by Steven Moore
It is a remarkably erudite work—Reeve/Euphrasia seems to have read everything from ancient Greek romances to the latest novels—and Reeve ingeniously maps her bibliographic treatise onto the coordinates of the courtship novel. In a sense, Euphrasia approaches Hortensius like any romance heroine angling for a husband, talking of virtuous novels to intimate her own virtuous habits, and there even seems to be a little sexual tension in some of their exchanges. When Euphrasia tells Hortensius she will come to their next meeting armed with notes and extracts, he calls them “Artillery and firearms against the small sword, [my] tongue,” to which she replies, “if I should come to a close engagement, the small sword will destroy what may escape the artillery” (1). Perhaps I’m misreading these as Taming of the Shrewish double entendres, but Euphrasia certainly courts his good opinion in a way familiar from novels of the period. And just as any heroine encounters setbacks in her romantic quest, Euphrasia expresses doubts about whether she can actually finish her alternative history of the novel. About halfway through the Progress, she comes to realize “how arduous an undertaking I have engaged, and to fear I shall leave it unfinished”—I hear ya, sister—but fortunately her friends rally around and encourage her to persevere, giving her permission to publish their conversations as long as she changes their names—hence the storybook names Euphrasia, Sophronia, and Hortensius.
As an appendix, Reeves tacks on “The History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt,” freely adapted (via a 1682 translation) from a medieval history of ancient Egypt by Murtada ibn al-’Afif.338 Set in the days of the patriarch Abraham, it tells how Charoba and her enchantress nurse overcame an unwanted suitor, an object lesson on how “a man of strength and valour should be overcome by the subtlety of a woman.” In her preface, Reeves says she includes the tale as an example of an Egyptian romance—a male friend doubted such things existed—but it is also an allegory for how subtle Euphrasia overcomes Hortensius’s limited, patriarchal view of the novel, shared by most previous historians of fiction. (She’s quite severe on Huet’s sketchy History of Romances, for example.) The women in the tale resort to poisoning, trickery, and genocide to get their way, which doesn’t square with Euphrasia’s old-maidish insistence on moral fiction.339 But the appendix is one more unusual feature of this unusual novel. On the eleventh evening Euphrasia reads aloud a list of “novels and stories original and uncommon”—A Tale of a Tub, Peter Wilkins, John Buncle, Tristram Shandy, et al—a list on which The Progress of Romance undoubtedly belongs.
Another bibliophiliac lady is the protagonist of The Victim of Fancy (1786) by Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins (1763–1828). Tomlins critiques Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther by mimicking its form (epistolary novel with supplementary information provided at the end by an editor) and by featuring a young woman under the spell of what she calls “Werteromania.” Gaga over Goethe’s controversial novella, Theresa Morven (yet another beautiful, well-off orphan) thinks it has been misunderstood: it was widely condemned for glamorizing adultery and suicide, while Theresa argues (with several people in the novel) that it is a dramatic warning against such actions. She loves it so much that she not only writes like Werther, but wants to meet the author—by which she means not “this Dr. Goethé” but the English translator responsible for “that animated expression, that overwhelming tenderness, that frenzy of sensibility which those interesting pages display.”340 Fortunately for Tomlins, the translator was anonymous—it was done by Richard Graves, author of The Spiritual Quixote—enabling her to contrive what, in other hands, would be a comedy: Theresa talks her aunt into traveling to Bath, where the translator is reputedly staying, so her unrequited suitor talks his brother Vincent into showing up there and impersonating the translator (to turn her off by behaving badly, presumably). Meanwhile, a guy named Frank has become as obsessed with Theresa as Werther is with Lotte, and, knowing of her Werteromania, sends her a note pretending to be the translator, then reveals his love and threatens suicide. She manages to disarm him, and just then the fake translator shows up, and later has a duel with (in effect) the real Werther of the novel. But rather than exploit the comic possibilities of all this, à la The Female Quixote, Tomlins plays it as tragedy. Theresa has fallen in love at first sight with Vincent, less because she suspects he is Goethe’s translator than because of his resemblance to her beloved brother, a soldier stationed in Gibraltar and the recipient of most of her letters; her love for him is so excessive that when the brother returns to England near the end fatally wounded, Theresa falls into a fever, and shortly after he dies, she dies, despite Vincent’s tender ministrations. In her final line, Theresa admits it is her brother “for whom I lived, for whom I die” (49), and the novel ends in an ocean of tears and treacly sentiments.
What Tomlins adds to the ongoing debate over the dangers of fiction is the danger of hero-worship. Theresa is too chaste to be called a literary groupie, but she’s one of the first to extend her enthusiasm for novels to their creators, and to creative people in general (including the creator of the natural world, which Theresa celebrates in language as rapturous as Werther’s). In addition to Goethe’s translator, Theresa admits, “I would travel miles to behold a Gibbon or a Hayley, to view the features of a Reynolds or a Copley;341 and I should feel that gratification in seeing them which the presence of a superior being might be supposed to produce” (14). She has already learned that an artist is not necessarily “a superior being” after a curate who delivered a beautiful sermon turns out to be a sardonic hypocrite, but that doesn’t prevent her from wanting also to meet the latest celebrity author to visit Bath: Sophia Lee, whose Gothic historical novel The Recess Theresa devours in three days, surprised to find it as good as Burney’s Cecilia. Theresa is a “victim of fancy,” by which Tomlins means a victim of the unrealistic expectations raised both by novels and by artists, but she complicates her message by broadening “fancy” to encompass other unregulated feelings, such as Theresa’s near-incestuous love for her brother; her brother’s “romantic admiration of the general you have so well distinguished yourself under” (25; he is fatally wounded while assisting the general); and fanciful religious effusions. I’m not sure Tomlins meant to muddy her message with suggestions of incest, suicidal/homoerotic patriotism, and impiety. Instead, she probably meant to rewrite Goethe’s novella to offer a character more worthy of sympathy: not an adulterous suicide but a benevolent, sentimental sister. At any rate, The Victim of Fancy is an interesting example of writing a novel to critique another novel, of fighting fiction with fiction.
Not one but a rout of readers critique Young Hocus; or, The History of John Bull (1790) by a writer who identifies himself only as Sir W― L―s. As the subtitle suggests, the short novel is a sequel to Arbuthnot’s poltical satire, updated to give a caustic, coded account of British domestic and foreign policies in the 1780s. Essentially it is a scurrilous satire on William Pitt the Younger, prime minister at the time, whose “hocus-pocus” politicking provided the name of the author’s “hero.” Like Arbuthnot’s novel, it begins by allegorizing England’s political problems via the disputes between Mr. and Mrs. John Bull and their employees, but halfway through it imitates Martinus Scriblerus by giving a ludicrous account of the birth and early exploits of young Hocus. But that’s only half the story: the other half is in the voluminous footnotes from about 60 individuals, itemized on the novel’s elaborate title page. Rather than wait for someone else to supply a key to his characters, as Arbuthnot did, L―s followed Pope’s example in The Dunciad Variorum, though his commentators are not critics but readers, ranging from real supporters and opponents of Pitt down to a local cheesemonger and doorman. They expose the identities of the author’s allegorical characters, challenge his interpretations or add corroborating details, and in general raise a heteroglossic ruckus that almost overwhelms the main text. Like Charlotte Summers and some other metafictional novels in the 1750s, Young Hocus anticipates readers’ responses and makes them part of the text, but it also critiques the variety of wa
ys readers read novels. Some are interested only in unlocking this roman à clef by identifying its characters, others go off on digressions based on something in the text, others want to argue with the author, and one near the end even threatens him. In a footnote in the final chapter, John Scott (a Pitt supporter) senses the author plans to criticize Pitt’s policy in India in the next volume, and warns the author he’d better not go there; and sure enough, though the title page announces this as Volume 1, there was no Volume 2.
Young Hocus is amusing in spots, but like Smollett’s Adventures of an Atom—which it also resembles in scatology—both the story and commentary are too dependent upon inside jokes and a detailed knowledge of the politics of the time to be enjoyable today. (Another level of footnoted commentary would be needed to truly appreciate it.) What is interesting is the author’s dramatization of readers’ responses and his parody of the critical-edition format. He has further fun with the conventions of fiction: the author dedicates the novel not to an influential patron but to himself, bragging for pages about his knowledge of artillery, and adds a fictitious editor who, after explaining he found the manuscript in a garden wall and apologizing for some Tale of a Tub-type lacunae, confidently asserts the novel deserves a place “in most private libraries of the kingdom, besides pleasing the readers of circulating libraries, whom it is particularly calculated to entertain.” It’s also interesting to note that its author (and/or publisher) had no problem calling this eccentric concoction “a novel” on the title page, understanding the term in a much broader sense than some critics today do.
Charlotte Palmer, on the other hand, wasn’t so sure. In her preface to It Is, and It Is Not a Novel (1792), she explains her fence-sitting title:
After having been advised to publish, a worthy friend called on me and, speaking of the letters (part of which he had seen), said, “And pray what do you mean to call your book when finished—a novel?” I replied, “I do not know what to call it, for it is, and it is not a novel.” “A very curious composition truly,” said he. “It is, and it is not, is quite in the female style of contradiction!” I was much obliged by his remark, which at once furnished me with a title for which I had entreated THOUGHT in vain! I then gave up all application to her, being fully persuaded (in a double sense of the expression) that it is and it is not a novel.342
She playfully resists patriarchal pigeon-holing and recognizes the still-fluid nature of the genre, but what she really means is that some parts of this epistolary novel are based on real events: later in her preface she says she might be “suspected of borrowing from Richardson” in one episode, but insists “the circumstances relating immediately to the heroine are literally true; I had a slight acquaintance with the young lady concealed under that name” (viii), and during the first half of the novel there are authorial footnotes like “This is not a fictitious name” and “The painting which I have so poorly described is not imaginary” (1:119, 187). So if you define a novel (as one minor character does) as a book “that has no truth in it” (2:6), then this is not a novel. But it is a novel in the sense that this is an “offspring of my imagination,” as Palmer admits in the preface; she does not pretend, as do Richardson and other some epistolary novelists, that she’s merely the editor of a bundle of real letters. So not only is it a novel, but it is a novel about novels. Palmer’s protagonists—a half dozen upper-class young women who effortlessly find husbands in rural England—are all novel-readers; they discuss or mention Gil Blas, Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison (he’s too “cool and collected” in one lady’s opinion), Rasselas, Almoran and Hamet, A Sentimental Journey, and The Vicar of Wakefield, but they make different uses of novels. Cleopatra Wingham—the witty, flighty young woman who makes fun of the others but marries badly—has learned all her coquettish airs from them: “I have not read novels for nothing” (1:80). But Elizabeth Digby, like her prudent friend Mary Eglantine, learns morality from them. Her favorite novel (and the author’s too, as she reveals in her preface) is a forgotten best-seller by Swiss writer Isabelle de Montolieu entitled Caroline of Lichfield (1786), not “as having any superiority of language above others, or that there is any plot more skilfully managed; its moral tendency is what entitles it to a preference” (1:195). Like some novels of the time, It Is, and It Is Not a Novel is a conduct book in fictional form—perhaps another sense in which the title is to be understood.
Palmer plays with the conventions of naming in novels: Cleopatra is of course pleased with her regal, romantic name and thinks Mary is “a stupid name for a heroine in a novel” (1:96); but after Cleopatra disgraces herself, Mary—one of the heroines of this novel—comments, “Unfortunate Cleopatra! had her name, as she observed, been Mary, Sarah, Elizabeth or Ann, she might not have had a turn for such enterprising love intrigues as she has really put in execution . . .” (2:253; that is, she would have left them in novels, not tried them out in the real world). This might be a call for the use of more realistic names in fiction, yet Palmer also employs artificial tag-names straight out of Restoration comedy: there’s a teacher named Mrs. Precept, a curate named Mr. Cassock, and military officers named Captain Skirmish and Colonel Cannonade. (After Cleopatra Wingham falls from grace, her name is clipped to Patty. Another young lady who is prudent like Mary but witty like Cleopatra has a name that combines both qualities: Sarah Brilliant.) It is a novel because of names like that, but it is not a novel because it also uses nonnovelistic names.
Charlotte Palmer’s novel doesn’t dramatize the contrast between prudent and imprudent behavior as perceptively as Jane Austen would in Sense and Sensibility—which coincidentally(?) includes a character named Charlotte Palmer—for her contrast is black and white, as opposed to Austen’s shades of gray. Her didactism is tiresome and predictable, though occasionally it is offset by some clever wordplay: after the pompous Mr. Cassock begins a sentence, “If you had ever seen the extra-regular exploits of these extra-judicials, . . .” Sarah brilliantly jokes, “I believe you are particularly cross tonight, as you use so many X Xs” (1:265–66). Let’s just say it is, and it is not an interesting novel.
Another novel that satirized current trends in fiction is Susanna; or, Traits of a Modern Miss (1795), attributed to Susanna Bullock.343 After 17-year-old Susanna Bridgeman subscribes to a circulating library, she takes on various fiction-inspired personae: regarding herself as another Clarissa when her parents suggest marriage, she runs away from home to elope with an aristocrat who looks like a romance hero, but she is humiliated to learn that his love letters were forged by his wily valet. After her father dies, Susanna goes to stay with the modest Benfield family, whose parents have given their daughters sentimental-romance names, even though “it was as utterly out of reason to expect Selina Ethelinda would make pies or superintended cooking, as to imagine Adeline Clara Eleonora could darn stockings or iron her own linen.” Susanna then elopes with an older bankrupt lord who owns a castle, which Susanna imagines is haunted, allowing her to play the persecuted heroine of a Gothic novel until she learns her servants have been pulling her leg. When she next meets a man who sounds like the hero of a pastoral romance, she becomes “Amelia” to his “Celadon,” and after her husband catches them in the act, she is humiliated again to learn that Celadon is the same valet who tricked her earlier. After reading novels espousing radical philosophy, Susanna “learns to conceive of herself as a victim of social injustice,” Shepperson reports. “She escapes from her ‘persecutors,’ and, ‘with a truly republican spirit,’ sets out for London, where she anticipates experiencing ‘the joys of “Liberty and equality.’’’ But the night is dark and rainy; she takes the wrong direction, and when morning comes she finds herself in Cornwall instead of London, ill from exposure, and without money or friends, an object lesson for radical-minded young ladies” (117). Reverting to Gothic-heroine mode, Susanna is locked in her room but eventually flees the castle and eventually embraces Methodism, exchanging one kind of fiction for another. There the satiric author leaves her, for S
usanna “grows every instant too sublime for my pen.”
Susanna was published by William Lane, a former owner of a circulating library whose Minerva Press was flooding the market with sentimental and Gothic romances in the 1790s. (It’s odd that he would accept a novel satirizing the kind of novels he published, but publishers are odd ducks.) Disgusted with the popularity of these trends in the decade following the publication of his Vathek, William Beckford retaliated with a pair of parodies of pop fiction. Parodies (burlesques, satires, pastiches) of particular genres are almost by definition critifictions, for they use fiction to criticize fictional modes and styles their authors feel debase the art of literature. Since most of these novels were written by women, Beckford used female pseudonyms: Modern Novel Writing; or, The Elegant Enthusiast, and Interesting Emotions of Arabella Bloomville. A Rhapsodical Romance Interspersed with Poetry (1796) purports to be by Lady Harriet Marlow, while Azemia: A Descriptive and Sentimental Novel Interspersed with Pieces of Poetry (1797) is by an admirer of Lady Marlow named Jacquetta Agneta Mariana Jenks “of Bellegrove Priory in Wales.” As the titles indicate, the sentimental novel is Beckford’s principal target, though he also mocks the Gothic novel while working in some political satire against the Pitt administration. Modern Novel Writing features a typical heroine who falls for a typical hero, and after some typical ups and downs, they marry at the end (though atypically, she gives birth to her first child only six months after the wedding). Beckford not only parodies the gushy rhetoric of sentimental fiction, the tropes, clichés, and inconsequential minutiae of the genre, but also inserts into his novel passages and entire paragraphs from some of its worst offenders. In a tongue-in-cheek afterword addressed to the conservative journal the British Critic, the author insists these passages are “not inserted with a design of depreciating their excellence, but merely to display that happy intricacy of style and sentiment without which no novel can have a just claim to your notice and approbation.”344 Most are from deservedly forgotten novels like Cassandra Hawke’s Julia de Gramont, Ann Radcliffe’s Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, Mary Robinson’s Vancenza, and Elizabeth Hervey’s Melissa and Marcia (all published between 1788 and 1792), but he mocks better novels as well, including the attempted rape scene from Pamela, the Man of the Hill episode in Tom Jones, and several passages from Smith’s Celestina. Beckford’s own goofy prose is best (reminiscent of the late Gilbert Sorrentino’s parodies of pop fiction), as “when Arabella instantly called to mind the excellence of her Henry, and seizing Margaret Grimes by the hair with great energy, vowed eternal fidelity to him” (2.13). It gets surrealistic when a guilty aristocrat goes into a frenzy: “he had jumped out of bed and bruised himself dreadfully against the walls of the room—‘To drive away,’ as he said, ‘a salamander that was playing on the harpsichord; look,’ cried he, ‘look at that pelican, how it smiles upon the imps of darkness—they chain the sun to a coal tub—what a world it is, who can tell but it may be given to me, for my library is full of jackals, and virtue is a mere carpet—murder, war, murder cannot go unpunished’ ” (2.4). Surprisingly, as Gemmet notes in his introduction, the British Critic gave it a fair evaluation, calling it “a very humorous and successful, though somewhat overcharged, attack on modern novel-writing” (31).
