Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland by Hal Gladfelder (review)

This is a very fine book, a postmodern, postcolonial, gender-and-queer studies reconfiguration of an older mode of biographical and critical scholarship—the “literary career,” typified in traditional eighteenth-century studies by (among others) Pottle on Boswell (1929), Sherburn on Pope (1934), or Sale on Richardson (1936). Mr. Gladfelder’s “history or case study of the [‘sodomitical’] writer writing” (re)presents Cleland (1710–1789) as “exemplary of the modern author as self-exiled outsider,” “a singular figure whose body of work is compelling, extravagant, perverse,” “the object of biographical desire” who is both made and unmade by Fanny Hill’s Memoirs.

The first chapter, in which the book finds its title and its interpretive strategy, is situated in Bombay, where Cleland’s twelve years (1728–1740) in the employ of the British East India Company “constitute an exemplary colonialist success story,” and where “his skill in writing and mastery of languages allowed him to rise rapidly through the ranks” and to develop “a flamboyant, contrarian authorial persona.” This development can be traced through a court case (Mr. Gladfelder’s quite wonderful discovery in the India Office Collection) in which Cleland was “accused of persuading a slave woman to leave her master’s house” in order “to make her his sexual slave.” The accusation and Cleland’s vigorous defense “exhibit . . . striking parallels with the Woman of Pleasure’s focus on sexual objectification, economic inequality, and male violence.” This case—and a previously adumbrated possibility (which Mr. Gladfelder’s research now intensifies into a rather compelling conjecture) that “the first draft” of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure “took shape” in Bombay “as a series of exchanges, challenges, borrowings, revisions, and dares” between Charles Carmichael (another Company colonial merchant), Cleland, and the erotic “books they were secretly reading”—induce Mr. Gladfelder to claim that Cleland’s “writing self” and “Fanny Hill’s voice” “began to emerge in those years” in Bombay as similarly “divided” articulations. In the mid-1730s Consultations and Proceedings of the Bombay factory, Cleland was publicly and officially inscribing himself as “both colonialist slave owner and renegade champion of those whom the colonials cheated, raped, and enslaved” (emphasis added); similarly and contemporaneously, in (what Cleland in yet another, later, legal deposition called) “the plan of the first part” of the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, “Fanny Hill’s voice” was also “making and unmaking” itself, “simultaneously female and male, hetero- and homoerotic, moralistic and obscene” (emphasis added).

Mr. Gladfelder teases out, from some previously known but not well-exploited sources, how, “in the course of a half dozen years [in the 1740s], Cleland [fell] from a ‘man of distinction’ whom the Portuguese ministers of state looked to for advice” “to a man condemned [in his own words] to ‘the meanness of writing for a bookseller.’ ” Based on what the Portuguese ambassador called “a vast collection of manuscripts containing examples of all the British East India Company’s practices in the administration of trade in Asia,” Cleland’s “scheme” for the establishment of “a rival [Portuguese] company” “verged (at least) on treason and mercantile espionage” as it “held out . . . the prospect of a radical reconfiguration of imperial power relations.” “The scheme’s unraveling made for a very bad end to Cleland’s stay in Portugal” and to his once “flourishing [colonial] career.” Within five years he was arrested and imprisoned for a debt owed to Thomas Cannon, whom, in a note pinned to Cannon’s door, Cleland accused of attempting to murder him by arsenic poisoning and of being “an execrable white-faced, rotten catamite,” a “Molly.” In an intriguing speculation about this note and Cannon’s affidavit that “he is well acquainted with the handwriting of John Cleland . . . having often seen him write,” Mr. Gladfelder conjectures that these words “suggest intimacy over time” and “not just friendship but friendship centered on writing—that is, literary collaboration,” a relationship which, “in turn...