Duke University Press
  • Smollett, Rowlandson, and a Problem of Identity: Decoding Names, Bodies, and Gender in Humphry Clinker

In casting a number of characters’ names in the form of initial letters and dashes, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker used a well-established tactic to evade charges of libel. Such ellipses, however, even when less transparent than referring to the king as “the k—g,” worked as much to enhance as disable the text’s claim to referentiality and topicality. Just as today’s blank newspaper columns draw attention to censorship, so dashes foregrounded self-censorship and provoked among readers an accentuated curiosity about the half-erased reference. With one or more letters in a name remaining in place, uninformed readers enjoyed the frisson of understanding that a character was identifiable. Meanwhile, the informed reader had the pleasure of actually completing such dangerous acrostics (often quite literally so as copies of texts with dashes bodied out in the handwriting of period readers are not uncommon survivals). Thanks to successive editors, there now remains only one character in Humphry Clinker bearing a name cast in this form who has never been ascribed a historical model. This is the villainous “Captain C——“ who appears briefly in the novel’s London section. Establishing the Captain’s identity, however, involves far more than the satisfaction of antiquarian curiosity: it results in his transformation from villain in or behind the text into a considerable victim of the text. Moreover, the transformation occurs as part of a new perspective on Humphry Clinker that significantly extends assessments of Smollett’s writing as a site in the construction and reproduction of stances toward emergent gender identities of the eighteenth century.

The possibility that the Captain had no particular historical model cannot be entirely dismissed. Novelists well appreciated the advantages of using letters and dashes as names for fictional characters in the interests of what Barthes termed “l’effet du réel”: Richardson’s “Mr B——“ is made textually more realistic by the erasure rather than the “revelation” of his name. In Humphry Clinker, however, models for characters whose names are represented by dashes have proved with the one exception to be identifiable. Scholars may have debated whether “Mr P——“ is Pitt or Pelham or whether the painter “Mr T——“ is Taverner or Taylor, yet no model has ever been proposed for Captain C——. 1 Lewis M. Knapp annotated the Captain as “unidentified,” though the number of other characters in Humphry Clinker that were equally unidentified and which he did not so annotate may suggest [End Page 1] that Knapp was here anticipating rather than discounting the possibility of an identification. 2 For Thomas Preston in the University of Georgia edition, Captain C—— is also “unidentified,” though with the teasing rider “perhaps fictitious.” 3 Testing the status of Captain C—— and proceeding to frame a hypothesis about a model for him leads first into Smollett’s relationship with a leading politician and then sets in high relief the homophobic dimensions of both the political satire and the mythologies of cultural difference and gender identity inscribed in Smollett’s novel and in such larger textual networks as sustained its reading.

Jery Melford and Matt Bramble are attending the levée of the lord privy seal and former prime minister Thomas Pelham-Holles, duke of Newcastle (1693–1768), when, through Mr. Barton, they fall in with Captain C—— (HC, p. 109). While Jery’s letter dated 5 June presents his own account of the duke of Newcastle, it also features Captain C——‘s commentary on both the duke and the figures that attend him.

Mr. Barton, who earlier acts as “introducer” and “conductor” at St. James’s, has been set to repeat his role at the duke’s levée. Barton’s displacement in this role by C—— adds nothing to the novel’s plot, while the description of the Captain may well suggest that he is a figure to be enjoyed primarily as an incidental caricature of the courtier: “a person, well stricken in years, tall, and raw-boned, with a hook-nose, and an arch leer, that indicated, at least, as much cunning as sagacity.” His history, where not wholly mysterious, offers the double-edged interest of including secret service work and allegations of his being a double agent for the French. Thematically, the fact that the Captain (as Jery reports) “has still access to all the ministers, and is said to be consulted by them on many subjects, as a man of uncommon understanding and great experience” contributes to the novel’s satire of politics, government, and the questionable judgment of the great: his self-assurance, Jery wryly reflects, “may well impose upon some of the shallow politicians, who now labour at the helm of administration” (HC, pp. 107–08). However, readers may well find disproportion in Matt’s eventual reaction against Captain C—— and in the Captain’s subsequent prominence in Matt’s black museum of metropolitan corruption:

What is the society of London, that I should be tempted, for its sake, to mortify my senses, and compound with such uncleanness as my soul abhors? All the people I see, are too much engrossed by schemes of interest or ambition, to have any room left for sentiment or friendship.... If you pick up a diverting original by accident, it may be dangerous to amuse yourself with his oddities— He is generally a tartar at bottom; a sharper, a spy, or a lunatic.

(HC, p. 121)

The words “sharper” and “spy” make it plain that Matt here has the Captain in mind, while his epithets “dangerous” and “lunatic” appear excessive enough to suggest that there is far more to Captain C—— than meets the eye.

Plate 1. Thomas Rowlandson, “Turkish Ambassador introduced to the Duke of N——,” in Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (London, 1793).
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Plate 1.

Thomas Rowlandson, “Turkish Ambassador introduced to the Duke of N——,” in Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (London, 1793).

What has met the eye of many readers in association with Smollett’s scene is Thomas Rowlandson’s illustration entitled “Turkish Ambassador introduced [End Page 2] to the Duke of N——“ (see Plate 1). Interrupted in his ablutions by the ambassador’s arrival, Newcastle stands in his nightcap, shaving lather covering his face. With his long beard and oriental dress the ambassador is readily recognized, as is his servant who makes his salaam in the right foreground. Beyond and between the two oriental figures, the large wig and spectacles belong to a censorious Matt Bramble. Further identification of characters becomes a more speculative matter. In the background and to the left two figures converse, the nearer pointing to the principal figures and speaking seriously to his attentive companion: this could well be the knowledgeable Mr. Barton explaining the scene to Jery Melford. Perhaps surprisingly, the Captain is not immediately announced by his “hook-nose.” Other descriptors (height, age, and his “raw-boned” look) favor the possibility of Captain C—— being either the figure entering by the door or more probably the tall figure next to Newcastle. The cut of this character’s coat may well bear naval or military connotations. In Smollett’s text, another character enters. Described as of “prepossessing appearance,” he is C—— T—— or Charles Townshend (1725–67), variously secretary of state for war and chancellor of the exchequer. Dramatically the door is a suitable location for him, but it is hard to see what might be “prepossessing” about Rowlandson’s new arrival. A better candidate may be the still-not-wildly-prepossessing but at least soft-featured figure already positioned in the center foreground (though his positioning here would involve some temporal discrepancies in Rowlandson’s version of Smollett’s text). Although figures opening doors in Rowlandson’s illustrations may be identifiable characters, they have primarily a symbolic role, drawing back the curtain from the scene for the illustration-viewer’s voyeurism and also providing by facial expression and gesture a reference point for the viewer’s immediate reaction to the scene, whether of horror, astonishment, [End Page 3] belly laugh, or perhaps as here, wry amusement. Developing a reading of Rowlandson’s illustration beyond this point, however, depends on further exploration of Smollett’s treatment of the episode.

The Captain contributes substantially to the reader’s view of the duke of Newcastle and, modified only by Jery’s framing act of narration, controls the view of Charles Townshend. In consequence, both Jery and Matt recognize the need to contextualize the Captain’s opinions on these dignitaries. The reader is positioned to do no less, but reaching conclusions is complicated by the underlying issue of whether to read Captain C—— as an essay in capturing a historical figure represented as having his own priorities or as a fictional actant strictly serving Smollett’s. A case for the latter possibility can certainly be made on the basis of the similarity of the Captain’s judgments of Charles Townshend in Humphry Clinker and Smollett’s judgments elsewhere. In an early number of his Continuation of the Complete History of England, Smollett had praised Townshend unequivocally for his genius and industry, characterizing him as “a wit without arrogance, a patriot without prejudice, and a courtier without dependance.” 4 In apparent contrast, Captain C—— observes of his “friend”:

There’s no faith to be given to his assertions, and no trust to be put in his promises—However, to give the devil his due, he’s very good-natured; and even friendly, when close urged in the way of solicitation—As for principle, that’s out of the question.

(HC, p. 112)

Now Townshend was probably “close urged in the way of solicitation” more than once by Smollett himself, certainly in pursuit of a post as physician to the army in Portugal (in 1762) and possibly in connection with Smollett’s attempts to become British consul at Nice (in late 1766 or early 1767). 5 Any “assertions” or “promises” that Smollett received from Townshend proved fruitless: “You see how much I may depend upon the Friendship of this Gentleman,” he wrote sarcastically to Moore. However, the Captain’s judgment of Townshend preserves the terms of Smollett’s original description in the Continuation—while now inverting the valuation of Townshend’s characteristics:

In a word, he is a wit and an orator, extremely entertaining, and he shines very often at the expense even of those ministers to whom he is retainer— This is a mark of great imprudence, by which he has made them all his enemies, whatever face they may put upon the matter; and sooner or later he’ll have cause to wish he had been able to keep his own counsel—I have several times cautioned him on this subject; but ‘tis all preaching to the desert—His vanity runs away with his discretion.

(HC, p. 112)

Yet readers might well conclude that they are positioned to distrust any judgment of the Captain’s. For Jery, the Captain is as much a leaky vessel as the Townshend he castigates, indeed, no better than an “apple-woman in Spring-garden,” in the full flight of a slanging match, betraying her own gross faults as much as highlighting her target’s failings (HC, p. 112). Besides, the Captain’s integrity is questioned from the beginning; when he first appears [End Page 4] Jery brings forward information learned “from another quarter” touching on the Captain’s “fraudulent practices,” “impostures,” and alleged activity as double agent (HC, pp. 107–08). Again, just before the Captain disappears from the novel, while he is busy diverting the judicious Matt with his anecdotes, Jery observes:

That same evening I spent at a tavern with some friends, one of whom let me into C——‘s character, which Mr. Bramble no sooner understood, than he expressed some concern for the connexion he had made, and resolved to disengage himself from it without ceremony.

(HC, p. 112)

This information that so disconcerts Matt is the same that Jery presents when first mentioning the Captain, and it is also this that triggers Matt’s reference to Captain C—— as “a tartar at bottom; a sharper, a spy, or a lunatic.” Yet the Captain’s judgments of Newcastle mirror dominant images of the duke’s eccentricity and are also strongly corroborated within the text by both Jery’s and Matt’s direct impressions. If, as it seems, C—— can be trusted on Newcastle, then perhaps (if only as a garrulous insider) the reader is also free to trust him on the subject of Townshend. Jery’s aspersions mainly suggest that C—— is as flawed as his patron rather than that the Captain specifically misrepresents Townshend: Townshend and the Captain are simply two apple-women together. 6 In this perspective, the evidence of Humphry Clinker, of the Continuation, and of Smollett’s own letters, points to Captain C——‘s opinions of Townshend as an authorial judgement—as a stick with which Smollett’s freely promising though nonproductive (and by now frustratingly deceased) patron was being flogged. To such an end, the Captain stood in no need of any historical model.

At the same time, the text enmeshes the Captain in a tantalizing excess of historical detail that invites other conclusions:

Our conductor [Barton] saluted him, by the name of captain C——, and afterwards informed us he was a man of shrewd parts, whom the government occasionally employed in secret services—But I have had the history of him more at large, from another quarter—He had been, many years ago, concerned in fraudulent practices, as a merchant, in France; and being convicted of some of them, was sent to the gallies, from whence he was delivered by the interest of the late Duke of Ormond, to whom he had recommended himself in letter, as his name-sake and relation.

(HC, p. 107)

The “late Duke of Ormond” was James Butler (1665–1745), second duke, a lord-lieutenant of Ireland and unsuccessful commander-in-chief under Queen Anne. A leading Jacobite, the duke was impeached in 1715, fled into exile in France and Spain, and was subsequently involved in a number of Jacobite enterprises. His name constitutes the real clue to Captain C——‘s identity, specifically through the information that the Captain has presented himself in a letter as the duke’s “name-sake and relation.” Commentators may not previously have responded to this clue because it immediately raises the problem of how anybody called “C——“ could have truthfully presented [End Page 5] himself as the “name-sake” of James Butler, duke of Ormonde. However, Barton “salutes” the Captain “by the name of captain C——“ (my italics). That expression may imply “going by the name of,” connoting disguise, deception, or the existence of a concealed name. (An Irish political writer at the house of Mr S—— “goes by the name of my Lord Potatoe”; Matt first describes Lydia’s disguised lover Dennison as “a handsome young fellow that goes by the name of Wilson” [HC, pp. 125 & 14].) “Captain C——“ may thus be a nom de guerre. Jery makes no comment on this onomastic paradox, but his very equanimity in the matter encourages consideration of the hypothesis that Captain C—— was indeed based on someone with the same name as the duke, in other words on one or another “James Butler.”

Namesakes do not necessarily stand in any close family relationship; “name-sake and relation” (my italics) thus constitutes additional information: the Captain has communicated to the duke that their shared name signifies a family relationship. Meanwhile, Smollett’s original audience would have been alive to a number of connotations of the name Ormonde, principally Irish and Jacobite associations.

Such considerations prompt a candidature for C—— specifying an aristocratic Irishman named James Butler, related to the dukes of Ormonde and “well stricken in years” (HC, p. 107). A number of James Butlers display one or more of these qualifications, but one particularly promising candidate is James Butler, commander of H. M. Sloop Vulture, author of what in context proves to be the very relevantly titled pamphlet The Case of James Butler, Late an Officer in his Majesty’s Navy, Respecting his Connexions with the House of Ormond (London, 1770). 7

Humphry Clinker does not specify what kind of “captain” C—— may be, or whether the rank is anything more than a nickname, though a specifically marine association might possibly be read in the word “merchant” (HC, p. 107). C——‘s story concerning Newcastle’s ignorance of geography might be read as constructed from a naval view of what constituted common knowledge (though Smollett’s The History and Adventures of an Atom [1768] happily cast Henry Fox and Carteret in the equivalent of the Captain’s role in variant versions of the same anecdote). 8 Again, the Captain comments that recent ministers have scarcely known “a crab from a cauliflower” (HC, p. 108); admittedly, “crab,” while perhaps a crustacean, may here mean “crab-apple.” In discussing the Captain, Jery talks of “state-pilots,” “shallow politicians,” and “the helm of administration” (HC, pp. 107–08). While these phrasings may derive from the common metaphor of the state as ship, or from Smollett’s stock of seagoing expressions rather than being specifically colored by Captain C——‘s occupation, they set a tone, and nothing in Humphry Clinker rules out the possibility of the Captain holding naval rank.

James Butler presented his pamphlet as being “offered to the world, not only to wipe off and silence some reflections which have been whispered about in prejudice of his reputation, whereby his honour has been greatly wounded; but also to convince mankind of the unreasonableness of the attempts which have been made to deprive him of his property, by repeated attacks against him in the court of chancery in Ireland” (Case, p. iii). Here, [End Page 6] James Butler of the Vulture defends his right, against prominent members of the Butler family (led by John Butler, son of Walter Butler, head of the family), to inherit property worth some £1,500 per annum under the will of Charles, earl of Arran, a chancellor of the University of Oxford and brother of the Jacobite James Butler, second duke of Ormonde. The trustees of the earl of Arran’s estate (“whispered” to have been bribed with £2,000 to do so) executed “about four years after lord Arran’s death” the transfer of “several fee-farm rents” to James Butler of the Vulture (Case, p. 2). In 1763, John and other members of the Butler family filed for an injunction to prevent the settlement. The injunction was eventually dissolved, but in 1769 new proceedings were undertaken, and it was during this phase of the dispute that The Case of James Butler appeared.

The particular interest of the pamphlet lies in a number of points concerning James Butler which chime, though sometimes by way of a productive discord, with aspects of the career of Captain C——. Indeed, with the pamphlet bearing the signature of “as Pope expresses it, the noblest work of God, AN HONEST MAN” (Case, p. 54), recognizing those discords suggests a different perspective on Jery’s tavern-gossip about Captain C—— : the possibility is raised that one man’s “information” may be another (“honest”) man’s “reflections...whispered about in prejudice of his reputation.”

James Butler of the Vulture, self-evidently a captain and a namesake of the second duke of Ormonde, also lays claim in his pamphlet to being related to the duke. Indeed, through the duke’s illegitimate son Major William Butler, he lays claim to being the duke’s grandson. Major Butler, base son of the duke by an unrevealed “young lady” of “great distinction,” married a Miss Harrison in 1712 and died when his son James was about three or four years old (Case, pp. 14 & 15n.). Major Butler had allegedly been promised “an earldom, viscount and barony in Ireland, and a peerage of England” by Queen Anne, but as a direct result of his natural father’s impeachment lost his commission and estates and was even imprisoned for debt (Case, p. 29). If James Butler’s claimed relationship of grandson is understood to underlie Captain C——‘s claim to be a “name-sake and relation” of the duke, then Captain C——‘s claim jumps into very sharp focus, as also, given Major Butler’s sufferings, does the duke’s readiness to respond to C—— (by way of amending for past neglect). 9

Strikingly, Captain C——‘s letter to the duke is indeed paralleled in the pamphlet by correspondence between the duke of Ormonde and James Butler of the Vulture. Yet that chiming is accompanied by a curious discord between the characteristics and contexts of the respective correspondences. In Humphry Clinker, Captain C—— has reportedly been convicted in France of fraudulent practices and been “sent to the gallies, from whence he was delivered by the interest of the late Duke of Ormond, to whom he had recommended himself in letter.” The Case of James Butler may be specifically rebutting one element of such gossip in stressing that it was the duke who initiated that correspondence: “Mr. Butler never saw him or wrote to him...” (Case, p. 21). Notwithstanding, Butler certainly does place himself in a “galley” at the moment when he received the duke’s “most affectionate letter” (Case, p. 22). [End Page 7] The situation described, however, is not that of a convicted prisoner of the French, but of a midshipman “in the year 1739...cruising off the coast of Spain” in the Dursley Galley (Case, p. 21). No oar-powered prison ship of the French, this particular “galley” was rather a sixth-rate ship of the British fleet carrying twenty guns, commanded by Admiral Thomas (“Tom in Ten Thousand”) Smith and deployed in the Mediterranean to exert pressure during sensitive political negotiations between Britain and Spain. 10 While bizarrely discrepant semantically, the verbal chiming (“gallies”/”galley”/Galley) is clear, and indeed a little earlier in the pamphlet Butler writes of the “Dursley galley” being “in the gulph of Lyons in the Mediterranean”—an area particularly associated with French prison galleys (Case, p. 20n.). The parallel between the pamphlet and Humphry Clinker’s account of Butler’s galley-service and the duke’s intervention constitutes a basis for identifying Captain C—— with Butler, though the version in the novel appears distinctly garbled. In Butler’s account the duke of Ormonde’s influence with the French court is quite irrelevant; what matters is the duke’s continuing influence with the British establishment, even from exile and during a period of difficult international relations. Delivering James Butler from “the gallies” thus translates into the less melodramatic matter of assisting a young man out of H.M.S. Dursley Galley and up the promotion ladder of the British navy: “His grace [the duke of Ormonde] had recommended Mr. Butler to the said Sir Benjamin Keene [British Ambassador in Spain] in the strongest terms, who thereupon promised to write to Sir Robert Walpole in his favour, which Sir Benjamin accordingly performed” (Case, pp. 22–23). According to Butler, Walpole duly performed his part and letters of recommendation eventually reached Rear-Admiral Haddock, commander of the Mediterranean squadron. By February 1742, indeed, Butler had risen to lieutenant.

A further chiming between novel and pamphlet involves Captain C——‘s intelligence work. Humphry Clinker’s reference to “secret services” may imply Newcastle’s use of secret service funds in election campaigns (see Atom, p. 229), but there are other dimensions to Captain C——‘s covert activities:

He was in the sequel employed by our ministry as a spy; and, in the war of 1740 traversed all Spain, as well as France, in the disguise of a capuchin, at the extreme hazard of his life, inasmuch as the court of Madrid had actually got scent of him, and given orders to apprehend him at St. Sebastian’s, from whence he had fortunately retired but a few hours before the order arrived.

(HC, p. 107)

James Butler’s pamphlet does confirm his involvement in intelligence work during the war. The pamphlet, however, eschews the word “spy,” presenting Butler’s covert operations as patriotically undertaken (in 1747) by a resourceful naval officer serving under the greatest seaman of the day:

When Mr. Butler was under the command of the late lord Anson, commander of the western fleet, being detached from the fleet then in the Bay of Biscay, he received sealed-up orders from lord Anson, to be opened in different latitudes, to cruize and gain what intelligence he could procure, which Mr. [End Page 8] Butler performed, gaining the wished-for private intelligence, viz that three Spanish men of war, one of 74, and two 64 gun ships, having been out in the South Seas five or six years, were returning home loaded with treasure, to the value of between two and three millions of money; Mr. Butler of the Vulture kept his station according to the orders he received from lord Anson, though he was reduced in his sloop’s company to a pint of water and half a pound of bisket per man a day, and by that means procured the necessary intelligence three weeks and five days before the three Spanish ships arrived safe with all their treasure at the Canary Isles....

(Case, p. 31)

Had the British fleet not “dispersed and separated,” it seems that Butler’s efforts might have resulted in a triumph comparable to Anson’s treasure-laden return from his circumnavigation. In particular, the daring of the adventure bears comparison with Captain C——‘s “hairbreadth ‘scapes” (HC, p. 107): “This service was so hazardous, that...lord Anson told him, that he gave him over for lost, thinking that the sloop and crew were all foundered” (Case, p. 32). Shortly afterward, the Vulture was in the Leeward Islands to deliver “expresses from the late duke of Newcastle and the admiralty” (Case, p. 35), helping set up operations which “completed the destruction of the French fighting navy.” 11 (“My dear C——!” cries Newcastle in Humphry Clinker, “you always bring us good news” [p. 108]). Ironically enough, in his History of England, Smollett had written admiringly of all these events, even observing that: “It must be owned, for the honour of [Lord Anson], that all the officers formed under his example, and raised by his influence, approved themselves in all respects worthy of the commands to which they were preferred” (11:287).

The Case of James Butler sheds little light on Humphry Clinker’s other charges. Beyond stressing Butler’s patriotic services and his Protestantism, the pamphlet does not specifically counter or even explicitly recognize the charge of his being a double agent. At the same time, in establishing his own credentials in seamanship, Butler does make much of having been offered commands in not just the Hungarian but the Spanish service, the latter a matter which, given his Ormonde connections, gossip might well have misconstrued. However, further insights stemming from The Case of James Butler hinge on rereading the particular milieu with which Humphry Clinker associates Captain C——.

Matt Bramble alludes to his brush with the “dangerous” Captain in describing his revulsion at a London society which demands that he “mortify [his] senses” and “compound with such uncleanness as [his] soul abhors.” This language derives partly from Psalms 107:18 (“Their soul abhorreth all manner of meat”), an allusion primarily reinforcing Matt’s attack in the same letter on the adulteration of food in London. However, it also pointedly derives from Colossians 3:5 where St. Paul admonishes: “Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness which is idolatry.” This gloss on the “uncleanness” Matt detects encourages one to return to Rowlandson’s “Turkish” and Smollett’s “Algerine” ambassador.

The ambassador is presented as “a venerable Turk, with a long white beard, attended by his dragoman, or interpreter, and another officer of his [End Page 9] household, who had got no stockings to his legs.” At one level the ambassador is a butt of humor, the foolish foreigner who, “ignorant of our political revolutions,” pays his respects believing that Newcastle is still first lord of the treasury (HC, p. 108). Within another frame, the humor works against Newcastle and escalates into political satire. Although allies since 1682, realpolitik and reciprocal acts of piracy and reprisal had characterized the usual relationship between Algiers and Britain. Smollett’s editorially supervised Modern Part of an Universal History dealt bluntly with the alliance, valuing the deployment of British men-of-war out of Gibraltar and Minorca over the finer points of diplomatic relations with the Barbary state. 12 His own Continuation was even more scathing, presenting Algiers as a “predatory republic” founded on “piracy and rapine” and deploring attempts at the accommodation of such “barbarous ruffians” with money and arms as “a flagrant reproach upon Christendom,” when instead,

the Maritime Powers...by one vigorous exertion of their power...might destroy all their ships, lay their towns in ashes, and totally extirpate those pernicious broods of desperate banditti. Even all the condescension of those who disgrace themselves with the title of allies to these miscreants, is not always sufficient to restrain them from acts of cruelty and rapine.

(1:54)

Such statements constitute a strong direction to read Newcastle’s welcome for the ambassador in Humphry Clinker as a satire of British ministerial condescension toward the perceived barbarism of Algiers. Readers who here find satire of the duke for his behavior in front of a worthy dignitary quite overlook this resonance.

The perceived barbarism at issue is also, and perhaps primarily, sexual. European tendencies to associate the orient with, in Edward Said’s phrases, “the freedom of licentious sex” and “bizarre jouissance” 13 have an attested history and diffusion beyond the scope of the present study; in this case those tendencies enter Humphry Clinker through a particular intertextual network, traces of which are identifiable via the ambassador’s comment on Newcastle’s eccentricities: “Holy prophet! I don’t wonder that this nation prospers, seeing it is governed by the counsel of ideots; a series of men, whom all good mussulmen revere as the organs of immediate inspiration!” (HC, p. 109). This idea and its phrasing continue a leitmotif in the treatment of North Africa in the Universal History. There, the role in religious government of the marabouts (understood as inspired by demons) is repeatedly stigmatized, and it is particularly remarked of the Algerines that: “Much the same regard they pay to their madmen, idiots, and lunatics, whom they esteem as inspired saints, and great favourites of God” (18:230; cf. 107, 386). An important ghosting presence at other points in Humphry Clinker, the Universal History here brings to bear the weight of its constructions of sexuality in North Africa, specifically among that region’s powerful Turkish minority. The “General Description of Africa” presents Africans as “hot, and addicted to all kinds of lusts, and most ready to promote them in others, as pimps [and] panders” (14:18–19): [End Page 10]

We need not add to these their impurities and blasphemies, because in these they outdo all other nations, Africa being known to have been burning with innumerable impurities; insomuch, that one would rather take it for a volcano of the most impure flames, than for an habitation of human creatures.

In the “Modern History of Barbary” this judgment is only modified in proposing that region’s Moors, Arabs, and Turks as outdoing all other Africans “by many degrees in laziness, ignorance, superstition, thieving, lying, cheating, treachery, cowardice, lewdness of all, even the most infamous, kinds, and every sort of baseness and vice.” The Turks are:

by far the worst, and in all respects, except their surprising and uncontrouled power and sway, the most contemptible of the three, being originally no better than a wretched crew of indigent, tattered, and famished, loose, idle, and thievish fellows, inlisted in and about Constantinople...and from thence are raised by degrees from one post to another, even to that of admiral, vazir, &c. and even to the Beyric.

(18:7)

Clearly such a catalogue might include, without distorting the writer’s views, the Algerine ambassador to the Court of St. James; meanwhile, such assumptions specifically illuminate the presentation of the Turkish officer “who had got no stockings to his legs”: this detail becomes less an observation on ethnic dress than emblematic code for a disreputable indigence understood, despite appearances, as inalienably attaching to the ambassador. After a treatment of polygamy, the Universal History proceeds to “the common evil” among the Turks: “The misfortune is, that, like the generality of the Turks, not content with such a variety of women, they are equally guilty of a shameful and unnatural vice, which modesty forbids even the mention of” (18:10–11). In Fez, in Morocco, there are “no less than 200 inns, both large and beautiful,” the majority of which are “a downright sink of unnatural abominations, acted not only impunely, but barefaced”:

The masters of these Sodoms in miniature are permitted not only to entertain a number of catamites for the use of their customers, but even to stand before their doors, or rove about the streets, some in women’s cloaths, to entice people by their effeminate voice, and lewd gestures and songs, into their houses.

(18:76–77)

From what to modern eyes is a ragingly racist, sexist, and homophobic standpoint, the Universal History constructs Africa as a pyramid of the sexually unnatural and unnameable reaching its apex ethnically in the Turks of the Barbary Coast and geographically in Algiers. 14 In the “History of Algiers,” attention is drawn to tribute being paid to the Ottoman Porte in a currency of young boys, while marginal headings conduct the reader from the “Strange Superstitions” of the Algerines to their “Unnatural Vices”:

Some of a grosser kind they are charged with; as of ranking sodomy, and other unnatural vices, among their virtues; which, whether strictly true or [End Page 11] not, their practice is a plain proof that they do not look upon it as a breach of their law, seeing it is a reigning vice amongst them, from which neither priests nor laymen of any rank are exempt.

(18:230)

Taking the broadest perspective, Randolph Trumbach has observed that “in 18th century England, when Italy was not cited as the home of sodomy, the next candidate was Turkey”; 15 within that broad perspective, the particular intertextual network of the Universal History and Humphry Clinker sharply clarifies the nature of the sexual connotation that accompanies the Algerine Turks. The question that follows is whether the whole levée is in consequence presented as “Sodom in miniature.”

The foundation of an answer is provided by the work of Randolph Trumbach, G. S. Rousseau, and Robert Adams Day on homophobia in such of Smollett’s texts as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and the early satire Advice (1746) with its plain condemnation:

Eternal infamy his name surround, Who planted first, that vice on British ground! A vice that ‘spite of sense and nature reigns, And poisons genial love and manhood stains! 16

Day argues that sexuality between males in Smollett’s texts tends to be collapsed into the particular practice of sodomy and is consequently figured in images centered on the buttocks and excrement (the “revelatory paradigm” that Day traces through from Roderick Random to an instance in Humphry Clinker being the “Sword in the Turd”). Yet while the accentuated antisodomite stance involved in the presentation of a Captain Whiffle, an Earl Strutwell, or a “Brush” Warren (“kept by both sexes at one time”) is quite evident, reading Smollett’s texts for attacks on sodomy or effeminacy can at times be complicated by overlapping discourses (Advice, ll. 89–90).

In The History and Adventures of an Atom, which offers a satirical history of England from the mid 1750s to the late 1760s through a mock chronicle of Japan, Newcastle is frequently associated with buttocks and with excrement; Day notes that even Newcastle’s name in this text (“Fika-kaka”) embodies the word “Caca” which “in many Indo-European languages is baby-talk or adult talk for defecation.” 17 As Day develops the point, the uncontrollably defecating Fika-kaka is portrayed being repeatedly and enjoyably kicked in the backside by his master (George II) and as suffering from a perpetually itchy fundament which he soothes, in Rabelaisian fashion, with a wide range of unlikely materials and “by having his arse kissed by bishops, whose beards produce exquisite (in fact, orgasmic) pleasure.” 18 It would be tempting to link the sexual pleasure of the bishops’ beards to the ambassador’s long white beard in Humphry Clinker, but the caveat is that the Atom’s images have historical and political referents which are not themselves primarily sexual. Those referents include George’s habit of “rumping” (i.e., turning his back on people), his political distaste for Newcastle, his habit of kicking his servants, and Newcastle’s control of Church appointments. 19 Arse-kissing, moreover, [End Page 12] is a metaphor for sycophancy and submission with a history hardly initiated in or ended by Smollett’s texts, while the idea of the bare-arsed can equally lead into a similarly persistent iconography of poverty. 20 As Day observes, “Scatology is one thing and scatological sex is another” (p. 230). Peter Thompson has recently remarked of satirical publications connected with the 1737 Licensing Bill that “the scenery is largely buttocks...; the idea of displaying the human rump is curiously persistent in the scurrilous art of the eighteenth century...; ‘bottoms’ haunted George II in the 1740s as ‘rumps’ had haunted him in the 1730s.” This was the tendency whether the referent had any conceivable connection with backsides or not (though Walpole’s involvement with The Golden Rump and Newcastle’s part in the “Broad-Bottom” coalition of the 1740s gave not inconsiderable hostages to fortune). 21 Former Tory cabinet minister Kenneth Baker has recently summed up this whole tendency in the depiction of British political life toward what Mark Jenner has designated “textual mooning” as a terrain running “from Walpole’s bottom to Major’s underpants.” The key question, then, as Day recognizes, is whether such imagery in Smollett’s texts displays a particular excess insisting upon a sexual interpretation.

Sexuality between males is a presence in the Atom: Frederick the Great’s sexuality, however, is relatively unemphatically acknowledged in the observation that “he had no communication with the female sex” (p. 49). Singled out for his “sensuality” (p. 63), there is continual innuendo (though more equivocation) in the case of Fika-kaka/Newcastle: “in his youth, he freely conversed with women; but, as he advanced in age, he placed his chief felicity in the delights of the table” (p. 13). As noted above, arse-kicking and “osculation a posteriori” between males certainly become the principal motifs in Fika-kaka’s representation, though to some degree carrying with them the problem of just how separable they are from a reductive satiric language for a culture of sycophancy. Specifically sexual innuendo may well be present in allusions to Newcastle’s support for the Jewish Naturalization Bill, the Atom reporting that “some malicious people did not scruple to whisper about, that [Fika-kaka] himself had privately undergone the operation [of circumcision]” (p. 14): the significance of this is that Smollett, in his edition of Voltaire (as Day highlights), “interrupts a discussion of Semitic customs to wonder whether circumcision causes homosexuality”; in corollary, Humphry Clinker contains a triumphalist view of the virtues of an intact state when, with a heterosexual reference, Hewett the Demonstrator is “stimulated to shew his parts” (and his heterosexual orthodoxy) during a dispute with some Turks on the topic of circumcision (HC, p. 176). 22 Less recondite, however, may be the frequent focus on Newcastle’s attested, and what Day terms “notorious,” mannerisms of publicly kissing and hugging other males, as when Anson, returning from his voyage of circumnavigation is “honoured with five kisses in public” (Atom, p. 21; cf. pp. 17, 42, 77, 86). Trumbach, tracing the modulation of gender identities in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, has observed that “by 1749 it could be said that when males kissed each other in greeting, it was the ‘first inlet to the detestable sin of sodomy’”: 23 Anson returned from his great voyage in 1744, but Smollett [End Page 13] was writing from the viewpoint of 1768 (while, in the interval, Newcastle’s manners would seem to have persisted in displaying cultural lag).

In general it would be an understatement to say that Newcastle’s male heterosexuality is presented as insecure in the Atom. He is not only associated, like Captain C—— and Charles Townshend in Humphry Clinker, with the image of an “apple-woman” (Atom, p. 12), but loses his genitals, turns into a woman, and shows a desire to sit and incubate eggs. Again, the reductive imagery of the satiric prints arguably furnishes all these motifs. 24 Day, however, also persuasively relates that image of birdlike incubation to Advice, its mention of the “prolific bum” of (a different) “C——,” and a cryptic footnote referring to a man laying “upwards of forty eggs,” a phenomenon which, the footnote explains, “some virtuosi affirm...must be the effect of a certain intercourse of organs not to be named.” 25 Clearly, as Day argues, the Atom does go beyond the merely scatological to associate Newcastle with forms of anal-eroticism between males. Fika-kaka’s discovery of the joy of beards, shows (despite the possible parody of medico-erotica) an excess of sensation suggesting more than just the pleasures of sycophantic attention:

The osculation itself was soft, warm, emollient, and comfortable; but when the nervous papillae were gently stroaked, and as it were fondled by the long, elastic, peristaltic, abstersive fibres that composed this reverend verriculum, such a delectable titillation ensued, that Fika-kaka was quite in raptures.

(Atom, p. 17)

Elsewhere, monstrosity associates Fika-kaka with perceived female roles, while sodomy, through the barely concealed double-entendre of “kicking,” is at least immanent throughout.

Such connotations are less freely available in Humphry Clinker, though at times details of event and scene so echo the Atom that they are not incompatible with a view of the novel equally constituting a site for reading Newcastle as associated with sodomitical practices. At St. James’s, the duke leaves Matt with the words “Well, I shall be glad to see you at Lincoln’s-inn-fields—You know the way—Times are altered. Though I have lost the power, I retain the inclination” (HC, p. 97). There is no ignoring the fact that the duke’s house was physically located where it was, but Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields also had a reputation from early in the century as a “molly district.” 26 Though the duke’s comments about “power” and “inclination” refer immediately to his loss of senior political office, the words reverberate with a flippancy that still has some currency in sexual jocularity; they also stand ready to be filled with more particular meanings involving impotence and the adoption of a passive sexual role. At his levée, the duke greets Matt with one eye on a Jery fresh from Oxford (with, as Advice had emphasized, its reputation for homosexual orgies): 27 “How d’ye Mr. Bramble? Your nephew is a pretty young fellow—Faith and troth, a very pretty fellow!” The exclamation and amplification of the descriptive phrase suggest a different nuance as Newcastle takes full notice of Jery’s appearance. Smollett himself had specifically commented on how the particular meaning of “a very pretty fellow” could [End Page 14] be radically changed through variations in intonation. 28 Trumbach points out that in Thomas Otway’s The Souldier’s Fortune, Sir Jolly Jumble calls Coustine “a pretty fellow” and tries to kiss him; Michael McKeon has recently commented on how the “Pretty Gentleman” as a gender identity was connected to the molly subculture and particularly associated with “the effeminacy of a refined gentility.” 29

The duke’s attentions are also directed toward Charles Townshend: “At length, a person of a very prepossessing appearance coming in, his grace ran up, and, hugging him in his arms, with the appellation of ‘My dear Ch——s’ led him forthwith into the inner apartment, or Sanctum Sanctorum of the political temple” (HC, p. 111). In the Atom, Newcastle’s “closet” is synonymous with osculation a posteriori, while the phrases “inner apartment” and “Sanctum Sanctorum of the political temple” are clearly open to interpretation in sexual terms. Trumbach has also commented on how, in the early eighteenth century, “enthusiastic forms of greeting” became particularly identified with the molly. 30 Similarly, Captain C——‘s geographical anecdote culminates in the duke’s joy finding expression in his “taking me in his arms” (HC, p. 108); Earl Strutwell, in Roderick Random, is characterized by his tendency toward “frequent squeezes of the hand” and “a tender embrace” (Rousseau, “Threshold,” p. 150). Taken individually, these points are slight, and indeed a homophobic effect might be risked in pressing any one of them to a conclusion. Not every instance in the novel of a male taking another in his arms constitutes evidence of sodomy; on such a premise Matt and Jery, unconsciously homocentric and homosocial though these two bachelors are to their differing degrees, would soon find themselves beyond the sexual pale Smollett uses them to construct. Taken cumulatively, however, and especially in a reading of Humphry Clinker against the Atom, the extensive network of innuendo surrounding the duke constitutes an environment for reading at the very least a receptivity to sexuality between males (indeed, the particularly stigmatized status of “pathic”) in Humphry Clinker’s presentation of Newcastle.

What of Captain C——? The OED cites Matt’s phrase “a tartar at bottom” as a use of “Tartar” to mean “a savage; a person supposed to resemble a Tartar in disposition; a rough and violent or irritable and intractable person.” Curiously, none of those characteristics bring Captain C—— to mind. However, the Universal History testifies to the complex traditions, debates, and popular myths surrounding the ethnicity of the mingled tribes of Tartary. “It may well be questioned, whether all the different tribes inhabiting Tartary are branches of Turks,” cautions the writer of the “General History of the Turks,” while at the same time acknowledging the primary position of the Turks among the peoples of Tartary, and the extent to which the terms “Turk” and “Tartar” had been conflated and indeed regarded as acceptably so conflated (Universal History, 4:34). Elsewhere the writer confirms the ethnic relationship of the Ottoman Turks to the Turks of Tartary. Beyond constituting a summing up of the epithets that follow, Matt’s phrase “a tartar at bottom” may thus carry all the usual pejorative connotations of “Turk” (see Universal History, 12:2) and, in particular, carry the suggestion of sodomy. [End Page 15] Certainly in the transposed geography of the Atom, the homosexual Frederick the Great is “the Tartar chief” (Atom, p. 39).

Captain C—— is not just “a tartar at bottom”: Jery also reports him as suspected of being “at bottom not only a Roman-catholic, but really a priest.” Here, the phrase “really a priest” can only mean “Jesuit.” Drawing on the popular perception of Jesuit involvement in political subversion, the charge is more than consonant with the allegation of C—— being a double agent, the idea of double agency oscillating between political, religious, and sexual contexts. Jesuits are prominent in Smollett’s sexual myths. As Day indicates, in Smollett’s translation and edition of Voltaire’s Candide, the sentence “Our general stood in need of new levies of young German Jesuits” receives the gratuitous annotation, “This is an oblique shaft levelled at that infamous passion which is supposed to prevail in this society.” 31 Moreover, the phrase “at bottom” occurs more than once in Humphry Clinker carrying genital/anal connotations. 32 It follows that whether as “tartar” or as “priest,” Humphry Clinker constitutes a site for reading Captain C—— as being, in essence, “at bottom.” Rictor Norton’s presentation of a limerick about Robert Thistlethwayte and the Oxford scandal of 1739 demonstrates the possible contemporary sexual loading of the phrase:

There once was a warden of Wadham Who approved of the folkways of Sodom,     For a man might, he said,     Have a very poor head, But be a fine fellow, at bottom.

(Mother Clap’s Molly House, p. 159)

Even the term “sharper,” as Dennis Rubini has pointed out, may carry some connotations of the kind. 33 Trumbach makes clear that the European taboo on sexuality between males has been occluded with broader objections to any kind of “unnatural or non-reproductive sexuality.” 34 The Atom’s presentation of a view that “an intercourse of the sexes [was not] required for the propagation of the species” as “freed from [the] troublesome and impertinent faculties of reason and reflection” consequently illuminates the suppressed logic of Matt’s judgment of Captain C—— as “dangerous” and, particularly, “lunatic” (Atom, pp. 60–61). In short, rereading the presentation, conjunction, and intertextuality of the Algerine ambassador, his entourage, the duke of Newcastle, Captain C——, and, at the margins, even Charles Townshend, it is clear that Humphry Clinker offered an invitation to read the duke’s levée disparagingly as a sodomitical clique and indeed, given the repertoire of characteristics of speech and body language presented as indicative and identifiable, as an outcrop of London’s increasingly recognizable homosexual subculture. 35

Rowlandson’s illustration may now be reread. What now comes into focus is the all-male environment and the boyish Newcastle lathered with sexual excitement as much as with soap as he half-crouches in deference and eagerness before an Algerine ambassador posed as object of sexual desire. [End Page 16] Beside Newcastle, the tall and “archly leering” figure appears to indicate with a delicately outstretched palm the handle of the long sword which hangs at the ambassador’s side. That handle, in shape and position (in a familiar ploy of graphic satire) has phallic attributes. The tall figure is now clearly legible as Captain C—— posed as intermediary or pander between Newcastle and the ambassador, while Charles Townshend looks on with satisfaction and Matt Bramble glowers disapprovingly at the inward-facing circle of four, a circle reinforced and defined as a group by the chandelier above them with its emblematic ring of four burning candles symbolizing passion. Here, for Matt Bramble is the bodying out of St. Paul’s list of detested sins: “fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness which is idolatry.” Moreover, the political establishment, the British Navy and the African Turk here form a dynamic tableau proffering the antisodomite’s mythic answer to the question posed in Advice: “Who planted first, that vice on British ground[?]”: it has come from the Turk, via the Navy and been harbored by the powerful. It is also hard not to read Rowlandson’s Newcastle against the Atom’s more frankly suggestive description of Fika-kaka:

[Fika-kaka’s] body was so well moulded for the celebration of the rite [of arse-kicking/sodomy], that one would have imagined nature had formed him expressly for that purpose, with his head and body projecting forwards, so as to form an angle of forty-five with the horizon, while the glutaei muscles swelled backwards as if ambitious to meet half-way the imperial encounter.

(p. 20)

In Rowlandson’s illustration, as in the Atom, Newcastle literally “retains the inclination.” While Matt only takes Jery to the levée to “see and learn to avoid the scene” (HC, p. 97), it is his further recognition of the gender identity of the company and C——‘s part in it which causes him to “disengage” so suddenly and vehemently from the vicinity of practices and life-styles he can only understand as typical of urban vice and from a “connexion” understood as not founded on any of his own definitions of “sentiment or friendship.”

Understandably, The Case of James Butler does not specify all the allegations prejudicing Butler’s position in the contested Arran inheritance. However, addressed to an audience disseminating or encountering those allegations, the pamphlet implicitly indexes through its own priorities the charges in circulation. In particular, Butler needed to display his own pedigree—not just to establish his status as a man of rank and honor, but to explain the intimacy and duration, the social and familial foundation, of his relationship with the earl of Arran and so demonstrate the reasonableness of the earl’s wishes in the disposition of his property. It does specifically emerge that John Butler had not only charged James Butler with bribery but had also disseminated “reflections of the like nature” and “insinuations...that he is an intruder on the family-rights of the ancient house of Ormond” (Case, pp. 6–7). The pamphlet energetically counters this latter point by laying [End Page 17] out the Butler family tree and the place of James Butler of the Vulture within it. Emphasis is placed on Major William Butler having been brought up in the duke’s house as if he had been born in wedlock, while, after the death of William (his son explains):

Lord Arran regarded Mr Butler in the most affectionate light, and he had the honour to live with him upon the footing of the utmost regard and affectionate friendship, and with the two ladies the countess of Arran and lady Amelia Butler; and he takes this opportunity to acknowledge and declare, that he still, and always shall, entertain the most grateful respect to the memory of lady Arran, for the utmost kindness that she always showed him in recommending him to her ladyship’s family, friends and connexions, and especially to her niece, the marchioness de Grey, and likewise to the memory of lady Amelia Butler, for the great honour, friendship and esteem she always showed him; as also to the late dutchess of Ormond, who, a short time before her decease, sent for him, being then very young, and in the presence of her daughter, lady Elizabeth (who was his godmother) gave him a purse of gold, and a ring with her lord’s hair, set round with brilliants; after which she tenderly saluted him, and shedding a flood of tears, recommended him in the strongest terms to the kind protection and countenance of her daughters.

(Case, pp. 18–19)

In 1746 it had been with the earl of Arran’s assistance that James Butler first became captain of the Vulture, though not without some struggle of feelings: “Mr. Butler was determined upon it, though his lordship at the same time desired him to stay with him, and behaved to him in the most affectionate manner, proving himself a friend and parent to him, as he had lost his own parents” (Case, p. 21). Some time after his intelligence expedition, however, following demands made upon him by the Navy which he regarded as particularly unreasonable, Butler “having at last obtained leave to resign his commission...accepted of the invitation given him repeatedly by lord Arran, of retiring from the sea and residing with his lordship, which he did until the day of his death, in 1758” (Case, p. 41). The principal concern of the pamphlet may have been to counter the charge of James Butler being “an intruder on the family-rights” through the fact of his father’s illegitimacy. However, a mass of “insinuations” and “reflections” is implied. Moreover, if Butler’s account of his history and situation was rejected by his enemies, particularly as it related to that domestic relationship with the earl of Arran that he explains in such detail, what was the counter-narrative, disseminated in gossip, that Butler faced? How, in particular, did it represent Butler’s place in the earl’s patronage, in his house, in his affections, and in his will? Why did Butler go out of his way to characterize the earl’s affection for him as quasi-parental? Why should he have so emphasized his acceptance by the female members of the earl’s household and elsewhere have drawn attention to the existence of his own illegitimate son? 36 Gossip may have been concerned with his downright “imposture” (one of Humphry Clinker’s broad charges) as the duke’s grandson, and Butler’s inability to name his grandmother other than as “a young lady of distinction” must have proved [End Page 18] a stumbling-block to him in that context. 37 However, it is no great leap to suspect that some versions of gossip’s case against James Butler, in accounting for the earl’s legacy, showed a coloring of substantial or, in the context of the court-case, tactical antisodomite suspicion or homophobia. 38

The case for Captain James Butler of the Vulture having been the model for Captain C—— is not quite complete. Tantalizingly, with the current genealogist of the Butler family, I remain unaware of any name beginning with “C” that Butler may have used. 39 However, on the premise that the name “James Butler” combined with an Ormonde family connection and the rank of captain are the prerequisites for any model of the character, James Butler of the Vulture implicitly makes the most elegant case for his own candidature in describing himself as “the only officer of the Ormond family serving the present government since the year 1713” (Case, p. 37n.). If that was so, the fact excludes the possibility of any other appropriately qualified James Butler (i.e., as “captain”) emerging as a rival candidate. Meanwhile, even the duke of Newcastle’s blunders work to support the candidacy of the captain of the Vulture. Replying to the Captain’s observation about the duke’s political enemies, Newcastle sums them up as “A pack of rascals...— Tories, Jacobites, rebels; one half of them would wag their heels at Tyburn, if they had their deserts—.” The stated principle of Newcastle’s caricature is that “he scarce ever opened his mouth without making some blunder, in relation to the person or business of the party with whom he conversed”: Newcastle could hardly make a more tactless blunder in conversing with someone claiming to be the grandson of the attainted duke of Ormonde than to explode on the subject of Tories, Jacobites, and rebels who warranted being hanged (HC, p. 111).

The evidence points strongly to Butler having been the model for Captain C——. At the same time, Humphry Clinker’s version of him was damagingly distorted and prejudicial; Jery’s phrase “if he is not belied” was clearly an empty concession. It may well have to be considered whether there were machinations behind the blackening of Captain Butler’s reputation by means of Smollett’s novel. In 1770/71 some certainly stood to gain by Butler’s continued representation as a person given to “fraudulent practices” and “imposture,” as a “tartar at bottom,” “at bottom a priest,” a “spy,” and a “sharper” connected with “schemes of interest or ambition,” and even as an “apple-woman” advertising herself as “a whore and a thief” (HC, p. 112). Smollett, resident in Italy, may have been carelessly exploiting and embroidering what he saw as colorful gossip without checking his facts; equally, he may have been allowing his fiction to serve one side of a private controversy. No judgment can be offered with complete confidence concerning the most germane politics—sexual, party-political, legal-financial, or personal—of the Captain’s appearance in Humphry Clinker. As matters stand, however, Captain James Butler of the Vulture—a ship, it should now be recognized, bearing the name of a “hook-nosed” bird with a reputation for possessing “as much cunning as sagacity”—may be proposed as best claimant to the antisodomitical and homophobic innuendo attaching to the character of Captain C—— and the duke of Newcastle’s circle. If the final piece of the [End Page 19] jigsaw as it concerns James Butler remains to be found (“C——“), the picture it would in any case complete is one of hostility inscribed in body and gesture to emergent gender identities of the period, and through Rowlandson’s illustration of Smollett, in image as well as in word.

Peter Miles
University of Wales, Lampeter

Acknowledgment

A version of this paper was delivered to the “Word and Visual Imagination” colloquium (University of Wales, Lampeter) on “The Human Figure and Gesture in Literature and Visual Art,” at Gregynog in May 1994. I am grateful to Rebecca Ferguson, Lawrence Normand, Allen Samuels, and Jonathan Sawday for particular advice and suggestions.

Footnotes

1. In these cases the evidence favors Pitt and Taylor. See The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Peter Miles (London: Dent, 1993), pp. 402–03, 376.

2. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Lewis M. Knapp (London: Oxford Univ., 1966), p. 110.

3. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, intro. & notes Thomas R. Preston; text ed. O M Brack Jr. (Athens & London: Univ. of Georgia, 1990), p. 376. All page refs. to Humphry Clinker in the text are to this edn., abbreviated as HC.

4. Continuation, 5 vols. (London, 1760–65), 1:436.

5. See Smollett’s letters to John Moore (19 Aug. 1762) and to the duchess of Hamilton (17 Jan. 1767), in The Letters of Tobias Smollett, ed. Lewis M. Knapp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), pp. 108 & 128.

6. William Lecky observed: “[Townshend] treated his colleagues [in the Rockingham Administration] with undisguised contempt, described the government of which he was a member as ‘a lutestring administration fit only for summer wear,’ and ostentatiously abstained from defending its measures”; “Townshend, in spite of all his extraordinary abilities, had all the vanity of a woman”; “had he possessed any earnestness of character, any settled convictions, any power of acting with fidelity to his colleagues, or any self-control, he might have won a great name in English politics” (A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 7 vols. [London: Longman, 1892], 3:273, 297).

7. Refs. to The Case of James Butler, abbreviated to Case, are hereafter given in the text. I am grateful to the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich for the following information: Butler was commissioned as lieutenant on 25 Feb. 1742; in that year he was appointed to H.M.S. Leopard as 3rd lieutenant and H.M.S. Princess Mary as 2nd lieutenant; in 1745 he was serving as 3rd lieutenant on H.M.S. Prince Frederick; he was appointed commander of H.M. Sloop Vulture on 11 Nov. 1746.

8. The History and Adventures of an Atom, intro. & notes by Robert Adams Day, text ed. O M Brack Jr. (Athens & London: Univ. of Georgia, 1989), pp. 28 & 86. All page refs. to the Atom in the text are to this edn.

9. In his A Complete History of England, 11 vols. (London, 1758–60), 10:181, Smollett had himself written: “A man of candour cannot, without an emotion of grief and indignation, reflect upon the ruin of the noble family of Ormond, in the person of a brave, generous, and humane nobleman, to whom no crime was imputed, but that of having obeyed the command of his sovereign.” Case frequently reports the earl of Arran’s lamentations for Major Butler’s undeserved personal suffering.

10. See Naval Administration 1715–1750, ed. Daniel A. Baugh (London: Naval Records Society, 1977), p. 209.

11. A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660–1783 (London: Marston, 1889), p. 271.

12. See the Modern Part of an Universal History, 44 vols. (London, 1759–66), 18:366. All page refs. to this work, abbreviated to Universal History, are hereafter given in the text.

13. Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 103 & 190.

14. For the judgment of Algiers in relation to the rest of North Africa, see Universal History, 18:387.

15. “London’s Sodomites: Homosexual Behaviour and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Social History 11 (1977–78): 6.

16. Advice: A Satire, in Plays and Poems Written by T. Smollett M.D. (1777), p. 211, ll. 91–94. See Robert Adams Day, “Sex, Scatology, Smollett,” in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Manchester: Manchester Univ., 1982), pp. 225–43. See also Robert D. Spector, Smollett’s Women: A Study in an Eighteenth-Century Masculine Sensibility (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994), pp. 13–14.

17. “Sex, Scatology, Smollett,” p. 239. The point may not have been made, but was doubtless not lost on the 18th-century satirist, that the title of “New-castle” offers a near rhyme in “arse-hole.”

18. “Sex, Scatology, Smollett,” p. 229; see Atom, p. 16: “he was seized with an orgasm of pleasure, analogous to that which characterises the extacy of love.”

19. Paul-Gabriel Boucé has identified a source for the episode’s satire on the duke as ecclesiastical patron and on the clergy’s disloyalty to him in a 1756 poem entitled The Levée. Although not dealing with the concerns of the present study, Boucé characterizes the episode as “a much more complex and subtle transformation of raw facts into fiction, than...mere passive and docile copying from actual life” (“The Duke of Newcastle’s Levee in Humphry Clinker,” Yearbook of English Studies 5 [1975]: 141).

20. See Eric Rothstein, “Scotophilia and Humphry Clinker: The Politics of Beggary, Bugs and Buttocks,” University of Toronto Quarterly 52 (1982): 63–78.

21. Thompson, “Fielding, Walpole, George II and the Liberty of the Theatre,” Literature and History, 3rd ser., 2, i (Spring 1993): 43 & 65. See pp. 62ff. for relevant prints; also the collection of prints reproduced in Atom. Smollett’s History observed: “This coalition was dignified with the epithet of ‘The Broad Bottom’.... The appellation...was afterwards converted into a term of derision” (11:195).

22. Day, “Sex, Scatology, Smollett,” p. 234; The Works of M. de Voltaire, Translated from the French, With Notes Historical and Critical, ed. T. Smollett, T. Francklin, et al. (1761), 1:43.

23. Trumbach, “The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660–1750,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, & George Chauncey Jr. (1989; rep. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 134.

24. Day points out that prints had long portrayed Newcastle as an old woman, and that Bute had been portrayed hatching eggs (Atom, p. 229).

25. Advice, p. 207, l.29 & n.; Day, “Sex, Scatology, Smollett,” pp. 232–33; the “C——“ concerned in Advice is Sir John Cope (d. 1760), the commander of English forces at Prestonpans much mocked by the Scots for his ignominious retreat. Tabitha, writing to Mrs. Gwyllim, may stumble into the same mythology of reproduction in use here in referring to the great number of eggs “you” must have laid and the numbers of “Turks” (turkeys) that must in consequence have hatched (HC, p. 264).

26. Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700–1830 (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1987), p. 78.

27. G. S. Rousseau notes a 1739 pamphlet entitled College Wit Sharpened, or a Head of a College with a Sting in the Tail (“Threshold and Explanation: The Social Anthropologist and the Critic of Eighteenth-Century Literature,” Eighteenth Century 22 [1981]:147n.). Rictor Norton cites the diarist Dudley Rider observing back in 1715/16 that “it is dangerous sending a young man that is beautiful to Oxford” (p. 159).

28. See the comments on Pitt’s oratory (Atom, p. 57). The OED notes contemporary usage of “pretty fellow” to mean, inter alia, a fine young man or a gaily dressed swell of a young man, as well as a heavily ironic use of the phrase.

29. Trumbach, “The Birth of the Queen,” p. 133; McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Evolution of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (Spring 1995): 311. G. S. Rousseau (“Threshold,” p. 147n.) mentions “‘The Pretty Gentlemen’ in the anonymous but very popular Fugitive Pieces on Various Subjects (1761),” a homophobic satire further explored by Norton.

30. Trumbach, “The Birth of the Queen,” p. 134. Townshend was actually Newcastle’s nephew; Smollett’s text, however, leaves no room for understanding this relationship as any kind of basis for the affection between the two men.

31. Day, “Sex, Scatology, Smollett,” p. 234; Works of M. de Voltaire, 18:54, 54n. For Jesuit contact with homosexuality in India, see G. S. Rousseau, “The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century: ‘Utterly Confused Category’ and/or Rich Repository?” Eighteenth-Century Life 9 (May 1985): 158.

32. Unambiguous usages probably include HC, pp. 55, 112, 199, 324. Double entendres of a loose sexual nature are evident when Matt doubts whether one of Dr. Linden’s cured prostitutes is “sound at bottom” (p. 20); when, in the matter of Miss Blackerby’s pregnancy, Jery suspects Mansel of being “at the bottom of the whole [/hole]” (p. 28), and when Tabitha (“I will not be rogered at this rate”) describes the lusty handyman Roger Williams as “no better than he should be at bottom” (p. 153). There may even be a double entendre in the maiden Lydia’s reflections on her illness caused by anxiety about Wilson’s possible insincerity: “I have recovered my flesh and appetite, though there is something still at bottom, which it is not in the power of air, exercise, company or medicine to remove” (p. 250).

33. “Sexuality and Augustan England: Sodomy, Politics, Elite Circles and Society,” in The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, ed. Kent Gerard & Gert Hekma (N.Y.: Harrington Park, 1989), pp. 349–81, 369.

34. “London’s Sodomites,” p. 12. Rousseau observes: “As the Swiss Protestant Dr. Samuel Tissot quickly learned in his antimasturbation campaigns, educated people were willing to believe that onanism caused insanity; it was, therefore, not difficult to persuade them that male sodomitical penetration represented a far more extreme version of physical and mental derangement” (“The Pursuit of Homosexuality,” p. 142).

35. Trumbach finds a significant marker of the emergence in British culture of circles of “exclusive adult sodomites” in Smollett’s presentation of Captain Whiffle: “Whiffle comes on board in the most extravagant garb ‘with a crowd of attendants, all of whom...seemed to be of their patron’s disposition’” (“The Birth of the Queen,” p. 134). Elsewhere, Trumbach comments on the role of royal courts as protected sites of behavior and, with particular reference to Lord Hervey and Frederick the Great, remarks that “aristocratic privilege did still allow for the formation of homosexual cliques” (“London’s Sodomites,” p. 23). McKeon observes: “What distinguished the molly subculture from precedent sodomitical activity, Alan Bray has claimed, was precisely its coalescence as a visible social phenomenon”; McKeon goes on to stress “the palpability of this development, the coalescence of an alien culture both within and apart from the familiar London world” (p. 307).

36. Trumbach observes: “It was part of the eighteenth-century stereotype to believe that if a man were married he could not be a sodomite. Some men at their trials attempted, with varying degrees of success, to disprove the charge of sodomy by producing a wife, a father-in-law or a child. (A single man might simply find female friends to swear that ‘he loved a girl too well to be concerned in other affairs’)” (“London’s Sodomites,” p. 18).

37. The acuteness of Jery’s distaste for C——‘s assumed impostures echoes his distaste for what, in his pride of family, he takes to be those of the fictional character Wilson: “the hot-headed boy is more than ever incensed against Wilson, whom he now considers as an impostor, that harbours some infamous design upon the honour of his family” (HC, p. 142). Ironically, Jery is proved wrong about the fictional Wilson.

38. “Throughout the...century the odium attached to the new role of the effeminate sodomite, and the difficulty of disproving the charge, led to a great many blackmail cases” (Trumbach, “The Birth of the Queen,” p. 137). “The charge of sodomite was an extreme form of ridicule beyond which one could not go” (Terrence Johnson, cited by Rousseau, “Threshold,” p. 151).

39. I am extremely grateful to Lord Dunboyne for patiently responding to queries about Butler family history. Other James Butlers did exist. In the Gentleman’s Magazine’s “List of Deaths for 1768” (12 Dec.), for example, there appears the “Rt Hon. James Butler, Lord Cahier of Ireland” (38 [1768]: 590]. As “Lord Cahier,” this James Butler might have been eminently addressable by the duke of Newcastle as just “Cahier” (“C——“) or as “my dear Cahier.” But beyond the mere fact of his name and the initial of his title, any case for Cahier (considerably more distantly related to the House of Ormonde than James Butler of the Vulture claimed to be) remains to be made. Lord Dunboyne has also drawn my attention to the claims of the interestingly described “Mr. Butler, called Captain, a cornet of horse,” another base child of the second duke of Ormonde—but who was dead as early as 1759.

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