding the sciences in ‘contempt and derision’, for ‘the patriot Muses have been banished the C--rt’, thus linking loss of patronage to the aristocratic mode for all things Gallic: ‘a titled blockhead is a very good negative MAECENAS’ (2: 7). Mrs. Midnight herself puts forward as candidates for her ‘Office of Annihilation’ ‘all Patrons who give Merit nothing but their Word’ (2: 59), and it is helpful here to note John Cannon’s remark that ‘[t]he attack upon patronage could easily slide into a more general disdain for 38 titles and rank, as it did with Churchill.’ There is a robust rejection of personal self-interested advancement, of disdain for those who bow or dance their way in Gallican style to power, in much of Smart’s writings for the Student. Chimaericus sarcastically observes that neither the universities nor the church are free of this practice of ‘our happy and enlightened age, in which no more than the very first elements of dancing are required to obtain preferment, riches and honour’: indeed, unnamed heads of houses at Cambridge have done well, for ‘some of them by scraping acquaintance with the ministry have bowed themselves into bishopricks’ (2: 329). This disgust is repeated in the Midwife: ‘What makes the Toadeater to a State-Mountebank think there is Musick in his Chains, and Dignity in his Disgrace, but the perpetual Notion of his some time being 39 raised on that very Pedestal, which is at present the Support of his Idol?’ (2: 98). Again, here she is discoursing on how a man may ‘engage the Fates in his Favour’: ‘Those who consider how many Gentlemen have advanced themselves ... can no longer doubt that it is of the utmost Consequence for a man TO RISE WITH HIS BACKSIDE UPWARDS’ (2: 51). Mrs. Midnight apostrophizes her ‘Boy’ in her first ‘Prowl’: Hey dey! Here comes Monsieur Flatter-and-Fly, who loses an hour in the Morning, and runs after it all Day. He’s of the ancient family of the Wise Acres. Wou’d you believe it, Boy? This very Gentleman spent a good Thousand a Year on Elections, in order to make

38 By 1730 references to Augustus and Maecenas were ‘politically loaded’: Gerrard, Patriot Opposition, 53. Cannon, Samuel Johnson and Politics, 181–2. 39 The fact that the splendid ‘musick of his chains’ phrase is repeated from a ‘Chimaericus’ article by Smart in the Student seven months earlier would make it likely that this piece is Smart’s own: see this chapter, 148. Goldsmith dramatizes the phrase in letter 4 of his 1762 Citizen of the World, in vol. 2 of Works, 28. For a poem using the theme, see John Byrom’s ‘Tom the Porter’ (1746): New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 209–11.

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good his Interest at Court, for a Place of five Hundred; walk along, hollow Head, walk along. (1: 7–8)

Rather than assign this sort of invective to mere personal resentment, I would like to suggest that with it Mrs. Midnight is pursuing a Bolingbrokean argument that stems from a vigorous tradition of oppositional thought. The discourse which stands opposed to self-interest, corruption and lack of personal integrity in public life is part of the powerful ‘neo-Roman’, or, to put it more loosely, ‘civic humanist’ school of thought. By this date, and in Britain, civic humanism had come to have as its basis, as Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock have shown, the defense of personal liberties in a country run on the principles of a ‘mixed government’. Skinner makes the link between patriotism, liberty and the constitution clear: ‘By the concept of patriotism, both Bolingbroke and his opponents understood the ideal of acting in such a way as to defend and preserve the political liberties which their fellow-countrymen enjoyed 40 under, and owed to, the constitution.’ The loathing Mrs. Midnight shows for those who crawl and cringe their way to preferment stands as an indictment of her own society, where the patterns of corruption established by the perceived maladministrations of Walpole were still believed to be in place under the Pelhams. To Bolingbroke, Britain was in danger of succumbing to tyranny, as will inevitably occur ‘when the spirit of liberty begins to flag in a free people, and when they become disposed, by habits that have grown insensibly upon them, to a base submission’. The ‘Toadeaters’ are obnoxius: ‘With the rise of neo-roman theories of freedom ... the term came to be used to describe ... the slavish conduct to be expected of those who live under the thumb of princes and 41 ruling oligarchies.’ According to the neo-Roman writers, including Bolingbroke, the liberty of citizens is in peril under conditions of slavish dependence: it is not merely force or the threat of it which endangers personal liberty, but the realization that to live in a condition of dependence is to put yourself in a position where your rights are already curtailed: ‘You will also be rendered unfree if you merely fall into a condition of political subjection or dependence … If you live under any form of government that allows for the exercise of prerogative or discretionary powers outside the law, 42 you will already be living as a slave.’ Walpole’s perceived network of corruption operated thus outside the law, and the opposition saw it as being largely retained under the Pelham administration. This is one reason why we shall later see Mrs. Midnight and the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul’s combining to such ferocious effect, and, more generally, it explains the importance to the ruling powers of maintaining the 40 Quentin Skinner, ‘The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole’, in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J.H. Plumb, ed. Neil McKendrick (London: Europa, 1974), 99. 41 ‘patterns of corruption’: see Carretta, Snarling Muse, 159, 182, and Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 185. ‘the spirit of liberty’: Bolingbroke, Letters ... and a Patriot King, 67. ‘with the rise’: Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 94. Bolingbroke twice uses the phrase ‘abject servility’ to describe Britons’ attitudes to their administration: Letters ... and a Patriot King, 22–3. 42 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 69–70.

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illusion that the liberty of citizens is safe in their hands. Mrs. Midnight, discussing the political situation in Sweden, notes that, although there ‘the Government has much more the Form of Liberty’ than in Denmark, ‘the People’ are not so happy. For ‘almost every other Consideration is swallowed up in the factious Designs of Parties, which seem no more likely to have an End here, than in some Countries famous also for the Forms of Liberty’ (1: 192). The ‘Forms’: she means Britain. If the ‘orders and forms’ of the constitution alone are in place, says Bolingbroke, 43 they are ‘nothing more than the dead letter of freedom, or masks of liberty’. No wonder ‘Chimaericus’, raging in the Student against people’s propensity to ‘humbug’ themselves, can refer so graphically to the ‘patriot singing of liberty to the musick of his own chains’ (2: 43). Thus, from this discussion of the predominantly, but not solely, Bolingbrokean bias of the Midwife, and of how patriotism underlies both its oppositional stance and the concern of its editor for both his own liberty and that of the nation, we have seen the value of digging below surface meanings: no subject Mrs. Midnight ever takes in hand is uncomplicatedly, or only, about what it seems to be. To further demonstrate this point, let us now turn to the most brilliant example of this genius for seeing and writing double—for what Howard Erskine-Hill has called the ‘twofold vision’ in 44 eighteenth-century writing—in the magazine. Jacobitism in the Midwife Smart chose, in the second article in the August 1751 number of the Midwife, to introduce what appears to be an open discussion and condemnation of Jacobitism into the pages of his magazine. As well as explaining what I have come to believe was his reason for this choice, I hope also to show here how skilfully the language of the piece works to carry opposing meanings. In recent years, a considerable body of literary and historical scholars has been reassessing the status of Jacobitism in the eighteenth century, with a view to re-establishing it as a body of ideas with important cultural significance, and now for the first time their work can be applied in a sustained way to Mrs. Midnight’s own idiosyncratic version of the phenomenon. This penultimate section of the chapter, then, will be devoted to ‘The Little Lighterman’ (2: 197–204) in which Smart flirts audaciously with the real danger of prosecution for seditious 45 libel.

43 Bolingbroke, Letters ... and a Patriot King, 83–4. 44 ‘not solely Bolingbrokean’: I think it is important to stress the difference—most especially in the attitude towards Jacobitism—between the Midwife’s stance and that of Fielding’s 1745 True Patriot, the ‘basic ideology’ of which was noted as ‘watered-down Bolingbroke’ by W.B. Coley, (ed.) The True Patriot and Related Writings (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), civ. Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘The Twofold Vision in Eighteenth-Century Writing’, ELH 64, no. 4 (1997): 911–22. 45 For a summary of conflicting scholarly views on the strength of Jacobitism as a political and cultural force, see Daniel Szechi, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe 1688–1788 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 3–8. For government prosecutions of

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At the start of this section I would like to make it perfectly clear that I am not suggesting that Smart was a Jacobite. There are pitfalls even in attributing certain leanings towards Jacobitism to eighteenth-century authors, and the arguments about Samuel Johnson’s alleged Jacobitism show plainly the problems inherent in trying to prove the unlikely. But Johnson was a hero of Smart’s, as was Pope to some degree, and, just as in their cases, it is instructive to consider how a certain measure of sympathy towards the Stuart cause may have been operating on occasion within 46 their writings, so it is in his. Jacobite rhetoric, as we have seen, exists in the pages of the Midwife; it seems most likely to me that it was used pragmatically, as just one of the languages of opposition available to its editor, in the manner explored in the previous section. Here my intent is to demonstrate the ingenuity with which, in this article, the symbols and totems of a submerged Jacobite culture of opposition were deployed, without claiming that Smart personally and vigorously sought the return of a Stuart monarchy. At first sight the ‘The Little Lighterman’ looks as though it is going to be a similar exercise to that of ‘To the Criticks and the Poets’, in which Mrs. Midnight ridiculed those gentlemen with reference to a popular street ballad. Rather than undertake an introductory preamble this time, Mrs. Midnight begins by printing out the text of her corpus vile: The little Lighterman, or the dissembling Waterman, (which was sung at the Corner of Blow Bladder Street on the 10th of June last, to the Tune of the Rolling Hornpipe) Chirurgically dissected. 1. Pray did you never hear of a sad Disaster’Twas but t’other Day that he ran away from his Master. Oh the little little Lighterman, and the dissembling Waterman; Molly’s a Girl that will dye, if she has not a Kiss from the Lighterman. 2. With his black Shammy Pumps and his rolling Eye, Sir, He did kiss ev’ry Girl that he did come nigh, Sir. Oh the little, little, &c. 3. But when his Master found him he put him into the Bridewell, Molly she loved him so well that she gave him a Pot of Porter. Oh the little, &c. (2: 197–8)

Mrs. Midnight assumes a grieving air of injured loyalty as she begins her ‘dissection’. She attributes the song to an author: ‘I am sorry to inform my Readers that this Ballad is the reputed Bantling of a Gentleman of great Eminence’. For ‘upon a candid and impartial Examination’ the song will prove to be ‘fraught with Principles destructive to the Community, derogatory from the Dignity of the Crown, Jacobitism in the press, see Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 20, 34, 36–7, 39–40, 49, 124. 46 For Smart’s regard for Johnson, see Devlin, Poor Kit Smart, 49, and chap. 1 above. The admiration continued during Smart’s incarceration: ‘God be gracious to Samuel Johnson’: Jubilate Agno, D74. For Pope, see Ann. Lett., 2–5.

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and repugnant to that Integrity and Honour which every Briton ought to bear in his Breast.’ (2: 198) Apparently, and at this point somewhat mysteriously, Mrs. Midnight has discovered seditious intent in this harmless-looking scrap of song. She has also been given a tone of pompous conformity more familiar to readers of the Midwife as satiric butt than desideratum. The next move in the piece is to retreat back into the apparent haven of literary antiquity: here classical philosophers and lawgivers are lauded for their mistrust of allegory: Allegories have always been suspected of evil Tendency, and discouraged by the wise Legislators of every Nation. PLATO, who had as much Prudence, Wisdom and Learning as any Man among us, banish’d Homer out of his Common Wealth for this very Consideration ... (2: 198)

After trotting past Solon and Lycurgus, the great lawgivers, she returns to Homer: That HOMER’s Iliad was a Satire upon the several States and Princes of Greece I make no doubt ... for those high Encomiums with which that poem is interlarded, could never be ascribed but by way of sneer or sarcasm to Princes, who, for ten Years together, had beat their Subjects Brains out against the stone Walls of Illium, and that for a Woman who had not half the Beauty, Modesty or Virtue that I have. (2: 199)

Mrs. M.’s knowledge of Jacobite allegory embraces both élite and popular versions. She redoubles her tone of bombastic outrage: ‘But let us leave the Poets to themselves, as a Pack of poor paultry People not worthy our Consideration, and examine this 47 wicked Piece of Work to the Bottom.’ It is now, some way into the piece, that Mrs. Midnight produces her major charge: ‘Pray did you never hear of a sad Disaster. No man that is possest of a Grain of common Sense, can but doubt that the Author by this sad Disaster means the Pretender’s landing in Scotland ...’ . (2: 200) The rest of the article is taken up in detailed attention to each phrase of this simple song, exposing it as a cunningly coded Jacobite allegory; it is a ‘virulent and Treasonable Performance’. This ‘wicked Author’, Mrs. Midnight proclaims, should be ‘placed in a state of Durance’. Accordingly, I would now like to draw away from the text of ‘The Little Lighterman’ somewhat in order to make plain certain relevant aspects of the literary and historical maelstrom out of which this flamboyantly hysterical charge comes. To begin with, consider the date of this piece. 1751 is only five years away from the battle of Culloden, when Charles Edward Stuart, ‘the Young Pretender’, and his army were defeated. A grain of commonsense, taken with a hefty dose of hindsight, would surely prompt one to agree with the historian W.A. Speck that, after Charles Edward’s dramatic escape from Scotland, ‘Jacobitism was now a completely spent 47 Christine Gerrard provides a concise and colourful account of the crucial significance of historical, classical and religious allegory to the opposition writers: Patriot Opposition, 103. For the allegorical significance within élite Jacobite culture of Troy, the Trojans and the Aeneid, see for example Murray Pittock, ‘The Aeneid in the Age of Burlington: A Jacobite Text’, Lord Burlington: Architecture, Art and Life, eds. Toby Barnard and Jane Clark (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), 231–49.

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force’. The trouble is that believers in lost causes are never given handy manuals which prescribe for them an exact date upon which to stop hoping. Jeremy Black is unequivocal: ‘The ’45 was the greatest crisis that affected the eighteenth-century British state’—a crisis of this magnitude can surely not be closed ‘history’ six years later. Nor was it, for sporadic rioting of Jacobite supporters continued and numbers of prosecutions for ‘seditious words’ (where Jacobite sympathy was openly avowed in public) rose again: it was not until 1753 that the last execution for Jacobitism 48 occurred. Jacobitism, then, was by no means a dead letter in 1751, and the presence of ‘The Little Lighterman’ in the Midwife certainly attests to that fact. The piece does, however, also support the claims of some literary critics, as well as historians, about the significance of Jacobitism in eighteenth-century writings generally, and especially about the literary traditions which the writer seems to have known and drawn upon. Paul Monod makes a strong case for Jacobitism as a sign system, a ‘political culture’ or ‘ “subculture” ’, which functioned as a network of subterranean interconnections and spread its influence widely. Indeed, the personal history of Bolingbroke, whose ideas we have seen Smart promulgating in the Midwife, was intimately bound up with Jacobitism, although it is important to add that in the Patriot King he distanced himself from it with vigour. The attraction for literary critics of pursuing, or indeed hallucinating, such a secretive beast as sympathy for the exiled house of Stuart are clear, and have produced much heated argument. The fact that, as I have mentioned, popular Jacobitism may often have pointed more to criticism of the Whig administration than to devotion to the house of Stuart, makes such pursuit even more difficult. Erskine-Hill states the problem clearly: ‘The slippery art of innuendo is as unavoidable a problem for the modern scholar as it 49 was, for its authors, a vital means of expression.’ ‘The Little Lighterman’ is verbal quicksand from start to finish. We are reading the words of an imaginary old woman who says she heard a possibly nonexistent 50 song being sung on a ludicrously-named street corner. She holds strong views, but 48 Speck, Stability and Strife, 251. Jeremy Black, Britain in the Age of Walpole (London: Macmillan, 1984), 20. For popular Jacobite riots, see Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 199, 205, 216–17: for ‘seditious words’ prosecutions, see ibid., 245–6. ‘the last execution’: Frank McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart: A Tragedy in Many Acts (London: Routledge, 1988), 403–13. 49 Monod, Jacobitism, 8. Bolingbroke, Patriot King, 106–8. For scholars at war over writers’ alleged Jacobite inclinations, see the special Jacobite no. of ELH, 64, no. 4 (1997). Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘Literature and the Jacobite Cause’, Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, ed. Eveline Cruickshanks (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), 59. 50 ‘Blow-Bladder-Street’ is mentioned by Ned Ward: The London-Spy COMPLEAT, in Eighteen Parts (1700), ed. Ralph Straus (London: The Casanova Society, 1924), 297. Leading into the booksellers’ area of St. Paul’s Churchyard, it abounded in butcher’s shops. Defoe suggested that the name came from the practice of blowing air into the bladders of carcasses so that they swelled (this acting as a metaphor for bad, pompous writing—or a fine signal for a spoof). My thanks to Peter Hinds for directing me to this: Ronald L. Baker and Richard C. Frushell, ‘Defoe’s “Blow-Bladder Street” in A Journal of the Plague Year’: The Journal of American Folklore 87, no. 344 (1974): 160–62.

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whose are they? To begin with, there is good evidence that the piece was written by Christopher Smart himself. In the third ‘Castle-building’ piece of the Student, Smart, as ‘Chimaericus’, describes a ‘Pantile Peg-Maker’ who is prone to imagine himself in a more exalted position than he in fact possesses: ... for though his outward-man was at work for Billy Tiplington, the dust-man, at the third house of your thumb-hand in Blow-Bladder St, yet his mind doubtless was busied in erecting Fabricks more superb than those of Venice, and furnishing them with laws very little inferior to those of Solon and Lycurgus. (Student, 1: 332)

It would be very strange to find ‘Blow-Bladder St.’, ‘Solon’ and ‘Lycurgus’ mentioned so closely together in articles by different hands, and there is evidence that later in the life of the Midwife Smart plundered Student articles ever more desperately for 51 material to recycle. It is difficult to tell how many eighteenth-century readers knew Smart to be Mrs. Midnight: but educated readers of the Midwife were used to her vociferous guardianship of literary standards, and would certainly remark her description of ancient and modern poets as ‘a Pack of poor paultry People unworthy our Consideration’. This is the crucial point where the reader is ‘required to reject the literal meaning’: Wayne Booth’s first step in the reconstruction of the meaning of 52 ironic discourse by the reader. I am aware that there is a danger of getting too solemn about this; when reading the Midwife one has to maintain a balance between assessing underlying political intent, and evaluating the extent to which the comedy undercuts that intent. What makes these tasks particularly difficult—and particularly rewarding—is that we are dealing with writing that needed to be popular, in a society with ‘a habit of mind which encouraged reading on several different levels’, and also with writing designed partly for a core of educated readers who ‘took pleasure in 53 literary obscurity and secrecy’. The strategem governing ‘The Little Lighterman’ was not a new one. It works by ridiculing the idea of imputing political intent, rendering it derisory by ludicrous exaggeration and association. It is as if Smart were saying ‘Look, this ballad is patently not about the Pretender—is everything to be laid at the door of politics nowadays?’—or even: ‘Have we lost sight of the relation of reality to the act of interpretation?’ To say this is one thing, but to say it with the intent of drawing attention away from one’s own secret beliefs is another, and thus it is impossible to determine to what degree Smart actually sympathized with Jacobitism, and to what degree his impulse was simply to mock pompous Whig alarmism. According to Nicholas Rogers, popular Jacobite symbolism during the 1715 rebellion ‘could

51 A Student piece (2:23) which criticized a tiny morsel of doggerel in Wagstaffian terms may have given Smart the idea for the ‘To the Criticks’ strategy examined in chap. 4 above. 52 Undoubtedly some of those in periodical circles knew of the Smart-Midnight connection: see the Gentleman’s Magazine 21 (1751), 142–3, 119–22. Wayne C. Booth: The Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 10. 53 ‘habit of mind’: Pat Rogers, The Augustan Vision (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), 28. ‘took pleasure’: Carretta, Snarling Muse, 42.

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be used to deflate Whig pomposity … it could be provocative, defiant, derisory’. Evidently this spirit of ridicule was still present during and after the 1745 uprisings, and in keeping with it ‘The Little Lighterman’ makes Whig distrust of the popular ballad tradition an object of derision. To turn to the attitude towards Jacobitism in the magazine as a whole to solve the problem does not necessarily help: dust is constantly being thrown in both the eighteenth-century and the modern reader’s eyes. Most exemplary of this dilemma is the close of Mrs. Midnight’s magnificent ‘Dissertation on the Perpetual Notion’. Printed as the first article in the June 1751 number, two months before the ‘Little Lighterman’, this piece sees Mrs. M. ironically professing her satisfaction at the way that the human capacity for self-delusion results in contentment. In this context, her reference to ‘the Culprit that wants to go abroad, and the Exile that fights to come home’, a hidden—but not very well—reference to George II and Charles Edward Stuart, could be read as placing both gentlemen on an equal footing as dupes of their 55 own fantasies (2: 99). To go so far as to refer to the monarch as a ‘Culprit’ hardly seems even-handed, however, and a more partisan approach is also indicated by the emotional tug of the ‘Exile that fights to come home’, with its unwritten corollary of ‘where he belongs’. If read thus, the article is undoubtedly teetering on the brink of sedition, as indeed was Mrs. M.’s trenchant letter, in the April 1751 number (2: 29): strong evidences suggest the target there was the Duke of Cumberland, disguised as a rapacious Alexander the Great.56 So Mrs. Midnight may be finding it necessary to use ‘The Little Lighterman’ as an exercise which will muddy the waters somewhat, in order to ward off accusations and possible prosecution. Pope pulled off a similar trick in 1715, writing as the apothecary ‘Esdras Barniveldt’ and accusing his own Rape of the Lock of Jacobite tendencies. ‘Esdras’, too, in The Key to the Lock, was keen on bringing the treasonous author to justice. Erskine-Hill suggests that ‘it seems likely that the Key is, as was soon after contended, a blind, or ‘ward’ designed to pre-empt embarrassing political 57 interpretation.’ The same author also draws attention to another related case, from 1723 this time. Philip Duke of Wharton’s political journal The True Briton is a masterpiece of textual innuendo, posing as a completely impartial paper, which actually, by a dazzling display of the use of the subjunctive and some convenient vaguenesses 54 Nicholas Rogers, ‘Riot and Popular Jacobitism in Early Hanoverian England’, Ideology and Conspiracy, ed. Cruickshanks, 72. 55 The Midwife had carried a veiled attack on George II as an absentee king, more inclined to further Germanic than British interests, 1: 93–4, and see chap. 3 above, 82, n. 26. 56 See chap. 4 above, and Min Wild, ‘Revisiting Christopher Smart’s Midwife: Alexander the Great and the Terrible Old Lady’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 27, no. 2 (2004): 286–7. 57 In vol. 1 of The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Norman Ault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 202. Erskine-Hill, ‘Literature and the Jacobite Cause’, Ideology and Conspiracy, ed. Cruickshanks, 67: Thomas Burnet spotted the strategy, writing in The Grumbler 14: ‘[Pope] obliges the World with a Key to his own Lock, in which the Wards are all false’: J.V. Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope: A Descriptive Bibliography (London: Methuen, 1969), 33.

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of tense, manages to convey the opposite of what it appears to say. Here is an example which, oddly, contains a phrase which we have already met in Mrs. Midnight’s announcement of her magazine’s loyalty—in the same number, it will be 58 remembered, as the ‘Little Lighterman’. Wharton has just been musing about the remote possibility of Parliamentary intimidation of members by an ‘evil Minister’: This manner of inslaving us, cannot be effected in our Time, there being so Glorious a Spirit in both Houses for the Support of our present happy Establishment: But it will be undoubted Ruin to all that is dear to us, whenever we see the Authority of a corrupt Parliament imploy’d to bring us under those Misfortunes which we have hitherto sav’d ourselves from ... (True Briton 3, 10 June 1723)

The confusion over tenses here works to dramatize Quentin Skinner’s point, examined earlier in this chapter, that where the conditions for servility are present, liberty is already felt to be lost. In a later number Wharton complains, with a goodnatured air of innocence defiled, that a highly-placed politician has accused him of disaffection. The politician replies to the polemicist’s own wide-eyed query as to the grounds of this: O! Sir, said he, shrugging his Shoulders, It is not Every-body that can find it out.- He is in his plain Way of Speaking, a very Honest Writer; But there is a Term call’d an INUENDO among us, that will shew him to have been frequently Guilty, monstrously Guilty! of criminal Libels, and I myself have studied a considerable Time to whisper about the Town some of the Inuendoes I mention against him. 59 (True Briton 65: 13 January 1723–24)

Wharton goes on to complain about the strange magical properties of the ‘Inuendo’; how it can, for example, make ‘ancient Greece and old Rome’ appear to signify the same as ‘ENGLAND’—or indeed, in our context, make a simple street ballad appear to be referring to the ‘Pretender’. It is a ‘new-invented Piece of Law-Artifice, that will not allow Writers to have their own Meanings, but will ever be devising new Meanings for them’. In the course of all this he is also instructing unpracticed readers in the art of deciphering hidden allegory, which, as Erskine-Hill suggests, is not just a matter of happenstance. So that it is certainly interesting that when twenty58 Howard Erskine-Hill comments that ‘the political innuendo of which the True Briton protests innocence is undeniably present in his pages’: ‘Literature and the Jacobite Cause’, Ideology and Conspiracy, ed. Cruickshanks, 67. The ‘present happy establishment’ phrase is used ironically by Wharton, Mrs. M., and Samuel Johnson in his Marmor Norfolciense (1739): ‘But my zeal for the present happy establishment will not suffer me to pursue … such shocking conclusions’: Political Writings, in vol. 10 of Works, ed. by Donald J. Greene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 42. Johnson used Jacobite iconography in this early piece: see Gerrard, Patriot Opposition, 238–43. The phrase, with its concomitant suspicion of innuendo, was still current in 1760, in an attack on Tristram Shandy: see Thomas Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 189. 59 For the significance of the word ‘honest’ in the eighteenth century as a code for ‘Jacobite’, see Murray G.H. Pittock, Jacobitism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 55. Also see Mrs. M.’s ‘Opinion Office’: ‘many an honest Man may be forced to talk and act against his Opinion’, 3: 73–4.

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eight years later Smart wishes to defend his Midwife from charges of disaffection, he 60 should choose a mode of defence so akin to those employed by Pope and Wharton. Mrs. Midnight, then, seems to be warding off accusations of disaffection and possibly Jacobitism from her magazine by a pyrotechnic comic display of loyalty offended, using a previously well-established verbal stratagem. Before leaving ‘The Little Lighterman’, however, I would like to show in closer detail the multi-layered ways in which it also is an ironic commentary on Whig 61 hysteria about perceived Jacobite propaganda. Always with an eye on the complex ingenuity of Smart’s prose, this final part of the section will involve some close reading of the article in order to show how cleverly it plays with the propaganda stories generated both in support of and in opposition to Charles Edward Stuart. Mrs. Midnight has told her readers that the ‘Disaster’ to which the song allegorically refers was the Pretender’s landing in Scotland. She goes on to interpret the little lighterman’s ‘master’ as standing allegorically for the French king, and has a pop at the French for ‘pretending’ ignorance of Charles Edward’s departure to Scotland (2: 200). We now know, and some people did then, that the king and his ministers were taken by surprise by Charles’s sailing to Scotland in late June 62 1745. The Pretender is a ‘lighterman’, Mrs. M. painfully informs us, because he is fleet of foot and can run faster (2: 201)—and the Jacobite troops were indeed noted for their skilful evasion of government troops. But actually the watermen and lightermen who worked on the Thames were seen as among the lowest dregs of the eighteenth-century London working population, and this may mock the propensity of pro-Hanoverian propaganda to counteract Jacobite veneration for the divinity of kingship by borrowing from popular traditions in which ‘the fallen man is ridiculous, 63 never an “archangel ruined” ’. Now we come to the Dutch, where things become spectacularly double-edged. Mrs. Midnight declares that by the ‘dissembling Waterman’ in the song ‘the Author undoubtedly means the Dutch, for you must remember, gentle Reader, that those 60 Memoirs of the Life of his Grace Philip Late Duke of Wharton ‘By an Impartial Hand’ (London, 1731) includes the entire run of The True Briton: the ‘Inuendo’: 12, 551–2. Erskine-Hill says of True Briton 65 that ‘it instructed in the art of innuendo, and protested its innocence of the art, at one and the same time’: ‘Literature and the Jacobite Cause’, Ideology and Conspiracy, ed. Cruickshanks, 54. Maynard Mack reprints the work of a Craftsman writer who, he says ‘manages, like all the contributors to that journal, to establish his innuendo in the very act of disclaiming it’: The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 136. 61 It was a Craftsman technique to accuse the ministerial papers of ‘absurd overreading’ to protect itself: Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits, 25. Swift’s Whiggish ‘Modest Proposer’ laments ‘the Number of Papists’ who ‘stay at Home [to breed] on Purpose, with a Design to deliver the Kingdom to the Pretender’: Jonathan Swift, in vol. 12 of Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), 114. 62 Szechi, Jacobites, 97, and Frank McLynn, France and the Jacobite Uprising of 1745 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 32. 63 Lois Potter, quoted by Murray G.H. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland 1685–1789 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 23. For the status of lightermen, see for example Ned Ward, The London-Spy COMPLEAT, 136, 153–5.

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high and mighty People did not come up to their Contract with us at that Time, to say no worse of it’ (2: 201). From the Whig point of view this was absolutely true, if somewhat unfair. The Dutch had contracted to help the Hanoverian army during the ’45, and had actually landed eight battalions of troops in Scotland, but they were tied by an agreement with the French not to fight the enemies of France and eventually withdrew. ‘Critics in England’, says Frank McLynn, ‘made much of the alleged cowardliness and unreliability of their Dutch allies.’ The splendidly double-edged point here is that the Jacobites, ever since the arrival of William III, had found much cause to loathe the Dutch. ‘If you would discover a concealed Tory, Jacobite or Papist, speak but of the Dutch, and you will find him out by his 64 passionate railings’. Mary Midnight, therefore, has carte blanche to follow up her apparently Whig distrust of the Dutch with a traditional Tory, anti-Williamite ‘fens and frogs’ disquisition: ‘no Man hath so much of Water in his Composition as your Dutchman’. (2: 202) It will hardly come as a surprise by now to learn that ‘Molly’, in peril from her love for this somewhat Macheathish lighterman, represents in Mrs. M.’s decoding exercise ‘Molly Britaina, or our British Ladies’: Molly’s a Girl that will dye if she has not a Kiss from the Lighterman. This was wrote to warm and animate the Hearts of our British Amazons in behalf of the young Pretender, and I believe in my Conscience was the Cause of the mad and unaccountable Healths that were drank, the party colour’d Ribbands they wore, and the Dancings, Clubs, Songs and Revellings of that Time; which I suppose will be talked on with Wonder and Amazement, when my little Grand-Child is a Grand-Mother. (2:202)

All this sounds suspiciously attractive: the last thing the Hanoverian establishment wants is enduring conversations of this sort. Furthermore, is Mrs. Midnight really saying that this song was the sole cause of popular Jacobite support in 1745? Even the most thick-headed Whig propaganda would not suggest anything so ludicrous. It would, though, and did characterize Jacobitism as at once feminized and lecherous: ‘for not only were women widely suspected of being vulnerable to Jacobitism: the 65 movement itself was also characterized as libertinous and predatory.’ Mrs. Midnight continues, making free with the facts of Charles Edward’s story in her familiar ‘gossip’ mode, and then, in a tone which has veered from half-indulgent scandal-mongering to outraged puritanism, declares that her ‘wicked Poet’ has gone too far, and ‘plainly shewn’ his evil designs by insinuating that ‘the Daughters of Britannia are in a languishing State for the Loss of this Lighterman’ (2: 204). A very 64 McLynn, France and the Jacobite Uprising, 88: also see 69–72, 87–9, 133. ‘if you would discover’: Evelyn Cruickshanks quotes this unplaced sentence, characterising antiDutch sentiment as a ‘constant feature’ of eighteenth-century Toryism: Introduction, Ideology and Conspiracy, 8. For Swift’s attitude to the Dutch, which is apposite to my point here, see Joseph Rosenblum, ‘Gulliver’s Dutch Uncle: Another Look at Swift and the Dutch’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 24, no. 1 (2001): 63–76. 65 Pittock, Jacobitism, 66. Also see Monod; ‘the attributes of May-Day were often transferred to the Jacobite holidays of 29th of May or 10th of June, and women were central to their commemoration’: Jacobitism and the English People, 64.

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little creative reading involving Britannia as Britain’s personification could render this an actionable statement in favour of the Stuart cause. Paul Monod refers to a tradition of ballads that employ the metaphor of James Francis, the ‘Old Pretender’ as a ‘lost lover’, and it is tempting to see Smart as choosing or inventing this particular song as exemplary of it: ‘unrequited love was an excellent metaphor for Jacobitism’. A surface reading, however, could perceive all this chatter about kisses and the ‘wanton Liberty’ in the Prince’s eye at balls merely as a Midnightized version of 66 Whig disgust at the facile sexual appeal of the Pretender. Mrs. Midnight is both declaring the writer guilty for rendering Charles Edward attractive to British women in the song—in his ‘black shammy pumps’ and all—and, as we have seen, also for saying that he is attractive to them, and has already won them over. As in the case of the Dutch, in the skilful use of language here there is only a paper’s thickness between Whig dogma and a triumphant celebration of Jacobite tenets. Persona, in the form of Mrs. M. in rhetorical mode, is useful here to heighten the hysteria of the discourse, and, spluttering with pantomime rage, she makes full and joyful use of Smart’s favourite stylistic mode—alliteration—and the rhetorical figure of correctio: ‘But I have done—no, I have not done—Creatures of this Complexion, Monsters of this Magnitude, Serpents of such Subtility, can never be enough exposed’ (2: 204). Finally, it seems that Mrs. Midnight is familiar with the traditions of popular demonstration in favour of the Stuarts, despite the fact that, according to Murray 67 Pittock, ‘by 1745 popular Jacobitism was in its last decline in London’. At the end of the piece she crows the cleverness of her own ‘extraordinary Knowledge in the Art of Decypheration’, in her discovery of the final clinching evidence of his twofaced cunning: This Janus-headed Author (for I hate a man that has a double Face) has so artfully contrived this Piece, that if it be sung on any other Day of the Year except the 10th of June, and to the Tune of Jack in the Green, or any other Tune but the Rolling Hornpipe, the Words will have quite a different Signification. (2: 204)

The tenth of June had been since the birth of James Francis Stuart ‘White Rose Day’, and the ‘highest of all political holidays for the Jacobites’. The mention of the ‘Jack in the Green’ gestures towards the topos of fertility, which has been described as ‘a central image of Stuart restoration’. The ‘Rolling Hornpipe’ is telling too: Pittock tells us that ‘setting pro-Stuart verses to a familiar air was a common device’, for sympathizers would recognize the allusion while prosecution became 68 almost impossible. With this, Mrs. Midnight’s concluding salvo, I suggest that we are returned to the True Briton technique of explaining the significance of codes, 66 Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 63. The material here about Charles Edward dancing at Cardinal Tencin’s ball, and Molly Britaina’s involvement in his ‘enlargement’ is of course pure fantasy. 67 Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain, 115. 68 ‘the highest of all’: Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 183. For the topos of fertility, see Pittock, ‘The Aeneid’, Lord Burlington, eds. Barnard and Clark, 243. ‘setting pro-Stuart verses’: Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain, 113.

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symbols and allegory under the guise of condemning them. These eighteenthcentury texts might be thought of as taking peculiar advantage of the fact, now well recognized within literary studies, that in order thoroughly to damn, one must also 69 thoroughly represent. What I hope has become clear by now in this detailed look at ‘The Little Lighterman’, is that, just as with the condemnation of the ‘Janus-faced’ author, the prose here, while feigning disgust with the untruthfulness and deception inherent in allegory, is flamboyantly displaying those very properties. The exuberance and the intelligence brought to bear on the material at hand here should now, I hope, be fully manifest. Karina Williamson refers to the ‘cryptic and allusive’ style which is a feature of Smart’s poetry, and to the use of word-play within it, and surely it should be recognized beyond argument that in his early satiric writings the prose-writer was 70 tutor to the poet. Perhaps it is not so far from ‘Blow-Bladder Street’ to Jubilate Agno after all. Stern Virtue: Mrs. Midnight and the ‘Whispering Gallery’ In 1700 Ned Ward, the popular geographer of the sins of London, found an elaborate simile for the reactions of the ladies who, gathering on balconies to watch the Lord-Mayor’s Show, were discommoded by the sir-reverence and other ‘Kennel Ammunition’ being flung promiscuously about by the crowds below.71 He said they ‘fretted at their Dawb’d Scarfs’ like ‘a Godly Old Woman that had drop’d her Bible in the Dirt, Singed the Nap of her High Crown’d-Hat, or broke her Spectacles.’ This is a lightning sketch of the kind of stylized, Theophrastan character that Mary Midnight was in part based upon, and from which her creator sometimes so zestfully departed. In this final part of the chapter, my aim is to suggest why such a ‘Godly’ and untimely person—these ladies, it seems, being old-fashioned even at the turn of the century—might have been chosen as a mouthpiece for a Tory, even Jacobite, and yet also a radical political point of view. This also will allow me to introduce in the last section of this chapter what is at once the angriest, most effective satire, and the most bizarre piece of politically-motivated prosopopoeia to grace the pages of the Midwife. I wonder if Smart’s lifelong friend Charles Burney would have recollected him as a ‘bold and daring spirit’ on the strength of his poetry alone.72 The first article of the Midwife number issued for September 1751 presents a puzzle at first reading. A prominent building writes to Mrs. Midnight, professing her admiration for that lady, and explaining that as she, the Whispering Gallery in St. Paul’s Cathedral, ‘has the Honour to be the Confidante of almost every Individual in this Metropolis’, she will furnish the midwife with a sample of her correspondence. Upon which follows ‘A genuine Copy of a most surprising Epistle sent by the 69 ‘If one is going to speak against the people, effectively, one must speak of the people: they must be seen, given form, allowed to speak’: Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (London: Routledge, 1978), 245. 70 PW1, xxiv. Mounsey is an honourable exception here: Christopher Smart, 218. 71 ‘sir-reverence’: see chap. 2 above, 58, n. 43. 72 Ned Ward, The London-Spy COMPLEAT, 298. Burney: PW4, xl.

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Whispering Gallery ..., to a certain Chocolate-House at the other end of the Town’ (2: 241–3). In order to emphasize that this piece should be read allegorically, it is preceded by a quotation from Phaedrus’s Prologue to his fables: ‘Calumniari siquis autem voluexit,/ Quod ARBORES loquantur, non tantum ferae,/ Fictis jocari nos meminerit fabulis’. This was translated by Smart, in his 1765 Phaedrus translation, as: ‘But if the critics we displease,/ By wrangling brutes and talking trees,/ Let them remember, ere they blame,/ We’re working neither sin nor shame,/ ’Tis but a play to 73 form the youth/ By fiction, in the cause of truth.’ There’s nothing about ‘youth’ in the original. This is an odd sort of chocolate-house, for the ‘little Society of Men’ that use it turn out to be the elected legislative body of the country, and therefore the satire has a dual target in terms of public architecture: not only the offending chocolate-house, but also the House of Commons itself: Thou Place of Infamy! Didst thou think, that I ... cou’d long be ignorant of the enormous Pranks to which thou art Witness: Didst thou think, that I, who am privy to the tender sighs of the wishing Maiden, the profound Secrets of the unfathomable Politician, the lamentable Groans of the Grutching Miser, and grievious Grumblings of the discontented Tradesman, cou’d be a Stranger to those CRIMES which are published [sic] by the COMMITTERS, and to 74 that NONSENSE which is propagated by NOISE. There were two worthy Aldermen whispering in my Precincts the other day; that a little Society of Men that frequent Thee, have made several Bye-Laws against Gaming, which is not so much a Vice itself, as it is the Parent of all others. (2: 241)

The Aldermen went on to whisper that this very ‘Society’ met ‘on purpose to break the Statutes they themselves promulged’. They have been gaming themselves, and thus committing the crime against which they have legislated: ... and this ... on that Day, when every thing about me in this sober City, is dedicated to the most sacred Purposes. When such Things as these are transacted in thee, how darest thou remain upon thy Foundations...? Much more have I to say to thee, and much more I will say to thee, if I do not hear it whisper’d that thou mendest thy Manners. Thy Vanity, thy Pride, thy Folly, Ignorance and Gluttony, will afford an ample Field for Whisperers, and what they whisper I will divulge, for Secrecy, when she works for the wicked, revolts from her fair Mistress Prudence, and becomes a Vice instead of a Virtue. Thine, as thou behavest, The WHISPERING GALLERY. (2: 243)

This building has a mastery of both rhetoric in the grand style, and persuasive satire in the form of vituperatio. She uses exclamatio, anaphora, alliteration, antithesis and 73 PW6, 31. 74 ‘Grutch’ is a medieval word which Smart recovered, and its presence here as a ‘known idiosyncrasy’ (PW6, xvi) of Smart’s suggests that Smart himself wrote this piece: see for instance his Hop-Garden: PW4, 58. ‘published’ : the sense of this requires ‘punished’, rather ‘published’, and thus I am tempted to a bit of Warburtoning: there are some printer’s mistakes in the Midwife as a whole.

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percontatio—the rhetorical question: ‘we ask because we would chide.’ In view of her clerical status, you would expect a godly tone, and her fury is understandable. In the ludicrous nature of the proceedings, however, a crucial point is obscured: somebody has come within a hair’s breadth of calling the legislators of the nation ‘wicked’, and implying that the House of Commons is a place of infamy, nonsense and noise. Bolingbroke defines the work of a corrupt ministerial faction as ‘the daily 75 drudgery of explaining nonsense, covering ignorance, disguising folly’. We have seen Skinner explaining the neo-roman opposition to corruption: ‘If you live under any form of government that allows for the exercise of prerogative or 76 discretionary powers outside the law, you will already be living as a slave.’ There is more than a quaint joke being perpetrated here. Mrs. M. adds a codicil: N.B. Mrs. Midnight hereby gives Notice, that she has now made a League, and established a Correspondence with the Whispering Gallery: So People of all Ranks and Degrees, are particularly admonish’d to be careful in their Conduct, or they will certainly be detected and exposed.—’Tis high Time to do something for the Cause of Virtue, when the very Stocks and Stones cry out against us. (2: 244)

Prosopopoeia is here proving an invaluable tool for the purposes of apocalyptic satire. Things are indeed bad when the buildings themselves are enraged, and there is a powerfully Biblical tone to this, with the very stones crying out against injustice and wickedness. In Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, when the protagonist’s faith seems utterly lost, the ‘very stones in the street, and tiles upon the houses, did bend themselves against [him]’. Yet in this letter the cleverness is not merely in the content of the extended figure, but in the way that the writer makes the very rhetorical strategy itself into the final powerful accusation. Lucian, whose fictional tyrant was condemned on the evidence of his own lamp and bed, could hardly have 77 done better. This is a stern Mary Midnight we encounter here: she is the same one who took the two Juvenalian prowls through the London streets, who noted wryly in the first that to keep company with ‘Virtue’ was ‘now out of Request’ (1: 6), and who darkly remarked of gaming that she had ‘but three small Objections against it, namely, that it is the Parent of ROBBERY, BLASPHEMY and MURDER’ (1: 199). Her strictures are almost always delivered to those ‘Knights, Lords, and Dukes’ whom Charles Churchill was eleven years later sarcastically to warn timid satirists against 75 ‘certain species of the grand style [rely] on figures of repetition, word order, and structure (such as anaphora and isocolon) to distance themselves from ... ordinary informal speech’: Carey McIntosh, The Evolution of English Prose, 1700–1800: Style, Politeness and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 102. Quentin Skinner draws attention to the Renaissance rhetoricians’ concern with the blurring of virtue and vice; Mrs. M. is working a sort of anti-paradiastole: Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 153–61. Bolingbroke, Letters ... and a Patriot King, 15. 76 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 69–70. 77 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding, with Other Spiritual Autobiographies [1666], ed. John Stachniewski with Anita Pacheco, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 54. Lucian, vol. 1 of Works, trans. H.W. Fowler and H.G. Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 245–6.

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78

attacking, for ‘dangers unthought of ambush there’. Most typical of Mrs. M. in this mood is her spirited disgust at the regulations governing the new Foundling Hospital; she refuses to become a ‘Governor’—though she has been ‘sollicited’ by ‘Persons of Distinction’—because ‘expos’d and deserted Children are absolutely excluded by the Laws of your House’, so that the ‘bastard of a L--d has an equal Chance with a hapless Wretch’. Her ire is provoked both by the lottery system for admitting infants to the Hospital—‘to play at Roley-Poley for the Bodies of your Fellow-Creatures, is carrying the Matter somewhat too far’—and the holding of charity balls: Extravagant Feasts, Musick, Revelling and Dancing, are of that Species of Charity, which Pride and Gluttony are ever ready to bestow upon themselves and their Associates.—But to Fast for a Friend in order to serve him;—to Pray for him in order to promote him; to undergo Pain to give him Pleasure, is Christian Charity.—All the rest is Ostentation, Nonsense, Noise, and something yet worse than all of them, which I forbear at present to mention, because I wou’d not give Offence to Persons of Distinction. (2: 60–61)

This ‘godly’ old woman, then, is capable of an almost Puritan austerity at times, as noted earlier: this is, however, almost solely a matter of amending the ways of the aristocracy. Consider the final words of her homily ‘On the Practice of Gaming among Ladies of Quality’, in which her profession comes in useful once more: after enumerating the horrors attendant upon women who ‘destroy the Estates of their Husbands’ by gaming—they ‘may be obliged to gratify an importunate Dun with something more valuable than Pelf’—she asks, ‘what a race of Warriors, Patriots and Statesmen, is poor Britain to expect I shall bring into the World from the Wombs of such dissolute Mothers?’ (2: 212) Mrs. Midnight’s ‘Virtue’ is always a matter of devotion to the public good, and of following the active life which will benefit the nation. Here she is pleased with the King of Portugal, who has published a ‘Proclamation for the Prevention of Luxury’: ... either the Portuguese Ministry has less Pride, or more Frugality, than are generally to be found in other Countries; particularly in my own dear native Kingdom of old England, where, while my poor fellow Subjects are most grievously oppressed with publick Debts and Taxes, yet a Spirit of Luxury prevails, when our first rate Quality should follow my example, and go clad in plain home-spun and grey, if they have half that Love for their Posterity, as I have for the whole Community. (2: 137–8)

Even the clothes a persona wears can score points off the opposition, it seems. The Midwife is partly a creature which arises out of the contrast of which Pocock speaks, between the ‘ “patriot” and “man of commerce”, between “virtue” and “politeness or refinement” ’; this contrast, he says ‘emerges during the first half of the eighteenth 79 century’. The strict version of ‘Virtue’, which in the Midwife takes the form of the 78 Charles Churchill, book 3 of The Ghost, (1762) in Poetical Works, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 128. 79 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, 114, and see 41–2, 246. In Smart’s Hop-Garden (1743/4?) we can already see the distinction, in which he addresses the sturdy men of Kent: ‘... better far / To shake with unbought agues in your weald, / Than dwell a slave to passion and to wealth, / Politely paralytic in the town!’: PW4, 46. Also see chap. 2 above, 59.

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lectures of a very elderly and forthright lady, undoubtedly belongs in the former camp in both cases. We might note too, that this kind of stern virtue—the privileges of rank carry great responsibilities—also was a theme of Samuel Johnson’s.80 We are now in a position to see how the political stance of the magazine which I have outlined in this chapter can scarcely be extricated from the literary preoccupations I examined in the last. Mrs. Midnight needs to be elderly, to be untimely: and not solely for the reasons of gravitas and moral stature Steele invoked in his last Tatler number. Of course she wears a high-crowned hat and speaks in ways which look to earlier in the century, and indeed, all the way back to a Renaissance and republican humanism: by the middle of the century, the language of active citizenship and engagement, ‘rested on an archaic and restrictive foundation’. Mrs. Midnight’s hat does not only denote a devotion to Scriblerian battles, to the anti-Walpole literary wars that had passed away—it also signifies her attachment to a form of ‘Virtue’ which in its austerity was to find itself outdated in a world of ‘politeness’, a world in which, as Chimaericus observes, no more than the very first elements of dancing are 81 required to obtain preferment’ (Student, 2: 329). Yet the antagonism towards a venial, corrupt and self-absorbed aristocracy which recurs in the Midwife is not a matter of nostalgia, for in looking back it also looks forward to the radical language of Paine and Price towards the end of the century: ‘enough of the Good Old Cause was kept alive by some very unlikely groups in opposition to make the extent of Tory contribution to later political radicalism a very 82 real question’. The ‘politeness’ which it is becoming an academic orthodoxy to see as the raison d’être of the periodical since the Spectator is strikingly absent from this one. Brean Hammond suggests that … it would be possible to document ... the ways in which the periodicals function to bring the aristocracy and the literate middle class into contact with each other on the ground of politeness, giving substance to the claim that the periodicals are the cultural arm of the making of the English middle class.83

This is very far from being the aim of the Midwife, as indeed is the programme of ‘gentrification’ outlined by Iona Italia for the Female Spectator (1744–46); I have 84 tried to show the political basis for the Midwife’s rejection of it in this chapter. It is not a very large step to take from perceiving that your government is operating by curtailing your liberty with a fiction—with what Bolingbroke called the ‘dead letter of freedom, or mask of liberty’—to becoming aware of how babblings of 85 opinion taken on trust might be hiding real relations of exploitation in your society. In another series of articles Mrs. Midnight was made to undertake the difficult work 80 Cannon, Samuel Johnson and Politics, 170–71. 81 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, 114. For Mrs. M.’s hat, see chap. 3 above, 101, n. 73. 82 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, 33. 83 Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 185. 84 Italia, The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment (London: Routledge, 2005), 139. 85 Bolingbroke, Letters ... and a Patriot King, 83–4.

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of directing attention to such ideological deceptions, and accordingly the next chapter will widen the focus of this book to encompass the way in which she used humour and ridicule by exaggeration for that purpose: the purpose of presenting a skilled and effective depiction of an entire society in which the ‘Tyrant Custom’ taught people to turn a dulled mechanical eye to injustice and brutality.

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Chapter 6

The ‘Kind Juggler’: Social Satire and Enlightenment in the Midwife Let James rejoice with the Skuttle-Fish, who foils his foe by the effusion of his ink. For the blessing of God hath been on my epistles, which I have written for the benefit of others. Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, B125.

You could not accuse Christopher Smart of appearing before the reading public in a state of undress; in ‘The Little Lighterman’, writing as Mrs. Midnight in the guise of a Whig pamphleteer, he was wearing at least three layers. Claude Rawson has drawn attention to the eighteenth-century attachment to the image of the ‘dress of thought’, and in this chapter I would like to draw back a little from the entanglements of authorship, gender and politics in the magazine and ask more searchingly about these flamboyantly-worn clothes: this chapter will start by asking questions about the genre of the writing in the Midwife as a whole. The magazine takes the conventional form of a mid eighteenth-century commercial magazine, and yet it is, in terms of content—as Peter Perreten has pointed out—an ‘anti-magazine’. I will be considering the particular genre of Menippean satire, which, as an ‘antigenre’, a ‘burlesque of literature at large’, could be said to encompass the nature of 1 the magazine. Although the Midwife can very conceivably be placed as a knowing and vigorous example of that tradition, I will consider the usefulness of such generic consignment, and via demonstrations by example, conclude that a careful investigation of individual rhetorical strategies at work within it ultimately is more helpful to our understanding of the way that satirical writing uses and adapts preestablished modes of expression. This final chapter will also, however, address important matters of content not yet covered in this book. Consonant with corrective satire’s emphasis upon right learning and right thinking, it will try to show the ways in which the Midwife takes up a strong position against some broad aspects of her society as a whole. Moving through Mary Midnight’s attacks on the legal system, on the sale of opinions in the marketplace, and on the self-delusions that ensure people’s complicity with the injustices and 1 Claude Rawson, ‘Henry Fielding’, Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 132–3. Peter Perreten, ‘Satire in Christopher Smart’s ‘Midwife’ (unpub. PhD dissertation, University of Delaware, 1972), 8. ‘anti-genre’, ‘burlesque of literature’: these are Joel C. Relihan’s phrases, quoted in Ingrid A.R. De Smet, Menippean Satire and the Republic of Letters 1581–1655 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1996), 30.

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corruptions of the polis, the chapter culminates with a Mrs. Midnight ready to do battle with some aspects of Enlightenment itself. The tendency to think of living beings in mechanistic ways was a part of both the French and the British Enlightenment, and it is for this topic that Smart reserves some of his most forceful satires. Mary Midnight has no mercy for people who think humans might be like machines, or for humans who behave as machines. It is a question of a new way of thinking, against which Smart determinedly sets his persona. Margaret Jacob, the present-day historian of Enlightenment, usefully reminds us of the ‘leap of historical imagination’ required to conceive of a world where to think of nature through mechanistic models is a dangerous and novel business. The age, Bonamy Dobrée suggested nearly half a century ago, was ‘adjusting itself to the notion of the 2 machine’ and, most especially, the ‘Cartesian presentation of the automatic animal’. In this chapter, I will show both Smart and Mrs. Midnight enquiring bitterly about the ethical basis of such models: if animals are machines, to be taken apart like watches to see how they work, then what are the implications for humans, when the new philosophy tells us they are merely superior animals? This chapter, then, will explore both the topics of content and of form: as John Sitter has said, attention to form, and the ‘tendency to minimize the history in satire’, 3 have been a feature of Augustan criticism. So that in order to try to do justice to both areas—the history in the content, and satirical traditions in the form—I will begin by addressing the question of the place of Menippean satire in the magazine. This in turn will enable discussions both of content and form in seven of the Midwife’s most far-reaching and powerful general social satires. The Midwife and Menippean Satire It is interesting that the most comprehensive account of the ‘family resemblances’ of Menippean satire available to date—that of Eugene P. Kirk— also is a reasonably good working definition of the Midwife: ‘the chief mark of Menippean style was unconventional diction. Neologisms, portmanteau words, macaronics, preciosity, coarse vulgarity, catalogues, bombast, mixed languages, and protracted sentences were typical of the genre ...’4 All of these are present in the Midwife, to a degree outstripping more conventionally satirical magazines such as Fielding’s CoventGarden Journal. Northrop Frye’s version of the Menippean genre was characterized 5 too by its encyclopaedic form, but so, of course, were eighteenth-century magazines. 2 Margaret C. Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 189, 132. Bonamy Dobrée, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century 1700–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 23. 3 John Sitter, Arguments of Augustan Wit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 159. 4 Eugene P. Kirk, Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism (New York: Garland Pubs, 1980), xi. 5 ‘All of these are present’: to ‘neologisms’ one might add the resurrection of archaic words; see for example in this study the discussion of ‘grutching’: chap. 5, 159, n. 74. For an ‘open’ protracted sentence, see chap. 3, 98, and for the portmanteau ‘Grammaticasters’, see

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Kirk continues: ‘[i]n outward structure, Menippean satire was a medley—usually a medley of alternating prose and verse, sometimes a jumble of flagrantly digressive narrative, or again a potpourri of tales, songs, dialogues, orations, letters, lists and other brief forms mixed together.’ This description tallies with the nature of the Midwife. However, it also describes the nature of many eighteenth-century periodicals per se—most notably the Grub Street Journal of the 1730s. Bakhtin’s account of the ‘menippea’ emphasises the aspect of topicality important to the genre, 6 which he calls ‘the “journalistic” genre of antiquity’. Eugene Kirk’s description continues: ‘Menippean topical elements included outlandish fictions, (i.e., fantastic voyages, dreams, visions, talking beasts) and 7 extreme distortions of argument’. ‘Outlandish fictions’ are the staple fare of the magazine: consider that readers have already encountered a letter-writing dog, a petrified Cornish turd sold for fifty pounds, and a dialogue between a wig and a tobacco pipe. Mrs. Midnight’s favourite weapon of ridicule by exaggeration is another version of ‘extreme distortions of argument’. Other features of the Menippean—as described by Kirk—such as the tendency to ‘talk down’ to a popular audience, the inclusion of coarse vulgarity, and the satirical eulogy, have already been noted as part of the magazine’s modus operandi. Howard Weinbrot’s more recent Menippean Satire Reconsidered offers a markedly different definition to Kirk’s: not so much a ‘clearly defined genre’, it is ‘a liberal working concept, or strategic hypothesis’. Weinbrot, though, does hope to ‘reduce the number of works called Menippean satire’—though not as drastically as we shall see Ingrid de Smet doing in a moment. He sees the genre as ‘a kind of satire that uses at least two different languages, genres, tones, or cultural or historical periods to combat a false and threatening orthodoxy’. Since he uses the words ‘at least’, the Midwife can be said to inhabit this territory in an overdetermined fashion, and it can be shown to use all of his four ‘major variations in technique’ that ‘flesh out the genre’: ‘satire by addition’, ‘by annotation’, ‘by incursion’ and ‘by genre’. Weinbrot’s point, however, that Menippean satire is ‘a set of variable but compatible devices whose traits support an authorial theme’ is perhaps most helpful to us here.8 The best way to approach the argument that the Midwife should be recognized as an example of Menippean satire is to enquire a little more closely into individual methodologies in use in the magazine. The use of the rhetorical trope of prosopopoeia, enabling and legitimating the deployment of Mary Midnight herself, has been at the heart of this book, and is—as has been previously shown—of Lucianic descent. When the word ‘Anybody’ sends his ‘Humble Petition’ to the midwife for inclusion in her magazine (2: 156–8), his ventriloquist almost certainly knows that his ancestry

chap. 2, 62. For macaronics, see the epigrams in Hebrew, Latin, Greek and English, Midwife 2: 1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 311. 6 Kirk, Menippean Satire, xi. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel (New York: Ardis, 1973), 97. 7 Kirk, Menippean Satire, xi. 8 Howard Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 4, 19, and preface, 6–7.

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stretches back to Lucian’s complaint of the letter ‘tau’ in the Court of Vowels. Ingrid De Smet, however, has argued, through her study of sixteenth and seventeenth century humanist writings on satire, that the writings of Lucian did not form so 10 prominent a part of the Menippean tradition as recent scholars have suggested. Menippus himself makes no appearance in the Midwife, but in Mrs. Midnight’s exceptionally effervescent ‘JACKBOOT: Being an Essay in the Manner of the Moderns, On Times, Persons and Things’ she despairs both of ‘Modern’ genrebending (‘Our Poetry is all Prose, and our Prose is false English’—2:116) and the philosophical subject/object divide: Now, as every Person is a Thing, tho’ every Thing is not a Person, I shall jumble these two Articles together in the true JACKBOOT Taste. Now it would require the united Wit of Fielding, Lucian, Swift, Butler and Erasmus, to treat of this Head with any tolerable Adroitness, so (as Mr. Bays says) in fine, I’ll say no more about it, and if any body asks me, where lies the Jest of all this? I answer with Mr. Johnson, Why, In the BOOT; where shou’d the Jest lie? (2: 118)

Mrs. Midnight’s direct quotation from George Villiers’s 1672 Rehearsal is included for the joy of it, but what is important here is that Lucian is claimed by Mrs. Midnight as an illustrious progenitor: neither she nor Smart ever mentions a Menippean or Varronian tradition of satire. It also is noteworthy that Fielding precedes Lucian in the temporally-jumbled list, which is a salutary reminder that writers, surely, are more powerfully affected by other writers as individuals, than by generic categories identified centuries later. It was Smart’s supreme capability as a satirist to be flexible in technique and tone. Smart’s love of Horace has been well documented; the Midwife smiles with him sometimes, as well as railing with Juvenal. De Smet’s ‘working definition’ of Menippean satire, ‘first-person narratives in prose interspersed with verse, aimed at mockery and ridicule and often moralizing’, rules out the Midwife. Yet, though narrower than those of Kirk, Bakhtin, Frye or Weinbrot, hers does have the advantage 11 of linking the Menippean more closely to classical satire generally. The furiouslyargued origin of the word ‘satire’, with its confusion of ‘satyrs’ and ‘satura’ (a ‘mixed dish’), points already to the nature of satire as an inclusive medley, without the need to invoke Menippus or Varro. Following a generously inclusive definition of Menippean satire, it would seem significant that at Cambridge the young Smart borrowed no fewer than five works cited by Kirk as influential in the history of the genre: the writings of Lucian, Plutarch’s Morals, Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy, More’s Utopia, Swift’s 9 Lucian, ‘Trial in the Court of Vowels’, in vol. 1 of Works, trans. H.W. Fowler and H.G. Fowler (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 26–30. More recent ancestors include Spectator 80, which carried the complaint of ‘That’, and the Gentleman’s Magazine of December 1750 which printed the complaint of the ‘disconsolate monosyllable “And” ’. Kirk’s Menippean tradition encompasses both the complaints of letters and words, and the sort of ‘Disputations over Nothing’ which antedated Rochester’s ‘Upon Nothing’, Menippean Satire, 75, 97. 10 De Smet, Menippean Satire, 56. 11 Ibid., 70.

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Tale of a Tub, and the important sixteenth-century Letters of Obscure Men. He also borrowed more than once Bayle’s Dictionary, which summarizes various works in the tradition, and in a ‘Castle-Building’ essay Smart’s persona quotes Fontenelle’s 12 Lucianic Dialogues des Morts. Again, though, we have no evidence that Smart himself considered these diverse works to form part of a single genre, and indeed it is quite difficult to see either structural or thematic similarities between, for instance, the Tale of a Tub and the Consolations of Philosophy. In a later section of this chapter I will investigate the part that the Letters of Obscure Men plays within the Midwife, as another way of illustrating the direct importance of considering how individual works, rather than genres, matter in the genesis of satire. For now, to take a different example of how blanket categories can obscure origins, consider the position of what Kirk claims as a Menippean 13 sub-genre—that of the ‘paradoxical encomium’. As part of the knockabout wars with Orator Henley, Mrs. Midnight invoked this form of satiric attack in her ironic ‘PANEGYRIC on the Orator’: An Essay of this Kind will upon the first Glance appear extremely absurd and impracticable. But I can quote Presidents where Things of a similar Nature, have been successfully effected—Erasmus’s Encomium on Folly, Heinsius’s Praise of an Ass, and a certain learned German’s Panegyrick on that Man-eating Cannibal, a Louse, are all Instances of this Kind. (3: 98)

‘Things of a similar Nature’: Mrs. Midnight’s creator is looking very specifically at the tradition of blame-by-praise, whose origin in rhetorical, epideictic practice— 14 rather than in Menippean satire—De Smet was surely right to recognize. Thus and finally here it is again most helpful, I think, to acknowledge nothing more specific than a broad tradition of ‘learned wit’ as underlying the satire in the 15 Midwife. This is the tradition which, as I suggested in the fourth chapter above, must have helped Smart to justify to himself the kind of commercial work he was undertaking in the magazine, and invoking it does not—as would be the case if one situated the Midwife as incontrovertibly ‘Menippean’—obliterate differences by reference to genre criticism. I may not here tackle the larger question of the 12 For works read at Cambridge, see SB as follows: Lucian, 39–42; Plutarch, 38; Boethius, 46; Swift, 45; More, 38; Letters of Obscure Men, 41; Bayle, 39, 42, 45; Fontenelle, 41, 43; and see Student (1: 286). 13 Kirk describes the close relation between paradoxical encomia and Menippean satire; Menippean Satire, xvii, 33–7. For Heinsius’s louse and ass, see ibid., 101, 124. Also see Noel Malcolm’s account of mock-encomia, crediting Lucian’s importance in the genre, but making no mention of the Menippean; The Origins of English Nonsense (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 95. Satirical eulogy was a Scriblerian weapon, and also employed in the 1730s Grub Street Journal, Pat Rogers; Grub Street: Studies in a Sub-Culture (London: Methuen, 1972), 218. 14 De Smet, Menippean Satire, 29, 75, and see Christopher Robinson on Lucian and mock-encomia: Lucian and His Influence in Europe (London: Duckworth, 1979), 98–9, 224–6. 15 See D.W. Jefferson ‘Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit’, Essays in Criticism 1, no. 3 (1951): 225–48.

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place of apparently Menippean forms in the eighteenth century literary periodical: suffice it to say that much that appears absurd, ‘pataphysical’, ‘carnivalesque’—or even post-modern—within such periodicals appears by courtesy of the tradition of learned wit. Akenside’s usually sober Museum, for instance, contained a parody of an advertisement for a conduct book, in the form of a Rabelaisian list of chapter contents: ‘Bk. II, Chapter I: A Description of Noah’s Living in the Ark. Some Reflections on his Wife, for not washing her Face and Hands, though they had such plenty of Water. A severe Censure on Married Folks, who break Wind before one 16 another.’ (4: 10 May 1746). The first two linked pieces I am about to discuss will demonstrate the productive difficulties of handling questions of both form and content, necessitating as they do particular attention to both the Letters of Obscure Men, and the messy quotidian detail of a Georgian assize court. To begin with, I would like to revisit some familiar ground from the previous chapter, which will provide the basis for this one to open out into the wide topic of the general social satire in the magazine. The Law at the Bar: The Prosopopoeic Letter in the Midwife The prosopopoeic letter is the most common form of satire in the Midwife. Let us look now at one of the most carefully staged and acutely observed instances of this, in order to note another way in which Mrs. Midnight’s disgust with ‘Toadeaters’ in her society manifests itself, this time in a juridical rather than a political framework. Here the Midnightian disdain for fools and pedants turns into a more active disgust for those involved in professions where real power is concentrated: what begins as an apparently mild Horatian attack on the fool ends as a vicious indictment of the 17 entire British legal system. In the third number of the Midwife the reader discovers that Mary Midnight has a cousin who moves in exalted circles. ‘R. Reynard’, named for his mindless devotion to hunting rather than his cunning, writes to her, and should be allowed to explain himself in his first breathless, barely capable, sentence: After my humble service to you, hoping you are well, as we all are at present; this is to let you know that I am appointed by the King High Sheriff of all this County, my Wife is hugely pleased at it, and desires you’ll send her an Account of the New Fashions, that she may dress out fit to entertain my Lord Judge, and as becometh the Wife of the head Man of this large County; and, as I have never served High Sheriff before, I desire that you’ll go to my Lord Judge to know when he will come, and when I shall meet him, and what he likes for dinner. (1: 111)

Reynard has little command of either approved sentence construction (he writes in the long loose ‘open’ sentences beginning to be proscribed by grammars at this time, and his ‘becometh’ is an archaism) or the realities of London social circles. He also 16 The Museum, or the Literary and Historical Register, ed. Mark Akenside (London: R. Dodsley, 1746–47), 170. 17 Ronald Paulson explains how Juvenal’s satire looks to expose the knave, and Horace’s the fool: The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 21.

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shows little understanding of the responsibility of his new post: ‘I wish you cou’d come to the Trials, we shall have rare Fun, and be very Merry, and you may come down in the Judge’s Coach, so no more at present from, your loving Cousin, R. REYNARD’. (1: 110–12) If there is a correct rhetorical name for the technique which Mary Midnight adopts in her reply (‘Mrs. Midnight’s Answer to the above Letter, in which some Directions are given to Mr. Reynard how to behave himself, when he goes to meet my Lord Judge, and at the Assize’, 1: 112–15) I have not yet come across it. It is an ironic ‘inverted advice’, where a person is exhorted to do the exact opposite of that which in reality the writer believes she should, an inversion of the conduct-book or, in a Renaissance context, the ‘mirror-for-princes’. Lucian used a version of it for his ‘Rhetorician’s Vade Mecum’, to which Mrs. Midnight’s letter bears a distinct familial resemblance, and it is the basis for both Swift’s (prior) ‘Directions to Servants’ and 18 Elizabeth Carter’s (subsequent) letter as ‘Chariessa’ to the Rambler (100). Mrs. M.’s answer to ‘Reynard’ is crisply competent, educated and displays an Austen-like bite: she cannot leave the busy work of the ‘Publication of my Magazine’, but will ‘offer some Instructions’ as to how he should behave in his new high office: ‘And here, as in all my other Letters [oh the patience!], I shall endeavour to accommodate my Style and Sentiments, to the Strength of your Genius and Capacity.’ Mrs. M. first turns her attention to the judicial procession which her cousin will have to orchestrate: this practice, as Stephen Sedley describes it, took the form of ‘a fearsome pageant. The judge’s party was met on horseback at the city limits by the high sheriff and his pikemen and escorted with hangman, chaplain and entourage 19 into the town centre.’ Mary Midnight suggests that this is an opportunity for Squire Reynard to use his powers as landlord to the full, and in doing so first shows the flash of radical steel—Dryden’s ‘fineness of a stroak that separates the Head from the 20 Body, and leaves it standing in its place’— beneath the good-natured butchering of an ass: Every Sheriff you know, must have his Attendants or Javelin Men to ride before him, with their Pikes to clear the way, and these, I think, you should chuse out of the Principal of your own Tenants, and cloath them in your own Livery, which will greatly soothe your Pride, and at the same Time debase and humble them; and if any of the more considerable of your Farmers should refuse to put on your Livery, why turn them out of their Dwellings, and let them know who you are. (1: 112–13)

Recommended topics of conversation with the judge follow, almost Beckettian in their repetitiveness, and here Reynard’s own idiolect is mimicked: ‘Then you may say it is very fine Weather, and after that exceeedingly fine Weather, and by and 18 Lucian, in vol. 3 of Works, 219–30. Pope, of course, used a specialized version in his Peri Bathous. Irvin Ehrenpreis calls them ‘ironic advices’: vol. 3 of Swift: The Man, His Works and the Age (London: Methuen: 1983), 832. 19 Stephen Sedley, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books 21, no. 22 (1999): 37. 20 John Dryden, ‘Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’, in vol. 4 of Works, eds. A.B. Chambers and William Frost (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 71.

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by, that ’tis a fine Day, and a good Day for Hunting, and then you have the fairest Opportunity in the World, to enter into the History of a Fox Chase, which, if told in your Manner, with all the little particular Incidents, will very well hold you out to the Town.’ (1: 113) It is when Mrs. M. advises Reynard on his behaviour at the trials themselves that the slovenliness, incompetence and inhumanity which is tolerated at the heart of the British legal system becomes the real and evident target of the satire. He should ‘drink pretty deep’, before he goes into court, for ‘Justice is always painted Blind, and I don’t know that you can better express your Impartiality, than by falling asleep.’ He is to chew tobacco, flirt ostentatiously with the women in the courtroom, and suppress any ‘Evidences that may be coming up in [the Prisoner’s] behalf’, if it is drawing near to dinner-time and ‘the Haunch may be spoil’d’: would this remind readers of Pope’s ‘wretches hang that jurymen may dine’?21 Now we are at the nub: If the Prisoner should have on a dirty Shirt, and a long Beard, (which may happen to a Man, who has long lain in Jail, and has no Money) you may safely tell him, according to Custom, that he looks like a Rogue, and every Body will admire your Wisdom and Penetration. (1: 115)

‘Custom’ is a force of repression and cruelty here, as it uniformly is throughout the Midwife. Mrs. Midnight closes her letter by stressing the fact that she is simply recommending the normal behaviour for a sheriff: ‘[t]hus, dear Cousin, I have endeavoured to throw together such Observations, as I have made at the many Assizes I have been at, and to collect from Experience, such Circumstances, as have rendered other Sheriffs amiable in the eyes of the People.’ Lest it might be thought that a reform of manners in venial sheriffs is all that is being called for, Mrs. M. adds a postscript: ‘I need not say any Thing respecting the Judge; if he does but interrupt the Evidences, and put them out of Countenance, over-awe the Jury, and brow-beat the Prisoners, ’twill be sufficient’. (1: 115) The law has been a target for satirists at least since Varro’s ‘Law at the-Whipping Post’. Satire may frequently contain a fictional element, but Howard Weinbrot is right to note that it ‘relies upon the authenticity of its central details and argument, 22 made convincing by the voice of the speaker’. Once Mrs. Midnight’s ‘Answer’ has been read in full, there could be little doubt that the man who stepped into her skirts to write it had been to such ‘Assizes’, and had seen behaviour among the judiciary of exactly this sort, so that ‘ridicule by slight exaggeration’ seems an effective description of this particular piece. There must indeed have been readers of the Midwife who had witnessed similar scenes. Allan Ramsay’s 1753 tract On Ridicule illuminated contemporary understanding of how the juxtaposition of empiricism and comedy was working in a piece like this. He might have been describing the Reynard letters in his conclusion that it is

21 Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, Canto 3, line 22. 22 Varro: Kirk, Menippean Satire, 7. Howard D. Weinbrot, Eighteenth-Century Satire: Essays on Text and Context from Dryden to Peter Pindar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 48.

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the combination of authentic experience and humour which makes ridicule indeed ‘a test of truth’: .... if appeals to experience are the best test of truth ... ; if in the most serious questions, such wherein the welfare of mankind is chiefly interested, the entertainment rises in proportion to the familiarity of the known truths, by the application of which any falshood in those important points is detected; if ... these things are so, ... a true philosopher ... has a better chance than ordinary of improving the understandings (of his audience), at the very 23 instant that he makes them laugh. (81–2)

Paul Langford states that the central criticism of the eighteenth-century courts was that their procedures were outmoded, cumbersome and expensive, and that they 24 were ‘in effect the resort of the rich, often against the poor’. I suspect also that a political point is being made by the writer beyond this general one: Reynard is not a boorish Jacobite Squire Western, for—as he is made to say at the very beginning of his letter, so that the point is not missed—county sheriffs were Crown appointees, 25 and the criminal justice system was exclusively a Whig and Hanoverian one. Reynard is laughable in his idiotic complacency. As Plato has Socrates say in the Philebus, a lack of self-knowledge in the weak is merely ridiculous, but ‘the ignorance of powerful people is dangerous as well as shameful—it is a menace to anyone near’: hence the necessity for the headsman’s steel to transform the detached Horatian offensive into truly bloodthirsty satire. The civic humanist requirements for integrity in public life are in tatters, and Reynard would barely be disturbed by his own signal failure to possess three of the four Ciceronian cardinal virtues: those of justice, temperance and wisdom. He’s not too hot on the secondary values of benevolence or eloquence either. He is eager to discover, however, how best to ingratiate himself with ‘my Lord Judge’, and thus comes under the heading of a 26 ‘Toadeater’, the type attacked with vigour by More in his Utopia. The technique of the prosopopoeic letter, then, is here used with marked satiric efficiency. The most comprehensive and celebrated previous example of this technique was the sixteenth-century epistolary satire called the Letters of Obscure 23 Allan Ramsay, On Ridicule (London: A. Miller, 1753). His approach is similar to Shaftesbury’s in the ‘Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour’, but is more closely analytical: Anthony Ashley Cooper, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinion, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29–69. 24 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 299. 25 ‘crown appointees’: W.A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England 1714–1760 (London: E. Arnold, 1977), 29. On the proscription of Tories from positions in public administration and the judiciary, see Linda Colley, In Defence of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 23. For Jacobite distrust of the Whig criminal justice system, see Murray G.H. Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland 1685–1789 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 94. 26 Plato, Philebus, trans. J.C.B. Gosling (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 49. ‘cardinal virtues’: Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 76–7. Thomas More, in vol. 4 of Complete Works, eds. E. Surtz and J.H. Hexter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 57. See also Rambler 104.

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Men, which—as previously noted—Smart read at Cambridge. In this devastatingly effective collection of spurious letters, two German students took on the multiple personae of various (invented, but designed to seem typical) ignorant, corrupt, conceited church and university bigots, and—from out of their own mouths, as it were—let readers ‘know who they were’. This exercise was undertaken on behalf of Johannes Reuchlin, a scholar who had suggested that there was merit in the sacred Hebrew writings, in order to advance the humanist cause of fair-minded study of 27 ancient texts—Erasmus was associated with the authors. The Letters are careful in their precise delineations of the self-delusion and greed of their supposed writers, and particularly good at exposing the unmerited intellectual vanity of men who, in some cases, can barely write or think. Swift was certainly indebted to this work, most notably in the Tale of a Tub, but also in other of his prosopopoeic creations, including Isaac Bickerstaff, and so too was Christopher Smart. The sheer volume of letters in the Midwife, and the fact that they are letters rather than other forms of prosopopoeic polemic, might suggest that the magazine owes much to Ulrich von Hutten and Johann Jaeger, the authors of the Letters, as well as to Swift. Two important features of the Letters of Obscure Men stand out in relation to the ‘Reynard’ letters in the Midwife: the first is that they also employ a form of inverted advice. They are all addressed to ‘Magister Ortuinus Gratius’, a caricatured professor at Louvain, and several of them contain directions to that gentleman as to how he should proceed in affairs of the heart or the pen—in the opposite direction, needless to say, to that which virtue would recommend. It seems that Smart enjoyed the possibilities inherent in the inverted advice formula, for it is probable that he wrote a Student piece—the adjective ‘ingenious’ from the editors usually seems to have indicated his presence—in which a lady advises a new undergraduate as to how he should behave. She recommends swearing, profligacy, roistering and driving his parents to an early grave. Other wits continued the joke, for later that year the Gentleman’s Magazine carried a similar piece of inverted advice entitled ‘Rules for 28 a Man of Wit and Learning to Make Himself a Disagreeable Companion’. The second point is that Reynard’s ‘Pride’ will be soothed by his tenants donning their servile liveries, and this is a key to a crucial feature of the use of prosopopoeia, which the Letters of Obscure Men also indicated: it is a superlative technique for displaying the folly of unmerited pride. The ‘Reynard’ letters, then, have shown their writer to be an effective radical satirist who, adapting available models, can skilfully transform the good-humoured roasting of a fool into the deadly serious denunciation of legal murder. We should notice, too, that Mrs. M. is also untimely in ignoring the eighteenth-century ‘taming’ 27 Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum: ed. Francis Griffin Stokes (London: Chatto and Windus, 1909). I am indebted to Charles Page for drawing my attention to the importance of this book. Also see Kirk, Menippean Satire, 76–7. 28 For ‘inverted advice’ see for example the letters from ‘Magister Tilmann Lumplin’, ‘Leopold Federfuchser’ and ‘Peter Lapp’: Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, 345–6, 361–2, 461–3. The Student piece appeared three months after the ‘Reynard’ letters, 2: 203. Gentleman’s Magazine 21: 410.

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of satire into good-natured wit described by Stuart Tave. Allan Ramsay’s On Ridicule is again useful here, for although he is here talking about the Tale of a Tub, his comments are particularly germane to Midwife prosopopoeic techniques: Swift’s Tale, he says is of the argumentative kind of ridicule, whose business is to oppose false opinions, and operates by raising up fictitious characters to act in familiar occurrences of life, upon principles false and chimerical, and by representing the obvious consequences of such a proceeding, convincing the reader of the falshood [sic] and absurdity of such principles and opinions. (On Ridicule, 53–4)

Reynard is such a ‘fictitious character’, and the skill of his letters lies in the fact that another fictitious character, in the shape of Mrs. Midnight, represents a dialogical alternative to his view of the world, and yet never appears overtly to oppose him—just as the Letters of Obscure Men never resorted to direct polemic. Persuasion is the aim and end of the satire in the Midwife: it is a rhetorical mode, and thus in the Reynard letters an epistolary—and very funny—fantasy of fictitious characters is designed to convince the reader that brutal ignorance and corruption is being encouraged to subvert the process of justice in contemporary Britain. There are other ways, though, of using ridicule ‘to oppose false opinions’, or to claim that false opinions are being arrived at in specious ways, and this claim is the matter of the group of articles to which I would now like to turn. Opinions For Sale: Ridicule by Exaggeration Mrs. Midnight’s back-handed puff for Fielding’s ‘Universal Register Office’ in the Midwife number of February 1751 (‘From Mrs. Midnight to the Community’, 1: 225–28), not only drew attention to her midwifely status—mentioning her ‘many maternal Concerns for the Good of this Kingdom’ (1: 225)—but seems to have set her creator to thinking about the ways in which ‘Offices’ in a material sense might be rich source of social satire: he may also have remembered Swift’s redescription of Catholic confession as a ‘Whispering-Office’.30 The shortcomings of society might be indicated through imagining new places to which people might come to have their wants satisfied in a business-like way. By the time the series of ‘Offices’ culminates in August 1752 (there are five in all; see Appendix 2), Mrs. M. has turned the concept into a bitter commentary on the ways in which she sees opinions being acquired in her society. Here we see ‘extreme distortions of argument’ inherited from Lucian, from Butler and from the Scriblerians being exercised against a new target: the reification of thought itself in a commercialized society. Samuel Johnson had 29 Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humourist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), and see ‘On WIT’: Midwife, 3: 109–11. 30 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of A Tub, in vol. 1 of Prose Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 66. For the Register Office war, see Bertrand Goldgar, introduction to Henry Fielding, Covent-Garden Journal & A Plan of the Universal Register Office (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), xv–liv.

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demonstrated his own scepticism about the ‘Register Office’ concept—in different but related terms, recognizing the greed and instability as well as the self-deception of human desires—in the month after Mrs. M.’s first Register Office piece appeared 31 (Rambler 105, 19 March 1751). ‘A Dissertation on the Expediency of setting a Standard in order to ascertain the Opinions of People in all Ranks and Conditions of Life’ (3: 73–5) is headed ‘From the ROSTRUM’ and thus was probably delivered as one of the orations at ‘Mrs. Midnight’s Oratory’: it is worth remembering that some of the later Midwife pieces doubled as spoken rhetoric, and that meanings can thus be even trickier to determine. Nevertheless there is no mistaking the butt of Mrs. M.’s satire here: she begins by declaring briskly that ‘As there is nothing more vague and indeterminate than the Opinions of Mankind in general, and as there is a great Majority, that, in fact, have no Opinions at all, a Tractate of this Nature can never be unseasonable.’ Warning firstly of the inadvisability of judging ‘of a Man’s Opinion by his Words and Actions’, she points out that ‘Hypocrites’ deceive, and also—in a different category—that ‘many an honest Man may be forced to talk and act against his Opinion, which latter Case is admirably illustrated by Hudibras: ‘He that complies against his Will/ Is of his own Opinion still.’ (3: 73–4) She then separates opinions into those ‘natural’ and those ‘acquired’, and at least has the grace to note her own transgression against ‘her’ sex as she states that the former ‘is only another name for Positiveness, and is (I fear) of the feminine 32 Gender.’ Moving swiftly on, she explains that Acquired Opinion is an implicit Belief of another Man’s Sentiments, or the Method of Judging by Tradition. The Words I THINK and I IMAGINE are never more frequent than in the Mouths of those who have neither Thought nor Imagination; and some Gentlemen, that make Use of them, having no mental Estate of their own, are obliged to a borrowing of or begging for ideas of their Neighbours. (3: 74)

The point at issue here is a fundamental one to a humanist construction of the self: wrong opinions are linked to the sway of passions over reason. Though Mrs. Midnight seems here to fall into line with the Lockean demand that opinions should not be not taken upon trust, either from other people or from custom, in the light of her incessant and untimely insistence on the worth and validity of the study of the classics throughout the magazine, I think that her position bears better comparison 31 For the later Smart’s distrust of the commercialization of religion, see Harriet Guest, A Form of Sound Words: The Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 277–8. For Lance Bertelsen on Smart, Fielding and the Register Office, see ‘ “Neutral Nonsense, neither false nor true”: Christopher Smart and the Paper War(s) of 1752–1753’, in Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment, ed. Clement Hawes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 136–7, and Henry Fielding at Work: Magistrate, Businessman, Writer (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000), 35–6. 32 Swift also had a low estimation of ‘acquired Opinion’ ‘common Sense, and plain Reason, while Men are disengaged from acquired Opinions, will ever have some Influence on their Minds’ ‘The Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome’, in vol.1 of Prose Works, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 232. The Houyhnhnms had difficulty in understanding the concept of ‘Opinion’ Gulliver’s Travels, 4: 8.

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with that of Plato. We may, in order to arrive at real knowledge, be guided by the study of the works of the wise, but we should avoid the pitfalls of ‘opinion’—which in the Republic was called the ‘perception of shadows’. These are the shadows of customary thinking, being swayed by current dogma, or indeed, of not thinking at all, of ‘unintentionally … always wallowing in the mire of ignorance’: Aristotle was an Ass, Dionysus a Driveller, Longinus a Leatherhead, and all the antient Critics collected in a Body, a Parcel of Giddy-heads, Goose-Caps, and Hum-drums, who would have been three Days in reading, considering and revising a Play, which you can judge and condemn … in three Minutes. (1: 79)

This ‘Ancient versus Modern’ disagreement over the nature of ‘opinion’ is a subtle but important one—well explained by Charles Taylor—and in this adherence to the 33 ‘Antients’ Smart’s persona demonstrates once again her untimeliness. Mary Midnight then proposes to establish a ‘Thought-Warehouse or OpinionOffice’, where she will sell sound opinions to those who are direly in need of them— opinions that she herself will formulate and will be binding. In this she anticipates Adam Smith, who discussed the marketable nature of knowledge: Only a very small part of any ordinary person’s knowledge has been the product of personal observation or reflection. All the rest has been purchased, in the same manner as his shoes or his stockings, from those whose business it is to make up and prepare for the 34 market that particular species of goods.

This sale of sanctioned opinions, she notes later, explaining the laws of the Office under six formally numbered heads, will help with the problem in the theatres, for the price of opinions will be doubled ‘in the Case of a new Play or any performance of Wit and Humour’. Another law forbids any person to ‘purchase two Opinions of one and the same Thing, so as to make use of one at Court, and another at the Exchange’. It is no accident that she uses the metaphor of ‘mental Estate’ in this arraignment of a society where everything, up to and including the furniture of people’s heads, can be reified and thus become subject to the laws of commerce. Smart used the term ‘mental estate’ in a Student essay: there it is what is left to men who have ‘play’d the fool’ and become destitute. Chimaericus hints that he is talking about himself, which leads to his complaint of merit going unrewarded (1: 379–81). The term ‘estate’ refers to monetary as well as landed assets, for its usage in the sense of land only post-dates the Midwife. Possibly the writers of both pieces also had plagiarism and the ‘property of wit’ in mind. Terry Eagleton’s remark about the eighteenth-century public sphere—‘the petty proprietors of a commodity known

33 Plato, in vol. 2 of The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), 33–4. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 168–9. 34 Adam Smith: this is from an early draft of the Wealth of Nations (1769), quoted in Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 14.

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as ‘opinion’ assemble[d] together for its regulated interchange’—does not allow voice to those who resisted this commodification.35 Thus, in suggesting that opinions may be a form of consumer goods, and in her role as ridiculer-by-exaggeration of the self-aggrandizement of hack productions, Mrs. M. is not so much endorsing Enlightenment views of opinion as mechanicallyheld ‘idle notions’ or vacuous uncertainty—I am thinking both of Shaftesbury and the French encyclopaedists here—as taking a stance which goes back to Horace as well as Plato, one which questions ‘pre-judicate’ opinions. Indeed, recalling the ultimately rhetorical nature of satire, the Sophists’ position of understanding opinion as doxa, as something to be arrived at actively through debate, is of central 36 importance to the character of the Midwife. There is also an important political dimension to this: Pocock argues that Whig and commercial ideologues were anxious to enlist ‘opinion’ in opposition to stern civic humanist ‘virtue’ as a way of regulating the passions: a somewhat more elastic way, which allows for the buying and selling of what we are encouraged to call 37 ‘lifestyles’ nowadays. To speak in the widest terms, then, it is possible to construe this particular piece of disposable and amusing trivia as drawing attention not only to the attempts of social authority to curtail free movement of thought, but more particularly to the power of ideology in a print-based culture, which may be operating under no law but that of cash in hand—and indeed on its behalf—to form and dominate public opinion. Here, then, ancient forms of attack upon longstanding satirical targets are refined to fit new circumstances and new outrages upon the body politic. ‘Untimeliness’, then, can also be most timely, for earlier satirical targets and techniques may always be revisited and refashioned for a new audience. If Mrs. Midnight’s greatest debt is to the ancients, she also owes much to the sixteenthcentury female eidolon briefly encountered in the first section of this chapter. Erasmus’ ‘Folly’ is not only an important precursor of Mary Midnight in terms of persona, but she also demonstrates how Mrs. Midnight’s concern with opinion is intimately linked to a topic which Smart’s two major personae are made to address with ferocious levity: that of self-delusion.

35 Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984), 26. 36 ‘Opinion’ is a retrogressive force in the Characteristics: Shaftesbury, Characteristics, ed. Lawrence E. Klein 29, 83, 132–3. For the French encyclopaedists, see Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1992), 92. Dryden praises Horace as a foe of ‘prejudicate Opinions’; Dryden, ‘The Original and Progress of Satire’, 74, and for the Sophists, see Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) 122–3. 37 J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 113–15.

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Self-Delusion and Society: Mrs. Midnight and Erasmus’s ‘Folly’ In the earlier sections of the Praise of Folly, Erasmus’s exemplary mock-encomium, he makes Folly herself speak—with Midnightian self-regard—in praise of her own powers. She is pleased with the fact that men are happier living in a constant state of self-deception, for this sort of foolishness is very particularly hers: But it’s sad, people say, to be deceived. Not at all, it’s far sadder not to be deceived. They’re quite wrong if they think man’s happiness depends on actual facts; it depends upon his opinions. For human affairs are so complex and obscure that nothing can be known of them for certain, as has been rightly stated by my Academicians, the least 38 assuming of the philosophers. (118)

It is clear from the last reference that the point here being made by Erasmus is the exact opposite of Folly’s, for ‘his Academicians’ are the scholastics whom he attacks throughout the work. Shortly afterwards he makes Folly declare: ‘Now this gain in happiness costs very little, whereas real facts often take a lot of trouble to acquire, even when they are quite unimportant, like grammar. An opinion, on the other hand, is very easily formed, and it is equally conducive to happiness, or even more so.’ The creators of Folly and Mrs. Midnight are using their personae to put across the opposite point: that acquiring knowledge is not a simple matter, but one which requires effort, study and thought—and, if we remember that in the Midwife’s literary criticism the most scathing satire is reserved for those who do not take the trouble to study their predecessors’ work—it is safe to say that in the ‘Dissertation Upon Opinions’ the Midwife is in effect offering a popularized and updated version of Erasmus’ point here. It is Folly’s linked point about happiness which I would like to address in this part of the chapter, and to show Smart—as ‘Chimaericus’—to be reworking this Erasmian argument, and Mrs. Midnight to be taking it a step further in the Midwife. A ‘human capacity for self-delusion’ is invoked by Swift when he defined happiness as ‘a perpetual Possession of being well Deceived’, but Mrs. M. radically alters and 39 updates her predecessors’ positions in her analysis, as we shall see. Folly makes the comforting observation that not only are human affairs too muddled to grasp, but ‘if anything can be known, more often than not it is something which interferes with the pleasures of life’, so there is even less need to bother with ‘real facts’. Folly abjures men to ‘adapt (themselves) to things as they are’, to ‘be willing to overlook things 40 along with the rest of the world’, and ‘to wear your illusions with a good grace.’ Chimaericus discussed in the Student the new craze for ‘Humbugging’—both the word and the activity. It meant simply to cheat, and the Castle-Building chapter is entitled ‘In which the readers will find an essay on the pleasure of being imposed upon.’ After some lively examples of the word in action among the (with weary sarcasm) ‘people of taste and fashion’—‘no body is fit for the society of persons of 38 Erasmus, Panegyricus Moria, in vol. 27 of Works, trans. Betty Radice, ed. A.H.T. Levi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). 39 Swift, The Tale of a Tub, ed. Herbert Davis, 108. 40 Erasmus, Panegyricus Moria, 118, 103.

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rank, who has not been HUMBUG’D DAMNABLY’—Chimaericus quotes from Hudibras: “Doubtless the pleasure is as great, “In being cheated as to cheat, says an inimitable brother Castle-Builder.—Yes—and, he might have said, a much greater. For ’tis so exquisite a joy to the mind of man to be impos’d upon—that if he cannot get some kind juggler to do the work for him, he is never more happily imployed than when he is imposing upon himself. (Student, 2: 42)

Chimaericus goes on to furnish the reader with a sublime and ridiculous mixed bag of examples both of the deluded and the deluders: here is the ‘patriot singing of liberty to the musick of his own chains’, and ‘Mr Chissle the statuary’ who ‘thinks 41 himself a poet’. These, then, are the happy people—Folly’s own fools—and the point, dressed somewhat garishly in up-to-the-minute clothing, is very similar to that of Erasmus. The Midwife number for June 1751—six months after this Castle-Building essay—begins with a return to this theme, but Mrs. Midnight attacks it with a bitter vigour lacking in Chimaericus’s version. She also invests it with a radical social awareness which takes the Erasmian and humanist point about an inherent weakness in mankind, and transforms it to demonstrate how an authoritarian society uses this to its own advantage. The title of the piece is designed to lead readers into expecting a ‘College of Physicians’-style attack on projectors and proto-scientific jargon, of which there are plenty in the magazine. ‘Mrs. Midnight’s Dissertation on the Perpetual Notion’ (2: 97–9) finds the lady explaining good-naturedly that there has not been a misprint, and that the ubiquitous contemporary topic of the search for ‘perpetual motion’ is not her target here. She then gives her definition of the ‘Perpetual Notion’, via a parenthesis which is an illegitimate and delightful semantic bamboozle. The ‘Perpetual Notion’ is ... an inherent Opinion (I will not say an innate one, for fear of being haunted by the Ghost of John Locke) I say, an inherent Opinion every Individual has, that he either now is, or at some Time will be, a Person of great Consequence. This is the Perpetual Notion, and, I will be bold to say, is of more Service to the Happiness and Well-being of Man, than any Mechanick Art, that was ever invented. (2: 97–8)

There follows a list of the self-deluded, and it is notable that they come from a wide range of social positions. ‘Opinions’ here are not being restricted to the articulation

41 ‘patriot singing’: see chap. 5 above, 148. Samuel Butler and Bolingbroke also both use the words ‘imposed upon’ in similar contexts: see Samuel Butler, Prose Observations, ed. Hugh de Quehen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 62. Bolingbroke addresses the sad state of a nation where ‘authority [has] imposed upon those as [do] not pretend to reason’: Henry St. John Bolingbroke, Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism and On the Idea of a Patriot King, ed. A. Hassall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 48.

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of the ‘propertied sort’, as Terry Eagleton has suggested that uniformly they were in 42 the eighteenth century. What makes the Prentice chearfully plod thro’ seven Year’s Servitude, but the Perpetual Notion he will one Day be a Master? What makes the Lover go thro’ a ten Year’s Siege, but a Perpetual Notion that the fair Obstinate will at length surrender? What makes the Toadeater to a State-Mountebank think there is Musick in his Chains, but the Perpetual Notion of his some time being raised on that very Pedestal, which is at present the Support of his Idol? (2: 98)

‘Persons of great Consequence’ then, as the example of the lover shows, is a broad category encompassing other delusions than those simply concerning social position, thus allying Mrs. Midnight’s point again to Folly’s generalized one about human nature. Now, in case we thought that the author had no real objection to this state of affairs, the steel of the satire begins to bite, and the argument here becomes different from Folly’s: By means of the Perpetual Notion every Body has always a Prospect, and a Prospect is a very good Thing at a very great Distance; those therefore who have the least Expectations have the finest Prospect, the Objects of their Desires being the most remote, which must be a great Consolation to the Poor and the Unfortunate. But see more of this in the fourteenth volume of my Treatise on Perspective, which was lately published at Amsterdam. (2: 98)

The nonsensical cod-scholarly intervention of the Huygensesque ‘Treatise on Perspective’ is a typically Midnightian move, diverting attention from the saeva indignatio which immediately precedes it. Here is an example of satire performing its invaluable function of showing people as ‘subservient to the laws of nature or 43 society, when they think they are being unique.’ Mrs. Midnight is anticipating later Marxist formulations concerning ‘false consciousness’, where imaginations are seen as being ensnared in the service of the state. This is not all that the piece does, however, and Mrs. M. injects a note of personal bitterness as she further signals her ironic intent: ‘Hope, that Passion, which was given to us to arouse us from the Consideration of real Misery, by deluding us with visionary Happiness, is founded on the Perpetual Notion, which nothing can destroy but Self-Contempt and Despair, Diseases of the Mind not incident to one Man in ten Million.’ Tell that to the Marines, one is tempted to say. Every Person is fond of Existence, every Person would fain be Somebody, a Perpetual Notion highly cherished by many a Man, who, in Fact, is Nobody. The brisk Minor that pants for Twenty-one, the brisker Damsel that pants for a Husband, the Culprit that wants

42 ‘the currency of this realm [of opinion] is neither title nor property but rationality— a rationality in fact articulable only by those within the social interests which property generates’: Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, 26. For an account of the growing significance of ‘public opinion’ in the latter half of the eighteenth century, see the last chapter in J.A.W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of Self-Recognition in EighteenthCentury Political Thought (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1983). 43 John Sitter, Arguments of Augustan Wit, 47.

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to go abroad, and the Exile that fights to come home, have no Peace, no Life, but in the Perpetual Notion. Even I myself, even Mary Midnight, who is writing this Dissertation, wou’d want Spirits to comfort herself in her old Age, was it not for the Perpetual Notion, that tho’ the Works of her hands bring nothing but frail Mortals into the World, yet the Works of her Head shall triumph in Immortality. (2: 99)

We have come quite a long way from Erasmus, and, oddly, it is to Hobbes that one can turn to find a parallel for this blend of the philosophical, the social and the political; the writer knows there is no real ‘Peace’ in the ‘Perpetual Notion’, just as he has little faith in the immortality of the works of Mrs. Midnight’s head. In Leviathan Hobbes, whom Smart disliked intensely in his youth, but found a kindly place for in Jubilate Agno, declared that ‘there is no such thing as perpetuall Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life it selfe is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, 45 nor without Feare, no more than without Sense.’ Mrs. Midnight’s ‘Dissertation’ is both an anatomy of society’s regulatory force, and a bleakly ironic (strangely personal, too, for ‘Self-Doubt and Despair’ seem powerfully present to the writer) philosophical consideration of the impossibility of happiness: it reads like a meditation on Hobbes’ remark. Perhaps—still being untimely and timely too—this Midwife piece might indicate Blanford Parker’s perspicuity in noting the importance of Butler and Hobbes to Pope and Swift’s revisions of Renaissance humanism, through the ‘satirical evacuation of traditional discourse’. The case is very different in Johnson’s Adventurer 69 (July 1753), where individuals are granted more power over their circumstances; though delusionary hope may lead people to ‘resolve to trust the promise which they know will be broken, [to] walk in a circle with their eyes shut, and persuade themselves to think that they go forward’, they nevertheless have the power to attain ‘solid advantages’ 46 ‘by sober thought and rational assiduity’. People would rather not see the real: the artificial is indiscriminately preferred over nature, and this is the message of a disgruntled Christopher Smart in his version of one of Phaedrus’s fables, which came to be known as ‘The Pig’. This formed part 47 of the oration—‘Mrs. Midnight To the Critics’—printed in the Midwife (3: 76–9). ‘Critics’ in this case are the judging public at the theatre, who, in their unconsidered adulation of a successful imitator of pig noises, hiss off the stage a competing

44 For a discussion of this as a Jacobite reference, see chap. 5 above, 153. 45 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 46. Smart excoriated Hobbes in his 1742 Tripos Verses, but owned that he had ‘wronged him’ in Jubilate Agno (B227): Williamson suggests that this was because Smart understood Hobbes to have ‘embraced the Christian religion’: PW4, 20–23, PW1, 50. 46 Blanford Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 12, 63–4. Johnson, Adventurer 69, in vol. 2 of Works, eds. W.J. Bate, John M. Bullitt and L.F.Powell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 391, 393: see also Rambler 67. 47 For Smart’s translations of Phaedrus (1765), and some suggestive points, from both Phaedrus and Williamson, about the capacity of fables to speak truth under the guise of fiction, see PW6, 2, 6, 18, 31, 59: for ‘The Buffoon and the Country-fellow’, on which ‘The Pig’ is based, see ibid., 98–100, and 126–30. Also see PW4, 201–2.

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countryman who has hidden a real pig under his jacket—‘That like a Pig!—each cry’d in Scoff’—but are confounded when he shows them the real thing: “Soft ye, a word before I go,” Quoth honest Hodge—and stooping low, Produc’d the pig, and thus aloud Bespoke the stupid, partial crowd—. BEHOLD AND LEARN FROM THIS POOR CREATURE, HOW MUCH YOU CRITICS KNOW OF NATURE. (3: 79)

‘Wearing your illusions with a good grace’ is not a desideratum for the writer of this piece, any more than it was for Erasmus. Nevertheless I hope in this section to have demonstrated how Smart’s persona is made to develop Erasmus’ scorn for a universal failing common to fallen mankind into a specific criticism: criticism of the way such a capacity for self-delusion is harnessed by his society to perpetuate injustice and corruption. It seems to Mrs. Midnight that the human capacity for rational judgement is being impaired: we are all being sold a pig in a poke. Mechanism, Free Will and Explosions of Language Parallel to an insistence upon the use of reason and learning in the Midwife runs a series of articles demonstrating the follies of a misuse of reason which, they appear to claim, result in its effective abolition. In the last two sections of this chapter we will revisit a topic which has already cropped up in several guises: the Midnightian attack on what she considers the mechanisation of thinking in her society: ‘matter and motion against art and nature!’48 The popular dissemination of scientific theories was a prominent feature of eighteenth-century cultural life, and periodicals played a crucial part in that process: the Midwife intransigently refused the trend, and 49 poured parodic scorn on those—like the Gentleman’s Magazine—that did not. We saw Mrs. Midnight in full flight on the folly and danger of mechanistic models in the practice of medicine, and on the comic horrors of a ‘Mechanick’ approach to writing, and there are few numbers of the Midwife which do not carry at least one article ridiculing by exaggeration either claims that man is nothing but a superior and capable machine, or people who seem to merit that description by behaving in machine-like ways. The legacies of classical and Renaissance satire are again to be observed underwriting Mrs. Midnight’s modus operandi here. Dominick LaCapra has described Menippean satire as ‘a manifest example of a type of text openly exploring the interaction or dialogue among uses of language’, and this well describes various pieces of linked writings in the magazine—the ‘Reynard’ letters are an example

48 Student, 2: 186, and see chap. 4 above, 112. 49 For the popularisation of science during the eighteenth century as part of a British Enlightenment, see for example Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2000), 142–55.

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from this chapter. The Midwife article we are about to examine, however, seems more intent upon explosions of languages, in the manner of Rabelais, rather than explorations of their interactions. Here the developing discourses of science and technology find themselves rubbing shoulders with parodied testimonials for quack medicines, and neither comes very well out of the exchange. Christopher Smart has been described as the significant writer of the century ‘least devoted to introspective fantasy’, and the Midwife is undoubtedly the least introspective of magazines. It has a commitment to a Ciceronian model of involvement in society as constitutive of the human, and to free will and reason as essential components of each man and woman’s interactions within society. The young Smart had no interest in the forms of ‘literary loneliness’ that John Sitter has seen as characteristic of mid-century poetry, and even in the asylum Smart’s poetry placed him in an imaginative world of being with others, whether they were 51 ‘Skuttle-fish’ or Lords. Throughout this book I have drawn attention to the civic humanist emphasis on the active agency of citizens within the polis, and this concept drives the words on every page of the magazine. Mrs. Midnight does battle with a mechanistic vocabulary that she saw as threatening to drain agency from individuals, and place them as part of a universe run with brutal solipsism on behalf of itself. The Midwife’s war against mechanism partly functions as parodies of articles in competitors like the Gentleman’s Magazine, but the parodies do not arise for the sake of cheap laughs: they are rooted in this basic humanist aversion to the displacing of free will from the heart of what it is to be human. For example, the two articles on the ‘Mill to Grind Old People Young’ (2: 172–4, 193–7) busy themselves about a number of tasks: they parody earnest popularisations of mechanical improvements, such as the Gentleman’s Magazine’s reports of the proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris; they deride the sort of testimonial letters with which Smart must have been familiar as part of Newbery’s aggressive marketing of ‘Dr James’ Fever Powder’, and thus modern idiotic credulity which seemed eager to be seduced by the power of advertisement; they have some fun with ‘old woman’ as a term of contempt for those in positions of power; and they provide a platform for an wide survey of 52 corruption in the professional, political and social spheres. 50 Dominick LaCapra, ‘Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts’, Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, eds. Dominic LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, nd.), 55. 51 ‘least devoted’: Morris Golden, ‘The Imagining Self in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1969): 22. Cicero: On Duties, eds. M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 6, 10, 59. John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). Also see Clement Hawes, ‘The Utopian Public Sphere: Intersubjectivity in Jubilate Agno’, Smart and Enlightenment, ed. Hawes. 52 It is possible that Smart composed fake testimonials for this: he dedicated his 1756 ‘Hymn to the Supreme Being on Recovering from a Dangerous Fit of Illness’ to Dr. James: see PW4, 319–23, 460. Similar fake testimonials were still being used in Regency political satire: Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790–1822 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 204. For an example of a Guildford Mill testimonial, see the letter from ‘Mrs. Philip Hugbribe’: chap. 5 above, 143.

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Mrs. M.’s ‘Mill’ is the most direct Midwife parody of a Gentleman’s Magazine article that I have found. In 1749 the latter reported on the French ‘Mill propos’d by M. Durand, which serves at once to scower cloths and to cleanse them after they are dy’d’ (19: 159). Mrs. M., though, here parodies a different article in the same year: it is an explanation of an illustration of ‘the Duke of Argyll’s horizontal Windmill for raising Water’, and the mathematical explanations and lay-out of the articles are very alike. The article directly following this, and opposite it, is an account of ‘a small cannon’, which features ropes, and also the bizarre phrase we are about to see Mrs. M. flaunting in her description of the Guildford Mill—‘Axis in Peritrochio’ (19: 249–50). The ‘Guildford Mill’, conceivably, could even be a Midnightian metaphor for the Gentleman’s Magazine itself, drawing attention to their similarity as forms of ‘machine’ which exploit social aspirations, and yet, it is derisively implied, leave their beneficiaries essentially unchanged. Yet they, and the next articles I shall discuss, also suggest that the logical result of thinking of humans as machines is to transform them into puppets with exchangeable body parts and no autonomy. It is telling, if not more than this, that Jeremy Bentham described his circular prison, his ‘panopticon’, as a ‘mill for grinding rogues honest’.53 Mrs. M.’s derision is reserved not only for this way of thought, but also for the people who seem to encourage it, by behaving like puppets; in this more than anything—and her overall debt is great—she follows Swift. As an example, then, of Mrs. Midnight’s aversion to both mathematization and what we would call technology, consider this, which, along with its testimonials, she has introduced as ‘an Account of some Miracles effected by a new Mill’: A Mathematical Description of the Guildford Mill. By NEHEMIAH NICKNACK, F.R.S. The perpendicular Altitude of this Mill is about thirty Feet, and the horizontal Aperture, or Dilation of the Hopper, is about ten. There are nine principal or cardinal Wheels, so judgematically contrived, that in them all the Squares of the periodical Times are equal to the Cubes of the Distances. (2: 194)

‘Nehemiah’ goes on to take his readers through a similarly unrestrained description of the ‘Sails (for it is a Wind-Mill)’, and then surpasses himself in describing the tubes and ropes between the ‘Hopper’ and the ‘Trough’: Diametrically opposite to the Tubes are four Ropes suspended funicularly, at the Extremities of which are four Levers of the third Kind, namely, such as have the Pow’r between the Fulchrum and the Weight. Besides which, there are Abundance of inclined Planes, Axes in Peritrochio, Polyspasts, Cylinders, together with the Trochlea, Cuneus and Cochlea and in short all the mechanical and mathematical Powers. Such is the Description of my Mill, which is so admirable for it’s [sic] PERSPICUITY, that a Child six years old may understand it ... (2: 195)

53 Ross Harrison, ‘Jeremy Bentham’, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 85.

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This is glorious nonsense, of course, but it is not only that, any more than are Rabelais’ parodies of scholastic discourse. To find the parts of the inner ear supporting levers is a joy, but it is a serious joy, implying that the discourse of medicine, too, is part of society’s obsession with the logic of machinery. This is a logic which can only be attacked with the extravagancies of illogic, but the attack is nonsense with a purpose—and thus not pure nonsense at all—and in the tradition of erudite techniques for exposing the fallacies of hubristic discourse. Sterne has a recognizably Midnightian version of this in Tristram Shandy, as the hero describes Uncle Toby’s entanglement in the geometry of cannon-ball projection: He proceeded next to Gallileo and Torricellius, wherein, by certain geometrical rules, infallibly laid down, he found the precise path to be a PARABOLA,—or else an HYPERBOLA,—.and that the parameter, or latus rectum, of the conic section of the said path, was to the quantity and amplitude in a direct ratio, as the whole line to the sine of double the angle of incidence, form’d by the breech upon an horizontal plane ;—and that the semi-parameter,—– stop! my dear uncle Toby,—stop!—go not one foot further into this thorny and bewilder’d track … intricate are the troubles which the pursuit of this bewitching phantom, KNOWLEDGE, will bring upon thee. (2: 3)

Mrs. Midnight’s ‘Mill’, I suggest, clearly marks a transitional point from Swift to Sterne: in the former, the projector is guilty of pride in attempting to interfere in a divinely-ordained universe, and if Gulliver’s Travels is the classic statement of this position, it is worth noting that it is also to be found in Bolingbroke. Menippean satire was used throughout the sixteenth century to discredit natural philosophers, and in the ‘Mill’ we find it up in arms against the scientific projectors who are in 54 some sort the heirs of both Bacon and Newton. In Sterne, however, the nonsense is enjoying itself in a markedly Midnightian manner, though essentially it is the vehicle for a gentle jest about Uncle Toby’s character. Smart’s Student persona finds encyclopaedism to be the chief advantage of his ‘System’ of ‘Castle-building’, for this ‘art is of such a various, capacious, anomalous nature, that the rest of the sciences differ not so much from one another, as this does from itself’ (1: 250). Elsewhere Chimaericus announces defiantly that ‘the beauty of the thing, (is that) the very nature of the subject excludes all order and method’ (2: 6). It is tempting to see the same hand at work in the two ‘Mill’ pieces, and in the mock-Newtonianism which forms the beginning of ‘The Necessity of keeping one’s FRIEND in one’s POCKET, demonstrated on the Principles of Sir ISAAC NEWTON’S Philosophy’ (3: 28–30). The rhetorical trope of adynaton, or impossibilia, is brought into play here by Mrs. Midnight: she has given a brief ironic account of Newton’s theory of gravity, and asks any sceptic to ‘but step to that part of the Globe opposite to St Pauls Churchyard’—she means Newbery’s shop, and thus where she is standing, for Mrs. M., like Pamela, is writing to the moment,

54 Kramnick attributes the position that the projector is guilty of pride to both Swift and Bolingbroke: Bolingbroke and his Circle, 194. For Menippean satire and natural philosophers, see Kirk, Menippean Satire, xxviii.

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and he will find himself firmly fix’d to the Earth there, notwithstanding the Soles of his Feet are over-against mine; and tho’ he may fancy, from the Structure of the Globe, that I am turned topsy turvy and placed upon my head (a Position not very satisfactory for one of 55 my Sex ) yet I shall have the Satisfaction to consider him in the same situation. To carry the Experiment still farther, and to make it demonstrable while you are there, if you please, Mr What-d’ye-call-it, let there be a Hole bored directly through the Globe from you to me; I will drop an Apple in here, and you a Lime there; and the Apple and the Lime shall meet exactly in the Centre, and there remain absolutely and unalterably fix’d. (3: 28–9)

The list of those late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century writers who did not show an indiscriminate welcome to scientific progress is lengthy, though we might note that Mrs. Midnight’s admired Matthew Prior, Samuel Butler, and the Scriblerians were among the secular arm, and in religion and philosophy it includes the Hutchinsonians, Law, the Cambridge Platonists and Bishop Berkeley, all of whose names have been mentioned in connection with Smart. Karina Williamson has noted the substantial presence of ‘attacks on Newtonian science and materialist 56 philosophy’ in Jubilate Agno. So that here again, Mrs. Midnight’s untimeliness is timely: attacks on mechanistic thinking from earlier in the century could be revived with new vigour when the reporting of scientific and technical discoveries was rife in the Gentleman’s Magazine and its imitators and competitors. Furthermore, a connection to Mrs. Midnight’s politics can be suggested here: Margaret Jacob has pointed out that Newtonian science was linked to the interests of the Whig oligarchy, as part of the ‘moderate Enlightenment’ in England. Novels also parodied mechanistic thinking, for the Tory Tobias Smollett’s ‘Mr Jolter’ proved by Nicknackian methods why the hero’s intrigue with Emily would end in disgrace in Peregrine Pickle (1750), and so did plays, for George Steven’s Distress Upon Distress (1752) contained an 57 absurdist parody of Newton in the mock-scholarly notes. The writers of testimonials to the efficacy of the ‘Mill’ such ‘Mrs. RICHARD FUMBLETEXT’—the head of a ‘University College’ and ‘Fellow of the Royal Society’—are pleased to have the effects of age reversed, and to be restored to their 55 Throughout this study I have resisted placing the Midwife into any ‘world-upsidedown’ or ‘woman-on-top’ schema, and even here I am convinced that Mrs. M. is using the specific rhetorical trope of adynaton, rather than placing herself in the field of popular ‘symbolic inversion’ described by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White: The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 17–18. 56 Mrs. M. approvingly quotes Prior, 3: 106. For Williamson, see PW1, xxv, and her ‘Surfing the Intertext: Smart among the Moderns’, Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment, ed. Hawes, 259. ‘The Necessity’ appeared in the number for 31 October 1751, so that attributing it firmly to Smart would mark a slightly earlier arrival of his ‘new-found distrust of Newton’ than Williamson suggests in ‘Smart’s Principia: Science and Anti-Science in Jubilate Agno’, Review of English Studies 30, no. 120 (1979): 414. 57 ‘from earlier in the century’: see for example the prosopopoeic letter to Martinus Scriblerus from ‘The Society of Free-Thinkers’: The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 138–9. Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West, 89–90. Stevens: Burlesque Plays of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Simon Trussler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 261, 284.

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deficient selves: Mrs. Fumbletext is delighted to be made ‘as much a Child as I ever was’ (2: 173). The other series of Midwife articles in this vein also concern those people who remain immured in their own inflexible caricatures: those who are ‘absolutely and unalterably fix’d’. The series of ‘Rides to Rumford’ comprise three letters from ‘Ralph Raganjaw’ (3: 18–21, 62–4, and 118–20: the name possibly taken from Garrick’s spoof Ragandjaw of 174658) who writes to his friend Mrs. M. to advertise his new ‘Head Shop’. Here people can purchase more than opinions, for they can exercise their right to consumer choice and walk away with an entire new head. Ralph, in commercial fashion, lists ‘the different Materials’ he uses for the composition of his heads: For Lawyers ——— Brass. For Politicians ——— Lead. For Physicians ——— Wood. For Beaux ——— Paper. For Belles ——— Dough. For Fidlers ——— Tin. And for Critics, Casuists, Stockjobbers, Mathematicians, Metaphysicians, Modern Poets, Bricklayers and Paviors, Rare old English Flint, or your right good substantial PortlandStone. (3: 20–21)

This is not the only ‘Menippean’ list in the Midwife, but it’s a good one, and some of the categories of person selected for treatment should by now be very familiar. Ralph’s later letters describe the shopping experiences of a dancing-master (Ralph’s proffered leaden head was lighter than the dancing-master’s own, so the shopkeeper advised against purchase), a Lord (who chose what he thought was a golden one, but it was pinchbeck), and a bad poet (block-tin head given gratis). These people inhabit their roles too well, and in occupying their positions as constitutive of themselves, they too are unchangeable, and thus reducible to solid matter. In Robert Merry’s political satire of 1793, his members of Parliament (‘TWO HUNDRED AUTOMATA, OR MOVING PUPPETS’) may be blockheaded descendants: they ‘will rise up, sit down, say Yes, or No, Receive Money … or do any dirty work 59 [Pitt] may think proper to put them to.’ In the very broadest terms, it is tempting to see, in the Ralph Ragandjaw pieces, ridicule of the limiting nature of professional roles in society as a reaction against the erosion of free will and human autonomy in modernity. It is materialism that is the ultimate target of the Ralph Raganjaw pieces, although some old enemies get a drubbing along the way. It would be stretching things too far to suggest that the anti-mechanistic, anti-materialist writing in the Midwife is entirely directed against one book, but the French physiologist Julien

58 Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World (London: Faber, 1997), 414. 59 The ‘Raganjaw’ attack on ‘Mr. Walter Wishy-Washy, the CORRECT Poet’, owes to George Carey’s parody of Ambrose Phillips, ‘Namby-Pamby ...’: The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 139. For Robert Merry’s political satire see Marcus Wood, Radical Satire 1790–1822, 82–5.

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Offray de La Mettrie’s L’homme Machine was published in London in translation as Man A Machine (1749), by the Marquis D’Argens, and provides an outstanding example of the sort of abstract materialist theories that would be bound to provoke the satire of an elderly Augustan on the loose like Mrs. Midnight. Much Augustan writing had criticized both mechanistic and idealistic thinking: note those stone60 headed ‘Mathematicians’ and ‘Metaphysicians’. Denis Todd has given an admirably clear account of the way that Augustan ‘orthodox minds’ had interpreted certain writings of Descartes, Spinoza and Hobbes as tending to destroy all that was distinctive and God-given about humans, and to ‘reduce [them] to mere thinking machines.’ Man a Machine, according to Karl Marx, 61 was ‘a combination of Descartes’ system and English materialism.’ In her ‘Office of Annihilation’ Mrs. Midnight entered an early plea for euthanasia—although she doubted the necessity for it in some cases—and made her own opinion of Descartes clear: Half the Work ... is done to our Hands; for I can demonstrate, that at least one Moiety of the People that breathe, cannot be said to exist with any Propriety of Language; Cogito 62 ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, is the great Des Cartes’ Definition of Existence. If this be true, those that do not think, do not exist, which Observation dispatches ten Millions at a Blow ... (2: 58)

‘D’Argens’/La Mettrie makes his foundational assertion in familiar terms: ‘The human body is a machine that winds up its own springs: it is a living image of the perpetual motion’. Food and drink are the fuel that drives the human engine; and his assertion that eating raw beef produces ‘fierceness’ in the English, and accounts for their ‘pride, hatred, (and) contempt of other nations’, may well lie behind Smart’s 63 Student joke about the consumption of ‘crab-verjuice’ producing satire. Matter, La Mettrie explains in his peroration, is all that there is: ‘Let us conclude boldly then, that man is a machine, and that there is only one substance, differently modified, in 60 The British publication of this book is noted in the same June 1749 number of the Gentleman’s Magazine that carried the two parodied ‘Mill’ articles, 19: 288. For Sitter’s discussion of Scriblerian antipathy to ‘ “crackpot materialism” ’, idealism and mechanistic thinking, see Arguments of Augustan Wit, 153–4. 61 Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 119–22. Karl Marx, The Holy Family (1845) in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 153. For the link between Descartes and La Mettrie, see Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 97–8. 62 Mrs. M. would be bound to disapprove of Descartes’s ‘Modern’ abandonment of scholarship; he ‘resolv[ed] to seek no knowledge other than that which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world’: ‘Discourse on the Method’, in vol. 3 of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoodhof and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 115. Johnson was more positive about Descartes in Rambler 43. 63 The Marquis D’Argens, Man A Machine (London: W. Owen, 1749), 11–12. For Smart’s joke about ‘crab verjuice’, see chap. 4 above, 112.

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the whole universe.’ If this is so, the Midwife concludes—and as it is the power of money that drives society—then ridicule by exaggeration suggests that naturally you may go to a shop and purchase a new opinion, or even a new head. Animus against mechanistic models of humankind was not solely driven by anxieties about erosion of free will and autonomy, for there was a related matter of ethical conduct at stake. Many were not convinced by La Mettrie’s argument that ‘the materialist, tho’ his vanity may murmur against it, in reality is convinced, that he is only a machine, or animal, and he will not abuse any of his fellow creatures’. Sharp-eyed readers of La Mettrie’s ‘proofs of the mechanical nature of beings’, will have noted that one concerns the continued beating of hearts after they have been removed from bodies: ‘Take a chick as yet in the egg, tear out the heart, and you will see the same phaenomenon ... These experiments ... are likewise to be seen in 64 pidgeons, dogs and rabbets.’ The Student of October 1750 contains a long, very curious piece entitled ‘An extract of a Thesis read before Mr. Haller, in October 1749. By MR. F.G. ZINN’ (2: 12–19). It is a clinically-worded account of experiments carried out on dogs, and begins thus: EXPERIMENT I After having adjusted the trochart to the fore part of the head, of a middle-siz’d dog, over the longitudinal sinus, I plunged the instrument through the mass of the brain, in such a manner, that it was fixed strongly in the bone of the basis of the skull. (2: 12)

The account details experiments of increasing barbarity on a series of live dogs, whose reactions of pain and terror are noted dispassionately, and it is only when one animal has not died after twenty-two hours with an instrument fixed into his brain in this manner that the mercifully spurious nature of the accounts becomes clear: ‘I perceived he might have lived some days longer, but being impatient, I hanged him’. (2: 13) It seems that this piece is designed as a reproof to attitudes like that of la Mettrie, who claims that a materialist ‘will not abuse any of his fellow creatures’. Specifically, the heart experiment related in Man A Machine is replicated with horrific cruelty. This dog is alive: ‘I took out the heart, with a single stroke of a knife, and perceiv’d it beat strongly in my hand, as often as I irritated it with the edge of my knife, which continued for four minutes’ (2: 15). The last related experiments reach a new pitch of sustained horror, with the dogs being subjected to prolonged torture. The reader will probably be feeling sick after the last one has his cerebellum ‘stirred about’, ‘so as to reduce it into a kind of soft pulp’, and the editor’s note which directly follows may come as a surprise: ‘NB. These experiments were received before the publication of our last Number, but could not then be inserted for want of room. This omission, therefore, we hope will be excus’d by our ingenious correspondent, for whom we shall hereafter express all possible regard.’ (2: 19) Samuel Johnson will later articulate the disgust which is so signally absent here, angrily condemning the ‘arts of torture’ practiced by this kind of novice physician (Idler 17). 64 D’Argens, Man A Machine: ‘let us conclude’ and for ‘the materialist’, 85, and the ‘proofs of the mechanical nature of beings’, 56–7.

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Bearing in mind that ‘ingenious’ is often the code word in the Student for Smart’s contributions, that he frequently chose pseudonyms beginning with the letter Z, and remembering his astonishing facility for imitating the distinguishing features of various types of spoken and written discourse, I suggest that he had a shaping hand in this ferocious attack on attitudes of what we might nowadays refer to as ‘scientific 65 objectivity’—the attitudes of materialists such as La Mettrie. La Mettrie, Allegory and Enlightenment In the last section of this book I would like to return, via a discussion of allegory in the Midwife, to re-emphasize the intensely radical nature of the magazine, which, through serious laughter, reads and presents a picture of a society becoming mechanized and inhumane. The Menippean is present in the articles I discuss here, most particularly in the parodies of discourses they contain, but there is one major piece of social satire in the Midwife which demands to be read equally in terms of allegory. In the previous chapter we saw Mrs. Midnight ironically denouncing allegory as having an ‘evil Tendency’, in a way which drew attention to its potential for disguised social comment. Blanford Parker has suggested that in Smart’s Jubilate Agno the analogical returns to poetry for the first time since Dryden: so that in her use of allegory Mrs. Midnight is being untimely yet again, but is also demonstrating the facility for mental connections and resemblances that form the basis of her creator’s later complex work.66 Animal torture again formed the basis of a lengthy article in the Midwife a month later. ‘A Letter from Mary Midnight to the ROYAL SOCIETY, containing some new and curious Improvements upon the CAT-ORGAN’ (1: 98–103). The idea of a cat67 organ did not originate with this piece, for some did exist in the eighteenth century. Mrs. Midnight writes to the ‘Persons of infinite Experience and Erudition’ at the Royal Society to inform them that she has perfected, after seven years study, some ‘Additions and Improvements’ to this ‘incomparably melodious’ instrument. She explains that whereas in an ordinary cat-organ, the animals are merely enclosed in boxes in a ‘plain Harpsichord’—their tails being squeezed to produce different notes as the organist strikes the keys—she has perfected some refinements. To play ‘Piano’ she uses the ‘Upper Row’ on the ordinary system, but her ‘Lower Row … on which I play Forte, or loudly, contains an harmonious Society of Grimalkins; whose Tails are severely prick’d by Brass-Pins, inserted at the End of the Key for that Purpose.’ At other times ‘Wren’s Quills’ tickle the cats’ throats to achieve ‘the most 65 Mahony and Rizzo, and Karina Williamson, are rightly suspicious of attributing material to Smart solely on the evidence of a pseudonym beginning with Z, but there is enough other evidence here to suggest that it may have been his. See Ann. Bib., 32 and 42. 66 Parker, Triumph of Augustan Poetics, 81. 67 For the account of a German ‘cat-organ’, see Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 29. The Gentleman’s Magazine is also attacked here: the August 1749 number began with an redaction of one of Diderot’s Dissertations on Several Mathematical Subjects, concerning his refinements to the ‘old German Organ’—though there were no cats involved, 19: 339.

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gurgling, warbling, shaking, quaking, trembling, murmuring Sound in the World’. Mechanized ‘Forceps or Pincers’ solve the problem of those cats who are ‘apt to continue their Mew after the proper Note [is] express’d’; they slam the cats’ ‘Noses and Chins’ shut to attain a crisp staccato (1: 100–101). This long and lovingly detailed piece is one of the most difficult to read in the Midwife. It has been described a ‘parody of projectors and their plans’, which is clearly the case, but the pains taken with it by the writer insistently point to a underlying purpose which goes further than that: after all Mrs. Midnight could, and 68 did, parody projectors in far briefer and more boisterous ways. Lance Bertelsen drew attention to the ‘symbolic similarity’ of the situation of the cats and Smart’s own, referring to the poet’s sense of ‘entrapment in a system of literary production’, where ‘ “music” ’ must be produced under duress. Both of these readings are tenable, but I think that neither takes a wide enough view of the significance of this article, which sits neatly under Heinsius’s definition of satire as ‘a kind of Poetry without a 69 Series of Action’. In the light of Mrs. M.’s overall, non-introspective concern with the mechanisation of human behaviour in her society, might it not be that the enclosing organ represents the social order itself? Consider that all the cats must function through coercion, but that the ‘Lower Row’ of cats are forced through vicious means to perform their tasks. Others must be tickled and caressed into a sexualized, feminine-voiced selfregulation, and finally, those that ‘overract their Part’ by not being willing to be silenced, must be muzzled with brutality. I think it probable that this is an allegorical representation of the midwife’s own society, with the lower classes being subject to harsher penalties in order to make them work harder, women—in this part and nowhere else the cats are referred to as ‘Puss’—being tempted to submission with sensual inducements, and lastly, dissident elements being forbidden to speak if they 70 step beyond the required loyalty to the ‘present happy Establishment’. This is not a clearly-signalled analogy, but it is there. I have so far in this book avoided making much of the inevitable comparisons between Pope’s goddess ‘Dulness’ and Mary Midnight, but by the logic of this allegory, Mrs. M. as creator of this infernal social machine—‘which I have at length accomplished, agreeable to my warmest Wishes’—takes on titanic proportions in the mind. Suddenly, like a genie unstopped, she assumes effortlessly the same monstrous controlling power that Pope allotted to Dulness. The ‘experimental fantasticality’ of the Menippean, according to Bakhtin, often achieves its effects through ‘radical changes of scale in the observed

68 Peter Flint Perreten, ‘Satire in Christopher Smart’s Midwife’, 98. 69 Lance Bertelsen, ‘Journalism, Carnival, and Jubilate Agno’, ELH 59, no. 2 (1992): 376. Heinsius, from De Satyra Horatiana, quoted in Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 98. 70 A brief Midwife poem refers to the muzzling of popular dissent: ‘Totus mundus agit histrionem’ compares the Court with strutting fawning players on the stage: ‘Whilst we poor Folks, or Populace vile, / (To speak in ministerial Stile) / Useful Spectators see the Play; / ’Tis they that act, but we that pay; / And when the Farce is done amiss, / ’Tis very hard if we mayn’t Hiss’, 3: 14–15.

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phenonema’; so that through this analogical sleight-of-hand, the genre’s relevance to 71 the Midwife is again indicated. The stress that materialists of the La Mettrie school placed on their own benevolence—they ‘will not abuse any of their fellow-creatures’—is again under fire here, and to gesture towards the ‘Cat-Organ’s similarity to Hogarth’s pictorial attacks on recreational cruelty to animals is to understate the article’s comparable 72 force. Mrs. Midnight, taking advantage of the chance for an Addisonian sideswipe at the fashionable Italian opera, recommends castration for the male cats in her musical torture-chamber, and thus reinforces the equation of cats and humans: And here I cannot help informing you of an Experiment I lately made on an Italian BoarCat, and an English one …; and I solemnly protest that after the Operation, my Country Animal had every whit as delicate, piercing and comprehensive a Tone as the Foreigner.— And I make no sort of Doubt but some of our harmonious Englishmen would shine with an equal Lustre, if they had the same ADVANTAGES as the Italians. (1: 99)

Students of Jubilate Agno will have no difficulty in recognising the tone of— somewhat hysterical—patriotism and also the implicit affection for all animals distinguishing that poem. The insistence in Man A Machine on the shaping importance of diet to the human engine receives a satirical drubbing in Mrs. M.’s account of the ‘Education of Cats for the Organ’. The point under protest is that ‘Education’ is not in La Mettrie’s frame at all: for the ‘Cat-Organ’ ridicules those attitudes like his which grant diet, the ‘fuel’ for the engine, a constitutive place in what it means to be human. There should be ‘Milk and Flummery, fry’d Mice and Fish’ for the high-voiced cats, and the basses must have ‘Bullock’s Liver’ and ‘Hog’s Harslet’. Lest it might be thought that some kindness is at last being shown the animals, Mrs. M. asserts that ‘[a]s for Exercise, moderate Mousing; and being very well tugg’d and haul’d about by the Children will … suffice.’ (1: 101–2) The ‘Cat-Organ’, then, can be seen to follow a technique already established by the Scriblerian writers, which has been well noted by John Sitter. He describes one of their major targets as an ignorance or exclusion of the body, which leads to a fatal abstraction among thinkers, leading them down those idealistic blind 73 alleys so comprehensively satirized in Gulliver’s Travels. In this piece, and in the clinical Student dog experiments, the abstracted discourse of objectification and experimentation is itself subjected to a painful dissection. It is a ready move, Smart would have thought, from abusing animals to abusing human beings, if you follow a philosophy like La Mettrie’s which claims—in the words of Paul Hazard—that ‘there is nothing in man to differentiate him from the purely mechanical character 74 of all other living things.’ The ‘Cat-Organ’ takes the radical step of suggesting that

71 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 95. 72 Lance Bertelsen, ‘Journalism, Carnival, and Jubilate Agno’, 376. 73 John Sitter, Arguments of Augustan Wit, 90–92. 74 Paul Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, quoted in J.F. Lively, The Enlightenment (London: Longmans, 1966), 146.

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the engine of society, like the machinery of this diabolical instrument, produces its goods through the transformation of living beings into coerced automata. What I hope to have demonstrated in this chapter is a Midwife which, through its inventive manipulation of satirical method, actually sometimes moves so far from the local as to become a trenchant critic of aspects of Enlightenment itself. The character of all the pieces at which we have looked in this chapter may be summed up in a couple of sentences, but they need not be mine. Here is a German philosopher, from 1774, who could almost have learnt his lesson from the comic hornbook of the Midwife, where the mechanisation of modern society was anatomized through irony, ‘experimental fantasticality’, prosopopoeia, mock-encomia and all the other instruments in the toolbox of learned wit: Each cog is kept in place by fear or habit or affluence or philosophy, and what are so many great philosophically governed herds but crowds held together by force like fenced-in cattle. They are supposed to be able to think, but perhaps thought is only spread among them, up to a certain point. From day to day they feel more like a machine, or else they feel according to the prejudices they have been fed with ... (J.G. Herder, ‘Yet another 75 Philosophy of History for the Enlightenment of Mankind’)

Herder has his specific place in the history of philosophy and politics, as well as in the formation of Romantic attitudes, and I do not mean unduly to stress this similarity. His deliberations, however, sit closely with the tenor of the Midwife articles considered here: the social process demands machines. A major aim throughout this book has been to question the value of simple binary oppositions: Smart’s escape into novelization is ignored, for instance, if we place him as poet-genius or hack journalist, and allow him no movement between those poles. I have kept in mind Dominick LaCapra’s reminder that ‘the seeming anomaly should be seen as having a special value in historiography’, for ‘an interest in what does not fit a model and an openness to what one does not expect to hear from the past 76 may even help to transform the very questions one poses to the past’. LaCapra’s insistence on interpretation as a continuing process is also helpful, in that it puts into formal terms the fact that this study represents only just one sort of beginning, from one particular perspective, in what is a relatively new field: the question of what the deployment of personae in the eighteenth-century periodical can tell us in the twenty-first century. In putting on her high-crowned hat and adopting the voice of a past more robust than that of her present, Mary Midnight also took her place in the future, as she knew she would. She memorialized herself and her magazine with misplaced optimism in her ‘Remarkable Prediction of an Author, who shall write a History of England in the Year 1931’: I cannot quit this Period without taking Notice of one of the Authors of that Time, namely Madam Mary Midnight. She wrote that celebrated Book entitled THE MIDWIFE: or, Old

75 J.G. Herder, J.G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, trans. and ed. F.M. Barnard (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 220. 76 Dominick LaCapra, ‘Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts’, 80–81, 65.

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Woman’s Magazine, which is now translated into all the modern Languages, and read in all the European Universities and Schools as a Classic. (2: 147)

What I hope most of all to have achieved in this book is to encourage readers of the Midwife to look beyond ‘juvenile buffoonery’, or ‘madcap antics’, and to recognize the magazine for what ultimately it is: an ingenious denunciation of ‘all the mechanical and mathematical Powers’ that are characterized as the destroyers of the human in the human. The Midwife and its animating female voice are creatures of rhetoric, and of traditions of learned wit which their creator adapted, with doubleedged cunning and imaginative exuberance, in order to satirize a society in which he saw materialism, greed and ignorance as threatening to obliterate not only a hardwon tradition of learning and scholarship, but also the cardinal human qualities of judgement and benevolence.

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Appendix 1 Attribution in the Midwife Rizzo and Mahony helpfully list those articles from the magazine which have not 1 been attributed elsewhere, and therefore may be Smart’s. There have been various suggestions as to the identity of occasional contributors, the most notable candidates 2 3 being Richard Rolt, Bonnell Thornton, and Arthur Murphy. Smart’s nephew and early biographer, Christopher Hunter suggested John Newbery as a co-writer, but Arthur Sherbo thought that unlikely; Rizzo and Mahony, however, do not rule out the 4 idea. Sherbo states that Smart ‘undertook the virtually single-handed authorship of the ... Midwife’. Sherbo also notes that, despite Hunter’s comment, ‘nothing has been claimed for Newbery with any certainty. And neither Bonnell Thornton nor Richard Rolt, both of whom have been mentioned in this connection, have been conclusively shown to be a contributor’. Smart’s first bibliographer listed the Midwife items he supposed to be by Smart, but appears to have used the ‘Midnight’ byline as his only 5 criterion. In 1751, during a paper scuffle between Smart and William Kenrick, the latter made several references to the authors of the Midwife, and strongly suggested that there were two ‘old women’ collaborating on the magazine; Bonnell Thornton is 6 often suggested as the second. However, in his Have at You All, or, The Drury-lane Journal (1752), Thornton wrote a vividly-realised account by ‘Mary Midnight’ of her and ‘Lady Pentweazle’s’ visit to his own impoverished persona ‘Roxana Termagant’, and, though there sometimes seems no limit to the deceptions and mystifications of which the proficient deployer of personae is capable, it is reasonable to suggest that Thornton would have been unlikely to parody his own previous writing as he does

1 Those thus listed are described as ‘possibly or even probably by Smart but ... there remains a degree of doubt’: Ann. Bib., x, and see all separate Midwife entries therein. 2 ‘though other contributors ... (especially John Newbery and Bonnell Thornton) almost certainly used the Midnight signature, there have appeared no firm criteria for distinguishing their productions from Smart’s; many of these works may be of composite authorship’: Ann. Bib., x. 3 Christopher Devlin, Poor Kit Smart (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961), 54. 4 ‘To the Old Woman’s Magazine ... Mr. Newbery and (Smart) were the chief, if not the only contributors’: Christopher Hunter, The Poems of the Late Christopher Smart M.A. (Reading: Smart and Cowslade, 1791), xix. 5 Arthur Sherbo, Christopher Smart: Scholar of the University (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), 70. G.J. Gray, ‘A Bibliography of the Writings of Christopher Smart’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 6 (1903), 277–8, and see Ann. Bib., 21. 6 See for example Roland B. Botting, ‘Christopher Smart in London’, Research Studies of the State College of Washington 7, no. 1 (March 1939): 11.

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‘Lady Pentweazle’ in this piece. Interestingly, in his affectionate representation of their styles of speech, he separated out the two most notable stylistic tics of Mary Midnight—her alliteration and her repetitive, cumulative hyperbole—and gave them respectively to Lady Pentweazle and Mrs. Midnight. Thornton gives ‘Mrs. Midnight’ herself little to say, though when she speaks he represents her as repetitive and markedly Celtic; Smart was of Welsh ancestry on his mother’s side, and it may be significant that Arthur Murphy was an Irishman. ‘Lady Pentweazle’ employs what ‘Mrs. Midnight’ calls ‘the figurative alliterating antithetical stile ... she is so fond of’ and is given most of the dialogue; she uses the alliteration and doubled or 8 tripled adjectives that Sherbo noted as a feature of Smart’s poetic style. Kenrick, in his ‘Pasquinade’, clearly stated that Richard Rolt wrote the last ‘news’ section of every number of the Midwife—‘The Midwife’s Politicks, or Gossip’s Chronicle of 9 Europe’—so this is a strong possibility. One might speculate, too, that either Rolt or Arthur Murphy was the second ‘old woman’, or ‘Lady Pentweazle’, or indeed, Mrs. 10 Midnight’s ‘Succubus Canidia’. Kenrick’s lively pamphlet The Magazines Blown Up ... (London, 1750) seems to indicate at least three close collaborators. ‘Ebenezer Pentweazle’, a pseudonym familiar to readers of the Midwife and Student, is a composite creature of an Oxford and a Cambridge scholar—Thornton is most often suggested as the former. ‘Frigidio’— whom ‘Justice Banter’ finds to be so nearly related to Pentweazle that he is surprised that he is not a part of that gentleman—is Rolt, for he is teased about his ‘catalogue of Welch Mountains and Heroes’, and Rolt had published (in 1749) Cambria: A Poem in Three Books, Illustrated with Historical, Critical and Explanatory Notes.11 Rolt also is liable to ‘speak Treason’ (Magazines, 24), but Cambria appears a loyal effort; Christine Gerrard says that the Jacobite Rolt ‘transferred his loyalty to Prince Frederick’ after 1745.12

7 Bonnell Thornton, Have at You All, or, The Drury-Lane Journal (30 January 1752), 60–64. 8 Sherbo, Scholar of the University, 57, 214. 9 In the notes to his Pasquinade, Kenrick scornfully discusses ‘Mr. Rolt, author of ... the Gossip’s Chronicle in the Old Woman’s Magazine’: William Kenrick, The Pasquinade, with Notes Variorum (London, 1753), 19. In the current Dictionary of National Bibliography Betty Rizzo states unequivocally that Rolt wrote the ‘Gossip’s Chronicle’, presumably using this as her source. 10 The reference is to the letter from ‘J. Sable, Undertaker’, who addresses Mrs. Midnight as ‘You old Skeleton’ and refers to the ‘other old dry-ey’d Hurdle’ and her ‘Confederate Succubus Canidia’ (Midwife, 1: 97–8). Dearnley considered that Kenrick himself may have written the letter: Moira Dearnley, The Poetry of Christopher Smart (London: Routledge, 1969), 20. For more on the Smart/ Kenrick connection, see chap. 4 of this study. 11 See The Magazines Blown Up ..., esp. 5, 8, 9 and 17. 12 See Richard Rolt, Selected Pieces, sel. Mary Rolt (London, 1772), 103–76; Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry and National Myth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 212.

Appendix 2 Subject Clusters in the Midwife Lawyers and the Law For attacks on lawyers and legal practice see as follows: ‘A LETTER from R. Reynard, Esq., High Sheriff of the County of ***’, and the following ‘Mrs. Midnight’s Answer to the above Letter’, 1: 111–15; ‘Mr. Justice BUNDLE’s Charge to the Grand Jury’, 2: 102; ‘The SPEECH of Lawyer Brief against Tediousness and Prolixity’, 3: 1–3. Literary Criticism See the following full articles which wholly or partially concern, or practise, literary criticism: ‘On Poetry’, 1: 32–5; ‘from Mr. SEMICOLON the CRITIC, to Mrs. Midnight’, and ‘Some Remarks on the CRITICS and CRITICISM of the Age, by Mrs. Midnight: Occasioned by the above Letter’, 1: 165–9; ‘To the Right Honourable the Lady **** ’ (in which Mrs. M. praises Warton’s ‘Newmarket’), 1: 122–4; ‘The ITCH of SCRIBBLING proved to be catching’, and ‘A few Thoughts concerning ELEGY-WRITING’, 2: 23–9; ‘To the little ELEVATORS in Poetry who love to surprise’, 2: 80; ‘JACKBOOT: Being an Essay in the Manner of the Moderns, On Times, Persons and Things’, 2: 116–18; ‘To the Criticks and the Poets’, 2: 174–80; ‘The little Lighterman, or the dissembling Waterman ... Chirurgically dissected’, 2: 197–204; ‘To Mrs. MARY MIDNIGHT’ (letter from ‘George Pilkinton’, extolling a ‘Poem in praise of Hackney’), 2: 274–7; ‘Mrs. Midnight to the Critics’, 3: 75–9; ‘On WIT’, 3: 109–11. Mechanism and Newtonianism For satirical treatments of mechanical devices, mechanistic reasoning and Newtonianism, see as follows: ‘A Letter from Mrs. Mary Midnight to the Royal Society, containing some new and curious Improvements upon the CAT-ORGAN’, 1: 98–102; ,‘Some Account of a new Mill to grind old People young’, 2: 172–4, and ‘A Letter to Mrs. Mary Midnight from the Guildford Miller ...’, 2: 193–7; ‘The ITCH of SCRIBBLING proved to be catching’, 2: 23–7, ‘A NEW RIDE to RUMFORD: Being an Epistle from Ralph Ragandjaw, 3: 18–20, ‘The Necessity of keeping one’s FRIEND in one’s POCKET’, 3: 28–31, ‘A new Ride to RUMFORD, being the second Epistle from Ralph Ragandjaw of that Place, to Mrs. Midnight’, 3: 62–4; ‘A new Ride to RUMFORD, being the third Letter from that Place, to Mrs. Midnight’, 3: 118–19.

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Neglect of Learning in the Universities See ‘Some Reflections on the Neglect of the Greek Language’, 1: 65–6; ‘A Proposal for expelling all Party, Party People and Party Principles out of our Universities’, 2: 215–19, and also the following: ‘ADVERTISEMENT in Defence of the two Universities: WE CAN ASSURE THE PUBLICK, That the Report of the Greek Language being expell’d the two Universities, is false ...; there being many Thousand Volumes, written in that Tongue, actually extant, and unmolested in the several Libraries’, 1: 279. Physicians For full articles (rather than the numerous incidental comments) on the iniquity of doctors see: ‘A Letter from an eminent Undertaker in Town, to an eminent Physician in the Country’, 1: 49–51; ‘To Mrs. Mary Midnight, and her Confederate Succubus Canidia’ (this is a letter from ‘J. Sable, Undertaker’), 1: 97–8; ‘A LETTER from Mrs. MIDNIGHT to the College of Physicians, in which is proved that Old Women and Nature are their greatest Enemies’, 2: 17–22; ‘A LETTER from a Surgeon of Great Practice and Experience’, 2: 255–7. Pompous Speech For parodies of pompous professional diction, see the following articles: ‘A SERMON, occasioned by the Death of Mr. Proctor, Minister of Gissing’, 1: 54–8 (this piece, Mrs. M. tells us, has ‘been published before’, so is almost certainly not her own); the letter ‘from Mr. SEMICOLON the CRITIC, to Mrs. Midnight’, 1: 165–9; ‘Mr. Justice BUNDLE’s Charge to the Grand Jury’, 2: 102; ‘The SPEECH of Lawyer Brief against Tediousness and Prolixity’, 3: 1–3. Also see the parody of John Hill’s Inspector, 3: 83–8. ‘Offices’ For the pieces inspired by Fielding’s ‘Universal Register Office’ (discussed in chap. 4: 207), see ‘From Mrs Midnight to the Community’, 1: 225–8; the ‘Office of Intelligence and Prediction’, 1: 285; the ‘Office of Annihilation’, 2: 58; the ‘Office for the Ignorant’, 2: 130; the ‘Opinion Office’, 3: 73–5. Stock Periodical Topics Revisited in the Midwife For those topics which had been stock periodical fare since the Tatler (discussed in chap. 3: 74) see, as follows: Duelling—2: 120–21; 143–4; 163–4. Effeminacy—1: 36; 1: 203; 3: 31–2; 3: 76 (also see chap. 3: 72) Gaming—1: 124–6; 193–9; 2: 205–12. Marriage market—2: 131–7; 2: 99–102. Masquerades—1: 126.

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The Theatre See the following items on the theatre, including prologues and epilogues: ‘New Occasional Prologue, spoken at the Opening of the Drury-Lane Theatre, by Mr. Garrick’, 1: 37; ‘The Occasional Prologue spoken at Covent-Garden Theatre, by Mr. Barry’, followed by Mrs. Midnight’s own ‘Occasional Prologue, Occasion’d by the two Occasional Prologues’, 1: 38–40; ‘Epilogue Occasion’d by the two Occasional Prologues, and spoken by Mrs. CLIVE’, followed by Mrs. Midnight’s praise for Jenny Cibber’s portrayal of ‘Alicia, in Jane Shore’, 1: 47–8; ‘ORATION spoken to the Clappers, Hissers and Damners ...’, 1: 79–80; ‘LETTER from Mrs. Mary Midnight to David Garrick, Esq.’, 1: 87–8; ‘A Dissertation on DUMB RHETORIC’, 1: 145–51; Prologue and Epilogues to Othello [and] Alfred, 1: 271–9; ‘Some Reflections on the State of the Stage’, 2: 74–9; Epigram, ‘Totus mundus agit histrionem’, 3: 14–15; Prologue and Epilogue to A Lick at the Town, 3: 15–18; ‘Prologue to Eastward-Hoe’, followed by Mrs. Midnight’s attribution of the ‘Plan’ of the play to ‘Ben Johnson’, 3: 25–7; ‘Prologue intended to have been spoken by Mr. Henry Woodward at his Benefit, in the Character of the old Mock-Doctor’, 3: 144–6. Also, from 3: 37 onwards, see the transcripts of various pieces from ‘Mrs. Mary Midnight’s Oratory’. ‘Vulgar’ Speech For parodies and mimicry of the language of the ‘Vulgar’, see the poetry of the Yorkshire parish clerk, 1: 34–5; ‘A Political Dialogue between a Mr Crib, a Taylor, Mr Patch, a Cobler and Jerry Pickbone, a Footman’, 1: 51–4; the parodies of the Robin Hood Society debates, 2: 215–20, 249–55.

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Index

Addison, Joseph, 18n6, 24–5, 38–9, 86, 193 on popular ballads, 117–18, 120–21 Smart’s admiration for, 85n34; see also Spectator Adorno, Theodor, 5 Akenside, Mark, 8, 170 Alexander the Great, 40, 127n59, 153 Althusser, Louis, 86n35 Antiquarians, (Royal) Society of, 55 Argyll, Duke of, 13, 185 Aristophanes, female gossip, 97n65 ‘learned wit’, 11, 46 Poet and the Women, 122 Aristotle, 51–2, 81, 119, 177 Poetics, 122 Astell, Mary, 64, 77 Austen, Jane, 121, 171 Bacon, Francis, 60, 186 Bahktin, M.M., carnival, 11, 52 Dialogic Imagination, 34–5, 130–31 masks, 23n18 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 167–8, 192–3 Baker, Ronald L., 151n50 Barker-Benfield, G.J., 90n46 Barrell, John Birth of Pandora, 21n15 English Literature in History, 77n12, 83n28, 117n36 Barry, Spranger, 78, 89 Barthes, Roland, 48 Battestin, Martin C., 58 Battestin, Martin with R. Ruthe, 15n1, 80, 110n22, 137n12 Bayle, Pierre, 169 Beckett, Samuel, 11, 171 Bentham, Jeremy, 185 Bentley, Richard, 56, 92 Benveniste, Émile, 41n71 Berkeley, Bishop, 187 Bertelsen, Lance, 134n3

Henry Fielding at Work, 101n73, 176n31 ‘Journalism, Carnival, and Jubilate Agno’, 11n24, 12–13, 45, 75–6, 192–3 ‘Neutral Nonsense’, 65n63, 100, 176n31 Nonsense Club, 45, 54n32, 62n54, 88 Black, Jeremy, 151 Blow-Bladder Street, 151n50, 152, 158 Boethius, 168–9 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 50n20 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 20, 33n48, 68, 134, 136–48 being ‘imposed upon’, 180n41 blurring of party labels, 118–19, 137, 143 chain of being, 145n37 civic humanism, 139, 141, 147 conditions for liberty, 147–8, 162 corruption, 142, 160 Jacobitism, 151 naval policy, 139–40 paternal authority, 138–9 projectors, 186 stockjobbing, 20, 140 toad-eating, 147 topics covered by Midwife, 140n23 Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, 138–48 On the Idea of a Patriot King, 13, 138–48 Bond, Donald, 22n17 Bond, Richmond P., 18n6, 20, 28n34, 32 Booth, Mark, 132n72 Booth, Wayne C., 152 Boswell, James, 31 Botting, Roland B. ‘Christopher Smart in London’, 44, 47n13, 48n16, 50n20, 84 ns29 and 31, 108n19; see also Appendix 1 Braund, Susanna Morton, 27n28 Brewer, John, 4n7 Pleasures of the Imagination, 22n17, 92, 104, 116 Brooke, Frances Moore, 41n70, 89n43, 92, 96 Brown, Thomas, 28

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Browning, Robert, 44 Bunyan, John, 136n7, 160 Burnet, Thomas, 153n57 Burney, Charles, 50, 84n29, 107, 158 Burney, Frances, 96n61, 128 Burns, Edward, 32, 34–7, 71, 131 Busbeq, Gislenius de, 113 Butler, Marilyn, 43 Butler, Samuel, 11, 103n2, 122, 127, 168, 176, 180n41, 182, 187 Byrom, John, 146n39 Cannon, John, 137, 146n38, 162n80 Capp, Bernard, 78n15, 98 Carey, George, 188n59 Carnan, Thomas, 1, 48n16, 135n4 Carretta, Vincent, 7n18, 138, 143, 147n41, 151n53 Carter, Elizabeth, 171 Cato Uticensis, 61 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, 80n22 Cellier, Elizabeth, 88n39 Chesterfield, Lord, 128n60 Churchill, Charles, 138, 146 The Ghost, 160–61 Cibber, Colley, 111 Cicero, 21n14, 63, 97, 173 On Duties 21n13, 39, 53, 58–61, 116n34, 117n35, 184 Clark, J.C.D., 135, 144n33 Clark, Stuart, 98n67 Cody, Lisa Forman, 88n39, 98 Coleridge, S.T., 44 Coley, W.B., 148n44 Colley, Linda, 140n21, 173n25 Colman, George, 54n32, 126n55, 135n4 Congreve, William, 75n7 Copley, Stephen, 116n34 Craftsman, 88, 90n47, 143, 155 ns60, 61 Cross, Wilbur L., 110n22 Crow, Norah F., 28n33 Cruickshanks, Eveline, 68n68, 156n64 Cunningham, Hugh, 144n34 D’Avenant, Sir William, 113 Davie, Donald, 43, 114n31 Davies, Tony, 97–8 Davis, Herbert, 28 Dearnley, Moira, 58n42, 61n52, 93n53, 96, 111

Defoe, Daniel, 39, 117 Dennis, John, 30n36, 111 Descartes, René, 24n21, 31, 86n36, 114n30, 166, 189 De Smet, Ingrid A. R., 28n32, 165n1, 167–9 Devlin, Christopher, 43n1, 44–5, 70n72, 136, 149n46; see also Appendix 1 Dickinson, H. T. Bolingbroke, 138n13, 139 ns18, 19 Politics of the People, 134n3, 136, 143 Dickson, P.G.M., 17n4 Diderot, Denis, 13, 191n67 Diogenes, 7, 75 Dionysius of Halicarnassus (‘Dionysus’ in Midwife), 51, 63, 119, 177 Dobrée, Bonamy, 166 Dodsley, Robert, 8n20, 36n56, 170n16 Donoghue, Frank, 5, 125n54 Downie, J.A., 40 Dragon of Wantley, 114n29, 115–16 Dryden, John, 31, 191 ‘Discourse Concerning ... Satire’, 171, 178n36 ‘Song for St Cecilia’s Day, 119 Dunton, John, 18n6 Eagleton, Terry, 6, 177–8, 180–81 Easthope, Anthony, 41n71 Ehrenpreis, Irvin, 16, 27, 35 Swift, 22n17, 171n18 ELH 64, no 4 (Winter 1997), 68n69, 144n33, 148n44, 151n40 Eliot, T.S., 43, 113 Empson, William, 121–2 Encyclopédie, the, 55 Enlightenment, attitudes towards; see also Midwife Epictetus, 37 ‘Equiano’, 136n7 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 11, 103n2, 123, 168 In Praise of Folly, 21, 122, 178–83 Erickson, Robert A., 100–101 Erskine-Hill, Howard, 7n18, 68n69, 148 ‘Literature and the Jacobite Cause’ 151, 153, 154–5 Falstaff, 6, 23 Fielding, Henry, 6n13, 11, 26, 35, 44, 50, 80, 103, 110n22, 131, 137, 168, 176n31

Index Works: Champion, 15–16, 26, 41n70, 43, 143n29 Covent-Garden Journal, 3n5, 52n25, 55n34, 112n25, 143n29, 166, 175n30 ‘Enquiry into the Causes ... of Robbers’, 110n22 Jacobite’s Journal, 35n52, 92 Jonathan Wild, 127n59 Tom Jones, 123, 127n58, 128, 173 Tragedy of Tragedies, 118n38 True Patriot, 120n43, 148n44 ‘financial revolution’, 11, 18–22, 26, 31, 38–41, 66, 82, 140, 188 Fontenelle, Bernard, 86, 169 Foote, Samuel, 144 Fraunce, Abraham, 130n64 Frederick, Prince of Wales, 114, 142, 198 Frushell, Richard C., 151n50 Frye, Northrop, 166–8 Furniss, Tom, 59n57 Fussell, Paul, 10n23, 54n31, 55n36 Garrick, David, 32, 35, 50, 53, 78, 89, 107, 123, 188; see also Appendix 2 Gay, John, 65, 106, 114n30, 78, 124 Gentleman’s Magazine, 2n2, 3n5, 13, 61n51, 98, 100n70, 114n29, 118, 122n47, 137, 152n52, 168n9, 174, 189 parodied by Midwife, 3, 13, 55, 58, 65n62, 143, 183–7, 191n67 George II, 68, 153, 181 George, M. Dorothy, 123n50 Gerrard, Christine, 13, 119n41, 138n13, 142, 146n38, 150n47, 154n58 Ginger, John, 109n21 Glover, Richard, 142 Golden, Morris, 18n6, 91, 145n36, 184n51 Goldgar, Bertrand A., 3n5, 13, 52n25, 175n30 Walpole and the Wits, 124, 132, 137, 142, 155n61 Goldsmith, Oliver, 109n21, 132 Bee, 76n8, 124–25 Citizen of the World, 51n24, 90, 139n18, 146n39 Graham, Walter, 4, 55n34 Gray, G.J., see Appendix 1 Gray, Thomas, 32, 104 Greene, Donald, 2

221

Griffin, Dustin Literary Patronage in England, 106, 124 Satire: A Critical Reintroduction, 123, 192n69 Groom, Nick, 113n53, 118 ns38 and 39 Grub St Journal, 132, 167, 169n13 Guerinot, J.V., 106n15, 121, 153n57 Guest, Harriet, 176n31 Gunn, J.A.W., 139n17, 181n42 Habermas, Jurgen, 137n12, 178n36 Hammond, Brean, 131 Professional Imaginative Writing, 6, 7n19, 52–3, 83n27, 105–6, 112, 116n34, 124–5, 128n60, 131n70, 162 Handel, G.F., 126 Harrington, James, 136, 141 Harrison, Ross, 185n53 Harvey, A.D., 76n8 Hawes, Clement Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment, 114–115n31 Mania and Literary Style, 141n24 ‘Utopian Public Sphere’, 184n51 Haywood, Eliza Female Spectator, 90, 96, 104, 162 Parrot, 41n70, 96, 130n4 Hazard, Paul, 193 Hazlitt, William, 128 Heinsius, 169, 192 Henley, ‘Orator’ John, 33–4, 47n13, 169 Herder, J. G., 194 Herman, Ruth, 89n44, 97 Herodotus, 81 Hill, ‘Sir’ John, 9, 55n34, 62n54, 75, 118n40, 139; see also Appendix 2 Hinds, Peter, 18n7, 151n50 Hippocrates, 81 Hobbes, Thomas, 182, 189 Hogarth, William, 144, 193 The March to Finchley, 49, 67–9 Holmes, Geoffrey, 134n31, 143 Holquist, Michael, 130 Homer, 51, 63, 81, 118–120, 126, 150 Horace, 33, 44n3, 97, 114,117, 119, 122, 168, 170, 173, 178 Hufton, Olwen, 76, 94n55 humanism, 11, 46, 52, 54, 107, 126, 137, 168, 174, 176, 180, 182, 184 Christian, 4, 10

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civic, 10, 21, 26, 30–31, 37, 40, 55, 62, 103, 124, 142, 147, 162, 173, 178, 184 gender, 94, 97 Hume, David, 17, 24–5, 141 Hundert, E.J., 23, 31 n .42 Hunter, Christopher, 105n11, 124n52; see also Appendix 1 Hunter, J. Paul, 31n40, 106n14 Hutchinsonians, 187 Huygens, Christiaan, 186 Ingram, Alan, 65, 90 Ingrassia, Catherine, 40 Italia, Iona, 7n19, 22, 38n60, 41, 46n9, 90n46, 91n49, 101n73, 130, 162 Jacob, Margaret C., 166, 187 Jaeger, Johann, 174 Jefferson, D.W., 123, 169n15; see also ‘learned wit’ Johnson, Samuel, 10, 38, 54n31, 69, 105, 117, 128n61, 137, 149, 162 Smart’s relationship to, 39n64, 121, 149 and n46 Works: Adventurer, 35n52, 125, 127, 182 Dictionary, 34–35, 136n9 Idler, 7, 94n54, 121, 126n55, 190 Marmor Norfolciense, 154n58 Rambler, 3, 25, 39n64, 55 ns34 and 35, 57n39, 64, 77, 90, 94, 122, 173n26, 176, 181n46, 189n62 Juvenal, 6, 8, 19, 26, 69, 79, 137, 138n15, 160, 168, 170n17 Keats, John, 86n36 Kelly, Gary, 94n54 Kenrick, William W., 107–116, 121, 126; see also Appendix 1 ‘Monody to ... Frederick Prince of Wales’, 115–16, 142 ‘Pasquinade’, 110n22, 112n24 ‘The ... old woman’s Dunciad’ 48n16, 65 and n63, 108, 111 Kerby-Miller, Charles, 25n22, 54n32, 122n46 Kernan, Alvin, 104, 131 Ketcham, Michael G., 30, 38n61 Ketton-Cremer, R.W., 104n8 Keymer, Thomas, 128n61, 154n58

Kirk, Eugene P., 28n32, 166–9, 172n22, 172n27, 186n54 Klein, Lawrence E., 5n11 ‘Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere’, 89n44, 94n55 ‘The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and ... Politeness’, 29, 59n47, 78n14, 116 Kramnick, Isaac, 15n1, 20n11, 140n20, 145, 184n54 La Bruyére, 36n56, 57n39, 122 LaCapra, Dominick, 183, 194 Lamb, Charles, 128 [La Mettrie, Julien Offray de.] ‘The Marquis D’Argens’, 13, 189–194 Langford, Paul, 80n20, 100n70, 142, 147, 173 Latini, Bruno, 37n59 Law, William, 187 ‘learned wit’, tradition of, 7, 12, 14, 88, 115, 123, 169 and n15, 170, 194–5 Letters of Obscure Men [Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum], 169–70, 174–5 Levine, Joseph M., 57, 92 Lewis, Wyndham, 123 Licensing Act, lapse of (1695), 12, 41 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 67n66 literary criticism, see Midwife Lively, Jack, 193n74 Locke, John, 11, 17, 23–5, 31, 86n36, 177, 180 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 23–5, 31, 36, 38n61 ‘Longinus’, 50n20, 52, 63, 107, 112–13, 119, 177 Lonsdale, Roger, 146n39, 188n59 Lucian of Samosata, 11, 27n29, 103n2, 127n59, 130, 160, 171, 176 Menippean satire, 28, 46, 122–3, 167–9 Lycurgus, 150, 152 MacDermott, Kathy, 5n10 Macherey, Pierre, 158n69 Machiavelli, Niccólo, 61 Mack, Maynard, 38n63, 155n60 Maclean, Kenneth, 25n22 Malcolm, Noel, 4, 63n55, 169n13 Manley, Delarivier, 89n44, 97 Marshall, Louise H., 89n44 Marx, Karl, 181, 189

Index materialism, 13, 113, 187–91, 193, 195 Mayo, Robert D., 3n5, 28n31 Mayr, Ernst, 189n61 McCarthy, William, 95n56 McDowell, Paula, 91n48, 97 McIntosh, Carey, 76, 117, 160n75 McKendrick, Neil, 4n7, 147n40 McKeon, Michael, 38 McLynn, Frank J., 151n48, 155–6 McRae, Andrew, 75n6 Menippean satire, 28, 46, 123, 165–70, 174n27, 184, 186, 188, 191–2 Merry, Robert, 188 Midgley, Graham, 33n48, 47n13 Milton, John, 51, 56–7 Comus, 107, 119, 126 Mischler, Gerd, 144 Moliére, J-B Poquelin, 50 ‘molly’ subculture, 57n40 Monod, Paul Kleber, 68n69 Jacobitism and the English People, 55n33, 144n33, 151, 156–7 Montagu, Elizabeth, 28, 95 More, Sir Thomas, 103 Utopia, 50n21, 168, 173 Mounsey, Chris persona in the Midwife, 73, 79 politics in the Midwife, 45–6, 70, 79, 88, 134n3, 135n4, 137, 146n26 Christopher Smart, 3, 47 ns12 & 13, 57n41, 82n25, 84n29, 114n28, 123n50, 124n52, 126n56, 127n57, 158n70 ‘“To the Women of both sexes”’, 57n40 ‘Mrs. Midnight’s Oratory’, 12n26, 32n44, 47–8, 57n40, 105, 107, 117n35, 176; see also Appendix 2 Mullan, John, 53n29, 60n49 Murphy, Arthur, 83n27, 136n7, 144; see also Appendix 1 Museum, 8, 10, 170 Myers, Sylvia Harcstark, 94 Nashe, Thomas, 24 Nath, Michael, 34n49 Newbery, John, 2, 32, 47, 48n16, 50n21, 83n27, 84, 87n38, 88, 107, 125–6, 135, 184, 186; see also Appendix 1 Newman, Gerald, 13, 112n24, 144 Newton, Sir Isaac, 114, 186, 187; see also Appendix 2

223

Newtonian physics, 99n69, 187; see also Appendix 2 Nicholson, Colin, 19, 37, 39 ns65 & 66 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17n5, 25–26 Nuttall, A.D., 4n8 Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., 30n37, 60n49, Ong, Walter J., 4n9 ontology, 16, 37, 39–40 Osborne, Francis, 15 Osborne, George, 144n3 Outram, Dorinda, 177n34 Page, Charles, 50n20, 174n27 Paine, Thomas, 144n33 Parker, Blanford, 103n3, 182, 191 Parker, Todd, 132n72 Partridge, Isaac, 20, 22–23, 28, 35 Paulson, Ronald, Fictions of Satire, 3, 28n32, 79n16, 131n69, 170n17 Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding, 60n50, 67n66, 68n68, 106n14 Pelham-Holles, Thomas, Duke of Newcastle, 66, 80–81, 137, 142, 147 Perelman, C. H., 30n37, 60n49 Perreten, Peter Flint, 48 ns10 & 11, 55n35, 129n62, 165, 192n68 persona, classical Rome, 26–7 consciousness, 17, 24–6, 31, 36, 86 ‘financial revolution’, 11, 17–23, 26, 31, 37–40, 66 origin of its use in periodicals, 10–11, 15–42 prosopopoeia, 6, 11, 26–9, 31, 35–7, 40, 58–62, 76, 89, 90, 95, 122, 130n64, 133–4, 146, 158–60, 167, 174, 194 theatre, 12, 22–3, 31–8, 41 ‘transactional’ character, 34–41, 86, 110; see also Smart Phillips, Ambrose, 188n59 Pindar, 119 Pitt, James, 15n1, 80 Pittock, Murray G.H., 68n69 ‘Aeneid in the Age of Burlington’, 150n47, 157 Inventing and Resisting Britain, 155n63, 157, 173n25 Jacobitism, 154n59, 156n65

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Plato, 27, 81, 97, 150, 173, 177–8, 187 Plautus, 122 Plumb, J.H., 4n7 Plutarch, 81, 95, 168 Pocock, J.G.A., 13, 147 Machiavellian Moment, 19, 39 Politics, Language and Time, 10n23 Virtue, Commerce and History, 19n8, 134, 139n18, 141, 143n30, 161–62, 178 politeness, 6–8, 22, 58–9, 76–7, 95, 104, 113, 115–22, 161–2 Pompey the Little, 27 Pope, Alexander, 7, 12, 16, 33n48, 43, 51, 60n50, 62, 63n58, 77, 105–7, 111–13, 114n30, 120–21, 131–2, 138–9, 142, 149, 182 Works: Dunciad, 6, 62, 65, 81, 105–6, 192 ‘Essay on Criticism’, 120 ‘Key to the Lock’, 153, 155 Ode for Musick on St. Cecilia’s Day, 2, 119 Peri Bathous, 54, 77, 103–4, 108, 112, 115n33, 125, 171n18 Rape of the Lock, 172 Pope, Joan, 70, 79, 80 Porter, Roy, 17n4, 98n67, 100n70, 183n49 Potter, Lois, 155n63 Prescott, Sarah, 89n44 Price, Cecil, 52n27 Price, Martin, 27n29, 35n53, 131n69 Price, Richard, 131n69 Prior, Matthew, 187 prosopopoeia, see persona, Smart Protestant self-examination, 11, 17, 31, 36 Puttenham, George, 27, 133 Queen Mab, 50–51, 53, 68 Quintilian, 63, 107, 119 Rabelais, 11, 44, 46, 62, 63n55, 170, 184, 186 Ramsay, Allan, 172, 175 Rawson, Claude, 38n63, 165 Raymond, Joad, 18 Rée, Jonathan, 191n67 Regan, Sean, 131 Reuchlin, Johannes, 174 rhetoric,

civic humanism, rhetoric as praxis, 6, 21, 29, 39, 60–62, 175, 178, 178, 195 persona, 2–4, 8, 10–13, 15–42, 65, 79, 86–91, 93–4, 103–32, 195 traditional study and uses of, 4, 11, 46, 57, 63, 74, 76–7, 97, 133–4, 138, 157, 159–60, 165, 167, 169, 171, 186, 195; see also Smart, prosopopoeia Relihan, Joel C. 165n1 Richardson, Samuel, 35, 39n64, 53–4, 64 Richetti, John,18, 26, 37n58, 165n1 Rizzo, Betty, 47n13, 132n72 Rizzo, Raymond, 47n13 Robinson, Christopher, 27n29, 169n14 Rochester, 168n9 Rogers, Nicholas, 152 Rogers, Pat Grub Street, 51n23, 63n58, 65n61, 106n14, 113, 169 Augustan Vision, 152n53 Rolt, Richard, 69, 88, 105n10, 110n22; see also Appendix 1 Rosenblum, Joseph, 156n64 Rounce, Adam, 39n65 Rouquet, Jean Andre., 67–9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 31 Ryskamp, Charles, 124n52 Sambrook, James, 117n37 Samuel, Raphael, 144n34 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 23 Savage, Richard, 124, 126n56 Scaliger, J. C., 33, 36 ‘Scriblerians’, the, against hacks, 77, 103, 106, 112–13, 116, 121–2, 125, 128, 130–31 ‘Ancientism’, 6, 86n37 as satirical forerunners, 6, 46, 49, 52, 63, 65, 88, 97, 101, 116, 121–2, 130–31, 162, 175, 187, 189, 193 energy from the ‘low’, 115 Memoirs of ... Martinus Scriblerus, 24–5, 54, 121–22, 187n57 paradoxical encomia, 169n13 patronage, 124 political bias of, 6, 137 professions, attacks on the, 9, 54, 63, 97, vita activa, 38, 40

Index Sedgly, Ben, 110, 113 Sedley, Stephen, 171 sensibility, 53–4 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of, 78n14, 86n37, 104, 116, 127, 173 n 23, 178 Shakespeare, 24, 51, 89, 107, 123n49, 129 Sharp, Jane, 88n39 Sherbo, Arthur, 12n26, 13n28, 32n44, 39n64, 44–5, 47n13, 83n27, 84 ns29 & 31, 85n33, 110n22, 124n52; see also Appendix 1 Shevelow, Kathryn, 8, 59n45, 95–6 Sidney, Algernon, 15 Sinfield, Alan, 17n4 Sitter, John, Literary Loneliness, 184 Arguments of Augustan Wit, 166, 181n43, 189n60, 193 Sitter, John and Deborah Ayer ‘The Midwife’, 45–6, 50, 74 Skinner, Quentin Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Renaissance, 21n14, 26n26, 37n59 Liberty Before Liberalism, 136, 147 ns41 &42, 154, 160 ‘Principles and Practice of Opposition’, 147n40 Reason and Rhetoric, 24, 27n29, 160n75, 173n26 Smallwood, Philip, 121 Smart, Christopher Enlightenment, attitude to, 3, 8, 10, 12–13, 77, 98–101, 114–15, 165–95 gratitude, 43–44, 61n52, 98, 125 Jacobite sympathy, question of possible, 148–9, 152–3 learning, importance of, 6–7, 52n27, 112–15, 125–6 literary merit, attacks on neglect of, 63n57, 85, 125, 142–3, 146 patriotism, 139–40, 142–8 patronage, 12, 71, 105–106, 122–5, 131, 144, 146 persona, use of gender, 73–101 literary marketplace, 12, 103–132 ‘novelization’ of, 12, 123, 125–32, 194 politics, 133–163

225 prosopopoeia, 6, 11, 27–8, 36, 58–62, 76, 89, 90, 95, 122, 130n64, 133–4, 146, 158–60, 167, 174, 194 ‘transactionality’, 34–7, 40, 50, 52, 64, 71, 74, 83, 86–7, 90, 101, 104, 106–107, 110, 122–3, 128, 131, 140n22 political position, 3–4, 6–7, 12–13, 69, 88–9, 105, 119, 122, 127, 133–63, 179–83, 194–5 self-delusion, attacks on, 66, 174, 178–80, 182–83 social interaction, 60, 184, 192 theatre, 32 Works: ‘Bag-wig and Tobacco-pipe’, 28, 144–5, 167 ‘Blockhead and the Bee’, 49n19 ‘Buffoon and the Country-fellow’, 182n47 ‘Distressed Damsel’, 57n40, 78n13 ‘English Bull Dog, Mastiff and Quail’, 61n51 Genuine History of the Good Devil of Woodstock, 100n70 Hilliad, 12n26, 62n54 Hop-Garden, 63n57, 82n25, 136n7, 159n74, 161n79 ‘Horatian Canons of Friendship’, 38n62, 62n54, 63n56, 92n50 ‘Hymn to the Supreme Being’, 184n52 Jubilate Agno, 36, 43, 57n39, 79n18, 81n24, 101n74, 111, 140, 144, 150n46, 165, 182, 187 relationship to Smart’s journalism, 45, 136, 146, 158, 191, 193 ‘Madam and the Magpie’, 93n53 Midwife animals, sympathy for, 61n51, 111, 166, 193 anti-populism, 51–2, 145 antiquarianism, 11, 54–8, 122, 126 aristocrats, attacks on, 7, 76–7, 136, 139,141–2, 144, 146, 160–61 attribution, 44, 48, 84, 93, 111, 128, 137, 152, 187n56, 191n65; see also Appendix 1

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Christopher Smart and Satire Bolingbroke, influence of, 13, 20, 33n48, 68, 133, 136–48, 151, 160, 162, 180n41, 186 burlesque, the, 5, 10, 105, 120, 122, 165 corruption, of politicians and aristocrats, attacks on, 10–11, 57, 60–62, 68–70, 127, 132, 134, 137–42, 146–8, 158–60, 165–6, 175, 183–4 ‘custom’, attacks on, 64, 75, 77, 163, 172, 176–7 ‘decorum’, 8, 59, 116 Enlightenment, attitude to, see Smart female education, 64, 87, 90–96 ‘financial revolution’, 19–20, 39, 66, 82, 140, 188 gender, 3, 8, 10–12, 40–41, 64, 71, 73–101, 130, 143, 159–62, 176, 184, 187, 192 Gentleman’s Magazine, parodies of, 3, 13, 55, 58, 65n62, 143, 183–7, 191n67 ‘inverted advice’, 54, 171, 174 Jacobitism, 13, 55n33, 68–9, 101n70, 133–4, 136, 141–4, 148–58, 173n25, 182n44; see also Appendix 1 learning, attacks on decline of, 52, 57, 63, 70, 81, 84, 85n33, 94, 112–5, 125–6, 134, 165, 176, 179, 183, 195 literary criticism, 2–4, 6, 9, 11–12, 44–6, 50–51, 62–4, 77–8, 83, 96, 103–132, 149, 179, 183; see also Appendix 2 literary merit, attacks on neglect of, see Smart madness, 64–7, 90, 128 mechanization, attacks on, 13, 52 –5, 97–9, 109–115, 120, 175–6, 163–6, 178, 180, 183–95; see also Appendix 2 Menippean satire, 28, 46, 123, 165–70, 183, 188, 191 –2 ‘Midwife’s Politicks’ sections, 3, 65n62, 70, 79–80, 82, 133, 139–40, 161; see also Appendix 1

neologisms, 62–3, 120, 166 ‘obnoxiousness’, 135–6, 147 ‘opinion’, 30, 82–3, 85, 94, 98, 154n59, 162–3, 174–80, 188, 190 paradoxical encomia, 111, 117, 150, 169, 179, 194 patriotism, 60–61, 68, 89, 133, 136, 138–48, 161, 193 patronage, 5, 12, 64, 71, 105–106, 122–5, 144, 146 politeness, 6–8, 58–9, 76–7, 95, 104, 113, 115–22, 161–2 political position, 3–4, 6–7, 12–13, 45–6, 68–70, 88–9, 105, 118–19, 122, 127, 133–163, 179–83, 194–5 pompous diction, parodies of, 9, 62–4, 118n40, 139, 150–52; see also Appendix 2 popular ballads, 93, 115–22, 127, 148–58 professions, attacks on, 10–11, 126, 133, 184, 186 antiquarians, 54–8 doctors, 97–99, 188 lawyers, 170–73 projectors, attacks on, 13, 74, 82–3, 180, 184–86, 192–4 puffery, 4, 47, 50–54, 61, 65, 77, 82–3, 87, 103, 107, 110–111, 125, 135–8, 175 ‘Puritanism’, 101n73, 141, 156, 158–62 self-delusion, 66, 153, 166–7, 178–83 ‘sallad’, 78, 119n42 Specific articles and poems in Midwife: ‘Amours of Mr. H. Lovewell and Miss E. Goodwill’, 58–60 ‘Apollo and Daphne: an Epigram’, 93 ‘Attempt to Prove that the Fair Sex have every Qualification’, 64, 90 ‘Bag-Wig and the TobaccoPipe’, 144–6, 167 ‘Case of Mr. Will. Wimble’, 37, 64n59, 85n34, 140n22

Index ‘Certificate ... concerning the Naturalization Bill’, 145n36 ‘Come, Dame, light up your Lanthorn’ (first ‘Prowl’), 7, 32 n, 45, 74–6, 146–7 ‘Description of Mr. Hogarth’s ... March to Finchley, 49, 67–9 ‘Dissertation on Dancing’, 12, 107 ‘Dissertation on Dumb Rhetoric’, 50–54, 61n51, 70, 107, 124; see also Appendix 2 ‘Dissertation on ... setting a Standard’ (‘Opinion Office’), 154n59, 176–8; see also Appendix 2 ‘Dissertation on the ... most excellent English Rules’, 59n46 ‘Dissertation on the Perpetual Notion’, 146, 153, 180–82 ‘Doctor Dove and his Horse Nobs’, 140n22 ‘Enter the Old Woman’ (second ‘Prowl’), 19–20, 26–7, 32n45, 82, 143, 160; see also Appendix 1 ‘Epigram on a Woman who was singing Ballads’, 93 ‘Epigram on Mr. Timothy Grouse’, 70, 89 ‘Extract of a Letter from Mrs. Susannah Rowe’, 54n32 ‘Fates in his Favour’, 146 ‘Few Thoughts concerning Elegy-Writing’, 47, 111, 114–17; see also Appendix 2 ‘Few Thoughts on Family’, 37n59, 113–4, 123n50, 138 ‘Following excellent Rules ... for those that can sing’, 187n56 ‘From Mrs. Midnight to the Community’, 175; see also Appendix 2

227 ‘A Genius restor’d’, 126 ‘A genuine Copy’ (letter from the ‘Whispering Gallery’), 28, 61, 147, 158–61 ‘Genuine Memoirs of a ... Tye-Wig’, 28, 83, 123n50 ‘History of Hannah’, 53n30, 64–5, 128 –131 ‘Itch of Scribbling’ 97n66, 107–111, 113–15, 131; see also Appendix 2 ‘Jackboot’, 11, 103n2, 168; see also Appendix 2 ‘Letter from a Lady to a Maid Servant’, 47 ‘Letter from an eminent Undertaker in Town ...’, 60; see also Appendix 2 ‘Letter from a Surgeon ...’ (‘Valentine Vertebra’) and ‘Mrs. Midnight’s Reflections on the above ...’, 99, 140, 145n37 ‘Letter from Farmer Trueman’s Dog Towzer’, 11, 60–62, 68, 111, 138n16, 167 ‘Letter from Martha Johnson’, 7, 76, 135 ‘Letter from Mary Midnight to the Royal Society’ (‘Cat-Organ’), 13, 82, 191–4; see also Appendix 2 ‘Letter from Mr. Semicolon the Critic’, 62–4; see also Appendix 2 ‘Letter from Mr. Smart to Mrs. Midnight’ and her ‘Answer’, 1–2, 4, 13–14, 32, 108, 122 ‘Letter from Mr. Williams [concerning] Mr. Jemmy Gymp’, 57n40 ‘Letter from Mrs. Mary Midnight to David Garrick, 32, 36, 50, 53; see also Appendix 2 ‘Letter from Mrs. Midnight to Mr. Hoyle’, 38n66,

228

Christopher Smart and Satire 95, 105n11, 140, 145n36, 160 ‘Letter from Mrs. Midnight to the College of Physicians’, 97–9, 108, 180; see also Appendix 2 ‘Letter from Mrs. Midnight to the Governors of the Foundling Hospital’, 161 ‘Letter from Mrs. Midnight to the Society of Antiquarians’, 11, 54–8 ‘Letter from R. Reynard’ and Mrs. M’s ‘Answer’, 82, 170–75, 183–4 ‘Letter to Mrs. Mary Midnight from the Guildford Miller’, 13, 140n22, 143, 184–7, 189n60; see also Appendix 2 ‘Little Lighterman’, 13, 115n32, 135n4, 148–58, 165, 191 ‘Mary Midnight, to the Sons of Urania, Greeting’, 57n40 ‘Memoirs of a Pamphlet ... on the Miss G-[unning]s’, 116 ‘Mrs. Midnight in Defence of her own Existence’ 33, 37 ‘Mrs. M., to all the Empresses on the Earth’, 47, 81–2, 127 ‘Mrs. M.’s Account of her own Abilities’, 9–10, 95 ‘Mrs. Midnight’s Letter to the Ghost of Alexander the Great’, 127, 153 ‘Mrs. Midnight to the Community’, 175; see also Appendix 2 ‘Mrs. Midnight to the Critics’, 182–3 ‘Necessity of keeping one’s Friend in one’s Pocket’, 141, 186–7; see also Appendix 2

‘New Ride[s] to Rumford’, 188–9; see also Appendix 2 ‘Occasional Prologue’, 78, 119n42; see also Appendix 2 ‘Ode on the New Year’, 69–70, 89 ‘Ode to the ... Earl of Northumberland’, 124 ‘On Poetry’, 6, 77; see also Appendix 2 ‘On the Practice of Gaming’, 161; see also Appendix 2 ‘On Wit’, 175n29 ‘Oration spoken to the Clappers and Hissers’, 51–53, 91, 94, 105 ‘Panegyrick on Loquacity’, 111n23 ‘Panegyrick on the Orator’, 169 ‘The Pig’, 182 ‘Ponto’s Answer to Towzer’, 61 Preface to Midwife, 46 ‘Proposal for expelling all Party ... out of our ... Universities’ (letter from ‘Mrs. Coxeter’), 91–2 Rambler in, 39n64, 55 ns34 & 35, 64, 77, 90 ‘Reflections on Matrimony’, 50n21, 103 ‘Remarkable Prediction of an Author’, 194–5 ‘Scheme for a Bill of Annihilation’ (‘Office of Annihilation’), 146, 189 ‘Silent Fair’, 93 ‘Some Account of a New Mill to grind old People Young’, see ‘Letter to Mrs. Mary Midnight from the Guildford Miller’ above ‘Some Reflections on the Neglect of the Greek Language’, 52n27, 73, 80–81, 85, 91–2, 94; see also Appendix 2

Index ‘Some Reflections on the State of the Stage’, 123, 140n21; see also Appendix 2 ‘Some Remarks on the Critics and Criticism of the Age’, 62–4; see also Appendix 2 ‘Song’ (‘The Talkative Fair’), 93 ‘Speech of Sir Richard Glover’, 142 subversion disclaimer (‘happy establishment’), 13, 132, 135–7, 154, 192 ‘Survey of Bedlam’ and ‘Survey of Bedlam continued’, 53n30, 59–60, 64–5, 67, 128–31 ‘Survey of Moorfields, 64–7, 128 ‘Tea-Pot and ScrubbingBrush’, 145 ‘Things to be laugh’d at’, 101 ‘To Mrs. Mary Midnight’ (letter from ‘George Pilkinton’), 115n32; see also Appendix 2 ‘To Mrs. Sarah Rowden’, 126 ‘To the Criticks and the Poets’, 117–22, 128, 149, 152n51; see also Appendix 2 ‘To the Keeper of the Curiosities at Gresham College’, 66n64 ‘To the Ladies of Quality’, 93 ‘To the Right Honourable the Lady *****’, 82–3, 90, 138–9 ‘To the venerable Society of Antiquarians’, 54, 57 ‘To the wise Inhabitants of Tring’, 99–100 ‘Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem’ 192n70; see also Appendix 2 ‘Virtues of Laughter’, 97n66 theatre, 2, 7, 12, 32, 49–54, 74, 78, 91, 122, 133, 177,

229 182–3, 192n70; see also Appendix 2 ‘toad-eating’, attacks on, 81n24, 138, 146–7, 162, 170, 173–4, 181 trade, 19–20, 39, 82–3, 109, 113, 125–6, 140, 142, 145 ‘untimeliness’, 6–9, 36, 77–8, 97, 116, 134, 142, 158–63, 174–8, 182, 187, 191 virtue in, 26, 37n59, 59–61, 64, 70, 75, 95, 113–14, 124, 134, 138n15, 142, 150, 158–62, 173, 178 witchcraft, 12, 98–101 ‘Munificence and Modesty’, 136n7 Poetical Translation of ... Phaedrus, 33n47, 159, 182 Poems on Several Occasions, 110n22 Prologue and Epilogue to Othello, 2, 13–14, 32, 108; see also Appendix 2 ‘Snake, the Goose and the Nightingale’, 51n24 ‘Solemn Dirge’, 114n29, 142n26 ‘Song to David’, 43 Student, 3–4, 52, 57n40, 60, 65, 69, 77, 84–7, 107, 111, 125–6, 141n25, 152, 174, 190–91, 193; see also Appendix 1 ‘A New System of CastleBuilding’: ‘Being the Chapter of Hats’ (2:2), 81n24, 146, 162 ‘Character of Mr. Allspice’ (1: 8), 52n27 ‘Containing a mighty pretty preamble’ (‘Maecenas’s’, 1: 5), 63n57, 125, 146, 186 ‘In which several knotty points ...’ (‘prerogative of an author’, 2: intro.), 106, 126–7, 135 ‘In which the author shews his taste’ (1: 1), 63n56, 85, 125,186 ‘In which the readers will find ... (‘pleasure of being imposed upon’,

230

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1: 6), 84, 146n39, 148, 179–80 ‘Introduction to a new system of CastleBuilding’, 85 ‘Of the service CastleBuilding ... geniuses’ (1: 4), 85n33, 177 ‘On the necessity of CastleBuilding’ (1: 2), 63, 56, 86 ‘On the folly, sin and danger of being excellent’ (2:1), 12, 48, 110 ‘On the sublime’ (1: 9), 52n26, 107–8, 111–15, 183n48, 189n63 ‘Wherein is shewn that this science’ (1: 3), 60, 85–6, 152 ‘Female Student’, letters from the, 87, 92, 107, 125–6 ‘To the King’, 142n26 ‘To the reverend and learned Dr Webster’, 69n71, 133 ‘Wholesale Critic and the HopMerchant’, 52n27, 85n34, 86n37 Works of Horace Translated into Verse, 33, 44n3 Smeed, J.W., 36n56 Smith, Adam, 177 Smith, Roger, 17n4 Smith, Sarah Maria, 64 Smollett, Tobias, 55n33, 131, 187 Socrates, 103, 107, 173 Solon, 150, 152 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 98 Speck, W.A., 80n20, 134n3, 150–51, 173n25 Spectator, 3, 9n22, 27, 37, 41n72, 85, 87, 90n47, 100n71, 108, 168n9 neutrality in politics, 66–7 persona, 11, 24–5, 30, 38, 40, 79, 85–6, 104, 128, 130 politeness, 7, 38, 59, 121, 162 popular ballads, 117–18, 120–21 Smart’s admiration for, 85n34 stock-market and trade, 39 stock topics in, 47 Spencer, Jane, 89n44, 95 ns57 & 59 Spinoza, 189

Stallybrass, Peter, 52n25, 88, 106n14, 187n55 Stamper, Francis, 109, 111 Steele, Richard, 18, 85, 110; see also Spectator personae, 10–11, 18, 20, 22–6, 28–40, 81, 85–6, 103–4, 123, 131, 162 Sterne, Laurence, 11, 44–5, 53, 131 Sermons of Mr. Yorick, 17 Tristram Shandy, 5, 73, 131, 154n58, 186 Stevens, George Alexander, 113n26, 187n57 Strong, Philip L., 46n9, 134n3 Stuart, Charles Edward, 68, 150, 153, 155–7 Student (pieces not firmly attrib. to Smart) ‘Essay IV’ (‘inverted advice’), 174 ‘Extract of a Thesis’ (‘Zinn’), 190–91, 193 ‘Letter from Mr. R. B—’s Dog Colebrook’, 110–11 ‘Letter from Mr. R. W***’, 126n56 ‘Notable Criticism on a special Piece of Morality’, 152n51 ‘On the Multiplicity of Modern Authors’, 105n10 Stukeley, William, 57n41 Sullivan, Alvin, 18n6, 44n4, 45n7, 47n14, 50n22, 54n32, 74n4, 90n47 Swift, Jonathan, 6, 11–12, 54n31, 57, 63, 97–8, 103, 106, 111, 116–17, 131–2, 137, 168, 182, 185–6 Dutch, and the, 156n64 energy from the ‘low’, 103, 106 ‘Isaac Bickerstaff’ and persona, 10–11, 20–23, 26–30, 33, 35–7, 81, 103, 123, 139 learned wit, tradition of, 11, 26–8, 45–6, 54, 103, 168–9, 174 parodic prosopopoeia, 6, 26–8 religion, 28, 38–39 stock-market, 21, 29, 39–40 ‘transactional’ character, 21, 33, 35–7 vita activa, 21, 30, 38–40 Works: Battle of the Books, 49n19, 56–7, 113 ‘Bickerstaff Papers’, see ‘Isaac Bickerstaff’ above ‘Contests and Dissentions’, 176n32 Directions to Servants, 171 Examiner, 20, 21n16, 40 Gulliver’s Travels, 8, 66, 103, 118, 176n32, 186, 193

Index ‘Modest Proposal’, 155n61 Tale of a Tub, 2–3, 65, 79, 107–8, 112, 127, 168–9, 175–6, 179 Szechi, Daniel, 134n3, 143, 148n45, 155n62 Tacitus, 136 Tasso, 130n64 Tatler, 27, 32, 37–8, 40, 47, 52, 55n34, 59, 67, 104, 110, 116, 162; see also Steele for persona in Tave, Stuart M., 175 Taylor, Charles, 30–31, 177 Taylor, Richard C., 132 Temple, Sir William, 56–7 theatre, 2, 7, 12, 22–3, 31–8, 49–54, 74, 78, 91, 122, 133, 177, 182–3, 192n70; see also Appendix 2 Theophrastus, 36, 122, 158 Thornton, Bonnell, 84, 88; see also Appendix 1 Connoisseur, 54n32 Have At You All, or the Drury-Lane Journal, 41, 55, 82n25, 104 Three Hours After Marriage, 144n30 Todd, Dennis, 86n36, 189 Todd, Janet, 96 Townsend, John Rowe, 126n55 trade, 21, 39, 19–20, 39, 82–3, 109, 113, 125–6, 140, 142, 145 Trussler, Simon, 113n26, 114n30, 115n33, 187n57 Turner, Cheryl, 95n59 Tzara, Tristan, 73 Uglow, Jenny, 67n66, 99n69, 188n58 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 168, 172 Vickers, Brian, 6 ns13 & 16, 27, 60n49, 178n36 Villiers, George, 168 Virgil, 6, 63, 81, 113n26, 118–20 von Hutten, Ulrich, 174

231

Wagstaffe, William, 117–18, 121 Walpole, Horace, 32n44, 116–17 Walpole, Sir Robert, 33n48, 66, 90n47, 135, 138, 143, 147, 162 Walsh, Marcus, 132n72, 145n37 Warburton, William, 62, 90n50, 113n26, 159n74 Ward, Ned, 6, 56n38, 58n43, 155n63, 158 Warton, Thomas, 50n21, 83n27; see also Appendix 2 Watt, Ian, 17n4, 31 Weber, Max, 17n4, 31 Weinbrot, Howard D. Eighteenth Century Satire, 141n25, 172 Menippean Satire Reconsidered, 167–8 Wharton, Philip, Duke of, 41n70, 67n65, 136–7, 144n33, 153–5 White, Allon, 52n25, 88, 106n14, 187n55 Wild, Min, 89n44, 128n59, 153n56 Wilkes, John, 143–4 Williams, Raymond, 6, 24, 43 Williamson, Karina, 43n1, 48, 78n13, 81n23, 88n40, 103n3, 140, 158, 182 ns45 & 47, ‘Christopher Smart: Problems of Attribution’, 48n15, 191n65 ‘Smart’s Principia’, 187n56 ‘Surfing the Intertext’, 138n16, 141n24, 187n56 Willmot, Robert A., 138n14 Wilson, Kathleen, 41, 144 Windsor Forest, 54–5 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 64, 95 Wood, Marcus, 13, 184n52, 188n59 Woodward, Henry, 50–51; see also Appendix 2 Wooler, Thomas, 13 Wordsworth, William, 43 Worlidge, Thomas, 110 Xenophon, 97