The Little Everyman: Stature and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century English Literature by Deborah Needleman Armintor (review)

When I happened to mention to various colleagues that I was reading a book on dwarfs, literal and metaphorical, in the eighteenth century, they each of them responded with some variation on “What an unusual topic!” One of the accomplishments of Deborah Needleman Armintor’s brief but suggestive book is just how central to the period this topic ends up seeming. Setting aside the large and loutish John Bull as a well-known but not particularly representative figure of English masculinity, Armintor posits that the eighteenth century was a century of “little men.”

The Little Everyman offers a chronologically ordered, wide-ranging discussion of the depiction of little men that extends from seventeenth-century court dwarf portraits to Josef Boruwlaski’s 1788 Memoirs of the Celebrated Dwarf. Along the way, Armintor turns to satiric prints showing, for example, Horace Walpole towering over tiny Englishmen, representations of Alexander Pope by both himself and his detractors, Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians, Henry Fielding’s Tom Thumb plays, and the homunculi of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. She argues that the changing modes of representing little men “both reflected and intervened in the fundamental shift in English culture from an ideology of patronage, elitism, and aristocracy to the brave new—and ... potentially emasculating—worlds of consumerism, companionate marriage, sentimentalism, and other supposedly democratizing principles of the new bourgeoisie” (xiv). If, at the beginning of the period covered, the dwarf is illustrative of an elite world of dependence on aristocratic patronage (thus, the “court” dwarf), by the end of the period the little man is representative of modern, middle-class independence. For Armintor, however, the literal or metaphorical dwarf remains a paradoxical figure or, rather, a figure that embodies the paradoxes of shifting ideology: in his move from the private court to the public “free market,” the little man really only trades one kind of dependence for another, and, as a representative everyman, he inevitably suggests that “modern” masculinity entails diminishment.

Armintor elaborates some of these paradoxes in her second chapter, “The Dwarfing of Little-Man Pope.” For Armintor, Pope stands as the paradigmatic writer of a new world of literary production, one in which an old order of elite patronage, which did not in fact disappear, was supposedly being replaced by a putatively free literary market. Pope’s ability to bridge these two modes of literary production accounts for both his success and his critics’ rage: “The paradox of Pope’s modern capitalistic business model, by which he prided himself on being a self-made man,” Armintor writes, “and his anachronistically aristocratic ideology and social connections found a rich and particularly scathing metaphorical counterpart in the figure of the eighteenth-century dwarf ... By likening Pope to old-fashioned court dwarfs, his critics therefore painted him as an aristocratically dependent and emasculated living anachronism, while their emphasis on his resemblances to the modern self-promoting dwarf made him out to be an impotent hypocrite” (32). The parallels that Armintor highlights between the status of modern writers and modern dwarfs are striking and intriguing, but of course Pope’s critics were not being entirely metaphorical. He was a conspicuously short man, and I wish this discussion had opened up to other writers in order to consolidate the status of the metaphor as metaphor.

Elsewhere, the representative little men do seem more representative. Armintor begins the chapter on Henry Fielding’s Tom Thumb plays with a brief discussion of a love poem Fielding wrote to Charlotte Cradock (“Celia”) in 1730: “On Her Wishing to Have a Lilliputian to Play With.” (Although Armintor frequently mentions the ubiquity of the term “Lilliputian” following the publication of Gulliver’s Travels, she offers no discussion of part 1 of that book.) In the poem, Fielding dreams of being “sunk to Lilliputian size” so that he might enjoy the erotic proximity of being carried in Celia’s hand, her gown, her...