by Steven Moore
It’s an unconventional ending for an “afterpiece” (usually a comic playlet that followed the evening’s main play), which Mr. Honeycombe acknowledges as he breaks the fourth wall: “Instead of happiness and jollity—my friends and family about me, a wedding and a dance, and everything as it should be—here I am, left by myself: deserted by my intended son-in-law, bullied by an attorney’s clerk, my daughter mad, my wife in the vapors, and all’s in confusion.” Equally unconventional is the preface Colman wrote for the book version, in which he not only defends his violation of “the received laws of the drama,” but concludes with a long letter from his mother, who transcribes for his benefit the catalog of her circulating library: four double-columned pages in small type listing some 180 titles from The Accomplished Rake to Zulima, or Pure Love, which includes most of the pre-1760 18th-century British novels I’ve discussed so far (and some French translations), along with things like The Intriguing Coxcomb and The Life and Opinions of Miss Sukey Shandy—all real.303 Polly Honeycomb is a nose-thumbing work: a play subtitled a dramatic novel, a comedy that forgoes a comic ending, and a satire about novels that makes no distinction between literary classics and commercial trash. It’s amusing in a predictable way, but sobering to see what the common reader makes of uncommon works.
The Disguise: A Dramatic Novel (1771) is a more deliberate hybrid of play and novel. In the preface, its anonymous author explains why s/he made this “unprecedented attempt”: “Epistolizing, journalizing, and narrating have been so hackneyed that novels grow unprofitable to the writer and insipid to the reader.” The author worries about female readers in particular: “a most melancholy deprivation of anything new” in fiction might drive them to “seek those adventures in the world which ceased to be offered to them in books.” With tongue in cheek, the author concludes, “In this hour of danger, philanthropy suggested that a new mode might revive the drooping spirit of romance, and that when epistolary correspondencies were grown dull, narratives tedious, and journals heavy, dialogue might supply the place.” Consequently, the novel physically resembles a play, including divisions into acts and scenes and a list of dramatis personae. The novelty of the form matches that of the content: the “hero” of the novel is a 19-year-old man wearing a dress and calling himself Harriet. Because his mother suspected his evil uncle of poisoning her other male children to obtain their inheritance, Lady Edmonds raised her son Harry as a girl, and he is now chafing at petticoats and uncertain how to prosecute his love for his neighbor Emilia. She is “struck with astonishment” at the warmth of Harriet’s advances, while he has to deal with the unwanted attentions of both a young man and his rakish father. But the author downplays homoerotic implications to focus on tyrannical fathers, for Harriet, Emilia, her sister Caroline, and Caroline’s male admirer, Lord Lessingham, are all being forced by their parents to marry against their wills.
Instead of a comedy of errors, The Disguise is a harsh look at patriarchy, the institution of marriage, and the question of filial duty. Forced to behave like a woman, Harry is disgusted at what women have to put up with and is grateful that he is a man; he is tempted to cane a scoundrel at one point, but resorts to feminine “wiles” to eel out of his engagement to the old rake and remains in drag all the way to the end. Although the theme of patriarchal tyranny was old hat by 1771 (though the practice was still in full force), The Disguise is a valiant attempt to view it from a fresh angle; the language is rather stiff—unlike the delightfully fluent Polly Honeycombe—and the serious discussions of marriage, education, and the oppression of women sound out place in the mouths of the novel’s teenage protagonists, but the novelty of a hero in petticoats keeps it interesting. Because Lessingham is rational and dutiful, he self-deprecatingly allows “I should make no figure in romance, but a poor one indeed in a modern novel” (1.5), a metafictional aside on the author’s daring decision to give the devoted lover’s role to a man in drag. The author apparently felt s/he was pushing the envelope of decency far enough with such a “heterogeneous” protagonist, for there are no blatant double entendres nor scenes in which Harry takes advantage of his situation with as much passion as Celadon does in Astrea. But apparently some still found it beyond the pale: the two major book-review journals of the day, the Monthly Review and Smollett’s Critical Review, both panned it without saying a word about the crossdressing plot, as though afraid of shocking (or tempting?) circulating library patrons.
Louisa: A Poetical Novel in Four Epistles (1784) by Anna Seward (1742–1809) is the first, I believe, to identify itself as a novel in verse. In her preface, Seward says she was inspired by Matthew Prior’s “Henry and Emma” (1708) and Alexander Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717), two relatively short narrative poems set in the Middle Ages, along with Rousseau’s Julie for one scene. Though written in couplets of iambic pentameter, Louisa’s content, Seward apparently felt, justified calling it a novel. As the subtitle indicates, the novella consists of four letters: in the first, the virginal, nature-loving Louisa tells her childhood friend Emma (now in the East Indies) how she fell for but was dumped by a friend of her brother’s named Eugenio, and how she took refuge in religion and “scenic objects.” A year and a half later, Eugenio writes Emma to explain that his father pressured him to marry a rich heiress named Emira (who had fallen for Eugenio after he rescued her from an attempted rape) in order to save the family from financial ruin. Emma forwards the letter to Louisa, who responds with joyous relief that Eugenio had a noble motive for dumping her, and in her fourth letter Louisa tells Emma how Emira neglected Eugenio and their baby girl to indulge in masquerades and dangerous liaisons, contracted a fever, and died, clearing the way for
The sacred union of the kindred mind.
Heaven reunites them! and the wretch removes
That impious rose between their plighted loves. (146)
As those lines indicate, the verse is as unremarkable as the plot, but poetic license allows Seward to express emotions with an intensity that would be ludicrous in a prose novel. Louisa’s love of nature justifies the extensive use of atmospheric conditions as metaphors for Louisa’s feelings—her blushes evoke a sunset, her sorrow “the wint’ry storm”—which fulfills Seward’s stated objective in the preface to provide “a description of passions than of incidents” (97). Powerful feelings and sensitivity to nature align Louisa with both the sentimental novel (which we’ll get to next) and to Romanticism, but it’s a period piece with limited appeal today. But at least Seward, like the author of The Disguise, tried something different; as overwrought and sentimental as Louisa is, it would have been far worse as a conventional prose novel.
Poet Helen Maria Williams (1762–1827) devised a compromise in Julia, a Novel Interspersed with Poetical Pieces (1790). Initially, the novel promises to be about the development of a poet named Julia Clifford, who “discovered at a very early age a particular sensibility to poetry.”304 She composes her first poem at age eight, and at age 19 (in the novel’s present) she writes a 28-stanza “Address to Poetry” that announces her devotion to the art and names some of her influences. Williams intersperses further poems throughout the novel, but also includes numerous quotations from poems and plays along with poetic phrasing and extended metaphors.305 But unfortunately, Julia’s poetic vocation fades into the background as the novel turns from wry social satire into a sermon on the dangers of romantic triangles like those depicted Rousseau’s Julie and especially in Goethe’s Werther—which Julia discusses in chapter 32 with Frederick Seymour, the Werther of Julia. Seymour had originally fallen for Julia’s cousin Charlotte, but after he meets the prettier and smarter Julia, he regrets his commitment to Charlotte. But he’s also committed to British society’s sense of “honor,” so even though Julia admires Seymour, they both repress their feelings and he marries Charlotte, sacrificing their personal happiness to the impersonal, stifling status quo that Williams has been satirizing.306 He dies of a fever at the birth of his first child, and Julia never marries.
Interestingly, the novel is set in 1776 and mentions the American Revolution; even more interestingly, the last poem in the book is “The Bastille: A Vision,” a 12-stanza rallying cry in which a political prisoner foresees “Freedom’s sacred temples rise.” So even though the author insists the moral of the tale is for readers “to guard against the influence of passion” (34), we should once again heed Lawrence’s advice (“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”) and ask what these references to revolution are telling us. Too timid to revolt against an antiquated sense of honor, too willing to sentence themselves to a life of misery, Julia’s protagonists are tragic examples of sensitive people too brainwashed to revolt against their oppressive culture, and too cowardly to engage in the pursuit of happiness. Julia doesn’t write the Bastille poem (a visitor from France reads it to her and Charlotte), but it condemns her. She abandons her poetry career, and instead seeks “consolation in the duties of religion, the exercise of benevolence, and the society of persons of understanding and merit” (34). Fittingly, the poetic style is abandoned as Williams summarizes the denouement in plain prose. Julia is a fascinating example how form and diction, rather than authorial intention, can determine meaning: the author apparently regarded the American and French revolutions as a call for social equality, ignoring their call for personal liberty as well—a call her conformist protagonists don’t hear, but heard by the attentive reader.
This section is the best place for a short novel that, according to one of its modern editors, “both borrows from and originates a variety of literary genres and subgenres without fitting neatly into any of them.”307 Castle Rackrent, an Hiberian Tale (1800) by Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849) is the first-person account by an illiterate, 90-year-old Irishman named Thady Quirk of four generations of the rich Rackrent family, which he has proudly served as steward, sharing their admiration for such holdings as the bog of Allyballycarricko’shaughlin. The head of each generation displays a different, flawed managerial style and Thady notes the hardships they entailed on the common people, along with examples of legal and political corruption. Although he gives an honest account of their failings, his loyalty to his masters clouds his judgment of these reprehensible landowners and blinds him to the fact that his family—represented by his opportunistic son Jason—triumphs over them and takes possession of Castle Rackrent at the end. It’s an early and brilliant use of the unreliable narrator—not unreliable in facts but in their significance. As Thady describes the physical house, he is unaware he is describing the decay of the “house” of Rackrent: “There was great silence in Castle Rackrent, and I went moping from room to room, hearing the doors clap for want of right locks, and the wind through the broken windows that the glazier never would come to mend, and the rain coming through the roof and best ceilings all over the house, for want of the slater whose bill was not paid, besides our having no slates or shingles for that part of the old building which was shingled, and burnt when the chimney took fire and has been open to the weather ever since” (61).
As Kirkpatrick notes, the novella is a mixed breed: “Combining the subtle wit of the French tale, the Gaelic cadences of Irish oral tradition, and Gothic intrigue over property and inheritance, Castle Rackrent has gathered a dazzling array of firsts—the first regional novel, the first socio-historical, the first Irish novel, the first Big House novel,308 the first saga novel” (vii). I would contest all but the Big House first, but they attest to the generic diversity of Edgeworth’s novella. In addition, Thady Quirk’s “Hibernian tale” is accompanied by explanatory footnotes and a lengthy glossary by an “editor,” which makes the novella look like an ethnological report on an exotic tribe. Though primarily an exposé of Irish landowning policies, Castle Rackrent is a successful experiment in genre and narrativity. Edgeworth went on to write other novels, but none as quirky and cute (as the Irish would say) as this one.
ROAD ROMANCES
By this designation I mean “that species of modern romance which Cervantes first introduced in Spain, which Le Sage and Marivaux imported into France, and on which the late Mr. Fielding and one or two living authors have exercised their talents successfully in England,” as Tobias Smollett wrote in 1763 (and undoubtedly including himself among those “one or two living authors”).309 He was reviewing an anonymous novel entitled The Peregrinations of Jeremiah Grant, which—like Gil Blas and Smollett’s own early novels—features a spirited protagonist who yo-yos through a variety of adventures high and low while traveling extensively. “This kind of romance is a diffused comedy unrestrained by the rules of drama,” Smollett goes on to say, “comprehending a great variety of incident and character,” which certainly describes Jeremiah Grant. Born and raised in Jamaica, Grant travels to England at age 14 to be educated, runs away from school, starves, almost joins the army, returns to Jamaica, inherits a fortune, returns to England and blows through it, joins the army long enough to get shot through the head, works as a Grub Street reviewer—his accusation that publishers pay reviewers to puff their books outraged Smollett, editor of the Critical Review—makes a whirlwind tour of Europe, helps a nun escape from her convent but is captured and almost executed by the Portuguese Inquisition—the nun, however, is raped before his eyes and burned to death, graphic scenes that shocked Smollett—then gets mixed up the in the slave trade in Africa, sails to Buenos Aires disguised as a Capuchin friar, and finally makes it back to Jamaica, where he marries his patient sweetheart and inherits his dead brother’s plantation.
Two things are remarkable about the novel: the racial element and its high degree of intertextuality. Born of a Scottish father and a Creole mother, Grant is “of a Numidian hue” and experiences some racial prejudice when he first goes to London, though not as much as one would expect, and none thereafter. (Indeed, I suspect the author forgot that his protagonist was black after a while.) But his mixed race gives added weight to Grant’s observations on slavery, both as practiced in the West Indies and especially in Africa, where he gives a detailed, caustic account of how Europeans acquired their “merchandise.” The novel is also filled with references to other novels—Don Quixote, Gil Blas, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Candide—and at one point in chapter 5, the author halts his narrative and announces: “Now, by way of drawing breath, and to divert the reader and myself, I will give him three specimens of my genius for imitation: the first shall be in the Shandean style, the second in the Fieldean, and the third in the Smolletean, which I look upon to be the three originals of English romance-writing.”310 He then resumes the narratives in their successive styles, anticipating by nearly 160 years Joyce’s similar procedure in the Oxen of the Sun episode of Ulysses. Smollett, placed in the awkward position of anonymously reviewing a novel that imitates his style, gives a fair evaluation of the 20-page performance: “As to the Rev. Mr. St―ne, Jeremiah Grant has laid fast hold on him by his whiskers, his asterisks, his dashes, and his pothooks, but the spirit of Fielding has slipped through his fingers; and as for the other, we make no doubt but he will be proud to see himself so taken off” (18). The author is very self-conscious of other authors of his time: early on he overhears his future wife singing and provides sheet music for the song “according to the example of some recent wits” (like Toldervy in Two Orphans). During one of his voyages he encounters a sea captain who is a huge fan of Richardson’s “voluminous and pathetic productions” and who models his behavior on that of Sir Charles Grandison. (They also discuss Tom Jones, Peregrine Pickle, and the narrator’s favorite, Joseph Andrews.) In the final chapter, the author pointedly forgoes describing how Grant won back his long-neglected sweetheart, “the soft things I said to her . . . which swell the volumes of my brethren, the writers of novels”—and instead reproduces a nine-page legal document and ends the novel with a Walter Shandyesque account of how he plans to raise his son. The Peregrinations of Jeremiah Grant is both a knowing homage and an eccentric contribution to the road romance, a genre that “opens such an extensive and agreeable field of en
tertainment to all sorts of readers,” Smollett observes, “that we do not wonder to see many adventurers for fame enter these lists . . .” (13).
Smollett himself returned to these lists in 1771 with his final, finest, and funniest novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. An ingenious use of the epistolary form, Humphry Clinker gathers the letters written during a comically chaotic trip through England and Scotland by a Welsh “family of originals”: a 55-year-old hypochondriac named Matthew Bramble, his 45-year-old spinster sister Tabitha, their wards Jeremy and Lydia Melford (about 20 and 17, respectively), and Tabitha’s maid Winifred Jenkins. (There are a few more letters by minor characters, though none by the title character.) Each writes in a different style and from a different point of view, which emerges as the theme of the novel: near the end, Jeremy writes to his college friend that he is “mortified to reflect what flagrant injustice we every day commit, and what absurd judgments we form, in viewing objects through the falsifying medium of prejudice and passion,” that is, from a subjective rather than objective viewpoint.311 Smollett dramatizes this in two ways: first, by pairing letters to express contrasting viewpoints. Matthew’s cranky letter condemning the spa city of Bath is followed by Lydia’s delighted one praising it; Matthew is disappointed by London, whereas Lydia is dazzled, though she realizes “People of experience and infirmity, my dear Letty, see with very different eyes from those that such as you and I make use of” (31 May)—not necessarily more accurate eyes, just different. In London, Jeremy meets a politician who sees everything through the “exaggerating medium” of partisan politics: “Without all doubt, the fumes of faction not only disturb the faculty of reason, but also pervert the organs of sense, and I would lay a hundred guineas to ten that if Barton on one side, and the most conscientious patriot in the opposition on the other, were to draw, upon honour, the picture of the k[ing] or m[inister], you and I, who are still uninfected and unbiased, would find both painters equally distant from the truth” (2 June). The unknowability of “the truth” dawns on each of the intelligent characters (Matthew, Jeremy, Lydia) as the novel progresses, each coming to realize the limitations of their points of view, though travel is certainly one way to broaden it. “Without all doubt,” Jeremy writes, “the greatest advantage acquired in travelling and perusing mankind in the original is that of dispelling those shameful clouds that darken the faculties of the mind, preventing it from judging with candor and precision” (14 October). The unintelligent characters (Tabitha, Winifred, Humphry) remain unaware to the end that they are “viewing objects through the falsifying medium of prejudice and passion,” and thus are quite rightly the butts of the author’s humor throughout.
