Simon Berington's Adventures of Sigr Gaudentio di Lucca

Simon Berington's Adventures of Sigr Gaudentio di Lucca A.D. Harvey and Jean-Michel Racault English novelists of the eighteenth century attempted most of die permutations of narrative form, the nineteendi century being in this respect a hiatus between two periods of technical experimentation: yet one of the most innovative and accomplished—and in its day one of the most popular—of eighteenth-century novels has been virtually forgotten since the 1850s, except by bibliographically minded scholars specializing in particular by-ways of early modern fiction.1 In 1737 there appeared in London a volume entiüed The Memoirs of Sigr Gaudentio di Lucca. There was a Dublin edition of 1738 and a French translation of 1746. The second London edition of 1748 was entitled The Adventures ofSigr Gaudentio di Lucca, which was die title under which all subsequent English language editions appeared. There was another Dublin edition in 1752, an Edinburgh edition in 1761, London editions in 1763 and 1764, a Glasgow edition in 1765, further London editions in 1774, 1776, 1786, and 1803, and a Dublin edition in 1821. The first American edition was published at Norwich, Connecti1 See Philip Babcock Gove, The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A History of Its Criticism and a Guidefor Its Study with an Annotated Check List of215 Imaginary Voyagesfrom 1700 to 1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), pp. 295-300; Victor Dupont, L'Utopie et le Roman Utopique dans la littérature anglaise (Paris: Cahors, 1941), pp. 281-305; JeanMichel Racault, L'Utopie narrative en France et en Angleterre de l'âge classique aux lumières (1675-1761), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991); Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution ofthe Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983) notices the novel on pp. 141-42, referring to the imaginary kingdom visited by Gaudentio as Mezzoramia. See also Lee M. Ellison, "Gaudentio di Lucca: A Forgotten Utopia," PMLA 50 (1935), 494-509. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 4, Number 1, October 1991 2 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION cut in 1796. The original edition had had die words "Faithfully translated from the Italian, by E.T. Gent. London" on die title page, amended in subsequent editions to 'Translated from the Italian," but in an early example of transatlantic literary tiieft the Philadelphia edition of 1799 stated tiiat it was 'Translated from the Italian / by E.T. gent., Philadelphia." There was also a Baltimore edition of 1800. Another publishing curiosity was a Dublin edition of 1798 in which The Adventures were printed together widi a History ofthe Inquisition, the picture given in die novel of die procedures of the Inquisition evidently being taken as autiientic by some Dublin literary paranoiac—1798 was the year of die great Roman Catholic rebellion in soum-east Ireland. French language editions appeared in Amsterdam in 1753, 1754, and 1777 and at Paris in 1787 and 1797: tiiis was a different translation from tiiat of 1746 and utilized a mysteriously expanded text.2 Despite the alleged Italian provenance of the work there does not seem to have been an Italian translation —perhaps in part because of the Inquisition passages—but a German translation was published at Frankfurt in 1751, and a Dutch translation came out at the Hague in 1775. The Adventures of Sigr Gaudentio di Lucca was thus one of the best-selling novels of die eighteendi century. As it was originally published in die very early days of the periodical press it seems to have escaped published criticism at its first appearance, but it was noticed by Le Mercure de France in March 17533 and bitterly denounced as an impudent fabrication by J.G. Meusel in 1785 in his expanded edition of one of the great bibliographical works of the period, Struve and Buder's Bibliotheca Histórica* In 1821 The Retrospective Review devoted sixteen pages to the novel, printing long extracts, praising it highly, and attributing it to the famous philosopher and ecclesiastic , George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne.5 Then, inexplicably, me novel sank into obscurity. In 1850 "the Phoenix Library: a series of original and 2 Information on editions is taken from the British Library Catalogue, the National Union Catalog, and Gove (Imaginary Voyage in...