6 - An American Reception of Clarissa: Erotica and Youthful Reading at the Salem Social Library

Summary

ON THE EVE OF the American War of Independence, an incident in the history of the oceanic exchange of knowledge and ideas in the eighteenth century, in this case between an American customer and a British bookseller, reveals how sentimental literature, erotica and even humour intersected in a single bulk book purchase. A fictive identification of a parallel or even hypocritical notion of enslavement linked the materiality of the purchase and a putative book-borrowing collection to a complex social and political critique.

The documentation of this transaction is a book list dated 7 February 1772 found in the papers of Timothy Pickering, later the third US Secretary of State between 1795 and 1800, but at the time a lawyer and an officer in the Massachusetts militia. Entitled ‘Catalogue Books Ship’d on Board the Vesuvious. Ichabud Lovelace Commander’, this list immediately raises the eyebrows of a scholar of the eighteenth century.

The Commander is given the names Ichabud and Lovelace. Lovelace is the love interest of the heroine of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, and generally regarded as a libertine villain because he rapes her. Indeed, it is clear that Pickering is being identified accusatorily as Lovelace because of the novel's rape theme and Pickering's reading of it. In Kathleen Lubey's words, ‘Clarissa endlessly talks about rape’ and ‘the novel begins in medias res with unstoppable rape already under way’. Taken together with ‘Ichabud’ being a term that Boston mothers as recently as this author's own Massachusetts childhood used to describe masturbation (‘Itchy-bod’), the names are clearly both a joke and a libel that linked rapist intent to the consumption of sentimental fictions like Richardson’s. Given some of the erotic titles in the list, this catalogue must be taken as a satirical one with the possible design of blackmail, as the list is not written in Pickering's own hand.

Why Pickering, or one of his family members, preserved this document in his papers is another question entirely, but it is of significance to our understanding of his role in the Revolution, given that it is dated at a moment of increasing tension in Massachusetts between patriots and loyalists. Pickering at this time was not as thoroughly convinced of the necessity of armed insurgence as one might expect a Massachusetts Minuteman to be.