Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) combines the reforming strategies of satire, conduct writing, and fable. The collision of these forms creates a fabular hybrid, a text in which fabular elements are folded into the generic markers of the conduct book, resulting in an intensification of the satire of conduct writing and infusing it with a moral claim. In the preface to her excoriating exposure of the abuses of power in domestic life, Collier applauds Jonathan Swift’s Directions to Servants for its “ingenuity,” the descriptor she applies to her own manual, and the text bears comparison to the Scriblerian project with its satire of both medium and message. The three sections into which Ingeniously Tormenting is divided emphasize the satire of the conduct book. The concluding fable of the Lion, the Leopard, the Lynx, and the Lamb, however, forces a rereading of Ingeniously Tormenting and points to John Gay’s fables. When references to animals, teeth, and claws to describe human behavior are echoed in the real teeth and claws of the animals in the fable, the essay’s tone darkens. The fable’s placement at the end of the book reflects the ironic inversion characteristic of satire.

The first chapter examines the British East India Company’s transformation into Bengal’s territorial sovereign in 1764 as an embodied history. The British men who worked for this trading monopoly adopted Persian titles that recall the polite historical protocols of Perso-Turkic-Mongol empires since the fifteenth century. These titles personified a corporate English body as an individual nobleman who was the imperial family’s only and most powerful patriarch – the ultimate mimic men. A shared ethical and linguistic orientation inspired Asian travelers and their British hosts to imagine an ethnic kinship, as mediated by the Indo-Persian political treatises that Company lexicographers had translated into conduct books for genteel Englishmen aspiring to a career in India. This trans-imperial masculinity was what empowered Asian travelers to climb social rank and challenge the Company’s claim to Mughal sovereignty as they befriended metropolitans in public showplaces – theaters, salons, and drawing rooms. The chapter proposes that orientalism and occidentalism are inadequate paradigms for understanding these travelers’ multimedia engagements in Britain.