Eighteenth Century Vignettes (Third Series) by Austin Dobson is right up my alley. It’s a miscellaneous collection of short essays dealing with various side roads of eighteenth century culture, often from a bookish angle. It’s told in an easy and readable manner and is generally full of charm and interest. As Dobson says in the introduction (in verse), he wishes to take a detailed peek at some obscure detail and to ‘arabesque’ with it.
The first vignette is about David Garrick’s last performances, which roles he took and reports of the audiences who saw them. They all seem in agreement, that he gave his all in those last performances, reminding his audiences what had made him so celebrated in his profession. Elizabeth Carter was particularly rapturous, and all those who wrote about him remarked on the rapid changes of expressions and micro expressions in his face, and the way he delivered lines as if they’d come to him spontaneously. As Johnson remarked, it was no wonder his face seemed more worn than his years, he’d used it more than most people.
There are a number of vignettes about people’s libraries… Dobson seems to enjoy rooting through old auction papers and accounts to find out exactly what a person had got. I learned about Dr Mead, an extremely successful doctor whose house became the initial home of Great Ormond Street Hospital. He had over ten thousand books and was a rare collector, in that he was a generous lender as well as a hoarder. He was also known as a happy person, with Johnson saying he lived in “the broad sunshine of life more than any man”. I’d not heard of him but was very pleased to meet him. (Though I’ve just looked him up on wikipedia to confirm Johnson’s quote and he may have also been a sex pest, lampooned by Sterne as ‘Dr Kunastrokius’ - so maybe not a completely clean figure).
Another library Dobson explores is Henry Fielding’s. Fielding had almost no novels, not even his own. It’s very possible that a person who wrote one of my favourite novels read fewer in his life than I typically do in a month. What he did have was law books (he was a lawyer after all) and books in Latin. He’s been accused of faking his classicist credentials but his book collection heavily imply that he really did mostly read them.
There’s a vignette on Hogarth’s Peregrination, a little trip the feisty painter took with a group of friends, and of which I have a facsimile of the group’s memorial account. One about Walpole’s press at Strawberry Hill and the kind of thing he printed for himself (including his Hieroglyphic Tales), one about Matthew Arnold, a rather sniffy one about Ramsay - a painter who rivalled Reynolds in his day but is less regarded now. There were a number of intriguing lives, including one of Thomas Gent, an Irish man who became a printer in York but was eventually bankrupted.
My favourite vignette was one where Dobson goes through a publisher’s catalogue and digs up various authors and works that haven’t been remembered. There’s a novel called Polly Honeycombe, a female Quixote figure who is driven mad by circulating libraries and the novels of Fielding and Richardson. Talking of Fielding, someone wrote a sequel to Tom Jones, depicting his married state. Someone also wrote a Sterne offshoot, The Life and Opinions of Miss Sukey Shandy of Bow Street, Gentlewoman. Among these unknown writers are the works of Eliza Haywood, someone who’s getting far more recognition these days.
The copy of the book I read was printed in 1896 and had a similar list of mostly forgotten works from the turn of that century. It’s possible that we are truly missing out on such works as The Lady of the Iron Bracelets and Who Poisoned Hetty Layton?. It is also interesting that in the 130-odd years since my copy was printed, I was the first person to read the book through, as I had to cut some of the pages open. Even a previous owner, George Stevenson, who fixed a lovely ship-themed ex-libris to the front, had not finished it. This is a shame, Eighteenth Century Vignettes (Third Series) is an easy and enjoyable read that poked into many odds and ends of eighteenth century stuff.
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