The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Parts 2, 3 and 4

Part Three, for Instance, Contains a Poem That Reads Like a Parody of

Belinda awaking in the first canto of Pope's Rape of the Lock. The author, identified as W. Overb - - ry, presents a realistic morning scene without either the charms and beauties that surround Pope's Belinda or the viciousness and focus of Swift's similar pictures (see pt. 3, p. 26).

Prevailingly, women are depicted as sexually insatiable, as in a piece written by a man who takes a month's vacation from sex to recoup his strength (pt. 2, p. 12). And the related image of the female with a sexual organ capable of absorbing a man plays a variation on the vagina dentata theme (e.g., pt. 2, pp. 19, 24). A drawing of a man hanging himself for love raises a considerable debate on whether such a thing can indeed occur (pt. 2, pp. 17-18). In a more realistic vein, though equally cynical, is the poem on the woman who complained of her husband making her pregnant so often:

A poor Woman was ill in a dangerous Case, She lay in, and was just as some other Folks was: By the Lord, cries She then, if my Husband e'er come, Once again with his Will for to tickle my Bum, I'll storm, and I'll swear, and I'll run staring wild; And yet the next Night, the Man got her with Child. S. M. 1708. (Pt. 2, pp. 10-11)

S. M. is clearly unsympathetic to the plight of married women in an age with only the most primitive forms of birth control. The picture of her as a long-suffering person is undercut by the casual male assumption that giving birth was not really dangerous and that women make too much of the pain and difficulty. That women were often forced to go through thirteen or fourteen deliveries when little thought had yet been given to creating an antiseptic environment for childbirth is apparently of little concern to S. M., who finds in the apparent willingness of the woman to have sexual intercourse one more time sufficient reason for contempt.

In addition to giving glimpses into social attitudes, The Merry-Thought has a variety of inscriptions that show the way these writings functioned. Professor George Guffey, in his introduction to the first part of this work (ARS 216 , iii-iv), remarks upon the proposal scene carried on in Moll Flanders between Moll and the admirer who will prove her third husband and her brother. Such scenes involving witty proposals and responses cut into the windows of taverns were real enough at the time. The exchange in part two of The Merry-Thought is not, however, half so satisfactory. The woman takes umbrage at her admirer's suggestions that the glass on which he writes is "the Emblem" of her mind in being "brittle, slipp'ry, pois'nous," and writes in retort:

I must confess, kind Sir, that though this Glass, Can't prove me brittle, it proves you an Ass. (Pt. 2, p. 27)

Though an easy cynicism about women's availability and about the body's insistently animal functions predominates, there is enough variety in The Merry-Thought to provide something of a picture of eighteenth-century society were any future anthropologist to come upon this volume as the sole remnant of that period. He would see a society engaged rather more in animal functions than in intellectual pursuits--a society rather more concerned with drinking, love, and defecation than the picture presented by the polite and intellectual literature of the time allowed. But he would also find in the satirical squibs on Corny, the Cambridge bookseller and printer, evidence of learning and university life (pt. 2, pp. 4-6) as well as a criticism of opera (pt. 2, pp. 14-16). He would see numerous young men longing for their mistresses to soften their hearts toward them, and cynical older men who had lost their illusions about love. But he could also come upon a straight piece of philosophy taken from the still fashionable Flask tavern in Hampstead (pt. 2, p. 24) or lowly bits of pious folk wisdom (pt. 2, p. 10). More often, however, he would uncover a society in which there was little of the generalized style that characterizes even the most personal formal poetry of the period. Many of the writers identify themselves and the names of the women they love or detest. In short, if these volumes do little else, they do provide a vivid glimpse into the personal life of the time, and to that extent an injection of some of these inscriptions into the anthologies of the period might help in providing a lively and piquant context for the serious artistic production of writers like Gay and Swift.

The announced "publisher" of this olio was one Hurlothrumbo, a character drawn from the theatrical piece of that name by Samuel Johnson of Cheshire (1691-1773). Professor Guffey has proposed that James Roberts, for whom the four parts were printed, "was almost certainly the collector of the graffiti" and that the name of Hurlothrumbo was invoked in order to attract some of the attention that Samuel Johnson of Cheshire and his play were still receiving two years after the play's first performance and publication. But Roberts would appear an unlikely candidate for the role of editor; I would suggest, rather, the possibility of a more direct and active connection with Samuel Johnson of Cheshire: that he was himself likely the compiler of the four parts of The Merry-Thought and that, whatever the individual versifiers may have intended, this infamous collection of graffiti--as collection--shares very closely with Johnson's other work a spirit of wild variety, eccentric juxtaposition, and essential anarchism that is meant to lead, not to clever parody of polite literature, but to a new, almost apocalyptic vision of the sublime.

At the first level, Hurlothrumbo: Or, The Super-Natural (1729) itself appears to be quite simply a parody, in this case of opera in the form of a work mixing dialogue and song in a manner similar to but much wilder than Gay's Beggar's Opera. Johnson's apparent takeoff on the heroics of opera managed to include in its attack a commentary upon the absurdity of contemporary tragedy as well as some specific references to those works that aimed at the sublime. Lines like "This World is all a Dream, an Outside, a Dunghill pav'd with Diamonds" (48) seem to call the very nature of metaphor into question, especially when juxtaposed with other delirious lines such as "Rapture is the Egg of Love, hatched by a radiant Eye" (14) or by songs such as that sung by the king on contemplating the effects of swallowing gunpowder and brandy together:

Then Lightning from the Nostrils flies. Swift Thunder-bolts from Anus, and the Mouth will break, With Sounds to pierce the Skies, and make the Earth to quake. (P. 42)

Hurlothrumbo may be mostly nonsense, but from the standpoint of literary history, it is highly significant nonsense. It represented a revolt against all dramatic conventions and shared a number of qualities with graffiti, including the sense of spontaneity.

Had Johnson's intention been something as relatively uncomplicated as literary parody he would have achieved some minor fame in a century which could boast any number of geniuses who had specialized in deriding the pretentiousness of the more established literary forms, particularly tragedy, the epic, and the pastoral. But Johnson of Cheshire lacked the aesthetic distance required of sustained irony and had a grander purpose in mind. His tradition was not that of the parodist but rather that of the visionary--the mystic whose tendency is to merge the high and the low, the sublime and the absurd, within a single work. He was not attacking the extravagant rants of the heroic play as Fielding was to do in his Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) or reflecting on opera and pastoral as Gay had done in The Beggar's Opera (1728); rather he was trying, however unsuccessfully, to maintain his own work at the highest reaches of sublimity. He was like one of Pope's "Flying Fishes," who "now and then rise upon their fins and fly out of the Profound; but their wings are soon dry, and they drop down to the bottom."

In his preface to The Blazing Comet; or the Beauties of the Poets (1732), Johnson of Cheshire noted that "the same thought that makes the Fool laugh, may make the wise Man sigh" (ix). Given such an equivocal approach to the ways in which the audience responded to his work, the poet could easily shrug off audience laughter to his most "Sublime" lines. He was always ready "to leap up in Extasy; and dip ... Pen in the Sun" (iv). Parts of Hurlothrumbo, particularly the scene between Lady Flame and Wildfire (both of whom are described in the list of characters as "mad") in which Wildfire threatens to cast off his clothes and "run about stark naked" (48), bear an odd resemblance to "The King's Cameleopard" in Huckleberry Finn. But the disconnected verbal structure, along with the music and dancing, achieves a strange mixture that must have amused and, to a certain extent, bemused its audience.

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