Wednesday, 24 July 2024

Review: The Adventures of a Black Coat

 The Adventures of a Black Coat was an anonymous work printed in 1760 and an example of the ‘it’ narrative, in which an object tells its life. In this case, the ‘it’ in question is an old, knackered black coat, who is passing his life-learned wisdom onto a new, flashy white coat who laughed at the black coat for their shabbiness.

The black coat, named Sable, was created as mourning wear for a politician. As such, the coat’s early life was spent in parliament, hearing “fallacious eloquence silence truth”, leaving it a cynic towards politicians. Now we are all cynics towards politicians, it would at least be nice to hear a little eloquence. 


Sable was given to a footman who sold him to a shop which rents out clothes to people who wish to borrow them. Nowadays, this is only really something that happens for very special occasions, like weddings, or a special outfit for an award or gala. Back in the eighteenth century, clothes were a huge financial outlay and renting was far more common. From a narrative perspective, this does mean that the coat gets to meet many more people. It also means that the people the coat does meet are those who wish to be a ‘gentleman for the day’. Some of these are people going on job interviews, some are con-artists - all of them want to make a good impression for some reason or another.


The first is an Irishman who borrows Sable so he can go meet a theatre manager and make a claim for himself as a great actor. He blows it though, by trying to get the manager to agree to an excessive salary before even seeing him act.


The second is a man going to a nobleman’s levee to see about a position in Spain as a secretary to the ambassador. The nobleman suggested, two years ago, that the position was his if he polished up his Spanish and brushed up on a few things. He has diligently done that, spending all his available money on the tuition. The nobleman, however, has completely forgotten about him and already given the position to someone else. He remarks that the young man hasn’t completely wasted his time and money though, he can now read Don Quixote in the original Spanish.


The third renter of the coat was my favourite. Our friend Sable quickly susses out that there’s something unusual about him but takes it at face value when the man runs on his coffee house bill and almost runs off with someone else’s (much nicer) hat. The wearer says that he has bad eyesight and that picking up the hat was an accident. But when he proceeds to do the same thing at another coffee house, and succeed at grabbing a nicer hat, and then rides a coach to Covent Garden, getting out to ‘check on a bill’ and escapes through a shop with doors at both ends - the coat realises he’s a conman. We then follow the conman for the day as he swindles a lovely new watch, a chain to go with it and brazenly steals a cape from a Drury Lane patron, and the coat is both appalled and impressed by what he sees.


Then there’s an interruption as the clothes dealer pulls out the black coat and puts him back. The narrator insists that the interruption hasn’t happened to eke out a thin story, but is there because the book is an accurate portrayal of everything that really happened.


The Sable recounts how he was rented by a playwright stiffed by a theatre manager (who’s using the playwright’s script as scrap paper because the play doesn’t even have a popular procession). Then he’s worn by a fortune-hunting waiter who pretends to be an army captain to win the daughter of a London butcher. He learns never to mess with a London butcher.


The next renter is a strange one. He is a practical joker who rents Sable to look nice at a yearly meal he and his friends have in Putney. On the boat trip up the river, the joker gives a particular fat man, who always boasts of his eating skill, ginger nuts laced with ‘physick’ - some substance designed to encourage vomiting and shitting. During the meal, the fat man keeps finding himself running away from the table with farts the “sound of distant thunder”. Much is made of the faces pulled by the fat man at the pains of “the globose belly of the afflicted hero”. Eventually, he vomits all over the table and shits himself. Which the joker finds a hilarious end to his trip but the coat doesn’t pass comment.


He’s then rented for a few months by a fortune teller who uses spies to suss out useful information and finally he’s rented by a proper Grub Street hack. This hack, Mr Stanza, one of the few named characters, was born a nobleman but gambled it all away and has now “taken up the lucrative calling of a poet.” As for his writing, “what was deficient in quantity has amply made up for in quantity”. He is of course immediately taken to the Fleet prison for debt and the shabby state of Sable is the result of this imprisonment.


Sable is about to come to the moral of his story when he is taken away abruptly and the thing just ends.


I really enjoyed The Adventures of a Black Coat, the range of people the coat meets are interesting and the various scenes well put together and described. I really liked the tricks of the conman, the slipperiness of the fortune teller and the bizarre nastiness of the prankster. The book shares that admirable Grub Street mix of straight-forwardness and archness. 


it was always strange that the main character is a coat. Not really because of it being an object, but that Sable has opinions and ideas but absolutely no control over anything he does. He has literally no agency, he’s helping a thief now, a failed civil servant next. It’s not just that his actions have no consequences, he has no actions. At one point White says he will “regulate my conduct agreeably”… but how? He’s a coat. The only virtue a coat could show is stoic acceptance. I wonder what my coat (who I’ve long named, Donna) thinks about me?




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