Memoirs of a Coxcomb (1751) by John Cleland (review)

77 Anselment’s 1995 study to Virginia Woolf’s thoughts ‘‘On Being Ill.’’ Smallpox soon displaced plague, syphilis , and leprosy in the seventeenth century as the disease du jour in belletristic literature. It inspired an avalanche of heroic couplets, satires, Ovidian fables, operas, essays, plays, pamphlets, and novels, a response Mr. Shuttleton labels ‘‘the infectious gaze’’ among such diverse authors as Jonson, Dryden, Cowley , Oldham (who died from it), Watts, William Thompson, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who most famously suffered its ravages. This is the short list. Lady Mary, who brought inoculation to England and Europe from Turkey and penned poetic treatments of the effects of the disease upon herself and others, fetches two chapters, one as victim , another as rescuer. The chapter on Edward Jenner’s discovery of cowpox as vaccination is especially insightful about propaganda in controlling disease. The book also has a thorough Index. Treatment of medical issues in general reflects the new academic orthodoxy as enunciated by Foucault and followers , such as Sander Gilman. Mr. Shuttleton repudiates the older fashion of recording the medical conquest of disease over time in favor of a narrative of aesthetic response to the painful, ugly, body-destroying effects of this epidemic . A narrative of death or ‘‘pathography ’’ (Anne H. Hawkins’s neologism ) emerges in his postmodern theorizing over sores, boils, pustules, vomiting , body discharge, fevers, grotesque faces, and the like. Women bore the brunt of this pandemic: ‘‘In a gendered economy of heterosexual desire, patriarchal power and property-relations . . . the woman scarred by smallpox functioned as a dreaded but ubiquitous sign of subjective and social disruption.’’ Such narrowly partisan opinions disfigure an interesting study. Mr. Shuttleton chronicles a miscellaneous manual of literary conceits, warnings , religious conversions, folk remedies , inoculations, cultural responses, Satanic appearances, and even divine intervention . His prose, however, is often daunting and dense: ‘‘Faced with the synchronic co-existence of multiple explanations of smallpox, we might refine [Charles] Rosenberg’s somewhat bifurcated schema by borrowing the model of dominant, residual, and emergent ‘structures of feeling’ proposed by the cultural historian Raymond Williams.’’ Arthur J. Weitzman Northeastern University JOHN CLELAND. Memoirs of a Coxcomb (1751), ed. Hal Gladfelder. Peterborough , ON: Broadview, 2005. Pp. 284. $19.95 (paper). Written shortly after Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), which led to the author’s arrest, Memoirs of a Coxcomb offers the male sequel to Fanny Hill’s bumpy bildungsroman, taking us down the same kind of road to the same kind of bogus self-awareness that Defoe pioneered with Moll Flanders. The commonplace understanding that the pleasures of wickedness are enhanced by draping them in virtue was the basis of other better novels in the century by de Laclos, Sade, and Sterne—and especially Diderot whose Les Bijoux Indiscrets (1748) makes its pornography part of a philosophical system . Nonetheless, Cleland’s book gives us another example of the construction of masculine identity in eighteenth-century fiction to be added to novels by Fielding, Smollett, and others. Just as 78 Fanny was a kind of brothelesque avatar of Pamela, so Sir William Delamor, a Sir Charles Grandison alive from the waist down. Cleland shared with Diderot and Sade an interest in medicine. Less interested than his two French counterparts in leading physiology into the bedchamber of pornography, he adeptly gives us keyhole views of the uniquely British erection of those bulwarks, fortifications, and towers that fascinate Sterne’s Uncle Toby—no small thing. Based on the London 1751 first publication , Mr. Gladfelder’s edition includes an Introduction, Chronology, extensive Bibliography, and four valuable Appendices that include Smollett’s review ; Cleland’s writings on the novel; three contemporary pieces on foppery; three texts by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ; and an excerpt on prostitution by Cleland from his The Case of the Unfortunate Bosavern Penlez (1749). Mr. Gladfelder’s extensive textual notes helpfully define arcane terms (many using Johnson’s dictionary) as well as historical , topical, political and mythological references. This learned edition is a valuable contribution to the study of sexuality, of Cleland, and of the novel. William Donahue Emerson College EMILY COCKAYNE. Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England, 1600–1770. New Haven and London: Yale, 2007. Pp. xii ⫹ 335. $35...