A Portrait of Richard Graves (review)

REVIEWS 71 Clarence Tracy. A Portrait of Richard Graves. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. xiv + 199pp. $30.00. This elegant portrait of the Reverend Richard Graves (1715-1804) is Clarence Tracy's second important biography of an eighteenth-century writer. His first, The Artificial Bastard: A Biography ofRichard Savage, was published in 1953. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast than that between these two Richards: Savage, the homicidal derelict who trudged the London streets late at night with Samuel Johnson and who composed poetry out of pain, and Graves, the upright, orthodox Church of England parson who wrote poetry and fiction largely for the fun of it. Yet, working with much less controversial or scandalous material this time, Tracy has managed to produce an attractive and engaging delineation. Richard Graves has been given scant attention by historians of the novel. When he is mentioned at all, it is as the author of The Spiritual Quixote (1773), an amusing episodic travelogue which Tracy edited for the Oxford English Novels series in 1967. The Quixote of the story is the Reverend Geoffry Wildgoose, and his Sancho Panza a village cobbler called Jerry Tugwell. Their quest, to bring about a religious revival of sorts, is the means by which Graves satirizes the current "Methodist madness" of the Wesleys and George Whitefield, all of whom were contemporaries or near-contemporaries of Graves at Oxford in the 1730s. Though careful to avoid overstressing the autobiographical content of the novel, Tracy recognizes several important connections here between fact and fiction. Interestingly enough, Graves was not always critical of the Methodists. During his Oxford days, in fact, he was a close friend of Charles Wesley. The most plausible reason for his change of attitude was the mental breakdown of his own brother, Charles Caspar Graves, due to religious mania. It is significant , then, that The Spiritual Quixote gives special prominence to hysterical conversion episodes. Though the stricken Charles Caspar eventually recovered his sanity and recanted Methodism, "a good deal of his well-meaning idealism went into the character of Geoffry Wildgoose" (p. 45). For a time Richard Graves himself abandoned his studies in divinity, following his undergraduate career at Oxford, where he was elected a Fellow of All Souls. His ultimate return to the cloth seems to have been a reluctant move. Among other things, he was doubtful whether the clerical character could ever be considered "genteel" enough. Moreover, he had a speech defect which made preaching irksome, and while he performed his parochial duties conscientiously, there was little to excite him in the tiny parish of Claverton, near Bath, Somerset , with its congregation of a hundred souls. Yet he stayed there as Rector for over fifty years, finding some diversion in running a small school in his parsonage (among his pupils were Ralph Warburton, son of the Bishop who edited Shakespeare and Pope, and Thomas Malthus, future author of the famous Essay on Population), riding daily to Bath to catch the post, and visiting London 72 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION twice a year to see plays and visit friends. It is not surprising that writing, both creative and scholarly, became a vital necessity for him. Why was a person of such manifest ability denied ecclesiastical preferment? For one thing, Graves contributed nothing to theology and very little to homiletic literature. Besides, from what his biographer tells us, the less admirable activities of his youth were decided impediments to his progress in the church. He had jilted one woman on the basis of a fraudulent defamatory letter, and eloped with the teen-aged daughter of his farmer-landlord, choosing the sordid surroundings of the Fleet prison in London (a kind of urban Gretna Green) for the wedding ceremony, to ensure secrecy and hence to preserve his fellowship at All Souls, which required celibacy. Within two years, however, the secret was out, and he forfeited the fellowship. After the birth of his first child he had the temerity to send his semi-literate wife to school in London in an unsuccessful attempt to make her more socially acceptable to his family. Whether Graves was actually denied preferment as a result of these early deceptions is...