The most hilarious success of the London stage in this period was The Beggar’s Opera. John Gay began as a merchant’s apprentice, rose to be secretary to the Earl of Clarendon, and became one of the liveliest members of the Scriblerus Club. Pope described him as
Of manners gentle, of affections mild;
In wit a man; simplicity, a child;
With native humor temp’ring virtuous rage,
Form’d to delight at once and lash the age. 68
Gay made his mark in 1716 with Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London. The clatter of wagon wheels on paving stones, the drivers urging their horses with whip and tongue, the “draggled damsel” bearing fish for Billingsgate, the serenity of “Pell Mell” with fragrant ladies leaning on the arms of beaux, the pedestrian weaving his way through a game of football filling the street, the gentle thieves who with “unfelt fingers make thy pocket light,” and the burly “watchman who with friendly light will teach thy reeling steps to tread aright,” and guide you to your door: Trivia still provides all this and more for those who would visualize the London of 1716.
In 1720 Gay’s Poems were published by subscription, and brought him a thousand pounds; these he lost in the crash of the South Sea Company. Pope and others came to his aid, but in 1728 he lifted himself to renewed prosperity with The Beggar’s Opera. The introduction presents the beggar, who presents his opera. This begins with a ballad sung by Peachum, who (like Jonathan Wild) pretends to serve the law by reporting thieves (when they refuse to serve him), but actually is a dealer in stolen goods. He calls himself an honest man because “all professions be-rogue one another,” and are moved by the greed for gain. His affairs are muddled by the fact that his daughter Polly has fallen in love with, perhaps has married, the dashing, handsome highwayman Captain Macheath; this will interfere with the use of Polly’s charms in managing buyers, sellers, and constables. Mrs. Peachum reassures him:
Why must our Polly, forsooth, differ from her sex, and love only her husband, and why must our Polly’s marriage, contrary to all observation, make her the less followed by other men? All men are thieves in love, and like a woman the better for being another’s property. 69
However, Mrs. Peachum warns her daughter:
You know, Polly, I am not against your toying a trifle with a customer in the way of business, or to get out a secret or so; but if I find that you have played the fool, and are married, you jade you, I’ll cut your throat.
Polly excuses her marriage in a ballad:
Can love be controlled by advice?
Will Cupid our mothers obey?
Though my heart were as frozen as ice,
At his flame ’twould have melted away.
When he kissed me, so closely he pressed,
’Twas so sweet that I must have complied;
So I thought it both safest and best
To marry, for fear you should chide. 70
Peachum rages; he is afraid that Macheath will kill him and his wife to inherit their fortune through Polly. He schemes to betray Macheath to the law and have him safely hanged. Macheath comes on the scene, comforts Polly with pressures, and assures her that henceforth he will be monogamous:
My heart was so free
It roved like the bee,
Till Polly my passion requited;
I sipped each flower,
I changed every hour,
But here every flower is united.
She begs him to swear that if transported he will take her with him. He swears: “Is there any power … that could tear me from thee? You might sooner tear a pension from a courtier, a fee from a lawyer, a pretty woman from a looking glass.” And they join in a charming duet:
HE. Were I laid on Greenland’s coast,
And in my arms embraced my lass,
Warm amidst eternal frost,
Too soon the half-year’s night would pass.
SHE. Were I sold on Indian soil,
Soon as the burning day was closed,
I could mock the sultry toil
When on my charmer’s breast reposed.
HE. And I would love you all the day,
SHE. Every night would kiss and play,
HE. If with me you’d fondly stray,
SHE. Over the hills and far away.
She confides to him that her father plans to surrender him to the law, and sorrowfully she bids him hide for a while. He goes, but stops in a tavern to give his aides instructions for a robbery. When they are gone he dances and toys with the tavern tarts; Peachum has bribed them to betray him; while they fondle him they steal his pistols, then summon the constables; in the next scene he is in Newgate jail. There Polly and another of his wives contend for his person; they free him, but he is recaptured and is sent to the gallows. En route he comforts his ladies with a song:
Then farewell, my love—dear charmers, adieu!
Contented I die—’tis the better for you.
Here ends all dispute for the rest of our lives,
For this way, at once, I please all my wives. 71
The beggar-author now appears, and prides himself on having made vice meet its due punishment, as in all proper plays. But an actor protests that “an opera must end happily” (how customs change!). The beggar yields, saves Macheath from one noose and gives him Polly as another; all dance around the couple, while the captain wonders has he met a fate worse than death.
Gay had had the luck to secure the services of Johann Pepusch, a German composer resident in England; Pepusch chose the music for Gay’s ballads from old English airs; the result was irresistible. Despite the satire of corruption and hypocrisy, the audience at the premiere in Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre (January 29, 1728) responded enthusiastically. The play ran for sixty-three consecutive nights, exceeding all precedents; it had long runs in the major towns of Britain; it still holds the stage on two continents, and has been made into one of the most delightful motion pictures of our time. The actress who played Polly became the toast of gay blades and the favorite of salons; her biography and her picture were sold in great number; her songs were painted on fans; she married a duke. But a High Churchman denounced Gay for making a highwayman his hero and letting him go unpunished. When Gay tried to produce a continuation under the title Polly the Lord Chamberlain refused to license it. Gay had Polly published; it sold so well, and the proceeds from The Beggar’s Opera mounted so pleasantly, that (as a wit said) the play made Gay rich, and Rich, the manager, gay. Four years after his triumph colic carried the poet away.
V. THE NOVEL
The outstanding event in the literary history of this period was the rise of the modern novel. Clarissa and Tom Jones are more important historically than any English poem or play of the age. From 1740, as the scope of significant life broadened from the court to the people, and from actions to sentiments, the novel replaced the drama as the voice and mirror of England.
Stories were as old as writing. India had had her tales and fables; Judea had included in her literature such legends as those of Ruth, Esther, and Job; Hellenistic Greece and medieval Christendom had produced romances of adventure and love; Renaissance Italy had turned out thousands of novelle (“little novelties”), as in Boccaccio and Bandello; Renaissance Spain and Elizabethan England had written picaresque accounts of picturesque rogues; seventeenth-century France had weighted the world with love stories far longer than love. Lesage had spun out Gil Bias; Defoe had perfected the narrative of adventure to illustrate human courage; Swift had used a travelogue to excoriate mankind.
But were these productions novels in our present sense? They resembled eighteenth-century fiction in being imaginary narratives; some had the substance of indubitable length; some portrayed character with an effort at reality; but (perhaps excepting Crusoe) they lacked a plot that would unify events and characters in a developing whole. Mrs. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), the story of an African slave, had a unifying plot; so did Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), and Roxan
a (1724); but all these were still a string of episodes rather than a structural unity in which every part advances a unifying theme. When Richardson and Fielding seized this art of development, portrayed character growing through events, and made their novels picture the manners of an age, the modern novel was born.
1. Samuel Richardson: 1689–1761
The man who inaugurated the new novel was the son of a Derbyshire carpenter who moved to London soon after Samuel’s birth. The family hoped to make him a clergyman, but was too poor to give him the requisite schooling; he managed, however, to do some preaching in his books. The circle in which he grew retained the Puritan morality. He was apprenticed to a printer, and his reputation for calligraphy enabled him to add to his income by composing letters for illiterate lovesick girls; this accident determined the epistolary form of his novels, and their extensive exploration of feminine psychology and sentiment. His industry and thrift served him well; he set up his own printing shop, married his ex-master’s daughter (1721), and begot by her six children, of whom five died in infancy. She too died (1730), still young and loved, and these bereavements helped to form his rather somber mood. He married again, begot six more children, suffered more bereavements, and rose to be printer to the House of Commons. He was fifty years old before he published a book.
In 1739 two printer friends engaged him to write a little volume of sample letters as a guide for “those country readers who were unable to indite for themselves,” and also as instruction in “how to think and act justly and prudently in the common concerns of human life.” 72 While preparing this book—and here genius took hold of circumstance—Richardson conceived the idea of weaving a succession of letters into a love story that would illustrate a virgin’s wise morality. The theme, chastity preserved through a long succession of temptations, may have been suggested by Marivaux’s Vie de Marianne (1731–41). In any case Richardson, in November, 1740, set a milestone in English literature by issuing, in two volumes, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to Her Parents; now first published in order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes. The book went well, and Richardson added two more volumes in 1741, Pamela in Her Exalted Condition, telling of her virtues and wisdom after her marriage.
The first half of the story is still interesting, for we are never too old to be interested in seduction—though after a thousand pages even seduction becomes a bore. The stress on sentiment begins on the first page, where Pamela writes: “Oh, how my eyes run! Don’t wonder to see the paper so blotted.” She is a model of goodness, gentleness, and modesty. Sent out to “service” at sixteen, she remits to her parents the first money she earns, “for Providence will not let me want.… If I get more I am sure it is my duty, as it shall be my care, to love and cherish you both; for you have loved and cherished me when I could do nothing for myself.” 73 The cautious parents refuse to use the money until they have assurance that it is not her bachelor employer’s advance payment for Pamela’s favors. They warn her that her beauty imperils her continence. “We fear—yes, my dear child, we fear— [lest] you should be too grateful, and reward him with that jewel, your virtue, which no riches … can make up to you.” She promises to be chary, and adds: “Oh, how amiable a thing is doing good! It is all I envy great folks for.” Her sentiments are admirable, though they lose some charm by being professed. In a culminating catastrophe her employer enters her bed without the proper preliminaries, and clasps her to his agitated bosom. She faints, and his program is disturbed. Recovering consciousness, “I put my hand to his mouth, and said, ‘Oh, tell me, yet tell me not, what have I suffered in this distress?’” 74 He assures her that his intentions had miscarried. Appreciating the compliment of his desire, she gradually learns to love him; and the gradations by which her fear is shown turning to love are among the many subtle touches that support Richardson’s reputation as a psychologist. Nevertheless she resists all his sieges, and finally he breaks down and offers her marriage. Happy to have saved her virtue and his soul, Pamela resolves to be a perfect English wife: to stay at home, avoid grand parties, keep the household accounts carefully, distribute charity, make jellies, cookies, candies, and preserves, and be grateful if her husband, descending the ladder of class, will give her now and then the grace and benefit of his conversation. Richardson concludes Volume II with a homily on the advantages of virtue in the bargaining of the sexes. “The editor of these sheets will have his end if it [Pamela’s virtue] inspires a laudable emulation in the minds of any worthy persons, who may thereby entitle themselves to the rewards, the praises, and the blessings by which Pamela was so deservedly distinguished.”
Some Englishmen, like the lusty Fielding, laughed, but thousands of middle-class readers entered sympathetically into Pamela’s throbs. The clergy praised the book, glad to have found such reinforcements of their sermons in a literature that had seemed sold to Beelzebub. Four editions of Pamela were taken up in six months; naturally the publishers urged Richardson to dig further in the same rich vein. But he was not mercenary, and besides, his health had begun to fail. He took his time, and proceeded with his printing. It was not till 1747 that he sent forth the masterpiece that brought all bourgeois Europe to his feet.
Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, two thousand pages long, came out in seven volumes between November, 1747, and December, 1748. Hurt by the charge that Pamela had shown virtue as merely a bargaining strategy, and had pictured a reformed rake as a good husband, Richardson undertook to show virtue as a divine gift to be rewarded in heaven, and an unreformed rake as inevitably bound for an evil and shattering end. The impetuous Lovelace, reputed a devil with women, seeks the hand of Clarissa Harlowe. She distrusts him, but is insensibly fascinated by his reputation. Her family forbids her to meet such a scoundrel; it closes its doors to him, and offers her Mr. Solmes, a man of no vices and no character. She refuses. To make her yield they scold her, torment her, lock her up. Lovelace hires an aide to simulate an armed attack upon her by her relatives; to escape them she allows him to abduct her to St. Albans. She is willing to marry him, but he thinks this too desperate a venture. He writes to a friend:
… Determined to marry I would be, were it not for this consideration, that once married, I am married for life.
That’s the plague of it! Could a man do as the birds do, change [mates] every Valentine’s Day, … there would be nothing at all in it.… Such a change would be a means of annihilating … four or five very atrocious capital sins: rape, vulgarly so called, adultery, and fornication; nor would polygamy be panted after. Frequently it would prevent murders and dueling; hardly any such thing as jealousy (the causes of shocking violences) would be heard of.… Nor would there possibly be such a person as a barren woman.… Both sexes would bear with each other, in the view that they could help themselves in a few months.… The newspapers would be crowded with paragraphs … concerned to see who and who’s together. Then would not the distinction be very pretty, Jack? as in flowers: such a gentleman, or such a lady, is an annual, such a one is a perennial.75
He tries to seduce Clarissa; she warns him that if he touches her she will kill herself. He keeps her in durance vile but genteel, during which she sends heartbroken letters to her confidante, Anna Howe. He invents one scheme after another to break through her defenses; she resists him, yet considers her honor irrevocably tarnished by her half-consenting to elope. She writes pitiful letters to her father begging him, not to forgive her, but to withdraw the curse which he has laid upon her, and which, she thinks, forever closes to her the gates of Paradise; he refuses. She falls into a wasting illness, in which her only support is her religious faith. Lovelace disappears into France, and is killed in a duel by Clarissa’s uncle. At last her parents come offering forgiveness, and find her dead.
It is a simple story, too long drawn out on a single note to hold the attention of our hectic minds; but in eighteenth-century England it became a
national issue; hundreds of readers, in the intervals of publication, wrote to Richardson imploring him not to let Clarissa die. 76 One father described his three daughters as having “at this moment each a separate volume [of Clarissa] in her hand; and all their eyes like a wet flower in April.” 77 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, as sophisticated as any Englishwoman of her rime, took up the book as a concession to middle-class sentiment and the popular furor, but it offended her aristocratic taste: