Abstract
It is a commonplace that British literary production became increasingly commercialised across the eighteenth century, and that shifts in literary genre, address and mood over the period need to be considered in that light. In this chapter, I want to address two quite specific structures within this process, concentrating on the mid-century period. The first is the close relationship between writing and forms of quackery or charlatanism. The second structure, which I will attend to more briefly, is the slow emergence among writers of what will later come to be called ressentiment from out of that old Satanic vice, envy. Setting these very different events side by side may seem perverse, but, by focussing on a cluster of commercial book-trade participants — John Newbery, Oliver Goldsmith and Christopher Smart — I want to make the case that, in the narrow period between about 1750 and 1780, they are in fact linked and in ways that help us make sense of the romanticism to come.
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Notes
Hester Lynch Piozzi, British Synonymy or, an Attempt at Regulating the Choice of Words in Familiar Conversation, vol. 2 (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1794), pp. 174–5.
Roy Porter, Quacks: Fakers & Charlatans in English Medicine (Stroud: Tempus, 2000), p. 15.
I have found the following scholarship useful in relation to this topic: Jeremy Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1987);
F. C. Doherty, A Study in Eighteenth-Century Advertising Methods: The Anodyne Necklace (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992);
John Feather, The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985);
C. Y. Ferdinand, Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);
Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006);
Peter Isaac, ‘Charles Elliot and Spilsbury’s Antiscorbuic Drops’, The Reach of Print: Making, Selling and Using Books. Eds. Peter Isaac and Barry McKay (Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 1998), pp. 157–74;
A.S. Hargreaves, ‘Some Later Seventeenth-Century Book Trade Activities’, Quadrat 6 (1997): 3–6.
Jan Fergus and Ruth Portner, ‘Provincial Bookselling in Eighteenth-Century England: the case of John Clay Reconsidered’, Studies in Bibliography, 40 (1987): 157–63. Fergus, however, does not include cash-sales in her account of John Clay’s sales, and it is not inconceivable that patent medicines were more often sold in this manner than books.
See Michael Harris, ‘Periodicals and the Book Trade’, Development of the English Book Trade, 1700–1899 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1981), p. 71 ff.
Hoh-cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1988), pp. 229–30.
The material in this paragraph is mainly drawn from Roger A. Hambridge, ‘“Empiricomany, an Infatuation in Favour of Empiricism or Quackery”: The Socio-Economics of Eighteenth-Century Quackery’, Literature and Science and Medicine: Papers Read at the Clark Library Summer Seminar 1981 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library 1982), pp. 47–102, and Roy Porter’s book on quacks cited above.
Charles Welsh, A Bookseller of the Last Century: Being Some Account of the Life of John Newbery, and of the Books He Published: With a Notice of the Later Newberys (London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh 1885), p. 17ff.
See also the introduction to S. Roscoe, John Newbery and His Successors, 1740–1814: A Bibliography (Wormley, Hertfordshire: Five Owls Press, 1973). More information on the Powder is to be found in Bruce Dickens, ‘Dr James’s Powder’, Life and Letters 2 (1929): 36–47, and Frederick Pottle, ‘James’s Powder’, Notes and Queries 149 (1925), pp. 11–12.
See Roger A. Hambridge, ‘“Empiricomany, an Infatuation in Favour of Empiricism or Quackery”: The Socio-Economics of Eighteenth-Century Quackery’, in Literature and Science and Medicine: Papers Read at the Clark Library Summer Seminar 1981 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library 1982), pp. 80–2.
Walter Baker, The affidavits and proceedings of Walter Baker, administrator to the late Baron Schwanberg, upon his petition presented to the King in Council, to vacate the patent obtained by Dr. Robert James for Schwanberg’s powder,… with a copy of the report, upon the hearing before the Attorney and Solicitor General, the sixth ofDecember, 1752 (London: Printed, and there published for physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, and all others whom it may concern, 1754).
See E. H. Mikhail (ed.), Goldsmith: Interviews and Recollections (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan 1993), pp. 102–6 for a reprint of Haynes’ pamphlet and notes on its context.
The formula was published in Donald Monro, A treatise on medical and pharmaceutical chymistry, and the materia medica, vol. 1 (London: T. Cadell 1788), p. 366, Monro having obtained it from the Chancery patent.
For an interesting account of certain cultural aspects of the Victorian patent medicine trade, see Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 851–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 168–204.
William Zachs, The First John Murray and the Late Eighteenth-Century London Book Trade: With a Checklist of His Publications (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998), p. 46.
Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale Supposed to Be Written by Himself, ed. Arthur Friedman (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 91.
See John Rowe Townsend, John Newbery and His Books: Trade and Plumb-Cake for Ever, Huzza! (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1994), pp. 117–27.
James Ralph, The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated; with Regard to Booksellers, the Stage and the Public (London: R. Griffiths, 1762), p. 18 ff.
John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century: Comprizing Biographical Memoirs of William Bowyer, Printer, F. S. A., and Many of His Learned Friends: An Incidental View of the Progress and Advancement of Literature in This Kingdom During the Last Century: And Biographical Anecdotes of a Considerable Number of Eminent Writers and Ingenious Artists; with a Very Copious Index. Vol. 3 (London: Printed for the author by Nichols, son, and Bentley 1812), p. 508.
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Paul A. Scanlon. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001 ), pp. 269–270.
Ralph M. Wardle, Oliver Goldsmith (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1957), p. 168.
Cited in Lewis Mansfield Knapp, Tobias Smollett, Doctor of Men and Manners (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 167.
James Adair, Essays on Fashionable Diseases. The dangerous Effects of Hot and Crouded [sic] rooms. The Cloathing of Invalids. Lady and Gentlemen Doctors. And on Quacks and Quackery (London: T.P. Bateman n.d.), p. 189.
Charles Churchill, The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 75.
Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 18.
See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 103–22.
For an interesting approach to Newbery, Smart and Goldsmith but with different interests than mine here, see Lori Branch, Rituals of Spotaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordworth (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press 2006), pp. 135–75.
See Harriet Guest, A Form of Sound Words: the Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) for a pioneering account of this poem and its theopolitical setting.
Christopher Smart, ‘Jubliate Agno’, Selected Poems, eds Karina Williamson and Marcus Walsh (London: Penguin, 1990), Fragment B, no. 326. p. 85.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Leslie Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 104.
Oliver Goldsmith, The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. David Masson (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 641.
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During, S. (2009). Charlatanism and Resentment in London’s Eighteenth-Century Literary Marketplace. In: Ferris, I., Keen, P. (eds) Bookish Histories. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244801_13
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