Britannia's Rule and the It-Narrator

Britannia's Rule and the It-NarratorAileen Douglas I? the prefatory material to a volume published in 1781, a girl steps into a hackney coach and muses: tis surprising some of these literary beings do not give us The Adventures ofa Hackney Coach; I am sure there is an extensive field for a fertile genius, and no contemptible one: We have the Adventures ofa Guinea, a most entertaining work: and similar adventures full of fancy and instruction.1 The hint, as the existence of such a volume testifies, was not wasted; the hackney coach joined those literary objects (among them the guinea, black coat, and corkscrew) who had already taken their turn at delighting and instructing the eighteenth-century public. The vogue for it-narration was initiated by Charles Johnstone, when he had a gold guinea narrate Clirysal: Or the Adventures of a Guinea (1760). Within two years of its publication the novel was in its third edition. When in 1765 Johnstone presented the public with an expanded, four-volume version he could justifiably speak of the "uncommon favour" with which his work had met2—favour which extended to the derivative works of Johnstone's successors. Adventures ofa Hackney Coach, published in 1781, was in its 1 Anon., Adventures ofa Hackney Coach (London, 1781), p. 2. References are to this edition. An additional volume was also published in 1781. 2 Charles Johnstone, Chrysal: Or the Adventures ofa Guinea (London, 1765), 3:a. Actually, what Johnstone published in 1765 were two additional volumes. These volumes were not a sequel in the proper sense, as they contained material which the industrious reader was to insert into the work as first published. Vols 3 and 4 contain elaborate instructions for these mental insertions. In this essay I refer to vols 1 and 2 as published in 1760, and vols 3 and 4 as published in 1765. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 6, Number 1, October 1993 66 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION fifth edition two years later, and, like Chrysal, this novel also produced a sequel, published with the author's "warmest effusion of gratitude" to the book-buying public (2:np). From the 1760s on, enthusiastic public response to novels like The Adventures ofa Guinea, The Adventures ofa Black Coat, The Adventures ofa Corkscrew, and The Adventures of a Hackney Coach ensured a steady supply of works narrated by inanimate objects.3 The great popularity of these works, so often independent of literary merit, was a cause for complaint in contemporary reviews: This mode of making up a book and styling it the Adventures of a Cat, Dog, a Monkey, a Hackney-Coach, a Louse, a Shilling, a Rupee, or—anything else, is grown so fashionable, that few months pass which do not bring one of them under our inspection. It is indeed a convenient method to writers of the inferior class, of emptying their commonplace books, and throwing together all the farrago ofpublic transactions, private characters, old and new stories, everything, in short, which they can pick up, to afford a little temporary amusement to an idle reader.4 It will be noted that not all of the narrators this disgruntled critic lists are inanimate. In fact, it-narratives were part of a broader subgenre which included eccentric narratives of various sorts, usually by animals. When the reviewer for the Critical Review denigrates the "method" of such works, and castigates their authors for jumbling materials which should be kept apart, he actually intimates the shared appeal of eccentric narratives: their lack of discrimination.3 Such narratives did not respect the boundaries and limits which organized eighteenth-century society . Corkscrews and lap-dogs could move among classes and ranks in a way no human subject could. To readers locked within particular social roles such movement must have been both engrossing and refreshing. 3 In his bibliographic article, "Bank Note, Corkscrew, Flea and Sedan: A Checklist of EighteenthCentury Fiction," Library Chronicle 35 (1969), 52-57, Richard K. Meeker records at least sixty eighteenth-century works written from a non-human point of view. 4 Critical Review (Dec. 1781) quoted in J.M.S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England (1932; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961...