The Merry Thought: or the Glass Window and Bog House Miscellany
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Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym) >> The Merry Thought: or the Glass Window and Bog House Miscellany
[Transcriber's Note:
The texts cited use a variety of long and short dashes, generally with
no relationship to the number of letters omitted. For this e-text,
short dashes are shown as separated hyphens, while longer dashes are
shown as connected hyphens:
D - - - n _Molley H----ns_ for her Pride.
Groups of vertical braces } represent a single brace encompassing
three-- in one case, four-- rhymed lines.]
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The Augustan Reprint Society
THE
MERRY-THOUGHT:
or, the
Glass-Window and Bog-House
MISCELLANY.
Parts 2, 3, and 4
(1731-?)
_Introduction by_
MAXIMILLIAN E. NOVAK
Publication Number 221-222
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles
1983
GENERAL EDITOR
David Stuart Rodes, _University of California, Los Angeles_
EDITORS
Charles L. Batten, _University of California, Los Angeles_
George Robert Guffey, _University of California, Los Angeles_
Maximillian E. Novak, _University of California, Los Angeles_
Nancy M. Shea, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_
Thomas Wright, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_
ADVISORY EDITORS
Ralph Cohen, _University of Virginia_
William E. Conway, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_
Vinton A. Dearing, _University of California, Los Angeles_
Phillip Harth, _University of Wisconsin, Madison_
Louis A. Landa, _Princeton University_
Earl Miner, _Princeton University_
James Sutherland, _University College, London_
Norman J. W. Thrower, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_
Robert Vosper, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_
John M. Wallace, _University of Chicago_
PUBLICATIONS MANAGER
Nancy M. Shea, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY
Beverly J. Onley, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Frances Miriam Reed, _University of California, Los Angeles_
INTRODUCTION
In an address to the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies at
the 1983 annual meeting, Roger Lonsdale suggested that our knowledge of
eighteenth-century poetry has depended heavily on what our anthologies
have decided to print. For the most part modern anthologies have, in
turn, drawn on collections put together at the end of the eighteenth
century and the beginning of the next, when the ideal for inclusion was
essentially that of "polite taste." The obscene, the feminine, and the
political were by general cultural agreement usually omitted. Lonsdale
is not the only scholar questioning the basis of the canon; indeed,
revisionism is fast becoming one of the more ingenious--and
useful--parlor games among academics. Modern readers are no longer so
squeamish about obscenity nor so uncomfortable with the purely personal
lyric as were the editors at the end of the eighteenth century. And we
are hardly likely to find poetry written by women objectionable on that
score alone. In short, the anthologies we depend upon are out of date.
Among the works that would never have been a source of poems for the
canon, and one mentioned by Lonsdale, was the collection of verse
published in four parts by J. Roberts beginning in 1731, _The
Merry-Thought: or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany_, commonly
known simply as _The Bog-House Miscellany_. Its contemporary reputation
may be described as infamous. James Bramston, in his _The Man of Taste_
(1733), mentioned it as an example in poetry of the very opposite of
"good Taste" (ARS 171 [1975], 7). Polite taste, of course, is meaningful
only if it can define itself by what it excludes, and nothing could be
in worse taste than a collection of pieces written on windows, carved in
tables, or inscribed on the walls of Britain's loos.
Just as the compilers of a modern work, _The Good Loo Guide_, were
parodying a well-known guide book to British restaurants, so the unknown
authors of _The Merry-Thought_ had some notion, however discontinuous,
of parodying the nation's polite literature. Were not Pope and Swift
famous for their distinguished miscellanies? What could be more amusing
than a collection of poems that represented a different poetic
ideal--a collection of verse with none of the pretensions to artistic
merit claimed by the superstars of the poetic world--the spontaneous
productions of nonpoets in moments of idleness or desperation.
Apparently some of the inscribers in the bog-houses used excrement
as a medium for--as well as a subject of--their inscriptions. _The
Merry-Thought_, then, is not even the kind of art that Dryden attacked
in _MacFlecknoe_ and Pope in his _Dunciad_--the work of bad poets
masquerading as geniuses.[1] Rather, it is a primitive form of folk art
produced as a more or less spontaneous act of play or passion, and
achieving some small degree of respectability only when practiced by a
respected poet and collected with his more serious verse.[2] Like modern
"serial" graffiti, it could function as a form of communication since
the first inscriptions often provoked those who followed to make their
own contributions.
[Footnote 1: On the other hand, the willingness of publishers to
bring out such material would have suited well enough with Pope's
picture of heir heroic games. See Alexander Pope, _The Dunciad_, ed.
James utherland, Twickenham Edition, 2d ed., rev. (London: Methuen,
1953), 97-306, bk 2, lines 17-220.]
[Footnote 2: See, for example, W. H. Auden's "Academic Graffiti," in
Collected Poems_, ed. Edward Mendelsohn (London: Faber and Faber,
976), 510-18. Such a verse as the following is more clever than most
raffiti, but like ordinary graffiti it remains essentially
"unpoetic": Lord Byron / Once succumbed to a Siren. / His flesh was
weak, / Hers reek."]
Indeed, one of the more interesting aspects of graffiti is that in an
impermanent form it testifies to the continuance over the centuries of
certain human concerns. Recent studies of graffiti have often focused on
particular modern conflicts between races or nations, on drug problems,
and on specific political commentary.[3] But such local matters aside,
the content of modern graffiti is surprisingly like that of earlier
periods: scatological observations, laments of lovers, accusations
against women for their sexual promiscuity, the repetition of "trite"
poems and sayings, and messages attributed to various men and women
suggesting their sexual availability and proficiency. And if the
political targets have changed over the years, many of the political
attitudes have remained consistent. Graffiti is an irreverent form, with
strong popular and anti-establishment elements. As actions common to all
classes, eating, drinking, defecation, and fornication find their lowly
record in graffiti-like form.
[Footnote 3: See, for example, Elizabeth Wales and Barbara Brewer,
"Graffiti in the 1970's," _Journal of Social Psychology_ 99 (1976):
115-23.]
On the most basic level, a writer will observe that the excrement of
the rich differs in no way from that of the poor. Thus one poem, taken
supposedly from a "Person of Quality's Boghouse," has the following
sentiment:
Good Lord! who could think,
That such fine Folks should stink?
(Pt. 2, p. 25)
There is nothing very polite about such observations, and no pretension
to art. These verses belong strictly to folklore and the sociology of
literature, but they suggest some continuing rumbles of discontent
against the class system, the existence among the lower orders of some
of the egalitarian attitudes that survived the passing of the Lollards
and the Levellers. Who were the writers of these pieces? Were they
indeed laborers? Or were they from the lower part of what was called the
"middle orders"? Is there some evidence to be found in the very fact
that they could write?
Graffiti may, indeed, tell us something about degrees of literacy. One
wit remarked that whatever the ability to read or write may have been at
the time, almost everyone seemed to have been literate when presented
with a bog-house wall: "Since all who come to Bog-house write" (pt. 2,
p. 26). The traditional connection between defecation and writing was
another comparison apparent to the commentators. One wrote:
There's Nothing foul that we commit,
But what we write, and what we sh - - t.
(Pt. 2, p. 13)
And the lack of some paper or material to clean the rear end provoked
the following sentiment in the form of a litany:
From costive Stools, and hide-bound Wit,
From Bawdy Rhymes, and Hole besh - - t.
From Walls besmear'd with stinking Ordure,
By Swine who nee'r provide Bumfodder
_Libera Nos_----
(Pt. 4, p. 7)
Other types of graffiti, however, vary from the very earnest expression
of affection to the nonexcrementally satiric. One of the more unusual is
a poem in praise of a faithful and loving wife:
I kiss'd her standing,
Kiss'd her lying,
Kiss'd her in Health,
And kiss'd her dying;
And when she mounts _the Skies_,
I'll kiss her flying.
(Pt. 3, p. 5)
Underneath this poem, _The Merry-Thought_ records a favorable comment on
the sentiment. Even more earnest is the complaint of a woman about her
fate in love:
Since cruel Fate has robb'd me of the Youth,
For whom my Heart had hoarded all its Truth,
I'll ne'er love more, dispairing e'er to find,
Such Constancy and Truth amongst Mankind.
_Feb._ 18, 1725.
(Pt. 2, p. 12)
We will never know why she was unable to marry the man she truly loved;
but her bitterness may have been short-lived. Just after this
inscription comes a cynical comment identifying the lady as a member of
the Walker family. And the writer insists that like all women she was
inconstant, since he kissed her the next night.
This cynical approach to love and women dominates _The Merry-Thought_.
Part three, for instance, contains a poem that reads like a parody of
Belinda awaking in the first canto of Pope's _Rape of the Lock_. The
author, identified as W. Overb - - ry, presents a realistic morning
scene without either the charms and beauties that surround Pope's
Belinda or the viciousness and focus of Swift's similar pictures (see
pt. 3, p. 26).
Prevailingly, women are depicted as sexually insatiable, as in a piece
written by a man who takes a month's vacation from sex to recoup his
strength (pt. 2, p. 12). And the related image of the female with a
sexual organ capable of absorbing a man plays a variation on the vagina
dentata theme (e.g., pt. 2, pp. 19, 24). A drawing of a man hanging
himself for love raises a considerable debate on whether such a thing
can indeed occur (pt. 2, pp. 17-18). In a more realistic vein, though
equally cynical, is the poem on the woman who complained of her husband
making her pregnant so often:
A poor Woman was ill in a dangerous Case,
She lay in, and was just as some other Folks was:
By the Lord, cries _She_ then, if my Husband e'er come,
Once again with his Will for to tickle my Bum,
I'll storm, and I'll swear, and I'll run staring wild;
And yet the next Night, the Man got her with Child.
S. M. 1708.
(Pt. 2, pp. 10-11)
S. M. is clearly unsympathetic to the plight of married women in an age
with only the most primitive forms of birth control.[4] The picture of
her as a long-suffering person is undercut by the casual male assumption
that giving birth was not really dangerous and that women make too much
of the pain and difficulty. That women were often forced to go through
thirteen or fourteen deliveries when little thought had yet been given
to creating an antiseptic environment for childbirth is apparently of
little concern to S. M., who finds in the apparent willingness of the
woman to have sexual intercourse one more time sufficient reason for
contempt.
[Footnote 4: For an account of the horrors associated with
childbirth, see Lawrence Stone, _The Family, Sex, and Marriage in
England, 1500-1800_ (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 79-80.]
In addition to giving glimpses into social attitudes, _The
Merry-Thought_ has a variety of inscriptions that show the way these
writings functioned. Professor George Guffey, in his introduction to
the first part of this work (ARS 216 [1982], iii-iv), remarks upon the
proposal scene carried on in _Moll Flanders_ between Moll and the
admirer who will prove her third husband and her brother. Such scenes
involving witty proposals and responses cut into the windows of taverns
were real enough at the time. The exchange in part two of _The
Merry-Thought_ is not, however, half so satisfactory. The woman takes
umbrage at her admirer's suggestions that the glass on which he writes
is "the Emblem" of her mind in being "brittle, slipp'ry, [and]
pois'nous," and writes in retort:
I must confess, kind Sir, that though this Glass,
Can't prove me brittle, it proves you an Ass.
(Pt. 2, p. 27)
Though an easy cynicism about women's availability and about the
body's insistently animal functions predominates, there is enough
variety in _The Merry-Thought_ to provide something of a picture of
eighteenth-century society were any future anthropologist to come
upon this volume as the sole remnant of that period. He would see a
society engaged rather more in animal functions than in intellectual
pursuits--a society rather more concerned with drinking, love, and
defecation than the picture presented by the polite and intellectual
literature of the time allowed. But he would also find in the satirical
squibs on Corny, the Cambridge bookseller and printer, evidence of
learning and university life (pt. 2, pp. 4-6) as well as a criticism of
opera (pt. 2, pp. 14-16). He would see numerous young men longing for
their mistresses to soften their hearts toward them, and cynical older
men who had lost their illusions about love. But he could also come upon
a straight piece of philosophy taken from the still fashionable Flask
tavern in Hampstead (pt. 2, p. 24) or lowly bits of pious folk wisdom
(pt. 2, p. 10). More often, however, he would uncover a society in which
there was little of the generalized style that characterizes even the
most personal formal poetry of the period. Many of the writers identify
themselves and the names of the women they love or detest. In short, if
these volumes do little else, they do provide a vivid glimpse into the
personal life of the time, and to that extent an injection of some of
these inscriptions into the anthologies of the period might help in
providing a lively and piquant context for the serious artistic
production of writers like Gay and Swift.
The announced "publisher" of this olio was one Hurlothrumbo, a character
drawn from the theatrical piece of that name by Samuel Johnson of
Cheshire (1691-1773). Professor Guffey has proposed that James Roberts,
for whom the four parts were printed, "was almost certainly the
collector of the graffiti" and that the name of Hurlothrumbo was invoked
in order to attract some of the attention that Samuel Johnson of
Cheshire and his play were still receiving two years after the play's
first performance and publication.[5] But Roberts would appear an
unlikely candidate for the role of editor;[6] I would suggest, rather,
the possibility of a more direct and active connection with Samuel
Johnson of Cheshire: that he was himself likely the compiler of the
four parts of _The Merry-Thought_ and that, whatever the individual
versifiers may have intended, this infamous collection of graffiti--_as
collection_--shares very closely with Johnson's other work a spirit of
wild variety, eccentric juxtaposition, and essential anarchism that is
meant to lead, not to clever parody of polite literature, but to a new,
almost apocalyptic vision of the sublime.
[Footnote 5: See ARS 216, x, n. 12. Professor Guffey offers
parallels between _The Merry-Thought_ and _Hurlothrumbo_ in
"Graffiti, Hurlo Thrumbo, and the Other Samuel Johnson," _Forum:
A Journal of the Humanities and Fine Arts_ 17 (1979): 35-47.]
[Footnote 6: Michael Treadwell has demonstrated that the "trade
publishers" of the eighteenth century, such as James Roberts, acted
almost exclusively as binders and distributors of books and were
therefore different in kind from the printers and booksellers, who
were directly involved in the selection and production process.
Roberts and the other "trade publishers" dealt almost exclusively in
"works belonging to others," and Treadwell singles out Roberts as
the purest example. Despite putting his name to "literally thousands
of works," he never purchased any of the copyrights on works during
his long career. See "London Trade Publishers, 1675-1750,"
_Library_, 6th ser., 4 (1982): 99-134.]
At the first level, _Hurlothrumbo: Or, The Super-Natural_ (1729) itself
appears to be quite simply a parody, in this case of opera in the form
of a work mixing dialogue and song in a manner similar to but much
wilder than Gay's _Beggar's Opera_. Johnson's apparent takeoff on the
heroics of opera managed to include in its attack a commentary upon the
absurdity of contemporary tragedy as well as some specific references to
those works that aimed at the sublime. Lines like "This World is all a
Dream, an Outside, a Dunghill pav'd with Diamonds" (48) seem to call the
very nature of metaphor into question, especially when juxtaposed with
other delirious lines such as "Rapture is the Egg of Love, hatched
by a radiant Eye" (14) or by songs such as that sung by the king on
contemplating the effects of swallowing gunpowder and brandy together:
Then Lightning from the Nostrils flies.
Swift Thunder-bolts from Anus, and the Mouth will break,
With Sounds to pierce the Skies, and make the Earth to quake.
(P. 42)
_Hurlothrumbo_ may be mostly nonsense, but from the standpoint of
literary history, it is highly significant nonsense. It represented a
revolt against all dramatic conventions and shared a number of qualities
with graffiti, including the sense of spontaneity.
Had Johnson's intention been something as relatively uncomplicated as
literary parody he would have achieved some minor fame in a century
which could boast any number of geniuses who had specialized in deriding
the pretentiousness of the more established literary forms, particularly
tragedy, the epic, and the pastoral. But Johnson of Cheshire lacked the
aesthetic distance required of sustained irony and had a grander purpose
in mind. His tradition was not that of the parodist but rather that of
the visionary--the mystic whose tendency is to merge the high and the
low, the sublime and the absurd, within a single work.[7] He was not
attacking the extravagant rants of the heroic play as Fielding was to do
in his _Tragedy of Tragedies_ (1731) or reflecting on opera and pastoral
as Gay had done in _The Beggar's Opera_ (1728); rather he was trying,
however unsuccessfully, to maintain his own work at the highest reaches
of sublimity. He was like one of Pope's "_Flying Fishes_," who "now and
then rise upon their fins and fly out of the Profound; but their wings
are soon dry, and they drop down to the bottom."[8]
[Footnote 7: See Martin Pops, "The Metamorphosis of Shit,"
_Salmagundi_ 56 (1982): 27-61.]
[Footnote 8: Alexander Pope, _Peri Bathous_, in _Literary Criticism
of Alexander Pope_, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1965), 54.]
In his preface to _The Blazing Comet; or the Beauties of the Poets_
(1732), Johnson of Cheshire noted that "the same thought that makes the
Fool laugh, may make the wise Man sigh" (ix). Given such an equivocal
approach to the ways in which the audience responded to his work, the
poet could easily shrug off audience laughter to his most "Sublime"
lines. He was always ready "to leap up in Extasy; and dip ... [his] Pen
in the Sun" (iv). Parts of _Hurlothrumbo_, particularly the scene
between Lady Flame and Wildfire (both of whom are described in the list
of characters as "mad") in which Wildfire threatens to cast off his
clothes and "run about stark naked" (48), bear an odd resemblance to
"The King's Cameleopard" in _Huckleberry Finn_. But the disconnected
verbal structure, along with the music and dancing, achieves a strange
mixture that must have amused and, to a certain extent, bemused its
audience.
Johnson called upon "Variety" as his most important artistic principle,
and he developed his ideas on this subject in _A Vision of Heaven_
(1738), a work which bears a striking resemblance to William Blake's
_The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_.[9] Johnson argues that all surface
appearances are merely a form of "Hieroglyphic" concealing a true vision
of things (6). His narrator is capable of what Blake was to call "mental
flight," and there is a particularly vivid passage in which the stars
are seen as throwing down "freezing Daggers" at the poor starving
children in the streets and another in which we encounter an aged woman
who wields a broom against spiders and against all the young women who
threaten to come near the narrator (26).[10] The mystic temperament is
often capable of making connections between the spiritual and the
excremental,[11] between the sublime and the bathos of "Thunder-bolts
from Anus." Blake, we should recall, has poems depicting himself
defecating.[12]
[Footnote 9: Without suggesting that Blake may have known of
Johnson's work, I would nevertheless note the similarity of certain
sections. Like Blake, Johnson mingled comedy and satire in his
vision.]
[Footnote 10: Compare Blake's "The Mental Traveler," _The Poetry and
Prose of William Blake_, ed. David Erdman and Harold Bloom (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), 476-77.]
[Footnote 11: See Pops, 31.]
[Footnote 12: Blake, _Poetry and Prose_, 491.]
Whether Johnson actually collected _The Merry-Thought_ or not, the
reasons for the association of these volumes with his name should then
be clear enough. While Fielding might appropriate the title "Scriblerus
Secundus" by way of staking out a line of descent for his humor and
satire, Hurlothrumbo was so thoroughly connected with Johnson and his
play that I can see no reason why he should not be considered the likely
editor of such a varied and eccentric collection of verse and prose as
_The Merry-Thought_. That the "Variety" bears no resemblance to that of
serious art, however, should be as obvious as the difference between a
William Blake and a Samuel Johnson of Cheshire. As William Hogarth was
to remark, "variety uncomposed, and without design is confusion and
deformity."[13]
[Footnote 13: _The Analysis of Beauty_, ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1955), 35.]
Of course, miscellanies by their very nature are likely to be organized
according to principles of variety. What makes _The Merry-Thought_
different from those appealing to polite taste is the wide swings of
emotion that prompt the writers of these poems and catch the compiler's
fancy. As we have seen, the verses themselves vary from the grossest
comments on shit to the most passionate expressions of love. That the
one is likely to appear on the walls of latrines and the other to be cut
in glass by a diamond is part of what Johnson would have called the
"Hieroglyphic" significance of this collection. In Johnson's plays,
there is the odd mixture of vulgarity and sublimity, the comic and the
serious, the satirical and the nonsensical. If his dramas bear a
resemblance to Jarry's _Ubu Roi_, so _The Merry-Thought_ resembles the
kind of anthology that Jarry might have put together to illustrate the
absurd anarchy of the human spirit. Johnson, on the other hand, regarded
this seeming anarchy of human thoughts and feelings optimistically as an
emblem of human spirituality.
_University of California,_
_Los Angeles_
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Part 2 ("The SECOND EDITION") and Part 3 of _The Merry-Thought_ are
reproduced in photographic facsimile from the copies in the William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library (Shelf Mark: *PR1195/H8H9/1731). They are
bound together with Part 1 ("the Third Edition; with very Large
Additions and Alterations"), which was published as ARS 216 in 1982.
A typical type page (pt. 2. p. 7) measures 154 x 87 mm. Part 4 is
reproduced from the copy in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Shelf Mark:
Douce T. 168[5]).
The
MERRY-THOUGHT:
or, the
Glass-Window and Bog-House
MISCELLANY.
Taken from
The Original Manuscripts written in _Diamond_
by Persons of the first Rank and Figure in _Great
Britain_; relating to Love, Matrimony, Drunkenness,
Sobriety, Ranting, Scandal, Politicks, Gaming,
and many other Subjects, _Serious_ and _Comical_.