The Novel

by Steven Moore

  In a sense, he becomes a squire to knights in brown leather when he begins reprinting their adventures, and throughout the book he alludes to these romances. At one point he says he’s “as well pleased as if I had been dubbed a knight,” and when he gets his own bookstore, he writes, “I had read in my romances of the pleasant life of hermits, how they lived without all trouble or care, and so did I and was as well pleased as might be I had the sole rule and command of my shop and books, and that I thought was equal to the government of any Enchanted Island” (12). Before reaching that blessed abode, the bookworm finds himself at an inn where he and others pass the time telling “novels” about other luckless people, alternating between fact and fiction: “you have my unlucky adventures mixed with those of others,” he explains, but warns the reader not to be “better pleased with my idle wanton stories than with my sober advice to you” (7). But since his own story reads like a picaresque novel with chivalric overtones, and since he includes more stories as he goes on—the final chapter is one tale after another—the line between fact and fiction is blurred. I don’t want to make too much of what is essentially a bumptious hard-luck story set in the early days of the book trade, appropriately stocked with bookish metaphors—he excuses the book’s typos by saying it’s the story of “the faults and erratas of his life”—but it’s a telling example of an era when both the term “novel” and its properties were still up for grabs.

  A Puritan example of the rogue novel can be found in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680) by the fundamentalist preacher John Bunyan (1628–88). Of course Bunyan is better known for The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; part 2, 1684), a dream about a religious nut who, addled by Bible-study and fearful of an imminent apocalypse, abandons his wife and children, wanders through a Christian theme park/obstacle course, and emerges to the sound of ringing bells with the grand prize: a shiny gold suit. It’s as simple as a Sunday School lesson, as literal-minded as a Jehovah’s Witnesses comic book, and comes prooftexted with biblical citations and sampler homilies in the margins. This Christian hokum is redeemed only by occasional flashes of humor—reminiscent of the goofy religiosity of The Simpsons’ Ned Flanders—and its homespun style. That earthy vernacular has been praised by some critics as Bunyan’s chief contribution to the novel genre—and for a few even qualifies The Pilgrim’s Progress as the “first” English novel—but it’s no different from the colloquial style that energizes the 17th-century English comic and criminal novels I’ve been discussing. The book is worth knowing because phrases and iconic sites like Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond became part of the language, but I cannot sympathize with its most recent editor’s lament “The Pilgrim’s Progress has all but disappeared from both college classrooms and children’s bookshelves.”61 Good riddance.

  “The Life and Death of Mr. Badman has a far better claim than The Pilgrim’s Progress to be treated as a precursor of the novel,” its modern editors feel.62 Two Puritan neighbors, Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive, spend a day speaking of the recent death of Mr. Badman, who died horribly and, in the smug opinion of Mr. Wiseman, is on his way to hell. (Mr. Badman? Really? That’s a three-year-old’s name for a villain.) Knowing him since he was a child, Wiseman walks Attentive through Badman’s profligate life (which closely resembles Meriton Latroon’s), beginning with childhood lying and stealing, then hanging with a bad crowd, refusing to keep the Sabbath holy, swearing, all accompanied by copious religious commentary from Wiseman. Again like Head’s antihero, Badman becomes an apprentice and goes from bad to worse; first by reading trashy books—he “would get all the bad and abominable books that he could, [such] as beastly romances, and books full of ribaldry, even such as immediately tended to set all fleshly lusts on fire” (40)—then by frequenting taverns and whores, seducing virgins, marrying for money and then running up debts, mistreating his wife, engaging in fraudulent business practices—the usual rap sheet, along with further sermons and supplementary examples from Wiseman, who gets rather coarse at times, as when taunting women who follow the latest fashions: “But what can be the end of those that are proud in the decking of themselves after their antic manner? why are they going with their bull’s-foretops, with their naked shoulders, and paps hanging out like a cow’s bag?” (125). Badman dies from multiple causes—“He was dropsical, he was consumptive, he was surfeited, was gouty, and, some say, he had a tang of the pox in his bowels” (148)—and Wisemen ends their conversation with a Bible-thumping sermon against unclean living.

  The language is plain-spoken, and the novel offers a more realistic dramatization than The Pilgrim’s Progress of the daily challenges Puritans faced living in what they considered a fallen world (with special sympathy for the plight of Christian women married to louts like Badman), but that’s the best that can said of it. The form is unoriginal—it closely resembles a popular dialogic work by Arthur Dent called The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601)—and it is as naive and intellectually stunted as its more famous predecessor. But I’ll “forbear quirking and mocking,” as Bunyan requests (1), and admit Mr. Badman has a place in the chain-gang of rogue fiction that eventually leads to novels like Fielding’s Jonathan Wild and Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, as its editors note, though I suspect its true devil-spawn are ludicrous religious novels like the Left Behind series.

  Two more picaresque/rogue novels—two of the best—and we’ll quit this crime scene.

  Don Tomazo, or The Juvenile Rambles of Thomas Dangerfield (1680) is the funniest and most sophisticated contribution to this genre, a self-consciously literary performance that cleverly melds form and content. It is attributed to Dangerfield himself (c. 1650–85), a suave counterfeiter, gigolo, and conspirator, for though it’s narrated in the third-person, there are four instances when the narrator “accidentally” slips into the first-person. The narrative conforms to the known facts of Dangerfield’s life—he ran away from home at 12, worked his way up from petty theft to counterfeiting, fraud, and espionage—but it is deliberately, even ostentatiously framed as a picaresque novel (hence the Spanish title, his literary persona). In the prefatory address “To the Reader,” he praises “The cheats and cunning contrivances of Gusman and Lazarillo de Tormes,”63 and throughout the novel he refers to himself as “a gusman” and his activities as “gusmanry”—nouns unacknowledged by the OED but typical of Dangerfield’s playful style. However, he makes a distinction when announcing his grandest scheme: “See here the difference between a Spanish and an English gusman: the one pursuing a poor, hungry plot upon his penurious master’s bread and cheese, the other designing to grasp the riches of the fourth part of the world by the ruin of a national commerce” (390). The scheme fails, but Dangerfield and his partner always think big, not deigning to soil their gentlemanly hands with petty crime: “Neither was for such extraordinary high-soaring gusmans as they to play at ordinary games, whose prodigality was not to be supplied by the dipping of country squires or the little cheats of high and low fullums” (392)—that is, loaded dice, a pointed dismissal of the penny-ante scams of Meriton Latroon and his ilk. Written while Dangerfield was awaiting trial for fomenting a false conspiracy, Don Tomazo tries to elicit sympathy for this ambitious, self-made man, who hints that criminal activities like his are “many times the beginning of a trade that advances several to vast and real fortunes” in the legitimate business world (395).64 He also hints more blatantly at the reader response he expects when he tells us he and his partner-in-crime “told their tale so smoothly that they found very compassionate entertainment among their countrymen” (385–86), and that one of Dangerfield’s victims was “so intoxicated with his narrative that he invited him over to his house” (405).

  Dangerfield blames his early propensity for crime on the “inconsiderable severity” of his father, which may be just an excuse (he blames his future setbacks on “fortune”) but at least he makes an attempt to understand the criminal mind, unlike Head (whose protagonist is merely born bad) or Bunyan (who unoriginally blames criminal
behavior on original sin). “They were for the quick dispatch; they were for drink and be rich,” because “the toil of keeping accounts was a labour too tedious to their mercurial brains” (389, 396). But the true appeal of Don Tomazo is its mercurial wit (a ship concealing soldiers is called a Trojan seahorse), its Wodehousian mix of elegant diction and slang, and its playful appropriation of literary genres. As a 12-year-old, Tomazo falls for the stories his Scottish servant spins about his wealthy estate in Scotland, whence “the young master and the young man, knight-errant like, set forward upon their Northern progress” (354–55), and upon arrival at his rude hovel, the boy “was so far from being over-ravished with joy at the sight that he took it for some enchanted castle” (356). Later he identifies with the parable of the prodigal son, and later still aligns himself with Ulysses, Aeneas, and Saint George, ever the hero of his own romance. Elsewhere Dangerfield appropriates the language of pastoral and heroic romance, though most often he favors the kind of wit that was lighting up the stages of Restoration theaters. Don Tomazo is a master of disguise as well as a counterfeiter, and Don Tomazo is his finest forgery, whereby he impersonates a picaresque hero and forges a document so appealing that it fooled some people into thinking it was an autobiography, and perhaps even fooled its author into thinking he was some kind of literary hero. Or it could have been written by someone else, a well-read conman cashing in on Dangerfield’s raffish notoriety and strengthening the conviction of some moralists that fiction-writing was itself a criminal activity. At any rate, it is a near-perfect crime: the last third may lack the sparkle of the first two-thirds, Don Tomazo’s partner-in-crime never comes to life, and the narrator ends the novel abruptly by referring the reader to contemporary pamphlets for the details of the conspiracy Dangerfield was charged with. Nonetheless, Don Tomazo is a sophisticated English spin on the Spanish picaresque and one of the finest examples of Restoration fiction.

  The London Jilt; or, The Politic Whore (1683) brings us back full circle to The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith, for it too is the first-person narrative of a woman who justifies her unconventional life in wittily vulgar prose. There the comparisons end, because the anonymous London Jilt is a far more artful performance. It begins with a hysterical preface that could have been written by Bunyan’s Mr. Wiseman, promising the book will alert male readers to “the subtleties and cheats that the misses of this town put upon men . . . to the decay and ruin both of their health, their fortune, and reputation.” Warming to his subject, he froths at the idea of such “female ambuscados”: “And indeed what greater folly can there be than to venture one’s all in such rotten bottoms, and at length become the horror and detestation of all the world, only for a momentary pleasure, and which in truth cannot well be termed pleasure considering what filthy, nasty, and stinking carcasses are the best and finest of our common whores? A whore is a but a close-stool to man, or a common-shore that receives all manner of filth; she’s like a barber’s chair, no sooner one’s out but t’others in, or as another has likened ’em to Sampson’s foxes, who carry fire in their tails to burn the standing corn.”65

  By calculated contrast, the female narrator of The London Jilt (identified only once as Cornelia) is calm and reasonable, mildly sarcastic and levelheaded as she tells how she drifted into prostitution, how she defrauded only those customers who defrauded her, and how she prospered well enough to retire and become a successful lace merchant after she lost her looks and, significantly, lost her appetite for sex. She insists that women have a sex drive almost as strong as men’s, but that social attitudes force them to dissemble this with hypocrisy and “counterfeit” attitudes. (The word “counterfeit” appears here almost as often as it does in Don Tomazo.) She acknowledges that the male sex drive can be more brutal and irrational—“men show that their bodies have an empire over their minds” (159)—but admits women too “are commonly blind in all their passions, and are so violently passionate in their hatred or their love, even most commonly without any cause, that they exceed all bounds” (119). The frankness with which Cornelia discusses and dramatizes these “petulant” passions is unusual in the literature of the time.

  The narrator becomes a prostitute at an early age almost naturally, not the result of poverty or a violent abduction, just a typical career path for a lower-class London girl, and thereafter she treats it merely as a job. (It’s significant that before she became a prostitute, she learned how to entertain family guests “by telling one pleasant story or other” [50], for there’s an implicit parallel throughout the novel between whoring and storytelling.) Noting that her mother once, during a time of financial distress, earned money by her “buttocks,” Cornelia writes: “tho’ several men of a nice and disdainful humor make it a trade to criticize upon persons who make their profit on that part of the body, yet I do not think that herein they have any great reason, for the fist and tail are made of one and the same flesh, and sweating is as easily got by that as by the most laborious trade that is exercised” (53). Unlike some jilts she can mention, she exercises her trade in a professional manner, invests in an annuity, and is able to retire at a reasonable age like any smart businesswoman. She’s not immoral but amoral, just telling it like it is, “very little concerned whether [her observations] were conformable or not with the profane or holy philosophy” (155).

  The novel’s structure is generated by “the desire of revenge, [which] takes its birth jointly with the female’s, and remains with them until that they have given up the last gasp” (147). The first dramatic incident the young Cornelia witnesses is the robbery of her father by a smooth-talking rope-dancer (trapeze artist), who hits the girl as he escapes and threatens to cut her throat. Years later, halfway through the novel, Cornelia recognizes him as one of her customers and plays an elaborate trick on him involving women’s clothes and a coffin. (This is a very funny book, by the way.) And near the end of the novel, the rope-dancer returns in an elaborate counterrevenge scheme that is brilliantly narrated. This narrative arc is supported throughout by other minor acts of revenge that Cornelia takes against cheating customers, always in retaliation against their frauds, and always handled fairly. In situations where she can rob them blind, she takes only the amount due for her services, not everything as male criminals usually do in other Restoration crime novels. Contrary to the hysterical preface, the novel is not a warning to men to avoid prostitutes but to treat them fairly, and to realize their flattering compliments are merely part of the show.

  The London Jilt’s realistic depiction of a whore’s life and its evenhanded social criticism of men and women are evidence that its author wanted to make a contribution to the growing use of verisimilitude in fiction. Before Cornelia recognizes the rope-dancer near the end, who is disguised as “a middle-aged woman dressed like a citizen’s wife,” “she fell to telling a story which seemed as if it would never have been at an end, insomuch that I began to conceive some suspicion that this was only the pretext to some concealed design. I had so much the more reason to be jealous that tho’ this story was told after a pertinent manner enough, yet there was such prodigious and such romantic circumstances that it could not be taken to be made up altogether of pure truths, and particularly amongst persons who have somewhat more understanding than what’s common in the world” (151). This is obviously a critique of the romantic fiction favored by middle-aged citizens’ wives (then and now), and The London Jilt presents a more realistic alternative, one that does not reinforce the oppressive status quo (“some concealed design”) but offers “pure truths” about the relations between men and women. The author runs contrary to romantic plotting by downplaying traditionally key events like the loss of her virginity (“of no great importance” [74]) and her wedding day, focusing instead on the daily activities of a whore, digressions on the uses of makeup, dealing with pregnancy and partner abuse, and sex scenes that are more emetic than erotic.66 The London Jilt was probably too realistic for readers of the time—and its audience limited by the fact it was p
ublished by a vendor of erotica whose shop was next to a bar in Fleet Street—but its artful construction and clear-eyed view of sexuality is admirable, as is Cornelia herself. ’Tis a pity she’s a whore, else she’d be cried up as one of the most admirable female narrators in early English fiction.67

  The Restoration period was a glorious time for English literature, producing memorable poetry (Milton, Butler, Dryden, Traherne, Rochester), plays (Wycherley, Congreve, Etherege, Vanbrugh), and biography/memoir (Walton, Aubrey, Wood, Pepys). The only novelist generally associated with this period is the mysterious Aphra Behn (1640–89); after a murky career that included a stint as a spy (code name Astrea), she turned to playwriting and then to fiction near the end of her life. Salzman praises her for producing “thirteen novels which encompass the whole range of influences operating on Restoration fiction” (313), but that is misleading: she published only one full-length novel, and four novellas; the rest are short stories, “novels” only in the older, Italian sense of novel anecdotes. That full-length one is the best-selling Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87), Behn’s first attempt at fiction and the first significant epistolary novel in English literature.