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NOTES
INTRODUCTION. “OLD CLELAND”
1. Boswell, In Extremes, 316.
2. Boswell, In Search of a Wife, 336.
3. Boswell and Johnson had visited the “old Lady Eglinton,” then in her eighties, on their tour of Scotland in 1773.
4. Ramsay’s portrait of Rousseau is now in the National Gallery of Scotland. Boswell’s reference to Rousseau’s cap could suggest that Cleland was also wearing a dressing gown something like the “Armenian” coat Rousseau wears in the portrait. Rousseau, too, was described by one contemporary as having “sharp black eyes,” and Boswell may have been influenced by Ramsay’s painting in drawing his sketch of Cleland. See Warburton, “Art and Allusion.”
5. Boswell, For the Defence, 81.
6. Cleland to Lovel Stanhope, also quoted in Foxon, Libertine Literature, 54.
7. Nichols, Obituary of John Cleland.
8. See, for example, Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment; Kernan, Printing Technology; Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace and Loving Doctor Johnson. See also Donoghue, Fame Machine, which includes case studies of Sterne, Smollett, and Goldsmith and brings together the biographical and critical-theoretical strands of literary scholarship in novel ways.
9. Johnson, Adventurer no. 115, Tuesday, 11 December 1753, in Johnson, “Idler” and “Adventurer,” 457. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
10. Cleland to Stanhope.
11. Campbell [attrib.], The Sale of Authors, 139.
12. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 27, and “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, 142–148. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
13. Burke, Death and Return, esp. 20–61; Bennett, The Author, esp. 9–28. See also “The Author” in Bennett and Royle, Introduction to Literature, 18–26.
14. Bennett and Royle, Introduction to Literature, 22.
15. Epstein, Images of a Life, 112.
16. For critical reflections on the problems and possibilities of literary biography after “the death of the author,” see Epstein, Recognizing Biography, and Contesting the Subject; and Donoghue, Fame Machine.
17. Cleland, review of Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle, in Monthly Review (March 1751), reprinted in Cleland, Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 228, 226.
18. Josiah Beckwith, manuscript note in copy of Cleland’s Celtic tracts (Cambridge University Library, class mark Aa-18-6), quoted in Merritt, “Biographical Note,” 305–306.
19. Foxon untangled the Memoirs’ early publishing history in Libertine Literature, 52–63. I discuss Drybutter and his possible connections with Cleland in chapter 3.
20. Smollett, review of Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb, reprinted in Cleland, Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 223–224.
21. Rider, Lives and Writings of the Living Authors, 16.
22. Cleland to Stanhope; Boswell, Laird, 76.
23. Boswell, Laird, 76–77.
24. Catherine Gallagher offers a historicist account of the author as ghost in Nobody’s Story. In print culture, she argues, “the disembodiment of the writer…was the condition of her appearance as an author” (62). As she writes of Aphra Behn, “the sale of the manuscript and the inconceivability of any property in the text were indeed forms of alienation from the work, but they were also the conditions of what Behn seemed to imagine as her ghostly endurance in the text” (64). On authors and ghosts, see also Bennett and Royle, Introduction to Literature, 18–26 and 133–141.
25. Cleland to Stanhope.
26. Boswell, Laird, 77.
27. In “From Work to Text,” written after “The Death of the Author,” Barthes allows for the “Author” to “‘come back’ in the Text, but he then does so as a ‘guest’…His life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work” (Image, Music, Text, 161).
28. Said, On Late Style, 7.
29. Review of The Surprises of Love, in Monthly Review 23 (October 1760), 327, quoted in Basker, “Wages,” 189.
CHAPTER 1. FANNY HILL IN BOMBAY (1728–1740)
1. Cleland to Stanhope.
2. Foxon, Libertine Literature, 7.
3. Cleland to Stanhope.
4. Stevenson, “Note on the Scotsman,” 40.
5. Boswell, Laird, 76–77. The editors note that their reconstruction of the sentence peppered with braces and square brackets is “highly conjectural,” owing to defects in the manuscript. Words within braces represent the editors’ conjectures as to illegible words while those within brackets supply words omitted by Boswell.
6. On John Carmichael, see Boswell, Laird, 77n7; Stevenson, “Note on the Scotsman,” 40.
7. India Office Collection (IOC), Miscellaneous Letters Received 27, E/1/27, item 133 (letter from William Henry Draper, dated Bombay 28 October 1736, folio j).
8. On Cleland’s family background and education, see Epstein, Images of a Life, 3–31.
9. IOC, Miscellaneous Letters Received 22, E/1/22 [1731], f. 36. Also quoted in Epstein, Images of a Life, 35.
10. Epstein, Images of a Life, 36.
11. Stevenson, “Note on the Scotsman,” 40–41; Boswell, Laird, 77n7.
12. IOC, List of Bombay Civil Servants, 1712–1752, O/6/37. His name is always spelled Carmichaell in the primary sources I’ve located.
13. IOC, Secretary’s List of Deceas’d Persons at Bombay & Factorys Subordinate, Anno 1733, in N/3/1, f. 149; and IOC, An Account of the Births, Christnings, Weddings, & Burials at Bombay, Anno 1733, N/3/1, f. 154. I have not yet found a record of Carmichael’s date of birth, but 1712 seems plausible.
14. On the Cleland family’s social and political connections, see Epstein, Images of a Life, 12–22.
15. The English text is printed in Mudge, When Flesh Becomes Word, 1–57. Mudge notes that apparently only one copy survives of the 1680 edition, in the Bayerischer Staatsbibliothek in Munich. See also Wagner, Eros Revived, 227; Foxon, Libertine Literature, 30–37. Another translation was published by Daniel Lynch and John Stevens in 1744 (Mudge, xvi). On L’École des filles more generally, see Turner, Schooling Sex, 106–164.
16. Samuel Pepys, diary entries for 8 and 9 February 1668, quoted in Foxon, Libertine Literature, 5–6.
17. IOC, List of Bombay Civil Servants, 1712–1752, O/6/37; Epstein, Images of a Life, 36–52.
18. Attorney to the Mayor’s Court: IOC, Register of Proceedings of the Mayor’s Court, P/416/103, f. 210. Secretary for Portuguese Affairs: IOC, Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/9, f. 159. Secretary to the Bombay Council: Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/10, ff. 17–18. These appointments and others are discussed in Epstein, Images of a Life, 35–39.
19. This case is discussed in detail in Epstein, Images of a Life, 38–48, on which I draw for my summary of events.
20. Vossontroy’s name is variously spelled in the legal documents; this spelling is from IOC, Register of Proceedings of the Mayor’s Court, P/416/108, f. 229.
21. IOC, Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/8, f. 19.
22. Epstein, Images of a Life, 44, 210n52.
23. IOC, Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/8, ff. 19, 22.
24. In another passage Cleland is equally uncompromising in his warning to the court of the likely fallout of a decision for Lowther: “But, shou’d the Justice of this Civil Government be refused to a Mogull Subject only suing for his own, on such a Plea as this, wou’d it not bring those Priviledges into a certain Danger: & if they were totally cancell’d & Destroy’d, on account of such a flagrant injustice; where wou’d the blame lie? Or to whom wou’d the first Breach of Faith & the Law of Nature & Nations be justly imputed to [sic]: Or with what face cou’d our Nation complain that they were not observed?” (IOC, Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/8, f. 20).
25. IOC, Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/8, ff. 10–12.
26. Ibid., f. 11.
27. The word “colour” does not necessarily refer to skin or race: it could also mean appearance more generally or might allude to the military or company colors under which Cleland served. But the charge that Cleland “deserted his King, Country & even the Colour Nature design’d him,” with its rise in rhetorical pitch from king to country to “even…Colour,” and its linkage of “Colour” to “Nature,” suggests that Cleland turned against or deserted his own fundamental or innate nature, and the racializing implication of Cleland as “pinion’d slave” is strong.
28. IOC, Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/8, f. 18.
29. Ibid., ff. 20, 15.
30. Ibid., ff. 19, 15.
31. IOC, Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/8, f. 23.
32. IOC, Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/8, f. 25. See also Epstein, Images of a Life, 44.
33. IOC, Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/8, ff. 11, 20.
34. Epstein, Images of a Life, 42, 46, 210–211nn55–58.
35. IOC, Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/8, f. 19.
36. IOC, Index of Court Minutes, B/63, f. 585.
37. IOC, Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/8, f. 15. The phrase “inveteracy and Venom” is quoted by Cleland from Lowther’s complaint, P/341/8, f. 6.
38. IOC, Index of Court Minutes, B/63, f. 584; Epstein, Images of a Life, 46–47, 211nn.57, 61.
39. IOC, Correspondence with the East, Despatch Books for 1733–1736, E/3/106, f. 660. See also Epstein, Images of a Life, 47.
40. IOC, Index of Court Minutes, B/63, f. 584.
41. IOC, Register of Proceedings in the Mayor’s Court, P/416/109, ff. 123–144, on 123. Subsequent references to the case will be cited parenthetically.
42. For a discussion of this pattern in eighteenth-century fiction, see Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, esp. 84–95.
43. Date of Cleland’s answer: IOC, Register of Proceedings of the Mayor’s Court, P/416/108, f. 178.
44. The evidence that Marthalina prosecuted King is found in John Bradyll’s testimony for the defense (that is, in support of Cleland), in which he refers to her as “a woman (who afterwards Prosecuted at the quarter sessions by the name of Marthalinah)” (f. 141).
45. Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law, 3.
46. On “pornotopia,” see Marcus, Other Victorians, esp. 268–281.
47. The complicated translation and publication history of Venus in the Cloister is best presented in Turner, Schooling Sex, xxviii; Foxon, Libertine Literature, 14, 43–45; and Baines and Rogers, Edmund Curll, 155–160. See also Wagner, Eros Revived, 72–73, 229–231.
48. Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 93, 88. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically. The equation of prostitution and marriage is a commonplace of the period, whether explicit, as in Moll Flanders or The Beggar’s Opera, or darkly implied, as in Clarissa; Cleland merely engages with the prostitution side of the equation more graphically than his contemporaries.
49. Cleland’s family moved to St. James’s Place when JC was a child, probably in 1722, and his parents remained there until William Cleland’s death in 1741; JC’s mother, Lucy, continued to live on or just off St. James’s until her death in 1763, JC living with her for much or most of the period 1741–1753 (see Epstein, Images of a Life, 29, 58–59, 128–129). Fanny writes that she and Charles lodged “in D——street, St James’s” (50), perhaps Duke Street, equidistant from St. James’s Place and St. James’s Square.
50. Cleland, Unfortunate Penlez, 9.
51. See Olsson, “Idealized and Realistic Portrayals.” Olsson argues against critics who have faulted the Memoirs for its idealized or unrealistic representation of prostitution, notably Randolph Trumbach in “Modern Prostitution and Gender.”
52. It was Boswell who described the Woman of Pleasure as “that most licentious and inflaming book.” Boswell, For the Defence, 81–82.
53. In July 1760, Cleland wrote a letter to Herbert Mayo, “Fellow of Brazen-noze College,” Oxford, in response to a request for information about a “collection of miniature-portraits of the Sovereigns of Indostan” that Cleland had acquired while living in Bombay, probably in 1735–1736 (Cleland, [copy of] letter to Herbert Mayo, IOC, Orme Manuscript Collection, vol. 147, ff. 47–50, on 47). The volume had been given by the governor of Surat, Teg beg Khaun (or Khan) to a “Mr Frazer,” who later gave or sold it to Cleland, who in turn sent it to Alexander Pope, “with whom,” Cleland writes, “I was then in correspondence” (f. 49). Pope, “judging it too great a curiosity for his private study” (f. 49), presented it to the Bodleian Library in 1737. The letter offers some interesting glimpses of Mughal politics as well as protoethnographic observations on the “tartarian origin” (f. 48) of both Mughal religious toleration and the facial features of Tamerlane and his successors. In the portrait of Tamerlane, Cleland writes, “you may very clearly remark…the distinctive tartar lineaments, a broad flattish face with small Eyes. These in his Son & Successor are somewhat less conspicuous, & as the line of Descent proceeds, they melt by degrees into the softness of the indian features” (f. 49). See also Epstein, Images of a Life, 50–52 and 212–213nn79–80.
54. Douglas, Glimpses, 255. A Voyage was published in one-volume form in 1757 and in two-volume editions in 1766 and 1772; it is unclear what Douglas’s dates of 1750–64 refer to.
55. Schürer, “Impartial Spectator of Sati,” 25.
56. Grose, Voyage aux Indes Orientales, n.p. Translation mine.
57. Cleland to Dickinson, 18 Feb. 1757, BL MS RP 4335[g] (see chapter 6, n. 5, for more on the letters in RP 4335).
58. Grose, Voyage to the East Indies, 407, 184. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically. On seraglios and dancing girls, see pp. 218–231.
59. See Farrant, “Grose, John Henry (b. 1732, d. in or after 1774),” ODNB.
60. The story can be dated 1734–1736 because John Horne, referred to as the governor of Bombay, only assumed this position in 1734, and William Boag died on 28 May 1736.
CHAPTER 2. DOWN AND OUT IN LISBON AND LONDON (1741–1748)
1. Douglas, Glimpses, 254. Cleland features in a chapter oxymoronically titled “People Whom India Has Forgotten.”
2. Ibid., 255.
3. The outlines of Charlotte Louisa’s life in Bombay are drawn from a number of documents in the India Office Collection. She first appears on the List of Free Merchants Seafaring Men & c for 25 October 1736, under the heading “Maids,” as Charlotte Louisa Cleland (IOC, European Inhabitants of Bombay, 1719–1792, O/5/31, vol. 1, f. 38). On the List of Births, Christenings, Weddings, & Burials on Bombay for 1737, the entry for 24 June records the wedding of “Mr. George Sadler, & Miss Charlotte Lucy Cleland” (N/3/1, f. 189, dated “from the 1st of Jan. 1736/7 to the 22d of Dec.br 1737”). The same list for 1739 registers the birth of “John the Son of Mr. George and Mrs. Charlotte Sadleir” on 3 October, his christening on 26 October, and his burial on 4 December (N/3/1 for 31 Dec. 1738 to 10 Jan. 1739/40, f. 222). The List of Deceased Persons of Bombay in the same volume, which is in Cleland’s hand and signed by him, records his nephew’s death: “Bombay—John Sadleir an Infant—Dec. 4—of Flux”(N/3/1, f.213).
4. IOC, Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/11, for 5 Sept. 1740, n.p.
5. Charlotte’s name is included on the lists of European inhabitants of Bombay through 20 September 1740 but is absent thereafter, not reappearing until October 1743, while her husband continues to be recorded as present—which almost certainly means she sailed with her brother and stayed in London for two years. See IOC, European Inhabitants of Bombay, 1719–1792, O/5/31, ff. 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 52, 54, 65v, 67v, 72v, 73v (for Charlotte), and List of Bombay Civil Servants, 1712–1752, O/6/37 (for George). On William Cleland’s poor state of health—he suffered among other things from “the Gravell,” or kidney stones—and his insecure position as civil servant, see Epstein, Images of a Life, 54–57.
6. As Epstein notes, Henry Cleland is recorded as having been appointed “collector” in Montserrat in the West Indies on 12 November 1745 (Images of a Life, 215). Pope described him as the “Favorite Son” in a letter dated 3 November 1730, when Henry was a student at Christ Church College, Oxford. Favorite he may have been, but his father was uneasy; as Pope writes, “He apprehends he may fall into mean company, unless some experienced worthy Man would countenance, & have an eye over him, or recommend him to proper Companions” (Correspondence, 3:144). On 1 January 1742, Pope wrote nostalgically to Hugh Bethel of William Cleland “having a few weeks before his death received at one post three Letters, from each of his children, from different Ends almost of the Earth, with the News that two of them were upon the way to see him…as extraordinary an Event as ever I heard of. He accordingly lived to receive his Eldest Son with great Satisfaction, & so be pretty easy as to the other two” (Correspondence, 4:378). Epstein conjectures that Henry was already in the West Indies—a “different End” of the Earth from his brother—and I agree that this is likely. I reckon the likely period of Henry’s death from the fact that he is not mentioned in Lucy Cleland’s will of 1752, and from a letter of John’s of 23 October 1755, in which he refers to himself as his mother’s “only, and unfortunate son” (BL MS RP 4335[e]; see chapter 6, n. 5, for more on the letters in RP 4335).
7. See Epstein, Images of a Life, 36–37.
8. See ibid., 52 and 213n83.
9. In his biography, Epstein rightly called these Cleland’s “lost years,” while recognizing that it was a “crucial period” (Images of a Life, 60) in his formation as an author.
10. Johnson, Life of Savage, 12. Savage was also linked, coincidentally, to Cleland’s father, William: both were allies of Pope in the paper war that raged after the publication of The Dunciad Variorum in 1728. As Pope’s friend Fenton wrote in a letter, “The war is carried on against him furiously in pictures and libels; and I heard of nobody but Savage and Cleland who have yet drawn their pens in his defence” (Pope, Correspondence, 3:37).
11. Cleland’s involvement in the Portuguese scheme was evidently first revealed by J. Lúcio de Azevedo in O Marquês de Pombal e a Sua Época (Rio de Janeiro, 1922) but only fully explained some sixty years later with the research undertaken by José Barreto, published in his edition of Escritos Económicos de Londres (1741–1742) by Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later Marquês de Pombal. Epstein, in his entry on Cleland for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, was the first to refer to this scheme in English but did not go into detail (104). In what follows I draw from Barreto’s edition of Pombal, which includes the original French text of Cleland’s mémoire addressed to the Portuguese king, never before translated. See also Maxwell, Pombal, 6–8.
12. See Stevenson, The Beggar’s Benison, esp. 23–29 and 37–43; Stevenson, “Note on the Scotsman”; and Epstein, Images of a Life, 69–71. Although Stevenson holds that the Beggar’s Benison minute “is the only known reference to Cleland’s text circulating before it was printed” (“Note on the Scotsman,” 39), the evidence is too insecure to rely on. Neither Cleland’s nor Carmichael’s Scottish connections link them to Anstruther, nor can this “Fanny Hill” be securely identified with Cleland’s, however suggestive the coincidence. The only real extratextual evidence for the Memoirs’ origins in the early 1730s is the consistency of Cleland’s account, from the letter to Stanhope to his statement to Boswell, when he had no more motive for prevarication.
13. Quoted in Maxwell, Pombal, 4–6 (translation Maxwell’s). My précis of British diplomatic relations with Portugal in the period 1739–1743 is taken from Maxwell and from Rodrigues and Craig, “English Mercantilist Influences.”
14. Rodrigues and Craig, “English Mercantilist Influences,” 334–337.
15. Barreto, introduction to Escritos Económicos, liii, lxxii–lxxiiin140; and Carvalho e Melo to Cardinal da Mota, 19 February 1742, in Escritos Económicos, 134–135. See also Rodrigues and Craig, “English Mercantilist Influences,” 338.
16. This summary of William Cleland’s career is based on Epstein, Images of a Life, 10–16 and 54–56.
17. Cleland to the Duke of Newcastle, 22 May 1741. See also Epstein, Images of a Life, 55–56.
18. Cleland to the Duke of Newcastle, 22 May 1741.
19. Ibid.
20. Carvalho e Melo to Cardinal da Mota, 19 Feb. 1742, in Escritos Económicos, 134 (translation mine). Cardinal da Mota was chief minister of the Portuguese king João V.
21. Carvalho e Melo, Escritos Económicos, 135 (translation mine).
22. Ibid., 134 (translation mine).
23. See Barreto, introduction to Escritos Económicos, xii–xiii and liii; and Maxwell, Pombal, 7.
24. Maxwell, Pombal, 7 (translation Maxwell’s) and Barreto, introduction to Escritos Económicos, xiii. Barreto argues that his brother’s death was among the key reasons for Carvalho’s interest in the Portuguese East India company plan.
25. Quoted in Rodrigues and Craig, “English Mercantilist Influences,” 338 (translation theirs). The original text of the Relação dos Gravames is in Carvalho e Melo, Escritos Económicos, 33–95; the passage quoted is on 94.
26. Printed (in French) in Carvalho e Melo, Escritos Económicos, 158–161. See appendix to the present volume for an English translation of the full text.
27. Carvalho e Melo, Escritos Económicos, 134. On Carvalho e Melo’s enemies and rivals, see Maxwell, Pombal, 8; and Barreto, introduction to Escritos Económicos, lv.
28. See Barreto, introduction to Escritos Económicos, xii–xiii, where he writes that not only did the company keep the government from providing military support to the Portuguese in the wake of the Marathas’ seizure of the Portuguese-controlled island of Salsete (just north of Bombay) and their attack on Goa, but it provided the Marathas with arms.
29. Carvalho e Melo, Escritos Económicos, 158, quoted in Rodrigues and Craig, “English Mercantilist Influences,” 336 (translation theirs).
30. The scheme’s demise is most fully discussed in Barreto, introduction to Escritos Económicos, lv–lvi. See also Maxwell, Pombal, 8; and Rodrigues and Craig, “English Mercantilist Influences,” 338–339.
31. Quoted in Barreto, introduction to Escritos Económicos, lv. The passage is from Carvalho’s 1748 letter to Coutinho (translation mine).
32. Charlotte died in Surat—a subordinate company station north of Bombay—on 11 October 1747 and was probably buried there (she is not listed in the records of Bombay burials); see IOC, Secretary’s List of Deceas’d Persons, N/3/1, ff. 281 and 285. Her husband, George Sadleir, evidently died on his way back to England from India in 1752; there were no surviving children. See Stoney, Life and Times of Sir Ralph Sadleir, 251.
33. My summary of the legal case is based on Epstein, Images of a Life, 61–62. Cannon himself, in the affidavit discussed below (NA KB 1/10/1) says that he had “recovered a Verdict” for £800 plus £16 damages. Epstein speculates that Cannon’s and Lane’s charges may have been false, but the evidence is inconclusive.
34. Annual rent of the house on Cleveland Court West, St. James’s Place, where Lucy Cleland lived from late 1741, was £30 (Epstein, Images of a Life, 58).
35. See Warner, “Cannon, Robert (1663–1722),” ODNB.
36. Cleland to Stanhope, quoted in Foxon, Libertine Literature, 54.
37. Whiston, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr William Whiston (1749), 110, quoted in Warner, “Cannon, Robert.”
38. Petition of Elizabeth Cannon to Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, n.d. [ca. 1754–1755], NA T1/338, f. 66.
39. I conjecture that when Cleland first knew him, Thomas lived with his mother at her house in Delahay Street, Westminster, on the basis of some of the details in the affidavit discussed below (NA KB 1/10/1)—in particular, the claim that the mother and son were acting in concert to fatally poison Cleland.
40. Pope, Correspondence, 4:378.
41. On William’s and Lucy’s wills, see Epstein, Images of a Life, 57 and 127–128; on Cleland’s railing, see below and chapter 6.
42. Cleland to Dickinson, 23 Nov. 1752, BL Ms. RP 4335[b].
43. William Henry Draper, letter from Bombay, 28 Oct. 1736, in IOC, E/1/27, no. 133, folio j.
44. Affidavits for Hilary Term 22nd George II [i.e., 1749], 5 Feb. 1748/49, NA KB 1/10/1.
45. A catamite is a kept boy, Latin catamitus from Greek Ganymedes or Ganymede; “molly,” as is now well known, was a standard slang term for what might generally be called a male homosexual, although the term’s precise meanings and nuances have been much debated in recent scholarship. See, among others, Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, esp. 81–114; Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House; Trumbach, “London’s Sodomites”; McFarlane, The Sodomite.
46. Apart from Cleland’s and Cannon’s texts, discussed below and in the following chapter, a small number of other published works in English contain sodomitical episodes or discussions of same-sex desire, notably Roderick Random (1748) and Peregrine Pickle (1751) by Cleland’s occasional colleague Tobias Smollett—both of which are more straightforwardly antisodomite than either Cleland’s or Cannon’s works. Another short book, the Love Letters Between a certain late Nobleman and the famous Mr. Wilson (1723), offers an extended if extremely elliptical treatment of a sodomitical relationship. For discussions of other eighteenth-century works in English, see Rousseau, “Pursuit of Homosexuality”; McFarlane, The Sodomite; and Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House.
47. Foxon, Libertine Literature, 52; Gladfelder, “In Search,” 22.
48. Cleland to Stanhope.
49. On Ralph Griffiths (ca. 1720–1803), see Forster, “Griffiths, Ralph (1720?–1803),” ODNB; Knapp, “Ralph Griffiths”; and Foxon, Libertine Literature, 52–63. Doubts have been raised about the very existence of Fenton Griffiths, but his existence is confirmed by a group of letters written to Ralph Griffiths by Fenton between 1785 and his death on 15 August 1791, now held in the Bodleian (MS Add C.89, ff. 5–51 and 132–137, cited in Epstein, Images of a Life, 219n36), in which he details his poor state of health, his 1785 marriage to “the Widow Cudlipp,” and their difficulties raising her children from an earlier marriage.
50. Quoted in Foxon, Libertine Literature, 53, original document in National Archives, SP 36/111, f. 159.
51. Epstein, Images of a Life, 72 and 219n36.
52. Examination of Ralph Griffiths before Lovel Stanhope, NA SP 36/112, f. 145. The story that Cleland was paid twenty guineas for the copyright to the Woman of Pleasure seems to have originated in the Nichols obituary; see also Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1812), 2:456–458.
53. Cleland to Stanhope.
54. Quoted in Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 53–54.
55. On Savage and Iscariot Hackney, see my article “The Hard Work of Doing Nothing.” Kate Levin, in “The Meanness of Writing for a Bookseller,” argues that “at a time when authorship was shifting from a system of patronage to a commercial relationship between author and publisher, Cleland used Fanny as a mouthpiece to challenge his own exploitation by the literary market” (330–331). I question Levin’s conclusion that Cleland, in a novel written before he had become a professional author, used Fanny as a figural embodiment of his own condition, but her article is suggestive in its reading of the Woman of Pleasure.
56. Affidavit of John Purser, Affidavits for Hilary Term 24th George II (1751), 9 Feb. 1750/51, NA KB1/10/4. By unlucky coincidence, the affidavits of Purser and his associate Hugh Morgan were given before the same W. Foster of Serjeants Inn who had taken Cannon’s affidavit against Cleland a year earlier: it can’t have helped Cannon that Foster knew he’d recently been labeled “an execrable white-faced, rotten catamite.” Purser had been prosecuted at least seven times over the preceding twenty years for seditious libel: see Prosecutions in the Crown Office for Seditious Libels in the Reign of George II, NA KB 15/54, ff. 154–157; see also Chapman, “Purser, John (fl. 1728–1747),” ODNB.
57. Affidavit of John Purser, NA KB 1/10/4.
58. Affidavit of Hugh Morgan, Affidavits for Trinity Term 24–25 George II (1751), 6 May 1751, NA KB 1/10/5.
59. Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle [then secretary of state], to the Attorney General, Dudley Ryder 20 Jan. 1749/50, NA SP 44/134, f. 9.
60. Cleland to Stanhope.
61. Newcastle to Ryder, 20 Jan. 1749/50, NA SP 44/134, f. 9.
CHAPTER 3. SODOMITES (1748–1749)
1. Quoted in Merritt, “Biographical Note,” 305–306.
2. Quoted in Foxon, Libertine Literature, 15.
3. Cannon, quoted in Gladfelder, “Indictment of John Purser,” 40. Further references both to Cannon’s text and to Ryder’s indictment are from this source and will be cited in the text.
4. It was Boswell who called the Woman of Pleasure “inflaming.” Boswell, For the Defence, 81.
5. See Sabor, “From Sexual Liberation to Gender Trouble,” for an overview of critical discussions of Cleland’s novel. Of the essays he discusses, those by Nancy K. Miller and David Weed exemplify the tendency to read the novel as complicit with hegemonic structures of masculine or heteronormative authority. See Miller, “I’s in Drag”; and Weed, “Fitting Fanny”; as well as Fowler, “This Tail-Piece of Morality”; and Markley, “Language, Power, and Sexuality.”
6. Petition of Elizabeth Cannon to Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, n.d. [ca. 1754–1755], NA T1/338, f. 66.
7. The Tryal and Condemnation of Mervin, Lord Audley, A3r.
8. Norton, “Reformation Necessary to Prevent Our Ruin, 1727,” in Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England.
9. Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy, 51.
10. Ibid., 51, 52, 54.
11. Quoted in Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House, 159.
12. The Trial of Richard Branson, 24–25.
13. Jody Greene reaches similar conclusions from different cases in “Public Secrets: Sodomy and the Pillory in the Eighteenth Century and Beyond”: “So dangerous, so potentially seductive is the appeal of non-normative sexuality that its very name cannot be spoken for fear of provoking an epidemic, a conflagration of buggery sweeping across the land” (225).
14. Petition of Elizabeth Cannon. For more detail on the legal proceedings, see Glad-felder, “In Search,” 26–28, and “Indictment of John Purser,” 58–59n1.
15. Foxon, Libertine Literature, 61.
16. Gladfelder, “In Search,” 28 and 37n19.
17. Heywood, Pleasant Dialogues and Drammas, 96.
18. For a lucid and nuanced discussion of the classical Athenian model of pederasty, see Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, in particular chapters 1 and 2 and the addendum.
19. The malleability of bodies and desires in Cannon’s text affiliates it to a seventeenth-century work by the Italian priest and professor of rhetoric Antonio Rocco, whose Alcibiade fanciullo a scuola is explored at length by James Grantham Turner in Schooling Sex. “Ambiguous beauty,” Turner writes, “places Alcibiade between active and passive, powerful and weak, heaven and earth, male and female” (94). Despite these similarities, especially to the breakdown of categorical distinctions in the Hyacinth-Amorio narrative discussed later, there is no evidence Cannon borrowed directly from Rocco.
20. A passage I quoted earlier from the Eumolpus narrative represents sexual climax in similar language: “grasping Love’s Bolt, [I] spurt myself away, plunging in a Gulph of unutterable Delight” (45). In context, it’s unclear whose “Bolt” Eumolpus is grasping, which only augments the sense of loss of self. Several other passages represent pleasure in terms of water or fluidity: Hyacinth exclaims “in what a Gulph of Pleasure have I been plung’d” (50), while pseudo-Lucian’s Theomnestes asks, “What; are we perpetually to converse with Youths of a Fairness, which only does not overflow the Eyes; and, when we can lay our Lips to it, and take a Draught shall we be such foolish Tantalus’s to suffer Thirst?” (51). The same speaker concludes with this summary of “my way of Loving”: “master’d by desire, [I] enter a narrow passage, which carries to the Ocean of absorbing Rapture” (51).
21. In How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Halperin identifies four “pre-homosexual categories of male sex and gender deviance”: “(1) effeminacy, (2) paederasty or ‘active’ sodomy, (3) friendship or male love, and (4) passivity or inversion” (109). Amorio and Hyacinth embody all these categories at once, so that Hyacinth, for example, while manifestly feminine, is simultaneously “active” and “invert” and lives happily in “the world of male friendship and love which can claim an equally ancient discursive tradition” (117).
22. The allusion here is to Mitchell and Leavitt, Pages Passed from Hand to Hand, and their positing of a sexual outsider/outlaw culture defined at least in part by the clandestine circulation of certain highly coded (if not explicitly “homosexual”) texts.
23. My use of the term “sodomitical practice” differs from McFarlane’s “sodomitical practices” in The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire. McFarlane uses the phrase to refer to the “representational practices” by which “sodomy” and “the sodomite” were discursively constructed (largely by others) in the period (see esp. 20–21 and 25–68); I use it to refer to the behaviors or acts in which sodomites engaged or were said (by themselves or others) to engage.
24. See Kopelson, “Seeing Sodomy”; and Edelman, “Seeing Things: Representation, the Scene of Surveillance, and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex,” in Homographesis, 173–191, esp. 183–188.
25. See McFarlane, The Sodomite, 172. McFarlane’s reading is the strongest of the many critical discussions of this scene over the last twenty years. For an overview of these up to the late 1990s, see Sabor’s important review essay, “From Sexual Liberation to Gender Trouble.” For discussion of some more recent work, and a provocative analysis in its own right, see Robinson, Closeted Writing, esp. 37–51 and 77–80. In addition to these and the essays by Kopelson and Edelman cited above, I have been most influenced by Mengay, “The Sodomitical Muse.”
26. Mengay, “The Sodomitical Muse,” 188.
27. See also ibid., 194–195.
28. See, for example, the illustrative 1709 and 1711 quotations from Steele in the OED definitions of “romp” and “romping”: “This careless Jade was eternally romping with the Footman” (Tatler 15, p. 2); “The Air she gave herself was that of a Romping Girl” (Spectator 187, p. 3).
29. See, for example, Ellis, Sexual Inversion. See also Bristow, “Symonds’s History, Ellis’s Heredity.” For a fuller discussion of Ellis and Symonds in relation to earlier theories of sodomy and Cleland’s challenge to these, see my essay “Plague Spots.”
30. Norton, “The Trial of Richard Manning and John Davis, 1745,” at Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England, 25 Jan. 2001, updated 1 Mar. 2003, http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/1745mann.htm, accessed 15 Apr. 2009. This trial is also discussed in relation to Cleland’s text by Robinson in Closeted Writing, 51–53. For an extended analysis of this and the Dicks trial in relation to the sodomitical scene in Cleland, see Haggerty, “Keyhole Testimony.”
31. Norton, “The Trial of John Dicks, 1722,” at Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England, updated 1 Dec. 1999, http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/1722dick.htm, accessed 7 Sept. 2004.
32. Ibid.
33. Campbell [attrib.], The Sale of Authors, 139.
34. As the novel’s editor, Peter Sabor, notes, citing the OED, a “carpet-road” is “smooth, sheltered water ‘near the shore, where vessels may lie at anchor in safety’” (201n). Fanny here echoes the nautical metaphors of the sailor episode and Mrs. Cole’s pronouncement about pleasure as “the universal port of destination” (144), thus “normalizing” this moment. Cleland’s phrase “the streights of entrance” echoes Cannon’s description of Amorio, “piloted into a Streight whose potent Cling draws all the Man in clammy streams away” (50).
35. See also Mengay, “The Sodomitical Muse,” 193–194; and Kubek, “Man Machine,” 186.
36. For other examples of disproportion as a vital constituent of desire, see Fanny’s description of Polly and the Genoese merchant with his “grand movement…of a size to frighten me, by sympathy, for the small tender part, which was the object of its fury” (30); her first intercourse with Charles, when “the largeness of his machine (for few men could dispute size with him) made all the difficulty” (40); her whipping session with Mr. Barvile who, stimulated by her lashings, presents Fanny with a “machine…grown not only to a prodigious stiffness of erection, but to a size that frighted even me: a non-pareil thickness indeed!” (147); or, most vividly, the encounter of Louisa with Good-Natur’d Dick, whose “standard of distinction…was positively of so tremendous a size, that prepar’d as we were to see something extraordinary, it still, out of measure surpass’d our expectation” (162).
37. The alternative to “immense disproportion” in Fanny’s narrative is not “natural” or proportionate desire, but no desire—as when she describes Mr. Norbert’s “machine” as “one of those sizes that slip in and out without being minded” (133), leaving her “unappeas’d” (140). When Fanny first tells Phoebe of her “doubts and apprehensions” (27) regarding the threat posed by the “terrible weapon,” Phoebe laughingly dismisses Fanny’s “fears from that imaginary disproportion” (28). “Disproportion” is “imaginary”—that is, a figure for desire itself. So, at a later tryst with Will, with whom she has already had sex repeatedly, Fanny once again touches his “enormous machine,” writing that “its dimensions, mocking either grasp or span, almost renew’d my terrors. I could not conceive how, or by what means, I could take, or put such a bulk out of sight” (81–82). This is an imaginary inconceivability: an arousal of desire by a fiction of impossibility.
38. It may be useful for North American readers to note that in Britain “fanny” does not refer to the backside but rather to the female genitals, so that fanny hill = mount-pleasant = mons veneris (mount or hill of Venus). The first references to “fanny” in either sense listed in the OED are from the late nineteenth century, but “Fanny Hill” itself suggests that the usage is much older.
39. See n. 9 above.
40. See also the discussion of this passage in Edelman, Homographesis, 184; and Robinson, Closeted Writing, 46–49.
41. See also Mengay, “The Sodomitical Muse,” 191, for a discussion of Fanny herself as a phallic figure. Felicity Nussbaum argues that “Cleland…radically implies that Fanny Hill’s body is both male and female” and that the novel “tolerates a sexual ambiguity not entertained or represented in eighteenth-century science” (Torrid Zones, 104–105). Nussbaum also discusses the gender ambiguity of Will’s body and the similar ambiguities and doublings in the sodomitical and “nipple of love” passages, though the conclusions she draws from these are very different from mine: see Torrid Zones, 103–113.
42. On the Dulwich schoolboys, see n. 12 above. Lisa L. Moore, in Dangerous Intimacies, reads Cleland’s discussion of “plague spots” in the Memoirs in the context of works like Satan’s Harvest Home that represent sodomy as a foreign import. See also Greene, “Arbitrary Tastes,” esp. 250–253. Greene notes “the gap between the depiction of the homosexual characters and the theory of homosexuality the otherwise reliable Mrs. Cole articulates” (252n13) but leaves this as an “inexplicable” problem. My own view is that this “gap” is precisely Cleland’s point: Mrs. Cole’s comments are patently baseless, as is also indicated by her retreat from her own claim that all are tainted: “among numbers of that stamp whom she had known, or at least were universally under the scandalous suspicion of it, she could not name an exception hardly of one of them” and so on (159, emphasis added).
43. In his 1753 Dictionary of Love, Cleland introduces another possible meaning of “plague spot” in his article on “Fribble,” defined as “one of those ambiguous animals, who are neither male nor female; disclaimed by his own sex, and the scorn of both”—a definition inspired by Garrick’s foppish William Fribble from Miss in Her Teens; or, The Medley of Lovers (1747). Noting the fribbles’ habit of giving women advice on how to dress, Cleland writes: “Nor is their own dress neglected: the muff, the ermin-facing, a cluster-ring, the stone-buckle, and now and then a patch, that on them does not always suppose a pimple, are the plague-spots, in which the folly of these less than butterflies breaks out.” Here, the plague spot is explicitly not a bodily mark. Instead, it’s an accessory or signal to others in the coterie, a badge of subcultural identification, not an imprint of nature. (Quoted in Cleland, Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 255.)
44. Mengay writes that virtually “all of the male characters are Ganymedes of sorts, patterned after Zeus’ catamite” (“Sodomitical Muse,” 190); certainly the more her male partners conform to this type, the more she desires them.
45. As work in the history of sexuality and gender over the past twenty-five years has established, notions and categories of masculinity in the eighteenth century were complex, contradictory, and in constant flux. Effeminate foppishness, as described here by Mrs. Cole, sometimes carried associations of same-sex desire, as in Smollett’s Captain Whiffle in Roderick Random (1748), and sometimes (perhaps more often) did not. See, among many other discussions, Haggerty, Men in Love, 44–80; Staves, “A Few Kind Words for the Fop”; McFarlane, The Sodomite, 42–49; and Trumbach, “Erotic Fantasy and Male Libertinism.”
46. Affidavit of John Ibbutt, 19 June 1750, Affidavits for Trinity term 24–25 George II, NA KB 1/10/3. This was the second of three affidavits sworn by Ibbutt, all to the same effect. The others are dated 26 May 1750 (Easter term 23 George II) and 27 June 1750 (Trinity term 24–25 George II).
47. Petition of Elizabeth Cannon.
48. Cannon’s “Retraction” was first cited by Faramerz Dabhoiwala, to whom I owe the discovery, in his 2010 article “Lust and Liberty,” 167. Cannon does not refer to Ancient and Modern Pederasty by name in the retraction but “bitterly deplores” (8) his earlier writing, whose effect was “to subvert Religion, and introduce the utmost Profligacy of Manners” (4). In its later pages, the retraction, written when Cannon was still under threat of prosecution, offers a poignant glimpse of the misery to which he had been reduced: “no Happiness can arrive to me in this World: my Nerves are so broke, as to render any Enjoyment, without a Miracle, impracticable, and to give me an immense Desire of the Grave” (9). Copies of the “Retraction” and the Treatise on Charity are held by the Lambeth Palace Library, the Huntington Library, and the University of Toronto Library.
49. Prosecutions in the Crown Office for Seditious Libels, NA KB 15/54, p. 157. In her petition, Elizabeth Cannon claims that Purser “underwent one part of the Sentence inflicted upon him by the Law, but, as your Petitioners are informed, was pardoned the infamous part of it,” which suggests that he might not have had to stand in the pillory.
50. Petition of Elizabeth Cannon. One letter by Thomas Cannon survives, dated “Toulouse, Aug: 21, 1751,” two years before he published his “Retraction.” Writing to the lord chancellor, Philip Yorke, Cannon asks that his recognizance be “suspended”—that is, that he be allowed to return to England but not be prosecuted except in case of further “misbehavior.” “I had not fled from justice,” Cannon writes, “but at the entreaty of an unhappy, aged mother, who could not see me carried to prison and removed for further punishment in a languishing state of health, for I have laboured under a severe hysteric disorder above 11 years. Since my flight,” he continues, “perpetually afflicted with a nervous headache and my inveterate lowness of spirits, become more terrible by the uncertainty of subsistence, I have suffered a continuance of agony experience alone could shew man can live in.” From Yorke, Life and Correspondence, 2:545. Thanks to Randolph Trumbach for pointing me to this source, as cited in his article “London’s Sodomites,” 14.
51. Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, to Dudley Ryder, Attorney General, 12 Apr. 1750, NA SP 44/134, f. 28. See also Newcastle’s Letter to the Attorney General of 27 Nov. 1750, NA SP 44/134, f. 32. These documents are further discussed in Foxon, Libertine Literature, 57–58; and Epstein, Images of a Life, 78–82.
52. Nichols, Obituary of John Cleland.
53. Even in this primly dismissive sentence, of course, there are the usual double entendres and ambiguities: “went to such lengths” and “soon satisfied me” hint both at what she sees and at her own sexual gratification.
54. Cleland, Memoirs of Fanny Hill, 320, 311, 315. For a discussion of the differences between the abridged and unabridged texts, including a few passages where the lack of detail actually makes the action more perversely ambiguous, see Sabor, “Censor Censured.”
55. Quoted in Foxon, Libertine Literature, 61; and in Sabor, “From Sexual Liberation to Gender Trouble,” 571.
56. Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House, 174–184. See also Norton, “The Macaroni Club: Homosexual Scandals in 1772,” at Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England, http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/macaroni.htm, accessed 18 Apr. 2009. Norton’s information is valuable, although there is no evidence to support the claim that Drybutter wrote the sodomitical material in the Woman of Pleasure, which Foxon convincingly established was written by Cleland for the novel’s first edition (Libertine Literature, 61–62).
57. Sabor, “Censor Censured,” 194, 199.
58. Campbell [attrib.], The Sale of Authors, 141, 140. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
59. John Harris was the putative author of Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies or Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar, which began appearing in 1758. According to Hallie Rubenhold, the real author was Samuel Derrick, who bought rights to the name from Harris (a.k.a. John Harrison), the self-styled Pimp General. See Rubenhold, Covent-Garden Ladies.
60. See also Haggerty, Men in Love, which suggests that the greatest threat posed by the men whose molly-house behavior was described in antisodomite texts may have been love: “For bourgeois culture there is no love outside of marriage and the heteronormative relations leading to marriage…The mollies appropriate love for other purposes, and this is when they pose the greatest threat” (59).
61. Holcroft, The Life of Thomas Holcroft, 208. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically. Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, 218n1. I owe the reference to Holcroft to McCalman, Radical Underworld, 211 and 288n22. McCalman speculates that Thomas Cannon, whom he calls a “radical freethinker,” may have been related to the dissenting minister and pornographer George Cannon, active in London in the 1810s and 1820s. See also McCalman, “Unrespectable Radicalism.”
62. Beert C. Verstraete has written that Tibullus wrote “a homoerotic love poetry that was dramatically more intricate and psychologically more complex and nuanced than that of his predecessors in extant Greek and Roman literature.” See his “Originality of Tibullus’s Marathus Elegies,” 311. Cannon described his aim to produce “spirited” English versions in Ancient and Modern Pederasty, 41.
CHAPTER 4. THREE MEMOIRS (1748–1752)
1. Peter Sabor writes that in the expurgated version of the Woman of Pleasure, the 1750 Memoirs of Fanny Hill, “there is little attempt at epistolary verisimilitude” (“Censor Censured,” 195), and the same is true of the unexpurgated text. On epistolary form and the complexities of Richardson’s handling of it, see Keymer, Richardson’s “Clarissa.” See also Bray, The Epistolary Novel.
2. Richardson, preface to Sir Charles Grandison [1753–1754], 4. On temporal open-endedness—“the spontaneity of the inconclusive present”—see Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in Dialogic Imagination, 27.
3. In this respect, Cleland’s text is affiliated to Henry Fielding’s anti-Richardsonian Shamela, whose Pamela-loving Parson Tickletext undermines his own moral asseverations by the bawdy double entendres that reveal his true licentious spirit.
4. The translation of Pinot-Duclos’s Mémoires was first attributed to Cleland by Lonsdale (“New Attributions,” 280–284), who discusses the importance of Cleland’s translator’s preface.
5. Cleland, translator’s preface to Pinot-Duclos’s Memoirs (1752), in Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 232–241, on 232. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically. Pinot-Duclos, Mémoires, 7.
6. Basker established from advertisements in the London Evening Post that Memoirs of a Coxcomb was published in September 1751 (“Wages,” 180). Volume editor Henri Coulet writes that Pinot-Duclos’s Mémoires appeared “dans les derniers mois de 1751” (in the last months of 1751) (Pinot-Duclos, Mémoires, 1). On this basis it seems unlikely that either imitated or plagiarized the other.
7. Lonsdale, “New Attributions,” 281.
8. See Cusset, “Suspended Ending.” A longer version of this essay appears in Cusset, No Tomorrow, 65–88. Crébillon, The Wayward Head and Heart. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
9. Nichols, Obituary of John Cleland. Peter Wagner discusses Cleland’s relationship to the French libertine tradition in his introduction to the Woman of Pleasure, 23–29 and 33–34.
10. Nancy K. Miller addresses Cleland’s authorial impersonation of a female narrative voice in “‘I’s’ in Drag.” Madeleine Kahn explores similar issues in Narrative Transvestism but concludes that “Cleland’s use of a female narrator…does not meet the criteria of the structural device I have called narrative transvestism” (154). For an incisive discussion of issues raised by critical invocations of “drag” in relation to Cleland’s novel, see Moore, Dangerous Intimacies, esp. 56–59.
11. In addition to Miller, Kahn, and Moore, see Julia Epstein, “Fanny’s Fanny”; Graham, “The Prostitute in the Garden”; Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, esp. 97–113; and Robinson, Closeted Writing, esp. 37–51 and 77–83.
12. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 105. See also Simmons, “John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.” Although Simmons concludes, unlike me, that Cleland’s novel “ultimately reaffirm[s] the primacy of chastity, heterosexuality, and patriarchal authority” (47), I agree with him that “we should see the ‘female reader’ and the ‘male reader’ not as static entities but as zones of conflict” (48).
13. We know that something like eighteen years have passed because their son is old enough that Charles has introduced him to “the most noted bawdy-houses in town” (188)—an “experiment” in aversion therapy to which I return later in this chapter. The fact that Fanny takes up her pen years after her marriage belies Nussbaum’s claim that their sexual reunion represents “the climactic relinquishing of her power to write” (Torrid Zones, 111) or that in “the prison of domesticity…her pen is silenced” (113).
14. Defoe, preface to Moll Flanders, 2.
15. Sabor, introduction to Fanny Hill, xxii. See also Keymer and Sabor, “Pamela” in the Marketplace, esp. 104–105.
16. Protesting against her confinement, Pamela writes Mr. B: “Were my Life in question, instead of my Honesty, I would not wish to involve you, or any body, in the least Difficulty for so worthless a poor Creature. But, O Sir! My Soul is of equal Importance with the Soul of a Princess; though my Quality is inferior to that of the meanest Slave” (Richardson, Pamela, 158). “Honesty” signifies both chastity and integrity; indeed, the first is an effect or instance of the second, rather than an “original” or “innocent” state of the body.
17. See Life, “Charteris, Francis (c. 1665–1732),” ODNB.
18. See Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce, esp. 97–120; Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson, 35–41; and Wagner, Eros Revived, 133–143, 220–225. On Cleland’s novel and prostitution in midcentury London, see Trumbach, “Modern Prostitution and Gender”; and Olsson, “Idealized and Realistic Portrayals.”
19. Fielding, Enquiry into the Causes, 144.
20. Cleland, Unfortunate Penlez, 9. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically. Excerpts from this work can also be found in Cleland, Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 276–282.
21. Even though she refers to her relationship with Phoebe as an instance of that “acquaintance and communication with the bad of our own sex” that is “fatal to innocence” (12–13), Fanny never characterizes their sexual relations as unnatural, but rather as expressions or enactments of nature, as when she writes that “the first sparks of kindling nature, the first ideas of pollution, were caught by me that night.” Later, she writes, of this first sexual experience, that “nature…had been too warmly stir’d, and fermented to subside without allaying by some means or other” (13).
22. See Moore, Dangerous Intimacies, 58–67; and Beynon, “Traffic.”
23. Miller contends that “the erotics erected by female impersonation is a mirroring not of female desire but of a phallic pride of place, a wish-fulfillment that ultimately translates into structures of masculine dominance and authority” (“I’s in Drag,” 54). Carol Houlihan Flynn, by contrast, emphasizes the parodic or ridiculous qualities of Fanny’s phallic descriptions, contending that the essence of the novel’s sexual “fantasy is not phallocentric power but the fear rendered ironic through hyperbole that the phallus lacks the power to be felt” (“What Fanny Felt,” 292).
24. In the Woman of Pleasure I have identified six “cruces,” points where a narrative crossroads is reached. (1) Fanny, alone in London, takes up Mrs. Brown’s invitation to live at her house, not knowing it to be a brothel; (2) Fanny elopes with Charles and so escapes Mrs. Brown’s; (3) Charles disappears, forcing Fanny, because of her debts, to become Mr. H——’s mistress; (4) Mr. H——discovers Fanny’s affair with his footman Will and sends her away, leading her to accept an offer to work at Mrs. Cole’s brothel; (5) Mrs. Cole retires, and Fanny takes up with an old bachelor, the “rational pleasurist”; (6) Fanny, heiress to a vast fortune upon the pleasurist’s death, is accidentally reunited with Charles and marries him. I use the term “romance” in keeping with Cleland’s own practice: “Romances, Novels, and Novel-Memoirs” all belong to the same “Branch of Writing” (translator’s preface to Pinot-Duclos’s Memoirs, 236), but within that branch he distinguishes the formulaic, “unnatural” plots of romance from the work of “Authors who naturalized Fiction” (238). Yet Cleland’s novelistic practice plays at the boundaries of novel and romance, natural and unnatural—delighting in amatory fiction while also dismantling it.
25. On the relationship between pain and pleasure in the novel’s representation of female sexuality, see Anderson, “Gendered Pleasure, Gendered Plot.” In her analysis of a specifically female “erotics of plot” (113), Anderson writes that “the repetitive sequence of deflorative moments that surround the [‘real’] defloration suspends linearity” and so disrupts the “male plot” of initiation and education (120). See also Miller, The Heroine’s Text, in which she compares Fanny’s defloration to that of Sade’s Justine (56–58).
26. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 106–107, 111, 113; see also Fowler, Weed, Miller, Kahn, and Julia Epstein for similar arguments.
27. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 104; Mengay, “The Sodomitical Muse,” 191–194.
28. See Jagose, “Critical Extasy,” esp. 475–478, for an interrogation of “the tendency to assume heterosexuality as the explanatory key to the novel’s design” (475). See also Roussel, Conversation of the Sexes, 37–66; and Moore, Dangerous Intimacies, 60–61, on the ambiguity of Phoebe’s sex.
29. Beynon, “Traffic,” 20–21; Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 137.
30. Moore, Dangerous Intimacies, 66.
31. See Moore, who argues that “the text produces and represents male and female homosexual desires and subjectivities, in characters and implied readers” (Dangerous Intimacies, 57); and Nussbaum, who writes that it “makes available to its heroine, author, and readers heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, autosexual, and omnisexual erotic responses” (Torrid Zones, 105), although she concludes that in the end the novel validates only heterosexual monogamy.
32. Fanny mourns Charles’s absence in the immediate wake of his departure, but once she is resigned to living with Mr. H——, she doesn’t mention Charles again until twelve pages from the end of the novel.
33. On the “accountable” and “unaccountable” in Fanny’s writing, see Beynon, “Traffic,” 8–12 and 16–17.
34. See Gautier, “Fanny’s Fantasies,” esp. 137–139.
35. Markley, “Language, Power, and Sexuality,” 345.
36. Beynon, “Traffic,” 6–7. Beynon’s argument echoes Steven Marcus’s claim in The Other Victorians that the pornographic text “really has no ending, since one of its cardinal principles of existence is repetition…The ideal pornographic novel, as everyone knows, would go on forever…If it has no ending in the sense of completion or gratification, then it can have no form” (195).
37. Jagose, “Critical Extasy,” 459, 463.
38. Anderson, “Gendered Pleasure, Gendered Plot,” 112, 110, 117.
39. Markley, “Language, Power, and Sexuality,” 343.
40. Marcus, Other Victorians, 279.
41. Markley, “Language, Power, and Sexuality,” 350.
42. Cleland, review of Amelia, in Monthly Review (Dec. 1751), reprinted in Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 230.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 231.
45. Cleland, Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 39. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
46. Cleland, review of Peregrine Pickle, in Monthly Review (Mar. 1751), in Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 227–228.
47. Johnson, Rambler 4 (31 March 1750), in Essays from the “Rambler,” “Adventurer,” and “Idler,” 11.
48. Ibid., 14.
49. Cleland, review of Amelia, in Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 231.
50. Cleland, review of Peregrine Pickle, in Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 226.
51. Smollett, review of Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 223.
52. Basker, “Wages,” 181.
53. Smollett, review of Coxcomb, in Cleland, Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 224; Basker, “Wages,” 181.
54. Basker cites a 1759 article from Smollett’s Critical Review on another novel, The Intriguing Coxcomb, of which Smollett writes, “This is a miserable plagiarism, partly from a French novel, and partly from a performance of the same nature in English, called the Memoirs of a Coxcomb, which was published some years ago, but not finished” (“Wages,” 181). Smollett and Cleland, as Basker has established, knew each other well, and it is possible that Smollett was passing on what Cleland had told him and that the Coxcomb was intended to run to further volumes. But I argue later in this chapter that while Cleland probably did alter his original plan, he did not intend any sequel to the three-part novel as published. See also Basker, Tobias Smollett, 251.
55. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 86.
56. Ibid., 103.
57. Todd C. Parker contends that William’s narrative “portrays heterosexual attraction as the self-evident meaning of a bodily sexuality that erupts into the world of the social” (Sexing the Text, 142). I agree that this is how William accounts for other-sex desire but disagree with Parker’s argument that Cleland wishes to “shore up” (175) such a model of “heterosexuality” as socially unmediated or natural. See Parker, Sexing the Text, 28–29 and 135–175.
58. The first Statira was the wife of the Persian king Darius III, whom Alexander the Great defeated in 334 BCE; after that defeat, Statira became Alexander’s lover until her death in childbirth. The second Statira was the daughter of the first and Darius; originally named Barsine, she took the name of her mother when she in turn married Alexander in 324 BCE.
59. Cleland, translator’s preface to Pinot-Duclos’s Memoirs, 236.
60. Fielding, Shamela, 311.
61. Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 519. Grundy writes that “dread and disgust well up in this climactic scene, where comedy of manners gives way to a kind of proto-gothic.”
62. Boswell, Laird, 77.
63. Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 250–251; Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 519. The Buralt-Fribourg resemblance, which strikes me as the strongest evidence that Cleland based Lady Travers on Lady Mary, is not addressed as such in either Halsband or Grundy, but see Halsband, 260, 278; and Grundy, 464, 481, 509.
64. Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 519.
65. Cleland, Institutes of Health, 98–99n.
66. Near the end of the novel, William accompanies his aunt back to Warwickshire so that she can attend to “certain indispensable affairs” (196), but he evidently has no such business to attend to on his estates.
67. Smollett, review of Coxcomb, in Cleland, Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 223.
68. Basker, “Wages,” 181.
69. Ibid.
70. Fanny holds open another door of possible continuation when she remarks, of the “rational pleasurist,” that “I propose to devote a letter entirely to the pleasure of retracing to you all the particulars of my acquaintance with this ever, to me, memorable friend” (174). Eighteenth-century authors often floated such trial balloons to see what interest there might be in a sequel; the absence of anything of the kind in the Coxcomb is in keeping with Cleland’s shutting down of possible new plotlines in the text’s final pages.
71. Crébillon, Wayward Head and Heart, 769–770.
72. Cusset, “Suspended Ending,” 754.
73. Ibid., 762–763.
74. Cusset writes that Crébillon’s suspended ending “is both a narrative strategy that frustrates readers from the end they had a right to expect, and a psychological device that teaches them not to trust their idealistic, moral, and sentimental impulse” (“Suspended Ending,” 764).
75. Flynn, “What Fanny Felt,” 293; Levin, “Meanness of Writing,” 338–339; Gautier, “Fanny’s Fantasies,” 141–142. See also Julia Epstein, “Fanny’s Fanny,” 149.
76. On the marriage proposal, see Gautier, “Fanny’s Fantasies,” 139; and Levin, “Meanness of Writing,” 338–339.
77. Boswell, Laird, 76–77.
78. Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty, 119–120.
79. Boswell, Laird, 76.
80. Samuel Richardson, in a letter to Mark Hildesley, bishop of Sodor and Man, condemned Sterne’s “execrable” novel in terms that mirror both Cleland’s critique and Sterne’s vindication: “One extenuating circumstance attends his works, that they are too gross to be inflaming.” Richardson to Hildesley, n.d. [early 1761], in Richardson, Selected Letters, 341.
81. Boswell, For the Defence, 81.
CHAPTER 5. THE HACK (1749–1759)
1. Cleland to Stanhope.
2. Examination of Ralph Griffiths, 26 Mar. 1749 [i.e., 1750], NA SP 36/112, f. 145.
3. Nichols, Obituary of John Cleland.
4. Cleland to Andrew Stone, 10 Nov. 1749, NA SP 36/111, ff. 152, 151; also quoted in Epstein, Images of a Life, 76, 67.
5. Cleland to Stanhope.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid. In the letter to Stone, he makes a similar plea: “As to myself, sir, I am perfectly resigned up to the worst of my fate, but it gives me great pain to see others torn from their families, and business, upon an occasion in which they are entirely innocent” (NA SP 36/111, f. 152, also quoted in Epstein, Images of a Life, 75).
8. Epstein, Images of a Life, 75.
9. See Forster, “Griffiths, Ralph.” On Smollett’s antipathy to Griffiths, see Donoghue, Fame Machine, 29–31; Basker, Tobias Smollett, esp. 36–38, 42–43, and 58–59; and Knapp, Tobias Smollett, esp. 134–136, 170–172, and 188–190.
10. Forster, “Griffiths, Ralph.” Biographical information on Griffiths is taken from this source unless otherwise noted.
11. Griffiths to Newcastle, 25 Aug. 1746, quoted in Knapp, “Ralph Griffiths,” 198.
12. Raven, Judging New Wealth, 59. But see also Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, which contains a remark concerning Evelina supposedly made by the bookseller Mr. Bowen to Hesther Thrale: “O, ma’am, what a Book thrown away was that!—all the Trade cry shame on Lowndes” (227). Whatever outcry there may have been against Lowndes was most likely prompted by the jealousy of other booksellers over his success with Burney’s novel. In another study cited by Gallagher, Raven writes that in the 1780s “the leading novel publisher, William Lane, was paying his authors £10–20 for outright purchase of the manuscript” but that “a payment of half-a-guinea per volume was the final offer to many an untried novelist” (quoted in Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, 154).
13. Epstein, Images of a Life, 155.
14. That Griffiths knew there was risk in publishing the Woman of Pleasure is evident from the use of the pseudonym “G. Fenton” for the book’s publisher on the title page as well as his statement to Stanhope on 13 November 1749, in which he says that “some time last Winter his brother Fenton Griffith came to him & asked his advice whether it would be safe for him to publish the said Book” (NA SP 36/111, f. 159, quoted in Foxon, Libertine Literature, 53). Fenton Griffiths’s involvement in publishing Cleland’s novel was secondary at best, given his lack of any other publications and Ralph’s subsequent involvement in Cleland’s career.
15. The figure of £20,000 is given in Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, 8:412; see also Epstein, Images of a Life, 219n38.
16. See Basker, “Wages,” 179; Foxon, Libertine Literature, 60; and Sabor, “Censor Censured,” 194.
17. Raven, Judging New Wealth, 60, 69.
18. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, xx. Although Gallagher focuses on women writers, whose “femaleness” affected the specific forms of their “disembodiment” and “dispossession,” she contends that women writers are “representatives of the condition of the author” (xv) in general: “Authors in general…were in the ‘feminized’ position of perpetuating themselves only by renouncing their property” (196).
19. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, 152.
20. Ibid., 152n23. Ralph went so far as to write that “there is no Difference between the Writer in his Garret, and the Slave in the Mines; but that the former has his Situation in the Air, and the latter in the Bowels of the Earth” (Case of Authors, 22).
21. Examination of Ralph Griffiths.
22. Sabor, “Censor Censured,” 198; on the ways in which Cleland’s style is “impoverished” by expurgation, see 197–199.
23. Cleland to Stanhope.
24. Sabor, “Censor Censured,” 198.
25. On Cleland’s letters to Griffiths, see Epstein, Images of a Life, 97–98 and 140–141.
26. For a complete list of Cleland’s articles in the Monthly Review, see Epstein, Images of a Life, 189–190.
27. Cleland’s burlesque is a parody of Robert Dodsley’s Œconomy of Human Life (1750), formerly attributed to Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, and purporting to be a translation from an ancient Brahmanic (Hindu) text. Dodsley was an ex-footman turned prominent London poet, playwright, and bookseller; among the authors whose work he published were Pope, Johnson, Sterne, and, in 1752, Cleland: the translation of Pinot-Duclos’s Memoirs.
28. Lonsdale suggests that “T. Clement” is a false imprint, as “no such bookseller is listed in Plomer’s Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers or in David Foxon’s exhaustive index of imprints in his English Verse 1700–1750” (“New Attributions,” 272).
29. Norman Edwin Oakes, “Ralph Griffiths and The Monthly Review” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1961), cited in Epstein, Images of a Life, 112–113.
30. See Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, 152–154. As Raven notes, all such estimates of numbers need to be used with caution, both because bibliographical information is incomplete and because what gets counted as a “novel” is open to debate; see Raven, Judging New Wealth, 31–41. By 1750–1752 the fiction craze of ten years earlier had died down, making booksellers more reluctant to take on new titles, especially by untried authors.
31. Greene, introduction to Major Works, by Samuel Johnson, xi–xxvii. In one of his letters to the Public Advertiser, Cleland referred to the journalistic practice of freely inventing parliamentary speeches, in this case to disparage the oratorical talents of William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham. Of one speech attributed to him, Cleland wrote that it was “penned in a white-limed Garret, in Exeter-street in the Strand, by one whom the Compiler of a Magazine employed to frame Speeches for the Members, rather in their respective Characters than in the Words actually spoke by them…The undoubted Truth however is, that Mr. P——t was never in his Life capable of writing, and less yet surely of speaking such a Speech as that of which he had the Honor” ([Cleland], writing as A Briton, letter to the Public Advertiser, 29 Nov. 1770). The term “miscellaneous writer” carries a disparaging connotation, as when Robert Carruthers refers to “John Cleland, the unfortunate and worthless man of letters, author of an infamous novel, and an extensive miscellaneous writer” (Life of Alexander Pope, 262).
32. [Cleland], writing as A Briton, letter to the Public Advertiser, 23 Sept. 1765. The two words in brackets are conjectural.
33. [Cleland], writing as A Briton, letter to the Public Advertiser, 21 July 1787.
34. Kernan, Printing Technology, 78.
35. Cleland, Economy of a Winter’s Day: A New Edition, 25–26. This second edition of the 1750 Œconomy of a Winter’s Day was published, according to Basker, “sometime between 1772 and 1789, the years when the bookseller ‘P[eter] Brett’ traded in the Strand under that name” (“Wages,” 180)—Basker’s source being Ian Maxted, The London Book Trades, 1775–1800: A Preliminary Checklist of Members (Folkestone: Dawson, 1977), 28. The passage I’ve cited was one of those added to the revised edition.
36. Carruthers, in his Life of Alexander Pope, calls Cleland “an adept in literary fraud” (148) for his alleged part in pirating the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu published in 1763 and forging a further group of four letters that appeared in An Additional Volume to the Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M——y W——y M——e in 1767. The charge of forgery was first made in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1803 (p. 1043), fourteen years after Cleland’s death.
37. For a chronological list of Cleland’s contributions to the Monthly Review, based on Benjamin Nangle’s bibliographical research, see Epstein, Images of a Life, 189–190.
38. Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), 54, 12.
39. Cleland to Stanhope.
40. There is no way of knowing whether Fielding read Cleland’s pamphlet before writing his or if Cleland had some advance information as to what Fielding was to write when he was working on the Unfortunate Penlez. See Zirker, “General Introduction,” xxxiv and xlii–xliii. He concludes that Fielding’s pamphlet was composed and printed in October, which would mean neither had seen the other’s work. I think it’s just possible, on the basis of the evidence proffered by Zirker and by Fredson Bowers in his “Textual Introduction” to the same edition (cxvii–cxviii), that the last part of Fielding’s text, including the protest against other authors’ “light and ludicrous Colours,” was written or revised after Fielding had read Cleland’s pamphlet. In an ironic coda to his involvement in the Penlez controversy, Cleland reviewed both his own and Fielding’s pamphlets in the same issue of the Monthly Review (Nov. 1749), 61–65, assuming an appearance of neutrality that highlights the fieriness of his initial polemical stance.
41. Cleland, trans. and ed., Catherine Vizzani, 34. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
42. Cleland, review of Peregrine Pickle, in Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 226.
43. Ibid. Three of the four texts on which I focus in this chapter (all but Tombo-Chiqui) were attributed to Cleland by Lonsdale in “New Attributions,” based on Ralph Griffiths’s manuscript notes in his own set of the Monthly Review.
44. Cleland, Unfortunate Penlez, 2nd ed., 17. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically. As Basker states, this is probably not a true second edition but a reissue of the first with a new title page, altering the date from 1749 to 1750 and adding the phrase “By a Gentleman Not Concern’d,” which had first been used in newspaper advertisements to distinguish this from Fielding’s pamphlet (“Wages,” 179–180).
45. Linebaugh, “Tyburn Riot,” esp. 89–102; Zirker, “General Introduction,” xxxiii–lii. Linebaugh has two sailors, Zirker (citing the Gentleman’s Magazine) three; Linebaugh two moidores, Zirker four. Both of these scholarly accounts are excellent, but the contemporary evidence is extremely inconsistent. I have discussed Fielding’s account, A True State of the Case, in Criminality and Narrative, 181–186. See also Rogers, “Penlez, Bosavern (1726–1749),” ODNB. I have drawn on all these sources but have not commented on differences of detail except where significant.
46. Gentleman’s Magazine, “Historical Chronicle” for July 1749, cited in Zirker, “General Introduction,” xxxiv.
47. Zirker, “General Introduction,” xl; see also, more generally, Zirker, “General Introduction,” xxxviii–li; and Linebaugh, “Tyburn Riot,” 93–98.
48. Linebaugh, “Tyburn Riot,” 98.
49. Linebaugh’s reading of the logic of the government’s actions—that an extreme degree of severity in punishing Penlez was necessary in order to “prove” that the representatives of the law had been justified in the first place in calling out the military to suppress what they mistakenly characterized as seditious riots—offers a suggestive inversion of Fielding’s statement “that the Outrages actually committed by the Mob…were such as no Government could justify passing over without some Censure and Example” (True State, 57). But while I agree with Linebaugh that the execution of Penlez was an egregious miscarriage of justice, I’m skeptical of this reading of Fielding’s or the government’s motives, because as far as I’m aware there were no demands for them to justify having called out the troops and no groundswell of criticism for their having done so, until after Penlez’s conviction and after the jury’s plea for mercy was turned down. That is, it was the perceived injustice of the government’s scapegoating of “the unfortunate” Penlez that had to be justified, not the recourse to military force—especially as all the soldiers had done was to beat their drums to disperse the crowd.
50. Fielding, True State, 60. As Fielding points out, Penlez had been indicted by the grand jury for burglary as well as for riot, but since he had been convicted of the latter, “there was no Occasion of trying him again” (True State, 60).
51. I accept Zirker’s view that Fielding believed Penlez to be guilty of theft as well as of riot, and Penlez’s garbled and conflicting accounts of how he came by the linens, as recorded in the watchmen’s testimony in the True State, may arouse suspicion that he did indeed steal them from Peter Wood’s house. No evidence in Fielding’s text, however, places Penlez at the scene of the crime, and in any case, as Zirker writes, “It is not at all clear that a jury would ever have convicted him of a capital offense for his theft. Eighteenth-century juries commonly spared a thief’s life either by finding him guilty of a lesser offence…or by undervaluing the goods he had stolen…Such ‘pious perjury,’ as Blackstone called it, was especially common when the culprit was a first offender of good reputation” (“General Introduction,” l–li). Fielding’s claim that the evidence of theft was such “as I think every impartial Man must allow would have convicted him (had he been tried) of Felony at least” (True State, 60) is thus doubtful.
52. The testimony is quoted from the Old Bailey Sessions Papers for 6–14 Sept. 1749, 134.
53. Cleland uses the phrase “Raw-head and Bloody-bones” to mock claims that the bawdy-house actions were in any way alarming or threatening (20). At the beginning of his own account of the trial, Cleland refers his readers to “the Account of the Trial publish’d in the Sessions-Paper, and to the actual Dying-Speech of Penlez, and the intended one of John Wilson” (25) and writes that “the Reader may then compare the Depositions of the Man [i.e., Wood] who hang’d one, and was near hanging more, upon this Occasion, with the dying Declarations of two Men of unblemish’d Characters, and from thence collect the Measure of the Veracity and Credibility on both Sides” (26)—an invitation to adopt a forensic manner of reading, as well as a gesture affirming the truth of his own account of events.
54. Fielding, True State, 60.
55. For other uses of “Frolic,” “Mirth,” “Joke,” and “Fun” to characterize the disorders, see, for example, Cleland, Unfortunate Penlez, 5, 23, 33, 37, 39, 41, in addition to the passages cited below.
56. The notion of a “moral economy” was formulated by E. P. Thompson in “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd” (1971). While Thompson’s focus is on the economic relations among different parts of the community, especially during times of dearth, I use the term in his more general sense of the crowd’s “consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations” (188).
57. In a later passage, Cleland writes that Penlez was drawn into the disorders “by seeing such Numbers at work, with great Mirth and Jollity, in so open and bare-fac’d a Manner, as if they had thought that the Guards, if they came, would sooner defend them than the Bawdy-Houses, or at least wink at their Escape” (39; see also 33n).
58. The use of “impress” in a sexual sense can be found at least as far back as Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728), in which Mrs. Peachum’s air “A Maid Is like the Golden Ore” equates the passage from maidenhood to sexual commodification with that from ore to coin, “tried and impressed in the mint.” See Gay, Beggar’s Opera [I, v (Air 5)], 14.
59. See Sutherland, “Where Does Fanny Hill Keep Her Contraceptives?” 11–18. Fanny never mentions a contraceptive use of the sponges, but I think Sutherland’s conjecture is plausible. The relevant passage in the Woman of Pleasure is on 135–136.
60. Cleland, Catherine Vizzani, title page. Under a new title, The True History and Adventures of Catherine Vizzani, the text was reissued (using, according to Lonsdale, “unsold sheets of the first edition” [280] and adding a new title page and frontispiece) by W. Reeve and C. Sympson in 1755.
61. Bianchi, Breve storia della vita di Catterina Vizzani. My thanks to Corrinne Harol for providing me with a copy of Bianchi’s text. Information on the publishing history and background of Bianchi’s text is taken from Donato, “Public and Private Negotiations of Gender.” Donato suggests that Bianchi’s text reached Cleland by way of Horace Walpole and Horace Mann, both of whom were friendly with Doctor Antonio Cocchi, a colleague of Bianchi’s. Cleland or his publishers may have become interested in Vizzani following the modest commercial success of Henry Fielding’s 1746 pamphlet The Female Husband, the half-moralistic, half-screwball story of another real-life cross-dressing female seducer of other women. Apart from that premise, the two works have little in common, but it is interesting to compare Fielding’s squeamish hints that Mary Hamilton deceived her wives by means of a dildo—“means which decency forbids me even to mention” (371), “something of too vile, wicked and scandalous a nature, which was found in the Doctor’s trunk” (379)—to Cleland’s more complex treatment, as discussed below.
62. Lanser, “Sapphic Picaresque,” 256.
63. Bianchi, Breve storia della vita di Catterina Vizzani, 4. All quotations in this paragraph are from pp. 3–4 in Bianchi and pp. 2–4 in Cleland’s Catherine Vizzani.
64. Bianchi, Breve storia della vita di Catterina Vizzani, 9.
65. In his introductory paragraph, Bianchi writes that Catterina is “una Fanciulla, che ne a Saffo, ne all’altre Donzelle di Lesbo nell’amare solamente quelle del medesimo sesso ha ceduto, ma che da gran lunga le ha trapassate” (3), which Cleland translates pretty literally as “a Girl, who, so far from being inferior to Sappho, or any of the Lesbian Nymphs, in an Attachment for those of her own Sex, has greatly surpassed them” (2). While “Lesbian” clearly means “from Lesbos,” Cleland’s use of the term moves it some distance toward referring to a category of sexual identity.
66. Another example of the ways in which Cleland expands on Bianchi’s text: at one point Giovanni’s master has to keep him away from Montepulciano because of some scrapes he’s got into by his womanizing. Bianchi writes, “Ivi ancora molto le donne vagheggiava, e per una d’esse colà un altra volta in un grande intrico si trovò” (There too he really went after the women, and for love of one of them he got himself into another mess there) (11). Cleland translates, “Giovanni’s amorous Pursuits…were not in any wise abated; whether Nature were actually uncontrolable, or Gratitude had not its proper Weight, or she was hardened against Pain, Infamy, or any other Consequence. She some Time after, at that Place, was brought into a dangerous Plunge by her intriguing Effrontery” (18). Cleland’s added asides, here in boldface, raise the question of whether Catherine’s behavior is best understood as an “uncontrolable” effect of “Nature,” or if its causes need to be looked for elsewhere. Bianchi then notes that Giovanni “never made the least Difficulty to lie in the same Bed with other Men,” as Cleland literally translates it, but when Bianchi adds “ne mai con alcuno di esser femmina confide” (nor ever told any of them that she was female), Cleland writes that she “also forbore making any Advances to her Bedfellow, though he were an Adonis” (18–19), making the erotic charge of the situation more vivid.
67. Bianchi, Breve storia della vita di Catterina Vizzani, 8. It should be noted, when comparing this passage with the translation that follows, that the subject pronoun is usually omitted in Italian, so that Bianchi does not need to choose between “he” and “she” in most cases. In this passage, the one time he uses the pronoun, he opts for “egli,” he.
68. See Donato, “Public and Private Negotiations of Gender,” esp. 183–185; and Donoghue, Passions, 80–86.
69. Cleland, review of Peregrine Pickle, in Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 226.
70. My reading of Vizzani’s “leathern Contrivance” is indebted to Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, esp. 195–197. As she argues, “Early modern women’s prosthetic supplementation of their bodies is…both additive and substitutive: as a material addition to the woman’s body and as a replacement of the man’s body by the woman’s, prosthesis not only displaces male prerogatives, but exposes ‘man’ as a simulacrum, and gender as a construction built on the faulty ground of mutually exclusive binaries” (196). Many commentators have been struck by the symbolic suggestiveness of Catherine Vizzani’s worthless, emptied-out phallus: see, for example, McCormick, Secret Sexualities, 176; and Donoghue, Passions, 83. It can also be read in light of Thomas Laqueur’s claim that in the early modern period (which runs to “sometime in the eighteenth century” [Making Sex, 149]), “biological sex, which we generally take to serve as the basis of gender, was just as much in the domain of culture and meaning as was gender. A penis was thus a status symbol rather than a sign of some other deeply rooted ontological essence: real sex. It could be construed as a certificate of sorts, like the diploma of a doctor or lawyer today, which entitled the bearer to certain rights and privileges” (Making Sex, 134–135).
71. Some confusion on this point has arisen because of the subtitle of the second (1755) edition of The Case, where Catherine is upgraded to “A Young Gentlewoman a Native of Rome.” But in the text of the second edition Catherine/Giovanni is still unambiguously the daughter of a carpenter and a servant all her life.
72. It may seem obvious that the purpose of what Donoghue calls Catherine’s “strap-on dildo” is sexual, and Donoghue writes that “apparently it deceives, and profoundly pleases, all the women she has sex with” (Passions, 82). But as she goes on to observe, “It is difficult to know how to read this part of the biography. Could so many sexually experienced women have been fooled by a dildo in the dark, when many female husbands seem to have been found out, even by timid and naïve wives, within a few weeks? It seems much more likely that at least some of her lovers knew her to be a woman and that her fame was based on coded recommendations.” Possibly so, but there’s no evidence one way or the other in Bianchi’s or Cleland’s texts—not even of the “she used this leathern machine to commit acts too shocking to tell” sort. Instead, Catherine owes her fame as a ladies’ man to the stratagems I’ve referred to: buying remedies for venereal diseases she only pretends to have, furtively half-exposing her phallus to her companions, telling the village laundress how “liberal” nature has been. I have no wish to desexualize Vizzani, but we should not take it for granted that sexual desire is necessarily acted out genitally or that, for Vizzani, erotic pleasure was necessarily dependent on what we might call sex; it seems to be at least as much linked to the excitement of elopements, midnight visits, and the circulation of admiring rumors about her masculinity, on “which she hugged herself with such Pride and Delight” (11).
73. Bianchi writes (in Cleland’s translation) that he has “reposited” Vizzani’s hymen “among those which I found in many Virgins of different Age at Sienna…for that the Hymen is no Fancy, but actually found in all Virgin Females, is not controverted among experienced Anatomists; yet, as there are not wanting in some at Sienna, who sneer at such a Thing, let them only take a View of my Collection of these Membranes; and, if they will not stand out against ocular Evidence, they must own the Reality thereof” (43).
74. On early modern theories of tribadism, see Traub, Renaissance, 45–48 and 188–228.
75. Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy, 51.
76. Diderot, Le Rêve de d’Alembert (1769), 91.
77. On Cleland’s treatment of the imagination in this passage, see also Sha, Perverse Romanticism, 70–72, although he attributes Cleland’s argument to Bianchi.
78. Donoghue, Passions, 85.
79. Monthly Review (March 1751), cited in Lonsdale, “New Attributions,” 277.
80. Cleland, review of Peregrine Pickle, in Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 226.
81. Cleland, “Advertisement” to Tombo-Chiqui, n.p. The possibility that Cleland’s translation was written with Garrick in mind is raised in Epstein, Images of a Life, 134, where he quotes from a letter from Cleland to Garrick referring to “the barely yet embryo of a production, the Clown polished by Love” and notes that the basic premise Cleland describes there “is not far removed” from that of Tombo-Chiqui. I agree that there is a connection, but the missing link is a comedy written by Pierre de Marivaux, also for the Théâtre-Italien, Arlequin poli par l’amour, which was performed along with Arlequin sauvage in 1730 and 1734. Cleland knew Marivaux’s writing well, referring to it in his introduction to Pinot-Duclos’s Memoirs, and the title of his “embryonic” production is a literal translation of Marivaux’s. He must have decided to work on Delisle’s play instead of Marivaux’s, intending that Garrick would take on the Harlequin character, now under the name of Tombo-chiqui. On the performance history of Delisle’s and Marivaux’s plays, see Forsans, introduction to Delisle, Arlequin sauvage, 16–19.
82. Lonsdale records more or less faithful editions of Cleland’s 1753 text in 1776 (London, Bell and Etherington), 1787 (London, Bell), and 1824 (Edinburgh, Buchanan) and modified or abridged versions in 1777 (London, J. Bew et al.), 1795 and 1806 (London, Minerva), and 1798 (Philadelphia). The British Library owns another edition (London, Morgan, n.d. [likely post-1800]) in which “John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester” is credited as author. See Lonsdale, “New Attributions,” 287; and Basker, “Wages,” 184.
83. The first phrase is from the preface to Cleland, Dictionary of Love, iv; the second from the “Advertisement” to Tombo-Chiqui. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically. Cleland’s statement about the success of Delisle’s Arlequin sauvage (first performed 1721; pub. 1722) is borne out by the research of Ola Forsans: the work was both a commercial and a critical success, reprinted numerous times in the eighteenth century and later, and was a favorite with the actors as well.
84. Cleland, translator’s preface to Pinot-Duclos’s Memoirs, 240.
85. The Marquis d’Argenson praised Arlequin sauvage as a “pièce philosophique” (quoted in Forsans, introduction to Delisle, Arlequin sauvage, 18) and indeed acknowledged that some might fault it for being too philosophical.
86. Birmingham, especially in its old alternative form, Brummagem (whence Brummie, etc.), has long been a byword for sham, counterfeit, worthless goods.
87. The pages in Cleland’s dictionary are not numbered, but the entries are arranged alphabetically. All the entries discussed here can also be found in Cleland, Memoirs of a Coxcomb, appendix C, 252–260.
88. There is an entry for “beau” in the French text, but Cleland’s is not based on it.
89. Garrick, Miss in Her Teens; or, The Medley of Lovers; excerpts reprinted in Cleland, Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 242–248 (quotation on 243).
90. As Scott J. Juengel notes, Cleland’s effort to establish the “just value” of words in the Dictionary “would become a broader philological preoccupation” in later years—a preoccupation whose most significant product was the 1766 work The Way to Things by Words, to whose title I allude. See Juengel, “Doing Things with Fanny Hill,” 427–429.
91. See Altherr, “Tombo-Chiqui: or, The American Savage,” 412.
92. Rousseau’s Le Flatteur was first performed in 1696 and makes up about half of Miller’s Art and Nature.
93. Quoted in Bentley, The Brecht Memoir, 30.
CHAPTER 6. THE MAN OF FEELING (1752–1768)
1. See Donkin, Getting into the Act. Donkin writes that later in the century a really successful play might earn its author £500–£600 from the proceeds of these benefit nights. For that reason, however, theater managers stood to earn more by staging older plays for which they did not have to pay out the take of every third performance, and if the managers, like Garrick, were also playwrights themselves, they had good reason to stage their own works instead of others’ and so keep the benefits (Getting into the Act, 7–8). But see also Milhous and Hume, “Playwrights’ Remuneration.” They write that “Garrick was a skilled judge of what his company could put across to the audience”; while he “was much maligned in his lifetime for refusing scripts…he made a real effort to let the playwrights he did produce earn as much as possible from their work” (16).
2. Cleland to Garrick, 31 July 1754, in Garrick, Private Correspondence, 58. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically. The conjectural reading of “girl” in the quotation that follows is that of the 1831 editor.
3. The critical literature on sentiment and sensibility in eighteenth-century fiction is considerable, but see especially Brissenden, Virtue in Distress; Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility; Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, esp. 57–113; Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction; and Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel.
4. Titus Vespasian, like Tombo-Chiqui and the 1755 comic afterpiece The Ladies Subscription, has apparently never been staged. Apart from one essay on Tombo-Chiqui and the noble savage myth by Thomas L. Altherr, the only critical remarks on any of the plays, as far as I know, are in Epstein’s biography. Of Titus, Epstein contends that the inter-weaving “of the play’s several borrowed plot lines produces a confusing and ultimately distracting array of stage business” (129) and that the events of the plot “fail to animate the printed version” (131). But it is hard to gauge the theatrical viability of these plays in the absence of any production history, and the fact that they were not performed, in a period when there were so few venues and so many constraints (economic and censorial) on new plays, is not in itself damning. As with Tombo-Chiqui, Cleland’s fidelity to the original work may have set him at odds with the tastes of contemporary English audiences—and certainly with Garrick’s taste. Metastasio has never been very well known in Britain (except among musicians, such as Charles Burney, who published a study of his work in 1796), and Metastasian melodrama is far from Shakespearean tragedy—of which Garrick, of course, was one of the key champions. Few English-language writers in the period would have endorsed Cleland’s assertion, in this same letter to Garrick, that Metastasio was “the greatest dramatic genius now living” (58); for one thing, his work wasn’t translated, other than by Cleland, until 1767. And while Stendhal held that Metastasio attained a greater degree of perfection than Dante, Petrarch, or Ariosto, his work has never attracted anything like as much attention as those authors from English-speaking critics. Even Mozart’s setting of La Clemenza di Tito was long considered dull, stilted, and dramatically dead, its characters implausible and its music incapable of bringing them to life. But just as Mozart’s opera has in recent years started to be championed by such conductors as René Jacobs, so it might be time for a reappraisal—or really a first appraisal—of Cleland’s blank-verse adaptation of Metastasio’s text. See Jacobs, “Seven Misconceptions about La Clemenza di Tito.”
5. Cleland to Edward Dickinson, n.d. [late 1752?], British Library manuscript photocopies BL MS RP 4335[a] and BL MS RP 3476. The manuscripts of these letters and the others to and from Edward Dickinson and Cleland’s mother, Lucy, are held in the Pier-pont Morgan Library in New York. The British Library holds photocopies in accordance with the law concerning manuscripts of British origin that have been sold for export abroad. Some of the letters are dated; others are not. The undated letters can sometimes be approximately dated based on internal evidence, but this is necessarily conjectural. RP 4335 contains eighteen letters in all, and to keep them distinct I’ve assigned each one a letter in brackets (e.g., RP 4335[a]), but they are not arranged in chronological sequence.
6. According to the terms of Lucy Cleland’s will, her son was to be paid an annuity of £60 per year after her death, but in a letter dated 31 Jan. 1759 (BL MS RP 4335[j]) Cleland writes that his allowance during his mother’s lifetime amounts to “a miserable 20 d” (twenty pence) per day, which is equivalent to thirty pounds per year.
7. Cleland to Dickinson, 21 Sept. 1762, BL MS RP 4335[l]. Cleland wrote a letter to the Public Advertiser from “Somersetshire” dated 9 September 1767 and one from Buckinghamshire on 4 July 1768; in the first of these he referred to himself, wryly, as a “Country Gentleman.”
8. Boswell, For the Defence, 81; Cleland to Garrick, 22 May 1772, in Garrick, Private Correspondence, 466–468.
9. Cleland to Dickinson, n.d. [Jan. 1759?], BL MS RP 4335[d]. Cf. Brachiano in Webster’s The White Devil, 5.3: “Oh, my brain’s on fire! / The helmet is poison’d.” Given the theatricality of several of these letters, it could be that the echo is a deliberate allusion.
10. On the slipperiness of the boundary between the genuine and the fictive, the heartfelt and the designing, in both real familiar letters and novelistic ones, see Keymer, Richardson’s “Clarissa,” esp. 1–44.
11. See Epstein, Images of a Life, 155. Both Epstein and Basker have dug out information on Cleland’s publications that allows us to date them with some precision.
12. In his obituary, John Nichols states that Cleland wrote a novel titled The Man of Honour “as an amende honourable for his former exceptionable book,” the Woman of Pleasure. Basker has argued that Nichols’s attribution was plausible (“Wages,” 192–193), but in the London Chronicle 30 (17–19 Oct. 1771): 384, The Man of Honour is attributed to J[ohn] H[uddlestone] Wynne, and that attribution is now generally accepted. (A copy of the first volume, which I have not read, is held in the library of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.) In any case, The Woman of Honor seems more obvious than The Man of Honour as the title of a work intended to make amends for the Woman of Pleasure. My guess is that Nichols (who did not list The Woman of Honor in his obituary) simply confused the two titles, perhaps not having read either, but I think Basker is likely right that the idea of the later novel as an amende honourable for the earlier was told to Nichols by Cleland himself.
13. Cleland, “Advertisement” to Way to Things, i.
14. Said, On Late Style, 7.
15. Ibid., 148.
16. Cleland to Garrick, 31 July 1754, in Garrick, Private Correspondence, 59.
17. Epstein provides evidence from the Poor Rate and Watch Rate record books that Cleland was living with his mother in St. James’s Place until around the time she moved to a different house in the same street, in late summer 1753 (Images of a Life, 128–29 and 228n51). However, in a letter to Dickinson dated 23 Nov. 1752, Cleland refers to money he owes some “poor wretched creditors” for a “Hired lodging” and furnishings, which strongly suggests he had been living on his own for some time before that. That letter, and others from the same period, also make it clear that he had not seen or spoken to his mother in quite a while and that their only “contact” had been by way of letters to and from Dickinson. I think it’s probable that Cleland had left St. James’s Place some months or years before Lucy Cleland moved house and that she continued to pay the rates on his behalf, but this is highly conjectural (Cleland to Dickinson, 23 Nov. 1752, BL MS RP 4335[b]). As noted in chapter 2, Cleland’s sister Charlotte died in India in 1747, and his brother Henry (probably) in the West Indies around 1750.
18. John Cleland to Lucy Cleland, 6 Mar. 1758, BL MS RP 4335[i].
19. Lucy Cleland, Last Will and Testament, NA PROB 11/888, ff. 221v–226v. The body of the will is dated 4 February 1752, but over the subsequent years she added some twenty codicils. In a note attached to one of the last of these, dated 13 August 1761, she addresses her lawyer, Edward Dickinson, directly, expressing her “desire [that] you will think me with the utmost Gratitude and affectionate yours at this Instant I think I am Dying.” See also Epstein, Images of a Life, 22–23, 127–128, and 228n50.
20. Cleland to Dickinson, 23 Oct. 1755, BL MS RP 4335[e].
21. Cleland to Dickinson, n.d. [Jan. 1759?], BL MS RP 4335[d].
22. Cleland to Dickinson, n.d. [late 1752?], BL MS RP 4335[a].
23. Cleland to Dickinson, 16 Feb. 1758, BL MS RP 4335[h].
24. IOC, Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/8, f. 18; Affidavits for Hilary Term 22nd George II, 5 Feb. 1748/49, NA KB 1/10/1.
25. Shakespeare, Macbeth 1.5.39–40, 44–45; see also 1.7.54–59.
26. Cleland to Dickinson, 9 Dec. 1756, BL MS RP 4335[f].
27. In another formulation of this idea of “negative persecution,” he writes, “I have found her bare negative of countenance, her non-concurrence to my interest as fatally destructive as the most active rancor of enmity” (Cleland to Dickinson, 23 Oct. 1755, BL MS RP 4335[e]).
28. Lucy Cleland to Dickinson, n.d., BL MS RP 4335[m]. This letter certainly dates from the early 1750s, as Cleland responds to some of the points in it in a letter to Dickinson that I think based on internal evidence must be from late 1752.
29. Lucy Cleland to Dickinson, n.d., BL MS RP 4335[n]. This is a second letter, photocopied with the letter above; I think the approximate date is 1752–1755, but it could be later.
30. This last phrase is from John Cleland’s letter to Dickinson dated 9 December 1756 (BL MS RP 4335[ f]). The preceding phrase is from the first of Lucy Cleland’s letters to Dickinson (BL MS RP 4335[m], n.d. [1752?]).
31. Dickinson to John Cleland, 18 Oct. 1755, BL MS RP 4335[r]. I have generally left spellings and the like as they appear in the original manuscript, but in this case I have spelled out words such as “which” and “would” when these are abbreviated.
32. Cleland to Dickinson, n.d. [late 1752?], BL MS RP 4335[a].
33. Cleland to Dickinson, 23 Oct. 1755, BL MS RP 4335[e].
34. Cleland to Dickinson, 9 Dec. 1756, BL MS RP 4335[ f].
35. Dickinson to Cleland, 18 Oct. 1755, BL MS RP 4335[r].
36. Cleland to Dickinson, 6 Mar. 1758, BL MS RP 4335[c]; John Cleland to Lucy Cleland, 6 Mar. 1758, BL MS RP 4335[i].
37. The phrase is from a letter by W. H. Draper, Bombay, 28 Oct. 1736 (IOC, E/1/27, item 133, folio j).
38. Cleland to Dickinson, n.d. [late 1752?], BL MS RP 3476.
39. See “The Conclusion to Part II” of “Christabel,” ll. 656–657, 662–665, 673, 675–677, in Coleridge, Poetical Works, 225–226.
40. Lucy Cleland is similarly elliptical in a letter to Dickinson, writing, “I shall not enter into the abundance of reasons He [JC] must be conscious of, why I might excuse myself from doing Him any service. They are well known to you, and the world” (BL MS RP 4335[m]). She may be referring to his financial irresponsibility, his abusive language toward her, the shame he brought on their family by writing the Woman of Pleasure, or other rumors and “reasons…well known to you, and the world” and so not necessary to be written.
41. Cleland to Dickinson, 21 Sept. 1762, BL MS RP 4335[l].
42. Cleland to Dickinson, 31 Jan. 1759, BL MS RP 4335[ j]; Dickinson to Cleland, 23 Sept. 1762, BL MS RP 4335[q].
43. Cleland to Dickinson, 21 Sept. 1762, BL MS RP 4335[l].
44. Cleland to Dickinson, n.d. [late 1752?], BL MS RP 4335[a].
45. Ralph Griffiths’s reference to Cleland going abroad is from his examination by Stanhope on 20 March 1750, but it refers to events of late 1749, probably after their arrests in November 1749, when it would have been reasonable for Griffiths to think of issuing an expurgated Fanny Hill. Although Griffiths was examined in March 1750 when Stanhope was considering prosecuting him for that very expurgated work, there is no record of Cleland being arrested or examined then, which suggests he may have been abroad. Cleland published no articles in the Monthly Review between November 1749 and November 1750, which also supports the hypothesis that he was away during this period. If Cleland revised the Memoirs of Fanny Hill between November 1749 and January 1750, Griffiths had time to prepare it for publication in March 1750. Cleland’s next known publications were his review of Dodsley’s The Œconomy of Human Life in November 1750 and the short burlesque The Œconomy of a Winter’s Day the following month, which suggests he was back and working in London from about September or October 1750.
46. Savage, preface to Miscellaneous Poems (1726), in Poetical Works, 268. See also Nussbaum on Savage and “unnatural” mothers in Torrid Zones, 47–66; and Gladfelder, “Hard Work,” 462–466.
47. Cleland to Dickinson, 6 Mar. 1758, BL MS RP 4335[c]. Cleland’s return address, or “direction,” indicates only where his mail was held, not where he was living. According to another letter to Dickinson, Cleland’s lodgings between 1756 and 1762 were at “Mrs Meredith’s a Staymaker in the Savoy where I have been near these six years” (Cleland to Dickinson, 21 Sept. 1762, BL MS RP 4335[l]). However, in January 1759 Cleland names his landlords as a Mr. and Mrs. Kyme, so until more information comes to light, Cleland’s domicile has to remain uncertain.
48. Davies, quoted in Cope, review of Revels History of Drama in English, 641. On Israel Pottinger, see Norgate, “Pottinger, Israel (fl. 1759–1761),” rev. Michael Bevan, ODNB; Lonsdale, “Goldsmith and the Weekly Magazine”; Basker, “Wages,” 187–188; and Maxted, “London Book Trades.”
49. See Maxted, “British Book Trade.” The bankruptcies of Cleland’s publishers listed by Maxted are those of Israel Pottinger (1760), Thomas Davies (1778), Samuel Hooper (1778), Thomas Becket (1779), and William Nicoll (1789).
50. Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, from Letters…to His Son (1774), vol. 1, letter 3, excerpted in Williams, Novel and Romance, 100.
51. Congreve, preface to Incognita (1692), in Williams, Novel and Romance, 27–28.
52. Review of The Surprises of Love, in Monthly Review 32 (February 1765): 156–157, quoted in Basker, “Wages,” 191.
53. Said, On Late Style, 25.
54. Quoted in Basker, “Wages,” 189. The phrase is from a review of the first of Cleland’s four novellas, The Romance of a Day, which was first published on its own in September 1760.
55. Cleland, The Romance of an Evening; or, Who Would Have Thought It? in The Surprises of Love, 214. As Basker notes, the volume was published on 15 December 1764 but with the following year’s date on the title page—a common device for extending a work’s “newness.” Subsequent references to The Surprises of Love will be cited parenthetically.
56. Sentimental Magazine (Jan. 1774), 6, quoted in Mullan, “Sentimental Novels,” 242. On the varied uses to which such terms as “sentiment” and “sensibility” could be put in eighteenth-century writing, see also Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, 96–139.
57. Review of The Romance of a Night, in Monthly Review 27 (November 1762): 386–387, quoted in Basker, “Wages,” 190.
58. Nichols, Obituary of John Cleland.
59. Review of The Surprises of Love, in Monthly Review 20 (1765), quoted in Basker, “Wages,” 191.
60. On Lowndes and Nicoll’s business dealings with Cleland, see Epstein, Images of a Life, 155 and 235n140. As Epstein notes, Cleland’s delivery of the manuscript on 23 October 1767 was accepted by Lowndes in exchange for the twenty-five guineas Cleland had been paid in advances over the previous two and a half years.
61. Review of Cleland, The Woman of Honor, in Critical Review 25 (Apr. 1768): 284; quoted in Basker, “Wages,” 191.
62. Epstein, Images of a Life, 157 and 159.
63. Cleland, The Woman of Honor, 3:72. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
64. Cleland, review of Amelia, in Memoirs of a Coxcomb, 231.
65. In other words, Cleland’s intrusive disruptions of the expectations readers acquired through their familiarity with other novels violate the apparent naturalness and transparency of conventional novelistic realism.
66. Weinsheimer, “Theory of Character.” As he writes, “Emma Woodhouse is not a woman nor need be described as if it were” (187). Epstein, Images of a Life, 159.
67. “J. B. D. F.” [Jean Baptiste de Freval], Prefatory Letter, in Richardson, Pamela, 5.
68. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 600 (canto 24, 3). On love and madness in Ariosto, see Weaver, “Interlaced Plot.”
CHAPTER 7. A BRITON (1757–1787)
1. Cleland, Way to Things, 70, 1. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
2. Nichols, Obituary of John Cleland.
3. Leonard’s account of the economic and moral consequences of financial speculation could almost have been written amid the British banking and financial crisis of the early twenty-first century, after years during which “the solid advantages” of industry and “commerce, foreign and domestic” were “impolitically sacrificed to an unwholesome bloated appearance of false opulence, from a nation’s being mortgaged without necessity, and posterity burthened without deserving it” (3:232). The word “crazy,” as Cleland uses it in the passage cited in the text, means not (or not only) mad or insane but “broken, decrepit,” as Johnson defines it in his Dictionary.
4. Cleland, Phisiologial Reveries, 3. As its title suggests, this work is a loose, sometimes dreamlike collection of three brief meditations: the first on respiration; the second on similarities between saliva (the “reparative fluid” [9]) and semen (the “generative fluid” [9]); the third on fevers as “increase[s] in the vital fire” (18) by which nature aims “to rid us of an obstruction, or of some noxious matter” (23). Although the writer for the Critical Review declared that Cleland “should ask pardon for the whole performance” (qtd. in Lonsdale, “New Attributions,” 290), the observations on fever are more or less in keeping with later medical thinking, and there are flashes of imaginative brilliance throughout. The short essay on respiration is especially striking, with its nightmarish vision of the surface of the human body “perforated like a sieve” (7) with “millions of air-mouths” (pores) engaged in “one continual vicissitude of respiration and expiration” (6), producing this image of the body as machine: “this diffusive chain-work of air-pumps spread over and through the whole body of man, gives you the idea of one great pneumatic engine, the incessant play of which, at once, keeps up the motion of our hydraulic machinery, and fans that vital fire in virtue of which the chimical laboratory within us is perpetually at work” (7).
5. Cleland to Stanhope, quoted in Foxon, Libertine Literature, 54.
6. Cleland, Institutes of Health, iii. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
7. Cleland, Specimen of an Etimological Vocabulary, xii. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
8. Cleland, Additional Articles to the Specimen, iv. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
9. [Cleland], writing as A Briton, letter to the Public Advertiser, 18 Oct. 1765.
10. [Cleland], writing as A Briton, letter to the Public Advertiser, 12 Dec. 1765.
11. Cleland to Dickinson, 18 Feb. 1757, BL MS RP 4335[g].
12. Boswell, For the Defence, 81.
13. Epstein, Images of a Life, 145. Of the fifteen letters signed Modestus in the Public Advertiser between June 1767 and October 1783, Epstein states that five were “probably not written by Cleland” (192), presumably on stylistic grounds.
14. For example, in a letter to Dickinson dated 26 February 1757 (BL MS RP 4335[k]), Cleland enclosed “three papers” he wrote on the subject of Admiral John Byng’s court-martial for dereliction of duty at the siege of Minorca in 1756. Cleland, who took Byng’s side, contending that Byng was sacrificed as a scapegoat for wider ministerial failures in the conduct of the war against France, tells Dickinson that he “gave” his three letters or papers “to the Public” sometime in the preceding week and that they had met with “approbation”—but these papers have not yet been found or identified.
15. Epstein, Images of a Life, 146.
16. Quoted in Merritt, “Biographical Note,” 305–306.
17. See Epstein, Images of a Life, 191–192. Of the 197 letters Epstein attributes to Cleland, 160 were written from 1770 on.
18. Epstein, Images of a Life, 145–146.
19. Boswell, In Extremes, 316.
20. Cleland to Dickinson, 9 Dec. 1756 and 16 Feb. 1758, BL MS RP 4335[ f, h].
21. Epstein attributes nine of the Public Advertiser “Modestus” letters to Cleland from the period November 1769–October 1770 and contends that Cleland was “employed by the administration to respond to ‘Junius’ ’s attacks” (151; see also 152, 192, and 234–235n128). He bases his attributions on the reference to “Modestus” in Nichols’s obituary of Cleland and on stylistic similarities to Cleland’s other writing.
22. See also letters from “A Briton” to the Public Advertiser on 26 Oct. 1767 and 11 July 1768.
23. Cleland to Dickinson, 18 Feb. 1757, BL MS RP 4335[g].
24. Said, On Late Style, 13. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.
25. For Cleland “raving,” see above, n. 19. Boswell describes Cleland as “a fine sly malcontent” in his journal entry for 31 March 1772, in which he also writes of Cleland “grumbling”: see above, n. 12. For Cleland “harping on a string,” see above, n. 10.
26. Williams, “Way to Things,” 251; Cleland, Way to Things, title page. The link between the origins of Britain and the migrations of the sons of Japhet can be traced at least as far back as the ninth-century Historia Brittonum of Nennius—see Bernau, “‘Britain’: Originary Myths,” esp. 631–632—but the “Celtomania” of the eighteenth century, of which the Ossian craze of the 1760s is the best-known example, was also driven by contemporary anxieties and desires related to the emergence of the modern nation-state and questions of national identity and culture. See Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue, 477–556, for a discussion of the Celtic revival centering on James Macpherson’s Ossian poems and Scottish culture. Cleland, however, despite his family’s Scottish heritage, does not link the “antient Celtic” to Scotland but rather to a common originary British nation.
27. Le Brigant’s advertisements were translated by Cleland and placed after his “Advertisement” to the Specimen, xiii–xvi; the passage quoted is from xv–xvi. Cleland’s “Mons. Brigant” was Jacques Le Brigant (1720–1804), Breton parliamentarian and co-founder (in 1804) of L’Académie Celtique (later the Société des Antiquaires de France). Le Brigant published his Éléments succincts de la langue des Celtes-Gomérites, ou Bretons in 1779 and the more wide-ranging La Langue primitive conservée in 1787. As the French title of the 1779 work suggests, Cleland’s translation of Le Brigant’s advertisement conceals the double meaning of “Breton,” which means both “Briton” and “Breton”—indeed it is the latter sense that Le Brigant is mainly interested in, another instance of the nationalistic impulse underlying much of the etymological research of the period, Cleland’s included.
28. Once the Druids’ allegorical fictions were mistaken for real “personages,” Cleland writes, “thence arose another mythology, in which the Egyptian, the Greek, and the Roman Gods manifestly sprung out of the corruption of Druidism, or rather of the worst part of Druidism” (Way, 118).
29. Haycock, “Stukeley, William (1687–1765),” ODNB.
30. Cooke, Enquiry into the Patriarchal and Druidical Religion, 61 and title page. Cooke’s publisher, Lockyer Davis, was also the publisher of Cleland’s three Celtic tracts, despite their different interpretations of Druidic religion. For a discussion of eighteenth-century theories of the supposed genealogical links between Celtic and Hebrew, see Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue, esp. 481–495. Against such theories, Cleland writes: “Nothing can be more demonstrably erroneous than a recourse for the origin of the Teutonic or British languages to the Phenician or Hebrew” (Articles, viii).
31. In another passage from The Way to Things, Cleland writes that “the primitive Christians, for rearing the fabric of their Church, took what suited them, of the ruins of demolished Druidism, for a scaffolding; which they struck, and put out of the way, as soon as they had finished a much nobler structure, and, as it is to be hoped, a more permanent one” (102). The qualifying phrase “as it is to be hoped” calls the permanence of the “nobler structure” into question, and the “primitive Christians,” distanced from author and reader by the use of the third-person “their,” “them,” and “they,” are presented, again, as opportunistic scavengers concealing their structural dependence on Druid “ruins.” See also Way to Things, 114.
32. Quoted in Merritt, “Biographical Note,” 305. Cleland’s etymology for Pentecost derives it from a Druid ordination ceremony for newly qualified members of the judiciary in which “the spirit of authority” was “conveyed by touching the head: Pen, head. T’ick, touch. Ghast, Spirit” (Specimen, 10).
33. Arthur Golding, The Eyght Bookes of C. J. Caesar (1565), 6:155, cited in Oxford English Dictionary Online, “Druid, n. (a.).”
34. Quoted in Epstein, Images of a Life, 164.
35. Williams, “Way to Things,” 258.
36. Beckwith, quoted in Merritt, “Biographical Note,” 305; Lemon, English Etymology, xxiii. The passage on Cleland is also reprinted in Epstein, Images of a Life, 194. Although Lemon is a significant enough figure to be included in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, his English Etymology is described there as “an eccentric and useless exposition of his theory that most English words were derived from a Greek radix”—interestingly contrary to Cleland’s own theory, notwithstanding Lemon’s admiration. See Tancock, “Lemon, George William (1726–1797),” rev. S. J. Skedd, ODNB.
37. Cleland developed the contrast between “amiable simplicity and youthful vigor of taste” and the “silly dotage of a luxury verging to its own death” at much greater length in the 1761 Institutes of Health, which he prefaces with the example of his own case as a warning of the dangers of excess, describing himself as “too far now advanced in years, when probably my stamina have suffered irretrievable damage by the most abandoned intemperance of all sorts” (iv). It’s hard to resist the invitation to speculate on that “abandoned intemperance,” but the aim of the temperance he advocates as a countermeasure is not puritan self-denial but pleasure, “the permanent voluptuousness inseparable from every function of life in a firm state of health” (48). This voluptuousness consists of “sensations more exquisite, a mind more alert…a body more disposed for action, and more delighting in it, more sprightliness, a clearer command of the imagination to produce or augment pleasure, powers greater and more lasting” (96–97). Cleland illustrates the benefits of natural diet and exercise by contrasting a young peasant—“that ignoble freshness of his complexion, that muscular vigor, that air of health breathing in his every motion” (50)—to the “quality-paleness, that bloodless, green-sick look, one would think the birthmark of the people of fashion” (51), reminiscent of the contrast Fanny draws between Mr. H——or her “country lad” Will (71) and “our pap-nerv’d softlings” (64). Despite his fears of his “stamina hav[ing] suffered irretrievable damage,” Cleland lived a further twenty-eight evidently healthy years, testament to his sensible recommendations: fresh air, local produce, not too much salt or animal fat, daily exercise, frequent bathing.
38. “Unsex’d male-misses” is Mrs. Cole’s epithet for sodomites in the Woman of Pleasure (160).
39. For “potent patriarchal forces,” see Williams, “Way to Things,” 258–259.
40. Ibid., 274. Cleland’s preoccupation with the ancient British “system of manliness” is also evident in the 1749 Case of the Unfortunate Bosavern Benlez, in which he extols the “antient Manliness” from which “the Spirit of the English is already too much broke, sunk, and declin’d” (46).
41. On the relationship between masculinity and the sublime in Cleland’s novel, see Blackwell, “It Stood an Object of Terror and Delight.”
42. That the Specimen was controversial I infer from the defensiveness of the advertisement Cleland prefaced to the Additional Articles the following year, in which he protests at length against “the suspicion of my having intended any offence to the Church” (xi) and maintains that “there was nothing of a theological import so much as thought of” (x). Declaring his “unfeigned sentiments of veneration for religion, and of reverence for its ministers,” he writes, “I could not well imagine it possible for ignorance or for malice to suggest the suspicion of any design in me of offence to either” (xii). Characteristically, however, Cleland’s self-justification bleeds into an attack on his attackers, as when he writes, of the clergy, that “I presumed them…infinitely superior to the injustice of little groundless jealousies of unimaginable attacks, and at once the best judges and the most equitable protectors of the truth” (xiii)—his phrasing clearly insinuating that this “presumption” in their favor was wrong. By the end of the advertisement, he asserts that the “Judgment” of those who “slighted or depreciated” his previous publication “is, literally speaking, not their own, but under a wretched enslavement…to inveterate prejudices” (xvi).
43. Merritt, “Biographical Note,” 305–306.
44. Epstein, “John Cleland,” 110; Basker, “Wages,” 185. See also, more generally, Epstein, Images of a Life, 146–153.
45. Cleland reviewed Bolingbroke’s Letters, including “On the Spirit of Patriotism” and “On the Idea of a Patriot King,” in the Monthly Review 1 (May–June 1749): 52–64 and 147–158. But even here, Cleland’s rhetorical extremism and loathing of the present is evident, as when he refers to “the little less than universal degeneracy, that like the plague, leaves scarce a door uncrossed” (60).
46. The writer for the Critical Review, although skeptical of some of Cleland’s “bold conjectures,” agreed: “Whatever the author’s aim may be, the reader will find great entertainment” (qtd. in Epstein, Images of a Life, 164).
47. Deuteronomy 34:4 (King James Version).
48. It is not always easy to track where Cleland was living when. Epstein has established that from September 1782 on he was living in Petty France, Westminster, between St. James’s Park and Tothill Fields (Images of a Life, 176 and 238–39n197). It’s possible he had lived there before—a letter to the Public Advertiser for 13 July 1764 is dated from Petty France—but the bulk of the surviving evidence suggests he was living in the neighborhood of the Strand, including the Savoy, for most of the period 1756–1781. In a letter to Dickinson dated 21 September 1762, he writes that “my present apartment is at Mr[s?] Meredith’s a Staymaker in the Savoy where I have been near these six years” (BL MS RP 4335[l], 21 Sept. 1762). A letter from 1758 gives his return address as care of “Mr Hooper, Bookseller at Gay’s head near Beaufort Buildings in the Strand”—this is the same Hooper who published Tombo-Chiqui and other texts by Cleland—but this was most likely simply the office where Cleland could retrieve his post, rather than a residence (BL MS RP 4335[c]). The same is probably true of “Mr Coles Peruke Maker in Beaufort buildings in the Strand,” to whom Dickinson directed a letter for Cleland on 23 September 1762 (BL MS RP 4335[p]). In any case, the Beaufort Buildings were just a few yards from the Savoy. Epstein provides evidence that from 1770 to 1772 Cleland may have rented a house in a much more expensive area, on what is now Soho Square (Images of a Life, 174–175), but if so, he was back in the Strand by late 1772, when he is listed as sharing a house with John Leslie in Buckingham Street. Cleland was living in the Savoy when he wrote to the Marquis of Rockingham in 1776, when Boswell visited in 1778, and when Beckwith came to call in 1781, so while he may have moved around during this period, the Savoy and the Strand have to be considered his home for most of those twenty-five years.
EPILOGUE. AFTERLIFE
1. Quoted in Epstein, Images of a Life, 177.
2. Nichols, Obituary of John Cleland; Cleland to Stanhope, quoted in Foxon, Libertine Literature, 54; Boswell, In Extremes, 316.
3. Rider, Account, 16. “Dialogues of Meursius” was pseudonymous shorthand for Nicolas Chorier’s Satyra sotadica (ca. 1660), known in French as L’Académie des dames (1680) and in English as Dialogue between a Married Lady and a Maid (1688, 1740); see Wagner, Eros Revived, 227–228. Petronius’s Satyricon, of course, was the source for some of the key passages of Cannon’s Ancient and Modern Pederasty.
4. Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 77.
5. Basker, “Wages,” 192–193.
6. See chapter 6, n. 12. From the mocking reviews in Critical Review 32 (Oct. 1771): 311, and Monthly Review 48 (Jan. 1773): 71, it doesn’t sound like Cleland’s work, but I have not read it, so there remains, for me, still a sliver of doubt.
7. In his biography, Epstein reviewed the (lack of) evidence for the Smyrna claim and concluded, convincingly, that it had no plausible basis (Images of a Life, 213–214n85).
8. IOC, Bombay Public Consultations, P/341/8, f. 11. On Cleland’s voyage to Carolina, see chapter 6, nn. 44–45. On Cannon as murderer, see chapter 2, n. 44.
9. On these two attributions, see Epstein, Images of a Life, 144–145 and 233nn108–109; Basker, “Wages,” 183.
10. Epstein, Images of a Life, 142–145; Halsband, introduction to Montagu, Complete Letters, xiv–xviii.
11. Carruthers, Life of Pope, 148. Henry Bohn, that book’s publisher, also appears to be the source of the claim that the Woman of Pleasure’s sodomitical scene was interpolated by Drybutter (see Foxon, Libertine Literature, 61), although he may have been drawing on rumors already current.
12. On Cleland and Lady Mary, see chapter 4, p. 126–127.
13. The reference to Hadrian and Antinous is in Montagu, Additional Volume, 34.
14. I have accepted Epstein’s and Lonsdale’s attributions, for all of which the evidence is convincing. Basker has provided further evidence for some of these, located copies of missing works, and made two new attributions: The Man of Honour and one or more volumes of The History of the Marchioness de Pompadour (1758–1760). In my view, The Man of Honour is not by Cleland, but the Pompadour History, which Basker attributed on the basis of a remark in a review probably written by Goldsmith, might well be Cleland’s work, given his connection during this period with the History’s publisher, Samuel Hooper, who also published Tombo-Chiqui and Grose’s Voyage to the East-Indies. All three volumes of the Pompadour History, copies of which were only located after Basker wrote his essay, await closer critical study.
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