Reading Fictions, 1660-1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture (review)

In transforming her dissertation into a book, Loveman has preserved some of the drier properties of her original venue. The eleven-page bibliography tends to dwarf the slim volume; and the footnotes, which crowd Loveman's own observations, suggest that she is fortifying her argument against onslaught. In this effort her copy-editor has not proved a steadfast ally. Near the end, for example, comes, "A powerful constituency of readers in the seventeenth and early eighteen centuries were [sic] not easily persuaded" (197).

Mechanical mistakes like this pale in importance when one considers Loveman's substantive errors, which occur mostly in the chapters on Defoe and Swift. Thus, in the service of her overall argument, she characterizes Swift as a coffee-house wit. She writes, "this Irish author was an active member of English coffee-house society and frequently contrived his writings for that milieu" (154). Gulliver's Travels is supposed by her to be "a skilled elaboration of the conventions of shamming coffee-house wit" (166). In this fictional narrative Swift is "participating in a lying contest, outdoing all his predecessors in his level of detail and po-faced [i.e., poker-faced] wit" (170). There follow many more asseverations that Swift was steeped in and utilizing in his writing the lies of the coffee-house raconteurs. Swift would hardly recognize this caricature of himself as among the rakish coffee-house wits described in the earlier chapters of Loveman's book. Because she desires to prove that the great fictional narratives of the early eighteenth century derived from hoaxes perpetrated in coffee-houses, she passes quickly over Swift's own definition of "raillery" as a compliment in disguise. She then claims that he did not practice the kind of raillery he defined: "Swift's raillery in print seldom involved dextrous compliment" (159). The existence of this kind of raillery in his poems to Stella, as well as in his ingenious compliments to correspondents, establishes this as another mistake.

If the chapters on Defoe and Swift are the weakest in Loveman's book, the preceding chapters on skeptical reading and delectable hoaxes in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries largely redeem this deficiency. Loveman argues that, during this time, "social, religious and political factors made the fascination with deception and shamming particularly pronounced" (3). Detecting the impostures of Roman Catholic apologists and free-thinkers required wariness on the part of readers. Romances and the tales of lying travelers sometimes concealed agendas, religious or political, which, again, only skeptical readers might discern. When they uncovered deceit, they reveled in their superior acuity and enhanced their social status among their coffee-house companions.

In 1656 A True and Exact Relation of the Strange Finding Out of Moses his Tombe provided such a hoax for the delectation of skeptical readers and the mystifying of the credulous. Composed by Thomas Chaloner, among others, the pamphlet reported, falsely, the finding of Moses's tomb and the ensuing quarrel over which religious group—the Jews, the Maronite Christians, the Armenian and Greek Churches, the Jesuits, the Franciscan monks—could claim the body. The Jesuits, supposedly, plotted to steal the corpse to bolster their reputation for holiness and accumulate wealth by means of selling indulgences. The dispute—so went the story—was eventually resolved by Rabbi Jeconius Ben-Gad, who demonstrated that the tomb was not Moses's, but that of a later namesake. Loveman praises this hoax as "not just the manipulation of print conventions to create a credible persona but also the successful exploitation of oral and manuscript news networks" (57). Chaloner, she says, "won himself the acclaim accorded to a wit," especially since "some came to view the fiction as a satire aimed at the religious authorities by a political radical" (58).

Although this delightful hoax and Henry Neville's succeeding sham, The Isle of Pines (1668), represent substantial contributions to her readers' knowledge and...