Donald W. Nichol, editor
NEW FOUNDLING HOSPITAL FOR WIT, 1768-1773
Three volumes. 1,408pp. Pickering and Chatto. £275.
978 1 85196 808 4
In the apocalyptic vision which closes Pope’s Dunciad of 1743, Religion and Morality expire, “And Universal Darkness buries All”. Among the casualties is Wit, shooting “in vain its momentary fires”. This prediction, Donald W. Nichol argues, was contradicted “a quarter of a century later” by the New Foundling Hospital for Wit, a six-part serial miscellany associated with John Wilkes. In his introduction to this handsome reprint, Nichol opines that Pope “could not have foreseen the rekindling of wit” represented in it, which raises the question of whether Pope used “Wit” in the narrow sense apparently implied by these words. If, as seems likely, he did not, other questions arise, as to whether these later satires did indeed reverse the prediction, and as to the survival and continuity of a tradition of writing represented by the great coterie of Swift, Pope and Gay in the early years of the eighteenth century, and emulated, in a rearguard action, by Henry Fielding.
The original Foundling Hospital for Wit began appearing in 1743, the same year as the Dunciad’s final version and Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, and its pseudonymous editor was “Samuel [subsequently Timothy] Silence”. It is attributed to the poet and diplomat Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Henry Fielding’s close friend, and may have taken seed, as Nichol intimates, at Eton in the 1720s, where Williams’s friends also included the elder Pitt, and Fielding’s future patron George Lyttelton, “all of whom were connected with both miscellanies”. The array of Etonian figures in both the original and the New Foundling Hospital would hold its own on any Tory front bench, except that they then came from both parties. Etonian camaraderie and nostalgia are found repeatedly in the New Foundling Hospital (at least three poems in Part III, for example), for all its radical Wilkesian sympathies. The idea was to include satirical pieces “which no-one else wanted – or dared – to print”, intended, as the original miscellany announced, “For the Reception and Preservation of such Brats of Wit and Humour, whose Parents chuse to drop them, . . . wrote since the Change of the Ministry”. “Brats of Wit and Humour”, or, in Nichol’s words, “opposition offspring”, taps a traditional conceit that words were children of the brain. (Subverbal effusions, the nonsense of bad writers, or the noises of Puritan zealots at worship, were sometimes called the brain’s droppings.) Hence “Foundling Hospital”, named after the children’s refuge, opened in 1739 through the benefaction of Sir Thomas Coram, on the site of what is now the Foundling Museum in Brunswick Square. (Coram’s Fields, a children’s playground, is still to be found adjacent.) Hogarth and Handel were benefactors, and their compositions were exhibited or performed there. So, when the first miscellany appeared in 1743, the jokey literary commonplace of its title also evoked a philanthropic enterprise with a distinguished cultural profile.
This was the model for the New Foundling Hospital for Wit (1768–73), which spans the years of John Wilkes’s imprisonment and swashbuckling electoral and popular triumphs, but also reprints some earlier writings, retrospectively covering the North Briton (the weekly paper established by Wilkes in 1762) and the Treaty of Paris (1763). Its publisher was Wilkes’s friend, the bookseller John Almon, whose authors included Junius and at least one future signatory of the American Declaration of Independence, but who also published Peerages, and whose apprentice and successor was John Debrett.
One of the most interesting works in Part I (1768) was The Three Conjurors, a little known parody of Macbeth published in 1763 during the scandal over North Briton, No 45. The play is part of a paper war against the late prime-ministership of Lord Bute, and loosely comparable to the anti-Walpole polemics of the Beggar’s Opera, Jonathan Wild and the Dunciad. Its central character, Macboote, stands for the Prime Minister, often portrayed in jackboots. But Bute was not a Walpole; more like his opposite, the Earl of Oxford, whose “felonious peace of Utrecht . . . which compleated the disgrace of the sovereign, and the dishonour of England”, was seen as the forerunner of Bute’s Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years War, and which Wilkes regarded as a sell-out. The North Briton and The Three Conjurors were attacking in 1762–3 what Swift and Pope had defended fifty years earlier: a Tory peace with France said to have squandered English victories and betrayed England’s allies. The North Briton persistently harped on Utrecht as the prototype of present discontents, down to the suggestion that the Scots profited from it, and that it fostered Jacobite rebellions.
The first Scottish Prime Minister was the focus of an evidently perennial complaint about “the number of government positions . . . now being filled by Scots”. It was a recurrent theme in the New Foundling Hospital that Bute was a kind of Pretender in disguise. The fact that his surname happened to be Stuart was not overlooked. Almon, the miscellany’s editor, described how “Bute in splendid usurpation shone, / King-like, array’d with honours not his own”. The North Briton snorted at “the government of a Stuart, which has been so fatal to England”, a much recycled joke, which gives a retrospective irony to Pope’s celebration of Queen Anne at the time of Utrecht: “And Peace and Plenty tell, a Stuart reigns”. The political outlook of The Three Conjurors was thus adversarial to that of the Swift–Pope circle, of which Gay was also a member. The play nevertheless parades its generic debt to the Beggar’s Opera, and has an epilogue “Written by the late Mr Gay, on Purpose for this excellent Production”, actually composed almost fifty years earlier for Gay’s The What D’Ye Call It (1715). It imitates the opera’s blend of dialogue and music, its focus on a corrupt Prime Minister, and something of its air of sleazy geniality. Gay also had a penchant for occasional Shakespearean parody.
The Three Conjurors has been described as the first verse parody of a Shakespearean play. If it is, it is something of a milestone, although there had been burlesque scenes and allusions, and there were at least two further Macbeth pieces in this miscellany. (In one of these, Bute reappears as an “all-corrupting . . . kingdom-grasping Thane”.) Like the Dunciad and Jonathan Wild, the play addressed modern realities through travesty of grander or “heroic” originals, though such ironic collocations of past and present usually invoked an epic model. It was the composite triad of Homer, Virgil and Milton, not Shakespeare, that provided Pope and others with a heroic norm, Milton having been co-opted by English poets as an honorary ancient. Samuel Johnson reflected at about this time (1765) that Shakespeare “may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient”, but this suggests that the classical status was incomplete. Macboote’s mock-Shakespearean successors include Alfred Jarry’s Ubu, Bertolt Brecht’s Arturo Ui, and the Ubu-inspired psychopaths of Eugène Ionesco’s Macbett. But Shakespeare was not yet what he had become for Jarry, Brecht and Ionesco, a natural (and international) resource, replacing the classical epics, for “mock-heroic” imitation, allusion and travesty, notably on issues of tyranny and war.
The fact that Shakespeare’s work often embodies, in itself, an unillusioned critique of the abuses of power and ranting self-importance engendered by “heroic” values, doubtless assisted this development. It is embryonically perceptible in The Three Conjurors, which described itself as having been “performed at sundry Places in Westminster, On Saturday the 30th of April, and Sunday the 1st of May”. These, the dates of Wilkes’s arrest for seditious libel and imprisonment in the Tower after North Briton No 45 (April 23), refer to the political brouhaha rather than to a stage performance, of which there seems to be no evidence. The three conjurors correspond to Shakespeare’s witches, and are controlled by Hecate, Macboote’s lover. Macboote has officially resigned, as Bute had left office on April 8, though he continued for a long time to be regarded as a sinister influence.
But Macboote is not a murderer like Macbeth. He has none of Macheath’s debonair sex appeal either, though the boozy dalliance between him and his paramour Hecate has a kind of seedy zest. As well as retaining her old Shakespearean role, Hecate largely replaces Lady Macbeth as scheming conspirator and spousal consort, but she is closer to a demonic Lady Bracknell than to the driven and tormented Shakespearean heroine. Her Guignolesque plottings are almost witlessly hyperactive, more expressive of the clockwork mania of farce than of an obsessively ambitious personality. Since she represents George III’s mother, rumoured to be Bute’s lover, the implication of political shenanigans is meant to be stinging, but does not neutralize the comedy of her skittish amorousness. She, as has been observed, has no desire to be “unsexed”: “Oh, what a dainty pleasure’s this / To ride in a coach, / While the riot’s abroach; / To laugh, to sing / To toy and kiss”. The corresponding lines in Shakespeare are sung by the Third Spirit, as Hecate rides in the air with her cat Malkin: a very different scene.
The conjurors, to the “sound of bagpipes”, perform curses and burn effigies of “the ranc’rous damn’d North Briton”. One conjuror gloats that the “Peace Preliminaries” to the hated Treaty are signed. Macboote is told he need not fear the “pen of W—lkes” and must “nought but a gibbet shun”, the suggestion, familiar in Fielding’s Jonathan Wild and Tom Jones, being that he was born to be hanged. He in turn believes he has nothing to fear, “Since noble by descent, I ne’er shall die / Upon a common gibbet”, but is warned that “When Wood’s do move, be sure thy fate’s begun”. This pun on the trees of Birnam Wood alludes to Robert Wood, the distinguished Homeric scholar who was also an under-secretary involved in the peace preliminaries jeered at in the play, and who directed the illegal seizure of Wilkes’s papers. The Hecate scenes are disproportionately prominent, highlighting the musical spectacle; a “Loud symphony of bagpipes” boisterously replaces Shakespeare’s “Chorus of Spirits”. The rowdy vivacity, though cheerfully Scotophobic, comes without the serial slaughter – a staple of parodists – of the Shakespearean original. Hecate and her swain fly instead to Harrogate, on the witch’s “beezum”.
At least, that is how the play ends in the miscellany, in compliance with the Beggar’s Opera’s prescription that “an Opera must end happily” – a feature even more evident in the original freestanding versions (of which Nichol’s edition gives no inkling), where the elopement is succeeded by a popular triumph, doubtless evoking Wilkes’s release on May 6, with “violent acclamations of LIBERTY, PROPERTY, and NO EXCISE”. This popular phrase also occurs in Wilkes’s own preceding piece in the miscellany. Euphoria is enhanced by the closing words “God Bless KING GEORGE”, partly an anti-Jacobite utterance, but also an illustration of the care repeatedly taken, in spite of the antipathy between Wilkes and George III, to distinguish the monarch from his ministers: a tactic followed with unctuous sarcasm in the comments on the speech from the throne in North Briton No 45. The genial close looks forward to Byron’s treatment of the same King in the Vision of Judgment sixty years later, just as it looks back to the Beggar’s Opera’s festive finale.
Such irrational accesses of delinquent likeableness in the portrayal of criminal or tyrannical malefactors have not as far as I know been fully understood, though W. H. Auden has some suggestive remarks about them in The Orators. It is partly a matter, as Auden perceived, of how we are drawn to aspects of the “heroic” of which we disapprove, and, as Brecht said to those who complained that he was being soft on Hitler in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, may also be a patronizing put-down. An interesting exception is Macbett (1972), Ionesco’s play of the Cold War years, where no atmosphere of boorish good humour rubs off on disreputable protagonists, and where even Shakespeare’s good characters, Duncan, “Banco”, and “Macol” (Malcolm), are Hitlerian or Stalinist killers, not even minimally likeable. A comparable effect is nevertheless created by means of a slapstick automatism of “cruelty”, as though the slanging matches of Punch and Judy shows, or the clockwork routine of a clown knocking another down, were defining the mood of every order to behead, and every act of mass killing. Ionesco, following Jan Kott, thought Shakespeare was the ancestor of the “absurd”.
Macbett resembles The Three Conjurors in dispensing with Lady Macbeth. She is replaced by “Lady Duncan”, who turns out to be a witch, and also, like Macboote’s Hecate, acts as both instigator and paramour, eventually becoming Macbett’s wife. She conspires with Macbett and Banco to murder Duncan. Duncan is himself as murderous as the rest, and casually orders instant beheadings or the execution of “Candor’s” defeated army: “There aren’t very many of them, 137,000”. Not for the first time in French versions of English entertainments (in “De l’essence du rire”, Baudelaire discusses an example from an English farce acted in Paris), a guillotine is used, here button-operated for multiple slaughter. (The man guillotined in Baudelaire’s account is a Punch-like “Pierrot”, and is such a compulsive thief that he puts his head in his pocket after he has been beheaded. Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, on the gallows, steals the parson’s corkscrew as he swings out of the world, a flourish commanding an offbeat respect.)
Macboote is a diminished Macbeth, the idea being to establish a degraded moral equivalence with the original. The gangster thug Wild’s equivalence with his Prime Minister Walpole, on the other hand, was an extravagant blow-up of villainy, expressed in a clowning sarcasm of “heroic” rant. For all his small-time seediness, he swells into an oafish Satan, not a prime ministerial clone. The tactic is to make the villain bigger than he is, as in the passage from the Dunciad that Nichol quotes in his introduction, which turns a multitude of Dick Minims into a vast Miltonic mushroom cloud of Dulness, “burying All”. In a manner quite different from most of the works in the miscellany, the urban madhouse of the dunces’ London is a secular transposition, not a deflation, of Milton’s Hell, creating an inverted epic enormity.
The Dunciad was the culmination of a mock-heroic project which had run out of steam by the time of the New Foundling Hospital. The design, initiated by Boileau in 1674 and elaborated by Dryden, was to make “the Majesty of the Heroique” rub off on the low matter of the parody, turning satire into a species of “Heroique Poetry it self”. Boileau’s simple technical prescription of using high language for low subjects, and not, as in demotic burlesque, the other way round, was designed to minimize awareness of the parodic joke on which the exercise depended. This opened up the possibility, protected by irony, of producing something like the epic that good poets felt no longer able to write “straight”.
The polluted Miltonic grandeurs of Pope’s or Dryden’s London evoke an urban inferno, pointing ultimately to the splendours and miseries of Baudelaire’s Paris, where, however, high Satanic majesties no longer have to be carried on the back of a mock-heroic joke. The joke could not be jettisoned as long as this parodic formula remained the enabling condition for attempting heroic accents at all. While Baudelaire could dispense with the joke, the Dunciad aspired to transcend it, as Eliot eventually did in the Shakespearean and Popeian pastiche in The Waste Land. There is nothing in the New Foundling Hospital resembling the Dunciad, not even William King’s The Toast (1732–36), an “Epic Poem” which invokes the Dunciad, and, like that poem, is (in its fuller original state) dedicated to Swift. The Toast was completed at a midpoint between the first version of Pope’s poem (1728) and the last (1743), dates which also span the years from The Beggar’s Opera to Jonathan Wild. It makes no claim to transcend its joke. For all its virulence, it is a playful exercise in “learned” burlesque, down to the bumptious elongations of its twelve-syllable “Tumbling Verse” (Adam Smith pointed out that the alexandrine, the official French measure for serious verse, is a burlesque metre in English, much as the pentameters of the English heroic couplet read comically in French). When King writes trippingly of “How the goddess, who rules the vast Dunciad, will smile”, there is nothing of the vacuous vastness or sweeping menace of Pope’s Dulness. The Toast invokes the Dunciad only because it is there.
The same is true of a more considerable poem, Charles Churchill’s Rosciad, a powerful discursive satire on the theatre, which shares with the Dunciad little more than the device of its name. Churchill, Wilkes’s associate on the North Briton and the strongest satiric voice of the decade, died suddenly while visiting Wilkes in Boulogne in 1763. He is treated in the miscellany as a great absent voice. One poem asks “Why lives not Churchill’s spirit to rehearse, / Such prostitution in immortal verse”, and there are other statements in the same vein, including one by his brother John Churchill. Churchill’s contributions to the New Foundling Hospital are sparse, and some of dubious attribution. None of his major poems is included, but his “On the monuments in Westminster-Abbey” is an epigram of remarkable wit and metrical energy. The most vigorous “Churchillian” writing here is by John Almon, on the inconstancy of the Whig lords during the ministerial changes (“Shall Whigs complete what Jacobites began?”), or complaining “That Chatham doats, tho’ Pitt was once a man!”, which excoriates the Great Commoner’s acceptance of an earldom. Although Wilkes is named on all the title pages of the New Foundling Hospital except the second (which names no individuals), he too is thinly represented as an author, with two prose fragments and a clutch of short poems.
Perhaps Pope would “not have foreseen” the New Foundling Hospital for Wit, but it is equally possible that he would have regarded this curious miscellany of warmed-up jokes, recycled lyric and erotic trifles, and angry Wilkesite polemic, as an all too predictable fulfilment of his prophecy. Even if he had thought it the dazzling efflorescence of wit that Nichol seems to, it belongs to a quite different register of satiric activity. The miscellany was culturally and politically not sympathetic to Pope, and Churchill disliked him. It reprints a few poems by him, mostly spurious, but exploiting a prestigious name. There was ambivalence on the subject, and Wilkes’s North Briton sometimes invoked Swift, and opened with a Popeian affirmation. The impassioned defence of “the liberty of the press” as “this most sacred weapon, given for the defence of truth and liberty” is an unmistakable evocation of Pope’s apostrophe to satire, “O sacred weapon! left for truth’s defence”, in the Epilogue to the Satires, which also provides the epigraph to the first number.
Like Churchill, Wilkes lacked the sharp precision of the Scriblerian satirists. His “wit” was strongest in conversation, as in his celebrated response to his Hell-fire associate the Earl of Sandwich, who predicted that Wilkes would “die of the pox or on the gallows”: “That depends, my lord, whether I embrace your mistress or your principles”. This scarcely has the packed grapeshot charge of Swift’s description of Thomas Earl of Wharton: “He is a Presbyterian in Politics, and an Atheist in Religion; but he chuseth at present to whore with a Papist”. Wilkes’s riposte belongs rather with Johnson’s comment that Chesterfield’s Letters taught “the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master”. In both remarks, knockdown finality is more important than finesse, though both Wilkes and Johnson aspired to finesse, and mimicked an Augustan hauteur that was not theirs. Wilkes scorned royal power and aristocratic privilege, and boasted the support of the “middling and inferior” people, but sometimes treated city dignitaries much as wits treated cits a century earlier. It is interesting to speculate whether his presence among the raffish grandees of the Hell-fire Club was exposed to the snubs Dryden sometimes suffered when he strove to be a “tearing Blade” among Rochester’s circle. A similar ambivalence permeates the Wilkesite New Foundling Hospital, from the publisher of what became Debrett’s Peerage.
The editing of these volumes is somewhat amateurish:
"Wherever possible, identities, facts and dates have been checked against the ODNB. Sources too numerous to name here have been consulted . . . . I started off being somewhat skeptical of relying on web sources, but . . . thousands of queries have been happily resolved through an internet search. Having said that, I must also admit to having scoured hundreds of hard-back anthologies, biographies, correspondences, dictionaries, histories and the like . . . . Some allusions and references remain vexingly untraceable. Searches which have produced a negative result are not generally noted."
The reliance on the ODNB as the ultimate fact-checking resource raises alarm bells, though even that does not seem to have been carried out very thoroughly. The self-reassurance about using the internet, of which there are indeed distinct signs, probably arouses more suspicion than the act itself, as does the boast of having “scoured hundreds of hard-back anthologies, biographies, correspondences, dictionaries, histories and the like”. “And the like”? And is “hard-back” an affirmation of seriousness, drawing the line at mere paperbacks (while Dryden, for example, is sometimes cited from an old student selection rather than a scholarly edition)? Least edifying, however, is that untraced references will be passed over in silence. Not that they are always untraceable either. There is no attempt to identify the Shakespearean originals of The Three Conjurors, still less to explain the pointed local variations. Nor is there any indication of the date or existence of the two earlier free-standing editions, which contain between them important front and back matter and an additional scene, and would have aided the annotation.
The commentary abounds with information that “W—lkes” and “H—ll—d” mean Wilkes and Holland, but is sparse and unreliable in identifying allusions to historical events. Lines about leaving fishing rights to the French, for example (“fishing upon that fatal bed / That well-nigh wash’d off Oxford’s head”), are glossed: “Wilkes’s North Briton, no. 45, criticized the Treaty of Paris which in the end gave Newfoundland to the British but allowed France to retain possession of two nearby islands, St. Pierre and Miquelon”. Newfoundland was already British, though its capital, St John’s, where Nichol is currently employed, was attacked by the French in 1762. That treaty did leave the islands to the French, but they are not mentioned in No 45 or this passage in the play. Both works, however, do address the French retention of fishing rights, a hugely contested issue ignored in this and the following note, about the Earl of Oxford’s impeachment in 1715, though North Briton No 32 had stated that “One of the articles of impeachment against the Earl of Oxford, was . . . the giving to the French the liberty of fishing, and drying fish on Newfoundland”. The impeached Earl was not, as Nichol says, the second Earl (1689–1741, and called Edward, not Robert), but his father the Prime Minister (1661–1724; see, for example, ODNB, which also reports that the second Earl, who would have been twenty-four at the time of Utrecht, “took no significant part in public affairs”). Such laxities and slippages are compounded by chaotic presentation. When information about date, authorship and occasion is supplied, it might turn up in one of several places other than the relevant point in the commentary: in the erratic biographical appendix, or a user-unfriendly “Author Index”, or occasionally in the headnote to the volume in which the work appears, as in the case of The Toast, where, incidentally, the dedication to Swift is incorrectly described as addressed to “Decanus” rather than “Cadenus”. But these texts are useful to have. Nichol reports that no complete set of the first edition of each part of this miscellany is to be found in the research libraries of the United Kingdom, and that the present volumes provide a unique “hardback set” in facsimile for the use of Britons, North and South.
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Claude Rawson is Professor of English at Yale University. His books include Henry Fielding and the Augustan Ideal under Stress, 1972, God, Gulliver, and Genocide, 2001, and Satire and Sentiment 1660-1830: Stress points in the English Augustan tradition, second edition 2000.
