Experimentalism in the Irish novel, 1750-1770.

Haslett, Moyra

When William Chaigneau jokingly accused Henry Fielding of plagiarism and Samuel Richardson of boring his readers, he boldly promoted his own novel, The History of Jack Connor (1752), as a rival to their celebrated fictions. (1) Such confidence is striking in a decade which saw the new literary reviews--The Monthly Review and The Critical Review (established in 1749 and 1756)--endorse Richardson and Fielding as the authors against whom all other fiction-writers would be measured and, inevitably, found wanting. Setting themselves the task of reviewing all publications, the reviews often relegated fiction to their final pages, where it was dismissed in scathing lists, ridiculed, in one notable example, as being 'beneath censure, we want words to express our contempt'. (2) Unsurprisingly, therefore, Ian Watt, when he sketched his famous theory of the 'rise of the novel', simply omitted fictions of the mid-eighteenth century, with the singular, particular exception of Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767). Half a century of scholarship on the eighteenth-century novel has subsequently corrected Watt's many omissions--of female writers, of popular amatory fictions, of sentimental and Gothic fiction--and a number of recent studies have turned their attention to the diverse experimentalism of mid-century fiction in particular. (3) Criminal biographies, travel accounts, 'spy' narratives, sentimental tales, Oriental fictions, utopian voyage narratives, satirical lives and Gothic narratives: such a list suggests the proliferation of novelistic genres in the mid-century. While 'experimentalism' might be cited as the only possible defining feature of eighteenth-century fiction more generally, the experimentalism of mid-century fiction is peculiarly situated: published in the wake of the popular and critical successes of novels by Richardson and Fielding and in advance of the acceptance of the novel as a genre, persuasively dated in recent critical work to the 1770s. (4) This essay thus turns to a range of Irish fiction published in the 1750s and 1760s, to examine the particular significance of experimentalism in the mid-century novel.

One of the many ways in which mid-century novelists responded to the challenge of writing in the shadow of Richardson and Fielding was to become self-conscious innovators. At times, such 'innovation' simply consisted of a fresh imitation of the innovations of their predecessors, rather than the creation of genuinely original features. Fielding's self-conscious narrator, who continually addresses his readers as intimate friends, or as resisting readers to be scolded, recurred in countless fictions of the period. Chaigneau, for example, suggests that his reader may skip over various sections of the novel if he pleases, asks him to fill in missing details, gives permission to him to re-read if he has forgotten earlier sections, apologises for trying his patience, and ends his novel with a formal farewell to his reader. Thomas Amory's narrator in The Life of John Buncle, Esq (1756, 1766) frequently addresses his readers as like-minded men, and women, of letters, who might follow his advice concerning books to read, specific editions to buy and ways of travelling in the most remote locations. The spirit-narrator, Chrysal, who gives his name to Charles Johnstone's Chrysah or, The Adventures of a Guinea (1760-65), has to stop his description of a feast for fear of awakening his reader's appetite, and, at one point, turns angrily on the reader, accusing him of ingratitude in his failure to recognise the advantages of British citizenship. (5) And each chapter in the first two volumes of Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (1765-66) ends with a comic dialogue between the author and his 'friend', who appears as an importuning, questioning reader of the unfolding novel. (6) Part-imitation, part-invention, the turn to the reader of mid-century fiction is so widespread that it reminds us of the extent to which Tristram Shandy developed fictional techniques which were fast becoming conventional in the 1750s. (7) Writers deployed these devices, however, as an index of the novelty of their works, as a figuring of the brash modernity of the novel. To an extent, then, the imitations of the mid-century made the act of copying both conventional and, paradoxically, experimental. Imitations, in short, helped to keep the novel 'novel'.

In other respects, Irish novelists clearly invented new novelistic features. Chaigneau's The History of Jack Connor is the first novel in English to include sections of verse, many original, as epigraphs to each chapter. It remains the only novel in English to include two titles within its text: the second volume is entitled The History of Jack Connor, now Conyers and the running head in volume one anticipates this change by itself altering half-way through. Thus at the very same moment that Jack's schoolmaster recommends that Jack lose his Irish accent and change his name on arrival at London, the book changes its own identity. The first instalment of Johnstone's Chrysal, published in 1760, opens with a remarkable fictional representation of the creation of the guinea as a form of ecstatic birth-narrative, quickly followed by a psychologised account of the processes of memory and consciousness, described as if these were tactile, tangible aspects of the brain. Both accounts can be seen as anticipating the monster's dawning self-awareness of his own birth and subsequent awakening into consciousness in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1816). The framing devices at the outset of Chrysal also recall the layering of narrative transmission within Frankenstein. A landlady tells her new lodger, who will become the fictional editor of Chrysal's account, of his predecessors: an alchemist, who on his sudden, mysterious death, left behind the manuscript in which he transcribed the speech of the guinea's spirit, and a clergyman, later a Methodist, who was the first to take possession of the manuscript and who, aghast at what he perceived to be the text's heterodox views, ruthlessly cut and excised it. Chrysal thus also anticipates Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771) in the pathos of its humiliated, damaged textual state: the manuscript containing the account of Chrysal's adventures is rescued from the fate of being used as a butter-dish and a wrapping for snuff from a chandler's shop by the editor, and later omissions and leaps of narrative are explained as the necessary condition of its fragmentariness and blotting. (8) Although the topos of print pages serving to line pastry cases, or worse, recurs in eighteenth-century literature, Chrysal is the first novel to embody this mutilation.

Arguably the most experimental author of the eighteenth century, not only of its mid-century, is Thomas Amory (c.1691-1788), who spent much of his early life in Ireland and whose fictions are particularly marked by this Irish background. Amory published three volumes of fiction: Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain. Interspersed with Literary Reflexions, and Accounts of Antiquities and Curious Things, in several letters (1755) and The Life of John Buncle, Esq; containing, Various Observations and Reflections, Made in several Parts of the World, and Many extraordinary Relations (published serially in two volumes, in 1756 and 1766). All three volumes narrate the life, adventures, and, most importantly, the opinions of a particularly singular gentleman, named 'John Buncle' in 1756. (9) Inspired by a particular zeal for rational dissent, Buncle pursues innumerable, associated interests in natural philosophy and theology, antiquarianism and aesthetics, radical Whig politics and poetry. Thus science and Christian apologetics, bibliographies and biographies of eminent men of learning, defences of female intelligence and chivalrous courtships, descriptions of paintings and catalogues of shells, sea-creatures, and insects, didactic tales of moral reformation and awe-struck descriptions of sublime landscape, all jostle for attention throughout the novels. At first glance, Amory's fiction appears to invoke the miscellaneity and aspiration to learned comprehensiveness of the eighteenth-century periodical or encyclopaedia, rather than the emerging conventions of the novel. His detailed contents lists, numbered sections and footnotes, side headings and marginal notes, and footnotes upon footnotes, all suggest his fictions' curious cross-fertilisation with popular digests and dictionaries of learning.

None of Amory's works acknowledges itself to be fiction. Indeed, their author goes to extraordinary and insistent lengths to proclaim their absolute authenticity as histories of a life, although they are no less typical of fiction of the early-eighteenth century in this regard. However, eighteenth-century reviews of Memoirs of Several Ladies and of both volumes of The Life of John Buncle, Esq show that the works were, from the first, read as fiction, despite their claims to history, learned treatise, or theological controversy. Despite denials to the contrary, the books are clearly 'novels', framed within the narrative of the life of John Buncle. Although knowledge is systematically numbered and marshalled as if in an encyclopaedia, there is none of the pretence of objectivity and neutrality which characterises such works as Ephraim Chambers's successful Cyclopaedia (1728; 7th rev. ed. 1751-2). Rather, learning is presented as being filtered through the strongly-held views and principles of Buncle and while footnotes, notes upon footnotes and, even, notes upon notes to footnotes accumulate, what appears to represent the infinitude of learning also, more simply, illustrates the garrulity of Buncle himself. Further appendices and volumes are promised, but endlessly deferred because, as Buncle puts it, we are 'pouring fast out of time into eternity'. (10) Anticipating Tristram Shandy's inability to keep pace with life as it is lived, rather than narrated, Buncle notes that the conversation of Azora Burcot, the learned head of the 'little female republic' living in a remote part of Westmoreland, would make a volume in itself: 'Were I to set down what she said even on sallads, cucumbers, colliflowers, melons, asparagus, early cabbages, strawberries, rasberries, currants, goosberries, apples, pears, plums, cherries, apricots, etc, and especially, her propagation of mushrooms, champignons, and buttons: this, exclusive of exotics and flowers, would make I believe an octavo'. (11) To measure conversation in octavos is worth commenting upon here. It draws attention to a mentality that life is merely to be poured into books, and no conversation is worth having without being bookshaped.

While a vast array of modern print features are marshalled in an effort to contain and channel Buncle's intellectual enthusiasms, the flowing patterning of speech chafes against the constrictions of text. At one point, the narrative of Buncle disappears altogether, as the footnotes assert their own priority on the page. (12) To this extent, Amory's three volumes of fiction all display the collision of oral and print cultures which is a particular feature of Irish culture in the early-eighteenth century, as has been persuasively argued in particular readings of Buncle by Ian Campbell Ross and Aileen Douglas. (13) Amory's mixture of forms is derived from such diverse influences as the fluid wit and conversational ease of the spoken anecdote or tall tale, and the intellectual precision of learned print, the verbal niceties of theological controversy.

In a striking reading of The Life of John Buncle, Esq, the mid-twentieth century critic Northrop Frye included it within a list of 'anatomies', books characterised by their huge variety of subject-matter and their interest in ideas, even to the relative disregard of character or plot. In this reading, Buncle is situated in relation to other anatomies: Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy (c.1524), Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler (1653), Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), the collaboratively written Noctes Ambrosianae (1822-1835), and Robert Southey's The Doctor (1834-1847). Frye writes against what he sees as the failure of literary criticism to account for different traditions of prose fiction, even to recognise certain kinds of fiction because they do not fit conventional categories:

   [W]hen we find that a technical discussion of a theory of
   aesthetics forms the climax of Joyce's Portrait [of the Artist as a
   Young Man], we realize that what makes this possible is the
   presence in that novel of another tradition of prose fiction. (14)

While Frye's taxonomy of the 'anatomy' is a suggestive one, intriguingly placing Buncle in a 'tradition', if such a thing is possible, of eccentric, experimental prose, it also ignores what is novelistic about such works, what is novelistic even about their deployment of extrafictional elements, such as 'a technical discussion of a theory of aesthetics', or, as in the case of Amory's novels, the incorporation into fiction of extensive passages of theology.

The combination of fiction and theology takes a particular form in Amory's work, mixing serious religious reasoning with comic whimsicality. In his many travels--to Northumbria, the outer Hebrides and the Canary Islands (in Memoirs), and within Ireland and the north of England (in Buncle)--Buncle encounters a succession of like-minded people living in the most remote locations, in which religious debates are given the character of novelistic encounters. Among the most topical issues of the 1750s, for example, was the question of Hutchinsonianism. John Hutchinson had proposed a theory of the Hebrew language by which the true understanding of the Bible could be reached, and his work attracted a considerable amount of attention, both sympathetic and adversarial, in the mid-eighteenth century. The Life of John Buncle, Esq (1756) includes a discussion of Hutchinsonian ideas but, unlike the vast number of pamphlets on these topics, it does so comically, novelistically. Amory makes his hero initially a naive supporter of Hutchinson's arguments, but he is firmly persuaded against his original position when, on a student ramble from Trinity, he comes upon Miss Noel living in the idyll of Eden-Park. High comedy is created when Buncle attempts to make love to Harriot Noel, but is rebuffed by her desire to discuss the finer points of Hutchinsonian theology. Defeated, Buncle joins the debate. When, at one point, he uses the debate itself as a form of courtship, once again, he is politely refused, leading him to enquire:

   If the miracle at Babel was a confusion of tongues, as is generally
   supposed, how did the holy family talk and act with such distant
   Kings and people? Illuminate me, thou glorious girl in this dark
   article, and be my teacher in Hebrew learning, as I flatter my self
   you will be the guide and dirigent of all my notions and my days.
   Yes, charming Harriot, my fate is in your hands. Dispose of it as
   you will, and make me what you please.

      You force me to smile, (the illustrious Miss Noel replyed) and
   oblige me to call you an odd compound of a man. Pray, Sir, let me
   have no more of those romantic flights, and I will answer your
   question as well as I can. (15)

Such comic touches only frame, and never impinge upon, the discussion itself. Miss Noel and Buncle engage in a detailed discussion of Hutchinsonian theories and at such points we leave the 'novelistic' behind, with Buncle taking on instead the tenor of a work of serious theology. But, equally, the discussion does not exist outside of its framing narrative. That Buncle interweaves his theological discussion with attempts at courtship reflects the importance of religion to everyday life, to everyday encounters. It also mixes the gravity of learned theology with a degree of gaiety, or, at the very least, lightheartedness.

The impact of theology upon the everyday is evident in a striking number

of Irish fictions of this period. Jeremiah Connor's futile attempts to comfort his wife or quell her rage with quotations from Proverbs, and the importance of Jack's memorization of The Whole Duty of Man in endearing him to the extended family of Bounty-Hall, underpin key moments at the outset of The History of Jack Connor. In The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Charles Primrose's idiosyncratic insistence that clergymen must marry only once is likewise a particularly significant aspect of his character, not least because it suggests, in its comic obsessiveness, that satirical readings of Primrose may not have been unauthorized by Goldsmith. Although Johnstone's it-narrator, 'Chrysal' claims that it is not permitted to speak of religion, the novel's central premise, in which a guinea assumes the power of speech and thought, is borrowed from the controversial theological work of Robert Clayton, the Church of Ireland bishop of Clogher. In An Essay on Spirit (first published in Dublin in 1750, and reprinted in London in 1751), Clayton argued that spirit animates matter, and may even become capable of thinking and reasoning:

   ... more than probable it is, that the great Expanse is full of
   Spirits of different Ranks and Degrees, from the lowest Power of
   Activity to the highest Degree of Perfection, which it is possible
   for created Spirits to be possessed of. (16)

On its first, Dublin publication, An Essay on Spirit had caused little comment. Once published in London, however, it inspired eighteen pamphlets in reply by 1754 and, after he openly declared his anti-trinitarian views in the Irish House of Lords (February 1756), Clayton was called to account by the Irish hierarchy. Only his sudden death in 1758 prevented his removal from office. Johnstone's open use of An Essay on Spirit in 1760 is not explicitly sympathetic. On the one hand, it permits the imaginative flight of fancy by which the guinea is circulated throughout the globe (Peru, Portugal, London, Holland, and Germany), and is empowered to narrate the stories, conversations and thoughts of those caught up in the Seven Years War (1756-63), the Inquisition and the various machinations of contemporary trade, from its most international to its most local transactions. However, several aspects of Chrysal suggest some distancing from Clayton: at the outset, we learn that the manuscript of Chrysal's narrative was damaged by cuts made by an orthodox clergyman, particularly in 'the most curious and entertaining part of the whole, the philosophy of the nature and agency of spirits'. The clergyman, about whom we know only, but pertinently, that he will shortly turn Methodist, was:

   offended at the author's notions, which he wanted judgment to see,
   were only a deliberate ridicule, of those wild, idle dreams, which
   some men, who call themselves philosophers, have thought proper
   gravely to obtrude upon the world, as learning and knowledge. (17)

The place of Clayton's philosophy within the novel is undermined by a number of other distancing motifs: Chrysal's last master, to whom we owe the transcription of the guinea's account, is ambiguously depicted as either madman or scientist; the editor of the account writes, in an ironic footnote, that the authors of the Essay and of Siris--Clayton and George Berkeley, philosopher bishop of Cloyne--'must have had a communication with this or some such spirit, to come at knowledge so supernatural' because Chrysal's account supports their systems so well; and Volume II concludes not only with an address to the reader, in which the author counsels him to 'reduce imagination to common sense', but with the sudden disappearance of the spirit in mid-sentence, offended by the adept's fart. (18) For the enthusiastically Unitarian Thomas Amory, writing in Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great-Britain, Clayton's Essay on Spirit is too orthodox. (19) For Henry Brooke, the Essay is the last in a list of many paltry hack works which the exasperated narrator recommends to the public as a parting, satirical shot at its poor taste. (20) Significant alterations in references to Clayton by another mid-century novelist, Richard Griffith, suggest increasing unease, as the scandal of Clayton's open anti-trinitarianism broke. The first edition of the semi-fictional work, A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances (1757), defended An Essay on Spirit from its critics, openly identified 'Henry' as Arian in his views and argued that Clayton's Essay had converted him from deism. (21) After further controversy, however, Griffith was more circumspect. Later editions completely rejected Clayton's views (1766), or candidly admitted that passages concerning An Essay had been removed (1767). (22)

Debates which we might now think of as narrowly 'theological' are presented in all of these works as the stuff of everyday life, incorporated not as consciously intellectual engagements with 'ideas', but as ways of thinking which suffuse contemporary life and the decisions and values by which people live. That Olivia Primrose has learned of religious controversy through reading fiction, as she claims, is not therefore as far-fetched as her more traditionally learned father would assert. In having read of 'Thwackum and Square' in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and Robinson Crusoe and Friday in Daniel Defoe's equally famous novel (1719), Olivia has learned something of the debates between deism and Christian orthodoxy. (23) Beyond the articulation and discussion of specific theological writings lie wider, epistemological questions about belief and scepticism, conviction and doubt which underpin or circulate within many of these fictions. Amory's fictions in particular are strenuously committed to the ideal of truths comprehended by reason, while simultaneously spinning the most elaborate and extravagant fictions. One of the many heroines of Memoirs (1755), Elise Janson, claims that Honore D'Urfe contains more 'good lessons' than St Thomas Aquinas and the narrator defends her predilection for romance, since she proves in her own person that 'the brightest imagination is consistent with solid thinking: that the finest fancy but perfectionats sound reason'. (24)

That Irish fiction of the mid-century demonstrates a particular tendency to engage with theological issues might be situated in relation to recent arguments that Irish Enlightenment thinking had a significantly religious inflection. The work of David Berman in particular has focused on the remarkable number of important philosophical and theological books which were produced in Ireland between 1696 and 1757. (25) John Toland (1670-1722), William Molyneux (1656-98), Robert Molesworth (1656-1725), Thomas Emlyn (1663-1741), Edward Synge the younger (1691-1762), Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), John Abernethy (1680-1740) and Robert Clayton (1695-1758) can be seen to offer a liberal, 'Enlightenment' tradition within Irish intellectual history; Edward Synge (1649-1741), William King (1650-1729), Peter Browne (c.1665-1735), John Ellis (1688/9-c.1768), Philip Skelton (1707-87) and Edmund Burke (1729-97) a more conservative, 'counter-Enlightenment' tradition, with George Berkeley (1685-1753) transcending these positions. The importance of these debates to mid-century Irish fiction is particularly marked in the case of Thomas Amory, whose three volumes of fiction refer to, or quote from, Toland, Emlyn, Abernethy, Clayton, King, Browne, Skelton and Berkeley, in addition to other Irish theologians, such as the non-juror Henry Dodwell (1641-1711); the Church of Ireland bishop of Waterford, Thomas Milles (1671-1740); the Church of Ireland Dean of Down, Patrick Delany (1685/6-1768); and the Dublin Presbyterian, John Leland (1691-1766). Amory's own 'Enlightenment' allegiances are clearly presented, with robust defences of John Toland, Thomas Emlyn and Robert Clayton and particular ire reserved for Philip Skelton.

A more general aspiration towards an engagement with current religious and theological debates is also evident in mid-century Irish fiction. Despite the regret expressed by the 'editor' of Chrysal that the cuts made in the manuscript by its first owner reduced 'the work to the appearance of a novel or romance, almost the whole philosophical part having been erased', the scandalous invocation of Clayton at the outset of the narrative continues to animate all four volumes, through the conceit of the 'spirit' of gold which narrates the novel and its sequel. (26) Like Lemuel Gulliver, Buncle dares us to disbelieve him, and the implication of our belief clearly has a religious significance. Consider, for example, the conversation between Buncle and Miss Turner, when Buncle first tumbles out of a mountain before her and her cousin Martha Jacquelot:

   But tell me, Sir, (one of these beauties said) how have you lived
   for several days among these rocks and desart places, as there are
   no inns in this country, nor a house, except this here, that we
   know? are you the favorite of the fairies and genies--or does the
   wise man of the hills bring you every night in a cloud to his home?

      It looks something like it, madam, (I answering said) and the
   thing to be sure must appear very strange: but it is like other
   strange things: when the nature of them is known, they appear easy
   and plain. (27)

In such passages, Buncle reminds us that its own context is one of intense theological debate, in which proponents of rational belief, such as Buncle, or Amory, had to meet the challenge of deist views, with which they had much in common. We need only recall the title of John Toland's first book, Christianity not Mysterious: 07; A Treatise shewing, That there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to reason, nor above it: and that no Christian doctrine can be properly call'd A Mystery (1696)--and the fact that there were no fewer than fifty-four replies to this book before 1761. (28) If, as David Berman has suggested, Swift's writing records the 'popular diffusion' of Irish philosophy, then, mid-century fiction continues that engagement, with Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great-Britain, Chrysal, Genuine Letters and The Fool of Quality all referring specifically to Clayton, and many of these fictions raising and problematizing questions of faith and knowledge, credulity and scepticism, imagination and reason. (29)

In the view of David Berman, the vitality of Irish theological and philosophical debates in the early-eighteenth century is due almost entirely to the insecurity of Anglicanism as the Established, but minority, religion. As he points out, the 'counter-Enlightenment' thinkers listed above, with the exception of Edmund Burke, were Church of Ireland clergyman. Our novelists of this period represent a range of religious backgrounds and loyalties--Huguenot (William Chaigneau), Unitarian (Thomas Amory), and Anglican (Henry Brooke, Charles Johnstone, or Oliver Goldsmith)--and these religious differences are revealed as much in the political as the theological stances implied and, often, openly adopted in the novels themselves. When Jack Connor gets caught up fighting for the Hanoverians at Culloden, for example, Chaigneau has his hero write a comic parody of Charles Edward Stuart, in which he ironically opposes the freedom of the press and the right of parishioners to read the Bible independently of church authorities. (30) In Amory's fictions, Buncle acquires likeminded friends who share his anti-trinitarianism and his Whiggish anti-Catholicism in remote settings as diverse as the outer Hebrides and the Cape Verde Islands. In the second volume of The Life of John Buncle, Esq, Buncle claims that all of the clergy he has met in England have been Jacobite, but, such is the idealism of Amory's Unitarian romances, that nowhere in the three volumes does Amory depict such an encounter. (31) In Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, by contrast, the Vicar's stout defence of 'sacred monarchy' as the safeguard of political liberty appears to endorse a more conservative politics of hierarchical government. (32) And in Chrysal's caricaturing of Jewish people (who, at one point, are depicted as gathering secretly to sacrifice Christian children), Johnstone does not always exemplify the 'Enlightenment' politics of relative toleration and moderation, which are so evident in Chaigneau and Amory.

Despite their obvious political and theological differences, however, the novels share striking defences of Ireland from common prejudice and casually or systematically discriminatory views and attitudes. Among the many 'novelties' introduced by mid-century fiction, then, and by no means its least significant innovation, is its challenge to prevailing representations of Ireland and the Irish. The History of Jack Connor, for example, sympathetically depicts and defends a wake of the 'common Irish'; argues that Irish dialect is humorous and strange only when it is unfamiliar, and that English accents might, depending on one's perspective, be just as laughable; complains of the injustice of blaming the Irish for any and every crime committed in England; and elaborates paternalistic schemes for improvements in Irish land and people. When Chaigneau's narrator suggests that English virtuosi, instead of travelling to Italy to purchase ancient statuary, might more simply 'step to' Ireland to see "Thousands, even at this Day, in the Original Habit, and whole Groups in the ancient Manner, eating on the Ground', and that Locke's theories of childhood development must have been indebted to his personal experience of Ireland, he weighs English pretensions and relative affluence against the hardships and poverty of Irish peasants with a comically ironic flourish, which underscores the seriousness of his point:

   All the World knew that the common Romans wore no Shoes; but Mr
   Locke could not infer from thence, with all his more than Human
   Understanding, that going without them, or having the Feet
   constantly wet, was conducive to Health or Vigour, till he saw such
   numberless Examples. (33)

Unsurprisingly, Chaigneau's apparent 'fondness' for Ireland was singled out for particular attention in the Monthly Review's response to The History of Jack Connor. (34) Thomas Amory's fictions all feature encounters between his hero and a remarkable number of Irish living abroad: a convent of Irish-speaking poor Clares, a group of Irish protestant bards, the Irish-speaking protestant islanders he meets on his travels in the Hebrides, or the six former Trinity College students re united at Harrogate spa, for example. There are also repeated recollections of his life in Ireland: how he narrowly escaped death after twenty-four hours of Irish hospitality and learned from the youth of Ireland how to descend precipitous mountains with the aid of a pole; how he sang and drank with 'Larrey Grogan' and 'Jack Lattin' in Ringsend and walked on shaking bogs in the West; how he attended the sale of Archbishop King's library and danced in Dublin Castle. And, although Amory's hero is vehemently anti-Catholic in matters of religious principle, he also frequently points out his affection for Catholic friends and family. In Memoirs, the narrator claims: 'My acquaintance among the people called catholics hath been very large. I have lived among them in several countrys: I have been in their houses for months, and passed much time with them in their serious and their festal hours ...' (35) The Life of John Buncle, Esq (1756) ends not only with Buncle's claim that he is 'nearly related to many Romanists of great fortune', but also with his marriage, in a Roman Catholic ceremony, to Miss Melmoth, whom he had first met on the sea voyage from Dublin to Whitehaven. (36) And in the second volume of The Life of John Buncle, Esq (1766), Amory rewrites the stereotypical narrative of the Irish fortune-hunter when he has his hero marry six further wives in quick succession, and hypothesize how he would marry one hundred if he could. (37) Although Johnstone's Chrysal is primarily concerned to lay bare the vices and foibles of people throughout the world during the Seven Years War, the novel includes a number of attacks on the political and economic exploitation of Ireland, by which the countess of Yarmouth, and mistress of George II, Amalie Walhnoden, for example, can treat Ireland as her privy purse, Irish peerages can be bought as easily as any other commodity, and a typically cruel English magistrate can show only anger towards a poor Irishwoman who pleads for help. (38)

That Irish novels of the mid-century should display significant defences of the Irish and engage so explicitly with philosophical and theological debates, particularly as inflected by their most 'celebrated' Irish examples (Berkeley and Clayton), suggests that these novels can be easily assimilated into a 'tradition' of Irish fiction. Other novels of the period exemplify various kinds of literary experimentalism, unremarked upon here. We have only to think of Sterne's whimsical learnedness in Tristram Shandy and the Sterneana which followed, such as Richard Griffith's The Triumvirate (1764), and The Posthumous Works of a Late Celebrated Genius, Deceased (1770), of the challengingly equivocal sentimentalism of Frances Sheridan's The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761-67) and Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), or the experiments in early Gothic represented by The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley (1760) and Thomas Leland's Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762). (39) However, the novels addressed in this essay--The History of Jack Connor; Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great-Britain; The Life of John Buncle, Esq; Chrysal; The Fool of Quality; and The Vicar of Wakefield--all demonstrate characters or characteristics which we can consider to be explicitly, self-consciously, 'Irish'. At one point, Chrysal finds himself in the possession of Sir William Johnson, at the head of a tribe of native American Indians. When Johnson meets with a grieving widow, searching for the body of her dead husband, slain in the course of the war in north America, Chrysal's account contains a subtle reference to Johnson's Irish birth:

   he soon felt himself still further interested in her favour, when
   he found she was a native of his own country, and of a family not
   entirely unknown to him, before he came to fix his abode in this
   distant part of the world.

      There is not a stronger instance of the force of that attachment,
   called in a larger sense patriotism, than the instinctive affection
   which persons of the same country, though utterly unacquainted
   before, feel for each other the moment they meet in a strange
   place. (40)

Ernest Baker, who edited Chrysal in the early-twentieth century, described Johnson as the 'admired English leader of American Indians'. Contemporary Irish readers, however, might be expected to have known of Johnson's birth in County Meath. (41) Johnstone's meeting of two Irish neighbours, thousands of miles from their original home, brought together by the forces of international war, is a slight episode in a sprawling work. However, it serves as a touchstone for how an Irish dimension is always a possibility in this fiction, and how an Irish audience of the day might have recognised such dimensions, even if later editors and commentators did not.

This Irish audience for fiction finds material form in significant Dublin imprints in the 1750s and 1760s. Johnstone's second novel, The Reverie (1762), and the first volume of Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality (1765) were first published by Dillon Chamberlaine in Dublin, and a number of Irish fictions survive latest in Dublin editions: The History of Jack Connor (1752; Dublin 1766) and The Reverie (1762; Dublin 1776). Ian Campbell Ross, Barbara Laning Fitzpatrick, and Shaun Regan have drawn attention to the ways in which works with originally English characters and locations were altered to Irish references: 'Garrick' is replaced with 'Spranger Barry' in the Dublin edition of The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1763); and the English location of the first, London, edition of Richard and Elizabeth Griffith's Genuine Letters (1757) is replaced with Irish settings in the second, Dublin, edition (1760). (42) And Kenneth Monkman has discovered that Dillon Chamberlaine's two Dublin printings of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy preceded their first publication in London, by R. and J. Dodsley in April 1760, and that Sterne may well have commissioned them. (43)

As the opening reference to The History of Jack Connor suggested, Irish novels of this period were driven by the desire to compete with Richardson and Fielding as much as were their English, and Scottish, counterparts. Richardson's and Fielding's novels were all quickly reprinted in Dublin. Richardson's pursuit of copyright in his battles against Dublin reprints of Pamela has made his Irish reception the better known of the two novelists', but Dublin editions of Fielding were also significant. (44) In 1752, Amelia appeared in three Dublin editions, for example, and the most experimental of Fielding's fictions, A Journey from this World to the Next, was first published in Fielding's Miscellanies (London and Dublin, 1743), but was re-published in Dublin (1754 and 1758), significantly before its next publication in England (1762).

Readers in Ireland--just like their counterparts elsewhere--appear to have enjoyed a range of fiction, and were not unduly concerned with subtle discriminations between 'Irish' and 'English', or, indeed, 'Scottish' fiction. (45) In retrospect, however, we can see that a number of key Irish novels of the mid-century engaged with extra-literary concerns, theological, economic, and political. In The History of Jack Connor, William Chaigneau openly endorsed the Incorporated Society for Protestant Schools in Ireland, and in the novel's second edition (1753), he added magazine contributions on Irish linen manufacture as an appendix. In Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great-Britain (1755), Amory added a 'Postilla, relative to true religion, the clergy, and their antagonists'. And, in the fourth volume of The Fool of Quality (1769), Brooke includes a principal character's 'Short System of the Beauties and Benefits of our Constitution'. However, all of the novels discussed in this essay might be described more broadly as 'novels of ideas' in their explorations of shifting identities (Jack Connor), Enlightenment curiosities of all kinds (Memoirs of Several Ladies and John Buncle), war and corruption (Chrysal), and education (The Fool of Quality). The incorporation of extra-fictional discourse into the novel was not, of course, peculiar to Irish fiction of this time. We have only to think of Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759), whose interweaving of fictional narrative with philosophy made the Critical Review argue that it was a book for philosophers, but not for novel readers. (46) However, while the discursive range of these texts, their intermingling of earnest debate with playful, self-conscious fiction is not exclusive to Irish fiction of this time, it may be said to be characteristic of it. Its experimentalism, then, resembles more the provocative eccentricities of Sterne, than the narrative innovations of Richardson and Fielding; and Sterne might be discussed in relation to contemporaneous Irish novels, not, clearly, because of Irish themes or subject-matter, but in the manner in which the Irish novel of this time enfolded the seriousness of contemporary learning and debate within its capacious, and frequently comic, embrace.

NOTES

(1.) See William Chaigneau, The History of lack Connor, 2 vols (Dublin, 1752), I, 161,172.

(2.) The Monthly Review 8 (March 1753), 230; review of The History of Sophia Shakespear.

(3.) See Brean Hammond, 'Mid-Century English Quixotism and the Defence of the Novel', Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10 (1997-98), 247-68; Thomas Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.49-82; and Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007).

(4.) See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Deirdre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p.7 and J.A. Downie, 'The Making of the English Novel', Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 (1997), 249-266 (p.264).

(5.) While Chrysal ostensibly addresses the 'adept', to whom he narrates the story of his adventures, later volumes of the novel do not recall this alchemist and appear rather to address the many readers who made the first two volumes so successful. Addresses to the reader are correspondingly much more frequent in volumes 3 and 4; see Charles Johnstone, Chrysal: or The Adventures of a Guinea, 2 vols (Dublin, 1760) and Chrysal: or The Adventures of a Guinea, vols 3 and 4 (Dublin, 1765).

(6.) After one brief dialogue in The Fool of Quality, Volume 3 (Dublin, 1767, pp.42-3), this feature disappears from subsequent volumes, as the novel increasingly develops its Sternean influences in a sentimental rather than a Shandean direction. The first volume of The Fool of Quality (Dublin, 1760) opens with a dedication 'To the right respectable, my ancient and well-beloved Patron the Public' and continues with a consciously whimsical chapter of Dedications, in which the reader is addressed as 'your Respectableness'.

(7.) See Wayne C. Booth, 'The Self-conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy', PMLA 67 (1952), 163-85 and Keymer, pp.49-82.

(8.) See Johnstone, Chrysal (1765), III, 43 footnote; The Man of Feeling (1771) opens with the rescue of Harley's manuscript from its fate as gun-wadding and the narrative thereafter is characterized by sudden breaks and gaps.

(9.) Although the narrator of Memoirs never identifies himself as 'John Buncle', The Life of John Buncle, Esq announces itself as a defence of the life of the author of Memoirs and there are many cross-references between all three volumes.

(10.) Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle, Esq (London, 1756), p.211.

(11.) Amory, Buncle (1756), pp.245-6.

(12.) See Amory, Buncle (1756), p.461.

(13.) See Ian Campbell Ross, 'Thomas Amory, John Buncle, and the Origins of Irish Fiction', Eire-Ireland 18.3 (1983), 71-85 and Arleen Douglas, 'The novel before 1800', in The Cambridge Companion to The Irish Novel, ed. by John Wilson Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp.22-38.

(14.) Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p.308.

(15.) Amory, Buncle (1756), pp.42-3.

(16.) Robert Clayton, An Essay on Spirit (London, 1751), p.25.

(17.) Johnstone, Chrysal (1760), 1, xi.

(18.) Johnstone, Chrysal (1760), I, xii; I, 4, 6; II, 220; II, 219. Johnstone added a third footnoted reference to Clayton in the second edition of the novel; see Chrysal, 2 vols (London, 1761), I, 36; and Chrysal, 2 vols (Dublin, 1761), I, 36.

(19.) Unitarians believed the doctrine of the Trinity was added to Christian belief in the centuries after Christ and thus that it was not only contrary to reason, but also had no Scriptural authority. The name comes from the belief in 'Unitarius', or single-person Deity. Unitarianism remained illegal until the Trinity Act of 1813.

(20.) Thomas Amory, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great-Britain (London, 1755), pp.340-1 footnote; Henry Brooke The Fool of Quality (Dublin, 1765), I 'Dedication', xx; see also I, 75 where the friend asks the author: 'Do you think there is any such Thing in Nature as a Spirit?'.

(21.) Named after its founder, Arius (c.260/280-336), who was excommunicated by the church in Alexandria for his views, Arianism is the belief that Christ pre-existed the creation of the world as a divine but subordinate and created being, so that, having been created by God, he was only semi-divine.

(22.) See Richard and Elizabeth Griffith, A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances, vols 1 and 2 (London, 1757), II, 39-43, 98; A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances, vols 3 and 4 (London, 1766), III, 72-4; 4 vols (London, 1767), 'Preface', I, xxxv-xxxvi. References to Clayton were largely omitted from the second edition of volumes 1 and 2 (Dublin, 1760). I would like to thank Shaun Regan for drawing Griffith's references to Clayton to my attention.

(23.) Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, ed. by Arthur Friedman (1766; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p.37.

(24.) Amory, Memoirs, pp.49-50, p.52. The 1769 edition of Memoirs gives 'perfectionates' (p.59). For a wider discussion of the ways in which the eighteenth-century novel came to provide Christian, specifically Anglican, guidance to its readers, see Carol Stewart, The Eighteenth-Century Novel and the Secularization of Ethics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010).

(25.) David Berman, 'Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment', in Irish Philosophy and 'The Causation and Culmination of Irish Philosophy', Archly fur Geschichte des Philosophie 64 (1982), 148-65 and 257-79; and 'The Irish Counter-Enlightenment' in The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions, ed. by Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1985), pp.119-40. See also, more recently, Michael Brown, 'Was there an Irish Enlightenment? The case of the Irish Anglicans', in Peripheries of the Enlightenment, ed. by Richard Butterwick, Simon Davies and Gabriel Sanchez Espinosa (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008), pp.49-63.

(26.) Johnstone, Chrysal (1760), I, xxiii.

(27.) Amory, Buncle (1756), p.406.

(28.) The figure of replies is taken from J.M. Robertson, A History of Freethought Ancient and Modern to the Period of the French Revolution, 2 vols (London: Watts, 1936), II, 715.

(29.) David Berman, 'The Irish Counter-Enlightenment', p.119.

(30.) Chaigneau, II, 302-6.

(31.) See Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle, Esq, 2 vols (London, 1766), II, 270. The only person who openly professes Jacobite views is the old miser Cock (II, 196).

(32.) See Goldsmith, pp.95-98. Friedman notes that the political views expressed by the Vicar at this point are also to be found in Goldsmith's own political writings of 17602. For a contrary reading of this always-potentially equivocal novel, see Benjamin Bird, 'Treason and hnagination: the Anxiety of legitimacy in the subject in the 1760s', Romanticism 12.3 (2006), 189-199.

(33.) Chaigneau, I, 28.

(34.) See The Monthly Review 6 (June 1752), 447-449; p.447: 'The author takes frequent occasion to express his fondness for this country, to digress in its praise, to throw out hints for its advantage, and propose schemes for its improvement; he often makes smart reprisals upon the English, for their national and vulgar prejudices against their brethren of Ireland'.

(35.) Amory, Memoirs, p.437.

(36.) Amory, Buncle (1756), pp.501n and 511. Three of Buncle's six marriages in the second volume of Buncle are also conducted by Buncle's friend, the Roman Catholic friar Fleming; see Amos, Buncle (1766), II, 51,136, 371.

(37.) Amory, Buncle (1766), II, 484. Buncle announces that he will eventually marry seven wives in the first sentence of the second volume (p.1). The Irish fortune-hunter, who preys upon English women, was a popular stereotype in eighteenth-century fiction. For contemporary examples, see The Adventures of Shelim O'Blunder, Esq; the Irish beau (London, c. 1750) and John Oakman, The Life and Surprising Adventures of Benjamin Brass, an Irish fortune-hunter, 2 vols (London, 1765).

(38.) See Johnstone, Chrysal (1760), II, 41-3; Chrysal (1765), III, 55; and Chrysal (1760), I, 169-70: 'I shall make you wish you had continued eating potatoes at home. I wish I could provide as well for everyone of your country! we shall never be well, till we have hang'd you all'.

(39.) For considerations of Griffith and early Gothic fiction, see the essays by Shaun Regan and Christina Morin in this volume.

(40.) Johnstone, Chrysal (1765), III, 103.

(41.) Charles Johnstone, Chrysal; or tire Adventures of a Guinea, ed. by Ernest Baker (London: Routledge and New York: Dutton, 1907), p.349.

(42.) See Ian Campbell Ross and Barbara Laning Fitzpatrick, 'David Garrick or Spranger Barry? A Dramatic Substitution in Irish Editions of Smollett's Sir Launcelot Greaves', Long Room 30 (1985), 6-10, and Shaun Regan's essay in this volume.

(43.) Kenneth Monkman, 'Tristram in Dublin', Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 7 (1979), 343-68. Volumes 1 and 2 of Tristram Shandy were first published in York and dated 1760, though they gave no indication of the place of publication or the publisher, and copies are known to have circulated locally in early December 1759.

(44.) For Richardson's battle with Dublin printers, see Mary Pollard, Dublin's Trade in Books, 1550-1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp.88-90 and James Phillips, Printing and Bookselling in Dublin, 1670-1800: A Bibliographical Enquiry (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998), pp.111-14.

(45.) The Dublin publisher, Faulkner, however, thought that English reviewers discriminated against Irish and Scottish books; see Prince of Dublin Printers: the letters of George Faulkner, ed. by Robert E. Ward (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), p.58 (18 Dec 1759).

(46.) The Critical Review 5 (April 1759), 372.