Say that a reader in the Romantic period noticed the word caricatura when they were reading the works of Thomas Browne, or when they encountered a reference in the Scots Magazine to Alexander Pope being ‘hurt by the caricatura of his figure’.1 Say that they recognised this word as Italian and were curious about its origins. Which reference work could they have turned to?
The best choice, I think, would have been one of the many editions of Giuseppe Baretti’s Dictionary of the English and Italian Languages. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was not an option: Johnson did not define ‘caricature’, and though a brief entry was added posthumously then expanded by H. J. Rodd in the 1818 edition, it contains no helpful information about the word’s Italian origins. Pocket editions of Johnson’s dictionary define caricature simply as ‘a ludicrous, droll likeness’,2 while Thomas Sheridan’s Complete Dictionary (1790) defines it as ‘exaggerated resemblance in drawings’. If the reader was uncertain how to pronounce the word and looked it up in John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1823), they would have been referred to Baretti’s dictionary.3 Alternatively, they might have picked up the latest edition of Giuspano Graglia’s New Pocket Dictionary of the Italian and English Languages, titled An Italian and English Pocket Dictionary when first published in 1787 and in its seventeenth edition by 1837.
What light would Italian have shed, for British readers in the Romantic period, on the meaning of caricatúra, assimilated into English as ‘caricature’?
From Caricatúra to Caricature: A History of the Word in English
Looking it up in Baretti’s dictionary, the reader does not immediately find the kind of definition they might expect from an Italian–English dictionary: a definition written in English. Baretti’s first 1760 edition explains caricatúra in Italian – ‘dicesi anche di ritratto ridicolo in cui siensi grandemente accresciati i diffetti’ – and notes that ‘[t]he English have adopted the word. See caricare in [sic] ritratto’.4 Graglia’s 1787 pocket dictionary, which reproduces content from Baretti, defines caricatúra only as ‘a caricature’. Thus, to understand the meaning of caricatúra, the reader must look higher on the page, where a series of definitions trace the word’s etymology.
First, we have cárica (‘charge, burden, load’) and cáricare (‘to charge, to load, to burden, to lay a burden upon’), with several examples of figurative usage such as ‘to charge one with something, to lay the fault upon him’. Graglia’s dictionary has caricárla ad uno, ‘to play tricks with one’, and caricársi, ‘to take upon one’s self’. In one of Baretti’s examples, the reader will find a definition of pictorial caricature: to caricare un ritratto is ‘to paint a portrait so, that the original may appear ridiculous by a kind of exaggeration of the parts of his face, yet without losing the resemblance’. Baretti’s definition would have helped the English reader with caricatúra as it appears in Letter to a Friend (1690), where Browne describes the face of a dying man with a reference to Italian caricatúra drawings:
[A] weak Physiognomist might say at first eye, This was a face of Earth, and that Morta had set her Hard-Seal upon his Temples, easily perceiving what Caricatura Draughts Death makes upon pined faces.5
This is one of the earliest references to caricatúra in an English-language text. Two decades later in no. 537 of the Spectator, John Hughes saves his reader the trouble of consulting a dictionary by providing his own definition of ‘those burlesk pictures, which the Italians call Caricatura’s’.6 By the late eighteenth century, when English readers were expected to know what ‘caricature’ meant, Baretti’s dictionary was there for any reader interested to know the history of this Italian-sounding word – especially when encountering it in its original Italian form, as in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1818). After asking Frank to describe his father, a businessman, Rashleigh responds:
‘O rare-painted portrait! […] Vandyke was a dauber to you, Frank. I see thy sire before me in all his strength and weakness, loving and honouring the King as a sort of lord mayor of the empire, or chief of the board of trade, venerating the Commons, for the acts regulating the export trade, and respecting the Peers, because the Lord Chancellor sits on a wool-sack.’
Rob Roy being set in 1715, Scott uses the period-appropriate ‘caricatura’ rather than the assimilated ‘caricature’ in this dialogue. Baretti’s explanation of caricare un ritratto is clearly relevant to this analogy between the two young men’s opposing verbal descriptions of Mr Osbaldistone and two different styles of portraiture, the Flemish painting and the exaggerated comic ritratto.
So far, so good. But say that this reader in the Romantic period had also come across other uses of the word ‘caricature’ where the ‘caricatures’ in question are clearly not literally ritratti, pictures or graphic portraits, but rather instances of writing, reviewing, editing and public speaking. Letters to the editor, newspaper advertisements for comic plays, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the Scots Magazine’s review of Frankenstein – all these refer to textual or verbal caricatures. Would Baretti’s dictionary have provided any helpful context for such references to written or spoken caricatúra?
I have been told formerly, that it is the office of a Critic to discover the beauties as well as the defects of a work. Our modern reviewers present us with nothing but caricature.
The best method, I believe, that can be adopted to correct a fondness for novels is to ridicule them; […] if a judicious person, with some turn for humour, would read several to a young girl, and point out […] how foolishly and ridiculously they caricatured human nature, just opinions might be substituted instead of romantic sentiments.
The taste of the day leans entirely to caricature: We have lost our relish for the simple beauties of nature. The caricature in acting, in novel-writing, in preaching, in parliamentary eloquence is entirely in rage. We are no longer satisfied with propriety and neatness; we must have something grotesque and disproportioned, cumbrous with ornament and gigantic in its dimensions.
This present evening Their Majesties Servants will act (never performed) a new Dramatick Caricature, in one act, called THE UGLY CLUB.
The Brain-Sucker. Or, the Distress of Authorship. A Serio-Comic Caricature. In a Letter from Farmer Homely, to an absent Friend.
SIR,—After seeing my letter of the 10th instant, in your Register of Sunday last, chequered, caricatured in Italics, and pared away, as it there appeared, ad libitum, for to suit your own purpose, I had almost resolved to desert the correspondence.
‘The Lord of the Manor’ was performed yesterday, and the House, as on Monday, was crowded to an overflow. JONES played Young Contrast with all that pleasantry of caricature which made the character so important when the Opera was first revived at this Theatre.
Here is one of the productions of the modern school in its highest style of caricature and exaggeration […]. There never was a wilder story imagined, yet like most of the fictions of this age, it has an air of reality attached to it, by being connected with the favourite projects and passions of the times.
None of these examples ask the reader to think specifically of drawings or graphic portraits. The Morning Chronicle gives several examples of caricature, all of which involve verbal expression and none of which are pictorial. For the Scots Magazine writer, caricature is a ‘style’ of writing.
Readers could have thought of these expressions as metaphors, analogies that apply Baretti’s definition of an exaggerated portrait – caricare un ritratto – to a ‘portrait’ in textual or verbal form. Indeed, verbal and textual caricatures are occasionally compared with graphic ritratti, whether implicitly (as in the Gentleman’s Magazine’s profile of the Shakespearean commentator George Steevens) or explicitly (as in John Hughes’s letter to The Spectator advertising his own ‘Ode to the Creator of the World’):
A characteristic bon mot, is a kind of oral caricature, copies of which, are multiplied by every tongue that utters it.
Politicians can resolve the most shining actions among men into artifice and design; others, who are soured by discontent, repulses, or ill usage, are apt to mistake their spleen for philosophy; men of profligate lives, and such as find themselves incapable of rising to any distinction among their fellow-creatures, are for pulling down all appearances of merit, which seem to upbraid them: and satirists describe nothing but deformity. From all these hands we have seen such draughts of mankind as are represented in those burlesk pictures, which the Italians call Caricatura’s; where the art consists in preserving, amidst distorted proportions and aggravated features, some distinguishing likeness of the person, but in such a manner as to transform the most agreeable beauty into the most odious monster.
But despite the analogies, these ‘caricatures’ were not simply textual versions of caricature ritratti, humorous portraits of individuals’ distinctive physical features. None of the oral or written caricatures mentioned in these examples involve people’s physical features, and only some of them are humorous; others are noted for having satirical or aesthetic impact, or being misinformative. Would a reader who consulted Baretti’s explanation of caricare un ritratto (‘to paint a portrait so, that the original may appear ridiculous’) and his definition of caricatúra (‘ritratto ridicolo’) have thought that, in being applied so diversely to verbal ‘caricatures’, the English borrowing of caricatúra was losing its meaning?
Perhaps not, since Baretti does offer the anglophone reader an Italian precedent for ‘caricature’ as exaggerated speech or writing. The last of the dictionary’s examples for the verb cáricare is ‘Caricare (accrescere in parlando la cosa più che veramente sia)’. Baretti renders his definition into English as ‘to enlarge, to be more vehement than it is need [sic], to exaggerate’, omitting to translate his phrase ‘in parlando’ – ‘in speaking’ or ‘in the telling’. The English reader could have found further linguistic justification for the ‘caricature’ that was not a ritratto ridicolo in the alternative definition for caricare un ritratto included in some editions of Baretti’s dictionary, ‘to overshadow a picture’, suggesting exaggerated contrasts rather than enlarged features. If they read through all Baretti’s entries under carica–, they would have found that caricatúra also meant ‘the charge of a gun’ (‘certa quantità di munizione’), and that to caricar l’inimico was ‘to charge or attack the enemy’ – a double meaning suggesting that an exaggerated ‘caricature’ might be more violent and hurtful than humorous and ridiculous. Baretti’s dictionary, where caricatúra appears alongside definitions of cárica and cáricare – and next to explanations of phrases like ‘caricare un archibuso’, ‘caricar l’orza’, ‘caricare (accusare)’ and ‘caricare (in parlando)’ – calls the English reader’s attention to the fact that caricatúra, when it describes a graphic or verbal likeness, is a figurative usage of cáricare. To use the word ‘caricature’ to describe an overblown sermon, a distorting abridgement of one’s letter to the editor about the Poor Laws, or the style of the new novel Frankenstein, was not to misapply caricatúra but to reinvest it with some of cáricare’s many idioms – contrast, force, impact, plenitude, addition, emphasis – that were subordinated in the ritratto ridicolo definition. Any reader who jumped from Cobbett’s Weekly Register or the Scots Magazine to Baretti’s dictionary would have been reassured that ‘caricature’ – used so freely of texts and speeches in the English language – was securely in the linguistic tradition of caricatúra.
I like to think that this scenario of mine is not hypothetical: that many readers in the Romantic period really did consult Baretti’s entry for caricatúra – or familiarise themselves with the word’s etymology elsewhere. In his Rules for Drawing Caricaturas (1788), Francis Grose implicitly recognises that the ritratto ridicolo is a ‘charged’ picture but not necessarily an ‘overcharged’ one, when he advises the amateur graphic caricaturist ‘not to overcharge the peculiarities of their subjects, as they would thereby become hideous instead of ridiculous, and instead of laughter excite horror’.11 Wollstonecraft insists that her satirical description of the dependent woman is ‘not an overcharged picture’.12 Austen’s manuscript of readers’ opinions about characters in Emma records one reader thinking that Miss Bates might be ‘overcharged’, and Thomas Babington Macaulay describes Fanny Burney’s characters as ‘extravagantly overcharged’.13 English’s use of ‘overcharged’ to mean ‘over-exaggerated’ indicates that English readers and writers continued to be aware of caricature’s linguistic ties with cárica and cáricare.
When, in the late Georgian period, Britain’s political graphic satirists became more adept in the techniques of the ritratto ridicolo, writers recognised these distinctive designs as ‘caricature prints’ – but caricature’s semantic range was not eclipsed by the strengthened association with satirical prints. A letter to the Morning Post, in 1776, describes Robert D’Arcy, 4th Earl of Holdernesse, as ‘foremost in the patronage of operas, opera singers, and every species of foreign taste, and foreign vertu’; thus, the writer thinks – referring to a print titled The Idol (c. 1756–58) – ‘[t]he well known satyrical print of his Lordship at the feet of Mingotti was not a caricature’.14 When ‘caricature’ is used in late eighteenth-century newspapers and periodicals to mean a graphic portrait, it usually alludes to drawings and amateur sketches – except where there is a discussion or advertisement specifically about satirical prints, such as a notice in the Morning Herald that ‘[t]his day is published by W. Holland […] A Caricature Print of Lloyd’s Coffee-House, and another of Wright’s Oyster-Room, the first 4s, the other 3s’.15
The richness of Baretti’s entries under carica–, and the varied ways ‘caricature’ was used in the Romantic period as just quoted, suggest that the history of the modern graphic caricature – its development in Renaissance Italy and its export to Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – is not quite as relevant as I once assumed, when it comes to the history of literature’s caricature in the Romantic period. In the following pages, some context on the Italian ritratti carichi and on that genre’s appropriation by the British elite, gives a background for British writers’ understanding of graphic caricature as an artistic tradition long preceding the satirical prints of the late Georgian period.
Literature and the Caricature Print in the Romantic Period
The inception of Romanticism in British culture and literature coincides with what twentieth-century scholarship dubbed the ‘Age of Caricature’ (sometimes the ‘golden age of caricature’), a period understood to span the 1770s to the 1820s. In this common shorthand, ‘caricature’ means the genre of single-sheet satirical prints that possessed a distinctive aesthetic and that seems to have attained an artistic high point in the late Georgian period. The very phrase ‘Age of Caricature’ tempts literary scholars – me among them – into imagining that poets and novelists in the Romantic period might have been struck by the ‘caricature’ of the satirical prints, might have incorporated the prints’ qualities into their own works, or might have been influenced by prints via some larger cultural phenomenon that graphic satirists helped create, with satirical prints representative of caricature as a ‘spirit of the age’. Such claims often lean on phrases denoting contemporaneity (‘the age of ’, ‘of the day’, ‘in the period when’): for example, Michael O’Neill remarks that ‘[g]reat Romantic short lyrics have something in common with the caricaturist’s eye for the telling detail (this is the age of Gillray, after all)’.16 What was the relationship between the satirical prints and the new literature being published in the Romantic period? On the way to answering that question, several points should be made about the relation of the word ‘caricature’ to the satirical print genre, the social status of the satirical print, and how the satirical prints and Romantic literature represented each other.
The satirical prints of the late Georgian era, laden with text and intertextual allusions, are a literary genre in their own right. Literary critics’ recent forays into the study of the genre are made possible by decades of work by print and art historians – most significantly the eleven-volume Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, which not only systematised the British Museum’s collection of thousands of single-sheet prints and caricature drawings but also annotated them with relevant historical information and identified the individuals depicted. Between 1868 and 1883 Frederic George Stephens, founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, compiled the first four volumes, comprising BM Sat 1 to 4838. Historian Mary Dorothy George took up the project in 1930, completing seven further volumes between 1935 and 1954. At the end of the twentieth century a new generation of print historians aimed to understand the genre in its broader cultural and socio-economic contexts, with Eirwen E.C Nicholson’s 1994 PhD thesis, a review and critical analysis of scholarship on political prints c. 1640–c. 1832, in the vanguard. Critics have had the benefit of print historian Diana Donald’s persuasively titled The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (1996); and for any literary critic with a serious interest in the topic, James Baker’s account of the genre’s socio-economic history in The Business of Satirical Prints in Late-Georgian England (2017) is indispensable.
Now a new generation of scholars subject the eighteenth-century satirical print to cultural historicism, critical theory and close-reading techniques – notably Amelia Rauser’s ground-breaking study Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints (2008), The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759–1838, a collection of essays edited by Todd Porterfield (2011), Ian Haywood’s Romanticism and Caricature (2014), Temi Odumosu’s Africans in English Caricature, 1769–1819 (2017) and David Taylor’s The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760–1830 (2018).17 While Odumosu uses a more capacious definition where ‘caricature’ can refer to satirical characterisations in plays, novels and periodicals as well as in satirical prints, generally these book titles reflect the pattern that has emerged in the study of satirical prints as a literary genre, of the word ‘caricature’ habitually standing in for the genre of the single-sheet satirical print. It is true that, as scholars acknowledge, the Georgian satirical print drew heavily on the techniques of Italian caricature portraiture, and some artists often used more extravagant, fantastic imagery than previous ‘emblematic’ political prints had done. However, caricature was not synonymous with the single-sheet satirical print at any point during ‘the Age of Caricature’ itself. Nor is it clear that we can expect to find significant lines of influence running directly between satirical prints and the new literature published in the Romantic period.
Due to the satirical prints’ borrowing from an established literary canon – Shakespeare, Paradise Lost, Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels18 – as well as from Gothic imagery and from the idioms of the press, it is inevitable that there are coincidences in imagery and wording between Cruikshank and Scott, between Gillray and Shelley. For example, as Haywood points out, Frankenstein shares its subtitle with George Cruikshank’s satire on Napoleon exiled to Elba, The Modern Prometheus, or Downfall of Tyranny (1814).19 Cruikshank certainly did not invent the phrase: it appears in a wide range of contemporary publications, for example referring to the electro-magnetic therapist James Graham in 1781, and to the anti-vaccination Benjamin Moseley in 1805, before being applied to Napoleon in 1815.20 Shaftesbury may have coined the phrase to cast aspersion on con artists, writing in The Moralists (1709) of ‘our modern PROMETHEUS’S, the Mountebanks, who perform’d such Wonders […]. Shou’d we dare to make such Empiricks of the Gods, and such a Patient of poor Nature?’21 Perhaps most pertinently, given the link between Galvanism and Frankenstein’s electrified oak tree, the epithet was applied to Benjamin Franklin. A poem published in the London Evening Post in 1777 portrays Franklin ascending to heaven ‘in chains of wire, / To perish by his stolen fire’, describing him in a footnote as ‘this arch patriot, philosopher, modern Prometheus, and rebel’.22 Contemporary references to Napoleon as Prometheus – including Cruikshank’s print – dwell on Prometheus chained rather than on Promethean fire. Shelley’s tagging of Frankenstein as a Prometheus draws on any number of negative associations the ‘modern Prometheus’ had gathered since Shaftesbury’s ironic statement in the early 1700s.
Looking beyond such coincidences of imagery and allusion between literature and satirical prints, it can be argued that the late-Georgian satirical print ‘evokes a parallel with Romantic aesthetics’ more generally, as Haywood does: ‘to the extent that it showcases a distorting application of the inspirational imagination, we can regard caricature as renegade Romanticism’.23 E. H. Gombrich supposes that around the time of the late-Georgian print, Romanticism was inculcating a taste for ‘the weirdest combinations of symbols, the most grotesque conglomerations of images, […] phantoms, nightmares, and apparitions’.24 Robert Patten sees the late-Georgian caricature print as ‘another manifestation of the Romantic movement’ in the sense of ‘the exploration of individuality and difference which confuted Augustan assumptions about universal norms’.25
I would suggest, however, that the extravagant imagery of some late-Georgian satirical prints – most prominently Gillray’s – should not be allowed to dominate any discussion of ‘caricature’ as a cultural phenomenon with close connections to literature in the Romantic period. Parallels between Romanticism and late-Georgian satirical prints cannot be grounded in an argument that novelists and poets of the Romantic period generally saw satirical prints as the model for a ‘caricature’ applicable beyond the most topical political events and matters of high society. Moreover, the comic and grotesque artistic techniques that became associated with caricatúra preceded the satirical print genre by hundreds of years – marginal drawings in medieval manuscripts, stone gargoyles, the ‘fancy head’ genre – and British connoisseurs were well aware of the modern caricature portrait’s origins in the Italian Renaissance, with Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine in 1815 observing that ‘[i]t is to no less persons than to those eminent restorers of the art of painting, Michel Angelo, and Leonardi di Vinci, that we are indebted for some of the first caricatures which have ever appeared in modern times’.26
British interest in modern graphic caricatúra was sparked by the comic ritratti carichi of sixteenth-century Italy that are credited to Annibale Carracci, a Bolognese painter of altarpieces and frescoes paid for by elite families. These early modern graphic caricatures followed a literary fad for short satirical ‘portraits’ in verse, and Donald Posner suggests that the first ritratti carichi were pictorial illustrations for these verses.27 Only a few examples survive of the caricatures by Carracci and his fellows: Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci mentions drawings of people depicted variously as dwarfed and hunchbacked, with animalistic physiognomies, or made to resemble inanimate objects. E. H. Gombrich identifies these techniques with ‘the theoretical discovery of the difference between likeness and equivalence’.28 Carracci named the perfetta deformità (‘perfect deformity’), a distinctive physical aberration supposed to contain the essence of a person’s real physical likeness, and which could be exaggerated or made the basis of a fantastic portrait that still, thanks to the perfect deformity, resembled the subject.29 Anne Summerscale notes that Carracci conceived of his caricatúra as something greater and more intellectual than mere ‘comic distortion’; rather, it was a realism born of perverse creativity, which sat alongside the Carracci family’s artistic reform movement.30 In 1582, when the Carracci founded a school for artists in Bologna, the Academia degli Incamminati (‘Academy of Those Who Are Making Progress’), fine art was dominated by the strand of Renaissance art that came to be seen as exaggeratedly elegant, ‘Mannerism’. The Carracci advocated a return to nature, flouting church doctrine by allowing artists to draw nudes from live models.31 Ritratti carichi, visual jokes that captured individuals’ physical likenesses in unflattering ways, became fashionable in the elite society that patronised the Academia’s painting. Noble men and women tried their hands at caricaturing each other, as well as commissioning professional portraits of themselves, their family and friends. The trend was imported to Britain by connoisseurs who returned from their Grand Tour with group portraits of themselves and their travelling companions: desirable souvenirs, especially if drawn by an acclaimed artist such as Pier Leone Ghezzi or the Italian-trained English painter Thomas Patch.32 When the British elites took up caricaturing as a hobby, enterprising publishers offered engraving and printing services so that amateur caricaturists could distribute copies of their drawings around the social circle that would recognise the likeness.
The most prominent of the publishers were Mary and Matthew Darly, who engraved portraits by George Marquess Townshend. Mary Darly created a drawing manual, A Book of Carricaturas (1762), to appeal to her clientele. In a run-on sentence introducing the book, she calls attention to caricaturing’s fashionably aristocratic and Continental origins, while patriotically endorsing the British upper ranks’ talent for this new pastime:
Carricatura is the burlesque of Character, or an exaggeration of nature, when not very pleasing it’s a manner of drawing that has & still is held in great esteem both by the Italiens [sic] & French, some of our Nobility & Gentility at this time do equal, if not excel any thing of the kind that has ever been done in any other country, tis the most diverting species of designing & will certainly keep those that practise it out of the hippo [hypochondria], or Vapours & that it may have such an effect on her friends is the wish of My Darly.33
Darly’s emphasis on amateur caricaturing as a way of dispelling the kinds of ‘nervous’ disorders now understood as ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’ accords with eighteenth-century caricatúra as a hobby carried out behind closed doors and among peers: social, entertaining, even therapeutic. Manuals like Darly’s play into the social pressure or encouragement to become a caricaturist, promising to teach caricaturing even to readers not talented at drawing with artistic formulae and diagrams. A Book of Carricaturas recommends that the would-be caricaturist begin by examining their subject’s linear profile and sorting it into one of four categories – straight, convex, concave, or with the S-shaped curve of the ogive arch or ‘ogee’. Later in the century, antiquarian Francis Grose attempts a more granular categorisation of faces into types of noses and mouths. His Rules for Drawing Caricaturas (1788) also gives tips for using these categories to caricature faces briefly glimpsed: ‘When a caricaturist wishes to delineate any face he may see in a place where it would be improper or impossible to draw it, he may commit it to his memory, by parsing it in his mind (as school-boys term it) by naming the contour and the different species of features of which it is constructed, as school-boys point out the different parts of the speech in a Latin sentence.’34 This grammar of the face helped artists to draw from life, and quickly, with a sketchy quality being part of the desired aesthetic. In some surviving examples of amateur caricaturing, multiple ritratti carichi float in empty space on a single page (in the manner of Leonardo Da Vinci’s sheets of grotesque and ‘fancy heads’), usually untitled and sometimes using reusing paper, such as with George Clerk’s drawing on a printed legal document catalogued as ‘Heads of Two Men’.35 Looking back on the inscrutable fashions of the past, a writer for The Athenaeum in 1888 remarks with wonder that Grose’s manual was ‘one of several books professing to give instructions in an art which nowadays no one would think of taking lessons in, though a century ago it seems to have been regarded as a “genteel accomplishment”’.36
The appeal of caricaturing as a pursuit for gentlemen and gentlewoman amateurs continued into the nineteenth century, when it was less exclusive to the highest ranks of British society. In Walter Scott’s circles, John Gibson Lockhart and Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe were known for ritratti carichi of private acquaintances. Writing to Lord Montagu in 1824, Scott asks, ‘Did you get Lockhart set to drawing Caricatures—he has a pretty talent that way’.37 Jonathan Henry Christie reports how, in their Balliol days, Lockhart ‘was an incessant caricaturist […] his papers, his books, and the walls of his rooms […] crowded with portraits of his friends and himself’.38 Redgauntlet draws inspiration from Lockhart’s penchant for caricaturing as a law student, describing Darsie Latimer’s notebook ‘filled with caricatures of the professors and my fellow students’.39 Whereas Lockhart gave up the practice in later life, Sharpe used his talent to illustrate Bannatyne Club publications, and had a volume of his drawings printed as Portraits of an Amateur (1833). Thackeray – known for his essay on the professional graphic satirist George Cruikshank – shows awareness of caricatúra’s status as a private entertainment for elite amateurs in Vanity Fair, where Becky Sharp endears herself to Lord Steyne by verbally ‘caricaturing Lady Jane and her ways’, and by sketching ‘a caricature of Sir Pitt Crawley’.40 Caricaturing continued to be practised for the enjoyment of the artists and their circles, from the watercolour comic tableaux of Jemima Blackburn, to Edward Lear’s self-portraits, to Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s private magazine Hyde Park Gate News. Blackburn routinely associated with earls and countesses her contemporary amateur caricaturist Ella Taylor also moved in high society, indicating that in the second half of the nineteenth century ritratti carichi continued to be a creative outlet for upper-class British men and women.41
The late Georgian period saw the emergence of single-sheet satirical prints enhanced by the techniques of ritratti carichi. These prints were the work of professional artists and were printed and distributed more widely than the Darlys’ customers’ designs. However, commercial ‘caricature prints’ still effectively belonged to those elites. In the 1780s, artists including James Sayers, Richard Newton, Thomas Rowlandson, David Allan, John Kay and Isaac Cruikshank capitalised on the fashion for amateur caricaturing with new kinds of ritratti carichi that would interest well-connected consumers. The intended consumer of single-sheet satirical prints had intimate knowledge through social acquaintance of the people depicted in them – their personal histories and rivalries, their faces and physiques, their mannerisms and speech tics. In many cases, these graphic satirists offered an enhanced version of the Darlys’ services: they would gratify their clients with professionally executed designs based on the clients’ sketches and ideas. Most of James Gillray’s prints were based on submissions from gentlemen amateurs: drawings, verbal descriptions of scenes and brief textual prompts. David Taylor gives an account of an extensive collaboration between Gillray and Captain Thomas Bradyll, son of an MP and heir to estates in Cumbria, for the 1803 print The King of Brobdingnag, and Gulliver.42 Gillray’s correspondence shows that he corresponded about designs with politicians including George Canning, John Hookham Frere, Sir John Dalrymple, Nathaniel Sneyd and Lord Bateman – and many more letters to Gillray are unsigned.43 One note from Canning suggests that Gillray could be kept on a tight leash, though instructions were delivered politely: ‘It is particularly wished that the Print of Mr. Sheridan No. 5 of the French Habits, which Mr. Gillray was so good as to send for inspection to-day, may not be published. If Mr. G. can call to-morrow, the reason will be explained to him.’44 Nineteenth-century commentators on Georgian satirical prints, unaware of the extent to which Gillray and Cruikshank were satirists for hire who served individuals in government, misrepresent them as independent agents with their own political agendas. An essay in The Athenaeum describes Gillray as ‘a sort of public and private spy’, ‘a caterpillar on the green-leaf of reputation’ who ‘loved to crawl over those whom Fame had marked as her own’ and who felt personal hatred for ‘his political adversaries’.45 In general, however, the prints toed the line by expressing socially conservative, politically reactionary and royalist attitudes – especially when the focus moved from parliamentary conflicts to wider social or diplomatic concerns. A satire on Pitt in a Gillray print was not a call to revolution. Nicholson’s work systematically presents research to dispel the myth that the single-sheet satirical print addressed a large public and could appeal ‘even [or] especially to the illiterate’, as some scholars had suggested.46
Indeed, most satirical prints were neither priced nor designed to be accessed and understood by the lower classes. Prolific collectors were Sarah Sophia Banks, George III, George IV and Sir William Augustus Fraser, who bequeathed his eleven morocco-bound folios of caricature prints to the House of Lords Library. The prints’ consumers were often, like the satirists’ clients, members of the political classes. Nicholson presents a compelling account of the satirical prints as peer-to-peer satire.47 Baker gives an account of the late-Georgian print shop and the ‘polite classes’ who were its core market.48 H. T. Dickinson highlights that most political satirical prints assumed a high level of political literacy, and Taylor demonstrates the high level of cultural literacy that readers would need to appreciate the prints’ dense parodies of classical texts.49 Many prints include phrases and quotations in French and Latin. There are comic imitations of fashionably controversial fine art, such as the burlesques of Fuseli’s 1781 painting The Nightmare, and Gillray’s 1798 print The Apotheosis of Hoche, suggested to him by the MP and Anti-Jacobin contributor John Hookham Frere.50 Graphic satirists also assumed, of course, that their patrons were connoisseurs of comic caricatúra. By using portraiture techniques distinctive to the ritratti carichi brought back from Italy and emulated by amateur caricaturists in British high society, late-Georgian satirical prints created an aesthetic that was familiarly high-end.
Where novelists in the Romantic period use the word ‘caricature’ in referring to satirical prints, they thematise the prints as material objects associated with the frivolous leisure pursuits of aristocrats and with the machinations of political elites – a fair representation of the social world discussed in the last section. Mary Brunton’s novel Self-control (1811), for example, gives an authentic view of the market for caricature prints, with print shop owners on the lookout for a wealthy lady wanting ‘to make some addition to her cabinet’, and protagonist Laura encountering ‘the elegant, the accomplished, Colonel Hargrave’ – ‘one of the best bred men in the kingdom’, an individual of ‘the highest polish’ – in a print shop. Hargrave does not notice Laura at first because he is ‘busied in examining a book of caricatures’, and she ‘hoped that the caricatures would not long continue so very interesting’.51 Hargrave’s caricatures resonate with Robert Ferrars’s jewelled pin in Sense and Sensibility: costly, fascinating and (in the novel’s view) trivial objects from which the man’s interest must be detached if the heroine is to advance her interest. Brunton evokes the ‘book of caricatures’ as something perhaps beyond the genteel reader’s income, yet certainly beneath her attention. For Brunton, caricature portraits – whether professional or amateur – are neither artistically valuable nor satirically purposeful but merely a material trapping of petty vices. The protagonist in Discipline (1814) teases her guardian by ‘hid[ing] her prayer-book’ and ‘past[ing] caricatures on the inside of her pew in church’;52 later, when she draws caricature portraits of people at an auction of expensive objects, she becomes a participant in the scene she is attempting to satirise:
As the sale proceeded, a hundred useless toys were exposed, and called forth a hundred vain and unlovely emotions […]. I took out my pencil to caricature a group, in which a spare dame, whose face combined no common contrast of projection and concavity, was darting from her sea-green eyes sidelong flames upon a china jar, which was surveyed with complacent smiles by its round and rosy purchaser. But my labours were interrupted, and from an amused spectator of the scene, I was converted into a keen actor, when the auctioneer exposed a tortoise-shell dressing-box, magnificently inlaid with gold.53
Edgeworth, the only writer who refers to specific prints in her novels, shares Brunton’s association of caricature drawing and satirical prints with a dissolute elite society: in an episode involving caricature drawings in Belinda (1801), she alludes to the prints that satirised Duchess of Devonshire’s alleged methods of political canvassing in 1784;54 in Ennui (1809), one character compares another to an Irish satirical print, exclaiming that he is ‘“the caricature of the English fire-side outdone!”’;55 and in Helen (1834), party guests are presented with ‘a heap of coarse caricatures […] party caricatures’ as after-dinner entertainment. The novel’s protagonist hides them under the table ‘“[f]or the honour of England”’, and substitutes ‘a portfolio of caricatures in a different style’.56 When Edgeworth meditates that ‘humour only can ensure [these prints’] permanence; the personality dies with the person’, she gives the example of ‘the famous old print of the minister rat-catcher, in the Westminster election’ – a timely reference since readers in the 1830s could have recalled the newest spate of prints on the theme of ‘placemen ratters’, which mocked Wellington’s soliciting of votes for the passage of the Roman Catholic Relief Act. Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge capitalised on that trend in the prints by reissuing an updated anti-Catholic version of their satirical ballad ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’ as The Devil’s Walk, with plates by Robert Cruikshank including an image of Wellington associating with the Devil calculated to please ultra-tory readers.57
The ways that living writers themselves feature in late-Georgian satirical prints makes plain the genre’s association with celebrity and social exclusivity. Southey and Charles Lamb are represented as political radicals in the inaugural number of the Anti-Jacobin (1797–99), founded by George Canning while Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, endorsed by Pitt and supported by the Treasury. At the time, Southey and Lamb did not have significant public profiles; being unfamiliar with the writers’ actual physical appearances, Gillray represents them as an ass and a frog, without caricaturing their real faces. For Southey, the experience was gratifying rather than humiliating, and in multiple letters he encourages his friends and family to seek out a copy of the magazine: ‘Did you know that I have been caricatured in the Anti-Jacobine [sic] Magazine together with Lloyd, Lamb, the Duke of Bedford—Fox &c &c &c? the fellow has not however libelled my likeness, because he did not know it—so he has clapt an Asse’s head on my shoulders.’58 Here, the word ‘caricature’ is used to mean a mocking, ludicrous representation rather than an artistic technique of linear exaggerated resemblance. Southey is apparently delighted at being satirised in the company of more illustrious ‘jacobins’ such as Fox and the Duke of Bedford. Since the Anti-Jacobin’s readership is relatively small and pro-government, he cannot trust that his acquaintances will come across it of their own accord, and at two shillings the illustrated magazine is not cheap: ‘If you have not already seen your acquaintance caricatured’, he writes to a friend, ‘pray send for the first number of the Anti-Jacobine Magazine. the caricature is worth two shillings, & you will not be amused the less for not recognizing the likeness’.59 Despite the lack of physical likeness, this print was proof positive that Southey was not beneath the notice of people in high places. He could have imagined lords and ladies noticing him as they read the Anti-Jacobin over breakfast in bed. Concluding another letter Southey mentions, ‘you have I suppose seen my asinine honours in the Jacobine Magazine’.60 Gillray’s portrait of the writer as an ass labelled ‘Southey’, in a magazine so closely tied to Pitt’s government, had little power to damage his reputation before his reading public and could even enhance his standing. Even if his face and physique were unknown, he was someone worth satirising.
Canning himself would have understood Southey’s delighted reaction to appearing in one of Gillray’s elaborate designs: Canning’s personal relationship with Gillray began when, through their mutual acquaintance John Sneyd, he persuaded the artist to include his portrait in a satirical print. As Taylor explains, for Canning’s peers this inclusion ‘would unequivocally signal his arrival on the political stage’.61 Similarly, an appearance in a satirical print suggested that a writer had considerable cultural impact. Scott was the most frequently portrayed, appearing in prints by Charles Williams, Thomas Hood, Robert Cruikshank, Henry Thomas Aiken and John Doyle between 1812 and 1827.62 Due to Byron’s status as an aristocrat and a ‘fashionable’ individual, his physical likeness, manners and deeds were far better known, and the satires correspondingly more personal.63 Southey’s excitement about being raised from obscurity into the colourful pages of the Anti-Jacobin – ‘Did you know I have been caricatured’ – and Lord Byron’s celebrity in the prints, both fit with the satirical print genre’s reputation as a ‘low’ genre for high society.
I have hunted for references to the ‘caricature’ of London-centric satirical print culture among the published works of the writers who most strongly represent the Romantic period in literary scholarship. Besides Edgeworth’s thematising of caricature prints in Belinda, Ennui and Helen, there is a possible reference to the satirical print genre in Percy Shelley’s satirical closet drama Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820), where government ministers plot to smear Queen Caroline in the press. The litigious ‘green bag’ supposed to contain evidence of her guilt actually contains a ‘fatal liquor’ that will make her appear in the public eye like ‘a ghastly caricature / Of what was human’ and ‘[b]e called adulterer, drunkard, liar, wretch’ regardless of what she has actually done.64 Shelley may be alluding here to the graphic caricature of satirical prints, given the green bag’s power to transform Caroline’s physical appearance from ‘gentlest looks / To savage, foul, and fierce deformity’. However, Shelley is almost certainly referring to the power of the journalistic press more generally, to apotheosise individuals as well as satirise them – and his emphasis on the press’s influence over common people suggests that the green bag contains more newspapers and pamphlets than satirical prints, which were expensive to purchase or hire. In Oedipus Tyrannus, the House of Lords tells a crowd of gullible pigs that if Caroline is innocent, the contents of the bag will transform her into an angel raining down ‘blessings in the shape of comfits’: ‘just the sort of thing / Swine will believe’.
In none of these examples does the writer position the satirical prints as the genre of caricature, or as particularly important to ideas about emphasis and exaggeration that could be applied to literary works. Walter Scott’s interest in John Kay is the exception that proves the rule. While Kay did produce satirical prints and portraits with distinct political meanings, Scott’s reference to ‘Kay’s caricatures’ in The Heart of Mid-Lothian is clearly aimed at graphic caricature’s potential for social documentary and historical record. Kay’s portraits of Edinburgh characters have been thought to be comparatively ‘gentle’ and ‘polite’,65 too different from Gillray’s and the Cruikshanks’ prints to be comfortably included in overviews of late-Georgian satire. Scott was a collector of political satirical prints and held Gillray to be the best artist in the genre.66 But his admiring reference to ‘Kay’s caricatures’ in The Heart of Mid-Lothian indicates that the pre-Gillray understanding of caricatúra was alive and well in the early nineteenth century. I consider Kay’s significance to Scott’s novel-writing in Chapter 3.
It is unfortunate for literary criticism that Kay has been marginalised in the study of late-Georgian graphic caricature, when his are the only ‘caricatures’ explicitly claimed as a model for a literary work’s textual description of people and places. Neglecting Kay’s work in Edinburgh, and the collection of prints Scott kept at Abbotsford,67 is convenient to scholarship’s tendency to overlook Scottishness in the phenomenon of late-Georgian graphic satire. For scholars working on British graphic satire, Kay is an afterthought when he is mentioned at all. Some have used phrases like ‘the golden age of English caricature’, despite the fact that Gillray’s and the Cruikshank family’s connections with Scotland should be well known from scholarship such as Robert Patten’s work on George Cruikshank.68 Early in his career, Isaac moved his family from Edinburgh (where he may have picked up professional caricaturing from Kay) to London, where the Cruikshanks attended a Scottish church; and dialogue in one of George and Robert’s collaborative prints shows familiarity with Scottish English despite living in London their whole adult lives.
These satirists’ Scottish origins were common knowledge during their lifetimes, with Gillray and Cruikshank being recognisably Scottish names, and were emphasised in nineteenth-century biographies. Whereas Gillray’s Lanarkshire father fought under the Duke of Cumberland in Flanders, the Cruikshanks were historically Jacobites. In 1833, the Monthly Magazine highlights the Cruikshanks’ Jacobite credentials on both sides of the family line:
Prior to the famous “forty-five,” the name of Cruikshank, or as it used to be spelt by its Scotch proprietors, Crookshank, appears to have been recorded only in the Highland fogs. The mother of George was a Mac Naghten. The Crookshanks and the Mac Naghtens were both Charlie Stewart’s men. Many of them were killed and more of them wounded at Preston Pans, and Culloden.69
The Morning Chronicle’s 1851 retrospective of ‘Gillray’s Caricatures’ identifies him as ‘the son of a Scotsman, who lost an arm at Fontenoy’.70 Gillray, notorious for alcoholism and dementia in the last years of his life,71 was not then proudly claimed as an English caricaturist, the brightest star of a golden age.
If any graphic satirist could be seen to fill that role, it was William Hogarth. John Barrell notes that the adjective ‘Hogarthian’ appeared in print during Hogarth’s lifetime.72 Commentators in the Romantic period describe Hogarth’s works as ‘comic paintings’ and ‘portraits’, or as ‘caricatures’ so good they were scarcely caricatures at all. The Monthly Magazine, reviewing Melincourt in 1817, declares that Peacock ‘finishes his portraits like Hogarth, while the portraits in [some other comic novels] are mere sign-posts or coarse caricatures’.73 Hazlitt claims that the faces in Hogarth’s works ‘go to the very verge of caricature and yet never (we believe in any single instance) go beyond it’.74 In an essay in The Athenaeum, Hogarth and his works are praised, yet denied the immortality of artistic ‘genius’, sharing Edgeworth’s idea of graphic satire in Helen as ephemeral, fatally concerned with temporary goings-on:
The political caricatures of that wonderful man [Hogarth] were felt and understood in their day […] but to the children of this age they appear only as extravagant riddles, which no one has the patience to solve. They have gone to that oblivion from which there is no redemption: indeed, the most successful of caricatures can be only for a passing moment. They deal only with the personal defects or the fleeting follies of the creatures of the hour […]. In caricatures, as in candles, there are wicks which will soon consume them; and the memories of the artists themselves may be safely permitted to perish with them.75
Hogarth could still be lumped in with the late-Georgian satirists, on the grounds that ‘you had to be there’ to appreciate his jokes.
The literati’s conceptions in the Romantic period of amateur caricaturing and caricature prints – highly exclusive, highly specific and thus short-lived – are at odds with a fundamental ideal of literary realism, the ‘originality’ of individualised characters that are particularised without being comic or satirically rendered portraits of unique and living individuals. Writers would have hoped to achieve broader appeal, make light reading more respectable and give readers more lasting pleasure, by distancing the idea that leisure reading offered characters as identities to be deciphered and narratives as puzzles to be solved. In Chapter 2, I consider the Romantic literary sphere’s wariness of prosopographic caricature as a context for the values of realist character-writing that emerge in the late eighteenth century’s critical reception of The Spectator.
Distorted People, Distorted Texts: ‘Caricature’ in Critique
I have pointed out that British literary culture’s understanding of ‘caricature’ as a term applicable to texts precedes the distinctive late-Georgian satirical print with its increased use of Italianate caricature portraiture. The caricature talk that emerged in the late eighteenth-century literary sphere originated in the appropriation of ‘caricature’ from the ritratti carichi brought to Britain by the Grand Tour: literary culture transferred caricatúra’s sense of techniques for exaggerated visual resemblance (more differentiated lines, darker shadows) to caricatúra in the sense of techniques for exaggerated textual description (too much, too often, too incongruously or contrastingly), with varied usage of ‘caricature’ recapturing the richness of caricatúra’s connotations and etymology in Italian.
But there was an intermediate step, I argue, in this transfer from the critique of pictures to the critique of texts. From the early years of ritratti carichi and caricatúra becoming known in Britain, anglophone writers used the vocabulary of caricature to describe real human bodies – and later, real human minds. ‘Caricature’ was a pliable metaphor for evoking the disturbing effect of a physical body that was unnatural and real, uncanny in its distorted resemblance of what it should ideally be. In Chapter 6, I discuss these descriptions of ‘flesh-caricatures’ in writing by Thomas Browne, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft as precursors to the ‘horrid realism’ local to grotesque bodies in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and ‘Transformation’, as well as in Scott’s novels, from The Black Dwarf to The Talisman. By metaphorising caricatúra – effectively saying that ‘this person resembles a picture that exaggerates yet resembles a person’ – writers literalise caricatúra, imagining an artistic representation of a real thing into the thing itself.
When Thomas Holcroft translated Johann Caspar Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente (1775–78) into English, the author’s reliance on the literalisation of caricatúra to evoke physical deformity frustrated the translator’s preference for varying vocabulary. Lavater uses ‘Carricatur’ and ‘Karikatur’ often enough that Holcroft runs out of synonyms:
By Caricature, the Author appears to mean nothing more than an imperfect drawing, and by Ideal, sometimes perfect beauty, sometimes a fancy piece. These words occur so frequently that they must inevitably be often retained in the translation.76
Whether or not Holcroft manages to pick up all the connotations of Lavater’s ‘Carricatur’ with his various synonyms, his translation is an instance of a Romantic-period reader needing to figure out what ‘caricature’ could mean for writers engaged in social and cultural critique. Clearly, Lavater was not making a straightforward analogy with the caricatúra of the ritratti carichi, which were deliberately distorted and intended to be comic or otherwise entertaining. The bodies and faces he saw around him were failures, ‘imperfect drawings’ of the human form, pitiable or horrific:
Carrikaturen aller Arten treff’ ich an.—Die Bemerkung entgeht mir nie, dass der Pobel zusammengenommen ordentlich die grobste Carrikatur des National-Stadt-Dorf-characters ist.77
Holcroft translates:
I constantly find that the vulgar, collectively, whether of nation, town, or village, are the most distorted.
Omitting to translate the first sentence as ‘I meet all kinds of caricatures’, and substituting the phrase ‘most distorted’ instead of ‘die grobste Carrikatur’, Holcroft may have wanted to avoid readers assuming that Lavater finds these beings humorous, or sees them as distinctive individuals. These connotations of ‘caricature’ would be at odds with Lavater’s disgusted tone or would contradict his seeing the common people zusammengenommen. Holcroft retains the word ‘caricature’ in a passage about family (mis)resemblance, where individual human beings are distorted versions of other particular human beings: if men ‘abandon themselves to their passions’ and sink ‘deep in degeneracy’, Lavater warns in Holcroft’s translation, ‘what variety of more or less gross, vulgar, caricatures will rise in succession, from father to son!’78 I imagine Holcroft, suspicious of Lavater’s seemingly figurative uses of ‘Carrikaturen’, picking up Baretti’s dictionary to reassure himself that ‘Carrikatur’ had an etymological link with caricare un ritratto in the sense of failing to copy reality closely enough.
Indeed, this meaning of caricatúra – an inadvertently bad drawing, particularly of a human body – was influential in the Romantic literary sphere’s appropriation of ‘caricature’ as a term of criticism, and fundamental to the anti-caricature rhetoric in Romantic character talk that I will discuss later. The distinction between a deliberate caricatúra and a ritratto caricato is debated in an exchange of letters published in successive numbers of the Monthly Review in 1758. The first letter in the exchange (signed ‘B’) is better known to scholars, for its response to Hogarth’s caption for The Bench (1758): Lynch mentions it in her analysis of the stance Hogarth takes on ‘caricature’ in The Analysis of Beauty (1743) and his caption for Characters and Caricaturas (1743).79 A second letter, responding to the first, contextualises ‘B’ and Hogarth’s disagreement over the meaning of caricatúra in the difference between caricato and caricatúra as technical terms for visual art.
Seen as part of a conversation about the meaning of caricature, these letters show a desire to categorise caricatúra as either a pejorative term or a name for a particular set of techniques and their aesthetic effects. In his caption for The Bench, Hogarth – like Holcroft in his translation of Lavater – tries to relegate ‘caricature’ to a single meaning: ‘That which has, of late years, got the name of Caracatura, is, or ought to be, totally divested of every stroke that hath a tendency to good Drawing.’ He compares it to ‘the early scrawlings of a child’ that make a reductive and inadvertently ‘comical resemblance’ of the human form, as opposed to ‘Outré’, which ‘signifies […] the exaggerated outlines of a figure, all the parts of which may be in other respects, a perfect and true picture of nature’. (To illustrate this, Hogarth gives an example that metaphorises and literalises pictorial exaggeration, suggesting that ‘[a] Giant or Dwarf may be called a common man Outré’.)
B, writing to the Monthly Review, requests that Hogarth give up his definition of caricature as an inadvertently bad drawing for the deliberately exaggerated ritratto ridicolo, referring to the Carracci’s perfetta deformità:
I must beg leave to differ with the Author [Hogarth], as to what he says of the meaning of those words [Caracatura and Outré] being commonly mistaken. I have conversed a good deal with Painters, with Connoisseurs, and with people entirely ignorant of Painting; and yet never remember to have heard them misapplied before: nor, indeed, do I recollect any three terms of art, in the meaning of which mankind are generally agreed. With submission to so great an Artist, I must beg leave to say, that his definition of Caracatura is entirely wrong […]. Caracatura, means the distinguishing figure of a person or thing ludicrously exaggerated, yet so as to preserve the similitude of the original, regardless of any circumstances that may arise for good or bad Drawing. As to the word Outré, it never meant any thing more than simply exaggerated.80
A third gentleman writes in from Worcester to agree with B’s definition, which he thinks ‘follows the surer guidance of the common sense and general acceptation, of the word’. The Worcester connoisseur’s main purpose, however, is to point out that the similarity in the words ‘character’ and ‘caricature’ is mere coincidence, that they are not etymologically linked, arguing that ‘caricature’ should be used only as part of the specialised vocabulary of the visual arts. After correcting Hogarth’s and B’s spelling of the word, he separates the ritratto caricato from the ritratto ridicolo or ritratto carichi:
CARACATURA has (some people will be suprized at it) no meaning whatever: nor is there any such word in the Italian, the French, or the English Dictionaries. There is, indeed, a word used by Italian painters, which is written Caricatura, which in English we should translate [to] a charging, or a loading, and perhaps an over-charging, or an over-loading,—and is derived from carica, a charge or load; hence caricato, loaded. […]
But to return to Caricato and Caricatura, as technical terms of painting, we shall observe, that the masters in Italy have frequent occasion for the first of these words, when they point out the faults of their disciples, who, in the copies they make, commonly exaggerate those almost imperceptible flexures and curvatures of the outlines […]. The master then says, Avete troppo caricato questo muscolo, questo naso, questo Ginocchio, &c. That is, you have loaded, or charged, or exaggerated, this muscle, this nose, this knee, &c.
Two years later, the Worcester connoisseur might have read with approval Baretti’s entries under carica–. What Hogarth calls ‘Caracatura’, he explains, is actually the drawing troppo caricato, whereas the exaggerations of caricatúra are intentional:
Una Caricatura is the technical term used precisely to express a kind of drawing, which delights in an artificial exaggeration of particular features, by means of which exaggeration the portrait of a very decent person may appear strikingly like, and at the same time be rendered whimsically ridiculous.
Of these Caricaturas excellent examples may be seen among the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Annibale Caracci, Carlo Marratti, &c. and even of Mr. Hogarth, that are not totally divested of every stroke which hath a tendency to good drawing.81
Hogarth and his respondents attempt to disentangle the different ways in which caricatúra was being used and mark some usages as erroneous, whereas later in the century – when ‘caricature’ is increasingly written and pronounced in an anglicised fashion – caricature talk is more accepting of the word’s fluidity.
Caricature talk in the Romantic period accepts caricatúra’s multivalence and applicability, beyond graphic satire and beyond the visual arts altogether. Hazlitt makes the generalised pronouncement that ‘[a]rt is at once a miniature and a caricature of nature’, and accuses Michelangelo’s sculptures of ‘tread[ing] on the verge of caricature’ with ‘extreme forms, massy, gigantic, supernatural’.82 Felix Mendelssohn deplores the ‘perverted caricatures’ in the ‘distorted cantus firmus of the “Dies Irae,” to which the witches are dancing’ in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.83 Francis Jeffrey complains of ‘harsh caricature’ in Scott’s Guy Mannering.84 The Critical Review accuses Byron of ‘having collected together a greater mass of offensive and disgusting objects than any poet ever did before – of having aspired to heap together caricatures of enormous guilt’.85 The Monthly Review makes a case for deliberately exaggerating physicalised emotion on the stage: ‘In the language of the theatre, the expression of every emotion ought to be not merely distinct, but obvious; the object should be magnified, colossalized, (if we may coin such an expression,) into conspicuousness. Like the pictured passions of Charles Le Brun, those of the play-house ought somewhat to caricature nature, in order to be instantly and definitely visible and distinguishable’.86 Painting, sculpture, music, novels, poetry, stage performance: this freedom of usage, where ‘caricature’ is limited neither to graphic satire, nor satire nor the visual arts generally, is reflected in several dictionaries published during the Romantic period. In H. J. Rodd’s 1818 edition of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, Rodd’s examples for ‘caricature’ and ‘to caricature’ include caricature drawings, but he defines the terms without reference to visual art, as ‘the representation of a person or circumstance, so as to render the original ridiculous, without losing the resemblance’ and ‘to ridicule; to represent unfairly’. Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, first published in 1823, argues that using ‘caricature’ to describe any kind of representation or imitation simply extends what is already a ‘metaphorical signification’ in using caricatúra to mean an exaggerated drawing:
This word, though not in Johnson, I have not scrupled to insert, from its frequent and legitimate usage. Baretti tells us that the literal sense of this word is certa quantita di munizione che si mettee nell’ archibuso o altro, which, in English, signifies the charge of a gun; but its metaphorical signification, and the only one in which the English use it, as he tells us, dichesi anche di ritratto ridicolo in cui sensei grandemente accresciute [sic]i diffetti, when applied to paintings, chiefly portraits, the heightening of some features, and lowering others, which we call in English overcharging, and which will make a very ugly picture, not unlike a handsome person: whence any exaggerated character, which is redundant in some of its parts, and defective in others, is called a Caricature.87
This definition’s easy transition from the deliberate ritratto ridicolo to ‘any exaggerated character’ is one of several instances suggesting Romantic-period English’s acceptance that ‘caricature’ comprised multiple interrelated definitions and could have positive or negative connotations depending on the context.
For example, in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, we have not only the deliberate caricature and the incompetent caricature, the accurate caricature and the misrepresenting caricature, the pictorial caricature and the textual caricature, but also the literalised caricature as in Lavater’s social critique. Wollstonecraft imagines that ‘the discriminating outline of a caricature’ could fully capture the details that her text does not include, ‘the domestic miseries and petty vices’ diffused by warped femininity. When she offers a description of dependent womanhood, she insists that it is ‘not an overcharged’ representation. She claims to have noticed a woman’s eye, having ‘glanced coldly over a most exquisite picture, rest, sparkling with pleasure, on a caricature rudely sketched’. She refers to silly novels ‘caricatur[ing] human nature’, and (in the first edition of the Vindication) to artificially sentimental literary style: ‘pretty superlatives’ that are actually ‘nothings—these caricatures of the real beauty of sensibility’.88 Finally, Wollstonecraft claims that the Protestant Dissenter’s body, like the female body, has been physically caricatured alongside the distortion of mental character:
Were not dissenters […] a class of people, with strict truth characterized by cunning? And may I not lay some stress on this fact to prove, that when any power but reason curbs the free spirit of man, dissimulation is practised, and the various shifts of art are naturally called forth? Great attention to decorum, which was carried to a degree of scrupulosity, and all that puerile bustle about trifles and consequential solemnity, which Butler’s caricature of a dissenter brings before the imagination, shaped their persons as well as their minds in the mould of prim littleness. […] Oppression thus formed many of the features of their character perfectly to coincide with that of the oppressed half of mankind; for is it not notorious, that dissenters were like women, fond of deliberating together, and asking advice of each other, till by a complication of little contrivances, some little end was brought about?89
Here, Wollstonecraft alludes to the titular character of Hubridas (1663–78), referring to a comic textual caricature simultaneously with literalising caricature into a horrifically shrunken body. Such ‘flesh-caricatures’, which I explore further in Chapter 6, use the troppo caricato definition of caricature for social critique.
Literary criticism in the Romantic period, on the other hand, uses troppo caricato in an anti-caricature rhetoric deploring supposedly exaggerated or disproportioned textual properties of literary works: their style, their structure, their variegation. Critique’s literalisation of ‘caricature’ into flesh-caricature played a role in cementing this rhetorical use of ‘caricature’ – in association with other terms like ‘disproportion’, ‘distortion’ and ‘exaggeration’ – to deplore works that apparently failed to shape their content into proper forms.
The Romantic period’s caricature talk about novels is dominated by anti-caricature rhetoric that seeks to establish the literary quality and verisimilitude of ‘strong’ characterisations that might otherwise be accused of being ‘caricatured’ or ‘overcharged’. To describe and judge the quality of artistic and literary works’ ‘likeness’ to reality, anti-caricature rhetoric uses a variety of elements from the Romantic period’s capacious concept of caricature, including social critique’s literalisation of the troppo caricato as flesh-caricature. In Romantic caricature talk, ‘caricature’ associates with the terms found in its contemporary dictionary definitions, such as ‘exaggerated’, ‘overcharged’ and ‘overdone’; as well as troppo caricato terms denoting grotesque delineation (‘disproportioned’, ‘distorted’, ‘misshapen’, ‘monstrous’, ‘gigantic’ etc.), phrases relating to the caricare un ritratto meaning of caricature (excessive ‘contrast’, ‘overcoloured’) and vocabulary evoking caricature’s etymological associations with weight, effort and impact (‘forced’, ‘striking’, ‘violent’, etc.). To convey their perceptions of caricature in the work, critics use spatial metaphors (the work’s distance from, or proximity to, caricature), painterly metaphors (‘strokes’ and ‘touches’ versus ‘daubs’ and ‘glare’) and imagery of gigantic and disproportioned bodies. In anti-caricature rhetoric, high value is placed on the ‘delicate’, ‘modest’ and ‘natural’, whereas ‘caricature’ and its associated terms are frequently modified by pejorative adjectives such as ‘coarse’, ‘gross’, ‘unnatural’, ‘ghastly’ and so on. James Beattie, for example, draws on anti-caricature vocabulary to illuminate the novel’s transition from romance to realism, a contrast dramatised by Cervantes in Don Quixote:
The extravagance of [the books of chivalry that influence Don Quixote] being placed, as it were, in the same groupe with the appearances of nature and the real business of life, the hideous disproportion of the former becomes so glaring by contrast. […] Don Quixote occasioned the death of the Old Romance, and gave birth to the New. Fiction henceforth divested herself of her gigantick size, tremendous aspect, and frantick demeanour.1
While anti-caricature rhetoric sometimes insists on caricature’s total absence from a work, generally ‘anti-caricature’ rhetoric is not absolutely against caricature: as I remark in Chapter 4, critics frequently propose that novelists should offer a ‘heightened’ and ‘striking’ reality that approaches caricature without crossing over into it, or which judiciously incorporates caricature while keeping it subordinate to other elements in the narrative. Often the vocabulary of caricature talk is used to critique a work’s overall style or structure for lacking restraint, discipline or self-consciousness in its representation of a reality.
As George Levine has argued, nineteenth-century realism ‘was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality. Its massive self-confidence implied a radical doubt, its strategies of truth telling, a profound self-consciousness’.2 Part I of this book describes how a ‘caricature talk’ dominated by anti-caricature rhetoric functions in literary realism’s self-consciousness during the Romantic period. Anti-caricature rhetoric, I argue, does not just ‘prop up’ novelistic realism but actually helps constitute it in the Romantic period – by habilitating for realism the elements of fiction that might seem exaggeratedly humorous, grotesque or ‘romantic’; by foregrounding and testing the theoretical distinction between resemblance and equivalence; and by turning novels’ fictitious ‘reality’ into a competition where characters are rated, and novelists ranked against each other. Later, I explore anti-caricature rhetoric in Romantic-period retrospectives on the Spectator (Chapter 3), in the long critical tradition on characters in Jane Austen’s published and unpublished fiction (Chapter 4), and in the contemporary critical reception of Scott’s characters (Chapter 5), as well as analysing how Austen and Scott incorporate anti-caricature rhetoric in the self-conscious realisms of their novels.
Literary criticism of the Romantic period speaks caricature talk most frequently when discussing fictive characters in novels; and non-protagonist characters framed as humorous or satirical are those most likely to attract caricature talk, with anti-caricature rhetoric used to distinguish outright ‘caricatures’ from the realist solidity of strong characters. In the first part of this chapter, I highlight caricature talk’s relationship with literary form in the literary criticism of the Romantic period and put my research in conversation with scholarship on the history of literary character criticism – writing and talking about fictive characters – in order to explain where caricature talk’s rhetorical denial of caricature fits in a literary history of the concept of literary character. The second part of this chapter provides an essential context for Chapter 3’s discussion of character ‘originality’ by giving an account of how prosopographic caricature was conceived of as distinct from imaginative literary characterisation in the Romantic period.
Anti-caricature and Literary Form in the Novel
Anti-caricature rhetoric, alert to the potential ‘deformity’ of lengthy prose fiction, lends itself in the Romantic period to the formalist imagining of literary works as textual assemblages of parts. In caricature talk about novels, for example, individual characters are parsed into qualities and characteristics, and placed into moral categories; casts of characters are subdivided into principal and subordinate characters; descriptions and characters are separated out from story; and story is conceived as a succession of incidents of different sizes, shapes and shades.
In the worst cases, the literary work might strike the reader as an under-structured ‘pile’ or ‘mass’ of content, accumulated through an additive process and striving for novelty and impact by making each example more extreme than the last. Josiah Conder writes that Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’ is ‘Fuseli out-Fuselied; horror accumulated upon horror in naked hideousness, up to the highest point of exaggeration’; and, in a backhanded compliment, concedes that ‘it required indeed a very extraordinary power of conception to make such a rabble of misshapen and ghastly ideas pass before the mind’.3 Often in such critiques, there is a latent distinction between form and content. Recycling the episode in Frankenstein where Victor’s opium dream shifts into a series of nightmarish images, the British Critic argues that while Shelley’s novel has no organisation in its ideas – ‘these volumes have neither principle, object, nor moral’ – though the horrific content might have been formed into some recognisable didactic or scientific purpose: ‘the horror which abounds in [Frankenstein] is too grotesque and bizarre ever to approach neither the sublime […] and yet we suspect, that the diseased and wandering imagination, which has stepped out of all legitimate bounds, to frame these disjointed combinations and unnatural adventures, might be disciplined into something better’.4
Anti-caricature rhetoric could also serve critiques of narrative structure and length, as in Scott’s apology for a single-volume Black Dwarf in the introduction to the Magnum Opus edition. ‘The story was intended to be longer, and the catastrophe more artificially brought out’ – but after receiving advice that the character of the Black Dwarf ‘was of a kind too revolting, and more likely to disgust than interest the reader’, Scott chose to cut the story short: ‘I got off my subject by hastening the story to an end, as fast as it was possible; and by huddling into one volume, a tale which was designed to occupy two, have perhaps produced a narrative as much disproportioned and distorted, as the Black Dwarf who is its subject.’5
The targets of anti-caricature rhetoric – disproportion, disjointedness, discordance perceived to result from the mishandling of subject matter and content – might be endemic to the novel as a literary form so reliant on the concatenation of parts. Since novelistic narratives were relatively prolonged and tended to contain more numerous and various settings, incidents and characters than other literary works, critics felt responsible for pointing out the good and bad points that readers might miss, as a writer for the Scots Magazine suggests in a review of Rob Roy:
A story is not like a picture or a statue, the whole of which we can take in at one glance, and of course immediately perceive whether there is any absurdity or incongruity in the composition. Our attention is rather successively occupied with different parts than with the whole, and if we are much interested, we shall be very ready either not to perceive or to forget the perplexities in which the narrator has involved himself.
Carving Scott’s novel into parts, the reviewer identifies strengths and weaknesses. Descriptions of places are excellent, and characterisations are impressive – but the plot is less interesting: ‘[I]t is to the character and the descriptions, much more than to the story, that our attention is rivetted in this [novel …] and we think the peculiar merit of the piece before us consists in the truth, and the little exaggeration of its leading features’. For this reviewer, Rob Roy’s leading features are its characters. With each character delineated in a ‘style of accurate drawing, without the slightest distortion or exaggeration’, it matters less if the novel as a whole is not well formed. Quoting Hamlet’s advice to the players at Elsinore, the Scots Magazine reviewer criticises Scott’s characterisation of Helen Campbell – who ‘out-herods Herod’ (Hamlet 3.2.14) – and commends other characterisations that ‘o’erstep not the modesty of nature’ (3.2.19):
They are the characters of unexaggerated nature […] that we prize by far the most highly in this work, and in some of them the author has shown infinite skill, the weaving together of discordant qualities, with so happy a regard to the due limits and proportions of each, that the result of the whole is the production of a perfectly natural character, even in cases where, ‘to overstep the modesty of nature,’ was almost unavoidable.6
Anti-caricature rhetoric brings fictive characters to the fore in its view of the novelist’s ability to construct a strong realism made convincing by ‘limits’ and ‘proportions’ as well as ‘particulars’. While I have quoted some less typical examples here, most of the Romantic-period caricature talk about novels focuses on characters, and on non-protagonists in particular – using the vocabulary of caricature talk to evaluate how entertaining, how interesting and how strongly related to reality fictive characters are.
John Frow proposes that while the concept of character is ‘perhaps the most widely-used of all critical tools, at all levels of analysis’, it is ‘perhaps the most problematic and the most undertheorized of the basic categories of narrative theory’, with ‘its sheer obviousness disguis[ing] the conceptual difficulties it presents’.7 Caricature too has seemed obvious, and like character its use as a critical tool has a history worth investigating. I agree with the argument in Lynch’s work on ‘character’s changing conditions of legibility’: that character has no ‘true identity’ to unmask, but rather consists in historically and materially contingent ways of explaining the human world and making it meaningful.8 In other words, literary characters are used, often very persuasively, to think, say and effect ideas about ourselves and – perhaps more frequently and more confidently – about others. As Lynch puts it, the history of character can be illuminated by ‘[t]he cultural historian’s task […] of investigating reading and writing practices as local accomplishments – as social technologies that depend on certain verbal forms, practical exercises, codes of deportment, and capacities for pleasure and that permit their users to engage in particular sets of activities’.9 One of these activities might be the cultural phenomenon that Toril Moi calls ‘character talk’, a language-game where we ‘talk [and write] about fictive characters in much the same way we talk about real people, and yet we don’t get confused, we don’t begin to mistake fiction for reality’.10
In the Romantic period’s iteration of the language-game of literary characters, caricature talk explicitly plays with this idea of fictive characters being mistaken for real ones. Here I return to my idea that literature’s caricature – the doppelgänger of ‘character’ as a critical tool – has historically brought consciousness of form and formal ‘realism’ into the discussion of literary characters, through caricature talk and anti-caricature rhetoric. The Victorian critic Anna Murphy Jameson, one of many character critics who might be accused of ‘naïvely realist’ psychological analysis, conveys the premise that characters can seem more real because they are fictive, not in the sense of being false or of belonging only to fiction, but in the sense of being intensively formed: ideas and facts densely interconnected through language and narrative. She contrasts Shakespeare’s ‘wicked women’ characters – ‘more terrible, because more credible and intelligible’ – with ‘those monstrous caricatures we meet with in history […] where isolated facts and actions are recorded, without any relation to causes or motives, or connecting feelings; and pictures exhibited, from which the considerate mind turns in disgust, and the feeling heart has no relief but in positive and, I may add, reasonable incredulity’.11 Caricature talk – often rhetorically pretending that the character’s existence pre-exists or exceeds the text – periodically orients character criticism to the text, the author, to characterisation, putting the ‘-ism’ in realism.
Lynch identifies ‘character appreciations’ like Jameson’s with ‘romantic faith in unsoundable depths’ of mind and feeling, and ‘pretext for endless moral invigilation and self-revision’.12 Early examples of this critical genre include Maurice Morgann’s An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777), Henry Mackenzie’s essays on Hamlet in The Mirror (1780) and on Falstaff in The Lounger (1786), William Richardson’s essays on Shakespeare’s characters in the 1780s, and Thomas Robertson’s Essay on the Character of Hamlet (1788). In the Victorian era, Lynch observes, Shakespearean heroines take over from Falstaff and Hamlet as paradigmatic of ethical or psychological character criticism, with Jameson’s Shakespeare’s Heroines: Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical (1832) preceding Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, in a Series of Tales (1851). Clarke’s projection of the heroines’ extra-textual lives has been seen as an extreme example of the kind of criticism L. C. Knights protested in ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’ – though as Lynch’s analysis of passages from Morgann’s 1777 essay demonstrates, the key elements of genre – its styles, its emphases, its aims – were already firmly in place in belles lettres literary scholarship of the second half of the eighteenth century. Romantic character criticism, Lynch argues, ‘produces the depth that needs explicating and with it the textual effects that signal the psychological real’.13 Frow identifies this ‘representational’ character criticism as the most culturally dominant mode of literary criticism, the one which – with reference to Fredric Jameson’s definition of ‘ethical’ and ‘psychological’ analysis – ‘deals in notions of personal identity, of the quest for self’.14
The professionalised academy had come to think of ‘character appreciation’ as women’s (and children’s) reading, associating it with the amateur literary debates of women’s book clubs and the secularised moral education of English Literature lessons. As Frow puts it, ‘the methodology of ethical analysis is, at its simplest (for example in the “character appreciation” that is at the heart of much of the literature syllabus in secondary schools), the discussion of the moral make-up, the ethos of characters, as though they were acquaintances whose virtues and shortcomings one were dissecting’.15 This idea that people naively discuss fictional characters ‘as though they were real people’ risks underselling the abilities of secondary school teachers, and the cultural literacy of their pupils, by assuming that readers have not already learned, through their enjoyment and discussion of narrative media, how to talk about real people ‘as though they were’ more or less sophisticatedly fictive characters. We might also forget how extensively people’s personal ethics may actually be derived largely from fictive and historical characters encountered through narrative media, rather than primarily from their direct observation of their acquaintances, or from dedicated religious or ethical instruction.
In the Romantic period’s language-games about fictive characters, anti-caricature rhetoric is not used only to judge the verisimilitude of fiction and segregate ‘realistic’ characters from ‘unrealistic’ ones. On the one hand, anti-caricature rhetoric describes verisimilitude in literary fiction, saying what is like reality and what is not; on the other hand, anti-caricature rhetoric also articulates why some characters are more pleasurably (or painfully) ‘real’ than others. Not only denying and distancing ‘caricature’ but also acknowledging caricature’s perverse realism, reading and writing practices engage in a caricature talk that, on the way to establishing the extra-textual ‘character’ (of the author, their time period, a historical figure, a nation, etc.), problematises fictive ‘character’ by emphasising authorial technique and talent for characterisation. The vocabulary of caricature talk, whether used pejoratively or not, raises the issue of the novelist’s simulated ‘reality’ as an intervention of style, humour, feeling, personality – and the text as a composition of ‘parts’, ‘marks’, ‘touches’ and ‘relations’.
Perhaps talking about characters has been one of the most pleasurable and useful aspects of the novel in large part because we do confuse fiction and reality when we engage in it, but not because we are stupid or naive. When readers declare their love for Sir Roger de Coverley or Mr Collins, the vocabulary and rhetoric of caricature talk tends to assume that the ‘originality’ confusion is a deliberate part of the literary work’s form, and that we seem to think, believe and feel things about ‘characters’ as discrete and credible human entities because writers do more than merely ‘record’ or ‘copy’ reality.
While literati in the Romantic period may not have theorised the concept of character in ways acceptable to modern formalist critics, the conceptual richness of their ‘caricature’ indicates that romantic faith in fictive characters’ potential for ‘depths’ and ‘roundness’ has always existed alongside caricature talk’s interest in what makes and unmakes the strength of characters’ realism.
Prosopographic Caricature in the Romantic Literary Sphere
Critics and writers who extol the superiority of created characters over copied ones do so, in the Romantic period, against a background of prosopographic writing – reviews, biographies, romans à clef and the ‘silver fork’ novels – that promises insider information about the personal lives of public figures. Some of this writing uses detailed characterisation that highlights its subject’s least ideal qualities, including the particulars of their body and physical appearance, simulating the intimacy of personal acquaintance with the individual depicted that was crucial to the perverse realism of amateur caricature drawings and late-Georgian caricature prints.
There are, however, several key differences between pictorial caricatúra of real people and textual ‘caricatures’ of real people, which made it important in the Romantic literary sphere to differentiate the ‘reality’ of texts’ most distinctive characters. For one thing, whereas the caricature print’s aesthetic tends to present its portraits as playful burlesques, humorous for the ways in which they distort as much as for the distortion of their subjects, the textuality of ‘caricatures’ in books and periodicals arguably gives them a stronger claim to candour. Second, prosopographic caricatures were not limited to a small elite group, where personal caricaturing was a mutual social activity and actually contributed to an individual’s status; instead, they were imagined to bring the subject before a miscellaneous ‘reading public’. Third, prosopographic writing appeared in publication contexts where personal caricature was selective, targeted at certain individuals for particular reasons. Fourth, since detailed prosopography requires a certain level of intimacy with the subject, inevitably writers were most likely to caricature other writers, potentially devaluing their most precious intellectual property, the authorial persona – whether compromising either the authority of an anonymous writer’s impersonality, or the attraction of a writer’s cultivated individualism. Caricature drawings and prints (mis)represented subjects who were supposed to be ‘public’ to the viewer in other ways, through social acquaintance, political speeches, ownership and development of land and properties, and news reporting about society and politics. By contrast, textual prosopographic ‘caricatures’ in books and periodicals could have more impact (psychological and financial) on a subject whose public reputation consisted primarily of books and periodicals.
What I am calling prosopographic ‘caricature’ was understood in the Romantic period as a textual representation of an individual character that relies on the author being able to recall first-hand or find out particulars about their subject’s figure in society (including their works and deeds, career and connections, speech and manners and/or physical appearance); and which frames some of those particulars as extreme, singular or unflatteringly material; and by which the reader might be able to recognise the real individual by their verbal expression, social behaviour or physical appearance. While some texts vulnerable to the charge of prosopographic caricature restricted their ‘particulars’ to material that was already published in textual form, or attempted to synthesise prosopographic referents into imaginary characters, others were ready to justify their personal ‘attacks’ on individual targets.
Here, I examine the Romantic literary sphere’s wariness of textual characterisations that meet the criteria for prosopographic caricature just listed, alongside writers’ justifications for this style of prosopography – looking at examples from Blackwood’s Magazine and Peacock’s comic symposia, and making points of comparison with Edgeworth’s characterisation of John Langan in Castle Rackrent and Scott’s of David Ritchie in The Black Dwarf. Placing caricature talk and anti-caricature rhetoric’s emphasis on artistic ‘originality’ in its social context, I give an account of the notion that distinctive textual characterisations would ideally be limited by propriety and civility, but I also notice when and why it was acceptable for writers to suspend these self-imposed rules.
The literary periodical press in the early nineteenth century used personality to mean ‘a statement or remark referring to or aimed at a particular person, and usually disparaging or offensive in nature’ (OED n. 6b). For a remark to count as a ‘personality’ in the literary sphere, the person had to be named or otherwise clearly identified, and the statement had to be published, for example in a review of the person’s work. Wilson, in Blackwood’s Magazine, referred to one such review as ‘one of those wicked, and we-know-not-what-to-call-them, things, which afflict the spirits of so many of our contemporaries’.16 The most offensive ‘personalities’ had a high degree of particularity, and capitalised on some degree of personal acquaintance with the subject as an individual. Writers for literary periodicals were conscious that even their most harshly critical reviews should avoid describing personal traits such as physical appearance and psychological temperament. They were to review writers’ works, not the writers themselves.
Thus William Blackwood, in 1817, knew that he could seize writers’ and readers’ attention with uncivil caricatures that disturbed the notion of the literary sphere as a sociable little public of idealists. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine published some exceptionally personal literary criticism in its first number of October 1817, all of which was unsigned by its authors: John Wilson’s review of Coleridge’s autobiography Biographia Literaria, the first of John Gibson Lockhart’s essays on the ‘Cockney School of Poetry’, and a satire on literary Edinburgh written in pseudo-biblical prose and titled ‘A Translation from an Ancient Chaldee Manuscript’. A collaboration between Wilson, Lockhart and Hogg, this account of the rivalry between Blackwood and Archibald Constable, publisher of the Edinburgh Review, provoked charges of libel and slander – and even blasphemy – against Blackwell. But all publicity was good publicity. The ‘Chaldee Manuscript’ defined Blackwood’s as a uniquely vitriolic publication.17 Once the first print run sold out, Blackwell made a show of contrition: the number was reissued with a statement of apology, the ‘Chaldee Manuscript’ removed and the first ‘Cockney School’ essay heavily revised. Blackwood established a fund in preparation for any future lawsuits, seeming to accept legal fees as part of the cost of doing business, and enshrining over-personal literary criticism in the magazine’s modus operandi. Macvey Napier went to the trouble of bringing out an anonymous pamphlet titled Hypocrisy Unveiled and Calumny Detected in a Review of Blackwood’s Magazine, accusing the reviewers of ‘hold[ing] up personal defects, peculiarities, and misfortunes, to ridicule and scorn’, and threatening retaliation: ‘We know them well—all and each of them,—their names, characters, and schemes.’18 Scholarship on Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine has emphasised the extremity of its writers’ personal attacks on other writers and other periodicals.19 Yet Blackwood’s writers did not disregard the taboo against personal criticism, nor did they flout it indiscriminately; rather, they tried to justify their attacks as well-deserved caricatures of particular writers.
Blackwood’s reissue of the first number retracts the more personal elements of Lockhart’s invective against Leigh Hunt. References to the writer’s private character and physical mannerisms are scrupulously removed, redirecting the harshest criticisms from the man to his writings.20 When Lockhart (signing himself as ‘Z’) makes another anonymous attack on Hunt’s character, he does so more cannily. The third ‘Cockney School’ essay excuses itself as a critique of Hunt’s moral character, where the boundary between private life and public reputation cannot be maintained, because Hunt has already degraded his character in published writing:
There can be no radical distinction allowed between the private and public character of a poet. If a poet sympathizes with and justifies wickedness in his poetry, he is a wicked man. It matters not that his private life may be free from wicked actions. […] It is therefore of little or no importance, whether Leigh Hunt be or be not a bad private character. […] The world is not fond of ingenious distinctions between the theory and practice of morals. The public are justified in refusing to hear a man plead in favour of his character, when they hold in their hands a work of his in which all respect to character is forgotten.21
This statement could be read as a manifesto for Blackwood’s Magazine’s rebellious approach to literary criticism, or even as an argument for the legitimacy of personal attacks in literary reviewing generally. By Lockhart’s reasoning, reviewing a literary work is always a review of its author, and vice versa: it is impossible to avoid commenting on an author’s character, when the work’s faults are its author’s. The statement primes the reader to notice that the insults Z fires at Hunt’s muse – claiming to expose her as a painted whore dressed in fashionably ‘transparent drapery’ – are personal criticisms of Hunt.22 Lockhart’s erasure of the distinction between private and public character might be read not as a deliberate intervention, sincerely meant, in the long-established consensus that personal satire should not feature in the literary sphere, but as a case for highly personal criticism in exceptional cases. Criticism becomes caricature when Lockhart uses a description of Hunt’s personal manners and psychology to justify his essay’s antagonism towards the poet. Hunt’s character is defined by personal antagonism, Z argues: he has an ‘irritable temper which keeps [him …] in a perpetual fret with himself and all the world beside, and that shews itself equally in his deadly enmities and capricious friendships’ (453). Such personal comments were extraordinarily offensive, as Keats understands in a letter to Benjamin Bailey: ‘There has been a flaming attack upon Hunt in the Endinburgh [sic] Magazine—I never read anything so virulent—accusing him of the greatest Crimes—dep[r]eciating his Wife his Poetry—his Habits—his company, his Conversation.’23
But Blackwood’s could claim that Hunt had started it. As editor of The Examiner and The Reflector, Hunt had himself written combative reviews and satires that conflated writers with their works, most notably The Feast of Poets (1811). Furthermore, he had been imprisoned for the crimes of seditious and blasphemous libel of the Prince Regent, printing Charles Lamb’s ‘Triumph of the Whale’ in 1812 and his own article ‘The Prince on St. Patrick’s Day’ in 1813.24 ‘The Story of Rimini’, a poem Hunt produced while he was in prison and supplied with material by Byron, was a sympathetic treatment of the historical figure Francesca da Rimini, who is depicted in Dante’s Inferno as consigned to the second circle of Hell, murdered by her husband after being discovered in bed with his younger brother. Hunt dedicated his poem to Byron. Other readers were less disposed to admire Francesca and Hunt’s poem about her, which they could easily interpret as an atheistic endorsement of adultery, incest and lust.25 As they saw it, sympathetic writing about Francesca da Rimini was pornography barely concealed beneath the respectability of its literary sources. Lockhart’s anti-jacobin imagery, which links the immorality of The Story of Rimini with Hunt’s radical politics, suggests that Z’s purportedly general statement is aimed pointedly at Hunt. Z’s phrase ‘no radical distinction’ is a dog whistle for Hunt’s republicanism, and implies that praise of Hunt’s literary works would be complicit in those radical opinions. It is not just any poet who loses the privilege of privacy, here, but the exceptionally seditious, blasphemous, bilious Hunt.
Blackwood’s could also justify personal criticisms of writers who had overreached themselves in search of personal celebrity, obtruding themselves into their writing. The Blackwood’s writers were not the first in the Romantic period to frame ‘caricature’ as a means of puncturing a poet’s egotism: Henry Brougham’s scathing review of Hours of Idleness (1807) in the Edinburgh Review (which provoked Byron’s satire English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers) justifies its personal criticisms by remarking that the poems self-promotingly parade Byron’s youth and hereditary privilege, ‘allud[ing] frequently to his family and ancestors—sometimes in poetry, sometimes in notes’.26 Romantic poetry of sentiments, when seen to exaggerate the beauties of nature and absurdly elevate the individual’s powers of perception and feeling, could strike the cynical reader as being the poet’s caricature of himself. Thus Anna Seward objects to lines in Wordsworth’s poem ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ with ‘contemptuous astonishment and disgust’:
I read about his dancing daffodils, ten thousand, as he says, in high dance in the breeze beside the river, whose waves dance with them, and in the poet’s heart, we are told, danced too. Then he proceeds to say, that in the hours of pensive or of pained contemplation, these same capering flowers flash on his memory, and his heart, losing its cares, dances with them too.
Surely if his worst foe had chosen to caricature this egotistic manufacturer of metaphysic importance upon trivial themes, he could not have done it more effectively!27
Individualist and confessional writers, addressing their readers in the first person and including biographical information in poems as well as prefaces, were vulnerable to charges of self-importance of a particular kind. De Quincey apologises in his Confessions for ‘breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars’.28 In the first number of The Friend, Coleridge unabashedly calls himself ‘the Biographer of my own sentiments’, a Romantic self-regard that attracted the scorn of Blackwood’s.29 Wilson frames his 1817 review of the Biographia Literaria as a just retort to an improperly personal biography that ‘lays open, not unfrequently, the character of the Man as well as of the Author’. Coleridge has not understood that it is the job of critics such as Wilson and Lockhart to celebrate authors: he celebrates himself, ‘scatter[ing] his Sibylline Leaves around him, with as majestical an air as if a crowd of enthusiastic admirers were rushing forward to grasp the divine promulgations, instead of their being, as they in fact are, coldly received by the accidental passenger, like a lying lottery puff or a quack advertisement’. Coleridge’s indecently detailed auto-characterisation contrasts, Wilson thinks, with the ‘dignified deportment’ of Scott, whose writing makes ‘scarcely an allusion […] to himself’.30
James Hogg, despite his close involvement with Blackwood’s, came in for worse treatment when he ventured to publicise the personal history behind his literary works, beginning the third edition of his poetry collection The Mountain Bard with ‘a Memoir of the Author’s Life, written by Himself’. Like Hunt’s Story of Rimini and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, the 1821 edition of The Mountain Bard was published with its author’s name displayed prominently on the title page. The memoir tells how Hogg, ruined by risky investments in farmland, and his reputation as a shepherd undermined by his literary pursuits, was unable to find work locally. Brandishing his rusticity as a mark of his poetry’s authenticity, Hogg says that his poems were written ‘to please the circles about the fire-sides in the country’, that he ‘had never been once in any polished society’ and at the age of thirty-eight ‘knew no more of human life or manners’ than as a boy.31 Candidly (and calculatedly) self-deprecating, the memoir also advertises the poet’s acquaintance with important figures on the literary scene, chief among them Byron, Scott and Wilson. Hogg’s apparent expectation that his book would be favourably reviewed in the magazine was insulting to Blackwood, who had been surprised to hear that the new edition of The Mountain Bard was being published by Oliver and Boyd. Hogg refused to consult with Blackwood about it, believing that Blackwood had no rights in the matter.32 Wilson’s and Blackwood’s established friendship with Hogg did not stop them from publishing an outrageous (and anonymous) review of the new Mountain Bard. Focusing on the memoir, Wilson makes an ironic contribution to Hogg’s self-promotion as a rustic poet:
Well, then—this prodigy tires of the shepherd’s life, and comes jogging into Edinburgh […]. Only picture to yourself a stout country lout, with a bushel of hair on his shoulders that had not been raked for months, enveloped in a coarse plaid impregnated with tobacco, with a prodigious mouthful of immeasurable tusks, and with a dialect that set all conjecture at defiance, lumbering suddenly in upon the elegant retirement of Mr Miller’s back-shop.33
The self-styled ‘Ettrick shepherd’ appears here not as the next Burns but as escaped livestock. Accusing Hogg of ‘self-exposure’, Wilson employs an extended analogy where Hogg is the living beast, the cook, the waiter and the meat served: ‘I take the liberty of sending back Hogg, which has disgusted me more severely than anything I have attempted to swallow since Macvey’s Bacon.’34
Editorialising the review, however, Wilson claims that ‘the playful malice of this “attack”’ actually conceals an advertisement for the poet and his work. The author must be a friend of Hogg – or even Hogg himself – stage-managing a public humiliation that whips the poet in order to whip up interest in his book:
If thou art, as we believe the generality of our readers are, a person endowed with a gentlemanly portion of common sense, and can relish banter and good humour […] thou wilt at once discover that the object of this ‘deevilrie,’ to use an expression of the Shepherd’s, is to add to the interest which his life has excited. Indeed if the paper has not come from Altrive Lake itself, it has certainly been written by some one who takes no small interest in the Shepherd’s affairs; for, in the private letter which accompanies it […] a hope is most feelingly expressed, that by this tickling the public sympathy may be awakened, so as to occasion a most beneficial demand for his works, and put a few cool hundreds in his pocket.35
On reading Wilson’s anonymous review of The Mountain Bard, Hogg wrote to Blackwood calling him ‘the worst assassin in hell’ and informing him that the review had wounded his wife as well as himself: on her ‘the blows that you inflict wound deeper and smart with more poignancy, nor can any palliatives that I can use heal them’. Hogg then requested that Blackwood send him the reviewer’s name and address.36 Receiving no response, he sought advice and sympathy from Scott: ‘Shall I answer [the reviewer] in print? pursue him at law to which it will soon come if I answer him? or knock out his brains?’37 Scott’s reply advises philosophical reflection:
I am very sorry to observe from the tenor of your letter that you permitted the caricature in Blackwoods magazine to sit so near your feelings. […] If a man says that I am guilty of some particular fact I would vindicate myself if I could but if he caricatures my person and depreciates my talents I would content myself with thinking that the world will judge of my exterior and of my powers of composition by the evidence of their own eyes and of my works. […] I know the advice to sit quiet under injury is hard to flesh and blood.38
As Scott points out, the personal caricature that makes Hogg a grotesque object in a comical situation does not have the satirical precision of a moral critique, as the Blackwood’s attacks on Hunt do. But Scott’s advice to Hogg – to ‘sit quiet’ – was likely shaped by his own attitude to Hogg as a man rising too far above his social station. Amused by the idea of a man like that participating in an ‘affair of honour’,39 Scott probably appreciated the review’s image of Hogg as a self-important man comically out of place. Hunt, too, was perceived as a plebeian too full of himself: in the first ‘Cockney School’ essay, Z describes him as ‘a vulgar man […] perpetually labouring to be genteel’ and his poetry ‘always on the stretch to be grand’.40
Indeed, Scott’s novel The Black Dwarf (1816) and Edgeworth’s novel Castle Rackrent (1800) show that writers could give themselves permission to relax their rules against caricaturing real people when they found good material in the lower classes. Edgeworth’s notebooks, according to Butler, show ‘a jackdaw-like attitude towards examples of human behaviour’ and speech, particularly among servants, though her only ‘conscious, systematic attempt to sketch an individual’ was the narrator ‘Thady Quirk’.41 Thady’s highly characteristic narration of the events in Castle Rackrent originated in Edgeworth’s oral mimicry of her father’s steward, John Langan, to entertain her family. Edgeworth developed the character by finding appropriate stories to tell in his words.42 Edgeworth’s performances may have included the physical mannerisms that she later used to characterise Thady: she describes in a letter how Langan ‘shakes his head, puts up his shoulder, or changes from leg to leg which are all in him sad tokens of distress’.43 But while Langan’s peculiarities made for entertaining dramatic monologues, Edgeworth was displeased with the result of using his idiosyncratic narration for her novel. As Butler points out, Thady ‘dominates the book, so that the Rackrents’ various doings serve the central aesthetic purpose of revealing his character and attitudes’. Edgeworth ‘found it unpalatable’, Butler remarks, ‘that she had made the quaint, archaic narrator more interesting than the Rackrents […]. Her motives in taking to fiction were not to act as an amanuensis to John Langan; on the contrary, the viewpoint she wanted to adopt was English and forward-looking’.44 The Edgeworth family publicly acknowledged that Langan was Thady’s ‘original’, while denying that any of Edgeworth’s other characters were portraits of individuals drawn from real acquaintance, despite the novels being strewn with character traits and characteristic incidents referring to the authors’ acquaintances. In a letter to her aunt, Edgeworth hashed out a strategy for using their close family friend, James Corry, as the basis for her character ‘King Corny’ in Ormond (1817):
If you recollect how we used to talk over Mr. Corry & when you used to make me laugh by the hour, we agreed that I might introduce such a character provided I did not make it too like the original—Now I am attempting this—My father […] knows nothing of my plan—therefore I am particularly anxious to know from you how far I may go—and these are my questions—Do you think I may venture to use the handfuls of Hemlock for the gout— […] I shall not put in the blasting—tempting almost irresistably [sic] tempting as it is nor working the goblin tapestry tho’ I’d give half a finger for it. […] The chances are that Mr. Corry himself would never read [the] thing unless he were put on the scent.45
None of Edgeworth’s most distinctive characters were intended as detailed caricature portraits of public or prominent figures, though Ennui’s Lord Craiglethorpe was inspired by John Carr’s authorship of Stranger in Ireland (1806). When characters were intended to represent public personalities with ties to the Edgeworth family, they were flatteringly idealised and often appeared in the role of mentor to the novels’ protagonist.46 However, readers still found ways to see characters as portraits of real people.
Since Thomas Love Peacock’s comic symposia were first published, for example, readers have been seeing ‘caricatures’ in them – but caricatures of who, or what? How do we read the word ‘characters’ in the Literary Gazette’s review of Nightmare Abbey in 1818, which describes Peacock’s writing as ‘a sort of caricature of modern characters and incidents’?47 In literary scholarship, scores of notes and keys have identified Peacock’s characters with real people, until Marilyn Butler’s work unsettled the established view of Peacock as a satirist of individuals. While Butler acknowledges that Peacock’s symposia do allude to real people, ‘his dislike of his period’s taste for personality is maintained in his work, and he does not deal in character at all’, Gary Dyer comments that Peacock ‘avoids the error’ of ‘scandal-mongering “personal” satire’.48 Figures previously assumed to be Peacock’s renderings of Coleridge, Shelley and Southey as individuals – ‘malicious personal portraits’ – might be better interpreted, James Mulvihill suggests, as ‘criticisms of the public figure’. Mulvihill has shown that Peacock’s characters are often derived from views expressed in print, arguing that ‘the Peacockian novel of talk posits a popular culture in which intellectual exchange has been processed for mass consumption’.49
This new consensus on Peacockian ‘characters’ reflects the position Peacock took in the 1830s: he insists in an 1837 selected edition of his symposium novels that he has ‘never intruded on the personality of others, nor taken any liberties but with public conduct and public opinions’, and reiterates in his 1856 preface to a new edition of Melincourt that ‘[o]f the disputants whose opinions and public characters (for I never trespassed on private life) were shadowed in some of the persons of the story, almost all have passed from the diurnal scene’.50 At the time Peacock wrote Crotchet Castle (1831), Percy Shelley’s and Byron’s reputations were increasingly sullied by ‘tell-all’ biographies such as Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830) and Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828), following Hazlitt’s essay ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ (1823) and Thomas Medwin’s Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (1824).51 Hunt’s memoir of Byron crossed a line – it was badly received, and effectively ended his literary career.52 Describing Byron’s physiognomy, Hunt puts together an unflattering portrait of features variously too large, too small and out of place:
His countenance did not improve with age, and there were always some defects in it. The jaw was too big for the upper part. It had all the wilfulness of a despot in it. The animal predominated over the intellectual part of his head, insamuch as the face altogether was large in proportion to the skull. The eyes also were set too near one another; and the nose, though handsome in itself, had the appearance, when you saw it closely in front, of being grafted on the face, rather than growing properly out of it. His person was very handsome, though terminating in lameness, and tending in fat and effeminacy; which makes me remember what a hostile fair one objected to him, namely, that he had a little beard.53
In Crotchet Castle, Peacock uses a character called ‘Eavesdrop’ as a scapegoat for this kind of journalism. The Reverend Folliott confronts him: ‘Sir, you have published a character […] wherein you have sketched off me; me, sir, even to my nose and wig. What business have the public with my nose and wig?’ Confronting Eavesdrop a second time, Folliott elaborates, ‘Sir, my blood boils. What business have the public with my nose and wig? You have dished me up, like a savory omelette, to gratify the appetite of the reading rabble for gossip’.54 The omelette figures the subject of caricature as an object of consumption, like Wilson’s culinary metaphor for Hogg’s mercenary ‘dishing up’ of himself. Eavesdrop, described by Lady Clarinda as ‘a sort of bookseller’s tool’ who ‘coins all his acquaintances in reminiscences and sketches of character’, is eventually expelled from the society of Crotchet Castle, ‘a flagitious violator of the confidences of private life’.55 While Eavesdrop has very few characteristics aside from his speaking name – he is almost totally silent throughout the text – the timing of Crotchet Castle suggests an identification with Hunt, as Butler has argued. Peacock certainly avoids caricaturing Hunt with the kind of detail to which Hunt had subjected Byron’s memory. In 1837, Peacock echoes Folliott’s words about Eavesdrop, noting that ‘literary violators of the confidences of private life still gain a disreputable livelihood and an unenviable notoriety’.56
Earlier in his career, however, Peacock could not resist including some prosopographic elements in symposia so concerned with the modern intellectual scene. As many scholars have noted, the Scythrop–Marionetta–Celinda love triangle in Nightmare Abbey parallels the scandalous story of Percy Shelley, Harriet Westbrook and Mary Godwin. Peacock seems to have deliberately sprinkled the character of Celinda Toobad with physical characteristics unlike Mary Shelley’s.57 Butler sees such instances as the satirist ‘careful[ly …] blending characteristics in such a way as to frustrate identification with real people’58 – but not carefully enough, in some cases. Attempts to deliberately frustrate identification could backfire when the identity of the real person was still apparent and personal caricature was aggravated with falsehood. When readers recognised Dickens’s character ‘Harold Skimpole’ as a satirical portrait of Hunt, a friend of Dickens, the character was all the more offensive because Dickens gave Skimpole ‘attributes quite foreign to Hunt’59 – compounding caricature with falsehood, as Scott did with his fictionalisation of David Ritchie, which I discuss later.
There was an established market in the Romantic period for literary works with characters supposedly representing prominent members of society. The ‘silver-fork’ novels that offered insight into the British aristocracy accompanied by keys to the characters’ real identities, were identified by Hazlitt as a distinct literary form in 1827.60 Middle-class readers could project a ‘fashionable’ readership who would not need such keys, being already familiar with the ‘originals’ referenced: in Mary Brunton’s 1814 novel Discipline, Lady St Edmunds ‘kill[s] the time’ by reading ‘novels enriched with slanderous tales or caricatures of living characters’ and ‘fashionable sonnets, guarded to the ear of decency’.61 Silver-fork novels like Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon (1816) and Eaton Stannard Barett’s Six Weeks at Long’s (1817) commodified upper-class gossip for a largely middle-class audience – or at least commodified the idea of upper-class gossip. In Crotchet Castle, Lady Clarinda decides to earn herself some pocket money for ‘trinkets and fal-lals, which I cannot get from papa’ by writing a cynical silver-fork novel that only pretends to caricature real ‘originals’:
LADY CLARINDA. […] You must know I have been reading several fashionable novels, the fashionable this, and the fashionable that; and I thought to myself, why I can do better than any of these myself. So I wrote a chapter or two, and sent them as a specimen to Mr Puffall, the bookseller, telling him they were to be a part of the fashionable something or other, and he offered me, I will not say how much, to finish it in three volumes, and let him pay all the newspapers for recommending it as the work of a lady of quality, who made very free with the characters of her acquaintance.
CAPTAIN FITZCHROME. Surely you have not done so?
LADY CLARINDA. Oh, no; I leave that to Mr Eavesdrop. But Mr Puffall made it a condition that I should let him say so.
CAPTAIN FITZCHROME. A strange recommendation.
LADY CLARINDA. Oh, nothing else will do.62
Peacock would have known about the controversy over Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey (1826), puffed by publisher Henry Colburn as ‘the adventures of an ambitious, dashing, and talented young man of high life’ and representing ‘nearly all the individuals at present figuring in fashionable society’. Colburn stoked interest in the novel by telling an editor that ‘[t]he authorship is a great secret – a man of high fashion – very high – keeps the first society’.63 Peacock imagines a publisher, ‘Puffall’, who falsely advertises Lady Clarinda’s text as a modern roman à clef, when she actually intends to imagine her characters. This dilettante, though choosing to capitalise on her ‘fashionable’ aristocratic identity, disdains her readers’ literal-minded interest in identifying real characters – an interest stoked by novels that did use elements of what was publicly known about real people.
The success in Dublin of Edgeworth’s Leonora (1806), for example, was driven by identifications of the characters with the real individuals Lady Asgill, Lord Moira and Lady Morgan. Edgeworth could not deny that she had been inspired by stories about Lady Morgan (previously Sydney Owenson), though she was grateful to Lovell Sneyd for trying to counter the idea that the portrait was based on personal acquaintance: ‘Thank you my dear brother for saying that I never saw Miss Owenson.’64 When novelists used documentary material, they piqued the interest of literal-minded (but often insightful) readers. In Lady Morgan’s own novel Florence Macarthy (1818), the writer Lady Clancare laments readers’ literal-mindedness when she remarks that ‘combine qualities as you may, to the very verge of extravagance, the world will furnish models, trace likenesses, and assign originals’65 – an ironic statement, given that Morgan wants readers to recognise the character ‘Con Crawley’ as a dig at John Wilson Croker, in revenge for his excoriating review of her 1817 account of France in the early years of the Bourbon Restoration. On the other hand, readers’ identifications did sometimes make connections irrelevant to what the author could have conceivably intended. Sydney Smith erroneously took Edgeworth’s clergyman character ‘Buckhurst Falcolner’ in Patronage (1814) as an offensive caricature of himself, writing in a letter that ‘[i]f [Edgeworth] has put into her Novels people who fed her and her odious father, she is not Trustworthy’ – though Edgeworth had not known him when she wrote the novel.66
But with Thady, there could be no such social consequences. A comic caricature of a lowborn caretaker could not hurt feelings or damage reputations among her peers, so Edgeworth was happy to avow it.
Similarly, Scott was unrepentant about his use of David Ritchie, writing about the ‘inspiration’ for the character Sir Edward Mauley (or ‘Canny Elshie’) at length in the Magnum Introduction to The Black Dwarf. Scott’s information about Ritchie was drawn partly from the anecdotes of Adam Fergusson, whose house was local to Ritchie’s cottage and whom Scott was visiting when he had his own personal encounter with the hermit: ‘The author saw this poor, and, it may be said, unhappy man, in autumn 1797.’67 The introduction also draws on Robert Chambers’s essay ‘The Life and Anecdotes of the Black Dwarf, or David Ritchie’ (1820), which had been published to capitalise on readers’ interest in the titular character of Scott’s novel. Scott’s use of other people’s anecdotes for the Magnum Introduction suggests that he merely ‘saw’ Ritchie, perhaps at a distance, and had to rely on descriptions for details such as ‘“his screech-owl voice, shrill, uncouth, and dissonant, [which] corresponded well with his other peculiarities’.68 Still, Scott congratulates himself, the novel’s ‘personal description’ of the dwarf ‘has been generally allowed to be a tolerably exact and unexaggerated portrait’ of the real David Ritchie.69 This should have been recognised as an unscrupulous use of a real person to create a fictive character, and Scott’s claim that ‘an individual existed many years since […] which suggested such a character’ does not tally with the fact that Ritchie died only a few years before the novel was published.70
Scott admits that the interest stirred up by The Black Dwarf (which inspired several further publications about Ritchie), caused suffering to the sister who lived next to Ritchie in a cottage he built for her:
[T]he author is sorry to learn that a sort of ‘local sympathy,’ and the curiosity then expressed concerning the Author of Waverley and the subjects of his Novels, exposed the poor woman to enquiries which gave her pain. When pressed about her brother’s peculiarities, she asked, in her turn, why they would not permit the dead to rest?71
Here, Scott fails to take responsibility for his appropriation of Ritchie’s life in a characterisation that uses so much detailed anecdotal material, yet combines it with fabricated episodes including Mauley’s revelation of his true identity. The character is so barely fictitious that these additions become more like falsehoods than fictions. Scott might have reflected on why he never borrowed so much personal detail from a real individual, particularly one so recently living, in any of his other novels. Instead, the Introduction explicitly understates the novel’s reliance on a real character – ‘not altogether imaginary’ – even while using anecdotes about the real ‘Black Dwarf’ to stoke interest in Scott’s characterisation: ‘The ideal being who is here presented as residing in solitude, and haunted by a consciousness of his own deformity, and a suspicion of his being generally subjected to the scorn of his fellow-men, is not altogether imaginary.’72 Reading the anecdotes that follow, and comparing them with the descriptions in the narrative, it is hard to see the Black Dwarf as more ‘ideal’ than real. Scott seems unaware of the irony that his novel proves Ritchie’s suspicions about society and violates the seclusion that sustained his existence: Scott actually recounts that Ritchie sought ‘the least possible communication with the world’ after years of wandering, finding no society where he could be free of ‘disagreeable attention’. The Magnum Introduction reinscribes the novel’s memorialisation of Ritchie through Mauley, effectively making sure that Ritchie will forever be ‘the Black Dwarf’. Ritchie the brush-maker was not thought of as a peer: his class and his parochialism, as well as his physical differences, meant for Scott that Ritchie’s peculiarities were fair game for caricature, though it was unfortunate that people got hurt.
While writers typically named their characters carefully so as to avoid strong identification with living individuals, avoiding prosopographic characterisation took on a performative aspect in realist fiction. Novelists begin using the elliptical long dash, which had been common in satires on real individuals,73 as a way of forestalling the reader’s identifying a character with a specific referent while giving the impression that there is a real, unmentionable referent. For example, in Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Philips tells her nieces that Mr. Wickham ‘was to have a lieutenant’s commission in the—shire [regiment]’.74 Dashes are used to redact the names of counties, towns and institutions entirely or in part, and also to redact digits from dates. Such redactions presumably were expedient for writers, since to plot a highly specific timeline or to map a narrative accurately onto real geography would be time-consuming, as well as inviting quibbles from pedantic readers. Elliptical punctuation could also play a role in bolstering the novel’s claims to universalism.
But by performatively discouraging readers from identifying referents while hinting that such identifications might actually be possible, formal realism can have it all: specificity and universality, authenticity and fictionality. The opening lines of The Warden (1855) give an extended performance of this magic trick, where the particulars are made real by their concealment. Trollope sets his scene ‘in the cathedral town of —————; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name it Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be suspected’.75 This passage can be read as both scrupulous and coy, with the narrator never stating outright that the story contains nothing personal; instead, our attention is diverted to what ‘might be presumed’ or ‘may be suspected’. From Scott’s presentation of the Black Dwarf as an ‘ideal being […] not altogether imaginary’ to Trollope’s ‘let us call it Barchester’, realisms take different routes to establishing an ambiguous ‘originality’ that insists on the writer’s power to create imaginatively ‘original’ characters, while pretending to withhold the identity of a real being that is ‘original’ in the sense of pre-existing the text.
In caricature talk and anti-caricature rhetoric, readers and writers play, interminably, with the interchangeability of these ‘originals’. Realism is a play space where we can both pretend to be deceived into thinking that fictions are real, and pretend to be deceived into thinking that real things are fiction. Anti-caricature rhetoric’s practised denial of caricature participates in this play when it pushes resemblance towards equivalence, a controlled exertion that holds novelistic character in a state of neither real nor false.
The fictitious characters created by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in The Spectator (1711–12) became, over the course of the eighteenth century and more than fifty collected editions, Britain’s gold standard for comic characterisation in literary prose. This chapter describes the Romantic-period novel’s inheritance from the Spectator’s characters and their critical reception. I argue that the Spectator, first published a century before Northanger Abbey found fault with its ‘improbable circumstances, unnatural characters’, has a strong claim to being the text that most definitively established the terms of caricature talk about ‘strong characters’ – fictive non-protagonist characters who were distinctive, individualised, comic and satirically rendered – for the Romantic period.
The Spectator’s character-writing, I argue, sets ‘diversion’, ‘originality’ and ‘realism’ as key topics for the Romantic period’s critical discourse about strong characterisation in the ‘light literature’ of novels and literary periodicals. Addison and Steele define these topics in several ways: self-reflexive comments about character-writing and character-reading, a hyperbolised distinction between satire and libel, innovative characterisation techniques in their quasi-Theophrastan ‘characters’, and development of individualised non-protagonist characters such as ‘the Spectator’ and ‘Will Honeycomb’. I examine how Steele and Addison, departing from the conventions and the moral-satirical commitment of the Theophrastan character, model the characterisation of a strong character: a fictitious being that evokes, through particularity and contrast, the ‘originality’ of a real individual, with virtual reality offering the reader pseudo-sensory and parasocial pleasure.
Half a century after the Spectator’s original publishing, the critical reception of Addison and Steele’s character ‘Sir Roger De Coverley’ became an important influence on the critical appreciation and writing of strong characters in new novels. I argue that the discourse around ‘Sir Roger’ in the second half of the eighteenth century was an early and formative example of the caricature talk distinctive from psychologising ‘character appreciations’ such as Henry Mackenzie’s Remarks on the Character of Falstaff (1786). While Steele and Addison’s collaboration on Sir Roger De Coverley was likened to literature’s most famous comic knights – Don Quixote and Falstaff – it was the Spectator and ‘Sir Roger’ that offered fresh inspiration for writers seeking to enrich the modern English realist novel with non-protagonist characters both contemporary and historical. Considering a selection of examples – from Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779) to Lionel Thomas Berguer’s British Essayists (1823) – I find that the critical reception of Sir Roger not only cemented the Spectator’s reputation for characters, but also conventionalised and added to the existing critical vocabulary that became prevalent in anti-caricature rhetoric for the praise of strong characters. I suggest that Sir Roger’s critical reception would have impressed readers and writers with the potential of non-protagonist characters to be uniquely luxurious and durable assets – a good investment for commercial authors seeking to build and sustain a readership.
Chapter 3 concludes by imagining the Spectator’s model for strong characters and the vocabulary and ideas generated by caricature talk about the Spectator as elements of character-writing that were re-purposed and re-contextualised by different novelistic realisms. The Spectator’s precepts and methods – and their critical reception in the 1770s–1820s – are variously refracted in the distinctive formal realisms represented over the subsequent three chapters. I end this chapter by noticing some ways in which Austen’s comic moral realism, Scott’s compendious historical realism and Shelley’s materialist horror realism transpose elements from the Spectator’s precedent, taking them in new and genre-defining directions.
Diversions, Originals and Particulars
In early nineteenth-century Britain, it would have been remarkable for a leisured reader never to have picked up the Spectator in some form. Over the eighteenth century, dozens of collected and selected editions of the essays had capitalised on the immediate success of the periodical publication, creating an intellectual property of immense commercial value. By 1767, the Spectator’s market value stood at £1,228 – far exceeding prices obtained in the 1760s for other modern English texts, such as Robinson Crusoe (£68), Pilgrim’s Progress (£196) and even Paradise Lost (£900).1 In the Romantic period, the Spectator’s inclusion in publishers’ series of ‘English classics’ with low prices and long print runs ensured that the Spectator was read more and more widely.2 The Spectator and Tatler essays headed the ‘English classics’, a canon of moral didactic literature extracted from periodicals including The Tatler, The Rambler and The Mirror. In a climate of increased worry about the dangers of reading, the Spectator was ‘safe’ – and so was its literary reputation.
Addison and Steele had explicitly targeted a female readership, and their essays became ubiquitous reading material provided to young readers and to women, even at a point when Addisonian essays of morals and manners began to show their age. In Northanger Abbey, Austen imagines a young lady being admired for reading the Spectator, rather than a novel, even though the Spectator’s manners are outdated:
‘And what are you reading, Miss—?’ ‘Oh! It is only a novel! […] It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda’; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.3
Austen had a point – sociolinguistic norms had changed, society had changed, expectations of women had changed, and young ladies were more likely to find examples relevant to their situations in novels by Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth or Mary Brunton than in the Spectator or the Tatler.
Nevertheless, these novelists had a considerable inheritance from the Spectator model of characterisation. As well as suggesting characterisation techniques for the writing of comic non-protagonist characters to enrich a plot-driven novel, the Spectator cultivated readers’ appreciation of such characters as ‘original’ and ‘natural’.
Post-romantic literary scholarship is suspicious of character criticism’s tendency – in professing to respond to characters as though they were people and attributing characters’ verisimilitude to the ‘genius’ of a god-like author – to elide the historical specifics of the writer’s knowledge and concept of the world, and the formal ways in which characterisation conveys that knowledge to readers. In the case of the Spectator’s characters, modern formalist literary criticism has assigned Addison and Steele’s character-writing to a particular moral didactic genre, the ‘character sketch’. Theresa Shön writes that character sketches ‘are containers of knowledge – social, satirical or religious, in any case moral’, that ‘the genre was employed to classify and thus to order the virtues and vices’, and that Addison and Steele used the genre ‘to convey knowledge on the moral and social nature of human beings’.4 Deriving from the Characters of Theophrastus (c. 371–287 BCE), the seventeenth-century character sketch is a classically satirical genre that explicitly claims to educate and correct readers by showing portraits of imaginary individuals whose behaviours illustrate a range of moral failings and ill manners. In Joseph Healey’s 1628 translation, Theophrastus’s opening proem hopes ‘that our children will prove the honester and better conditioned, if we shall leave them good precedents of imitation: that of good children they may prove better men’.5 The fourth English-language edition of Jean de la Bruyère’s Caractères, the most famous imitation of Theophrastus’s Characters, opens with the promise that ‘[t]he World may view the Picture I have drawn of it from Nature, and if I have hit on any defects, which it agrees with me to be such, it may at leisure correct them’.6 The Theophrastan characterologist assumes, or pretends to assume, that his reader needs to be taught how to recognise a bad character, so that the reader can avoid the real person who resembles it, and avoid becoming part of that person’s society, with the imitation and conciliation that society involves. Thus, the Spectator, like de la Bruyère’s Caractères, declares its aim ‘to Cultivate and Polish Human Life, by promoting Virtue and Knowledge’ – in the preface to the first collected volume, dedicated to Whig statesman John Somers (1651–1716) as ‘a Person of a finished Character’.7
However, in the periodical publication of the Spectator, Addison does not describe the essays as ‘instructive’ until the tenth number – and there, the idea of the Spectator as corrective literature is comically undermined by the ‘Spectator’ character’s baser motives. Addison presents the Spectator’s narrator, for the reader’s amusement, as a writer pleased by the success of his own new publication. Imagining a large and deferential readership for his future writings, the Spectator attempts to flatter readers with the idea of themselves as a select group of ‘Disciples’; and he assures them, in ironically elevated language, of his publication’s value as a moral pharmaceutical to be taken daily:
It is with much Satisfaction that I hear this great City inquiring Day by Day after my Papers, and receiving my Morning Lectures with a becoming Seriousness and Attention. My Publisher tells me, that there are already Three Thousand of them distributed every Day: So that if I allow Twenty Readers to every paper, which I look upon as a modest Computation, I may reckon about Threescore thousand Disciples in London and Westminster, who I hope will take care to distinguish themselves from the thoughtless Herd of their ignorant and unattentive Brethren. Since I have raised to myself so great an Audience, I shall spare no Pains to make their Instruction agreeable, and their Diversion useful. For which Reasons I shall endeavour to enliven Morality with Wit, and to temper Wit with Morality […]. And to the End that [readers’] Virtue and Discretion may not be short transient intermitting Starts of Thought, I have resolved to refresh their Memories from Day to Day, till I have recovered them out of that desperate State of Vice and Folly, into which the Age is fallen. The Mind that lies fallow but a single Day, sprouts up in Follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous Culture. […] I would therefore in a very particular Manner recommend these my Speculations to all well-regulated Families, that set apart an Hour in every Morning for Tea and Bread and Butter; and would earnestly advise them for their Good to order this Paper to be punctually served up, and to be looked upon as a Part of the Tea Equipage.
This is the morality of someone trying to sell something. The Spectator purports to serve a universally appealing combination of ‘Morality’, ‘Civility’ and ‘Diversion’ – rather than the ‘Party’ and ‘Politics’ that divide its potential readership. The Spectator’s ironical self-fashioning as an innocuously educational and non-partisan publication astutely combines Addison and Steele’s underlying political concerns with a comically exaggerated portrait of non-partisanship. Neutral in all things, the Spectator character’s ‘exact Neutrality between the Whigs and the Tories’ is one manifestation of his refusal to participate in any sphere or activity: ‘I have acted in all the parts of my Life as a Looker-on, which is the Character I intend to preserve in this Paper’ (S no. 1, Addison). He opens his mouth so seldom that he is able to quantify his spoken words with remarkable precision, claiming that ‘during the Space of eight Years’ at university, ‘I scarce uttered the Quantity of an hundred Words; and indeed do not remember that I ever spoke three Sentences together in my whole Life’ (no. 1), and confessing that he ‘ha[s] indulged [his] Silence to such an Extravagance’ that friends have to deduce opinions from his facial expressions (S no. 4, Steele). By presenting the Spectator’s political neutrality not as an abstract virtue but as the comical peculiarity of an odd-mannered man, the early numbers of the Spectator are calculated to divert and flatter readers regardless of politics and religion.
First, the Spectator’s comic auto-characterisation promises the reader – who is presumably already inundated with sermons and conduct literature – a novel narrator whose ostentatiously ‘instructive’ satires on manners and politics will be continually lightened with comic irony. Second, the irony of the salesman’s pitch flatters the reader’s critical understanding of consumerism and the commercialisation of literature, thus selling the Spectator more persuasively to readers who know they are being sold to. Third, the deliberately comic characterisation of neutrality flatters the knowledge of the distrustful and politically astute reader who might well have discerned, behind the pretence of non-partisanship, what the magazine’s political project might be in the 1710s. The Whigs were out of favour with Queen Anne and had gone into opposition. Brian Cowan argues that the Spectator’s political neutrality was a pose, a strategy for a distinctively Whiggish social reform project aiming to reform and discipline practices of public sociability such as newspaper reading and political debate in coffeehouses.8 ‘The object of this reformation was not the perpetuation of a rational public sphere’, writes Cowan, but the ‘construct[ion of] a social world that was amenable to the survival of Whig politics during a time in which the future of Whiggery was unclear’.9
Part of the Spectator’s strategy to endear its project to a broader audience – to become a favourite with all parties – is that Addison and Steele’s pretence to non-partisanship is continuous with their comic auto-characterisation of it. The Spectator’s characters do, of course, refract various forms of knowledge about the readers’ world. But if we understand the Spectator’s humour merely as a pleasing cover for moral earnestness or political strategy, we risk overlooking the extent to which Addison and Steele, through comic characterisation, problematise their own claim to serve ‘Morality’ with ‘Wit’ and lower the value of doing so. The Spectator’s characters and auto-characterisation, I argue, make ‘Diversion’ a valuable good in itself. Imagining its papers as innocuous consumer objects, part of the tea service, the Spectator speculates a provisionally depoliticised ‘civil’ society where all ideas and ideals can be ‘characterised’ into eccentricities – where opinionated and public-minded citizens are continually diverted away from political concerns, and into good humour with each other. For the Spectator, comically peculiar characters are sport, not instruction – ‘Odd and uncommon Characters are the Game that I look for, and most delight in’ (no. 108, Addison) – and it is a social sport, with novel characters exchanged between friends. One fictitious ‘letter to the editor’ begs the Spectator, ‘Give me Leave to make you a Present of a Character not yet described in your Papers’ (no. 194, Steele); another letter begins by addressing him as ‘the greatest Sportsman, or, if you please, the Nimrod among this Species of Writers’ (no. 371, Addison).
The fictive originals of light literature thus use characterology for diversion, welcoming readers to a ‘great Field of Game’ (no. 131, Addison) where they can safely indulge their aggressive tendencies to sport with real people’s characters. There, readers might be free both from the authority of serious moral satire, and from the risks of libellous, politically motivated satires on real individuals – so long as the sportsmen manage to confine their fire to their intended imaginary targets.
For commercial imaginative literature including the novel, the Spectator suggested how fictive characters could create civilised (and civilising) diversions as a compelling alternative to divisive satire and gossip. To achieve this supposed aim, characters had to be ‘original’ in the sense of not being copied from real people in ways that would be recognisable to readers. Here, the reader is made responsible for fictionality: they must curb any tendency to recognise real people in imaginative works and they must cultivate respect for the author’s imagination. The reader must believe that ‘Odd and uncommon Characters’ like the Spectator’s (no. 108, Addison) can substantially originate in an author’s mind. In other words, they must believe that in a judgement on the work’s fictionality, the imagination and assemblage involved in character-writing are more significant than elements based on direct observation. Addison and Steele thus model character originality for their readers as well as for aspiring writers: they suggest that, to be safely diverted by innocently original and fictitious characters, readers must enter a compact with the writer. To accept characters’ fictionality, and to admire their originality, is to be a more sophisticated reader – unlike the literal-minded man in one of the Spectator’s anecdotes, who glosses the original characters of imaginative literature with his own pet hates:
A Man who has a good Nose at Innuendo, smells Treason and Sedition in the most innocent Words that can be put together, and never sees a Vice or Folly stigmatized, but finds out one or other of his Acquaintance pointed at by the Writer. I remember an empty pragmatical Fellow in the Country, who upon reading over the whole Duty of Man, had written the Names of several Persons in the Village at the Side of every Sin which is mentioned by that excellent Author; so that he had converted one of the best Books in the World into a Libel against the Squire, Church-wardens, Overseers of the Poor, and all the most considerable Persons in the Parish.
Readers, Addison suggests, can libel as badly as writers; and the Spectator makes a show of trusting its readers, for their intellectual sophistication, their discretion and – by association with their faith in the author’s originality – their powers of imagination.
Not being Romantics, Addison and Steele do not speak of ‘originality’, ‘imagination’ or ‘creativity’ in positive terms; rather, these faculties are implied in statements about the importance of abstraction, generalisation, qualification and avoidance in character-writing. The Spectator, for example, ‘must […] intreat every Particular Person, who does me the Honour to be a Reader of this Paper, never to think himself, or any one of his Friends or Enemies, aimed at in what is said: For I promise him, never to draw a faulty Character which does not fit at least a Thousand People’ (no. 34, Addison). The reader must be able to entertain the notion that a peculiar character is particular enough to belong to a real person, yet still have the status of an abstracted and generalised ‘it’:
When I meet with any vicious Character that is not generally known, in order to prevent its doing Mischief, I draw it at length, and set it up as a Scarecrow; by which means I do not only make an Example of the Person to whom it belongs, but give Warning to all Her Majesty’s Subjects, that they may not suffer by it.
Steele offers more detail on character-writing as an effortful editorial process of avoidance and addition – avoiding too-particular resemblances and adding details that deliberately frustrate character-person identification:
I believe my Reader would […] think the better of me, if he knew the Pains I am at in qualifying what I write after such a manner, that nothing may be interpreted as aimed at private Persons. For this Reason when I draw any faulty Character, I consider all those Persons to whom the Malice of the World may possibly apply it, and take care to dash it with such particular Circumstances as may prevent all such ill-natured Applications. If I write any Thing on a black Man, I run over in my Mind all the eminent Persons in the Nation who are of that Complection: When I place an imaginary Name at the Head of a Character, I examine every Syllable and Letter of it, that it may not bear any Resemblance to one that is real.
Here, the emphasis is not on character-writing as a ‘creative’ endeavour, but on the necessity of examining one’s ‘exemplary’ characters against an index of real ones.
It is not until the caricature talk of Romantic character criticism – developed in part through the critical reception of the Spectator’s characters – that characters’ ‘originality’ takes a positive form. James Edward Austen-Leigh’s memoir, for example, does not trouble to defend Austen’s characters by claiming that she ‘avoided’ caricaturing real people or deliberately ‘dashed’ characteristics with circumstances. Instead, he trusts readers to believe that Austen could actually originate characters, could ‘create’ them and ‘invest’ them with qualities:
She did not copy individuals, but invested her own creations with individuality of character. […] Her own relations never recognised any individual in her characters; and I can call to mind several of her acquaintance whose peculiarities were very tempting and easy to be caricatured of whom there are no traces in her pages. She herself, when questioned on the subject by a friend, expressed a dread of what she called such an ‘invasion of social proprieties.’ She said that she thought it fair to note peculiarities and weaknesses, but that it was her desire to create, not to reproduce; ‘besides,’ she added, ‘I am too proud of my gentlemen to admit that they were only Mr. A. or Colonel B.’10
While Austen’s remark about her own writing has a note of self-deprecation, it is clear that the idea of ‘originality’ in character-writing has gained ground, such that it makes sense to speak in proprietary terms of ‘my gentlemen’, and that originality eclipses ‘observation’ as a talent beneficial to characterisation technique. Whereas Addison and Steele speak of abstract characters potentially ‘belonging’ to real people (S no. 205), Romantic character criticism speaks of imaginary characters belonging securely to authors – and then to readers.
This is not to say that Augustan character-writers did not find ways of expressing pride in their ‘originality’. I suggest that caricature talk’s emphasis on the character-writer’s creative energy is latent in early eighteenth-century literature, in moments when imaginative comic writers – Swift, Hogarth and Fielding as well as Addison and Steele – auto-characterise their satirical personae as proud of their moral rectitude. Rather than pride himself on his originality, Addison’s characterologist finds self-regard in being above personal satire: ‘I know very well the Value which every Man sets upon his Reputation, and how painful it is to be exposed to the Mirth and Derision of the Publick, and should therefore scorn to divert my Reader, at the Expence of any private Man’ (no. 262). Sociability and civility, not queen and country, are at stake in these characterisations. In Addison’s comic anecdote about The Whole Duty of Man, the innuendo-sniffer’s marginalia is discovered and causes uproar in his village, but there is no material disturbance to the wider political or religious order. The ‘Libel’ only disrupts the peace of sociability, and lowers the man’s value as a candidate for social acquaintance.
But while the stakes are relatively low, Augustan writers often describe the risks in strong language more suited to seditious libel than the comic characterisation of private individuals. Addison’s mock-heroic language makes a joke of the Spectator’s strenuous insistence on the difference between ‘satire’ and ‘libel’, transmuting the author’s pride in their characters’ originality into the character’s excessive pride in his scrupulousness. For example, the Spectator’s denunciation of libellous satires and gossip, while expressed in dramatic imagery and grandiose language, boils down to some advice on how to be a good friend and not hurt people’s feelings, even when they pretend to be unaffected by gossip:
There is nothing that more betrays a base, ungenerous Spirit, than the giving of secret Stabs to a Man’s Reputation. Lampoons and Satyrs, that are written with Wit and Spirit, are like poison’d Darts, which not only inflict a Wound, but make it incurable. For this Reason I am very much troubled when I see the Talents of Humour and Ridicule in the Possession of an ill-natured Man. There cannot be a greater Gratification to a barbarous and inhuman Wit, than to stir up Sorrow in the Heart of a private Person, to raise Uneasiness among near Relations, and to expose whole Families to Derision, at the same time that he remains unseen and undiscovered. If, besides, a Man is vicious into the bargain, he is one of the most mischievious Creatures that can enter into a Civil Society. […] It is impossible to enumerate the Evils which arise from these Arrows that fly in the dark. […] For my part, I would never trust a Man that I thought was capable of giving these secret Wounds, and cannot but think that he would hurt the Person, whose Reputation he thus assaults, in his Body or in his Fortune, could he do it with the same Security.
And so on. Addison putatively aims this advice at publishing writers, the satirists most capable of concealing themselves from their victims – but it is also a comically overwritten and characteristic speech advertising the Spectator’s own merits as an inoffensive and imaginative author. If the Spectator claims to be having ‘Serious Thoughts’ about the innumerable evils of libellous mockery, Addison is not presenting them seriously.
Readers might have recalled the bombastic speech in Thomas Randolph’s play The Muse’s Looking Glass (1706), where the demonic figure of ‘Satyre’ exults over his victims in a rapid mixing of metaphors – freezing, cutting, cooking, whipping, scarring, infecting and ulcerating:
While numerous texts of the ‘Augustan’ literary era condemn libellous intentions as a perversion of satire, they generally do not use the kind of overblown language and cumulative style that Randolph and Addison put in the mouths of their self-important characters. In cooler terms, writers deplore ‘Invectives’, ‘Slander’ and the ‘real Names [that] turn Satyr to abuse’, and they approve satire ‘pointed at the Vice more than at the Man’, without referring to poisoned arrows or physical assaults.12 Contrastingly, professionals who, like the ‘Spectator’ character, want to foreground their own inventive talents, emphasise the supposed high-mindedness of their own satire with more sensational and more particular images like those used by Randolph’s Satyre. Captioning his painting Midnight Modern Conversation in 1732, Hogarth advises his audience ‘not to find one meant resemblance there / We lash the vices but the persons spare’. Fielding’s narrator, digressing from the plot in Joseph Andrews (1742), describes the satirist as someone who corrects faults in private, ‘like a parent’, the libeller as someone who punishes them in public, ‘like an executioner’.13 These parallels are reworked from a passage in the Tatler where Steele’s ‘Isaac Bickerstaff’ persona laments how the concepts of satire and libel are ‘promiscuously joined together in the Notions of the Vulgar’, whereas actually ‘the Satyrist and the Libeller differ as much as the Magistrate and the Murderer’ (T no. 92). Swift, in his obituary for himself, celebrates the accuracy of his aim as a satirist in jaunty rhyming couplets: ‘malice never was his aim; / He lash’d the vice, but spared the name; / No individual could resent, / Where thousands equally were meant’.14
Are Hogarth, Swift and Fielding genuinely concerned that their comical characterisations might be taken for personal satires? Are they genuinely claiming that they create imaginary characters primarily so that their works can have more universal effect on society’s morals? I read these Augustan denunciations of libel and ad hominem argument, with their mock-heroic imagery of lashing and stabbing and poisoning, as ironic auto-characterisations after Addison and Steele’s ‘Spectator’ and ‘Bickerstaff’ characters. They celebrate the author’s genius for original characterisation not with earnest condemnations of libel, but by participating in a comic tradition of hyperbolising the social evils of ‘unoriginal’ characters.
The caricature talk of Romantic character criticism, while writers still insist on the innocent originality of their characters, conventionally suggests that a peculiar and amusing character is so well-characterised that it must be a description of a real individual. In this permutation of the language-game of ‘character talk’, to use Moi’s term, readers pay tribute to authors’ talents for characterisation by affecting to believe that the character is not original. Sometimes a critic recounts how other readers have identified the character with a real person, the actual ‘original’ on whom the character might be based. In his essay on Austen’s novels for the Quarterly Review, for example, Scott tells how ‘[a] friend of ours, whom [Austen] never saw or heard of, was at once recognized by his own family as the original of Mr. Bennet, and we do not know if he has yet got rid of the nickname’.15
Often for readers, however, the ‘originals’ of characters are ideal beings, merely imagined and ‘felt’ to pre-exist the author’s work, as in Francis Jeffrey’s review of Waverley. A cursory reading of the essay in the Edinburgh Review might suggest that Jeffrey is praising Scott for the opposite of originality in his depictions of the lower classes: after all, he notes ‘the extraordinary fidelity […] with which all the inferior agents in the story are represented’ (the phrase ‘inferior agents’ suggesting their subordinacy in narrative as well as their socio-economic status). However, Jeffrey is also bent on persuading the reader that they can feel, subjectively, that this subset of Scott’s characters are faithful representations without actually being familiar with the real originals that are represented:
The way in which [manners and characters] are here represented must satisfy every reader, we think, by an inward tact and conviction, that the delineation has been made from actual experience and observation.16
‘Inner tact’ suggests a figurative application of tact’s original meaning in English – the sense of touch, via French from Latin tangere, ‘to touch’ – signifying a perceptive faculty that might be likened to the sense of touch. Scott’s peculiar characters are tangible to the reader’s mind because of ‘the way in which they are here represented’, independently of the sources that would verify their factual reality. The detailed texture of Scott’s writing, his formal means of characterising – as Jeffrey puts it, his ‘way’ – creates the phenomena that satisfy the reader’s ‘tact’ for what is real. In fact, there do exist ‘records and vestiges of the more extraordinary parts of the representation’, which will, Jeffrey notes, ‘satisfy all who have the means of consulting them, as to the perfect accuracy of the picture’ – but then, Jeffrey reaffirms his conviction that readers need no extra-textual verification to be impressed by Scott’s characters’ accuracy:
No one who has not lived extensively among the lower orders of all descriptions, and made himself familiar with their various tempers and dialects, can perceive the full merit of those rapid and characteristic sketches; but it requires only a general knowledge of human nature to feel that they must be faithful copies from known originals.17
‘Tactful’ reading means the subjective experience of a virtual world with strong characters who seem real not because the reader knows their originals, but because the author’s talents convince the reader that the characters are known to the author. In some cases, the reader takes satisfaction in imagining that their personal acquaintance might be the original of the fictional character – but believing that this is not actually the case.
Either way, the fictional character’s accuracy is virtual. In response to realist character-writing like Scott’s, fiction-readers develop a faculty of ‘inner tact’ such that characters’ fidelity to the real can be cerebrally ‘touched’ and ‘felt’ without being known. The character-writer’s talent for originality consists not in the invention of characters never seen before, but in the creation of characters that seem to have ‘originals’. Romantic character talk does not use original to designate artistic originality in the sense of ‘unconventional’ or ‘unprecedented’; typically, original is used only to mean the ideal ‘real people’ to which fictional characters might refer, as in ‘the original of Mr. Bennet’. Nevertheless, by recognising the ideality of those originals, Romantic character talk acknowledges the author’s power to originate characters through the formal realist ‘way’ they write, and supposes the existence of some faculty in readers that responds to it. While Romantic readers do not talk explicitly about character-writers being ‘original’, they do think that realist character-writers project a feeling about originality. ‘Inward tact and conviction’ about characters, not ‘actual experience and observation’, mediate for readers between realism and the real; or, to put it another way, this realism is a feeling about characters.
My analysis here falls in with a critical tradition of reading the Spectator and the Tatler as proto-novelistic, seeing Addison and Steele’s characterisations as a large factor in the periodicals’ success as distinctively entertaining reading material, and recognising the ways in which they deploy and develop Jean de la Bruyère’s departures from the established conventions of the Theophrastan character. As Schön summarises, this criticism emphasises the differences between Theophrastan ‘types’ and novelistic ‘individuals’, arguing that the Spectator and its imitators provided ‘examples in techniques which were later taken over as a valuable heritage by the newly emerging novel’.18 I am interested in what the Spectator’s character-writing techniques seemingly do to replace an instructive taxonomy of moral character types with a bewildered field of characters ‘not yet described’ and ‘not generally known’,19 seeming to trust (reasonably) that their readers would already possess knowledge of the themes and categories that had been used in the modern English ‘character sketch’ genre for around a hundred years, as well as being known from translations of Theophrastus and other examples from antiquity.20
I am also interested in how the Spectator arguably cultivates a desire for fictive ‘reality’ more generally – a realist conspiracy of setting, narrative, scenario and character – by experimenting with particularity, variety and haphazardness through the comic non-protagonist characters that comprise the Spectator’s club throughout the periodical, as well as through the more briefly described (or auto-characterised) characters who appear only once in scenarios and ‘letters to the editor’.
The rise of the English-language realist novel in eighteenth-century Britain has been associated with the idea that ‘particularities’ enhance literary works intended to divert readers because details and distinctiveness make the fiction’s virtual reality more experiential and empirically credible. As Watt points out, the early British realists experimented with quotidian specificity in narrative and character decades before ‘particularity’ became established in critical discourse: ‘For the critical tradition in the early eighteenth century was still governed by the strong classical preference for the general and universal: the proper object of literature remained quod semper quod ubique ab omnibus creditum est.’21 Critics in the second half of the eighteenth century got hold of the first principle of British empiricism, that human knowledge derives from sense perception. In the discourse on the senses that introduces Elements of Criticism (1762), Lord Kames argues that the fine arts are part of a divine plan to decorporealise the human sensory experience of pleasure that offers mental diversion – as well as physical relief – from work:
Our first perceptions are of external objects, and our first attachments are to them. Organic pleasures take the lead. But the mind, gradually ripening, relisheth more and more the pleasures of the eye and the ear; which approach the purely mental, without exhausting the spirits; and exceed the purely sensual, without danger of satiety. The pleasures of the eye and ear have accordingly a natural aptitude to attract us from the immoderate gratification of sensual appetite. For the mind, once accustomed to enjoy a variety of external objects [i.e. pleasure in the arts] without being conscious of the organic impression [as with pleasure in sex and eating], is prepared for enjoying internal objects where there cannot be an organic impression [i.e. pleasure in religious devotion]. Thus the author of nature, by qualifying the human mind for a succession of enjoyments from the lowest to the highest, leads it by gentle steps from the most groveling corporeal pleasures, for which solely it is fitted in the beginning of life, to those refined and sublime pleasures which are suited to its maturity.22
Kames’s notion of pleasure in the arts as an intermediate step between the organic satisfaction of the body and the religious exaltation of the mind – both sensory and cerebral – anticipates Jeffrey’s idea of an ‘inner tact’ that rewards character-reading. Since the perception involved in fiction-reading has graduated from the sensory perception of material objects, readers will be more satisfied by the particular than the abstract. As Kames puts it, ‘abstract or general terms have no good effect in any composition for amusement; because it is only of particular objects that images can be formed’.23 Whereas generalities present readers with intellectual exercise, particularities produce pseudo-sensory effects in the mind of the reader, allowing them to experience a virtual reality. Kames sees this human faculty as a gift from God, ‘not governed by unavoidable necessity’ but ‘offer[ed …] to us, in order to advance our happiness’.24
(Kames recognises that it might usually be ‘the opulent [members of society], who have leisure to improve their minds and their feelings’ with the pseudo-sensory pleasures of the fine arts – unsurprisingly, given his moment in history. From my own viewpoint in a different historical moment, it is over a series of economic shifts and systems – industrial revolution, de-industrialisation, neoliberalism – that the realisms available from books, film and television have become increasingly important as sources of pseudo-sensory enjoyment or ‘happiness’ for many of us non-opulents. ‘True crime’, ‘reality TV’, ‘costume drama’: as suggested by their genre monikers, the postmodern realisms co-constructed for narrative forms by media, media journalism and social media are highly self-reflexive. They extensively use techniques that encourage listeners, viewers and readers to develop scepticism about the ‘reality’ of narrative entertainment in order to double their pleasure in realism: both the pseudo-sensory pleasure of immersion in a virtual reality, and the humour that arises from our perception of incongruities and artifices. This faculty destabilises realism to discover the ‘real’ dramas behind it: complex narratives of strategic collaboration and rivalry on a petty scale among workers in the hierarchies of the media industry – producers, directors, managers, writers, researchers, performers, technicians, caterers – and beyond that, a multinational epic of production and distribution companies, studios and state censors.)
In the Romantic period, the essential link between realism and pseudo-sensory experience was often expressed in discussions about non-protagonist characters – recall Coleridge’s affection for Fielding’s ‘characters of postilions, landlords, landladies, waiters’ where ‘nothing can be more true, more happy or more humorous’25 – though it has often been implicit or repressed in modern scholarship’s accounts of the realist novel, as in Watt’s observation that formal realism obliges itself ‘to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as to the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms’ (32). Is formal realism’s ‘satisfaction’ always a feeling? Realism satisfies the reader by convincing them of a virtual reality that provides them with pseudo-sensory impressions of objects understood to be like external ‘referents’ – or, in Romantic caricature talk, ‘originals’.
The Spectator tends to assume a pleasure-driven taste not only for particularity, novelty and variety but also for the ways in which these elements ironically undermine the narrator’s moral authority and the text’s instructiveness. Addison explicitly acknowledges the reader’s innate curiosity about ‘Particulars’ in the first number of the Spectator, where the titular character introduces himself. The kind of comic auto-characterising narration pioneered by Addison and Steele, innovating on Bruyère’s first-person narration of character sketches, and exemplified in the Romantic novel by Scott’s pseudo-epigraphic ‘editors’, adds to the reader’s pleasure with an additional layer of realism:
I have observed, that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure’till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right Understanding of an Author. To gratify this Curiosity, which is so natural to a Reader, I design this Paper, and my next, as Prefatory Discourses to my following Writings, and shall give some Account in them of the several persons that are engaged in this Work.
After the Spectator’s account of himself as an extravagantly, unaccountably silent and neutral gentleman who approaches life as a spectator sport, he claims to withhold deliberately the details that would make his identity known, openly playing to the reader’s hunger for particulars: ‘I keep my Complexion and Dress, as very great Secrets; tho’ it is not impossible, but I may make Discoveries of both in the Progress of the Work I have undertaken’. The particulars that imply an original are not, in the Spectator, adjuncts to the illustration of a vice or a failure of manners; rather, the Spectator’s eccentricity is depicted as an innocuous, bountiful source of amusement. The reader is also expected to be amused by apparent contradictions in the Spectator’s character – silent yet sociable, he must ‘beg People’s Pardon for an odd Humour I am guilty of, […] which is saluting any Person whom I like, whether I know him or not’ (no. 454, Steele). When it comes to the ‘sketched’ quasi-Theophrastan characters who appear only once in the Spectator, their particulars and peculiarities might be understood to serve the author’s moral lessons by making the scenarios more engaging.
However, the Spectator continually undermines the moral import of its ‘character sketches’, first by treating the ill effects of characters’ behaviour with hyperbole, second by calling the sketched character’s supposed guilt into question, and third by emphasising the appeal of variety and novelty in the presentation of characters. In no. 194, for example, Steele prefaces two ‘letters to the editor’ with a moralising preface by the Spectator, who laments the ‘ten thousand Tortures’ experienced by individuals who perceive that their companions do not make enough effort to reciprocate their affections. The first letter, from a jealous husband, complains of a wife who does not make any pro-active effort to defend the innocence of her conduct – despite being convinced of her actual innocence:
I have a Wife, of whose Virtue I am not in the least doubtful; yet I cannot be satisfied that she loves me, which gives me as great Uneasiness as being faulty the other Way would do. […] If my Wife does the most ordinary thing, as visiting her Sister, or taking the Air with her Mother, it is always carried with the Air of a Secret: Then she will sometimes tell a thing of no Consequence, as if it was only Want of memory made her conceal it before; and this only to dally with my Anxiety.
The Spectator gives the wife the epithet of ‘Corinna’, a hyperbolic comparison with Ovid’s Amores that calls into question the letter-writer’s character as a faithful, innocent husband. The poet’s persona in the Amores is a promiscuous character who suffers from sexual impotence and is having an affair with Corinna, a married woman, whom he coaches to flirt secretly with him while her husband is present. The Amores’s wounded lover, despicable and self-absorbed, is certainly no less fickle than the object of his affection. In one of the poems, he grabs Corinna by the hair, hits her and scratches her face; in another, he wishes that Corinna’s husband would guard her more closely, since accessibility makes her less attractive to him; in another, he elegises Corinna’s parrot, referencing Catullus’s verses on a pet sparrow and implying his envy of the beloved pet. By framing the husband’s letter with a reference to Ovid’s anxieties about Corinna, who has sex with other lovers and risks her life by terminating a pregnancy, Steele directs the reader to see the letter-writer as pathetically paranoid, eccentrically anxious about his wife merely leaving the house and not telling him immediately about everything.
No. 194’s second letter is self-conscious of its novelty and variety, offering ‘a Present of a Character not yet described in your Papers, which is that of a Man who treats his Friend with the same odd Variety which a Fantastical Female Tyrant practises towards her lover’. In the terminology of the 2000s, his friend is ‘flaky’: but that habit of ‘ghosting’ friends, while not consistent with the letter-writer’s ideal of friendship, cannot be attributed to any conscious malice or selfishness. In fact, the letter-writer connects his friend’s avoidant behaviour with his mood instability, which might be seasonal: transcribing ‘some short Minutes I have taken of him in my Almanack since last Spring’, the letter-writer points out that his friend’s humour seems to be ‘as various as the Weather’. It is hinted that the friend might be flaky because he trusts that the letter-writer will continue to love him despite his habit of avoiding his friends when it pleases his mood: ‘The Rogue I know loves me, yet takes Advantage of my Fondness for him to use me as he pleases.’ If the friend could be more considerate of the letter-writer, the letter-writer could also learn to take his friend’s seasonality less personally. Again, the Spectator’s hyperbolic description of its impact – ‘the Source of utmost Unhappiness’ – comically exaggerates the irritation of a letter-writer who is fortunate to enjoy, if only for part of the year, the company of ‘the best Friend’ and ‘the sprightliest best-humoured Fellow in the World’. Addison and Steele’s frequent use of the first-person ‘letter to the editor’, comically undermining the writer’s reliability as a reporter of other characters, represents one of the Spectator’s biggest departures from the conventional didacticism of Theophrastan character-writing, and further comedises the ‘character sketch’ genre by shedding the authority of Bruyère’s depersonalised I-narrator.
The Spectator’s haphazard accumulation of various characteristics and circumstances, dashed together and caught up in ironic comparisons, squashes the supposed ‘moral’ into a pretext, an occasion for diverting readers with characters. When a number of the Spectator begins with the moral, as in no. 194 with its ‘ten thousand Tortures’ and allusion to the Amores, it does not stabilise that moral into an authoritative pre-emption of the reader’s perusal of the characters. Amid the irony of the Spectator’s disapproval, and the varied particulars of the anecdotes, it becomes untenable that each character is ‘an anthropomorphised social-moral theme, such as thrift or loquaciousness’ or embodies a single ‘social, moral, or psychological category’, as Schön and Smeed respectively describe the Theophrastan character.26 In no. 194, various elements cast serious doubt on the characters’ categorisation into a type such as ‘the Mercurial Person’, a phrase used by the second letter-writer to mean changeable or volatile, by association with the properties of ‘quicksilver’ (mercury). But in fact, both characters are predictable in their behaviour, since the wife is consistently unconcerned with her husband’s anxiety to know everything she is doing and thinking, while the friend changes according to the seasons. With the second letter, Steele even makes a covert pun on the word ‘mercurial’: keeping an eye on ‘the Glass’ – which might be a barometer containing mercury – the letter-writer recognises that it might be British weather, not his friend, that is fickle. In addition to these methods of frustrating a reader’s efforts to make typological categorisations, the structure of the characterisations in the Spectator, as in the Caractères, does not fall in with the Theophrastan convention of beginning with formulae such as ‘A Fickle Woman is the sort of woman who’. For example, the Spectator does not tell us how to classify William Honeycomb (S no. 2, Steele), in contrast with the London Magazine’s 1764 Bruyère-esque portrait of ‘Philander’, who is ‘what is called the ladies’ man’.27 The reader is not instructed but rather trusted to recognise Honeycomb as a ‘beau’ or ‘gallant’. To conclude the sketch, rather than to begin it, the Spectator twists the Theophrastan formula into a polite phrase that conceals more than reveals character: ‘I find there is not one of the Company but myself, who rarely speak at all, but speaks of him as that Sort of Man, who is usually called a well-bred fine Gentlemen [sic].’
More important than putting Honeycomb’s singular behaviour in a social, moral, or psychological category, is emphasising his value to the club’s variety. The ‘gallant Will. Honeycomb’ is included so ‘that our Society may not appear a Set of Humourists unacquainted with the Gallantries and Pleasures of the Age’, having a ‘Way of Talking [that] very much enlivens the Conversation among us of a sedate Turn’. If anything, the reader is encouraged to include gallants in their society, as amusing companions and perhaps as a means of enjoying the forthright expression of thoughts that more scrupulously polite men would leave unsaid. To illustrate this point: in no. 4, Steele includes a one-sided ‘dialogue’ between Honeycomb and the Spectator at the opera, where the Spectator quietly ogles the women sitting near them, and Honeycomb responds aloud to his silent friend’s ‘great Approbation’. No. 454 finds the Spectator chasing a young woman (whom he considers a flirt) through the streets, aided by their coachmen’s hand signals, in a scene described with realist precision comparable to Defoe’s in Moll Flanders. When the coachmen deliberately ‘meet, jostle, and threaten each other for Way, […] entangled at the End of Newport-Street and Long-Acre’, the lady opens her window to look out, ‘when she sees the Man she would avoid’. Switching in and out of the present tense, the Spectator describes how ‘the Tackle of the Coach-Window is so bad she cannot draw it up again’ – giving him the opportunity to watch her bumping along, ‘the laced Shoe of her left Foot, with a careless Gesture, just appearing on the opposite Cushion, held her both firm, and in a proper Attitude to receive the next Jolt’. After this game of ‘Blindman’s Buff’, the Spectator admires ‘agreeable Females’ with ‘so many pretty Hands busie in the Foldings of Ribbands’ and ‘the utmost Eagerness of agreeable Faces in the sale of Patches, Pins, and Wires’ – implicating him in Honeycomb’s knowledge of fashionable clothing as well as his attention to women.
Thus, within a single number of the Spectator, a variety of characters (Honeycomb and the Spectator in no. 4; the wife, the husband and the friends in no. 194) can be played off against each other – not to make instructive contrasts between vice and virtue, between bad and good manners, but to immerse the reader in a virtual social reality where characters’ various ‘Particulars’ prevent them from being assertively classified by a social-moral theme, as the Spectator’s ‘dashing’ of characteristics and circumstances prevents them from being identified as portraits of real individuals. Addison and Steele’s joint ownership of the Spectator and the other club members, and the periodical nature of the composition, should probably be considered as important circumstantial factors in the Spectator’s particular facility for ‘dashing’ characters with a variety of anecdotes and details. The result is a formal realism of strong characters defined by originality, particularity, variety and the seemingly haphazard entanglement of characteristics such that characters do not separately represent abstract categories.
Critical tradition has often subsumed the Spectator’s comic characterisations under the moral essay genre, seeing them as accessories to the conveyance of social, moral and psychological knowledge. Focusing on the Spectator’s precedents for Romantic caricature talk, I have argued that the periodical’s character-writing techniques depart from the conventions of moral characterology, showing how it emphasises diverting characters over instructive ones, assuming that the reader already possesses the knowledge of morals and manners that is required to appreciate Addison’s and Steele’s irony. The ‘character sketch’ genre had thrived in British literary culture throughout the seventeenth century, with sketches ‘found gathered together in collections (a volume containing anything from eight to eighty [characters]), singly in pamphlet form, or scattered in the periodicals’;28 and interest in the genre was then revitalised by English translations of Jean de la Bruyère’s controversial Caractères (1688). With each new edition of Caractères, readers had added to their manuscript ‘keys’ listing the real people that Caractères supposedly portrayed as quasi-Theophrastan characters – and Bruyères objected. Addison and Steele, and the British comic novelists after them, also insisted on the possibility of ‘original’ characters, who were carefully constructed to seem as particular as real people without having individual referents. Unseating at every turn its narrator’s claim to write morally purposeful satire that aims to correct the reader and society at large, the Spectator offers readers a humorously ambiguous diversion where ‘Morality’ is always falling down on ‘Wit’.
Critics and editors have tried to distinguish the Spectator’s wit from its wisdom, diagramming the former as a container for the latter, even to the extent of literally separating the two in an attempt to frame the Spectator as a set of instructive moral essays. In the late 1820s, the Rev. E. Berens split his selected edition of the Spectator over two volumes, one containing moral wisdom suited to the ignorant, the other containing wit intended for those already wise and well mannered. The first of these volumes, ‘made with a view to readers of every description, and every rank in life’ and omitting the Greek and Latin mottos, was honoured with a place on ‘the Supplemental Catalogue of the Society of Promoting Christian Knowledge for the use of Parochial Libraries’. It is Berens’s Second Selection (1828), a volume ‘of a less serious character’ and ‘intended for readers whose literary education has been more advanced, and who have more leisure for light reading’,29 which includes the twelve numbers featuring anecdotes about the Spectator’s most popular character, ‘Sir Roger de Coverley’. Although aspects of Addison’s and Steele’s writing could be read unironically and classified as ‘moral essays’, the complete Spectator could not be shoehorned into that category: its characters especially made it prone to classification as ‘light reading’.
The Spectator and the Tatler emerged as precursors to the tradition of the novel luxuriant with comic characters – Fielding, Smollett, Burney, Edgeworth, Austen, Scott, Dickens – and its strong characters, particularly Sir Roger, as enduring symbols of the ‘originality’ required for divertingly realist characterisation.
Loving Sir Roger de Coverley
One of the first comic non-protagonist characters in English-language literature to be taken seriously by character criticism, ‘Sir Roger de Coverley’ was a node around which Romantic caricature talk took shape. As well as appearing in professional writing about literature, Sir Roger is a subject of readers’ character talk when he is casually summoned as a virtual human presence readily recollected in humorous scenarios. A good example is Robert Burns’s reference to Sir Roger’s deathbed scene in a letter to the Edinburgh bookseller Peter Hill, where he uses Sir Roger for a comic reflection on his own whimsical behaviour: ‘[A]s Sir Roger de Coverley, because it happened to be a cold day in which he made his will, ordered his servants great-coats for mourning, so, because I have been this week plagued with an indigestion, I have sent you by the carrier a fine old ewe-milk cheese.’30 This casual reference to a particular number of the Spectator suggests, I think, that Sir Roger could have featured, briefly and frequently, in oral conversations throughout the eighteenth century, for as long as speakers could assume that their interlocutors would have read the Spectator or at least a selection of Sir Roger’s appearances. A passing reference to Sir Roger, a famously sociable and benevolent character, could powerfully signify friendship, generosity and pathos as well as providing humour.
Here I focus on how appreciations of Sir Roger practised the terms of Romantic caricature talk about strong characters in the professional literary criticism of the late eighteenth century and the Romantic period. I analyse a selection of passages about Sir Roger from essays on Steele and Addison, published between the late 1770s and the early 1820s, when perhaps professional readers’ interest in formal arguments about the character is waning: excerpts from Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779), James Beattie’s Papers of Joseph Addison (1790), Nathan Drake’s Essays Biographical, Critical and Historical (1805), Alexander Chalmers’s The British Essayists (1808) and Lionel Thomas Berguer’s British Essayists (1823).31 In these passages – as well as the ideals for comic non-protagonists discussed in the first part of this chapter (diversion, originality, realism) – there are several elements distinctive of Romantic-period caricature talk. First, the critics explicitly link the character’s ‘originality’ to the combinational power of the creative mind; and second, critics use the anti-caricature vocabulary also discussed in Chapters 2 and 4 of this book. Third, caricature talk about Sir Roger, like the critical genre of the character appreciation, takes up certain stylistic and rhetorical devices, such as the use of first-person plural pronouns and superlative constructions. Fourth, ‘Sir Roger’ evokes the idea of literary favouritism and of writers, as well as readers, loving fictitious characters in parasocial and/or proprietary ways.
Whereas in early eighteenth-century literature the link between the comic character’s constructed ‘originality’ and the character-writer’s imaginative ‘originality’ is only implied, Romantic caricature talk about strong and favourite characters praises Addison and Steele for a creative mental faculty that seems to originate the very characters that strike the reader with extra-textual ‘originality’. In Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, for example, Addison ‘copies life with so much fidelity, that he can be hardly said to invent; yet his exhibitions have an air so much original, that it is difficult to suppose them not merely the product of imagination’.32 (Here, Johnson uses the word ‘merely’ not as a pejorative, but in the sense of ‘purely’ or ‘entirely’.)
Other critics followed Johnson in crediting Steele, as well as Addison, with the ability to ‘originate’ characters: the eight-volume edition of The Spectator printed in 1788 for Payne, Rivington, Davis, Longman, Dodsley et al. agrees that ‘it seems most probable that the character of Sir Roger de Coverley originated in Stelee’s [sic] fertile imagination, as that of Bickerstaff likewise did’.33 After criticism misattributed no. 2 of the Spectator to Addison, there remained controversy over whether Addison or Steele was most responsible for Sir Roger, and critics differed on whether Steele should be given more credit for his ‘outline’ than Addison for his ‘extension’ and ‘improvement’ of the character, in Chalmers’s words.34 Summarising the decades of debate about Addison’s and Steele’s different contributions to Sir Roger, Berguer’s commentary comes down on the side of inventiveness and of Steele’s ‘original draft’:
For the first outline, or skeleton of this character, we are indebted certainly to Steele; but Addison, after availing himself of this elementary suggestion, departs materially from the original draft, as he brings out his picture into relief. This has occasioned many critics to charge the character with inconsistency; and without question the Sir Roger de Coverley of Steele is a very altered personage in the hands of Addison. Let it, however, be always remembered, that we are primarily indebted to Steele for Sir Roger de Coverley, even as we have him: Addison finished, but Steele invented him.35
Nathan Drake, too, credits Steele with the invention of Sir Roger, using the phrase ‘original character’ in the sense of a character that gives an impression of authorial originality, and which requires serious effort from collaborators to ‘enter […] with perfect accuracy into the conception and keeping of a character so original as that of Sir Roger de Coverley’.36
For Drake, Steele’s originality in character-writing creates a strong impression of ‘creative energy’ seemingly at odds with the convincing naturalness of characters’ features and manners. Steele’s comic characters in the Spectator, the Tatler and the Guardian are ‘original’ yet typical, natural yet still ‘original’:
Of the oriental tale, apologue, or fable, […] I much wish that Sir Richard had afforded us more numerous examples. […] If in the effusions of pure imagination Sir Richard seldom indulged, he has amply compensated for the omission by the invention and originality he has exhibited in the conception and conduct of many of the various characters which enliven his productions. [… His characters] are drawn and finished in a manner which not only indicates a perfect insight into the passions and feelings of the human frame, but demonstrates likewise the possession of that creative energy which, from the numerous shades and gradations of manner, can select and associate such features as shall designate a character altogether original, though founded on the usual acknowledged motives and actions of mankind; the resemblance, in fact, is true to the species, though not to any peculiar individual. This faculty of forming natural, consistent, yet original character, so essential to the dramatic writer whether in poetry or prose, so rarely attainable, and so valuable when attained, Steele most assuredly possessed in a very considerable degree.37
Original character-writing, Drake supposes, is a process of combining and selecting from the writer’s knowledge of human life, both interior and social. Like other critics, Drake contradicts the rumour that the Spectator’s club members were actually based on real ‘originals’: ‘It has been supposed, though upon no firm foundation, that the personages here enumerated were intended as copies of existing characters; that Sir Roger was drawn for Sir John Packington of Worcestershire, a Tory not deficient in good sense, but abounding in whimsical peculiarities. […] These are, however, mere conjectures, and therefore claim but little credit.’38 Authorial originality combines existing materials with such novelty – contrast, irony, complexity – that the reader receives an impression of ‘creative energy’ capable of actually ‘originating’ something, rather than only copying it.
In praising both Sir Roger’s ‘originality’ and the authorial originality of his creators, Romantic character talk fends off potential arguments that Addison’s and Steele’s comic characters might be unnatural or exaggerated, using the vocabulary of the anti-caricature rhetoric discussed in Chapter 2. Critics emphasise the ‘delicacy’, ‘fidelity’ and ‘modesty’ of Addison’s character-writing – concepts that become feminised in the critical reception of Austen’s characters, as I explore in Chapter 4. Johnson writes that Addison ‘formed a very delicate and discriminated idea’ of Sir Roger, and that he ‘never outsteps the modesty of nature’; his characters ‘neither divert by distortion, or amaze by aggravation’.39 Berguer calls Sir Roger ‘one of the most exquisite pieces of comic painting which English literature possesses’.40 Beattie observes that the characterisation stops short of being ‘humorous in that degree of extravagance, which Addison always avoided’, and contrasts the subtle characterisation of ‘Sir Roger’ with the exaggerations of caricature drawing and comic theatrics:
Many writers seem to think that humour consists in violent and preternatural exaggeration; as there are no doubt many frequenters of the theatre, who find no want of comic powers in the actor who has a sufficient variety of wry faces and antic gestures; and many admirers of farce and fun, with whom bombast and big words would pass for exquisite ridicule. But wry faces are made with little effort, caricatura may be sketched by a very unskilful [sic] hand, and he who has no command of natural expression may easily put together gigantic figures and rumbling syllables.41
While exaggerated ‘caricatures’ can make an immediate impact by playing to popular taste, they can never be lovable: only ‘naturally’ comic characters can inspire lasting affection, never behaving so peculiarly that the reader cannot imagine disliking their company, were they real people. ‘Sir Roger has peculiarities; that was necessary to make him a comic character; but’, Beattie argues, ‘they are all amiable, and tend to good: and there is not one of them that would give offence, or raise contempt or concern; in any rational society. At Sir Roger we never laugh, though we generally smile; but it is a smile, always of affection, and frequently of esteem’.42
In this strain of anti-caricature rhetoric, avoiding caricature makes strong characters good company. Austen asks that her readers be able to enjoy, as her protagonists do, the society of peculiar yet essentially ‘good’ characters: Elizabeth and Mr Bennet are quietly and tolerantly amused by Mr Collins for several hours, and Emma’s friends are shocked when she mocks Miss Bates to her face. Caricature talk thus imagines the reader developing parasociality with comic non-protagonist characters, a relationship comprising attentiveness, patience and affection.
While Romantic caricature talk about the Spectator, dominated by anti-caricature rhetoric, is distinct from the critical genre of the character appreciation as described by Lynch – ‘excessive with respect to its subject matter’, with an ‘over-the-top effect and purple prose’43 – there are some points of similarity with ‘character appreciation’ in caricature talk’s rhetoric and style. Anti-caricature rhetoric uses superlative constructions to praise character and writer: Johnson writes that ‘[a]s a describer of life and manners, [Addison] must be allowed to stand perhaps the first of the first rank’; and Beattie thinks that ‘No man on earth affects grandeur less, or thinks less of it, than Sir Roger; and no man is less solitary.’44 Critics pretend that their opinions are controversial, using constructions like ‘I beg leave to observe’, ‘I cannot admit’ and ‘I will not admit’ – while also chummily assuming that other readers naturally share the critic’s appreciation: ‘At Sir Roger we never laugh, […] we generally smile; but it is a smile,—always of affection, and frequently of esteem.’45
Like the character appreciation genre, caricature talk generally bases its comments on the critic’s holistic remembrance of the character. The critic feels no obligation to provide evidence for specific claims with correspondingly specific textual analysis: the reader seems expected to compare the critic’s claims about ‘Sir Roger’ not with the actual text of the Spectator, but with the version of Sir Roger that the reader carries around in their head. Like character appreciation, Romantic caricature talk defends or minimises the strong character’s peculiarities as though their mind and ethics exist separately of the text. Johnson and Beattie, for example, feel the need to argue that Sir Roger is sound of mind. Johnson gives the opinion that Sir Roger’s ‘irregularities […] in conduct seem not so much the effects of a mind deviating from the beaten track of life, by the perpetual pressure of some overwhelming idea, as of habitual rusticity, and that negligence which solitary grandeur naturally generates’.46 Beattie disagrees that ‘there is in this character any thing of rusticity (as that word is generally understood) or any of those habits or ways of thinking that solitary grandeur creates’; but he agrees with Johnson that ‘it never was, or could be, the Author’s purpose to represent Sir Roger as a person of disordered understanding’.47
However, this faith in authorial intentionality and in the author’s intellectual ownership of the non-protagonist character makes a significant difference between caricature talk and the character appreciation – which, Lynch observes, continually raises the possibility that characters exceed, or somehow pre-exist, their authors’ conscious control. Maurice Morgann, for example, wants to ‘examine if there be not something more in the character than is shewn; something inferred’; Thomas Robertson suggests that ‘Shakespeare had no particular plan laid out in his mind for Hamlet to walk by’ and ‘rather meant to follow [Hamlet]; and like an historian, with fidelity to record how a person so singularly and marvellously made up should act’.48 In contrast, despite similar concerns with characters’ ‘fidelity’ and ‘singularity’, caricature talk’s anti-caricature rhetoric insists on the writer’s complete control over the character, often in categorical terms: character-writers ‘never’ do something, and ‘always’ do another.
Comic characters rarely stand alone in caricature talk, even when they are identified as ‘favourites’. The most fundamental difference between caricature talk and the character appreciation is the fact that appreciations focus on a single character and are relatively extended, often taking up whole essays or chapters with the character’s name in the title, whereas caricature talk typically occurs in the midst of an essay on a more general topic, discussing the author and multiple works by them. Then, when fictive characters are discussed, critics usually bring multiple characters and writers into the frame, grouping them, comparing and ranking them. Berguer’s remarks, in 1823, on the longevity of Sir Roger – a comic character who ‘has continued without a rival for upwards of one hundred years [… and] can bear even now to rank unflinchingly with those masterly delineations of life and manners, which, since Shakspeare, only the Author of Waverley has been able to achieve’ – exemplify the way in which Romantic caricature talk, sometimes using anti-caricature rhetoric, puts strong non-protagonist characters into competition with each other, testing their strength.49
This rhetorical formula is used to its fullest extent in the introduction to an 1894 edition of Pride and Prejudice, where George Saintsbury ranks Pride and Prejudice’s characters above those of Austen’s other novels, and raises Austen as a comic writer even above Addison:
I for one should put Pride and Prejudice far lower if it did not contain what seem to me the very masterpieces of Miss Austen’s humour and of her faculty of character-creation—masterpieces who may indeed admit John Thorpe, the Eltons, Mrs. Norris, and one or two others to their company, but who, in one instance certainly, and perhaps in others are still superior to them.
The characteristics of Miss Austen’s humour are so subtle and delicate […] To me this humour seems to possess a greater affinity, on the whole, to that of Addison than to any other of the humorous species of this greater British genus […T]he likeness of quality consists in a great number of subdivisions of quality—demureness, extreme minuteness of touch, avoidance of loud tones and glaring effects.50
But despite Addison’s reputation, Saintsbury argues, Mr Collins – ‘the immortal, the ineffable Mr. Collins’ – is ‘really great; far greater than anything Addison ever did’.51 As Addison’s and Steele’s work on the club members and character sketches of the Spectator became a benchmark for the critical reception of comic non-protagonist characters throughout the Romantic period and the nineteenth century, it was admitted that some writers might be able to exceed Addison’s comic talent while writing more up-to-date characters. According to Saintsbury, though he ‘has been charged with exaggeration’, though ‘there is something gigantic’ about him, Mr Collins ‘is perfectly natural, and perfectly alive’, and in Austen’s realist characters, ‘[n]othing is false; nothing is superfluous’: late nineteenth-century anti-caricature rhetoric uses the same absolutes to praise Austen that late eighteenth-century caricature talk uses to praise Addison.52
These last pages of Chapter 3 investigate Romantic-period critics’ expressions of love and possessiveness about ‘Sir Roger’ and ‘Mr Collins’. The critical receptions of these two characters illustrate how, in Romantic caricature talk, the comic non-protagonist characters most vulnerable to being ‘charged with exaggeration’ are capable of eliciting – by means of superior realism – a pseudo-sensory pleasure interpreted as ‘love’ and involving simulated feelings of anxiety, loss and relief. James Beattie exemplifies Romantic caricature talk’s declared feelings about the Spectator’s most popular character when he writes of ‘lov[ing] with that fondness with which every heart is attached to Sir Roger’.53
The most prominent trope in late eighteenth–century character talk about The Spectator is an anecdote that establishes Sir Roger’s lovability and his status as a favourite. Every critic and editor refers to Eustace Budgell’s claim, in the first number of The Bee, that Addison wanted to kill off Sir Roger before anyone else got the chance – identifying Sir Roger not only as Addison’s ‘favourite’ but as everyone’s favourite, and thus vulnerable to becoming an unauthorised literary franchise. The debate over whether Addison or Steele was most responsible for ‘Sir Roger’ also highlights the possibility of feeling possessive and protective of a fictive character, with Chalmers suggesting that Addison, ‘charmed with his colleague’s outline of Sir Roger, […] might probably determine to make it in some measure his own, by guarding with a father’s fondness, against any violation that might be offered’.54 Johnson imagines Addison’s fatherly fondness of Sir Roger, referring both to ‘the killing of Sir Roger’ and to Addison’s displeasure with Steele’s episode of Sir Roger and the prostitute, which Addison did not know of until it was published:
It is recorded by Budgell, that of the characters feigned or exhibited in the Spectator, the favourite of Addison was Sir Roger de Coverley, of whom he had formed a very delicate and discriminated idea, which he would not suffer to be violated; and therefore when Steele had shown him innocently picking up a girl in the Temple and taking her to a tavern, he drew upon himself so much of his friend’s indignation, that he was forced to appease him by a promise of forbearing Sir Roger for the time to come. The reason which induced Cervantes to bring his hero to the grave, para mi solo nacio Don Quixote, y yo para el, made Addison declare, with an undue vehemence of expression, that he would kill Sir Roger; being of opinion that they were born for one another, and that any other hand would do him wrong.55
The love of an author for his character is a relationship between gentlemen, as Johnson sees it: Addison ‘kills’ Sir Roger – ensuring authorial control of the circumstances and manner of the character’s death – not merely to do honour to a textual character but as though to preserve the honour of an extra-textual character. Johnson’s version of the ‘killing Sir Roger’ anecdote imagines that the focus of Addison’s love is not the text characterising ‘Sir Roger’ but ‘a very delicate and discriminate idea’ of Sir Roger residing in his mind. Because for Addison any textual addition or sequel that seems to modify the character, or show it in a different light, is not an extension of the character but a ‘violation’ of it, Sir Roger acquires a quality of extra-textuality.
Critics differ on how proprietorial Addison’s love of Sir Roger was, with Chalmers claiming that ‘he neither immediately laid hold on what he considered as Steele’s property, nor did he wish to monopolize the worthy Knight’.56 However, the anecdote about Addison killing Sir Roger out of love consistently recurs in the introductions and footnotes to successive editions of the Spectator: readers experiencing Sir Roger’s death for the first time would typically have encountered it with footnotes referring to Budgell’s anecdote in the Bee. For example, in Payne’s 1788 edition of the Spectator, the page looks like this (‘departed’ is the catchword):
We last night received a piece of ill news at our club, which very sensibly afflicted every one of us. I question not but my readers themselves will be troubled at the hearing of it. To keep them no longer in suspence, Sir ROGER DE COVERLEY is dead.* He
departed
* ‘Mr. Addison was so fond of this character, that a little before he laid down The Spectator, (foreseeing that some nimble gentleman would catch up his pen the moment he quitted it) he said to an intimate friend, with a certain warmth in his expression, which he was not often guilty of, By G—, I’ll kill Sir Roger, that nobody else may murder him. Accordingly the whole Spectator, No 517, consists of nothing else but an account of the old knight’s death, and some moving circumstances which attended it.’57
This anecdote, reiterated in edition after edition, and cited in numerous critical essays on Addison and Steele, would have impressed generations of Spectator-readers with the notion of Sir Roger as an ‘idea’ separate from the text, animated by an authorial love that demands the primacy of authorial intention.
From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, and after the Spectator as a whole ceased to be regularly recommended reading, Sir Roger’s continued recognition as a favourite character was reinforced by selected editions of ‘the Sir Roger de Coverley papers’. Thus, the Spectator endured as a model of comic characterisation. The first Sir Roger De Coverley Papers appeared in 1850, and successive editions of The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers from “The Spectator” came out in the 1890s, in Britain and the United States – often alongside other ‘classics’, such as in Longmans’ English Classics, the American Book Company’s Eclectic English Classics and Riverside Literature Series. In Britain, Joseph Meek’s edition of The De Coverley Papers from The Spectator (London: J. M. Dent, 1920), part of The Kings Treasuries of Literature series, went through several printings.
Meek’s introduction suggests an unbroken critical tradition of caricature talk and anti-caricature rhetoric about Sir Roger – though it adopts an idiom that deploys more similes than the ‘sentimental’ caricature talk of the Romantic period (and which is perhaps, depending on your taste, a more affectedly sentimental or ‘twee’ mode of criticism). Meek of course makes references to Scott and Dickens, as well as Shakespeare: ‘There is no original for Sir Roger or Falstaff or Mr. Micawber.’ The tropes, rhetoric and stylistic devices of anti-caricature rhetoric in Romantic caricature talk about Sir Roger are all present in Meek’s introduction. The first-person pronouns, superlatives, ranking of comic characters, comparisons with Shakespeare and other literary touchstones, emphasis on authorial originality, on the author’s possessiveness and the reader’s love, are all trotted out as dependable clichés of popular literary criticism:
No character in our literature, not even Mr. Pickwick, has more endeared himself to successive generations of readers than Addison’s Sir Roger de Coverley: there are many figures in drama and fiction of whom we feel that they are in a way personal friends of our own, that once introduced to us they remain a permanent part of our little world. It is the abiding glory of Dickens, it is one of Shakespeare’s abiding glories, to have created many such […]. We are brought into the society of a fine old-fashioned country gentleman […] with just those touches of whimsicality and those lovable faults which go straight to our hearts. […]
‘Addison’s’ Sir Roger we have called him, and be sure that honest Dick Steele, even if he drew the first outlines of the figure, would not bear us a grudge for so doing. Whoever first thought of Sir Roger, and however many little touches may have been added by other hands, he remains Addison’s creation: and furthermore it does not matter a snap of the fingers whether any actual person served as the model from which the picture was taken. Of all the bootless quests that literary criticism can undertake, this search for ‘the original’ is the least valuable. The artist’s mind is a crucible which transmutes and re-creates.58
The belief that Sir Roger belongs to Addison, his supposed creator, not only frames the 1920 Papers but actually alters the reader’s encounter with Sir Roger. Meek opts not to include Steele’s episode of Sir Roger inviting a prostitute to the countryside, ‘which is wholly out of keeping with Sir Roger’s character’.59 Meek does not reveal what happens in the omitted episode and does not inform the reader about which number of the Spectator is concerned. Thus, Meek’s most significant editorial decision is driven by Romantic caricature talk’s concept of Sir Roger being Addison’s, both as an intellectual property and as an object of love. Favouritism gives editors like Meek a special sense of duty. In Meek’s interpretation of this duty, the selected Sir Roger is more authentic than the complete ‘Sir Roger’ – resulting in an edition that is textually incomplete but which honours Addison’s supposed feelings about Sir Roger as an extra-textual personage.
Scholarship on the novel, when it considers the fictitious characters most prone to being seen as ‘caricatures’, has often defined their ‘minorness’ or ‘subordination’ in terms of narrative or plot. Caricature talk, however, as it evokes favouritism for strong non-protagonist characters, is well-placed to argue for their importance to the narrative form of the realist novel, where plots might emerge ‘naturally’ out of collisions between diverse characters in a social space. In the last pages of this chapter, I argue that Romantic caricature talk was able to think that comic and eccentric non-protagonist characters were inceptive to realist novels because it reckoned the intellect and creative energy that authors seemed to have disproportionately invested in such ‘favourites’. From a 1904 edition of the Sir Roger De Coverley Papers, via Watt’s observations about character and narrative in Tom Jones in 1957, I wend to Coleridge’s commentary on Mercutio as one of ‘Shakspere’s favourite characters’. Coleridge’s analysis of the narrative importance of favouritism represents with great intellectual clarity a facet of Romantic caricature talk’s faith that readers forge especially ‘real’, parasocial connections with certain characters, the ones who might possibly be considered ‘caricatures’ – and that fondness for strong characters has a crucial role in readers feeling themselves convinced by literary constructions of reality.
As I have discussed, highly particularised non-protagonist characters were more readily conceptualised as extra-textual entities who exist prior to narrative; and this was reinforced by the literal extraction of Sir Roger from his textual context in publications like The Sir Roger De Coverley Papers and indexes in selections from Addison’s and Steele’s writings.60 In one such edition, C. T. Winchester argues using anti-caricature rhetoric that since strong characters like Sir Roger have ‘living’ presence that pre-exists narrative, they are crucial to the process of realist plot-writing:
The Sir Roger de Coverley papers are often said to be the precursor of the modern English novel. And in a very real sense they are. There are, to be sure, crude specimens of prose fiction in the preceding century. […] But these romances, while they supply the element of plot and adventure most liberally, were deficient in genuine characters. There are no real men and women in them. Moreover, they made no attempt to depict contemporary life as it was. But Sir Roger de Coverley is no personage of romance. He is a hearty, red-blooded, Tory gentleman who lives in Worcestershire. And he has no adventures more striking than might naturally befall a country squire who comes up to London for the season once a year. There were scores of just such men in every shire in England. His speech, his habits, his prejudices, are all shown us with simple truth. And yet this is done with so much art and humour that Sir Roger is one of the most living persons in our literature. He is as immortal as Hamlet or Julius Caesar. We know him as well as we know our nearest neighbour; and we like him quite as well as we like most of our neighbours.
Now this was something new in English literature. Sir Roger is the earliest person in English imaginative prose that is really still alive. There are men and women in our poetry before his day – in the drama there is, of course, a great host of them; but in prose literature Sir Roger is the first. Furthermore, the men and women of the drama, even in that comedy of manners which professed to reflect most accurately contemporary society, were almost always drawn with some romantic or satiric exaggeration; but there is no exaggeration in the character of Sir Roger. Here was the beginning of a healthy realism. It was only necessary for Richardson and Fielding, thirty years later, to bring together several such characters into a group, and to show how the incidents of their lives naturally ran into plot or story – and we have a novel.61
There are language and ideas here that are familiar from early nineteenth-century caricature talk such as in the critical reception of Austen’s characters, which I discuss in Chapter 4.
Winchester’s explicit subordination of narrative to character is less typical of caricature talk, however, and interests me by the way it contradicts Watt’s argument in The Rise of the Novel that ‘minor characters’ are generally incidental to the plots of realist novels. Strong characters are free to provide humour and sociological interest because they have little to do with the central narrative:
Tom Jones […] would seem to exemplify a principle of considerable significance for the novel form in general: namely, that the importance of the plot is in inverse proportion to that of character. [… T]he organisation of the narrative into an extended and complex structure will tend to turn the protagonists into its passive agents, but will offer compensatingly greater opportunities for the introduction of a variety of minor characters, whose treatment will not be hampered in the same way by the roles which they are allotted by the complications of the narrative design. The principle and its corollary would seem to lie behind Coleridge’s contrast of the ‘forced and unnatural quality’ of the scenes between the protagonists in Tom Jones and Fielding’s treatment of the ‘characters of postilions, landlords, landladies, waiters’ where ‘nothing can be more true, more happy or more humorous’. These minor characters figure only in scenes which require exactly the amount of psychological individuality which they are possessed of; relieved of any responsibility for carrying out the major narrative design, Mrs. Honour can get herself dismissed from the Western household by methods which are at once triumphantly comic, sociologically perceptive and eminently characteristic.62
In Watt’s schema of plot and character, every plot device, and every new setting or social interaction involved in the progression of the plot, is an opportunity for the writer to introduce a new ‘minor character’, or to tell an anecdote about an already established one; and the non-protagonist character’s power to divert is bound up with its status as a digression. Romantic character talk, however, has a long-standing alternative perspective on the eighteenth-century British novel’s supposed innovations in plot-construction: Winchester’s caricature talk about ‘Sir Roger’ in 1904 resonates with Coleridge’s remarks about ‘Mercutio’, his seventh lecture on Shakespeare, in linking the amiability of the non-protagonist character to the impact of narrative realism.
Coleridge’s commentary on the strong characters in Romeo and Juliet somewhat resembles the ‘character appreciation’ genre, in that he is ready to appreciate character eccentricities in terms of the complexity of the human mind. He celebrates characteristic comic dialogue for its ‘truth’ in distinctly representing different operations of the human mental faculty. Coleridge also acknowledges that peculiar or ‘irregular’ characters can serve to make plots more plausible and emotionally interesting (Mercutio, and the narrative consequences of Romeo’s friendship with him), as well as indirectly characterising protagonists (the nurse, and her contrast with Juliet). The plot’s structure may not require the non-protagonists’ interesting peculiarities, but the plot’s significance and realism can rely on them. Coleridge points out that the plot of Romeo and Juliet, in the inciting action of Tybalt’s killing, depends not just on Mercutio’s death, but on his character. Peculiarity of character renders Mercutio’s death interesting, important and a plausible cause of Romeo’s switch from self-absorbed lover to vengeful friend:
Shakspere’s favourite characters are full of such lively intellect. Mercutio is a man possessing all the elements of a poet: the whole word was, as it were, subject to his law of association. Whenever he wishes to impress anything, all things become his servants for the purpose: all things tell the same tale, and sound in unison. This faculty, moreover, is combined with the manners and feelings of a perfect gentleman, himself utterly unconscious of his powers. By his loss it was contrived that the whole catastrophe of the tragedy should be brought about: it endears him to Romeo, and gives to the death of Mercutio an importance which it could not otherwise have acquired.
I say this in answer to an observation, I think by Dryden (to which indeed Dr. Johnson has fully replied), that Shakspere having carried the part of Mercutio as far as he could, till his genius was exhausted, had killed him in the third Act, to get him out of the way. What shallow nonsense! As I have remarked, upon the death of Mercutio the whole catastrophe depends; it is produced by it. The scene in which it occurs serves to show how indifference to any subject but one, and aversion to activity on the part of Romeo, may be overcome and roused to the most resolute and determined conduct. Had not Mercutio been rendered so amiable and so interesting, we could not have felt so strongly the necessity for Romeo’s interference, connecting it immediately, and passionately, with the future fortunes of the lover and his mistress.63
Put another way, ‘we’ understand that Romeo kills Tybalt because Mercutio is Romeo’s particular favourite, and we find the action convincing because Mercutio is our favourite too. Romantic character criticism insists that fictive characters can be the objects of our love, and occasion our sense of loss when they fictitiously die. While Coleridge does not address how favouritism for Mercutio might interact with emotional responses to the lovers’ deaths at the close of the narrative, it is implicit in his commentary that the more one cares about Mercutio, the more one will be convinced of the tragic necessity of the play’s final events, which represent Romeo and Juliet’s failure to overcome the separation imposed by Romeo’s revenge for Mercutio. One’s emotional response to the lovers’ deaths might be intensified and complicated by the textual and diegetic ‘precedence’ of the stronger ‘favourite’ character.
For readers familiar with the caricature talk that mediated the Spectator in the Romantic period, the death of Sir Roger was famously affecting. While the character’s appearances in the Spectator did not form a novelistic plot, ‘killing’ Sir Roger offered something like a sense of narrative closure. The character’s death acted as emotional punctuation, inviting readers to reflect on the pleasure they had taken in Sir Roger, to contemplate his finitude and experience a semblance of loss; asking readers to feel satisfied by a ‘natural ending’ to Addison and Steele’s papers, and to feel the twinge of one emotion accompanying another, when amusement at Edward Biscuit’s letter and Sir Roger’s marginalia is swiftly displaced by grief:
This Letter, notwithstanding the poor Butler’s Manner of writing it, gave us such an Idea of our good old Friend, that upon the reading of it there was not a dry Eye in the Club. Sir Andrew opening the Book, found it to be a Collection of Acts of Parliament. There was in particular the Act of Uniformity, with some Passages in it marked by Sir Roger’s own Hand. Sir Andrew found that they related to two or three points, which he had disputed with Sir Roger the last time he appeared at the Club. Sir Andrew, who would have been merry at such an Incident on another Occasion, at the sight of the old Man’s Hand-writing burst into Tears, and put the Book into his Pocket.
In The British Essayists, Chalmers claims that ‘it is universally agreed that [the killing of Sir Roger] produced a paper of transcendant [sic] excellence in all the graces of simplicity and pathos. There is not in our language any assumption of character more faithful than that of the honest butler, nor a more irresistible stroke of nature than the circumstance of the book received by Sir Andrew Freeport’.64 Readers committed no. 517 to memory, able to recall details of incident: Sir Roger writing his will on a cold day and leaving warm clothing to everyone in the parish, Sir Andrew Freeport putting the book in his pocket. The description of Sir Andrew weeping openly over Sir Roger’s handwriting in the Acts of Parliament prompts the Spectator’s readers to recognise their own emotional sensitivity to such mundane and characteristic textual details in a context of mortality and loss. Finalising its characterisation of Sir Roger with his fictitious death, rather than with a more arbitrary textual truncation, the Spectator invites readers to discern the full extent of their love for Sir Roger, now that he exists both as ‘such an Idea of our good old Friend’ – particularised, static, immortal – and as a real departed presence, here and gone. By reading, re-reading and remembering Sir Roger’s life and death in the Spectator, the Romantic character-reader experiences a cycle of love, loss and relief, ultimately reassured by the permanence of their idea of Sir Roger as much as his permanence in the pages of the Spectator.
The continued reading of Addison’s and Steele’s essays in the Romantic period, and the emergence of Romantic character criticism about Sir Roger, established the Spectator as a gold standard for realist characterisation, a centennial ‘favourite’ against which nineteenth-century novelists might test their own strong characters. While the Spectator’s critical reception primed readers (and would-be writers) to think that memorable non-protagonist characters were unique assets to novelistic realism, the durability of the character-centric Spectator’s critical acclaim and high market value made it clear that ‘favourite’ characters were a good commercial investment for authors seeking to attract and sustain a readership.65
Caricature talk continued to insist on ‘originality’ throughout the nineteenth century in large part because readers continued to speculate on characters’ ‘originals’ – after all, as discussed in Chapter 2, it was possible to discover extra-textual evidence that a writer had based a strong character on a real person. Saintsbury, in 1920, decries ‘this search for “the original”’ as ‘the least valuable’ of ‘the bootless quests that literary criticism can undertake’ – and yet the quest was a popular one. In 1884–85, Lord Brabourne’s edition of previously unpublished correspondence by Jane Austen raised a flutter of curiosity among literary journalists and Janeites. T. E. Kebbel imagines that Austen, her writing process continually interrupted by neighbours, would have been ‘rewarded for her self-possession by finding that many of her morning visitors were qualified to serve as models; and that, while she seemed to be listening with ready politeness to the gossip of some village bore, she was quietly taking his likeness, and forming in her own mind a Mr. Collins or a Miss Bates’.66
But readers’ concern with ‘real characters’ was not necessarily, as Saintsbury implies, an unsophisticated reading that devalued an author’s originality. When an article in the Standard stokes interest in Brabourne’s edition, the emphasis is just as much on Austen’s ‘humour at work’ as the identification of originals. Readers, the Standard implies, are interested in these letters because they preserve a trace of Austen’s mental process in a singular originative moment. The letters might offer not an insight into the extended process of writing a novel, but a glimmer of creativity itself, the fantasised moment when a character comes into the world:
Will these Letters display Miss Austen’s humour at work upon real character, and exhibit her in the act of filling in a Mrs. Norris or a Mr. Elton from among her own acquaintances? To judge from some of the published Letters, we should say this is very likely. And if the anticipation is well founded, the promised volume should be one of the most delightful in the language.67
It is easy to misrepresent such remarks as the idle curiosity of readers with a simplistic understanding of literature. However, through the lens of Romantic caricature talk described in this chapter – its concepts of originality, realism and favouritism – the nuances of this language-game come into focus. The Standard reviewer anticipates Austen’s letters being superlatively ‘the most delightful’ not, I argue, because readers in the 1880s were interested in Hampshire folk who lived a hundred years ago, but because they might witness the inception of their favourite characters. As the Spectator’s ideal of character-creation contains the necessity of an author who, like the Spectator, excels in observing and listening, so – conversely – the quest for ‘the original’ contains the desire to see the first textual trace of pure creative energy invisibly meeting raw materials.
My aim is not to argue that the Spectator’s comic non-protagonist characters directly influenced the distinctive Romantic-period realisms that I analyse in this book. My point is that the Spectator – its characterisation techniques, its ideals of character-writing and its critical reception as a model for strong characters starting in the late eighteenth century – is powerfully representative of the Romantic-period novel’s inheritance from eighteenth-century literature’s diverse combinations of character-writing with formal realism.
Part II explores how that inheritance is selectively re-purposed and recontextualised by caricature talk combining with characterisation technique in the realisms of Jane Austen, Walter Scott and Mary Shelley. As compared with the Spectator’s realism of character, Scott substitutes history for contemporaneity; moves from the Spectator’s limited social variety to a compendium of ethnic, regional, religious and professional characteristics; and plans, especially in the Magnum Opus editions, for the impending obsolescence of strongly historical characters.
Shelley might not seem to inherit much from the Spectator’s model of character realism: Frankenstein and ‘Transformation’ lack comic non-protagonist characters, and resemble Gothic tales more than ‘English classics’ by Fielding or Smollett. No source from the Romantic period admits to acquiring a ‘favourite’ from Frankenstein. But it is significant that Shelley’s experiments in horror fiction develop writing techniques for a ‘horrid realism’ that happens to invert the concept of using particularised and varied characters to create pseudo-sensory pleasure – eliciting pseudo-sensory revulsion by continually drawing legible ‘character’ into tension with the heterogenous particulars of the material body.
For Austen, on the other hand, the fat body is legible within a concept of caricature as the aesthetic effect of self-indulgence. Under the aegis of this ethics of caricature, Austen carries techniques for strong characterisation: her realism is put forward as accurate narration of a social phenomenon of people who ‘really’ think, speak, look and occupy space in ‘caricatured’ ways. Touting the new comic realism of Burney and Edgeworth, Northanger Abbey openly names the Spectator as the dotard of the genre, now coasting on a reputation for ‘wit and humour’ combined with ‘knowledge of human nature’ and the ‘delineation of its varieties’. Austen seems unimpressed by decades of praise for the Spectator’s characters. Others might claim that Sir Roger is immortal; Austen recognises that strong characters must be reconceived for a new age.
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