Nicholas Seager Keele University

Gulliver’s Travels Serialized and Continued

Abstract. The publication history of Gulliver’s Travels mirrors developments in the seri- alization of prose fiction during the eighteenth century. This essay traces this publication history, from the almost immediate reprints in newspapers through mid-century number books to late-century re-issues in literary magazines. Aspects of the original form of Swift’s fiction, both its verbal structure and its bibliographical design, were conducive to these modes of serial publication. The propensity for other writers to supply unauthorized continuations of Gulliver’s Travels, particularly in the wake of its initial publication but persisting beyond the eighteenth century, is not only related to the repetitive, accretive, and formulaic mode that makes Gulliver a serial narrative, but to the self-consciously incomplete fictional form that Swift cultivates. Sequels to Gulliver’s Travels, like the serializations, indicate readers’ desires for elastic and sometimes inconclusive fictional forms, as well as other authors’ desires to chal- lenge Swift’s aims. The essay discusses four early continuations, before the two phenomena are drawn together with the example of a serialized continuation of the Travels.

In July 1839, Charles Dickens sent to John Forster his plans for a new serial, later named Master Humphrey’s Clock, which ran from April 1840 to December 1841, and included The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge. In his letter, Dickens characteristically harked back to eighteenth-century prototypes The Tatler (1709– 11), The Spectator (1711–14), and The Bee (1759). He also considered commencing in the proposed publication “a series of satirical papers purporting to be translated from some Savage Chronicles, and to describe the administration of justice in some country that never existed” with the aim of “keep[ing] a special look-out upon the magistrates in town and country, and never to leave those worthies alone.” Unsurprisingly, when contemplating a topical satire figured through a fictitious distant land, his thoughts shifted to Swift. “If I can compare it with anything,” he said in a parenthesis, “it would be something between Gulliver’s Travels and the Citizen of the World.”1 Dickens’s thinking of Gulliver’s Travels alongside the periodicals by Addison and Steele, and Goldsmith’s “Chinese Letters” (1760–61), indicates that Swift’s magnum opus retained currency not only as a satirical work but also as a serial work at least into the 1830s, after a century in which its publication history matched developments in the history of the serial publication of prose

1 The Letters of Charles Dickens, I: 1820–1839, eds Madeline House and Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 564. 544 Nicholas Seager

fiction before Dickens (and his contemporaries, like Marryat) ushered in what has recently been dubbed the “serial revolution.”2 The earlier history of serial publication is typically overlooked in accounts that may be said to overstate the case for a Victorian “revolution.” The serialization of eighteenth-century fiction has not been extensively studied for the past fifty years.3 Sequels have meanwhile gained a greater extent of treatment in some of the more recent work on prose fiction’s place in eighteenth-century print culture.4 Literary critics must consider both authors’ and publishers’ commercial motivations for the continuation of literary stories, as well as the cultural conditions that made contemporaries want to contest the meaning of certain texts; furthermore, critics must account for the formal expectations that ensured readers were happy to defer or forego the “sense of an ending” so integral to later novels.5 The first part of this essay reconstructs the publication history of Gulliver’s Travels in relation to three distinct phases in the history of serialized publication: early eighteenth-century newspaper reprints, mid-eighteenth-century number books, and late-eighteenth- century literary magazines. The second part of the essay gives a more focused account of the first five years following Gulliver’s publication, 1726 to 1731. This period generated a number of adaptations and appropriations, but it has not yet been considered thoroughly in the way that the creative responses to Richardson’s Pamela or Sterne’s Tristram Shandy have been.6 The focus here will be on continuations of Gulliver’s Travels, a cottage industry throughout the eighteenth century and beyond, and the relationship of continuation to serialization. Serialization and continuation not only signal new uses of popular texts as resources for publishers and authors, but are also publishing practices which took their cue from, and had a subsequent influence on, fictional form.

2 Graham Law and Robert L. Patten, “The Serial Revolution,” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, VI, ed. David McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 144–71. 3 The two pioneering accounts are R. M. Wiles, Serial Publication in England before 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957); and Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740– 1815 (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, and London: Oxford University Press, 1962). Thomas Keymer has more recently attended to the subject in relation to the publication of Tristram Shandy, in Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Of course, the qualities of “contingency, malleability, elasticity, improvisation” (p. 86) that Keymer highlights apply less directly to a serialized reprint. 4 For example, Paul Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg, eds, Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). 5 See J. Paul Hunter, “Serious Reflections on Farther Adventures: Resistances to Closure in Eighteenth- Century British Novels,” Augustan Subjects: Essays in Honor of Martin C. Battestin, ed. Albert J. Rivero (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, and London: Associated University Presses, 1997), pp. 276–94. 6 See Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, “Pamela” in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Warren L. Oakley, A Culture of Mimicry: Laurence Sterne, his Readers and the Art of Bodysnatching (London, et al.: Maney Publishing, 2010).