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c h a p t e r 1 Powerlessness as Entertainment Intrusive Narration In the years before and immediately after Tristram Shandy appeared, a significant number of lesser-known but equally self-conscious novels were published. Most of these contain only moderately interestingly romances, adventures, and life narratives. But they are framed and delivered by well-characterized narrators possessed of the disarming power to describe the flaws of novel writing and to reprimand and banter with fictional readers. The narrator of one of the more successful fictions of the period, the anonymous History of Charlotte Summers, the Fortunate Parish Girl (1750), comments in this spirit on the interpretive activities of those reading the novel. His intrusions include addresses to “Miss Censorious,” who is told not “to run too quick upon a malicious Scent,” and to readers who are permitted to “yawn a little” while the narrator rests to “smoak a serious Pipe.”1 In the second volume, the “numerous Tribe of Criticks, who may find materials sufficient in this work to employ their malicious talents” is hailed as a force from which the author must be saved (2:52). Charlotte is introduced as a character to be “dressed and presented” and installed within the papery mansion of the book, where readers are invited to visit her (1:13). As such gestures illustrate, the entity that fictions like Charlotte Summers appear to know best is a reader whose mood oscillates between boredom and frustration. “You are much obliged to me,” claims the narrator of The Temple Beau or the Town Coquets (1753) in justification of an abridgement, “if I cure you of that impatience, which many Readers are seized with, to know the End of a Story.”2 More specifically, these fictions anticipate a reader in the physical throes of reading or of mishandling a text. The brazen narrator of Edward Long’s The Anti-Gallican; or, The History and Adventures of Harry Cobham, 22 chapter 1 Esquire (1757) flags the hardship of reading a bad novel by advising that “if, after traveling through half a dozen Pages, you find your senses gradually declining into a heavy Torpitude, halt directly, and advance no further without the repelling Aid of Tea or Coffee.”3 In John Kidgell’s The Card (1755), the narrator claims to have included an illustration of the ten of clubs, on which a message is written, in order to increase the chances of his novel being rescued from its fate as waste paper by a child’s seeing the illustration: as probably the labourious compilers of the History of the Present Times may adjudge Incidents of this sort too low to deserve a place in their immortal Register, this elaborate Representation of a Message is devoted to the Perusal of the curious. By this artifice doth the Author ingeniously project a message to preserve himself from total oblivion; humbly conceiving, that when this neglected Treatise under the character of waste-paper, shall be doomed to share the Fate of it, some little Master or Miss may be kindly advertised of the picture of that harmless Card which adorns one happy leaf of it, and which began about the year one thousand Seven hundred and Fifty, to be universally respected as a high Messenger of Honour.4 The inclusion of an illustrated page works here as occasion to flaunt the author ’s perception of novels being fashionable items, quickly cast aside and reduced to paper. In a similar spirit, William Toldervy includes songs that he hopes will catch the eye in a novel his narrator otherwise admits is thin on remarkable events.5 Other authors describe more broadly the mood of their disgruntled audience and their possible reactions to the page. Readers of William Goodall’s Adventures of Capt. Greenland (1752) are invited to “indulge their spleen” by tearing out digressive passages they don’t like or “if it should better please them, by throwing the Whole Book into the consuming flames,” and Shebbeare ’s Lydia, or Filial Piety: a novel (1755) challenges readers discontent with a chapter to “write a better themselves.”6 The cocky narrator of The Marriage Act (1754) encourages readers to leave off reading and head down to the club to bet on the events to come in the novel—“Now in this very Place, if an Author could lay Wagers with his Readers, Thousands of Pounds might be won; but as he cannot, it may serve a Bet a White’s, where the Lives...

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