Orthodoxy and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Society: Essays from the Debartolo Conference

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Orthodoxy and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Society

The Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

General Editor:

Greg Clingham, Bucknell University

Advisory Board: Paul K. Alkon, University of Southern California Chloe Chard, Independent Scholar Clement Hawes, The Pennsylvania State University Robert Markley, West Virginia University Jessica Munns, University of Denver Cedric D. Reverand II, University of Wyoming Janet Todd, University of Glasgow The Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture aims to publish challenging, new eighteenth-century scholarship. Of particular interest is critical, historical, and interdisciplinary work that is interestingly and intelligently theorized, and that broadens and refines the conception of the field. At the same time, the series remains open to all theoretical perspectives and different kinds of scholarship. While the focus of the series is the literature, history, arts, and culture (including art, architecture, music, travel, and history of science, medicine, and law) of the long eighteenth century in Britain and Europe, the series is also interested in scholarship that establishes relationships with other geographies, literatures, and cultures of the period 1660–1830. Titles in This Series Tanya Caldwell, Time to Begin Anew: Dryden’s Georgics and Aeneis Mita Choudhury, Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theatre, 1660–1800: Identity, Performance, Empire James Cruise, Governing Consumption: Needs and Wants, Suspended Characters, and the ‘‘Origins’’ of Eighteenth-Century English Novels Edward Jacobs, Accidental Migrations: An Archaeology of Gothic Discourse Regina Hewitt and Pat Rogers, eds. Orthodoxy and Heresy in EighteenthCentury Society Chris Mounsey, Christopher Smart: Clown of God Chris Mounsey, ed., Presenting Gender Laura Rosenthal and Mita Choudhury, eds., Monstrous Dreams of Reason Philip Smallwood, ed., Johnson Re-Visioned: Looking Before and After http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/univ press

Orthodoxy and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Society Essays from the DeBartolo Conference

Edited by Regina Hewitt and Pat Rogers

Lewisburg Bucknell University Press London: Associated University Presses

䉷 2002 by Rosemont Publishing and Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eights cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-8387-5501-1/02 $10.00 pl 8¢ pp, pc.]

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Orthodoxy and heresy in eighteenth-century society : essays from the DeBartolo Conference / edited by Regina Hewitt and Pat Rogers. p. cm.—(The Bucknell studies in eighteenth-century literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8387-5501-1 1. Deviant behavior—History—18th century—Congresses. 2. Conformity— History—18th century—Congresses. 3. Heresy—History—18th century— Congresses. I. Hewitt, Regina, 1959– II. Rogers, Pat, 1938– III. DeBartolo Conference (1998 : University of South Florida) IV. Series. HM811 .O77 2002 302.5⬘42⬘09033—dc21 2001043844

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents Illustrations Preface

7 9

Introduction REGINA HEWITT Where the Wild Things Are: Guides to London’s Transgressive Spaces CAROL HOULIHAN FLYNN Sedition, Vice, and Atheism: The Limits of Toleration and the Orthodox Attack on Rational Religion in Late-EighteenthCentury England ARTHUR SHEPS Breaking All the Rules: The Worsley Affair in Late-EighteenthCentury Britain CINDY MCCREERY Plagued by Enthusiasm: Swift’s Fear of Infectious Dissent and His Argument against Abolishing Christian Quarantine in A Tale of a Tub JOHN BRUCE Apocalypse Then: Pope and the Prophets of Dulness PAT ROGERS Junius: An Orthodox Rebel LINDE KATRITZKY Simon Jaillot: Sculptor, Pamphleteer, Outcast ANNE BETTY WEINSHENKER The Gnostic Clarissa MARGARET ANNE DOODY Eros Heretic: Transgression Generic and Religious in and out of Diderot’s L’Oiseau blanc, conte bleu ISABELLE CASSAGNE DEMARTE Sade and Nerciat: Marginality in Search of an Erotology VALE´RIE VAN CRUGTEN-ANDRE´ 5

13

27

51

69

89 112 134 154 176

207 230

6

CONTENTS

Olympe de Gouges: Revolutionary in Search of an Audience MEGAN CONWAY Meat, Ethics, and the Case of John Wesley WILLIAM STROUP Suggestions for Further Reading Contributors Index

247 267 281 287 289

List of Illustrations J[ames] Sayers, The REPEAL of the TEST ACT: a vision William Holland, PURITANICAL AMUSEMENTS REVIVED! Anon., SEDITION and ATHEISM DEFEATED I. M. [?J. Mortimer], W. H. [?W. Humphrey], A Trip to Cocks Heath [James Gillray], Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly [James Gillray], A Peep into Lady !!!!!y’s Seraglio Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lady Worsley E. Malpas, A Heroine of 1784 Charles Le Brun, Expressions of the Passions: Fear Charles Le Brun, Martyrdom of St. Andrew Simon Jaillot, Crucifixion Group Nicolas Tardieu, Crucifixion, after Charles Le Brun Se´bastien Le Clerc, Funeral of Chancellor Pierre Se´guier Philippe de Champaigne, Christ on the Cross

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55 56 64 73 76 79 81 82 162 163 164 166 169 171

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Preface The DeBartolo Conference on Eighteenth-Century Studies THE CONFERENCE HAS BEEN HELD ANNUALLY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF South Florida, Tampa, since its inception in 1987. It was instituted in association with the endowment of the DeBartolo Chair in the Liberal Arts, set up in 1986 with the aid of a gift from the Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation and a matching contribution from the State of Florida. The first and present holder of the Chair is J. P. W. Rogers, formerly Head of the Department of English at the University of Bristol. The original foundation of the conference owes most to Robert Pawlowski, Chair of the Department of English at USF at the time of the endowment. His vision of a DeBartolo Conference, in which the holder of the endowed position would join other scholars in interdisciplinary dialogue, led to the institution of this event. His successors, William T. Ross and Sara M. Deats, have given unstinting support during the past decade as the conference became established as a regular event within the academic community. Deans James F. Strange, Rollin H. Richmond, and S. David Stamps have equally provided support from the College of Arts and Sciences. The original director of the conference was James G. Bentley. After his untimely death, this demanding role was taken over by Sara M. Deats, who piloted the event for six successful years. In 1994 she was succeeded by Regina Hewitt. A committee of faculty members, which over the years has consisted of Rosalie M. Baum, William Heim, Laura Runge, R. Donald Wyly and Flora Zbar, assists with administration. From the start, the conference has fostered interdisciplinarity, inviting contributions from scholars in any branch of study connected with the so-called ‘‘long’’ eighteenth century (approximately 1660–1830) in any region of the world. The exchange of ideas has been further facilitated by the topical structure of the conference. Each year’s conference revolves around a carefully defined theme that conditions the selection of papers for presentation, the division of papers into sessions, and the 9

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PREFACE

terms of the debate within each session. Following the first conference, on the evolution of historical consciousness in the eighteenth century, subsequent conferences have treated the themes of crowds, clubs, and carnivals (1988), the family (1989), mythology (1990), biography and autobiography (1991), the perception of ‘‘new’’ and ‘‘old’’ worlds (1992), the body (1993), the division of the period into Augustan, Romantic, and Victorian portions (1994), the eighteenth-century male (1995), law and politics (1996), the commemoration of Burke, Walpole and Wollstonecraft (1997), and the topic represented in this volume, eighteenth-century heresies (1998). The scope of the conference has been deliberately kept quite small, with limited numbers of papers accepted and concurrent sessions avoided. This strategy has enabled all participants to attend the same events and join in collective discussion in ways precluded at large conferences with many simultaneous sessions. Participants have almost without exception greeted this format as an attractive one allowing them the maximum amount of interaction and intellectual contact. In addition to segmental sessions in which participants consider aspects of the given theme, the conference also includes plenary sessions in which distinguished scholars address the subject at some length. The holder of the DeBartolo Chair always gives one such lecture; other invited lectures have been given by Claude Rawson, Kenneth Boulding, Terry Castle, Alvin Kernan, Ronald Paulson, Christopher Ricks, Lawrence Stone, Jean H. Hagstrum, Lawrence Lipking, Patricia M. Spacks, Jane Perry-Camp, Dominick LaCapra, G. S. Rousseau, Barbara M. Stafford, U. C. Knoepflmacher, J. Paul Hunter, Felicity Nussbaum, Susan Staves, Stanley N. Katz, Moira Ferguson, Peter J. Stanlis, Margaret Doody, and Carol Houlihan Flynn. In connection with the 1998 conference, a decision to seek publication of a volume of essays from the event was made. It is hoped that the volume will provide a tangible record of the kind of interconnected study of a topic that is possible through the conference and will pique the interest of potential participants in future events. While the volume has been in preparation, the conference has gone on to explore the topics of revolutions in print, with plenary speakers Jeremy Popkin and Robert DeMaria (1999), and will soon address the past and future of eighteenth-century studies, with plenary speakers Howard Weinbrot and Stuart Sherman (2000). All involved look forward to a bright future for the conference.

Orthodoxy and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Society

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Introduction Regina Hewitt

THE

ESSAYS IN THIS VOLUME BEGAN AS PRESENTATIONS AT THE

twelfth annual DeBartolo Conference on Eighteen-Century Studies, sponsored by the University of South Florida and held in Tampa from February 19 to 21, 1998. The conference topic was ‘‘eighteenth-century heresies,’’ but treatments of the topic were not limited to matters of theology or issues of ecclesiastical power. From the start, we defined heresy as ‘‘the quest for the forbidden’’—not only in religion but in the arts and sciences and in the conduct of private and public life. As a result of this broad definition, the conference was able to examine numerous instances of transgression, subversion, and protest that might more usually be studied as ‘‘deviance’’ than as ‘‘heresy.’’ What can we discover about such behavior, and efforts to contain it, by reviving the condemnatory language of theology that we might overlook by using the deliberately nonjudgmental vocabulary of the social sciences? Most importantly, we gain insight into the values animating both transgression and repression. Those upholding norms, in any area of experience, treat the order they defend as sacred. Their fear of disorder and their efforts to remove whatever threatens their teleology are more fully intelligible when we acknowledge their commitment as a sort of creed. We can indeed see a process of sanctification involved in the maintenance of secular systems, and we can better account for the passion displayed in their defense. Complementarily, we can see that deviant acts often stem from an equally passionate belief in a ‘‘right’’ order of things. Some protesters share the same creed as those they oppose and act to recall others to a more strict observance; others see themselves as prophets of a new order and act to set it up in place of existing structures. Attention to the value invested in order explains how heretical positions can themselves become orthodoxies: the transformation occurs when the new order is sacralized. The language of theology also allows us to understand what is at stake in merely experimental deviance—the exploring of forbidden spaces, the testing of boundaries, 13

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ORTHODOXY AND HERESY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SOCIETY

without a commitment to the outsider position. The sacred nature of the given order makes the risk of leaving or spoiling it greater than it might otherwise appear to be. Turning to religion in order to fathom social systems has a precedent in sociology itself. Emile Durkheim, one of the most prominent founders of the discipline, took the study of religion as a means to develop his theories about society. Hence, a conceptual model derived from Durkheim can better enable us to see the connections in the essays that follow. In the introduction to his last major work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim explains that he undertook an analysis of Australian totemism with the goal of learning more about his own contemporaries. Through religion, Durkheim hoped to glimpse ‘‘a fundamental and permanent aspect of humanity’’ and thus to discern the moral basis for all social organization.1 What Durkehim discovered—or believed he discovered—was the sacred character of society itself. His claims about society as the beginning and end of religion have some bearing on our own claims about the heretical nature of deviance. Durkheim’s hypothesis rests on his view of collective and religious experience as fulfilling the same need—the need of the individual to aspire to something greater than him or herself. After his survey of beliefs and rituals, Durkheim concluded: However complex the outward manifestations of religious life may be, its inner essence is simple, and one and the same . . . In all its forms, its object is to lift man above himself and make him live a higher life than he would if he obeyed only his own individual impulses. The beliefs express this life in representations; the rites organize and regulate its functioning.2

In short, religious aspirations are social aspirations. Believers may express them with reference to gods and other worlds, but the very multiplication of terms makes Durkheim suspect the literal accuracy of the statements. Behind all the various representations of divinity, Durkheim sees society.3 Collective experience makes people ‘‘capable of feeling and conduct of which [they] are incapable’’ alone. Every society channels this experience into its own set of symbols, concepts, or ‘‘collective representations,’’ which become objects to worship and defend.4 They even become internalized in each individual, for collective representations are the basis of such categories of thought as time and space through which all persons in a given group share their perceptions.5 The sanctity of symbols or concepts, however, comes from the collective

INTRODUCTION

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experience that authorizes their use. Society has consecrated the selected men, things, or ideas in the given order. Society is the creative force behind religious systems.6 Durkheim could assign society so high a function because he located its origin in the natural order rather than in any human contract. Society, he maintained, is ‘‘a reality sui generis’’; it is a ‘‘part of nature’’ that ‘‘has its own characteristics’’ and that is not reducible to its individual members.7 In fact, it exists prior to its individual members. With this startling inversion of the expected sequence of social development, Durkheim does not deny the early existence of separate human beings but of self-conscious autonomy. In his view, people move from an early state of complete identification with their extended family group, in which they do not perceive themselves as independent beings, to a later state of individuation, in which they recognize themselves as individuals with ideas and interests that may separate them from the group.8 Durkheim insisted on this pattern because of its similarity to the development of biological organisms, which gradually become more complex and differentiated. If society is truly a part of nature, then its processes should resemble those of other living things. The pattern of contract theory— movement from individuation to collectivity—struck Durkheim as unnatural. Countering Rousseau, he argued that solidarity must exist before contracts: individuals will accept contracts only if they already accept their dependence on something outside of themselves.9 Whether or not Durkheim’s theory actually gives society ontological status is controversial. Commentators embarrassed by his apparent ‘‘social realism’’ usually take his statements figuratively. For example, Stjepan Mestrovic describes Durkheim’s sociology as a Schopenhauerian theory of society as ‘‘representation.’’ Durkheim’s society is a concept located between physical and mental realms. The symbols, rituals, and mores that characterize a social group are the accessible forms of its collective ideas, beliefs, and values. Social existence thus gives people access to an aspect of experience that is inconceivable through sensation and unrealizable through reason.10 More recently, however, Donald Nielsen has advocated a literal interpretation of Durkheim’s claims. According to Nielsen, Durkheim is a social realist.11 His understanding of society as a creative power devolves from religious notions of divine power. Mediated by Spinoza, whose work Durkheim knew well, notions of a creative power in nature metamorphose into notions of a creative power in society. Durkheim’s sociology centers on a ‘‘self-identical trinity of divinity, totality, society.’’ Society is a power in nature that

16


transcends the physical realm and individual beings by creating, through collective action, a moral realm.12 One need not decide between literal and figurative interpretations of Durkheim to see that his religious analogies allow him to call attention to the moral effects of social organization in ways that few other comparisons could articulate. Only the vocabulary that has traditionally been reserved for the sacred seems adequate to account for the behavior that Durkheim sought to understand—the solidarity of individuals within groups, the violence with which groups defend their collective representations against challenges from within or without their boundaries, the ability of association to modify individual interests, beliefs, and actions.13 It is such behavior that participants in the DeBartolo Conference also sought to understand, and the explanatory power of the sacred is reflected in their conceptualizations of transgression as heresy. Though the essays in this volume make no explicit use of Durkheim, their attention to the sacred and the social places them in the company of applications of Durkheim’s theory that attest to the importance of religious associations in conceptualizing society. In some sense, they extend the project begun in Jeffrey Alexander’s volume of essays Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, which was to identify and encourage the diffusion of Durkheim’s religious thought in culture studies.14 Whereas essays in that volume look for the sacred in historical events and political institutions, essays in this volume look for it in literature and art as well as in history and politics. The excursion into literary and artistic areas also distinguishes this volume from a more recent collection of essays on heresy, Roger D. Lund’s The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750. Lund’s volume centers on the institution of Anglicanism itself, investigating conflicts over its nature and status.15 Taking in a larger range of structures and conflicts, our volume, like Alexander’s, examines the power of the sacred behind all privileged forms. As Alexander writes in support of reference to Durkheim’s concept of the sacred by current sociologists, the sacred helps to explain ‘‘motivated, expressive behavior as compared with conscious strategic action’’ and to reveal how people work with symbol systems they did not ‘‘intentionally create’’; it expresses ‘‘human anxiety about meaning and order’’ and serves ‘‘as a focal point for the institutionalization of power and social control.’’16 Examples of social insights gained from attention to the sacred range from Robert Bellah’s now classic description of the symbol systems of secular states as civil religions, referenced in Alexander’s introduction,

INTRODUCTION

17

through Lynn Hunt’s analysis of attempts to consecrate a new national order during the French Revolution, to Eric Rothenbuhler’s study of the gaps in sanctified space in which social change occurs—both represented by essays in Alexander’s volume.17 Rothenbuhler’s work forms something of a bridge between Alexander’s volume and this one because, like Carol Houlihan Flynn in this book, Rothenbuhler attends to the concept of social space and because, like the contributors to this volume who look at struggles between heretical defiers and orthodox defenders of sacred orders, he looks at conflicts between scorners and upholders of a given economic order. According to Rothenbuhler, we have to see the sacred foundation on which a given social or economic structure rests if we are to understand ‘‘the sense of violation that accompanies innovations to the system.’’18 In opposition to the sacred, Rothenbuhler places the ‘‘liminal’’—an open space within the structure. Unlike the profane or the criminal that can be defined and managed by those within the given system, the liminal cannot be explained by available terms. Because it cannot be understood by those within the system, it cannot be assigned a space inside or outside of the familiar structure. It provokes a ‘‘fight over signification,’’ and through the effort to define the liminal and locate it with respect to the sacred, social change can occur. Change can occur because those in the dominant system must make some response to the liminal threat.19 Rothenbuhler describes four possible patterns to the conflict, which for our purposes might be reduced to two: the dominant system will define and contain the liminal threat, in which case the original structure is reinforced, resacralized; the dominant system will be usurped by the liminal threat, in which case a new structure will become the sacred system.20 Rothenbuhler illustrates the struggle between the liminal and the sacred through the example of early-twentieth-century labor strikes. Ordinary strikes could be defined and managed within the given system because strikers and managers shared the same economic values. Ordinary strikers did not want to change the system; they wanted to change their place within it. In contrast, actions by the Industrial Workers of the World, known as ‘‘Wobblies,’’ could not be similarly defined and managed because the Wobblies did not share capitalist values; they wanted to change the system. Consequently, their actions, even when not—or especially when not—illegal occurred in a liminal space in the structure. Wobblies’ parading through stores posed more of a threat than ordinary pickets because such actions could not be defined in criminal or any other available terms. Wobblies’ sending children out of

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a stricken town evoked images of war-time refugees. Eventually, those in the dominant system criminalized the Wobblies, expelling their threat and resacralizing the original structure.21 By taking seriously perceptions of a familiar social order as sacred, Rothenbuhler has been able to explain otherwise puzzling variations in the impact of strikes and treatment of strikers. The explanatory value of religious associations emerges likewise from the analyses in this volume of transgressive behavior and the responses it provokes. Making use of the concept of heresy to capture the value-laden nature of social conflict, the essays below offer insights into how order is perceived, valued, and negotiated (or consecrated, deconsecrated, and re-consecrated) through cultural interactions. Orthodox and heterodox claims on social order are mapped by Carol Houlihan Flynn in ‘‘Where the Wild Things Are: Guides to London’s Transgressive Spaces.’’ Beginning with Ned Ward’s London Spy and Addison and Steele’s Mr. Spectator, Flynn examines how the guides treat those areas of the city where people regularly indulge in activities that are restricted elsewhere. Though the guides generally coincide in their identifications of these gaps in the socio-geographical structure and their descriptions of the conduct that fills them, they bring contrasting values to their assessments of the territory. The Whig Spectator, eager to arrest threats to the disciplined, commercial order his party would establish, condemns the lack of restraint; the Tory Spy, equally eager to check Whig progress, celebrates the same quality. Tracing similar patterns in guides throughout the eighteenth century, Flynn posits that the compromise they effect between orthodox conformity and heterodox expression accounts for their wide appeal. The guides served multiple purposes: they could warn readers about dangers to avoid as well as they could lead them into those very temptations. The guides thus show the complicated negotiations involved in the maintenance of social order. The sanctity of the whole is more secure when it allows some straying within its boundaries. Cultural interactions, of course, are not all peaceful. Sometimes these cultural interactions involve much violence, as in the case of the Birmingham Riots analyzed by Arthur Sheps. According to Sheps, the attacks on Dissenters during the 1790s amount to ‘‘rituals of violence’’ played out to determine who contributes—and who does not contribute—to the well-being of British society. Though the conflict between Anglicans and Rational Dissenters explicitly hinged on beliefs about immortality, salvation, and determinism, it implicitly turned on convictions about the social consequences of those beliefs. Examining the po-

INTRODUCTION

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sitions at issue, Sheps shows that Anglicans—and orthodox Dissenters (a paradoxical concept to which we return later in this introduction)— feared Rational Dissent because its emphasis on a self-evident and necessary order endangered the performance of charitable works. Thus, skepticism about the value of ‘‘doing good’’ as a means of ensuring one’s other-worldly reward was construed as a threat to a worldly system that depended on good will and good deeds to hold its disparate members together. Rational Dissent was therefore associated with sedition, stigmatized, and thrust outside of the ‘‘right’’ order of things in an effort to protect norms of charitable relief. What is sanctified through this ritual is a particular system of social relations, one that is made to follow from a given theology but that might have been reconfigured by a different creed. The sanctification of social relations is also ritually played out in the adultery trials of the late eighteenth century, particularly the Worsley trial with which Cindy McCreery’s essay is concerned. McCreery correlates an increase in prints satirizing aristocratic affairs with an increase in public anxiety about corruption in the upper class and in the upper ranks of the military. Because the Worsleys were prominent, they became exemplary targets for criticism. They were blamed not just as individuals but as a class, blamed for deviating from the norms of conduct for their positions. The ‘‘heresy of the Worsleys,’’ however, is not adultery, for aristocratic violations of the bonds of marriage were common enough to be orthodox; the Worsleys were heretical in the ‘‘indifference . . . to public opinion’’ evident in their open litigation. Wrangling in the courts, the Worsleys lost the personal authority that sustains aristocratic power. They failed to provide the leadership expected from their rank. In stigmatizing the Worsleys, then, the press protected an ideal of social relations in which those at the top of a hierarchy serve as guides for the lower strata. Anger against the Worsleys shows how much people wanted to believe in a traditional social order—even while they lost confidence in its individual representatives. Belief in a social order that is greater than individuals and that must be protected from individual caprice is evident not only in satires of the Worsley affair but in other uses of satire, caricature, and irony during the ‘‘long’’ eighteenth century. If, as Dustin Griffin argues in his ‘‘reintroduction’’ to satire, this form serves more to express anxiety than to voice confident criticism,22 then such attacks on secular and ecclesiastical governments as Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Pope’s Dunciad manifest a fear of disorder following from individual freedom. That the concepts of order at issue are political, religious, and moral is itself significant,

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for the notion of a social sphere distinct from these other spheres is not commonly held until the nineteenth century. Earlier anxieties about the adequacy of political and religious institutions to maintain good order open the way, however, for the development of more explicitly sociological thinking in later eras. Swift and Pope wrote against prevailing systems that they saw as a threat to right order. As Swift feared the ascendancy of the Presbyterian Church over the Anglican in Ireland, Pope feared the triumph of militant Protestantism over Catholicism in England. Swift’s attempt to discredit Dissent, especially by pathologizing it, are the subject of John Bruce’s essay. Pope’s refraction of Protestant zealots as Dunces is studied in an essay by Pat Rogers. According to Bruce, Swift’s efforts at quarantining Dissent and preserving the health of the Anglican Church fall short of that goal because some element of the rejected system is necessary to revitalize the Anglican order. To succeed, Swift would have to infect his congregation with the enthusiasm that generated cohesion among the Dissenters, but so much personal testimony, hinting of antinomianism, was not compatible with Anglican doctrine. Consequently, Swift ends up defending an orthodox institution through unorthodox means. According to Rogers, Pope’s anxieties about the oppression of Catholics in England lie just below the surface of The Dunciad. Examining the tendency of radical Protestants to invent political events with apocalyptic significance, Rogers shows how Pope’s Dunces exhibit the messianic fervor and self-righteous enthusiasm of sectarians for whom recent history promised another fall of Rome. Pope’s satire of intolerance sends a cautionary message to readers of all persuasions, whose identities as orthordox believers or heretics could change with the next war. As a Catholic in England, Pope had the dual identity of believer and heretic, member of a globally powerful and locally powerless system. His position gave him considerable insight into the complexity of ‘‘right’’ order. The predicaments of both Swift and Pope, who were caught between competing systems, brings to light a characteristic of social organization that is relevant to numerous other essays in this volume. The particular beliefs, values, and norms within any given system are subject to change, negotiation, compromise, and even confusion. When different systems are variously defended as orthodox or attacked as heretical, what is at stake is less the content of the system than its effect as system. Defenders of faiths, like Swift, crave the security of consensus. For that reason, they often see heresy as self-assertion. Yet individuals who are perceived as—or who perceive themselves—as heretics seldom pursue

INTRODUCTION

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merely personal or arbitrary ends. On the contrary, they are usually as attached as the orthodox to a collectivist ideal. Both worship social order, but they define its contents differently. Often, the heretic’s aim is to become orthodox—to recall others to the ‘‘right’’ way from which they are perceived to have strayed. Heretics may thus assume the identities of reformers within religious or philosophical systems. They may be ‘‘orthodox rebels,’’ such as the Junius whom Linde Katritzky investigates; or they may take a more combative stance, as did the sculptor Simon Jaillot about whom Anne Betty Weinshenker writes, while still exhibiting a(n) (re)ordering impulse. In the conflicts between these individuals and the groups they sought to influence, we can see the nuances of cultural interaction that construct and reconstruct social orders. The paradox of the heretic’s identity, involving presentation of the self as orthodox and reception by others as unorthodox, is embodied in the figure of ‘‘Junius,’’ the ‘‘orthodox rebel’’ in Linde Katritzky’s essay. Junius, in fact, exemplifies the reordering impulse of heresy. The persona was constructed to indict the government for refusing to recognize the election of John Wilkes because he had once been expelled from Parliament and was therefore deemed ineligible to be returned to the House. According to Junius, the government strayed from the law in this action, for the law gives the people the right to elect their representatives. As Katritzky explains, Junius upheld an orthodox legal standard against unorthodox government practices. He was thus orthodox in doctrine while engaged in the highly unorthodox activity of denouncing his government. Katritzky’s suggestion of Junius’s success, both in interpreting the law and in turning riots into nonviolent protests, further illustrates the malleable nature of heretical identities and positions: history often vindicates the heretics’ view. Though sympathy with heresy is characteristic of current trends toward valorizing whatever had been neglected, moving the marginalized to the center and vice versa, the phenomenon does not merely reflect the operation of revisionism. Rather, it shows how much the accusation of heresy depends on attachment to the order challenged by the accused. The attachment to the ‘‘rightness’’ of the given order generates the protective denunciation of the challenge. When time, or some other factor, has loosened the attachments to the system in question, the denunciation of its challengers ceases to be necessary. Hence, the current generation is more likely to celebrate its ancestors’ heretics—a fact that more than incidentally reveals its own attachment to the illusion of individual agency and fears of institutional power.

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Such an inversion of attitudes toward a figure once scorned for his heterodoxy may be seen in Anne Betty Weinshenker’s sympathetic treatment of Simon Jaillot, a sculptor at odds with the French Academy. Without denying Jaillot’s personal cantankerousness, Weinshenker accounts for his position as ‘‘outcast’’ by examining the bonds within the Acade´mie. There, she finds an order that preferred painters to sculptors, defining the former as intellectual and the latter as manual laborers. Jaillot sought to reorder this relationship. He thus embraced a heretical identity, defying the Acade´mie’s doctrine through both written attack and artistic practice. More like Diderot and Olympe de Gouge (treated below) than Junius, Jaillot sought a reordering along new lines rather than a recovery of a supposedly earlier orientation. For him, the Acade´ mie had always missed the proper ideal. As Weinshenker shows, Jaillot was helped in the construction of his position by his Jansenist inclinations. His assumption of righteousness against the Academie’s error resembles Jansenists’ convictions that their own election is confirmed by persecution. In showing how easily artistic and religious dimensions merge with each other, the case of Jaillot calls attention to another aspect of the topic of heresy that is important to several other papers in this volume: it calls attention to art and literature as crucial grounds for the interactions through which social orders are negotiated. One need not accept the Arnoldian substitution of literature for religion (a nineteenth-century heresy that became an orthodoxy and that is once again a heresy as attachments have shifted) to recognize the cultural functions of words and images. The uses of literature in cultural interactions are treated in Margaret Anne Doody’s ‘‘Gnostic Clarissa,’’23 as well as in essays by Isabelle Cassagne DeMarte on Diderot, Vale´rie van Crugten-Andre´ on libertine novels, and Megan Conway on Olympe de Gouges. Doody identifies a Gnostic ‘‘symbol system’’ within the narrative of Clarissa that complicates the Christian moralizing in the text. By surrounding Clarissa with images of light, Richardson associates her with the Gnostic figure of a heavenly maid who falls from heaven to earth, then rises to return to heaven. Clarissa’s story is the story of this ‘‘alien’’ figure’s struggle to free herself from the earth-bound Harlowes and from Lovelace. The symbol system ‘‘sets up . . . [a] powerful resistance’’ to the linear narrative; it offers a ‘‘cosmic counter-story that fights against translating spiritual light into repressions defined as ‘duty.’ ’’ The simultaneous presence of heretical and orthodox systems in the structure of the novel reflects their simultaneous presence in the structure of society itself, for Doody uncovers the mysticism of Jakob

INTRODUCTION

23

Boehme in both Anglican and Enlightenment thought. The sanctity of society, like the ‘‘moral’’ of Clarissa, emerges from and is repeatedly adjusted by the struggle between competing systems to dominate each other. Competing systems also receive attention in Isabelle Cassagne DeMarte’s essay. DeMarte argues that Diderot’s fiction is more heretical than his philosophical writing because it exposes the ‘‘literariness of religion’’: it shows that the Church’s claims to authority have no more validity than a writer’s, for knowledge develops in and through manipulation of the word. In DeMarte’s view, Diderot accomplishes this challenge to the Church through ‘‘literary transgression,’’ that is, the crossing of generic and conceptual boundaries in his work. She finds this technique especially apparent in Diderot’s appropriation of the ‘‘blue library’’ stories and in his use of erotic content. By inviting readers to see the deliberate creation of meaning through fiction, he also invites them to recognize the fictionality of Scripture: biblical and patristic texts become equivalent to other stories. Diderot’s heresy, then, aims to dismantle the authoritative structure of orthodoxy and to (re)place epistemic responsibility in the larger culture outside the Church. Turning to less subtle literary transgression, Vale´ rie van CrugtenAndre´ examines the challenge to orthodoxy posed by libertine novels. The very existence of such fiction threatens social order, for it treats freely the details of sexual conduct that are usually repressed and regulated. Van Crugten-Andre´ shows, however, that libertine novels do not merely display anarchy; rather, they present highly organized alternative societies. For example, the fictions of the Marquis de Sade and the Chevalier Andreá de Nerciat both present self-contained worlds that operate by their own laws. In these worlds, characters can indulge (and readers can indulge vicariously) in behavior that cannot be practiced elsewhere. Especially in Nerciat, these indulgences have political implications that reflect the changing governments of the era: Nerciat’s society consists exclusively of artistocrats, and hence is a reactionary enclave, yet these figures experiment with sexual egalitarianism. The possibility of vicarious experimentation through fiction suggests one reason for its privileged role in cultural interactions: it offers a means for those attached to orthodox society to consider alternatives without sacrificing their security in more direct experiences. Despite the relative safety of such indirect approaches, literary transgression still poses a threat to orthodoxy, making it possible for people to implement the changes they can imagine. Orthodox society thus responds to threatening books in the same way it responds to threatening individuals: it stig-

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matizes them and thrusts them outside the ‘‘right’’ order. The order is thus protected from desecration by heretical literature or thinkers. Outcast books and figures nevertheless remain potential catalysts for change in future interactions. To some extent, orthodoxy depends on heterodoxy to maintain its normative structure, for in defining what it is not, orthodoxy realizes what it is, at least in a given time and place. The continually negotiated nature of orthodoxy and the role of literature in assisting it come to light through the career of Olympe de Gouges, which Megan Conway addresses. De Gouges—novelist, playwright, pamphleteer—generally worked outside of orthodox society. Her eclectic beliefs, evident in her wishes that the Declaration of the Rights of Man included the rights of women and that Marie Antoinette would crusade on behalf of them, kept her from finding a secure place in either old or new regimes, yet in one instance she did win acceptance within an ascendant order. Her play The Convent or Forced Vows fit the sentimental, republican, and anticlerical orthodoxy of 1790 and thus enjoyed general acclaim. Recognizing in de Gouges’s drama the ideals it sought to enact in the ‘‘real’’ world, orthodox society could bring the playwright into the fold— where she might futher assist the articulation of doctrine for the new order. By 1793, however, de Gouges was again heretical, for her calls to reform the Republic by election threatened the authority of the government of the Terror. De Gouges was guillotined. Her ultimate fate offers an obvious example of how orthodoxy defines itself against heterodoxy, becoming more secure by controlling heretical identities. But her earlier and temporary success is no less significant for an understanding of the interaction between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Perhaps the most paradoxically positioned ‘‘heretic’’ in this volume is John Wesley, whose desire to remain within the Church of England makes him quite literally an ‘‘orthodox Dissenter’’ who would render his own heresy obsolete by recalling the orthodox to more enthusiastic spirituality. Wesley was placed outside of the Church by others, not by himself. His unorthodox identity was constructed either by his orthodox contemporaries in an effort to protect the status quo from his challenge or by his more radical contemporaries in an effort to amass support for their agendas. In short, Wesley became a heretic by association, and he continues to be enlisted as a supporter of causes he did not recognize. This construction of heresy by association is explored by William Stroup in his essay on Wesley and vegetarianism. Distinguishing between ‘‘not eating meat’’ and ‘‘being vegetarian,’’ Stroup points out that Wesley made no ethical commitment to a vegeta-

INTRODUCTION

25

ble diet. Though he did not eat meat, he neither took a stance against doing so nor encouraged his followers to imitate his abstention. His practice seems to have stemmed from ascetic and medical concerns rather than from worries about exploiting animals or appropriating resources. Nevertheless, the coincidence of his practice with that of ethical vegetarians puts him outside of the dominant culture of his time and therefore in the company of transgressors, deviants, and heretics—and even of Gnostics, for Doody associates Richardson’s abstention from meat with a Gnostic other-worldliness to which he was attracted. Stroup’s examination of Wesley’s position illustrates ‘‘how the history of an idea has been constructed.’’ Sharing the desire of heretics to become orthodox, later vegetarians have invented a ‘‘heretical tradition’’ (another oxymoron, like ‘‘orthodox Dissent’’ and ‘‘orthodox rebel’’) in which all abstainers from meat are claimed as forerunners of deliberate vegetarians—irrespective of the earlier abstainers’ motives. In this way, deliberate vegetarians create and sanctify a long-standing alternative order as a support system for themselves and as an example of ‘‘right’’ practice to offer to others. Their opposition to the normative system is thus defined not by individual assertion but by collective precedent, a precedent the orthodox might be enticed to follow because it includes figures, such as Wesley, whose values are in other regards close to the dominant culture’s. Raising the question of whether Wesley could, at his historical time, have thought about meat eating in the ethical and political ways developed in later eras, Stroup encourages us to note the shifting perceptions by which a figure appears heterodox or orthodox along with the functions of using those categories. His work offers a fitting conclusion to a volume of essays on formations of ‘‘right’’ order in the eighteenth century.

NOTES 1. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York and London: Free Press, 1995), p. 1. 2. Ibid., p. 417. 3. Ibid., p. 421. 4. Ibid., pp. 212, 208–16. 5. Ibid., pp. 8–17. 6. Ibid., pp. 27, 447. 7. Ibid., pp. 15, 17. 8. Durkheim had posited his theory about the priority of society over individuals in earlier works, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. W. D. Halls, intro. Steven Lukes (New York: Free Press, 1982), pp. 126–42, and ‘‘The Rules of Sociological Method,’’

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in Durkheim: The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method, trans. W. D. Halls, intro. Steven Lukes (New York: Free Press, 1982), pp. 143–44. 9. Durkheim, Labor, pp. 158–61. 10. Stjepan Mestrovic, Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), pp. 40–50. 11. Donald Nielsen, Three Faces of God: Society, Religion, and the Categories of Totality in the Philosophy of Emile Durkheim (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 185. 12. Nielsen, pp. 33–37, 81, 209. 13. Durkheim, Forms, pp. 209–16. 14. Jeffrey C. Alexander, introduction to Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 1–10. 15. Roger D. Lund, introduction to The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750, ed. Roger D. Lund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 2. 16. Alexander, p. 11. 17. Alexander, pp. 7–8; Lynn Hunt, ‘‘The Sacred and the French Revolution,’’ Eric Rothenbuhler, ‘‘The Liminal Fight: Mass Strikes as Ritual and Interpretation,’’ in Durkheimian Sociology, pp. 25–43, 66–89. 18. Rothenbuhler, p. 70. 19. Ibid., pp. 68–72, 80, 69, 86. 20. Ibid., pp. 69–70. 21. Ibid., pp. 75–86. 22. Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993). 23. Margaret Doody’s ‘‘Gnostic Clarissa’’ was originally presented at the DeBartolo Conference and subsequently published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11, no. 1 (October 1998): pp. 29–78. It is reprinted here by permission.

Where the Wild Things Are: Guides to London’s Transgressive Spaces Carol Houlihan Flynn

IT IS NO WONDER THAT VISITORS FROM THE COUNTRY ARRIVING IN London for the first time captured the eighteenth-century imagination. They had so much to learn, and once taught, so much to teach others. From Margery Pinchwife to Harriet Byron, Moll Hackabout and Moll Flanders, Samuel Johnson and David Garrick, Tom Jones and Partridge, Burney’s Evelina and James Boswell, all arrived eagerly, expectantly, to learn how to walk the urban walk and make their ways through irregular streets and lanes that Fielding suggested appeared to be designed for ‘‘the very purposes of concealment.’’1 I purposely mix here the fictional and the ‘‘real’’ to emphasize the interconnection between the two in the guide tradition. Novels, plays and poetry reinforced the spatial discourse, establishing an urban landscape filled with dependable transgressive spaces, pleasure gardens like Vauxhall Gardens, brothels and bagnios in Covent Garden and Drury Lane, as well as more ambiguous social spaces like Hyde Park and the Temple. Readers of guides and novels learned how to negotiate these social spaces and, in the process, learned how to become urban. This essay will examine the importance of orientation for eighteenthcentury subjects learning how to become, in Evelina’s words, ‘‘Londonized.’’2 First I will look at two early and influential guides of the period: Ned Ward’s London Spy and Addison and Steele’s Mr. Spectator. Their voices (often in opposition) inform guides and novels that constructed the urban subject throughout the century. After discussing these two seminal texts, I will consult those London guides that create throughout the century ‘‘classical’’ sites of pleasure and danger where the visitor expects to be gratified by trouble and temptation. Finally, keeping in mind the ways that gender and class determine what value such transgressive spaces hold, I will turn to Frances Burney and James Boswell. These early moderns represent many figures, actual 27

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and fictional, of the period in their struggles to incorporate conflicting theories of orientation as they negotiate the social spaces of London. The size and complexity of eighteenth-century London made orientation a vital necessity for its inhabitants and its visitors alike. After the London fire of 1666 and the city’s consequent rebuilding, guides to London and Westminster began to fill the need for the uninitiated trying to make space of what would become known as a ‘‘scattered’’ urban space.3 While the rebuilt city space imitated the medieval plan of the narrow, confused lanes, streets and alleys, its citizens also moved westward, creating an urban sprawl that extended into Westminster and eventually out of town. Thus in 1765, Smollett’s Matthew Bramble, speaking for visitors throughout the century, complains that the capital, which has become for him ‘‘literally new,’’ has turned into an ‘‘overgrown monster; which, like a dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support.’’4 His hyperbole denotes the unstable vitality and disorientation that characterized contemporary descriptions of London. ‘‘The great and inexhaustible maw,’’ the ‘‘great wen,’’ the ‘‘Great God Moloch’’ was famous for consuming its children and relying upon migrants from the country to feed its insatiable appetite for working bodies.5 Newcomers, often in their twenties, not only renewed the population, they also produced a need for instruction in becoming urban, in learning how to negotiate the social and cultural spaces of the city itself. Their goal was one of orientation, of finding a way to locate themselves on a civic and cultural grid. Maps provided a certain degree of orientation, although they were not included in traditional guidebooks to the city until 1756. Individual directories like A new review of London (1722) would provide lists of streets, rates of foreign and domestic letters, lists of stage coaches, wagons, and inns to guide travelers to their destinations.6 But even then, the layouts of ‘‘the City’’ and Westminster would be confusing to the devoted student of map and directory. Few streets were marked with signposts, and houses and shops weren’t numbered until the 1770’s. Location rather depended upon the aid of shop signs that often served as a sort of address. Lodgings might be found three doors down from the sign of ‘‘The Lamb and the Inkbottle’’ or close to the sign of ‘‘The China Jar, in Cannon Street, near Brace-church Street.’’ Of course to arrive at that particular spot, the traveler, working hard to ‘‘keep to the wall’’ to avoid being splattered by passing coaches and wagons, would need to cross many unmarked streets badly paved.7 There were greater dangers for the visitor, however, than muddy streets. Guides to London repeatedly warn against the murky moral

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

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dangers of a social space that threatens never to become civil. The guides that I am most interested in discussing actually constitute a subgenre of guidebooks dedicated to exposing ‘‘tricks of the town.’’ Rather than providing the visitor with a list of sights to be seen and routes to be taken, their lively, often dramatic narratives instruct their readers how to avoid being cheated and fleeced and harmed when they venture into town. Their London is a wilderness, a ‘‘grand Reservoir, or commonSewer of the World,’’8 filled with forbidden pleasures and dangers, a maze of marvelous confusion, which must be tracked and known. It is for this reason that so many of the ‘‘Guides’’ call themselves ‘‘Spies.’’ The spy’s main function is to scout ahead, investigate the dangers in wait, and report back to the homebound reader the lay of the land, the tricks laid bare. Without such aid, the unwary traveler asking for directions reveals an innocence that can be quickly exploited. Town sharpers might ensnare their culls into a game of chance, a liaison with a poxed prostitute, a chance to recover ‘‘found money’’ or false coins. The risk is even greater for the woman visitor vulnerable to more dangerous advice. Hogarth’s Moll Hackabout, fresh from the York stagecoach being met by Mother Needham, illustrates perils that lie in wait for the young woman looking for direction, perils reinforced by Richardson’s Familiar Letters (1741), and tracts by Sir John Fielding and Jonas Hanway.9 Seemingly, the spy provides a public service, providing inventories of tricks and frauds that will warn, and therefore protect, his reader. In the process, however, he also constructs a dramatic and compelling urban landscape even more attractive because of its dangers. Sometimes it seems as if the guides actually invite imaginary deviations from discipline and order. The ‘‘Country Spy’’ (1750) explains that he writes ‘‘to entertain [countrymen] during the long and tedious Winter Nights, and to caution them against their being ensnared in the Traps that are artfully laid to catch the Unwary.’’10 The spy’s use of the word entertain promises a state of titillation as well as a state of vigilance. Instructed and delighted, the reader might find a way to travel without taking the risk of leaving home, safely imagining an urban adventure which becomes all the more concrete as the readership indulging in this fantasy grows. But another less domesticated reader might take to the road in search of the ‘‘real’’ experience promised in the narrative. In either case, both readers would be sharing assumptions about urban spaces, assumptions that depend upon a large number of readers consuming narratives which revisit, often word for word, step by step, the same eroticized sites. *

*

*

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The conflict implicit in the interpretations of the streets themselves, whether or not they are dangerous or delightful, whether in fact their dangers produce their delights, can be found in the dueling refrains of Ward’s ‘‘London Spy’’ and Addison’s and Steele’s ‘‘Mr. Spectator.’’ The transgressive Ned Ward, writing his London Spy11 in eighteen monthly segments from 1698 until 1700, speaks for a freedom of the streets that was being checked even as he was exploring the dark side of his London landscape. His narrator exudes a confidence in urban disorder, an anarchic distrust of reform, and a Rabelasian delight in the most visceral bodily matters. This scatological glory is contested by a second, ultimately more influential figure, one who came to define bourgeois behavior for much of the century to come. Mr. Spectator teaches early moderns their need to protect themselves from the ‘‘shocks’’ of urban experience. By abstracting himself from the matter at hand to become a disembodied surveyor, he speaks for careful control of the outside, the streets and public meeting places, and for equally thorough regulation of the body.12 These guides are politically and culturally at odds from the start. At the time of the Spectator papers, 1711–12, Addison and Steele identified themselves as Whig opponents of the Tory government, while Ward, in 1698–1700, when he wrote The London Spy, defined himself as a High Church Tory in opposition to the Whig government then in power. Their opposition characterizes London guides for the rest of the eighteenth century. Ward’s Tory anarchy, manifested in his strong distrust of governmental regulation, strongly resists the self-improving, progressive faith that Whiggish Mr. Spectator invests in order and surveillance. While Ward’s Spy delights in discovering those transgressive spaces, where wild things threaten and titillate, Mr. Spectator insists upon a different sort of knowledge, an armed, even alarmed awareness of these same locations in order to promote wariness, caution, and upright behavior in his readers. Ward advertises his intention to take ‘‘a complete survey of the most remarkable places as well as the common vanities and follies of mankind (both day and night)’’ (p. 9). His readership includes both ‘‘Town gentlemen’’ and ‘‘sober country friends,’’ both constituencies in need, apparently, of protection from ‘‘snares and practised subtleties,’’ which he promises to expose. In the act of exposing, however, he diverts his readers all the more with tantalizing descriptions of dangers that usually prove exciting, stimulating, and unusually benign. The Spy’s confidence in facing and even enjoying ‘‘the vanities and vices of the town’’ (pp. 10–11) and his insistence that regulatory schemes are more dan-


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gerous than the vices themselves demonstrates Ward’s strong resistance to prevailing movements for reform and social control. In 1689 William III had ordered the Bishops to preach against swearing and the keeping of mistresses, in 1692 the Society for the Reformation of Manners formed under the patronage of the queen, while in 1700 the Lord Mayor and Aldermen attempted to close down Bartholomew Fair and successfully shut down May Fair in 1708, both places which the Spy visits and enjoys.13 What emerges from his narration is a positive celebration of ‘‘the dark mysteries of iniquity in so corrupt an age’’ and an intensely material pleasure in the streets themselves. We can see this immediately in his description of London’s nighttime streets. It is nine p.m. in the streets of London, marked by the ‘‘joyful alarm of Bow Bell’’: The streets were all adorned with dazzling lights whose bright reflections so glittered in my eyes that I could see nothing but themselves. Thus I walked amazed, like a wandering soul in its pilgrimage to Heaven when it passes through the spangled regions. My ears were so serenaded on every side with the grave music of sundry passing-bells, the rattling of coaches, and the melancholy ditties of ‘Hot Baked Wardens and Pippins!’ that had I as many eyes as Argos and as many ears as Fame, they would have been all confounded, for nothing could I see but light, and nothing hear but noise. (p. 29)

Ward’s delight in the sensory overload (‘‘some odoriferous civet-box perfumed the air and saluted our nostrils with so refreshing a nosegay’’) never ends. No sight, sound, noise, or smell is too strong for his constitution; rather he seeks out the stimulation that they provide. Indeed, he finds contentment in the most squalid of circumstances. A bizarre night’s entertainment involves two drunken seamen hanging one ‘‘little crooked fiddler . . . by the hind slit of his breeches’’ onto a hook driven into the mantel. ‘‘Being sorely affrighted at this unexpected elevation, he shot that into his trousers which made the crooked vermin out-stink a polecat . . . dripping his guts upon the hearth like a roasting woodcock.’’ Had the company ‘‘seen a bailiff bogged or a fellow break his neck at football, it could not have been a greater jest to the spectators’’ (p. 42). The pleasures of the night ‘‘were so engaging, and every various humour such a wakeful piece of drollery’’ (p. 44), that he could barely think of rest. The next night, finding himself in the Poultry Compter, where he is imprisoned for violating the curfew, the Spy is equally at home in a structure described as both an ‘‘enchanted castle’’

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and ‘‘the poor man’s purgatory’’ (p. 68). Filled with the ‘‘unwholesome fumes’’ and promiscuous noises of beshitten combatants who take pleasure in emptying out the contents of the excretion tub onto each others’ heads, the Compter seems to be a fluid, grotesque, unfinished space, both transgressive and fiercely free. Passing away ‘‘the dull hours of confinement till the morning’’ with ‘‘observations,’’ the Spy himself remains unscathed, moved to describe his companions as a ‘‘family’’ at peace in its confinement. The jarring serenity of their rest is almost hypnotizing in its attention to the animal pleasures of these ‘‘tender mortals’’ at rest: Now the whole family were grown as silent as so many hogs when their bellies are full, nothing being heard but snoring, except now and then a crack from the stretching of a louse’s skin, or an ungrateful sound from the untuneable drone of a filthy bagpipe, which is never heard but by the assistance of a stinking breath . . . I observed men lay piled in cabins one upon another, like coffins in a burying vault . . . other poor curs . . . were lain upon benches . . . others coiled underneath like dogs . . . some lay round the fire, almost covered with ashes, like potatoes roasting . . . another was crept into a corner and had whelmed his head over the ash tub . . . to defend his head from the coldness of the weather. (pp. 70–71)

Ward’s acceptance of such circumstances provides his narrative with the confidence it needs to move through such experiences unscathed while offering a model of invulnerability that the other guides will follow. In spite of their perfunctory railings against dangers in the street, the guides usually ensure that naive visitors to London, even when they are pick-pocketed and bamboozled, will emerge from their experiences relatively innocent, almost invigorated by their delightfully narrow escapes. Thus, even when offended by the ‘‘sour breaths of corrupt carcases and turpentine belches’’of Bartholomew Fair, the Spy decides to stay to endure the ‘‘intolerable nosegay’’ rather than ‘‘quit the place, which we were unwilling to do till we had made a more nice inspection into the pomps and vanities of this wicked world’’ (p. 203). This desire to look deeper into the wickedness, regardless of the stench, keeps Ward’s Spy at his work. Only civil authority sticks in his craw. The sights in the street which offend his sensibilities are Reforming Constables, and the Waits. The most frightening sight in all of London is that noble edifice which brings tears of joy to Mr. Spectator’s eyes14—the Royal Exchange, where he is ‘‘jostled amongst a parcel of swarthy buggerantoes . . . who would ogle a handsome young man with as much lust as a true-bred English


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whore master would gaze upon a beautiful virgin.’’ Ward’s delight in mixture completely deserts him here; he appears to be assaulted by ‘‘bum-firking Italians’’ and Dutch ‘‘strait-laced monsters . . . confusedly jumbled among people of sundry nations’’ who threaten him with their difference (pp. 58–59). This strange mixture of commercial signifiers denotes the circulation of a market economy driven by Whiggish Stock Jobbers whose whole ‘‘business is tricking’’ (p. 298). The Royal Exchange houses a system both powerful and abstract, one that exists apart from the physical phenomena that the London Spy understands. His homophobic fears of being ogled and penetrated by monstrous, effeminate, swarthy buggerantoes suggests his feeling of vulnerability in the one public arena that fills Mr. Spectator with power. While the Spectator works to protect himself from the shocks of the very material experience that so delights the London Spy, he feels right at home in a commercial world of money, which Ward calls ‘‘dirt’’ and exchange. *

*

*

Mr. Spectator is the creation of two distinctly different figures. Addison, poet, critic, would-be politician, was known for his theoretical brilliance and his taciturn ambitions. He had worked with the mercurial, sometimes feckless (he was frequently in debt) Steele on The Tatler in 1711. While both writers valued the opportunity to achieve fame and influence—Mr. Spectator reckons that sixty thousand people read him every day since at least twenty Londoners will share the three thousand sheets in circulation—Addison appears to have been the most interested in producing through their writing his model of the ‘‘new’’ Whiggish Englishman of the middling sort who is sober, modest, a gentlemanly practitioner of commerce, one who knows some Milton and a little bit of Latin (enough to read the tags). This paragon will have a wife or daughter who will be commensurably modest, who will drink tea, read Mr. Spectator’s essays on Milton, and stay away from masquerades. In his benevolent surveillance, Mr. Spectator considers himself no less than one of the proto-Foucauldian ‘‘swarm’’ of surveying spirits. We have, he tells us, ‘‘Multitudes of Spectators on all our Actions, when we think our selves most alone: But instead of terrifying my self with such a Notion, I am wonderfully pleased to think that I am always engaged with such an innumerable Society in searching out the Wonders of the Creation’’ (no. 12, 1, p. 54). As an invisible agent of the creator, he also searches out offensive behaviors and materials the better to transform them. The ‘‘Correction of Impudence’’ is dear to his heart, particularly the Offence committed by the Eyes by Starers, those ‘‘Out-

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law[s] in Good Breeding’’ (no. 20, 1, pp. 85–86). Equally important is a thorough regulation of the body, tempered by regimens of exercise and diet (no. 115, 1, 471–474 and no. 195, 2, pp. 263–67). Mr. Spectator’s ultimate project is protection from the irregular, the discordant, and the intrusive. This is why the streets themselves must be cleared of monstrous sights and sounds. While the London Spy marveled at the noise and brightness of the streets, the Spectator is threatened by anything untoward in the way and so sensitive to the perils of mixture that even Westminster Abbey offends him with its ‘‘Multitudes of People lay[ing] confus’d together . . . undistinguished in the same promiscuous Heap of Matter’’ (no. 26, 1, pp. 109–110). Mr. Spectator publishes the request of a ‘‘Projector’’ to be made superintendent of the signposts of London ‘‘with full Powers to rectify or expunge whatever I shall find irregular or defective’’ (no. 28, 1, p. 116). Another inventor aims to be ‘‘Comptroller general of the London Cries, which are at present under no manner of Rules of Discipline.’’ Like the Signmaster General, he is most distressed by the disorder of the cries ‘‘so full of Incongruities and Barbarisms that we appear a distracted City, to Foreigners, who do not comprehend the Meaning of such Enormous Outcries’’ (no. 251, 2, p. 475). These projects are the inventions of cranks and projectors with names like Ralph Crotchett, but they express nonetheless a more profound and serious intention to reform and regularize that dominates the Spectator’s most whimsical moments and his most serious considerations of what it is to be part of a confused heap of mortality. This rage for order can be seen most clearly in the three letters (nos. 324, 332, 347) that describe the exploits of the Mohocks. These nighttime thugs were distinguished for ‘‘various kinds of Barbarities . . . tipping the Lion . . . by squeezing the Nose flat to the face, and boring out the Eyes with their Fingers.’’ Others, called ‘‘Dancing masters . . . teach their Scholars to cut Capers by running Swords thro’ their Legs,’’ while ‘‘Tumblers . . . set Women upon their Heads, and commit . . . Barbarities, on the Limbs which they expose’’ (no. 324, 3, pp. 187–88). At first, these hooligans seem to be the natural enemy of Mr. Spectator so concerned with public order, but it happens that they enforce a greater order, for their nightly patrols keep the streets clear of fornicators. Jack Lightfoot reports that while going along Fleet street, ‘‘ just enter’d into Discourse with a wandering Female who was travelling the same Way,’’ he was attacked by a gang of ‘‘Sweaters,’’ Mohocks who prick and smack their victims with swords until they break out into a sweat. After describing the ‘‘discipline,’’ Lightfoot curiously, in a postscript, dis-


35

cusses the problems that he had finding the correct way to spell Bagnio, a word he uses in describing the Sweating discipline. To find the word, Mr. Lightfoot needed to visit both the Bagnio in Newgate Street and in Chancery Lane, where he found it correctly spelled on their signposts (no. 332, 3, pp. 224–25). Because Bagnios and Hummums were notorious locales for sexual encounters as well as steaming and sweating and bathing and rubbing, this postscript is curiously provocative, almost sending the reader off the streets (all to the public good) and into the sanctioned illicit space of the public baths. The disciplinary nature of the Mohocks becomes most clear in the manifesto of the Emperor of the Mohocks. He promises that Mohocks never knock a man down ‘‘while he is employed in his lawful Business at proper Hours.’’ He even provides a timetable of the street disciplines. Mohocks never sally forth ‘‘till between the Hours of Eleven and Twelve’’ (after curfew), never Tip the Lion ‘‘till the Clock at St. Dunstans shall have struck One,’’ while the Sweat is ‘‘never given but between the Hours of One and Two.’’ Tumblers ‘‘confine the themselves to Drury-lane and the purlieus of the Temple’’ (places famous for nightwalking women). We have, he announces ‘‘nothing more at our Imperial Heart than the Reformation of the Cities of London and Westminster. Men must ‘‘repair themselves to their respective Habitations at early . . . Hours, but also . . . keep their Wives and Daughters, Sons, Servants and Apprentices from appearing in the Streets at those Times’’ (no. 347, 3, pp. 284–95). He is writing, it might seem, a guide to the streets to be avoided—or is it a guide to transgressive streets to discover? One thing that Mr. Spectator seeks out is the sight of a woman working. In his study of the tourist and the origins of alienated leisure, Dean MacCannell notes that the tourist frequently seeks out the site of work being performed, transforming work, through the gaze, into a sort of voyeuristic play for the gazer.15 We can see this in most of our guides, who inevitably seek out the cries of London, the site of the Royal Exchange, the richly profane haunts of the watermen shouting out their Billingsgate. Mr. Spectator is never happier than when he is in the presence of the shop women working in the stalls around the Royal Exchange, uniting in their presence the joys of the Exchange itself with their own considerable charms. Steele describes their ‘‘pretty Hands busy in the Foldings of Ribbands, and the utmost Eagerness of agreeable Faces in the Sale of Patches, Pins, and Wires on each Side.’’ When they ask him what he wants, he cannot answer what he is thinking, ‘‘only To look at you,’’ and gives himself over instead to the pleasure he

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absorbs from the labor and desire rising from the floor of the temple of commerce. ‘‘I went to one of the Windows which opened to the Area below, where all the several Voices lost their Distinction, and rose up in a confused Humming’’ (no. 454, 4, p. 102). We will leave Mr. Spectator here, blurring the distinctions between proscribed behaviors (isn’t he an ogler here, a starer?) and his own desires, and look for the ways that guides across the century mix the monitory habits of Mr. Spectator with the celebratory titillation of the London Spy. *

*

*

The world that the guides create is one of timeless temptation relegated to dependable, controlled spaces. In spite of the great difference in London over the century between The Country Gentleman’s Vademecum (1699) and a Fortnight’s Ramble through London (1795), the guides create and recreate a surprisingly stable urban landscape, one whose classified topography establishes ‘‘classical’’ places of pleasure and danger that would be as familiar to Ward’s London Spy of 1700 as it would be to Richard King’s Complete Modern London Spy in 1781.16 Early on, sites become places where the visitor expects to be gratified by trouble. In 1698 Ned Ward’s Spy is already so prepared to be assaulted by the Billingsgate language along the riverside that he mishears ‘‘a parcel of fellows’’ who appear to be running upon him ‘‘in a great fury, crying out, as I thought, ‘Scholars, scholars, will you have any whores?’ ’’ The Spy cries out that ‘‘we wanted no whores, nor would we have any,’’ but is embarrassed by his friend’s hearty laughter at his mistake. He ‘‘undeceived my ignorance, telling me they were watermen who distinguished themselves by the titles of ‘Oars’ and ‘Scullers,’ which made me blush at my error, like a bashful lady that has dropped her garter, or a modest man who cripples his jest by a forgetful hesitation’’ (pp. 45–46). As Ward’s similes suggest, his embarrassment stems from a vulnerable self-consciousness formed by urban myths which have prepared him to be insulted. This much anticipated onslaught upon the senses that visitors to London expect from watermen, seems just as powerful some eighty years later when Samuel Johnson, tutored for the exchange by Mr. Spectator, triumphs in Billingsgate. Boswell reports: It is well known that there was formerly a rude custom for those who were sailing upon the Thames, to accost each other as they passed, in the most abusive language they could invent, generally, however, with as much satirical humor as they were capable of producing. Addison gives an example of this in Number 383 of The Spectator, when Sir Roger de Coverly and he are


37

going to Spring-garden. Johnson was once eminently successful in this species of contest; a fellow having attacked him with some coarse raillery, Johnson answered them thus, ‘‘Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy-house, is a receiver of stolen goods.’’ 17

‘‘Trips through Town’’ and ‘‘Country Gentlemens’ Vade Mecums’’ describe with stunning repetitiveness the virtues and vices of eighteenth-century London. They are more often than not written by ‘‘anon’’ and usually have titles like: The Midnight Spy, The Night Walker, The Tricks of the Town, or New Tricks of the Town laid bare, New Cheats Exposed, The Art of Living in London, The London Spy, the New London Spy, The Frauds of London Detected, the New London Spy’s Second Trip Through Town. Their very titles unpack their levels of indebtedness to previous works; thus The Cheats of London Exposed, or, the Tricks of the Town laid open to both Sexes: being a clear discovery of all the various frauds and villains that are daily practiced in that great city, by the author of the New London Spy18 creates in the reader’s mind a virtual library of previous works to consult. They not only repeat each others’ insights and revisit their predecessors’ haunts, but create in the process a grid of the streets and alleys of London that direct their readers to discover the ‘‘tricks’’ and delights of the town which they must simultaneously forswear. Fulsome description, supported by names and street locations, time of day, and price range characterizes all of the guides. ‘‘A German Gentleman,’’ another ‘‘Town Spy,’’ locates his reader in 1725 on the borders of the Parish of St. Giles’s in the Fields, at ‘‘that ancient and venerable Spot, the Hundred of Drury,’’ where there ‘‘are reckon’d to be one Hundred and seven Pleasure-Houses, within and about the Settlement, the Ladies whereof ply the Passengers at Noon-day,’’ while he reports that around St. Paul’s in Covent Garden, ‘‘Gamesters . . . patrol the Piazza, for about three Hours generally in an afternoon.’’19 The German Gentleman enumerates indicted pleasures parish by parish. In St. Dunstans in the West, ‘‘pretty Gentlemen . . . retained for the Use and behalf of too many Gentlemen’’ can be found near Redlyon-street (p. 29), while Ram Alley,20 ‘‘one of the Temple Avenues[,] . . . is the Night Scene of a good deal of obscure Gallantry . . . a Market where Half-pence pass in current Payment, and Abundance of dirty Love is hung out to sale ready made . . . at reasonable Rates’’ (p. 27). Lombard Street, Change Alley, and many of the shops around the Stock Market become notable ‘‘Resorts of Virginity Brokers,’’ where one Mrs. Lately of Change Alley is ‘‘said to have sold her Virginity nineteen times’’ (p. 29). Such guides invariably locate forbidden pleasures—Drury Lane, St.

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Paul’s, Covent Garden, Ram Alley, describe the proscribed pleasure— gambling, prostitution, ‘‘dirty love,’’ approximate the hours of operation—‘‘about three hours in the afternoon’’—and even suggest ‘‘reasonable rates’’ for services rendered. The guides quite often borrow generously from each other. Thus the German Gentleman’s description of Ram Alley in 1725 is duplicated word for word in A Trip through London,21 a text which appears in at least eight editions between 1725 and 1740. Sometimes whole chapters will be borrowed and recycled, and in the process the oft-cited warnings about Drury Lane, the Strand, and alleys leading into and out of Covent Garden reinforce the visitor’s expectations about exactly what dangers await on exactly what corners. They construct a grid of pleasure, primarily sexual, one reinforced by poets and novelists like Swift and Pope, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson and Defoe, Edgeworth and Burney, one illustrated by Hogarth and Rowlandson, that becomes persuasive in its graphic repetition. * * * Henri LeFebvre considers the strange effect that urban space has upon desire: For one thing, it unleashes desire. It presents desire with a ‘‘transparency’’ which encourages it to surge forth in the attempt to lay claim to an apparently clear field. Of course this foray comes to naught, for desire encounters no objects, nothing desirable, and no work results from its action. Searching in vain for plenitude, desire must make do with words, with the rhetoric of desire. Disillusion leaves space empty—an emptiness that words convey. Spaces are devastated—and devastating, incomprehensibly so. ‘‘Nothing is allowed. Nothing is forbidden,’’ in the words of one inhabitant. Spaces are strange: homogeneous, rationalized, and as such constraining, yet at the same time, utterly dislocated.22

LeFebvre provokes us to read guides to London as rhetorical constructions that create an ‘‘empty plenitude of social space.’’ Searching for objects of desire, the visitor to London, or the reader of guidebooks safe at home, must make do with words rather than things, finding in the enumerated sites of pleasure a record of encounters that can happen at least in the imagination. Gender differentiates the process, determining whether one is learning the lists of prostitutes or the lists of rules of punctilio, whether one wanders the streets in search of adventures or learns the streets to avoid lest one be taken for an object of pleasure. The work of the guides becomes the product of a cultural imagination formed by a classification system that drives individual action. The guides depend upon the culture’s newly aroused appetite for the


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circulation of news and information. The early modern urban subject was coming to depend upon networks providing access to fresh supplies of intelligence. Such networks could be utopian in nature, like Henry Fielding’s scheme for a Public Office of Intelligence23 linking up master with servant, writer with bookseller, governess with situation, but more likely, the intelligence being exchanged eroticized the urban landscape. Women, we learn again and again, can be found for sale in Drury Lane, on the Strand, all over the Bagnios and Humums of Covent Garden, for half a crown, for half a guinea, until one a.m. every morning. And they can also be found, as Mr. Spectator noted, displaying their pretty hands as they serve gentlemen in the coffeehouses and sell their wares at the New Exchange and the Royal Exchange. By placing women in the street, behind stalls, but always in public view, the guides emphasize the vulnerability of women in the public spaces but also in the private sectors, where professionally private women wait at home for men to call. In A Second part of a View of London and Westminster, ‘‘the town spy,’’ exposing ‘‘the several vices, follies, and impertinencies of the inhabitants,’’ supplies the reader with a twentypage ‘‘Account of the Present State of fashionable Fornication.’’ Women are catalogued according to their streets and their keepers: CONDUIT STREET 3 Miss Leather Miss Depth

By D. What d’ye call him By a General Officer

Miss Gallop; this Lady has been no Truant in the Loss of her time, having been seduced at Fourteen, and had Issue three Children before Seventeen

By a Scotch Nobleman

NEW BOND STREET 3 Miss Fanny Fire From Exeter-Exchange

By Sir Francis Fumble, Bar.

Miss Nimble, formerly A Servant-maid

By a Merchant, at an annual Stipend Of 2001.

Miss Julep; at first seduc’d by a Noble man, at the Instigation of the infamous Mother Needham24

By a noted Physician

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Like so many of the interdicted pleasures made famous by the guides, these lists seem to be designed with two contradictory purposes. Ostensibly exposing the keepers and vilifying the kept women, they also invite the reader to partake, street by street, in the ‘‘fashionable fornication’’ that the London Spy is attacking. Lists of whores and jilts with somewhat clearer intentions were published throughout the eighteenth century. From 1746 until his death in 1766, Jack Harris, a waiter at Shakespeare’s Head Tavern, published Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies or New Atalantis, a text so popular that eight thousand copies were published annually for subscribers. After 1766 it was continued by various hacks until the end of the century. Harris’s List, which sold for half-a-crown in hard cover, advertised the names and addresses and descriptions of one hundred prostitutes in alphabetical order. Here are two entries from 1764: Miss Bird alias Johnson. Brydges St, Covent Garden. A tall thin genteel girl agreeable in her manners . . . seen every night at the Ben Jonsons Head. She has a northern brogue and is too often in a state of intoxication. Poll Talbot, Bow Street, Covent Garden. A fair comely Dame who by long intercourse . . . has learnt that the profession of a Purveyor is more profitable than that of a private Trader, and for that reason has opened a House for the amusement of genteel Company where Gentlemen and Ladies will meet with a Civil Reception. She loves the smack of the Whip sometimes.25

There seems to be little difference between the celebrated charms of Miss Fanny Fire of New Bond Street and the intoxicated talents of Miss Bird alias Johnson. Both women are classified and fixed upon a cultural map of dangerous pleasures. It is the act of locating them and bringing them into the readers’ imagination that blurs the differences of intentions of the lists themselves. Peter Wagner, arguing that the catalogues were possibly sold as ‘‘erotica’’ rather than guidebooks, cites a commentator perusing a 1758 catalogue of prostitutes: He pulled out a LIST containing the Names of near FOUR HUNDRED, alphabetically ranged with an exact Account of their Persons, Age, Qualifications, and Places of Abode. To me . . . this List was more entertaining than the real Object of its Description, and I perused it with great Attention.26

The number, ‘‘four hundred alphabetically,’’ pushes the encounter altogether into the obsessively organized realm of fantasy, while the lists themselves provide the underpinning of a fantasy life that creates a the-


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atrical, feverish urbanity. Horace Walpole, for one, preserved copies of Harris’s List in his library long after they could have ever been considered useful. They provided, perhaps, a social space for erotic and transgressive meditation, a place where sexuality is always renewed, never in decline. Even as the guides warn against the debilitating effects of vice, their repeated warnings revisit bagnios and hummums by the hundreds in Drury and in the lanes and alleys around Covent Garden that keep alive in a timeless fashion fresh constructions of transgressive, urban knowledge. Gender differentiates the process, whether one learns lists of prostitutes or lists of rules of punctilios, whether one wanders the streets in search of adventures, or learns the streets to stay out of, lest one be mistaken for an object of pleasure. The guides are ostensibly written for gentlemen from the country. Women from the country scarcely exist in this discourse, unless they are Moll Hackabouts coming from the country to be debauched for the convenience of gentlemen following them on the next stagecoach. Interestingly, by the end of the century, the ‘‘harlot’s progress’’ shows signs of wear. In A Fortnight’s Ramble (p. 175), a suspiciously kind matron presses the young country girl Nancy, ‘‘quite a stranger in thie wicked town,’’ to go into service, but she is immediately exposed as a ‘‘hog in hypocrisy,’’ who keeps a ‘‘wine hotel’’ in H- Row near St. Martins, is well known about Covent Garden, and has even been represented on the stage at the Haymarket theater in the character of old Mother Cole, the methodistical procuress (pp. 13–14). The Rambler also notes in passing that he walked by the window of Lord Baltimore, windows of the very room where Miss Woodward27 was ‘‘several days confined’’ and raped by that nobleman. Carefully mapping the sexual danger spots, the narrator seems to be offering some possibilities to resist the age-old seduction plot, but in the process the transgressive spaces—the ‘‘wine hotel’’ in H- Row and Lord Baltimore’s second-story drawing room—remain places for the young lady to fear. When transgressive spaces are automatically eroticized, resistance takes effort. In The Country Spy (1750), a gentlewoman on a trip to Southwark is attacked by a waterman in Billingsgate, that language that impugns its target just because she does understand what is being said. This particular gentlewoman, however, tries to silence her attacker by ‘‘turning her own cannon on him’’ and unleashing her own store of low retorts. The waterman responds by exposing his private parts to the lady while shouting ‘‘To her, Towser, To her Towser.’’ She in turn ‘‘unveil[s] the most tempting Part’’ as she replies, ‘‘Shake him Shocky,

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Shake him Shocky.’’ At this point, the woman, ‘‘touched to the Quick by having transgressed the Laws of Decency, fell into a Swoon’’(p. 21). The swoon suggests that the price of bawdy resistance may be too high even for the boldest gentlewoman. Better perhaps, to stay on the shore protected from the tempting assaults of water language. It is this need for safety that at least partially silences women like Frances Burney, women looking for a way to resist. *

*

*

The difference in the power both to transgress and to resist can be seen in the actions of two early modern subjects, James Boswell, age twenty-two (in the year 1763, the year of his first London Journal),28 and Frances Burney’s Evelina, age seventeen (written by Burney, age twenty-six in the year 1778). Their minute observations allow us to chart their movements as they negotiate the social spaces of London, Vauxhall, Ranelagh and Covent Garden, Haymarket, High Holborn, and Snow Hill. In their fresh, enthusiastic entrance onto the urban scene, full of the contradictory instructions of both Ward’s Spy and Mr. Spectator, they represent the many ‘‘real’’ and fictional figures that arrive in the city anxious to know London, but equally determined to retain sovereignty and independence. Boswell and Evelina arrive ripe for assimilation, eager to be, as Evelina puts it, ‘‘Londonized,’’ ready to lose Scottish accents and country customs. Their experiences remind us how hard it is to become urban without losing a certain innocence and authenticity. Boswell, learning how to speak ‘‘English,’’ keeps himself apart from his Scottish friends the better to retain ‘‘London ideas.’’ Evelina also seeks urbanity by learning the rules that will gain her acceptance in the remarkably impolite circles of high society. In the process, she threatens to become somewhat of a snob, positively ‘‘Uppish,’’ as she barricades herself against the uncouth vitality of her ‘‘city’’ relations, the raucous Branghtons. While the London streets exalt Boswell’s imagination, providing a theatrical backdrop for his impersonations of Macheath and Captain Plume, and even Mr. Spectator, they depresses Evelina’s, producing within her a self-conscious awareness of her public abjection and objectification. Evelina will begin her London adventures filled with the terrors of a punctilio that is constructed upon the perpetual idea of surveillance, as well as the realization that as a woman, she is seen as a lovely commodity on the market, on somebody’s list of ladies. Oppressed by the eyes of starers, she particularly suffers from the panoptical gaze of her hero and eventual husband, Orville. The ‘‘eyes of


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Orville’’ oversee her every move, watching her repeatedly mortify herself in public spaces like Ranelagh and Marybone Gardens. *

*

*

Even as he fetishizes his points of entry and exit into the city he loves, Boswell looks to London’s public spaces for pleasures as varied as fireworks in the pleasure gardens and public executions at Tyburn. On the twelfth day of Christmas, with nobody to visit, Boswell takes ‘‘a whim that between St. Paul’s and the Exchange and back again, taking the different sides of the street, I would eat a penny Twelfth-cake at every shop where I could get it’’ (p. 26). He takes another whim to ‘‘go through all the churches and chapels in London, taking one each Sunday’’ (p. 107); more substantially, he resolves to ‘‘have a variety of dining places . . . by degrees’’ (p. 222). The hungry connoisseur of flesh needs to seek out hidden, abject spaces for more private celebrations. Boswell makes his journal a personal guide to London’s sexual sites, dark spaces in the park, the hidden alleys, and the noble edifice of Westminster Bridge. Not even in London a week, he sets out on a pilgrimage to the street signifying his first love: I next went and called in Southampton Street, Strand, for Miss Sally Forrester . . . who lived at the Blue Periwig. I found that the people of the house were broke and dead and could hear nothing of her. I also called for Miss Jenny Wells in Barrack Street, Soho, but found that she was fled, they knew not whither, and had been ruined with extravagance. Good heaven, thought I, what an amazing change in two years! I saw in the year 1760 these young ladies all in the glow of beauty and admiration; and now they are utterly erased or worse. (pp. 46–47)

The elegiac tone of Boswell’s visit—made, it would seem, to the street itself rather than the person—suggests he expected and enjoyed the loss of loved objects ‘‘utterly erased or worse.’’ He employs Sally Forrester, as if she were on Harris’s List the following spring when he ‘‘marches’’ Dr. Blair down Southampton Street in the Strand ‘‘from the whimsical idea of passing under the windows of my first London lady of the town with an Edinburgh minister whom I had so often heard preach in the New church’’ (p. 236). When Boswell returns to Southampton Street, he searches for the ‘‘idea’’ of a connection that removes him from the commercial exchange dominating his typical sexual encounters. Sensitive to the range of options, ‘‘from the splendid Madam at fifty guineas a night, down to the

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civil nymph with white-thread stockings who tramps along the Strand and will resign her engaging person to your honour for a pint of wine and a shilling,’’ (p. 83) he sets out to win ‘‘free’’ and ‘‘safe’’ sex from the actress Louisa. To woo her, he employs the streets of London to provide dramatic settings for his elaborate ‘‘trip’’ into London to spend a clandestine night of passion at the Black Lion in Water Lane. Boswell produces a scripted, fully stocked social space that depends upon his knowledge of tourism, urban modishness, and the commodification of desire. This space seems to become even larger and denser the next morning, when he walks out to patrol ‘‘up and down Fleet Street, thinking on London, the seat of Parliament and the seat of pleasure, and seeming to myself as one of the wits in King Charles the Second’s time,’’ and later Farquhar’s Captain Plume (pp. 136–140). His identification with historical and fictional figures who have preceded him on the street continues into the next week, when on his way to Child’s (scene of his repetitive imitations of Addison’s Mr. Spectator), as he passes the Black Lion, he ‘‘superstitiously’’ takes off his hat and bows (p. 144). Moving through an elaborate maze of social spaces, Boswell always manages to return to Child’s Coffee House, seat of Addisonian gentlemanlike respectability. At his most transgressive, he looks for a way to reenter the bourgeois world. In fact, he can only enjoy his abject experiences when they can be seen through. Even as he plays at being a ‘‘Blackguard’’ on the King’s birthnight, drinking carousing, rogering, he is ‘‘gratified . . . that . . . I was always taken for a gentleman in disguise’’ (p. 273). In the most debauched moments, Boswell still looks for approval from some sort of authority. We can see him doing this at Shakespeare’s Head Tavern, where he shows up with two pretty little girls he has picked up in Covent Garden. At Shakespeare’s Head, he presents them both proudly to the waiter, whom I suspect is Jack Harris, taking notes for his list of ‘‘Ladies.’’ (We know that Samuel Derrick, a friend of Boswell’s, was the author of the List in 1766 after Harris died.)29 ‘‘ ‘Waiter,’ said I, ‘I have got here a couple of human beings; I don’t know how they’ll do.’ ‘I’ll look, your Honour,’ cried he, and with inimitable effrontery stared them in the face and then cried, ‘They’ll do very well.’ ’’ Receiving the certification he needs, Boswell enjoys his ‘‘seraglio,’’ drinks and sings and thinks himself Captain Macheath. Better still, he has become a contributor to Harris’s List and the author of his own guidebook. * * * In 1769 Boswell records an experiment: ‘‘To see if I could go home [from Queen’s Square to Poultry Street] without asking the way at all.


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So I walked from street to street a long time. At last found myself in the fields near to the Foundling Hospital. This was not safe. So, I just turned back, was happy to get again into a crowded street, and then asked my way and got to my quarters in good time.’’30 His confidence in his ability to wander, to ‘‘deviate,’’ marks his strong sense of identity with the city as well as his sense of freedom from the well-ordered grids beloved of regulators like Mr. Spectator. Burney, however, even though she is a Londoner, exhibits in her journals little interest in knowing London at all. She prefers to describe the comfortable landscapes of Knowle at Seven Oaks and Streatham, the assembly rooms of Brighton and Bath. The London of her novels is filled with dangerous spaces that trick and bedevil her heroines. Evelina gets lost, wanders off, and keeps exposing her ignorance of the ways around town. When she does possess knowledge, she prefers to hide it, particularly when it is a ‘‘low’’ address like a certain Hosier in High Holborn. Her feeble sense of direction suggests that it would be unladylike to have the slightest idea how to locate oneself on the map. Such ignorance is in itself dangerous. When Sir Clement Willoughby carries Evelina off from the opera in a coach, she knows at once (instructed, perhaps, by Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison) that she is being abducted; the trip is taking too long.31 Ready to jump out of the coach, she convinces Sir Clement to direct the coach back to Queen Anne Street. Evelina keeps her head to the window, ‘‘watching which way he drove, but without any comfort to myself, as I was quite unacquainted with either the right or the wrong’’ (p. 99). For Burney, a lady doesn’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, know just where she is located. To know how to walk the streets might make one a streetwalker.32 Ladies ride in coaches and chairs, and if their feet do touch the streets, they are accompanied by at least an accommodating servant. Ladies who demonstrate their knowledge of the streets become automatically suspect. The dilemma of the lady, not to show knowledge that would expose her to a position of urban expertise, makes the twenty-seven-year-old Londoner Burney’s choice of Evelina, seventeen, fresh and ignorant, particularly poignant. It is as if Burney, knowing too well where she is located, uses the perpetually confused foil, Evelina, to preserve her reputation. As an heiress, Cecilia, ostensibly more independent, becomes just as vulnerable once she is on the street. She is subjected to the movements of the mob twice, once near Tyburn, and once, perilously, close to the Sign of the Three Blue Balls, encircled, pressed, and ‘‘rifled’’ by the crowd, she falls into fits of madness and great disorientation. Even Juliet, the ‘‘wanderer,’’ entering into the

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less genteel world of the female milliner and haberdasher, suffers the abjection of her positions and the dangers of being on the street.33 The public arenas of Ranelagh, Vauxhall, and Marybone Gardens prove particularly dangerous to Evelina. These pleasure grounds are what LeFebvre calls ‘‘empty spaces,’’ where nothing is allowed, nothing forbidden. Subjects pass through driven by private desires, constrained by private codes that alter their use of ‘‘apparently clear fields.’’ Thus Evelina, constrained by the elaborate rules of punctilio that she is always trying to master, lacks her Branghton cousins’ freedom to scamper and holler up and down the dark walks. While public spaces invigorate her vulgar cousins, they paralyze Evelina into postures of vulnerable immobility, putting her at risk from the more active assaults of roving prostitutes and rakish admirers. She forms part of a tradition including Amelia, Cecilia, Belinda, and Becky Sharp, reinforcing the dangers that await the unprotected genteel female taking her pleasure at Vauxhall Garden. For all of her uncertainty, Evelina is sure of one thing. Her cousins the Branghtons are so ‘‘low-bred and vulgar’’ that they cover her over in mortification (p. 94). The reader is no doubt supposed to agree with her judgment. But in their freedom, the Branghtons provide for the reader, and perhaps for Burney, the opportunity to deviate from the oppressive social grid that is being nailed into place by the author and her novelistic project. Their vulgar confidence that they possess the right to partake of the freedoms of the city and the town, as long as they can come up with the entrance fee, allows for a covert, subterranean guide to London’s pleasure grounds to be written within the margins of Burney’s novel of ‘‘manners.’’ While cultural mortification awaits the watchful middle-class woman desperately trying to learn all of the rules, the rule-breaking Branghtons, jostling and crowding their way into London’s social spaces, provide the freedom that enlivens deviant guides throughout the century as well as a list of the most exciting sights in town. This is not to say that their revolutionary, deviating ways are to be admired. We would hardly expect Burney to endorse her upstart creatures. Nevertheless, her upstarts stand for a ‘‘hurly-burly’’ power of the lively and irrepressible Londoner34 that eludes the timid and repressed subjects confined to the middle-class grid. At home at Don Saltero’s, George’s at Hampstead, Sadler’s Wells, the Tower, St. Paul’s, Vauxhall, Marybone, the White-Conduit House, Mother Red-caps, and Bagnigge Wells, the Branghtons take their pleasure with impunity. While we readers are no doubt deviating from Burney’s own plan if we find the Branghtons


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anything but revolting, their energy inspires such deviations. Burney’s text argues for Evelina’s right to be ‘‘uppish,’’ yet the vitality of the scampering, bustling, hurly-burly Branghtons asserts the freedoms of the unrepressed city itself. ‘‘Uppish’’ Evelina crying ‘‘God Forbid’’ that she is actually seen trudging up Holborn Hill with a silversmith’s son proves in this moment of chagrin to be just a little bit embarrassing in her snobbish attempts to protect herself from the grounds of her own being. But the energy that courses through the vulgar veins of the Branghtons proves too dangerous. In a culture that forces women to disavow even a consciousness of their power (p. 82), the self-imposed delicacy and weakness that Evelina demonstrates guarantees that the only space possible for her to fill is that within ‘‘the arms of the best of men’’(p. 406). Evelina ultimately flees the urban spaces that threaten danger, disorder, and dirt, to settle for the safe certainties of a greatly reduced private sphere. Unlike Boswell, who can ritually transgress in his annual pilgrimages to London, playing the transgressive London Spy against his Addisonian model of deportment, Burney’s heroines, unable to enjoy Boswell’s range, flee the urban ‘‘empty spaces’’ for the more straightforward moral topography of the rural and suburban world.

NOTES 1. Cited in Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 146. 2. Evelina, Or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. E. A. and L. D. Bloom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 35–36. Kristina Straub’s recent ‘‘Cultural’’ edition is particularly valuable for its supplementary materials, Evelina (New York and Boston: Bedford Books, 1997). 3. The term is Steen Rasmussen’s, from London: The Unique City (1934; reprint, Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1967), which remains one of the best accounts of the structural history of London. Felix Barker and Peter Jackson’s The History of London in Maps (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990) and Phillipa Glanville’s London in Maps (London: Connoisseur, 1972) provide excellent introductions to the growth of London and Westminster. Roy Porter’s London: A Social History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) is also valuable. One of the most recent histories of London, Stephen Inwood’s A History of London (London: Macmillan, 1999), weighing in at 1,1111 pages, is by far the most stupendous. Pat Rogers’s nuanced study of Grub Street (Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture) (London: Methuen, 1972), remains invaluable. 4. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. T. Preston and O. M. Brack (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 97–98. 5. Louis Landa discusses the development of this figure in ‘‘London Observed: The Progress of a Simile,’’ in Essays in Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Princeton:

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Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 218–31. See also Max Byrd, London Transformed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 13–17; Carol Flynn, The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 134–36; P. J. Corfield, ‘‘Walking the Streets: The Urban Odyssey in Eighteenth-Century England,’’ Journal of Urban History 16, no. 2 (February 1990), pp. 134–35; and George Rude´, Hanoverian London: 1741–1808 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 1–19. 6. Richard Burridge, A new review of London: being an exact survey . . . of every street . . . within the cities, liberties, or suburbs of London, Westminster and the borough of Southwark (London, 1722). 7. W. S. Lewis, Three Tours Through London in the Years 1748–1776–197 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), pp. 16–17. See also Walter Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century (London: A. & C. Black, 1902), pp. 88–106, and Richard B. Schwartz, Daily Life in Johnson’s London (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983) for discussions of the streets of London. 8. A Trip through London: Containing Observations on Men and Things, 3rd ed. (London, 1728), p. 1. 9. William Hogarth, ‘‘The Harlot’s Progress’’ (1732); Samuel Richardson, Familiar Letters on Important Occasions (London, 1741), ed. B. N. Downs (London, 1928), pp. 72–76; Sir John Felding, A Brief Description of the Cities of London and Westminster (London: 1776), p. xxvii; Jonas Hanway, Virtue in Humble Life, 2 vols. (London, 1774), vol. 2, p. 223. 10. The Country Spy; or, a Ramble thro’ London Containing Many curious Remarks, diverting Tales and merry Joaks. (London, 1750). 11. Ned Ward, The London Spy, (1698–99) ed. Paul Hyland, from the fourth edition of 1709 (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1993). References to this work will appear parenthetically within the text. 12. The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). References to this work will appear parenthetically within the text. Walter Benjamin discusses the ‘‘shocks’’ of urban experience in his essay ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), pp. 160–65. Mr. Spectator seems to me to be anticipating the shocks of overstimulation that affect the urban subject. 13. In ‘‘The Fair, the Pig, Authorship,’’ Peter Stallybrass and Allon White provide a useful conceptualization of ‘‘the fair’’ as a site of cultural transformation playing a crucial part in the ‘‘transformation of local socio-economic relations and the State’’ and argue that the urban early modern fair ‘‘promoted a conjuncture of discourses and objects favourable to innovation.’’ The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 35–36. 14. I refer to the famous description of the Royal Exchange, No. 69, in which Mr. Spectator confesses that the ‘‘grand Scene of Business’’ gives him so much pleasure that ‘‘I cannot forbear expressing my Joy with Tears that have stolen down my Cheeks’’ (1, 294). 15. ‘‘The Paris Case: Origins of Alienated Leisure,’’ in The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), pp. 57–76. 16. A Country Gentleman’s Vademecum (London, 1699); A Fortnight’s Ramble through London, or a Complete Display of all the Cheats and Frauds Practized in that great Metropolis, with the best Methods for eluding them (London, 1795); Richard King, The Complete Modern


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London Spy for the present Year, 1781, or a real, New, and universal Disclosure, The Secret, Nocturnal and Diurnal Transactions, In and About the Cities of London and Westminster, and the Borough of Southwark (London, 1781). 17. James Boswell, The Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 1084. 18. The Cheats of London . . . (London, 1769). 19. A View of London and Westminster: Or, the Town Spy . . . by a German Gentleman, 2nd ed. (London, 1725), pp. 12–13. 20. Besides Ram Alley, Fleet Street, near the Temple, John Rocque lists three other Ram Alleys in the index to his 1747 map of London, The A to Z of Georgian London, ed. Ralph Hyde (London: London Topographical Society, 1982), p. 77. It is revealing that the German Gentleman takes such pains to guide his reader to the ‘‘correct’’ Ram Alley. 21. [Erasmus Jones], A Trip through London: containing observations of men and things (London, 1728). 22. Henri LeFebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), p. 97. 23. ‘‘A Plan of the Universal Register Office’’ in The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding, ed. B. A. Goldgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 24. A Second part of a View of London and Westminster; or, The town spy: shewing the several vies, follies, and impertinences of the inhabitants (London, 1725), pp. 34–35. 25. Cited in E. J. Burford, Wits, Wenchers, and Wantons (London: R. Hale, 1986) p. 105. In her paper ‘‘The Brazen and the Gilded Whore: The Construction of the Prostitute Subject in Harris’s Lists of Covent Garden Ladies,’’ Liz Denlinger takes issue with Burford’s estimation of the eight thousand copies sold annually, cautioning against Burford’s lack of footnoted sources. Her entire discussion is valuable. Harris’s List is available in facsimile from P. Harris Publishing, Edinburgh, 1982. 26. Peter Wagner, Eros Revived: Eroticism of the Enlightenment in England and America (London: Secker and Warburg, 1988), p. 142. 27. The woman’s name was Sarah Woodcock, and she was a milliner. Lord Baltimore was tried for her rape but was acquitted. See The Trial of Frederick Calvert, Esquire . . . for a Rape on the Body of Sarah Woodcock . . . Taken in Shorthand by Joseph Gurney (London, 1768). Baltimore’s room is being pointed out as a tourist site more than twenty-five years after the trial. 28. Boswell’s London Journal: 1762–63, ed. F. A. Pottle (New York, Toronto, and London: McGraw Hill, 1950). References to this work will appear parenthetically within the text. 29. Burford, p. 106. Boswell thinks of Derrick, who ‘‘was a kind of governor to me,’’ in September 1769, when he breakfasts at the Smyrna Coffee-house, now removed to St. James’s Street. Frank Brady notes that Derrick, ‘‘who had died in March, 1769, introduced Boswell to the sensual pleasures of London in 1760.’’ Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766–1769, ed. F. Brady and F. Pottle (New York, Toronto, and London: McGraw Hill, 1956), p. 270. 30. Boswell in Search of a Wife, p. 295. In ‘‘Pedestrian Speech Acts,’’ in The Practices of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Kendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), Michel deCerteau finds in pedestrian acts of deviation and wandering a certain degree of relief from the more rigid discourse of power and surveillance found in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) and in so many other works by Michel Foucault. Certainly, Boswell’s

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talent for deviation provides him for the moment a degree of power and freedom, but it is never very long lasting. 31. Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), ed. Jocelyn Harris (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Carried off in a chair, Harriet Byron is aware of the wrong way that her chairmen are going and calls out to them to set her down. 32. Corfield argues that the streets in eighteenth-century London were accessible to ‘‘all ages and social groups and to both sexes’’ (p. 135), and she cites Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) for the example of a heroine who walked about successfully on her own through London streets. Actually, Betsy Thoughtless generally took chairs wherever she went, and if she did find herself unaccompanied in the street, she was apt to fall into trouble as she does when she finds herself chairless in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. Eliza Haywood, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) ed. C. Blouch (reprint, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Literary Texts, 1998), pp. 155–61. 33. On her way to Mr. Briggs, Cecilia (accompanied by a servant) plans to walk through Oxford Road and then ‘‘put herself into a chair.’’ When she sees a mob ‘‘assembling to see some malefactor pass by on their way to Tyburn,’’ she turns down a street to find that also filled with people. She becomes ‘‘encircled . . . every way, and asks a maid servant standing at the door of a house ‘‘leave to step in till the mob was gone by.’’ Frances Burney, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Doody (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 176. When a mob encircles Cecilia’s coach, she struggles to break away, runs off in extreme disorientation, and later discovers that ‘‘her pockets, in the mob, had been rifled,’’ p. 895–98. See also Burney, The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties (1814; reprint, ed. Margaret Drabble, London: Pandora, 1988), pp. 596–98, 620–2. 34. Henry D. Smith II discusses the ‘‘hurly burly’’ power of the early modern Londoner in ‘‘Tokyo and London, Comparative Conceptions of the City,’’ Japan: A Comparative View, ed. A. M. Craig (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 76, 82.

Sedition, Vice, and Atheism: The Limits of Toleration and the Orthodox Attack on Rational Religion in Late Eighteenth-Century England Arthur Sheps

THE BIRMINGHAM ‘‘CHURCH AND KING’’ RIOTS OF 1791 WERE THE FIRST major instance of urban rioting outside London in the eighteenth century. The riots, which began as an attack on a July 14 dinner commemorating the outbreak of the French Revolution, raged for three days and nights, destroyed three Dissenting chapels and seven residences belonging to prominent religious Dissenters, cost several lives, including those of drunken rioters, and caused, in some contemporary estimates, hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage. Among the chief intended targets of the riots was the eminent scientist, political controversialist, and rational dissenter Joseph Priestley, whose house, laboratory, library, and scientific apparatus were all destroyed. Eventually the army, on Home Office direction, restored order. Twelve of the rioters were tried at the Warwick Assizes in 1791; four were convicted, and two were executed.1 But the very fury of the riots shows the limits of toleration for religious dissent in late-eighteenth-century England and the way in which rational religion was seen as a dangerous heresy promoting social and religious disorder. Home Office and Treasury Solicitor officials responsible for public order were genuinely alarmed by the riots and the attacks on property and persons. But the marquis of Buckingham, then a secretary of state, wrote that, excessive as the riots had been, he was not sorry about the destruction of property belonging to seditious Dissenters.2 And the king, although he issued a royal proclamation against the rioters, admitted that he could not ‘‘but feel better pleased that Priestley is the sufferer for the doctrines that he and his party have instilled, and that the people see them in their true light.’’3 The local magistrates in Birmingham, members of the Anglican clergy and old squirearchy who ought to have been responsible for maintaining public order, appear to 51

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have encouraged and directed the animosity of the artisans and laborers to what they regarded as dangerous heretics. Their only concern was to limit the mob’s riotous acts to the houses and chapels of Dissenters. Both Treasury Solicitor officials and the Birmingham Dissenters themselves were disgusted by the ineffectualness and laxity of the local magistrates. Home Office papers collected after the riots by William Russell, one of the prominent victims, showed that the magistrates ‘‘acted with neglect if not worse’’ in failing to protect all their fellow inhabitants. There is, however, an explanation for the magistrates’ behavior. The rituals of violence that the riots embodied were performances meant to communicate to the participants, perpetrators, and victims alike, who were the members of the community and who were transgressively beyond it. Or, as the king himself had put it, to ensure that the people saw Priestley and his party in their true light. The riots made the mob and its protectors feel that they were the only legitimate participants and beneficiaries in established society. They also reinforced the Dissenters’ sense that they were unjustly marginalized whereas the Anglican clergy and Churchmen were unfairly privileged.4 Immediately after the 1791 riots, Priestley expressed surprise that the Protestant Dissenters were seen as enemies of true religion and a threat to the constitution of the State. The Dissenters, he insisted, had published little on political matters and were neither disloyal nor irreligious.5 But, in fact, this suspicion of atheism and sedition that erupted so violently in the riots had its origins much earlier, in the 1770s, in the debate over Rational Dissent’s unitarianism and materialism, which were equated with irreligion, vice, and republicanism. The explanation for Priestley’s dismay most probably lies in the relatively irenic responses to earlier polemical forays by the Dissenters. This writing had included works on American affairs, the Test Acts, Dissenters’ civil disabilities, and the nature of civil and religious liberty. There had been replies, but no vilification of the Dissenters as a political or social danger. Even Blackstone who, in the Commentaries on the Laws of England, had treated Nonconformity as a crime, in an exchange with Priestley in 1769 conceded that the Dissenters were now faithful subjects and no longer enemies to Church or Crown.6 Similarly, the theological essays of Priestley and other so-called Rational Dissenters, although controversial, were not attacked as totally destructive of true religion. In his works, as he moved from Calvinism through Arminianism, Arianism and rejection of the doctrines of atonement and vicarious salvation, to Socinianism and modern unitarianism, Priestley argued

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that he was merely rediscovering the truth of scriptural Christianity. The replies from both Churchmen and orthodox Dissenters were moderate and even respectful in tone. They quarreled with what they saw as innovations. But there were no attacks equating Rational Dissent or even unitarianism with infidelity and disloyalty. Before the American War of Independence the margins of orthodoxy appear to have been diffuse enough to accommodate discourse with such views. Priestley himself had become a figure of increasing distinction. He had received recognition from the Royal Society and several foreign academies, an Edinburgh L.L.D., the offer of a civil list pension from the king, and the friendship of Edmund Burke. In 1772 the House of Commons had assented to petitions from the Dissenters and voted to remove the requirement that their teachers and ministers subscribe to the Church’s Articles of Faith to prove their orthodoxy. The Lords blocked the passage of these bills. But by 1779, in the face of the need to unify the nation over the crisis of the American war, the government promoted and passed a bill relieving Dissenters from subscription.7 The eventual success of the antisubscription movement has led some historians to underestimate the growing degree of hostility to Dissent at this time.8 The 1779 act, however, contained provisions to ensure that Dissenters would still be kept out of the English universities. And the view of government ministers and the establishment was that toleration of various beliefs and forms of worship did not necessarily imply entitlement to equal political rights. The Dissenters continued to feel strongly that the Test and Corporation Acts were a painful stigma, a sign of their being second-class subjects and citizens because there were certain public offices they could never hold.9 By the 1780s the equation between religious dissent and hostility to the established order was becoming commonplace in broadsides, newspapers, pamphlets, booklets, and satirical prints. Edward Gibbon, in an exchange of letters with Priestley in 1782, specifically dissociated his own views of the history of the development of Christian doctrine from the unitarian notions advanced in Priestley’s History of the Corruptions of Christianity, published that same year. Apart from personal concerns about what any suspicion of heresy would do to the advancement of his career, Gibbon genuinely believed in the value and importance of an established religion and feared that any attack on its claims was socially dangerous and irresponsible in the highest degree. Rational Dissent, he thought, was as much of a threat as open strident atheism, and he put them both in the same class. The ultimate tendency of such opinions, Gibbon wrote, was one at which ‘‘the priest and the magistrate may

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tremble.’’10 And from 1783 until 1790 Priestley was engaged in a debate with Samuel Horsley, the bishop of St. David’s, over the nature of Christ’s person and the scriptural sources of unitarian doctrine, which culminated in Horsley’s writing that ‘‘the principles of a Nonconformist in religion and a republican in politics are inseparably united.’’11 The three attempts, in 1787, 1789, and 1790, to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts and the civil disabilities under which all Dissenters suffered failed. Pitt, who seemed to have promised relief, disappointed them. This was largely because, although both orthodox and unitarian or rational Dissenters were seeking repeal, the movement was largely led by the unitarian elite among the Protestant Dissenters and was associated in the minds of the establishment with Rational Dissent. In the House of Lords, during the debate over the third attempt, the bishop of Llandaff read out passages from Priestley to prove how subversive of orthodoxy many Protestant Dissenters were. Pitt’s elder brother, the second Lord Chatham, supported the bishop’s attacks with cries of ‘‘monstrous, horrible, shocking.’’12 In James Sayers’s February 1790 print, The REPEAL of the TEST ACT: a Vision, Dissent is explicitly associated with irreligion and republicanism. The complex design depicts many of the leading advocates of the Dissenting interest. Three prominent Dissenting ministers—Priestley, Richard Price, and Theophilus Lindsey—occupy the pulpit. Two others, Abraham Rees and Andrew Kippis, are in the pews below along with such suspect friends of Dissent as Paine, Fox, and the Dissenting M.P. from Bolton, Sir Henry Hoghton, who seconded all three of the motions for repeal. Price is portrayed praying for the French National Assembly and for the abolition of monarchy and aristocracy. Priestley is belching out smoke columns of Atheism, Deism, Socinianism, and Arianism, while Lindsey is tearing a copy of the Church’s Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith into pieces. Above the pulpit are various seditious articles, including an American flag and books by Priestley on civil government and Price on civil liberty. There is a portrait of the regicide Cromwell beyond the door, on the right, and above it a murderous-looking ruffian holds a sermon by Priestley entitled The Rights of the Protestant Dissenters vindicated. The St. James Chronicle of February 20, 1790, described this print as one of ‘‘the most forcible strokes of satire . . . aimed at the cause of fanaticism.’’13 Vituperation of Priestley and the Rational Dissenters intensified with Burke’s attack on them, first in Parliament in March 1790, and then a few months later in the Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke’s friendship for Priestley and the Dissenters had turned to enmity. In 1779 he had voted for their relief from subscription. Now he voted

J[ames] Sayers, The REPEAL of the TEST ACT: a vision. 䉷 Copyright The British Museum.

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against Fox’s motion for repeal of the Test Acts. He cited unitarians such as Robert Robinson and Richard Price and quoted selectively from work by Priestley to show that the Rational Dissenters favored the course and principles of the French Revolution and could not, therefore, be trusted with public office. Alluding to the metaphor that Priestley had used in a number of his recent publications about ‘‘laying gunpowder under old error and superstition,’’ Burke claimed that to repeal the Test Acts would be to ‘‘proceed step by step’’ to the leveling of the foundations of first the Church and then the State. These attacks were also made more generally outside Parliament in a variety of broadsides and prints.14 In PURITANICAL AMUSEMENTS REVIVED! the Dissenters who had been agitating for repeal are saddled with the excesses of their seventeenth-century forebears and with seditious as well as heretical intentions. Priestley and the demon between his legs (right of center, bottom) are both wielding firebrands, an allusion to the ‘‘gunpowder’’ metaphor, and (upper right) St. Paul’s Cathedral and three bishops experience Rational Dissent’s alleged explosive threats to the established order. By the time of the Birmingham Riots a year later, the establishment

William Holland, PURITANICAL AMUSEMENTS REVIVED! 䉷 Copyright The British Museum.


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view was that ‘‘Unitarianism, in the person of Dr. Priestley, [has] . . . been inviting . . . the persecution [of the Dissenters].’’15 A modern critic, Donald Davie, appears to agree; Arians and unitarians, while actually a small minority, pretended to be the voice of Dissent. These English philosophes, as he calls them, ‘‘queered the pitch for Dissent as a whole, permitting the Establishment to pretend for the benefit of the mobs of the 1790s that ‘dissenter’ meant the same as ‘republican’ or ‘Jacobin.’ ’’16 But the bulk of actual persecution in the 1790s did fall on the unitarians themselves. In addition to the Birmingham Riots, which were directed primarily at Priestley and other known Rational Dissenters, factories and meetinghouses belonging to known unitarians were attacked, flooded, and fired in 1792 and 1794 in Nottingham and Manchester. An effigy of Paine was burned at the home of Joshua Toulmin, a unitarian minister in Taunton. Thomas Fyshe Palmer, a fellow of Queen’s College, Cambridge, who had become a unitarian minister in Scotland, was deported for Botany Bay on a charge of sedition. James Belcher, a unitarian bookseller in Birmingham, was imprisoned briefly in 1793. And Jeremiah Joyce, future secretary of the Unitarian Society was arrested and held for twenty-three weeks in 1794 on suspicion of treason. Bishop Horsley, fulminated in a charge to his clergy that unitarian meetings, under the guise of religion, were conventicles of atheism and sedition. And Burke, when voting against Fox’s attempt in 1792 to remove penal sanctions against unitarians, maintained that they were ‘‘not confined to a theological sect, but are also a political faction [whose] designs against the church are concurrent with a design to subvert the state.’’17 An explanation for this hardening of attitudes can be found in the increased corporate visibility of unitarianism throughout the 1770s and 1780s, and in disturbing developments in the ideas and writings of Priestley. By the mid-70s, Priestley had become a figure of scientific and public distinction. And he was very much the spiritual and educational father of a growing Rational Dissent movement. So clearly whatever he said and did would generate interest. In 1774 Theophilus Lindsey’s Essex Street Chapel was the first avowedly unitarian congregation. During the 1780s and 1790s an increasing number of what R. K. Webb calls Priestley’s disciples, ex-churchmen like Lindsey, Presbyterians, Independents, and even a few Baptists became open unitarians. Unitarianism became more coherent and defined under their influence. More sympathetic congregations were gathered. And in 1791 a national Unitarian Society was formed.18 At the same time, Priestley’s theology

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began to merge with philosophical materialism. Unitarianism then appears to have crossed a boundary of toleration, and Priestley’s writings provoked a strong reaction. There had been intimations of materialism in Priestley’s earliest work. His reading, in 1754, of Anthony Collins’ Enquiry into Human Liberty and David Hartley’s Observations on Man were his first encounter with the idea of philosophical necessity. He became a ‘‘necessarian’’ or determinist, but at the same time he firmly rejected Calvinistic predestination. His colleagues tried to discourage him from following this line of thought. They feared that a non-Calvinistic determinism might be implicated with the charge of unbelief. Priestley, however, replied that the doctrine of philosophical necessity was a source of spiritual satisfaction and improved Christian piety.19 In the late 1750s he argued against miracles as instruments of divine influence in an orderly, regulated universe.20 A 1764 sermon, No Man Liveth to Himself, influenced by Hartley’s physiological psychology, contains a kind of divinely ordered sociobiology. In An Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768), Priestley exhibited a cosmic and optimistic determinism coupling his ‘‘belief in the doctrine of an overruling Providence’’ to the conviction that what appears to be noxious is, in fact, always ‘‘subservient to the wise and generous design of the Divine will.’’ That is, whatever is, is for the best, because a benevolent God has willed it.21 And in 1774 he attacked the Scottish common sense philosophers as enemies to rational inquiry into religion. At the same time, he reaffirmed his admiration for Hartley’s conviction that necessity was part of the divine order.22 All these notions were integrated in a way that was deeply disturbing for the conventionally orthodox. Priestley’s psychology and epistemology grew out of a religious motive—the defense of religion against philosophical unbelievers and the conviction that rational inquiry could be combined with faith. But the materialism that emerged led to imputations of infidelity and atheism. Priestley’s publication in 1775 of an edition of Hartley’s work produced the charge that Priestley was ‘‘an unbeliever in revelation and no better than an Atheist.’’23 Hartley had not until then been much read, so Priestley’s edition and enthusiastic ‘‘Introductory Essays’’ gave Hartley’s views greater currency. Priestley reaffirmed his belief in necessity as part of the Divine order, and he wondered whether the human mind, what Hartley called ‘‘the sentient part of man,’’ was not in some sense material. And in the preface to one of his scientific works he first advanced the theory that matter was active and penetrable.24 This idea


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was thought by some to be atheistical since it argued against the traditional view that only God could effect change or movement within material objects that were otherwise solid and impenetrable. Priestley also adopted Hartley’s doctrine of vibrations, which argued that thought was matter in motion: the vibration of particles of nerves extending through the ether to the brain, or what today would be called neuron firings. The mind-body distinction was beginning to disappear, and there were hints of a thoroughgoing materialism. Friends tried to dissuade Priestley from continuing these inquiries for fear of bringing the Dissenters into disrepute.25 But he was determined to give these questions more serious consideration and did so in 1777 in Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit and The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated. These works were the first clear-cut statement from someone claiming to be a Christian of the homogeneity of human nature and the compatibility of materialism with revealed religion. Priestley was now ‘‘of the firmest persuasion that man is wholly material.’’ Since the mind or soul had no being separate from the body, there could be no preexistence before birth or survival independent of the body after death. But being wholly material did not preclude immortality. Divine revelation, in which Priestley firmly believed, promised that we could escape from permanent extinction through bodily resurrection. Given our material natures, he wrote, ‘‘the only prospect of immortality is from the Christian doctrine of resurrection.’’26 The orthodox charge against materialism was that it endangered a natural explanation for immortality, based on the independent existence of the soul and, thus, led to atheism. What was alarming about Priestley and his followers was that they claimed to be combining materialism with faith in revelation and immortality. Unitarianism was central to this conjunction. Christ was wholly human and, therefore, like us, wholly material. He had no existence before his birth, and had escaped death only through God’s gift of physical resurrection, which was offered to all of us. Belief in resurrection, then, was warranted only by the facts of revealed religion, especially the evidence of Christ’s example. Priestley quoted scriptural sources extensively to demonstrate that these doctrines were consistent with uncorrupted biblical truths and with rational inquiry.27 He then went on to defend philosophical necessity against the perils of Calvinistic predestination on the one hand, and the accusation, on the other, that the mechanistic determinism of materialism removed the incentive to do good. Priestley adopted a kind of soft determinism and

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tried to reconcile God’s omnipotence with some degree of human will. Many theologians, including some orthodox Dissenters and a few unitarians, feared that necessity was a Trojan horse for Calvinism. But Priestley was sure that, while Calvinism led to amoral fatalism, his doctrines led to moral exertion. In a necessarian world, God alone has absolute free will; there is no such thing as human liberty. We are but guided instruments in the hand of the Almighty. Consequently, when we exercise our wills we do not act arbitrarily. Rather, like all material things, our actions are determined and have a cause or reason. What we will is governed by our nature in conformity with the Creator’s design. It is in our nature to seek pleasure. Pure love of God is our highest pleasure. So naturally we try to behave morally, in a way that will please God. Priestley then reiterated his assurance that divine goodness made eternal damnation impossible. Apparent evil or punishment in this world were but instruments of moral education and ultimate good.28 In the introduction to the Disquisitions, Priestley announced his ‘‘firm persuasion that the three doctrines of materialism, of . . . Socinianism, and of philosophical necessity, are . . . parts of one system, being equally founded on . . . observations of nature, and . . . deductions from the Scriptures.’’29 This equation of materialism, determinism, and unitarianism as the only true form of Christianity on both rational and scriptural grounds produced a variety of responses that hint at an increasing rigidity. A number of replies from orthodox Dissenters, liberal Churchmen, and Roman Catholics acknowledged that the purpose of these arguments was to convince philosophical unbelievers of the truths of religion. But they wondered why the salvation of distinguished infidels, who were unlikely to be converted by Priestley’s arguments, was more important than that of well-meaning Christians who would be corrupted by his doctrines. Their fear was that materialism would be used by the sceptical and profane to deny immortality. As one writer put it, Priestley’s theories would be misused by ‘‘the swarm of atheistic libertines who are not qualified to Reason about religion, but only to vilify it.’’30 Orthodox critics, of various theological persuasions, were troubled by Priestley’s belief that, in a material universe, immortality depended wholly and solely on ‘‘the promise of God, confirmed by the resurrection of Christ’’ as revealed by the Scriptures. Curiously, the orthodox wanted the assurances of reason, as they understood it, as well as the promise of revelation. They insisted that orthodox Christianity was compatible with science and philosophy, that is, with received conven-


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tional ideas about the nature of the universe. For example, Joseph Berington, a Roman Catholic scientific writer, lamented the fact that Priestley was publicizing Hartley’s obscure materialist doctrines. Materialism, he feared, by eliminating from nature an independent spiritual existence, threatened immortality. He argued that there were good rational as well as scriptural reasons for rejecting materialism and embracing a natural scientific explanation for the existence of the soul and its immortality. Indeed, he pointed out, many ‘‘whose religious faith is much less than a grain of mustard seed . . . are still warm maintainers of the soul’s natural immortality; such as the wild Orangoutang J. J. Rousseau of Geneva; and the famous Berlin Jew, Moses Mendelssohn.’’31 Similarly, Richard Price, not so advanced or heterodox a theologian as Priestley, argued that the existence of the soul made possible a natural explanation for the prospect of survival after death. Priestley’s response was that in a wholly material universe only the evidence of revelation offered a sure promise of an afterlife. A so-called natural explanation for immortality undermined our absolute dependence on ‘‘the scriptural doctrine of bodily resurrection in which all Christians must believe.’’32 The anonymous author of An Essay on the Immateriality and Immortality of the Soul also insisted that the existence of the soul could be derived from ‘‘the light of nature.’’ The author wanted to have the assurance of as many collateral proofs of immortality as possible: science, philosophy, and Scripture. Priestley’s doctrines were both unscriptural and irrational, he said. By denying any hope, on natural grounds, for immortality they led the deist to atheism. Moreover, Priestley’s opinions were also a dangerous threat to the orthodox. ‘‘If we are entirely material, the progress of the man who was a Christian (until convinced by Dr. Priestley that he has no spiritual principle of life) is much more rapid to Atheism, than even the progress of a Deist.’’ Priestley was thus promoting atheism by leading people away from the authority of reason and Scripture, both of which taught immateriality.33 Defenders of the reasonableness of orthodoxy tried to refute the materialist contention that mental operations were simply vibrations of the brain. For were this so, consciousness would cease with death and resurrection would not be personal survival, but a new creation. Real immortality, these rational orthodox critics thought, was the continuing personal identity and consciousness of a distinct soul. Manasseh Dawes, a lawyer of the Inner Temple, was typical of this school of orthodoxy. He was alarmed by a materialism that claimed to be Christian, and not heretical or atheistical, and which made afterlife depend merely

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on belief or revelation. Such doctrines, he wrote, were ‘‘in pretended favour of Christianity.’’ But by espousing materialism and disallowing a natural explanation for immortality Priestley had under the cloak of philosophy stripped himself of all religious covering and revealed . . . that he was ‘‘a complete unbeliever in an after state, from any other evidence but revelation.’’ A liberal Anglican clergyman, a believer in compatibility of reason and orthodox religion, was worried that Rational Dissent would discourage belief in immortality. Priestley’s theories, it was pointed out, meant that only God’s promise assured us of immortality and that natural reason gave us ‘‘absolutely no hope of surviving the grave.’’34 One writer defending him pointed out that Priestley was a firm believer in immortality. He wondered, therefore, why such faith troubled so many other Christians.35 But, as we have seen, prevailing orthodoxy wanted a philosophically sound Christianity and insisted upon rational explanations for immortality. It was uncomfortable with revelation alone as the sole grounds for belief. So Rational Dissent’s combination of faith in revelation and a materialistic denial of natural explanations for an afterlife was alarming and led to charges of infidelity. An orthodox Methodist writer noted the alarming connection between unitarianism and materialism. Rejection of the divinity of Christ led to denial of the soul’s existence and, he pointed out, to the possibility of atheism. Teaching that ‘‘we have no souls . . . is not far from teaching, there is no God.’’36 Even the most liberal Churchmen warned about this dangerous conjunction of materialism and strict Socinian unitarianism. For example, John Whitehead, a medical scientist, in his Materialism Philosophically Examined, could not help ‘‘lamenting and disapproving’’ the consequences that could arise from materialist doctrines and suspecting ‘‘the very motive for which they were undertaken. The grand object . . . was . . . to undermine the . . . doctrine of the divinity of our blessed Lord and Saviour; to prove that Jesus Christ was nothing more than a mere philosophizing man . . . What zeal is here for the worst and most destructive purposes.’’ The real intention, it was charged, was ‘‘to degrade the Saviour, the more easily to trample on the Christian religion.’’37 The fear was that unitarianism, once in association with materialism and determinism, also threatened morality by undermining the promise of an afterlife. This concern about the foundations of morality was shared by many different shades of opinion. The British Library’s copies of Priestley’s Disquisitions on Matter and Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity contain


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manuscript notes by John Horne Tooke, the radical political agitator, who was probably an Arian Christian. Christianity, Horne Tooke thought, was a moral and civilizing force in a corrupt monarchical world. He feared, as his notes show, that Priestley’s determinism might absolutely undermine Christianity, and, ‘‘unless we were sure of perpetual good government, there is a great need of Christianity.’’ Joseph Berington, the Roman Catholic writer, expressed himself in similar terms. ‘‘Materialism,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is . . . dangerous . . . because it unbinds the reins to vice, confirming the libertine and the unbeliever in their incredulity; it is . . . inimical to virtue; [the] injunctions [of religion] can no longer be enforced, when [we] are told the same will be the ultimate fate of the virtuous and the vicious—utter annihilation.’’ What compounded this dangerous tendency, as Benson, the Methodist, and others pointed out, was that Rational Dissent’s materialism led to a mechanical view of the mental process and thus to a determinism which could only result in moral irresponsibility. Or, as a slightly more orthodox Dissenter, Richard Price, put it, ‘‘liberty was essential to practical virtue.’’ Necessarianism leads to license and vice.38 Priestley, it was admitted, tried to reconcile necessity with impulses to good behavior. But the generality of mankind, his critics feared, would conclude that necessity freed them from moral duties. Whitehead summed up the growing orthodox concern when he warned that ‘‘the doctrine of materialism, must be attended with the most destructive and fatal consequences; it supposes that this life is our only place of existence, and so takes away all confidence in God, all hopes of future rewards and fear of punishment; it tears up all religion by the very roots . . . , in short its language is, Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’’39 By the spring of 1780, Priestley’s views had become enough of an embarrassment to his patron, Lord Shelburne, that Priestley resigned his position in the Shelburne household. During the next decade Priestley engaged in heated polemical exchanges over the nature of Christ’s person and the scriptural authenticity of unitarian doctrine. He regularly published defenses of materialism and helped to establish unitarian congregations within the Dissenting societies. And he was heavily involved in the debate over the Dissenters’ civil rights and the attempts in the late 1780s and early 1790s to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts. These activities all exacerbated the growing public impression and portrayal of Dissent, and especially Rational Dissent, as a danger to religious and political orthodoxy. But this dangerous heretical reputation was already well established before the controversy over the unsuccessful proposals to remove the Dissenters’ civil and political

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disabilities. It found its origins in the earlier debate over philosophical necessity and the material nature of man. Many Dissenters had feared that the equation of materialism with unitarianism and true religion would threaten the de facto toleration which the Dissenters enjoyed throughout much of the eighteenth century even if it was not a very heartfelt or deeply ingrained toleration. Their concern was justified. The orthodox reaction to this kind of materialism helps to account for the new hostility and the strident and violent attacks in Parliament and out-of-doors in the late eighteenth century. Materialism earlier in the century made no religious or spiritual claims and so was not seen as the same kind of threat to orthodoxy. But now materialistic determinism was presented in conjunction with unitarianism as the truth of Christianity. These views were castigated from their first appearance as a danger to the established order and beyond the limits of toleration. They led to the repeated charge against the Rational Dissenters of promoting sedition, vice, and atheism. In SEDITION and ATHEISM DEFEATED, a print which appeared on March 18, 1790, the defeat a few days earlier of Fox’s motion to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts is represented as a victory over precisely those vices. A group of devils (upper left) are bragging that the Dissent-

Anon., SEDITION and ATHEISM DEFEATED. 䉷 Copyright The British Museum.


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ers are their tools in promoting blasphemy, atheism, and treason. In the next frame (upper middle left), around a table, six of the leading Dissenting ministers who were involved in the repeal agitation are portrayed as advocating violence, revolution, and republicanism. In the lower strip the two frames on the left accuse Priestley of promoting atheism and suggest that this is the real intention of the repeal movement. And in the lower right-hand frame, entitled ‘‘FINIS,’’ a swarm of flying demons is dragging to hell the Dissenting ministers, now defeated, after the failure of the repeal motion, in their attempts at sedition and atheism. The print, in the subtitle, is dedicated to the alliance between the Church of England and the great body of worthy, that is, orthodox, Dissenters, ‘‘who refused to join a few ambitious, seditious, and atheistical Ministers in their Attempts to subvert the Constitution and establish Infidelity.’’ The defeat of toleration is being celebrated as the victory of orthodoxy over the heretical threat to Church and State which Rational Dissent had come to embody.

NOTES 1. For the fullest contemporary account of the riots, see An Authentic Account of the Riots in Birmingham . . . (London, 1791) and An Authentic Account . . . to which is now added an Appendix . . . , 2nd ed. (London, 1792). 2. Buckingham to Lord Grenville, Stowe (July 19, 1791), in Historical Manuscripts Commission: Fourteenth Report, ‘‘Fortescue Mss.,’’ app. 5, 2 (London, 1894), p. 133. 3. George III to Henry Dundas (July 14, 1791), in The Letters of King George III, ed. Bonamy Dobreé (London: Cassell, 1935), p. 212. 4. Public Record Office, Privy Council Papers, PCI/l9A23, Birmingham Riots (1791); PRO, Treasury Solicitor’s Papers, TS11/932/3304 (1791), Priestley Riots, Birmingham; R. B. Rose, ‘‘The Priestley Riots of 1791,’’ Past and Present 18 (November 1960): pp. 66–88; Frederick B. Bird, ‘‘The Nature and Function of Ritual Forms: A Sociological Discussion,’’ Studies in Religion 9, no. 1 (1979): pp. 387–402, and his ‘‘Ritual as Communicative Action,’’ in Jack N. Lightstone and Frederick B. Bird, Ritual and Ethnic Identity (Waterloo ONT.: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1995), pp. 112–35. 5. Joseph Priestley, An Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the Riots in Birmingham . . . (Birmingham, 1791), p. 31; [Priestley], Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Priestley to the Year 1795, written by himself; . . . (Northumberland and London, 1806), pp. 116–17. 6. Priestley, Remarks on some Paragraphs in the fourth volume of Dr. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, relating to the Dissenters (London, 1769); [William Blackstone], A reply to Dr. Priestley’s Remarks on the fourth volume of the commentaries of the laws of England, by the author of the commentaries (London, 1769). 7. Richard Burgess Barlow, Citizenship and Conscience: A Study in the Theory and Practice of Religious Toleration in England during the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), pp. 207–210; Ursula Henriques, Religious Toleration in England, 1787–1833 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 56.

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8. See, for example, Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics, and Public Order in England, 1760– 1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 251. 9. Henriques, pp. 56, 65–66. 10. The Priestley-Gibbon letters are to be found in J. T. Rutt, ed., The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, L.L.D., F.R.S., &c., 25 vols. (London, 1817–32; reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint Company, 1972), 17: pp. 533–36. Gibbon opposed publication of the letters at the time because he feared that any association with Priestley would hurt his prospects of patronage and advancement. But Priestley, as he told Theophilus Lindsey, another leading Rational Dissenter, prefixed the letters to his Discourses on the Evidence of Revealed Religion (London, 1794), after Gibbon’s death since he thought that by then there was no breach of honor (Lindsey to W. Turner, London, March 24, 1794, in Doctor Williams’s Library, London, Mss. Mod. 12.44, f. 57) . See also Paul Turnbull, ‘‘Gibbon’s Exchange with Joseph Priestley,’’ British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 14 (1991): pp. 139–58. 11. Quoted in Anthony Lincoln, Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent, 1763– 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 256. 12. Donald Davie, Essays in Dissent: Church, Chapel, and the Unitarian Conspiracy (Manchester: Cancarnet, 1995), p. 104; Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, vol. 2, The Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 350; W. R. Ward, Religion and Society in England, 1790–1850 (London: Batsford, 1972), pp. 16–25; Barlow, pp. 179, 207–10; Lincoln, pp. 61, 256–59. 13. Mary Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires . . . in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1938), 6: p. 663. 14. Parliamentary History, 28 (March 2, 1790): p. 438. The ‘‘gunpowder’’ metaphor which Burke cited is in the preface to Priestley’s Letters to the Rev. Edward Burn, in answer to his on the Infallibility of the Apostolic Testimony concerning the Person of Christ (Birmingham, 1790), which had appeared just before the motion for repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts was to be debated. For earlier uses of different versions of the metaphor than the one referred to in Parliament, see Priestley’s The Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry in Matters of Religion. A Sermon preached before the Congregations of the Old and New Meeting at Birmingham, Nov. 5, 1785. To which are added, Reflections on the Present State of Free Inquiry in this Country (Birmingham, 1785) and A Letter to the Right Hon. William Pitt, on the Subjects of Toleration and Church Establishments, occasioned by his Speech against the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (London, 1787). See also the Following Extracts from a Preface to . . . ‘‘Letters to . . . Burn’’ (Birmingham, 1790 ) [a single sheet broadside]. 15. Edward Burn, A Reply to Dr. Priestley’s Appeal to the Public (Birmingham, 1792), p. 102. 16. Davie, pp.104–6. 17. Watts, Dissenters, 2: pp. 354–57, 368; Samuel Horsley, Charge . . . to the Clergy of his Diocese (London, 1800), pp. 19–20; Burke, Works, 2: p. 476, as quoted in John Gascoigne, ‘‘Anglican latitudinarianism, Rational Dissent and political radicalism in the late eighteenth century,’’ in Knud Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 233. 18. John Seed, ‘‘The Theologies of Power: Unitarianism and the Social Relations of Religious Discourse, 1800–1850,’’ in R. J. Morris, ed. Class, Power, and Social Structure in British Nineteenth-Century Towns (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986), pp. 107–56; W. R. Ward, Religion and Society in England, 1790–1850 (London: Batsford,


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1972), pp. 62ff. R. K. Webb, ‘‘The Unitarian Background,’’ in Barbara Smith, ed. Truth, Liberty, Religion: Essays Celebrating Two Hundred Years of Manchester College (Oxford: Manchester College, 1986), pp. 2–30. 19. Priestley, Memoirs, p. 19. 20. Priestley composed a treatise on divine influence in the late 1750s at Needham Market that was eventually incorporated into a published ordination sermon, The Doctrine of Divine Influence on the Human Mind . . . (Bath, 1779); see his Memoirs, p. 35. 21. Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government, and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty (London, 1768), p. 6. 22. Priestley, preface to An Examination of Dr. Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense; Dr. Beattie’s Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth; and Dr. Oswald’s Appeal to Common Sense in behalf of Religion (London, 1774). 23. Hartley’s Observations on Man (1749), abridged and published by Priestley as Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind on the Principle of the Association of Ideas, . . . (London, 1775); and his Memoirs, p. 79. 24. Priestley, preface to The History of the Present State of Discoveries relating to Vision, Light, and Colours (London, 1772). 25. Priestley, Memoirs, pp. 79–81. 26. Ibid., p. 80. 27. Priestley, Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit. To which is added, the History of the Philosophical Doctrine concerning the Soul and the Nature of Matter; with its Influence on Christianity, especially with respect to the Doctrine of the Pre-existence of Christ (London, 1777) in his Works (ed. Rutt), 3: p. 199. 28. Priestley, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity illustrated; being an Appendix to the Disquisitions (London, 1777). 29. Priestley, Disquisitions . . ., in Works (ed. Rutt), 3: p. 220. 30. Philalethes Rusticans [pseud.], Reflections on the doctrine of materialism; and the application of that doctrine to the pre-existence of Christ: addressed to Joseph Priestley, . . . By Philalethes Rusticans (London, 1779), p. xii; see also [Samuel Badcock], A slight sketch of the controversy between Dr. Priestley and his opponents on the subject of his disquisitions on matter and spirit. In a letter to a friend (London, [1780/82?] ), p. vi; [Joseph Berington], Letters on materialism and Hartley’s theory of the human mind, addressed to Dr. Priestley, F.R.S. (London and Birmingham, 1776), p. 219; Richard Gifford, Outlines of an answer to Dr. Priestley’s disquisitions relating to matter and spirit (London, 1781). 31. Berington, pp. 219–20. 32. Priestley and Richard Price, A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity, in a Correspondence between Dr. Price and Dr. Priestley; to which are added, by Dr. Priestley; an Introduction, explaining the Nature of the controversy and Letters to several Writers who have animadverted on his Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit, or his Treatise on Necessity (London, 1778). p. 9. 33. [Caulfield ?], An essay on the immateriality and immortality of the soul, and its instinctive sense of good and evil; in opposition to the opinions advanced in the essays introductory to Dr. Priestley’s abridgment of Dr. Hartley’s Observations on man . . . With an appendix in answer to Dr. Priestley’s Disquisitions on matter and spirit (London, 1778), p. 66. 34. M. Dawes, Philosophical considerations; or, a free enquiry into the merits of a controversy between Dr. Priestley and Dr. Price on matter and spirit and philosophical necessity (London, 1780), pp. 11–13, and [Andrew Baxter], The evidence of reason in proof of the immortality of the soul, independent on the more abstruse inquiry into the nature of matter and spirit. Collected

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from the manuscripts of Mr. Baxter, . . . To which is Prefixed a letter from the editor [John Duncan] to the Reverend Dr. Priestley (London, 1779), p. xxxv; see also [Caulfield], p. 66 and John Whitehead, Materialism philosophically examined. or, the immateriality of the soul asserted and proved on philosophical principles; in answer to Dr. Priestley’s Disquisitions on matter and spirit (London, 1778), pp. 92–95. 35. [Badcock], A letter to Doctor Priestley . . . 36. Joseph Benson, Remarks on Dr. Priestley’s system of materialism, mechanism, and necessity, ln a series of letters to the Reverend Mr. Wesley, . . . (London, [1788]), p. v. 37. Whitehead, pp. 171–72; [John Butterworth ?], A serious address to the Rev. Dr. Priestley, occasioned by reading his familiar letters, addressed to the inhabitants of Birmingham . . . by Christopholus (Coventry, London, and Birmingham, 1790), p. 338; see also John Palmer, Observations in defense of the liberty of man as a moral agent: in answer to Dr. Priestley’s Illustrations of philosophical necessity (London, 1779), p. iv. 38. Berington, p. 23; Benson, p. v; Richard Price, as quoted in Jacob Bryant, An address to Dr. Priestley, upon his doctrine of philosophical necessity, illustrated (London, 1780), p. 401. 39. Whitehead, pp. 95–96.

Breaking All the Rules: The Worsley Affair in Late-Eighteenth-Century Britain Cindy McCreery

IN 1782 THE WORSLEY AFFAIR CAPTURED THE IMAGINATION OF BRITISH society. Although adultery cases were far from unusual in lateeighteenth-century Britain, the trial of George Maurice Bisset for ‘‘criminal conversation’’ with Lady Seymour Dorothy Worsley commanded particular attention.1 Two different and perhaps contradictory aspects of the case interest me here. First, the representation of the affair through a variety of media, and in particular satirical engravings, distinguished it from other contemporary adultery cases. Second, the links made between this adultery case and aristocratic adultery on the whole suggest that the affair was taken as proof of the wholesale decadence of aristocratic and military society, a society which seemed, more than perhaps ever before, to be ‘‘breaking all the rules.’’2 The Worsley affair can thus be described as both an example of unique, heterodox behavior and as representative of a more general, orthodox pattern of behavior. Heresy is a relative, not an absolute, term, and its definition is subject to change as orthodoxy itself shifts. The Worsley affair appeared heretical in many respects and orthodox in others. What was orthodox in late-eighteenth-century British society, what heterodox, and who decided? In order to fully comprehend the way in which the Worsley affair was understood and treated by contemporaries, it is first necessary to explore its historical context. In the late 1770s and 1780s Britain faced considerable political and social pressures, some of which were illuminated through the Worsley affair. Of most immediate concern was the problem of the unpopular war with the American colonies and the morale of the British military as a whole. The fact that the wronged husband who prosecuted Bisset was his friend and fellow officer in the Hampshire Militia, Sir Richard Worsley, indicated that the code of 69

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honor theoretically observed by military officers had been violated. Military men were expected to behave honorably to one another and to set an example of courtesy and loyalty for the rest of society. More generally, the Worsley affair raised doubts about the solidarity and professionalism of the contemporary military leadership. This was a particularly sensitive issue at the time given Britain’s ongoing and controversial involvement in the American War of Independence. By February 1782, when the Worsley case came to trial before Lord Mansfield and a special jury at the court of King’s Bench in London, Britain was still technically at war (albeit peace negotiations were well under way) with not just the American colonies, but its traditional enemies France, Spain, and Holland as well.3 Given the delicate military situation, and within a society which remained wholly resistant to the creation of a permanent standing army, the role of volunteer militia was seen as crucial. Whereas standing armies were associated with foreign absolutism, and in particular the mass armies of Britain’s old enemy Louis XIV of France, volunteer militia were regarded as proof of the aristocracy and gentry’s commitment to defend the nation alongside the common man. The Isle of Wight, where Sir Richard Worsley served as governor until April 1782, was considered particularly vulnerable to foreign invasion given its position near Portsmouth, Britain’s most important naval base. Thus Sir Richard Worsley’s prosecution of a fellow officer in the Hampshire Militia raised questions about the professional commitment and solidarity of the military force defending a strategically important area in wartime. The Worsley affair pointed to the military’s apparent preference for sexual intrigue over war preparation. But the lawsuit also drew attention to the aristocracy’s failure in social leadership. Each of the three principals demonstrated selfishness rather than selflessness. Sir Richard Worsley and George Maurice Bisset met through a property transaction, and their relationship with Lady Worsley continued along these lines. At the trial Sir Richard Worsley’s lawyers noted the financial worth of each of the three parties: Sir Richard possessed an income of about £5,000 a year, with Lady Worsley a fortune of £70,000 or upwards, while George Maurice Bisset drew an income of about £1,500 a year.4 Lady Worsley’s substantial wealth was thus acknowledged as a factor in the case from the beginning of the trial. The lawyers also claimed that George Maurice Bisset had ‘‘made an assault on Seymour, the Wife of the Plaintiff, and then and there debauched, deflowered, lay with, and carnally knew her, the said Seymour, to the Plaintiff’s damage of 20,000.’’5 This wording implies that Bisset’s ‘‘attache´’’ had damaged Worsley’s ‘‘property’’ in cal-

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culable financial terms—namely £20,000. Yet it also suggests that Sir Richard Worsley had failed to keep his subordinate officer faithful to him and that he sought high damages for financial gain rather than to restore his and his wife’s honor. Indeed, by this stage, restoring his wife’s honor was out of the question as she had eloped with Bisset, and whereas this affair did end, she never returned to her husband.6 These details of marital discord were particularly embarrassing as Sir Richard Worsley was a pillar of British society. In addition to his role as colonel in the local militia, Worsley served as member of Parliament for Newport, governor of the Isle of Wight, and was well known as a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, publishing The History of the Isle of Wight in 1781.7 After the trial he spent two years traveling in Greece, collecting material for his massive antiquarian volume Museum Worsleyanum.8 In both works Worsley presents himself as a scholar and a gentleman who upholds the values of civilized society. He dedicates the History of the Isle of Wight to King George III: ‘‘The description of any part of the British Dominions may be offered, as a just tribute, to the Prince, by whose Virtues their happiness and freedom are protected.’’ Worsley then notes in the preface that he considers his publication, based on the manuscript begun by his grandfather and added to by his father, ‘‘as the discharge of a filial duty.’’9 In similar vein he describes his decision to prepare the Museum Worsleyanum: ‘‘Impelled by a love of the Fine Arts, and anxious to view the celebrated remains of sculpture, when it was carried to the highest perfection by the most elegant nation in the universe, I determined to visit Athens.’’10 Not surprisingly, there is no mention here of his recent lawsuit and its likely influence on his decision to travel abroad! As loyal subject and devoted son, soldier, politician, administrator, historian, and above all as a landed gentleman, Sir Richard Worsley demonstrated his leadership of the community and his (apparent) adherence to social mores. The Hampshire Militia, like other militia, was designed to reflect the patriarchal framework of county society. In theory the local elite, including members of the gentry such as Sir Richard Worsley, would form the officer class of the militia, and their tenants and employees would serve as enlisted men. Officers were also gentlemen, in terms of both their social status and their manner, and their behavior both on and off duty was expected to set a good example for the men. Yet despite the apparently natural fit between the social hierarchy of county society and the militia, conflicts frequently arose. Although envisaged as local defense units, the militia in fact attracted the partici-

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pation of outsiders, particularly fashionable young gentlemen who were attracted by the glamor of the uniform and the trappings of military life. As early as the 1770s members of the militia were satirized as elite men playing soldier. George Maurice Bisset was not alone in being given his commission by an acquaintance, in this case his new friend and purchaser of his estate in the Isle of Wight, Sir Richard Worsley.11 The participants’ general lack of military experience and commitment was exacerbated by the distractions offered by nearby communities. Rather than wholly separate from the civilian population, militia were often positioned, both geographically and in spirit, at the center of the county social scene. Visits to the camps, balls, and the adoption of military-style dress all linked the militia with civilian society. Particularly scathing comments were directed at those women who adopted masculine dress and mixed freely with the officers and men. The titles of some of the many caricatures produced on this subject convey their contempt for the behavior of both playboy soldiers and their female visitors: Master Lavender Qualifying Himself for the Army, Capt. Jessamy Learning the Proper Discipline of the Couch, An Officer in the Light Infantry driven by his Lady to the Camp, and Lady Gorget Raising Recruits for Cox-Heath.12 Although it could be argued that civilian ties bolstered local support for the militia, it seems likely that they also weakened soldiers’ commitment to their task and to one another. Soldiers’ behavior seemed to be governed more by pursuit of pleasure and sexual gratification than patriotic duty. The militia thereby demonstrated that it was not only an ineffective fighting unit, but a harmful social force. Coxheath, the military camp near Maidstone, Kent, where Sir Richard Worsley and George Maurice Bisset were stationed, was satirized as early as 1778, in the first recorded engraved caricature of militia camps. The smutty tone of the print can be gauged from its punning title, A Trip to Cocks Heath, and the design, which depicts, among a jumble of odd characters, women gathering around a penis-shaped cannon.13 Such images have been discussed by Gillian Russell and Paul Langford, but more remains to be said about the association of the militia with immorality.14 If military camps were hotbeds of vice and immorality, what hope was there for the security and, moreover, the moral safety of the nation? A crisis of confidence was developing rapidly in late-eighteenth-century Britain. Engraved caricatures, such as A Trip to Cocks Heath, were sold throughout Britain and abroad, but the center of the printselling trade remained in London. The print market expanded rapidly, and over the course of the eighteenth century Britain shifted from being a net importer to a net exporter of prints.15 Whereas satirical prints formed only


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I. M. [?J. Mortimer], W. H. [?W. Humphrey], A Trip to Cocks Heath. 䉷 Copyright The British Museum.

one element of a diverse print market, their increased production does point to a growing appetite for social satire in eighteenth-century Britain. It was not just in the provinces that immorality was widespread. Britain as a whole seemed to be suffering from an epidemic of vice, and sexual scandals were regularly commented on by observers. Engraved caricatures occupied the lower end of the print market, selling at prices of between sixpence and several shillings, although Gillray’s later, political satires were sold at the extremely high price of five guineas. Although there has been recent debate over the number and type of viewers of these prints, it seems reasonable to assume that satirical prints reached mainly middle-class and upper-class people.16 Whether viewed in London print shop windows, provincial bookshops, or in albums kept by friends, satirical prints would have had a fairly wide circulation. Once obtained, satirical prints would probably have been pasted into albums or onto screens, tacked onto walls, or stored loosely in drawers. Only relatively expensive prints would have been worth framing and glazing. Whereas male and female viewers would have seen many of the same prints, it is likely that some of the more salacious prints, such as A Trip to Cocks Heath and Capt. Jessamy Learning the Proper

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Discipline of the Couch, would have been intended for a male audience.17 The Worsley affair provides a perfect example of the way in which satirical prints fed the national appetite for sexual scandal. Several prints describe the affair not only as an example of commonplace immorality, but of particular depravity that deserves special notice. So in addition to visiting Coxheath and other militia camps out of curiosity, Londoners and other interested viewers could enjoy the sights and scandals of these camps through satirical prints. Rather than a straightforward case of a gentleman betraying his fellow officer’s trust by committing adultery with his wife, the Worsley affair is complicated by witness reports that Sir Richard allowed Bisset to watch his wife bathing, possibly with her consent.18 This detail, plus other ambiguities, suggest collusion, not just between two military officers, but between husband and wife. This helps explain why the court, although convicting Bisset (and by extension Lady Worsley), who did not contest the charge, of criminal conversation, awarded the wronged husband only a shilling in damages.19 Compared with the spectacular damages originally sought, and which were occasionally obtained by cuckolded husbands (for example, in 1769 the king’s brother, the Duke of Cumberland, was ordered to pay Lord Grosvenor damages of ten thousand pounds after his conviction for adultery with Lady Grosvenor), Sir Richard Worsley’s award appeared, and was intended to appear, as a victory in name only. The Grosvenor affair, like the Worsley affair which followed, was heavily satirized in the press, including engraved caricatures.20 Yet there were important differences in the way in which the two affairs were represented. Although Lord Grosvenor was satirized as a cuckold and the Duke of Cumberland as a fool, their behavior appeared comprehensible, prompted by such understandable motives as resentment and lust. By contrast, the motives of the participants in the Worsley affair seemed far more ambiguous, their response to notoriety more ambivalent, and the whole situation in many ways more fascinating for observers. Bisset (and Lady Worsley’s) apparent collusion with Sir Richard Worsley affected not only the outcome of the court case, but the way in which the affair was represented in the press. Of the many commentaries the affair inspired, perhaps the most striking are the dozen or so engraved caricatures published shortly after the trial ended. The number and vitality of engravings of the Worsley affair distinguished it from other adultery cases. While the Worsley affair may be said to have brought out the worst in the parties involved, it brought out the best in its talented commentators. The caricaturist James Gillray, still at an


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early stage of his career, was particularly taken with the Worsley affair. Several of the themes he discusses in his Worsley prints were to reappear in his later work, for example, the depravity of aristocratic wives and their domination of aristocratic men, including their husbands. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the Worsley affair shaped Gillray’s view of aristocratic society—and that his designs in turn shaped the attitudes of others towards this group. Gillray produced the definitive image of the affair with designs based on a parody of the Old Testament story of Susannah and the elders. One Gillray caricature is entitled The Maidstone Bath or the Modern Susanna, while a print by another artist makes further reference to the contrast between the values of contemporary and classical society through its title, A Bath of the Moderns. Whereas the biblical Susannah was a faithful wife whose innocence was vindicated despite the treachery of the elders who spy on her as she bathes, the ‘‘modern Susanna,’’ Lady Worsley, appears to be as depraved as the men who watch her. Lady Worsley’s behavior suggests that female virtue has become a thing of the past. In one of several similar versions of a Gillray design, Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly, Exposing his Wifes Bottom;—O fye!, a coy Lady Worsley steps into a bath, appearing, somewhat unconvincingly, to cover herself, as a man, standing on another man’s back, peers in at her through a window.21 The title phrase of this engraving uses mock horror to emphasize that Lady Worsley’s apparent abuse by her husband is in fact a sham. All the figures, including Lady Worsley, it suggests, are more or less equally culpable. Rather than being seen as a victim, therefore, Lady Worsley must be understood as a willing participant, who cunningly disguises her lustfulness in order to appear innocent. The arrangement of the four figures in this design is loosely based on the testimony of a witness and establishes a pattern that is followed in other representations of the affair.22 Sir Richard Worsley is depicted squatting down with his back against the bathing house wall, supporting Bisset on his back. Sir Richard’s submissive position is reinforced by his comment: ‘‘My Yoke is Easy & my Burden Light.’’ Above him, by contrast, Bisset faces the bathing house and eagerly leans in the window to watch Lady Worsley. His report back to his superior officer: ‘‘Charming View of the Back Settlements, Sr. Richard,’’ parodies a military intelligence message. It also mocks fashionable interest in the theory and the language of the picturesque. Inspired by the writings of the Reverend William Gilpin, educated eighteenth-century British tourists sought out picturesque landscapes. Views of nature, such as mountains, rushing streams, and steep valleys were expected to arouse emotional

[James Gillray], Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly. 䉷 Copyright The British Museum.


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responses in the viewer.23 Certainly this view of Lady Worsley excites her viewer, Bisset, into appropriately descriptive language. Yet instead of wonder and a sense of God’s majesty, as the theory of the picturesque intends, Bisset’s view of Lady Worsley impresses upon him the power and authority of her husband. Lady Worsley’s body is described as another part of Sir Richard’s colonial territory, which he has the authority to guide others around, analogous to his authority as governor and historian of the Isle of Wight. This connection is reinforced by the picture inscribed ‘‘Map of the Isle of Wight,’’ which hangs on the wall above Lady Worsley in the bathing house. Rather than learning about God’s majesty by viewing Lady Worsley, Bisset learns about Sir Richard’s authority, his own lust, and Lady Worsley’s depraved nature. Viewing the Worsley ‘‘back settlements’’ encourages Bisset to take possession of them for himself. While Lady Worsley is naked and mute, the attendant who stands next to her is fully dressed and exclaims with a smile, ‘‘Good lack! My Lady the Capt. will see all for Nothing.’’ This suggests that Bisset is seeing more than was originally intended ( at this stage, anyway)—but that he was intended to see something, and even, perhaps, that he was expected to pay for the privilege. The attendant’s physical resemblance, her well-dressed appearance, and the fact that she holds Lady Worsley’s clothes indicate that she both speaks for and in some ways stands in for her employer. Clothes were frequently passed on from employers to servants in part payment for their service, yet this practice increased contemporaries’ concern that servants would be mistaken, both by their behavior and their appearance, for their betters. Even worse was the prospect that aristocrats would lead their servants to emulate their own vicious behavior.24 Yet the actual bathing house attendant was not a personal servant of Lady Worsley, and her behavior at the trial reveals her independent position. In an affidavit submitted to the court, the attendant, Mary Marriott, drops a bombshell, describing how Lady Worsley reacted calmly when her husband told her that Bisset would get up to watch her bathing, and that the three laughed about it afterwards.25 This statement indicates that the aristocracy was no longer commanding unqualified obedience from the servant class, and that the lower orders were prepared not just not to follow the aristocracy’s moral lead, but to protest against it. Lady Worsley is the only one of the four figures in the design not to speak, which implies that her significance lies in her naked presence, not her speech. Her coy look, however, suggests that she is more than just a pawn in her husband’s game. Indeed her silence suggests that,

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unlike the other figures, her role in this melodrama is less easily explicable and thus justifiable. Lady Worsley’s silence adds to her mysteriousness and heightens her sexual appeal. In many ways she resembles a female nude in an Old Master painting. While she is shown almost fully upright rather than recumbent, Lady Worsley’s partial nudity and coy manner is reminiscent of nudes such as Titian’s alluring Venus of Urbino. Like this famous nude, Lady Worsley manipulates through her gaze. The passive object of desire demonstrates that she is not the mere slave of men. As Titian’s painting surprises viewers by the amount of naked female flesh depicted and the nude’s come-hither look, so Gillray’s depiction of Lady Worsley shocks with its explicit depiction of a woman’s nakedness. Although influenced by Titian’s celebration of the sensuality of the nude female form, Gillray’s work goes beyond it. Gillray emphasizes not just the woman’s nakedness, but her bold gaze at an unauthorized male viewer(s). It is to George Maurice Bisset (and, in turn, the print viewer) rather than her husband that Lady Worsley directs her gaze and displays her body.26 Lady Worsley is dangerous rather than just enticing, and she appears as a siren who tempts men to foolish behavior and in turn to their own moral and social destruction. The idea that it is in fact Lady Worsley who is manipulating men, rather than the other way around, is made explicit in another Gillray caricature inspired by the affair. In A Peep into Lady W!!!!!y’s Seraglio, nine men line up on a staircase to the left of a bedroom.27 This spatial arrangement mirrors that in the bathing house scene, where men are positioned outside Lady Worsley’s chamber, and the print’s title continues the association with Oriental decadence made in other representations of the affair. The print viewer can see more, and thus literally as well as figuratively has a better perspective on the situation than the waiting men. Gillray’s design allows the viewer to once again take the position of voyeur, indicating how caricatures aroused male sexual fantasies at the same time that the actual fulfillment of these fantasies (by Worsley and Bisset) is deplored. In the bedroom Lady Worsley embraces a man in bed. Significantly, it is she who is ‘‘on top’’ and who speaks, saying, ‘‘Give all thou canst and let me dream the rest.’’ To the right, a pathetic male figure turns away from the couple and dresses himself. He says, ‘‘O dear, I believe it’s all over with me.’’ This pattern of male inability to satisfy Lady Worsley’s sexual appetite continues through the line of men waiting outside her bedroom door. Below the design a quotation from Nicholas Rowe’s 1703 tragedy The Fair Penitent,


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[James Gillray], A Peep into Lady !!!!!y’s Seraglio. 䉷 Copyright The British Museum.

which traces the fatal consequences of a young woman’s loss of innocence, sums up the ludicrous scene: One Lover to another still succeeds, Another & another after that, And the last Fool is welcome as the former: Till having lov’d his hour out he gives place, And mingles with the herd that went before him.28

These lines come from a speech by Horatio to his naive wife, Lavinia, in which he makes her aware that not all women are as pure as she. His lines point to the depravity of the ‘‘fatally fair’’ and the stupidity of the men who are captivated by them, for ‘‘all that gaze upon ’em are undone.’’29 Although the men in Gillray’s design are drawn from different sections of society, including the church, the military, rural and urban life, they are all equally, and as the quote implies, deservedly, shortlived in maintaining Lady Worsley’s sexual interest. Lady Worsley is, in many ways, more ‘‘manly’’ than any of her lovers. Unlike the tragic Calista in Rowe’s Fair Penitent, then, Lady Worsley is not a victim, but a villain. Despite the crude subject matter, which was no doubt inspired

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by the remarkable appearance of several of Lady Worsley’s former lovers as witnesses at her adultery trial, and of pamphlet reports of her many lovers, Gillray’s design retains an elegant air.30 This elegance underlines the fact that, for many contemporaries, not to mention her numerous lovers, Lady Worsley’s sexual appeal was genuine as well as widespread. Such a combination of fascination and disgust within a single design should not surprise us—it was typical of many contemporary caricatures—and indeed representative of the paradoxes within late eighteenth-century Britain. The idea that Lady Worsley’s sexual appeal is heightened by her assertive demeanor is expressed in portraits as well as engraved caricatures. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s grand oil portrait of Lady Worsley depicts her in masculine attire.31 Even though her riding dress is based on her husband’s militia uniform, which is visible in his own portrait by Reynolds, Lady Worsley’s confident air emphasizes her own, very independent nature. Even before her trial for adultery, Lady Worsley’s libertine reputation was well known. The reviewer of Reynolds’s portrait of Lady Worsley (probably the Reverend Henry Bate) exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780 could openly describe it in a newspaper article as ‘‘so well coloured, that we should gaze upon it with admiration, if we had not pretty strong reasons for concluding that the natural tints of the original will long out-live the artificial ones of the Painter.’’32 This is a dig at both Lady Worsley’s reputation for immorality and Sir Joshua Reynolds’s notorious use of unstable pigments in his paintings, which led to their rapid physical deterioration. The reference to the red in Lady Worsley’s dress as a symbol of shame was adapted in a later caricature of her husband. In this design the figure of Justice, referring to the red in the Worsley coat of arms, says of Sir Richard, ‘‘Take away that badge of Distinction, Shame may transfer the colour to his face.’’33 The lawsuit thus publicly branded the Worsleys as reprobates, even though their elite social position, signified, among other ways, by the possession of a coat of arms, insulated them personally from much of the criticism. Or did it? It may be that the Worsleys’ exalted social rank increased rather than diminished suspicion of their behavior. Concern about aristocratic depravity, a recurrent source of complaint, reached panic proportions in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Aristocratic misbehavior appeared to operate as an epidemic, corrupting not only the entire class but also the lower orders who looked to the aristocracy for moral leadership. As typical rather than atypical representatives of their debauched class, then, the Worsleys accrued blame for both their individual sins and the sins of their entire class. What


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Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lady Worsley. Reproduced by kind permission of the Earl and Countess of Harewood and Trustees of the Harewood House Trust.

was most worrying about the Worsleys was that their behavior was not unique. Criticism of the aristocracy was manifested not just through negative comments about their appearance in grand portraits, but in visual parodies of these paintings. Reynolds’s portrait of Lady Worsley may have inspired the engraving A Heroine of 1784, which shows a defiant young woman in similar attire.34 The date in the title of this engraving may indicate a subject connected with the 1784 Westminster election, per-

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E. Malpas, A Heroine of 1784. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

haps Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, another prominent beauty famous for wearing masculine-style riding dress, whose husband was also involved in the militia movement. Indeed, rather than a single source, this design may have been influenced by a range of sources, including both Reynolds’s 1780 portrait of Lady Worsley and the many caricatures of her 1782 adultery trial. The idea that Lady Worsley’s behavior


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is not unique, but is in fact part of a wider pattern of aristocratic female assertiveness, is reinforced by the caption below A Heroine of 1784: ‘‘The hat the whip, the masculine attire, / In which they roughen to the sense, and all / The winning softness of their sex is lost.’’ This compares unfavorably with the way women were supposed to behave. One of the most influential contemporary female role models was Queen Charlotte, who banned immoral aristocratic women from her court. Among many testaments of the queen’s femininity were the verses on the frontispiece of The Ladies’ Diary: or Woman’s Almanack in 1771: VIRTUE and SENSE, with FEMALE-SOFTNESS join’d, (All that subdues and captivates Mankind!) In BRITAIN’S Matchless FAIR resplendent Shine; THEY rule LOVE’S Empire by a Right-Divine: Justly their Charms the astonish’d World admires, Whom Royal CHARLOTTE’s bright Example fires.35

Thus Queen Charlotte embodies the ideal feminine role model, and Lady Worsley the antifeminine role model. In addition to her femininity, Charlotte’s maternal role strengthens her appeal as an ideal woman. Queen Charlotte appears as a mother par excellence in numerous portraits, engravings, and poems.36 Lady Worsley, by contrast, is a conspicuously unmaternal figure. Although she has two children by Sir Richard Worsley, they are not individually mentioned in either visual or written commentary on the affair. Rather, their importance lies in their position as heirs to Sir Richard Worsley’s estate, and once Bisset’s possible paternity of the younger child has been publicly discounted by his lawyer during the trial the children play no further role in the affair.37 Like Bisset’s estate on the Isle of Wight and Lady Worsley’s body, the children are viewed as property to be managed and disposed of as the male owner sees fit. Lady Worsley’s misbehavior, which includes not only wearing masculine-style dress but allegedly running through (and remaining unsated by) a series of lovers, as well as possibly colluding with her husband to implicate his friend and fellow officer in adultery, is thus most frightening in that it is but one example of a perceived significant decline in elite morality. Female as well as male aristocrats were to blame. The mother-in-law of Lady Worsley’s own sister, Jane (who was also called the Countess of Harrington) was almost equally infamous for her unorthodox and immoral sexual behavior.38 Yet while in the immediate aftermath of the trial Lady Worsley grabs most of the

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attention, as the years pass she is largely forgotten. Rather it is her husband, Sir Richard Worsley, who is repeatedly held up in caricatures as a reminder of aristocratic depravity and as the most culpable of the wayward trio.39 This indicates that aristocratic authority, as indeed authority in general, is seen to lie with the husband. Lady Worsley’s transgressions are dangerous not so much for the dishonor they bring upon her name, but upon the name of her husband and his family. Similarly, the affair compromises Sir Richard’s estate by publicly exposing the risk of spurious heirs entering the Worsley line. By privately permitting the affair to continue, Sir Richard Worsley ensures the destruction of his family’s reputation. Moreover, by bringing the affair into the public domain (through the instigation of the lawsuit), Sir Richard Worsley misjudges the proper boundary between public and private. Parading his unconventional marital arrangements in court reduces, rather than heightens, public sympathy for his position as the minimal award granted him indicates. On the other hand, Sir Richard fails to comprehend that his family’s misbehavior shocks not so much because it is unique, but because it seems to be typical of the malaise affecting an entire class. In a letter to his friend Horace Mann in Italy, the astute social commentator Horace Walpole notes with amused disdain the involvement of so many young aristocratic men, including his own nephew Earl Cholmondeley, as Lady Worsley’s lovers.40 Moreover, he suggests that Lady Worsley, far from being ashamed of her behavior, seeks to publicize it: ‘‘she is just come to town and drives about London, for fear her adventure should be forgotten before it comes into the House of Lords.’’41 Walpole’s amusement is mixed with astonishment at the brazenness of Lady Worsley’s behavior, and if it would be going too far to say that such behavior shocked Walpole, its public display certainly seemed problematic to him. Walpole’s laughter is mixed with concern that the Worsleys are in fact more typical than atypical aristocrats. Walpole’s comments indicate that the Worsley affair has national as well as local significance. Like many aristocrats, the Worsleys move frequently between London and the local scene, interacting with a variety of social groups as hosts, patrons, clients, and employers. Their influence is at once widespread and considerable. As leading members of Hampshire, indeed of national society, the Worsleys owe their inferiors a better example. Such indifference to public opinion is perhaps the most striking feature of the Worsley affair. In turn, public representations of the case, such as Gillray’s caricature Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly, Exposing his Wifes Bottom; O fye!, indicate that contemporaries felt the Worselys’ extraordinary behavior demanded explicit censure. It was


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this harsh publicity rather than the actual behavior that inspired it which most impressed foreign observers, whose own nobles would have been protected from such public slurs. Thus the French author of the ‘‘Voyage Moral D’Angleterre’’ noted that the sight of Gillray’s caricature Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly, Exposing his Wifes Bottom, O fye! so impressed upon him the extraordinary extent of the liberty of the English press that he purchased a colored version and pasted it into his manuscript scrapbook.42 While this very freedom of the press may have stunned the Frenchman, he nevertheless went ahead and bought the caricature. The shocking details of the Worsley affair were thus a cause of private entertainment as well as public concern. Through such engravings, viewers could feel that they too were looking in the window at an undressed Lady Worsley. They could speculate on the decadent intentions behind her coy smile and shiver in delightful fear at the immorality of the age. The Worsley affair thus points to a number of preoccupations in lateeighteenth-century Britain. The exact details of the case remain murky, and there is more than a little suggestion of farce in many contemporary representations, such as Gillray’s caricatures. Indeed, the disjuncture between elegant rendering and scandalous subject in many of the caricatures suggests that entertainment coexists with didacticism in most representations of the case. Contemporaries enjoyed being shocked at outrageous behavior which they themselves never would (or could afford to) indulge in. Nevertheless the Worsley affair does seem to offer multiple warnings to society. The failure of the wife to submit to her husband’s authority and the failure of both to keep their promise of fidelity suggest that marriage, or at least aristocratic marriage, is in crisis. Moreover, the breakdown in trust and loyalty between two officers in the Hampshire Militia points to wider problems of commitment and authority within the military, and between the military and civilian society. The Worsley affair suggests the nation’s general lack of commitment to the American war, and by extension the weak, effeminate character of its erstwhile military leaders. Above all, the case highlights a general failure of social leadership. The heresy of the Worsleys was not manifested in the act of adultery, nor the collusion it encompassed, but rather the sheer indifference they displayed to public opinion. Whether or not this indifference was as great as Gillray and other contemporaries alleged, the important point about the representation of the Worsley affair was that the Worsleys, and by extension the aristocracy as a whole, were perceived to be out of touch with the expectations and needs of society. Notwithstanding the many comic and light-hearted el-

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ements of the affair, which certainly appealed to some as entertainment rather than a lesson in morals, the Worsley affair had more serious implications. If this was the example the aristocracy set, what hope was there for more humble citizens? More important, could, or should, the aristocracy still be seen as leaders of society? If not, who would take their place as moral exemplars for the nation? The diverse representations of the Worsley affair point to the tensions within a society that is both paternalistic and skeptical of the benefits of aristocratic leadership and commercially astute about exploiting their scandalous behavior. Despite the many criticisms they contain, the representations of the Worsley affair indicate the continuing fascination with aristocratic behavior and sexual intrigue. By examining how the Worsely affair was seen to be ‘‘breaking all the rules,’’ we gain a better understanding of the priorities, preoccupations, and inconsistencies of late-eighteenth-century Britain.

NOTES 1. The defendant’s name was variously recorded as ‘‘George Maurice’’ and ‘‘Maurice George’’ ‘‘Bisset’’ or ‘‘Bissett.’’ I use the most commonly accepted form of ‘‘George Maurice Bisset.’’ 2. I employ the term ‘‘aristocracy’’ deliberately loosely in this essay, to mean the upper classes broadly defined, including members of the gentry class as well as members of the House of Lords (peers) and their extended families. Sir Richard Worsley can thus be described as part of aristocratic society although strictly speaking as a baronet he should be described as a member of the gentry. 3. The Trial . . . between the Right Hon. Sir Richard Worsley, Bart . . . and George Maurice Bissett, Esq. Defendant, for Criminal Conversation with the Plaintiff’s Wife . . . , 4th ed. (1782), pp. 1–2. Place of publication for all sources is London unless otherwise noted. 4. Trial, p. 2. 5. Ibid.,p. 1. 6. Reynolds, ed. Nicholas Penny, with contributions by Diana Donald, David Mannings, John Newman, Nicholas Penny, Aileen Ribeiro, Robert Rosenblum and M. Kirby Talley Jr. (British Museum, 1986), pp. 144, 289–90, 389; David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds. A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings. The Subject Pictures Catalogued by Martin Postle (2000), pp. 482–83. 7. Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sidney Lee (1900), 63: 36–37; Sir Richard Worsley, The History of the Isle of Wight (1781). 8. Sir Richard Worsley, Museum Worsleyanum or a collection of Antique Basso Relievos . . . Taken on the spot in the Years MDCCLXXXV VI and VII (1794; reprint 1803). 9. History, dedication and preface, p. 3. 10. Museum, introduction, p. 1. 11. Trial, p. 2.


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12. Master Lavender Qualifying Himself for the Army, pub. [date erased, 1781] by Carington Bowles, col. mezzotint, in F. G. Stephens, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Division 1: Political and Personal Satires, vol. 4 (1883) and M. D. George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum, vols. 5–6 (1935–37), hereafter ‘‘BM’’ [no.] 5950; Capt. Jessamy Learning the Proper Discipline of the Couch, pub. [date erased, 1782] by Carington Bowles, col. mezzotint (BM 6156); John Collet, An Officer in the Light Infantry driven by his Lady to the Camp, pub. [date erased, c.1770] by Bowles & Carver, mezzotint (BM 4563) and Lady Gorget Raising Recruits for Cox-Heath, pub. [date erased, 1781] by Carington Bowles, col. mezzotint (BM 5953). 13. A Trip to Cocks Heath, I. M. Inv. [?J. Mortimer], W. H. Fe. [? W. Humphrey] pub. 28 October 1778 by W. Humphrey, engraving (BM 5523). 14. Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 34–41, and Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pl. opp. p. 492. 15. Letter from John Boydell to Sir John William Anderson, February 4, 1804, in Alexander Chalmers, The General Biographical Dictionary . . ., 2nd ed. (1812), 6: pp. 307–8. 16. Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), chap. 1. For a more conservative estimate of the number and type of print viewers, see Eirwen Nicholson, ‘‘Consumers and Spectators: The Public of the Political Print in Eighteenth-Century England,’’ History 81, no. 261 (January 1996): pp. 5–21 and Simon Turner, ‘‘William Holland’s Satirical Print Catalogues, 1788–1794,’’ Print Quarterly, 16, no. 2 (1999): pp. 127–138. 17. Carington Bowles, New and Enlarged Catalogue . . . (1784), pp. 111–17. 18. Trial, p. 12. 19. Ibid., p. 21 and Reynolds, p. 389. 20. See for example An Apology for the Conduct of Lady Grosvenor. Addressed to the Ladies (Dublin: T. Walker, 1770); A certain personage in the Character of a Fool as he perform’s it at Whitchurch & elsewhere, Oxford Magazine (August 1770), opp. p. 74, engraving; and The Trial of the D. of C, and Lady G-r for Crim. Con. [?pub. in a magazine, 1770], engraving (BM 4845). 21. [James Gillray] Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly, Exposing his Wifes Bottom; o Fye!, pub. March 14, 1782, by H. Brown, engraving (BM 6109). 22. Trial, p. 12. 23. Carl Paul Barbier, William Gilpin: His Drawings, Teaching, and Theory of the Picturesque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 1–3. 24. This danger is explored by Maria Edgeworth in her novel Belinda, ed. Eileán Nı´ Chuilleanaín (1801; reprint, Everyman, 1993), see especially chap. 3. 25. Trial, p. 12. 26. John Berger et al., Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger (BBC, 1972), chap. 3, especially pp. 56–63. 27. [James Gillray] A Peep into Lady !!!!!y’s Seraglio, pub. April 29, 1782 by W. Humphrey, engraving (BM 6112). 28. The format of Gillray’s caption varies slightly from the text of the play, which reads: ‘‘One lover to another still succeeds, / Another, and another after that, / And the last fool is welcome as the former, / Till, having loved his hour out, he gives place, / And mingles with the herd that went before him.’’ Nicholas Rowe, The Fair Penitent

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(1703; reprint, ed. Malcolm Goldstein, Edward Arnold and the University of Nebraska Press, 1969), act 1, lines 387–91. 29. Rowe, lines 382, 384. 30. See Walpole Correspondence, 25, p. 228; Memoirs of Sir Finical Whimsy and His Lady (1782), pp. 8–20 and Variety, or, which is the man? A Poem. Dedicated to Lady W**sl*y (1782), pp. 4–11. 31. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lady Worsley, oil on canvas, R. A. 1780 (The Earl of Harewood). 32. ‘‘The Painter’s Mirror, Royal Academy Exhibition for 1780,’’ Morning Post, and Daily Advertiser (May 2, 1780). 33. The Shilling or the Value of A P . . . Y:C . . . . R’s Matrimonial Honor, pub. by H. Humphrey, February 27, 1782, engraving (BM 6105). 34. A Heroine of 1784, engr. E. Malpas, pub. September 15, 1784, red stipple engraving (Pierpont Morgan Library). 35. The Ladies’ Diary: or Woman’s Almanack . . . (1771), frontispiece. 36. See for example The Royal Family on the Terrace at Windsor, in Charlotte Cowley, The Ladies History of England . . . (1780), engraving opp. p. 686. 37. Trial, p. 11. 38. See ‘‘The Censor,’’ Oxford Magazine (April 1770), pp. 124–25. 39. See for example [William Dent] The Return to the Political Ark, pub. by W. Dent, [?November 24, 1790], col. engraving (BM 7682). 40. To Sir Horace Mann, December 28, 1781, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971) 25: p. 228. 41. Ibid., pp. 227–28. 42. [?Chevalier de LaCoste] ‘‘Voyage Moral D’Angleterre,’’ BM Add. Ms. 40083, p. 194; see also the published version which lacks the print: Voyage Philosophique D’Angleterre Fait en 1783 et 1784, (1786) 2: p. 59.

Plagued by Enthusiasm: Swift’s Fear of Infectious Dissent and His Argument against Abolishing Christian Quarantine in A Tale of a Tub John Bruce

AS THE PASSAGE OF TIME OBLIGINGLY EXPANDS THE APPLICABILITY OF Swift’s defiantly perpetual challenge to modern scholarship in A Tale of a Tub (1704), critics in the second half of the past century have likewise multiplied the number of its satirical applications. Answering with full force the summons to contest the obscurity of the work, Swift critics have considered the Tale from a variety of formal and thematic perspectives, most having reached beyond the openly proclaimed antagonists—Puritanism and Catholicism—to convincingly identify other anathematized Christian doctrines as defined by Swift’s frenetic modern persona. Although Swift lashes out at deism, atheism, and Roman Catholicism in the Tale with varying degrees of concealment or severity, Presbyterianism is Swift’s principal target of abuse considering its prominence—not only in A Tale and Mechanical Operation of the Spirit and other early writings, but just as powerfully in some of his later sermons and tracts. Perennially viewing the threat to orthodoxy through an epidemiological lens, Swift follows and transcends the tradition established by fellow Anglican apologists over the previous century.1 In the course of casting Puritanism in the worst light possible, numerous seventeenth-century antecedents of Swift portray Calvinism as a contagious menace—yet none does so with the severity or intensity of Swift, who throughout his career continues to espouse prophylaxis against nonconformist sermonizing. Ironically, however, the veteran divine becomes so preoccupied with maintaining orthodoxy that he slides into dissent: oscillating between preacher and prophet, he zealously delivers jeremiads against zeal. In raging against dissenting enthusiasm, Swift grudgingly acknowledges its horrifyingly 89

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contagious appeal, and it ultimately must be envied for that very reason. Underpinning Swift’s obsessive abhorrence of doctrinal nonconformity is a profound appreciation of the power of proselytization, either benign or malignant. The latter applies when Swift, in the guise of the manic modern author of the Tale, indirectly and perhaps unintentionally pays reluctant tribute to his congener within the narrative, the crazed dissenting zealot Jack, ‘‘whose Adventures will be so extraordinary.’’2 More directly and forcefully linking plague and dissenting enthusiasm than any of his predecessors, Swift’s author takes pains to identify Jack twice as the founder of the ‘‘Epidemick Sect of Æolists’’: once in section 6 and again in section 11.3 In the companion piece, Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, Swift carries this association further, declaring that dissenting enthusiasm ‘‘has grown . . . Epidemick’’ through practitioners of ‘‘Artifice and Mechanick Operation.’’4 Yoking Puritanism with pestilential infection indicates that Swift in no way openly admired Presbyterians; rather, he detested them. Unintentional or intentionally veiled praise of dissenting proselytization aside, Swift’s disparaging categorizations of extreme Protestantism as infectiously influential magnify the vehemence of his satiric onslaught. Swift consistently suggests connotations of epidemic activity involving the dissemination of dissenting doctrine, such as at the opening of the parable section of the Tale.5 Inclination toward casting religious dissent as contagion can also be identified in Swift’s first published work, ‘‘Ode to the Athenian Society’’ (1692),6 and characterization of nonconformist apostasy as a pestilential phenomenon continues throughout Swift’s career, such as in The Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man (1711), A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Enter’d into Holy Orders (1720), and even late tracts such as Queries Relating to the Sacramentall Test (1732) and The Presbyterian’s Plea of Merit (1733). Not one to carelessly choose metaphorical applications, Swift deliberately employs plague similitudes throughout crucial sections of A Tale—really the seminal work of Swift in this regard—to underscore his categorical revulsion toward Presbyterianism: ‘‘It was clearly intended to express the attitude of a moderate Churchman.’’7 Fundamental to an understanding of Swift’s lifelong disdain for nonconformity is the fact that he developed the relevant sections of the Tale between January 1695 and May 1696 as a neophyte Anglican priest in his bleak Kilroot prebend in Northern Ireland surrounded by concentrated masses of Presbyterians of Scottish origin.8 That this formative experience of Swift—sharpened no less because of an intersecting lifelong

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loathing for Scotland—is crucial for an appreciation of his literary milieu is supported by Angus Ross and David Woolley: ‘‘Swift’s brief service in 1695–6 as a Church of Ireland . . . priest in a predominantly Presbyterian area at Kilroot . . . without doubt sharpened his ecclesiastical and political sensibilities.’’9 And given that Herbert Davis observes that ‘‘Swift’s point of view will often be better understood . . . if the Tale [and presumably his other works relating to religious conflict] is read with an eye to the actual conditions in Ireland,’’10 a brief survey of the religious climate of Ireland (and specifically the Kilroot prebend territory) is appropriate. Although the periods of ascendancy enjoyed by Puritanism and Catholicism in England had reached effectual termini by the end of the seventeenth century, the threats posed by these rival religions to the Church of Ireland—the Anglican establishment in Ireland—loomed continually.11 Only five years before Swift is believed to have begun writing the parable of the three brothers, the Catholic forces of James II were defeated by William’s army at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690. Although English authorities failed to honor the Treaty of Limerick and thereby ensured that Catholics were severely hobbled, estimates of the proportion of Catholics to Protestants in Ireland range from 2 to 1 to 5 to 1 during the period.12 Appropriately, Swift represents the papist brother Peter as a power-hungry charlatan, one who will remain powerless to convert others through his marginally influential chicanery. Just as the threat of Catholicism wanes in Ireland, Peter fades from the pages of Swift’s Tale. Such is not the case with Jack, whose omnipresence in the parable sections of the tale accords with his omnipotence as an infectious proselytizer.13 To the extent that Jack’s contagious preaching endeavors threaten to overtake Christendom, the Presbyterian descendants of the Scottish settlers had effected systemic doctrinal penetration into Catholic territory, at least in Ulster, to a far greater degree than the Anglican church had achieved anywhere in Ireland. The eighteenth-century religious landscape of Swift’s homeland is described as tersely as possible by Oliver Ferguson: ‘‘Ireland was divided into three bitterly opposed religious factions,’’ two of which came under the category of Protestants: the dissenters and the members of the established church; the overwhelming majority were the severely penalized Catholics.14 Not only were Catholics deprived of numerous religious and civil rights by the penal laws in effect during the earliest years of Swift’s career, but the Catholic priesthood were subject to exile or execution under regulations seeking, via a form of prohibitive pro-

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phylaxis, a curtailment of the vitality and spread of Catholicism in Ireland: All archbishops, bishops, deans, and vicars-general were ordered to leave the country; any remaining or returning were subject to the penalties of high treason—hanging and quartering. The inferior clergy could celebrate mass only if they were registered with the government. Unregistered priests faced transportation; if they returned to Ireland, they could be hanged.15

Although Ferguson notes that these decrees ‘‘were probably rarely applied,’’16 the fact that they called for a form of quarantine against the religious majority in Ireland underscores the notion that contagion and any perceived ‘‘irreligion’’ shared common methods of ‘‘disease control.’’ Although from Swift’s perspective the Catholics were harmlessly quartered beyond the pale, the concentrated masses of Presbyterians in his immediate vicinity posed a greater threat, yet they were paradoxically treated with greater leniency—they were, after all, fellow Protestants—as much as Swift would quail at the comparison. Owing to an organized and highly concentrated migration of colonists from Scotland to Northern Ireland throughout the seventeenth century, ‘‘the Ulster Presbyterians almost equalled conforming communicants throughout Ireland, and in their stronghold of Londonderry they greatly outnumbered them.’’17 By the time Swift assumed control of the Kilroot prebend in 1695, the province of Ulster and ‘‘particularly County Antrim, where Swift’s parishes lay’’ had become nonconformist territory resulting from ‘‘a constant influx of Scottish Presbyterians . . . [t]hroughout the reigns of James I and Charles I.’’18 Ironically, Presbyterians in Ulster constituted, in effect, the predominant church, prompting Anglican clergymen, Swift among them, to take ‘‘every means to check this threat to their privileged status.’’19 Altogether, Kilroot’s demographic landscape crystallized for Swift a genetic predisposition toward viewing Presbyterians in epidemic (and possibly even endemic) terms: The geographical isolation of the parishes, the meanness of their church buildings and temporalities, the paucity of worshippers, the threatening crowds of the hostile sect, the profound corruption of his own prebendal antecedents—to be undisturbed by such a congeries of evil symptoms would seem a mark not of wisdom but of vice.20

Such disquiet is similarly related by Ferguson: ‘‘A great many members of the established church disapproved of the dissenters on doctrinal


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grounds, but the deeper reason for the church’s inveterate hostility to them was fear,’’21 and Swift must be placed among this adverse company. Swift’s inimical disposition toward dissenting enthusiasm may not have originated at Kilroot, but it certainly was exacerbated in the precise locale where Swift’s ‘‘ancestral prejudices against the Nonconformists were likely to be confirmed’’ while enduring a sixteen-month exposure to vigorous Presbyterian congregations while simultaneously preaching to a dispirited and diminished Anglican audience.22 Development at this time of Swift’s deep-rooted antipathy to nonconformity has been described similarly by Irvin Ehrenpreis: ‘‘Even if he had not just come from the civilization of Moor Park, even if he were not infused with the highest ethical ideals, even if he did not possess a both hereditary and inculcated repugnance for Puritanism, the circumstances of his entry into the church must have shocked him.’’23 Swift also inherits traditional hostility directed toward all dissenters, most of whom had been barred or evicted from their livings after the Restoration. Just five years before Swift’s birth, an estimated two thousand Presbyterian ministers were removed from established churches after the passage of the Act of Uniformity in 1662,24 and the Five-Mile Act of 1665 prohibited nonconformist preaching within a five-mile radius of London, which had been emptied of Anglican clergymen who fled to safer territory during the plague. Such legislation can be seen as a form of prophylaxis, especially considering that Puritanism had already been associated with pestilence by Anglican apologists—either directly, as in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) or indirectly, as in Meric Casaubon’s A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme (1655) and Henry More’s Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1662). Such is the accumulated baggage Swift carried with him to Kilroot. Indicative of the pervasive quality of Presbyterianism in the vicinity of Kilroot, one Church of Ireland bishop complained prior to Swift’s assuming his duties that in Antrim ‘‘[s]ome parishes have not ten, some not six, that come to [the Established Church], while the Presbyterian meetings are crowded with thousands covering all the fields.’’25 Even Ehrenpreis himself, in describing the endemic incidence of Presbyterianism in the county surrounding Kilroot, employs a plague metaphor to do so: ‘‘Even within Antrim, no parishes were more seriously infected than Swift’s.’’26 Similarly, Louis Landa notes that ‘‘Kilroot . . . suffered from the inroads of dissent.’’27 The dogmatic agon faced by Swift, who paradoxically becomes the dissenter in the sense that he represents a potentially infectious incursion himself into orthodox Presbyterianism,

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is best summarized by Landa: ‘‘In view of Swift’s lifelong struggle against dissent, it is of special significance that he began his clerical career in parishes with a long history of Presbyterianism.’’28 Thus Swift faced a hopelessly uphill battle to attract a congregation, especially given that dissenting ‘‘ministers openly flaunted their power’’ in the face of ‘‘the weakness of the established Church [which] was in sharp contrast to the flourishing condition of the Kirk, which had a well-knit organization and openly held its provincial synods.’’29 Shortly before Swift’s tenure at Kilroot, Church of Ireland members in one of Swift’s parishes were forced to attend Presbyterian services for want of an Anglican priest,30 a state of affairs which, if protracted, would only drain the Church of Ireland further of any vitality. The plight of Anglicans in the region is succinctly summarized by Ehrenpreis: ‘‘Not only was Ulster in general heavily Presbyterian, but Swift’s diocese, especially [the county of] Antrim, was still more densely so than the rest of the province.’’31 Overriding symbolic irony derives from Swift’s appointment as prebendary of Kilroot: In the Kilroot parish, the smallest of the three within Swift’s prebend, ‘‘There was no church . . . only a non-functioning ruin.’’32 Normally the priest would have a house for his own use in at least one parish, but none existed in any of Swift’s parishes. Additional irony derives from the fact that Presbyterians in Ireland had the support of King William—by title the head of the Church of England—and that Irish dissenters were not subject to enforcement of the Act of Uniformity.33 Furthermore, the ‘‘first Presbyterian minister in Ireland . . . became prebendary of Kilroot in 1619, a position he retained until his refusal to comply with the canons of the Church of England in 1636,’’ and Swift’s immediate predecessor was a Presbyterian who turned Anglican at the Restoration.34 By taking into account Swift’s Sisyphian predicament in this crucial period, reading A Tale with a heightened awareness of infection imagery as it applies to irreligion—for Swift now and forever Scottish Presbyterianism—indicates that when he most wanted to illustrate his utter repugnance of any infidelity toward the established religion, he chose to malign its proponents as pestilentially influential. Without question, Swift arraigns a rogues’ gallery of doctrinal offenders in the doggedly bobbing tub which is the Tale: Ronald Paulson, while acknowledging Swift’s obvious targets of Puritanism and Catholicism, focuses on Swift’s adaptation of a classical attack on the Gnostic heresy; Phillip Harth argues that atheists come in for the lion’s share of Swift’s abuse; and more recently, Kenneth Craven suggests that Toland and the deists face trial as the principal culprits in Swift’s hanging court.35 Yet to un-


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dervalue Swift’s obvious objective of heaping ridicule upon faiths represented by Jack (and to a much lesser extent Peter) in the Tale’s parable is to lose sight of Swift’s official yet ironically zealous role as Anglican apologist, literally so in the sense of a defender of his faith against historically influential rivals. Pure anathema in this regard would be the Kirk of Scotland, Calvinism blossoming under Swift’s Anglican aegis on Irish soil. Such circumstances explain one of Swift’s elemental philosophies restated later in his career: ‘‘I look upon myself, in the capacity of a clergyman, to be one appointed by providence for defending a post assigned me, and for gaining over as many enemies as I can.’’36 Diminishing Jack’s role as the chief target of Swift’s satirical onslaught either by pointing to others more deserving of the title (Harth) or collapsing others under Jack’s spacious umbrella (Craven) plays right into Swift’s hands. Knowing full well that A Tale of a Tub would be picked apart for decades and even centuries to come for hidden or perceived meanings (just as William Wotton signally failed to do), Swift intended that Jack’s character should plague critics as much as his proselytes are infected by his spiritual dogma. Although in one instance not referring specifically to Jack, Swift tells us to expect expansive and unfocused interpretations of Jack’s puzzling nature. In making the Tale’s only other reference to any word with the root epidemic, Swift indicates that among the powerful contagions of fastidiousness and yawning, shapelessness afflicts susceptible individuals, including Jack: ‘‘[A]s Mankind is now disposed, he receives much greater Advantage by being Diverted than Instructed; His Epidemical Diseases being Fastidiosity, Amorphy, and Oscitation.’’37 Elsewhere, in specifically referring to Jack, Patrick Reilly, more so than any other recent critic, has drawn attention to Jack’s genuinely infectious essence: Peter is just a clever mountebank and the papal impostures are simple, straightforward swindles to augment the power and wealth of Rome. Jack, by contrast—it is the measure both of his menace and his fascination—is not amenable to any such easy formula; he is a sincere man who believes in himself and who can communicate this belief to others as if by contagion.38

Jack’s protean indeterminacy—manifested in his multiple identities—is precisely that which makes him most infectious. In keeping with Swift’s overall reticence either to categorically praise Jack’s mission and methodology or to entirely renounce them, Swift’s modern persona omits—for whatever reason—any indication of the success or failure of Jack’s proselytization campaign in the two key pas-

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sages in which Jack, contagious by nature, has direct contact with other individuals subject to coming under his influence, the first appearing in section 6 just after Jack’s separation from Martin over doctrinal differences: AND now the little Boys in the Streets began to salute him with several Names. Sometimes they would call Him, Jack the Bald; sometimes, Jack with a Lanthorn; sometimes, Dutch Jack; sometimes, French Hugh; sometimes, Tom the Beggar; and sometimes, Knocking Jack of the North. And it was under one, or some, or all of these Appellations (which I leave the Learned Reader to determine) that he hath given Rise to the most Illustrious and Epidemick Sect of Æolists, who with honourable Commemoration, do still acknowledge the Renowned JACK for their Author and Founder.39

Whether the greetings of the street youths are genuine or sarcastic, Swift leaves intentionally ambiguous; Swift would realistically expect that Jack would encounter sympathetic as well as hostile individuals throughout his evangelization endeavor. But not only this is left obscure; the author explicitly allows for the possibility that John Knox (‘‘Knocking Jack of the North’’) and the Church of Scotland stand symbolically as the source of the pestilential outbreak.40 Equally indicative of Swift’s intent to leave open the possibility of Jack’s outbursts having the effect of converting the masses to Presbyterianism is the famous passage in which Jack preaches ex tempore on the subject of predestination and unquestionably draws the attention of onlookers: HE would shut his Eyes as he walked along the Streets, and if he happened to bounce his Head against a Post, or fall into the Kennel (as he seldom missed either to do one or both) he would tell the gibing Prentices, who looked on, that he submitted with entire Resignation, as to a Trip, or a Blow of Fate with whom he found, by long Experience, how vain it was either to wrestle or to cuff; and whoever durst undertake to do either, would be sure to come off with a swinging Fall or a bloody Nose. It was ordained, said he, some few Days before the Creation that my Nose and this very Post should have a Rencounter; and therefore Nature thought fit to send us both into the World in the same Age, and to make us Countrymen and Fellow-Citizens.’’41

This serves as a fine example of Jack’s impromptu preaching style designed to maximize the number of religious conversions to Calvinism. This sermon of Jack’s continues further, making it the longest unbroken speech by the infectious protagonist of the parable section of A Tale.


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As we would expect, the discourse is commented upon only cursorily by Swift’s author at its close: ‘‘THIS I have produced, as a Scantling of Jack’s great Eloquence, and the Force of his Reasoning upon such abstruse Matters.’’42 Again, although the comment is clearly intended to be ironical, as always Swift tempts the reader (and possibly himself) into believing that Jack is eloquent and forceful—and therefore much more to be feared for his contaminatory potential. Returning briefly to the very end of section 6, just after Jack is identified as the founder of ‘‘the most Illustrious and Epidemick Sect of Æolists,’’ Swift’s author again emphasizes Jack’s infectious nature by quoting (inaccurately) from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura: ‘‘Mellæo contingens cuncta Lepore,’’ [I touch all with the honeyed charm / grace]),43 altered from ‘‘musaeo contingens cuncta lepore’’ [I touch all with the Muses’ grace].44 Significantly, either version includes contingens, which is etymologically related to contagio, the Latin term for ‘‘touching’’ or ‘‘contact’’ as well as ‘‘contagion’’ or ‘‘infection.’’45 The line of Latin verse quoted by Swift derives from a passage in which Lucretius maintains that his strain of Epicureanism is best disseminated to potential converts when cloaked in mellifluous poetry ‘‘since this doctrine commonly seems somewhat harsh to those who have not used it.’’46 Lucretius’s poetic exposition of the noxious belief (among others) that the soul dies with the body, would be as abhorrent a doctrine to a Christian as would be the Calvinist principle of predestination to an orthodox Anglican, thus making it fitting that Swift should by such conspicuous placement of this line from the didactic poem link him with Jack, another whom Swift would identify as one who spreads vicious dogma in the guise of seductively enthusiastic and zealous discourse. Just as Swift delivers indirect and hesitant praise for the Roman poet in the process of condemning him,47 Jack also is paradoxically appreciated for his ability to spread rebellious heterodoxy. Jack is blessed with having the enviable status not only of a fool, but he is also knavishly opportunistic—far from simply being a clown stumbling through muck to provide perverse enjoyment to onlookers. Although part of Jack’s appeal derives from sympathetic feelings that might be generated toward his having to endure constant trials and tribulations, Jack also shrewdly assesses his contaminatory potential at each step along the way—even if it occasionally leads him into the gutter. Jack, who impulsively ‘‘rent the main Body of his Coat [Calvinism] from Top to Bottom’’ while zealously stripping remnants of Peter’s influence away, pleads with Martin, who has conservatively removed ornamental accretions from his coat (the Church of England), to ‘‘Strip,

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Tear, Pull, Rent, Flay off all, that we may appear as unlike the Rogue Peter, as it is possible.’’48 Thus does Jack’s infectious proselytization campaign begin by ironically seeking his first converts from among the established church. While Jack’s first evangelization effort is fruitless—‘‘Martin . . . at this time happened to be extremely flegmatick and sedate’’ and unwilling to make further alterations—Jack’s zeal for gaining converts only increases.49 Martin’s ‘‘Pedantick affected Calmness’’ and ‘‘Patience put Jack in a Rage; but that which most afflicted him was, to observe his Brother’s Coat so well reduced into the State of Innocence.’’50 Like a plague victim seeking to infect others to lessen his suffering, Jack ‘‘would have been extremely glad to see his Coat in the Condition of Martin’s, but infinitely gladder to find that of Martin’s in the same Predicament with his.’’51 Shrewdly realizing that ‘‘neither of these was likely to come to pass, he thought fit to lend the whole Business another Turn, and to dress up Necessity into a Virtue,’’ indicating the extent of Jack’s volatile versatility.52 After again failing to convince Martin to reform further, Jack suffers a paroxysm leading to ‘‘a mortal Breach between these two,’’ and this initiates Jack’s unrestrained dissemination of Calvinist doctrine: ‘‘Jack went immediately to New Lodgings, and in a few Days it was for certain reported, that he had run out of his Wits. In a short time after, he appeared abroad, and confirmed the Report, by falling into the oddest Whimsies that ever a sick Brain conceived.’’53 Thus it is in this diseased condition that Jack is left freely roaming the streets, all the while communicating nonconformity. Keeping in mind what Swift considered to be fanatical followers of the Scottish national church in Ireland and elsewhere, Swift’s addled author begins section 1 of A Tale with a discourse honoring ‘‘three wooden Machines, for the Use of those Orators who desire to talk much without Interruption,’’ the first of which is a ‘‘Pulpit . . . made of Timber from the Sylva Caledonia’’ [the Scottish forest].54 Damning with ironical praise, Swift—through his hack writer persona—condemns to the degree that the narrator praises the Presbyterian preaching platform, introduced as ‘‘the first of these Oratorial Machines in Place as well as Dignity,’’ taking precedence over the ladder (a small platform adjoining the gallows) and the stage itinerant, the moveable forum for mountebanks.55 For Swift, all three structures are venues of potentially baneful communication: last speeches of condemned criminals—first worked over by Grub Street aficionados—morbidly gorge printing presses, and roving quacks standing atop soapboxes deliver fallacious appeals to unwitting passers-by, but most pernicious are the dissenting ministers spreading zeal as if by contagion to their auditors.


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The pulpit—here the metonymy of Presbyterian preaching— ‘‘will ever have a mighty Influence on human Ears,’’ the latter referring to the members of a given conventicle who would be subject to contraction of the infectious doctrine.56 All three pedestals are interrelated in that the stage itinerant ‘‘is the great Seminary of the two former, and its Orators are sometimes preferred to the One, and sometimes to the Other, in proportion to their Deservings, there being a strict and perpetual Intercourse between all three.’’57 Swift’s explanatory footnote regarding the stage itinerant implies that Puritanism is as deadly a terminus for a dissenter as capital punishment is for a criminal awaiting execution. Speakers atop ‘‘the Mountebank’s Stage . . . the Author determines either to the Gallows or a Conventicle.’’58 Although Swift’s persona in this regard gives precedence to the mountebank’s platform, ultimately any of the three sources of discourse is a potential wellspring of infectious communication. Considered in this epidemiological sense, the mountebank would pose the greatest challenge to any disease control efforts that might be made against him: the stage itinerant is ‘‘erected with much Sagacity’’ for it is strategically established ‘‘[i]n the Open Air and in Streets where the greatest Resort is,’’ and this would allow for maximum rhetorical influence to occur.59 Appropriately, Swift’s modern author takes pains to argue that speech has physical properties, this deduced from the hack writer’s appropriately warped scientific analysis in a passage into which Swift cannot resist inserting a characteristic pun: ‘‘Words . . . are also Bodies of much Weight and Gravity, as it is manifest from those deep Impressions they make and leave upon us.’’60 Once it is established that speech is physically communicated just as a biological contagion would be, we can identify an equation between oration and infection, especially with regard to preaching. Significantly, Swift here inserts a passage from book 4 of De Rerum Natura, which he translates in an accompanying footnote as follows: ‘‘Tis certain then, that Voice that thus can wound / Is all Material; Body every Sound.’’61 Swift’s author adds weight to this argument in section 8, the exposition of Jack’s sect, the Aeolists, which only further identifies Jack with Presbyterianism. As is evident from Swift’s basing the sect’s name upon Aeolus, the classical god of the winds, Swift identifies wind as the key element in the nature of Jack’s followers, allowing for multiple satirical attacks to be made against ‘‘All Pretenders to inspiration whatsoever.’’62 Playing fast and loose with etymology throughout section 8, Swift is able to equate inspiration (literally a breathing in) with dissenting enthusiasm as well as, for example, belching and flatulence. If wind is taken as that element

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which causes religious conversion, and if it is also considered to be biologically transmitted as would be any number of viruses or bacteria (or atoms in seventeenth-century thinking), we can see that coming under the influence of enthusiastic preaching, for example, results in the contraction of that infection. Certain phrases in the discussion of the Aeolists’ practices hint at epidemiological activity. The belief among the Aeolists—one that Swift would say is erroneous—is that ‘‘Man brings with him into the World a peculiar Portion or Grain of Wind,’’63 indicating that inspiration is pandemic and congenital. This is clearly contradicted, in fact, by the Aeolists’ next principle that inspiration, ‘‘when blown up to its Perfection, ought not to be covetously hoarded up, stifled, or hid under a Bushel, but freely communicated to Mankind.’’64 If inspiration were universally spread, its unrestricted transmission would have no consequence. Closing in upon his notion that Presbyterian preaching spreads infectious dogma, Swift records that ‘‘[a]t certain Seasons of the Year, you might behold the Priests among them in vast Numbers, with their Mouths gaping wide against a Storm,’’ receiving that which will then be disseminated among their congregations: ‘‘When, by these and the like Performances, they were grown sufficiently replete, they would immediately depart, and disembogue for the Publick Good, a plentiful Share of their Acquirements into their Disciples Chaps,’’ further spreading the contagious system of belief.65 Swift again draws attention to his link between Presbyterianism and pestilence in the form of Jack by identifying the chief god of the Aeolists, one of ‘‘the four Winds,’’ as ‘‘the Almighty-North,’’ a clear reference to Scotland.66 Paradoxically, this Calvinist God is everywhere yet also in one principal location: This God, tho’ endued with Ubiquity, was yet supposed by the profounder Æolists, to possess one peculiar Habitation, or (to speak in Form) a Cælum Empyræm, wherein he was more intimately present. This was situated in a certain Region, well known to the Ancient Greeks, by them called, ⌺␹␱␶␫␣, or the Land of Darkness.67

Supremely convenient for Swift is the fact that scotia is the Greek term for ‘‘darkness’’ and appears frequently in the New Testament— especially in the sense of ‘‘spiritual or moral darkness’’—and that scotia is also the Latin name of Scotland.68 Swift here is clearly mocking the Calvinist belief in the ‘‘inner light’’ or individual inspiration; he converts Milton’s ‘‘darkness visible’’ to, in this case, the equivalent of light invisible, a symbol of what Swift believed was a misguided faith.69


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Finally, Swift describes the communicative nature of Presbyterianism, and although the site of God’s seat may be disputed, all agree that the contagion of Calvinism has its source in Scotland and has spread not only into England but into other regions as well: And altho’ many Controversies have arisen upon that Matter; yet so much is undisputed, that from a Region of the like Denomination, the most refined Æolists have borrowed their Original, from whence, in every Age, the zealous among their Priesthood, have brought over their choicest Inspiration, fetching it with their own Hands, from the Fountain Head, in certain Bladders, and disploding it among the Sectaries in all Nations, who did, and do, and ever will, daily Gasp and Pant after it.70

Keeping in mind that Swift has already linked Jack and the pestilential Aeolists with Presbyterianism, dissemination of the zealous doctrine as described in this passage may also be read with an understanding of biological as well as spiritual contamination, ironically one which is enthusiastically sought after by proselytes. A Tale clearly proceeds with an end to diversion, yet many passages of the work that are intended to yield utility are gravely serious, especially in the characterizations of non-Anglican Christians as well as deists and atheists, as pestilentially dangerous. And although the title page advertises a work ‘‘Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind,’’ the Tale, in keeping with Swift’s ironical intentions, falls far short of providing comprehensive amelioration by failing to go beyond casting spotlights on the dynamics of infectious irreligion—a process aptly expressed in the title of the companion piece, The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. Rather than provide a prescription for erection of a cordon sanitaire with which to defend the Established Church against the contagions of zeal or superstition, Swift emphasizes the paradoxically comical yet mortal menace of anathematized spiritual influence. Added to this is the overriding irony that by giving such place to Jack by faithfully recounting his fanatical meanderings, Swift exhibits an underlying appreciation of the zealous proselytization that had ensured the endemic establishment of Puritanism in regions surrounding the Church of Ireland priest in the Kilroot prebendary. Swift would like to have Jack’s swelling congregations but would denounce the means used to influence parishioners. Incisively, C. P. Daw observes, however, that Swift, in order to distance himself from potential hypocrisy, can cleverly deny the offense of prideful independence so often faulted in dissenting enthusiasts: ‘‘His explicit references to the Bible usually occur

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when he has temporarily cloaked himself in an adopted identity that screens him from charges of priestly self-interest in citing Scripture as an authority for his position.’’71 Although the abuses in learning that Swift’s author decries may be considered separately from the abuses in religion, the latter often subsumes the other.72 By designating in section 9 the proliferation of nascent religious sects as one of three manifestations of mental illness, Swift connects thematically to the genealogy of the lunatic Aeolists in section 8,73 unifying the seeming disparity of the alternating sections. In presenting an argument unifying the alternating sections of A Tale, Paulson observes that ‘‘[t]he defender of Swift must accept the fact that, whatever statistics can be produced to the contrary, the religious theme is the crucial one to an understanding of the Tale.’’74 Although Harth and Miriam Starkman seek to demonstrate unity through the separateness of the alternating sections, recurring allusions to dynamics of religion support an overriding concern for prophylactic protection of the established faith. Taken to extremes, failure to maintain a spiritual quarantine can cause or result from either military conquest or unrestrained philosophical inquiry, the two forms of madness identified by Swift in addition to propagation of new religions. Inevitably, the focus in both the parable and the digressions of A Tale devolves to considerations of religion, such as in the ‘‘Apology,’’ when the author challenges the reader to find ‘‘any one Opinion [that] can be fairly deduced from that Book, which is contrary to Religion or Morality.’’75 The devotedly unorthodox Anglican apologist, Swift here by implication equates ‘‘Religion’’ with the established church, cunningly dismissing Puritanism and Catholicism as inherently ‘‘irreligious.’’ And as Swift tells us himself in A Project for the Advancement of Religion, crafty connotations are not necessarily inappropriate; in arguing that Anglican clergymen should use ‘‘all honest Arts to make themselves acceptable to the Laity,’’ he is only following ‘‘St. Paul who became all Things to all Men, to the Jews a Jew, and a Greek to the Greeks,’’ and Christ, who dictates that shrewdness, ‘‘that Wisdom of the Serpent,’’ has its place in boosting church attendance.76 Swift as the embattled young priest in Kilroot shares with the postconversion Paul the sense of agon defined by seeking, against the odds, to influence (or in a crude sense ‘‘infect’’) others through preaching and proselytization. As is especially evident in Swift’s attacks on the Whigs for seeking greater religious toleration, religion in fact supersedes and determines his political maneuvering. Carole Fabricant’s assertion that Swift’s political involvement was the principal impetus of his sermonizing and


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pamphleteering, seems to be made at the expense of not fully appreciating his self-appointed role as (seemingly at times) the last bastion of Anglican orthodoxy, his critically elemental defense of it on multiple fronts: ‘‘It was an inescapably and pervasively political landscape that regularly caught Swift’s eye and monopolized his attention.’’77 Were it not for Swift’s doctrinal entrenchment within the established church, his political endeavors would have manifested themselves as they did; after all, chronologically speaking, Swift was a priest before he was a politician, although the distinction becomes blurred once he becomes heavily involved in political matters in 1708 and beyond.78 Nonetheless, for Swift, religion must ultimately take precedence over politics, as is observed by Michael DePorte: ‘‘the importance of preserving established religion is [a] persistent . . . theme in Swift’s later writings,’’79 not to mention that the earlier writings also revolve principally around matters of religion that may manifest themselves in political arenas.80 At times throughout his career obviously frustrated at the dwindling attendance at Church of Ireland services on an island inundated with Presbyterians and Catholics, Swift would praise any mechanism by which proselytes could be gained legitimately—that is, without resorting to the theatrics of dissenting ministers, seemingly summarized in the first sentence of section 1 of A Tale: ‘‘WHOEVER hath an Ambition to be heard in a Crowd, must press, squeeze, and thrust, and climb with indefatigable Pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain Degree of Altitude above them.’’81 Curtailing the spread of ecstatic utterance and behavior within the church would contribute to the overall aim of inducement to conversion, and Paul’s words of wisdom would not be lost on Swift, for whom I Corinthians was an elementally influential text.82 A dignified and orderly service ensures that the faith will prosper and thereby advance itself further as worshippers and converts interact with others in their communities, thus casting I Corinthians as a text which bolsters a defense against dissenting heterodoxy, and ‘‘is essentially a tract setting forth, and advocating conformity to, the principles of Christianity as revealed to the apostles’’ and it ‘‘responds to the early Church’s most explicit confrontation with the problem of disunity.’’83 Additionally, ‘‘There can be little doubt that a man with Swift’s facility for exploiting parallels between ancient and modern history . . . would have grasped the correspondences between the Corinthian schismatics and the Dissenters of his own day.’’84 As exemplified in both the Tale and repeatedly in Paul’s letters, prideful self-sufficiency yields dissension and fanaticism: ‘‘[Swift] chose to attack the force of individualistic religion as ‘zeal’ or ‘enthusiasm,’ and to ascribe it to pride,’’85 this same

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insolence being the heretical infection that Milton’s Satan induces among the apostate angels, that which he also craftily communicates to Adam and Eve and thereby to their descendants. In issuing a warning for his own time, Swift compounds his declaration of the two denominational antipodes as epidemically influential when the author in the apology employs the rhetoric of infection to influence the reader: ‘‘Why should any Clergyman of our Church be angry to see the Follies of Fanticism and Superstition exposed, tho’ in the most ridiculous Manner? since that is perhaps the most probable way to cure them, or at least to hinder them from farther spreading.’’86 In addition to raising the specters of Puritanism and Catholicism, Swift also denounces atheism and roguery, an ironical implication that broadly directed invectives against English civilization are well received, whereas condemnation of individuals through libel or slander is inexcusable: Here [in England], you may securely display your utmost Rhetorick against Mankind, in the Face of the World; tell them, ‘‘That all are gone astray; That there is none that doth good, no not one; That we live in the very Dregs of Time; That Knavery and Atheism are Epidemick as the Pox; That Honesty is fled with Astræa; with any other Common places equally new and eloquent, which are furnished by the Splendida bilis.87

Immediately following this passage, Swift delivers proof that such infectious discourse is highly contagious: ‘‘And when you have done, the whole Audience, far from being offended, shall return you thanks as a Deliverer of precious and useful Truths.’’88 By pairing in each passage above the dual hazards in this parallel fashion, Swift underscores his intention to characterize doctrinal threats as biologically invasive; Presbyterianism, Catholicism, atheism, and villainy all vie equally for placement as the tenor in the author’s (and Swift’s) rotating infection metaphor, pinpointing heterodox beliefs as virulent contagions threatening to overrun religious order. Assuming a defensive posture himself, Swift (through his persona) responds appropriately to criticisms of the 1704 edition made, ironically, by fellow Anglicans.89 The author of A Tale implies that those critics should have targeted publications of the apologists for Geneva and Rome and understood that certain irreverent passages were orthodox attacks on Puritanism and Roman Catholicism, whose defenders are ‘‘heavy, illiterate Scriblers . . . who to the shame of good Sense as well as Piety, are greedily read, meerly upon the Strength of bold, false, impious Assertions, mixt with unmannerly Reflections upon the Priesthood, and openly intended


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against all Religion.’’90 In addition to seeking protection from Presbyterians and Papists, Swift’s author disgracefully declares he would have also hoped to protect unwitting victims of malevolent religious persuasion—disgracefully for Swift—emanating from fellow members of the Established Church: Had the Author’s Intentions [to vilify the baneful doctrinal antagonists] met with a more candid Interpretation from some whom out of Respect he forbears to name, he might have been encouraged to an Examination of Books written by some of those Authors above-described, whose Errors, Ignorance, Dullness and Villany, he thinks he could have detected and exposed in such a Manner that the Persons who are most conceived to be infected by them, would soon lay them aside and be ashamed.91

Thus the writings Swift identifies as ‘‘openly intended against all Religions’’ are also capable of contaminating readers whose own immunological defenses may not be strong enough to realize the mephitic intentions of those authors. Repeatedly the attack on the moderns devolves into an offensive against religious extremism, often indistinguishable from any other target. Ironically becoming one of the ‘‘Rabble of Scriblers’’ himself, Swift’s author in the preface of A Tale defends accusations that their proliferation has reached epidemic proportions. Ever fascinated by the dynamics of influential oratory, Swift relates a seemingly digressive ‘‘short Tale’’ on this very subject in the process of dilating the above theme: ‘‘A Mountebank in Leicester-Fields, had drawn a huge Assembly about him,’’ and among the crowd is ‘‘a fat unwieldy Fellow’’ who complains of being unduly pressed.92 The corpulent auditor’s grumbling provokes a weaver standing nearby to a verbal assault which has subsidiary implications of wishing the dissenter excised from the flock via infection: ‘‘A Plague confound [defeat] you.’’93 Later in the preface the author describes satirists as the ‘‘large eminent Sect of our British Writers’’ who overshadow the ancients, whose ‘‘Dedications, and other Bundles of Flattery run all upon stale musty Topicks, without the smallest tincture of any thing New; not only to the torment and nauseating of the Christian Reader, but (if not suddenly prevented) to the universal spreading of that pestilent Disease, the Lethargy, in this Island.’’94 Given that for Swift the terms ‘‘Christian’’ and ‘‘Anglican’’ hold virtual equivalence, forgetful torpidity here is viewed as an infectious threat to established religion, a faith which would presumably also succumb in the face of a complete dissemination of the spiritual malaise.95 Anchoring the predominant levity of the floating tub is Swift’s genu-

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ine aversion to three sources of epidemically influential systems mentioned in the opening of section 9, ‘‘the Digression concerning Madness’’: ‘‘The Establishment of New Empires by Conquest: The Advance and Progress of New Schemes in Philosophy; and the contriving, as well as the propagating of New Religions.’’96 As DePorte shrewdly observes, Swift makes a clear distinction between upstart heterodoxy and Christianity, which, arguably, was a new religion: But what of the new divinity and method of worship taught by St Paul? Claiming certain knowledge of ‘‘things agreed on all hands impossible to be known’’ is the sure sign of madness. How are we to distinguish Jesus from other propagators of new religions? The obvious answer, and the answer Swift gives in his sermons, is that Christianity is not the vision of a single man but the direct revelation of divine will.97

Given that Christianity is exempt from this classification, one can consider the zealous conquerors and the schismatic philosophers as collapsible under the same umbrella of dissenting doctrinism.98 The distinction between the two lines of attack again blurs when the author puzzles in section 9 over the tendency of ‘‘Introducers of new Schemes in Philosophy . . . to advance new Systems with such an eager Zeal,’’99 a term Swift repeatedly employs in his designations of extremism and fanaticism. Swift’s characterization of Presbyterianism as an infectious menace in the character of Jack illustrates that Swift was far more concerned about the potential for this strain of dissenting enthusiasm to spread epidemically among the population, than for atheism, deism, or Catholicism to disseminate pervasively. In this arena of doctrinal agon, Swift openly acknowledges a debt of influence to Paul for guidelines on preaching, proselytization, and preserving the faith. Advising young clergymen to protect themselves from the baneful influence of sophistication, Swift reveals his indebtedness to and affinity with the apostle: ‘‘Others again, are fond of dilating on Matter and Phænomena; directly against the Advice of St. Paul, who yet appears to have been conversant enough in those Kinds of Studies,’’100 advice which Swift clearly takes to heart with regard to the perceived infectious threat to the Church of England posed by Presbyterianism.

NOTES 1. Irvin Ehrenpreis, in discussing An Argument against Abolishing Christianity, observes that Swift ‘‘took sects [specifically nonconformist ones] to be a psychological or


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biological tendency, representing not the devout conscience of a variant revelation but an instinct for perverseness of every sort’’ (Swift: The Man, his Works, and the Age, 3 vols. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962–83], 2: p. 281). 2. Swift, Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939–68), 1: p. 86. 3. Ibid., 1: pp. 89, 121. 4. Ibid., 1: p. 175. 5. Ibid., 1: p. 46: ‘‘FOR, about this Time it happened a Sect arose, whose Tenets obtained and spread very far, especially in the Grande Monde, and among every Body of good Fashion.’’ If the beliefs of this heretical denomination are considered contagious in the physical sense, this epidemic of clothes worshipping is deeply rooted; ‘‘obtained,’’ when used in the intransitive form, denotes ‘‘prevalent’’ or ‘‘established,’’ according to the OED. Although Swift declares that he is here introducing ‘‘an Occasional Satyr upon Dress and Fashion,’’ he then specifies that members of the expanding sect ‘‘worshipped a sort of Idol,’’ identified as a tailor incidental to the allegory of the coats in section 2. 6. The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 1: p. 18, ll. 76, 81; p. 19, 1. 111; and p. 20, 1. 139. Interestingly, both epidemic and sect appear in close proximity in this multifarious poem, but the words are not fused as adjective and noun until the drafting of A Tale, later in the decade. According to Ehrenpreis, Swift urges ‘‘a bookseller and some hack assistants . . . not to mind the ‘sect’ [the ‘‘ill’’ faction of ll. 72–73] who cry them down’’ for ‘‘reviving learning after the wars of 1688–91‘‘ (1: p. 115). Swift praises the righteous faction for ‘‘maintain[ing] orthodox religion in the face of sniping doubters’’ (Ibid., p. 115). Pat Rogers notes that their antagonists, the ‘‘Surly Sect,’’ are ‘‘sceptics at large, but especially satirical freethinkers in the line of Rochester’’ (Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983], p. 606). 7. Davis, Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, 1: p. xxii. 8. Davis observes that although the Tale ‘‘may have roots which go as far back as [Swift’s] last years at Trinity College, we may be fairly certain that it was at Kilroot that Swift first conceived the plan of a satire on the numerous gross corruptions in religion, which should at the same time justify the position of the Church of England, and show it to be free from the extravagancies of Papists and fanatics alike’’ (Prose Works, 1: pp. xv-xvi). Louis Landa allows for ‘‘the possibility that a portion of a Tale of a Tub was written at Kilroot, and, if not actually there, then while [Swift] was nonresident but still prebendary of Kilroot, with the experience of Ulster Presbyterianism fresh enough to give a dark and bitter tinge to that work (Swift and the Church of Ireland [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954], p. 21). 9. Angus Ross and David Woolley, eds. A Tale of a Tub and Other Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. x. 10. Davis, Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, 1: p. xvi. 11. G. R. Cragg, From Puritanism to the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 165–66. 12. Oliver W. Ferguson, Jonathan Swift and Ireland (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), p. 7, note. 13. The three brothers are introduced in section 2 of A Tale. The character of Peter dominates the next installment of the allegory, section 4, and it is not until section 6 that Martin (Martin Luther, representing the Church of England) and Jack (John Calvin, representing Puritanism) are given names. Martin is only cursorily discussed—the

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focus is on Jack through to the end of this section. The Aeolists, Jack’s predecessors, are the subject of section 8, and Jack is emphasized in the last segment of the parable, section 11. 14. Ferguson, p. 15. 15. Ibid., p. 16. 16. Ibid., p. 17. 17. Ibid., p. 18. 18. Landa, p. 19. 19. Ferguson, p. 18. 20. Ehrenpreis, p. 162. 21. Ferguson, p. 18. 22. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, eds. A Tale of a Tub To Which is added The Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. xlvii. Looming large in any hereditary influence Swift may have had against Puritanism would likely involve his grandfather, Vicar Thomas Swift, a staunch royalist during the Civil War who was described in 1642 by Parliamentarian forces as ‘‘malignant’’ (Nigel Dennis, Jonathan Swift: A Short Character [1964; reprint, New York: Collier, 1967], p. 10). John Wilders and Hugh de Quehen, in their edition of Samuel Butler: Hudibras Parts I and II and Other Selected Writings (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), note ‘‘malignant’’ as ‘‘a term of abuse applied by the Puritans to the Royalists’’ (p. 49). Davis also comments that ‘‘to satisfy perhaps his ancestral prejudices, Swift throws out, for the wits of all parties to play with, A Tale of a Tub’’ (Prose Works, vol. 1: p. xxii). 23. Ehrenpreis, p. 162. 24. Elizabeth A. Livingstone, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 527. See also Ross and Woolley, p. x. 25. Landa, pp. 20–21. 26. Ehrenpreis, p. 160. 27. Landa, p. 18. 28. Ibid., p. 19. Here Landa adds that ‘‘there is a touch of irony in the fact that [Swift’s] predecessors in these cures were of [Presbyterian] persuasion.’’ 29. Ibid., p. 20. Landa also notes here that ‘‘Belfast, only a few miles from Kilroot, was the very centre of the strength and wealth of Presbyterianism,’’ and that ‘‘the established Church did not have, as Swift must have observed, the exclusive position it was presumed to have.’’ 30. Ehrenpreis, p. 161. 31. Ibid., p. 160. 32. Ibid., p. 159. 33. Landa, pp. 19–20. 34. Ibid., p. 19. 35. Ronald Paulson, Theme and Structure in Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1960; reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972); Phillip Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of ‘‘A Tale of a Tub’’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Kenneth Craven, Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness: The Information Age in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992). In addition to naming John Toland (1670–1722) as Swift’s primary satirical victim, Craven identifies the following contemporaries of Swift as also coming under attack: John Locke (1632–1704); Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of, 1671–1713); Narcissus Marsh, Archbishop of Dublin (1638–1713); and Marsh’s ‘‘disciple’’ Peter Browne (d. 1735).


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36. Prose Works, vol. 9, p. 262. 37. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 77. 38. Patrick Reilly, Jonathan Swift: The Brave Desponder (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), p. 66. 39. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 88–89. Frederik N. Smith, Language and Reality in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), points out that ‘‘if we assume that one’s name is his most personal possession, then the multiplicity of names here implies a multiplicity of identities’’ (p. 15), and that ‘‘[t]he most obvious explanation for the instability of proper names is that Swift intends to satirize Catholics and Protestants into stereotypes, suggesting that whatever you call them they are all the same’’ (pp. 15–16), implying that all denominations of Christianity—of course to varying degrees—are doctrinally influential. Swift’s author at this point in the narrative announces that he is ‘‘now advancing to gratify the World with a very particular Account’’ of Aeolism, yet he of course fails to honor the promise: ‘‘A Digression in Praise of Digressions,’’ section 7, intervenes before the promised exposition of the Aeolists—Jack’s followers—in section 8. 40. Such an association had previously been made only slightly more explicitly than Swift by the staunchly Royalist poet John Cleveland in ‘‘The Rebel Scot’’ (1658): ‘‘Scotland’s a nation epidemical’’ (Poems of John Cleveland, ed. John M. Berdan [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1903], pp. 148, l. 70). Cleveland elsewhere in the poem identifies the infectious militants as conspicuous for following their ‘‘Kirk of Scots’’ (pp. 148, l. 54). 41. Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 123. 42. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 124. 43. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 89. Guthkelch and Nichol Smith note that ‘‘Mellæo’’ is an intentionally wrong spelling of ‘‘Melleo,’’ whereby Swift disguises the metrical defect resulting from the alteration (p. 142). 44. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (1924; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) 1, l. 934, p. 79. 45. Sir William Smith and Sir John Lockwood, Latin-English Dictionary (1933; reprint, Edinburgh and London: W&R Chambers and John Murray, 1976). 46. Lucretius 1, 11. 933–34 (Rouse, p. 79). 47. Swift quotes directly from De Rerum Natura repeatedly in A Tale: the second epigraph on the title page is from 1, 928–31, and citations other than that discussed above are from 4, 526–27 (Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 36); 6, pp. 786–87 (Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 61); 1, pp. 141–42 (Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 77); 5, p. 107 (Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 95); 4, p. 1065, and 4, 1048 and 1055 (Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 103) Such extensive reference to Lucretius’s didactic poem indicate that Swift was impressed with the work even if he detested its doctrine: ‘‘Swift claimed to have read Lucretius three times before or during 1696–7’’ (Paulson, note 6, p. 99). See also Guthkelch-Nichol Smith, p. lvi. 48. Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 87. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 87–88. 51. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 88. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 34–35. Ross and Woolley note that ‘‘the austere Calvinist Kirk of Scotland, like many of the ‘dissenting’ groups in England, emphasized preaching’’

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(p. 207), that process which Swift would most abhor in this principal competitor for boosting his congregation. 55. Prose Works vol. 1, p. 35. 56. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 35. Significantly, the word ‘‘influence’’ derives from the Latin influentia and is etymologically related to influentia, the highly contagious viral infection, a connection which may have occurred to Swift during the drafting process. 57. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 36. 58. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 35. 59. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 35–36. 60. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 36. That Swift intrudes here in punning style is established convincingly by Frederik N. Smith: ‘‘The pseudoserious argument of course pivots on the ironic pun on ‘Impressions,’ which Swift forces us to take in its physical as well as figurative sense’’ (p. 17). Smith further elucidates the pun: ‘‘[Swift] even puns on its double usage in a physical sense: the word means both the mark left by a heavy body or a blow and the characters made by printing from type’’ (note 21, p. 25). 61. Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 36. W. H. D. Rouse translates book 4, 11. 526–27 as follows: ‘‘For we must confess that voice and sound also are bodily, since they can strike upon the sense’’ (pp. 316–17), making Swift’s translation of possunt impellere [can wound] intentionally afflictive in its meaning. The first three definitions of impellere listed by Smith and Lockwood are ‘‘to push, drive, or strike against’’ (pp. 327–28). 62. Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 95. 63. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 96. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 97. Sir Walter Scott observes in his note to this passage that ‘‘[t]he more zealous sectaries were the presbyterians of the Scottish discipline’’ (Guthkelch-Nichol Smith, p. 154, note 5). 67. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 97. 68. W. E.Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1996), p. 145. Swift would also appreciate the paradoxical nature of the term in its biblical usage: ‘‘With the exception of the significance of secrecy . . . , darkness is always used in a bad sense. Moreover the different forms of darkness are so closely allied, being either cause and effect, or else concurrent effects of the same cause, that they cannot always be distinguished’’ (ibid., p. 145). 69. Paradise Lost, 1, l. 63 (John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes [New York: Macmillan, 1957]). 70. Prose Works, vol. 1, pp. 97–98. 71. C. P. Daw, ‘‘Swift’s Favorite Books of the Bible.’’ Huntington Library Quarterly 43 (Summer 1980): pp. 201. 72. Phillip Harth argues in Swift and Anglican Rationalism that the ‘‘New Schemes in Philosophy’’ relate principally to atheism, indicating that Swift’s greatest concern is preventing malevolent religious or atheistic influence, pp. 85–100. 73. Harth, p. 3. 74. Paulson, p. 5. 75. Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 2. 76. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 54. See also Matthew 10.16. 77. Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 1.


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78. J. C. Beckett, Confrontations: Studies in Irish History (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972), p. 119. Beckett’s particularly apt term ‘‘priest in politics’’ best describes Swift’s identity as it is characterized in this study, although Beckett places Swift somewhere closer to the middle between priest and politician: ‘‘He was not the dedicated cleric for whom political life is simply the means of advancing some ecclesiastical interest. He is not, at the other extreme, the politician who is only a cleric, as it were, by accident . . .’’ (p. 119). 79. Michael DePorte, ‘‘The Road to St. Patrick’s: Swift and the Problem of Belief.’’ Swift Studies 8 (1993): p.13. 80. In the ostensibly political essay Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome (1701), discussion devolves to ‘‘Reasoners, who employ so much of their Zeal, their Wit, and their Leisure for upholding the Ballance of Power in Christendom,’’ who ‘‘by their Practices . . . are endeavouring to destroy it at home’’ (Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 200). See also the summary of doctrinal conflicts in contemporary England, vol. 1, pp. 230–36. 81. Ibid., vol. 1, p 33. 82. Daw, p. 202: ‘‘Like most Christian clergymen, Swift refers to the New Testament more often than to the Old. Within the New Testament, however, remarkable biases emerge: almost half of these allusions and quotations can be traced to Matthew or I Corinthians.’’ 83. Ibid., p. 203. 84. Ibid., p. 204. 85. Ross and Woolley, pp. x-xi. 86. Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 2. 87. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 31. 88. Ibid. 89. Treatises written by fellow Anglicans against Swift’s A Tale include William King’s Remarks on the Tale of a Tub (1704) and William Wotton’s Observations upon the Tale of a Tub (1705); see Guthkelch-Nichol Smith, p. 3. 90. Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 2. 91. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 2–3. 92. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 28. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 30. Significantly, Swift here uses the term ‘‘sect’’ in the sense of signification 4c of the OED, which is ‘‘commonly applied to a separately organized religious body, having its distinctive name and its own places of worship’’ and ‘‘in a narrower sense, one of the bodies separated from the Church,’’ and the plural form is ‘‘. . . applied by Anglicans to the various bodies of Dissenters . . .’’ Additionally, the term can also be a derogatory expression used to refer to a nonconformist faith. 95. The 1711 treatise Argument against Abolishing Christianity is essentially an argument against the elimination of Anglicanism, which for Swift is the only true Christianity. Weakening of the Church of England’s stance against nonconformists would ‘‘take in all Sorts of Dissenters; who are now shut out of the Pale upon Account of a few Ceremonies, which all Sides confess to be Things indifferent’’ (Prose Works, vol. 11, p. 34). Employing demographic terminology reflecting religious division in Ireland, Swift implies that ideally, nonconformists would be quarantined and prevented from spreading influential irreligion. 96. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 102. 97. DePorte, p. 13; Swift, Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 105. 98. Harth, pp. 95–97. 99. Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 104. 100. Ibid., vol. 9, p. 77.

Apocalypse Then: Pope and the Prophets of Dulness Pat Rogers

LIKE OTHER DISSIDENTS, HERETICS HAVE ENJOYED A GOOD SCHOLarly press in recent years.1 Yet perhaps heresy needs to be reconceptualized, or at least to be reconfigured historically. We have not always seen the extent to which heresies have existed in competition— unavoidably so since heretics are often self-defined, and what is heretical is contested by those within unorthodox faiths as well as by those outside them. One preliminary step is to abandon the model, derived from Foucault, of a crushing power system which creates categories of the marginal and rigidly defines the normal. This model relates chiefly to the highly centralized absolutist states of Europe, particularly France, with their organized and bureaucratically effective church— though it may also fit New England to some extent. It applies much less well in other places, notably in the case of early modern Britain. Over the course of the ‘‘long’’ eighteenth century, the British experience involved an almost permanently contested orthodoxy, in matters of political, constitutional, and religious opinion, and so heterodoxies were constantly shifting in their nature and influence. This is not to say that minorities could never be left out or oppressed, especially on economic grounds. But the foundations of the state had been regularly challenged and indeed overturned under the Commonwealth, with the supreme symbol of monarchical power executed. They were put in doubt once more in 1688–89, when the king was ejected, and yet again during the early Hanoverian years, when a constant threat of another seismic disturbance hung over the nation. Meanwhile, the established Church was beset by rivals, whether dissenters, deists, or freethinkers, and often had to extend a more or less reluctant tolerance towards such groups. In this context, the situation of Alexander Pope is both exceptional and exemplary. He was in many ways an outsider. As a Catholic, he belonged to an effectively proscribed religion. As an invalid, he was 112

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subjected to extensive somatic prejudice. As a freemason, who knew a good deal about Rosicrucianism and other branches of ‘‘ancient knowledge,’’ he was potentially suspect to those who upheld the ruling orthodoxies. And even if he was not an active Jacobite (though that is a very questionable assumption), he emphatically held deep sympathy with the dying spirit of the Stuart cause as the dynasty faded into the margins of history. It is true that he was not anxious to persecute dissenters: indeed, he showed himself tolerant and sympathetic towards individual members of the nonconformist church. Yet he did take a stand, along with his friend Swift, against enthusiasm and the practices of extremist Protestant sects. (There can be debate, of course, as to what is extreme in this context and what constitutes a sect.) All this is the more notable because Pope was clearly in other respects a true insider, who could attain a relation of almost camaraderie with dukes and duchesses, and who had access even to Robert Walpole. If he had chosen to compromise his personal values and sense of vocation as a writer, he could actually have operated legitimately as court poet and spokesman for the establishment—almost the last author of genuinely high talent of whom this might be said. Pope’s attitudes can be clarified if we look at The Dunciad in the context of three historical phenomena.2 They might variously be described as ideologies, discursive practices, or modes of heretical testimony. Each promised in its own way a new world. Each offered a promise of a transformed Britain, allegedly based on some kind of ancient prophecy, and each defined an orthodoxy from which Pope would be specifically excluded. The first was the continuing strain of militant Protestantism which the experience of defeat in the Civil War had quite failed to destroy. Second was the brief incursion of a group of French prophets into the nation, during the reign of Anne. The third was the unceasing barrage of anti-Catholic propaganda distributed to a large section of the population by the almanacs of men like John Partridge—a figure with a longer-lasting relevance to Pope than to a more familiar adversary, Swift.

1 Recent scholarship has conclusively demonstrated that Spenser, Milton, and Marvell have important roots in chiliastic and apocalyptic beliefs of their age.3 Milton and Marvell died in the decade before Pope was born, and thus they were no more remote to the poet as he formed

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his identity as an author than T. S. Eliot would be to a young writer in his or her thirties today. Pope’s own father (a Catholic convert) was born in 1646, his mother in 1643; even his nurse, the other key member of the household during his upbringing, came into the world as early as 1648. The poet’s most important mentor, Sir William Trumbull, was old enough to retain boyhood memories of the Civil War, since he first saw light in 1639. Young Alexander’s early development and reading were supervised by men of this generation: among his other mentors at this stage were William Wycherley, born about 1640, and Thomas Betterton, born about 1635. The sponsors of his Pastorals included another dramatist, Thomas Southerne (b. 1659); the marquess of Dorchester (b. c.1665); Lord Wharton (b. 1648); Sir Samuel Garth (b. 1661); Sir Henry Sheeres (b. ante 1650); and the duke of Buckinghamshire (b. 1648). All members of this group were at least fifteen years senior to Pope. His new literary friends around 1712–13 included Swift (b. 1667), Arbuthnot (b. 1667) and Prior (b. 1664). The dedicatee of Windsor-Forest was Granville (also b. 1667), himself a seventeenthcentury poet. Most, though not all, of this group came from a royalist background: it is just as significant that they belonged to a cohort who had lived through the contentious aftermath of the political and religious struggles of the mid-seventeenth century. This is of course to leave aside Pope’s poetic father John Dryden (b. 1631), another writer whose concerns with what might be called political astrology are now fully documented. Such men provided the intellectual and literary coordinates within which Pope came to maturity. Two ways of approaching the millenarian tradition immediately suggest themselves. One is to consider the growth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of an aggressive Protestant ideology, at the heart of which lay an eschatological account of the way in which the English became the chosen people, preordained to accomplish God’s purposes, and the instrument of a providence which would extirpate the Antichrist. According to this doctrine, the Reformation had enabled England to lead the process by which the domination of Rome would be brought down. Even the Civil War had been no more than a stage on this, as Christ came to liquidate the king. It was, Keith Thomas observes, ‘‘the execution of Charles I which left the way open for King Jesus.’’4 The coalition that fought the war was soon to split up, and at the radical end many of the individual sects were to have a short effective life. But the Ranters and Levellers and Diggers lived on as their ideas were expressed both in politics and in religious dissent. The Ranters in particular have received sympathetic treatment from


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Clement Hawes, but it is the Fifth Monarchy Men who are the most immediately to our purpose.5 Their beliefs are usually traced back to Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in the second book of Daniel as this was interpreted by the prophet. The four biblical empires (sometimes identified with Persia, Media, Egypt and Greece, with Rome often substituted for Media) were to be succeeded by the fifth kingdom of God. The crucial instrument of these communities of belief was the use of prophecy. This comes out not just directly in the astrological tradition as developed by men like William Lilly, but also in the practice of searching out ancient myths that would sustain the ideology of overthrowing the monarch. As Lilly declared, ‘‘All or most of our ancient English, Welsh and Saxon prophecies had relation to Charles Stuart, late King of England, unto his reign, his actions, life and death, and unto the now present times wherein we live, and unto no other preceding kings or times whatsoever.’’6 Thus millennial hopes were regularly tied to a politics of social revolution: what may not be so obvious is that they could just as easily be subsumed in a theology of antipopery. The innumerable appeals to Geoffrey of Monmouth and other stores of Celtic mythology (Pope, we recall, was well versed in this author)7 the tendentious use of Arthurian legend and the endless repetition of the deeds of Merlin as satirized by Swift in his poem ‘‘The Windsor Prophecy’’ (1711)—all testify to this hunger for mythical precedents. Indeed, what Thomas calls ‘‘the appeal to the past’’ is among the most vital constituents of the millenarian mindset.8 It is surely no accident that The Dunciad is littered with references to a similar obsession on the part of the Dunces—deriving from their conviction that they are accomplishing the predestined conquest of the nation: ‘‘This, this is he, foretold by ancient rhymes: / Th’ Augustus born to bring Saturnian times’’ (3:319– 20). However, there is of course a more general context of apocalyptic and chiliastic thinking. For instance, the Jewish tradition had enshrined a very old idea concerning the great sabbath, according to which the world would last six thousand years and then enter a final age of one thousand years, when the people would come into their own. Etymologically, shabbath means simply ‘‘rest’’ in Hebrew: Pope’s joke is to literalize this, so that when the godly people of The Dunciad take over, it will be one long snooze: ‘‘See Christians, Jews, one heavy sabbath keep, / And all the western world believe and sleep’’ (3: 99–100). This plot is acted out most obviously in the climactic scene following the great yawn of Dulness in the last book. Before Oblomov, before Bouvard et Pećuchet, before Ulysses, Pope had intuited that the ultimate step into

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dehumanized chaos might be taken out of a kind of sloth, more than from greed, tyranny, or ambition. It is well known that all sorts of millennial sects flourished in medieval Europe. Some were actually stigmatized by the church as heresies eo nomine. An example is the movement of the Free Spirit, a frequent victim of the Inquisition, and one whose adepts rejected all rules and restraints in the name of spiritual emancipation. This sect has been studied along with other groups of holy beggars and mystical apostles by Norman Cohn, in his classic (the more so, because controversial) book The Pursuit of the Millennium. Some of these movements had a profound social impact, and some led to major uprisings, including the Peasants’ Revolt—an event still recalled in the almanacs of Pope’s day. Most of the groups envisaged a new order which would emerge from some great cataclysmic event, such as the appearance of the New Jerusalem following upon the Day of Wrath. With such a future to be expected, it was natural to place great emphasis on portents and prodigies, especially those expressed in the heavenly language of comets and meteors.9 Almost every one of these features is echoed in The Dunciad. The social unrest, the abandonment of restraint, the prophecies, the portents are all present. As for the rejection of all restraint, this is palpably a goal of the Dunces throughout, but it can be seen at its most explicit in a passage from the third book: All crowd, who foremost shall be damn’d to Fame. Some strain in rhyme; the Muses, on their racks, Scream like the winding of ten thousand jacks: Some free from rhyme or reason, rule or check, Break Priscian’s head, and Pegasus’s neck; Down, down they larum, with impetuous whirl, The Pindars, and the Miltons of a Curl. (3: 158–64)

However, the similarities between millenarian activity and duncely activism can easily be occluded, because we have tended to concentrate on the classical mythology underlying the poem, whether it be the first book of the Metamorphoses or Virgil’s eclogue to Pollio. In fact, there were other versions of the golden age, Neoplatonized or translated into alchemic terms, which intervened between Ovid and Pope, as we need to recall in reading lines such as those which invoke ‘‘a new Saturnian age of Lead’’ (1: 28). There was, too, a specifically political usage to the


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phrase, available to royalists as well as republicans: when Pope writes of ‘‘Albion’s Golden Days’’ (Windsor-Forest 424), he may be remembering the Golden Day which Catholics had imagined more than a century earlier, and which would see Elizabeth brought down and the monasteries restored. For the most part such applications to the myth by royalists tended to be narrowly concerned with the restoration of a particular dynasty: ostensibly at any rate, they did not incorporate a long-term theology of rebirth as did the radical versions—though it is possible that a wider politics was obfuscated or mystified in conservative treatment of the golden age. One of the most compelling sections of Norman Cohn’s book deals with the prophetic background to the Crusades. Even before Urban II urged the ranks of Christendom to regain the Holy Land, at the end of the eleventh century, hordes of common people were gathering to implement this program, under the leadership of inspired prophetae like Peter the Hermit. For the common people, the Crusade was ‘‘an armed and militant pilgrimage, the greatest and most sublime of pilgrimages.’’10 It was through the teachings of such mystics that so many became convinced that they were destined to share in the overthrow of the Antichrist, as the long-anticipated hero known as the Last Emperor led his forces to Jerusalem. The theme of The Dunciad, of course, is the effort of Dulness to restore her ‘‘old Empire’’ (1: 17). Cibber is bizarrely cast as the heaven-born leader to revive this ‘‘good old Cause’’ (1: 165), and presented to the people as their savior: ‘‘And the hoarse nation croak’d, ‘God save King Log!’ ’’ (1: 330). At the same time, the ‘‘Chosen’’ among his followers behave as the elect always do, self-righteously confident of their mission to eradicate other groups, whether Moslem, Jewish, or Catholic. Just as the medieval hordes set out on their mission to massacre the ungodly, so the modern Dunces rolling through the city in a ‘‘black troop’’ (2: 360) embark on their own pogrom to eliminate the negative: ‘‘How keen the war, if Dulness draw the sword!’’ (3: 120). Behind all their infights (‘‘barb’rous civil war,’’ 3: 176) and their orgiastic practices, the Dunces cling on to their crusade, to ‘‘MAKE ONE MIGHTY DUNCIAD OF THE LAND’’ of the Land’ (4: 604). In the action of the poem, a conventional epic property—the vision of a prophecy to be fulfilled—is linked to messianic ambitions: Dulness repossesses ‘‘her ancient right’’ (1: 11) as she persuades her puppet Cibber and the rest of her followers to clothe her in glory: And see, my son! the hour is on its way, That lifts our Goddess to imperial sway;

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This fav’rite Isle, long sever’d from her reign, Dove-like, she gathers to her wings again. Now look thro’ Fate! behold the scene she draws! What aids, what armies to assert her cause! (3: 123–29)

One famous episode, above all, seems to fit the antimilleniary purposes of The Dunciad most squarely. This occurs with the ‘‘messianic reign of John of Leyden,’’ as Cohn describes it—that is, the uprising by Anabaptists who seized the city of Mu¨nster in 1534, and set up a kingdom of Zion, which enforced a nakedly communist regime as well as a system of polygamy.11 The movement was led by a tailor of twenty-five, Jan Bockelson, who named himself king of Israel and the chief of his fifteen wives Divara. We have positive proof that the Scriblerians were well aware of Jack of Leiden, as he was generally known by this date. He is present as a fanatic in the ‘‘Digression on Madness’’ in A Tale of a Tub, where one of Jack’s nicknames in the allegorical narrative is ‘‘Dutch Jack.’’12 Moreover, at the start of the Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus, we learn that the home of the hero’s father, Cornelius Scriblerus, is Mu¨nster, and this same Cornelius is a devotee of every bogus arcane craft. It is worth reminding ourselves that Pope was busy preparing the Memoirs for their first appearance in print among his collected works in 1741, at a juncture when he was also completing the four-book version of The Dunciad.13 The occupation of Mu¨nster lasted little more than a year before it was besieged and taken by the bishop of the diocese. Jack himself was tortured to death in public. Nevertheless, the entire episode, culminating in atrocities on both sides, took a strong hold on the European historical imagination. It is hard to read any account of the events, such as the graphic description by Cohn, without being constantly reminded of The Dunciad. For example, the Anabaptists declared that the unlearned were chosen by God to redeem the world, with the result that ‘‘when they sacked the cathedral they took particular delight in defiling, tearing up and burning the books and manuscripts of its old library.’’14 All books save the Bible were banned—the Dunces do not make even this exception. The episode anticipates Fahrenheit 451, but it resembles in much closer detail Settle’s inspired vision of the triumph of Dulness, based on the destruction of the wisdom of centuries: ‘‘And one bright blaze turns Learning into air’’ (3: 78). Jack was solemnly anointed and proclaimed king of the New Jerusalem; this is pretty well exactly what happens in the first book of Pope’s


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poem, with Cibber substituting as monarch and the empire of Dulness equated with Jerusalem. Equally revelatory is Cohn’s description of the magnificently dressed Jack on his throne among his suite of courtiers: ‘‘In the market place a throne was erected; draped with cloth of gold it towered above the surrounding benches which were allotted to the royal councillors and the preachers. Sometimes the king would come there to sit in judgement or to witness the proclamation of new ordinances. Heralded by a fanfare, he would arrive on horseback, wearing his crown and carrying his sceptre.’’ There followed ‘‘a long line of ministers, courtiers and servants.’’15 All this is faithfully replicated in The Dunciad, with its picture of Cibber resplendent ‘‘High on a gorgeous seat’’ and surrounded by his peers (2: 1–12). The queen promptly proclaims ‘‘by herald Hawkers’’ the games to follow (2:18), and the later part of the poem supplies the approach of courtiers at a royal levee. Furthermore, we are told that preachers identified Bockelson as none other than the Messiah foretold by the prophets in the Old Testament. This blasphemous thought is never far from the surface in The Dunciad, first because Pope replays with parodic force lines from his own Messiah, but mainly because the language of the millenarians hovers over the diction of the poem. Jack was said to be strikingly handsome and endowed with ‘‘an irresistible eloquence.’’ From his youth, he had delighted in writing and acting plays: as Cohn says, at Mu¨nster he was able ‘‘to shape real life into a play, with himself as its hero.’’ When the siege took effect, he devised more fantastic entertainments to distract the populace: ‘‘On one occasion the starving population was summoned to take part in three days of dancing, racing and athletics [again, precisely the plot of Book 2] . . . Dramatic performances were staged in the cathedral: an obscene parody of the Mass, a social morality based on the story of Dives and Lazarus.’’16 It needs no emphasis that the actual Colley Cibber was actor, playwright, and theatrical impresario, or that these occupations are central to the role Pope allots to Cibber in the poem, as the showman of state fit to rule over Walpole’s England. He is also in a technical sense the ‘‘hero’’ of the epic, with his perverse suitability for the office set out in a lengthy segment of the preliminaries; and his self-regarding vanity expresses the narcissism of power. Like other messianic leaders, Cibber bases his authority on personal glamor and unlimited confidence, rather than solid achievement. He resembles the ‘‘amoral supermen’’ studied by Cohn, with their easy routes to self-deification: ‘‘What then remains? Ourself. Still, still remain / Cibberian forehead, and Cibberian brain’’ (2: 217–18).

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It would be impossible to sustain the claim that Cibber is Jack of Leiden, or that The Dunciad constitutes a direct replay of the terrors of Mu¨nster. Rather, Pope’s vision of Duncehood reinscribes actual heresy, as some saw it, on the republicans and extreme radicals of his day. The Scriblerians, like other conservative thinkers, feared the element of social disruption that such prophets inspired, with their charismatic egocentricity and innocence. Beyond this, a man such as Pope cannot have failed to observe that the millennial creeds nearly always involved a pollution of hallowed rites, as with the obscene parody of the mass at Mu¨nster. It is scarcely a coincidence that Jack began with a sort of ethnic cleansing: all Roman Catholics and Lutherans who remained in the town were compelled to go through a ceremony of rebaptism. It became a capital offense to be unbaptized. The others were driven out as godless. This was done in the name of achieving a community of true believers, the children of God. In Jack’s world the new age was to be ‘‘the age of vengeance and triumph of the Saints.’’17 Pope could not have heard such phrases without trembling, in the awareness that there were homebred ‘‘saints’’ who thirsted for revenge and whose triumph would mean suppression of the old faith. Whether it was Bockelson running naked through the streets of Mu¨nster in a state of mystical ecstasy or the Dunces claiming the West End of London for their own savage rituals, the result would be the same—true piety would be mocked, reason abjured, and vengeance taken against the ancient bastions of civilization. It sounds like a melodramatic view of the world to us, but then we are not beleaguered Catholics surrounded by a lurid antipapist rhetoric, put about by those whose recent ancestors had suffered humiliation and contempt after the failure of their own constitutional experiment.

2 If, as a young man, Pope had wanted a real-life demonstration of enthusiasm at work, he had before his eyes the amazing descent of the socalled French prophets in London from 1706. This has been the subject of an excellent book by Hillel Schwarz, whose account provides some necessary analytic insight into a series of events striking enough in their narrative interest. The complex background to the sudden eruption of religious feeling can be briefly summarized here. In fact, the story began with a Protestant rising in the Ce´vennes following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. At first the Huguenots envisioned their delivery in 1689, and when that hope failed they looked to a new judg-


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ment day in 1700. When this equally declined to materialize, the movement pressed on regardless, and the inspire´s toured the countryside to bring the breath of the divine spirit to their persecuted coreligionists. A full-blown revolt was mounted by the Camisards in the summer of 1702. This the royal troops were unable to crush for two whole years, a period which witnessed a violent series of ambushes and atrocities. In December 1702, for example, more than two hundred churches in the Ce´vennes were burnt down. Inevitably, the authorities responded with equal savagery. Then, in 1706, three of the prophets arrived in London, to proclaim the Second Coming, and received a warm welcome from the descendants of those millennial groups (notably the Philadelphians, under the direction of Jane Lead) that had flourished in England during the 1690s. Gradually their appeal widened, even among Anglicans: they proved able to attract a large number of women followers in particular, under the leadership of an Englishman of genteel origins named John Lacy.18 For the next two years, the prophets were the talk of the town. Swift mentioned them in the Bickerstaff papers, and Mary Astell wrote a condemnatory pamphlet. There can be no doubt that Pope was well aware of their activities, for the group prompted a somewhat paranoid reference in a letter from his elderly friend Wycherley in late 1707: For Agitation is now the word, because they work out their Damnation here, with fear, and trembling, as the Quakers did formerly; and they are seised, with a Spiritual Ague; which turns to such a Feaver, in their Brains, that they are hot-headed to the degree of Fanatical Prophecy; and so great a Faith, that ’tis said, they believe themselves what they say; and pretend to working Miracles also.19

There is nothing here which could not be paralleled in the numerous alarmist pamphlets that greeted the arrival of the French devotees. What is noteworthy is the assimilation of this group into a tradition of inspired prophecy, reaching back—significantly—to the inception of the Quaker movement just half a century before. Pope made no direct response in his extant correspondence, but he continued to joke about prophets, as he would for the remainder of his life. At the height of the affair, on October 30, 1707, his close adviser Sir William Trumbull received news of the doings of John Lacy—a sign of how anxious the conservative heartland of the nation was growing by this time.20 Distant as the events were by 1728, the poet must have kept stored up in his mind when he came to write The Dunciad a recollection of this briefly celebrated episode of ‘‘Fanatical Prophecy.’’

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A small footnote may be added. The most interesting of the three prophets who came to trial in England was Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (1664–1753), a notable Swiss astronomer and physicist, and friend of both Isaac Newton and David Gregory. In addition, he had served as tutor to the earl of Arran, brother of the great duke of Ormond, and this led the duke to take steps to ensure that the three men were treated with a measure of lenity after their conviction. Arran was a Catholic, a Jacobite, a subscriber to the Iliad, and a neighbor of Pope’s sister and brother-in-law in Windsor Forest whom Pope would visit in years to come. Here was another possible reminder of the visit of the French Protestants. Ultimately, three of the Camisard devotees were put on trial and sentenced to the pillory in December 1707 for their ‘‘wicked and counterfeit prophecies.’’ They stood on the scaffold at Charing Cross, and the populace duly pelted them with mud and stones. Not surprisingly, this made martyrs of them, a necessary prelude as they saw it to the coming of the New Jerusalem. A more serious reversal occurred when a muchheralded miracle, involving the raising of the dead Thomas Emes, a follower of the prophets, failed to materialize. The event was supposed to take place in May 1708 at Bunhill Fields—an area associated with Milton, Bunyan, and Defoe. Swift was one of those to note the failure of this resurrection with satisfaction: a reference also appears in Defoe’s Review.21 For a few more years the cult continued to win some adherents, but it gradually faded into obscurity, and by 1715 it was effectively dead as a popular movement. The prophecies of the group, with its pervading ethos of cataclysm, had taken a familiar form: ‘‘The Trumpet is ready to sound. Fire, Lightning and Thunderbolts are prepared for thine Enemies.’’ A day of vengeance was foretold: pestilential fogs and mists would sweep away the inhabitants of London ‘‘like a Plague,’’ just what the ‘‘cloud-compelling Queen’’ of Dulness (1: 79) brings to the capital.22 There would be many portents such as comets and eclipses, anticipating the Scriblerian satires against men like William Whiston in years to come, and pointing towards the cosmic upheavals of The Dunciad. Remarkably, the inspire´s prophesied while asleep, an accomplishment to be envied by the inhabitants of Dultown: ‘‘Hence, from the straw where Bedlam’s Prophet nods, / He hears loud Oracles, and talks with Gods’’ (3: 7–8). There are further odd contiguities: Lacy rented a building in the Barbican to serve as an officially licensed meetingplace for the French prophets, and it remained the center of their operations throughout their stay: hostile observers termed it their ‘‘Shop of Inspiration.’’23 Likewise the Dunces


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met in the very same quarter of the city, and before that, in the chief literary model for Pope’s poem, Dryden had described Shadwell’s imperial residence at the start of Mac Flecknoe: ‘‘An ancient fabrick . . . / There stood of yore, and Barbican it hight.’’ The prophets, it emerges, hung out just down the road from Grub Street. Here then was a concrete historical case that attracted the attention of Pope and his friends. It was a recrudescence of the kind of popular prophetic movement that had been so visible in England during the seventeenth century and about which Pope’s elders perhaps muttered warnings to the young boy. It could be enlisted by the poet to align millenarian causes with virulent anti-Catholicism and with social upheaval. Nothing quite like this had erupted in the intervening years up to the composition of The Dunciad. Schwartz remarks on the various forms anti-Catholicism took in the early eighteenth century, which could be shared by ‘‘all levels of English society’’;24 he also cites a playbill for an opera performed at Bartholomew Fair during Anne’s reign, with a spectacular apocalyptic finale of the very kind that Pope satirizes in the third book of his poem (3: 253–72). Again we find Dives along with Herod as a personification of the cruelty, tyranny, and pomp of the papist church. In such a climate, the proclamation of doom towards Catholicism uttered by the prophets could count on a sympathetic hearing from a large segment of the population. If Alexander Pope did not immediately feel his heart turn cold, he was astonishingly resilient. It would be otiose here to recite all the evidence which has been assembled to show that Pope as a young man was deeply scarred by the treatment he and his family received at the hands of authority. Born to Catholic converts at the very moment when papists were least popular, forced into a kind of internal exile by the recusancy laws, driven out again after the Hanoverian accession from his paternal home in Windsor Forest (which remained a lost domain in his imagination ever after), required officially to declare his allegiance to the new regime, not to say taxed in a discriminatory way—such a life experience could scarcely leave him unaffected.25 In 1715 his friends and relatives were implicated in the Old Pretender’s rebellion: many of those who subscribed to the Iliad translation of that year found themselves banished, stripped of their estates, or sent to the Tower—one of their number, the earl of Derwentwater, actually went to the block. We should not melodramatize these events, but there are moments when it is easy to recall the pursuit of Edmund Campion a century and a half before. The Elizabethan recusant spent his last few days of freedom at Stonor, the family home of Pope’s friend and neighbor Thomas Stonor. Of course, the

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Hanoverians would not succeed in repressing members of the Catholic faith quite as brutally as the Elizabethans had done—but that may be because they lacked such effective means of repression.

3 For certain, plenty of respectable ways existed to foment antipapist feeling in Pope’s lifetime. Beyond any of these, however, there was one discursive site that contained a more durable and pervasive strain of hostile feeling. This was the domain of the almanac, a branch of literature which has received much more attention in recent years in the wake of Bernard Capp’s valuable survey, but which still tends to be unduly neglected in attempts to understand the mentalite´ of early modern Britain. That Pope was aware of the almanac literature proves very little—every sentient being was familiar with these ubiquitous organs of popular expression. Even before he met Pope, of course, Swift had involved himself with John Partridge, in the Bickerstaff papers of 1708–9. As for Pope, his own most famous reference occurs at the end of The Rape of the Lock, when Belinda’s lock is carried up to the heavens as a new astral phenomenon for the soothsayers to interpret: This Partridge soon shall view in cloudless Skies, When next he looks thro’ Galilæo’s Eyes; And hence th’ Egregious Wizard shall foredoom The Fate of Louis, and the Fall of Rome. (5: 137–40)

Partridge was by no means the only Protestant astrologer to foretell the death of Louis XIV or to herald the destruction of the Roman Catholic Church. At the very time of Pope’s birth, the almanacs had joined in decoding the victory of William III over James II as a sign that the new king would act as ‘‘umpire’’ of Europe, by ‘‘destroying the pope and his champion, Louis XIV.’’26 But Partridge was notorious for the virulence with which he pursued this theme: he had fled abroad at the accession of James, and when the Revolution came in 1689 he gave an ‘‘astrological guarantee’’ that the change was permanent. It might be added here that The Rape of the Lock supplies further evidence that Pope was fully cognizant of the astrological calendar, especially the bad or ‘‘dismal’’ days, to which Ariel refers in canto 1 and Belinda in canto 4.


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The impression we have received concerning Partridge is of a hapless, well meaning man who unluckily found himself embroiled with Swift. In truth he was well able to look after himself. He spent decades fomenting religious and political warfare and had traded blows with all the leading astrologers, notably John Gadbury. While exiled in Holland, he had revealed that according to the stars James II might be dead by October 1688, which was a remarkably good guess as far as the king’s political survival was concerned. If the wind had not turned in the wrong direction, William’s expeditionary force would have set out before the end of that month: it actually made its first abortive attempt on October 30, and then set sail on its successful campaign on November 10. Until this time, Partridge had been firmly republican in his views, asserting that ‘‘a commonwealth’s the thing that kingdoms want.’’ Opposing almanac writers accused him of being involved with Monmouth and the Rye House Plot to kill the king.27 It is true in any case that prophecy had always been linked with conspiracy and rebellion: long before, Thomas Nashe had declared that ‘‘all malcontents intending any invasion against their prince and country run headlong to [the astrologer’s] oracle.’’28 Even those who disbelieved in astrology reprinted Partridge’s works on the Revolution for their political and propagandistic value. Throughout the seventeenth century, Protestant eschatology as represented in the almanacs had interpreted events (both topical and historical) as predicting the fall of Rome: William Lilly had said this about the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London a year later. Totally characteristic, in an almost banal way, is the bill of fare offered by the Protestant Almanack for the Year 1684, which promises readers an account of ‘‘The Bloody Aspects, Fatal Oppositions, Diabolical Conjunctures, Inhuman Revolutions, and Pernicious Designs of the Papacy, against the Lord’s Anointed,’’ as well as ‘‘Popish Gulleries and Fopperies,’’ aimed at deluding the common people. Most almanacs also ran a chronology of leading events in British history, which must have constituted the major source of information for many humble people. The Protestant Almanack lists these in terms of the time gap since a given event: thus, Martin Luther wrote against the Pope 168 years ago. The final entries relate to ‘‘Our deliverance from Popery by Queen Elizabeth,’’ then ‘‘The horrid design of the Gun-Powder Plot,’’ followed by ‘‘The Burning of the City of London’’ (no need to allot explicit blame), and ‘‘Our miraculous Deliverance from Popery, by K. William.’’ We shall find it hard to recover in our mind the insidious effect of such messages on the literate population, repeated as the onslaught was every single year. In book 3 of The Dunciad, the prophetic

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vision of Settle concerns the destruction of imperial Rome; but it is impossible to doubt that Pope is encoding a message simultaneously about the fall of Rome, in the sense that Lilly used it, or as it appears in The Rape of the Lock. Settle, we may recall, was most celebrated ‘‘For writing Pamphlets, and for roasting Popes’’ (3: 284). Besides, it was in predicting the destruction of cities and empires that Lilly’s specialty had lain.29 Like Cibber, in the demented vision of Settle, astrologers were for Pope ‘‘born to see what none can see awake’’ (3: 43). On one occasion in 1702, the journalistic prophets were able to detect a propitious sign as Saturn and Jupiter came into conjunction: It remained an article of faith in the almanacs that the pope was Antichrist, and that his fall was at hand. Many compilers offered a glorious millenarian future. Moore drew on the Sybilline oracles, the prophecy of the Northern lion, and Nostradamus. He envisaged a messianic English conqueror sweeping through Europe to destroy the pope and Turk, and recall the Jews . . . Partridge in 1702 spoke of a millennium due to dawn in the following year and to reach perfection in 1778; his definition of the Antichrist widened generously to embrace almost all ‘‘priests of all persuasions’’ . . . Tanner anticipated a glorious age of sabbatism, Kendal, a ‘‘peaceable and happy time,’’ Salmon looked for a messianic Pax Britannica.30

Several details here recall The Dunciad, for example the moment when Cibber is led on his visit to the Elysian shades by ‘‘a slip-shod Sibyl’’ (3: 15), or the triumphant progress of barbarism through Europe, culminating in the ‘‘conqu’ring tribes’’ of Mahomet: ‘‘See Christians, Jews, one heavy sabbath keep, / And all the western world believe and sleep (3: 99–100). More generally, the poem enacts the success of Dulness in erasing the world of learning as this is accomplished through tyranny, inundations of barbarians, and superstition (see Pope’s note to 3: 67). This last phase shows ‘‘Rome, the Mistress of Arts, described in her degeneracy,’’ quickly to be followed by Britain, ‘‘the scene of the action of the poem.’’ In fact, the text of the poem at this point draws on Bayle’s Dictionary to show the medieval popes as presiding over a superstitious process of converting pagan symbols into Christian artifacts: ‘‘Till Peter’s Keys some christen’d Jove adorn’’ (3: 101). Notoriously Pope had written in the Essay on Criticism that ‘‘the Monks finish’d what the Goths begun’’ (692). He accepted the conventional view of his time that the election of Leo X in 1513 instituted a great revival in the arts and marked the end of an obscurantist and backward-looking papacy. With the defeat of Stuart hopes on the accession of George I, the Whig astrologers knew their moment of triumph. As Capp tells us, Par-


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tridge made August 1, when the king acceded, ‘‘a red-letter day of thanksgiving for deliverance from ‘popery, French slavery and English traitors.’ ’’ During the reign of Anne, almanacs like those of Partridge and Francis Moore had kept up a barrage against the French and Jacobitism, linked to a general attack on Catholicism: Partridge had long contained a section called ‘‘The Protestant Remembrancer,’’ which held up Catholic beliefs and practices to ridicule. The editor warned that the Old Pretender was nothing but ‘‘a pupil of Jesuits, and tool of Rome.’’ His elevation to the throne would mean that the Church reclaimed all the valuable lands that had been confiscated in the Reformation. More crucially still, Capp reminds us that ‘‘anti-popery was linked, almost inevitably, with millenarian excitement.’’31 Indeed it could be argued that millenarian zeal survived in the eighteenth century (as it did, to some extent) largely through the preservation of its hopes in the enduring discourse of almanacs. There were still a few almanacs that took the opposing stance. Throughout the 1690s George Parker had kept up a campaign against the ‘‘Villany’’ of Partridge in Mercurius Anglicanus; or, the English Mercury, but this ran out of steam in the new century. For Pope, the most significant of the remaining Tory organs was probably the Oxford Almanack, which clung on to the dream of a Stuart restoration longer than most. In the later years of Anne, this publication featured an annual cover design presenting an allegorical version of Jacobite politics. These designs provided an iconographic basis for Windsor-Forest, with its symbolism of a beneficent Stuart rule protecting the grateful nation.32 But for the most part the astrological field was left to the victors, whose triumphalist copy reached almost every segment of society. As scholars including Patrick Curry have shown, a stubborn core of astrological belief persisted in the mind of individuals such as Pope’s acquaintance William Stukeley.33 The predictions of William Whiston (a frequent butt of the Scriblerians) joined those of Nostradamus in the almanac-makers’ repertory of unlikely and ambiguous prophecies. To quote Capp once more: The fall of Rome and the Turk were still at hand, and the descent of the New Jerusalem must surely follow. In the 1750s the editor of Moore cited the great earthquake at Lisbon as marking the fall of Antichrist (for the city had been inhabited by ‘‘most bigoted’’ papists), and mentioned a triumphant piece of Whig theology, by which the Young Pretender, Charles Edward, was unveiled as the little horn of the beast of Daniel.34

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As it happened, Pope died a year too soon to witness the rebellion of the Young Pretender, but the rising led by Charles Edward’s father a generation earlier had provoked equally virulent claims and equally implausible applications to the prophetic books of the Old Testament.35 Not that almanacs were the only place where Pope could have found lurid accounts by soothsayers of the course of English history. The Cheshire prophecies of Robert Nixon were supposed to date from the reign of Edward IV, although Nixon himself lived in the early seventeenth century. They foretold the destruction of popery and were interpreted in 1714 as a sign of the triumph of Protestantism after the arrival of the Hanoverian regime. The prophecy went through innumerable printings right into the nineteenth century: five came out by the end of 1715, and a few months before Pope died in 1744 the so-called ‘‘thirteenth’’ edition appeared. The rising of 1745 brought the tally up to twenty editions. Many of these reprints carried the name of Edmund Curll as publisher; the introduction and main text (containing a life of Nixon) were the work of John Oldmixon. Both author and publisher, of course, were lifelong adversaries of Pope, and both are allotted a prominent role in the second book of The Dunciad. It can hardly be maintained that the poet had missed his targets or that there was no basis for his attack on popular milleniary writing as this genre merged with routine anti-Catholic propaganda.

4 Saints’ days are fixed, but the calendar of heresy is one of moveable feasts, if only because the identity of heretics changes across time and space. To that extent, any historical interpretation of this phenomenon must involve a theory of relativity, to take account of the differing perspectives of participants and observers. It would be going too far to say that all heresy is a product of social construction. We might instance the mass suicide at Jonestown of 900 people, including 240 children, which the cult leader Jim Jones enforced in 1978. This offended the principles of almost very known religious group active around any part of the world in the past three millennia, and the action could reasonably be described as heretical in an absolute sense, that is, repugnant to the creed of every community outside this single cult. But in general the logic of this subject could essentially be conjugated, ‘‘I am a free spirit, you are a dissident, he/she is a heretic.’’ Heterodox belief challenges the borders of normality as well as the definition of what is acceptable.


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To some in the early eighteenth century, Roman Catholics were themselves the arch-heretics. They too could be seen as looking towards a millennial future, especially when they espoused the cause of the Pretender. However, conservative theology (whether Catholic or High Anglican) drew the line at some things associated with messianic groups—for example, it was blasphemous to identify any other figure than Christ with the messiah. While Pope and his allies were willing to adopt the classical trope of the Golden Age for modern political purposes, as the entire design of Windsor-Forest confirms, they stopped short of any attempt to secularize the Second Coming. The monarchy was the instrument of restoration and rebirth but did not ultimately constitute the spiritual essence of that process: individual monarchs were godlike only in a metaphoric and honorific sense. Nor, unlike Dryden, did Pope enlist astrological lore to vindicate his imaginative projection of a transformed and reinvigorated nation.36 One famous passage in the poem relates immediately to our theme here. It shows that the future dreamed by the Dunces resembles very closely the world turned upside down, as imagined by millenarian writers: Thence a new world to Nature’s laws unknown, Breaks out refulgent, with a heav’n its own: Another Cynthia her new journey runs, And other planets circle other suns. The forests dance, the rivers upward rise, Whales sport in woods, and dolphins in the skies; And last, to give the whole creation grace, Lo! one vast Egg produces human race. (3: 241–48)

Similarly, the tracts of the Ranters had proclaimed that high mountains would hide in the dust and the hills be leveled. This is perhaps a spiritual metaphor rather than a literal prophecy; but the belief that the Lord of Hosts would come as the great leveler and overturn the existing order was a more or less direct expression of political faith. Some Ranters, too, spoke of the ‘‘terrible’’ day of the Lord as appearing suddenly, leaving the believer intoxicated with happiness: ‘‘Whereupon being mad drunk, I so strangely spake, and acted I knew not what.’’ 37 What we have just seen suggests that Pope has a conscious rhetorical design: he figures his satiric victims as participants in a millenarian movement that is bent on destroying the great institutions of state in

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order to bring about the ‘‘New World’’ of Dulness. Some might be inclined to see this representation as a caricature of historical reality, in respect to these areas of belief. According to a scholar such as George Rude´, it is misleading to view crowds as the passive adherents of monstrous leaders along the lines in which Gustave Le Bon and Elias Canetti have variously depicted them.38 Yet nobody could read Cohn’s book without acknowledging that, historically, the messianic cults of medieval and early modern Europe did repeatedly exhibit just this pattern of charismatic Fu¨hrer and a swarm of almost unthinking followers. Actually, swarm is not far from Pope’s own word for it: None want a place, for all their Centre found, Hung to the Goddess, and coher’d around. Not closer, orb in orb, conglob’d are seen, The Buzzing Bees about their dusky Queen. The gath’ring number, as it moves along, Involves a vast involuntary throng, Who gently drawn, and struggling less and less, Roll in her Vortex, and her pow’r confess. (4: 77–84)

The next couplet refers to ‘‘Not those alone who passive own her laws, / But who, weak rebels, more advance her cause.’’ This ‘‘motley mixture’’ has already been anatomized earlier in the poem (2: 21): what may be more striking is the collapse of Dulness/Caroline into a queen bee, regulating the lives of her dependent species as they instinctively attach themselves to her person. The plot of The Dunciad is such that any reading must appear overdetermined since the action develops along so many parallel lines— literary, mythological, political, and religious. Nevertheless, a cursory examination of the argument to book 3 will show that Pope is seeking to reattach visionary delusion to political troublemaking, disloyalty, and cultural anomie: the new king of the Dunces is laid to sleep in a temple: ‘‘a position of marvellous virtue, which causes all the visions of wild enthusiasts, projectors, politicians, inamorato’s, castle-builders, chymists and poets.’’ He is carried on the wings of fancy to the banks of Lethe: here he meets Settle, who takes him to ‘‘a Mount of Vision,’’ from where he can glimpse the past, present, and future triumphs of Dulness. Typically, the scene blends allusions to the Bible (Moses on Mount Pisgah, in Deuteronomy 3) and to Milton (Adam on the peak of a high mountain in Paradise Lost, book 11). After witnessing the appearance of


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‘‘miracles and prodigies’’ that foretell the events of his reign to come, Cibber is shown how Dulness will return all things to their original state of chaos. The argument concludes with an assurance that the action of the poem is ‘‘but a Type or Foretaste, giving a Glimpse or Pisgahsight of the full glory of Dulness.’’39 It is safe to assume that this passage is the work of Scriblerus or some other scholiast, who may be presumed to be on the side of the Dunces and who greets this forecast of the future with every sign of warmth. The great event announced at the start is an equivalent of the great day of wrath, and it ushers in a kingdom of new saints, who turn out to be the Dunces in this eschatology. One further speculation may be risked at this point. Milton is unquestionably present in the text as a source of allusion and analogy. We have always known that the ‘‘Antichrist of wit’’ shares some of the lineaments of Satan in Paradise Lost, and this has been all the more clear since the appearance of Aubrey Williams’s remarkable book on The Dunciad in 1955.40 The dreadful secret behind the poem may be that the fierce campaign of Dulness could implicate Satan’s creator, too. Pope loves his poetic father, but fears Milton along with Cromwell among the ancestors of those who defined Catholicism as a heresy, rather than just the political threat it chiefly represented to the Elizabethans. If Christopher Hill has correctly described Milton’s attitude to heresy and apostasy, then Pope can only have regarded his predecessor as theologically of the Dunces’ party.41 Today we are mostly of the heresiarch’s party, and perhaps that is for the good. Still, we need to remember that the blessed heretic of one man or woman may be another’s oppressor. All three of the groups we have looked at had attributes in common—the medieval followers of Jack of Leiden, rampaging through Mu¨nster; the French prophets in London, with their roots in violent Camisard protests; and the Protestant astrologers with their almanacs. Adherents of each sect considered themselves oppressed; each anticipated a great day of vengeance; all felt justified by their own inspiration and by mystical prophecies; and all made Catholicism a particular object of their fury. As The Dunciad reveals, the most marginal in society can find themselves targeted by cults and fringe groups who prove to be wholly intolerant when they achieve any sort of power—a lesson scarcely irrelevant to the course of twentieth-century history, even though that was a future into which neither the fictive Settle nor his creator could peer. With his life history as a member of an embattled minority, Pope learned the lesson all too painfully: it is the dissidents whom dissidence often threatens.

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NOTES 1. An earlier version of this essay was presented at a plenary session of the DeBartolo Conference in 1998. I am grateful to participants in informal discussion afterwards for suggestions and comments. 2. All references are to The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland (London, 1963). This forms volume 5 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. (London: Methuen 1939–69). References are by book and verse and, unless otherwise stated, refer to the ‘‘B’’ text of 1743. 3. The most fully developed argument along these lines is that of Margarita Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell: The Second Coming in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press,1986). Stocker also provides (p. xii) a useful note on the terminology of the subject, distinguishing aptly between millenarianism, chiliasm, and apocalyptic. My use of these terms is broadly in line with that of Stocker. 4. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1978), p.170. This seminal work is the most important general survey of the historical issues underlying this essay, although I have also taken account of other scholars, including Christopher Hill, William M. Lamont, and Michael Walzer. 5. For the Ranters as pioneers of a ‘‘manic’’ mode of writing, see Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 25–97. On the Fifth Monarchists, there is the more sober approach of B. S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber and Faber, 1972). 6. Quoted by Thomas, Religion, pp. 488–89. 7. See The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn , 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 1: p. 425. 8. Thomas, Religion, pp. 459–514. 9. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), esp. pp. 19–36. 10. Ibid., pp. 61–70: quotation from p. 63. 11. Ibid., pp. 261–80. 12. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. 142, 170. Jack is also mentioned as one of the ‘‘late Fanaticks of Note’’ in ‘‘The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,’’ p. 286. 13. See The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 63–65. 14. Cohn, Millennium, p. 267. 15. Ibid., p. 273. 16. Ibid., pp. 267–68, 278. 17. Ibid., p. 274. 18. This paragraph is based chiefly on Hillel Schwartz, The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in Eighteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). The episode was first brought to general attention in modern times by James Sutherland, Background for Queen Anne (London: Methuen, 1939), pp. 36–74. On Jane Lead see also Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 167–79. 19. Pope, Correspondence, 1: p. 35. 20. Schwartz, Prophets, pp. 109–10.


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21. Ibid., Prophets, p. 123. 22. Ibid., Prophets, pp. 75, 91. 23. Ibid., Prophets, p. 87. 24. Ibid., p. 66. 25. The best account of the loss of a paternal home is found in Paul Gabrinier, ‘‘The Papist’s House, The Papist’s Horse: Alexander Pope and the Removal from Binfield,’’ in Centennial Hauntings: Pope, Byron, and Eliot, ed. C. C. Barfoot and T. D’Haen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), pp. 13–64. For the wider relevance of Pope’s disabilities, see Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), passim. 26. Bernard Capp, English Almanacs 1500–1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p.178. 27. Capp, Almanacs, p. 96. 28. Quoted by Thomas, Religion, p. 407. 29. The fullest modern treatment is Ann Geneva, Astrology and the Seventeenth-Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 30. Capp, Almanacs, p. 252. For wider attitudes towards the millennium (e.g., regarding the conversion of the Jews), see Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 176. 31. Capp, Almanacs, pp. 250–51. 32. See Helen Mary Petter, The Oxford Almanacks (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). 33. See Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 34. Capp, Almanacs, p. 252. 35. In addition, Pope enjoyed playing with the formula ‘‘the Turk and Pope,’’ sometimes with roguish self-reference: see his Court Ballad (1717), l. 3. 36. See Michael McKeon, Politics and Poetry in Restoration England: The Case of Dryden’s ‘‘Annus Mirabilis’’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 37. Quotations from Cohn, Millennium, pp. 318–22. 38. See for example George Rude´, The Crowd in History (New York: Wiley, 1964), as well as Rude´, The Face of the Crowd: Studies in Revolution, Ideology, and Popular Protest, ed. Harvey J. Kaye (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988), p. 111. On the involvement of ‘‘fringe’’ religious groups in popular protest and insurrection, see Rude´’s Ideology and Popular Protest (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), esp. pp. 85–86 (on Ranters and Seekers). 39. Dunciad, ed. Sutherland, pp. 55–56. Here the slightly fuller 1729 text is quoted. 40. Aubrey Williams, Pope’s ‘‘Dunciad’’: A Study of its Meaning (London: Methuen, 1955) pp. 131–58. 41. See Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1979); as well as Hill, Liberty against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies (London: Allen Lane, 1996), pp. 206–13.

Junius: An Orthodox Rebel Linde Katritzky

DURING A PERIOD OF INTENSE POLITICAL UNREST AND TURMOIL, THE brilliant, provocative, and enigmatic Junius burst into public notice on January 21, 1769, with an anonymous letter to the Public Advertiser, spiced with satire and outspoken political criticism, which opened ample opportunities for widespread discussion of the contested issues. At stake were serious constitutional principles, for the reckless John Wilkes (1727–97), member of the notorious Hellfire Club and of Parliament, had after various libel suits and escapades been expelled from the House of Commons and been declared ineligible. Nevertheless, in 1768 he stood for the seat of Middlesex and was elected by an overwhelming majority. When Parliament accepted in his stead the conspicuously unsuccessful candidate, the insignificant, but well-connected Colonel Luttrel, this high-handed measure incensed the masses and Wilkes’s popularity soared. As Samuel Johnson stated in his False Alarm (1770)—cautiously applying the indecisive subjunctive—if the imputations against Wilkes were just, ‘‘the expulsion was surely seasonable.’’ All the same, he admitted that ‘‘the Freeholders of Middlesex were of another opinion. They either thought him innocent, or were not offended by his guilt.’’1 The potentially explosive situation was carnivalized by the demagogy of the charismatic, but irresponsible Wilkes, who gained instant fame through his flamboyant defiance of authority. He soon turned into the focal point of every species of political ferment and discontent. The disunity and passions he excited led to riots, an escalating involvement of the mob, and to the fear of many moderates, expressed by the first Duke of Newcastle, Lord Privy Seal from 1765 to 1766, that the nation ‘‘must be either governed by a mad, lawless Mob, or the peace be preserved only by a Military force, both of which are unknown to our constitution.’’2 At this critical point Junius succeeded in wrenching the initiative away from the excitable masses by involving the literate part of the nation in a prolonged debate on constitutional law and on the 134

JUNIUS: AN ORTHODOX REBEL

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rights and responsibilities it delegates to each citizen. As John Cannon sums up: ‘‘he excelled at the exposition of political and legal questions’’ and additionally possessed the rare ‘‘ability to kindle excitement.’’ Hence his letters were ‘‘felt to be a matter of public importance and each one provoked a flurry of comment and contention.’’3 Though Junius was, therefore, denounced by his adversaries as an agitator, he was thoroughly orthodox in the sense of Johnson’s Dictionary: ‘‘sound in opinion and doctrine, not heretical.’’ He was a rebel, however, not in Johnson’s definition as ‘‘one who opposes lawful authority by violence,’’ but rather in the more modern understanding, where actual violence is not necessarily involved in a clash between the government and individuals with differing views. That he opposed the lawful authority—namely the king and his cabinet, and this at times vehemently and with the potent weapons of ridicule and well-aimed satire— earned him the hatred and invective of influential adversaries. But he did so on an orthodox platform, insisting that he was merely upholding the constitution, that his views were firmly grounded in English legal tradition, and that he was giving voice to the true lawful authority—the statutes—which the established government treated with disregard and contempt. His letters to the Public Advertiser created an instant sensation with their bold political satire, their fierce, but always judicious, censure of public mismanagement, and the suspense created by the mystery surrounding their author. They were voraciously read and discussed by everybody interested in public affairs, not only in Britain, but also on the Continent and in the American colonies, and during this process Junius’s opinions on constitutional law, and on how best to apply legal principles to topical situations and to the benefit of all, were almost imperceptibly absorbed by a large part of the population. He expressed his satiric criticisms and his dictums on how the country should be run without concern for social distinctions or even political parties, declaring emphatically: ‘‘The dearest interests of this country are its laws and its constitution. Against every attack upon these, there will, I hope, be always found amongst us the firmest spirit of resistance; superior to the united efforts of faction and ambition’’ (XIX, 105). As Junius wrote with unwonted frankness, he was considered a radical, and his importance as a stabilizer, teacher of the nation, and unprecedented popularizer of legal principles was largely overlooked. In direct contrast to Samuel Johnson, who elucidated the case for Parliament in his political pamphlet The False Alarm, Junius championed and explained that of the people, exhorting them to claim their rights, assert themselves politically, and above all maintain ‘‘those sacred original rights,’’ which, as

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he repeatedly reminds them, ‘‘they claim and possess as the birth-right of Englishmen’’ (XI, 66–67). While his message is strongly akin and intrinsically related to the clamor for freedom and equality that had gripped Europe and led to the changes and upheavals of the French Revolution, it is also fundamentally different, in that its only and insistent call to action consists in urging everybody to study and honor the laws of the land and to act resolutely within their provisions. Basically, he calls for a concerted voter-initiative, though strictly speaking he could address only a small percentage of the population in this manner, for the principle of participation by the whole body of citizens was not yet accepted in eighteenthcentury England, where only those with sufficient property were allowed a vote. Not least among Junius’s innovative and forward-looking ideas was, therefore, his insistence on equitable rights for all citizens. He advanced this concept by tacit assumption, by extending his legal maxims to everyone, and by promoting ‘‘the civil equality of the laws’’ as glorious privilege and ‘‘the birthright of the people’’ (XXX, 147). Junius entreats everyone: ‘‘What remains to be done concerns the collective body of the people. They are now to determine for themselves, whether they will firmly and constitutionally assert their rights; or make an humble, slavish surrender of them at the feet of ministry’’ (XX, 100). His criticism and satirical attacks were not aimed at the lawful government or at legal institutions as such, but directed against the woeful incompetence of individual cabinet members. ‘‘Without much political sagacity, or any extraordinary depth of observation,’’ he announced, ‘‘we need only mark how the principal departments of the state are bestowed, and look no farther for the true cause of every mischief that befals us’’ (I, 27). While he castigated inept measures, he also outlined lawful and peaceful possibilities for healing and conciliation, and in this spirit he reminded his readers that ‘‘the pure and impartial administration of justice is perhaps the firmest bond to secure a chearful submission of the people, and to engage their affections to government’’ (I, 32). His aim was to diffuse contentions, not to create them, and in significant divergence from other radicals, he not only declared rights and privileges for all, but insisted that these have to be balanced by corresponding obligations. Paramount among these was the duty to be acquainted with the provisions of the constitution, and when he declared himself ‘‘no lawyer by profession,’’ he added modestly: ‘‘nor do I pretend to be more deeply read, than every English gentleman should be in the laws of his country’’ (Preface, 13). Knowing full well that this ideal was far from


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reality, he took it upon himself to enlighten the nation by introducing sobering legal points of view into the escalating disagreements, calling for adherence to the law, and demonstrating how to apply it to government proceedings and jealously guard it against encroachments and willful alterations. These he suspected particularly from the insidious infiltration of foreign judicial procedure, spearheaded, in his view, by the Scottish Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench from 1756 to 1788. To him he addressed several of his critical open letters and the sarcasms against the Scots that flowed so easily from his pen whenever an opportunity presented itself. ‘‘Permit me to begin,’’ he wrote to Lord Mansfield in November 1770, ‘‘with paying a just tribute to Scotch sincerity, wherever I find it. I own I am not apt to confide in the professions of gentlemen of that country, and when they smile, I feel an involuntary emotion to guard myself against mischief.’’ Such raillery apart, his intentions were serious. He went on to lecture the legal lord on English legal procedure, censured Mansfield’s inclination to bypass the decisions of his predecessors or depart from them altogether, and publicly faulted and admonished him: In contempt or ignorance of the common law of England, you have made it your study to introduce into the court, where you preside, maxims of jurisprudence unknown to Englishmen. The Roman code, the law of nations, and the opinion of foreign civilians, are your perpetual theme;—but whoever heard you mention Magna Charta or the Bill of Rights with approbation or respect? By such treacherous arts, the noble simplicity and free spirit of our Saxon laws were first corrupted. The Norman conquest was not compleat, until Norman lawyers had introduced their laws, and reduced slavery to a system. (XLI, 208–9)

By constantly referring to legal precedents and by recalling historic instances—and their consequences—Junius created not only an aura of superior sagacity around himself, but also a public forum for informed and disinterested debate. His political polemic, though denounced as rabble-rousing by his opponents, had therefore a thoughtprovoking and sobering effect, and instead of inciting and dividing the populace, he attempted to unite the nation with statements such as this: ‘‘One particular class of men are permitted to call themselves the King’s friends, as if the body of the people were the King’s enemies’’ (XXXIX, 202). As a result, the long-term impact of his arguments was considerable, though his immediate political achievements may be less obvious.

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Notably, the famous appeal to the King of December 19, 1769, carefully framed in an address ‘‘To the Printer of the Public Advertiser,’’ failed to reach its goal, when the King refused to respond to Junius’s appeals to exercise his royal prerogative and dissolve Parliament, thus enabling the voters to express their wishes within the established legal framework. The arguments of this request accord exactly with the English Constitution as interpreted by Robert Chambers in the lectures that Samuel Johnson helped to prepare.4 What Chambers taught in Oxford, Junius applied to the pressing needs of the moment. With the bold assurance of being legally and morally justified, he claimed general consent and presented himself as spokesman for the public—one of his forceful strategies to influence and shape the climate of opinion. It is only since 1986, when these law lectures were published for the first time, that we can assert the complete compliance of Junius with Chambers’s tenets in his address to the King throughout his discourse. Junius deviates only in the emphasis, which he shifts consistently towards the enlightened ideal of equitable rights for all citizens, as opposed to the traditional assumption of privileges and concessions for the advantaged sections of the community. The adoption of this just and reasonable proposition occasioned the violent rebellion and upheavals in France, which shattered the hopes of rational thinkers and shook faith in progressive advancement. That equity was gradually and peacefully accepted in England as an integral part of long accustomed constitutional law, and proclaimed as universal—if not yet fully implemented—truth in the American Declaration of Independence, should be ascribed in large part to the successful efforts of Junius to explain and popularize the spirit of constitutional law as taught by Chambers in Oxford to the selected few, and as presented in manuscript to the King’s librarian, Mr. Barnard, by Johnson, in an, alas, futile effort to alert and educate King, court and cabinet.5 His address to the King emphasized above all the legal implication of the royal prerogative to dissolve Parliament. Confidently he proclaimed: ‘‘The English nation declare they are grossly injured by their representatives, and solicit your Majesty to exert your lawful prerogative, and give them an opportunity of recalling a trust, which, they find, has been scandalously abused.’’ He justified this demand by explaining ‘‘that the power of the house of commons is not original, but delegated to them for the welfare of the people, from whom they received it.’’ When the King refused to respond, he warned that by rejecting ‘‘the majority of votes, the only criterion, by which our laws judge of the sense of the people,’’ Parliament has ‘‘transferred the right of election


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from the collective to the representative body; and by these acts, taken separately or together, they have essentially altered the original constitution of the house of commons’’ (XXXIV 170–71). With deference, but also with an unprecedented air of superiority, he lectured the King that where ‘‘a question of right arises between the constituent and the representative body,’’ legal options have to be weighed: Shall the lords be called upon to determine the rights and privileges of the commons?—They cannot do it without a flagrant breach of the constitution. Or will you refer it to the judges?—They have often told your ancestors, that the law of parliament is above them. What party then remains, but to leave it to the people to determine for themselves? They alone are injured; and since there is no superior power, to which the cause can be referred, they alone ought to determine. (XXXV, l70)6

The dilemma was complicated by the irrepressible Wilkes, whose flagrant defiance of authority intoxicated the mob, while his public and private conduct alienated even those of the more thoughtful and educated voters, who regarded the right of electors to decide who should sit in Parliament as paramount. Consequently, even they were inclined to let ancient privileges be overruled in this particular case. Junius, however, cautioned that one such precedent would grant powers to Parliament, which were alien to the English Constitution, and he warned passionately of the dangers such an infringement could entail for the future. Presenting his objectives as indisputable facts, he insisted: ‘‘Prudence and self-preservation will oblige the most moderate dispositions to make common cause, even with a man whose conduct they censure, if they see him persecuted in a way, which the real spirit of the laws will not justify’’ (I, 33). With such statements he outlines ideal attitudes, and does not describe, but strongly influences the real state of affairs. To smooth tempers and to disentangle present contentions from general principles, he had already advised the Duke of Grafton: ‘‘Mr. Wilkes, if not persecuted, will soon be forgotten’’ (XI, 67). Now he counseled the King: He will soon fall back into his natural station,—a silent senator, and hardly supporting the weekly eloquence of a news paper. The gentle breath of peace would leave him on the surface, neglected and unremoved. It is only the tempest, that lifts him from his place. (XXXV, 171–72)

These are hardly rebellious sentiments. However, Junius approached the King also with such blunt, if reasonable questions as,

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‘‘Can you conceive that the people of this country will long submit to be governed by so flexible a house of commons!’’ to which he added ominously, ‘‘It is not in the nature of human society, that any form of government, in such circumstances, can long be preserved’’ (XXXV, 165). Considered even more outrageous was his assertion at the end of his epistle that ‘‘the people of England are loyal to the house of Hanover, not from a vain preference of one family to another, but from a conviction that the establishment of that family was necessary to the support of their civil and religious liberties,’’ followed by a final reminder that the Crown, ‘‘as it was acquired by one revolution, . . . may be lost by another’’ (XXXV, 173). In this special letter Junius concentrated all the legal points he had previously discussed. But now he presented them from the perspective of the King and in the light of the actions legally open to ‘‘the first magistrate’’ (XXXV, 161) as he addressed the monarch in accordance with the definition of king in Johnson’s Dictionary. He urged him: ‘‘Without consulting your minister, call together your whole council. Let it appear to the public that you can determine and act for yourself,’’ and he appealed to him as one rational human being to another: ‘‘Come forward to your people. Lay aside the wretched formalities of a King, and speak to your subjects with the spirit of a man, and in the language of a gentleman’’ (XXXV, 172). Throughout his letter Junius attempted to steer the King away from the influence of his cabinet, implying that George III concurred with its members ‘‘to subvert the constitution and restore royal absolutism,’’ a suspicion which was shared by various informed politicians, notably Edmund Burke in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770).7 These frank explanations and appeals to the monarch astonished and excited his readers and caused consternation at court, which Junius had in vain attempted to forestall by telling the King: ‘‘These sentiments, Sir, and the stile they are conveyed in, may be offensive, perhaps, because they are new to you’’ (XXXV, 172), and by stating at the start of his letter: ‘‘It is the misfortune of your life, and originally the cause of every reproach and distress, which has attended your government, that you should never have been acquainted with the language of truth, until you heard it in the complaints of your people’’ (XXXV, 160). This attitude accords with the legal insistence that the King can do no wrong and that all mismanagement has to be attributed to those who serve him. Of course, the statement comprises a purely legal attitude, rather than a statement of facts or a private judgment. It is entirely compatible with the reverential, but firm and authoritative tenor of the letter, which was, at the time, a riveting novelty in a dis-


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course with royalty. As Junius’s farsighted ideas have been proven correct, his daring innovations have become commonplace, and his modernistic approach is no longer easily recognizable. From notes to his printer it can be deduced that Junius regarded the address to the King as the culmination and end of his self-imposed task, for he wrote: ‘‘I am now meditating a capital & I hope a final piece’’ (359). Knowing full well that his correspondence was eagerly read and reviewed at court, he had obviously expected some impact on the King’s attitude, and not unreasonably so, as numerous petitions to dissolve Parliament had reached the court, one of them thought to have been initiated by Edmund Burke.8 Instead, his publisher, Henry Woodfall, was served with a libel suit and in the Speech from the Throne on January 9, 1770, in which the King outlined the plans of the ministry and opened a new session of Parliament, he completely ignored the arguments and legal instructions of Junius, as well as the clamor of the petitions. Not only did he continue with business as usual, he began with the calculated, and under the circumstances quite insulting, rebuttal: ‘‘My Lords and Gentlemen, It is with much concern that I find myself obliged to open this session of Parliament with acquainting you that the distemper among the horned cattle has lately broke out in the Kingdom.’’9 Such tactics failed utterly to dissolve the seething agitation, and rather than restore confidence, they only fueled anger, resistance, and further dissent. At this critical moment, Samuel Johnson penned the first of the four political pamphlets he produced during the 1770s, The False Alarm. His motivation for this unexpected political initiative has often been questioned, especially as it was interpreted as uncharacteristic willingness ‘‘to support the Grafton and North ministries—perhaps as the least of a number of evils,’’ for Johnson’s private opinions were known to be of a different nature. ‘‘His gloomy private remarks, during the last decade of his life,’’ Greene notes, ‘‘about the course of disaster on which Britain seemed to be heading indicate that he was no more a complacent admirer of the political status quo at the end of his political life than he had been at the beginning of it.’’10 Why, then, this apparent deviation during his middle years? Numerous contemporaries were as baffled as Boswell ‘‘to see how a prejudice in favour of government in general, and an aversion to popular clamour, could blind and contract such an understanding as Johnson’s in this particular case.’’ Boswell, a personal friend of the scintillating Wilkes, speaks for many when he reports: ‘‘Mr. Wilkes had a great majority of votes,’’ wherefore his rejection was ‘‘being justly considered as a gross violation of the right of election,’’

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and a justified ‘‘alarm for the constitution extended itself all over the kingdom.’’ Regretfully he notes that ‘‘to prove the alarm to be false, was the purpose of Johnson’s pamphlet. But even his vast powers were inadequate to cope with constitutional truth and reason, and his argument failed of effect.’’ They succeeded, however, in capturing general interest, even as it was by no means as favorable as that accorded to Johnson’s other writings. If Junius was read and reread to penetrate the mystery of the elusive author and to savor his exuberant satire, The False Alarm was as minutely scrutinized for clues to Johnson’s attitude and possible purpose. It spawned prolonged and ardent discussion on constitutional rights which also furthered legal understanding, even though Johnson’s views were belittled in a number of pamphlets and ‘‘care was taken to remind the publick of his former attacks upon government, and of his now’’ receiving a pension from it.11 Especially Johnson’s competence to lecture on political and legal matters was challenged, for he had kept his expertise hidden, nor did he reveal it under these repeated attacks or defend himself in any other way. Yet his political acumen was extraordinary, but as most readers of the pamphlet were not as conversant with constitutional law as Junius suggested everybody should be, they neither realized Johnson’s competence nor saw that the considerations he put before the public were not so much a private political statement as a detached explication of legal options open to Parliament. As Greene observes, Mrs. Thrale recorded that Johnson wrote The False Alarm at her home ‘‘between eight o’clock on Wednesday night and twelve o’clock on Thursday night,’’ and that it was forthwith read to her husband, when he came home from the House of Commons very late. Greene calculates that ‘‘as the Speech from the Throne alluded to near the end of the work was delivered on Tuesday, 9 January 1770, and as the pamphlet was published on Wednesday, 17 January, Johnson must have written it on 10 and 11 January.’’12 It should be obvious from this rapid sequence that Johnson reacted to the King’s pronouncements instantly, with grave concern, and with a legally well-prepared mind, in which the relevant arguments must have simmered for a considerable time because his pamphlet is an exceptionally lucid explanation of the rights and duties of Parliament within the English Constitution. On the face of it, Johnson is, therefore, representing all those opposing Junius, an impression which is accentuated by his quite different approach to the problem. Yet, in their different ways, when taken together, Junius and Johnson provide a concerted overview of the different constitutional options by which the dangerous impasse could peacefully be traversed.13 While Junius excels


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in dissecting topical issues, and never shrinks from exposing and lampooning highly placed individuals, Johnson steers clear of singling out anyone for special blame and emphasizes his impartial detachment right from the start by commencing with the deliberately abstract comment: One of the chief advantages derived by the present generation from the improvement and diffusion of philosophy, is deliverance from unnecessary terrours, and exemption from false alarms. The unusual appearances, whether regular or accidental, which once spread consternation over ages of ignorance, are now the recreations of inquisitive security. The sun is no more lamented when it is eclipsed, than when it sets; and meteors play their coruscations without prognostick or prediction.

Where Junius delights in exposing the inadequacies and follies of the high and mighty, Johnson merely expresses his view on the mismanagement of public affairs by the following general and sobering observation: ‘‘The politician’s improvements are opposed by every passion that can exclude conviction or suppress it; by ambition, by avarice, by hope, and by terrour, by public faction, and private animosity.’’ Without entangling himself in contentious details or explicitly apportioning blame, he adds that whatever the cause, ‘‘this nation, with all its renown for speculation and for learning, has yet made little proficiency in civil wisdom.’’14 Like Junius, he takes it upon himself to amend this deficiency, albeit by supplying a different, but complementary point of view. Neither Johnson nor Junius can refrain from singling out the Scots, ‘‘these hungry intruders from the North,’’ of whom Johnson sarcastically warns that they are ‘‘contriving to expel all the English’’ from the House of Commons, and ‘‘who can guess what may be done when the Scots have the whole House to themselves?’’15 Their opinions coincide also on other matters, and there are various indications that Junius and Johnson wrote to the same purpose, rather than that they clashed in their intentions, as has so readily been assumed. Their stated opinion of Wilkes, and especially of his role in public affairs, is certainly identical. Junius calls Wilkes in his letter to the King ‘‘a man not very honorably distinguished’’ and attempts throughout his correspondence to detach the flawed character and personal shortcomings of this demagogue from fundamental issues. Where he predicts that Wilkes would sink into comparative oblivion if left to his own devices, Johnson says much the same, if in a contrasting manner, when he warns in general terms that ‘‘many a wretch, whom his colleagues should expel [from the House of Commons], might come back

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persecuted into fame’’ and cause even more trouble.16 When he pursues the identical strategy of diffusing tensions by underlining the irrelevance of Wilkes’s personal idiosyncrasies to the long-term aspects of the problems at hand, Johnson again uses a different approach. Dismissing Wilkes’s antics with the slighting remark, ‘‘Lampoon itself would disdain to speak ill of him of whom no man speaks well,’’ he tries like Junius to reduce the contested issues to their legal proportions, without getting embroiled in personal invective. ‘‘The grievance which has produced all this tempest of outrage,’’ he writes with calculated and somewhat sarcastic simplification, ‘‘the oppression in which all other oppressions are included, the invasion which has left us no property, the alarm that suffers no patriot to sleep in quiet, is comprised in a vote of the House of Commons, by which the freeholders of Middlesex are deprived of a Briton’s birth-right, representation in Parliament.’’17 It is, perhaps, noteworthy that Junius declared himself emphatically the champion of Englishmen, the English Constitution and, indeed, the English nation, to which he dedicated his correspondence, while Johnson, renowned, and sometimes criticized for his particularly English outlook, uses here the word Briton. Otherwise the statement would be identical with words Junius uses repeatedly, and with more justification, because the impassioned controversy centered on different interpretations of the English Constitution, on which Johnson’s political pamphlets are likewise based. And while Junius tries to sting voters into action with positive exhortations, Johnson employs ridicule and satire for the same end. His hilarious description of voters’ self-interest and political indifference reads like a commentary to Hogarth’s Election Prints, and like them, Johnson applies ridicule to expose—and through that improve—a deplorable state of affairs.18 Both Junius and Johnson were perfectly aware that the English law, which derives from statute and precedent, was not always perfectly clear. Hence they concede that different modes of application might be possible. Thus Junius challenges the Duke of Grafton: ‘‘You cannot but know that the right of the freeholders to adhere to their choice (even supposing it improperly exerted), was as clear and indisputable as that of the house of commons to exclude one of their own members.’’ But he also points out, entirely correctly: ‘‘The right of expulsion, in the most favourable sense, is no more than the custom of parliament. The right of election is the very essence of the constitution’’ (XI, 65). Johnson says much the same when he explains that ‘‘the Commons cannot make laws, they can only pass resolutions, which, like all resolutions, are of force only to those that make them, and to those only while they are


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willing to observe them.’’ As for governments, he reminds his readers that they are ‘‘formed by chance, and gradually improved by such expedients, as the successive discovery of their defects happened to suggest,’’ but that all their imperfections not withstanding, ‘‘we must be content with them as they are, should we attempt to mend their disproportions, we might easily demolish, and difficultly rebuild them.’’19 This is precisely the course which Junius strongly advocates, and in this spirit he argues in his Preface: If juries are fallible, to what other tribunal shall we appeal?—If juries cannot safely be trusted, shall we unite the offices of judge and jury, so wisely divided by the constitution, and trust implicitly to Lord Mansfield?—Are the judges of the court of Kings’ Bench more likely to be unbiassed and impartial, than twelve yeomen, burgesses, or gentlemen taken indifferently from the country at large?—Or, in short, shall there be no decision, until we have instituted a tribunal, from which no possible abuse or inconvenience whatsoever can arise?—. (20)

Although he notes with resignation that ‘‘it has pleased God to give us a ministry and a parliament, who are neither to be persuaded by argument, nor instructed by experience’’ (XXXIX, 200), he persistently suggests constructive alternatives, usually by referring to disregarded laws and common sense. Like Johnson, Junius was a pragmatist. Unlike most rebellious subjects, especially in the enlightened eighteenth century, he never demanded perfection or idealistic conditions, and he was never satisfied with abstract solutions. Instead, he tried to affect change by proclaiming the spirit of the law and by instilling a sense of communal interdependence and responsibility into the agitated nation, where all too many allowed themselves to be carried away by the general clamor for forceful action, especially those who could, as Johnson complained in The False Alarm, ‘‘scarcely, in the most common affairs, distinguish right from wrong, to judge of a question complicated with law written and unwritten, with the general principles of government, and the particular customs of the House of Commons.’’20 Both Johnson and Junius were among the very few who were not only able to understand these complex differences, but could explain them lucidly in terms both legally correct and readily accessible, and in doing so shape them into a coherent system. In this they were always practical and mindful of common experience, and Junius, too, reacted to problems and grievances consistently in the manner of Johnson, who cautioned, for instance: ‘‘Here we must again recur not to positive institutions, but

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to the unwritten law of social nature, to the great and pregnant principle of political necessity.’’21 After the Speech from the Throne, discontent reached such proportions that the Duke of Grafton resigned; Junius addressed him in his next letter to the Public Advertiser, castigating him sarcastically for the ‘‘neglect of the petitions,’’ which he denounced as part of the Duke’s ‘‘original plan of government,’’ in accordance with the legal theory that the King can do no wrong and that his ministers must take the blame (XXXVI, 176). The following letter starts with a renewed attempt to infuse calm and sensible considerations into the explosive situation: I believe there is no man, however indifferent about the interests of his country, who will not readily confess that the situation, to which we are now reduced, whether it has arisen from the violence of faction, or from an arbitrary system of government, justifies the most melancholy apprehension, and calls for the exertion of whatever wisdom or vigour is left among us.

Such sentiments were by no means exceptional; however, Junius’s simultaneous insistence on equity was, especially as he did not formulate his vision as future goal, but presented it as an established, constitutional right. ‘‘However distinguished by rank or property,’’ he persisted, ‘‘in the rights of freedom we are all equal. As we are Englishmen, the least considerable man among us has an interest equal to the proudest nobleman, in the laws and constitution of his country, and is equally called upon to make a generous contribution in support of them.’’ In this spirit Junius concludes his letter proudly by deftly combining conservative attitudes with his defiantly progressive demands: ‘‘That he may long continue the King of a free people, is the second wish that animates my heart. The first is, THAT THE PEOPLE MAY BE FREE’’ (XXXVII, l82, 186). Freedom, to Junius, meant to act responsibly within the law and be in turn protected and supported by it. To promote this ideal he continued with his commentaries and lectures on law, which had become such a force in public affairs that he could begin an open letter to Lord Mansfield with this confident and fully justified assertion: ‘‘The appearance of this letter will attract the curiosity of the public, and command even your Lordship’s attention’’ (XLI, 206–7). As on other occasions, he may sound arrogant, but whatever he said was always the plain, if often unaccustomed, truth. The immediate occasion for a personal appeal to Mansfield was the libel case ensuing from the letter to the King, in which the publisher was held responsible, because Junius could


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never be identified, in spite of united and sustained efforts. The failure to find him attests to his exceptional skills and foresight, as well as to his thorough knowledge of London printers and their habits. In some measure it seems also to be due to the determined efforts to find a writer who would fit the enigmatic author profile. As this task has never been accomplished, Junius, perhaps, should rather be regarded as a literary fiction, a mouthpiece, fashioned to pronounce legal information with supreme authority, but also in a form that would make the nation eager to receive it. During the fight for his publisher’s acquittal, Junius, true to his detached, impartial and scholarly image, kept scrupulously within the law, taking great pains to affirm that he did not expect special treatment, but that his grievance was the violation of lawful procedure, in that Lord Mansfield, who was presiding over the case, illegally presumed to be party and judge at once (XLI, 201). Without ever stepping forward, he defended his publisher ably with all the extensive expertise at his command, and through these exertions he initiated debates on the rights and duties of juries and on the liberty of the press, which eventually led to the firm establishment of the rights he had championed. After King and Cabinet had failed to accept his guidance, Junius contented himself with clarifying legal implications arising from matters of the moment, and as he was still read avidly, his interpretation of constitutional law was disseminated throughout the nation. His satiric comments on current affairs opened legal perspectives to sections of the public who had never given much, if any, thought to legalities. Now they became accustomed to integrate such deliberations into their opinions and decisions. Some of the topical examples he had to use for his discourse were of necessity not of wide ranging importance—and he was promptly and sharply criticized for that—but the principles were important, which he demonstrated while discussing these ephemeral matters of the moment. To measure his exact impact is impossible, for even those who had not followed his correspondence personally imbibed his ideas through indirect channels. It is generally accepted that his scholarly arguments on behalf of his printer resulted not only in eventual acquittal but led ‘‘in the course of time to a change in the law of libel, whereby juries were allowed to decide on the issue of libel as well as the fact of publication,’’ and that it was largely due to his efforts that in time ‘‘the right to publish parliamentary debates was tacitly conceded’’ (xxi). The increasing liberties granted to the press owe also much to him, especially to the conclusion of his Dedication, which he began with the following impassioned reminder:

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Let it be instilled into your children, that the liberty of the press is the Palladium of all the civil, political, and religious rights of an Englishman, and that the right of juries to return a general verdict, in all cases whatsoever is an essential part of our constitution, not to be controuled or limited by the judges, nor in any shape questionable by the legislature. (8–9)

To this he added one of the maxims he had distilled from the constitution, specially close to his heart and legal understanding. Considered a commonplace by now, it was, however, highly suspect in an age where monarchs still claimed to rule by divine right: ‘‘The power of King, Lords, and Commons is not an arbitrary power. They are the trustees, not the owners of the estate’’ (9). Although the exact influence of Junius on legal and political affairs, and on the self-understanding of his contemporaries, can never be precisely delineated, the impact of this orthodox rebel can be measured by the acclaim accorded to him, and by the outstanding personalities, suspected to hide behind his pseudonym. Among them numbered Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Lord Chesterfield, Horace Walpole, Thomas Paine, and the independently minded Earl of Shelburne, briefly Prime Minister in 1782–83.22 When it became clear that for various reasons none of these eminent writers could have composed the celebrated letters, less and less distinguished authors had to be proposed and, with their declining status, estimation of the achievement of Junius sank dramatically. It was even claimed that his unprecedented success was merely fortuitous and due to a number of completely accidental circumstances, such as the timely and impassioned antagonism of the erudite and fiery Sir William Draper, who needled Junius repeatedly and challenged him on several details, but was soundly ridiculed and demolished by him. There are, however, a number of quite distinct indications that Junius planned his strategies carefully and with considerable premeditation. Not least among them is his thoroughly revised approach to the capture of public attention, after a preliminary letter under his signature failed to make any noticeable impact. This had appeared in the Public Advertiser on November 21, 1768, and it already dealt with the basic concerns that fueled the famous ensuing correspondence (455–56). It deplored the volatile political situation created by Wilkes and the ineptitude of the Duke of Grafton, the Prime Minister, whose vacillating inexperience Junius satirized scathingly and quite memorably in later letters, beginning with the suggestion that ‘‘it may be candid to suppose that he has hitherto voluntarily concealed his talents; intending, per-


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haps to astonish the world, when we least expect it, with a knowledge of trade, a choice of expedients, and a depth of resources, equal to the necessities, and far beyond the hopes of his country’’ (I, 28). While such language electrified the nation, neither the measured, well-reasoned arguments, nor the impeccable eloquence, or the carefully selected pseudonym of the preliminary message—a name of Juvenal and of the freedom-loving family, which had produced Brutus, but also his legendary ancestor, credited with establishing the Roman Republic—attracted any special attention during those times of political strife, when fluent style and frequent resource to classic examples were widespread among the well bred. The second letter (the first which Junius later included in his official edition of 1772) met with a markedly different reception. Political concerns were now amply laced with unrestrained satire, which became his hallmark and which attracted a large audience, among whom very few were motivated by a desire to be educated in the intricacies and implications of constitutional law. Junius had already started his previous communication with the imperious grandeur he employed to reinforce his lapidary legal maxims, by beginning with the confident assertion: ‘‘It will soon be decided by the highest Authority, whether the Justice of our Laws, and the Liberty of our constitution have been essentially violated in the Person of Mr. Wilkes’’ (455). Now, in his revised approach, he started with one of his legal maxims, which summarized existing law and, in the tradition of the greatest legal experts, at the same time interpreted and developed it: ‘‘The submission of a free people to the executive authority of government is no more,’’ he commenced, ‘‘than a compliance with laws, which they themselves have enacted.’’ And instantly he reinforced the legality of this basically inflammatory statement by adding: ‘‘While the national honour is firmly maintained abroad, and while justice is impartially administered at home, the obedience of the subject will be voluntary, chearful [sic], and I might almost say unlimited . . . Loyalty, in the heart and understanding of an Englishman, is a rational attachment to the guardian of the laws’’ (I, 25). We find here the same insistence on lawful subordination, which Johnson promoted, stating, for instance: The great end of government is to give every man his own, no inconvenience is greater than that of making right uncertain. Nor is any man more an enemy to publick peace, than he who fills weak heads with imaginary claims, and breaks the series of civil subordination, by inciting the lower classes of mankind to encroach upon the higher.23

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Such an order Junius declares, however, as ‘‘insulted and abused’’ by the incompetent blunders of the ruling cabinet, maintaining that ‘‘without much political sagacity, or any extraordinary depth of observation, we need only mark how the principal departments of the state are bestowed, and look no farther for the true cause of every mischief that befalls us.’’ He then goes on to expose the ineptitude of each member of cabinet, starting with the Duke of Grafton, Prime Minister from 1768 to 1770, of whom he proclaims, among other satiric accusations: ‘‘As for business, the world yet knows nothing of his talents or resolution; unless a wayward, wavering inconsistency be a mark of genius and caprice a demonstration of spirit.’’ When in July 1769, in spite of such attacks and ridicule, Grafton was installed as Chancellor of Cambridge University in an imposing ceremony graced by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Junius suggested to the man thus honored that times were approaching when ‘‘the venerable tutors of the university will no longer distress your modesty, by proposing you for a pattern to their pupils,’’ and added sarcastically: ‘‘Yet for the benefit of the succeeding age, I could wish that your retreat might be deferred, until your morals shall happily be ripened to that maturity of corruption, at which the worst examples cease to be contagious’’ (XV, 85–86). The unconstrained composure with which Junius aimed his satire at those in power and his sophisticated ability to hit his targets secured his lasting popularity and were the key to his success, which depended largely on two conditions—planning and research—both of which could only be established and sustained with considerable foresight. All his facts had to be right—and in that nobody could ever fault him, though he sometimes exaggerated or accentuated selected aspects in order to highlight particular issues. His legal pronouncements, however, were always exactly to the point. His prodigious expertise becomes once more apparent in his last letter, a lengthy exercise in legal exposition, purged of satire and ephemeral froth, and therefore sorely taxing the patience of his readers. Junius had anticipated this effect, but insisted: However dull my argument, the subject of it is interesting. I shall be honoured with the attention of the public, and have a right to demand the attention of the legislature. Supported, as I am, by the whole body of the criminal law of England, I have no doubt of establishing my charge. (LXVIII, 3200)

This letter, once more addressed to the Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, was the last in the voluminous correspondence. Dated January 21,


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1772, it appeared exactly three years to the day after the first successful epistle, indicating that Junius had intended to fashion a consistent work, and the entirely serious tone and legal concerns of this final message accentuate his commitment to legitimate reform and his self-image as teacher of the nation. The second condition for his unprecedented and sustained success was that his anonymity had to be absolutely preserved, not only to protect him from the inevitable consequences of his unconstrained criticism of those in power, but also to maintain the authority of his pronouncements. Considering the enormous impact and popularity of his letters and the hectic and sustained hunt for his person, we must look for a writer in whom quite unusual efficacy and recognition of his own worth was coupled with uncommon modesty and self-denial. Acting on impulse and relying on good luck could not have been part of his design. Junius himself understood perfectly well what was at stake. To Wilkes, who in the course of their private correspondence pronounced the identity of Junius ‘‘the most important secret of our times,’’ he explained: Besides every personal Consideration, if I were known, I could no longer be a useful servant to the public. At present there is something oracular in the delivery of my Opinions. I speak from a Recess, which no human Curiosity can penetrate; & Darkness, we are told, is one Source of the Sublime.—The Mystery of Junius increases his Importance. (414, 424)

He gave similar assurances in his letters. Quite early in his public role he terminated his responses to Sir William Draper with the same firm confidence that his methods in protecting his privacy would prove effective, for he dismissed the attacks from the incensed knight with a superior assertion: ‘‘And now, Sir William, I shall take leave of you for ever. Motives very different from any apprehension of your resentment, make it impossible you should ever know me’’ (52). An author who could maintain this claim with such finality must have gone to extraordinary lengths in taking precautions and devising stratagems. And to be sure these would be effective, he must have been unusually conversant with the intricacies and intrigues of the publishing world in eighteenthcentury London. Sir William Draper was not the only adversary trying to deflect or deflate Junius. Thus, in order to preserve his authoritative detachment and keep focused on the legal considerations at the core of his epistolary arguments, Junius introduced the subsidiary correspondent Philo Jun-

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ius, whose function it was to refute false accusations, clarify misunderstandings, and lead the discussion back on track. By his very existence this secondary mouthpiece points to a writer well able to speak in different idioms and to create voices perfectly suited to the messages he intends to convey. To consolidate his epistolary form, a genre uncommonly difficult to control, Junius conducted his correspondence within a well defined time limit. He then shaped his letters into ‘‘a compleat [sic] edition, corrected and improved by the author,’’ providing a Preface in which he explained that ‘‘the auxiliary part of Philo Junius was indispensable necessary to defend or explain particular passages in Junius, in answer to plausible objections’’ (13). On the whole, however, the Preface deals with legal questions, especially those raised by the libel case brought against the publisher Henry Woodfall, notably the rights and duties of juries and the freedom of the press. In his legal depositions Junius displayed the same adamant and, incidentally, never-faulted assurance with which he maintained his anonymity. ‘‘I speak advisedly,’’ he declared, ‘‘and am well assured that no lawyer, of character in Westminster-hall, will contradict me’’ (16). While the Preface discusses particulars and goes into much legal detail, the Dedication is concerned with general aspects and universal truth. It presents the unusual novelty of being addressed not to a patron—Junius had repeatedly professed his lack of interest in personal wealth or recognition—but to the ‘‘English Nation’’ to which the arguments are directed throughout the correspondence. Summing up the efforts to extend the benefits and accountabilities inherent in English constitutional law to everyone, it starts: ‘‘I Dedicate to You a collection of Letters, written by one of Yourselves for the common benefit of us all.’’ Proving that he was concerned with principles and basic tendencies, rather than with the individual incidents he used to demonstrate his points, he insists: ‘‘When Kings and Ministers are forgotten, when the force and direction of personal satyr is no longer understood, and when measures are only felt in their remotest consequences, this book will, I believe, be found to contain principles, worthy to be transmitted to posterity.’’ Not least among these are his remarkable strategies of promoting radical ideas and activating the populace to participate in the political process, while at the same time diffusing contentions, strengthening the existing legal framework and shaping a new outlook from tradition and antiquated statutes, thus peacefully promoting freedom and democratization, instead of unrest and destruction in times of political imbalance and revolutionary fervor.


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NOTES 1. The False Alarm, in Samuel Johnson, Political Writings, ed. Donald J. Greene, Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 323. 2. George Rude´, Wilkes and Liberty (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1962; reprint, 1983), p. 55. The remark refers to the riots and civil unrest following the massacre of St. George’s Fields, May 10, 1768 and the ensuing trials. 3. The Letters of Junius, ed. John Cannon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), xxviii. Letters are designated by capital Roman numbers in the text, followed by page numbers. 4. Cf. Sir Robert Chambers, A Course of Lectures on the English Law. Delivered at the University of Oxford 1767–1773, and Composed in Association with Samuel Johnson, ed. Thomas M. Curley, 2 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986): 1, p. 148: ‘‘to dissolve a Parliament at pleasure, as it is the highest act of power, is a right inherent in the crown and essential to the constitution.’’ 5. E. L. McAdam Jr., Dr. Johnson and the English Law (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1951), p. 120–21. 6. Cf Chambers 1, pp. 148, 141, 204,140, 217–18. 7. Political Writings, p. xv. 8. False Alarm, 340, n. 3. 9. Parliamentary History, XIV, p. 642, quoted in Political Writings, p. 341, n. 5. 10. Political Writings, p. xxvi. 11. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 431–32 (January 1770). 12. False Alarm, p. 313. 13. Reluctantly, and with considerable surprise, I have reached the conclusion that the most likely candidate for having conceived and executed the extraordinary Letters of Junius, and planned the unprecedented dissemination of legal knowledge, would be Samuel Johnson himself. See Linde Katritzky, Johnson and the ‘‘Letters of Junius’’. New Perspectives on an Old Enigma (New York: Peter Lang, 1996). 14. False Alarm, p. 318. 15. Ibid., p. 333. 16. Ibid., p. 328. 17. Ibid., p. 319. 18. Ibid., p. 340. 19. Ibid., p. 328. 20. Ibid., p. 338. 21. Ibid., p. 325. 22. For a list of names suggested as Junius, see Francesco Cordasco, Junius: A Biography of the Letters of Junius (Fairview, NJ: Junius Vaughn Press, 1986), p. 221. For the many editions, see chapter 3, p. 111–46. 23. Life of Johnson, 534 (Saturday, May 1, 1773).

Simon Jaillot: Sculptor, Pamphleteer, Outcast Anne Betty Weinshenker

SCULPTORS WERE AMONG THE MOST UNCOOPERATIVE AND CONTENtious members of the Acade´mie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris. They often disobeyed its rules: Gaspard Marsy, for example, was required to step down from his post of professor in 1660 because of neglect of duties.1 Many sculptors were described as possessing unpleasant character traits: Vasse´ attempted to steal a major commission from his colleague Pigalle.2 Bouchardon, Lambert-Sigisbert Adam, Falconet, and Pigalle were ill-tempered; several were labeled avaricious.3 Even the fledgling sculptors seem to have caused more trouble than the other art students: the proposal to found the school for the Acade´mie in Rome stipulated that a servant ‘‘was not to lose sight’’ of the sculpture students.4 Pierre Il Legros violated regulations and ignored his obligations as a royal pensioner in Rome so that he was never granted full membership in the Acade´mie.5 Vleughels, director of the school, complained in 1732 that the young sculptors presented discipline problems, behaving more rebelliously than the other students there.6 None among the sculptors was more fractious than Pierre-Simon Jaillot, a specialist in the creation of ivory crucifixes and crucifixion groups. Born in the early 1630s in a provincial area of Franche-Comte´, he was admitted to membership in the Acade´mie in 1661. His works were praised by contemporary writers and in the eighteenth century by Mariette and Bachaumont.7 Charles Le Brun, the powerful Chancellor of the Acade´mie, must also have appreciated them and commissioned a crucifix from him in 1662 but didn’t pay for it promptly enough. The audacious Jaillot sold it to someone else and claimed that it went for twice the price offered by Le Brun. From this time on, Jaillot’s situation in the Acade´mie deteriorated; while he was undoubtedly a contentious and difficult person, his fate provides a novel perspective on the widely recognized absolute control exercised over the institution by Le Brun. Chancellor Se´ guier, protector of the Acade´ mie, died eleven years after Jaillot’s admission to membership. Le Brun proposed a special 154

SIMON JAILLOT: SCULPTOR, PAMPHLETEER, OUTCAST

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ceremonial to honor Se´guier’s memory and designed an elaborate set of funeral decorations to be carried out by the painters and sculptors of the Acade´mie.8 In addition, each academician was required to provide funding in order to help defray expenses for the occasion. Jaillot, who had been absent from many meetings because of his irritation at the rule that only officers were permitted to express opinions, now refused to contribute and heatedly denounced the enforced donation. Despite his subsequent apology and promise to reform, he continued to absent himself from Acade´mie meetings and again in the next year, 1673, he interrupted the proceedings of a meeting with angry outbursts, directed especially against Le Brun. Four days later he was expelled from the Acade´mie and his reception piece—the work that each artist was required to present on being accepted for membership in the institution— was removed from its premises and permanently donated to the PetitesMaisons, that is, the insane asylum. In this way Jaillot’s work was devalued, and besides being removed from the Acade´mie, he was symbolically placed among those estranged from society. Over the course of the next few years several documents attacking the Acade´ mie and Le Brun appeared and were attributed to Jaillot. One of them led to the final skirmish of his war against the artistic authorities, which ended with his utter defeat. The ‘‘Dialogue d’un Gentilhomme Narcfois et d’un Italien’’ (‘‘Narcfois’’ is an anagram for ‘‘François,’’ or Français), a libelous pamphlet attacking Le Brun and the Acade´mie de peinture et de sculpture, came out in 1676 or 1677. Jaillot was suspected of having written it. A search of his home followed, and papers that appeared to confirm his authorship were found. Arrested on Le Brun’s complaint and sent to the Bastille in 1678, Jaillot remained there for a year. He was sentenced to a fine and to five years’ banishment, but died two years later, in 1681. The attribution of the ‘‘Dialogue’’ to Jaillot seems correct. Only a single copy is known to have survived, in the archives of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. It remained unpublished until 1914, when Andre´ Fontaine included it in a chapter on Jaillot in his Acade´miciens d’autrefois.9 Although Fontaine commented briefly about the text, neither he nor any other scholar has dealt with certain noteworthy aspects of its structure and content. The present study focuses on them and examines their significance in the light of Jaillot’s situation as an artist in the Acade´mie and his religious beliefs. The ‘‘Dialogue’’ flaunts a persistent negativity directed against the institutional discourse of the Acade´ mie. Jaillot selected the dialogic form for presenting his views on the visual arts, as Fe´libien had done in

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his Entretiens beginning in 1666 and Roger de Piles in the Dialogue sur le coloris of 1673. Taking advantage of the opportunity offered by this format for the presentation of opposing opinions, Jaillot consistently presents the ‘‘Narcfois,’’ that is, the Frenchman, as a naive and unthinking follower of the official doctrine of the Acade´mie. Representing the author’s viewpoint, the Italian contradicts his companion on every point and ultimately convinces him. The selection of this antithetical format underscores Jaillot’s intention not merely to delineate his own stance, but to emphasize its unremitting opposition to the policy and practice sanctioned by the Acade´mie. Jaillot’s employment of anagrams is the most unusual tactic in his campaign of reversal. He rearranges the orthography of most of the proper names in the ‘‘Dialogue,’’ changing ‘‘Paris’’ to ‘‘Pirsa’’ (primarily an inversion of the vowels), ‘‘Le Brun’’ to ‘‘Le Nurb’’ (a reversal of the last four letters), ‘‘Versailles’’ to ‘‘Saillevers’’ (mainly an exchange of the two syllables), ‘‘Girardon’’ to ‘‘Grodiran’’ (a shuffling of all the letters except the first and last), and so forth.10 That these were intentional rather than spontaneous deformations is indicated by the key to the anagrams turned up by the police search of Jaillot’s home.11 If his plan was to disguise the names, the result was hardly effective. If, on the other hand, the distortions were for purposes of derision, he was successful. The strange names created by these rearrangements serve to deflate the lofty grandeur of influential individuals and loci of power. They also underscore the tone of plebian mockery that crops up throughout the text. A large portion of the ‘‘Dialogue’’ is devoted to the presentation of Jaillot’s opinions on the relative merits of painting and sculpture. Disputation over which was the superior art had occupied Italian theorists since the Paragone of Leonardo da Vinci in the early sixteenth century; his treatise on painting, in which it appears, had been translated for the Acade´mie in 1651 and read during its meetings in 1665.12 Leonardo had unequivocally described painting as superior to the more material, manually practiced art of sculpture: The only difference I find between painting and sculpture is that the sculptor conducts his work with greater bodily fatigue and the painter conducts his work with greater mental fatigue . . . The sculptor [works] by effort of his arm and by percussion, which is a highly mechanical exercise, often accompanied by great amounts of sweat . . . his house is filthy and full of chips and stone dust. Just the opposite happens to the painter, [who] sits in front of his work at great ease, well-dressed, and wielding the lightest brush


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with charming colors. His clothing is ornamented according to his pleasure, and his house is filled with charming paintings, and clean, and he is often accompanied by music or readers of varied and beautiful works that are heard with great pleasure without the uproar compounded of hammers.13

The officials and members of the Acade´mie royale de peinture et de sculpture did not engage in any such obvious depreciation of sculptors and their art, yet there is much evidence to indicate that their thinking was along the lines so blatantly set forth by Leonardo. They were urged to this viewpoint by the situation of the Acade´mie. The story of the institution’s creation, struggles, triumph, and subsequent history has been told several times,14 but certain elements of that account are relevant here and require restating. The Acade´mie had been formed in 1648 by a group of artists who worked for the royal family in order to free themselves from the irritating demands and restrictions of the Community of St. Luke, also called the Maıˆtrise. This guild, instituted in the Middle Ages, regulated the work of painters, sculptors, and several other kinds of artisans, including housepainters; it prevented, or attempted to prevent, nonguild members from practicing those occupations. The Maıˆtrise fought to retain its claims on the members of the Acade´ mie, which nevertheless managed to obtain royal renewal and extension of its privileges in 1663. Even after that confirmation the Acade´mie needed to be vigilant and to carry on a campaign of proof that its members were practicing a liberal art, like literature, rather than crafts and mechanical activities like the members of the guild. Among the most convincing claims to liberal arts status was the Acade´mie’s insistence that the most important part of its members’ activity was the imaginative, intellectual work of conceiving and devising images. The physical act of using materials to make these images visible was the secondary and less noble aspect of artistic creation. Andre´ Fe´libien, royal historiographer and an official of the Acade´mie, stated this principle in the first of his Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres (1666), a work that embodies the doctrines of the Acade´mie. Composition, he asserts, ‘‘includes almost all the theory of art, because it is accomplished in the painter’s imagination.’’ Drawing and coloring, the two other parts of art, ‘‘are only concerned with execution, and belong to the workman, which makes them less noble than composition which is entirely a liberal art.’’15 Although sculptors were included in the Acade´mie16 and referred to in Fe´libien’s text as well as in others by officials of the institution, they

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did not fully have the opportunity to exercise this noble part of their art. As his contemporary biographer Nivelon describes, Charles Le Brun, who was the first painter to the king as well as chancellor of the Acade´mie, provided drawings or approval for all the furnishings and works of art made for the royal palaces except for some of the productions of the history painters.17 Le Brun, who was himself a history painter, chose to allow these artists a free hand in composing certain works. This was not the case with the sculptors; he furnished the basic designs for virtually all their productions, whether royal commissions or works for other patrons.18 This reduced them to the level of artisans, like the makers of furniture and decorative objects for whom he also provided or supervised designs. Not given the opportunity to invent their own works, the sculptors could not achieve as elevated a status as the history painters. There are numerous testimonies to the fact that painters were more highly regarded than sculptors in the Acade´mie. Images by Le Brun— whose ideas and actions dominated the institution—and by other artists convey this differential.19 So too do texts by Acade´mie officials. Fe´libien sums up academic doctrine in his Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres, an extensive text in which sculpture plays only a minor role. The discussions are largely oriented toward the concerns of painters, including such matters as use of color, modeling in light and dark, and aerial perspective (the diminution of color intensity and clarity of form to create the illusion of distance in a painting). Fe´libien’s other major publication dealing with the importance and tenets of the Acade´mie is the Confe´rences de l’Acade´mie royale de peinture et de sculpture pendant l’anneé 1667, published in 1669. In his preface to this report of lectures by members of the Acade´mie Fe´libien occasionally mentions sculpture along with painting, but far more often refers only to the latter. Of the lectures discussed, six are concerned with paintings in the royal collection and only one with a work of sculpture. A similar bias is found in the Sentiments des plus habiles peintres sur la pratique de la peinture et sculpture—the title tellingly includes no reference to the sentiments of the sculpteurs. Published in 1696 under the name of Henri Testelin, former secretary of the Acade´mie, it gathers and systematizes the precepts promoted by the institution into a set of six tables. Each of these is called a ‘‘precepte de la peinture,’’ and while several of them are also applicable to sculpture, it is evident that the teaching of painting is their primary goal. Besides its artist constituency, the Acade´mie included a small number of honorary members or ‘‘counselors,’’ men keenly interested in the arts


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and actively involved with the concerns of the institution. Among them Roger de Piles was one of the most passionate and persistent advocates of his convictions about art. Promoting his belief that color is more important than drawing, his Dialogue sur le coloris of 1673 says that drawing, ‘‘includes nothing that the sculptor cannot do; and when considering a painting, these things will always remain imperfect without the help of color, which puts the painter above the sculptor, and causes painted objects to resemble real ones more perfectly.’’20 Holding such views, de Piles was a partisan of the Moderns in their opposition to the defenders of the Ancients, and disagreed with Le Brun’s recommendation that the academicians regard classic sculpture as paradigmatic when creating their figures.21 Boldly contesting the academic prejudice in favor of painting, Jaillot alone among the membership maintained that sculpture is superior to painting. Combative in personality, he characteristically selected a tactic of reversal, even in so elemental a form as renaming the Acade´mie. In his ‘‘Dialogue’’ it becomes the ‘‘Acade´ mie des statuaires et peintres.’’22 He adopts the arguments put forth by the Acade´mie to prove that its members’ work depended on intellectual activity rather than simply manual skill, and begins by accepting the equality of the arts (although again naming sculpture before painting): ‘‘Without theory which is the principle and the base of all these projects, . . . sculptors and architects will be nothing but crude masons without rule or measure and painters only smearers.’’23 He goes on to enumerate the kinds of knowledge needed, which are largely similar to those on the lists provided for Acade´ mie members by Fe´ libien, Testelin, and de Piles.24 While their requirements were encased in writings primarily directed toward painters, however, his are unequivocally for the use of sculptors. In his text, as in theirs, the length of the list is intended to impress upon the reader the complexity and difficulty of the profession being discussed. According to Jaillot, the sculptor’s principal theoretical knowledge must give him the ability to discern the perfect human body. This requirement was a cornerstone of academic theory, concerned with eliminating the imperfections of individuals and portraying the ideal human; this was known as ‘‘la belle nature’’—nature beautified.25 Jaillot connects it, as do the academic texts, with the study of ideal proportion and ‘‘the relationship of each part to the totality in [persons of] different ages, ranks, temperaments and constitutions.’’26 He departs from standard academic theory in following this requirement with a similar one for sculptors: knowledge of perfect animal proportions. This was not

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among the kinds of knowledge that academic writers, unswervingly anthropocentric, counted among the primary concerns for artists. Although Jaillot restricted his own production to portrayals of the Crucifixion, he must have been aware that some of the most widely visible productions of sculpture were equestrian monuments, like those of Henri IV on the Pont Neuf or Louis XIII in the Place Royale. Jaillot may also have been thinking of Bernini’s equestrian statue of Louis XIV, completed in 1673. Creating such a work required intensive study of the anatomy of the horse, of the kind in which French sculptors such as Bouchardon and Falconet are documented as having been engaged in the eighteenth century.27 The next item on Jaillot’s listing of kinds of knowledge that sculptors must have is in total accord with the doctrine of the Acade´mie: ‘‘The expressions of the passions and movements of the soul reflected on the human face, with which the actions of the body and its parts must agree in accordance with the dominant passion and the rank of the person, also the clothing if the subject requires any.’’28 Le Brun had lectured to the Acade´mie on this topic in 1668, and continued to place great emphasis on the importance for artists of portrayal of emotion; the subject reappeared frequently in discussions by the academicians.29 Jaillot’s other requirements for sculptors: knowledge of geometry and perspective, and of religious and secular history, were also emphasized by the academic authors.30 At the conclusion of his enumeration appears the necessity ‘‘to be inventive, judicious, and work hard.’’ The brief and unobtrusive mention of ‘‘inventive’’ is the closest Jaillot comes to the concept of composition, or ‘‘ordonnance,’’ given such great importance in the texts of the academicians.31 Since Le Brun designed the compositions for the sculptors, giving them no opportunity to employ a knowledge of ‘‘ordonnance,’’ Jaillot’s lack of emphasis on this major point of academic theory may be an attempt to devalue it. His list of things that sculptors need to know constitutes a response to those stipulated by the academic theorists as required for artists but in actuality largely directed toward painters. In this regard he is again reactive, reversing the academic tenets generally concerned with training painters in order to apply them instead to sculptors. His list was not devised merely to serve as a corrective to the omission of sculpture from so much of the academic discourse, but was intended to reverse the relative status of painting and sculpture embedded in that discourse. His negative position toward painting becomes clear from the statement that, ‘‘theory for the painter should be the same as for the sculptor, but possessing only a very feeble knowledge of nature, he carefully tries to


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imitate the beauties of sculpture in order to use them in his paintings. That is why painters’ studios are so full of plaster and wax casts.’’32 These words mock the advice, given painters by the academic theorists, to copy classic statues and integrate them into their works.33 Jaillot chooses to interpret this copying as an indication that painting—at least as taught in the Acade´mie—is merely the weak reflection of sculpture. In his campaign to overturn the primacy of painting in relation to sculpture, Jaillot employs an analogy, the comparison between shadow and substance. ‘‘The art of sculpture,’’ he insists, ‘‘is as superior to the other arts as a living man under the sun is to his shadow.’’34 He follows this statement with a nod toward the Bible as providing justification for the advantageous position of sculpture, and then includes a characteristic jab from his bizarre sense of humor: God created all the animals on earth, under water, and in the air in rounded, not flat, form. He formed man in his image, . . . from which it follows that the sculptor forming a figure resembling a man imitates God forming Adam. If almighty God endowed a beautiful figure with his divine breath of life, nobody would be surprised to see it possess all the functions of a living man because . . . it already had such an exterior form; but if the same breath were infused into a flat painted figure, it would be monstrous and the bravest could not but be frightened at seeing a moving object whose front would slightly resemble a man [but] whose body would be as thin as canvas and his back without any form.35

This statement also reverses a claim that had previously been made for painting. In his First Entretien, Fe´libien presents an idea that had probably been considered at the Acade´mie: painting has ‘‘something of the divine, since there is no way that man imitates the omnipotence of God more, . . . than in using a few colors to represent all the things that he has created. For just as God made man in his image, it seems that man for his part creates an image of himself by expressing his actions and his thoughts on a canvas.’’36 The relentless iteration of Jaillot’s negative stance, and his anger, are directed primarily at Le Brun. At one point he repeats a statement that particularly infuriates him, ‘‘that the work of the painter has always surpassed the sculptor’s in the imitation of nature’’ is what Le Brun ‘‘has dared to say in his ridiculous Acade´mie.’’37 To demonstrate the falsehood of this claim, Jaillot immediately follows it with another opposition: Nicolas Poussin and Pietro da Cortona, the premier painters of the age, equal but do not surpass the sculptors François Duquesnoy and Alessandro Algardi, on whose advice and corrections they relied and

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‘‘whom they always recognized as their superiors.’’ Here too Jaillot has adopted a tactic of reversal, directed at the usual procedure for sculptural production in the Acade´mie, where designs and supervision were furnished by Le Brun.38 While the friendship and collaboration of Poussin and Duquesnoy have been documented, Jaillot’s interpretation of their interaction has been carried to an extreme in order to make his point. The same is true for the close personal and artistic relationship of Pietro da Cortona and Algardi.39 Jaillot goes on to mock one of the most prominent of Le Brun’s academic teachings. By means of his lecture of 1668 and many demonstration drawings, Le Brun had prescribed the appropriate way to portray a variety of emotions through facial expression.40 According to the ‘‘Dialogue,’’ Le Brun’s own ability to depict human feelings is highly questionable, as witness his paintings. Citing the Saint Andrew of 1648 in Notre-Dame as characteristic of all Le Brun’s works, Jaillot’s text also implies rejection of the very specific guidelines in the chancellor’s lecture. Jaillot replaces the names of the emotions that Le Brun’s painted figures were intended to communicate with those that he actually finds

Charles Le Brun, Expressions of the Passions: Fear. Pen and ink. Paris, Museé du Louvre. 䉷 Photo RMN—Ge´rard Blot.

Charles Le Brun, Martyrdom of St. Andrew. Paris, Notre Dame. Arch. Phot. 䉷 C. M. N., Paris.

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Simon Jaillot, Crucifixion Group. Ivory. London, Victoria and Albert Museum. V& A Picture Library.

in them. The notion that the chancellor of the Acade´ mie and first painter to the king could be incapable of convincingly portraying emotion is made more insulting by the ferocious terms Jaillot uses to describe the images in question: If [Le Brun] knew the effects that the passions should have on the human face, would he so many times have represented madness in place of magnanimity, stupidity for heroism, idiotic chagrin for modest seriousness, a person possessed for one screaming with fright, a constipated individual for a distressed one?41

What of Jaillot’s own sculptural work? Until recently it seemed that none of it, unfortunately, had survived. Then in 1983 an auction sale at Sotheby’s in London turned out to include a signed and authenticated Crucifixion group of ten figures by him.42 It now belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The suavity and delicacy of the carved figures are


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difficult to reconcile with the abrasive personality of the sculptor. Yet perhaps even here is to be found a trace of his penchant for opposition, or more specifically, opposition within symmetry. In many seventeenthcentury portrayals of the Crucifixion, as in an engraving by Nicolas Tardieu after a painting by Le Brun, St. John supports the fainting Virgin Mary as they share their anguish. Jaillot’s statuettes of the pair, each thirteen and a half inches high, instead present a set of contrasts: Mary’s head and upper body incline to her right, St. John’s to his left; her eyes and face tilt down in weakness, his are energetically raised. The arms of each extend toward the left of the body, but Mary’s hands are clasped with self-contained inner grief, John’s actively gesturing in outward motion. The repentant and unrepentant thieves are of course a traditional subject for contrast, and Jaillot has taken advantage of that in the differences between their heads. The hands of the Christ are closer together than those of the thieves, so that his arms appear more vertically strained, a position described by Bachaumont as ‘‘a` la janseniste,’’ although that label is inaccurate.43 While the arms of Jaillot’s crucified Christ do not present conclusive evidence, there are other convincing indications that he was a Jansenist.44 Among the papers seized in his home was a list of Jansenist books and another short writing by him entitled Arts de peinture et sculpture. In a characteristically Jansenist approach, it quotes biblical text and affirms that sculpture is an expression of piety and a way to sustain it among the people.45 This concept parallels a statement by Martin de Barcos, the Jansenist abbot of the monastery of Saint-Cyran. Barcos wrote in 1678 to the Jansenist painter Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne that painters are ‘‘little preachers of the faith.’’46 Jaillot’s restriction of his sculptural production to the subject of the Crucifixion also strongly suggests Jansenist austere piety and puritanical simplicity of devotion. It is reminiscent of the meditation on the Passion emphasized at the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal and recommended to the Jansenist painter Philippe de Champaigne by its abbess, Mother Angelica.47 Certain procedures employed in writings by Jansenist authors also have elements in common with Jaillot’s ‘‘Dialogue.’’ His unusual conversion of names into anagrams is reminiscent of a word play by the Jansenist mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal. In 1658 Pascal wrote about a problem in physics in a letter signed ‘‘Amos Dettonville’’; this is an anagram of ‘‘Louis de Montalte,’’ a pseudonym he had been using for about a year.48 Jaillot’s repeated reliance on reversal in order to oppose the doctrine of the Acade´mie also seems related to a passage by his contemporary Pierre Nicole, a major Jansenist author. Expand-

Nicolas Tardieu, Crucifixion, after Charles Le Brun. Engraving. Stockholm, Nationalmuseum. 䉷 Photo Hans Thorwid, Nationalmuseum.


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ing on a biblical phrase, Nicole states that faith ‘‘makes us see how little are the great of this world and how great are the little people, how poor the rich and how rich the poor, how miserable the fortunate and how fortunate the wretched.’’49 Jaillot’s Jansenist beliefs may furnish the explanation for a good portion of his antisocial behavior. This pessimistic faith included emphasis on predestination and the necessity of grace along with the denial of free will. Alexander Sedgwick discusses the characteristics of its followers: ‘‘The very intensity of their faith and their commitment to God were indications to [them] that they were among the elect. Having suffered through the psychological agonies of introspection, they had come to feel God’s grace stirring within them.’’50 This was an ‘‘elitist attitude . . . to be one of God’s chosen souls was a singular honor, because the number of God’s redeemed was always very small.’’ Adherents to these doctrines aroused the hostility of religious and secular authorities, and the Jansenists lived in a state of antagonism with the society around them. Accustomed to suffering by their penitential discipline and its accompanying indications of God’s grace, they viewed persecution by ignorant officials as ‘‘a means by which God tested the faith of his elect.’’51 Viewed in the light of this belief, Jaillot’s persistently rebellious behavior in the Acade´mie and his attacks on Le Brun take on a new significance. Fortified by his religion, he was empowered to protest against what appeared to him as the erroneous ways of the institution and was prepared to deal with the baneful consequences of his conduct. Equally meaningful in Jaillot’s case is the deep-seated independence characteristic of the Jansenist outlook. Sedgwick describes ‘‘their inclination to place the spiritual interests of the individual above the interests of society’’ and affirms that ‘‘Jansenism was a movement in opposition to authority of one sort or another throughout much of the seventeenth century. Its emphasis on the spiritual and intellectual integrity of the individual ran counter to the spirit of absolutism that prevailed in Church and state.’’52 Jaillot’s stubborn refusal to attend Acade´ mie meetings because of his anger that only the officers were allowed to voice opinions exemplifies this attitude. The kind of sculpture he created is further evidence of his unflagging individualism. The small dimensions of his works could have suggested a link between his production and the artisan output of the members of the Maıˆtrise. In that case they might have been viewed as totally at odds with the standards that sculpture created by members of the Acade´mie was expected to meet: nobility because of monumental scale as well as classicizing form. Academic pieces were made to be visible and impres-

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sive even from some distance, whereas Jaillot’s were to be seen from close at hand, in a personal relationship. The works of Acade´mie sculptors could be admired by large groups of people simultaneously, but Jaillot’s welcomed the attention of only one or a few at a time. Sculptors belonging to the Acade´mie also adopted the materials used by Greek and Roman artists, that is, marble or stone and bronze. An essay on sculpture written in 1686 by Rainssant, keeper of the royal medals, indicates the favoring of bronze and marble.53 Academic scorn for ‘‘lesser’’ materials, echoing attitudes of the classicist tradition in Italy, is suggested in several passages of the Vies des fameux sculpteurs of 1787 by Dezaillier d’Argenville. One of them notes that Duquesnoy was reproached for ‘‘only knowing how to work in clay, wax and ivory.’’54 Restricting his production to works in ivory, Jaillot no more acceded to the use of the materials preferred for sculpture in the Acade´mie than he did to employing the dimensions usual for those works. Yet just as Jaillot’s theoretical pronouncements are much like those of the academicians, his sculpture displays classicizing qualities of style despite its academically uncommon material and small size. His idealized figures and his theoretical stance seem consonant with the goals of the Acade´mie. It appears that his major distaste was for the florid and Baroque aspects of the Acade´ mie members’ work. That style represented an approach diametrically opposed to the reserve and introspective quality of Jaillot’s, which embodied the soul-searching characteristic of the Jansenists. Le Brun’s production was frequently given to the Baroque richness that Jaillot so heartily disliked. The decorations designed by the first painter for the funeral ceremonies of Se´guier in the Church of the Oratory, for example, included many dramatic and allegorical elements.55 The nave of the church was all draped in black. In its center was a large marble catafalque surmounted by a porphyry tomb, above them a great pyramid of gold stars, each holding a white candle. Simulated flame and smoke came from an urn atop the pyramid. On the catafalque and upper walls of the nave were figures of death, in the form of draped skeletons. Also included were allegorical figures representing the arts, the virtues, the Acade´mie, immortality, time, gratitude, etc. There were gilded bronze and marble ornaments, winged death’s heads, hourglasses, many repetitions of Se´guier’s coat of arms, and twelve paintings of the history of his life with skulls, owls, and bats ornamenting their frames. Given Jaillot’s ascetic and deeply felt religious convictions, it is easy to understand the violence of his objections to participation in the creation of these lavish adornments.


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Se´bastien Le Clerc, Funeral of Chancellor Pierre Se´guier. Engraving. Cliche´ Bibliothe`que nationale de France, Paris.

Le Brun’s designs for this and other magnificent ensembles represent an adoption not only of forms derived from Italian Baroque models, but also specifically associated with the Jesuits.56 Works of art produced for this order tended to be lavish, theatrical, and overtly emotional. Since the Jesuits were relentless enemies of the Jansenists,57 Jaillot had all the more reason for anger that this style had been taken up by Le Brun and imposed by him on the members of the Acade´mie.

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Philippe de Champaigne and his nephew Jean-Baptiste, the Jansenist painters in the Acade´mie, shared Jaillot’s preference for an art of devout seriousness and sober austerity. A comparison of Jaillot’s Crucifixion scene with one of the several paintings of the crucified Christ by Philippe de Champaigne reveals the stark simplicity of both in comparison to the more florid style of Le Brun’s full draperies and billowing clouds. The Jaillot and Champaigne works are even further from the Italianate theatricality and lushness of Le Brun’s Martyrdom of St. Andrew and recall the words of Martin de Barcos in a letter of 1674 to Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne: ‘‘By delivering painting from the errors and lies that the Italians have introduced, you will be regarded as a restorer of painting.’’58 Yet there are marked differences as well between Jaillot’s art and that of the Jansenist painters. The severe harshness of the Champaigne work, evident in the frontality and verticality of the Christ, contrasts with the softer, more fluid grace of the sculpted figures. Jaillot’s art theory, as we have seen it, essentially accorded with that of the Acade´mie in emphasizing idealization; the Champaignes did not agree, preferring fidelity to nature as it was created by God to any embellishment.59 If Jaillot was sustained by Jansenist self-reliant individualism in his rebellion against Le Brun and the Acade´mie, some of the same spirit appears to have led both the Champaignes to public disagreement with the first painter, Philippe in a lecture and exchange of comments with Le Brun in 1668, Jean-Baptiste in a lecture of 1674.60 Yet the uncle and the nephew both remained respected members of the Acade´mie, neither having displayed disruptive and antisocial behavior like that of Jaillot. Was the difference between their experience in the institution and Jaillot’s purely a matter of individual personality and inclinations? That is possible, but we cannot avoid noting the difficulties undergone by so many sculptors in the Acade´mie and the derogatory comments recorded about many of them in its memoirs, whether or not they were adherents of Jansenism.

Philippe de Champaigne, Christ on the Cross. Paris, Museé du Louvre. 䉷 Photo RMN.

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NOTES 1. Proce`s-Verbaux de l’Acade´mie royale de peinture et de sculpture, ed. Anatole de Montaigion, 1 (Paris: Baur, 1875), pp. 159–62; Antoine-Nicolas Dezallier d’Argenville, Vies des fameux sculpteurs depuis la renaissance des arts (1787; reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1972), p. 208; Thomas Hedin, The Sculpture of Gaspard and Balthazard Marsy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), p. 237. 2. Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Me´ moires ine´ dits sur le Comte de Caylus, Bouchardon, les Slodtz, ed. Charles Henry (Paris: Baur, 1880), pp. 58–64; François Souchal, Les Slodtz, sculpteurs et dećorateurs du Roi (1685–1764) (Paris: Boccard, 1967), p. 96. 3. Cochin, pp. 63, 85–93; Louis Reáu, Les Sculpteurs français en Italie (Paris: Les E´ditions Universelles, 1945), p. 58; Souchal, p. 103; Diderot: Salons, ed. Jean Seznec and Jean Adhe´mar, 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 214. 4. Paris, Archives nationales, O1, 1927. Except as otherwise noted, the translations in this essay are my own. 5. Dezallier d’Argenville, p. 271; Reáu, p. 58; Robert Enggass, Early Eighteenth-Century Sculpture in Rome (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), pp. 125, 128. 6. Comte de Caylus, Vies d’artistes du XVIIIe sie`cle; discours sur la peinture et la sculpture, ed. Andre´ Fontaine (Paris: Laurens, 1910), pp. 79–80, n. 2. In the late 1680s the school’s director, La Teulie`re, accused the sculpture student Jean-Baptiste Theódon of being lazy and difficult, and of trying to poison him: Anatole de Montaiglon and Jules Guiffrey, eds., Correspondance des Directeurs de l’Acade´mie de France a` Rome avec les Surintendants des Baˆtiments (Paris: Charavay, 1887–1908), 1: p. 461. 7. Major sources for information on Jaillot include Proce`s-Verbaux, 1: pp. 176–77, 180, 378, 380–82; 2 (Paris: Baur, 1878): pp. 13–16, 18–19, 110–17; Andre´ Fontaine, Acade´miciens d’autrefois (Paris: Laurens, 1914), pp. 115–43; Bernard Teysse`dre, Roger de Piles et les de´bats sur le coloris au sie`cle de Louis XIV (Paris: Bibliothe`que des Arts, 1957), pp. 182–83, 285–87; Paul Duro, The Academy and the Limits of Painting in SeventeenthCentury France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 38–41. Among early laudatory references to Jaillot’s work are Michel de Marolles, Livre des Peintres et graveurs, quoted in Fontaine, pp. 115–16; Florent Le Comte, Cabinet des Singularitez d’Architecture. Peinture, Sculpture, et Gravure, 3 (Paris: Picart & Le Clerc, 1700): pp. 225–27; Pierre-Jean Mariette, Abeće´dario, ed. P. de Chennevie`res and A. de Montaiglon, 3 (Paris: Dumoulin, 1854–56): p. 2; 6 (Paris: Dumoulin, 1859–60): 83; Louis Petit de Bachaumont, Me´moires secrets, 34 (London: Adamson, 1789): pp. 347, 362–63. 8. Preparations described in Proce`s-Verbaux, 1: pp. 371–88. On the completed decorations, [Andre´ Fe´libien], Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes, 2 (Paris: Mabre-Cramoisy, 1688): pp. 536–62; Teysse` dre, pp. 180–82; Hedin (as in n. 1 above), pp. 161–63. 9. pp. 123–34. 10. Fontaine, pp. 126, 127, 130. 11. Ibid., pp. 135–36. 12. Henri Testelin, Sentimens des plus habiles peintres sur la pratique de la peinture et sculpture (Paris: Mabre-Cramoisy, 1696), preface; Teysse`dre, pp. 56, 579. 13. Claire J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘‘Paragone’’ (Leiden: Brill, 1992), p. 257. 14. Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art, Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), pp. 82–109, includes all relevant prior bibliography; also see An-


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toine Schnapper, ‘‘The Debut of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture,’’ The French Academy: Classicism and Its Antagonists, ed. June Hargrove (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), pp. 27–36; Reed Benhamou, ‘‘Public and Private Art Education in France 1648–1793’’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 308, (1993): pp. 46–49. 15. Fe´libien, 1 (1666; second edition, Paris: Mabre-Cramoisy, 1685), p. 39. 16. There were significantly fewer of them than painters among the membership and officers of the Acade´mie. See Ludovic Vitet, L’Acade´mie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Paris: Le´vy, 1880), pp. 326–405. 17. Quoted in Henry Jouin, Charles Le Brun et les Arts sous Louis XIV (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1889), pp. 226–27. ‘‘History painting’’ is the term used to describe the portrayal of scenes from ancient or religious history or classical mythology. The Acade´mie classified it as the most elevated form of painting. 18. Pierre Marcel, Charles Le Brun (Paris: Plon, 1909), pp. 129–36; Jennifer Montagu, ‘‘Charles Le Brun and his Sculptors: A Reconsideration in the Light of Some Newly Identified Drawings,’’ The Burlington Magazine, 118 (1976), p. 88. On the anger of the eighteenth-century sculptor Falconet over Le Brun’s domination of sculptors, see Anne Betty Weinshenker, Falconet: His Writings and His Friend Diderot (Geneva: Droz, 1966), p. 115. 19. Anne Betty Weinshenker, ‘‘Hierarchy and Position: Allegories of the Visual Arts in France,’’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 346–48: Transactions of the Ninth International Congress on the Enlightenment, 1996, pp. 797–801. 20. Roger de Piles, Dialogue sur le coloris (1673; second edition, Paris: Langlois, 1699), p. 31. 21. Roger de Piles, Conversations sur la connoissance de la peinture (1677), quoted in Teysse`dre, pp. 251–52. It is apparent that Le Brun’s admiration for classic sculpture did not affect his attitude toward contemporary sculptors. 22. Fontaine, p. 131. 23. Ibid., p. 125. 24. Fe´ libien, Entretiens, 1: pp. 40–42; Testelin, tables of precepts; Roger de Piles, ‘‘Remarques sur l’Art de Peinture de Charles Alfonse du Fresnoy,’’ Oeuvres diverses, 5 (Amsterdam: Arksteé & Merkus, 1767), pp. 131–36. 25. This tenet appears repeatedly in academic discourse, e.g., Fe´libien, Entretiens, 1: pp. 39–40, where it is stipulated for painters. 26. Fontaine, p. 128. Compare Fe´libien, Entretiens, 1: pp. 40, 42; Confe´rences, pp. 86– 89, 118; Testelin, p. 13 and second precept of painting. The importance of proportion for the painter is also stated in Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy, De Arte Graphica, trans. John Dryden from the French of Roger de Piles (London: Rogers, 1695), p. 59. The original text in Latin was written in mid-century and published with de Piles’s translation and commentary. 27. On the Bernini statue, Charles Avery, Bernini (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), pp. 245–46. On the Bouchardon, the exhibition catalogue of the Cabinet des dessins, Museé du Louvre, La statue e´questre de Louis XV, dessins de Bouchardon, 1973. On Falconet, Louis Re´ au, E´ tienne-Maurice Falconet (Paris: Demotte, 1922), 2: pp. 365–67; George Levitine, The Sculpture of Falconet (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1972), p. 56. Jaillot may also have been aware of the statue of Milo of Crotona attacked by a lion, begun by Pierre Puget in 1671 and planned for placement in the park of Versailles; Klaus Herding, Pierre Puget (Berlin: Mann, 1970), pp. 167–73.

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28. Fontaine, p. 129. 29. Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Andre´ Fontaine, Les doctrines d’art en France: peintres, amateurs, critiques, de Poussin a` Diderot (1909; reprint, Gene`ve: Slatkine, 1970), pp. 68–69. In 1675 Michel Anguier lectured to his colleagues in the Acade´ mie on ‘‘The Expression of Anger’’ (Teysse`dre, pp. 160, 553). Testelin’s third table of precepts for painting is on expression. 30. Fontaine, Acade´ miciens, p. 129; Fe´ libien, Entretiens, 1: p. 42; Testelin, preface. Roger de Piles, ‘‘Remarques sur l’art de peinture . . . ,’’ pp. 130–36 supplies a lengthy list of books and topics with which artists should be familiar. 31. For Fe´libien’s statement on the importance of composition, see n. 15 above. ‘‘Ordonnance’’ constitutes the fifth of Testelin’s tables of precepts for painting. 32. Fontaine, Acade´miciens, p. 129. 33. E.g., Testelin, p. 11: in the Acade´mie, ‘‘it was agreed that study of the beautiful ancient figures was very necessary . . . and even more advantageous than studying nature.’’ Academic lectures dwelled on the necessity of using these works as models, and demonstrated how the revered Poussin had followed this procedure; Fe´libien, Confe´rences, p. 86, quotes Le Brun’s discussion of Poussin’s painting, The Fall of Manna: ‘‘He called attention to the greatest and most noteworthy element in that rare painting, the proportions of all the figures, taken by M. Poussin from the most beautiful antique statues and perfectly adapted by him to his subject.’’ Ibid., pp. 118–19 reports Se´bastien Bourdon’s lecture on Poussin’s painting, Christ Healing the Blind, which makes similar observations about the artist’s basing his figures on ancient statues. 34. Fontaine, Acade´miciens, p. 127. 35. Ibid., pp. 127–28. 36. Entretiens, 1: p. 46. 37. Fontaine, Acade´miciens, p. 130. 38. For Le Brun’s influence, beyond the provision of designs, on works by sculptors of the Acade´mie, see L. Dussieux et al., eds., Me´moires ine´dits sur la vie et les ouvrages des membres de l’Acade´mie royale de peinture et de sculpture, 2, (Paris, 1854), p. 83 and Pierre Pradel, ‘‘Morceaux de rećeption des sculpteurs de l’Acade´mie royale au XVIIe sie`cle,’’ Bulletin de la Socie´te´ de l’Histoire de l’Art Français, 1945–46, pp. 34–36, 92–95. 39. Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1967), pp. 54, 59 (quotes the statement in Bellori’s Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti moderni of 1672 that Poussin made wax models after figures in a Titian painting with his friend Duquesnoy), p. 102, 232 (Poussin’s influence on Duquesnoy, quoted from Passeri, Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti che hanno lavorato in Roma). Jennifer Montagu, Alessandro Algardi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 31–32 on the affinities and mutual influence in the work of Cortona and Algardi. 40. The text of Le Brun’s lecture appears in Montagu, Expression (as in n. 29), pp. 112–24, English translation pp. 126–40. 41. Fontaine, Acade´miciens, p. 132. 42. Christian Theuerkauff, ‘‘Kleinplastik des Barock,’’ Kunst & Antiquita¨ten, 1985, p. 48. 43. Bachaumont (as in note 7 above), p. 362. In paintings of the Crucifixion by Philippe de Champaigne, who was a Jansenist, the arms of the Christ are spread wide, demonstrating the incorrectness of Bachaumont’s phrase. See Bernard Dorival, Philippe de Champaigne, 1602–1674 (Paris: Laget, 1976), 2: p. 44.


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44. I wish to thank Margaret Anne Doody for asking the question about Jaillot, during the Twelfth DeBartolo Conference, that led to my further investigation of his Jansenist ties. 45. Fontaine, Acade´miciens, pp. 137–38. 46. Bernard Dorival, Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne (1631–1681) (Paris: Dorival, 1992), p. 27. 47. Dorival, Philippe de Champaigne, 2: p. 45. 48. Bernard Dorival, ed., Album Pascal (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), pp. 116, 142–46. 49. Nicole, Essais de Morale, 5: p. 85, cited in Alexander Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), p. 142. 50. Sedgwick, pp. 195–96. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., pp. 196, 205. 53. Rainssant, ‘‘Dissertation sur les Statue¨ s,’’ Journal des Sç avans 14 (1686): pp. 195–96. 54. Dezallier d’Argenville (as in n. 1 above), p. 51; also cf. ibid., pp. 63, 86, 116. 55. See n. 8 above. 56. Hedin (as in n. 1), p. 161. 57. Sedgwick, pp. 68–74, 123–24; W. J. Stankiewicz, Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-Century France (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1960), pp. 149–50, 177–78, 193. 58. Fontaine, Doctrines (as in n. 29), p. 108; Teyssedre (as in n. 7), p. 240. 59. Dorival, Philippe de Champaigne, 1: pp. 75, 107–8; idem, Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne, p. 24. 60. Ibid., 1: pp. 75–76; idem, p. 27.

The Gnostic Clarissa Margaret Anne Doody

Such a Sun in a family, where there are none but faint twinklers, how could they bear it! . . . The distance between you and them is immense. Their eyes ake to look up at you. What shades does your full day of merit cast upon them! (Anna to Clarissa, 9 March) Do they not act in character?—And to whom? To an Alien. You are not one of them. (Anna to Clarissa, 25 March)

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A VIRGIN MAID WHO LIVED IN BLISS surrounded by the light in which she participated. In her happy home some say she was placed just below her Mother, in freedom and felicity. But in making a false and deadly contact with an inimical element, whether out of inadvertence, curiosity, or desire, this Virgin Maid lost her happy place. She was deceived and beguiled; she confused the low with the high, the false simulacrum or reflected light with the reality. The arrogant and destructive deceiver who beguiled her brought about her fall. The Lady of Light was nearly quenched by his arrogant power. But she, seeing the truth at last, turned back, and repenting her error returned, slowly and not without trials, through the unhappy chaos back to her place of light. Simply put, this summary gives us what we will, I think, recognize as a possible plot summary of Richardson’s Clarissa—although we will all immediately protest against it, saying that Clarissa’s place in her ‘‘original family’’ the Harlowes is far from truly happy. The plot summary I have just given is a justifiable, if greatly shortened, version of the Gnostic Story of Sophia or Heavenly Wisdom. For centuries, the main source of information about the chief Gnostic versions of cosmic events was St. Irenaeus of Lyons, who, in an all-out treatise Against Heresies, left the most accessible versions of the beliefs he attempted to re176

THE GNOSTIC CLARISSA

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fute; his work was widely known to learned Christian divines of various persuasions in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Texts more recently translated, such as Pistis Sophia (which was not translated into English from Coptic until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), have added greatly to our own knowledge of these cosmologies and theologies, even before the discovery in this century of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts.1 Various forms of Gnostic beliefs can be traced in the thinking of some Renaissance groups such as the Family of Love, which flourished in the environment of Renaissance print culture.2 It would not be especially surprising if Richardson had come upon versions and variants of Gnostic thought fairly often, even in hostile citations in sermons and in antagonistic tracts. Richardson’s age was full of religious controversy.3 The atmosphere of the 1720s and 1730s was conducive to attacks upon ‘‘heresy,’’ which means, of course, that heresies had to get some kind of airing. The endeavor on some sides to turn Christian theology into deistic moralizing—a tendency so visible in the eighteenth century—may actually have stimulated a kind of oppositional interest in inner-light doctrines of various kinds, as the rise of Methodism would seem to indicate. My point is certainly not to say that Richardson was a Gnostic. Nor is it to argue that we can pin Richardson down to one ascertainable set of beliefs in a systematic and categorizing manner. Anyone who considers a religious matter intently and over a period of time and with imagination—is quite probably going to be subjected to accusations of inconstancy or inconsistency, if not of heresy—or simple folly. What I want to do is to draw attention to the presence of the Gnostic story within Clarissa, and the significance of that presence. One of the reasons for the endurance of Richardson’s story—and for the respect one has to accord the novel when one reads it in entirety—is the rich density of its material, its intellectual challenge and its symbolic depth. The symbolic depth is not achieved by setting down a simple linear moralistic story— even if efforts to make Clarissa into precisely that kind of story date from its own time.4 There are two symbolic systems I want to look at. I want to emphasize that I prefer to use words such as symbol and symbology rather than allegory or allegorical. I take it that allegory refers to a hidden but not-sohidden meaning that the reader is (in some sense) supposed to ‘‘get.’’ I am not at all sure that the reader is meant to ‘‘get’’ the lively symbolic system working within the narrative—although some readers must surely have done so. Richardson’s ‘‘Gnostic Clarissa’’ within his Clarissa

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is not ‘‘the’’ Clarissa or ‘‘the answer’’ to our puzzles about the text. But its presence—if I am right—raises the ante about the novel’s meaning or what it is saying to us. *

*

*

The novel Clarissa, more than any other eighteenth-century mainstream work, is about not being at home in the world. A great deal has been written by orthodox Christians about not being at home in the world, but the less orthodox have had even more to say about it. Some such works are openly and clearly allegorical—‘‘The Hymn of the Pearl’’ or ‘‘The Song of the Soul’’ associated with the apocryphal text The Acts of Thomas, for example. In this (presumably) second-century ‘‘Hymn’’ the soul is represented as the child of a Great King who has been sent on away on an important errand: When I was an infant too young to talk, in my father’s palace, Reposing in the wealth and luxury of those who nourished me, My parents equipped me with supplies and sent me out from the East, our country, on a mission. . . . They took away from me the jewel-studded garment shot with gold That they had made out of love for me And the robe of yellow color (tailored) to my size, But they made an agreement with me, Impressed it on my mind (so that) I might (not) forget it, and said, ‘‘If you go down to Egypt and bring from there the one pearl, Which resides near the ravenous dragon, You shall put (back) on that jewel-studded garment and the robe.’’5

The wandering soul forgets its mission and its true identity, taken up with the delusions of the place to which it travels, the false and shadowy ‘‘Egypt.’’ It is an alien, but tries to conform too readily: ‘‘So I put on their style of dress, so that I might not look like one who was foreign’’ (line 29, p. 372). At last it is reminded of its true home: ‘‘And I snatched the pearl, and turned to carry it away to my parents. / And I took off the dirty clothing, and left it behind in their land’’ (lines 61–62, p. 374) ‘‘The Song of the Pearl’’ is a relatively simple Gnostic tale, the emblematic story of one life, though an Everyman life. Other Gnostic narratives tell more dramatic stories about cosmic conflict between mighty and antagonistic entities. The substance of the Gnostic myths, particularly as outlined by St. Irenaeus, was well known in Richardson’s time; references (albeit disparaging) are to be found in the works of orthodox writers. For example, John Alexander in The Primitive Doctrine of Christ’s


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Divinity (1727) produces an outline of what Irenaeus said the Gnostic Valentinians believed: Their supream God and Father of all they called Bythus, i.e. the Depth, or incomprehensible Being . . . him they supposed . . . long before the beginning of the World, to have produced a glorious Æon, equal to himself, and capable to comprehend him: whom they called the only-begotten . . . and the Mind (nus) [i.e., nous] they coupled him with another Female-Æon emitted at the same time, termed (Alethia) Truth. These soon propagated . . . The last Female-Æon, called Sophia, Wisdom, thro’ an immoderate desire to search out and comprehend the unknown Father, had almost lost her Place in the Pleroˆma of the Æons.6

The Gnostic Story of the Fall and Rise of the Virgin Sophia (in its various versions) is a story of supra-mundane significance. The important acts happen outside time and matter—time and matter are aspects of the fallen world, the dead world. Sophia herself is begotten by a drop of light falling downward from the left hand of the true unchanging God into matter. Thus was Wisdom born. Her counterpart, emanating from God’s right hand, is Christ, who is complete light, with no admixture of matter. Sophia is light-fluid; she has been caught up in and given form by the mother-waters, the original hyle¯ or matter. Beautiful as such a form is, she is anxious to rid herself altogether of the hylic and return to her sphere. References to such a system sparkle throughout literature of the Enlightenment. Cowley refers to the mother-waters in Davideis, ‘‘Where their vast Court, the Mother-waters keep,’’ a line memorably parodied by Dryden in MacFlecknoe as ‘‘Where their vast Courts the Mother-Strumpets keep.’’7 In the Gnostic system, the mass of the four original elements (Water, Darkness, Abyss, and Chaos) was brooded over by the Universal Mother. The Gnostic story is a series of falls—all of which explain the existence and dysfunction of matter, time, death, and the things of this world, including earthly powers. Irenaeus explains what the Gnostics said happened when the drop of light fell into the waters: It absolutely sank into the waters . . . set them in motion, recklessly proceeding all the way to the lowest depths, and it assumed from them a body. For—they say—all things rushed toward the secretion of light that it contained; clung to it; and enveloped it . . . Bound, therefore, by a body composed of matter, and greatly weighed down by it, this (power) recovered its senses, and attempted to escape from the waters and ascend to its mother. But it could not do so, on account of the weight of the enveloping body. But

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greatly suffering, it contrived to conceal that light, which was from above, for fear that the light too might be injured by the inferior elements, just as it had been.8

Sophia’s contact with what G. R. S. Mead terms ‘‘the Space-Waters’’ caused the generation also of a son, ‘‘the chief Creative Power of the Sensible World.’’9 Sophia herself becomes by pathogenesis a ‘‘Mother Strumpet,’’ conceiving by her descent a most imperfect offspring. This troublesome son in many Gnostic texts is named Ialdabaoth. Ialdabaoth is a tyrant, arrogant and assuming. He is the false God, the Demiourgos or Demiurge who creates Adam and Eve—but even Ialdabaoth can breathe life in them only by imparting some of the true light-fluid he received from Sophia. The tyrant pseudo-creator we know from Blake as old Nobodaddy, Urizen.10 Freethinkers also refer to this delinquent tyrant-power as ‘‘Jehovah,’’ indicating that the biblical bossy deity, the jealous and angry God worshipped by ignorant Christians and Jews, is a perversion of the true serene light. We do not, of course, have to go far in Clarissa to look for bossy and unreasonable men who insist that their system of things is the height of reason. The two male Harlowes, the two Jameses, both named for a failed king, come to mind. But Lovelace above all is the representative of Ialdabaoth. He thinks of himself as the sun: ‘‘Knowest thou not moreover, that Man is the Woman’s Sun; Woman is the Man’s Earth?—How dreary, how desolate, the Earth, that the Sun shines not upon!’’11 But this is comic posturing, defying the truth of the novel which is that Clarissa—whose name means ‘‘most light,’’ ‘‘most bright’’—and also ‘‘most sparkling,’’ ‘‘most glaring,’’ ‘‘most shining,’’ ‘‘most famous’’—is the sun. Anna Howe says this, with emphasis, very early in the novel: Such a Sun in a family, where there are none but faint twinklers, how could they bear it! . . . The distance between you and them is immense. Their eyes ake to look up at you. What shades does your full day of merit cast upon them! (1: p. 170)

Lovelace vividly likens Clarissa to the sun several times, most strikingly perhaps when at Hampstead he sees his lost Clarissa once again and feels like the man born blind in the story of Christ’s healing—or like the dreamer brought out of the cave in Plato’s Parable of the Sun in the Republic: Then my Charmer opened the door, and blazed upon me, as it were, in a flood of light, like what one might imagine would strike a man, who, born


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blind, had by some propitious power been blessed with his sight, all at once, in a meridian Sun. (5: p. 83)

When truly facing and seeing Clarissa, Lovelace must always yield his own pretence to be the light. Lovelace behaves as Ialdabaoth’s true representative most strikingly in his oft-announced arrogation to himself of the right to create: I have changed his name by virtue of my own single authority. Knowest thou not, that I am a great Name-father? . . . Quality too I create. And by a still more valuable prerogative, I degrade by virtue of my own imperial will, without any other act of forfeiture than for my own convenience. What a poor thing is a monarch to me! (4: p. 43)

Lovelace is supreme ruler, above all law: ‘‘The Law was not made for such a man as me’’ (4: p. 44). He can, however, create only pseudorealties, weak fictions, simulacra and gimcracks. But we should not make the Gnostic Lovelace too pathetic an antagonist, or too simple a rake-villain. Once we bring this symbological system in, we must be willing to face the suggestions of a more complex relationship between the two protagonists on the supra-mundane sphere. If we apply the Gnostic cosmological system to Clarissa, we can play with the idea that in a super-narrative, a supra-narrative untold, Ialdabaoth (Lovelace) is the child of Sophia herself, the offspring of Clarissa’s eternal principle before she was born of flesh and blood. Clarissa’s very birth into flesh and blood strikes Lovelace himself as odd: ‘‘Her nurse Norton boasts of her maternal offices . . . So that there is full proof, that she came not from above all at once an angel!’’ (1: p. 201). He makes a comic show of repudiating the idea that Clarissa the divine could truly belong to her earthbound family: ‘‘She takes the man she calls her Father . . . the fellow she calls her Brother . . . to be her Father, to be her . . . Brother . . . Mere cradle-prejudices!’’ (1: p. 201). Most of the more extreme statements of Gnostic views in the novel are, as we might expect, made by Lovelace (the author could readily repudiate them at need). But not all are made in a totally jocular manner. When Clarissa falls ill after receiving her father’s brutal curse, Lovelace says ‘‘I will tell thee—I was in danger of losing my Charmer for ever.—She was soaring upward to her native Skies. She was got above earth, by means, too, of the Earth-born. (3: p. 276; Lovelace’s emphasis). The ‘‘Earth-born’’ Harlowes are thus hylic mud-people, mere simulacra of human beings, without the divine spark, in contrast to the heavenly Clarissa. Anna has

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said practically the same thing, in a Gnostic shorthand, when she says that the Harlowes, in treating Clarissa so badly, act in character ‘‘And to whom? To an Alien. You are not one of them’’ (2: p. 61). Clarissa, the ‘‘Alien,’’ comes from above, from the Plero¯ma, from the light world, has descended to the dull matter that the Harlowes occupy. Despite his half-serious insistence that Clarissa is divine, Lovelace longs to impregnate her, which means (to him) using her to reproduce himself. But he also yearns towards her as a maternal being. In the ‘‘love-story’’ of Lovelace and Clarissa, Lovelace often imagines himself with his mother, or with Clarissa as mother—her breasts fascinate him. He wants to be perpetually loved and forgiven by Clarissa, a motherfigure who is to give unconditional and steady regard. He wants to have ‘‘a young Lovelace’’ by her, thinking (rightly) it would be a triumph to make ‘‘such an angel’’ give birth. Strangely, Lovelace in his mid-twenties seems to be suffering from a state of orphanage. He appears to have lost to death a most indulgent but pious mother (see, for example, 3: p. 107), and he never once alludes to his father. There is in the novel one allusion to this missing parent. After the rape, Clarissa reproaches Lovelace: ‘‘Thou hadst a Father, who was a man of honour’’ (5: p. 345). It is natural, or at least realistic, that she should believe he did, but Lovelace’s own psychological picture entirely lacks the father. It is striking that only in the case of Lovelace does this novelist present us with a major character who has no male parent in his psychic background. Richardson, who takes a great interest in family dynamics, gives a good glimpse of Mr. B.’s original family, and Pamela of course has an important father as well as a mother. Clarissa’s earthly parents are rendered for us in great detail. Sir Charles Grandison’s relations with his parents, including his recently deceased father, Sir Thomas Grandison, as well as a mother who died when he was seventeen, are very important in shaping his development and attitudes. Lovelace refers to his mother several times in the narrative, but we tend to think of him as he does, as having, curiously enough, no father. This deficiency is eminently suited to his role, as defined by Karen L. King in her discussion of an archetypal bad boy and rapist: The chief Archon (Samael, Sakla, Yaldabaoth) is characterized as blind, ignorant, or mistaken, and arrogant, the source of Envy and the Father of Death. He is androgynous and formed like a beast; his mother is the Abyss, he derives from Matter—no father is mentioned. Though he himself has no father, he is the world creator of a fatherless world like its fatherless father.12


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The blind and arrogant Archon or Ruler is (as in the Gnostic text The Hypostasis of the Archons, discussed here by King) a cruel yet oddly ineffectual rapist, desiring, despising, yet curiously subjected to the female principle. In the dynamic of Richardson’s novel, Lovelace remains an ignorant bastard, a pseudo-creator who is the product of a peculiar pathogenesis. In all his Ialdabaoth boasting, Robert Lovelace never boasts of his own paternity. Lovelace-Ialdabaoth implicitly makes the vaunt of hubristic Ialdabaoth: ‘‘It is I who am the parent and god; and there is none above me.’’13 He wants to drive his Clarissa-Sophia into the position of forgetting the higher heaven and worshipping only himself, trembling at his frown. But the light principle, however much she suffers, cannot do that. Indeed, it is by the Lady of Light’s retention of the principle of light, however dimmed and unsteady in her lowest traverses of the lower world, that the power to love remains. That love is what sustains and creates in the universe—‘‘Flowers, and Knots, and Trees, and the Sun, and the Moon, and the Seven Stars,’’ a creation joked about by Lovelace when he says Clarissa made them by stitching them in her sampler (6: p. 102). But they are an original creation of Light and Love working in or with the material. In the Gnostic cosmological narrative, Sophia can hardly simply hate Ialdabaoth or ‘‘son of Chaos’’ because he is, after all, her child. In the Gnostic system, such an ‘‘angel’’ has already given birth to an infant Lovelace. But if she is seduced by this imperfect offspring to make him momentarily her lover, and to mistake the cunning false system of mirrored lights for the true light, she has to escape. In the Gnostic narratives, the Virgin escapes by means of divine help from the first or real Heaven, not from any spectral imitation of the realm of Ialdabaoth. Christ is sent to help Sophia. Christ ‘‘clothed his sister Sophia with the Light-vesture and they rejoiced together.’’14 In the ‘‘mystical marriage’’ they mount together to the Incorruptible Æon. According to Pistis Sophia, the Arrogant One seduced Sophia, deceiving her into taking the low for the high, imagining that the lower regions were the genuine Light. ‘‘And so in ignorance she descended into matter, saying ‘I will go into that region, without my consort, to take the light . . . so that I may go to the Light of lights, which is in the Height of heights.’ . . . But all the material emanations of Arrogant surrounded her, and the lightpower of Arrogant set to work to devour all the light-powers in Sophia.’’15 Only after going through a series of repentances, even descending altogether into Chaos, does Sophia, still yearning for the Light, move back to her origin. The stages of repentance set out in ancient

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Gnostic works such Pistis Sophia link their visions of the world to Egyptian apocrypha and Hermetic works. (Egyptian thought is much attached to numerical evolutionary stages of a progress; the Egyptians seem to be the ultimate progenitors of all twelve-step programs.) After the thirteenth repentance, Christ aids Sophia, sending her light-power: Then, while Sophia pours forth hymns of joy, the power becomes a ‘‘crown to her head’’ and her hyle¯ (or material propensities) begins to be entirely purified, while the spiritual light-powers which she has succeeded in retaining during her long combat, join themselves with the new vesture of light which has descended upon her.16

In the scheme of Richardson’s novel, Clarissa, the fallen Sophia, descends into chaos. The first descent is a descent prehistoric as it were, the descent into the dunghill world of matter, figured as the world of the Harlowes and their Harlowe Place. (It is Lovelace who correctly identifies Harlowe Place as ‘‘sprung up from a dunghil,’’ 1: p. 231). The light shineth in the darkness—and the darkness nearly comprehends it. Lovelace knows the Virgin carnally against her will, nearly destroying the light of reason in her. She goes into the depth of Chaos in the sheriff’s officer’s prison room, a totally hylic enclosure, decorated with dead and dying plants. The short sequence of scenes in which Clarissa is imprisoned represents the universal light being nearly overpowered by the darkness of the material world and by the absence of light-spark—an absence we know as human evil. The prostitutes taunt her with her change of state: ‘‘Methinks, Miss, said Sally, you are a little soily, to what we have seen you’’ (6: p. 265). Yet Clarissa’s light is not overwhelmed by dirt, darkness, or despair even during her one day of unrecorded dereliction and agony in the three days in the prison room—although despair comes close to her. Clarissa has enough light still to enlighten this abode of death and darkness: ‘‘When I survey’d the room around, and the kneeling Lady, sunk with majesty too in her white flowing robes . . . spreading the dark, tho’ not dirty, floor, and illuminating that horrid corner . . .’’ (Belford to Lovelace, 6: p. 274). Clarissa, as we see later, will sell her clothes to buy a coffin; like the King’s child in ‘‘Hymn of the Pearl’’ she ‘‘took off [her] dirty clothing and left it behind in their land.’’ She also confronts and subdues the ‘‘ravenous dragon’’: ‘‘And I subdued it by calling out my father’s name.’’17 Mrs. Sinclair—in whom sin is clear (Richardson through Lovelace’s allegorizing witticism does here get very close to the allegory direct)—is ‘‘the old dragon’’ (6: p. 36). We might remember,


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however, that in one version of the cosmic Sophia-myth, one which could have been known to Richardson, Mrs. Sinclair is also SophiaClarissa’s child: [Sophia] had almost lost her Place in the Pleroˆma of the Æons: And tho’ recover’d after some time, yet produced a monstrous birth, called Mother Achamoth, a blind, shapeless Æon, made up of Ignorance and Passion, cast forth without the Pleroma, and yet under some Influence and Management of those within it: She produced the Demiurgus [Sic] or Creator, who made the World.18

Achamoth, ‘‘a corruption from the Hebrew,’’ is a word meaning ‘‘Wisdom’’ (hokma) and ‘‘Death’’ (moth).19 Mrs. Sinclair is Wisdom’s Death, or Death-Wisdom. ‘‘Mother Sinclair,’’ whose monstrous birth arises from Sophia’s original error, is the true Mother of Lovelace, and it is thus hardly strange that he should so often term her ‘‘mother.’’ In the supra-mundane drama, Clarissa-Sophia has a spiritual responsibility for both her monstrous children, a responsibility which she works off by living and suffering with and through them. But we can also say simply that on the mundane level Clarissa’s imprisonment is brought about by the aggressively hylic fat bawd and her minions, emanations of the dark and angry powers of the cosmos, who when they come to taunt her come as projections of tyrannical Ialdabaoth. Once we say that, we begin to see (uneasily, perhaps) that if Ialdabaoth’s avatars are James Harlowe Senior, James Junior, and (most powerfully and fully) Lovelace, then the attribution of the salient qualities of these willful, jealous, and tyrannical males to the Judeo-Christian Deity is—just as Gnostics held—a blasphemy. If we follow the Gnostic clues, we will entertain the proposition that when Clarissa—in her own greatest exercise in allegory—speaks of ‘‘setting out with all diligence to my Father’s House’’ (7: p. 175), what is really meant is not a departure for the first time to the heavenly Father’s house, ‘‘going up to heaven,’’ as we may read it—but more truly a return to the Primal Light. The King and Queen of the Pearl-child are not found in the limited and earthbound Harlowes; the senior Harlowes are reflections of the dragon-force who would keep Clarissa, ‘‘the Alien’’ imprisoned with them, forced to conform and do as they do. We know, as Lovelace obtusely does not, that when Clarissa refers in her riddling letter to ‘‘my Father,’’ she is not speaking of James Harlowe. But if we read her as the Gnostic Lady of Light, she is not speaking either of the Urizen Jehovah-God, whose representative on earth James Harlowe Senior took

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himself to be. If we take Clarissa in that sense, then even Lovelace the bad interpreter is partly right in believing that she refers to returning. The wise reader knows that Clarissa in her metaphorical letter cannot mean going back to live under the power of the Harlowes. But she is not going back either to the house of Nobodaddy, the petulant rulemaker and tormentor whose avatars are James Harlowe and Lovelace. The wise Gnostic reader may suspect that Clarissa in going to her true Father’s house is returning to the Heavenly Sphere to which she belongs—what Lovelace himself calls (in what appears at first glance to be merely a lover’s hyperbole) her ‘‘native Skies.’’ This is the home from which she fell—in an original fall only echoed and really cured within the novel. The Harlowes are non-beings, each (as Lovelace said of Arabella) ‘‘a mere mortal’’ (1: p. 197). The Harlowes are emanations of the distorted and wintry cosmos of fallen and dead matter. To begin to say such a scandalous thing is to challenge that other aspect of Richardson’s story—the moralizing about what young ladies should do, about ‘‘good’’ behavior, about obedience and propriety. All that becomes so much chopped straw. We observe the pretences by which chaos tries to legitimate itself. Here, I think, we come upon a partial explanation of the novel’s enduring appeal. Only by incorporating such a powerful choke-pear as the Gnostic symbolic system could Richardson’s work resist the pressure of what convention and custom had made of Christianity as a set of rules for nice and successful people, a set of rules making the poor and women know their place. Richardson himself, like any wise father and good citizen of the time, is attracted, on his worldly (and journalistic) level, by the very view that another part of him steadily resists, even though the attractive and easy opinions look like certainties and constitute almost everything that his contemporaries could recognize as ‘‘the moral.’’ Had he not incorporated the conventional concerns (often using some very conventional viewpoints, as we see almost always in Morden and occasionally in Belford), Richardson could not have appealed to his public. Moreover, he could not even have been comprehensible to himself. But he sets up also this powerful resistance, this cosmic counter-story that fights against translating spiritual light into repressions defined as ‘‘duty.’’ The novel’s own radicalism begins in its own dialectic. You may feel that I have overdone the matter in suggesting that the Gnostic story lies at the heart of Clarissa. But it may not have seemed entirely radical or unfamiliar to Richardson’s own contemporaries. After all, one of Richardson’s most intelligent readers was another novelist who named his own heroine ‘‘Sophia,’’ perhaps in witty rebuke of


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Richardson’s heroine and her status. We might refuse to entertain the presence of Gnosticism in Clarissa under the supposition that such ideas lie at some distance away from good solid Anglicanism, on the one hand, and from the scientific Enlightenment, on the other. But the ‘‘Enlightenment’’ itself was inspired by multiplex views of the true light, and how that light could be attained. A major influence on the thought of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is the work of Jakob Boehme (1575–1624; in English usually called ‘‘Behmen’’), the mystic shoemaker whose series of tracts and treatises are at the foundation not only of modern Theosophy but of much else in our thought. Boehme is neither remote from nor inaccessible to Europeans of his time. His first work, Morgenro¨te im Aufgang (known in English as Aurora), appeared in 1612; Boehme’s visions of the first flush of the dawn of spiritual light in himself were also appealing to many of his contemporaries and followers as an image of the cultural dawning of true enlightenment. A number of new works, clarifying and setting out his system of thinking more fully, appeared during his lifetime and just after his death; his writings were a major feature of Continental Protestant culture in the 1620s and 1630s. Boehme’s treatises were soon translated into English, principally by John Sparrow (Mysterium Magnum in 1654, Aurora in 1656). Boehme’s influence flickers through the poems of the later Metaphysicals and is found in many places we might assume to be unlikely, including the physics of Isaac Newton. Some of Boehme’s works were translated in the early mid–eighteenth century by William Law, best known to us as the author of the highly regarded and well-known devotional treatise A Serious Call to the Devout and Holy Life (1728), a work known by, for instance, Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon. Law is not a peripheral figure. The fact that Law translated Boehme shows what a direct route Boehme had to the heart of Protestantism in England, including Anglicanism, although the German mystic philosopher may be seen as directly influential upon the Quakers and (even more) the Shakers. Boehme must also be considered a major and shaping presence within both the Enlightenment and the Romantic age; he is certainly a powerful influence upon Blake, and on numerous successors including Hegel, Emerson, and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and Heidegger in the twentieth. We do not have to go far to look for connections between William Law and Richardson. John Dussinger has already commented on the connection between Law the moralist and Richardson in his article ‘‘Conscience and the Pattern of Christian Perfection in Clarissa,’’ and Rosemary Bechler’s important article ‘‘ ‘Triall by what is contrary’:

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Samuel Richardson and Christian Dialectic’’ has underlined Richardson’s ‘‘extraordinary circle’’ of mystically-minded friends, including Law.20 Richardson printed for William Law and also for John Byrom, the poet best known for his Christmas poem (later hymn) ‘‘Christians awake! Salute the happy morn.’’21 Law’s Serious Call, which does indeed call for Christian perfection, is a relatively early work representing rather the moral than the mystical side of Law, but the mystical works were well known to his contemporaries. In the mid-1730s, William Law became engrossed in the writings of Jakob Boehme. Law got into a print controversy with Dr. Joseph Trapp, a divine and a literary scholar, the first Professor of Poetry at Oxford, over issues of trusting inner light, and of world-despising and asceticism. Trapp’s rebuke of Law in his The Nature, Folly, Sin and Danger of being Righteous Overmuch (1739) was met by Law’s An Earnest and Serious Answer (1740), and Trapp’s Reply to Dr. Law’s Answer (1741) was soon responded to by Law’s Some Animadversions. Trapp highlighted what he considered the mystical and heretical beliefs in Law—‘‘mystical’’ and ‘‘heretical’’ being one. Indeed, Law despises the created physical universe rather more even than Boehme, and his asceticism springs from a desire not to be tainted by the corrupt stuff of the world. Trapp argued that Law carried his hatred of matter so far as to make it wicked to smell a rose. In Grandison, Richardson inclines a little more to Trapp’s side of the argument.22 Even in Clarissa he includes an implied compliment to Trapp, in incorporating in his narrative a sermon on Nathan’s rebuke to King David over the Bathsheba affair (3: p. 325), an obvious reference to Trapp’s well-known sermon of 1738, The Royal Sin; or; Adultery Rebuk’d in a Great King (aimed at King George II).23 But for the most part, in Clarissa, Richardson entertains Law’s side of the argument. As the London literary world entered the 1740s, writers could hardly help being aware of this controversy, or of the animating spirit of ‘‘Behmenism.’’ Richardson we know had produced a first draft of Clarissa during 1742–44, and by January 1745 a revision of this version ‘‘in a series of vellum volumes’’ was ready to circulate to readers.24 William Law produced an edition of Boehme (incomplete) as Works of Jacob Behmen in 1744; the preparation of this work thus coincides with the period in which Richardson was working seriously at getting Clarissa under way. Richardson may have been introduced to Law though his physician, Dr. George Cheyne, with whom he was in touch in the period (he had printed works by both Cheyne and Law in 1733). It was Cheyne who had introduced Law to Boehme.25 Cheyne’s own belief in the necessity of putting the body under the rule of the spirit, the desirability


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of spiritualizing the too-stout—the too-clamorously hylic—body contributed to his success as a diet doctor. At Cheyne’s advice, Richardson gave up all alcoholic drinks and adopted a vegetarian diet—-thus following much Gnostic and Hermetic practice.26 Jakob Boehme himself is an inheritor of many ‘‘heresies including the Kabbala, Hermeticism, and the major forms of Gnosticism, though he gives them original expression in working out his salvation. Boehme is also endeavoring to incorporate the new science of the Renaissance, making his work harmonize with astrology as most ‘‘scientifically’’ considered, and also with the chemistry of Paracelsus, which gave a new view of the cosmos as mutable and transmogrifying. Boehme’s imagistic mode of thinking has a great deal of literary appeal, and we should not be surprised to find it harmonized within Richardson’s imagistic system in Clarissa, where its import helps to fill out and enliven the Gnostic side of the novel’s meanings, while also tempering them. In Boehme’s system there is no emphasis upon a fiendish Demiourgos, but the world of matter is a bad and lowly thing. Man is a tripartite being: ‘‘Man only (among all the earthly creatures) hath a threefold body and spirit.’’27 He has the fleshly self, an astral self, and an inner spiritual being which is God within. Angels and men alike ‘‘bear in themselves the great name of God’’ (MM 4:13, p. 15). For Boehme (as for Traherne) man has in his true self an angelical nature, and grows within an angelic world. Byrom’s Christmas hymn has as its original last line, ‘‘Of angels and of angel-men the King’’; as Stephen Hobhouse notes, this ‘‘quaint expression’’ is ‘‘no doubt a reminiscence of the poet’s study of Boehme.’’28 Hobhouse is here commenting on William Law’s statement: ‘‘If your will is angelic, you are an angel and angelic happiness must be yours.’’29 Remembering that Law was an acquaintance and Byrom a friend of Richardson’s, we should probably read all references to Clarissa as ‘‘an angel’’ a bit more carefully—noting too that Lovelace, through his self-disguising amorous language, consistently recognizes the spiritual reality. According to Boehme, there is nothing that does not contain God, but the more material, the more imperfect and lumpish, the less there is of divine light. It is our duty and privilege to work with God—in a sense, as God—to redeem the whole laboring creation. Earth and stone are cold, hard, dark, and lifeless. The whole of Tellus is caught in dark matter and material will. In Mysterium Magnum, Boehme distinguishes ‘‘the seven properties of the eternal nature, which make three Principles or worlds’’ (6:13, p. 26). The first property or ‘‘form’’ is the Astringent: ‘‘the concreting of

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the eternal nothing into something . . . the cause of all essences . . . a mother of all salts.’’ The second ‘‘Form,’’ the Bitter, is ‘‘compunctive,’’ ‘‘a cause of all life and stirring, so also of the senses and distinction.’’ The third ‘‘Form’’ is ‘‘Anguish, or the sensibility,’’ ‘‘wherein the senses become active.’’ The fourth ‘‘Form’’ is ‘‘Fire; Spirit; Reason; Desire’’ ‘‘wherein the holy powers of the free lubet are delivered from the astringent undigested roughness; for the fire devoureth in its essence the dark substance of the impression; and works it forth out of itself . . . into spiritual powers.’’ (We might feel here we are touching very closely on the realm of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, for Hegel defines making matter into spirit as the great task of the human mind.) The fifth ‘‘Form’’ is Light, Love, ‘‘the holy spiritual love-desire, where the holy will of God now . . . brings itself forth through the fire in the light’’ (6:14–18, pp. 26–27). The sixth ‘‘Form’’ is Sound, Voice, the divine Word, and the seventh is ‘‘Essence, Being,’’ ‘‘mansion and house of all the rest’’ of the forms (6:19–20, p. 27). These seven forms or properties are not to be understood as divided, but as mingling and interacting. Yet at times Boehme separates them hierarchically, always making the Astringent the lowest. In Aurora the scheme differs slightly from that in Mysterium Magnum; but here too the Astringent is the base note, the quality of Lucifer, par excellence, and of death and Hell, also of salt and stone, ice and heart. The second quality in Aurora (as not in Mysterium Magnum) is defined as the Sweet, which is the overcoming of the Astringent. The Sweet is the fountain of the mercy of God, the softening of the heart, the melting of ice, the divine water. When Lovelace says ‘‘Anatomists allow, that women have more watry heads than men’’ (6: p. 31), he makes an unwitting compliment, though he is speaking physiologically and satirically. In Boehme’s system to be ‘‘more watry’’ is to be more compassionate and nearer the heavenly. The third quality or ‘‘Form,’’ according to Aurora, is the Bitter, which penetrates and triumphs within the astringent and the sweet, and allows for joy, triumph, and delight. The Bitter is the fundamental principle of motion, of stirring, ‘‘and is well called Cor or the heart, for it is the trembling, shivering, elevating, penetrating spirit . . . in the sweet quality the bitter is mollified, so that it becometh very richly loving and joyful.’’30 But when there is too much, or when it has not enough of sweet to act upon, the bitter turns deadly, is experienced as a poison, a tearing, pain and stench: In the sour quality it causeth a rankness and brittleness, a stink, a misery, a house of mourning, a house of darkness, of death and of hell; an end of joy,


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which therein can no more be thought upon: For it cannot be quieted or stilled by anything, nor can it be enlightened again by anything; but the dark, astringent or harsh, stinking, sour, torn, bitter, fierce quality riseth up to all eternity. (8:52, p. 157)

The scene in which Belford visits the brothel to see the dying Mrs. Sinclair offers a good illustration of the total domination of ‘‘the Bitter,’’ in Boehme’s sense. We are made to imagine the close room, the stench of Mrs. Sinclair’s gangrene, the smell of the prostitutes after a long night, and their appearance, their face-paint ‘‘lying in streaky seams,’’ their hair indebted to ‘‘the black-lead comb.’’ The tired whores surround the ‘‘huge quaggy carcase’’ of Mrs. Sinclair: ‘‘her big eyes, goggling and flaming-red as we may suppose those of a salamander . . . her livid lips parched, and working violently.’’ She cannot be quiet but fills the house with lamenting angry cries: ‘‘she was raving, crying, cursing, and even howling, more like a wolf than a human creature’’ (8: pp. 50– 55). Mrs. Sinclair, cursing, blaming others, and speaking her own despair (‘‘I, who can neither cry, nor pray!’’), exhibits bitterness at its extreme. James Harlowe Junior and Robert Lovelace both exhibit astringency at its extreme. Lovelace accuses Clarissa of astringency, when he says he must ‘‘steel my heart, that I may cut thro’ a rock of ice to hers’’ (4: p. 111). If Clarissa is both ‘‘rock’’ and ‘‘ice,’’ she combines two major images of the Astringent. Lovelace uses the very word when he deliberately takes what he calls ‘‘astringent medicine’’ (4: p. 264), the Eaton’s Styptic, to recover from the ipecacuanha he took in order to make himself ill and thus to elicit some sign of Clarissa’s love for him. Ironically, he gets Clarissa to administer the ‘‘astringent medicine’’ to him (4: p. 277). Lovelace does not need to be any more astringent than he already is. Clarissa embodies and represents sweetness—but with enough astringency to give her what we recognize as ‘‘will,’’ to produce the friction or reaction of ‘‘the flash.’’ All three of these qualities—astringency, sweetness, bitterness—as Boehme describes them, have their own colors: Moreover it [the bitter] is the imaging or forming of all sorts of red colours in its own quality; in the sweet it imageth or formeth all sorts of white and blue; in the astringent, or harsh and sour, it formeth all sorts of green, dusky and mixed colours, with all manner of forms or figures and smells. (Aurora 8:47, p. 156)

We see the red predominate in Mrs. Sinclair, her eyes ‘‘goggling and flaming-red.’’ The sweet, almost always associated closely with Clarissa,

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is intimated in details of her clothing at the time of the abduction/elopement. Oddly enough, she does wear yellow, like the child in ‘‘Hymn of the Pearl’’: ‘‘Her morning-gown was a pale primrose-coloured paduasoy.’’ But the dominant colors are white and blue: ‘‘Her head-dress was a Brussels-lace mob . . . A sky-blue ribband illustrated that.’’ She wears a ‘‘coat’’ [or overskirt] of ‘‘white satten’’ and her shoes are ‘‘Blue satten.’’ Above all, her sweetness is reflected in her own work, ‘‘cuffs and robings curiously embroidered . . . in a running pattern of violets and their leaves’’ (3: p. 28). For Boehme, flowers, especially blue or white flowers, represent the quintessence of divine sweetness. When Clarissa is dying, her hands are seen ‘‘white as the lily, with her meandring veins more transparently blue’’ (7: p. 412). Lovelace in his dreamvision in which he sees Clarissa ascending to the heavens catches at ‘‘her azure robe’’ (7: p. 148). Yet Clarissa is also constantly surrounded by images of the astringent, most remarkably in the emblematic scene in the prison room in the ‘‘horrid hole of a house’’ with its coarse and broken furnishings, its smoky ceiling, the windows ‘‘dark and double-barred, the tops boarded up to save mending,’’ the only light the faint and irritating twinkling of a minute candle in ‘‘an iron shove-up candlestick.’’ The pale fire of such a nearly lightless candle, a ‘‘faint twinkler’’ like a member of the Harlowe family, cannot enlighten. In the past, a dreary succession of such nearly useless candles has been used by other miserable prisoners, who, having ‘‘no other way to amuse themselves,’’ have left the ceiling ‘‘smoked with variety of figures.’’ Now even the coarse but vital element of visible fire itself has nearly disappeared, its place being taken by smoke. In this nearly lightless room the power of light is rendered more feeble than anywhere else in the novel—because the light is denied, shut out by the boarded-up windows. Darkness and stoniness announce the astringency of the place. The strangest element in the composition is the weird bouquet in the ‘‘large stone-bottle without a neck’’ which takes the place of the absent fire. This container is ‘‘filled with baleful Yew, as an Ever-green, withered Southernwood, dead Sweet-briar, and sprigs of Rue in flower’’ (6: pp. 272–73). Here indeed we have the mixture of the green and the dusky, with various figures and smells (yew and rue and southernwood have different kinds of bitter and sour odors). Richardson renders his scene dense with different kinds of ugliness, almost all attaching firmly to Boehme’s category or form of the Astringent, or the inert and durable, the lifeless—even the violence of the bitter is absent, and sweetness has died with the ‘‘dead Sweet-briar.’’


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The Astringent, according to Boehme in Mysterium Magnum, is a desire ‘‘self-conceiving . . . substantial, wholly rough, harsh, hard and thick’’ (MM 3:9, p. 8). But in Mysterium Magnum the second ‘‘Form,’’ compunction, is ‘‘constringency,’’ an attracting which begins to torment the inert with desire. ‘‘For here ariseth the first enmity between the astringency or hardness, and the compunction or sting of stirring; for the desire maketh hard, thick and congealeth, as the cold stiffeneth and freezeth the water. Thus the astringency is a mere raw coldness’’ (MM 3:10, p. 8). The third property, defined in Aurora as ‘‘penetrating or triumphing,’’ is in Mysterium Magnum defined as the distress caused by the relation of the other two; ‘‘anguish’’ makes possible life and the awakening of power. Anguish—distress, conflict—is a powerful if relative good. It is fire. In the low form (or to the low vision), this fire is a painful and terrible thing. God’s love, that is, must be perceived as the fire of wrath from a certain point of view. God’s love is the divine fire which emerges in the conflict of the cosmos between ‘‘the horrible astringent hard compunctive sharpness’’ and the ‘‘free lubet’’ which ‘‘is a great meekness’’ (MM 3:25, p. 11)—that is, between the imperfect will knowing itself as will, and the will as love and gentleness: Now both these dash together in one another. The sharp will eagerly and mightily desireth the free lubet, and the lubet desireth the austere will; and as they enter into and feel each other, a great flagrat is made, like a flash of lightning. (MM 3:25, p. 11)

This is felt both as illumination and death, for ‘‘the astringent harsh darkness’’ which cannot be kindled retires into itself as the enmity to light, as the abyss (MM 3:26, pp. 11–12). Boehme notoriously uses fire in several senses; at times it is good, as in divine fire, but that seems only a comparative good—for those who truly love the divine, there is no fire, there is only light. Fire is a low element bespeaking conflict. Fiery people are imperfect, the angry (like salamanders) live in fire. Some are ‘‘combustible spirits,’’ as Lord M. (with some justification) complains is the case with Colonel Morden (7: p. 266). In an important section of Clarissa, Lovelace tries to frighten his beloved into accepting him sexually by setting fire (under controlled circumstances) to part of his dwelling, turning the brothel’s inner house into what it really is, a place of fire (with more smoke than fire, more dirt than purification). The fire expresses how Clarissa’s light is felt within the brothel, felt by the brothel. Here she is a fiery tiger (‘‘a Tyger of a Lady’’; 6: p. 36), like Blake’s Tyger, burning bright.

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Lovelace has a nightmare of return to the astringent harsh darkness, of falling into the abyss (one of Boehme’s favorite images, the Urgrund), when he dreams of tumbling down ‘‘into a hole more frightful than that of Elden; and, tumbling over and over down it, without view of a bottom’’ (7: p. 148). He is not going down into a place (like Dante’s Inferno), but is in the Void, the bottomless emptiness of God’s withdrawal. He has sought the Urgrund instead of the Ungrund, Boehme’s word for the unconditioned and unconditional being of God. Lovelace is a victim of the gravity that he loves, that pulls him inward to the self-attracting and anti-vital low point, the point of nearly entire materiality, untouched by spirit, hence the true Void. Hell for Jakob Boehme is not a place but a logical necessity, a first ground. He is not quite consistent about this, but in most of his writings it seems clear that Hell is not a ‘‘place’’ to which we ‘‘go,’’ for each of us has within the spark of life eternal, which is God. Part of man’s deepest trouble is his individual ego (in which even desire for heaven can also become entrapped), human individuation in a competitive and separating mode: Now all men are proceeded out of this only man, he is the stem or body, the other are all his branches, and do receive power from their stem, and bring forth fruit out of one root, and each twig enjoyeth the tree’s ens, also they do all alike enjoy the four elements and the astrum alike. What folly is it then, that the twig willeth to be an own tree; and grows up of itself as a strange plant, as if its fellow-twig did not stand also in its stem. It is the Serpent’s introduced ens which seduceth and divideth the branches on the life’s tree of man from the only life of man, bringing each twig into a peculiar sundry hunger, desiring to be a tree by itself, in self-full power and domination, And therefore it desireth the muchness of this world for its own property, that it might greatly enlarge itself in the Serpent’s ens, and be a great, thick, strong, fat, well-spread tree . . . In all self-hood and own-hood [annotated by Sparrow as ‘‘Selfish interests, minehood and thinehood, meum and tuum’’] there is a false plant; one brother should be the sovereign cure and refreshment to another, and delight or content his mind with the insinuation of his love-will. There were enough and enough in this world, if covetousness drew it not into a selfish property. (MM, chap. 24, ‘‘Of the Cause and Rise of the Curse of the Earth,’’ 17–21, p. 161)31

This lesson of brotherhood and necessary connectedness Clarissa tries in vain to teach her family, but they cannot bear to hear it: ‘‘the World is but one great family. Originally it was so. What then is this narrow selfishness that reigns in us, but relationship remembred [sic] against relationship forgot?’’ (1: p. 46).


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In Boehme’s system, God’s love is manifested in the flash of love-fire, but within the cosmos or the individual life any such flash is felt as pain. Clarissa, according to this scheme, is a representative not just of the light in its serene radiance but of ‘‘the flash,’’ the sudden manifestation of love’s fire—which must always be felt as pain to those caught up in the dark astringent world of cold hostility. The flash as the light comes is felt as pain both to ‘‘the Astringent’’ and to ‘‘the Sweet’’ whose conflict makes it happen. When the flash riseth up in the heat, then first the sweet water catcheth or captivateth it, for therein it becometh shining. Now when the water catcheth the flash, that is, the birth of the light, then the sweet water is terrified . . . Now when the astringent quality, which is very cold, catcheth the heat and the flash, then it is terrified, as in a tempest of lightning; for when the heat cometh with the light into the hard cold, then it maketh a fierce flash, of a very fiery and light colour . . . And the flash in itself keepeth its fierceness, from whence existeth the bitter quality, or the bitter spirit, which now riseth up in the astringent quality . . . and the light or flash drieth itself in the hardness, and shineth clear and bright, far brighter than the light of the sun. (Aurora 10:17–20, p. 211)

In the antithesis and union of the opposing but inevitable qualities the sparkle is born. Distress—adversity—conflict—must be there to make the shining. So Anna tells Clarissa, ‘‘the time of ADVERSITY is your SHINING-TIME’’ (4: p. 64). A consideration of such a passage as that just quoted from Aurora in connection with Clarissa makes a new sense of Anna’s words (which also present us with a new hyphenated compound phrase, quite in the Boehme style). Boehme’s image also gives a new sense to phrases such as ‘‘two or three flashes of lightning from her indignant eyes’’ (4: p. 7) and likewise to whole scenes, such as that in which Lovelace sees Clarissa at Hampstead and she ‘‘blazed upon’’ him—and to all the other references to her shining, her blazing. We should probably note here that although in the plot-story Lovelace is as full of lies as the Devil, as a spiritual visionary he seems compelled to tell the truth, though with an affectation of poetic fantasy and joke that may make the true appear false to the unwary or too superficiallyknowing reader, who hears Lovelace’s fictions but cannot hear his truth. We are not good judges of voices. In this present state of existence, says Jakob Boehme, we do not even have our true voices—the sound is harsh, the notes are few: For where the sound is gross, harsh and shrill, there it is strong in the dark impression; and there the fire is vehement and burning. As we men after the

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fall of Adam have so awaked and enkindled the fire of the dark world in our vital essence, that our vital sound is gross and beast-like, resembling the abyss; and the like is to be understood of the sound in the darkness. For as the generation of the word is, in its manifestation in the light, in the holy power, so also in the darkness: but altogether rigorous, harsh, hard and gross . . . And this proceeds from the essence of the astringent hard compunctive anxious generation, viz. from the original of the coldness, or cold fire’s source. (MM 5:19, p. 22)

Voices in Clarissa are often ‘‘rigorous, harsh, hard, and gross.’’ Clarissa’s father speaks ‘‘with a big voice’’ (1: 93)—vox et praeterea nihil. There is not very much to Mr. Harlowe, but he tries to make himself be, to make his will all-powerful, through the thunder of his voice. The Harlowes (except for Clarissa’s mother) are an astringent, hard, and anxious generation who love laying down the law and speaking coarsely; they are great interrupters of each other’s sentences. Lovelace is overheard by Clarissa on the first evening of her forced elopement with him speaking harshly to the servants at the inn, cursing and swearing in the astringent and self-centered language of the low self, making sounds ‘‘gross and beast-like,’’ as Clarissa rather too tartly reminds him in her satiric dig, pretending she mistook him for a low soldier, ‘‘Well do they make it a proverb—Like a trooper!’’ (3: p. 21). Mrs. Sinclair’s wolflike howling presents the low point of our earthly and bestial language. Another kind of abuse of speech, another species of dreadful language really quite as bad as Mrs. Sinclair’s, however, is represented in the quotation-sprinkled, minced, and pompous language of Parson Brand—-about whom Howard Weinbrot has written so well.32 Brand’s perversions of the sacred, as well as his unstoppable gushing that would overrun all other voices, exhibit a great sin against the light, and he bears out Boehme’s satiric view of professional ministers and learned schoolmen: But who were they that falsified and adulterated the right, pure Christian doctrine, and always fought against and opposed it? Even the learned doctors and scribes, popes, cardinals, bishops, and great dons or masters and teachers. And why did the world follow after them, and depend on them? But because they had great respect, were in great authority and power, lived stately, and carried a port in the world. Even such a proud whore is the corrupt, perished human nature. (Aurora 9:12, p. 190)

Brand, who is a marked or branded man in Richardson’s system, initially thinks—-or pretends to think—-that he by his severe suspicious-


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ness is rescuing a brand from the burning, prescribing a wholesome suffering for this ‘‘poor limed soul’’ (7: p. 280). He favors exiling her to the colonies, in a quasipenal manner. An interest in punishing others is presented throughout Richardson’s novel, as it is throughout Boehme’s work, as the mark of a low, self-regarding, and angry personality, a sign of defect, the encouragement of a devil within, sure to create anger and dissension in others. Lord M., hearing this man’s name, exclaims ‘‘Brand! Brand! It should have been Firebrand’’ (7: p. 28; this is one of Richardson’s rare tributes to Fielding, to Pasquin in which the cleric Firebrand is a bad advisor to Queen Ignorance). Parson Elias Brand is governed by his own desire to get on the right side of John Harlowe— and to be connected with the family who may have gifts to offer. Although he at first reprobates Clarissa as a light woman and prevents her family from seeing her, in his later letter he hints that he would be willing, after her rehabilitation, to espouse her himself if the price were right (7: p. 384–85). Brand himself is a whore, ‘‘a proud whore,’’ and the equal of Madame Sinclair, of Sally and Polly—if less able to speak to the point than any of these. This Elias (Elijah is coming?) is a symptom of the chronic sickness of his society and of the chronic fatigue of a Church weakened from within by proud and self-centered men who do not love their fellow beings. The human word is sick. It may seem odd to say that this is the insight of an author who loved words as much as Richardson, but the full exploration of language within this text, though sometimes decried as ‘‘prolixity,’’ is necessary for the complete illustration of the vanity and imperfection of most human language. I would draw the reader’s attention in particular to the suspect language of Colonel Morden. Not utterly without reason does the self-defensive Lovelace comment on Morden’s ‘‘trite manner’’ (7: p. 262). More plausible than Brand because more nearly approaching the good, Morden is still bound up in astringency and death—and rightly named after death, Mors, la mort. He loves the righteousness of his own anger. His judgments are poor (look at his conventional misogyny for a start), he is almost always worldly, materialistic, conventional, and self-justifying. He is very easily turned into an angry gentleman. Morden is the active proponent of the offensiveness which he pretends to punish. Sickness abounds throughout the novel—almost everybody is sick at some point or other, including those who are not going to die within the story. It is comically noticeable that Mr. Harlowe and Lovelace’s uncle Lord M. reflect each other, most obviously in the fact that each is a sufferer from that (fashionable and aristocratic but painful) disease, the

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gout. Within this naturalistic detail we may read Boehme’s earlier joke, in Aurora: The musician hath wound up his pegs, and tuned his strings; the Bridegroom cometh. When the round beginneth take heed thou dost not get the hellish gout in thy feet; lest thou be found incapable or unfit for the angelical dance, and so be thrust out from the wedding, seeing thou hast on no angelical garment. (5:33, p. 109)

The sidenote to ‘‘hellish gout’’ is the single word Podagra, starkly in the margin. In the first edition of Clarissa, Lovelace jokingly refers to his uncle as ‘‘that noble podagra-man.’’33 Yet Lovelace wants to be a ‘‘podagra-man’’ too; in his expedition to Hampstead, he makes himself up as a gouty old gentleman. Three of the leading male characters (Mr. Harlowe, Lord M., and Lovelace) are rendered as ‘‘podagra-men,’’ unready for the angelical wedding dance. (Not only so, but England is evidently being run by the podagra-men.) The dance circle is a heavenly-right version or reparation of the dreary circles in which people are caught in the world below. Clarissa on her coffin incorporates the emblem of the ouroboros, the serpent with its tail in its mouth, known to the modern West as an Egyptian symbol of the universe since the publication of The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo (1505).34 The circular is the image of immortal Eternity, the true Eternity. For George Wither this emblem is ‘‘Eternities wide round.’’35 But Boehme, we should note, uses it differently. In his ‘‘Dialogue of the Two Souls’’ in The Way to Christ Discovered, the ouroboros becomes a symbol of the fire-wheel of cosmic life, the delusive wheel of things in which the unwitting soul is caught. And this the Devill did present to the soule, the Mercury in Vulcan, that is, the fiery wheele of Essence . . . in the form of a Serpent. The Devil sayd, Thou thy selfe also art such a fiery Mercury, if thou doest break thy will off from God, and bring thy desire into this Art, then thy hidden ground will be manifested in thee, and then thou mayst work in the same manner also . . . and then thou wilt instantly be as the fiery wheele is, and so bring all things into thy own power and possesse them as thy own.36

Mercury and Vulcan are images of things being made in the dark world blended with the fire-world, as is the material cosmos. Lovelace several times alludes to Mercury and to Vulcan, though the crowning pun is made by Richardson, who lodges Clarissa in Covent Garden with a couple named ‘‘Smith,’’ the artificers presiding over her painful trans-


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formation. Such a Smith is the higher artificer, not the lower, the Mercury-Demiourgos holding us within the wheel of things. Clarissa in her designs for her coffin-plate places the lily within the serpent. She is the snapped lily, which is likewise the soul. For Boehme too, the soul is a lily planted within the field of this world. The inner divine spark is also likened to the lily: A man must wrastle so long, till the dark center that is shut up so close, break open, and the spark in the center kindle, and from then immediately the Noble* Lillybranch (* Or; Lilly-twig) sprouteth, as from the divine grain of Mustard-seed, as Christ saith.37

According to a ‘‘Behmenist’’ reading, the design Clarissa makes for her coffin-plate signifies her penitence at having fallen into the earthly Mercury, the desires of the mind, the fire-wheel or wheel of things of earthly desire, false gratification, and frustration. But her design also expresses her confidence in escaping this wheel of fire, this serpentine karmic round, even when apparently fixed within it. Clarissa with her spark of life, her ‘‘Lilly-twig,’’ triumphs over Lovelace, impersonator of the Devil who loves time, delay, and repetitive process, who brings the serpent to the soul. In another scheme of the novel, however, Clarissa is herself the Divine Wisdom, and Lovelace is the Bridegroom to whom she tenderly appears. In this trope, Lovelace becomes the Soul, and Clarissa is the heavenly wisdom, the Virgin Sophia, who seeks to mate with her erring and confused betrothed. Clarissa could say to Lovelace what the Virgin says to her penitent lover in Boehme’s allegory in ‘‘Of True Repentance’’: My Noble Bridegroome . . . thou couldest not see my light, for thou didst walke in the valley of darknesse: I was very neare thee, and intreated thee continually, but thy sinne held thee captive in death, so that thou knowest me not.

And the Soul, the humbled Bridegroom, joyfully recognizes the saving love: The Soule sayeth againe to its Noble Sophia, its love, that is borne againe in the Soule: O my noble Pearle, and opened flame of my light in my anxious fiery life, O how thou changest me into thy joy; O beautifull Love, I have broken my faith with thee, in my fallen Adam, and, with my fiery strength have turned my selfe to the pleasure and vanity of the outward world, and have

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fallen in love with a stranger, and had been constrained to walke in the valley of darknesse in this strange love, if thou hadst not come to me into the house of my misery . . . I behold in thee the mercy of God, which was hidden from me before by the strange Love.38

If we consider a passage such as this, we may be tempted to say that the role of Sally Martin within the novel is more fully explicable. There are a series of imitations or substitutes for Clarissa, starting with Arabella Harlowe. Of these, Sally is most fully and intelligibly the ‘‘strange love.’’ We see this fully in the weird scene in which, after Lovelace has failed to see Clarissa at Smith’s (he has actually seen her for the last time, although he is not aware of that terrible truth), he returns to the brothel where Sally offers him her representation of Clarissa: Come, said she, what will you give me, and I’ll be virtuous for a quarter of an hour, and mimic your Clarissa to the life? I was Belforded all over. I could not bear such an insult upon the dear creature . . . But the little devil was not to be balked; but fell a crying, sobbing, praying, begging, exclaiming, fainting, that I never saw my lovely girl so well aped. Indeed I was almost taken in; for I could have fansied I had her before me once more. (7: p. 145)

This is the most astonishing, perhaps the saddest, statement of Lovelace’s own love of being deceived; he falls into the simulacra he has pseudo-created. There is no earthly good, the reader has to realize, not subject to earthly repetition in earth’s mirror world of imitation. There is no gesture on earth Clarissa could make that could not be parodied or mimicked. Lovelace in the brothel, if in one sense the lord of a harem, fulfiller of male fantasy, is in another sense an imprisoned soul, living in the house of misery he created, tempted by his own fictions. Yet, if Sally is the ‘‘strange Love,’’ Clarissa herself, the true love, is also a ‘‘strange Love,’’ a stranger, the Alien. On the cosmic scale, Clarissa and Lovelace cannot die, neither can they be symbolically separated. In Boehme’s ‘‘A Dialogue between a Scholar and his Master, concerning The Super-sensuall life,’’ the Disciple asks the Master, ‘‘Doth it [the soul] not enter into Heaven or Hell as a man entreth into a house, or as a man passes through a hole [doore or window: translator’s addition in brackets] into another world?’’ The Master replies ‘‘No, there is no such kind of entrings, for Heaven and Hell are present everywhere; and it is but the turning in of the will either into God’s love or into his anger; and this cometh to passe in this


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life.’’39 Moralists of the eighteenth century and later want to say, ‘‘Clarissa goes to heaven and Lovelace goes to Hell,’’ while twentieth-century critics wish to say that Richardson in his simplicity said so. But in the terms of Boehme’s mysticism that is a ludicrous statement. All humankind are one, and Clarissa, in so far as she represents ‘‘the flash,’’ the light, sweetness, grace, cannot hate Lovelace—as indeed, the character Clarissa says she does not (7: p. 378). If Clarissa is of the divine, what we mistakenly call ‘‘her will’’ must prevail, and the erring and astringent incomplete soul of Lovelace will be saved. Such a system gives the erring one a lower but more hopeful place than that of the early Gnostics’ Ialdabaoth. *

*

*

I do not argue for this ‘‘Gnostic reading’’ of Clarissa as the only reading—the novel is in dialogue with itself, and this is but one strand (an important one, however) of its dialectic. If there are at least six important ways of reading Clarissa, this is one. We can see, too, that the Gnosticism of Richardson’s text divides and ramifies. There are two strands that I have identified, an antique Gnosticism and Boehme’s theosophic mystic Gnosticism, and they are in dialogue with each other. In the end, I believe, the text favors Boehme above the more pessimistic mysticism that dismisses most of humanity as not meant to be salvageable. Boehme’s system has for Richardson the attraction of avoiding the harsh divisiveness of purest Gnosticism, according to which there are the divinely spiritual beings, true souls or spirits, and the merely hylic people, the material beings who have only enough soul or psyche¯ to get through this life in a kind of imitation of being, but who have no real place in the divine world. These hylic creatures are stuck in matter, to perish utterly. In Boehme’s (and Law’s) vision, no place and no soulbeing is totally deserted by the Divine. In some (Byrom’s ‘‘angel-men’’) the Divine is truly and more fully present. Considered even as purely human character, Clarissa is theosophically a partial embodiment of Divine Being: ‘‘How the God within her exalted her . . . Divine creature! (as I thought her) I called her’’ (5: p. 233). But the Divinity is to some extent within every human being, and, that being so, there must be a limit to punishment, moralism, and reprobation. Such a system as Boehme’s allows us to think of the Harlowes more charitably than we do according to the stricter Gnostic systems also suggested within the novel. The Harlowes are not just mud-people, earthy and disposable simulacra of the higher reality; they too can be seen as possessing the divine spark, albeit very dimly—they are, as

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Anna observed early in the narrative, ‘‘faint twinklers.’’ Nothing that we see is entirely abandoned by the Divine. As Lovelace observes, the sun shines even upon Mrs. Sinclair’s: ‘‘For that impartial orb shines upon mother Sinclair’s house, as well as upon any other: But nothing within me can it illuminate’’ (5: p. 330). (He errs, for the spiritual sun could indeed illuminate him if he would turn to the light.) Boehme’s system, to which I believe Richardson very much inclined, allows for the ultimate salvation of all mankind, but it brings very sharply to the foreground the discomforts of life in the dark, discordant, and astringent world.40

NOTES Permission to reprint from Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11, no. 1 (October 1998): pp. 49–78 is gratefully acknowledged. 1. St. Irenaeus of Lyons writing Against Heresies about A.D. 180 left valuable information about the sects he was trying to combat, particularly the followers of Valentinus who began to flourish about the middle of the second century A.D. Irenaeus summarizes what he takes to be the beliefs of various Gnostic groups and is still the chief source of information about Gnostic thought in the early Christian era. Pistis Sophia was discovered, if not edited, in the eighteenth century; it was in the possession of Dr. Anthony Askew, a divine at Cambridge. The discovery in the mid–twentieth century of the Nag Hammadi library of Gnostic texts buried in Egypt has greatly amplified our knowledge of Gnosticism. 2. Christopher W. Marsh, in a recent study, The Family of Love in English Society 1550–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), notes as others have done that the Family of Love on the Continent flourished chiefly among the Antwerp humanists and had a special connection to the printing house of the Plantins. New material was brought to England in ‘‘the wholesale transposition of a collection of mystical Dutch writings from the Low Countries to England during the 1570s’’ (p. 28). Among the works that came in were works of personal piety such as The Imitation of Christ (mentioned in Clarissa). Richardson’s association with the printing fellowship might have put him in touch with the various strains of thought associated with the Familists in England. Richardson uses the phrase ‘‘family of love’’ to describe the Grandisons: see The History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). e.g., 1: p. 133. 3. Anthony Collins, to take but one example, remained a controversial figure from The Discourse of Freethinking (1713) through the publication of The Grounds of Christian Religion (1724) and The Literal Scheme of Prophecy (1726). The Bangorian controversy had attracted numerous disputants, including William Law, as early as 1717. The deistic views of Dr. Samuel Clarke, Queen Caroline’s favorite philosopher, were eagerly disputed by many antagonists, including Dr. Joseph Trapp. As well as the disputes between the upholders of Christianity and the deists and freethinkers, or the bitter disagreements between Churchman and Dissenter, there were frequent arguments within Anglicanism regarding the meanings of Church and sacrament.


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4. This is visible not only in the remarks of some commentators, but also in some overt simplifications such as the chapbook redactions told in the third person, with the moral made plain and obvious, produced for the uneducated in the late eighteenth century. 5. The Gnostic Scriptures, trans. Bentley Layton (New York: Doubleday, 1987) p. 371, lines 1–4. ‘‘The Hymn of the Pearl,’’ also entitled ‘‘The Hymn of Jude Thomas the Apostle in the Country of the Indians,’’ is of unknown authorship. It appears in The Acts of Thomas, probably written in Edessa in the third century, and has sometimes been attributed to the Syrian Christian Gnostic poet and philosopher Bardaisan (b. A.D. 54). Although there are a number of manuscripts of The Acts of Thomas, only one manuscript in Greek and one in Syriac contain ‘‘The Hymn of the Pearl.’’ But ideas from it seem to flow into a number of later works, including perhaps the medieval English poem Pearl. 6. John Alexander, The Primitive Doctrine of Christ’s Divinity; Or, A Specimen of a Full View of the Ante-Nicene Doctrine. In An Essay on Irenaeus (London, 1727), p. 20. 7. See the essay by A. L. Korn, ‘‘MacFlecknoe and Cowley’s Davideis,’’ in Essential Articles for the Study John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966), pp. 170–200. 8. Gnostic Scriptures, p. 174. This is from a section in Layton’s book entitled ‘‘ ‘Other’ Gnostic Teachings According to St. Irenaeus.’’ Compare G. R. S. Mead, ‘‘An Anonymous System from Irenaeus’’: ‘‘The Universal Mother brooded over the Waters; enamoured of her beauty, the First and Second Man produced from her the third Great Light, the Christ . . . But a drop of Light fell downwards to the left hand into chaotic matter; this was called Sophia, or Wisdom, the World-Mother. The Waters of the Æther were thus set in motion, and formed a body for Sophia (the Light-Æon), viz., the Heaven-sphere. And she, freeing herself, left her body behind, and ascended to the Middle Region below her Mother (the Universal Mother), who formed the boundary of the Ideal universe. G. R. S. Mead, with an introduction by Kenneth Rexroth, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (New York: University Books, 1960), p. 188. The universal Mother is a puzzling character. Ioan Couliano points out that she is sometimes Sophia, ‘‘also called agap or Love and elsewhere Silence . . . a universal Mother, protogeneteira (first begetress), multiplying herself.’’ In other versions of the scheme, such as that apparently produced by the Sethians, ‘‘the universal Mother is an androgynous entity who fecundates herself. She must be concretely represented as a womb endowed with a phallus.’’ Ioan Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism, trans. H. S. Wiesner and the author (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), pp. 80–81. This is not only a translation but a revision of the earlier Les Gnoses Dualistes d’occident (1990). 9. Mead, p. 188. 10. In speaking of William Blake, we might remember that Blake’s ‘‘O rose thou art sick’’ owes something to one of Clarissa’s ‘‘mad papers’’ (paper 3, 5:p.306) in Richardson’s novel. Blake was evidently attracted to Richardson’s work and found it (in some respects at least) congenial. 11. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, ed. Florian Stuber, 8 vols. The Clarissa Project (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 4: p. 230. References are to this edition by volume and page number. 12. Karen L. King, ‘‘Ridicule and Rape, Rule and Rebellion.’’ Gnosticism and the Early Christian World, ed. James E. Goehring et al. (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1990), pp. 8–9.

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13. Gnostic Scriptures, p. 175. 14. Mead, p. 191. 15. Mead, ‘‘The Pistis Sophia,’’ Fragments, p. 470. 16. Summary of the ending of Pistis Sophia, Mead, p. 473. 17. ‘‘Hymn of the Pearl,’’ line 59, Gnostic Scriptures, p. 374. 18. Alexander, p. 20. 19. The Harper Collins Dictionary of Religion, ed. Jonathan Z. Smith (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). ‘‘The distinction is clear in the First Apocalypse of James . . . where Achamoth is an inferior and ignorant entity produced by Sophia’’ (Couliano, p. 81). 20. John Dussinger, ‘‘Conscience and the Pattern of Christian Perfection in Clarissa,’’ PMLA 81 (1966): pp. 236–45; Rosemary Bechler, ‘‘ ‘Triall by what is contrary’: Samuel Richardson and Christian Dialectic,’’ Samuel Richardson: Passion and Prudence, ed. Valerie Grosvenor Myer (London: Vision Press; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1986), pp. 93–113. Bechler points out the connection between Law and Boehme, and suggests possible influences of Boehme on Richardson’s novel, taking her cue from Walter Benjamin, for whom Boehme was ‘‘one of the greatest allegorists’’ (p. 99). 21. Richardson certainly printed Law’s The Oxford Methodists as early as 1733; see William Merritt Sale, Samuel Richardson: Master Printer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950), pp. 126–27. Among Richardson’s MSS is a passage of Boehme, evidently copied from Law. For Richardson’s acquaintance with John Byrom, see T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 459. Byrom wrote some manuscript poems to Richardson. Bechler’s article deals with connections between Dr. George Cheyne, William Law, and John Byrom. 22. It would take too long to argue here the many ways in which that is so. (The thematic differences are, broadly speaking, what I was driving at in A Natural Passion, though I did not realize then the extreme asceticism tugging at Richardson from the Cheyne-Law side.) Briefly, any reader can see that in Grandison Richardson goes out of his way to speak highly of physical pleasures, of wealth and cheerfulness, and of worldly order. This novel is almost aggressively not world-despising. It is also more carefully orthodox in its Anglicanism in many important respects, and goes out of its way to discuss the coexistence of Catholicism and Anglicanism. This novel also contains the first attempts in Richardson’s œuvre at drawing really good clergymen of the established churches, in the portraits of Dr. Bartlett and Father Maresconi. Parson Williams in Pamela is rather a clot and a klutz, Parson Peters is a sycophantic worldling, and the Reverend Mr. Lewen in Clarissa is a portrait of moral failure more serious than the greed and obtuseness of Brand. (I personally find Sir Charles Grandison’s Dr. Bartlett disgustingly sycophantic, but I do not think Richardson means us to think so.) By the 1750s Richardson seems less than enthusiastic about Methodism. Methodism is mentioned in Grandison with at best only patronizing approbation, and Charlotte’s pronouncement against ‘‘over-doers’’ is not really contradicted. 23. The Royal Sin: or Adultery Rebuk’d in a Great King. Being a Discourse from the following text. And Nathan said unto David, Thou art the man, 2 Sam. xii.78. Deliver’d in the parish of St. Martin’s, and published at the unanimous request of the congregation. Addressed to those whom it may concern. (London: J. Huggonson, 1738). 24. See Florian Stuber, ‘‘Text, Reader, Writer, World,’’ introduction to Clarissa, 1: p. 6. 25. Bechler, p. 96.


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26. A certain apocalypticism is apparent in even the gently teasing (and repeated) advice given by Cheyne to Richardson to reduce: ‘‘You will fall away infinitely to what you are: every Atom and Fibre of your old Habit must be worn out; all must become new and you’ll get to a moderate, Active gay Temper and Habit, and write Books without End.’’ Letter of February 1742, Letters of Dr. Cheyne to Richardson, ed. Charles F Mullett, University of Missouri Studies 18 (1943): p. 83. The old body, the body of sin and death, is to be cast aside. Cheyne’s regimen includes not only abstinence but frequent fasting, evacuation through purges and bleedings, and a determined bulimia in the use of what he unpleasingly calls ‘‘Thumb Vomits.’’ If Clarissa is anorexic, bulimia would seem to be represented rather unfavorably in Lovelace, with his dramatic retchings after the self-administered dose of ipecac. Cheyne’s advocacy of consistent vegetarianism was a reflection of a spiritual rather than pragmatic vision. Virginia Smith, in ‘‘Physical Puritanism and Sanitary Science,’’ comments on the ‘‘two major outbreaks of ‘serious’ vegetarianism at the beginning and at the end of the eighteenth century’’: ‘‘Two mystic neo-Platonic phases can at present be identified. The first, in the 1720s and 1730s, was that surrounding the quietist natural philosophers George Cheyne (1671– 1743) and William Law (1686–1761). While Law and his admirers such as John Byrom and John Wesley were conducting philosophic vegetarian experiments, Cheyne’s influential advice book Essay of Health and Long Life (1724) laid the basis for the popular acceptance of the vegetable-based diet.’’ Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy 1750–1850, ed. W. B. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Croom Helm, 1987), p. 178. As Smith points out, ‘‘the right to manage the body for personal salvation was a special preoccupation closely associated with classical and Christian philosophic traditions and earlier magical practices’’ (p. 176). A movement towards systematic vegetarianism is always a move to greater purity, and to a more spiritualized, less gross, version of the physical being. It sits well with periods in which Gnosticism becomes, if not dominant, at least culturally important among the educated—a period like our own, in short. 27. Jakob Boehme, Mysterium Magnum. Or an Exposition of the First Book of Moses called Genesis, trans. John Sparrow (London. 1654), in modern reprint, ed. C. J. B. (London: John M. Watkins. 1965), chap. 11, section 20, p. 176. The reprint modernizes some spellings and removes italics. References are to this edition (MM) by chapter, section, and page. 28. Stephen Hobhouse, with a ‘‘Foreword’’ by Aldous Huxley, Selected Mystical Writings of William Law (London: Salisbury Square, 1948), p. 272. 29. Hobhouse, p. 134. 30. Jakob Boehme, Aurora. That is, the Day-Spring. Or Dawning of the Day in the Orient Or Morning-Rednesse in the Rising of the Sun, trans. John Sparrow, in a modern edition ‘‘edited by C. J. B. and D. S. H.,’’ a reprint of the 1914 edition (London: Watkins and Clarke, 1960), chap. 8, section 48, p. 157. References are to this edition by chapter, section, and page. 31. This image is surely a source of Grimmelshausen’s satiric vision of the tree in Simplicissimus. 32. See Howard Weinbrot, ‘‘Clarissa, Elias Brand and Death by Parentheses,’’ New Essays on Samuel Richardson, ed. Albert J. Rivero (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). 33. Clarissa (1747–1748) 3: p. 349; cf. first edition (modernized in incidentals), ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 557. Was Richardson persuaded to take the phrase out of later editions because it was too unkind to the gouty? 34. The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo offers a key to and an explanation of certain Egyp-

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tian hieroglyphics (the only important explanation of that kind until the Napoleonic era). It is supposedly the work of a Hellenistic Egyptian living in Alexandria in the fifth century A.D. The Horapollo family were involved in trying to find the key to all mythologies, synthesizing all religious thought—a typically Alexandrian proceeding. A few of their readings of the Egyptian symbols have been confirmed, or partially confirmed, by the discoveries of modern Egyptology, but in many ways Horapollo was off the mark. The publication of Horapollo in the early Renaissance stimulated a great interest in hieroglyphs and emblems. See The Hieroglyphics of Harapollo, translated and introduced by George Bons (1950), with a new foreword by Anthony Grafton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). See the second emblem, ‘‘the Universe’’: ‘‘When they wish to depict the Universe, they draw a serpent devouring its own tail, marked with variegated scales,’’ p. 43. 35. See this emblem reproduced and commented upon in relation to Clarissa’s coffin in my A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 186. 36. ‘‘A Discourse between a Soule hungry . . . and a Soule enlightened’’ (London, 1648), p. 4. The running title is ‘‘The Way from Darkness.’’ Four pamphlets are included in The Way to Christ: ‘‘Of True Repentance,’’ ‘‘Of True Resignation,’’ ‘‘Of Regeneration,’’ ‘‘Of the Super-rationall Life.’’ To these were added other works formerly published as individual tracts, the most important for our purposes being A Discourse between a Soule hungry and thirsty after the Fountain of Life . . . with a Soule unenlightened (1624) (elsewhere called Colloquium viatorum, or A Dialogue between an Enlightened and an Unenlightened Soul). In that dialogue we find the emblem of the serpent with the tail in its mouth used very negatively. All quotations from The Way to Christ are taken from this 1648 edition—or rather compilation. 37. The second Booke treating of True Resignation . . . Written in the German Language 1622 (1647), included in The Way to Christ, p. 114. 38. ‘‘Of True Repentance,’’ pp. 60–63. 39. ‘‘A Dialogue . . . concerning The Super-sensuall life,’’ The Way to Christ, p. 74. 40. An early version of a portion of this paper was given as a plenary lecture at the DeBartolo Conference, Tampa, Florida, in February 1998.

Eros Heretic: Transgression Generic and Religious In and Out of Diderot’s L’Oiseau blanc, conte bleu Isabelle Cassagne DeMarte

THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, KNOWN FOR BEING INTELLECTUALLY driven towards new forms of knowledge and new means for representing knowledge, provides an ideal background for Diderot’s continuous exploration of various epistemological paths and persistent questioning of religion’s dogmatism. Throughout his life, whether at home, in school, or in his own household, Diderot (1713–84) also demonstrated a tendency for nonconformism and rebellion against whatever authority was imposed on him. His eclecticism reflects the position he held among the intellectuals of the eighteenth century as an outstanding transgressor of norms, challenging the historical constraints set by inherited tradition in a variety of writings that, throughout his career, often escape any categorization in terms of genre. In his essays and open letters on political, scientific, and historical matters, he blended the historiographical and the biographical by fictionally identifying with figures of the past.1 He intermingled the factual and the fictional by integrating the latter into accounts supposedly translated from historical texts and sources. His philosophical works display literary and narrative qualities that make them read like tales. Fiction also turns his drama Le Fils naturel (4: pp. 1081–127) into a novelistic play with whose author-protagonist he meets and discusses the play in Les Entretiens sur Le ‘Fils naturel’ (4: pp. 131–90). In his novel La Religieuse (2: pp. 277–405), Diderot, inspired by Richardson, fused memoir- and letter-writing and wrote a masterpiece of mystification based on a fictional character modeled after an historical alter ego. His Salons (4: pp. 193–1005) provide yet another medium in which choosing fiction goes along with transgressing the theoretical boundaries between esthetics and philosophy and break new ground in art criticism.2 With regards to the protean variety in which his acclaimed narrative 207

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fiction finds shape, critics tend to agree that Les Bijoux indiscrets (pub. 1747; 2: pp. 25–216), Jacques le fataliste et son maıˆtre (pub. 1778–80; 2: pp. 699–919), or Le Neveu de Rameau (pub. 1823; 2: pp. 623–95) cannot decisively be called ‘‘contes,’’ ‘‘romans,’’ or ‘‘dialogues’’—just as Ceci n’est pas un conte (pub. 1773; 2: pp. 503–19) overtly puts into question the definitional ability of its apparent generic label. Otherwise, one should include in one and the same volume works that have found their place elsewhere as philosophical works. ‘‘Conte’’—which describes externally a rather short narrative3 and internally either its questionable truth value, or its claim for fictional truthfulness—seems the least problematic (though not the least ambiguous) or the most consensual and therefore the most practical label to classify these texts. Within the evolution of the narrative genre in the eighteenth century, the traditionally entertaining and potentially instructive fictionality of short works made ‘‘contes’’ a frivolous4 and fashionable enterprise, as well as a somewhat safer way to develop unorthodox thinking than more openly ideological genres. As Jacques Proust notes, since the seventeenth century, moral didacticism had grown apart from comic entertainment in a way ‘‘[n]on pas . . . pour se´parer les genres, mais simplement parce que la tendance, sensible au de´but du sie`cle, a` faire du conte le support d’un enseignement moral ou dogmatique, appelait nećessairement son contraire’’ (p. xxiii). [that did not . . . separate these genres from one another. Rather, it happened because the trend, perceptible early in the century, to make the tale a support frame for moral or dogmatic teachings thus called for the opposite trend.] Just as a law, or established set of rules implicitly and ironically calls for transgression as it forbids it, similarly, the result of the dual tendency outlined by Proust was to make of ‘‘contes’’ the medium for parodying moral standards while stretching standards, definitions, and genre categories. This essay proposes to show that fiction constitutes the locus for the questioning of authority by means of generic—thereby essentially literary—transgressions. Their heretic dimension, both generic and religious, will appear upon examination of the seminal episode opening L’Oiseau blanc, conte bleu (1749, pub. 1777–78; 2: pp. 223–67), as well as in the overall narrative scheme of this work, in contradistinction with the more critically acclaimed Bijoux indiscrets, with which it shares characters and setting inspired by Les Mille et Une Nuits.5 With these thematic and narratological keys, the door will open for Diderot’s antidogmatic mind frame to appear in a new light. We will then further examine the unorthodoxy of this work in particular and of Diderot’s

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style in general by comparing L’Oiseau blanc, conte bleu with other more openly philosophic and antireligious works. Composed around the same time, Les Penseés philosophiques (1745, pub. 1746; 1: pp. 19–49) and La Promenade du sceptique (1747, pub. 1830; 1: pp. 71–132) widen the ideological background of Diderot’s unholy writings. Underlying the contrastive study of this ‘‘conte’’ by Diderot will be the assumption that the baffling variety of his output not only is bound, but also means to defeat scholarly search for unity—unity as an aspect crucial to, and inherent in, both the notion of genre as inherited from classicism and the authority and orthodox views of religion in Enlightenment France. As he was about to embark on his journey as chief editor of the Encyclope´die and as leader of the ‘‘Philosophes,’’ repeatedly challenged by censorship, Diderot went to prison on charges of being the author not only of the antireligious Lettre sur les aveugles a` l’usage de ceux qui voient (1749, 1: pp. 139–96), but also of his popular and ‘‘naughty’’ Bijoux indiscrets, the sensationalist fantasy about talking genital parts.6 This enhances the link between erotic writing and unorthodox thinking and the then-common association between spiritual libertinism and heretic behavior. Once in jail, with his freedom seriously threatened by the severity of censors, the caged philosophe eagerly promised the police that he would no longer publish any more licentious work. Thus, L’Oiseau blanc, conte bleu, likewise sought after by police officers, somehow escaped publication and inevitable scrutiny. It was not until years later that it appeared, not in print but instead carefully distributed only to the select, enlightened subscribers of Grimm’s handwritten Correspondance Litte´raire. According to the affiliation to the ‘‘bibliothe`que bleue’’ evoked by conte bleu, the story would normally have been ranked among the marvelous tales bound in blue cloth and freely distributed to ordinary people by peddlers. Beyond the reality of its author’s reputation as a figure of heterodoxy, what comes out of the circumstances around the publication of Diderot’s ‘‘conte’’ is the potential reflection—or deflection—of such heterodoxy onto the generic choice of the ‘‘conte.’’ With its title alone, L’Oiseau blanc, conte bleu calls for critical attention to bear on the generic imprint of this text, more often than not overlooked by scholars.7 Besides, the stories normally published in the ‘‘Bibliothe`que bleue’’ were expected to deal with contemporary themes, overlooking the daily travails of their customary lower-class audience while at the same time drawing from the literary tradition of tales of chivalry and nobility.8 Again, by contrast to its title affiliation, Diderot’s choice of the Orientalist theme for the setting of L’Oiseau blanc links his tale to the satiric vein and the cultural relativism popularized by

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Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes from 1721 on. While not in strict accordance with the expectations set by its generic affiliation, L’Oiseau blanc, conte bleu, with the diversity of its influences, internally duplicates and exemplifies the diversity of views defended and embodied by the Philosophes against the Church. Concurrent with missionary expansionism, Orientalism had marked the seventeenth century with a definite taste for oriental curios (chinoiseries) and art inspired by the Far East. Intellectual debates had also been fueled for many years by the seniority of the Orient over the Occident, pursuing a controversy about the historical origins of the world, while heralding an assault against revealed religion and its own version of these origins (Dufrenoy 2223). It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, that Orientalism began to penetrate the realm of literature. Characterized in France as much by the exoticism of its signature depiction of other cultural (and religious) mores—rendered fashionable by Antoine Galland’s French translation of the Arabian Nights (1704–17)—as by the unorthodoxy of the relativism which emanated from such depiction, more often than not, the literary outcome of Orientalism opened a covert way for criticism directed at the powers in place to express itself. Thus, although it may well have helped shape Diderot’s lack of experience in his early fiction, the definite intertextual quality of L’Oiseau blanc broadened its reach beyond that of mere experimentation in story writing. Both Les Bijoux indiscrets and L’Oiseau blanc share the Oriental court and harem, the customary sultan’s favorite, as well as other elements pertaining to, but more importantly for our discussion, parodying, the erotico-exotic genre or ‘‘roman galant.’’9 The light-heartedness with which Diderot is known to have written both Les Bijoux indiscrets and L’Oiseau blanc, conte bleu—a work he tried to disown by openly attributing its composition to his then mistress Mme. de Puisieux—bears witness at once to the low status accorded this genre and to the game of hide-and-seek played between the writer and religious or political censorship. Seeing the Oriental court as a satirical version of the French court only renders the unorthodoxy of his work more obvious. Meanwhile, it must be acknowledged that each and every work supposedly authored by Diderot inevitably triggered the police’s interest in it, while any given work under scrutiny by censorship and made famous by its unorthodoxy, but whose author remained unidentified, was oftentimes attributed to Diderot. Hence, he decided not to publish L’Oiseau blanc until thirty years later; hence, also, this tale deserves more critical attention than it has generated so far. A look at Les Bijoux indiscrets sheds light on the depth of what may be

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less obviously unorthodox in its counterpart, L’Oiseau blanc. The device of the magic ring literally and figuratively coalesces the narrative and thematic transgressions enacted by Diderot. Its power allows Mangogul to transcend space by allowing him to transport himself wherever he wants in a second and remain invisible, while providing the sole yet repeated temporal motor of the narrating itself: following each experiment of the narrative jewel on the women at court, the sultan conveys its results to an assembly of attendants including his favorite, Mirzoza. Beyond the string of highly entertaining episodes to which this gives way, the stories in question are less telling about the actual idiosyncrasies of each speaking jewel—none of which is described in truly graphic, or pornographic, detail for that matter—than about the light they shed on issues of religious and political authority which involve the king’s handling of power by means of controlling that of knowledge. What the repeated trials of the ring’s power by Mangogul in search for truth underlines its essentially experimental nature, as well as the inherently dogmatic bend of its postulated result. In his earlier Penseés philosophiques, Diderot had already shown evidence of his aversion for dogmatism in formulating the basis of an experimental philosophy devoid of teleology: ‘‘On doit exiger de moi que je cherche la ve´rite´, mais non que je la trouve’’ (1: p. 28). [One must require that I seek truth, not that I find it.] Moreover, given the political power of the Catholic Church over the king in Enlightenment France, Mangogul’s public intrusion in the private life of his subjects can be read in other ways. At first sight, it may appear as a condemnation of the lack of morality of the women aimed at and ridiculed in public, a condemnation rooted in the view of Eve/ Woman as sinful temptation made flesh. Yet on closer inspection, since in the Oriental tradition Mangogul’s status combines political and religious power, the sultan’s compulsive intrusion into the physical privacy of his subjects may also constitute an implicit statement that the Church’s institutional attempt to limit and control people’s mores with the marital vows of fidelity—a societal version of faith—or with the practice of confession no longer holds power over natural instincts. In point of fact, Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality reminds one that, as a result of confessional practices, original sin was constituted, and instituted, as a twofold problem of truth and knowledge central to a political and religious network of power relations.10 Thus, ‘‘talking publically about sex’’ as Diderot chose to do unorthodoxly in Les Bijoux, by means of the sultan’s active role in publicizing private matters, can be viewed in yet another way. It illustrated the philosophical affirmation

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of anatomy as a locus for truth, and intimated that the mystery of (pro)creation needed to be explained scientifically rather than biblically.11 Diderot’s dramatizing private sexual behavior as the disruptive center of public discussion in Les Bijoux can thus be coupled with the choice of fiction through ‘‘le genre galant’’ and the expression of antireligious thought. While Stephen Werner turned around the interpretation of Les Bijoux as a pastiche ‘‘key-novel’’ and privileged its parodic dimension to promote his own (Les Bijoux as ‘‘anti-novel’’), we prefer not to eliminate it, if only on the grounds that the encylopedists demanded that one study an object in all its aspects, in order to avoid the prejudices that they associated with religious orthodoxy. Our purpose is to combine simultaneously a relativistic version of Werner’s notion of the ‘‘ironic’’ with regards to the Orientalist ‘‘tricks’’ and Diderot’s skeptic view of the ruling authority of generic and politico-religious laws and conventions.12 An instance in which Diderot formulates the inconsequentiality of rules, and their arbitrariness, occurs in his foundational article on ‘‘Encyclope´die’’ (1, pp. 363–436). In it, laying the groundwork for the skeptic empiricism characteristic of Enlightenment ‘‘esprit critique,’’ he gives a sensationalist version of Kant’s definition of Enlightenment as ‘‘Sapere aude’’ [Dare to know]: Il faut tout examiner, tout remuer sans exception et sans meńagement: oser voir, ainsi que nous commençons a` nous en convaincre, qu’il en est presque des genres de litte´rature, ainsi que de la compilation geńe´rale des lois, et de la premie`re formation des villes, que c’est a` un hasard singulier, a` une circonstance bizarre, quelquefois a` un essor du geńie, qu’ils ont duˆ leur naissance. (p. 412) [One must examine, and look into, everything, indiscriminately and indefatigably; one must dare to see, as we begin to understand, that literary genres are created most as laws are compiled and cities first erected, i.e., owing to a fortuitous occurrence, an odd circumstance, or sometimes a rare stroke of genius.]

In other words, by choosing to caricature the Orient and the marvelous, Diderot further enhanced the fact that the ‘‘history’’ of the Orient had revealed worlds far more ancient than the one dramatized in Genesis, or in Livy’s history of Rome for that matter. By the same token, this choice implied that the origins of a people were an issue steeped in manly, as opposed to godly, creation. It meant that origins were the object of much fantasizing and fictionalizing, as was evidenced in the plot of Les Bijoux or that of L’Oiseau blanc. Beyond the comic indecency

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of the speaking jewels in Les Bijoux, the work does offer a story about ‘‘speaking origins.’’ Besides, the fact that Mangogul resorts to the marvelous in order to make secrets come to light only underlines the weakness of political or religious institutions when faced with the question of whether they actually detain truth or merely maintain the illusion that they hold its key. The erotic vein woven into the fabric of L’Oiseau blanc appears somewhat softened when compared to Les Bijoux. Yet the main character, the Prince of China, turns into the white bird in order to swiftly fly to the palace of his patron fairy, aptly named Ve´rite´ [Truth], then goes back to his father’s kingdom, where he recounts his amorous adventures. Against the ideological background of the discrepancy between the Church’s pretensions to abide by revealed truth found in the Divine, and those of Diderot and the ‘‘Philosophes’’ claiming that they were required to seek truth rather than find it, the allegorical dimension of the bird’s journey leads one to examine at once its internal development and the external conditions of its narrating. Jean Starobinski does so in his article entitled ‘‘The Favorite’s Foot: Diderot and Mixed Perceptions.’’13 He approaches some of the very passages that we are analyzing less on anticlerical grounds than on sensationalistic ones, which further underscores the philosophical audacity of the tale. His analysis hinges on the simultaneous stimulation of the Sultana’s ear by the telling of the white bird’s story by four storytellers, and of her foot by the tickling of an appointed Chatouilleuse. Underlying this blending of the physical (the tickling and subsequent reaction of pleasure) and of the metaphysical (the listening and subsequent reacting to the story)14 is the Barthesian dynamic of textual pleasure as a metaphorical mimicry of the anticipation metonymically leading to sexual gratification. Starobinski parallels the sultana’s pleasure experience with that of the bird, often caressed by those encountered along the way, thus linking the telling of the story with the story being told. Not surprisingly, the bird’s singing creates in his listeners the same kind of pleasure described by Starobinski about the sultana, which leads us back to the thematic unorthodoxy of eroticism in L’Oiseau blanc. In particular, the fact that the prince’s name—‘‘Geńistan’’ in the local idiom—translates as ‘‘Spirit’’ into ours immediately kindles unorthodox associations between libertinism and religion. The appearance of the bird in the story is marked by miraculous occurrences disturbing the quiet and rather boring life of nuns caged in the ‘‘couvent de la Guenon couleur de feu’’ [the convent of the flame-colored female monkey]. If translating15 guenon into ‘‘female monkey’’ ironically displaces the

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human onto the adjectival plane, thus dehumanizing the lives of ‘monks’ into those of ‘monk-eys,’ the mother superior’s title of ‘‘Guenon couleur de feu,’’ for one, echoes that of Fougeret de Montbron’s libertine novel, Le canape´ couleur de feu [the flame-colored sofa], as well as Cre´billon-fils’s Le Sopha. Beyond the rather obvious link between the Holy Spirit and the meaning of the white bird’s native name, these intertextual echos render the association of conventual life with unorthodox sexuality more subtle yet no less subversive. Indeed, not only is the Holy Spirit of the Catholic liturgy thus obliquely compared with the metamorphic characters typical of marvelous tales and fables, but at the same time, it is inevitably associated with the subversive agent of Reason.16 Sighted by the virgins of the Great Guenon’s community, the princely bird hovers over them, singing with captivating and wonderous beauty. From his point of view, there is no resisting the advances of two young and lovely women whom as a bird he cannot perceive as nuns, nuns whose attire would ‘‘normally’’ signal as forbidden objects of desire, or prevent from exciting such desire in others—be they birds or spirits—, but whose dramatization as coquettes in a parodic setting brings to the level of highly unorthodox behavior: ‘‘L’Oiseau e´tait trop galant pour se refuser aux agaceries de deux jeunes et jolies personnes. Il prit son vol et descendit le´ge`rement sur le sein de celle qui l’avait appele´’’ (p. 223). [The bird was far too gallant to resist being teased by two lovely young maidens; he took off and delicately lighted on the bosom of the girl who had signalled to him.] The heretic winds its way through the cracks opened up by Diderot’s ‘‘transgeneric’’ usage of genre-related categories. It emerges in the various levels of interpretation inscribed between the lines of his intertextual tale, a tale whose transgeneric imprint bears witness to the polysemy of his language, and its concurrent challenging of, the univocal idiom of revealed religion. This dimension is reinforced at the level of the storytelling, when the storyteller of the passage in question indulges in a judgment call—a feature common in philosophic tales. Parodying the ‘‘genre galant’’ with the counterfeit seduction scene sketched out above, Diderot fuses the lines of the storyteller’s seemingly cultural explanation of Chinese mores with an anticlerical parody, in fact a merciless attack against the ‘‘inhumane’’ conditions of conventual life. Beyond them, Diderot stigmatizes a worldview caged both literally (at a thematic level of analysis) and figuratively (at a narratological level of analysis) by the dogmatic narrow-mindedness of its rules: La Premie`re Femme.—[. . .] Ces vierges couraient un grand pe´ril a` cesser de l’eˆtre sans permission. S’il arrivait a` quelqu’une de se conduire maladroite-

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ment, on la jetait pour le reste de sa vie dans une caverne obscure ou` elle e´tait abandonneé a` des geńies souterrains. Il n’y avait qu’un moyen d’ećhapper a` ce supplice, c’e´tait de contrefaire la folle ou de l’eˆtre (p. 224). [First Woman Attendant.—[. . .] These virgins exposed themselves to great danger by ceasing to be virgins without permission. Should any one of them act improperly, she would be thrown into a dark hole, abandoned to underground spirits for the rest of her life. Her only way out of this torture was to act mad or be it.]

Sketched with tongue in cheek, the first part of this witty picture (‘‘Ces vierges couraient un grand pe´ ril a` cesser de l’eˆ tre sans permission’’) [These virgins exposed themselves to great danger by ceasing to be virgins without permission] suggests that the nuns might be permitted to ‘‘cease’’ to be virgins. Pushed a little further, this statement also implies that they might actually break their vow without transgressing the fundamental tenet of chastity, a statement whose indirect unorthodoxy illustrates Diderot’s innovative thinking and writing and attendant religious transgression. The flowery language of the marvelous and foreign serves to deride and further criticize religious indoctrination and its psychological exploitation of people’s minds. By presenting the awakening of the nuns’ spirit in heretical terms of sexual arousal, Diderot undeniably pulls the spiritual down into its bodily frame. But he also tells the tragic tale of youth caught up in the midst of adolescent turmoil, mistaking the call of physical nature and sensual stimuli for that, spiritual and metaphysical, of religion.17 By the same token, he tells the blasphemous tale of the Church’s unnatural imposition of the biblical story of the Annunciation and other supposedly unquestionable ‘‘facts’’ of revealed religion. Following the birdly appearance of Spirit, the heretic depiction of the nuns’ encounter with him drafts a slanderous account of the Annunciation not only by the sexual nature of its content, but also because it can read as a parody of pornographic idioms, one bringing out the questionable validity and truth-value of the above-mentioned facts: La Seconde Femme.—[. . .] Cependant l’oiseau s’e´levant subitement dans les airs, se met a` planer sur [les vierges ‘‘compagnes d’Agariste’’]; son ombre les couvre et elles en conçoivent des mouvements singuliers. Agariste et Me´lisse e´ prouvent les premie` res les merveilleux effets de son influence. Un feu divin, une ardeur sacreé s’allument dans leur cœur; je ne sais quels e´panchements lumineux et subtils passent dans leur esprit, y fermentent, et de deux idiotes qu’elles e´taient en font les filles les plus spirituelles et les plus e´veilleés qu’il y eut a` la Chine. [. . .]

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La Sultane.—En furent-elles plus heureuses? La Seconde Femme.—Je l’ignore. Un matin l’oiseau blanc se mit a` chanter, mais d’une façon si me´lodieuse que toutes les vierges tombe`rent en extase. La supe´ rieure qui jusqu’a` ce moment avait fait l’esprit fort et de´ daigne´ l’oiseau, tourna les yeux, se renversa sur ses carreaux et s’ećria d’une voix entrecoupeé: ‘‘Ah! je n’en puis plus! . . . Je me meurs! . . . Je n’en puis plus! . . . Oiseau charmant, oiseau divin, encore un petit air.’’ (224) [Second Woman Attendant.—[. . .] Meanwhile, the bird suddenly soared into the sky and began hovering over the virgins. His shadow spread over them, arousing peculiar emotions in them. Agariste and Me´lisse first experienced the wondrous effects of his influence. A flame divine, a sacred ardor lighted their hearts; I know not what light subtly flowed into their minds, fermented awhile, and turned these two idiots into the most spirited and awakened creatures that ever existed in China.] [The Sultana.—Were they happier for that?] [First Woman Attendant.—I do not know. One morning, the white bird began singing so melodiously that all the virgins swooned into ecstasy. The mother superior who, strong-spirited, had looked down upon the bird until then, now turned her eyes up and fell on the tile, crying out these words with a breaking voice : ‘‘Ah ! I cannot take it any longer! . . . I am dying! . . . I cannot take it any longer! . . . Oh, charming bird, divine bird, another little song.’’]

The mother superior’s characterization as an ‘‘esprit fort’’ [strong spirit] strengthens the tale’s religious unorthodoxy. With this epithet, the Holy Spirit—whose parodic portrayal comes out in the adjective ‘‘divine’’—is inappropriately and transgressively replaced by Reason, ‘‘esprit fort’’ reading as a euphemistic allusion to the skepticism of free-thinkers. What is more, the nun’s metaphorical yet orgasmic ‘‘I am dying’’ makes her request for more pleasure a blasphemous caricature of religious fanaticism as sexual addiction, and desacralizes the Holy Spirit as the key element in the process of sexual addiction, the latter becoming the threshold between idiocy and intelligence. After such a dual parody of pornography as defaming religion and of liturgy as pornography in disguise, it is no surprise that Mirzoza finds the ensuing account of the birth of multiple Christlike figures plainly laughable: Le Premier E´mir.—Il en naquit nombre de petits esprits sans que la virginite´ de ces filles en souffrıˆt. La Sultane.—Allons donc, E´mir, vous vous moquez. Je veux bien qu’on me fasse des contes, mais je ne veux pas qu’on me les fasse ridicules. (225) [First Emir.—Many a little spirit was born thereafter, without affecting the girls’ virginity.]

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[The Sultana.—In faith, Emir, you are trying to fool me. I will gladly be told stories, but I will not hear ludicrous ones.]

This is perhaps the most heretic part of the passage, in that, framing the actual space devoted to the story itself, it inserts within its narrative margins the rudiments of its interpretation as fiction. Following Mirzoza’s comment, the story of the white bird, once equated as nonsense, can thus be read as an understated apology of physical sensations versus spiritual superstitions—which converges with Starobinski’s reading of L’Oiseau blanc. Both religious and literary discourses are here paired as ‘‘des contes’’ [stories] in a crucial blurring of the differences between the genre of the sacred text and that of the galant conte bleu. From the perspective of literary genres, Diderot’s skepticism about the former, through Mirzoza’s disbelief of the latter, translates the enlightenment battle for truth, revealed or scientific, into an esthetic battle fought on the opposing grounds of reality and fiction. Such opposition hinges in part on the relationship between power and truth,18 on the staging of authorship, and beyond that of authorship, on that of authoritative discourse at large, ultimately referring to the authority of the Word of God in Genesis, and challenging the Old Testament. Diderot had already addressed the questionable value of the latter in clear and harsh terms in his Penseés philosophiques. Interestingly enough, the Penseés appeared anonymously in 1746, as he was being recruited as a member of the encyclopedic team. His first original work, the work became an instant bestseller. However, Diderot being rather unknown at the time, it was, instead, attributed to thinkers such as Voltaire or La Mettrie, whose previous publications had been condemned to the flames. A couple of years later, Diderot, having then been denounced as the author of the Penseés philosophiques, was interrogated by the police about this work as well as about Les Bijoux indiscrets, L’Oiseau blanc, conte bleu, and La Promenade du sceptique (then Les Alleés des ideés). Diderot’s most heretic gesture was to question the bases for the Church’s authority as fictional. In substance, the teaching of the principal ‘‘faits’’ in religious liturgy was challenged by the forcefulness of empiricism and scientific ‘‘de´ monstration’’ as the only reliable basis for knowledge. On the one hand, he boldly asserted in penseé no. 21 that ‘‘Prouver l’E´vangile par un miracle, c’est prouver une absurdite´ par une chose contre nature.’’ [to prove the Gospel with a miracle is to prove an absurdity with something unnatural.]. On the other hand, penseé no. 50 summarized the issue at stake, that is, that of truth, common to his ideological and narrative endeavors: ‘‘Une seule de´ monstration me

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frappe plus que cinquante faits . . . Si la religion . . . est vraie, sa ve´rite´ peut eˆtre mise en e´vidence et se de´montrer par des raisons invincibles’’19 [One demonstration strikes me more than fifty facts . . . If religion . . . is true then its truth can be proven and demonstrated by unquestionable reasoning.’’] In L’Oiseau blanc, conte bleu, no obvious demonstration is at work at least not in any scientific fashion. Instead, Diderot indirectly tackles the problematic authority of religious discourse in his staging of narrative discourse. In her article on ‘‘Vraisemblance pragmatique et autorite´ fictionnelle,’’20 Cećile Cavaillac discusses authorial or narratorial preambles as necessary pretexts establishing what Jean Rousset has called la ‘‘fiction du non-fictif’’ (24) [the fiction of the non-fictional]. Up until the nineteenth century, ‘‘vraisemblance pragmatique’’ [pragmatic verisimilitude] stands as a necessary yet not exclusive condition validating ‘‘l’autorite´ fictionnelle, avant tout comprise comme autorite´ de la voix narrative’’ (25) [fiction’s authority, an authority understood above all as that of the narrative voice]. Yet, in eighteenth-century narrative works, Cavaillac notes that the interplay between fiction and nonfiction leads to texts that subvert and deconstruct this polar opposition—as exemplified in works such as Tristram Shandy or Jacques le fataliste. The thematic unorthodoxy of the story in L’Oiseau blanc finds itself multiplied at the level of the narrating, as Diderot’s treatment of the discourse of authority through his questioning of ‘‘l’autorite´ fictionnelle’’ illustrates. In L’Oiseau blanc, the challenge to the Word of God lies hidden in the wings of the frame narrative, where an ‘‘invisible’’ narrator presents the plot of the white bird story, putting noticeable emphasis on the telling of the story rather than on the story itself. The reader’s attention is thus displaced from the details of the story’s content to the circumstances of its delivery: La favorite se couchait de bonne heure et s’endormait fort tard. Pour haˆter le moment de son sommeil, on lui chatouillait la plante des pieds, et on lui faisait des contes; et pour meńager l’imagination et la poitrine des conteurs, cette fonction e´ tait partage´ e entre quatre personnes, deux e´ mirs et deux femmes. Ces quatre improvisateurs poursuivaient successivement le meˆme rećit aux ordres de la favorite. (223) [The favorite would go to bed rather early and fall asleep rather late. To fall asleep more rapidly, she would have her feet tickled and stories told to her. Moreover, to spare the story-tellers’ imagination and their breath, the storytelling was assigned to four different people, two emirs and two woman at-

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tendants. In turn, the four improvisators would continue the same narrative according to the Sultana’s fancy.]

The factor of chance inherent in the improvising of the story by any of Mirzoza’s four attendants, deauthorizes its origin, an origin lost between the multiple and faceless voices identifiable only by the numerical order—‘‘first’’ or ‘‘second’’ emir, ‘‘first’’ or ‘‘second’’ woman attendant—in which the Sultana calls upon them randomly. The initial setting of the narrating in Mirzoza’s chamber does fall under the basic pragmatic verisimilitude analyzed by Cećile Cavaillac, in that it is concurrent with eighteenth-century standard expectations about the activities performed at an Oriental court, albeit fictional. However, this process ultimately invalidates any purported expression of truth, a fact reinforced by the absence of Mangogul’s authority figure from the narrative stage, an absence echoed by that of the frame narrator once the opening scene has been staged.21 In that regard, the sevenfold structure of L’Oiseau blanc, whose inside story is told throughout seven evenings, recalls that of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptame´ ron, itself explicitly modeled after Boccaccio’s Decameron, and seen by John D. Lyons as the ‘‘foundation of Critical Narrative.’’22 The historical context outlined by John D. Lyons bears a striking resemblance with that surrounding the composition of L’Oiseau blanc: ‘‘At stake in the Heptame´ron is the role of literature in an era that is increasingly confronted by a withdrawal of the divine order from the observable world. In attempting to establish order without abandoning the divine, narrative can only displace the transcendant function onto some human agency’’ (150). Moreover, the displacement from the story told to the telling of that story becomes crucial to Diderot’s transgressive treatment of generic conventions in that it underscores traditions as the eventual object of caricature, while suggesting that the nature of their authority is relative and improvisational rather than firmly grounded in certainty. In a similar fashion as Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptame´ron ‘‘marks the end of a tradition, and [she] explicitly establishes herself as closing the generic adventure that began with Boccaccio’s Decameron . . .’’ (ibid.) although she was able to do so more openly than Diderot, who did not have the protection that she could from her brother King Francis I—Diderot composes his tale at the peaking popularity of Orientalism (Dufrenoy 40) but also at the beginning of its decline.23 The opening lines of his tale caricature and parody the traditional view of stories as entertaining and informative, while distancing L’Oiseau blanc, conte bleu from one of its more obvious ascendants, the Arabian Nights. Unlike Scheherazade,

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Mirzoza is not compelled to tell her sultan stories in order both for him to stay awake and for her to postpone the moment of her death. Again, the Sultan, an authoritative, and authoritarian figure par excellence, is simply absent from the narrative stage. It is Mirzoza instead, who supervises the telling of a story paradoxically—or unorthodoxically, rather—meant to lull her into slumber. In another discrepancy separating the tale from a closer ‘‘relative,’’ from Les Bijoux to L’Oiseau blanc, authoritative discourse shifts away from the sultan to the sultana. In Les Bijoux, Mangogul’s deciding whose ‘‘bijou’’ would tell its indiscreet story is always followed by the report of his findings to Mirzoza, concurrent with implicitly giving up his status of authority by making her approval a dynamic component in his search for truth. The sultana’s power even increases in L’Oiseau blanc, as she remains the sole authority over the confines of her quarters and over what story may be told therein. Meanwhile, throughout the seven evenings framing the telling of the conte bleu, the Sultan’s authority and control are carefully kept outside these quarters, whose privacy only enhances the potential subversiveness of what is kept within their boundaries. As a result, Mangogul’s one-time intruding on the rituals of her falling asleep during the fifth evening suggests that Mirzoza’s chamber materializes a suitable locus for a subversive tale to be told privately, a tale otherwise unorthodox if opened to authority’s ear—a fact confirmed when Mirzoza forbids the storytellers to let the Sultan in again without notifying her (258). Diderot’s idiomatic challenge to the traditional hierarchy between author and storyteller or reader and listener24 gives fictional form to his committed defense of relativism as the approach proper to face the tyranny of religious dogmatism. In the narrative scheme of L’Oiseau blanc, power is displaced onto the one listening and paying attention in the same way as Diderot wanted man and his critical abilities to become the active center of a universe grown indepedent from prejudices imposed on it from above. Mirzoza is the listener of a story that she commissions, but also criticizes systematically in a gesture questioning the authority of any storyteller. What is more, her position as the commissioner dictating the rules of the telling game simultaneously puts her in the position of an implied author, so to speak. In predicting the unfolding of the story and taking over its telling on several occasions, she blurs the distinction between listener and storytellers by episodically switching places with them. We noted her impatience at being told ridiculous stories when listening to the parodic annunciation sung to the virgins caged in ‘‘le Couvent de la Guenon couleur de feu.’’ At that point, she merely underlines the fabulous, and therefore incredible, fiction of a

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‘‘conception par l’oreille’’ [spirit conceived by aural intercourse] (Starobinski, ‘‘Le Pied de la favorite’’ 70) and ridicules one of the foundational facts of revealed religion. But the next evening, however bored by the commonplaces to which the storytellers resort to lull her asleep and fulfill their mission, she identifies these commonplaces as such, laying bare the conventions of storytelling and thereby underscoring their arbitrariness. In one instance, after the white bird arrived in the kingdom of India, Lively, the daughter of the emperor, is said to have pulled the reins controlling her mule, and unwittingly hit her eunuch’s nose, thereafter left flattened (228). The sultana’s reaction is immediate: ‘‘Et voila` l’origine de nos nez plats, ils descendent de la mule de Lively et de son sot eunuque’’ (ibid.) [And that is where our flat noses come from; they are descended from Lively’s mule and boring eunuch]. More than the local color and commonplace quality of its details, this comment shows Mirzoza’s understanding of what foundational myths are about, and her suggestion that, just like the supernatural birth of Geńistan or of Christ, they are but stories historically ungrounded and unfounded. In accordance with their Greek etymon, myths tell fabulous and legendary ‘‘stories’’ about origins, about multiple geneses. By contrast, Genesis boils down to that very status, that of a story comparable to a thousand others, without any author nor any authority likely to turn it into the unshakable basis for the beliefs of an entire people, having lost its potency and forcefulness through the light shed on its fictionality. The reach of Mirzoza’s interpretation of the white bird’s fable as ridiculous enlightens a rhetorical question left unanswered in the Addition aux Penseés philosophiques, a question that unveils at once the partiality of ‘‘orthodox’’ readings of evangelical against mythological imagery, and the unreliability of the former’s claim for truth value: ‘‘Mais pourquoi est-ce que le cygne de Le´da et les petites flammes de Castor et Pollux nous font rire, et que nous ne rions pas de la colombe et des langues de feu de l’Evangile?’’ (no. 62, 1: pp. 46–47) [Why on earth do we laugh at Leda’s swan and Castor and Pollux’s flamelets, and not at the dove and flames in the Gospels?’’]. This addition, and after it, L’Oiseau blanc, put the Gospels and mythology side by side, coherent with the Encyclopedist critical approach looking at any object from all possible angles, the object being here the altogether questioned authority and seriousness of any text. Diderot’s transgressive practice of generic conventions in L’Oiseau blanc thus takes an even more heretic turn when compared with his early philosophical works. What is at stake in such comparison is both

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stylistic and ideological, both literary and philosophical, for it opens and paves the way for a new reading of his later experiments with genres. Beyond the common ideological bend that comes out of Diderot’s philosophical yet fictionalized statements on the ‘‘facts’’ of religion, and of his literary treatment of fictional facts, striking similarities of images, themes, and word choice appear when one parallels fragments otherwise categorized as serious and philosophical in the Penseés Philosophiques or as fiction and fantasy in L’Oiseau blanc. The Penseés philosophiques provides instances where the heretic dimension found in the white bird story comes out in terms concurrent with Mirzoza’s skeptic reception of its acceptability. In penseé no. 25, Diderot presents the telling/teaching of revealed religion as psychological nonsense fostered by the Church’s abuse of children’s readiness to believe in supernatural stories: Qu’est-ce que Dieu? Question qu’on fait aux enfants, et a` laquelle les philosophes ont bien de la peine a` re´pondre . . . On sait a` quel aˆge un enfant doit apprendre a` lire, a` chanter, a` danser, le latin, la geóme´trie. Ce n’est qu’en matie`re de religion qu’on ne consulte point sa porteé . . . C’est dans le meˆme instant, c’est de la meˆme bouche, qu’ il apprend qu’il y a des esprits follets, des revenants, des loups-garous et un Dieu. On lui inculque une des plus importantes ve´rite´s d’une manie`re capable de la dećrier un jour au tribunal de la raison.25 [What is God? Children are required to answer this question, which even philosophers have a hard time answering . . . One knows the proper age for a child to learn how to read, sing, and dance, or how to read Latin and geometry. Only in religion does one neglect to determine it . . . In the same breath, from the same person, children hear about fiends, ghosts, werewolves, and a god. One impresses them with one of the most important truths in a way likely to be defeated later when tried by reason.]

One might add Oriental birds to the list of fiends, ghosts, werewolves, and gods, only to realize that catechized children will perceive the biblical account of the origins or the spiritual awakening of Chinese nuns in the same light, which underscores at once the fictional aspect of the biblical fable of the origins, but also the epistemological dimension of narrative fiction. As Ronald Shusterman has shown in ‘‘Fiction, connaissance, e´piste´mologie,’’ texts, whether scientific or literary—and, we may add, religious—do not convey knowledge, but instead, cognition, whose processes they mirror, which allows the dichotomy between the real and the fictional to collapse.26 Narrativized in L’Oiseau blanc,

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Mirzoza’s skeptic reception—as a cognitive process characteristic of Enlightenment philosophy—of the white bird story echoes with two of the later additions to the Penseés. First, while endorsing Mirzoza’s disbelief, Diderot contends that ‘‘Les faits dont on appuie les religions sont anciens et merveilleux, c’est-a`-dire les plus suspects qu’il est possible, pour prouver la chose la plus incroyable’’ (no. 20). [The foundational facts of religion are ancient and marvelous, i.e., the most suspicious possible when it comes to proving the most incredible thing’’]. Second, in a gesture that illustrates further his to-and-fro between various generic phrasings of the same concern, Diderot chooses a transgeneric minifiction that may also read like an exemplum.27 Yet, intercalated right after the question posed by addition no. 62, it implicitly leads to the same kind of interpretation adopted by Mirzoza in the seminal episode of L’Oiseau blanc, where critical thoughts have become integral parts of the fictional whole—as opposed to the numbered philosophical statements typographically framing the intercalated story: Une jeune femme qui couchait ordinairement avec son mari reçut un jour la visite d’un jeune homme accompagne´ d’un pigeon. Du jour de cette visite, elle devint grosse: et l’on demandait: ‘‘Qui est-ce qui avait fait l’enfant du mari, du jeune homme ou de l’oiseau?’’ Un preˆtre qui e´tait la` dit: ‘‘Il est prouve´ que c’est l’oiseau.’’ (no. 63) [One day, a young woman known to sleep with her husband was called upon by a young man with a pigeon. From that day on, she became pregnant. People would ask: ‘‘Who had begot the child, was it the young man or the pigeon?’’ A priest said: ‘‘It is proven that it was the bird.’’]

The format of separate, numbered paragraphs generically associated with the sententiousness of philosophical thoughts apparently displays content without additional commentary. However, it is challenged internally, at the stylistical level, in a way that makes echo and blend with fiction. The mythological colombe in addition no. 62 is reminiscent of the bird in L’Oiseau blanc, while the pregnancy of the wife, a ‘‘fact’’ peremptorily attributed to the bird by the prelate in the exemplum, strangely echoes the nuns’ own spiritual births in the conte bleu. If one reads the quotations from the Penseés philosophiques in comparison with the parody of the Annunciation in L’Oiseau blanc, Mirzoza’s interpretation of this parody as ridiculous in the latter appears embedded in the substance of the former. Philosophy and fiction emphasize, in their stylistic closeness, the literariness of religion, blurring the sacred and the fictional. Also categorized among Diderot’s philosophical works, La Promenade

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du Sceptique bridges Diderot’s incipient blending philosophy, religion, and erotic fiction in the Penseés philosophiques with his more elaborate fictionalization of philosophy and religion in L’Oiseau blanc. In it, too, the format of numbered paragraphs selected by Diderot loosens the generic conciseness and didacticism characteristic of philosophical thoughts. The typograpical discontinuity of the genre is overlapped and penetrated by the narrative continuity of the philosopher’s allegorical story, making the work closer to the ‘‘conte’’ and the ‘‘nouvelle’’ inherited from past centuries than it is to that inherited from Pascal’s Penseés or La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes. Taking into consideration the publication, in between, of Voltaire’s popular but censored Lettres Philosophiques as well as Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes or De l’Esprit des lois, Diderot takes up again the criticism, versus the defense, of faith in one religion, and pushes the genre of penseés to the limits demanded by his relativistic outlook. The Promenade tells of a philosophizing character, as subsequently reported by his admiring addressee, who unfolds his characterization of three philosophies as if he were speaking of three foreign cultures whose allegorical names reflect their ideological specificity: orthodox theologians walk in ‘‘L’Alleé des e´pines’’ [Lane of Thorns], although they sometimes trespass into the neighboring ‘‘Alleé des roses’’ [Lane of Roses] where libertines flourish, whereas sensationalist philosophers prefer the intellectual ‘‘Alle´ e des marroniers’’ [Chestnut Tree Lane]. All three ways of life come to the reader with enough details to make them look like exotic foreign kingdoms. The realms of thoughts and fictionalized facts subtly interpenetrate each other, blurring fiction and reality in a rhetorical feast ordained by Diderot’s subversively creative imagination. Even if the model set by the philosophic ‘‘Alleé des marroniers’’ appears to prevail in the end, it is not presented dogmatically as the only possible option, however. Rather, it appears in relativistic contradistinction with the other two alleys. The reader is once more faced with a multifacetted satire of Genesis, set in the remote land of China, the very setting where the story in L’Oiseau blanc will unfold. In this setting, not surprisingly, one finds ‘‘volie`res’’ described like the henhouse-convent parodied in the fiction, which somehow prepares Diderot for writing L’Oiseau blanc. What Diderot’s cross-generic perspective emphasizes, ultimately, is that Diderot walks the paths of traditionally separate domains that become mutually nonexclusive openings for creativity to foster at once his tremendous imagination and continuous critique of religious dogmatism, while trying in the heretic ‘‘spirit’’ of the Encyclope´die to ‘‘changer la façon commune de penser’’ [to change the way people commonly think].

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To close, I would like to go along with Daniel Brewer’s thesis in his book The Discourse of the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century, which takes to task critics who choose to focus either on the philosophical aspects of Diderot’s writing, or on its literary quality. In view of the Enlightenment concern for and representation of knowledge, this approach has the great merit of bringing together ‘‘intellectual history and literary interpretation.’’ I undoubtedly agree with Brewer that ‘‘[i]n Diderot’s case, this division between what could be called the conceptual and the poetic, or in slightly different terms, the philosophic and the literary, precludes presenting what is most powerfully pertinent in his writing, namely, his art of philosophizing’’ (9–10). This critical notion of the interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary, finds its sharpest expression in what I call the ‘‘transgeneric,’’ a notion fundamental in modern scholarly undertakings, one that subsumes the analytic depths reached, and yielded, by Diderotian dialogue, and eventually the reason why postmodern criticism so often turns to the Age of Enlightenment and to Diderot studies. Whether historical, thematic, or narratological, the circumstances surrounding Diderot’s literary tale mirror his unorthodox questioning of the authority claimed by religious discourse. The transgressiveness of his gesture lies as much in the original choice of a genre considered to be frivolous for its erotic and expected lightheartedness, as in the fact that the fictional dimension of this choice undermines the truth value of religious discourse by making it stand as a fictional narrative. It adds new depth to the much discussed dialogic nature of Diderot’s style and sheds new light on his nonconformism, on his quest for scientific versus revealed truth, for relativism versus dogmatism, for new versus old forms of expression, all crystallized in the trespassing of generic boundaries.

NOTES 1. All references to Diderot’s works will be to Œuvres, ed. Laurent Versini, 5 vols. (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994–97), and will appear parenthetically, with page numbers preceded by the volume. Vol. 1 (‘‘Philosophie’’) includes works categorized as such; vol. 2 (‘‘Contes’’) contains most of his narrative fiction and some dialogues; vol. 4 includes his esthetic as well as his dramatic works. References to the Encyclope´die will be to the original seventeen-volume edition of the ‘‘Grand dictionnaire’’ published in Paris between 1751 and 1772, except when they pertain to articles by Diderot, quoted from Versini. Page references will appear as with Versini’s edition of Diderot. 2. See the recent English translation of this important side of Diderot’s esthetic writings by John Goodman, Diderot on Art, with an introduction by Thomas Crow, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). In the famous Vernet sequence from

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the 1767 Salons, Diderot describes a series of landscape paintings by Vernet while supposedly recounting a trip to the countryside during which his conversations on art with a clergyman lead them throughout scenes that turn out to be Vernet’s actual paintings (4: pp. 593–635). Diderot’s fictional framing of his reflections on Vernet’s art, and inventing the religious character, provide a new medium in which the philosopher can explore the debate opposing his school of thought to that of the Church, implicitly and structurally questioning the assumption of nature as evidence for the existence of God and his creational powers. 3. This parameter of length appears in the encyclopedic articles devoted to ‘‘Conte’’ Œuvres, 4: p. 126) and ‘‘Roman’’ (Encyclope´ die, 14: pp. 341–43). In ‘‘Conte’’ or short ‘‘roman,’’ Diderot contrasts ‘‘contes’’ and ‘‘fables,’’ taking up the moral aspect common in these genres, and partly related to an esthetics of the true as seen in ‘‘nouvelles.’’ See Fre´de´ric Deloffre, Histoire de la nouvelle a` l’aˆge classique (Paris: Didier, 1967), pp. 38–42, on that issue. See also Jacques Proust, introduction to Quatre contes (Gene`ve: Droz, 1964), where ‘‘nouvelle’’ and ‘‘conte’’ are used interchangeably. They are contrasted with ‘‘roman’’ in terms of their length and linkage to an esthetic realism (p. xxv), while the fact that both ‘‘contes’’ and ‘‘roman’’ evince a ‘‘romanesque’’ vein somewhat contradicts the contention that the stories involved are true for the most part (p. xi). 4. Diderot would refer to this tradition in his 1761 Eloge de Richardson in which he celebrates the novelty of the English writer’s use of fictionality as a means of attaining realism and verisimilitude. His eulogy opens thus: ‘‘Par un roman, on a entendu jusqu’a` ce jour un tissu d’e´veńements chime´riques et frivoles, dont la lecture e´tait dangereuse pour le gouˆt et pour les mœurs. Je voudrais bien qu’on trouvaˆt un autre nom pour les ouvrages de Richardson, qui e´le`vent l’esprit, qui touchent l’aˆme, qui respirent partout l’amour du bien, et qu’on appelle aussi des romans’’ (4: p. 155) [To this day, a novel has been considered a fabric of frivolous and chimeric events whose reading endangers one’s taste and habits. I wish another name could be found for Richardson’s works. They elevate the spirit, and touch the soul; they express love for the good; and yet, they, too, are called novels]. 5. See Marie-Louise Dufrenoy’s L’Orient romanesque en France, 1704–1789 (Montreál: Beauchemin, 1946), 1: p. 112, the reference work on Orientalism in French fiction. 6. Daniel Brewer in The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), summarizes Les Bijoux thus: ‘‘[It] recounts the story of a magic ring so powerful that when directed towards women it forces them to speak the most intimate of truths, voiced by the most intimate part of the female body, their ‘‘jewel.’’ The Sultan Mangogul receives this ring from his magician Cucufa, and with it he is freed from merely imagining the innermost secrets of the women in his court’’ (p. 172). 7. Vivienne Mylne and Janet Osborne first drew attention to this text in a 1971 study combining it with Les Bijoux indiscrets. (See ‘‘Diderot’s Early Fiction: Les Bijoux indiscrets and L’Oiseau blanc,’’ Diderot Studies 9 [1971]: pp. 143–66.) Mylne sees L’Oiseau blanc as a mere essay in the narrative genre without much in-depth character study. More recently, Jean Starobinski’s wonderful study of this work (‘‘Le pied de la favorite: Diderot et les perceptions meˆleés’’ L’Esprit creáteur 24, no. 2 [1984]: pp. 62–72); and Hinrich Hudde’s article on ‘‘Diderot als Marchenparodist: L’Oiseau blanc, conte bleu’’ (in Denis Diderot: Zeit, Werk, Wirkung: Zehn Beitrage [pp. 81–93]) failed to renew lasting critical interest in this ‘‘conte.’’ 8. Be´ atrice Didier, ‘‘Bibliothe` que’’ in Le Sie` cle des Lumie` res (Paris: MA Editions, 1987) pp. 57–58.

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9. Stephen Werner develops this idea in ‘‘Diderot’s first anti-novel: Les Bijoux indiscrets,’’ (Diderot Studies 26 [1995]: pp. 215–28). He sees it as growing out of the composition of this work, which Diderot undertook as ‘‘a bluff or wager’’ (p. 217), thereby shifting the emphasis away from electing the ‘‘roman galant’’ over other genres, to treating it with the frivolousness and ironic distance that he identifies as the key to Diderot’s antinovelistic writings. To him, Diderot does not so much ‘‘endorse the mode of le roman galant as explode the mode of its validity . . . He has even challenged the value of a ‘‘key novel’’ (p. 226), prefering imitative pastiche to critical parody. 10. Trans. from the French by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Press, 1978). 11. See Aram Vartanian’s enlightening discussion of ‘‘Erotisme et philosophie chez Diderot,’’ Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Etudes Franç aises 13 (June 1961): pp. 367–90. 12. In that sense, Mangogul’s trials of the magic ring of knowledge might seem to represent experience, all the more since, in the chapter entitled ‘‘Le reˆve de Mangogul’’ [Mangogul’s Dream], a chapter later added to Les Bijoux by Diderot, the sultan precisely dreams that a giant named Experience overturns everything around him. We cannot, therefore, affirm that Mangogul merely represents the tyrannical figure of dogmatism and absolute power, if only because he himself occupies the position of a critical successor to his father’s throne in L’Oiseau blanc. As we shall see in the seminal episode of the white bird story, allegorical meanings oftentimes are doubled by their opposites. Even though the diversity of meanings that can be derived from Diderot’s writing style may seem to contradict our point, it eventually reinforces it, for it will underline the arbitrariness of choosing one over another. We can only be satisfied with the fact that, within the network of issues which we are considering, and given the comparative approach that imposed itself to us as we read L’Oiseau blanc along with Les Bijoux, Les Penseés philosophiques, and La Promenade du sceptique, the interpretation that we are nevertheless privileging ‘‘makes more sense.’’ 13. We started working on L’Oiseau blanc, conte bleu long before coming across Starobinski’s article. His argument does not contradict, but instead reinforces, ours: indeed, as Diderot evolved from deism toward atheism, his already developed interest in physiology and biology became sharper and sharper, while his feelings toward religious fanaticism grew stronger and stronger. 14. Starobinski goes as far as comparing this distribution of stimuli between the four storytellers on the one hand and the one ‘‘Chatouilleuse’’ on the other hand, with the combined action of four fingers rubbing simultaneously yet not synchronically with the thumb (66). 15. A translinguistic pun on Diderot’s part is not entirely out of the question. In fact, Diderot first established his reputation as a translator of English. He was a collaborator in the publication of Temple Stanyan’s L’Histoire de Gre`ce, and became actively involved in the translation into French of Robert James’s Dictionary of Medicine (pub. 1746–48), which helped in his being chosen as an editor for the Encyclope´die, itself originally grown out of a projected translation of Chambers’ Cyclopaedia. The link between Diderot, translation, and unorthodoxy is the clearest, however, in his 1745 publication of an Essai sur le me´rite de la vertu translating Shaftesbury’s An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (1699). Shaftesbury allegedly influenced Diderot’s deism, and Diderot’s Essai was the notorious target of censorship and criticism on the part of the religious establishment. For the philosophical ramification of Diderot as a translator of English, see Peter France, ‘‘Diderot traducteur de l’anglais,’’ in Colloque lnternational Diderot, Anne-Marie

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Chouillet, ed., (Paris: Aux Amateurs de livres, 1985), pp. 383–93; Bonnie Arden Robb, ‘‘Diderot’s Comparative Linguistics: The Philosophe’s English,’’ in Man, God, and Nature in the Enlightenment, eds. Donald C. Mell Jr., Theodore E. D. Braun and Lucia M. Palmer (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1988), 215–24. 16. Already pointing to the nonconformism of Diderot’s tale, this also explains why the allegorical or parabolic as its only key cannot be embraced unconditionally. We must admit that an allegorical interpretation of L’Oiseau blanc imposes its bias on our own reading of the story, since we are finding a dimension or meaning secondary to the more obvious orientation of the text as dictated by its generic title. However, two facts prevent us from adopting this (or any other) interpretation alone. On the one hand, Mirzoza, on the fifth evening, guards the reader against this temptation to apply any single-minded view, let alone an allegorical one, to the object under scrutiny, in this case, the narrated story of the white bird: ‘‘Il y a tant de finesse dans votre conte, que je serais tenteé de le croire alle´gorique’’ (255) [Your story is so subtle that I am tempted to think it is allegorical]. On the other hand, the multiplicity of generic traditions which we find intermingled throughout the tale acts as a warning against such a view. Instead, it creates a labyrinth of generic characteristics at once making it impossible to pinpoint its genre and ultimately highlighting the correlative impossibility to ‘‘pinpoint’’ linguistically at all. 17. This theme pervades Diderot’s writings, from La Religieuse, where it is developed at great length, but also in Jacques le fataliste, where one finds another, fuller, version of the criticism fictionally sketched out into L’Oiseau blanc, conte bleu: ‘‘Il vient un moment ou` presque toutes les jeunes filles et les jeunes garçons tombent dans la me´lancolie; ils sont tourmente´s d’une inquie´tude vague qui se prome`ne sur tout, et qui ne trouve rien qui la calme. Ils cherchent la solitude; ils pleurent; le silence des cloıˆtres les touche; l’image de la paix qui semble re´gner dans les maisons religieuses les se´duit. Ils prennent pour la voix de Dieu qui les appelle a` lui les premiers efforts d’un tempe´rament qui se de´veloppe: et c’est prećise´ment lorsque la nature les sollicite, qu’ils embrassent un genre de vie contraire au vœu de la nature. L’erreur ne dure pas; l’expression de la nature devient plus claire: on la reconnaıˆt; et l’eˆtre se´questre´ tombe dans les regrets, la langueur, les vapeurs, la folie ou le de´sespoir . . .’’ (p. 841) [There comes a time in the lives of maidens and youths when all fall into melancholy. Tormented by a vague uneasiness, their feelings wander about every thing and find solace in none. They seek solitude; they cry. The silence in convents moves them; the peace apparently reigning over religious communities attracts them. They mistake the first expression of their temperament for God’s calling them to him. And the very moment nature solicits them, they embrace a way of life contrary to nature’s call. The mistake does not last long. Soon nature speaks more clearly; it is identified; and the poor sequestered soul falls into languishing regrets, spleen, madness, and despair’’]. 18. See Jean Starobinski, ‘‘The Favorite’s Foot,’’ p. 63; Jindrich Vesely, ‘‘Diderot et la mise en question des genres narratifs,’’ Philologia Pragensia 27, no. 4 (1984): pp. 210–18. Vesely finds that Diderot’s narratives hinge on ‘‘la recherche de la ve´rite´’’ (p. 213). 19. Starobinski’s article on ‘‘Diderot et l’art de la de´monstration’’ discusses the ideological importance as well as the evolution of the word facts in the eighteenth century. (Recherches sur Diderot et l’Encyclope´die 18–19 [1995]: pp. 171–90). 20. Poe´tique 95, no. l (1995): pp. 23–46. 21. Indeed, the tale is carried to a mildly interesting conclusion, without any narra-

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torial epilogue, but instead with the subversive idea that the multiple spirits begot by Geńistan cannot be got rid of. They actually almost create havoc upon arriving together at Geńistan’s court toward the end of the story in order to demand recognition, their wings at once making it impossible for him to deny begetting them (p. 263), testifying to the lasting mark left by his subversive song, and hinting at the all-enduring and pervasive power of fiction. 22. Yale French Studies 70 (1986): pp. 151–62. 23. Dufrenoy notes that ‘‘La ‘de´gradation’ de la couleur orientale s’ope`re a` partir de 1742 pour se re´pandre dans les contes Cre´billoniens. Elle s’observe notamment dans l’utilisation plus que fantaisiste de la toponymie orientale’’ (p. 109) [The taste for oriental local colour starts degenerating from 1742 on and spreads into Cre´billon-style tales. This can be seen in particular in a widely inaccurate use of oriental toponymy]. 24. Ceci n’est pas un conte, Jacques le fataliste et son maıˆtre, and Le Neveu de Rameau are among the most famous instances of this challenge, both in terms of their narrative forms and in terms of the issues discussed within the frame these forms constitute. 25. Hence the statements, in penseé no. 41, that ‘‘Le temps des re´ve´lations, des prodiges et des missions extraordinaires est passe´’’ (p. 30) [The time for revelations, miracles and extraordinary missions is over], and in pense´ e no. 61, that ‘‘Les livres qui contiennent les motifs de ma croyance m’offrent en meˆme temps les raisons de l’incre´dulite´’’ (p. 39) [The books in which I find grounds for my belief in God simultaneously give me grounds for disbelief]. 26. Poe´tique 101, no. 4 (1995): pp. 503–18. 27. Similarly, John D. Lyons underlines that Marguerite de Navarre’s narrative dynamics is based on the telling and subsequent critiquing of the tradition of exempla (p. 151).

Sade and Nerciat: Marginality in Search of an Erotology Vale´rie van Crugten-Andre´

THE FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IS WITHOUT DOUBT THE CENtury of heresy and transgression, at least from the point of view of the Church and State. Philosophy turns the ideological certainties of dogma upside down and begins to reflect on the subject of power. Revolution dissolves the monarchy and abolishes (at least theoretically) the differences between the constitutive Orders of the Nation. In the cultural field, libertine literature, which is transgressive by nature, offers by way of its polymorphism a contrasted image of subversion and marginality. One of these aspects is to be found in the libertine novel of the second half of the century, a still undervalued and underestimated but fascinating and abundant corpus of works.1 Most libertine novels are presented as novels of an individuality, which explains the predominance of narratives in the first person. On occasion, however, an author does not concentrate his story on the same character, but opts to present a society of libertines. And it is this society, taken as a whole, that becomes the ‘‘heroine’’ of the novel. Its members share the same conception of existence, based on the cult of physical pleasure. Two writers distinguished themselves in this type of libertine fiction: the Chevalier Andreá de Nerciat, a little-known writer whom I shall introduce briefly, and the Marquis de Sade. Novelists of excesses both, they constructed a real erotology, which is reproduced from work to work. I shall draw a contrasting portrait of this erotology in this essay, through a comparative analysis of Les Aphrodites (1793) (and Le Diable au corps2 (1803), indissociable from the first), and of the Cent vingt journeés de Sodome. In these monuments, comparable and yet so dissimilar (the pedagogical didacticism and rigor of the Journeés3 versus the lively and contrasting scenes of Les Aphrodites), Sade and Nerciat manage to extract the quintessence of the thought, diffuse in all their other literary creations, which underpins their erotology. 230

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The search for absolute pleasure serves as motor for Sadean heroes as for Nerciat’s characters, but whereas the former find in the suffering of others a stimulant capable of bringing them to the ultimate climax, pain and death are excluded from the world of Nerciat: sensual pleasure is an end in itself and can under no circumstances put up with the negation of the individual. In spite of this irreconcilable difference, there are numerous detectable analogies in the conception of the two libertine societies of Les Aphrodites and of Silling Castle. Les Aphrodites have given rise to several studies and we could ramble on for pages and pages about the multiple content of this curious work,4 in which the author presents a sort of freemasonry of pleasure, a secret society of libertines. I shall limit myself here to broaching the novel from certain specific angles, which will bring to light the sexual utopia of the society of Les Aphrodites and link it with the community conceived by Sade.5 In Sade as in Nerciat, the libertines live in a world separated from the outside world, an autarkic microsociety with their own conventions and their own laws. Silling Castle is the symbol of this privileged space, closed in on itself, and protected from peering from the outside.6 The libertines are sheltered there from justice and can abandon themselves to all crimes and the most wicked deeds with impunity. Speech is left at the door of the castle, and the continuous narrative of orgies comes up against secretive silence. In the same way, the temple of Les Aphrodites is protected by a law of secrecy, well kept by Mme Durut [Mrs ‘‘In Heat’’], former madam, whose ‘‘strong sex drive [. . .] decided her vocation when she sought the painful, yet entertaining and lucrative job of concierge at the abode of Les Aphrodites.‘‘ Composed essentially for aristocrats, in spite of its ‘‘egalitarian’’ ideal, the society of Les Aphrodites is teeming with the cries and rowdiness of the Revolution at its very doorstep. Once inside this sanctuary of pleasure, the affiliates can give free rein to their passions and satisfy their maddest desires: Whatever tribulations wealthy members of our confraternity may endure, where I am taking you, at least, they will not be followed by their suffering. I want you to feel relieved of the weight of your sorrows as soon as you have crossed the threshold of our temple.7

Whereas critics are unanimous in seeing the prison world of Silling both as a projection of the very existence of Sade, his fantasies, and a

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sort of insula perdita where everything becomes possible, Les Aphrodites has been subjected to the widest interpretations, ranging from a simple accommodating society8 to the Edenic refuge where Eros is pitted against Thanatos. This at least is the position adopted by Jean-Pierre Dubost, who ascribes to the work of Nerciat a literary tradition of privileged, closed spaces. ‘‘If we want to put this contended confinement in a sufficiently large inter-textual perspective,’’ he explains, ‘‘we must think of the Decameron, the Heptameron, the Astreé, and all those great closed worlds, to these worlds of expressions [. . .] unfurled against a background of catastrophic events: plague in the Decameron, flood in the Heptameron, political upheaval in Les Aphrodites [. . .]. In all these closed worlds, the threat of death is conjured by the narration.’’9 This interpretation, which fosters the sociopolitical context that serves as a backdrop for the different snatches,10 as well as the date of publication of the novel (1793), is quite appealing, but formulated as such, it does not seem to me capable of explaining what an order such as that of Les Aphrodites represents in the reality of fiction. In his Preámbule nećessaire, the author took care to retrace the history of this community, also called ‘‘Morosophists’’ [foolishly wise]. He stresses the antiquity of the sect11 and explains that the revolutionary events have forced the members to dissolve the first institutions and to recreate it elsewhere. The ‘‘lascivious system and the capricious habits of Les Aphrodites’’ (p. 7) are considerably older than 1789: from the outset, they observed the rule of secrecy and met in a ‘‘temple’’ unknown to the noninitiates, a perfectly closed place where orgies could be held without causing a scandal. Under such circumstances, I find it difficult to accept without reservation the hypothesis of Dubost, who considers ‘‘Les Aphrodites both as an expression to an idyllic entrenchment, as a way to close one’s eyes and ears to the eruption of a new world order, and as a writing device to conjure the threat of death (all too real for an aristocrat living in 1793).’’12 I would gladly speak of an order of initiates, a society of libertines who have human relations with a shared conception and which find meaning for their existence in the unbridled expression13 of their sexuality. In the revolutionary context, the overvaluing of sexual prowess and physical pleasure, the foundations of the ideology of Les Aphrodites, acquires a new dimension, which can be analyzed, with Jean-Pierre Dubost, as a negation of external reality and a manifestation of the instinct of survival. Sexual prowess, as a vital principle, becomes synony-

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mous with energy and enables the protagonists to affirm their status as human beings. The mythifying of ejaculation and of ‘‘unloading’’ can therefore be interpreted in part14 as the epiphenomena of this will to exist by and through sex. Nevertheless, this hypersexualization of existence never entails a will to procreate. Vital sexual energy is under no circumstances put to the service of generation: the instinct of survival is not appeased in the same line as the self, quite the contrary.15 The text is peppered with remarks against pregnancy, that obstacle to pleasure, and with reflections on the usefulness of contraception. Through his characters, Nerciat draws up a real inventory of different birth control methods,16 which the protagonists do not hesitate to put into practice. This attitude of rejecting maternity is not rare in libertine novels, and that is why children are significantly absent among the characters. The rare exceptions to this rule can be summarized in scenes of pedophilia, where the child is perceived as a fully fledged sex partner, and in the first chapters of some works where the narrator dwells snugly into the first years of his youth.17 In Sade, the relation with childbearing is much more complex and exceeds by far purely hedonistic considerations. Always perceived as a degradation, pregnancy and, symmetrically, the relation with the mother, are probably the motifs in Sade’s writings most exploited by critics of a psychological or even psychoanalytical vein. In this regard, Les Cent vingt journeés de Sodome provides a summary of the mental and physical attitudes of the Sadean individual to the mother and the fetus.18 I. Brouard-Arends devotes an entire section of his work on Vies et images maternelles dans la litte´rature française du XVIIIe siećle19 to this novel. ‘‘This work,’’ Brouard-Arends explains, ‘‘holds the most significant characteristics of Sade’s approach to the mother. Les 120 journeés de Sodome reveal a relation to maternity, to the child, and to the foetus itself, experienced in the key of hatred, of cruelty, of moral and physical brutality. Maternal love does not really exist in Sade, and when it is present on rare occasions, it becomes the prey of merciless torturers, as in Aline et Valcour’’.20 And she adds: ‘‘The mother in Sade is actually a woman to be beaten, condemned and loathed in advance, who must be enjoyed before being put to death. We find in Sade the theme of incestuous desire, but treated to its extreme.’’ I shall not dwell much longer on this aspect of the Marquis’ prose, but this brief digression too makes it possible to illustrate the basic difference between the erotologies of Sade and of Nerciat. The first cannot conceive of pleasure without the affirmation of the omnipotence of the

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individual (which inevitably goes through suffering, the death of the other21); the second one refuses categorically a climax based on pain. Hedonism, the key word in the work of Nerciat, goes through the satisfaction of the partner’s desire and the climax of pleasure is attained in shared ecstasy. The society of Les Aphrodites is essentially composed of aristocrats who, in this period of revolutionary upheavals, find in meetings of the order an escape from the daily travails. It is impossible to remain silent about the equivocal vision that Nerciat presents of the nobility, parallel to the political ambiguity which he displays in all his works, and in particular in Les Aphrodites.22 Some critics have seen in the novel a nostalgic projection of a ‘‘lost world’’ where the aristocracy could enjoy all its privileges;23 others on the contrary see a critical discourse on the nobility, which is ridiculed and accused of irresponsible off-handedness.24 In truth, it is impossible to define with certainty the political opinions of this man whose biography is riddled with ellipses.25 Descended from an aristocratic Neapolitan family, Andreá was born in Dijon on April 17, 1739, the son of a counsel in the parliament of Burgundy. In 1759 he embarked on a military career, which he abandoned in 1775. He traveled until 1780 when, lured by the Marquis de Luchet, he joined the court of Frederic II of Hesse-Cassel as a librarian. He was soon suspected of being a spy in the service of the king of France. In 1783 he returned to Paris and got married. In 1791 he emigrated and apparently joined the army of the Prince de Conde´ . Once again, he was suspected of espionage. The political contradictions mount: in October 1792, he comes to Paris to negotiate for the life of Louis XVI, as an aide-de-camp of the Duke of Brunswick, and Apollinaire affirms that, as of September 1792, Nerciat was working for the revolutionary government (he moreover specifies that his two sons, Georges-Auguste and Andre´-Louis-Philippe, were grant holders of Equality). He then became a secret agent in the service of Delacroix (1796). He left for Linz, then Vienna, with a mission to negotiate peace between France and Austria; he is then found in Italy to second Clarke26 and, perhaps, also to keep an eye on Jose´phine Bonaparte. He then became the lover of Queen Marie-Caroline, but Acton, the official lover of the Princess, got rid of him by sending him off ‘‘to the pope as a representative of the Crown of Naples.’’ He was arrested in Rome by the French troops of General Berthier and was imprisoned in the castle of San Angelo for two years. Released probably in 1799, he died in Naples in the beginning of 1800.

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Always sitting on a fence, at times a secret agent in the service of the French court, at other times an agent of the revolutionary government or spy of the Directory, Nerciat had a chaotic political career that is difficult to interpret27 and is reflected in his literary works. Les Aphrodites contain the most contradictory statements and allegations concerning the political situation and the fall of the ancien re´gime. A clear position in favor of the persecuted nobility— The marquis had cause to regret above all the acts of barbarism against this poor French nobility, threatened with not keeping a farthing of its property, if they remained irrevocably under the rabid teeth of a people of murderous brigands who call themselves sovereign, equal and free (vol. 2, p. 169)—

was countered by an acerbic criticism of emigration (‘‘a spider web where so many noble midges have been disastrously entrapped’’) (vol. 2, p. 138, note at the foot of the page), or a virulent denunciation of aristocratic prejudices. Thus, in a scene that pits the duchess (who is indignant because she has unwittingly made love with a commoner) against Mrs. Durut, Nerciat underscores the absurdity of the prejudice of birth: Mrs. Durut: In spite of my great respect for you, Duchess, you will allow me to tell you that you are extremely straight-laced! [. . .] If this adorable creature were not, by chance, a petit bourgeois, where would be the harm? [. . .] Well, bugger all! (*28) [. . .] were he a hairdresser or a footman, ladies of the upper crust such as yourself would take him on their belly, without asking him to show his mettle. Wouldn’t it be really a great tragedy, if an honest individual, with no degrees, had a child with a duchess! As if herself could not undoubtedly be the daughter of some valet! (vol. 1, pp. 42–43)

Finally, the latter extract, in contradiction with the citation from page 169 (see supra), insinuates that the wealth, now thought to be deprived of, has remained in the hands of the aristocrats, the principal clients of the order: [Celestine, the sister of Durut, speaking]: I really admire that, although the world seems to be dying of hunger, we see our killed come here with their pockets full. Mme Durut—You would be even more surprised to see the gamblers, when we would play a game of cards; they are stuffed with gold. (vol. 1, p. 68)

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Such examples, taken from the sketches themselves or from reference notes that the author uses as a platform, are reproduced page after page and confuse the reader. That is why critics have such radically opposing views when they analyze the political thought of Nerciat. Nerciat has fun throwing off the reader, by involving him in a masked game in spite of himself, in which he (Nerciat) always wins. He uses irony and the derision of parody with such skill that it is impossible to determine the limit between sarcasm and the simulation of good faith. Kay Wilkins has understood it well and reproaches critics for not reading the novel with the distance that the multiple personality requires: ‘‘I believe,’’ she wrote about M. Cook’s conclusions,29 ‘‘that the evidence he adduces is rather weak and rests on a misinterpretation of Nerciat’s irony and also the writer’s desire to protect himself at what was decidedly an anti-aristocratic time.’’30 The ambiguity of Nerciat’s political discourse is present in the very foundations of the community of Les Aphrodites. Operating according to a code of laws it has laid down itself, the society enshrined the acceptance by all of a total equality between members and affiliates as an inviolable law. There is constant allusion to this sacrosanct precept, which is nonetheless flouted on several occasions. Mme Durut, who stands guarantor for the respect of house rules, utterly despises her domestic servants and treats them with arrogance,31 and the marquise of Le Diable au corps is reprimanded by her friend, the countess of Mottenfeu, for having flouted the principle of equality (‘‘Have you forgotten the statues of our confraternity? Are you going to perjure yourself by making any distinction based on birth, status or wealth?’’ [vol. 1, p. 74]). But the marquise does not budge, and although she likes being fondled by her footmen, she still treats them with that cold reserve conferred to her by the superiority of her birth: I find that we debase ourselves by letting these people see all too well that we make a certain exception in their case. As long as a domestic servant does not do those things with the persuasion expected of them only as a sort of body service, he remains in his place; if he gets it into his head that we love him [. . .] smugness sets in, and the wretch thinks he is at the same level as yourself and will let you down at one point or another. (Le Diable au corps, vol. 1, p. 85)

In fact, the egalitarian ideal of Les Aphrodites is limited to sex: once the orgy is finished, everyone returns to his place in the social hierarchy. The jockeys and other servants, whose virile potency is much ap-

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preciated by these ladies, gain access to the nobility only during the lovemaking, and K. Wilkins is right to underscore that ‘‘Nerciat evokes a fin de sie`cle aristocratic milieu in which sexual attractiveness acts as the leveller between the classes. But this leveller seems only to work for women. Lower-class men participate in sexual games and may well indeed be masters of sexual prowess, but they do not rise socially and become the equals of the nobles as do some of the females.’’32 In Le Diable au corps, one of the characters, Bricon [cunt bruiser] the ‘‘pedlarspy,’’ draws the same conclusions from his own experience: They are all like that: the ladies of the nobility especially. You’ve scarcely pulled it out, and from the demi-god you were in putting it in, you become a scoundrel, a dog. But what do we care if we have fun and earn some money. (vol. 1, p. 57)

This leads me to broach a theme of primordial importance, both in the study of Les Aphrodites and in that of Les Cent vingt journeés de Sodome: money and the motifs that arise out of it. In Sade, the theme of money is fundamental and is deployed in all of the marquis’s novels.33 The Duke of Blangis and his three acolytes are real potentates in the institutions they represent: the Sword, the Cloth, Justice and Finance, the four cardinal points of the State in the ancien re´gime. They are at the head of an immense fortune (‘‘Fortune [. . .] in gracing Blangis with immense wealth, had actually assigned to him all the movements, all the inspiration required to abuse it’’ [p. 26]) which they devote to libertinism.34 They really worship money, which enables them to feel that they are above the law and to find, day in and day out, new elements of refinement to satisfy their lust. They keep accurate accounts of their expenditures and draw up a detailed inventory of their daily expenses for the reader: ‘‘Two million a year were appropriated to the pleasures of the flesh and of lust’’ explains the narrator (p. 21), adding: In regard to his expensive dinners, it is useless to say that abundance and delicacy reigned supreme on such occasions: not one of these meals cost less than ten thousand francs and featured the rarest and most exquisite fare to be found in France and abroad. (p. 25)

Beátrice Didier insists on this ‘‘economic dimension’’ of Sadean libertinism: ‘‘The libertine lord of the manor is rich, otherwise he would not be a libertine. And Sade insists on the economic infrastructure, which

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is indispensable for this feudalism of pleasure where the castle is at once the image and the locus.’’35 Organizing ritual orgies requires a sizeable financial investment, and for the libertines of Silling, spending is one of the premises of the climax. Money is an instrument of power, and as such, it too is part of the juxtaposition of master and slave that governs human relations. Inside Silling Castle, the ‘‘social contract’’ is flouted every minute; the Duke of Blangis and his friends have raised the sophisms of their existence into an inviolable philosophical system. There is no room any more for traditional morality or for the respect of the individual; the libertines feel they are in the right to refute them in the name of their principles and their wealth:36 If all values and mechanisms are perverted precisely [. . .] there is only one mechanism left, which is reflected by the so-called normal world, without any alteration to its basic function: money [. . .] Sade always explains with extreme care the amount of income of the libertines, the source of their wealth, etc. The libertines often come from high finance circles, i.e., the wealthiest class in the Ancient Regime. La Duclos and some libertines of plebeian origin are an exception which nonetheless takes nothing away from the importance of money: on the contrary, these people have managed to acquire wealth through their intelligence and dishonesty, that others had come to easier through birth or their social functions. Money is the only value whose meaning is not perverted because it is itself already an instrument of perversion.37

This last remark is of capital importance for all libertine novels. Whereas in Sade, the theme of money is integrated in a very particular system of thought, it appears also in the other works as an ambivalent leitmotif38 the corrupting nature of which is always stressed. In Nerciat’s novel, money occupies an equally important place as in Les Cent vingt journeés de Sodome. If we agree to ‘‘de-poetise’’ the society of Les Aphrodites by disregarding the initiation rights, big speeches on the origins of the order, etc., we realize that it is actually a house of ill repute in which Mme Durut, who has experience in the trade, is nothing other than the madam. Critics have all too often bypassed this aspect of the work to focus on less pragmatic considerations that have made it possible to raise the discussion to a level of discursive abstraction. Whereas Les Aphrodites do constitute an attempt at sexual utopia, Nerciat nonetheless opted to make the society a house of pleasure where caresses received and orgies in which one participates are bought.39 To be admitted in the commu-

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nity, one has to pay a contribution and reward the liberalities of the other affiliates. Ce´ lestine and Mme Durut keep accurate accounts and, like good shopkeepers, look after the interests of ‘‘the business.’’40 In ‘‘The Eye of The Master,’’ part 1, the two appear in Mme Durut’s lodgings and are busy counting. Each has an expenditure ledger in front of her and they are checking the items. Mme Durut. Ce´lesline. Mme Durut. Mme Durut. Ce´lestine. Mme Durut.

How much do expenditures come to in your calculation? Nine thousand six hundred and eighty-four guineas and twelve shillings. A scale would not be more accurate than us; I come to the same total down to six pence. [. . .] Revenues? Ten thousand eight hundred and ninety-six guineas and eight shillings . . . and no pence. Smashing. Well, Ce´lestine, what job, what so-called honest business, could generate, with the same funds, a net profit of a cool twelve hundred and twelve guineas, five shillings and six pence while satisfying a number of small fantasies, the price of which is included in the expenditures? (vol. 1, p. 63)

They do nonetheless take care to dissociate themselves from the habits of a ‘‘brothel’’: The Marquis. Mme Durut. The Marquis. Mme Durut

I’m dying of impatience to indoctrinate Miss Violette . . . And you will . . . Violette? [. . .] (holding his purse). Gold for you, my friend. (refusing the money). Pooh! Where do you think you are? In a brothel? If what I am offering you was not going to be worth the price I put on it, there is nothing doing, my dear: if you do not like the object, then another will; it is your right as a brother, and my duty no less than my pleasure. (vol. 2, p. 91)

The nuance is spicy; the irony of the author no less so. Prostitution is therefore a daily phenomenon in the world of Les Aphrodites41 but, a not insubstantial particular feature, in Nerciat, it is essentially men who prostitute themselves or at least, who do so without the slightest doubt. Le Diable au corps is teeming with masculine figures (complacent jockeys and footmen) ready to sell their charms to a beautiful marquise. In Les Aphrodites, Nerciat goes as far as to reproduce a hiring scene,

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where the good Trottignac introduces himself to Mme Durut, bearing a letter of recommendation, in which the correspondent is full of praise for the sexual prowess of the dashing Gascon: You seemed embarrassed at times about supplying good lays; you do not always have the right stuff at hand for the job; here is a hot number you can have for a song; you can employ him in your establishment where he will do wonders: he was the stud of the county. The trollops and bitches in heat will pay a high price for such a workman. (vol. 1, pp. 107–8)

The world of Nerciat is essentially ‘‘gynocratic.’’ The principle figures are women endowed with astounding personalities and sex drives as ardent as men’s. K. Wilkins points out that ‘‘In other ways Nerciat stands outside conventional pornography and creates a singular world. It’s a world in which women, both as narrators and protagonists, enjoy unusual prominence. Not only do they narrate events as in Fe´licia, Monrose and Mon noviciat, but they are in charge of organising activities as in Le Diable au corps and Les Aphrodites.’’42 Consequently, this reversal of the traditional imagery of mercenary love illustrated in other novels of the same period—such as L’Anneé galante and Le Libertin de qualite´ by Mirabeau—should not come as a surprise. Nerciat does not hesitate either to speak about the prostitution of the aristocracy (already present in the prostitution novel), in particular in Le Diable au corps where the countess of Mottenfeu agrees to sleep with a man who has pox to earn some money: The Marquise. The Countess.

Are you crazy! It is obvious that he had the clap! Of the most advanced stage in fact. But just a condon (sic) . . . and a hundred louis d’or to be had.

I have finally come to the theme of the orgy which, for Sade as for Nerciat, is the organizing principle of the story. The repetition of the orgiastic scenes, ever tedious for the reader, reveals the erotology of the two authors. The orgies of Les Aphrodites reflect the organization of the community. They take us from the erotic to the grotesque, from the simplicity of nude bodies to accessories and other sex contraptions. In this sexual utopia where the motto is always All for All, pleasure is disorderly and frantic, and subject to the rhythm of sexual desire. In Sade, on the other hand, the orgies are orchestrated and ritualized (Beátrice Didier speaks about a ‘‘dramatic art’’ of the orgy) and meet the didactic requirements of the author. The instructional progression is at the core of the

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Marquis’s concerns who, as a good teacher, evokes first the most banal perversions and takes the reader on voyage of initiation ‘‘to the end of fantasy.’’ Criticism has said everything, or nearly everything, there is to say about the climax according to Sade, and Maurice Blanchot has managed to define very concisely the essence of Sade’s thought as expressed in all his work and principally in Les Cent vingt journeés de Sodome: ‘‘His philosophy boils down to interest, and then to utter selfishness. Everyone has no other law than pleasure.’’ Nature brings us in the world alone: I have to seek what makes me feel good without wondering about the repercussions on others. The enjoyment is in me; the crime outside of me.43 But whereas he accepts all excesses, Nerciat sets the suffering of the other as the impassable limit.44 Rape scenes are rapidly transformed into frolicking by mutual consent, and the only malice that the libertines permit themselves regarding the other consists of innocent practical jokes.45 The orgies of Sade and of Nerciat share the same esthetic of excesses and outrageousness. There is no need to go over the sadistic perversions accumulated in Les Cent vingt journeés de Sodome, so often studied. We shall simply stress their repetitive and hyperbolic nature, which exceeds all stylistic measure to become a writer’s habit. In his way, Nerciat displays the same shortcomings and tries to ‘‘outdo’’ himself on every page. The four thousand nine hundred and fifty-nine lovers of the Baroness of Mottenfeu are followed by the bestiality scene in Le Diable au corps (one of the women protagonists has sexual relations with an ass!). The same weariness sets in when reading Les Aphrodites or Le Diable au corps as when reading the lesson of the Silling libertines. Of course, the works of Nerciat do not provoke the same disgust as the sexual slaughter of Les Cent vingt journeés de Sodome, but they wind up exhausting the reader with the outrageous descriptions and verbal obscenities. Jean-Pierre Dubost, who has carried out a linguistic analysis of Les Aphrodites, qualifies the style of the author as a ‘‘libertine over-writing,’’ characteristic of works at the end of the eighteenth century: In Nerciat [. . .] this over-writing and its specific exhaustion are revealed by a certain number of easily noticeable (and quite remarkable) qualities, i.e., the virtuosity of the style and what the English call at this time ‘‘wit,’’ which the texts of the Athenaeum will soon revere under the term ‘‘Witz.’’ To Nerciat’s misfortune, however, Friedrich Schlegel had not read his works, and he found in the works of Louvet de Couvray what, in my view, is far more decisive and much more detailed in Nerciat—to wit, the virtuos-

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ity of style and the deliberate frivolity of the dialogues, in a tone of cynical naughtiness which is enough in itself to distinguish Nerciat from all other libertine writers.46

And he adds: The language of Nerciat revives here the blissful expression of the most delightful texts of the beginning of the century. Everything is in the art of periphrasis and allusion, of the understatement, the paradox, in a rhetoric all the more effective as it can mix perfectly retention with obscenity.47

This criticism pays homage to qualities which Nerciat’s writing does not have in my view. Those who have read Les Aphrodites cannot help making a connection with the texts of the first half of the eighteenth century and the evocation of the ‘‘art of allusion and periphrasis.’’ Moreover, the comparison with Louvet de Couvray, at least as far as style is concerned, is altogether inappropriate. I am more willing to accept the expression ‘‘over-writing’’ insofar as I give it another meaning. This term expresses the verbal exaggeration of Les Aphrodites, but also the astounding linguistic creativity of Nerciat, which is an undeniable writing quality. This author excels in neologisms, in fact, which give his writings an incomparable piquancy and enrich the erotic vocabulary with a specialized and poetic terminology. Although I cannot rally to the opinions of Jean-Jacques Pauvert and of Sarane Alexandrian, who consider the Nerciat of Les Aphrodites and Le Diable au corps as a virtuoso of style and one of the finest writers of the age, I am nonetheless aware of the capital importance of this author in the libertine novel as a whole (a topic to which I shall return). That is why I have devoted many pages to him and decided to compare him with the writer who comes closest to him while being his exact opposite. ‘‘The sexual scenes are the antithesis of Sade,’’ K. Wilkins explains. ‘‘In orgies, the whippings are not harsh and are relished by the participants. Incest creates no psychological problems and pleasure remains the keynote.’’ Variety and enjoyment are what make life worth living: ‘‘Abandon yourselves to all tastes, all whims, master how to seize all sensations: change the object of enjoyment every minute; only then will you have found the impossible.’’48 In the final analysis, Sade and Nerciat are probably the only authors to have developed an erotology the purpose of which is the absolute search for pleasure. Their paths diverge all too soon, however, and the ‘‘society of the friends of crime’’ is juxtaposed by the community of Les Aphrodites or Morosophists, ‘‘the society of the friends of pleasure.’’

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Neither Nerciat nor Sade will ever depart from their respective principles. Thus both novelists, who brought the libertine novel to the edge of what can be said, who carried it to the extremes of discourse, will never meet again, but will remain always irreconcilable cousins.

NOTES 1. For a complete study of the libertine novel at the turn of the Enlightenment, see my Le Roman du libertinage. 1782–1815. Redećouverte et re´habilitation (Paris: Honore´ Champion, 1997). 2. A. de Nerciat, Les Aphrodites [. . .], no name of publisher, 1925; Le Diable au corps, oeuvre posthume du tre`s-recommandable docteur Cazzone´, membre extraordinaire de la joyeuse Faculte´ phallo-coı¨ ro-pygo-glottonomique, Geneva, 1786. This is actually an edition published in Brussels in 1872 by the publisher and bookseller Vital-Puissant, who brought out numerous reprints of eighteenth-century libertine works. Le Diable au corps appeared posthumously in 1803 (the date of 1786 perhaps alludes to the first edition of the novel, although it is not clear whether it actually existed, entitled Les Ecarts du tempe´rement ou le catećhisme de Figaro). It features the same characters as in Les Aphrodites, round the Marquise and the Countess de Mottenfeu [Muff ablaze]. 3. There is a story for every day, followed by ‘‘practical exercises,’’ going from simple lechery to criminal passions, to end up with a real slaughter, the whole organized according to a didactic progression underscored by the subtitle: L’Ecole du libertinage. 4. Critics like Jean-Pierre Dubost have devoted several articles or extracts to this novel. For instance ‘‘Zwischen Intensivismus und Authentizita¨ t: Mirabeau, Nerciat, Re´tif ’’ (in Eros und Vernunft. Literatur und Libertinage [Frankfurt: Athenaeum, 1988], pp. 145–68) and ‘‘Les Aphrodites ou les bonnes affaires de la contre-socie´te´ libertine,’’ in Sade, Re´tif de la Bretonne et les formes du roman pendant la re´volution française, Actes du 3e colloque international des paralitte´ratures de Chaudfontaine (Lie`ge: Bibliothe`que des paralitte´ratures de Chaudfontaine, 1992), pp. 123–41. 5. In the same way, I shall always discuss Les Cent vingt journeés de Sodome in regard to Les Aphrodites. I shall not dwell on what the critics have called the ‘‘sexual pathology’’ expressed through the narrative, on the motifs borrowed from the Gothic novel, etc. 6. B. Didier has provided a very interesting analysis of the metaphor of the castle in the work of the ‘‘divine marquis’’ (Sade, une ećriture du de´sir [Paris: Denoe¨l, 1976], part 2, Le chateau inte´rieur). She insists on the obvious relation between this connoted space (with its secret and underground passages and its dungeons) and the depths of the unconscious, the universe of fantasy, and defines Les Cent vingt journeés de Sodome themselves as a castle-work, a closed place where desire is expressed through speech. 7. Excerpt cited by J.-P. Dubost, ‘‘Les Aphrodites ou les bonnes affaires de la contresocie´te´ libertine,’’ p. 128. 8. A. Dinaux, Les Socie´te´s badines (Paris: Bachelin-Deflorenne, 1867). 9. J.-P. Dubost, ‘‘Les Aphrodites ou les bonnes affaires de la contre-socie´te´ libertine,’’ p. 128. 10. There is constant reference to the Revolution and the Emigration. We shall return to this when we broach the problem of political ambiguity in Nerciat. 11. To be admitted among Les Aphrodites (who call each other brothers and sisters),

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a candidate must undergo a series of profane initiation rites. Several characteristics are reminiscent of what, in a wider sense, is usually referred to as a sect. 12. J.-P. Dubost, Ibid. 13. I use the word expression deliberately to designate both the act of speech (the works of Nerciat are characterised by a logorrhoea which stimulates the dramatization of the novel) and the effective fulfillment of sexual urges. 14. There is a clear preference in Nerciat for the erotic effect and for insisting on the ‘‘external manifestations’’ of the climax. Independently from the psychological interpretation that can be given to a novel like Les Aphrodites, it is worth underscoring the particularly hardcore character of the works of Nerciat. He himself is aware of this and indeed claims the right to excesses. Thus, in a word to the reader which interrupts the dialogue of Le Diable au corps, he cries out: ‘‘Reader, if you only like laughing, mild, and modest portraits, even in the most unlikely situations; if you want to be agitated without being aroused; lured without being swept away; if you set limits to pleasure, to whim itself; if you refuse to believe in their power and doubt their excessive means; if the extravagant results that may ensue hold no glamour for you, then stick with novels of the boudoir, to meek libertine curiosity; this book is not for you. To suit you, to be able to put up with it, you would have to be susceptible too to having yourself on occasion, le Diable au corps’’ (vol. 2, part 6, p. 209–10). 15. Les Aphrodites practice daily an extreme sensualist doctrine which can be summarized in a nutshell by the simple aphorism of ‘‘I come, therefore I am.’’ Childbirth, a factor of physical suffering and not of climax, is consequently excluded by implication. 16. Which P. Laroch does not shirk from labeling ‘‘inventories of an oriental bazaar [which] weaken the artistic tenor of his tales’’ (Petits-maıˆtres et roue´s. Evolution de la notion de libertinage dans le roman franç ais du XVIIIe sie` cle [Que´ bec: Presses de L’universite´ Laval, 1979], p. 139). 17. When a heroine gets pregnant, the author sees to it that the new-born baby disappears from subsequent narrative. At times, the mother has a miscarriage and loses the baby, at other times she abandons it in an orphanage, at other times yet she entrusts it to a wet nurse who is never heard of again. It also happens that once the pregnancy is announced, nothing more is said of the cumbersome offspring; instead, the narrative goes without further ado from announcing the pregnancy to the churching of the lady and her new adventures. 18. The attitudes are especially apparent in the terrible scenes where the libertines go after pregnant women. 19. I. Brouard-Arends, Vies et images maternelles dans la litte´rature française du XVIIIe siećle, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 291 (1991). The section devoted to Sade is fittingly entitled ‘‘Les Cent vingt journeés de Sodome: le meurtre de la me`re.’’ 20. Ibid., p. 361. 21. For Sade, the ultimate degree of the affirmation of existence goes through the physical murder of the mother. The Sadean libertine experiences supreme climax, the feeling of omnipotence, by imposing his law on the mother, this being who, in giving him life, condemned him to inescapable death. 22. We could also cite Mon Noviciat ou les joies de Lolotte, which proceeds in the same ironic vein. 23. Cf. P. Laroch, op. cit., p. 148. 24. Cf. M. Cook, ‘‘Politics in the Fiction of the French Revolution, 1789–1794,’’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 201 (1982): p. 270.

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25. The most reliable and most complete sources on the life of Nerciat are still the biographical essay of Apollinaire (L’Oeuvre du chevalier Andreá de Nerciat [Paris: Bibliothe`que des Curieux, coll. ‘‘Les Maıˆtres de l’amour,’’ 1927]), completed by the thesis of M. L. Toebbens (Etude des romans libertins du chevalier Andreá de Nerciat [1739–1800]). The lines which follow are based on these two works. We also borrow some information from the biographical note of Jean-Jacques Pauvert (Anthologie historique des lectures e´rotiques, 4 vols., [Manchecourt: Stock/Spengler, 1995], 2, p. 57). 26. Henri Jacques Guillaume Clarke, duke of Feltres, was a marshal of France of Irish descent. Considered suspect, he was relieved of his duties as chief of staff of the Rhine Army in 1793. Bonaparte restored him in the favors of power, and he resumed his political and military career until 1807, a year before his death. 27. Is it a case of instability, opportunism, real convictions, or simply the machinations of a disoriented aristocrat to survive? 28. The author adds in a note: ‘‘So sorry, dear reader.’’ 29. In his article ‘‘Politics in the Fiction of the French Revolution, 1789–1794,’’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 201 (1982): pp. 237–340. 30. K. Wilkins, ‘‘Nerciat and the Libertine Tradition in eighteenth-Century France,’’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 256 (1988): p. 235. My translation. 31. Furious at being on the receiving end of such aggressive treatment, the young Loulou cried out ‘‘The masters no longer have the right, I assure you [. . .] enough is enough!’’ vol. 1, p. 73. 32. K. Wilkins, op. cit., p. 234. 33. What I have to say about Les Cent vingt journeés de Sodome actually applies also to all the novels of Sade, in particular to La Nouvelle Justine (Histoire de Juliette). Juliette is extremely venal; she knows that money will enable her to go as far into dissipation and vice as her nature requires. Furthermore, money, prostitution, and libertinism are closely linked in this novel, as in Les Cent vingt journeés de Sodome. 34. The word is taken in its widest sense, as is the case in Sade. 35. B. Didier, Sade, une ećriture du de´sir, p. 23. 36. Friday dinners, for example, have four young women of modest background as victims, taken from their parents by means of crafty tactics and money. 37. B. Didier, op. cit., pp. 196–97. 38. Seen at times as an instrument of success, at other times as responsible for the fall of the hero or the heroine. 39. Once again, we cannot but detect in this option an additional sign of Nerciat’s irony. The society he depicts as a sort of Edenic refuge where the pleasure of each one is the ideal of all is, all things considered, only a love nest, a luxurious hostel of prostitution. 40. From the point of view of literary form, the incredible invectiveness of the chevalier de Nerciat has to be appreciated. He had a particular gift for neologism, and he enriched the erotic vocabulary with a specialized poetical terminology that gives his work an unequalled piquancy. He applied to the novels a series of writing methods pertaining to the theater, creating a new narrative genre, a hybrid which he called ‘‘le roman dramatique,’’ the dramatic novel. This excerpt is highly representative of this marginal form of the novel. For a more detailed analysis of Nerciat’s esthetic in the novel, see my Le Roman du libertinage. 41. It is as much so in Sade, but at another level. The ‘‘historians’’ of Les Cent vingt journeés are former madams who supply the libertines with the ‘‘personnel’’ of their or-

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gies. They are in charge of recruiting young people to submit to the whims of the lords of Silling Castle. 42. K. Wilkins, op. cit., p. 232. 43. M. Blanchot, Sade et Re´tif de la Bretonne (Verviers: Complexe, 1986), p. 13. 44. In his article entitled ‘‘The parameters of a period-piece pornographer, Andreá de Nerciat’’ (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 98 (1972): pp. 199–235), B. Ivker noted a single exception to this rule. This has to do with the relation of libertines to pedophilia. The heroes of Sade and Nerciat also like to have sexual relations with young children. Without any scruples, Mme. Durut sells to her affiliates the deflowering of young kids eleven to fourteen, whom she presents as nymphomaniacs and sex maniacs! (cf. Les Aphrodites, vol. 2, pp. 89–91). B. Ivker has shown that these are ‘‘young virgins of both sexes’’ which are more objects of pleasure than bona fide participants. And he adds: ‘‘Sade was more honest in naming the victims’’ (p. 204). 45. B. Ivker (op. cit.) reduces Nerciat’s sexual philosophy to three essential points: erotic stimulation must always be far removed from notions of love and feelings, encouraged by new sensations and, finally, in order to reach the paroxysms of pleasure, all apparent sexual distinction between sex partners must be eliminated. 46. J.-P. Dubost, ‘‘Les Aphrodites ou les bonnes affaires de la contre-socie´te´ libertine,’’ pp. 126–27. 47. Ibid., p. 132. 48. Op. cit., p. 230.

Olympe de Gouges: Revolutionary in Search of an Audience Megan Conway

A RADICAL DENIED BY FELLOW RADICALS, A PLAYWRIGHT MOCKED BY the actresses and actors for whom she wrote, a revolutionary silenced by the Revolution, Olympe de Gouges suffered enough rejection in her lifetime to have blighted a less resilient soul. The author of several novels, numerous plays, and a veritable flood of political tracts, she suffered the humiliation of being accused of illiteracy. An ardent proponent of Rousseau’s theories of natural law, Olympe de Gouges refused to recognize that Rousseau’s principles also limited the role of women in society to child-bearing and child care. Passionately concerned with reform and equal rights for all citizens, de Gouges was first a reformed royalist, then a revolutionary, then a federalist, and in the end believed that a constitutional monarchy would best serve France. Guillotined November 3, 1793, at the age of thirty-eight, she was condemned for political crimes although, as a woman, she had no political rights. The paradoxes of her literary and political career serve to illuminate a period of French history where the dramatic events of the Revolution have often overshadowed the ironies of reality. While the main intention of this essay is to examine her only work that met with a modicum of acceptance, a play entitled Le Couvent ou les voeux force´s [The Convent or the Forced Vows], it is impossible to proceed without some pertinent background information concerning this remarkable woman and her political views. Although death effectively silenced her voice and allowed her works to be completely marginalized and reduced to obscurity, during her lifetime, Olympe de Gouges was the Parisian equivalent of Oprah Winfrey. Her name was recognizable to thousands, she championed social and political causes, she adored and sought publicity, and she was criticized, loved, and hated by every level of society. Olympe herself recounts a story where she overhears a conversation during which the discussants are denying that she wrote 247

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her own pamphlets (B, p. 55).1 Not surprisingly, she insinuates herself into the conversation and gives the fellow a taste of her sharp tongue. Friend and foe alike wrote about her. Her enemies included Beaumarchais, Mirabeau, Restif de la Bretonne, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Charles Nodier, Marat, Danton, and Robespierre; her supporters, Abbe´ Gre´ goire, Marie-Joseph Che´ nier, Mercier, and a number of lesser known journalists. The citizens of Paris got so accustomed to seeing her placards plastered all over town2 that when one went up on September 21, 1793, during Olympe’s final imprisonment, the response was limited to the remark ‘‘Oh, it’s only Olympe de Gouges’’ (B, p. 172). Outraged that a female should insist on such a high profile, offended by her style, and choked by her output, her male political and literary competitors all but obliterated her work and her memory after her death. To a certain extent this was facilitated by the fact that as an accredited ‘‘enemy’’ of the Revolution, it was expedient to reject anything to do with her. Modern critics and historians have done little to resolve the cloak of contradictions that surround this controversial character. In Citizens, that masterful work on the French Revolution, Simon Schama remarks that Olympe was an actress, a comment Olwen Hufton repeats in her 1996 The Prospect before Her.3 Although Olympe was passionately attracted to the theater, there is no evidence to suggest that she ever set foot on a stage other than to harass actors whom she felt were not doing her plays justice. Given the disdain for actors that seeps through her writings, the reader gets the feeling that de Gouges would have been horrified to be taken for an actress—on purely artistic rather than moral grounds. Olivier Blanc does an exceptional job of gathering factual information about this extraordinary character, but he seems alone among de Gouges scholars in trying to present an objective picture of the woman. While most critics agree that she was born Marie Gouze in 1748 in Montauban, there is little else that about her that is not subject to some debate—much of which she appears to have initiated herself. Worse still, de Gouges’s own personality, endless energy, and her love of the limelight make it easy for modern critics to concentrate on the parts of her writings or political activities that tend to prove whatever thesis the critics have in mind. As a result, the casual reader of Olympe is left with such conflicting impressions that the woman seems perilously close to being a complete lunatic—an impression that her contemporaries were at pains to foster. She was or was not illegitimate—either the self-educated daughter of

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a butcher4 or the daughter of the butcher’s wife.5 In any case, she later decided to reinvent herself in a style reminiscent of Voltaire and Molie`re (both of whom she admired). The idea of being a bastard was particularly convenient given her life-long claim, detailed in her ‘‘autobiographical’’ novel Me´moire de Mme de Valmont, that she was the illegitimate daughter of the marquis Le Franc de Pompignan, a local aristocrat and man of letters. Although it seems likely that Le Franc was at one time enamored with her mother, he never admitted that Olympe was his daughter. In fact, he went public to deny her claims upon him in a carefully worded statement that clearly establishes his desire to be through with her but leaves some doubt after all as to her patrimony. At sixteen, she married a local restaurateur and caterer, Louis-Yves Aubry, whom she ‘‘did not love’’ and who was ‘‘neither rich nor wellborn.’’6 At seventeen, she gave birth to a son, Pierre, and shortly afterward (conveniently) lost her husband. She found little in the married state that made her desire to repeat the experience—she later refers to marriage as the ‘‘tombeau de l’amour et de la confiance’’ (O, p. 108) [the grave of love and confidence]. She never married again, preferring a nonformalized free union, and refused to take the customary title of ‘‘the widow Aubry.’’ Instead, she decided to give herself a new name more suited to her ideas (of grandeur) and chose the rather aristocratic name Olympe de Gouges transforming her maiden name Gouze and adopting one of her mother’s Christian names. Not long after the death of her husband, she and her young son left Montauban for good under the protection of one of her suitors, the eldest son of a wealthy bourgeois family. In some of her writings, Olympe hints that she was seduced in her innocence by this besotted young man. Whatever the case, Jacques Bie´trix de Rozie`res afforded her the opportunity to escape the provinces for the glamor of Paris and to gratify her desire to live a more upscale lifestyle. Her liaison with him lasted for many years and brought her considerable financial benefits. It appears that, since Olympe refused to marry him, Bie´trix sought to cement her affection in 1774 by signing over to her the yearly interest on a large sum of money7 plus covering the cost of her housing. Olympe took full advantage of her lover’s generosity even after the fire of their romance had gone out—in ten years she spent over seventy thousand livres of his money without touching the funds he had placed at her disposal (B, p. 32). She was shrewd enough to build up her capital, but her spendthrift ways and the ease in which she lived left her in debt when the affairs of the Bie´trix family went into a precipitous decline in

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1788, and in 1791 she was forced to sell several pieces of jewelry to pay her creditors. During the years between her arrival in Paris (the date is uncertain but appears to have been around 1768) and 1778, Olympe dedicated herself to ‘‘la vie galante.’’ At this time in her life, de Gouges was by all accounts (not just her own8) an exceptional beauty and, as marriage did not suit her plans, she capitalized on her dazzling good looks. Neither she nor anyone else makes the claim that she was ‘‘faithful’’ to Bie´trix. Although Jacques was her means of support and her principal companion, she had numerous lovers. It appears that she had another child— probably but not necessarily Jacques’—a little girl who died at a young age. Olympe never apologizes for this period of her life or for the fact that during it she enjoyed conspicuous luxury. Rather it is obvious that she considered this lifestyle as something of a necessity. After all, as she points out, other than marriage and the convent, what avenue of support was left for a woman? She was merely lucky to have been so beautiful and practical enough to have taken advantage of the fact. While her detractors will later refer snidely to her career in gallantry, they are generally compelled to mention her beauty as well. For some unknown reason, around the age of thirty de Gouges renounced her life of gallantry9 and decided to turn her attention to the realm of ideas. In what would become a pattern of behavior, she changed her lodgings to suit her new interests. She abandoned her luxurious apartments among the courtesans on the rue Ventadour and took up an equally elegant residence on the rue Poissonie`re, an area with a more literary bent. Here, she gathered about her authors, philosophes, and journalists, no doubt hoping to recreate something of a salon in the manner of one of her favorite historical characters, Ninon de Lenclos, a famous courtesan of the seventeenth century.10 An ardent admirer of the theater and the opera, de Gouges used her ‘‘salon’’ as a forum for discussing current plays, critiquing new authors, criticizing the performances of actors and actresses, and showing off her own lively wit. Here she also met the currently well-known author Louis-Se´ bastien Mercier, who soon became her mentor, perhaps her lover, certainly her friend. Besides a common love of theater and conversation, they shared an interest in ‘‘otherworldly ideas’’ (B, p. 41) including physiognomy and reincarnation. Olympe’s reputation as an original was further enhanced by the menagerie of pets she kept and endowed with the ancestries of unfortunate, former humans. De Gouges’s association with writers no doubt prompted a latent desire to become an author herself—part of the ‘‘heritage’’ she claimed in

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choosing Le Franc as her natural father. When she began writing is uncertain. Her first published work appears around 1785, but by 1784 she had finished the final draft of the Me´moire de Mme de Valmont and about thirty plays (!) of which she admitted that maybe ten had ‘‘sens commun’’ (B, p. 45). Given the amazing vitality of the woman, such production is not as surprising as it might seem. What is problematic, however, is the thorny question of her education. Endowed with considerable native intelligence, it appears that de Gouges was completely self-educated. Unfortunately, it is impossible to ascertain even what that simple statement means, for her very ability to read and write has been questioned from the time of her earliest publications. For the modern reader, these claims of illiteracy by her contemporaries result in no little consternation. It seems improbable in the extreme that her extensive literary output—she wrote over forty plays, twenty-nine novels and prose pieces, and more than sixty political pamphlets and placards—could be the product of someone incapable of reading or writing. De Gouges herself is not particularly helpful in the matter. She talks of dictating her work and at one point states that her imagination is so fertile that were she to have ten secretaries, she would be able to keep them all busy (O, p. 23). To make matters more obscure, as an ardent proponent of Rousseau, de Gouges stresses at every turn that her work is ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘simple,’’ ‘‘avec le de´sordre de la nature brute’’ [with the disorder of unrefined/rough nature] (second preface to Mirabeau, TP, p. 101).11 From details picked out of her own texts, de Gouges admits (and others affirm) that she had a strong meridional accent and turn of phrase thanks to her childhood in Montauban, that she wrote with difficulty, and that she dictated most of her work. The latter would have greatly appealed to her sense of grandeur, for many great authors had used the services of secretaries. Considering the breadth of her interests, the variety of subjects treated in her writings, and her slashing ripostes to printed statements critical of her works or deeds, it seems impossible that she could not read. These rumors are more likely the product of a contemporary effort to discredit her voice, for she inspired virulent hostility in many of her male contemporaries. However, lacking sufficient evidence, the modern reader can only conclude for certain that, at the very least, she had extraordinary powers of listening and memory. De Gouges’s hasty and careless style is, in a large part, responsible for her critical reception and peremptory dismissal from the early canon of serious writers. She believed that the ideas and content of her work mattered much more than her style and did not realize that the uneven

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and often sloppy quality of her prose alienated many of her readers who might otherwise have been in sympathy with her theories. Her works often contain apologies for ‘‘fautes de français, fautes de construction, fautes de style, . . .’’ (B, p. 44; see n. 65) [flaws of French, flaws of construction, flaws of style]. Unfortunately, they also reflect an undeniable egocentrism, for she habitually digresses from her thesis to make comments about her private life. In the midst of a serious discussion of political theory, the reader is often disconcerted by complaints about the problems of her private life (financial difficulties, her treatment by the Come´ die franç aise, her worries about her son finding a suitable job). This practice gave her detractors, including Beaumarchais and Restif de la Bretonne, ample ammunition to find fault with her writing and stigmatize it as something one might expect from a female who did not know her place. Or, as one of her contemporaries phrased it, ‘‘Si cette femme n’avait pas des fuseés dans la teˆte, elle nous dirait parfois d’excellentes choses!’’ (B, p. 97) [If this woman didn’t have rockets in her head, she would now and again say excellent things to us!] Olympe’s massive vanity, startling self-absorption, and carefully cultivated persecution complex overwhelm many of the various prefaces to her works and often require the reader to make an effort to carry on in order to perceive the very real originality that threads its way through the pieces themselves. This is undoubtedly easier for modem readers than it was for her contemporaries, who had her overpowering and abrasive presence to deal with as well. The rejection she often suffered was in no small part due to the fact that she was so undeniably obnoxious. When things did not go her way, or the way she thought they should go, she commonly resorted to heckling or to the law courts. It is typical of de Gouges that when she decided to submit her first play for production, she went directly to the most snobbish company in France. Surprisingly enough, the Come´ die franç aise accepted the play—submitted anonymously in 1785 with certain corrections. The history of the play, first entitled Zamour et Mirza and later L’Esclavage des Noirs [The Slavery of Blacks], is complicated and fascinating but rather too long to describe here fully. Suffice it to say that since the Come´die française had been enjoying royal privilege for nearly two centuries, it treated the canon which it ‘‘owned’’12 with great respect and new authors with very little. Women authors received even less. Both de Gouges and her play fell afoul of the powers at the Come´die, and the play was put off for years probably due to political pressure over the play’s controversial subject. Impatient to see her play staged, Olympe appeared at rehearsals badgering managers and actors, she wrote pub-

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lic pamphlets denouncing the company’s actions, and filed a lawsuit. Exasperated, the directors threatened her with a lettre de cachet. Not surprisingly, her subsequent submissions were regularly rejected. Despite such adventures, no one could accuse de Gouges of being daunted or lacking self-confidence: her temerity is startling even at a distance of two hundred years. Her outspoken advocacy of women’s rights is unparalleled.13 By October of 1789, she had proposed a reform program to the National Assembly that included ‘‘legal sexual equality, admission for women to all occupations, and the suppression of the dowry system through a state-provided alternative’’ (p. 124). Popular belief has it that she is responsible for starting women’s clubs during the Revolution. Although Olivier Blanc proves this to be unlikely, it is certain that Olympe did enjoy frequenting numerous Parisian clubs and cafes. She petitioned the National Assembly and gained permission to organize a group of women to march in the ‘‘Feˆte de la Loi’’ in June of 1792. Like her medieval counterpart, Christine de Pisan, de Gouges also advocated the education of girls. She had a sincere interest in the welfare of the underdog and the underprivileged and wrote about the plight of slaves and bastards believing that both should have civic and legal rights. Due undoubtedly to her own circumstances, she advocated the establishment of homes for unwed mothers and legal recourse to trace down recalcitrant fathers. Moreover, she fought to secure the rights of bastard children to inherit some of the father’s goods. Never at a loss for ideas to improve society, de Gouges tried to convince the National Assembly to establish a ‘‘caisse nationale’’ [national treasury] supported by free-will gifts from French citizens. An outspoken critic of traditional marriage, Olympe loudly supported divorce, fought against the vow of celibacy for priests and nuns, and thought that prostitution should be limited to certain areas of the city. Her most important political work, however, is the astonishingly ignored answer to the Revolution’s rejection of women in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.14 In September 1791, nearly a year before Mary Wollstonecraft’s landmark Vindication of the Rights of Woman, de Gouges published a brilliant pamphlet dedicated to Marie-Antoinette and entitled Dećlaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne. In the dedicatory letter, de Gouges declares her loyalty to the queen of France, but the tone is forthright rather than subservient. She calls on the queen in her capacity as a wife and mother to give her support to the issue of women’s rights and urges her as queen to aspire to the fame and glory that such an accomplishment would bring. The document itself is frankly and daringly feminist and deserves a special place in the study of wom-

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en’s rights. As Simon Schama states in Citizens, it is ‘‘a document sneered at then and since, but which in fact makes a telling and moving case for the inclusion of women in the totalizing promises of the Revolution’’ (p. 498). In her Dećlaration, de Gouges redefined the general will to include women and called on ‘‘mothers, daughters, and sisters, representatives of the nation’’ (O, p. 102) to constitute their own national assembly. At the end of the Dećlaration, de Gouges includes her alternative to traditional marriage, a ‘‘social contract’’ between the two parties. Politically, de Gouges began as a moderate royalist despite her revolutionary social ideas. She strongly favored the new constitution and celebrated Louis’s affirmation of the document. However, the royal family’s flight to Varennes completely shook her faith in the current monarch, and she became an outspoken republican. She ardently believed that change was both necessary and inevitable but could be effected peacefully. Violence and those who promoted it she found abhorrent. Although her political sympathies were aroused by the persecution of the Girondins, Olympe never declared an affiliation with any particular political group; her loyalty was reserved for ‘‘la patrie,’’ for France.15 Her own politics center around Rousseau’s ideas of natural rights, but she extends them far beyond Rousseau’s limited vision. In her independence, she reserved the right to criticize any and all. Responding to the September massacres of 1792, de Gouges wrote two pamphlets, one decrying the deed and affirming the innocence of the victims and the other hinting at Marat’s guilt in the mass murders. Never sympathetic to the aristocracy, she remained loyal to the abstract idea of the monarchy even though Louis Capet had, by his own actions, forfeited his rights to be king. Always anxious for justice to be served, when Louis XVI chose the aged Malesherbes to undertake his defense, de Gouges wrote a letter to the National Convention volunteering as a ‘‘frank and loyal republican’’16 to lend her services to help the venerable minister. The convention dismissed her letter without discussion, but it was published around Paris, where her temerity was met with ridicule and anger. Given her history, it is difficult to believe the offer was completely altruistic, for there is no doubt that Olympe loved publicity. Yet her offer helped put her very life at risk, and she knew it and would eventually pay the price. Little if anything in her life met with unqualified success. Her plays were mostly rejected out of hand or hissed off the stage and later published at ruinous expense out of her own pocket. Her pamphlets were ridiculed, her ideas for social reform rejected, her beliefs in the rights of women scorned by others of her sex. She shocked the majority of her

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male contemporaries who were uncomfortable in the extreme by her forays into literary and sociological areas that were considered masculine domains. Such unpopular public opinion combined with her unhappy knack for making herself detested cause the modern reader to conclude that, very likely, the malicious rumors like those of her illiteracy were spread to discredit her voice. Even her son, whom she refers to as ‘‘her only happiness on earth’’ (p. 86), hastily repudiated her views after her death. In the face of so much rejection and spite, the modern reader cannot help but be intrigued by the single work from her pen that met with a modicum of success and contemporary approval. In early 1790, the Come´die française had refused Les voeux force´s but, after a heated struggle, the newly founded Theáˆtre National Comique et Lyrique accepted the play. Renamed Le Couvent, ou les voeux force´s, it opened October 4, 1790. Between runs in Paris and the provinces, the play enjoyed an astonishing total of eighty performances. What was it about this play that allowed for such public and critical acceptance? After reading fragments of at least a dozen of de Gouges’s other works,17 which are generally intelligent, thought-provoking, and original (particularly when read without their prejudicial prefaces), Le Couvent seems all the more tepid, sentimental, and trite. Perhaps the play’s very conventionality was a major key to its success, for at the heart of the plot is the traditional boy-meets-girl, boy nearly loses girl, boy-wins-girl story. The play presents a rather sanitized, acceptable political agenda as well; it is openly anticlerical and criticizes the abuses of aristocratic privilege. Appearing as it did in 1790, such topics were suited to popular tastes, for earlier that year the National Assembly had abolished monastic vows, and anticlerical plays (even one written by Olympe) were the order of the day. Moreover, there was a demand for popular plays and Le Couvent met a market need. It is a measure of the paradoxes of the time that although Olympe herself was a professed atheist and the unredeemed abbess and grand vicaire are self-serving, venal, worldly, and wicked, the simple parish priest is the disinterested hero of the piece as well as the mouthpiece for de Gouges’s ideas about natural law. In truth, neither the playwright nor the audience seems to have been completely comfortable with the reversal of traditional religious perspectives. While critics lauded the play for its revolutionary spirit, they found the scenes imitating convent life and the young hero’s use of a monk’s robe for disguise very offensive (TP, p. 15; n. 28). As de Gouges found out again and again, old habits died hard even during the Revolution. The apparent villain of the drama, the marquis de Leuville, is the ar-

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chetype of the arrogant, immoral, egotistical aristocrat. His own son, the chevalier, describes his parent as ‘‘violent, despote, la moindre re´sistance a` ses volonte´s est une injure qu’il ne pardonne jamais’’ (TP, p. 45) [violent, a despot, the least resistance to his will is an insult that he never forgives]. We discover worse; many years ago, he killed his brother-in-law and rid himself of his sister by forcing her to become a nun. Now he is determined to constrain his niece to take her vows because he no longer wishes to be bothered by the memory of his nefariousness. Ignorant of the girl’s true identity, the chevalier has fallen in love with the young Julie, whom he has seen on a few occasions when he has accompanied his father on the marquis’ visits with the mother abbess. He knows that his father is responsible for putting Julie into the convent as a little child and he knows that it is his father’s order rather than her own volition that is forcing Julie to take her vows. Her beauty has moved him to admiration, love, and pity, and he is determined to speak with her and talk her out of spending the rest of her life as a nun. Equally determined to see Julie embrace her vows are the abbess and the grand vicaire. The Abbess’s concern is based on selfinterest: the marquis has threatened to cut off all Julie’s support if she refuses. The grand vicaire has no real stake in the matter, so his interference comes across as officious and vain. To him, it seems more a matter of power than religion. The determined young man enlists the aid of the comic gardener and enters the convent in disguise. In the end, the cure´, the new republic, love, and natural law prevail over the scheming abbess and the evil marquis, who has a change of heart and repents of his wicked ways. The extreme banality of the plot and its execution cause the modern reader to wonder if the prevailing masculine intellectual coterie somehow intervened to allow this (of all her works) to achieve recognition. How convenient for the status quo for Olympe de Gouges to be known during her lifetime as the author of the exceedingly mediocre Les voeux force´s rather than the high impact Dećlaration or one of her works denouncing slavery. Unfortunately, no solid hint of such a conspiracy can be scraped together by the modern critic. And although such a plot would have certainly appealed to Olympe’s love of playing the ‘‘victim,’’ de Gouges would never have perceived the joke for she lacked any critical perspective on her own work and undoubtedly considered Le Couvent as good and as important as her major texts. Admittedly, the play does have some ideological merit. In all her works, de Gouges never strays from at least one of her favorite subjects—politics, oppression, and feminism—and Le Couvent deals with all

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three plus religion which, for Olympe, fits conveniently into all three categories. In Olympe’s eyes, religion—particularly Catholicism—was politically incorrect; furthermore, in cloistering men and women, it fostered moral corruption and was a dangerous instrument of oppression mainly used against defenseless women. Her portrayal of convent life is particularly unflattering. When Antoine, the gardener who speaks with a comic meridional accent reminiscent of his creator, voices his scruples about helping the chevalier impersonate a priest, the young lover counters: ‘‘Crois-tu que ce soit la premie`re fois qu’un amant de´guise´ entre sous des veˆtements religieux dans ces asiles? Crois-moi, mon cher Antoine, il se passe souvent dans ces retraites des aventures que le public ignore’’ (p. 43) [Do you think that this is the first time that a lover disguised in religious clothes has entered this sanctuary? Believe me, my dear Antoine, there are lots of adventures that occur in these houses of refuge that the general public knows nothing of]. Placed in the mouth of the most idealistic character in the play, these words seem all the more cynical. Act 3 opens with a scene of gossip between two nuns, Sister Agathe and Sister Fe´licite´, who share the titillating news of a man in the cloisters. Soeur Agathe announces what had been in fact the truth since February of that year, that ‘‘bientoˆt ils n’auront besoin de se cacher, ils entreront librement dans les clottres; on ne prononcera plus des voeux . . .’’ (p. 74) [soon they will not need to hide, they will enter freely in the cloisters; one will no longer take vows . . .]. De Gouges makes sure that when Soeur Fe´licite´ assures her companion that she is dying of fright, the audience knows for certain that her trembling is caused by the very opposite emotions. The scene ends rather daringly as the two nuns assure each other of their physical beauty and Agathe claims that Fe´licite´ will have no difficulty ‘‘finding some chevaliers just like Sister Julie’’ (p. 75). Although the hypocrisy of the two sisters is softened by the fact that these attitudes are more ‘‘natural’’ than the those of the artificial life of the cloister,18 the character of the mother abbess has no redeeming qualities. She appears on the stage for the first time in scene 2 of the second act after a particularly touching and tearful scene between Soeur Ange´lique, Julie’s mother, and Julie, who for some unknown reason has been kept ignorant of the fact. Naturally, the image of her tender victims makes the abbess seem all the more cruel and hypocritical. Her first words to Julie make this intention quite clear: ‘‘Vous versez des larmes, ma soeur, c’est sans doute la joie de quitter l’esclavage du monde, qui vous les fait re´pandre’’ (p. 60) [You shed tears, my sister, without doubt

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it is the joy of leaving the slavery of this world that makes you do so]. Her use of the word slavery is particularly ironic, for it is obviously the oppression of the convent life not the world that Olympe views as slavery. When Ange´lique begs her superior to have pity on Julie and delay the ceremony until the girl is more certain of her vocation, the Abbess answers that a delay is impossible because the marquis has threatened to cut off Julie’s financial support unless she takes her vows that same day. When Julie offers to forego the marquis’ benefits and instead serve the convent by taking on the most onerous tasks in the house, the hardhearted abbess declares that even this would be impossible without a dowry from the marquis. When Ange´lique tries to intervene again, the abbess orders her to her cell under a punishment of silence and hints at heavenly retribution in the case of Julie. When the abbess appears again in act 3, she gives a fire and brimstone speech to the gathered nuns and recommends that they increase their prayers and redouble their flagellations, a suggestion met with something less than enthusiasm by the sisters. She stays on stage throughout the remainder of the play, trying to blackmail Julie into professing her vows when coercion fails. Meriting the audience’s ultimate scom, she even tries to thwart the law of the new republic, but is foiled in her attempt. Only at the very end and at the insistence of the renovated marquis does the abbess submit to a change of attitude. Although the abbess is on stage for nineteen scenes—longer than any other figure—at no point does Olympe encourage the reader to have any sympathy for this character. Although the grand vicaire appears in seventeen scenes, Olympe uses him as a figure of authority rather than religion. His announcement when faced with Julie’s obstinance that ‘‘Ce que nous n’avons pu gagner par la force, il faut l’obtenir par la ruse’’ (p. 78) [That which we have not been able to win by force we will have to obtain by trickery], is hardly what one would expect from a priest. Nor is his hint of blackmail to the marquis: ‘‘Il est dans votre inte´reˆt que le public ignore l’existence de cette fille . . .’’ (p. 79) [It is in your interest that the public knows nothing of this girl . . .]. The Grand Vicaire’s pompous intonation of religious platitudes is an attempt to regulate the status quo and maintain the proper social hierarchy. Thus his function seems more political than religious as he uses his position of authority to threaten the cure´ when the latter challenges Leuville. Even so, Olympe is much more interested in the grand vicaire as a dark presence rather than as an actor, an impression underscored by the fact that although he is on

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stage throughout the last two scenes—the deńouement of the play—he does not utter a single word. Above all, Le Couvent ou les voeux force´s is a political play, a platform for Olympe’s ideas about natural law and social theory. Her spokesperson is the cure´, whose understanding about how the world should be is clearly superior to that of the other characters in the play with a higher social standing, excepting of course the chevalier, whose love for Julie frees him from this stigma. The cure´ is the defender of the underdog, willing to challenge the authority of the aristocracy and the Church in order to protect the rights of an insignificant novice. In a wonderful line that reminds at least this reader of de Gouges herself, the cure´ excuses himself for butting in on the grand vicaire’s authority by virtue of his (the cure´’s) ‘‘character’’ (p. 48) and mixing in the marquis’s affairs by virtue of the ‘‘purity’’ of his intentions (p. 49). The cure´ argues with the marquis over the necessity of free choice and reasons that taking the veil without a vocation is an offense to the ‘‘Supreme Being.’’19 He goes on to assert that ‘‘La religion ne commande point d’eˆtre sourd a` la nature’’ (p. 50) [Religion does not command that one be deaf to nature]. Although the cure´ never goes so far as to say outright that profession without vocation is slavery, his vocabulary—sacrifice, joug, sacrifices, enchalner, des liens, barbare, tyrannique, condamner, enchainez, vendre, sacrifie´, barbares, enchaine, all found within the space of two pages (mid 49–mid 51)—certainly suggests this as a logical extension of his argument. Olympe’s own atheism did not prevent her from allowing the cure´ to be a defender of religion although his beliefs come across as far more Rousseauean than Catholic. He represents the purity of the people rather than the corruption of the aristocracy and the clergy. At the Grand Vicaire’s urging, Leuville tries to soften up the cure´’s principles with a bribe, but the cure´ is vulnerable to ‘‘ni promesses, ni meńaces’’ (p. 54) [neither promises nor threats]. He stands as the single presence impeding the will of the marquis, the cupidity of the abbess, the weakness of Julie, and the rashness of the chevalier. Nevertheless, the cure´ would not be able to emerge victorious in this struggle were it not for some outside intervention by the Republic itself. Small wonder that this play was lauded for its ‘‘revolutionary enthusiasm,’’ for it is the appearance of the commissaire that ensures justice and order. The commissaire himself is a two-dimensional, cardboard figure of no personal interest. Like the grand vicaire, who is equally devoid of personality, the commissaire is a representation rather than a true character. He stands for a better world where the innocent can be protected from the corruption of old powers. The dominion of the new

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Republic spreads even behind the convent walls, where despite the protests of the mother abbess, the commissaire orders the suspension of the ceremony. The matter is taken out of religious hands to await the decision of the lay tribunal. Even the frenzy of true love must bow to the order of the new Republic. When the distressed chevalier threatens to blow out his brains with his pistol, the commissaire politely takes the young man into custody. This control is momentarily displaced at the end of act 2, when Antoine rushes in with the news that the street is full of people. In an eerie echo of real life, the common people have gathered at the convent gates and threaten to riot if the novice is forced to say her vows against her will. Antoine begs the police commissioner to come hastily and establish ‘‘order’’ (p. 73). In the company of several soldiers and the chevalier, the cure´ and the commissaire exit together to go ‘‘calmer ce peuple agite´’’—a combination of ‘‘douceur’’ [gentleness] in the person of the cure´ and ‘‘se´ve´rite´’’ [severity] in the commissaire. Once discipline has been established outside, the company returns only to find that, in the absence of Republican order, chaos has resurfaced. The abbess, Leuville, and the grand vicaire have joined forces to bend Julie to their collective will using threats against the liberty and future of the chevalier as leverage. The lovestruck innocent is ready to sacrifice her freedom when the commissaire’s indignant entrance stops the action. At this point, the plot freezes in a momentary power struggle between Church and State, and Olympe switches the focus of the action to a contest between three female wills. The modern reader expects Olympe to weave a feminist thread into the plot that so obviously deals with female oppression, but as usual de Gouges baffles expectations. In the triangle of the abbess, Julie, and Ange´lique, there is no triumphant female heroine. Curiously enough, Julie is a rather spineless character incapable of seeing past the immediate moment. The cure´ and the lovestruck chevalier are more concerned with her future than she is. Swooning and delirious under the pressure of authority, Julie is ready to submit to the psychological blackmail of the abbess when the latter is blocked momentarily by the commissaire’s reappearance. In this juncture, it is the sudden entrance of a courageous—or desperate— Ange´lique and her shocking disclosures that allow for the resolution of the conflict. Julie is freed from the coercion of the religious institution but destined for marriage with the chevalier without a single word of joy or acquiescence escaping her lips. Since Julie has previously shown that she would give up her freedom to save him, perhaps de Gouges thought that Julie’s will had been clearly demonstrated, yet by the final

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scene, the reader wonders if our antiwedlock Olympe has decided to give in to convention. The abbess declares that she will henceforth consult the cure´ about matters concerning the convent, also something of a compromise since, despite his inherent good sense, the cure´ is a male authority figure. The play’s real tragedy, however, lies in Ange´lique’s fate. Even though the National Assembly had voted on February 13, 1790, to abolish monastic vows, very few nuns actually left their convents.20 With the best of intentions, not even as ardent a feminist as Olympe could tamper with the actual social order enough to save Julie’s mother. Having taken her vows, Ange´lique is doomed forever to remain a prisoner of the convent. Although the play was staged in October 1790, the version available to readers and scholars was revised and printed at the houses of two female publishers in March 1792, well after the play’s eighty performances. What differences there might be between the published edition and the actual stage representation is a matter open to speculation. Olympe’s preface relates the play’s turbulent history and provides the reader with several clues that indicate that indeed this might not be the exact production copy. De Gouges writes that she has given it ‘‘une nouvelle vigeur par un troisie`me acte, . . . mis plus d’action dans le dialogue, plus de purete´ dans le style’’ (p. 37) [a new vigor by a third act, . . . put more action in the dialog, more purity in the style]. However, near the beginning of the preface she mentions that early on, theater companies had asked her to add a third act. The title page of the printed version confuses the origin of the third act even further. It reads: ‘‘Repre´sente´ en deux Actes, et remis en trois au Theáˆtre Français, Comique et Lyrique, au mois d’Octobre 1790’’ (p. 35). Most probably, Olympe outlined a third act which was then added by a writer of the Theáˆtre Français and later rewritten by Olympe for the printed version. Far from showing herself pleased with the play’s reception—it was by far the most successful of all her writings—she uses the melodrama’s preface to chronicle her persecutions in detail. The document opens in medıás res with the comment ‘‘J’ai de´ja` prouve´ que depuis ma naissance je suis persećuteé; que rien ne m’a jamais reússi, et qu’enfin les vraies jouissances me sont inconnues, quoique le Ciel m’ait fait une aˆme pour en gouˆter les de´lices’’ (p. 34) [I have already proven that I have been persecuted since my birth, that nothing has ever succeded for me, and that true joys are unknown to me, although heaven made me a soul to savor their delights]. While the modern reader might feel at something of a loss, one can only imagine the field day her detractors had linking her ‘‘soul’s taste for delights’’ and her previous career in gallantry. She

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then mentions her troubles with L’Esclavage des Noirs and how her efforts in political and philosophical fields have been thwarted due to her sex. Never one to shy away from battle, Olympe has the audacity to name her real life source of inspiration for the villainous grand vicaire as well as those who engendered the cure´. She rails against those people who encouraged the idea of the play but who were too fearful to back the real thing. Such cowardice did not affect our author for she tells the reader that she took the play to the theater under the protection of the king’s brother in February 1790. De Gouges gives a detailed description of the play’s progress—or lack thereof—not hesitating to name names. Whereas these names mean little to the modern reader, the impact of her temerity remains undiluted across the centuries. Curiously enough, it is Olympe’s son who is responsible for the play’s appearance at the Theáˆtre Français, Comique et Lyrique, and for this he received no thanks from his mother. Poor Pierre probably thought he had done his persecuted mother a good deed, and in return she immortalizes him in her preface as ‘‘un e´tourdi’’ (p. 36) [a scatterbrain]. Without his mother’s permission, he agreed to changes in the manuscript on condition that the play would be performed without any of the delays that so infuriated Olympe. The play was a success, but when de Gouges returned from a visit to the country to see posters proclaiming Les voeux force´s, par Mme de Gouges et M. Labreux, her indignation was epic. In the first preface to her play Mirabeau aux Champs Elyseés (1791), Olympe mentions the scandalous effrontery of M. Labreux (p. 95). The preface to the printed edition of Le Couvent which appeared the following year, gave de Gouges the opportunity to launch a diatribe against M. Labreux, whose ‘‘theft’’ she deplores at length. Never one to pass up an opportunity to bring attention to herself, Olympe goes on to point out that not only has Le Couvent been stolen from her but that L’Esclavage des Noirs has also been plagiarized, giving birth to multiple offspring. In fact, while watching several plays at the Come´ die italienne, she has recognized entire scenes lifted from her work. From this evidence she is forced to conclude that her gifts must approach those of ‘‘des grands talents’’ (p. 37).21 Given the bitter, ranting tone of the preface, the reader is never sure exactly what is serious and what is simply scathing. Olympe did believe that she had great talent; her unfortunate experiences seem to have reinforced that idea rather than make her question her abilities as they might have in a person of lesser self-confidence. The persecutions she has suffered—which were shared by other playwrights22—seem to incite rather than silence

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her. Although she declares ‘‘je ne donne plus ni aux auteurs, ni au public mes ouvrages’’ (p. 39) [I will no longer give my works to authors nor to the public], which would no doubt have gratified a large number of her contemporaries, less than five lines later she adds ‘‘je vois bien qu’il faut que je . . . montre les dents si je veux reprendre ma revanche’’ [I truly see that I must show my teeth if I want to take my revenge]. If the reader is troubled by the dubious quality of this particular play, a few sentences at the end of the equally questionable preface are enough to inspire the reader with enough faith in Olympe’s abilities to continue reading this and other works. The small paragraph is a resume of her philosophy of life as a writer and activist, a mission statement, a jeu de mots, a critique of her enemies, an act of defiance. ‘‘Il m’a pris fantaisie de faire fortune, je veux la faire, je la ferai. Je la ferai, dis-je, en de´pit des envieux, de la critique et du sort meˆme . . . je vois aussi que notre vie n’est qu’un jeu, et que celui qui ne sait pas calculer perd toujours. J’ai appris mathe´matiquement a` vivre a` mes de´pens’’ (p. 39) [The whim took me to make my fortune, I want to do it, I will do it. I will do it, I say, in spite of the envious, in spite of criticism, even in spite of fate . . . I also see that our life is nothing but a game, and that he who does not know how to calculate always loses. I have learned mathematically to live at my expense]. No one can doubt her ability to turn a phrase. Unfortunately, her most brilliant ideas are so often masked and tarnished by a heap of accompanying irrelevancies23 that even her more congenial contemporaries—as well as readers of successive generations—lost patience with her. Today we can admire the genius of her political foresight and the courage of her outspoken activism, but in her own time the scattering effects of her boundless energy were easily attributed and dismissed as female hysteria. With her atrocious lack of tact and radical ideas, she upset everyone—from the crumbling powers of the ancien re´gime to movers and shakers of the new Republic. At a time when it was barely acceptable for a noblewoman to write sentimental novels, here is Olympe writing works of radical political and feminist content—and she was certainly not noble, scarcely middle class, most probably illegitimate, and definitely a courtesan. In a world ruled by a strict social hierarchy that the Revolution could shake but not completely shatter, traditional prejudices kept de Gouges in the fringes. In fact, all things considered, it seems nothing short of remarkable that Le Couvent ou les voeux force´s made it to the stage at all. Perhaps the conventional plot and a trite and sentimental finish were necessary in order for a play by a female author to be acceptable. Perhaps a male coauthor listed on the

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poster helped allay prejudice. Whatever the case, Olympe looked at neither element as a formula for success. Although she undoubtedly would have adored popularity had it come her way, her ideas and her love of ‘‘la patrie’’ were of paramount importance. Nowhere in her writing does it ever appear that she considered changing her style to suit her public. Nothing—not even two assassination attempts on her life—could stop Olympe from writing. Only death was sufficient to gag her. Even in prison awaiting her trial, she wrote diatribes criticizing the Terror in general and Robespierre and the prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville in particular. These were smuggled out, printed on eye-catching red paper, and plastered around Paris. When brought to trial, she was denied a lawyer (who would have had the courage to defend her?) on the grounds that she ‘‘had sufficient wit’’ to defend herself (B, p. 176). Numerous accusations were made against her, but she was charged with attacking the authority of the Republic in an uncirculated poster entitled Les Trois Urnes [The Three Urns] in which, knowing it was against the law to do so, she called for a public referendum to decide what form of government the French people preferred. It is a measure of her outspokenness and celebrity that the leaders of the Revolution could not tolerate Olympe’s questioning the legitimacy of the Republic. Most certainly one of the period’s most revolutionary and creative thinkers, the amazingly courageous Olympe de Gouges was sentenced to death and sent to the guillotine for political crimes that her sex theoretically precluded her from committing.

NOTES 1. The best biography of Olympe de Gouges to date is Olivier Blanc’s Une Femme de Liberte´s: Olympe de Gouges (Paris: Syros Alternatives, 1989). Citations from this book will appear in the text as (B, page). English translations are mine. 2. After 1789 she had placards of her writings published at the rate of nearly one a month. It appears that she herself bore the expense of having these published—often on red or yellow paper—and posted around the city. 3. Simon Schama, Citizens (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 498, 657; Olwen Hufton, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 462. 4. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 124. 5. Linda Kelly, Women of the French Revolution (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), p. 36. 6. Olympe de Gouges, Oeuvres, ed. Benoıˆ te Groult (Paris: Mercure de France,

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1986), p. 15. Future references to this work will appear in the text after the letter O. English translations are mine. 7. This sum was 30,000 livres, giving Olympe a yearly income of 2,400 livres at a time when the average daily wage for a man was barely 3 livres. See B, p. 31. 8. She writes of herself in L’Homme geńe´reux (1786), ‘‘une taille de nymphe, un noble maintien, un son de voix qui charme les sens et ravit l’aˆme, de grands yeux noirs, un tient de lis et de rose, une bouche vermeille, un sourire enchanteur . . .’’ (B, p. 29) [the figure of a nymph, a noble carriage, a voice that charms the senses and ravishes the soul, large black eyes, a complexion of lily and rose, a vermillion mouth, an enchanting smile . . .]. 9. Many of her contemporary detractors, several of whom are particularly vitriolic, claim that she had lost her beauty and turned into a hag. This however seems more spite than truth for reports of her extraordinary looks still circulate well into the late 1780s. 10. The salon of Ninon de Lenclos included such figures as La Fontaine, Racine, Molie`re, and Boileau. Among her female friends, she counted Mme de la Fayette and Mme de Maintenon. 11. All references to Le Couvent and Mirabeau are from Olympe de Gouges, Theáˆtre Politique, ed. Gisela Knoblock (Paris: Coˆte´-Femmes E´ditions, 1991). Since this edition is the only modern source for the plays and prefaces in their entirety, I will use page numbers for the reader’s convenience rather than act/scene. Citations to this collection will use TP. The English translations are mine. 12. All classical plays (i.e., those of Molie`re, Racine, Corneille, etc.) were considered the sole property of the Come´die française by royal decree, and no other company had the right to perform these plays. This sole proprietorship was revoked by law during the Revolution. 13. Joan Landes remarks that de Gouges shows herself to be exceptional in that she imagines a ‘‘female defined public space—the establishment of a national theatre in which only plays by women would be acted’’ (p. 124). I believe, on the other hand, that this is in fact de Gouges’s least exceptional idea and rather the inevitable outcome of the painful and continual rejection of her plays by traditional companies such as the Come´die française. 14. The Declaration did not guarantee universal rights at all—only white, French males over twenty-five who had had an established domicile for over a year who were not domestic servants or dependents of any kind and who had paid at least the equivalent of three days’ labor in taxes were entitled to vote in the primary electoral assemblies. 15. Blanc cites a wonderful example of her wit while endeavoring to explain her political views (p. 90): Quand on l’interroge sur ses opinions politiques, ambigues pour beaucoup, elle re´pond avec a` propos: ‘‘Les uns veulent que je sois aristocrate, les aristocrates pre´tendent que je suis de´mocrate. Je me trouve re´duite comme ce pauvre agonisant a` qui un pretre rigoureux demandat a` son dernier soupir: ‘‘Etes-vous moliniste ou janseńiste? —Helas, re´pond le pauvre moribond, je suis e´beńiste. Comme lui, explique-t-elle, je ne connais aucun parti. Le seul qui m’inte´resse vivement est celui de ma Patrie, celui de la France, de mon pays enfin . . .’’

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[When one questions her about her political opinions, ambiguous for many, she responds accordingly: ‘‘Some people want me to be an aristocrat, the aristocrats claim that I am a democrat. I find myself reduced like that poor sufferer at whose last sigh a stern priest demanded: ‘Are you a Molinist or a Jansenist? —Alas, answered the poor dying man, I am a cabinet maker (e´beńiste).’ Like him, she explains, I do not know a single party. The only one that interests me greatly is that of my homeland, that of France, of my country . . .’’]

16. Kelly, p. 80. 17. Some are available only in fragments due to the fact that her only collected works are subject to her modern editor’s extremely deplorable practice of publishing extracts under the guise of Oeuvres. Groult does not let the reader know that the ellipses in the text are hers and not Olympe’s, a natural assumption given the eighteenth-century predilection for the practice. The reader only discovers this by unhappy accident when reading comments about certain portions of the texts that have been omitted. Fortunately, Knobloch did not follow this practice in her edition of the Theáˆtre Politique. 18. The opinion that convent and monastic life was unnatural is common among the philosophes of the Enlightenment, as exemplified in Voltaire’s Candide, Diderot’s La Religieuse and his articles in the Encyclope´die. 19. Olympe is somewhat ahead of her time. Robespierre’s Festival of the Supreme Being does not occur until June 1794. 20. Schama, p. 487. 21. Olympe makes a similar claim in the first preface to Mirabeau: ‘‘. . . la noire calomnie que l’on a employeé pour empoisonner tout ce que j’ai fait de me´ritoire, seraient propres a` me donner de l’orgeuil, puisqu’il est vrai qu’on me traite et qu’on me persećute en grande homme . . .’’ (TP, p. 95) [. . . the black lies that have been used to poison all that I have done that is worthwhile would be enough to give me arrogant pride, since it is true that I have been treated and persecuted like a great man . . .]. 22. For example, Marie-Joseph Cheńier had similar difficulties with the Come´die française at the same time as de Gouges over his play Charles IX and had to take the company to court as well. 23. At the end of the document, her wonderful Dećlaration tumbles from the sublime to the ridiculous as de Gouges suddenly launches into a diatribe against a coachman who tried to cheat her (Kelly, pp. 37–38). This part of the text is left out in Groult’s edition.

Meat, Ethics, and the Case of John Wesley William Stroup

‘‘BUT

FOR THE UNFORTUNATE CHARACTERISTIC OF THIS ‘SELF-

indulgent’ age, in which ‘nothing is more common than to hear men warmly supporting a theory in the abstract without any intention of submitting to it in practice,’ we should all be vegetarians.’’ Thus wrote twenty-seven-year-old Mahatma Gandhi to the editor of the Natal Mercury in 1896, praising the paper for a recent article on ‘‘The New Science of Healing,’’ which advocated vegetarianism, and offering further arguments of his own along these lines. His letter included a list of famous vegetarians, the achievements of whom he hoped will speak for themselves as an endorsement of the cause: ‘‘we have the example of Buddha, Pythagoras, Plato, Porphyry, Ray, Daniel, Wesley, Howard, Shelley, Sir Isaac Pitman, Edison, Sir W. B. Richardson, and a host of other eminent men as vegetarians.’’1 The list is strange in many ways, excluding a number of famous names usually summoned in such a context. And it includes Wesley, which is a surprise, for he is not often thought of in the same context as the Buddha, or Shelley, or Gandhi himself. John Wesley’s voice is one of the most familiar of the eighteenth century. The following passage, representative of his method and beliefs, is from his Directions for Renewing Our Covenant with God: Get these three principles fixed in your hearts: that things eternal are much more considerable than things temporal; that things not seen are as certain as the things that are seen; that upon your present choice depends your eternal lot. Chuse Christ and his ways, and you are blessed for ever; refuse and you are undone for ever.2

This is not a passage one would expect to find in the context of eighteenth century heterodoxy. In its earnestness, its absolute piety, this voice sounds like the sober monody against which the laughter and curses of his radical contemporaries reached a rich cacophony. Though one 267

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could obviously cite John Wesley’s prominence as the founder and leader of British Methodism, which had by 1790 attracted seventy-one thousand members away from the official Church of England, this would be a narrowly literal interpretation of heresy. Wesley, indeed, labored tirelessly to defuse the charge of heresy against his movement, and a formal severing of ties between Methodism and the Church of England would not occur until after the grave forced an end to his administrative control. But John Wesley did something else—or, rather, did not do something else—which places him in a long and complex heretical tradition, and which finds a crucial aspect of his behavior resembling that of some people with whom he would otherwise be in sharp disagreement. As Gandhi correctly remarked, Wesley did not eat meat, and to deviate from this then-standard practice not because of poverty but because of a conscious decision was a radical act. What did it mean to be a vegetarian in the eighteenth century? What is a vegetarian? The word was not yet coined in Wesley’s lifetime and did not come into popular use until the first ‘‘Vegetarian society’’ was formed in 1847. Until that point, it was always ‘‘the natural diet,’’ ‘‘the vegetable regimen,’’ or ‘‘the Pythagorean diet.’’ But the contemporary meanings of this diet were multiple, as we shall see, and in some ways the case of Wesley is anomalous. Yet his example provides an opportunity to consider how the history of an idea has been constructed, namely, the idea of locating questions of the ethics of diet at the intersection of religion, social reform, and conceptions of the role and function of humans in the natural world. In the popular imagination, vegetarianism obtains the rare status of perennial trendiness, in spite of its long and accomplished history. The two major attempts to write a history of vegetarianism—Colin Spencer’s The Heretics’ Feast (1993) and Howard Williams’s unduly neglected The Ethics of Diet (1896)—survey a surprising range of writers from Hesiod to the present day.3 To write a thorough history of eighteenth-century attitudes alone would require sustained attention to a host of major figures who eschewed meat-eating and who also wrote about their motivations, a list including Bernard de Mandeville, James Thomson, David Hartley, Franklin, Pope, Richardson, Rousseau, Voltaire, Goldsmith, Joseph Ritson, and John Oswald.4 Most of these writers connected their decision to concerns about the ethics of violence, or to their revulsion at what they perceived as an increasingly mechanized view of all forms of life. These issues appear throughout the history of deliberate vegetarianism, but such protests do not appear in the sermons, essays, journals, or other publications of John Wesley: despite his own diurnal practices, the ethics of diet or

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the suffering of sentient beings did not present themselves to Wesley as matters for serious theological consideration. It is not my intention to accuse John Wesley of myopic insensitivity, for the possibility of animals having rights also fails to register as a major concern in the writings of such indismissable figures as Calvin, Luther, or Aquinas. Before the age of sensibility, moral objections to acts of cruelty towards animals were considered significant only insofar as they involved deleterious effects on the spirit of the person doing the act.5 The permission granted to Noah in Genesis, book 9, was read as unproblematic, not yet contentious in interpretation: The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground, and all the fish of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.

Absolute dominion of humans over animals was guaranteed under such authority. Wesley is every bit as literal and forthright in his scriptural interpretations as earlier theologians, but unlike them he also read contemporary essays that included arguments for the fitness of a vegetable diet for humans based on comparative anatomy. Moreover, he did not take this permission as a mandate and made disciplined habits of living a central tenet of his teachings on the enactment of faith. In 1714, at age ten and a half, John Wesley entered Charterhouse School, where the senior boys were notorious for stealing the rations of the younger scholars, specifically their supply of meat.6 Wesley’s stoic response was to go without meat rather than to seek to replace it, and he established himself as an indefatigable scholar on a diet of bread and water. This capacity for self-denial would become a key aspect of Wesley’s legend, celebrated by later biographers and sympathetic historians of Methodism. By the age of five, under the careful teaching of Susanna Wesley, he had already dedicated himself to a life of religious study. Total concentration on the spirit could only be achieved through denial of the body, and temperance became a characteristic form of physical strength which would serve him well in his travels as a preacher. When Wesley’s name is mentioned in later vegetarian writing, it is usually to demonstrate that such a diet does not rob the strength and faculties of its adherents, a point which apologists for meat always worry over, regardless of the evidence. A crucial difference exists between ‘‘not eating meat’’ and ‘‘being a vegetarian,’’ and to investigate this distinction

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allows us to see the imperatives behind both church historians who want to keep a careful control over which radical reforms their founder is associated with and reformist vegetarians who are willing to enlist any famous person to membership in their cause. To demonstrate this distinction, we must look at the source of Wesley’s dedication to a meatless diet. By 1724, the year he graduated from Oxford, Wesley wrote to his mother that he had just read Dr. George Cheyne’s Essay of Health and Long Life, and this work fixed him on his lifelong dedication to spare and temperate diet as the best way to remain in good health.7 Cheyne’s works would become a primary source for Wesley in his later attempts to disseminate medical advice, and Wesley continued to read works of popular medicine as avidly as he would theology. Cheyne himself plays an important role in any discussion of eighteenth-century conceptions of diet, especially as we discriminate between differing motivations for moving away from a meat-based regimen. Because Wesley adopted Cheyne’s ideas both in practice and in works that later appeared under Wesley’s own name, Cheyne becomes a major figure in Wesley’s story. In Cheyne’s case, rejecting meat began because of health considerations. His situation was, to say the least, extreme, and might even gain popular sympathy among ‘‘yo-yo dieters’’ today. A Scot who studied at Edinburgh, he came to London in 1701 at age thirty, took the M.D., and became a Fellow of the Royal Society, all this time in good health. Then the first of the enormous weight gains he experienced while on a meat-based regimen began. Howard Williams explained it this way in 1896: The manner of life of a medical practitioner in the first half of the last century differed considerably from the present fashion. Not only personal inclination, but professional interest, usually led him to frequent taverns and to indulge in all the excesses of ‘‘good living,’’ for in such boon-companionship he most easily laid the foundation of his practice. Cheyne’s early habits of temperance gave way to the double temptation [i.e., meat and alcohol], and by this indulgence he soon contracted painful disorders which threatened his life. An enormous weight of flesh, intermittent fevers, shortness of breath, and lethargy combined to enfeeble and depress him.8

This decline in health occurred in his mid-thirties, as he was just beginning his career as a fashionable physician in London and Bath, and he had not yet approached his maximum weight. In writings such as An Essay on the Gout and Bath Waters (1720), Cheyne advocated, but did not


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strongly adhere to, a vegetable diet. The turning point came when his weight reached the mark that made walking almost impossible: thirtytwo stone (448 pounds!). Finally, in 1724, at the age of fifty-three, he wrote about the diet that set him on a path to health, mobility, and professional achievement, and which allowed him to return from such a weight to live to the age of seventy-two. The Essay of Health and Long Life was his first widely read book, and in it he argued for at least a marked reduction in one’s intake of animal food, if not its complete elimination from the diet. In later works, Cheyne would advance his arguments with more force; in this earlier tome he discreetly encouraged his readers. The invitation in his preface would have obvious appeal for the disciplined Wesley, as Cheyne directs his advice to those persons of weak health who are able and willing to abstain from everything hurtful, and to deny themselves anything their appetites craved, to conform to any rules for a tolerable degree of health, ease, and freedom of spirits. It is for these, and these only, the following treatise is designed. The robust, the luxurious, the pot-companions, etc., have here no business; their time is not yet come.9

But he implied that the time would come for everybody, and Cheyne argued far more explicitly for the health benefits of a vegetable diet in 1740’s Essay on Regimen. These fortified beliefs would also become a guiding principle behind 1742’s The Natural Method of Cureing the Diseases of the Body, a popular work which John Wesley knew intimately. Over the course of Cheyne’s writings on diet, a pattern emerges, one recognizable in the vegetarian discourse of any era, and noteworthy for its absence in the work of John Wesley. This pattern finds the writer moving from whatever particularity persuaded him or her to experiment with a vegetable diet—in Cheyne’s case, a desire to lose weight; for others, identification with the suffering of an animal—into larger questions about the rights and responsibilities of humans and other animals, and about what the ‘‘natural’’ diet of humans should be and why. Two examples of this development in Cheyne’s Essay on Regimen should illustrate the point. It should not be surprising to note that the Essay on Regimen was not as well received as the milder Essay on Health and Long Life. As Cheyne was moved to reflect on the suffering of animals, readers became uncomfortable with their inherited assumptions about the absolute subordination of animals to humans. Such effects are evident even today, as many people who still eat meat can become seriously angry when they

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feel they are being accused of cruelty. Cheyne wrote at a time when animals, as livestock and as beasts of burden, were ubiquitous even in cities, so his investigations into the status of animals would have been profoundly threatening to his audience. From the tentative preface cited above, Cheyne moved on to more searching reflections on the meaning of a vegetable diet, and prefigured the intense debates over humanity’s animal nature usually identified with the post-Darwinian world: [t]he question I design to treat of here is, whether animal or vegetable food was, in the original design of the Creator, intended for the food of animals, and particularly of the human race. And I am almost convinced it never was intended but only permitted as a curse or punishment . . . At what time animal food came first in use is not certainly known. He was a bold man who made the first experiment . . . To see the convulsions, agonies, and tortures of a poor fellow creature, whom they cannot restore nor recompense, dying to gratify luxury and tickle callous and rank organs, must require a rocky heart, and a great degree of cruelty and ferocity. I cannot find any great difference, on the foot of natural reason and equity only, between feeding on human flesh and feeding on animal flesh, except custom and example.10

For a prominent physician to invoke the taboo of cannibalism is truly remarkable; it identifies this as the work of someone attempting nothing less than to discover a system for understanding the universe. Cheyne had been doing this since his early experiments with combining mathematics and physiology, but never with such risk.11 To mention the ‘‘rocky heart’’ required to feed upon flesh necessarily distances a vast majority of readers who exempt themselves from the nightmare of the slaughterhouse because they view such killing as necessary, even as humane. Moreover, any Christian concerned with the designs of Providence must account for the human body’s ability to digest food that is bad for us: another version of the problem of evil. The concept of meat as ‘‘curse or punishment’’ mentioned above is further developed by Cheyne in a second example from the Essay on Regimen, which Wesley read and accorded with in practice, though he never commented on its theological merits. In the second of five discourses ‘‘medical, moral, and philosophical’’ published along with the second edition of the Essay on Regimen (1742), Cheyne moves well beyond an interest in occasional menu decisions in ‘‘Philosophical Conjectures about the Preference of Vegetable to Animal Food: and of the End and Design of Providence, in Appointing the First, and, On Trial, Permitting the Latter.’’12 The balance in his title is


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ingenious: the conditional ‘‘permission’’ and the requisite ‘‘appointment’’ brilliantly temper the role of the analytic scientist with the cultural imperative for piety. Despite the moral conclusions that might follow from the frank acknowledgment of cruelty in the passage above, Cheyne’s interest is still primarily medical as opposed to ethical; yet he persists in his search for a unifying theory. Unlike true enthusiasts such as Shelley, he admits that meat has nutritional value: a moderate and small quantity of animal food, and generous fermented liquors, will naturally tighten, harden, and strengthen, give firmness and force to animal solids and fibres, and enrich, warm, and invigorate the blood and juices; and consequently, is safest to all subject to eruptive distempers, as Gout, Erisipelas, &c., in the Fits. But at the same time that it hardens and tightens the solids, it condenses and thickens the juices, and renders the animal of a shorter duration of life, and more subject to diseases.13

Cheyne finds a way out of this paradox of meat with a theological argument which John Wesley does not pursue. We can eat meat, Cheyne argues, because God ‘‘in his infinite wisdom and foresight’’ designed us to be versatile in an emergency.14 Moreover, in an argument for which I can find no precedent, Cheyne posits that God allows us to eat food that will harm us so that we don’t ‘‘sin infinitely’’15: our death prevents more sinning, and witnessing the misery attendant upon excessive meat-eating might ‘‘conduce moral improvement’’ in the living.16 Much of what Cheyne had to say about temperance sounds logical and familiar today, but these attempts at theology deserve a place in the museum of weird ideas. It is difficult to imagine how John Wesley read Cheyne so closely as to borrow entire sections of The Natural Method for his own publications without himself becoming obsessed with such enigmas on a moral and ethical level. Because for Wesley ‘‘things eternal are much more considerable than things temporal,’’ and nothing seems more blatantly temporal than the body and its intestines, he never wastes a sermon on the ethics of diet. But among his many publications was a work of popular medicine that went through twenty-four editions in his lifetime: Primitive Physic; or, An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases (1747).17 The first edition appeared five years after ‘‘the learned and ingenious Dr. Cheyne’’ published his compendium of home remedies, The Natural Method, and opened at random the books look almost identical.18 Wesley’s revisions of Cheyne reveal the different locations of truth for each writer: the doctor would not necessarily agree with Wesley’s dictum that ‘‘things

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not seen are as certain as the things that are seen’’ and tests all of his advice against the bodily systems he has discerned. Thus Cheyne writes that ‘‘the great secret of health and long life, lies in keeping the blood (and consequently the other juices) in a due degree of fluidity.’’19 To let such a purely physical explanation claim the status of a ‘‘great secret’’ is impossible for Wesley, who adds a ‘‘Final General Rule’’ for health to all of the advice Cheyne repeats in his prefaces. Wesley writes: The love of God, as it is the sovereign remedy of all miseries, so in particular it effectually prevents all the bodily disorders the passions introduce, by keeping the passions themselves within due bounds. And by the unspeakable joy and perfect calm, serenity and tranquillity it gives the mind, it becomes the most powerful of all the means of health and long life.20

Wesley particularly warns against ‘‘the slow and lasting passions, such as Grief and Love’’ for their ability to ‘‘bring on chronic diseases,’’ a characteristic addition for one who urged his converts not to marry.21 Cheyne died in 1743, but Wesley’s popular volume helped to keep many of his suggestions in circulation into the next century. In his prefatory advice on daily sustenance, Wesley recommends ‘‘plain diet, easy of digestion, and this as sparingly as you can,’’ a distillation of Cheyne’s longer remarks on the subject.22 But the overwhelming impact of Primitive Physic is of the benefits of a vegetable diet. Though hundreds of ailments—from earaches and insomnia to consumption and the plague—are addressed in Wesley’s alphabetized guide, his medicine kit resembles a cottager’s garden, plus a little milk, plenty of water, and frequent prayer. Of course, several of the suggestions in Primitive Physic are famously absurd, especially when a serious disease is underestimated—can ‘‘cold water alone, drank largely’’ really cure the plague?— but this is no less frightening than the most credible professional medicine of the age. The crucial matter for Wesley is always the practical effect of his advice, and many of the more startling suggestions are accompanied by brief anecdotal reports on their success, not present in the work of the accredited Cheyne. For example, these are among Wesley’s suggestions for curing consumption, the first of which would impress the most devoted deep ecologist: — . . . every morning cut up a little turf of fresh earth, and lying down, breathe into the hole for a quarter of an hour.—I have known a deep consumption cured thus. [. . .] —Or take morning and evening, a teaspoonful of white rosin powdered and


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mixed with honey—This cured one in less than a month, who was very near death. —Or, drink thrice a day two spoonfuls of juice of water-cresses.—This has cured a deep consumption. —In the last stage, suck a healthy woman daily. This cured my father.—For diet, use milk and apples, or water-gruel made with fine flour. Drink cyderwhey, barley-water sharpened with lemon-juice, or apple-water.23

The recommendation of a wet-nurse for an adult patient is striking, especially as the book is directed for use by both male and female patients. ‘‘This cured my father’’ may suggest a focus upon male patients, but Wesley also includes remedy for ‘‘Menses obstructed.’’24 Except for his urgings about the passions, Wesley is not interested in the moral status of any of his materials: he stopped recommending opium, bark, steel, and quicksilver from late editions only because he learned they could be unsafe. Moreover, he ‘‘omitted that which was, though cheap and safe, not so common or well-known,’’ especially obscure herbs.25 The idea is that anyone can use the book, and Wesley is willing to look anywhere for cures as long as his readers will have the materials easily at hand. Then why exclude meat? Besides the fact that he appropriated his initial set of remedies from Cheyne, no ethical or doctrinal reason exists. Yet its appearances are extremely rare, and he rejects the standard wisdom of the age by never advising people to feast themselves upon cuts of meat, just as he never did. Animals are used for gelatin (a concoction with ‘‘boiled cows’ heels’’ for consumption), for light broth (drink ‘‘the water in which a chicken has been boiled’’ for cholera), or externally (‘‘apply fresh beef to corns’’).26 In the work of a professed vegetarian, these would certainly be lapses, but in Wesley’s case it demonstrates his lack of doctrinal interest in the status of animals as food. Meat carries a symbolic value well in excess of its nutritional value; though the meaning of meat as a cultural sign has obviously altered from the eighteenth century to our own, in any age its most profound associations are those of gender. At least until recently, as Carol J. Adams argues in The Sexual Politics of Meat, ‘‘because meat eating is a measure of a virile culture and individual our society equates vegetarianism with emasculation or femininity.’’ 27 This makes the relation of Wesley’s diet to his function in the particular masculine role of clergyman especially complex. His light regimen does not exactly unman him because it becomes another aspect of his heroic dedication to a larger cause. George Eliot evokes this complexity through the words of Meth-

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odist preacher Dinah Morris. Near the beginning of Adam Bede, Dinah recalls ‘‘Mr. Wesley,’’ who ‘‘entered into his rest eight years ago’’: I remember his face well. He was a very old man, and had very long white hair; his voice was very soft and beautiful not like any voice I had ever heard before. I was a little girl, and scarcely knew anything; and this old man seemed to me such a different sort of a man from anybody I had ever seen before, that I thought he had perhaps come down from the sky to preach to us, and I said, ‘‘Aunt, will he go back to the sky to-night, like the picture in the Bible?’’28

He is at once the apotheosis of masculinity—a sky god—and physically feminized by his ‘‘soft and beautiful’’ voice. Such a combination may explain Wesley’s appeal to his followers, especially women, who were called by Wesley into the transgressive space of preaching. The example of Wesley allows Eliot to create in Dinah Morris a deceptively complex character, who disrupts the community by her piety, and whose assertiveness is effective in proportion to her self-sacrifice. This model of feminine virtue, who many readers find too sweet to be believed, builds her life and character in imitation of a man. Wesley’s singular power, his versatile appeal, can be seen more clearly when his personal regimen is considered in the context of other transgressive practices. The function of Primitive Physic must also be understood in terms of contemporary concerns over the professionalization of medicine. Wesley’s articulation of his disapproval shows him at his persuasive best, and his claims for the lay practice of medicine run parallel to his beliefs about the diversification of preachers in the Methodist Church. In a part of the preface, which appeared with all twenty-four editions, he asks: has not the Author of Nature taught us the use of many other medicines, by what is vulgarly termed accident? Thus one walking some years since in a grove of pines, at a time when many in the neighboring town were afflicted by a kind of new distemper, little sores on the inside of the mouth, a Drop of Natural Gum fell from one of the trees, on the book which he was reading. This he took up, and thoughtfully applied it to one of those sore places. Finding the pain immediately cease he applied it to another, which was also presently healed. The same remedy he imparted to others, and it did not fail to heal any [who thus] applied it. And doubtless numberless remedies have been thus carefully discovered in this age and nation.29

This might be considered the Aeolian Harp school of medicine. Clearly a degree of exaggeration alters Wesley’s rhetoric so that he can soothe


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and attract his readers with a positive model. Yet his argument continues on a more painful note, anticipating the future course of medicine. Since this time, he says, too many powerful doctors have filled their writings with technical terms utterly unintelligible to plain men . . . They represented the critical knowledge of Anatomy, Natural Philosophy (and what not? some of them insisting on that of Astronomy and Astrology too) as necessary previous to the understanding of the Art of Healing. They introduced into practice . . . chemicals such as [their own countrymen] had neither skill, nor fortune, nor time to prepare; yea, and of Dangerous ones, such as they could not use, without hazarding life, but with the advice of a physician. And thus both their honor and gain were secured: a vast majority of mankind, being utterly cut off from helping either themselves or their neighbors, or once daring to attempt it.30

The appeal of such a position for Wesley’s audience is clear, especially for women, who were often caregivers and responsible for nursing the ill. By the last years of his career, when Methodism became extremely popular among the working classes, such alienation of knowledge and labor was becoming more prevalent, and his book addressed an important need. What is crucial to note, however, is that by the 1790s Wesley’s rhetorical move of contrasting our currently deplorable state of affairs to a past model of communitarian values and healthfulness was becoming a standard argument in the works of such political and dietary radicals as John Oswald, whose The Cry of Nature appeared in 1791.31 Historian Keith Thomas has noted that ‘‘[i]n the 1790s vegetarianism had markedly radical overtones,’’ primarily because the appeal to a natural diet participated in the revolutionary discourse of natural rights.32 In seeking to ‘‘return physic to its antient standard,’’33 John Wesley seems to prefigure the reinterpretation of foundational accounts of diet and illness in Percy Shelley’s A Vindication of Natural Diet, an essay whose centrality to Shelley’s thought has recently been championed by Timothy Morton and Onno Oerlemans.34 Shelley makes his basic point immediately: ‘‘I hold that the depravity of the physical and moral nature of man originated in his unnatural habits of life.’’35 Like other vegetarians before and since, Shelley sees in the diet of the Golden Age a chance for society to reclaim its prelapsarian ease. Meat eating becomes a colossal wrong turn in this version of history; a horror to which we have become numb only through custom. This is similar to Wesley’s explanation of the fall of physic from its ‘‘antient standard,’’ which towers in virtue and effectiveness over modern custom. Yet here we must pause: how can the respective authors of Directions for Renewing

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Our Covenant with God and The Necessity of Atheism seem to be in such agreement? Wesley and Shelley are almost never discussed together, precisely because of such contrasts; yet vegetarianism may provide new grounds for such comparison.36 What we have, in fact, is not a concordance of belief between John Wesley and radical vegetarians like Shelley, but rather a simultaneity of practice. This difference is crucial and allows us to use Wesley’s example to draw distinctions among three types of vegetarian practice, each of which intersected with the dominant meat-culture of the age. First and foremost, vegetarianism for moral and ethical reasons—a conscious choice not to impose needless suffering—a tradition going back to Pythagoras and Plutarch and extending through Shelley to Shaw and Gandhi, and into our own era. Secondly, not eating meat strictly for reasons of health, as in losing weight or avoiding animal diseases. Some who begin in this category move toward the first as their awareness of meat’s prevalence in our culture increases, as was the case with Cheyne. Others become obsessed with bodily purity, as in the notorious example of Hitler, which defenders of meat consistently invoke to mock even the most salient claims for vegetarianism. The third type of vegetarianism practice is John Wesley’s: pure asceticism, the denial of the flesh, seeking temperance in all things. It is the first category only which we might truly call vegetarian in the ethical sense, the others are simply without meat. For Gandhi to name Wesley in his list of eminent vegetarians is, when we conceive of the term in this way, somewhat inaccurate. John Wesley did not eat meat, but can we truly say he was a ‘‘vegetarian’’? Wesley’s participation with the literature of popular medicine, through the example of Cheyne, and his proximity to the rhetoric of defenders of the ‘‘natural diet’’ leads to an inevitable conjecture: what would have happened if John Wesley had used his influence to make the virtues of a vegetable diet a key aspect of Methodism? Colin Spencer speculates, longingly, that its subsequent history might have been ‘‘more akin to Hinduism’’ than to other Protestant sects.37 Or perhaps Wesley’s message would have lost some of its appeal, as calls to change long-standing habits met then, as they do now, with anger, resistance, and sometimes justified annoyance. Yet Wesley embodies an illustrative tension: in a century filled with clergymen who did not practice what they preached, he did not preach about a key aspect of what he practiced. Had his directive to ‘‘Chuse Christ and his ways’’ included among these ways an expansion of radical sympathy, Wesley’s place of honor at the Heretics’ Feast would be secure.


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NOTES 1. Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 90 vols. (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1958–88), 1: p. 289. 2. John Wesley, Directions for Renewing Our Covenant with God, 4th ed. (London: 1787), p. 3. 3. Colin Spencer, The Heretics’ Feast: A History of Vegetarianism (London: Fourth Estate, 1993; reprint, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995); Howard Williams, The Ethics of Diet (London, 1883; citations from rev. ed., London: 1896). Spencer’s book is a readable general history which features careful attention to Chinese and Indian along with European traditions. His account extends to biological anthropology as well as cultural history. Howard Williams’s The Ethics of Diet is divided into fiftyeight chapters each devoted to an individual writer from Hesiod to Anna Kingsford, with references to other figures abounding. Williams’s evident goal was to defend vegetarianism from frequent charges of sentimentality by showing how frequently and in what serious company statements about the subject had been made. Like the great collectors of his day, he made his book into a massive compendium of source materials, linked by partial but profoundly learned commentary. A third book that deserves to be mentioned in this company is Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England: 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), which is of course not exclusively about vegetarian history but which places its precepts in the widest possible cultural context (see especially sections 3, 4, and 5). 4. Not all of these writers remained practicing vegetarians, but all discussed the problems attendant upon the production and consumption of meat in their work. Ritson and Oswald are now relatively obscure but, along with John Frank Newton, were key sources for Shelley’s subsequent essays on vegetable diet. For more on Oswald’s radicalism, see David Erdman, Commerce des lumie`res: John Oswald and the British in Paris in 1790–93 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986). A lucid discussion of Rousseau’s connection to this history is David Boonin-Vail, ‘‘The Vegetarian Savage: Rousseau’s Critique of Meat Eating,’’ Environmental Ethics 15, no. 1 (spring 93): pp. 75–84. 5. For more on the history of this idea before the age of Wesley, see Andrew Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals (New York: Crossroad, 1987), esp. chapter 2. 6. Samuel J. Rogal, John and Charles Wesley (Boston: Twayne, 1983), p. 12–13. 7. John Wesley. The Works of John Wesley (Letters 1, 1721–1739), ed. Frank Baker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 25: p. 151. 8. Williams, Ethics of Diet, pp. 260–61. 9. George Cheyne, An Essay of Health and Long Life (London: 1724); quoted from Williams, Ethics of Diet, p. 262. 10. George Cheyne, An Essay on Regimen (London: 1740), pp. 54, 70. 11. See Cheyne’s Philosophic Principles of Natural Religion (London: 1705) for an attempt to discuss religion and medicine through (nearly incomprehensible) mathematical formulas. The idea of equating culturally endorsed meat-eating with cannibalism lies behind Henry S. Salt’s memoir of a life spent working for humanitarian reform in England, Seventy Years among Savages (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1921). 12. George Cheyne, An Essay on Regimen, Together with Five Discourses, Medical, Moral, and Philosophical: Serving to Illustrate the Principles and Theory of Philosophical Medicine, and Point Out Some of Its Moral Consequence, 2nd ed. (London, 1742). Unless otherwise stated, all citations are from this edition.

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13. Ibid., p. 88; spelling and capitalization modernized; emphasis added. 14. George Cheyne, The Natural Method of Cureing the Diseases of the Body and the Disorders of the Mind Depending on the Body (London: 1742), p. 21. 15. Cheyne, Essay on Regimen, discourse 2, p. 53. 16. Cheyne, The Natural Method, p. 21. 17. John Wesley, Primitive Physic; or, An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases (London, 1747). 18. Ibid., p. xiii. 19. Cheyne, Essay of Health and Long Life, p. 23. 20. John Wesley, Primitive Physic, 24th ed. (London, 1792), pp. xxiii-xxiv. All subsequent citations are from this edition. 21. Ibid., p. xxiii. For more on Wesley and sexuality, see Henry Abelove, The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 22. Ibid., p. xvii. 23. Wesley, Primitive Physic, pp. 42–43; spelling modernized. 24. Ibid., p. 90; for ‘‘Menses Obstructed’’ he suggests that one ‘‘Take half a pint of strong Decoction of Penny-royal every night at going to bed.’’ 25. Ibid., p. xv. 26. Ibid., pp. 42, 40, 48. 27. Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990), p. 14. 28. George Eliot, Adam Bede, 2 vols., (1859; reprint, New York: Harper, 1945), 2 vols., 1: p. 30. 29. Wesley, Primitive Physic, pp. vii–viii. 30. Ibid., p. x–xi. 31. John Oswald, The Cry of Nature; or, An Appeal to Mercy and to Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals (London, 1791). 32. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 296. 33. Ibid., p. xi. 34. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘‘A Vindication of Natural Diet’’ (1813), in The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. E. B. Murray (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 1: pp. 75–91; Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Onno Oerlemans, ‘‘Shelley’s Ideal Body: Vegetarianism and Nature,’’ Studies in Romanticism 34 (winter 1995): pp. 531–52. 35. Shelley, Vindication of Natural Diet, p. 75. 36. A notable exception is Richard E. Brantley, Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1984), pp. 168–85. Brantley demonstrates how the epistemological tensions in ‘‘The Defence of Poetry,’’ ‘‘Mont Blanc,’’ and ‘‘Adonais’’ can be understood in terms of Wesley’s influential version of a spiritualized interpretation of Locke. 37. Spencer, The Heretics’ Feast, p. 226.

Suggestions for Further Reading BECAUSE

THIS VOLUME ENLISTS SCHOLARSHIP FROM NUMEROUS

fields to examine orthodoxy and heresy in eighteenth-century society, it offers readers the opportunity to look at the topic through a greater variety of lenses than are likely to be familiar to any one person. Although this multidisciplinary approach has the advantage of enriching our understanding of the subject under study, as well as of ways to pursue the inquiry, it may also have the disadvantage of leaving us insufficiently oriented to the details of each case or discipline. To provide a bit more guidance, the contributors have singled out some studies that may be particularly helpful for readers wishing to look further into the matter or field of each essay. Their recommendations are listed below, in the order of the essays in the volume.

INTRODUCTION Alexander, Jeffrey C., ed. Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Karen E. Fields. New York and London: Free Press, 1995. Etzioni, Amitai. ‘‘Toward a Theory of Public Ritual.’’ Sociological Theory 18, no. 1 (2000): pp. 44–59. Mestrovic, Stjepan. Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988. Nielsen, Donald. Three Faces of God: Society, Religion, and the Categories of Totality in the Philosophy of Emile Durkheim. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE: GUIDES TO LONDON’S TRANSGRESSIVE SPACES Corfield, P. J. ‘‘Walking the Streets: The Urban Odyssey in Eighteenth-Century England.’’ Journal of Urban History 16 (1990): pp. 132–74. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Kendall. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988.

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SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Le Febvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994. Rasmussen, Steen. London: The Unique City. 1934. Reprint Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967. Rogers, Pat. Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture. London: Methuen, 1972.

SEDITION, VICE, AND ATHEISM: THE LIMITS OF TOLERATION AND THE ORTHODOX ATTACK ON RATIONAL RELIGION IN LATE-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Gibson, William. Church, State, and Society, 1760–1850. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Haakonssen, Knud, ed. Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hempton, David. Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland from the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hole, Robert. Pulpits, Politics, and Public Order in England, 1760–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Ward, W. R. Religion and Society in England, 1790–1850. London: Batsford, 1972.

BREAKING ALL THE RULES: THE WORSLEY AFFAIR IN LATE-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992. Donald, Diana. The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. Langford, Paul. A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Penney, Nicholas, ed. Reynolds. London: British Museum, 1986. Russell, Gillian. The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Stone, Lawrence. Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England, 1660–1857. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

PLAGUED BY ENTHUSIASM: SWIFT’S FEAR OF INFECTIOUS DISSENT AND HIS ARGUMENT AGAINST ABOLISHING CHRISTIAN QUARANTINE IN A TALE OF A TUB Canavan, Thomas L. ‘‘Robert Burton, Jonathan Swift, and the Tradition of AntiPuritan Invective.’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973): pp. 227–42.


283

Craven, Kenneth. Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness: The Information Age in Swift’s ‘‘A Tale of a Tub.’’ Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992. DePorte, Michael V. ‘‘The Road to St. Patrick’s: Swift and the Problem of Belief.’’ Swift Studies 8 (1993): pp. 5–17. Harth, Phillip. Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of ‘‘A Tale of a Tub.’’ Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Reilly, Patrick. Jonathan Swift: The Brave Desponder. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.

APOCALYPSE THEN: POPE AND THE PROPHETS OF DULNESS Capp, Bernard. English Almanacs 1500–1800: Astrology and the Popular Press. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Schwartz, Hillel. The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in EighteenthCentury England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Stocker, Margarita. Apocalyptic Marvell: The Second Coming in Seventeenth-Century Poetry. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

JUNIUS: AN ORTHODOX REBEL Cannon, John, ed. The Letters of Junius. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Chambers, Sir Robert. A Course of Lectures on the English Law. Delivered at the University of Oxford 1767–1773, and Composed in Association with Samuel Johnson. Ed. Thomas M. Curley. 2 vols. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. Cordasco, Francesco. Junius: A Biography of the Letters of Junius. Fairview, NJ: Junius Vaughn Press, 1986. Katritzky, Linde. Johnson and ‘‘The Letters of Junius.’’ New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Rude´, George. Wilkes and Liberty. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1962.

SIMON JAILLOT: SCULPTOR, PAMPHLETEER, OUTCAST Benhamou, Reed. ‘‘Public and Private Art Education in France, 1648–1793.’’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 108 (1993): pp. 1–183. Fontaine, Andre´. Acade´miciens d’autrefois. Paris: Laurens, 1914. Montagu, Jennifer. The Expression of the Passions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Sedgwick, Alexander. Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977.

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Teysse`dre, Bernard. Roger de Piles et les de´bats sur le coloris au sie`cle de Louis XIV. Paris: Bibliothe`que des Arts, 1957.

THE GNOSTIC CLARISSA Bentley, Layton. The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation. London: SCM Press, 1987. Hoffman, Daniel L. The Status of Women in Gnosticism and in Irenaeus and Tertullian. Vol. 36. Studies in Women and Religion. Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen, 1995. [This work may be seen as corrective of Pagels’s (entry below) optimistic view of the topic.] Jung, C. G. Psychology and Alchemy. Vol. 12. Collected Works. 2nd ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Random House, 1979. [Readers are advised to be cautious about accepting Pagels’s optimistic view of women and Gnosticism; it is best balanced by attention to Hoffman’s work (entry above).]

EROS HERETIC: TRANSGRESSION GENERIC AND RELIGIOUS IN AND OUT OF DIDEROT’S L’OISEAU BLANC, CONTE BLEU Brewer, Daniel. The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot’s Art of Philosophizing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Kavanagh, Thomas. ‘‘The Language of Deception in Les Bijoux indiscrets.’’ Diderot Studies 23 (1988): pp. 101–13. Lloyd, Caryl. ‘‘Illusion and Seduction: Diderot’s Rejection of Traditional Authority in Works Prior to Le Neveu de Rameau.’’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 228 (1984): pp. 179–93. Shusterman, Ronald. ‘‘Fiction, connaissance, e´piste´mologie.’’ Poe´tique 101, no. 4 (1995): pp. 503–18. Starobinski, Jean. ‘‘Le pied de la favorite: Diderot et les perceptions meˆleés.’’ L’Esprit creáteur 24, no. 2 (1984): pp. 62–72. Vartanian, Aram. ‘‘Erotisme et philosophie chez Diderot.’’ Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Etudes Françaises 13 (1961): pp. 367–90.

SADE AND NERCIAT: MARGINALITY IN SEARCH OF AN EROTOLOGY Apollinaire. L’oeuvre du chevalier Andrea de Nerciat. Paris: Bibliothe´que des Curieux, Coll. Les Maıˆtres de l’amour, 1927. Delon, M. ‘‘Rupture et transitions dans les romans libertins a` la fin de l’Ancien Re´gime: Louvet et Nerciat.’’ Signes du roman, signes de la transition. Ed. J. Bessie`re, pp. 105–15. Paris: P. U. F., 1986. Hunt, L. A. The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity. New York: Zone Book, 1993.


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Lever, M. Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade. Paris: Fayard, 1991. Sade. Re´tif de la Bretonne et les formes du roman pendant la Re´volution française. Actes du 3e colloque international des paralitte´ratures de Chaudfontaine. Lie`ge: Bibliothe`que des Paralitte´ratuares de Chaudfontaine, 1992. van Crugten-Andre´, V. Le roman du libertinage, 1782–1815: Redećouverte et rehabilitation. Paris: H. Champion, 1997.

OLYMPE DE GOUGES: REVOLUTIONARY IN SEARCH OF AN AUDIENCE Blanc, Olivier. Une Femme de Liberte´s: Olympe de Gouges. Paris: Syros Alternatives, 1989. Noack, Paul. Olympe de Gouges. Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1993. [There are no books exclusively on de Gouges in English. The following are the most helpful, albeit sometimes misleading, sources in English:] Kelly, Linda. Women of the French Revolution. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989. Landes, Joan. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Trouille, Mary Seidman. Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997.

MEAT, ETHICS, AND THE CASE OF JOHN WESLEY Abelove, Henry. The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Brantley, Richard E. Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1984. Linzey, Andrew. Animal Theology. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Spencer, Colin. The Heretics’ Feast: A History of Vegetarianism. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995. Walters, Kerry, and Lisa Portmess, eds. Ethical Vegetarianism: From Pythagoras to Peter Singer. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Notes on Contributors JOHN BRUCE is Assistant Professor of Language and Literature at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in Chickasha, Oklahoma. A recent recipient of the Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow (Scotland), he has published articles on Washington Irving and Milton. ISABELLE CASSAGNE DEMARTE, Assistant Professor of French at the University of North Texas at Denton, is pursuing a study (a reworking of her dissertation titled ‘‘When the Curtain Rises on Convention: Diderot and the Problematic of Literary Genres’’) of the pervasive influence of fiction on Diderot’s works. Her paper on ‘‘Religions, Science, and ‘Fictions’ around the Encyclope´die,’’ presented at the Second International Conference on Breaking Barriers: Literature and Emerging Issues, University of Maryland—Princess Anne, appeared in the Conference Proceedings in October 1998. She has also given presentations on Diderot at conferences of the American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies. MEGAN CONWAY is Professor of French at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. Her major areas of research are anticlericalism in eighteenth-century France and the early French Renaissance. Her latest article is ‘‘Christianity and Classicism in He´lisenne de Crenne’s Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours’’ in the Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 18 (1997): pp. 111–31. She is currently working on a book about four women authors of the French Renaissance and an article on Olympe de Gouges’ political writings. MARGARET ANNE DOODY has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, and Vanderbilt, where she was Director of the Comparative Literature Program (1992–99). She is now the John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of a number of works, including Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (1988) and The True Story of the Novel (1996), as well as the novel Aristotle Detective (1978). 286

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287

CAROL HOULIHAN FLYNN, Professor of English at Tufts University, has published numerous scholarly studies, including Samuel Richardson, A Man of Letters (1982) and The Body in Swift and Defoe (1990), along with the novel Washed in the Blood (1983). She has recently coedited (with Edward Copeland) a volume of essays for the ‘‘Clarissa Project’’ (1999), and she is currently writing a book on London in the eighteenth century, tentatively titled ‘‘Becoming Urban.’’ REGINA HEWITT, Professor of English at the University of South Florida, holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her most recently published book, The Possibilities of Society: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Sociological Viewpoint of English Romanticism (1997), situates Romantic Era literature in the field of sociology. She has published numerous articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and sociology in journals from both disciplines. She also serves as book review editor for The European Romantic Review. LINDE KATRITZKY, Adjunct Professor of German and Slavic at the University of Florida, has published extensively in international journals on literature, the Enlightenment, and English/German cultural relations. Her monograph, Lichtenbergs Gedankensystem, is vol. 6 in the Peter Lang series The Enlightenment: German and Interdisciplinary Studies (1995); Johnson and The Letters of Junius: New Perspectives on an Old Enigma is vol. 5 in the series Ars Interpretandi/The Art of Interpretation (1996), and A Guide to Bonaventura’s Nightwatches is vol. 9 (1999). CINDY MCCREERY is Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of History at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She has recently completed Ports of the World: Prints from the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich c. 1700–1870 (1999) and is preparing Satirical Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain for publication with Oxford University Press in 2001. Her current research project explores the visual representation of Australian port communities c. 1788–190l. PAT ROGERS, formerly Head of the Department of English at the University of Bristol, is currently DeBartolo Professor in the Liberal Arts at the University of South Florida. He holds Ph.D. and Litt.D. degrees from the University of Cambridge. Author of twenty-eight books and editions, along with several hundred articles in eighteenthcentury studies, his most recently published titles are The Text of Great

288

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Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour (University of Delaware Press, 1998), The Samuel Johnson Encyclopedia (1996), and Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia (1995). ARTHUR SHEPS is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. He has published a number of articles, review essays, and editions dealing with eighteenth-century Anglo-American religious and political radicalism. His most recent publication in this area is ‘‘Joseph Priestley’s Time Charts: The Uses and Teaching of History by Radical Dissent in Late Eighteenth-century England,’’ in Lumen xviii (1999). WILLIAM STROUP has recently completed his dissertation on ‘‘Shelley and the Legacy of Ethical Nonviolence,’’ at the University of New Hampshire and is now Assistant Professor of English at Keene State College. His ecocritical discussion of Jane Austen’s Emma appeared in The Wordsworth Circle in 1997. VALE´ RIE VAN CRUGTEN-ANDRE´ holds a Ph.D. in French language and literature and is qualified as ‘‘maıˆtre de confe´rences’’ for the French universities. She is currently attached as Researcher to the Belgian FNRS and Free University of Brussels. She is the author of a number of articles and essays as well as of three books: Le roman du libertinage (1782–1815) (1997); Le traite´ sur la tole´rance de Voltaire: un champion des Lumie`res contre le fanatisme (1999); Les Me´moires de Jean-Baptiste Louvet ou la tentation du roman (2000). ANNE BETTY WEINSHENKER is Associate Professor of Art History at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Her research focus is the role of sculptors and the reception of sculpture in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among her recent publications are ‘‘Hierarchy and Position: Allegories of the Visual Arts in France,’’ Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century (1996) and ‘‘Chinoiserie Sculpture’’ Dalhousie French Studies (1998).

Index References to illustrations are in boldface. Books are entered under the name of the author, and graphic works under the name of the artist. Acade´mie royale de peinture et de sculpture, 22, 154–70 Addison, Joseph (1672–1719), essayist, 18, 27, 30, 33, 36; Spectator, 18, 27, 30, 32–36, 39, 42, 44–45 Aeolism, 90, 99–101 almanacs, 115–16, 124–25, 127–28, 131 American War of Independence, 53, 69– 70, 85 Anabaptists, 118–19 Anglicanism and Anglicans, 20, 24, 51, 62, 65, 89, 91, 93–94, 97, 103, 268 Anne, Queen of England (1665–1714), 113, 123, 127 anti-catholicism, 113, 120, 123–29, 131 Antichrist, 117, 131 Antrim, Co. (Ireland), 92–93 apocalyptic beliefs and sects, 113, 115 Arianism, 52, 54, 57, 63 Arminianism, 52 astringency (gnostic concept), 189–93, 196, 202 astrology and astrologers, 114–15, 124– 27, 129, 131, 189 atheism, 54, 58, 61, 64–65, 89, 104

Boswell, James (1740–95), biographer, 27, 36, 42–45, 141 Burke, Edmund (1729–97), statesman, 53–55, 140–41, 148; Reflections on the Revolution in France, 54–55; Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 140 Burney, Frances (1752–1840), novelist, 27, 38, 42, 45; Cecilia, 45; Evelina, 27, 42, 45–47; The Wanderer, 45–46 Byrom, John (1692–1763), poet, 188–89, 201

Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de (1732–99), dramatist, 248, 252 Birmingham, England, 18, 51–52, 56–57 Bisset, George Maurice, involved in Worsley trial, 69–72, 74–75, 77–78, 83 Blake, William (1757–1827), poet, 180, 187, 193 Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–75), poet, Decameron, 219, 232 Bockelson, Jan. See Jack of Leiden

Calvinism, 52, 58–60, 89, 94, 96–98, 100 Camisards, 121–22, 131 Capp, Bernard, scholar, 124, 126–27 caricatures and graphic satires, 19, 72–75 Caroline, Queen of England (1683– 1737), 83, 130 catholicism. See Roman catholicism Champaigne, Jean-Baptiste de (1631– 81), painter, 165, 170 Champaigne, Philippe de (1602–74), painter, 170, 171 Charles I, King of England (1600–49), 114–15 Cheyne, George (1671–1743), medical author, 188–89, 270–74; Essay of Health and Long Life, 270–71; Essay on Regimen, 271–73; Natural Method of Cureing the Diseases of the Body, 271, 273 Church of England. See Angelicanism Cibber, Colley (1671–1757), actor and dramatist, 117, 119, 126, 131 Civil War (English), 113–14 Cohn, Norman, historian, 116–19 Come´die française, 252, 255

289

290

INDEX

contagion, 89–90, 95, 97–99, 101, 104, 106 conte, 208–9, 217 Craven, Kenneth, scholar, 94–95 criminal conversation, 69, 74 Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658), Lord Protector, 54, 131 crusades, 117 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 24, 253 Defoe, Daniel (c.1660–1731), author, 38, 122; Moll Flanders, 27; The Review, 122 demiourgos, 180, 185, 199 DePorte, Michael, scholar, 103, 106 deism, 54, 61, 89, 94, 112, 177 Diderot, Denis (1713–84), author, 22–23, 207–25; Les Bijoux Indiscrets, 208, 210– 11, 217; Jacques le Fataliste, 208, 218; L’Oiseau Blanc, 208–25; Les Penseés Philosophiques, 209, 211, 217, 222–24; La Promenade du Sceptique, 209, 213, 217, 224. See also Encylope´die dissent and dissenters, 19–20, 24–25, 51– 65, 91, 93, 98; Rational Dissent, 52–54, 56–57, 62–64 Draper, Sir William (1721–87), soldier, 148, 151 Dryden, John (1631–1700), author, 114, 123, 179; Mac Flecknoe, 179 Duquesnoy, François (1594–1643), sculptor, 161–62, 168 Durkheim, Emile (1858–1917), social theorist, 14–16; The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 14 Ehrenpreis, Irvin, scholar, 93–94 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819– 80), novelist, 275–76; Adam Bede, 276 Encyclope´die (d’Alembert and Diderot), 209, 212, 221, 224 England, Church of. See Anglicanism Enlightenment, 187, 207, 209, 211–12, 225 enthusiasm, 90, 93, 97, 113 eroticism, 209–10, 225, 230, 232–33, 240 Fe´libien des Avaux, Andre´ (1619–95), art critic, 155, 157–59, 161; Entretiens, 156– 58, 161

Ferguson, Oliver W., scholar, 91–92 Fielding, Henry (1707–54), novelist, 27– 28, 197; Tom Jones, 27 Foucault, Michel, author, 33, 112, 211 Fox, Charles James (1749–1806), politician, 54, 56–57, 64 freethinkers, 112, 216 French prophets, 120–22, 131 French Revolution, 51, 56, 231, 247, 253, 263 Gandhi, Mahatma (1969–1948), religious leader, 267, 278 generic transgressions, 23, 208–9, 225 George III, King of England (1738– 1820), 71, 74, 138–41 Gibbon, Edward (1737–94), historian, 57, 148, 187 Gillray, James (1757–1815), caricaturist, 73–80, 84–85; The Maidstone Bath, 75; A Peep into Lady W!!!!!y’s Seraglio, 78, 79, 80; Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly, 75, 76, 77–78, 84–85 gnosticism and gnostics, 22, 25, 94, 176–202 de Gouges, Olympe (1745–93), author, 22, 24, 247–64; Le Couvent, 24, 247, 255–63; L’Esclavage des Noirs, 252, 262; Me´morie de Mme de Valmont, 249, 251, 262; Mirabeau aux Champs-Elyseés, 251, 262 gout, 197–98 Grafton, Augustus Fitzroy, 3rd Duke of (1735–1811), politician, 139, 141, 144, 146, 148, 150 Greene, Donald, scholar, 141–42 guidebooks. See London ‘‘Hackabout, Moll,’’ character in Hogarth, 27, 29, 41 Hampshire Militia, 69, 71–72, 85 Harris, John (d. 1766), writer of guides, 40; List of Covent Garden Ladies, 40–41, 43–44 Harth, Phillip, scholar, 94–95, 102 Hartley, David (1705–57), philosopher, 58, 61, 268; Observations on Man, 58 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–

INDEX

1831), philosopher, 187, 190; Phenomenology of Spirit, 190 heresy: defined, 13; relations to orthodoxy, 13, 21, 24–25, 69, 112, 135. See also under names of particular heresies heretics, identity of, 21 hermeticism. See gnosticism Hogarth, William (1697–1764), artist, 29, 38, 144 Holland, William, artist, Puritanical Amusements Revived!, 56 Horsley, Samuel (1733–1806), churchman, 54, 57 Ialdebaoth, gnostic figure, 180–83 Industrial Workers of the World (‘‘Wobblies’’), 17–18 inspiration, 89, 99–100, 122 Ireland, 20, 90–95, 98 Ireland, Church of, 91, 93, 101, 103 Irenaeus, St. (c.130–c.200), church father, 176–79 Jack of Leiden (Jan Bockelson) (1509– 36), revolutionary leader, 118–20, 131 Jacobitism, 113, 122, 127 Jaillot, Pierre-Simon (1602–74), sculptor, 22, 154–70 James II, King of England (1633–1701), 91, 124 Jansenism, 22, 165, 167, 168–70 Johnson, Samuel (1709–84), author, 27, 36, 138, 142–45, 149, 187; Dictionary of the English Language, 135, 140; The False Alarm, 134–35, 141, 145 ‘‘Junius,’’ political writer, 21, 134–52 Kilroot, Co. Antrim, Ireland, 90, 92–94, 101–2 Landa, Louis, scholar, 93–94 Law, William (1686–1761), theological writer, 187–88, 189, 201; An Earnest and Serious Answer, 188; A Serious Call to the Devout and Holy Life, 187–88 LeBrun, Charles (1619–90), artist, 154– 61, 162–63, 165, 167–69 LeFebvre, Henri, scholar, 38, 46

291

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), artist, 156–57 libertine literature, 22, 214, 230, 232, 242–43 libertinism, 209, 213, 231–32 Lilly, William (1602–81), astrologer, 115, 125 liminality, 17 Lindsey, Theophilus (1723–1808), Unitarian, 54, 57 London ––––general references, 28–47; guidebooks, 28–29, 36–42 ––––specific localities and institutions: Bartholomew Fair, 31–32, 123; Billingsgate, 36, 41; Covent Garden, 27, 37–42, 44, 198; Drury Lane, 27, 35, 37–39; Hampstead, 46, 195, 198; Holborn, 42, 45, 47; Marybone Gardens, 43, 46; Ram Alley, 37–38; Ranelagh, 43, 46; Royal Exchange, 32–33, 35; St. Paul’s cathedral, 43, 46, 56; St Paul’s, Covent Garden, 37–38; Strand, 38, 43; Temple, 27, 35; Tower, 46, 123; Tyburn, 43, 45; Vauxhall Gardens, 27, 42, 46; Westminster, 28, 34, 43 London Spy. See Ward, Ned Louis XIV, King of France (1638–1715), 70, 124, 160 Lucretius (c.99–55 BC), poet, 97; De Rerum Natura, 97, 99 Luther, Martin (1483–1546), reformer, 125, 269 ‘‘Macheath’’ (character in Gay, Beggar’s Opera), 42, 44 Mansfield, William Murray, 1st Earl of (1705–93), jurist, 70, 137, 145–47, 150 Marat, Jean-Paul (1743–93), revolutionary, 248, 254 Marguerite, Queen of Navarre (1492– 1549), Heptame´ron, 219, 232 Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France (1755–93), 24, 253 materialism, 58, 61–62, 64 Mercier, Louis-Se´bastien (1740–1814), author, 248, 250 messianic belief, 117, 119, 129–30

292

INDEX

methodism, 177, 268–69, 276 millenarianism, 114–16, 120, 127–29 Milton, John (1608–74), poet, 33, 100, 113, 122, 130–31 Mohocks, 34–35 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de (1689–1755), author, 210, 224; L’Esprit des Lois, 224; Lettres Persanes, 210, 224 Mu¨nster, Germany, 118–20, 131 mysticism, 187–88, 201

Priestley, Joseph (1733–1804), scientist and theological writer, 51–65; Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit, 59; Essay on First Principles of Government, 58; History of the Corruptions of Christianity, 53 prophets, 113, 119, 128 Protestant sects, 114–16 Public Advertiser, 134–35, 138, 146 puritanism, 89–90, 93–94, 99, 102, 104 Quakers, 121, 187

Nerciat, Andreá (1739–1800), author, 23, 230–43; Les Aphrodites, 230–32, 234–42; Le Diable au Corps, 230, 236–37, 239–42 New Jerusalem, 116, 118, 122 Newton, Sir Isaac (1642–1727), scientist, 122, 187 Orientalism, 209–10, 212, 219, 222 orthodoxy. See heresy Oswald, John (c.1760–93), republican, 268, 277 Paine, Thomas (1737–1809), writer, 54, 148 Partridge, John (1644–1715), astrologer, 113, 124–25, 127 Pascal, Blaise (1623–62), philosopher, 165, 224 Paul, St., evangelist, 102–3, 106 Paulson, Ronald, scholar, 94, 102 de Piles, Roger (1635–1709), art critic, 156, 159 ‘‘Plume, Captain’’ (character in Farquhar), 42, 44 Pope, Alexander (1688–1744), poet, 19– 20, 112–31; The Dunciad, 19–20, 113, 115–23, 125–26, 128–31, 268; Essay on Criticism, 126; Messiah, 119; Pastorals, 114; Rape of the Lock, 124, 126; WindsorForest, 114, 117, 127, 129 pornography, 216, 240 Poussin, Nicolas (1594–1665), artist, 161–62 Presbyterianism, 20, 90, 92–94, 96, 98– 99, 101, 103–6 Price, Richard (1723–91), Unitarian, 54, 56, 61, 63

Ranters, 114, 129 Rational Dissent. See dissent republicanism, 54, 57, 65, 126 Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas (1734– 1806), author, 248, 252 Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723–92), artist, 80, 81, 82 Richardson, Samuel (1689–1761), novelist, 22–23, 25, 29, 38, 176–202, 268; Clarissa, 22–23, 176–202; Familiar Letters, 29; Pamela, 182; Sir Charles Grandison, 45, 182, 188 riots, 51, 56–57 Roman catholicism, 20, 60–61, 63, 89, 91, 94, 102–4, 112, 123–29, 257; as heresy, 129, 131. See also anti-catholicism Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78), author, 15, 61, 254, 268 Rowe, Nicholas (1674–1718), dramatist, 78–79; The Fair Penitent, 78–79 Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François, Comte de (1740–1814), writers, 23, 230–33, 237–43; Les Cents Vingt Journeés de Sodome, 230, 233, 237–38, 241 Sayers, James (1748–1823), caricaturist, The Repeal of the Test Act, 54, 55 Schama, Simon, historian, 248, 254 Schwartz, Hillel, scholar, 120, 123 Scotland, 92–96, 95, 98, 100 sculpture, 154–70 sedition, 19, 51, 64–65 Se´guier, Pierre (1588–1672), protector of the Acade´mie Royale, 154–55, 168 Settle, Elkanah (1648–1724), writer, 126, 130–31

INDEX

Shelburne, William Petty, 2nd Earl of (1737–1805), politician, 63, 148 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822), poet, 273, 277–78 Smollett, Tobias George (1721–71), novelist, 28, 38 Socinianism, 52, 54, 62. See also unitarianism Sophia (gnostic figure), 176–77, 180–81, 183–86, 199 Spectator. See Addison Spencer, Colin, author, 268, 278 Starobinski, Jean, scholar, 213, 217 Steele, Sir Richard (1672–1729), essayist, 18, 22, 30, 35; Tatler, 33. See also Addison Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745), author, 19–20, 38, 89–106, 114, 118, 121, 124; Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, 89–90, 101, 114, 115, 118; Project for the Advancement of Religion, 102; Tale of a Tub, 19, 89–106; ‘‘Windsor Prophecy’’, 115 Terror, the, 24, 264 Test and Corporation Acts, 53, 57, 63–64 Testelin, Henri (1616–95), painter, 158–59 Thomas, Keith, scholar, 114, 277 transgression, 13, 23 transgressive space, 27, 47 Trumbull, Sir William (1639–1717), patron of literature, 114, 121 unitarianism, 57, 59, 62. See also Socinianism Uniformity, Act of, 93–94 vegitarianism, 24–254, 189, 267–78 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet (1694–

293 1778), writer, 217, 249, 268; Lettres Philosophiques, 224

Walpole, Horace, 4th Earl of Orford (1717–97), 41, 84, 148 Walpole, Robert, 1st Earl of Orford (1676–1745), statesman, 113, 119 Ward, Ned (1667–1731), author, 18, 27, 30–32, 36, 42; London Spy, 18, 27, 30– 32, 36, 42, 47 Wesley, John (1703–91), evangelist, 24– 25, 267–78; Directions for Renewing Our Covenant with God, 267; Primitive Physick, 273–77 Whigs, 30, 33, 102 Whiston, William (1667–1752), mathematician, 122, 127 Whitehead, John (c.1740–1806), writer, 62–63; Materialism Philosophically Examined, 62 Wight, Isle of, England, 70–72, 83 Windsor Forest, England, 122–23 Wilkes, John (1727–97), politician, 21, 134, 139, 141, 143–44, 148–9, 151 Wilkins, Kay, scholar, 236–37, 240, 242 William III, King of England (1650– 1702), 31, 91, 94, 124–25 Wobblies. See Industrial Workers of the World Worsley, Seymour Dorothy, Lady Worsley (d. after 1805), 69–71, 74–75, 77–85 Worsley, Sir Robert (1751–1805), 69–72, 74, 75, 77–80, 83–85 Worsley trial, 19, 69–86 Wycherley, William (c.1640–1717), dramatist, 114, 121

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