George Berkeley and the authorship of The Memoirs of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca.

Berman, David ; Ross, Ian Campbell

The anonymous novel, Memoirs of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca (1737), was originally attributed to George Berkeley, the philosopher and Bishop of Cloyne, but subsequently to Simon Berington, a Roman Catholic priest. This note reviews the authorship question and, after presenting two new pieces of evidence for Berkeley's authorship, concludes that the question of authorship remains open.

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That George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, may have written a hugely popular work of prose fiction might come as a surprise even to knowledgeable readers. For a century after his death, however, the anonymously published The Memoirs of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca was attributed to the philosopher. The nature and scope of this utopian work is initially suggested by its unusually lengthy full title: The Memoirs of Sigr Gaudentio di Lucca: Taken from his Confession and Examination before the Fathers of the Inquisition at Bologna in Italy. Making a Discovery of an unknown Country in the midst of the vast Deserts of Africa, as Ancient, Populous, and Civilized, as the Chinese. With an Account of their Antiquity, Origine, Religion, Customs, Polity, &c. and the Manner how they got first over those vast Deserts. Interspers'd with several most surprising and curious Incidents. Copied from the original Manuscript kept in St. Mark's Library at Venice. With Critical Notes of the Learned Signor Rhedi, late Library-Keeper of the said Library. To which is prefix'd, a Letter of the Secretary of the Inquisition, to the same Signor Rhedi, giving an Account of the Manner and Causes of his being seized. Faithfully translated from the Italian, by E.T. Gent.

First published in London in 1737, Gaudentio went through at least nine subsequent British and Irish editions in the eighteenth century, beginning with the Dublin edition of 1738, and including another Dublin edition, published in 1752, the year of Berkeley's death, a Glasgow edition of 1765, and an Edinburgh edition of 1773. (1) To the 1798 Dublin edition of the book was added, as an appendix, a 'History of the Inquisition. Giving an Account of its Establishment, the Treatment of its Prisoners, The Tortures Inflicted on Them, &c, &c'. This edition was 'Embellished with Plates', the last of which is entitled 'A View of the Several Methods of Torturing before the Inquisitor'. (2) If this edition seems far removed from the milder views on Roman Catholicism of George Berkeley, then the times were, of course, very different. Nineteenth-century editions included one published in London and another in Dublin in 1821, with a final popular reprint appearing in London in 1851. Nor was the success of Gaudentio di Lucca confined to these islands. There were at least two French translations, beginning with one published in 1746, followed by editions in translation, variously published in Amsterdam and Paris in 1753, 1754 and 1777, and 1787 and 1797, respectively. (3) A first American edition, published in Norwich, Connecticut in 1796 was quickly followed by others appearing in Philadelphia (1798) and Baltimore (1800).

Though the fiction was published anonymously, the notion that Berkeley had written Gaudentio was widespread and persistent. So, The Gentleman's Magazine noted in 1777 that 'The Adventures of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca have been generally attributed to [Berkeley]'. (4) Although this attribution was soon to be challenged, it survived into the nineteenth century, when The Retrospective Review, in printing extended extracts in 1821, suggested Berkeley to have been the author, a view echoed in the Dublin edition printed in the same year. The Phoenix Library abridgement of 1851, edited by J.M. Morgan, also notes the attribution to Berkeley.

It was, however, while indicating the general attribution of Gaudentio to Berkeley that a writer for The Gentleman's Magazine in 1777 seemed, perhaps inadvertently, to call this into question. In a review of Joseph Stock's An Account of the Life of George Berkeley, D.D. (1776), 'Academicus' noted:

   In p. 3, the Biographer speaks of "the airy visions of romances, to
   the reading of which he was much addicted." But he makes no
   mention of his having written any romance, tho' "The Adventures
   [sic] of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca." have been generally
   attributed to him. (5)

This equivocal remark, which perhaps suggested that Stock should have mentioned Berkeley's authorship, was made in the context of Berkeley's

Theory of Vision (1709), and was soon followed by another attribution of the work to Berkeley, in the second volume of Biographica Britannica (1780). It was this that prompted a response from the philosopher's son, also George. In The Gentleman's Magazine (1780), an emphatic declaration by the younger Berkeley was quoted: '"Gaudentio di' Lucca" was not written by my father, nor did he see the book, untill I was a grown lad; and he never read it, but only twirled over some of the leaves'. (6) An alternative attribution quickly followed. Again writing in The Gentleman's Magazine, a 'W.H.' declared, on 'very good' (but entirely unspecified) authority, the author to have been one 'Barrington, a Catholic priest, who had chambers in Gray's Inn, in which he was keeper of a library for the use of the Romish clergy'. (7) Since the librarian in question was called Berington, this alternative attribution does not begin entirely convincingly nor, as we have seen, did W.H.'s assertion gain quick or easy acceptance. Nevertheless, and despite the lack of compelling corroborative evidence, the received view is that Simon Berington (1680-1755) was indeed the author of The Memoirs of Gaudentio di Lucca. (8)

Before offering new evidence for Berkeley's possible authorship of Memoirs, let us consider the case against Berkeley. There is nothing we can add to the Berington attribution which, however confidently accepted today, consists of little more than increasingly confident assertions founded on the account offered by W.H.. (9) More impressive is the case against Berkeley's authorship, since it is based on the testimony of his son, George, who, as noted, strongly repudiated the suggestion that his father had written Gaudentio. The testimony of the Bishop's son cannot be accepted unquestioningly, however. For example, his statement concerning which essays in The Guardian (1713) his father did, and did not, write can be shown to be incorrect. (10) He was also too eager to repudiate anything that seemed inconsistent with 'my father's fair fame', as he put it in an interesting letter, dated 19 November 1788, in which he denied that 'there is any truth in that strange anecdote of my father when at college'. (11) Yet the anecdote, strange as it is, has a good pedigree. It was first told in The Weekly Magazine of December 1759, by Oliver Goldsmith, who informs us that Berkeley, with the help of a College companion, Thomas Contarine, went through the motions of hanging himself, in order to experience 'the pains and symptoms ... felt upon such an occasion'. (12) Goldsmith's testimony is, in this instance, far more credible than that of Berkeley's son, for Goldsmith gives as his source for the story his uncle and benefactor, the Revd Thomas Contarine himself, who was still alive the previous year. (13) Conversely, how could the younger Berkeley possibly know, years after his father's death, that a certain youthful episode never happened? And how, to return to Memoirs, could he know that his father 'never read it'? It is not hard to guess why he should have wanted to believe and to proclaim that his father was not the author for, evidently, Berkeley's association with visionary romances was--like Goldsmith's hanging anecdote--inconsistent with 'my father's fair fame'.

Having argued contra-contra, we now turn to the positive evidence. Although Memoirs had been 'generally attributed' to Berkeley by 1777, the first sustained case for his authorship was made only in the 1821 Retrospective Review article. This consists of a mass of (unsatisfactory) 'internal evidence on which [the anonymous authors] rely, as corroborating [their] opinion that this book was written by Bishop Berkeley'. (14) We say 'unsatisfactory' because the authors' list of correspondences between Memoirs and Berkeley's life and works is too general and too superficial; indeed, they omit some fairly obvious and more striking instances, notably the critical sketch of an English free thinker that corresponds with the picture of English free-thinkers given in Berkeley's Alciphron; or, the Minute Philosopher (1732), (15) though too many writers were then critical of free-thinkers for this to identify Berkeley as author of Memoirs.

There are, however, two specific pieces of textual evidence that allow the question of Berkeley's possible authorship of Gaudentio to remain open. Both relate to the idealistic but ill-fated Bermuda project to which Berkeley devoted himself from 1724-1731. As is well known, Berkeley never reached Bermuda, where he had hoped to build a college and town that were to be, as he put it, in visionary terms, in his best-known poem, 'Verses by the Author on the Prospect of planting Arts and Learning in America', the scene of 'another Golden Age'. (16) Instead, he built a modest house near Newport, where he lived for two years and where he wrote his longest book, Alciphron. A.C. Fraser wrote that 'Tradition tells that much of Alciphron was the issue of meditation in the open air, at a favourite retreat, beneath the Hanging Rocks, which commands an extensive view of the beach and ocean ...', and he includes a pleasing engraving of the notable Berkeleian landmark, a distinctive geological formation. (17) In Gaudentio, the central character recounts:

I was walking in a melancholy Posture along the Sea shore, and reflecting on the Adventures of my past Life, occasion'd by those very Waters whereon I was looking, when I came or rather my Feet carried me to a hanging Rock, on the side of the Island, just on the edge of the Sea, and where there was just enough room for two or three Persons to stand privately under covert, very difficult to be discern'd; where going to sit down, and indulge my melancholy Thoughts, I espied a Turk ... (Memoirs, p.284).

The correspondence between this 'hanging rock' and Berkeley's Hanging Rocks in Rhode Island is, admittedly, more suggestive than compelling. A second textual echo is more striking. It is to be found in an interleaved copy of Joseph Stock's Account of the Life of George Berkeley (London, 1776), annotated by Berkeley's widow, Mrs. Anne Berkeley. On the recto of p.18 of the book, now in the Library of Trinity College Dublin, Mrs. Berkeley describes her husband's design for the college and town.

   I have seen the plan of the College and town of Bermuda drawn by
   the Dean [i.e. Berkeley]--in the midst of a large circle stood the
   College--and this circle was formed by the houses of the fellows at
   proper distances to allow a good garden to each house Another
   circle without this one was formed of houses for gentlemen ... An
   outward circle was composed of shops and houses for artificers....
   (18)

Berkeley's circular plan for his ideal town appears to have been novel. There is, however, another town-plan that featured concentric circular streets having as their centre the main feature or institution of the city: the utopian city described in The Memoirs of Gaudentio di Lucca:

The Grand Place [or religious temple] is in the Center of the Town ... The Fronts of the Houses round the Grand Place are all concave, or Segments of Circles ... This vast round is set with double Rows and Circles of stately Cedars before the Houses ... The cross Streets are so many Parallel Circles round the Grand Place and Temple, as the Center, making greater Circles as the Town enlarges itself ... The middle of the Area's between the cuttings of the Streets are left for Gardens ...(Memoirs, pp.161-3).

We are far from claiming here to have established Berkeley's authorship of the Memoirs but given the still vexed issue of who did write Memoirs of Gaudentio di Lucca, we suggest that the question remains open.

NOTES

(1.) Although both the first London and Dublin editions give the title The Memoirs of Gaudentio di Lucca, most subsequent editions preferred the perhaps more commercial title Adventures, though what was advertised as the fifth Dublin edition (1752) retains Memoirs.

(2.) Gaudentio di Lucca (Dublin, 1798), illustration 4.

(3.) http://catalogue.bnf.fr

(4.) The Gentleman's Magazine 47 (January 1777), 13.

(5.) Ibid.

(6.) The Gentleman's Magazine 50 (March 1780), 125.

(7.) The Gentleman's Magazine 55.2 (October 1785), 757.

(8.) See T. E. Jessop, Bibliography of George Berkeley (1934; 2nd ed. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), pp.46-7 and A.D. Harvey and Jean-Michel Racault, "Simon Berington's Adventures of Sig'r Gaudentio di Lucca', Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4.1 (1991), 1-13. The latter article, while offering an interesting reading of the book, brings its own views into doubt, not least by some strange speculation concerning the use of the name Rhedi for the name of the librarian of St. Mark's Library in Venice, arguing that the name may be 'some sort of verbal conundrum or anagram', though Rhedi is the name Montesquieu gives to one of the correspondents, who writes from Venice, in his Lettres Persanes (1721).

(9.) The later, the more confident the assertion; see, for example, Lee Monroe Ellison, 'Gaudentio di Lucca: a forgotten Utopia', PMLA 50.2 (1935), 497.

(10.) See David Berman, review of G. Keynes's A Bibliography of George Berkeley, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), in Hermathena 125 (1978), 69-70; so, the Guardian essays numbers 69 and 83 were written by Berkeley, although they are missing from the son's list; and no. 3, which is on the list, was the work of Richard Steele.

(11.) The letter is published in David Berman, 'New Bermuda Berkleiana', in Hermathena 110 (1970), 28-9.

(12.) See Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. by Arthur Friedman, 5 vols (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1966), III, 36.

(13.) See David Berman, George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p10.204-5, and Berman, 'Berkeley's life and works', in Kermeth P. Winkler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p.19.

(14.) The Retrospective Review 4 (1821), 333.

(15.) See Memoirs of Gaudentio di Lucca (Dublin, 1738), pp.272-80.

(16.) 'Verses', in The Works of Berkeley, 9 vols, ed. A.A. Luce (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1955), VII, 373.

(17.) The Works of George Berkeley, 4 vols., ed. A.C. Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), I, lvi and facing lviii. A good photograph of the Hanging Rocks, which are located near Berkeley's house, faces p.27 of B. Rand's Berkeley's American Sojourn, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932); see also pp.25-6.

(18.) See David Berman, 'Mrs. Berkeley's annotations in her interleaved copy of An Account of the Life of George Berkeley (1776), Hermathena 122 (1977), 19, repr. in Berman, Berkeley and Irish Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2009), p.191.