Reading Fictions, 1660-1740

Deception in English Literary and Political Culture

Kate Loveman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351906586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

English society in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was fascinated by deception, and concerns about deceptive narratives had a profound effect on reading practices. Kate Loveman's interdisciplinary study explores the ways in which reading habits, first developed to deal with suspect political and religious texts, were applied to a range of genres, and, as authors responded to readers' critiques, shaped genres. Examining responses to authors such as Defoe, Swift, Richardson and Fielding, Loveman investigates reading as a sociable activity. She uncovers a lost critical discourse, centred on strategies of 'shamming', which involved readers in public displays of reason, wit and ironic pretence as they discussed the credibility of oral and written narratives. Widely understood by early modern readers and authors, the codes of this rhetoric have now been forgotten, to the detriment of our perception of the period's literature and politics. Loveman's lively book offers a striking new approach to Restoration and eighteenth-century literary culture and, in particular, to understanding the development of the novel.

Chapter 1

Sceptical Reading in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries

At the close of the seventeenth century, a laudatory biography of the nonconformist minister Philip Henry praised him as ‘a very candid Reader of Books, not apt to pick Quarrels with what he read, especially when the Design appear’d to be Honest’.¹ ‘Candid’ readers, combining the qualities of generosity, impartiality, sincerity and perceptiveness, had been sought by writers across the second half of the century and solicited in numerous prefaces and addresses.² Ideally, the relationship between authors and their readers would always be one of candour, of mutual honesty, respect and tolerance. But it was not an ideal world, and even a reader of Mr Henry’s exceptional candour was required to have an eye to the possibility that an author’s design was not ‘honest’. Hence writers, while attempting to construct a relationship of candour with their own readers, stressed the need for acuity over generosity when interpreting the works of others. The ‘wary reader’ was to be commended, for he assessed works carefully and was not ensnared by erroneous and false claims.³ The ‘unwary Reader’, in contrast, came in for a great deal of opprobrium. He was tricked by ‘specious’ title-pages; prevailed upon by ‘passionate expressions, and vehement asseverations’; beguiled by ‘Verbal shift’; corrupted by mere ‘facetiousness’ of style; deceived by ‘any Romantick Story’; imposed on by ‘the grossest Falsities’; and, finally, cheated out of ‘his Creed’.⁴ Appearing in works from seventeenth-century scientific treatises to eighteenth-century prose fictions, these casual aspersions directed at unwary readers appealed to a well understood and widespread view of interpretive priorities. In this model of interpretation, candour on the part of readers was neither realistic nor particularly desirable. It was a reader’s first responsibility to discern the truth-status of a work, thereby avoiding shameful misapprehension and lessening the risk of being deceived. I will refer to this model of reading as ‘sceptical’ reading. A prestigious approach to texts, sceptical reading might take mild or severe forms, with readers’ attitudes ranging from inquisitiveness about the factual status of a work to profound suspicion of the writer’s intent. In each case, readers sought to look beneath a writer’s professed design to discern a hidden agenda – the truth about the work’s origins and meaning. The result was commonly a controversial biographical, political or religious interpretation of the text. This shaded easily into interpretation predicated on distrust, where readers not only suspected that the true meaning of a work had been disguised but also that the writer had a devious, possibly malicious, design upon his audience. It should be noted that readers of the period would not have appreciated being called ‘sceptical’, since for many the term was a loose synonym for ‘atheistical’; however for us the word aptly conveys the combination of inquisitiveness, caution and suspicion often seen in the responses of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century readers.

The perception that the chief duties of a reader were to ascertain a work’s truth and avoid being gulled was widely shared in this period. The first half of this chapter will examine the social, religious and political factors which encouraged this sense of reading priorities throughout seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This aspect of the investigation centres on news and on political and religious polemic, but the concerns expressed in these works were also crucial to the interpretation of other forms of literature. I next explore types of evidence available to readers in determining a narrative’s nature and origins. Adrian Johns justly states that ‘readers judged the printed books they met by what they knew of the people, places, and practices implicated in their production, distribution, and use’.⁵ What individuals knew, or thought they knew, about the stories behind any one narrative was important not just in assessing that particular work, but in their evaluations of themselves as readers, and in society’s evaluations of their status. My last section explores these issues in more detail through two fictions from the 1660s: Thomas Shadwell’s comedy The Sullen Lovers (1668) and Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665). In the case of Head’s work there was contention between the writer and his readers over what constituted a suitably sceptical and informed response to the story. Yet these two examples also show that the process of scrutinising a narrative’s truth could be highly enjoyable, for it licensed readers and auditors to accumulate intriguing, and sometimes scurrilous, gossip. The absence of candour between authors and readers proved to have its rewards.

Access to Information

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, concern about the deception of readers was driven by profound changes in access to information. Literacy rates were on the increase. David Cressy estimates that at the time of the Civil Wars, around 70% of men and 90% of women in England could not sign their names; by 1714 these figures had declined to 55% and 75% respectively. Literacy in London and Middlesex was higher than elsewhere. The proportion of tradesmen and craftsmen in this area who could not sign their names was 26% in the 1680s – a figure identical to the level in the 1610s. By the 1720s, however, the proportion of London tradesmen and craftsmen unable to sign had fallen to just 8%. Female illiteracy in England was far higher than male illiteracy, but this too was falling: Cressy reports 78% of women in London and Middlesex could not sign in the 1670s but that this declined to 44% in the 1720s.⁶ Such figures may be gross underestimates of literacy: since writing was generally taught after reading, more individuals could read than could sign their names.⁷ The access to information offered by improvements in literacy may have been offset in some cases by rising costs of living, but individuals did not need to be able to purchase works to read them or hear of their contents.⁸ The rise in literacy was accompanied by a growth in printing activity. The later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw an overall increase in the number of print publications issued per year. To take a very rough guide, the average number of titles published per year in the 1630s was 496, in the 1730s it was 1571. This was by no means a steady increase: the number of publications rose and fell from year to year, with particularly sharp rises during periods of political crisis. For example, the average number of publications per year in the 1640s was an unprecedented 1762, a figure not approached again until the tumultuous years of the 1680s. After 1680, the average number of publications per year in each decade only once fell below 1500.⁹

These averages, derived from the English Short Title Catalogue, do not come close to representing the huge increases in the volume of printed news during this period, for they record entire runs of serials under one title. Charles I had allowed only the printing of serials of foreign news and had forbad even these corantos for most of the 1630s. By January 1644, however, the adoption of the news serial as propaganda weapon in the Civil Wars meant that there were 17 titles available.¹⁰ Throughout the 1640s and early 1650s, interested readers could turn to the newsbooks for domestic and foreign news, editorial comment and political satire. Under Cromwell, newsbooks were restricted to government-approved titles, a measure continued by Charles II and James II, both of whom also made use of legislation to curtail general press output. However, at times when government control was weak or non-existent – the years surrounding Charles’s Restoration, the Exclusion Crisis and the Revolution of 1688 – the number of newsbooks proliferated. Multiple titles were available in the early 1690s, and the expiration of the Printing Act in May 1695 gave a further boost to serials.¹¹ In addition, after the Restoration, improvements in communications meant that news reports and sensational stories travelled more easily around the country. Public postal services expanded: by 1680 there were six main postal routes across England, with deliveries from London to all parts of England and Scotland three times a week. Those with narratives best kept from the government’s eyes could also use the growing network of carriers or public stagecoaches to pass on information orally, in manuscript or in print.¹² By the early eighteenth century, readers could chose from monthly, weekly or daily London papers, along with the first provincial newspapers. In Anne’s reign, moves to restrict the flow of information by imposing a duty on cheap pamphlets and newspapers achieved only a temporary effect. A government survey of 1723 found that there were 34 newspapers supportive of the king, 34 opposition newspapers, as well as 3 papers for non-jurors and 4 for Roman Catholics.¹³

What contemporaries recognised all too well, however, was that increase in the availability of information did not necessarily correspond to increase in the quality of information. In fact, some rather suspected that the reverse was true and that the requirement to produce frequent reports itself resulted in inaccuracy and invention.¹⁴ Charges of financially and ideologically motivated deception against publishers and writers were commonplace – not least from the news-writers who enjoyed highlighting and scoffing at their rivals’ inaccuracies and inventions.¹⁵ Judging by contemporary comment, it was the expansion of the news press in particular which brought concerns about false and deceptive narratives to the fore. Dramatists and pamphleteers took to devising sarcastic maxims on this subject: ‘fuller of false News, than an unlicens’d Mercury’; ‘as full of Lyes as any Gazet or Domestick-Intelligence’.¹⁶ The plurality of different accounts, as Brendan Dooley notes, could serve simply to emphasise that all reports were uncertain and too much information a hindrance to discerning the truth.¹⁷ On these grounds there was some reason to suspect that, with an apparent growth in the amount of false news and with the number of inexperienced readers on the increase, the susceptibility of the reading public to deception was also rising.

The Deceivable Vulgar

Improvements in access to information for those lower down the social scale were a source of unease because there could be no doubt who was most likely to credit falsehoods: it was the ‘simple, and dimme sighted Vulgar’, ‘the simple, ignorant people’ and ‘vulgar Minds’ who were particularly at risk; ‘the vulgar, in all Ages’ being ‘easie to be gull’d by Men of more Learning and cunning’.¹⁸ There was very little discussion of exactly who constituted the vulgar but phrases such as ‘the easie, and deceiveable Vulgar’ imply that credulity was a defining characteristic.¹⁹ The corollary was that once someone was seen as succumbing to lies and fictions, he or she was more likely to be derisively relegated to one of the vulgar. Writers regularly evoked this nebulous social category in an attempt to persuade readers to follow their guidance: a reader who disagreed with the writer’s notion of truth was effectively identifying himself as one of the foolish vulgar.

The loss of status attached to misplaced credulity arose from the perception that anyone who fell for a deceit surrendered his independence of mind. In 1603, Samuel Harsnett, addressing the ‘seduced Catholiques of England’, wondered that ‘men as you are, borne free of an understanding spirit, and ingenious disposition, should so basely degenerate, as to captivate your wits, wils, & spirits, to a forraine Idole Gull [i.e. trick], composed of palpable fiction’.²⁰ To credit a cheat was to acknowledge the superior skills of the deceiver and to accord him an unjust power; moreover this degradation was to a great extent self-willed. As the pamphleteer John Cameron put it, ‘the perversenesse of our passions’ distempers the heart and dulls the apprehension. ‘The Epidemicall disease of our soules,’ he argued, ‘maketh us easily induced to beleeve all that for true ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figure
• Acknowledgements
• Conventions
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Sceptical Reading in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries
• 2 The Strange Finding Out of Moses his Tombe: Strategies and Motives for Hoaxing
• 3 ‘Florishing Lyes’: Coffee-House Wit in the Restoration
• 4 More Shams Still: Reading in the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis
• 5 News, Novels and Imposture, 1688–1702
• 6 Defoe and his ‘Ill-disposed’ Readers
• 7 Swift’s Bites: Eighteenth-Century Raillery in Theory and Practice
• 8 Bubbling Sentiments: Richardson’s Pamela and Fielding’s Shamela
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index