Translation, Reputation, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Britain

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Catherine Fleming

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto

Translation, Reputation, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Catherine Fleming

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English University of Toronto

2018 Abstract This thesis explores the reputation-building strategies which shaped eighteenth-century translation practices by examining authors of both translations and original works whose lives and writing span the long eighteenth century. Recent studies in translation have often focused on the way in which adaptation shapes the reception of a foreign work, questioning the assumptions and cultural influences which become visible in the process of transformation. My research adds a new dimension to the emerging scholarship on translation by examining how foreign texts empower their English translators, offering opportunities for authors to establish themselves within a literary community. Translation, adaptation, and revision allow writers to set up advantageous comparisons to other authors, times, and literary milieux and to create a product which benefits from the cachet of foreignness and the authority implied by a pre-existing audience, successful reception history, and the standing of the original author. I argue that John

Dryden, Alexander Pope, Eliza Haywood, and Elizabeth Carter integrate this legitimizing process into their conscious attempts at self-fashioning as they work with existing texts to demonstrate creative and compositional skills, establish kinship to canonical authors, and both

construct and insert themselves within a literary canon, exercising a unique form of control over their contemporary reputation.

By examining the classical translations of Dryden and Pope alongside Haywood’s popular French translations and Carter’s scholarly and philosophical translations from Greek,

Italian, and French, I show how each of these authors use conventions of classical translation, following similar strategies to build reputations. Both Pope and Dryden ask readers to compare them to a classical source, but Dryden promotes his writing by praising the authors he translates while Pope’s relationship to his originals is often adversarial. Haywood refuses to follow the topos of modesty, demanding equality with her authors, while Carter caters to current fashions by displaying her faults while praising her original. Although they wrote for different audiences and in different genres, I argue that these writers and their contemporaries saw translation as a central part of their public identity and I call for increased scholarly attention to this dimension of self-fashioning in eighteenth-century literature.

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Acknowledgments

This study could never have been completed without the generous advice and support I have received. My work is immeasurably better for the input of my supervisor, Thomas Keymer, my committee members Carol Percy and Simon Stern, and my friend Abigail Lochtefeld, who has read this almost as often as I have. My time as a fellow at Chawton House Library was also invaluable. I have been truly blessed by the time, patience, and support of my colleagues, family, and friends.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... iv Table of Contents ...... v Introduction ...... 1 Adaptive Translation ...... 4 Narrowing Definitions ...... 9 Authorial Property ...... 24 The History of Translation ...... 28 Translation and the Spread of Ideas ...... 32 Translation and Reputation ...... 36 Chapter 1 Dryden: Laureate, Theorist, and Translator ...... 44 A Classical History: Translation and the Classics ...... 47 The Empowered Translator: Dryden’s Translation Theory ...... 62 Creating the Ideal Reader ...... 78 A Poetic Father ...... 87 Chapter 2 Pope, His Homer, and Himself...... 96 Judgement and Invention, Derivation and Debts ...... 98 The Value of an Original ...... 108 Manliness and Morality ...... 115 Horace ...... 130 Pope’s Audience ...... 140 After Life of Pope’s Translations ...... 149 Chapter 3 Haywood: Consistency of Purpose ...... 152 Who Wrote That? Reputation and Anonymity ...... 158 Establishing a Reputation ...... 174 Translation as Intervention ...... 188 Establishing a Career: Haywood’s Respectability ...... 197 Chapter 4 Elizabeth Carter: Hidden Fame, Subtle Teaching ...... 213 Contesting Beliefs ...... 221 Social Acceptance ...... 238 Divinely Reasoned Education ...... 251 Conclusion ...... 272 Works Cited and Consulted ...... 287

Introduction

If you asked an eighteenth-century Londoner what a translator looked like, you would be offered a variety of different images: the schoolboy laboriously parsing his first paragraph out of

Caesar, the starving hack writing to order in his publisher’s garret, and the gentleman of leisure or of letters whiling away an hour by inventing a new phrase to express the meaning of a favorite author. Central to each of these images is the question of agency and the challenge of demonstrating creative freedom in a restrictive medium. Despite the challenges of working with another author’s text, translations make up an astonishing 15-35 percent of eighteenth-century prose fiction, as recent scholarly estimates by James Raven, Mary Helen McMurran, and others show.1 When Biblical, philosophical, and poetic translations are factored in, the number of translations rises even further, yet their writers are often discussed as subordinate to their publishers or to their source rather than as authors making their own interpretative decisions. The fear of being merely derivative frightened some writers away from translation, but others sought the respect given to authors who displayed the depth of scholarship and the nuance of interpretation which good translation required. These authors saw translation as a necessary part of their self-creation, offering unique opportunities to establish themselves in a multinational and multigenerational community of writers.

1 James Raven, introduction to The English Novel 1770-1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, ed. James Raven and Antonia Forster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), I.58; Mary Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010), 46, 55.

Translation allowed authors to connect themselves to other authors, places, and classes while setting up advantageous comparisons. When Alexander Pope declares his intention to tame

Homer’s “wild paradise,” for example, he is both asserting that he is like Homer and declaring his own superiority to the classical author.2 Translation, as André Lefevere recognizes, is about

“authority and legitimacy.”3 Even in its least respectable iterations, adaptations of French pornography or crib sheets for schoolboys, translation participates in the process of legitimizing a work by accepting and integrating it into a second culture, and the product benefits from the cachet of foreignness and the authority implied by a supposed pre-existing audience and successful history.

While translation could be either a respectable, interpretative enterprise or a hurried, slapdash venture, it created assumptions about the worth of the work being translated. The status that the label of translation gave to a work led many authors to create pseudo-translations, original pieces labelled as translations. James Macpherson published Fingal and other “Ossian” poems as translations in an attempt to give Scotland an epic history and to create a figure equivalent to the Grecian Homer. Horace Walpole similarly claimed that his Castle of Otranto was a translation, using an invented history to introduce his new genre, gothic romance, as part of a respected tradition. This strategy worked, but only temporarily, and in both cases outrage greeted the revelation of authorship in a public response which demonstrates translation’s status and respectability in comparison to original work.4 While not all translations were viewed as respectable, the process of translation acted, and still acts, as a legitimizing force. I argue that

2 Alexander Pope, Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, Maynard Mack, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939-67), VII.3. 3 André Lefevere, introduction to Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 1992), 2. 4 Robert Miles, “Europhobia: The Catholic Other in Horace Walpole and Charles Maturin,” in European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760-1960, ed. Avril Horner (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 92-3.

Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Eliza Haywood, and Elizabeth Carter used translation to create connections and comparisons in various forms of self-promotion. By establishing their kinship to canonical authors, these writers could exercise a unique form of control over their contemporary reputation.

For these writers and their contemporaries, I suggest, translation was not just a lucrative venture but a central part of their public identity. In fact, eighteenth-century audiences often judged writers as much or more by their translations as by their original work. As an adaptive medium, translation encouraged a focus on artistry and style in an arena in which plot and theme were predetermined.5 Retranslations offered particular opportunities to stand out, as Dryden says,

“amongst the Crowd of Sutors” showing off their poetic skill.6 Dryden’s Homeric image, which I explore in greater detail in Chapter 1, emphasizes the competitive nature of translation and its attraction. By portraying a foreign text as a virtuous, wealthy, and beautiful lady surrounded by men eager to win both her name and her money, Dryden demonstrates the form’s appeal. By examining the erudite, classical translations of Dryden and Pope along with Haywood’s popular romantic adaptations and Carter’s scholarly and moralistic works, I will show how all of these writers used translation centrally in their self-fashioning. Although writing for different audiences and in different genres, these authors all used strategies of connection, comparison, and stylistic alteration to build their reputations in ways that would have been impossible to authors who published only original work.

5 André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett, Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation (New York: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 1998), 2. 6 John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, ed. Vinton A. Dearing, H. T. Swedenburg, Alan Roper, et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956-90), XII.10.

Adaptive Translation

The adaptive nature of eighteenth-century translation allowed these authors to make it a central part of their self-fashioning strategies. Manuals, reviews, and paratexts encouraged authors to make changes both on the local level, to clarify foreign words and ideas, and on the ideological level, to make the message and the action suit contemporary sensibilities. This permissive attitude encouraged Pope to remove references to types of flour from his Odyssey and

Haywood to rearrange the internal structure of The Virtuous Villager, creating a situation in which readers expected translators to take ownership of the contents as well as the style of their work. The notion of faithfulness to the original, as recent studies demonstrate, was complicated by uncertainty over whether an author’s style, ideas, or structure were more important and by questions about how much it was permissible for translators to change. Scholars like Jennifer

Birkett examine translation as a more difficult version of authorship in which the translator must overcome and control the original piece. Indeed, Birkett’s declaration, in her article on translation in fiction, that “Seven pages in, [Behn’s Lycidas] finally reaches a recognizable phrase from the first page of the source text” is a triumphant celebration of the difference between source and translation.7

Scholarly examination of the faithfulness or lack of faithfulness to the words, ideas, and ideals of the original is an important part of translation studies, as Paul Hammond suggests in his essay on Dryden’s Lucretius.8 Hammond’s argument demonstrates the translator’s struggle

7 Jennifer Birkett, “Prose Fiction: Courtly and Popular Romance,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, ed. Gordon Braden, Roger Ellis, Peter France, Kenneth Haynes, David Hopkins, and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005-11), III.343. 8 Paul Hammond, “The Integrity of Dryden’s Lucretius,” Modern Language Review 78.1 (1983): 1-23.

between literal and ideological faithfulness and the ways in which mediation of the text can occur outside the context of the translated text, impacting authorial reception and acceptance.

Although some scholars, particularly those examining texts from minority cultures, wish to find evidence of faithfulness, most current scholarship focuses on what Sarah Annes Brown calls the

“authority to alter and improve the original.” Both of these methods examine translations largely in terms of the closeness of their reproduction of an original text, eliding the form’s fundamentally interpretative nature.9

Accuracy is an inherently problematic idea. As Edith Grossman warns, even if a writer’s goal is “fidelity to the effect and impact of the original . . . what should never be forgotten or overlooked is the obvious fact that what we read in a translation is the translator’s writing,” and that this is inevitably different from the foreign-language original.10 Even the most strenuous attempt at exactitude is predetermined to fail, because there are many factors which affect the reading process. The most accurate form of translation, word-for-word rendition, is almost universally rejected, because differences in grammar and normative phrasing between languages make word-for-word translation not only awkward but often unintelligible.

Abraham Cowley’s oft-cited declaration that if “a man should undertake to translate

Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one Madman had translated another” is one of many examples of revolt against word-for-word translation. While Cowley carried his rebellion to the extreme of rejecting “the Name Translator,” his general sentiments were widely shared among Restoration- and eighteenth-century translators.11 Indeed, the word-for-word translation he disparages was never commonly accepted among literary translators, and Cowley uses it as a

9 Sarah Annes Brown, “Women Translators,” in Oxford History of Literary Translation, II.114. 10 Edith Grossman, Why Translation Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 31. 11 Abraham Cowley, “Preface to Pindarique Odes,” in Abraham Cowley: Poetry & Prose, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 73, 74.

straw-man argument to support his deviation from the more common form of sense-for-sense translation, which called for authors to translate the sense of each phrase, sentence, or idea in its original order. Even this more forgiving form of sense-for-sense translation, as Cowley’s movement toward a looser imitative style reveals, creates difficulties when style and implication are important factors. In translating poetry, as do Dryden and Pope, the process becomes especially difficult. Although eighteenth-century writers did not attempt to maintain the metre of foreign poetry, they debated the best form of translation. Some felt that only prose could properly convey the sense of the original. Others argued that, while verse forms inevitably force deviation from a strict sense-for-sense translation, prose loses the impact of arranged metre and sound and destroys the power of the original. Writers debated the impact of heroic couplets, blank verse, and prose forms, but they all recognized the impossibility of precisely reproducing the poetic impact of a foreign metre.

Rejecting close translation allowed eighteenth-century writers to emphasize their relationship to their source in an early example of resistance to the secondary position of adaptive writing. Lawrence Venuti’s book on the invisibility of the translator has encouraged a similar focus on the translator in modern scholarship, highlighting the importance of foregrounding the presence of multiple authors in an adapted work by making readers aware of the translation’s distance from the original text.12 Increased attention to interpretation has led to a revival in translation studies led by figures like Peter France, who claims that translation studies are in a “ghetto” and that scholars are still working to move them into mainstream scholarly and cultural narratives.13 Thanks to these scholars, translation studies are a rapidly growing field,

12 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 2008). 13 Peter France, “Introduction: Poetry, Culture, and Translation,” Translation and Literature 6 (1997): 7; Stuart Gillespie, English Translation and Classical Reception (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 7; Richard B. Sher,

supported by debates over the meaning of originality in different social, legal, and literary climates.

From its rise in the mid eighteenth century, originality has become a central marker of quality in both literary and academic writing. While earlier writers had celebrated creativity in all of its forms, this new idea of literary creation demanded originality of plot and even of genre and form, rejecting the existing tradition of revisionary recreation. Robert Macfarlane argues that the idea of originality ex nihilo stems from a movement that began in the late 1750s and reached its zenith during the Romantic Period.14 Writers during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century created what Walter Bate calls “a precedent with which the intellectual has since been condemned to live,” by emphasizing originality over craftsmanship.15 In fact, while insisting on a strict ex nihilo originality would exclude much great literature from the canon, Christopher Lee identifies originality as one of the four “critical topoi of canonisation” in his argument for the inclusion of colonial writers in the English canon, demonstrating the continuing influence of late eighteenth-century ideas of originality on modern critical thought.16

When originality is viewed not as an absolute but as a continuum, however, the importance of adaptive translation becomes apparent. While eighteenth-century and Romantic theorists such as Shaftesbury, Rowe, Young, Coleridge, and Keats, all of whom Macfarlane examines in his work on originality, often claimed absolute originality for authors later proven to have derived their plots and ideas from existing works or historical sources, today the question of

“Patrons, Publishers, and Places,” in The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 195-208; James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 119-153. 14 Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 18-50. 15 Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971), 105. 16 Christopher Lee, “Literary Adaptation and Market Value: Encounters with the Public in the Early Career of Roger McDonald,” Queensland Review 21.1 (2014): 39.

originality is much more nuanced, and demonstrations of influence are no longer considered as oppositional to creative work.17 Translation can be seen as a source of influence on the writer which must be both incorporated and overcome. Reflecting on his time as a young teacher, from

1957 to 1967, Harold Bloom expressed surprise that “nearly every critic I encountered assumed idealistically that influence was a benign process,” an assumption that his work on influence theory has nearly reversed.18 As he himself demonstrates, however, the influence of foreign writers, and especially of dead foreign writers, was less threatening than that of an author’s immediate precursors, a fact which may have encouraged writers to acknowledge and celebrate the influence of their work as translators on their original writing.19 Richard Jones examines one example of a clear trail of influence in Tobias Smollett’s movement from translating Gil Blas of

Santilane to his original picaresque novel, Roderick Random, published later the same year and exhibiting many of the same features.20

A more immediate form of influence appears within individual works, complicated by authorial claims to be writing literal translation, which authors used to ameliorate unpopular or even illegal religious or political statements. Dryden uses Juvenal’s sixteenth satire to attack the government, insisting that Juvenal “intended an Invective against a standing Army,” a complaint that is nowhere in his source but was a major source of popular grievance against king William.21

By claiming faithfulness to a celebrated original, authors like Dryden could avoid responsibility for the statements they popularized while accepting public acclaim for their style and abilities.

17 Macfarlane, Original Copy, 19-20. 18 Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 4. 19 Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, 137-8. 20 Richard J. Jones, Tobias Smollett in the Enlightenment: Travels Through France, Italy, and Scotland (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011), 9. 21 Dryden, Works, IV.245.

While this type of disclaimer offered some safety from political accusations, the free translation such authors used and their willingness to alter the original in ways that were often even more radical than their source suggests the translator’s complicity in the ideas that their translations helped to spread. While claiming to be slaves to their original, these authors created a relationship of sympathy and equality.

These examples demonstrate the importance of adaptive translation, but they also demonstrate the questions that troubled eighteenth-century translators: How much latitude is enough, and how much is too much? Where is the line between a translator’s duty to his author and his own authorial instinct? Who is the author of a translated work, and how much authority can a translator claim? How does a translator deal with an audience composed of both readers familiar with the source text and readers who are not, and is it possible to please both? These questions reverberate through the writings of translators, especially those translators who were also authors of original work, and are still contested in scholarship today.22

Narrowing Definitions

Understanding the loose, adaptive nature of eighteenth-century translation necessitates an examination of translation as a term. Etymologically, translation comes from the Latin active noun translātiōnem, a carrying across, referring to the transfer of items, ideas, and language from one place to another, and this etymological history is reflected in the current understanding of the

22 Paul Hammond, “Is Dryden a Classic?” in John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6; William Frost, Dryden and the Art of Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955).

word.23 Modern translation theory, following the model created by Lefevere, understands translation to include adaptation, cultural transfer, and even interpersonal communication. All of these understandings are useful, and it is important to keep in mind the wide range of adaptive practices in use during the eighteenth century, but in order to fruitfully study the methodology by which authors used adaptive practices to establish themselves within literary society, a narrow definition of translation must be determined.

Pseudo-translations, imitative practices, unacknowledged translations, and the pitfalls of historical record-keeping make it impossible to make definitive statements about the number and growth of such works in the marketplace prior to the mid-1850s. Although both the Copyright

Act of 1709/10 and the Act of 1842 required publishers to submit copies of new books for deposit in government-approved libraries, these laws were not strictly followed until the British

Museum Library’s head librarian, Antonio Panizzi, began to threaten publishers with prosecution.24 Despite the lack of consistent and standardized record-keeping in the eighteenth century, some estimates of publication can be made by extrapolating from the number of acknowledged translations which survive in libraries today or which appear in published book lists from the eighteenth century.

There is no consensus about what percentage of the books sold in England during the long eighteenth century were translations. Raven, examining only first publications of novels, identifies 531 novels published between 1750 and 1769, 18 percent of which were translations, a number that, by his calculations, drops to 15 percent by the end of the century.25 McMurran uses

23 “translation, n,” OED Online. June 2017. Oxford University Press. 24 Simon Eliot, “Very Necessary but Not Quite Sufficient: A Personal View of Quantitative Analysis in Book History,” Book History 5 (2002): 289. 25 James Raven, “Cheap and Cheerless: English Novels in German Translation and German Novels in English Translation 1770-1799,” in The Corvey Library and Anglo-German Cultural Exchanges, 1770-1837, ed. Werner

lists of prose fiction to determine that from 30 to 35 percent of eighteenth-century prose fiction was composed of translations.26 The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, although avowedly selective and focusing on “early or unusual developments in fictional technique,” offers a list of minor works of prose fiction of which nearly 30 percent are translations.27 Robert

Day and William McBurney estimate that between 25 and 30 percent of all published fiction between 1700 and 1740 was translation.28 Stuart Gillespie, in his statistical analysis of classical translation, does not offer an overarching percentage, but notes that 40 percent of the classical translations he examines were reprinted within the century, a number which should serve as a warning to scholars using only first editions to determine the prevalence of translations on the market.29 None of these numbers includes either non-fiction translation or poetic or biblical translation. Despite the uncertainty of these numbers and the constant revisions being made to their components, the estimate that between 15 and 35 percent of published fiction was made up of translation gives an indication of the flood of such works onto the British market during the century.

The uncertainty over the number of translations published during the eighteenth century is intensified by uncertainties over the definition of translation itself. In its current use, translation is usually viewed as a form of rewriting, and Lefevere claims that any movement from one culture to another or any interaction between cultures is a translation of meaning which intentionally adapts an original for aesthetic and/or political effect. He claims that translation is

Huber (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlaug, 2004), 10; Raven, The English Novel 1770-1829, 58. 26 McMurran, Spread of Novels, 46, 55. 27 George Watson, ed., The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), II.975-1014. 28 Robert Day, Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction Before Richardson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 29; William McBurney, A Check List of English Prose Fiction 1700-1739 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), viii. 29 Stuart Gillespie, “The Developing Corpus of Literary Translation,” in Oxford History of Literary Translation, III.144.

“manipulation, undertaken in the service of power,” and that every translation manipulates

“literature to function in a given society,” in a way that undermines its function in its source language and culture.30 This theoretical framework allows for a multifaceted image of cultural understanding and brings the labour of the translator to the attention of the reader, but involves either a level of intentionality or an internalized belief in hegemonic cultural mores that is not always demonstrable.

Highlighting places where no direct translation is possible reveals the culturally based worldviews of reader and translator, where cultural relationships influence and overlay the final product in an acculturation of the text which is central to post-colonial thought. Susan Bassnet examines the ways translations both subjugate the text and liberate the original culture by creating a place for foreign ideas. Bassnet claims that this is “part of an ongoing process of intercultural transfer,” that reifies the process of colonialization while simultaneously offering the colonialized culture influence and a place in international discussion.31 It is impossible to adapt a work without revealing, and sometimes discovering the ways “we view the foreign,” as

Katherine Faull declares in her summing up of modern translation practice.32 Post-colonial theorists support this model and its awareness of inherent biases, encouraging sympathetic treatments of cultural difference which attempt to undo the cultural simplifications and misunderstandings created by unsympathetic translation. Even translations which attempt to be sympathetic to the original culture risk lauding or vilifying the original based on contemporary mores, as the eighteenth-century conflations of contemporary morals with their Latin or Grecian

30 Lefevere, Translation/History/Culture, xi. 31 Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, introduction to Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 1999), 2. 32 Katherine Faull, introduction to Translation and Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 18.

counterparts often did, overlooking cultural differences or attempting to hide these differences in order to present either their own or their source culture in a more acceptable light.

Translation thus becomes the point of mediation between foreign and domestic culture, and travel narratives, spy stories, or tales of foreign visitors can be read as translations and must be understood within the context of the writer’s often fumbling and inarticulate attempts to understand and portray the foreign within a recognizable framework. This broad definition drives

Mirella Agorni’s Translating Italy, which argues that eighteenth-century English writers saw

Italy as a place of intellectual freedom for women, misunderstanding the desire of Italian writers for increased freedom as a declaration that they are already free.33 The recent collection of essays by Lyse Hébert uses a similarly broad definition in examining the relations between diverse fields and cultures, and the artificial divisions and superficial agreements between cultures that lead to deeper misunderstandings.34 The idea of translation as mediation brings into focus the socio-cultural implications of transference and the adaptive nature of international movement and conversation, but its inclusive nature complicates the creation of formal designations, problematizing key terms.

Viewing translation as adaptive mediation assumes that any translation will naturalize its source and in fact must do so in order to convey meaning. Intercultural dialogue involves not only information but also, as Daniel Weissbort and Ástráður Eysteinsson explain, the “cultural heritage” and “historical depth” of both cultures.35 This modern view follows Friedrich

Schleiermacher’s 1813 lectures, in which he defines translation by contrasting it with

33 Mirella Agorni, Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century: Women, Translation, and Travel Writing (1739- 1797) (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2002), 67, 86. 34 Lyse Hébert, Beyond Mediation? Exploring Translation and Interpretation in the Current Globalized Landscape (Toronto: York University Press, 2014). 35 Daniel Weissbort and Ástráður Eysteinsson, eds., Translation–Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3-4.

interpretation, claiming that interpretation prioritizes the communication of facts but that translation is a literary product of subjectivities, filtering the writer’s subjective perspective through the translator’s equally individual viewpoint to create a work that is then interpreted according to the biases of the reader. At the same time, Schleiermacher reacts against the idea that the foreign must be naturalized. Instead, he argues that the best translations struggle to retain a sense of otherness in order to convey to the reader the cultural difference of the source.36

Following his method, writers attempt to retain markers of the foreign as an intrusive declaration to readers of the ownership of these ideas.

When Venuti popularized Schleiermacher’s ideas among modern English translators, he focused on reversing the Anglicization of foreign personal and place names and using intentionally archaic language to highlight the distance between modern readers and the text.

Venuti’s attempt to highlight the foreign has many problems. He has been criticized for the vagueness of his suggestions, the impossibility of fully realizing his aims, and the difficulty involved in determining what translating decisions will create the desired ethical result.

Archaism, for instance, creates distance between readers and texts but also encourage readers to view the original in light of their preconceived ideas about their own past. Despite the problems with Venuti’s theories, however, his revitalization of the foreign/domestic paradox created a new movement in translation that is focused on the ethics of cultural appropriation and understanding.37

This movement has its roots in post-colonial theory, but its practice leads to many of the same results as the colonializing translations of the nineteenth century. While nineteenth-century

36 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Sämmtliche Werke, Dritte Abtheilung: Zur Philosophie (Berlin: Reimer, 1938), II.207-45. 37 Outi Paloposki, “Domestication and Foreignization,” in Handbook of Translation Studies Volume 2, ed. Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (Philadelphia: John Benjamin’s Publishing Co., 2011), 40-42.

translations intentionally invoked the exotic to celebrate the imperial scope of England’s language, literature, and dominion, post-colonial translations use exoticism to shock the reader out of a complacently Westernized perspective, always struggling to find new realms of the foreign that can be simultaneously understood as part of a shared human experience and as foreign but which have not been appropriated into the comfortably exotic framework of nineteenth-century orientalism.

A natural effect of this modern method of highlighting the foreign in translated texts is the recognition that, as Antoine Berman argues, translation is both necessary and diametrically opposed to the desire of a culture to remain vital but unadulterated.38 Berman’s vision of translation as simultaneously desirable and destructive is part of a tendency in modern translation theory to expand the definition of translation, encouraging readers to view translated texts not as literary endeavours but as socio-cultural phenomena that reflect cultural notions of the other. The goals of modern translation theory, which responds to and in turn creates worries about colonialism, identity, and assimilation, is very far from the eighteenth-century desire to, as Julie

Hayes puts it, make “the author ‘speak’ like a compatriot,” eliminating traces of the other and working as far as possible to create the assimilation which modern theories often strive to prevent.39

While notions of the foreign are at the centre of modern translation discourse, eighteenth- century translators took for granted both the innate worth of their original and their own right to assimilate that original. For some writers, their translations were not only seen as their own creative output, but as eclipsing their source text in status and importance. This is seen most

38 Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Heyvaert (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 53-69. 39 Julie Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600-1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 220.

clearly in the high-status translations of Dryden and Pope, but also appears in the many retranslations of Haywood’s works back into their original French.40 These were marketed as new works by an English author, a confusion which reflects the perennial struggle of translators to make their works understandable and admirable by contemporary standards while retaining the spirit of the original. The inherently problematic nature of translation is captured by Jorge

Luis Borges, whose story of a translator who, in a desperate attempt to create a modernized translation of Don Quixote that carries the spirit of the original, wakes from an inspired dream to frantically write, as his translation, the exact text that Cervantes wrote.41 Borges’ text demonstrates the inevitable failure of art to replicate nature – and the inevitable artistic failure of anything that does. A translation must change its source in order to claim the status of a work of art in its own right or even to be a translation at all.

Eighteenth-century translators recognized this both implicitly, in their worries over whether the English language was fit to translate the great works of art, and explicitly in their declarations of a translator’s necessary qualities. In 1648, the poet and translator Sir John

Denham praised another translator for not being “fetter’d to [the original’s] numbers and his times.” Denham’s ideal poet recognizes when the original’s poetry is “low” and “Let’st in [his] own to make it rise and flow,” being “true to his sense, but truer to his fame.” 42 This praise demonstrates an ideal which continues throughout the eighteenth century. In 1752, Thomas

Franklin declared that the ideal translator must “hide his [original’s] faults . . . Soften each blemish, and each grace improve,” in order to create a translation “Such as in Pope’s extensive

40 Patrick Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), 22, 777-82. 41 Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote,” Ficciones (1997): 41-55. 42 John Denham, “To Richard Fanshawe, Upon his Translation of Pastor Fido,” in The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets: Poetic Responses to English Poetry from Chaucer to Yeats, ed. David Hopkins (New York: Routledge, 2016), 138.

genius shone, / And made immortal Homer all our own.”43 Although the power dynamics vary, the desire to claim ownership over foreign texts through Anglicization and alteration, which appears in the colonializing trend that theorists like Venuti and Bassnet react against, is the basis for most translation in the eighteenth century, which attempted to incorporate and naturalize foreign ideas and texts. At the same time as they asserted their ownership over translated texts, however, these translators saw themselves working “To vindicate the Greek and Roman” originals they translated and to “pay the debt of gratitude” they owed to these by spreading their fame to the English language.44

The differing responses of eighteenth-century translators to the inevitable struggle between source and translation inform my examination of these translators. At the same time, theoretical examinations of the nature of translation risk abandoning the realm of literary studies.

By following the idea of translation as mediation or movement between two mediums to its natural conclusion, any form of mediation becomes a moment of translation, including the mediation of sensory input to the mind. Indeed, Octavio Paz sees translation as central to our understanding of the world, arguing that literary translation is only the final step in a process that begins with the translation of external input into a form understandable by the human brain.45

While this view of translation reveals the psychological roots of interpretation, it is too broad to be easily applied to a literary text. As a tool for the exploration of individual or cultural mindsets and understandings, this is an important theoretical model, but it also creates a dangerously unstable definition of translation.

It is important to recognize the theoretical framework of historical, cultural, and linguistic

43 Thomas Franklin, Translation: A Poem (London, 1752), 9-10, 11. 44 Franklin, Translation: A Poem, 13. 45 Octavio Paz, “Translations of Literature and Letters,” trans. Irene del Corral, in Theories of Translation from Dryden to Derrida, ed. R. Schulte and J. Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 154.

interactions but it is imperative to also retain a definition of translation that is sufficiently focused to be of use to a literary scholar. In this work, translation is examined solely in relation to literary texts and their transmission from one language to another. Even this narrowed definition, however, entails many complications, especially in separating ideas of textual ownership and originality. The question of whether a translation is an original work in its own right is one with a long and complex history, as Lorna Hardwick examines in Translating Words,

Translating Cultures, showing how classical translations have helped to refigure poetic and political awareness throughout English history.46

Several important trends in eighteenth-century translation affect my use of the term. In some cases, especially in popular fiction, no source is given for a work that scholars now know to be a translation or adaptation of a popular foreign work. Even in translations which credit the original author, many works, like those of Haywood, fail to provide the original title. This can encourage the retranslation of a text into its source language to create a new work. The phenomenon of retranslation was surprisingly popular both in literary circles, where works like

Aphra Behn’s 1688 History of Agnes de Castro, translated from J. B. de Brilhac’s Agnés de

Castro, nouvelle portugaise, was translated back into French by Marie Thiroux d’Arconville in her 1761 Romans traduits de l’anglais, and in academic circles where James St.André argues that it serves “as a form of argument” and discussion with peers and predecessors.47 This practice shows the transferability of ideas and the fluidity of eighteenth-century plots, genres, and characters across cultural borders, a trend which is especially evident in the French fiction that,

Carolyn Dever and Margaret Cohen’s recent essay collection explores, “flooded the British

46 Lorna Hardwick, Translating Words, Translating Cultures (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2000). 47 McMurran, Spread of Novels, 4-5; James St.André, “Retranslation as Argument: Canon Formation, Professionalization, and International Rivalry in 19th Century Sinological Translation,” Cadernos de Tradução 11.1 (2003): 60.

marketplace throughout the 1720s and 1730s” and provided English writers with new exemplars, sources, and ideas.48

While some writers failed to acknowledge their source, other writers invented spurious sources. Delarivier Manley is one of many writers who published scandal chronicles and political exposés under the name of a foreign author, a model which Haywood also follows and which makes it difficult to determine which works are translations, which claim to be when they are not, and which claim not to be when they are. Because this project focuses on the use of translation to establish and maintain a literary reputation, pieces which are not publicly acknowledged as translations are not closely examined, although they make useful material for future study. Pseudo-translations are an important source of information on the reception-history of translation, but it is difficult to quantify the extent to which their claims were believed or whether the authors intended that they be believed. Because of this uncertainty, this study focuses on works that both claim to be translations and have a recognizable source text.

Original is the term which eighteenth-century authors most often use for their sources, and in this study it has become a shorthand for an author’s source text. This word encourages pejorative implications, in creating a binary between original/unoriginal, that are important to maintain when considering the way that writers during the later eighteenth century, as well as modern scholars, view translations. By dividing texts into original and derivative works, an implied hierarchy is created which places the original works in a superior position to derived works, adaptations, and translations. At the same time, there are few other words available for the source text of a translation, so original is used as a neutral term within this study, and should

48 Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, eds., The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 15.

not be taken to mean that translators have given up their claim to authorial ownership or that their creations are not also original. In fact, it is difficult to discern a lack of originality in anything but outright plagiarism as even abridgment requires authorial creativity in choosing what to remove and how to hide the loss of material to create a new product. Translation, which involves a much higher level of interpretative decision-making, must be viewed as original work, even as its separation from its original, or source text, is emphasized. This is even more true of the fraught terms of imitation and formal imitation.

Imitation was used both as a formal description and a pejorative. Within this study, formal imitation is used to mean the style of adapting a translated text formalized during the eighteenth century and used most famously in Johnson’s London, where he translated, modernized, and updated Juvenal’s Third Satire to refer to his own time and place. The distinction between formal imitation and imitative translation is especially important because imitation was an accepted, if not fully respectable, style of translation and one of the styles that that Dryden identifies in the essay on translation which he prefixed to his translation of Ovid’s

Epistles, while formal imitation was being simultaneously codified into its own genre.

In his “Life of Pope,” Johnson called formal imitation “a kind of middle composition between translation and original design” in which “the ancients are familiarized by adapting their sentiments to modern topicks” rather than by adapting their language, as a translator would, to modern taste.49 One of the characteristic differences between formal imitation and translation is that while translations allowed readers to discover how well the translator has massaged the original into a more acceptable shape, formal imitation explicitly demanded that readers compare

49 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), IV.45.

not only the words but also the cultures in which the texts were created. Indeed, Johnson declared that “such imitations cannot give pleasure to common readers” because the enjoyment of an imitation is based on delighted recognition of “an unexpected parallel,” which unlearned readers could not be expected to recognize.50

In Johnson’s formulation, formal imitation is easier than translation, but “what is easy is seldom excellent,” and although he wrote several formal imitations of his own, he claimed to be unimpressed by the practice. He felt that because of its derivative nature, “the comparison requires knowledge of the original” and its cultural context that readers should not be expected to possess. At the same time, he believed that English and Roman cultures were not similar enough for formal imitation to flourish.51 For Johnson, formal imitation is a recognition rather than a creation of similarity. But of course, many authors disagree about where parallels can be found, and sometimes formal imitations, as will be seen in my chapter on Pope, attempted to draw parallels from very dissimilar situations.

Because of their emphasis on topicality, formal imitations are intrinsically political, and focus much more clearly on immediately contemporary issues than faithful translations. When translators are not concerned with faithfulness to the ideas of their sources, or when they interpret their source in the light of contemporary concerns, however, there is spillover from one type of writing to the other, and imitation and translation can co-exist in one text. The different types of translation and different ways in which translators highlight their inventiveness are examined in more detail in the chapter on Dryden, whose lengthy discussions of translation theory shows how originality and translation were uncertain terms even during the eighteenth

50 Johnson, “Life of Pope,” IV.45. 51 Johnson, “Life of Pope,” IV.78.

century, creating tensions between translators’ attempts to create a new text and their desire to maintain the ideas and reputation of their original.

For the purposes of this study, the translations examined can include any work which is clearly taken from an original work in another language and repurposed in such a way that the author acknowledges a reliance on that text. This is not a definition of translation, and indeed the group of texts which this umbrella covers will include several texts that strain the limits of categorization, including formal imitations, rewritings, and adaptations. As Linda Hutcheon recognizes, the difference between reinterpretation, transposition, and translation is part of a

“debate over proximity to the ‘original’” which recognizes a text’s “overt relationship to another work or works” and which attempts to formalize that relationship by definition and categorization.52 My argument challenges her assumption that “in most concepts of translation, the source text is granted an axiomatic primacy,” arguing that, for the eighteenth-century authors

I study, translation creates a relationship of equality rather than a subordination.53 Redefining translation in this way problematizes a straightforward categorization of works into translations, adaptations, and rewritings and encourages closer attention to authorial statements of attribution or of ownership.

While not excluding works which make broad-based changes to their source text, this study does not closely examine translations which adapt a work to another form, such as the many adaptations of foreign works for the stage. Although such adaptations are an important part of translating culture, they do not invite the same kind of close stylistic attention that translations within a genre inspire, and they invite a more critical, less equal response from the translator or

52 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 6-7. 53 Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, 16.

adaptor. By reading a text as a prototype for a different form, the translator is forced into the position of critic and judge and encouraged from the first reading to view the text not as a holistic document but as a collection of ideas, events, or phrases. This study invites speculation on the process by which broad adaptations and revisions to a text are carried out both within the scope of a single genre and between forms and genres, especially in shifts from poetry to prose or from one prosodic form to another, but focuses on the narrower field of self-defined translation.

By including only acknowledged translations, this group of texts necessarily excludes a large number of unattributed translations. Attribution is a difficult concept within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when anonymity was often a publicity stunt rather than a true attempt to conceal authorship. Carter’s early works were published under the pseudonym ‘Eliza,’ a name of which she was as jealous as her own. A similar case can be seen in John Mullan’s recent work on anonymity, which outlines the authorial claims of one of Carter’s literary heroes, Mrs. Rowe, who wrote under the name “Philomela,” or “nightingale.” This name uses existing associations to create a poetic rather than a personal identity, but her pseudonym, like Carter’s, was as recognizable as her name. 54 Indeed, Carter’s poem “On the Death of Mrs. Rowe” addresses

Rowe as Philomela throughout. This confusion around anonymity, pseudonymity, and acknowledged authorship creates uncertainty for students of eighteenth-century reputation, but for the purposes of this study, an unattributed translation is any translation which was not publicly attributed to its author during that author’s lifetime. Such translations are often important to the history of literature and culture, but do not impact the reputation-building function of translations.

54 John Mullan, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 52.

In practice, therefore, this study largely follows the conventions of the authors it examines in labelling pieces translations or originals, with the exception of pseudo-translations.

Although close examination of pseudo-translations would shed light on eighteenth-century strategies of self-creation, I exclude pseudo-translations because they raise questions about the invention of historical antecedents and creation of false canons that distract attention from my focus on translation as a connecting point between authors and cultures. Such false histories create a sense of shared fame, reputation, and connection, but lack the reciprocity and the common ownership which bind the reputation of both original author and translator.

Authorial Property

In light of the allusive and imitative practices of the eighteenth-century translation culture that flourished during the rise of copyright, my study challenges the current view that originality is the primary determinant of ownership. In fact, I argue that eighteenth-century authors used adaptive processes to create shared ownership of texts. A public claim of ownership, my study suggests, is as important to authorial reputation as originality of plot or style or even of publication and copyright. Pope’s clandestine publication of his letters demonstrates his awareness of the complexities which surrounded ownership, law, and public perception. By creating public links between himself and his text, Pope established his public authorship regardless of his legal title to the texts.

As copyright law came into existence, however, questions of ownership and authorial property became increasingly complex. The rise of the professional author and an increasing

reliance on publishers and book sales in place of traditional patronage encouraged concerns about the ownership of texts. As authors turned to the middling classes, with their new purchasing power, Joseph Loewenstein argues that a new concept of authorship emerged, creating the professional author reliant on legal ownership of copyright for sustenance.55 Mark

Rose was among the first scholars to connect this focus on literary property and the rise of copyright legislation in the eighteenth century with originality. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of authorship as individualization, Rose argues that “the principal institutional embodiment of the author-work relation is copyright,” which gives “legal reality” to the notion of intellectual property and affirms the identity and rights of the creator.56 If, as Rose argues, “the discourse of original genius coincided with that of authorial property,” then the idea of authorship can be clearly traced to the early eighteenth century with the 1709/10 Statute of Anne establishing governmentally regulated copyright.57 This correlation, as Clare Pettitt demonstrates, was certainly established by the nineteenth century, when notions of intellectual property were based entirely on a demonstrable originality.58

In the eighteenth century, however, despite Locke’s theories of property leading to a popular conception of originality as a mark of ownership, originality was not yet central to legal authorship. Debates around ownership of texts centred not around property concerns, although these were certainly important, but as Jody Greene demonstrates, around responsibility, libel

55 Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 56 Mark Rose, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Beckett and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship,” in Of Authors and Origins, ed. Brad Sherman and Alain Strowel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 27. 57 Mark Rose, Authors and Owners (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 115. 58 Clare Pettitt, Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).

laws, and punishment.59 Copyright, as Simon Stern explains, did not prevent the reprinting of extracts, borrowing of characters, or even publication of abridgements.60 It took, as Ronan

Deazley points out in his response to Rose, until 1737 for the English government to pass laws against immediate abridgement, and these were based, not on the notion of literary property, but on a worry that fast and careless versions would “sink the Reputation of the original

Composition.”61 Indeed, as Deazley points out elsewhere, although “policy makers, lawyers, judges and academics” have been using notions of intellectual property for decades, there is still no “consensus as to its fundamental nature or justification.”62 William St. Clair, in his examination of the metaphors used to describe literary property, traces the concept back to the early 1500s, where books and authors were viewed as part of a “commonwealth” of learning and required to “contribute to the well-being – the common weal – of the whole” both by social convention and by a series of laws establishing price controls and means of redress.63

Intellectual property, then, is not the fixed notion, beginning in the eighteenth century with the development of copyright law, that Rose first posited. Nor can early ideas of intellectual property and copyright be understood without taking into account the intrinsically derivative nature of any literary text that uses an existing language, structure, and socially determined form.

Concerns about plagiarism did arise in the eighteenth century, but these must be addressed in connection with the increasing concerns about legal ownership and not viewed strictly as a

59 Jody Greene, The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660-1730 (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 25-62. 60 Simon Stern, “Copyright, Originality, and the Public Domain in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Originality and. Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, ed. Reginald McGinnis (New York: Routledge, 2008), 72-80. 61 Ronan Deazley, On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth Century Britain (1695-1775) (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2004), 106. 62 Ronan Deazley, Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language (Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2006), 137. 63 William St. Clair, “Metaphors of Intellectual Property,” in Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright, ed. Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer, and Lionel Bently (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010), 374-5.

matter of originality and derivation.

Ownership of translations is necessarily predicated on what Trevor Ross calls “creativity in expression” rather than “creativity in ideas.”64 While originality was redefined over the course of the eighteenth-century in response to the creation and codification of copyright law, the translator’s creativity of expression found itself in conflict with the idea of respect toward one’s source. Altering the style of your source, as Cowley did in his imitations of Pindar, created an original work but failed to honor the distinctive expression of the source. Dryden, Ross argues, was among the first to develop “prescient gestures of resistance” to innovation for the sake of ownership, developing an idea of individual style inherent in an author.65 This style, Dryden argued, must be preserved in order to translate the “particular turn of Thoughts and of

Expression” and to fulfill the author’s duty to his source text.66

Indeed, during this period the idea that a translator had a duty to his source became increasingly stressed. Louis Kelly argues that due to “a mid-century redefinition of originality, the source author was increasingly respected, and translators sought to capture their author’s tone with the minimum of linguistic and rhetorical intervention.”67 By the end of the eighteenth century, Alexander Fraser Tytler declared that it was “the duty of a poetical translator” to follow his source text. At the same time, he ordered translators “never to suffer [their] original to fall” but to improve source texts if necessary to maintain the reputation of their author.68 Dryden, too, insists that translation is “the payment of a Debt” to the original, an insistence which rejects the

64 Trevor Ross, “The Fate of Style in an Age of Intellectual Property,” ELH 80.3 (2013): 748. 65 Ross, “The Fate of Style,” 753. 66 Dryden, Works, I.117. 67 Louis Kelly, “The Eighteenth Century to Tytler,” in Oxford History of Literary Translation, III.67. 68 Alexander Fraser Tytler, Essay on the Principles of Translation (London, 1797), 81.

individual ownership on which copyright claims are predicated.69

The insistence that translations could improve or damage the reputation of their source and that writers had a duty to their original occurred alongside a culture of allusion in which

“imitative practices were the norm.” 70 The eighteenth-century culture of allusion made it difficult for scholars to differentiate between original works that contain allusions to or even direct translations from older works, loose paraphrases including ideas, phrases and verses found nowhere in the original work, and formal imitations which altered as much as they imitated, further complicating the relationship between originality and ownership. These practices created a culture in which authorship was not only, as Pope famously described it in his “Essay on

Criticism,” the ability to revitalize an old idea with new expression, but a matter of shared publicity.71 Far from viewing translation as an individual occupation, these authors saw it as a form of joint authorship. By sharing ideas between languages, cultures, and texts, translation connected writers to important figures in a literary and linguistic bond that was separate from and simultaneous with legal copyright, helping to explain the exponential growth of the form at the same time as the question of ownership and authorial identity was becoming fraught.

The History of Translation

Today, scholars view the temporary “breakdown of the British censorship and licensing system” during the English Civil War in 1642-6 and the increase in printed works that followed

69 Dryden, Works, I.117. 70 Paul Davis, Translation and the Poet’s Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646-1726 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6. 71 Pope, Poems, I.263.

as the beginning of the boom that led to translation becoming one of the most marketable forms of writing in eighteenth-century England.72 Recent studies in the early modern period parallel that of the eighteenth century in structure, content, and history. The recognition of the importance of translation in recent decades has led to a number of single-author studies, following Victoria Moul’s argument that even the “closest of translation styles can nevertheless include interpretation and even contention.”73 Studies of multiple adaptations and revisions based on a single text or a single author are often used, as Jessica Winston says of Senecan tragedies, to provide “a vehicle” for politically dangerous “anxieties about the nature of kingship” or moral truth.74 Donna Hamilton argues that translation can also be a way to hide a dangerous religious affiliation, claiming that the adaptations of Anthony Munday reveal covert Catholic sympathies.75 Translations could also be propaganda, as Alastair Blanchard and Tracey Sowerby demonstrate in their article on Thomas Wilson’s reworking of Demosthenes, examining how

Wilson hid “his authorial voice behind the mask of classical authority” in order to urge his

English countrymen to take aggressive action against Spain.76

It wasn’t only men who used translation for their own ends. Roger Ellis, in his work on

Queen Elizabeth, argues that translation was one of the few areas where women received as much or more praise than their male counterparts, offering space for female voices to enter masculine discourse.77 Anne Coldiron examines texts about women’s issues in English Printing,

Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, but the standard narrative focuses on female

72 Philip M. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 118. 73 Victoria Moul, “Translation As Commentary? The Case of Ben Jonson’s Ars Poetica,” Palimpsests 20 (2007): 63. 74 Jessica Winston, “Seneca in Early Elizabethan England,” Renaissance Quarterly 59.1 (2006): 58. 75 Donna Hamilton, Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560-1633 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 76 Alastair Blanchard and Tracey Sowerby, “Thomas Wilson’s Demosthenes and the Politics of Tudor Translation,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 12.1 (2005): 47. 77 Roger Ellis, “The Juvenile Translations of Elizabeth Tudor,” Translation and Literature 18 (2009): 158, 172.

translators of religious, romantic, or classical texts.78 Mary Sidney’s version of the Psalms is one example of a religious translation that has, as Gillian Wright explains, “benefited from the growth of interest” in women’s writing and “the history of translation.” Sidney’s text, formerly

“dismissed as feminine ‘tinkering,’” is now recognized as part of a growing number of works by female writers who used adaptation to create a public voice.79 Although translations did not offer as much freedom of expression as original writing, they were a culturally acceptable way of entering a wider field of discourse and offered writers an opportunity to create a literary reputation.

England’s literary culture encouraged both women and men to use translation to make their ideas appear more reputable, taking original sources and altering their meaning or their political implications. One example of this bowdlerizing approach appears in the many versions of Erasmus’ Funus. English writers changed the denominations of his positive and negative exemplars depending on their religious affiliation, creating versions of the text which appear to argue in favor of opposite sides in the religious debates.80 Many examples of pseudo-translations exist which follow the same pattern of propaganda, using famous names or places to support contested ideas. Greg Walker examines the literary subterfuge of Thomas Elyot, among others, in Writing under Tyranny, showing how authors used “carefully chosen selection[s] of material”

78 A. E. Coldiron, English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476-1557 (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2009). 79 Gillian Wright, “Mary Sidney Pembroke,” in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. Peter France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 79. 80 Louis Kelly, “Translation and Religious Belief,” in Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, 26.

to create politicized translations.81 Some of these strayed so far from their source text that, as

Valerie Worth-Stylianou demonstrates, they blurred the line between imitation and translation.82

The difficulty of determining a consistent translation strategy in a period where authors claimed fidelity while making changes that often radically altered the meaning of a text leads

Warren Boutcher to suggest that scholars “read Renaissance translations as ‘original’ works by authors who happen to be translating.”83 While this may be a useful strategy for some works, it risks oversimplification, ignoring translation’s connectivity as well as its position within the debates on translation in vogue on the continent during the Tudor period. At the same time, as

Massimiliano Morini’s Tudor Translation demonstrates, there was comparatively little theoretical discussion of the subject in England during the early Tudor period.84 Theoretical arguments about the level of faithfulness required and the means by which translations ought to be created became both more frequent and more heated, as Gordon Braden explains, in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but these debates had yet to reach concrete agreement by the eighteenth century.85

Yehudi Lindeman reacts to this view by claiming that scholars need to stop looking for a consensus in early modern authors. According to Lindeman, early modern translators demonstrate a simultaneous acceptance of two “diametrically opposed” views. Early modern writers believed, or at least claimed, both that the translator was a traitor to his original, stealing thoughts and credit and producing something that could never live up to nor reproduce their

81 Grey Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 242. 82 Valerie Worth-Stylianou, “Translatio and Translation in the Renaissance: from Italy to France,” in The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton, vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 127–35. 83 Warren Boutcher, “The Renaissance,” in Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, 46. 84 Massimiliano Morini, Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 85 Gordon Braden, “Translating Procedures in Theory and Practice,” in Oxford History of Literary Translation, II.98.

source, and that the translator was a conquering hero, rescuing stories, ideas, and phrases from the dust of their original and disseminating these stories in a new and potentially better form than their source offered. Lindeman claims that these views, which are clearly evident to any scholar of early modern or eighteenth-century translation, cannot be reconciled by reason, only by an emotional reaction to the texts.86 My own examination of translations and paratexts shows how

Dryden manipulates these emotional reactions to create a form of authorial voice within his translations, using this to compare himself to his source texts.

Translation and the Spread of Ideas

A. E. Coldiron takes a different approach to early modern translation theory, using book- historical methods to examine the changes that the intercontinental market drove in both derivative and original work.87 This study of how market forces shape transnational identity is part of an increasing focus on the internationality of translation that recognizes the impossibility of transmitting texts without cultural exchange. While some authors, like Douglas Robinson, follow modern post-colonial theories about translation in arguing that translation is a conquest of the translated text wherein the text acts as a signifier for its originating nation, the recent collection Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe focuses on the way that translation fostered comparison, identification, and assimilation of foreign cultures.88

86 Yehudi Lindeman, “Translation in the Renaissance: A Context and a Map,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (1981): 205. 87 A. E. Coldiron, Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 88 Douglas Robinson, Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1997), 55; José María Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee, eds., Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

This view of translation as not only a literary but also a cultural experience is one that is gaining traction in eighteenth-century studies as well as early modern studies. In fact, as Early

Modern Exchanges: Dialogues Between Nations and Cultures, 1550-1800, shows, sometimes these two periods can be conflated by scholars who examine translation as a dialogue between cultures and languages.89 Christa Knellwolf argues that many eighteenth-century translators saw themselves as mediating “between the scientific and cultural achievements” of foreign countries and those of their own, positioning themselves as gatekeepers of knowledge and accessibility.90

While few translators made such grandiose claims, their work does, as Margaret Cohen and

Carolyn Dever’s collection explores, spread ideas between nations, creating strong cultural bonds that offset the increasing nationalism of European countries.91 McMurran is part of a growing body of scholars working to rewrite the history of the English novel to include the influence of French texts. This idea is governed by a recognition of the widespread translation culture that fostered the spread of ideas between France and England.92 McMurran’s image of

English authors imitating and altering the shape of the late-seventeenth-century French romance, adding depth of character and taking part in the slow modernization of a form that hearkened back to the medieval romances of knights in armour, challenges Ian Watt’s narrative of the rise of the novel.93

89 Helen Hackett, ed. Early Modern Exchanges: Dialogues Between Nations and Cultures, 1550-1800 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015). 90 Christa Knellwolf, “Women Translators, Gender and the Cultural Context of the Scientific Revolution,” in Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness, ed. Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown (New York: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2001), 115. 91 Cohen and Dever, The Literary Channel. 92 McMurran, Spread of Novels, 27-43. 93 McMurran, Spread of Novels; Frost, Dryden and the Art of Translation, 75-7; Steven Zwicker, Dryden’s Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation (Providence: Brown University Press, 1972).

A series of studies by Terry Hale question the origins of the Gothic novel, resituating this eighteenth and early nineteenth-century phenomenon within its continental roots.94 According to their research, early Gothic fiction was stimulated by a new form of French romance, enhanced by elements drawn from Burke’s theory of the sublime. While these introduced elements created a newly British genre, the genre continually drew from continental sources, reaching, as Hale claims, its final stages by assimilating the popular German genre of the Schauerroman which had reached England in translation.95 This movement is, as scholars are beginning to recognize, typical of the interactions between cultures fostered by translation, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The nineteenth-century culture of translation was heavily influenced by the Romantic poets, including Coleridge, whose hostility toward translation and desire for poetry that is

“perfectly unborrowed,” helped to create our modern understanding of the field.96 Despite the growing cult of originality in the Romantic period, translations remained as popular as ever.

Recent studies in the nineteenth-century often examine translation as canon-formation, watching the British canon of great literature grow to include not only classical and British authors but also, as Peter France, Kenneth Haynes, and Haruo Shirane demonstrate, ancient writings from

India and the east as well as an increasing number of contemporary German titles.97

94 Terry Hale, “Translation, Adaptation, Appropriation: The Origins of the European Gothic Novel,” Angelistica 55 (2001): 145-71; Terry Hale, “French and German Gothic: The Beginnings,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63-84. 95 Terry Hale, “Translation in Distress: Cultural Misappropriation and the Construction of the Gothic,” in European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760-1960, ed. Avril Horder (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 18- 21. 96 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), II.124. 97 Peter France and Kenneth Haynes, “The Publication of Literary Translation,” in Oxford History of Literary Translation, IV.136; Haruo Shirane, “Issues in Canon Formation,” in Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, ed. Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuku (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1-27.

Translations from Icelandic, Celtic, and old German form an important part of the scholarly narrative of nineteenth-century translations.98 These Germanic stories were manipulated to valorize upward social mobility and popular authority and played an important role in the unification of Prussia in the early twentieth century. As Robert Cook examines, translators often used intentional archaisms to enhance the historicism of the works they translated, a movement which dovetailed with the century’s reclamation of Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature and the revitalizing of literary historicism.99 Writers also looked farther afield for inspiration. Eva Sallis examines the complicated history behind the English struggle with difficult, foreign, and erotic Arabic texts, while Lauren Pfister examines the problems with translation from Chinese.100 Norman Girardot’s recent and comprehensive biography of James

Legge, the primary translator from Chinese during the nineteenth century, offers a new perspective on the simultaneous valorization of works offering new perspectives on foreign and exotic places and denigration of translation as mechanical labour which took place during the great era of nineteenth-century linguistic exploration.101

The influx of new texts did not completely displace classical literature, which continued to be used for political and polemical purposes. Nineteenth-century writers, despite the prevalence of the classics in education and political debate, slowly lost their reverence for

98 Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 117-41. 99 Robert Cook, “On Translating Sagas,” Gripla 13 (2002): 107-45; J. R. Hall, “Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Nineteenth-Century: England, Denmark, America,” in A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 434-54. 100 Eva Sallis, Sheharazade through the Looking Glass: The Metamorphosis of the Thousand and One Nights (New York: Routledge, 1999), 54; Lauren F. Pfister, “Chinese, Translation of Theological Terms Into,” in Concise Encyclopedia of Language and Religion, ed. J. Simpson and J. Sawyer (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001), 118-22; Lauren F. Pfister, “Translation and its Problems,” in Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, ed. Antonia S. Cua (New York: Routledge, 2001), 734-9. 101 Norman J. Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 250.

classical texts, and, as Duncan Bell argues, turned to new inspirations to form the basis of their new empires.102 Norman Vance shows how translation from the classics became increasingly experimental, bringing new aspects of classical works to light and eschewing older models.103

This new focus on experimental translation encouraged scholars to attempt authors who had never been translated in their entirety before, most famously, Dante Alighieri. Edoardo Crisafulli claims that “if one measured Dante’s fortunes by considering the number of complete translations of the Comedy, one would have to conclude that the Florentine poet was totally neglected” until the nineteenth century, when he finally joined the ranks of Italian poets that found their way into British literature.104 At the same time, nineteenth-century translation was more conscribed in other ways than its predecessor. Women’s right to publish in many fields had regressed since the early eighteenth century, as is evident in Susanne Stark’s work on female translators, who once again faced criticism for attempting to break into the field of translation, a field which had been open to them for more than a hundred years.105

Translation and Reputation

One of the most important concerns for eighteenth-century writers wishing to establish their reputation was the perceived morality of both writer and text. Even popular writers could be condemned for immoral behaviour and suffer losses both to their reputation and their sales.

102 Duncan Bell, “From Ancient to Modern in Victorian Imperial Thought,” The Historical Journal 49.3 (2006): 735- 759. 103 Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997), 105. 104 Edoardo Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante: Cary’s Translation of The Divine Comedy (Leicester: Troubadour Publishing, 2003), 5. 105 Susanne Stark, ‘Behind Inverted Commas’: Translation and Anglo-German Cultural Relation in the Nineteenth Century (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, Ltd, 1999), 37.

While some authors, such as John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, rose to posthumous popularity due to a reputation for scandal others, like John Hawkesworth and, in later years, Mary

Wollstonecraft, lost their audience and their reputation when accusations of immorality were brought against them.106 For these authors, then, it was crucial to establish and maintain a consistent stance in relation to the moral standards of their society, but the moral and religious positions they took could be very different. Although most eighteenth-century writers practiced some form of Christianity, accepting the existence of a universal moral constant that David

Norton and Manfred Kuehn argue was understood by “ordinary individuals, as much as moral theorists,” this apparent agreement concealed “substantial differences of opinion.”107 Eighteenth century theologians supported a number of denominations and creeds, each of which emphasized subtly different moral boundaries and codes of behavior.

Although an individual’s moral standing was a vital part of his or her authorial reputation, the definition and practice of proper behavior was erratic, leading writers to maintain individualized standards of personal and public behaviour. Each of the authors in this study chooses a different form of social behaviour, but each author attempts to use their consistent support of a single form of conduct as a demonstration of their right to claim a positive moral standing. Haywood’s disregard of conventional and restrictive social and sexual norms offers a stark contrast to Carter’s horror at any form of sexual contact outside a Church-blessed, family sanctioned marriage, but each writer saw her position as an acceptable stance within the limits of

106 Public Advertiser (London, England), July 17, 1773; Issue 11938. 17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers; “Hawkesworth, John (bap. 1720, d. 1773),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); Lucy Peltz, “‘A Revolution in Female Manners’: Women, Politics and Reputation in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Brilliant Women:18th-Century Bluestockings, ed. Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2008), 111-3. 107 David Norton and Manfred Kuehn, “The Foundations of Morality,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth- Century Philosophy, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 944.

their society, and each used her adherence to a code of ethics to make public claims of moral respectability. For the male authors in this study, sexual morality was a less imperative concern than it was for eighteenth-century women, but both Pope and Dryden foreground their participation in a socially constructed system of virtuous behaviour as an inextricable part of their attempts to create an authorial self-representation.

This project explores the many ways in which translation was used to build and support reputations in the eighteenth century, focusing on the careers of the two foremost male poets of their day: John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and two less conventional female authors: Eliza

Haywood and Elizabeth Carter. While only Pope began his career with a translation, each of these authors used that medium as an important part of their self-fashioning. Translation allowed these writers to connect themselves to other authors, places, and classes and to compare themselves favourably to their contemporaries and to famous authors of the past. In doing so, these writers found a socially acceptable form of self-promotion which allowed them to pursue their societal and literary goals.

John Dryden, the subject of my first chapter, is well known for using both translation and original poetry to define himself through the creation of a literary genealogy. “Strong were our sires,” he declares in a laudatory poem addressed to Congreve, and he depicts himself as using that strength to support his own writing.108 Indeed, his original poetry prefigures the debate between “ancients and moderns” in its apparent tendency to exalt the classical poets by devaluing not only Dryden’s contemporaries but his own poetry. His poetry clearly establishes his place in a line of descent that stretched back to the ancient Roman and Greek authors. In moving from the medieval poems of Chaucer to the works of his immediate predecessors, Jonson

108 Dryden, Works, IV.432.

and Fletcher, he claimed that modern poetry had refined the “rough diamond” of early English poetry, but despite this assertion of modern superiority over his English ancestors, his original poetry appears to situate his position as inferior to his classical forbears.109

My chapter argues that Dryden uses his translations to reverse this image, and demonstrate his equality, if not superiority, to the classical writers he admired. In his translations,

Dryden explicitly compares himself to these authors without the accusations of hubris which he would have garnered if he had compared himself to them in his original works. In his preface to

All for Love, Dryden describes translation and adaptation of famous stories as the literary equivalent of the “Bowe of Ulysses.” In this comparison, only the best authors have the strength even to attempt a translation or an adaptation of a famous story, and his success at reaching “the

Mark” set by his predecessors serves as a public demonstration of his ability.110 Further, I argue that Dryden used his translations to create a position for himself within literary history. By positioning his translations as exemplars for future authors and by working with Jacob Tonson, the publisher of his Miscellany volumes, to set up a new literary form for the encouragement of young writers, Dryden uses his translations to position himself as an ancestor for future authors in the same way that he himself was the literary descendant of the classical greats he praised.

For Alexander Pope, I argue, the ancient writers were not figures of emulation he hoped to join. Instead, Pope viewed the ancient writers in a far more Bloomian way, as antagonists that he needed to overcome even as he used them to support his writing career. Working during the debate between ancients and moderns, and writing in the teeth of an emerging emphasis on the importance of originality to literary value, Pope uses his translations to defend his superiority

109 Dryden, Works, VII.40. 110 Dryden, Works, XIII.10.

over both his contemporaries and the classical authors he used as exemplars. His preface to his

Homeric translations demonstrates his attempt to capitalize on the Greek author’s fame, not only by praising him, as Dryden does, but by subtly disparaging Homer’s abilities. Pope insists that while Homer is justly praised for his invention, his writing is disordered and lacks unity.

Although the Odyssey is justly famous, Pope argues, its original author was unable to bring his famous poem to either “perfection or maturity.”111 Pope’s translation, he suggests, improves on

Homer’s poem, creating something that is both mature and perfect.

Promising to improve on Homer shows Pope’s hubris but also, as I will explore further in chapter two, Pope’s insecurities. While Pope believed that originality was one of the hallmarks of a great writer, he was aware that his greatest strength lay not in the compositional genius later praised by the Romantics but in alteration and improvement. This became clear to him early in his career, when he acted as an editor and adaptor for the aging poet William Wycherley, and his adaptive genius becomes more apparent throughout his career. My chapter portrays Pope’s struggle between the need to use translation to assert himself in the traditional field of eighteenth-century literature, the longing to vindicate his editorial judgement, and the desire to create himself as an author who did not need an original or inspiration but could rely on his native genius.

The pre-eminent position for which Pope strove was never in reach for Haywood. She struggled to maintain a literary reputation against constant scandals and accusations from compatriots, including Pope himself. As my chapter argues, Haywood saw her translations as a way of associating herself with already accepted authors. When she attempted to establish her name with a high-class translation that was circulated among potential subscribers, she was

111 Pope, Poems, VII.3.

following the tradition established by writers like Pope and Dryden of using subscription publication of translations for support and publicity. In order to realize her publication, Haywood and her publisher created an advertising campaign based around translation that she hoped would propel her work into the upper-class circles where she situated the majority of her adventures.

My chapter examines the ways in which Haywood used translation to connect herself to English authors such as Pope as well as to the French authors whom she translated and whom, she insisted, belonged “at the Court of France,” the French equivalent of the audience she sought for her writing.112 While she never attained Pope’s popularity or Carter’s level of social acceptance,

I argue that Haywood used translations, from her racy 1725 The Lady's Philosopher's Stone to her didactic 1742 The Virtuous Villager, to create a consistently practical, woman-centric model of proper social behaviour.

Taking a stance against the early trend in Haywood studies which sees Haywood’s writing as forming two distinct moral and stylistic groups, I argue that Haywood maintained a consistent position throughout her career. Her moral focus, as I demonstrate, rests on a legalistic claim that the most important part of sexual morality is the fulfillment of verbal as well as written promises, and this focus is continuous throughout her writings in both her original works and the alterations that she makes to her translated texts. Her complaint in the essay she attaches to her first translation, the 1721 Letters to a Lady of Quality, that “Men, in their days of

Courtship, promise a thousand times more than they ever mean” is echoed in her heroine’s exclamation in her 1753 moral tale, The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, that no one “that sees a man a husband would ever think he had been a lover” and that few husbands fulfil the

112 Champion, or Evening Advertiser (London), March 18, 1742; Issue 367.

promises they make as lovers.113 These texts demonstrate both her attempts to establish a publicly acceptable moral position and her stubborn refusal to be relegated to the lower classes of society. By choosing authors who were part of the courts of France, Haywood was able to consistently link her name to the courtly circles through the advertising and content of her translations. Like Pope, Haywood never fully attained her goals, but her translations helped her to create a stable self-representation, to attract an audience, and to take part in the wider literary community despite her chequered reputation.

While Haywood’s works were never fully accepted by the court, Carter’s successful presentation of moral womanhood resulted in several solicitations to join the court, including one hastily declined invitation to become a tutor to the Princess of Wales’s children.114 Through her translations, she depicted learning as a part of pious behaviour, and this helped to create and promote a model of femininity that included classical education. Although she was the most faithful translator this study examines, following a strict sense-for-sense form in the majority of her translations, I argue that Carter used this apparently neutral position to make a case for the usefulness of all learning. Her poems accept that there are many “diff’rent Ways” to pursue God, but insist that “The one eternal End of Heav’n / Is universal Good,” and that this goal should be the centre of every man’s existence.115 By combining these clear declarations of pious intent with extremely faithful translations of heathen philosophy, Carter demonstrates her belief in the importance of retaining the teachings of the classical philosophers. Her faithful translations join with her didactic, moralizing poetry to insist that her practice of retaining pagan teachings and philosophy is an improvement over the Christianizing impulse of previous translators.

113 Eliza Haywood, “A Discourse Concerning Writings of this Nature,” in Letters to a Lady of Quality (London, 1721), 20; Eliza Haywood, The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (London, 1753), I.75-6. 114 Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 91. 115 Carter, “Written at MIDNIGHT in a THUNDER STORM,” Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1772), 37.

Although Carter’s principles and her ideas of acceptable writing and behaviour were rigid even by the standards of her cultural milieu, she was firmly consistent in her opinion that non-

Christian writers had important lessons to teach about philosophy, morality, and even religion, and she combined this with strong support for female students and writers. While Pope overtly states his goals in revising the texts he translated, Carter hid her desire for a radical reformulation of the way that the classical authors were studied under the guise of a reclusive, pious woman who addressed her writings to likeminded women. Thanks both to her own self-representation and that of her nephew and biographer, Matthew Pennington, Carter successfully established and maintained a reputation for exemplary morality and scholarship even in the strict milieu of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century society.

For each of these authors, translation created opportunities to develop a shared literary property within an international community. In their own time, each of these writers successfully used translation as an important strategy in the process of self-creation. It offered an ability to disguise radical intentions behind an apparently neutral position alongside connections to established writers and comparisons between authors. Unlike original work, translation is innately comparative, forcing writers to respond to both their original source and to past translations. Eighteenth-century translators used this comparative nature as a vital part of their self-fashioning, demonstrating their creative and compositional skills by attempting to improve upon their original even as they took advantage of the connections of their source author to establish themselves and their translations as part of an existing canon.

Chapter 1 Dryden: Laureate, Theorist, and Translator

John Dryden is known as a political animal with a strong interest in his own reputation, but except for his politicized translations of Virgil’s works, his translations are rarely considered an important part of his reputation-building strategy.116 In this chapter, I argue against the perception that Dryden’s translations are secondary works or that they were written primarily for financial reasons. Far from being secondary works, I suggest that his translations, especially his

Miscellanies, were of primary importance both to Dryden’s own self-fashioning and his plan for his posterity. Not content with being the product of great literary ancestors, Dryden wanted to be the father of the next generation of writers. Recognising how Dryden works to create a school of followers by whom posterity would remember him reveals the centrality of Dryden’s

Miscellanies to a project based not on politics or even immediate fame but on a new way of looking at English literature and the creation of a new focus on translation and a new following for Dryden’s style.

Dryden used his poetry, and particularly his translations, to shape his reputation and to encourage younger poets to imitate him. Dryden’s desire to situate himself in a line of poets descended from classical ancestry is well known. As Paul Hammond’s excellent book Dryden and the Traces of Ancient Rome shows, Dryden saw his connection to a classical literary history as central to his self-identity as a writer.117 But his idea of hereditage extended beyond the past and into the future. His translations of important classical works, his theoretical discussions highlighting comparisons between himself and his sources, and his addresses to an educated,

116 Steven Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 41-2. 117 Paul Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

classically-trained readership all helped to position Dryden as a literary father to the next generation of poets.

Dryden saw translation as the best and most accessible means of building his literary persona. Far from the now prevalent image of Dryden as an occasional poet and playwright who turned reluctantly to translation as a means of earning money when he lost his royal patronage after the Glorious Revolution, this chapter shows Dryden’s consistent preference for the work of the translator. Even his first royalist poem, the 1660 Astraea Redux, praises the editorial work of artistic restoration, declaring that “pencils can by one slight touch” bring “Smiles to that changed face that wept before.”118 More immediately, Dryden’s defence of contemporary English writing in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy rests not on the originality of his fellow authors but on the

English antecedents which “we endeavour therein to follow.” He proudly itemizes modern borrowings from older English authors, declaring, in praise of Ben Jonson’s adaptive drama that

“He invades Authours like a Monarch, and what would be theft in other Poets, is onely victory in him.” Comparing Johnson’s translations to a war, he declares that “the spoils of these Writers” are revitalized in Johnson so “that if one of their Poets had written either of his Tragedies, we had seen less of it then in him” (XVII.57). While Dryden used less antagonist language to describe his own writing, this image of the conquering translator who proved his worth by beating the classical authors at their own game established a pattern that Dryden followed throughout his career, establishing a reputation as a translator which he used to shape his public image, to claim the reputation he desired, and to set a precedent that he encouraged other poets to follow.

118 John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, ed. Vinton A. Dearing, H. T. Swedenburg, Alan Roper, et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956-90), I.26. Cited with parenthetical volume and page references.

In his own lifetime, Dryden’s connections to classical texts gave him a polite excuse for taking open pride in his creations. Rather than risk accusations of boastfulness by openly claiming fame and honour for himself, Dryden instead ascribed it to others. While consistently foregrounding his relationship to his classical forebears, Dryden allowed English writers praise only in connection with classical writers. He used translation to compare himself to the great classical authors, making himself, like them, a figure of emulation for other poets. Dryden’s

Miscellanies, as I have argued elsewhere, serve the double purpose of promoting his project to improve the English language through translation and giving him a platform he could use to support younger authors.119 Thanks in part to Dryden and Tonson, translations, already a profitable form, became increasingly lucrative and increasingly popular with both the booksellers who produced and disseminated publications and the reading public. After Dryden’s death,

Tonson continued to produce and support translations, publishing, among other productions, a

1717 multiple-hands edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that included poems by Dryden, Addison,

Congreve, Maynwaring, Rowe, Garth, Tate, Harvey, and Pope.120 Together, Dryden and Tonson popularized the miscellany volume, a form that included between five and fifteen hundred different titles between 1700 and 1780. Aspiring poets, like both Alexander Pope and Elizabeth

Carter, launched their careers in miscellany volumes that included mixed short poems, translations, and other media.121

119 Catherine Fleming, “Improvised Patronage: Jacob Tonson and Dryden’s Linguistic Project,” Lumen 36 (2017): 95-111. 120 Charles Tomlinson, “Why Dryden’s Translations Matter,” Translation and Literature 10.1 (2001): 18. 121 Michael F. Suarez SJ, “The Production and Consumption of the Eighteenth-Century Poetic Miscellany,” in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, ed. Isabel Rivers (London: Continuum, 2001), 217.

A Classical History: Translation and the Classics

During the Restoration and Enlightenment, only one of Dryden’s original poems vied with his translations for popularity, and despite the praise for his Ode on Saint Cecilia’s Day, he was best known by his contemporaries for his translations.122 Only a few years after Dryden’s death, Pope declared that “his fire, like the Sun’s, shin’d clearest towards its setting,” in the translations which composed the bulk of Dryden’s late works.123 This was by no means an unusual view, and Jabez Hughes, in his 1706 poem “Upon Reading Mr Dryden’s Fables,” also claims that the translations in the Fables show Dryden’s “fire [was] not less,” at the end of his life, and “he more correctly writ, / With ripen’d Judgment and digested Wit.”124 Congreve,

Dryden’s protégé, insisted that “his Ode of St. Cecilia’s Day and his Fables” demonstrate his improvement in “Fire and Imagination, as well as in Judgement.”125 This shared image of

Dryden’s literary and creative vitality demonstrates his success in conflating his life and works.

Moreover, the image of creativity as a consistent vital fire becoming brighter at the end of his life demonstrates singularity and constant activity, offering a counterpoint to later conceptions that

Dryden’s adaptive output under William was mercenary or inferior.

Even near the end of the century, Warton could write that “It is to his fables,” translated from Latin, Italian, and Middle English, “that Dryden will owe his immortality.”126 In fact, in

1785, Clara Reeve wrote that “Dryden’s elegant, rich, and harmonious numbers, have preserved

122 Tom Mason and Adam Rounce, “Alexander’s Feast, or the Power of Music: The Poem and its Readers,” in John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, 140-173. 123 Alexander Pope, “Letter to Wycherly, Dec. 26, 1704,” in Correspondence, ed. G. Sherburn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), I.2. 124 Jabez Hughes, “Verses Occasion’d by Reading Mr. Dryden’s Fables,” in John Dryden: The Critical Heritage, ed. James and Helen Kinsley (New York: Routledge, 1971), 246. 125 William Congreve, “Epistle Dedicatory,” in John Dryden: The Critical Heritage, 265. 126 Joseph Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (London, 1782), II.12.

this, and many other of Chaucer’s works, from sinking into oblivion, and he has given the old

Bard a share of his own immortality.”127 This claim establishes the continuity of Dryden’s fame, forecasting the decade-long literary debate that took place in The Gentleman’s Magazine between 1788 and 1799 on the relative merits of Pope and Dryden in an attempt to establish a poetic standard for the following century. Though condemned by many Romantic critics and largely ignored during the following century, the prestige and centrality of Dryden’s translations to his career and throughout the eighteenth century must be remembered when considering

Dryden’s reputation-building strategies.

The classical connections that Dryden stressed throughout his literary life, and especially in his later translations, formed the foundation for his contemporary reputation. Understanding the contemporary tradition of reading in Latin and Greek and looking at Augustan Rome as the

Golden Age of civilization, is an essential part of understanding Dryden’s writing practices. His writing demonstrates a desire for a literary kinship that he felt was intrinsically necessary to contemporary writing. He took up the Roman view that translation was both “the preeminent act of literary creation,” and a form which allowed competition with ancient authors.128 Dryden’s claim of kinship with these writers, whom he referred to as “our sires,” appears most clearly in the prefaces to his adapted plays and translations, in which he invites readers to compare his translations to the original and stress the prestige awarded to a translator who successfully navigated between his own style and that of a classical author (IV.432). These works show that he saw translation as empowering writers, offering opportunities for literary sons like himself to claim the privilege and position of their sires.

127 Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance Through Times, Countries, and Manners (Colchester, 1785), I.86. 128 Elizabeth Marie Young, Translation as Muse: Poetic Translation in Catullus’s Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 2.

Although plagiarism was a worrying accusation, and one that was difficult to refute, as

Alexander Lindey and Richard Terry argue, Restoration and early eighteenth-century audiences viewed imitation of both ancient and contemporary models as laudatory.129 Writers were encouraged to begin their careers by imitating their Latin and Greek counterparts, both in style, form, and content, copying from Cicero’s letters to create missives to prospective patrons, families, and friends, and the movement toward formal imitation in the mid-seventeenth century shows a willingness to adapt texts to contemporary needs.130 Dryden’s idea of imitation, which echoes that of Abraham Cowley, sees imitation as a median between translation and original work, using the source text as a “Pattern” or blueprint for new ideas (I.116-9). This encouraged repeated imitations of the same work by allowing more variation between different imitated versions of the same text, just as his preferred favourite form of translation with latitude does.

Although formal imitation as it develops during the period is a distinct subset of translation,

Dryden views both this and adaptive verse as forms of loose translation, explaining the liberties which writers can take in imitations in his discussion of the three forms of translation in his introduction to Ovid’s Epistles.

In this paratext, Dryden separates translation into metaphrase, imitation, and translation with latitude, which he considers to be a happy medium. Metaphrase, the first of these forms, is the art of “turning an Author Word by Word, and Line by Line, from one Language into another.”

129 Alexander Lindey, Plagiarism and Originality (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1952), 79; Richard Terry, The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature From Butler to Sterne (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 53-6. 130 Sarah Haggarty, “‘The Ceremonial of Letter for Letter’: William Cowper and the Tempo of Epistolary Exchange,” Eighteenth-Century Life 35 (2011): 149-67; Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); James Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Frank Stack, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), 18-20; Harold F. Brooks, “The ‘Imitation’ in English Poetry, Especially in Formal Satire, before the Age of Pope,” The Review of English Studies 25.48 (1949): 124-140; Thomas Sprat, “An Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Abraham Cowley,” in The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley (London, 1668), c1.

(I.117) Dryden rejects metaphrase completely, declaring that it is impossible to create beautiful poetry this way and that “no sober man would put himself into a danger for the Applause of scaping without breaking his Neck.” (I.117) Comparing poetic failure to death, Dryden stakes his claim in the arena, demonstrating vividly the importance of grace and freedom in the display of literary talent.

Imitation offers poets the freedom to showcase their abilities and invites comparison with the texts they imitate, but even in this introduction, his statements about imitation are conflicted.

This form is, he claims, more graceful than metaphrase, which “is incumber’d with so many difficulties at once,” that it is “like dancing on Ropes with fetter’d Legs” (I.117). Imitation allows the translator to have the power in the relationship, but this very power is problematic.

The resulting translation may be “more Excellent” than the original, but he believes that a translator must be prepared to display both his own prowess and his “Authors [sic] thoughts” and even something of his words (I.117). This introduction shows Dryden’s conflicted relationship with his sources. He first writes, then rejects, then accepts imitations. He calls for faithfulness to his author, then insists on “Translation with latitude,” and finally admits that he has “taken more liberty” than even the “just Translation” which he describes will allow (I.118-9). In his introductions, and especially here in his definition of translation, he struggles between his duty to his author and his desire for personal fame and recognition.

Although Dryden did not write formal imitations in verse, he enjoyed revising, updating, and reworking older works, and many of his plays fall into the realm of formal imitation. Dryden also encouraged other authors in their translating and imitating ventures. When asked to polish

William Soames’ translation of the Art of Poetry, he chose to replace French authors with

English, creating an effect very close to formal imitation which was, as Tonson’s Advertisement

demonstrates, Dryden’s primary contribution to the volume:

I saw the Manuscript lye in Mr. Dryden’s Hands for above Six Months, who made

very considerable Alterations in it, particularly, the beginning of the 4th Canto; and

it being his Opinion that it would be better to apply the Poem to English Writers,

than keep to the French Names, as it was first Translated, Sir William desired he

wou’d take the Pains to make that Alteration, and accordingly that was entirely done

by Mr. Dryden (II.368).

Altering the French manuscript to praise English authors shows Dryden’s political loyalties and his willingness to adapt his style, blurring the lines between translation, imitation, and original work as he worked to showcase his own skill and that of his collaborator.

Putting himself first is hardly a new step for Dryden, who is consistently immodest about his abilities, even as he hides under a claim of modesty. “No man is capable of Translating

Poetry, who besides a Genius to that Art, is not a Master both of his Authours Language, and of his own” (I.117), he says, and again “to be a thorow Translatour, he must be a thorow Poet”

(III.5), claiming for himself both genius and mastery. Closely resembling “the endowments necessary for an epic poet” that he describes in his Discourse of Satire, these “exacting requirements for a translator” show how Dryden uses his homage to older masters as a springboard for his own claims to greatness (II.268). Dryden claims that translators must

look into our selves, to conform our Genius to his, to give his thought either the

same turn if our tongue will bear it, or if not, to vary but the dress, not to alter or

destroy the substance. The like Care must be taken of the more outward

Ornaments, the Words: when they appear (which is but seldom) litterally graceful,

it were an injury to the Authour that they should be chang’d. (I.118)

As he often does, Dryden begins with a statement of humility, but “conforming” to his author is quickly subordinated to his desire for beauty. Translators are only to copy their originals “if our tongue will bear it.” Dryden briefly retrenches, claiming that he will not allow his fellow translators to change “the substance” of his author’s meaning, but immediately returns to offer an even clearer statement of the translator’s power over their author. The words of the source author become mere “outward Ornaments” to the sense or the inspiration he calls translators to retain, and moments later Dryden dismisses even their capacity to adorn. Although he offers his authors some small subservience, he expands the rights and work of a translator by belittling his original.

If his author’s words “seldom” appear graceful in English, then the translator has not only the right but the duty to insert his own.

Dryden’s defence of his Amphitryon, where he claims that the play is “worth your

Patronage” because of its connection to both Plautus, its original author, and Molière, who wrote its recent French adaptation, provides a typical example of the way that Dryden bolstered his authority by connecting himself to established authors . His apparent modesty is undermined, here and elsewhere, by his invitation to his readers to compare his work to the original. By explicitly asking his audience “not to compare him too strictly with Molière’s” (XII.224-5),

Dryden calls attention to the ease with which his audience could do so, declaring that “more than half of it is mine” in a phrase which both encourages readers to make exactly the comparison between his and Molière’s work that he is apparently trying to avert (XII.224). By making this claim of ownership at the same time as he emphasizes Molière’s part in the play, Dryden creates a shared ownership and asserts his kinship to the French author.

The loose imitation which Dryden used in adapting Molière’s play is different from the close rendering that he used for works like his Virgil, which hides political and ideological

alterations by using strongly inflected synonyms. But Restoration and eighteenth-century audiences anticipated a broad range of translation practices, and Dryden showcased his poetic abilities using many different adaptive practices throughout his career.131 Translators, as Dryden and his contemporary theorists insisted, needed to convey the words, thoughts, and manner of their authors, but, following the “free imitations by Horace” and his injunction “Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus / Interpres” (not render faithfully word for word, but interpret), completely slavish renderings were considered just as problematic as translations that were too loose.132 Dryden’s discussion of metaphrase in his preface to Ovid’s Epistles, claims that word- for-word renditions are often stilted and without poetic fire. This attack emphasized the differences in his own, more liberal, translation, and helped to fend off accusations that he was imitating previous translations rather than working directly with his source.

Liberal translation was a major factor in gaining literary status and reputation. Although translators made many changes to their source, they, as McMurran explains, “appear to have instinctively refused the moniker ‘imitators’ and rarely called their works ‘imitations’ or

‘adaptations’ even though such license was closer to imitation than translation.”133 The cachet of translation encouraged writers to align themselves with translators rather than imitators. Writing in this milieu, Dryden’s sense of himself as a writer was intimately connected to his sense of himself as a part of a long classical tradition, a tradition that he hoped would continue after his death. Very aware of the ways in which a translator can alter his author’s sense, style, and

131 Louis Kelly, “The Eighteenth Century to Tytler,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, ed. Gordon Braden, Peter France, and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005-11), III.67-78; Mary Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 73-97; Julie Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600-1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 220. 132 John Draper, “The Theory of Translation in the Eighteenth Century,” Neophilologus 6.1 (1921): 242. 133 McMurran, Spread of Novels, 73.

meaning, Dryden viewed himself as both a conveyer of ancient thoughts and a poet capable of improving on those writers and serving as a classical forebear himself. Dryden’s poems about literature show him using the typology of the classics in order to discuss contemporary writers, just as his political poems use biblical typology to discuss contemporary figures. Perhaps the best example of Dryden’s use of classical figures to enhance his own status as a writer capable of inspiring imitation is in his 1694 poem, “To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve on his Comedy

Call’d the Double Dealer.”

Dryden opens this poem in a prophetic mode that foretells the future by examining the past, demonstrating that even in fulfilling their promise and surpassing the ancients in wit, modern writers must still acknowledge their inferiority to the ancients. Though surpassing their predecessors in wit, moderns have failed in “genius” and “what we gained in skill we lost in strength,” Dryden declares (IV.432-3). Dryden’s goal in separating classical genius from modern grace and skill is not to withhold praise from Congreve, but to use modesty strategically and so claim the more desirable and more concrete praise. While in his political writing, Dryden assumes a topos of modesty as a form of protection, here his modest position relative to the classical authors seems less a form of protection than a backwards claim to fame.

In this poem, Dryden fashions his own identity with as much care as he does that of

Congreve, the author who the poem is supposedly both to and about. Dryden classes himself as one of the modern authors who fail in strength, praising Congreve as “the best Vitruvius” who will “Our beauties equal; but excel our strength,” creating an architectural structure that will last as long as the temples of antiquity (IV.432-3). This allows him to retain the appearance of modesty while also presenting himself as Congreve’s literary father, and claiming the privileged position of a literary ancestor. At the same time, Dryden reclaims the territory of the ancients by

saving “the diversity of nature” from the “flood” of the Civil War and culture-destroying interregnum, acting as a founding father and creator of culture in imitation of the biblical patriarch, Noah (IV.433). “His complete career” becomes, as Raphael Lyne recognizes, “an Ark of past culture preserved and categorized and resituated for a new era.”134 Although Lyne presents this program as a holistic part of Dryden’s career, the program of preservation is most evident in his translations, which explicitly connect past and present works. While he qualifies his position, first in relation to the ancients, and then in relation to Congreve, Dryden chains his own identity firmly to his classical literary ancestors.

“Oh that your brows my laurel had sustain’d,” he tells Congreve, reaffirming his own

‘laurelled’ position as the poet laureate, and also his powerlessness. While this position is political, referring to his loss of position under William, his inability to pass on his ‘crown’ of laurels is also connected to the lack of strength which Dryden claims modern poets have in comparison to their forefathers. He next returns to the poem’s opening “promised hour” by making a “prophesy” of his own. This returns the poem to its ostensible focus on Congreve, a rising Whig talent, but it also re-establishes Dryden’s classical connection with the bards and prophets of the classical era. If Dryden’s old-fashioned loyalty to the exiled Stuarts puts him in the position of prophetic predecessor to Congreve, as he suggests, this establishes both himself and king Charles as members of a Golden Age of literature and kingship. This subtle claim of superiority over his successor is reinforced by Dryden’s re-invocation of the images of the

“laurel” and “genius” (IV.433).

134 Raphael Lyne, “Dryden and the Complete Career,” in Classical Literary Careers and their Reception, ed. Philip Hardie and Helen Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 249.

These two images serve different functions. The laurel shows the unbroken continuity between the ancients and moderns by demonstrating that the crown which the ancient writers wore is still being passed down. Conversely, Dryden has reserved genius for the classical poets, and it is this which he claims is revived now in his literary son, Congreve. By separating the continuity of the laurel from the crown of genius, Dryden connects modern politics with classical writers and Roman emperors, but at the same time, he claims a special status for his classical forebears who had both the laurel and the crown, and for himself as the father and teacher of the man who brings genius back to England, reclaiming the crown that had been lost over the centuries.

Dryden’s references in this poem and elsewhere show him as unwilling to think of literature without connecting it to the literary past. His connections to more recent English literature are often perfunctory. His single reference to Shakespeare in this poem is brief and formulaic and he not only does not mention, but subtly excludes, the anti-monarchical Milton from the rank of geniuses which Congreve joins. Dryden’s focus is on the classical past, on Italy and, as in the “Prologue and Epilogue to the University of Oxon [1673]” on “Greece, when

Learning flourish’d” (I.146).

Looking at the larger scope of Dryden’s work, it becomes evident that in both his translation and his original work Dryden relied on his classical heritage to establish himself in his contemporary literary context as well as to his support for aspiring authors. As Zwicker notes, “his work points us at once to his deep indebtedness to the classical past and to his vigorous advocacy of innovation.”135 Dryden saw reliance on a classical history not as a barrier

135 Steven Zwicker, “Dryden and the Problem of Literary Modernity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dryden, ed. Steven Zwicker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 284.

to innovation but as an aid to creatively navigating the difficult literary and political waters of the late seventeenth century and to establishing his literary position.

Focusing on classical authors allowed Dryden to further explore the multiple voices which feature in much of his work, whether original, adaptation, or translation.136 Even in his original works, he borrowed many voices from other writers. In his preface to Annus Mirabilis

(1666), for instance, Dryden establishes his position as historian by comparing himself to Virgil.

This comparison served both his political and his literary ends. By choosing Virgil and positioning him as a factual and historical writer, in comparison to the more luxuriant writer of fiction, Ovid, Dryden attempts to create a neutral rather than a partisan persona.137 The choice of

Virgil as his pattern also establishes his literary bona fides. These choices are especially interesting in light of his later choices of material to translate, where he used both Virgil and

Ovid to establish himself as a translator.

In Annus Mirabilis, Dryden calls attention to the way that his Virgilian link elevates his poem. After a long, scholarly discussion in praise of Virgil, he addresses his audience, saying,

before I leave Virgil, I must own the vanity to tell you, and by you the world, that

he has been my Master in this Poem; I have followed him every where, I know not

with what success, but I am sure with diligence enough: my Images are many of

them copied from him and the rest are imitations of him. My expressions also are

as near as the Idioms of the two languages would admit of in translation. (I.55)

Already, twenty years before Dryden began to write his most famous translations, he is connecting his work to this form in order to build his reputation. Taking Virgil as his teacher,

136 Paul Davis, “Dryden and the Invention of Augustan Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dryden. 137 Zwicker, Politics and Language, 41-2.

Dryden suggests, means copying, and Dryden’s description of his imitation, copying, and near translation is a forerunner of his discussion of imitation, metaphrase, and translation with latitude in Ovid’s Epistles. Dryden does not see adaptation as a last resort, only to be turned to when he cannot write anything else. Instead, he claims to be a translator, even in an original work.

Dryden’s claim to derivation is a means of establishing authority. By insisting that his

“Images are many of them copied” from the great master of writing, he asks readers to look for similarities between himself and that master. That this opens him to the accusation of “Plagiary,” he acknowledges, but Dryden treats this supposed charge with some disdain, claiming that while

“In some places, where either the fancy, or the words, were his, or any others, I have noted it in the Margin, that I might not seem a Plagiary: in others I have neglected it, to avoid as well the tediousness, as the affectation of doing it too often” (I.56). This type of casual borrowing was common during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, in large part because the view of the classical poets as an open source for writers to draw on was widespread. Isobel Grundy shows how Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, “regarded poetry as an unbroken tradition on which its latest practitioner could always draw” and therefore unashamedly “indulged in extensive borrowing, even of whole passages” from other poets.138 Lady Mary’s willingness to plunder other authors was not shared by all of the literati, however, and over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as authors became increasingly preoccupied with notions of originality, so the accusation of plagiarism, initially reserved for the copy and sale of entire works, became applied to smaller and smaller pieces of an author’s writing.139 Dryden’s dismissive claim to have cited only some authors in only some places shows his contempt for

138 Isobel Grundy, “The Verse of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: A Critical Edition,” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1971), 1, 89. 139 Terry, The Plagiarism Allegation.

such accusations, but also his acknowledgement of their increasing power. Although Dryden’s words acknowledge the need to differentiate between words that were directly copied from another source and those that were not consciously derivative, he scorns careful distinction as

“affectation.” Not only does he claim that he is actively trying to copy Virgil’s language, he also notes that although the words are the easiest to respond to with a claim of plagiary, in many places where he draws from his source he takes not their words, or even their images, but their

“fancy.”

The decision to claim Virgil as his mentor was a carefully thought-out political statement, but it was also a matter of fact. Dryden calls attention to his use of Latinisms “in abundance” as well as “expressions that render Latin idioms more or less literally” both inside his poem and in his preface (I.264). He uses these to connect Charles II with Virgil’s hero and to emphasize the scope of his power. In Annus Mirabilis, Dryden claims that “He in himself did whole Armado’s

[sic] bring” (I.61), a translation of a passage that he writes in the Aeneis as “in himself alone, an

Army brought” (VI.601). In fact, several phrases from Annus Mirabilis reappear in his later translation of the Georgics, particularly descriptions such as the “Sea-green Syrens” (I.62) of

Annus Mirabilis that appear as the “Sea-green Sisters” of Cyrene in the Georgics (V.253) or the

“Fasces of the Main” (III.67) that appear in the Georgics as the “Fasces of the Sea” (V.156).

These show that he did, as he claimed, include direct translation in his poem in addition to borrowing fancies and images from his ‘master.’

Dryden performs similar acts of translation and transference in his plays, mixing original work with plots, ideas, and language taken from his sources. Robert McHenry described him as

“revising Shakespeare’s obsolete Jacobean style into Restoration English” in much the same way as he translated from Molière, Corneille, Sophocles, or Plautus, taking liberties with words,

phrases, and even plots.140 Although Dryden speaks scornfully of Authors who “make whole

Playes, and yet scarce write one word” in the Prologue to Albumazar, he openly experimented with multi-author dialogues in his adaptations of older plays, particularly those of Shakespeare.

In his versions of Shakespeare’s plays, Dryden uses additional characters and plot to create the multi-faceted pieces characteristic of the Restoration drama, but retains much of Shakespeare’s original. In fact, Samuel Pepys, writing about the first appearance of Dryden’s The Tempest, calls it, not Dryden’s, but “an old play of Shakespeare’s.”141 Admitting his debt to Shakespeare in his preface to All for Love, Dryden presents his borrowings in a positive light, claiming that “‘tis almost a Miracle that much of his language remains so pure” and so usable. (XIII.18). At the same time, and in the same sentence, Dryden insists he has “not Copy’d my Author servilely” but instead has altered, updated, and revitalized Shakespeare’s text. His use of “servilely” echoes his description of “servile, literal Translation” in his preface to Ovid’s Epistles (I.117).

Dryden presents the age and literary history of his text as a sign of his own daring and his own literary standing. Reminding readers of the popularity of his subject, the doomed love of

Antony and Cleopatra, Dryden claims that writers have treated this so “variously” that they have

“given me the confidence to try my self in this Bowe of Ulysses . . . and withal, to take my own measures, in aiming at the Mark” (XIII.10). His metaphor not only pulls in another source text but demonstrates his way of thinking about his play, and in fact, translation as a whole. Dryden wants to test himself, not against his own mind, but against other great writers, and the best way to do that, his metaphor suggests, is by writing the same story. This was an easy association for him, because this type of dialogue is already visible in his original political and religious poems.

140 Robert W. McHenry, Jr., “Plagiarism and Paternity: Dryden’s Adaptations,” in Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, ed. Reginald McGinnis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 9. 141 Samuel Pepys, cited in Works of John Dryden, X.321.

In political poems like “Absalom and Achitophel” and “The Hind and the Panther,” Dryden creates characters to voice the opinions of his opponents, setting his claims in dialogue with other ideas and creating multi-faceted works which include several perspectives and points of view. In doing this he offers the appearance of even-handedness, but he also shows his ability to manipulate the words, phrases, and ideas of others, just as he does in his translations.142 By working with the same story, characters, and sometimes even words, Dryden creates points of dialogue, comparison, and diversity, forcing his readers to compare to others. Whether his point of comparison is a political opponent, the great writers he imitates in his plays, or the classical authors he translates, Dryden asks readers to see him as a clearer thinker, a more entertaining writer, and a better stylist.

Dryden’s claims of modesty serve to highlight his “courage” as he takes up well-known subjects, calling reader’s attention to his abilities. He claims of his Amphitryon that “were this

Comedy wholly mine, I should call it a Trifle,” reaffirming his own modesty. But, he continues, because this same piece was the “best” of “the two greatest Names of Ancient and Modern

Comedy,” he cannot call it a trifle, and can bring it before his chosen patron with pride

(XIII.224-5). Again, as he did in his preface to Annus Mirabilis, he connects his work on the

Amphitryon to translation. Still professing modesty, Dryden pretends that his audience will be interested in the play solely because of its Latin and French roots, and that they will be disappointed to discover “that more than half of it is mine; and the rest is rather a lame Imitation of their Excellencies than a just Translation” (XIII.225). Translation, again, becomes the

142 Hammond, “Is Dryden a Classic?,” 6; Reginald McGinnis, introduction to Originality and Intellectual Property, xi-xv; David Roberts, “‘Ranked Among the Best’: Translation and Cultural Agency in Restoration Translations of French Drama,” The Modern Language Review 108.2 (2013): 396-415.

professed desire of Dryden’s readers, and Dryden acts to frustrate that desire at the same time as he promises to partially fulfill it.

Almost half of the play, his words suggest, belongs to the famous writers he praises here.

This means that for those readers unfamiliar with the originals, Dryden’s play will provide an introduction. But for those already familiar with the originals, Dryden offers a play that incorporates both versions, translates them, alters them, edits them, and then adds new material to create an original piece. Here as elsewhere, Dryden uses his prologues to portray himself as compositor, editor, original writer, and translator, displaying his facility at blurring the lines between the different stances he takes toward his texts. These roles give him space to explore the differences between authors’ styles and ideas. Dryden includes references to and quotations from classical and contemporary sources, and asks readers to look for them in his poems and plays, much the same way as he would later ask readers to look for places in his translations where he has altered the meaning of his originals, using his changes and connections to build up a reputation as an author capable of making improvements to the works of great classical authors.

The Empowered Translator: Dryden’s Translation Theory

As a man who had already defined himself and his ability to write original work by his relationship to classical authors and the Latin pre-texts that he used to create his own literary origin story and whose self-presentation of original work shows him as both an original writer and a conveyer of ancient thoughts, Dryden’s progression, after the Glorious Revolution, from original poetry to the safer and perhaps more profitable venture of translation seems natural. This shift aligned him further with his classical predecessors, placing his name next to the august

names of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucretius, and also increased the difficulty of writing adaptive work. As Hammond notes, although many readers came to Dryden’s texts to learn the originals, “For others, Dryden’s English was enticingly engaged in an intricate dialogue with

Latin.” This word play “contributed importantly to the meaning and pleasure of the text,” allowing Dryden to interact closely with his classical original.143

Dryden’s claim that translation improved his work was not made in an entirely congenial atmosphere. Where Dryden likes to complicate his original works by linking them to translation, his friend and patron Roscommon claims in his verse “Essay on Translated Works” that

“Composing is the Nobler Part” and his assurance that although “Invention labours less,” the translator’s “Judgement, [labours] more,” while the clear forerunner of Pope’s later claims, seems hardly equivalent to Dryden’s consistent praise of translation.144 Roscommon’s focus on the judgement of the translator, does however, dovetail nicely with Dryden’s prioritizing of learning, judgement, and editorial skill, and his essay shows the same insistence on conscious modesty in the face of classical authors that Dryden continually displays. Dryden’s prefaces combine Roscommon’s modesty in the face of classical authors with an insistence on the value and importance of the editorial function of the translator. In so doing, he crystalized contemporary debates on translation theory and created an example of verse translation that authors like Pope followed for the next century.

As part of his ongoing discussion on the theory of translation, Dryden gives several apparently conflicting views of the job of the translator. Examining Dryden’s most sweeping and best known statement about translation from the preface to Ovid’s Epistles, it is evident that

143 Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, 43. 144 Earl of Roscommon (Wentworth Dillon), An Essay on Translated Verse (London, 1684), 5.

Dryden sets himself up in dialogue with and even in opposition to his author. He begins with a variation on the standard idea of subordinating translator to original author, claiming that “‘tis time to look into our selves, to conform our Genius to his, to give his thought either the same turn if our tongue will bear it, or if not, to vary but the dress, not to alter or destroy the substance,” but he immediately asserts that “it would be unreasonable to limit a Translator to the narrow compass of his Authours words” and admits that he may also have altered or expanded the sense of Ovid’s text (I.118). He claims that “a translator has no right” to make any alteration to his original, but he admits that “I have both added and omitted,” both acknowledging the standard limitations which are placed on translators and rejecting them for himself, separating himself – and indeed all poet-translators – from the lower ranks of those writers who consider translation only a matter of conveying their author’s ideas (III.3). Where a translator of this sort may have no right to take liberties, Dryden sets himself apart from mere copiers and encourages poets to consider themselves capable of improving on their original.

A poet must be neither mimic nor pedant, but good translators were commanded by nearly all theorists, including Dryden, to consult other translations and critics as they prepared to write. Even writers who affected to disdain these critics needed to show that they were aware of the work that had been done on their subject. But authors who followed too closely the recommendations or the examples they studied could face accusations of copying other translators – and these accusations were not leveled only at authors who deserved the criticism.

Tobias Smollett, for instance, faced accusations both of having too slavishly copied his predecessors and of having failed to read these predecessors.

At the same time as authors struggled to both incorporate the interpretations of previous translators and justify creating a new work, popular and modern translations were an increasingly

widespread commodity. Depending on their intended readership, authors could expect many of their readers never to have seen the original. Some translators worked without regard to authenticity, taking other contemporary translations as their sources rather than a classical original, a type of translation which resulted in texts bearing little relation to their supposed original. Literary translators like Dryden, who had a reputation for scholarship and stylistic brilliance to maintain, were more restricted, by both the audience’s knowledge and by the translator’s desire to separate themselves from these hack translations. This same wide knowledge of a classical original and its connections, however, allowed and encouraged writers to differentiate themselves from other translators of the same text. In addition, the prestige of the connection to the classics was an encouragement to writers, and helps to explain the importance that Dryden and his contemporaries placed on translation.

His desire to show respect for the authors he claimed a kinship with through translation does not prevent Dryden from manipulating his texts. His translations of Lucretius, although

Swedenburg insists that “What Dryden takes from Lucretius” is “genuinely Lucretian,” change the setting and context in such a way as to remove much of Lucretius’ stoic composure, focusing instead on his observations on romantic love until Lucretius himself seems to be a lover

(III.278). Although scholars debate Dryden’s intent, his Lucretian verses are clearly a radical re- envisioning of Lucretius’ ideas. Dryden’s ability to make these verses fit into the love poetry that surrounds them displays Dryden’s mastery at adaptation and revision as well as translation.

His translation of Lucretius in Sylvae is one of Dryden’s freer translations, done at fifty- four, during the height of his career. Dryden took the young Creech, whose translation of

Lucretius had already gone through four editions, as his model in this translation. There is some debate about whether Dryden’s alterations were made in order to reorient Lucretius’ atheistic

poetry into something acceptable to Dryden’s contemporaries or whether his translation is

Dryden’s attempt to understand and to rescue the truly Lucretian ideas from his contemporaries’ perverted notion of Epicureanism.145 Whether Dryden’s liberties, as Austin and Swedenburg suggest, involve Christianizing Lucretius or, as Hammond insists, expanding his words to better convey Dryden’s “radical re-examination of what makes a human life” seen through Epicurean philosophy, scholars agree that Dryden does not follow the literal sense of this text.146

He admits to taking “more liberty” than Creech, creating a poetic rather than a philosophical version of Lucretius (III.14). To this end, Dryden’s tendency in this work was to expand, to cut some passages and pull out new meanings from others in order to massage

Lucretius’ Epicurean ideals into something acceptable in Christian England. However, his expansion continued to reference Lucretius’ words, ensuring that alert readers found the echoes of his original and could clearly see how Dryden not only translated but also interpreted the philosopher.

One example of Dryden’s work with Lucretius is his handling of the lines “pertineat quicquam tamen ad nos id quoque factum, / interrupta semel cum sit repentia nostri” (Nothing, however, belongs to us or our deeds / once interrupted by things unexpected to us). These two lines, in Dryden’s translation become four:

What gain to us would all this bustle bring,

The new made man wou’d be another thing;

When once an interrupting pause is made,

That individual Being is decayed. (III.48)

145 Norman Austin, “Translation as Baptism: Dryden’s Lucretius,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 7.4 (1968), 576-602; Paul Hammond, “The Integrity of Dryden’s Lucretius,” The Modern Language Review 78.1 (1983): 1-23. 146 Hammond, “Integrity of Dryden’s Lucretius,” 22.

Dryden’s expansions add clarity to the original, changing the vague ‘belongs’ to the clearer word

“gains” and adding action by altering ‘us or our deeds’ to the active “bustle.” His final line,

“That individual Being is decayed” is nowhere in the original lines, but works to clarify the

“interruption” of the Latin, while his use of the Latinized “interrupting” clearly displays to his reader where he is in the text, and shows Dryden’s awareness of the connection between the

Latin and English languages.

Again, Dryden both expands and subtly alters Lucretius’ “Imperfecta tibi elapsa’st, ingrataque vita” to

From hence it comes thy vain desires at strife

Within themselves, have tantalized thy Life (III.52).

He retains the ideas of Lucretius, but not the words. Lucretius’ imperfect and ungratifying life becomes, in Dryden, a different Latinism entirely as Dryden introduces a connection to Tantalus, who was stuck between two temptations. This Latinate word, tantalized, while not new, was a relatively recent addition to English usage.147 While Lucretius’ phrase makes life the subject of the line and its movement away from the listener the action, Dryden focuses readers instead on desire, making his poem a sharper condemnation of the hedonistic reader than his original while keeping his reader’s attention on Latin history and myth by trying his own interpretation to a

Roman myth.

Dryden’s Virgil, his most famous work, is also the translation which he most clearly revised to make his own overt political statement. Opening his book with a dedication that connects himself to Virgil, Caesar to Virgil’s hero, and King William to Caesar as the conqueror by force and not by right, Dryden’s language throughout is inflected to heighten the “political

147 "tantalize, v.," OED Online. March 2015. Oxford University Press.

themes and topics” which haunted him at this time.148 Dryden’s work is not untrue to his original, but he changes tenses, translates into language that is subtly inflected toward contemporary political ideology, and expands Virgil’s thought. Latinus’ consideration of marriage, for instance, which appears in Virgil as “conubio natae thalamoque moratur” (the marriage of his daughter and the deferral of her bridal bed), and which H. Fairclough translates as “his daughter’s wedlock and bridal bed,” become, in Dryden’s text, a reflection on “future

Things of wondrous weight / Succession, Empire, and his Daughter’s fate” (III.346).149 As this demonstrates, there is clear evidence of alteration in Dryden’s text, but his work also follows the main strain of Virgil’s ideas, offering a translation that is also an interpretation. This is not the kind of analogized retelling that he offers in Absalom and Achitophel but a thoughtful revision showing how a scholar can interpret Virgil’s text to support his own cause. Both Virgil and

Absalom and Achitophel show Dryden as a translator and experimenter following the ‘middle way’ that he first espoused in his preface to Ovid’s Epistles – that of “Translation with Latitude”

(I.114).

These examples show that Dryden’s claims that translators must closely follow the sense of their authors must be read in line with his own practices and his repeated admissions in the prefaces to his translations that he has altered his original. This fact, placed in the endpoint of many of his prefaces as the final word in his argument and the piece intended to stay with the reader as they read, is not an admission of failure but an advertisement. He invites his readers to comb through his translation looking for the places where he has added or omitted. By discussing a few pieces of the text where he has made minor changes, Dryden encourages knowledgeable

148 Zwicker, Politics and Language, 196. 149 Virgil, Virgil, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (New York: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1942), 20, 21.

readers to search carefully and to be aware of the larger alterations he makes. This highlights the potential of these changes to alter the meaning of his original, encouraging readers to look for hidden meanings. In order to truly understand his prefaces, readers must already have a familiarity with other texts, especially the originals Dryden is translating but also other translations and interpretations. Such knowledge is not necessary, however, in order to read, understand, and enjoy his texts, thus allowing his works to substitute for, or even to replace, the originals for many readers. Choosing his authors for their personal relationship to him as well as for their sympathies, whether real or invented, with his own ideas, Dryden offers finished works that are translations, not imitations, but he also selects and adapts, offering translations that he clearly feels belong to himself, at least as a co-author.

Dryden’s culture encouraged translators to adapt the language and ideas of their source to fit contemporary styles and mores. Jacques de Tourreil, a translator of classical philosophy, succinctly explains this practice in the preface to his 1702 Several Orations of Demosthenes, declaring that a translation should render “the thoughts” of an author in “a foreign Language” so that they “seem born [into] that into which he has Translated them.”150 Later in the century,

Gilbert West declares in his 1749 translation of Pindar that he has attempted to render his original “intelligible, or at least palatable to the generality of readers,” maintaining many of the ideas of his source but acknowledging that he has made extensive changes in order to suit his readership.151 Near the end of the century, George Campbell’s Four Gospels promise to convey

“the author’s spirit and manner . . . the very character of his style;” and to make “the author

‘speak’ like a compatriot.”152

150 Jacques de Tourreil, preface to Several Orations of Demosthenes (London, 1702), 161. 151 Gilbert West, Odes of Pindar (London, 1749), 67. 152 George Campbell, The Four Gospels (London, 1789), I.445-6; Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture, 220.

Like these authors, Dryden claimed for himself a privileged position as part of a doubled community which consisted of both his English contemporaries and his classical sources.

Following the advice in Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse, which he praised in several poems and prefaces, Dryden chooses “a Poet . . . [and] an Author as you chuse a Friend,” becoming “United” to the authors he translates “by this Sympathetick Bond,” and growing

“Familiar, Intimate, and Fond.”153 Claiming this intimacy for himself, Dryden asserts a special knowledge of these poets. Speaking of Ovid’s adaptation of Virgil, Dryden says “I think I may be judge of this, because I have translated both” (V.300). This interpretation of method not only justifies his own changes and declarations, it also signals to other writers how they ought to interact with a text if they also want to act as critics.

Positioning himself in community with his originals in this way simultaneously grants him a measure of license as a translator and confines him to a closer reading than is open to writers working with a less celebrated original. In a typical piece of exposition in the preface to

Sylvae, Dryden claims that he has

sometimes very boldly made such expositions of my Authors, as no Dutch

Commentator will forgive me. Perhaps, in such particular passages, I have thought

that I discover’d some beauty yet undiscover’d by those Pedants, which none but a

Poet cou’d have found. Where I have taken away . . . what was beautiful in the

Greek or Latin, wou’d not appear so shining in the English – And where I have

enlarg’d them, I desire the false Criticks wou’d not always think that those

thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the Poet, or may be

fairly deduc’d from him: or at least, if both these considerations should fail, that

153 Roscommon, Essay on Translated Verse, 7.

my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they

are such, as he wou’d probably have written. (III.4)

Dryden claims to follow the spirit of the original, to say what he would have said if his source

“were living, and an Englishman.” Going beyond purely stylistic change, Dryden makes bold to inform the reader what his original meant, and even what he would have meant if he had

Dryden’s knowledge and experience, taking the position of fellow poet and interpreter. Of course, this was not an unusual thing either in translations or everyday writing. Reading

Boswell’s Life of Johnson, to give but one instance, shows many places where Boswell insists on the right to interpret Johnson’s meaning.154 This right to interpret becomes even more fraught when dealing with translations, and translators offer many, often self-contradictory, depictions of their relations to their texts.

Dryden does not take a subordinate stance toward his contemporaries here. “The scorn he affects for Dutch scholars,” as Swedenburg declares, “reflects the increasingly clear line being drawn between the grammarian and the critic, the professional scholar and the man of taste,” but it also shows the distinction between a translator and a mere writer (I.115). Dryden’s disdain for these professional scholars is supported by Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse, which creates a clear distinction between the educated reader and the academic. Roscommon connects critics to “Pedantick Schools” of thought, calling them “Copies” which “Arrain th’ Originals” they discuss.155 Dryden, like Roscommon, decries the critics who can only carp, not write, and uses that criticism to elevate the poet above both critic and gentleman-scholar, as he claims that only a poet could have found the beauties that he has. This elevation of the poet above the “false

154 Murray Pittock, “Boswell and the Making of Johnson,” in The Interpretation of Samuel Johnson, ed. Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 72-84; Adam Sisman, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000). 155 Roscommon, Essay on Translated Verse, 5.

Criticks” leads naturally to Dryden’s claim that, as a poet himself, he can read more deeply and see things that are “secretly” in his original. This was a common justification for alterations, but it also opens the door to a claim of even closer kinship, and thus of a higher authorial position for himself and poets who follow his lead.

By asserting, as Dryden does, that “my own is of a piece with” Virgil’s, “and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they are such, as he wou’d probably have written,” Dryden sets himself up as, if not the new Virgil, at least so close to Virgil that he can speak for the great author. He insists that he has nowhere “offered such violence to his sense, as to make it seem mine,” but where their senses may differ, he insists, “mine are fuller then his” (III.4). Dryden’s thoughts are not always Virgil’s, and he invites and expects his readers to find the places where they are not, but where they are not, they are the thoughts which Virgil would have had, his preface claims, if Virgil had thought more and thought more deeply about his text.

Dryden makes similar claims about his other translations. In his preface to Ovid’s

Epistles, Dryden begins to display his tendency toward adaptation in his description of three styles of translation. He dismisses the first, the most accurate, style scornfully, cautioning his fellow translators that “Too faithfully is indeed pedantically: ‘tis a faith like that which proceeds from Superstition, blind and zealous” (V.300). Authors, he claims, are to be admired, but they are not to be left to themselves, and not only because Latin and English are such different languages. Although Dryden claims that his primary consideration is the brevity of the Latin language, and that it is impossible to translate from English to Latin while maintaining a similarity of rhythm and line, especially when the translator is also required to make his lines rhyme, he later makes just such an attempt in his Miscellany Poems, producing a rendition of

Ovid’s nineteenth elegy that has exactly the same number of lines as his Latin original. While the

liberties he took in this poem support his complaint about the difficulties of translation, his success in recreating a poem with the same number of lines as his original shows that his dismissal is not merely a result of linguistic differences and difficulty, but a defense of the underlying right of the translator to alter his source.

Dryden’s translation of Ovid’s nineteenth elegy in the Miscellany Poems is, as his editor notes, both one of his loosest translations which, by the standards Dryden lays out in the preface to Ovid’s Epistles, is closer to imitation than translation, and one of his most careful. Dryden presents his readers with “an almost studied avoidance of verbal resemblance,” as he transforms

Ovid’s narrative into the story of a jaded Englishman and his mistress, complete with references to the “Orange-wench” who carries letters from wife to lover (II.159). Despite the alterations which adapt Ovid’s work to fit a contemporary story, Dryden nevertheless offers his readers “a totally responsible English substitution. The length to which Dryden went in such careful negligence is apparent in the unparalleled economy of the translation, where he renders Ovid’s sixty Latin lines in a like number of English lines” (III.374-5).

The success with which Dryden follows the “numbers” of his author in this translation shows that his scorn for the numerical accuracy of metaphrase is not absolute. This piece is part of a series of experiments in translation that Dryden carried out during this early period, before the exigencies of the Glorious Revolution encouraged him to use his translations to earn his living. In the nineteenth elegy, Dryden experiments with the tension between different types of translation, following a physical structure close to the metaphrase that he seems to find so awkward in his preface but a linguistic structure closer to the loosest type, imitation.

As his Ovidian translation shows, it is not scansion that Dryden objects to in his criticism of metaphrase, but the subordination of translator to author in what he calls “servile, literal

Translation,” making a bid for the powerful nature of his own, freer verse (I.117). While the translator must remember his duty to his author, Dryden claims, he also has a duty to himself and to his own language. Denham, who Dryden quotes, claims that “a new Spirit” must be added to translated poetry or else the translation is dead. Dryden picks up on this idea, claiming that the translator is just as important as the thing translated. “No man,” he declares in blatant self- flattery, “is capable of translating Poetry” who is not “a Genius to that art,” able to move beyond mere repetition to create something new (I.116-8). This movement from repetition to creation, a hallmark of modernist poetry as well as eighteenth-century translation, shows the reciprocal relationship that Dryden’s translation created.

At the same time Dryden claims, in this preface, to be very much against the loose translations of formal imitation. Although “Imitation of an Author is the most advantageous way for a Translator to shew himself,” Dryden claims, it is also “the greatest wrong which can be done to the Memory and Reputation of the dead” (I.117). This is a strange claim, and one that sounds even stranger given Dryden’s inclusion in this collection of a translation by Aphra Behn that, as he himself claims only a few pages later, is done without any understanding of the original language and following “Mr. Cowleys way of Imitation” (I.119). Indeed, despite this claim that Imitation wrongs the reputation of the dead, Dryden has little else to say against it either here or elsewhere. He allows that this type of translation is useful when translating “wild and ungovernable” poets like Pindar, if not for more regular authors who fit more neatly into contemporary verse (I.117).

Dryden’s criticism of imitation allows him to take his habitual position, that of the

“mean” betwixt “two Extreams, which ought to be avoided” (I.118). Setting himself against strict translation and against imitation allows him to champion his chosen method: “that of Paraphrase,

or Translation with Latitude.” Using this method, although “the Authour is kept in view by the

Translator,” neither his words nor his sense are to be strictly followed. The line between translation and imitation becomes blurred because both involve the translator and original authors as co-creators. The difference between the two is simply that an Imitation goes farther until “tis no longer to be called” the work of the original, but is “almost the creation of another hand” (I.114-7). Importantly, even when speaking of imitation, which he has rejected for being too unlike its original, Dryden calls it “almost” another hand and not actually another hand.

Moreover, he immediately goes on to claim that the imitation may be “more Excellent” than the original work that it copies (I.117). This is not the language of a man who hates the idea of imitation or who feels that the classical authors he translates are more important than the works of his own time.

This struggle, or rather this balancing act which Dryden undertakes, is evident throughout his career. In his dedication to an early play, The Indian Emperor, which was performed in 1665 and whose second, 1667 edition appeared with a defence of his Essay on Dramatic Poetry,

Dryden makes a claim for “the liberty of a Poet, to add, alter, or diminish” (IX.25) that is strikingly similar to his declaration in the preface to Ovid’s Epistles that his author’s “words are not so strictly followed as his sense, and that too is admitted to be amplyfied” (I.114), and even more similar to his claim that “I have both added and omitted” in the preface to Sylvae (III.3). In

The Indian Emperor, Dryden makes this claim for the triumph of the poet over the historian rather than the translator over his author, but the underlying assertion, that the contemporary poet is and ought to be the focus of attention and that “the beautifying of” his work is more important than staying true to facts, history, and sources, is the same (IX.25).

In practice, Dryden was a much more careful translator than these words might suggest, but he consistently claims pride of place for the translator. A good translator must “distinguish that which is pure in a good Author, from that which is vicious and corrupt in him,” allowing the translator the right of judgement not only over critics and commentators but over his author

(III.5). Dryden claims, in several places, that he has a duty to his original and is “bound when I translate an Author, to do him all the right I can,” but he also asserts himself as a poet (III.12).

While modern writers and scholars view derivation as less important than original works, Dryden asserts his poetic force in his adaptations and translations as much as in his original work. Even scholars like MacFarlane, whose Original Copy complicates the shift from imitation to creation in the Romantic period, do not see translation as an authorial undertaking. Scholars, however, are increasingly questioning the status of original as opposed to derived works in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Anne Sechin, writing on Diderot’s views of originality, shows that he

“depicts a quite clear transition between the seventeenth century, where an ‘original’ is to be understood as a model to be imitated, and the eighteenth century, where an original is a

‘prospector of new forms,’” thus shifting original from acted upon to actor, making originality an almost verbal form rather than a purely descriptive adjective.156

Dryden’s writings, contrarily, show him taking just as much pride in his translations as his original works. Although Dearing claims that “Dryden of course rates originality above translation,” the lines which he interprets this way, on the Earl of Roscommon’s Essay on

Translated Verse seem to have another meaning (II.382). When Dryden writes,

To what perfection will our Tongue arrive,

156 Anne Sechin, “On Plagiarism, Originality, Textual Ownership, and Textual Responsibility: The Case of Jacques le fataliste,” in Originality and Intellectual Property, 103.

How will Invention and Translation thrive

When Authors nobly born will bear their part,

And not disdain th’ inglorious praise of Art! (III.173) he is not denigrating translation but mourning the lack of fame which it offers. Instead of uplifting the translator, he suggests in the next lines, translation “augment[s]” the “Fame” of the original writer, because the translator improves their lines. Classical authors are the source of “all that is pardonable in us,” Dryden says with false modesty, but in a bad translation, an author is no more than a “Carcass” (III.5). Good translation is the living body of the poet, and the poets who are also translators may stand “On equal terms” with classical authors, “Nor mighty Homer fear, nor sacred Virgil’s page” (III.174).

Virgil is one of the greatest of the classical poets and the most-respected by Dryden’s contemporaries. We can see evidence of Dryden’s own deference to this poet in Under Mr.

Milton’s Picture, which Dryden wrote for Tonson as an introduction to his edition of Paradise

Lost. In this short poem, Dryden reflects on the history of poetry.

Three poets in three distant ages born,

Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.

The first in loftiness of thought surpass’d;

The next, in majesty; in both, the last.

The force of nature could no further go;

To make a third, she join’d the former two. (III.208)

Dryden’s focus in this poem emphasizes the importance of the classical authors to contemporary perceptions of literature, and also shows just how elevated was the position of these two poets. Dryden does not need to give names in order for his readers to know that the

Greek and Italian poets are Homer and Virgil. These simply are, in the minds of Dryden and his contemporaries, the greatest poets of all time. And it is with these that Dryden aligns himself, claiming to equal and in fact to surpass them, encouraging Virgil to “speak such English as I

[can] teach him,” placing himself as the mentor and Virgil as a struggling student of English

(VI.808).

Dryden’s deliberate positioning within a literary family ultimately makes him both collaborator and rival to his originals – including Virgil, one of the most celebrated authors of his time. By focusing his attention on educated readers and asking these readers to look from the original to his translation and back, he is inviting comparison in a way that, despite his self- deprecating demurral, calls both readers and potential writers to see his translation as not just a companion to but an improvement on the original work. In so doing, Dryden makes a claim for the works of modern authors – that their deference to the ancients is a deference to teachers who they are capable not only of admiring but of joining and perhaps surpassing.

Creating the Ideal Reader

Dryden’s translations were read by a wide audience, but his prefaces worked to create an ideal reader, one educated in the classics and aware of and interested in questions of translation.

Within this group of educated readers, translation allowed Dryden and poets like him a unique method of dialogue. Dryden emphasizes his relationship to both his readers and his sources, highlighting the erudition of his readers in order to situate himself within this elite group and to display his ability to make judgements about and improve his original. But his addresses to the reader, which focus on translation theory and refer to other contemporary translations as

exemplars, are also an important part of his work to create a new generation of translators in his image.

Restoration and eighteenth-century reading audiences, although in practice confused and heterogeneous, can be divided for convenience into two groups. The upper class of men, and a select group of women, who had benefited from private tutors and often university education make up the majority of the educated or as they were sometimes called the literate readers who could read Latin, and often Greek, as well as English and several other modern languages.

Unlike earlier periods, in which the majority of the reading public fell into this group, by the eighteenth century an estimated 60% of men and 40% of women in Britain were literate, creating a large class disparity within the reading public in place of previous class disparities between the reading and the illiterate publics. This increasing rate of literacy is linked to an increasing availability of books and other printed material and it resulted in a much larger and broader reading public and a wider range of options for would-be readers.157 This was a period when university dissertations were universally written in Latin and in which, for the first part of the seventeenth century, many English translators worked with Latin originals written by

Englishmen. Latin was the universal language of the educated classes, nearly all of whom were familiar with the classic texts. In contrast, the uneducated readers of the middling and lower classes as well as many upper-class women could read in English and perhaps other modern languages, but could neither read nor understand Latin or Greek and would be totally unfamiliar with classical originals.

157 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2013), 141-164.

For some readers, then, the translated versions of Latin works acted as a substitute for the

Latin, offering them access to a form of education they were otherwise denied. Although Dryden is most interested in educated readers that he can groom to follow his example, he was a professional writer who did not want to lose any audience, and he acknowledges his unlettered audience in his careful address to female readers. The women who read Dryden’s translations would have found it difficult to gain access to original classical texts because of the link between classical scholarship and masculinity. Fielding is one of the most prominent examples of an author who links masculinity and classical learning. He mocks female learning in Amelia and uneducated lower-class readers in The Author’s Farce, Tom Jones, and Joseph Andrews, demonstrating both class and gender biases linked to knowledge of classical history and texts.158

Although Fielding sneers at readers who learn the classics through English translations, other writers, especially women, praise Dryden for allowing them a new familiarity with ancient poets.

Lady Mary Chudleigh focuses on just this, saying that Dryden “from our Confinement free[d]” women by Englishing the greatest of the classical poets (VI.1189) and her advice to women to read translations as well as important contemporary literature is repeated throughout her works.159

More praise for Dryden’s translations as a source of education comes from Elizabeth

Thomas, Elizabeth Rowe, and Judith Drake.160 Although this was not the form of education that

Dryden was most interested in, Dryden recognized and responded to his female readership in the

158 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, ed. Martin Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 421; Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: Dent, 1986), I.289, II.166-8, 185-6, 306-7. 159 Mary Chudleigh, The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh, ed. Margaret J.M. Ezell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 88-111, 255-61, 295-9. 160 Elizabeth Thomas, Miscellany Poems on Several Subjects (London, 1722), 18-25; Elizabeth Rowe, “To the Reader,” Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1696); Judith Drake, An Essay in Defense of the Female Sex (London, 1696), 41-2.

preface to his Virgil, where he spends several pages discussing how women perceive Aneis’ flight from Dido, and in Ovid’s Epistles, where he assures them that he has done his best to ensure their modesty despite Ovid’s “amorous expressions” (I.14). The majority of Dryden’s prefaces, however, are focused toward a different type of education.

Instead of offering an introduction to his author’s life for the general reader, Dryden uses his prefaces to discuss translation. He lays out his theories of translation as these change over time and discusses wider issues of inheritance, influence, and transformation.161 His discussion of Virgil in the preface to the Works of Virgil, which is clearly political in focus, demonstrates that he is aware of the need for explanatory introductions and perfectly capable of writing them when he wants to. The fact that Dryden’s other introductions to translations focus on translation theory in a scholarly way that many of his readers found difficult to follow is not an accident but a deliberate choice. Indeed, it was not only true of his uneducated readers who found his theories difficult to follow. One contemporary response by Mathew Stevenson, objected to Dryden’s attempts “to Extenuate [his] faults by an Elaborate Epistle or an insinuating Preface,” a tendency that he complains is far too common among the prolix “Modern Sages.”162 Jonathan Swift wrote that the preface and dedication to Dryden’s works are as hard to read as “so much Latin,” suggesting that only those who are capable of reading the work in its original are able to find value in Dryden’s preface.163 While neither response is positive, both reactions connect Dryden

161 David Hopkins, “Translation, Metempsychosis, and the Flux of Nature: ‘Of the Pythagorean Philosophy,’” in Dryden and the World of Neoclassicism, ed. Wolfgang Görstschacher and Holger Klein (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2001), 145-147. 162 Matthew Stevenson, The Wits Paraphras’d, or, Paraphrase Upon Paraphrase in a Burlesque on the Several Late Translations of Ovid’s Epistles (London, 1680), A6. 163 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelth and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 69.

to a tradition of scholarship and suggest that readers recognized both the difficulty and the educational value of these prefaces.

Dryden creates this scholarly atmosphere by joining current conversations about translation, and in so doing he creates signposts for readers unfamiliar with the field. He responds to well-known translations, and explains his theories about the three types of translation by reference to translations by important contemporary figures, including Ben Jonson, Edmund

Waller, and Abraham Cowley (1.114). Throughout his text, Dryden assumes that his audience is either familiar enough with these translations and with their originals to follow him in his comparisons or eager enough to learn that they will follow his references and read these texts.

His reference, immediately in the Preface to Sylvae, to the “Rules” of Roscommon’s Essay on

Translated Verse also insists that his readers either be familiar with the essay or read it for themselves. Dryden refuses to tell his readers what these rules are. If they have not read the essay, he implies, and are not already familiar enough with the rules to judge whether Dryden has, as he mockingly flatters himself that he has, “made Examples to his Rules,” then they are not qualified to understand his translations, although they may read and enjoy them (1.115).

Refusing to make concessions for an audience that may not know the translations he discusses or be able to compare them to the originals, Dryden does not offer examples from these translations to explain why he uses them as examples, as Tytler does in his “Essay on the

Principles of Translation.” Instead, he uses these casual references to well-known classical works and translations to situate himself for an educated audience and as someone who both is himself and expects his readers to be conversant about these figures and their works. In this way, although Dryden does not offer a beginner’s guide to translation, he creates a trail that educated and interested readers can follow to educate themselves further.

Dryden’s preface to Sylvae demonstrates his method of setting himself up as a part of an elite group, part of which is already in existence, and part of which he hopes to create in his successors. This group not only reads the classics for pleasure, but also remains up to date on contemporary productions. He begins his depiction of himself by claiming to have been

“troubled with the disease” of translation and to have found “a kind of ease” in the throes of this disease (III.3). This, as his later reference suggests, may also be a reference to the Earl of

Roscommon, part of the larger group of writers he worked to encourage, who claimed that “No

Poet any Passion can excite; / But what they feel transport them as they write.”164 Transported by the throes of passionate translation, Dryden finds an ease in the light, scurrilous work of Ovid that is made more acceptable by the passion that creates a kinship between himself and his author.

Demonstrating this ease, both in his prefaces and in his translations themselves, which are filled with Latinisms and references to other authors, Dryden’s choice of language within his translations helps to create points of reference to other works. When he discusses the “sylvan scene” in which Aeneis shelters from Juno’s storm, he refers not only directly to the Latin itself

(tum silvis scaena coruscis) but also to Milton’s punning use of the same phrase to describe

Satan’s first view of Eden in his Paradise Lost and to Lauderdale’s earlier translation of the passage.165 This is an excellent example of how Dryden uses earlier translations, and especially

Lauderdale, who he greatly admired.

Betwixt two rows of Rocks a Sylvan Scene

Appears above, and Groves forever green;

164 Roscommon, Essay on Translated Verse, 18. 165 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 81.

A Grott is form’d beneath, with Mossy Seats,

To rest the Nereids, and exclude the Heats.

Down through the Crannies of the living Walls

The Crystal Streams descend in murm’ring Falls. (V.349-50)

This translation of Dryden’s clearly draws from Lauderdale’s translation:

And Sylvan scenes the shaded Bay inclose.

A natural Grot a marble Seat surrounds

And fronts the Entry: Here the murm’ring sounds

Of Water purling from a living Spring,

To this retreat the Nymphs and Nereids . . .166

Dryden’s indebtedness to this earlier passage is evident. He has adopted Lauderdale’s “Sylvan scenes” with their resonances from the Latin and their Miltonic echo, but he also adapts and rephrases Lauderdale’s translation. Lauderdale both insists on the grove’s naturalness and seems to flaunt its unnatural connections. Where Lauderdale’s Nereids have apparently created a

“marble seat” to sit on as they watch the entry of their “natural” grotto, Dryden offers an image much closer to Milton’s Eden, where nature itself, without the interfering hand of man, offers man all the comforts of a created home. Milton’s “sylvan scene” is a hostile one, a “thicket overgrown” forming a wall that attempts, and fails, to keep out Satan. 167 Virgil’s, in its larger context, is a respite between one form of Juno’s anger and another, subtler form of temptation in

Carthage. These connections add depth to Dryden’s translation, allowing him to display his learning as well as to delicately foreshadow the hardships which Aeneis will face.

166 Richard Lauderdale, The Works of Virgil, Translated into English Verse (London, 1709), 83. 167 Milton, Paradise Lost, 81.

This interest in making multiple connections between his work and that of other writers is typical of Dryden’s translations and his prefaces, shown in Bottkol’s reconstruction of his working method.

He sat with a favorite edition open before him . . . read the original carefully, often

the Latin prose Interpretario, and invariably studied the accompanying annotations

. . . he repeatedly turned to other editors, studied and compared their varying

opinions . . . Also he had open before him on the table one or more earlier English

translations, particularly those which were written in heroic couplets. From these

he often took rhymes, stray phrases, or even whole lines and passages.168

Robin Sowerby’s “Dryden and Homer” proves that Dryden used at least eight different English translations in addition to English and Latin commentaries on the Greek when he wrote his

Homeric translations.169 Working within this long tradition of translators, Dryden references both his predecessors and his original text in his introductions, to alert readers to his intentions, and then within the text itself, shows off his own invention and his connection to his original. Even in his loose translations from Lucretius, Dryden constructs his lines to echo the Latin with which his educated, interested reader is familiar. One passage especially redolent of its Latin roots is

First guilty Conscience does the mirrour bring,

Then sharp remorse shoots out her angry sting,

And anxious thoughts within themselves at strife,

Upbraid the long mispent, luxurious life. (III.60)

168 J. Bottkol, “Dryden’s Latin Scholarship,” Modern Philology 40 (1943): 243. 169 Robin Sowerby, “Dryden and Homer,” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1975), 235-8; Gordon Braden, “Translating Procedures in Theory and Practice,” in Oxford History of Literary Translation, II.98.

Even to readers unable to understand the Latin, the original of the same passage is clearly related to Dryden’s by sound:

Aut quod conscius ipse animus se forte remordet,

Desidiose agere aetatem, lustrisque perire.

Dryden expands this passage, but his “Conscience,” and “remorse” use the innate Latinism of the

English language, and luxurious, while not a direct translation of Lucretius’ “lustrisque” retains something of both the meaning and the sound of the original. “Luxurious” not only has the same initial letter, but the same number of syllables and sibilant internal vowel as its Latin source. This type of phrasing, which references the original in ways that would be clearly understood only by those educated readers familiar with the Latin, helps to continue the pose that Dryden begins in his prefaces – that of a writer who resists reading by unlearned readers and who aligns himself instead with an educated elite. Furthermore, insisting that he is not taking up his authors anew, but “resuming [an] old acquaintance” with them raises Dryden clearly out of the purview of the

Grub Street writer and offers a shortcut to establishing his credentials as a scholar and as a poet

(III.3).

The liberties that Dryden takes are emblematic of the exploration and experimentation he undertook in the 1680s. As Swedenburg declares, “whatever else translation was to him, it was also a proving ground, an opportunity to explore the prosodic limits possible in his day”

(III.281), and the publicity of that proving ground made it an encouragement to younger authors to follow in his footsteps. Dryden’s The paradoxical emphasis on his faithfulness, his alterations, and his experimentation is echoed by the many styles of translation which Dryden’s publishes in his miscellany volumes, creating exemplars of many different styles for future writers to imitate.

A Poetic Father

Dryden’s multiple hands edition of Ovid’s Epistles is the first of a series of carefully structured translations that offered other writers a means to become part of his poetical family.

Just as Dryden portrays himself as a son to the classical writers and the great English authors, he envisioned becoming the father of future English poets. Although he did not publish another collaborative edition of a single work, Dryden’s next translations were also published as part of a collaborative edition. This edition included many of his translations that did not fit into larger projects: an Ovidian elegy, an Idyllium from Theocritus, and two of Virgil’s Eclogues, later revised as part of his Virgil. These translations appeared, with a large selection of Dryden’s prologues, epilogues, and miscellaneous poems, as Miscellany Poems: Containing a New

Translation of Virgills Eclogues, Ovid’s Love Elegies, Odes of Horace, and Other Authors; with several Original Poems by the most Eminent Hands, a title that emphasizes the translations it contains and its collaborative nature (IV.435). This volume, which included not only these pieces by Dryden but works by other authors and translators may have seemed less important than the

Epistles when Dryden first agreed to publish as part of it. There is no introduction to the work, only a table of contents which orders the miscellaneous translations by their originals, and lists the names of the authors next to their poems. Although Dryden’s name is attached to the pieces he contributed, and he is the primary contributor to the volume, the title does not mention his name, attributing the work only to “the most Eminent Hands.”170

170 John Dryden, Miscellany Poems (London, 1684).

A year later, when Sylvae was published, Dryden was considerably more invested.

Sylvae, despite its collaborative nature, is very much Dryden’s production. As Walker shows in his examination of the relationship between Dryden and his publisher, for this volume, “Dryden made suggestions for work to be published, solicited contributors, wrote prefaces, translated - in short, ‘edited’,” this volume, insisting that “I am resolvd we will have nothing but good” writers.171 Not only is this one of the earliest examples of modern editing, although neither

Tonson nor Dryden used this term, it is also a clear indication of the importance which Dryden now attached to the project.

At the same time, Dryden admits that the project is larger than he is. “I hope,” he ends the preface to Sylvae, “it will not be expected from me, that I shou’d say any thing of my fellow undertakers in this Miscellany” (V.325). While he had been happy to defend the two imitations in the Epistles by way of concluding his theoretical discussion and ameliorating the admission that he himself has “transgress’d the Rules which I have given,” his relationship to the pieces in

Sylvae is much more complex (I.118). He is too close, and was too involved with many of the authors to praise them “without suspicion of partiality” (V.325). This illustrates how involved

Dryden was in the project, to the point that Tonson published the second edition of the

Miscellanies as a set which claimed to be “Published by Mr. Dryden.”172 Dryden’s claim immediately following this, that he has “not perus’d” some of these translations, allows him to take a step back, claiming only limited editorial intervention. It also shows the number of poets

171 Keith Walker, “Jacob Tonson, Bookseller,” The American Scholar 61 (1992): 426; John Dryden, “Letter to Tonson, August/September 1684,” in The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons, ed Stephen Bernard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 88. 172 Hugh MacDonald, John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions of Drydenia (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1966), 70.

he was able to find who were doing similar work, as there are so many that he is not acquainted with all of them despite his close involvement in the English literary world.

Dryden’s miscellany set a trend which he continued and encouraged others to follow.

“Ovid’s Epistles, advertised on 6 February 1680, contains the first of Dryden’s translations to appear in print,” and from this point until the end of his life and career “the great bulk of his nondramatic poetry was to consist in translation” in both poetry and prose (I.323). Dryden used his Miscellanies to test his audience, experimenting with different forms and levels of latitude and waiting for a reaction. The frame of a miscellany volume allowed him to try new methods and support the work of new authors without committing himself to a large project like his Virgil or risking his reputation by advertising an experiment.

After the success of his Miscellanies, Dryden began other translation projects to showcase further experimentation. His translations from Juvenal and Persius, which he described as “a kind of Paraphrase; or somewhat which is yet more loose, betwixt a Paraphrase and

Imitation” (IV.87), show him working through different styles of translation, moving between near-faithful line for line renditions and broad paraphrase in a continuation of his experimentation with the types of translation.173 Dryden’s rendition of The Art of Painting, and especially the preface comparing painting to poetry, shows his attempt to conceptualize a theory of translation that would explain his practice and aid other writers.

Dryden participated in a multiple hands translation of Tacitus in 1698 as well as writing an introduction and preface to a new multiple hands translation of Lucian. Appearing to think of the authors of the Lucian as “an association of scholars and gentlemen of quality,” Dryden’s participation both encouraged these particular writers and suggested that he might be willing to

173 David Hopkins, “Dryden and the Tenth Satire of Juvenal,” Translation and Literature 4.1 (1995): 34.

support future translation projects.174 He knew several of the translators, and his very public participation in the project, not only writing a “Life of Lucian” as a preface but allowing his name to be included on the title-page, demonstrates his support and the ways that he positioned himself as a literary “father’ to other authors. The Tonson edition of Tacitus also brings together a group of translators who are introduced by Dryden in the same way as the Epistles. While not part of his Miscellanies series, these works clearly participate in Dryden’s project of assisting and supporting good translation and the poets who write it.

Most of Dryden’s translations from the 1680s to the end of his life show his preoccupation with theories of language and translation, and his work to promote these theories and encourage his successors, a work which I explore more thoroughly in my recent article.175

His Miscellanies were at the centre of this work, the most clearly outward-reaching of his publications in their inclusion of works by other writers and Dryden’s use of them to support and promote translation. The centrality of the Miscellanies and their extension of his genealogical line is demonstrated by Dryden’s willingness to use better-selling books to support the series.

Even in his Virgil, published as a stand-alone piece, Dryden continually references his

Miscellanies in the notes, discussing translations of various pieces by others which were published in the Miscellanies and referring his reader there to read Rochester’s notes in lieu of providing his own full set (IV.813-4). Aware of the cultural and political value his Virgil had taken on even before its publication, Dryden takes steps to ensure that its readers – those interested and educated enough to read and benefit from its notes – return to his fullest expressions of translation theory in his Miscellanies.

174 Hardin Craig, “Dryden’s Lucian,” Modern Philology 16.2 (1921): 153 175 Fleming, “Improvised Patronage,” 95-111.

Dryden’s work in his Virgil examines several strains of his work on translation theory that are visible in the Miscellanies. As Dryden says in his dedication to the Aeneis, he “Trade[s] both with the Living and the Dead, for the enrichment of our Native Language” (VI.336). This trade is what inspires his interest in importing useful Latinate words into the English language.

One place especially where Dryden acknowledges criticism is in his coinage of the word

“falsify’d,” an innovation he uses to replace Virgil’s “falsar,” and which he supports both as a part of his larger project relating to the English language and as an imaginative connection to the original Latin (VI.824-5).

Much more interesting than the mere appearance of the term is his lengthy discussion of the reasoning behind the Latinized word. Although Dryden ends his note by claiming that the point is “not worth dispute,” he spends several paragraphs, spread over multiple pages, explaining his reasoning and defending – importantly – not his particular practice here but his wider ability to create or to adopt words which he had already pointed out in the dedication to the

Æneis, defending himself against the claim that “I latinize too much” by declaring that he only does so when he cannot find an English word that is “significant and sounding” (V.335). In the notes, by contrast, Dryden focuses on the need to improve the English language rather than on defending his own practice. He claims that the Italian from which he took this new word is “a polish’d Language” in implicit contrast to his “Native Tongue” which still needs to be refined.

This note briefly identifies the source for the new word, skims over his reasoning for its invention, and ends by claiming that he might as easily and as well have used an already existing word, pierced, guiding reader attention to his overarching linguistic project and emphasizing his creativity and his connection to the original (VI.828-9).

Dryden does not include this type of discussion in Ovid’s Epistles or in his four

Miscellany volumes, preferring to write in such a way that he was understandable with the minimum number of notes. As he says in the Virgilian note, “The words . . . .make my meaning plain” (VI.829), and for the most part this is the rule by which he writes. Many of his subtlest allusions require an intimate knowledge of the original – or that consumers read with another copy of the work at hand – but these, while they enhance his translations, are not required to understand them. What Dryden makes overt in this footnote in the Virgil appears more quietly in his other translations: his desire to import especially beautiful or useful words from the Latin as part of his project to improve the English language. Dryden uses Latinisms in this way throughout his career, but not until the Virgil, with its reputation and market already established by the time he writes his notes, does he make his work so explicit.

Given Virgil’s centrality to Dryden’s theories of translation, Dryden’s connections between this text and his Miscellanies are important to understanding the ways in which Dryden attempted to groom his successors. The Miscellanies provided a medium for publishing and sharing translations from the classics and encouraged the careers of younger poets. The young poets that were featured in the Miscellanies used their association with Dryden and the readership his sponsorship gained for their translations to further their own careers, as Dryden hoped they would. Addison’s career offers one example of how the Dryden-Tonson pair could help aspiring poets by including them in their translation ventures. Dryden’s position as sponsor is even more apparent in his relation to Congreve, but his association with Addison is more

typical and less complicated by the pressing questions of authorship, influence, mutual debts, and succession that haunt the Congreve-Dryden relationship.176

Addison’s first and second publications, a series of Latin verses in praise of King

William, appeared in 1689 and 90 in collections sponsored by his college at Oxford. He broke into the larger field of publication in Examen Poeticum, with a short poem in praise of Dryden.

The following year, apparently impressed by his poetry, Dryden included a long translation from the Georgics and several short poems by Addison in the 1694 Annual Miscellany. Although two translation projects suggested to Addison by Tonson failed to come to fruition, Dryden introduced the young poet to Congreve, who in turn led Addison to his patron, Montagu.

Addison, then contributed an anonymous essay on the Georgics to Dryden’s Virgil. This was both a repayment of his debt to the older poet and a shrewd career move. While the majority of the reading public may not have known the author of this essay, identified by Dryden (he claims at Addison’s request) only as a “Worthy Friend” (V.337), Addison’s patron, Montagu, and those authors and patrons in both Dryden’s and Tonson’s circles would have known the author and given him credit for his work, and Dryden cites Addison in his “Postscript to the Reader” as a translator in his own right, whose work “has put me to sufficient pains to make my own not inferior to his” (VI.810). This is high praise, and Dryden’s commendation of this young writer shows Dryden’s eagerness to support Addison in his career.

Together, Dryden and Tonson acted as sponsors to the young poet, giving him opportunities and introducing him to other poets, publishers, and patrons. Without detracting from their own interests, the pair’s Miscellany volumes and the group translations which Dryden

176 Harold Weber, “A ‘double Portion of his Father’s Art’: Congreve, Dryden, Jonson and the Drama of Theatrical Succession,” Criticism 39.3 (1997): 359-382; Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976): 381-90; Robert Markley, Two Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 200.

organized of Ovid, Juvenal, Persius, and Plutarch, also helped to support the kind of translating collaborative that Dryden hoped would take on some of the linguistic questions of his age. The

Miscellany volumes “permitted new, young poets to get into print early in their careers and in the company of their elders,” forwarding their careers as Dryden, a professional writer who was very aware of how his own reputation worked, hoped.177 He intended these to mold the language through collaboration with ancient writers, and credit him for the change, establishing a line of literary children to carry on his work.

Although Dryden “published some of his most important reflections on the English language, translation, the classical heritage, and the role of the poet” in poetic and prose prefaces to his translations and to the works of friends, including his poem on Roscommon’s “Essay on

Translated Verse,” he never collected these elsewhere, leaving them to stand in connection with his translations and the apparently minor poems and works of his friends and unofficial clients.178 This suggests that Dryden felt these works were important enough and likely to remain so for long enough that his words were safely preserved within their pages. It also, given his references to these prior works in his most acclaimed production – his Virgil – shows his desire to promote these publications. Readers who wanted to read all of Dryden’s works needed to also buy, and hopefully read, the translations, essays, and poems that he promoted in this way.

Dryden supported his own children in the same way that he did other poets. His 1693 multiple hands translation of the satires of Juvenal and Persius includes translations by both of his eldest sons, who are named in the table of contents, along with Creech and Congreve, as some of the “Several Other Eminent Hands” featured on the title page.179 His eldest son, Charles

177 David Wykes, A Preface to Dryden (London: Longman Publishing Group, 1977), 47. 178 Paul Hammond, The Making of Restoration Poetry (New York: D.S. Brewer, 2006), 147. 179 John Dryden, The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis … Together with the Satires of Aulus Persius Flaccus

Dryden, also appears in the Annual Miscellany, the fourth of Dryden’s Miscellany volumes, and

Dryden wrote a preface and several songs for his second son’s play, The Husband His Own

Cuckold.180 Although his sons died young, producing neither children nor an extensive body of work, this shows how Dryden used the same techniques to promote his physical and his literary progeny. In both cases, he used his Miscellany volumes, his multiple hands translations, and his prefaces to improve the circulation of these writers.

Dryden’s legacy among his contemporaries was shaped by his facility with language and particularly by his translations. This inheritance, taken up by the brilliant young poet Alexander

Pope, set the stage for the poetic style that was to dominate much of the following century, and provided a new venue for young poets attempting to break into the literary market. It is a testament to Dryden’s forethought that while his first piece of poetry to be published was a laudatory poem, Pope’s initial foray into the wider literary world was in one of the Tonson

Miscellanies that Dryden had popularized – and it came in the form of a translation.

(London, 1693). 180 John Dryden, The Annual Miscellany, for the Year 1694 (London, 1694); George Watson, ed. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), II.441. .

Chapter 2 Pope, His Homer, and Himself

Alexander Pope’s struggle to fashion himself as a man of genius is usually seen as evidence of his focus on originality, a quality he ironically praises in prefaces to his translated editions of Homer and his heavily edited critical edition of Shakespeare, but his stress on originality disguises a career based heavily on adaptation. Much of Pope’s time was taken up in editing both his own writing and that of others, as the many editions of the Dunciad demonstrate.

His choice to edit and adapt this poem instead of creating new poems to destroy new adversaries is one of many indications of the editorial and adaptive process he brought to both his original works and his translations. Although Pope’s talents led him toward adaptation, he wanted to be known as an original author and feared that his editorial talent would not bring him the same praise that Dryden received for his translations.

This conflict between Pope’s adaptive focus and his desire to be seen as original manifests itself in his editorial and adaptive work as an antagonistic relationship between himself and his originals. If Dryden saw translation as a way to join his classical predecessors on a poetic

Mount Parnassus, Pope saw it as a way to surpass them. Dryden claimed in the notes to his

Æneïs that his words “make my meaning plain” to readers unfamiliar with his originals, but offered readers who could compare his works to his originals a deeper, more nuanced reading experience.181 Unlike Dryden, Pope was not content to speak to the reader through prefaces.

Indeed, although his preface to the Iliad is a long and important piece, which clearly displays his jockeying attempts to position himself above Homer, he chose not to include a preface to the

181 John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, ed. Vinton A. Dearing, H. T. Swedenburg, Alan Roper, et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956-90), VI.829.

Odyssey. Instead Pope inserted long sections of “Observations” between each book of his

Homeric translations, added essays and indexes, and worked to assert his presence throughout.

Where Dryden alters his text’s meaning primarily to reflect his party politics and religious affiliation, Pope’s alterations of Homer present a specific image of himself as, in his own terms, a more moral, manly, and virtuous writer than his original. Pope uses his “Observations,” and the textual changes which the “Observations” discuss, to set himself above Homer.

The majority of Pope’s writing addresses the issue of proper behaviour in one way or another, from the insistence on politeness and civility in the Essay on Criticism and the gentle satire on flirtation and spleen in Rape of the Lock to the harsh denunciations in the Dunciad, which closes his career on a note of moral and literary censure. Pope structured his public persona as a moral exemplar – sometimes going to surprisingly immoral lengths in order to do so. Bringing a lawsuit against the publisher he himself had clandestinely encouraged to publish his letters on the grounds that they were printed without permission would hardly be an appropriate way to promote your morality, even if Pope had been successful in keeping his actions a secret.182 Similarly, Pope’s presentation of his multiple-hands translation of the

Odyssey as a single-author text, while it backfired, was an attempt to shape public perceptions of himself and his works.

Pope’s attention to his reputation is a central theme in scholarly dialogue. Dustin

Griffin’s perennially important Alexander Pope: The Poet in Poems examines the self-expressive nature of Pope’s poetry and the difference between the poet his poems describe and the known details of Pope’s life, while James McLaverty shows how Pope continually fashioned his

182 Mark Rose, “The Author in Court: Pope v. Curll (1741),” Cultural Critique 21 (1992): 203.

reputation through new and innovative publishing techniques.183 Despite the wealth of information provided by these and other examinations of Pope’s authorial persona in his life and poetry, Pope’s translations are underrepresented in discussions of his self-fashioning. While

Pope’s struggle with originality and derivation is central to Helen Deutsch’s study of authenticity and authorship, and Richard Terry’s recent work on plagiarism, and Pope’s Imitations of Horace are often considered in relation to his self-fashioning and his creation of a new relationship to classical authors, the translation of Homer, which was even more important to Pope’s contemporary reputation, has been comparatively neglected.184 This translation plays a pivotal role in his practice of self-creation. Indeed, redefining Pope as an author who saw his writing as adaptive, even within his original works, illuminates his process of polishing and editing a work for production. For Pope, editing was not only a matter of final touches to an already beautiful work, but a central part of his creative process which played an important role in his self- fashioning. An examination of Pope as a translator, editor, and imitator reveals the uncertain boundaries between writing and adapting which he struggled with throughout his life.

Judgement and Invention, Derivation and Debts

Pope begins his preface to the Iliad, “Homer is universally allowed to have had the greatest invention of any writer” (VII.3), and he continues with praise not only for Homer but for

183 Dustin H. Griffin, Alexander Pope: The Poet in Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); James McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 184 Helen Deutsch, Resemblance & Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Harvard University Press, 1996); Richard Terry, The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Howard D. Weinbrot, “Pope and the Classics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope, ed. Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 81-3.

invention. Invention was a contested idea in the eighteenth century, as Robert Macfarlane and

Paul Davis have demonstrated, showing how writers and audiences struggled to define originality, caught between a paradigm in which originality was defined by style and a new definition of originality that focused on broader themes, plots, and arrangement of ideas. These competing views, as Mark Rose, Ronan Deazley, and Joseph Loewenstein have argued, were influential in the development of copyright, authorial ownership of a text, and the notion of literary property.185 Pope appears to create his own place relative to this paradigm of originality in his stream of metaphors praising Homer’s invention. But there is a discordant note to his praise. If Homer’s work is “a wild paradise,” filled with “the seeds and first productions of every kind,” it is a paradise in which readers “cannot see all the beauties so distinctly as in an ordered garden.”186 For Pope, who as Maynard Mack shows, was an avid gardener whose passion for design informed his work, a disordered garden is an unsightly blot on the landscape.187 A garden in which “some things are too luxuriant” and others “are not arrived to perfection or maturity” is in desperate need of a gardener, as Homer’s poem, Pope suggests, is in need of an editorial translator (VII.3). In the middle of his praise for the greatest of poets, with whom Virgil can only

“contest” (VII.3), Pope promises to improve Homer.

Although, as Richard Terry shows, he was often accused of copying the work of others,

Pope was a perfectionist whose editorial advice was sought after from his early correspondence

185 Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Paul Davis, Translation and the Poet’s Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646-1726 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Mark Rose, Authors and Owners (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Ronan Deazley, Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language (Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2006); Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 186 Alexander Pope, Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, Maynard Mack, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939-67), VII.3. Cited with parenthetical volume and page references. 187 Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 22.

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with William Wycherley to his collaborations with Swift, Gay, Broome, and Fenton later in his career. Moreover, Pope’s literary judgement was widely praised, and Percival Stockdale’s formulation of Pope as someone who “takes a guinea, and returns a diamond,” borrowing ideas from other authors and “improving” them with “force and beauty,” exemplifies the contemporary response to Pope’s focus on regularity, style, and manners.188 Stockdale’s defence of Pope, which describes him as a thief, albeit one whose poetry is so beautiful that his theft ought to be pardoned, demonstrates the same conflicted response to originality that Pope describes in his preface to the Iliad. Pope makes it clear that pure invention, without perfect judgement to temper it, fails to fulfil its promise, praising Homer, whose story the other epic poets copy, but also denigrating Homer’s practice and placing him in the same category as those poets who went to

Pope for editorial advice.

Granting Homer the leadership in invention, Pope nevertheless prefers the “succeeding poets” who have translated, imitated, and adapted Homer, because of “their judgment in having contracted” (VII.6) Homer’s overly luxuriant metaphors. Now that science has expanded its field and offered these poets more knowledge of the world, he claims, it is “as reasonable in the more modern poets” to abandon such metaphorical language “as it was in Homer to make use of it”

(VII.6-7). Damning him with faint praise, Pope admits the beauty of Homer’s imagination but denies his right to exercise it, suggesting that he would have done better to keep his activities within the realm of nature as defined by science. Pope grants Homer’s imaginative superiority, but suggests that this imagination creates a story that is unbelievable and which would be improved by the poetic judgement of later authors such as Virgil, who reworked Homer’s epic in his Aeneid, and, implicitly, Pope.

188 Percival Stockdale, Lectures on the Truly Eminent British Poets (London, 1807), I.428.

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Throughout his life, Pope responded to personal and literary attacks by formulating accusations against his opponents, and he follows the same tactic here, heading off potential complaints about his lack of invention by attacking other poets. It is, he says several times in this preface, evident that Virgil “has scarce any comparisons which are not drawn from his master,”

(VII.9) and he closes the opening section of his preface, in which he spends so long praising originality, with an apology to Virgil that serves as a defence of his own practice.

I hope, in what has been said of Virgil, with regard to any of these heads, I have

no way derogated from his character. Nothing is more absurd or endless, than the

common method of comparing eminent writers by an opposition of particular

passages in them, and forming a judgment from thence of their merit upon the

whole. (VII.12)

Having taken pains to point out Virgil’s copying, Pope insists that this should not reflect badly upon the writer. Instead, he abandons his praise of invention in order to prioritize the editorial judgement that Virgil shows in his adaptation of Homer, concluding that “Homer was the greater genius, Virgil the better artist” (VII.12).

This backhanded compliment reflects Pope’s view of his own career. His career began with a translation which appeared in one of the Tonson Miscellanies which was followed by the

Essay on Criticism which not only prioritizes critical judgement, but is itself an adaptive work, famously modelled after Nicholas Boileau’s L’Art Poétique. Pope’s imitative practice continued in Windsor Forest which, as Pat Rogers shows, displays Pope’s learning by adapting and imitating Virgil, Spenser, Drayton, Camden, and Dryden among other authors.189 These poems,

189 Pat Rogers, The Symbolic Design of Windsor Forest: Iconography, Pageant, and Prophecy in Pope’s Early Work (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 113, 203.

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like much of Pope’s later work, demonstrate the beauty and variety of Pope’s adaptive process.

By prioritizing Virgil’s “attractive majesty” and “careful magnificence” over Homer’s

“commanding impetuosity” and “generous profusion,” Pope separates invention from art.

Homer’s invention, in this formulation, is not a matter of genius or even beauty, for it is Virgil who is described as beautiful and awe-inspiring. Homer is described as a patron of literature, who commands and bestows gifts, but not as a creator of art. By claiming that judgement is the truer sign of artistry, Pope speaks to his own writing, defending his adaptive and editorial practices against the contemporary focus on originality and modernity.

Modernity and originality were important concerns in contemporary debates about the nature of literature which raged through France and England, and in which Pope’s friend

Jonathan Swift bore an important part.190 Although Pope, unlike Swift, never took a direct position in the battle between the Ancients and the Moderns, his worries about invention and praise of universalism, industry, and the display of classical sources, clearly reflect Swift’s position in the debate. Both Pope’s original works and his translations display his connections to classical authors through their references and wide-ranging imitations. His concerns about originality and his imitative practices, as Brean Hammond shows, earned him a reputation as a supporter of Swift and defender of the Ancients who used modern methods to show the applicability of classical teachings to modern life.191 They also led to accusation of literary theft from authors less willing to forgive his borrowing than Stockdale, who insists that Pope’s

“generous and luxuriant thought” outweighs his “transplanted” ideas.192

190 For the French sources of the debate, see la Querelle des anciens et des moderns CVIIe-XVII siècles, ed. Anne- Marie Lecoq (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). 191 Brean Hammond, Pope Amongst the Satirists 1660-1750 (Devon: Northcote House, 2004), 69. 192 Stockdale, Truly Eminent Poets, 430.

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Pope attempted to stave off accusations of plagiarism in part by stressing the importance of judgement and refinement in his translations, but his unwillingness to share credit with others he disliked worked against him. In the footnotes to his Homeric translations, while he cited many authors, translators, and commentators, his omissions are almost as obvious as his inclusions, as is clear in his treatment of Mme Dacier. Although the French prose translation of Mme Dacier was both his primary source of competition and his principal source for notes, he rarely acknowledges his indebtedness (VII.xli). In fact, Pope makes disparaging comments about her translations and commentaries both in his notes and in his more public letters.

These letters, usually directed to gentry with the expectation that they will be shared, are often carefully-crafted pieces of art which are further edited in the authorized editions of his

Correspondence.193 Preserved, edited, and clandestinely published late in his life, the public letters are very different from the hastily-scribbled notes that survive to show how Pope spoke on less formal occasions. The simultaneously public and private nature of these letters and the many changes Pope made to his correspondence, as Winn demonstrates, are evidence of Pope’s use of editing to present himself as a “witty writer, sympathetic friend, serious thinker, sensitive observer, and (not least) educated practitioner of the epistolary form.”194 Despite their claims to privacy, his formal letters can be read as public essays which Pope uses to continue his process of self-fashioning.

In one of these formal letters, directed to the Duke of Buckingham and published in every authorized edition of the Correspondence, Pope compares himself to Mme Dacier, denigrating both her morals and her scholarship. He insists that Dacier’s femininity ought to relegate her to a

193 Alexander Pope, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, in 5 vols, ed George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), I.xv. Cited as letter date and correspondent, volume, and page reference. 194 James Winn, A Window in the Bosom: The Letters of Alexander Pope (Hamden: Archon Books, 1977), 72.

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lesser position than male writers, claiming that it is the “complaisance” of the “polite” French that “allow[s] her to be a Critic of equal rank with her husband,” whose “Sense, Penetration” and

“Taste” prove a foil for her “slighter” learning (Pope to Buckingham, 1 Sept 1718, I.492). Pope’s declaration of his own superiority is subtler, expressed in his insistence that he, unlike Dacier, recognizes the need for “more depth or learning” in her notes on Aristophanes and the Greek

Scholia. In Pope’s formulation, Dacier’s womanly fragility prevents her from displaying more than the slight amounts of knowledge that her weaker frame can support, and more, it encourages her to borrow from others. Eustathius, who Pope himself had to ask for help in understanding, “is transcribed ten times for once that he is quoted” by Mme Dacier.

Although Pope’s words could show Mme Dacier’s learning, in that she has so thoroughly partaken of the ancient commentators as to be unable to distinguish their thoughts from her own, he uses this evidence as a sign of her weakness. To refuse to disclose where you have borrowed, he suggests, is to tacitly admit your inability to contribute anything new. This sentiment is then turned on its head as Pope claims that “I have had so much of the French complaisance as to conceal her thefts; for whenever I have found her notes to be wholly anothers [sic], (which is the case in some hundreds) I have barely quoted the true Proprietor without observing on it” (Pope to

Buckingham, 1 Sept, 1718, I.496). As Maynard Mack points out in his edition of the Poems, many of Pope’s notes are directly copied from the English translation of Dacier’s work (VII.xli).

Thus Pope’s note above, which implies that his failure to cite Mme Dacier is a compliment to her, allows him to ignore his scholarly debts. Instead of pointing out Dacier’s theft, he claims, he has returned the credit to where it is due, and obviated the need to admit his dependency.

This need to pay debts appears throughout literature in the period, partaking in the increasingly blurred boundaries between legal ownership and appropriation. Tilar Mazzeo shows

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that sometimes accusations of plagiarism were made even when authors explicitly cited their sources, making it difficult for authors to avoid plagiarizing.195 Outright piracy, as Simon Stern points out, was “the only prohibited form of copying,” which meant that accusations of plagiarism rarely led to legal charges, but defences against these claims were essential to the literary culture of the enlightenment.196 One of Boswell’s unpublished poems illustrates eighteenth century discussion of debts, calling this type of writer “a jackdaw dress’d in foreign plumes” who “tells us, when he comes to print, / Tho’ all is stolen – he borrow’d but a hint.”197

Boswell criticizes writers for claiming the credit for works which belong to other authors.

Although he says nothing against derivative works – and implies that those who freely admit their borrowings may indeed profit by them – he clearly indicates the increasing sense that literary ideas belonged to their creators and that writers incurred debts when they used other writers’ ideas.

In order to maintain his reputation, Pope needed to pay his debts, and so despite his disinclination, he gave some credit to Mme Dacier. Pope claims in his letter to Broome part-way through their collaborative translation of the Odyssey, that Broome has “sometimes made as free use of Madame Dacier, as she did of Eustathius” and this is the “best excuse” for a lack of citation (Pope to Broome, 20 Jan, 1725/6, II.363). Recognizing the need to avoid accusations of intellectual theft, Pope does his best to turn the same accusations against his primary source.

Although Howard Weinbrot calls Pope’s discussion of Dacier “generous and generously acknowledged . . . demonstrably regard[ing] her as the eminent authority she deserved to be,”

195 Tilar Mazzeo, “Byron and the Scandal of Paternity: Anonymity, Plagiarism, and the Natural Rights of Authors,” in Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, ed. Reginald McGinnis (New York: Routledge, 2009), 163. 196 Simon Stern, “Copyright, Originality, and the Public Doman in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Originality and Intellectual Property, 69. 197 James Boswell, Boswell’s Book of Bad Verse, ed Jack Werner (Toronto: White Lion Publishers Ltd., 1975), 81.

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there are strong indications even at the beginning of the Iliad that his intentions toward her are not so friendly as Weinbrot suggests.198

Pope declares partway through the Odyssey that “till very lately I never imagined” that

Dacier had borrowed many of her notes from Eustathius (Pope to Broome, 20 Jan, 1725/6,

II.363), but his notes in the Iliad show him using this accusation as a programmatic campaign against Dacier long before he began the Odyssey. He includes references to Dacier in many of the notes in the Iliad, but several of these include insinuations that her commentaries are stolen.

In one such note, Pope says openly that, “Madam Dacier should have acknowledged this Remark to belong to Eustathius” (VII.314). In another place he silently implies the same by ending his note with the attribution “Eustath. Dacier” (VIII.528).

This attempt to shift his reliance on the female Mme Dacier to the older, male critic

Eustathius is emblematic of Pope’s general attitude toward debts, derivation and invention in his most famous translation. He received, and partially acknowledged, help with both his first and second translations from Homer, but in both cases he attempted to minimize his debts. After the success of the Iliad, Pope was both exhilarated and exhausted. But for the sake of his pockets and his reputation, he wanted to complete the work he had begun and translate both of the great

Homeric epics. To do so, he enlisted the help of Broome and Fenton, two men who had helped him as he wrote his Iliad to be co-writers of the Odyssey. This type of collaboration was, as

Stuart Gillespie points out, not a new idea but “a practice Pope inherited primarily from Dryden,

198 Howard D. Weinbrot, “Alexander Pope and Madame Dacier’s Homer: Conjectures concerning Cardinal Dubois, Sir Luke Schaub, and Samuel Buckley,” Huntington Library Quarterly 62.1 (1999): 2; Weinbrot, “‘What Must the World Think of Me?’: Pope, Madame Dacier, and Homer: The Anatomy of a Quarrel,” in Eighteenth-Century Contexts: Historical Inquiries in Honor of Phillip Harth, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot, Peter J. Schakel, and Stepehen E. Karian (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 183-206.

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the editor of a number of ‘several hands’ translations.”199 His failure to publicly acknowledge his collaborators, however, and his attempt to pass off a translation by several hands “under his own

Name” and as entirely his own work doomed the reputation of the Odyssey.200 Pope’s relationship to his collaborators reflects the way he deals with his text, privileging his editorial judgement above both his collaborators and his source. Pope claims that although Homer’s invention is his most striking feature, “it is often hard to distinguish exactly where the virtue ends, or the fault begins” (VII.13). Worst of all, according to Pope, are “his compound epithets,” which “cannot be done literally into English” by any good poet because they destroy “the purity of our language” and do “violence to the ear” (VII.19), clear evidence of Pope’s superiority.

As a translator, Pope sits in judgement over Homer. Pope presents his translation as a triumph of judgement that acknowledges his editorial supremacy like that of Virgil, who won praise by imitating and adapting Homer’s epic. René Rapin, a seventeenth-century writer and critic, exemplifies neoclassical responses to Homer and Virgil when he declares that Homer “is the Model and Original by which Virgil form’d his whole design,” that “Homer, has more Spirit and Virgil, more Judgement,” and that he should “much rather wish to have writ the Aeneid, than the Iliad and Odyssey.”201 Pope follows this same formulation, separating judgement and originality and connecting himself to the judgement which neoclassical taste preferred.202

Although Pope concludes with apparent modesty that

Upon the whole, I must confess myself utterly incapable of doing justice to

Homer. I attempt him in no other hope but that which one may entertain without

199 Stuart Gillespie, English Translation and Classical Reception (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 12. 200 Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985), 414. 201 René Rapin, The Whole Critical Works of Monsieur Rapin (London, 1706), I.210. 202 Kirsti Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius: Eighteenth-Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (1688-1798) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 83.

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much vanity, of giving a more tolerable copy of him than any entire translation in

verse has yet done. (VII.21)

In fact, this claim shows exactly that “vanity” it purports to avoid. Pope makes the standard claim that he cannot measure up to his original, but at the same time he claims that no other man has done better. He restricts this claim to “any entire translation in verse,” thus carefully not including Madame Dacier’s recent prose translation, but his emphasis on Virgil’s Aeneid as a copy of Homer implicitly includes Virgil in the group who he has bettered, staking his claim to fame and reputation not on invention but on judgement.

The Value of an Original

Although Pope understood that his Homeric translation was the foundation of his contemporary reputation, he disliked working with Homer’s Greek and may have initially seen creating a multi-authored translation as the natural response to this dilemma. Pope had experience working with collaborators, beginning with his work as editor for William Wycherley early in his career. As a subordinate author, Pope made extensive revisions to the poetry of the aging playwright but he finally published Wycherley’s work, posthumously, without taking any credit for himself.203 This work, in which one man took credit for the work of two, prepared Pope for the Iliad and the Odyssey, in which he similarly massages a Greek original and a series of

English translations into a beautiful and coherent poem which integrates Homeric and eighteenth-century standards by responding to and integrating criticism not only in the notes but also in Pope’s alterations to the text itself. Pope’s work with Wycherley’s poems taught him that

203 Mack, Alexander Pope, 98-100.

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it was acceptable to take advantage of a younger, subordinate poet, and he seems initially to have had no qualms about the public reaction to such an admission, even after learning that his co- conspirator had let the cat out of the bag (Pope to Broome, 4 Dec, 1724, II.273-4).

Putting aside the ethical problems with Pope’s decision to take the credit for this translation, which even Mack, Pope’s staunch supporter and defender, helplessly calls “a shabby business,” the question of why Pope was willing to share not only the tedious work but some of the glory remains. Pope’s collaborative translation builds on work by John Dryden, who was the primary writer in several multi-author translations, and who also acknowledged that the internal essays in his Virgil were written by others. Dryden’s work, especially his shorter translations from Homer is often referenced in Pope’s Iliad, suggesting that Pope had Dryden’s work in mind when planning his Homeric translations, but Dryden was careful to publicly acknowledge the help he received, and Pope claimed he intended to do the same. Pope repeatedly promised his co- conspirators that he would “promote your reputation[s] . . . more than my own” and that his name would be “read with yours by posterity” (Pope to Broome, 4 Dec, 1724, II.273-4; Pope to

Broome, 2 Jan, 1726, II.358).204 Broome was never fully satisfied by the “share of honour,” which Pope finally gave him, but Pope insisted in later years that he had “made it good” with his collaborators finally claiming “only twelve books of the poem” and not the notes as his own

(Broome to Fenton, 1 Dec, 1725, II.344; Pope to Broome, 2 Oct, 1735, III.497). This willingness to share even partial credit seems unlike Pope’s usual desire for fame, but may be attributed to his mixed feelings about the work itself.

His letters, especially those to John Caryll, clearly show how tiring – and tiresome – he found the work of translating. He complains of “the Drudgery of an author in correcting sheets,”

204 Mack, Alexander Pope, 414.

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his unhappiness at being “obliged to do [his] drudgery at home, and stick to [his] old task and daily labor,” and the “bitter dry drudgery” of the work (Pope to Trumbull, 14 Feb, 1714/15,

I.281; Pope to Caryll, Apr, 1715, I.290; Pope to Caryll, June, 1715, I.292). By defining translation as drudgery, and as the work of the laborer, Pope separates it from the gentleman’s leisure activity of original writing. Dryden, in comparison, wrote to Tonson on sending a series of translations for his Miscellany that “my business heere is to unweary my selfe, after my studyes, not to drudge.”205

Pope’s exhaustion and “weariness” which make him almost “willing to leave poetry” show how different his attitude was from his predecessor (Pope to Caryll, 13 July 1714, I.235).

Some fatigue is to be expected, with long works such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the longest work that Pope had yet produced and the most difficult. This project required not only Pope’s usual struggle for verbal perfection but mastery of multiple languages, an elaborate set of notes, and a series of revisions tailored to make Homer socially acceptable. The Odyssey also forced him to manage a group of authors, chivvying his co-writers into completing their portions of the work and reassuring them about his intentions. It is no wonder that Pope found the process exhausting.

But Pope’s willingness to share the work and the praise of the Odyssey stemmed from something more than mental weariness. The same process of scholarship and revision characterized his imitations of Horace, where he included the original on the facing page for better comparison, and his many editions of the Dunciad, where the notes which were even more integral a part of the composition and required just as much innovation and care as the text

205 John Dryden, Letter to Tonson, August/September 1684, in The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons, ed. Stephen Bernard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 88.

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itself.206 Both the imitations of Horace and the Dunciad postdate Pope’s Homeric translations, indicating Pope’s continuing reliance on editorial practices. True, Pope never again produced a poem the length of the Odyssey or Iliad and the sheer volume of the work was certainly a major factor in his consequent fatigue, but although he complained of the difficulty of dealing with publishers and proofs, Pope repeatedly and minutely edited the thick volumes of his Works and

Letters.

In fact, Pope’s letters suggest that he found his Homeric translations tiresome and fatiguing in part because he believed the work was beneath him. It may be unimportant that much of his work on Homer was done on the backs of letters to save paper – paper, after all, was expensive and Pope not yet wealthy – but it certainly is important that although he included short translated poems he chose not to include his Homeric translations in early editions of his Works.

His personal letters are even more telling. In a teasing letter to Cromwell, Pope declares, “I would lay out all my Poetry in Love; an Original for a Lady, & a Translation for a Waiting

Maid” (12 Dec, 1711, I.137-8). The claim is hyperbole, but his hierarchy is telling. Pope’s original works are worthy of the gentry, and he shows his pique that they are not enough to win him the favour that he craves. But although his translations began his career, showcase his skill, and earn him his first entry into society, Pope calls them less than his originals, worthy of the lower orders.

Given this letter, written two years before Pope announced his intention to translate the

Iliad, it may seem surprising that Pope chose to translate Homer, a massive undertaking for someone who claimed not to value translation. Another, more serious, letter to Caryll describes

206 Although Pope invented spurious authors for his notes and Warburton posthumously attributed many them to others, Valerie Rumbold declares it “overwhelmingly likely” that most of the notes are by Pope. Valerie Rumbold, Introduction to The Dunciad in Four Books, by Alexander Pope (New York: Routledge, 2009), 2.

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Pope as shrinking, “by due Gradation of dullness, from a poet to a translator, and from a translator to a mere editor,” belying his praise of judgement in the introduction to the Iliad and clearly showing Pope’s hierarchy of writers (26 Oct, 1722, II.140). He later discusses this hierarchy publicly in his Dunciad, where he belittles Grub Street translation and bemoans his own fate at having been forced for “ten years to comment and translate” (V.336) when he could have been creating his own poetry. In these letters and poems he seems to be wondering “if he was anything more than a dull drudge,” a position which he refutes by the very existence of the poem surrounding these lines but which displays an evident worry about his own originality and reputation.207

In his relationship with his translations, Pope shows the increasing demand of eighteenth- century writers for ‘original’ writing. While Addison, by the mid-century, claimed that “Wit and fine writing doth not consist so much in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable turn,” this was a contested claim, as Addison’s phrasing demonstrates.208

The two views of wit that Addison outlines in this quotation existed simultaneously throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, demonstrating a conflicted desire for both originality and adaptation. Indeed, while translation was a respectable occupation during the period, Theo

Hermans points out that much of the Renaissance discussion of translation was depreciatory.209

Edward Young, one of the most prominent writers on originality in the period, claimed that

“thoughts, when become too common, should lose their currency” and be replaced by newer

207 Griffin, Poet in Poems, 228. 208 Joseph Addison, Critical Essays from the Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 59. 209 Theo Hermans, “Metaphor and Imagery in the Renaissance Discourse on Translation,” in The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, ed. Theo Hermans (London: Routledge, 2014), 103-35.

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ideas and plots.210 Pope was especially polarising in this debate and his prominence as a writer drew Young to attack him both for his Heroic couplets, which he claimed put “half Homer to death” and his lack of originality, insisting that adapted work “differs as much from an Original, as the moon from the sun” and that even “supposing Pope’s Iliad to have been perfect in its kind; yet it is a Translation” and therefore automatically inferior to original work, offering only a pale reflection of Homer’s “masculine melody.” 211 While Young approved neither of Pope’s verse nor his subject, however, Theophilus Cibber declared that “a line of his is more musical than any other line can be made” and that Pope “discovers invention” as well as “fine designing, and admirable execution” in his original works and his translations.212 Pope worried about the negative aspects of translation, “the imposition of severe constraints on [his] imaginative freedom, a sense of belatedness pregnant with suspicions of inferiority,” and the “sheer toilsomeness” of retreading ground that had been broken by many poets before him.213

Pat Rogers who calls Pope’s focus on translation and editing “a break in creative activity,” rather than accepting that this was a period of intense creative work, follows in the footsteps of writers like Young who ignore translation’s importance and difficulty.214 Despite critiques, translation was still one of the most well-respected, and lucrative, forms of writing.

Pope’s publication of the Iliad, whose first popular duodecimo edition sold out of 2,500 copies within six months, made him wealthy enough to begin work on a villa to rival those of his titled friends.215 In fact, Pope’s adaptive translation of Homer was so popular that it encouraged him to

210 Edward Young, “Conjectures on Original Composition,” in The Works in Prose, of the Reverend Edward Young, LL.D (London, 1765), 281. 211 Young, “Original Composition,” 61. 212 Theophilus Cibber, Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1753), V.249. 213 Davis, Translation and the Poet’s Life, 6. 214 Pat Rogers, Alexander Pope: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), i. 215 David Foxon and James McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (Oxford: Clarendon

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extend his editorial office. While Pope’s scholarly edition of Shakespeare’s Works, in which he

“played fast and loose with the evidence of Shakespeare’s text,” deserves to be dismissed as a portrait of Shakespeare, it demonstrates Pope’s intensely creative editorial work, showing the same sensibility and focus which he brought to his translations.216 Following his usual liberal practice, Pope removed “over fifteen hundred lines” of Shakespeare’s which he thought were too vulgar to suit his audience and therefore too vulgar to have really been Shakespeare’s.217 He uses footnotes, as he used his endnotes in the Iliad and Odyssey, to showcase his judgement, highlighted in a comprehensive preface that allows Pope to guide his readers to important interventions. Pope begins the preface to his Shakespeare edition in the same way he does the preface of the Iliad, separating his author’s invention from his own judgement. His language reflects the contemporary debate over originality, and instead of discussing a generalized idea of invention, he calls Shakespeare “an Original.”218 But as in his preface to Homer, Pope qualifies his praise, showing the need for editorial judgement. Although, Pope says, Shakespeare “has certainly written better, so he has perhaps written worse, than any other.”219 By attributing whatever is “wrong” in Shakespeare to his “Publishers,” and the “ignorance of the Players,”

Pope gives himself licence to change the text, elevating his own edition and judgement over past readers of Shakespeare.220 Moreover, just as Pope shared the work of the Odyssey with Broome and Fenton, so he shared the edition of Shakespeare with a group of “hired assistants” who

Press, 1991), 58. 216 Randall McLeod [Random Cloud pseud.], “‘The very names of the Persons’: Editing and the Invention of Dramatic Character,” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991), 88-89. 217 Paul Baines, The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope (New York: Routledge, 2000), 27. 218 Alexander Pope, The Works of Shakespear (London, 1725), ii. 219 Pope, Works of Shakespear, iv. 220 Pope, Works of Shakespear, xiv.

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“eased” him of “a considerable amount of [the] drudgery” of production.221 This brief treatment shows some of the ways in which Pope treated his scholarly edition like a translation, to a very mixed effect.

Pope’s youthful attempt at an epic followed the same lines as his translation and edition, collecting “all the beauties of the great epic writers into one piece: there was Milton’s style in part, and Cowley’s in another; here the style of Spenser imitated, and there of Statius; here

Homer and Virgil, and there Ovid and Claudian.”222 An ambitious project for a young man, it shows his focus on judgement and improvement rather than on invention.223 Pope used this focus and his connection to ancient writers throughout his career to gain a wider audience, more lucrative prospects, and a platform to speak about himself.

Manliness and Morality

Pope was already a household name when he began the translation of Homer that he hoped would permanently establish his reputation. If the ultimate result of this translation was to tarnish his reputation, this was due to no failure in his efforts to emphasize his moral and manly character. It would be redundant to list all of the ways in which Pope’s size, illness, education, and religion worked to render him uneasy in his social world. The charges of irreligion, effeminacy, and social climbing which were levelled against him are well known among scholars of the eighteenth century. Mack spends much of his biography arguing against such charges and presenting Pope as a consistently pious man who focuses on friendship first and sees titles as

221 Leopold Damrosch, Jr, The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 126; George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 234. 222 Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men (London, 1820), 48. 223 Reuben Brower, Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 283.

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proof of virtue rather than something to be sought after, and Carolyn Williams examines accusations of femininity, insisting that Pope’s only way to “‘make a man of himself’” was to publish “a translation of Homer” and to establish his abilities in the field of classical learning.224

Translating Homer, who Pope’s contemporaries viewed as “the source of a true and significant picture of the moral and human universe,” offered Pope one opportunity to display both his manliness and his morality.225

Both manliness and morality are complex terms tied to diverse and sometimes opposing markers.226 Eighteenth-century ideas of morality consisted of a mixture of religious, philosophical, and societal positions which were closely tied to gender and status. Manliness was a marker of class and status within one’s class even more than sexual difference, signifying not only a physical state but also a position of social power and a moral position of power over oneself.227 Both manliness and morality were defined and opposed by effeminacy, which signalled subordination, susceptibility to temptation, and lack of originality in men as well as in women.228 Samuel Johnson’s definition of ‘manly’ as “firm, brave, stout, undaunted, undismayed” shows how manliness was defined by opposition to the feminine qualities of fear, timidity, and malleability, and especially by the will and ability to carry one’s point.229

224 Carolyn Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness (New York: Routledge, 1993), 57; Stephen Gregg, Defoe’s Writings and Manliness (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 43-4; Henry Carey, “A Satyr on the Luxury and Effeminacy of the Age,” Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1729), 29. 225 Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius, 7. 226 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 76. 227 Susan S. Lanser, “Befriending the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.2 (1999): 179-198; Michael McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660-1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28.3 (1995): 295-322; Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 83-93; 411; Stephen Gregg, “Defoe’s Good Men in Bad Times,” in The Image of Manhood in Early Modern Literature, ed. Andrew P. Williams (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 151; Andrew P. Williams, “Soft Women and Softer Men: The Libertine Maintenance of Masculine Identity,” in The Image of Manhood in Early Modern Literature, 108-10. 228 Raymond Stephanson, The Yard of Wit: Male Creativity and Sexuality, 1650-1750 (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 229 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755).

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Pope’s hyper-masculine presentation in the Iliad, and what Christa Knellwolf calls his

“numerous explicit statements” that “women are morally and mentally weak,” must be read in the context of the attacks he faced throughout his life.230 His heroic claims are an attempt to defend and establish his reputation in the face of repeated attacks on his manliness, his writing, and his very humanity. The best-known of these attacks today appears in Lady Mary Wortley-

Montagu’s “Verses Addressed to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book Of Horace,” where she sneers at Pope for choosing to “libel those who cannot write” because he is incapable of beating them as he ought, comparing his wit to “The female scold’s” use of “weakness” as a

“defence.”231 She mocks his attempt to join in the masculine world of letters, insisting that without a strong physical body he will only be responded to as a woman. Finally she does her best to remove him from humanity entirely, describing him as a “carcase” whose body is “the

Emblem of [his] crooked Mind,” given to him “by God’s own Hand” as an outward sign of his alienation from mankind.232 Pope’s body, Lady Mary writes, is inextricably connected to his works.

Thine is just such an image of his [Horace’s] pen,

As thou thyself art of the sons of men,

Where our own species in burlesque we trace,

A sign-post likeness of the human race,

That is at once resemblance and disgrace.233

230 Christa Knellwolf, A Contradiction Still: Representations of Women in the Poetry of Alexander Pope (New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 14. 231 Mary Wortley Montagu [a lady pseud.], Verses Address’d to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace (London, 1733), 6. 232 Montagu, Verses, 4. 233 Montagu, Verses, 8.

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She plays on an established image of Pope’s body as a twisted, misshapen, barely human thing

“at once resemblance and disgrace” to the real men who look at it in order to refute the resemblance to classical writers that Pope uses his translations to establish.

Claims like this naturally enhanced Pope’s fear of inferiority and his acute desire for a good reputation and a positive self-image. Lady Mary’s satire is one of the most famous, but it is only one among many of the responses which struck as much at Pope’s physical deformity as at the flaws in his poetry. The casually cruel crudity of eighteenth-century criticism meant that critics of Pope’s works often found it expedient to attack Pope directly rather than to focus on his writing. In Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput, Pope is defined by his appearance. His size, the writer claims, is a “Security from Slander” despite “those great ladies who do nothing without him.” Pope is a “harmless Creature” whose pen is not only his sole weapon but one that is only drawn “in defence of their Beauty or to second their revenge” or, at best, “in privately transcribing and passing for his own, the elaborate Studies of some more learned Genius.”234

Pope’s size makes him both inadequate and feminine, which, in eighteenth-century parlance, bars him from the violent masculine world.

John Dennis is among the first to connect Pope’s unmanly body with an unmanly mind.

Although Dennis’ pamphlet on the “Essay on Criticism” begins by pointing out real logical flaws in Pope’s argument, Dennis turns in his last pages to a personal attack which focuses on Pope’s physical characteristics. Not only is Pope a bad poet, he is “a Creature,” a “hunch-back’d toad” rather than a man. In a reverse of Lady Mary, who declares that Pope’s unmanly body created his unmanly works, Dennis declares that he has “taken a Survey of [Pope’s] inward Man” and has used his writing to discover the deformities of “his outward Person.” This is all bad enough, but

234 Gulliver [pseud.], Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput (London, 1727), 16-17.

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Dennis’ triumphant conclusion not only claims that “a Survey” of Pope’s body makes it clear that he is not “a proper Author to make personal reflections on others,” he also makes Pope’s body actually inhuman, a “Spectre,” and declares that had Pope been born in Greece, where a parent had the right to dispose of their children as they pleased, “his Life had been no longer than that of one of his poems, the Life of half a day.”235 Dennis claims that even this is inadequate and that

his inward Man is ten times more ridiculous; it being impossible that his Outward

Form, tho’ it should be that of a downright Monkey, should differ so much from

human Shape, as his immaterial thinking part does from human understanding.236

Here Dennis has created an image that will endure throughout Pope’s career – that of Pope as the small, hunchbacked monkey grinning over his writing. That this picture stuck is a tribute

Dennis’s success in reflecting the spirit of the time, and demonstrates the link between Pope’s physical and mental abilities that he was never able to overcome.

Dennis’ continual references to Pope as a “little” author or a “very little . . . Creature”237 touch one of the poet’s sore points. Pope always resented his stature, and from Mack’s Life to

Williams’ Manliness it has become standard to talk of Pope’s early translation of Statius’

Thebaid as a celebration of the shortness of the epic hero.238 Later, Pope refined his boyish attempt to derive manliness from translation. He removes the passage on Tydeus’s triumphant battle from his published translation of the Thebaid in order to make it fit for publication, but he retains the ideals which this work inspired in his translation of the Iliad (Pope to Cromwell, 19

235 John Dennis, Reflections Critical and Satirical upon a late Rhapsody Called, an Essay upon Criticism (London, 1711), 26, 28-9. 236 Dennis, Reflections, 29. 237 John Dennis, A True Character of Mr. Pope and His Writings (London, 1716), 4. 238 Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness, 61.

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June, 1709, I.37). Tydeus, one of the heroes of the Thebaid, is described in Pope’s Homer as one

“whose little Body lodg’d a mighty mind” and who, as Pope points out in his Observations,

“fought and overcame the Thebans even tho’ Minerva forbade him,” (VII.314) in direct contrast to Homer’s Hector, a hero of more traditional stature.

In his relationship to Hector, Pope clearly defines himself against both Homer and

Homer’s commentators, establishing the primacy of his judgement and editorial intervention. In one of his semi-public letters239 to the Duke of Buckingham, Pope announces that he is “shock’d at the flight of Hector upon the first appearance of Achilles,” and that “to shew [him] self a true

Commentator, if not a true Critick . . . [he] will endeavour to excuse, if not to defend it” (Pope to

Buckingham, 1 Sept 1718, I.492). In the letter, he suggests that Hector’s failure is due to his certainty that his cause is not only doomed but morally wrong. In his note for this section of the

Iliad, however, Pope expands on this suggestion, both explaining and condemning Hector.

At the beginning of his note, Pope quotes his friend Lord Peterborough, who he claims was an exceptionally brave man but who said, “Shew me but a certain Danger, and I shall be as much afraid as any of you” (VIII.461) and it is on these lines that Pope offers a defence.

Granting that Hector was afraid of Achilles and that he fled, Pope gives four reasons in why this behaviour might not negate Hector’s courage.

Pope’s reasons focus on Hector’s manliness and morality. Beginning on the purely physical level, with the fact that Hector could not best Achilles, Pope works his way to the final claim that Hector’s flight was as much a flight from his city’s moral failings as from any sort of physical danger. Pope uses Mme. Dacier both as a source and as a foil throughout this note,

239 Amy Smith, “Naming the Un‐’Familiar’: Formal Letters and Travel Narratives in Late Seventeenth‐ And Eighteenth‐Century Britain,” Review of English Studies 54 (2003): 178-202.

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saying that he and his readers “may observe with Dacier” the terror which Achilles inspires

(VIII.461). Connecting this terror with Dacier, whose femininity he continually references, allows Pope to undermine the argument’s efficacy as a bolster to Hector’s manliness.

Instead of being satisfied that Hector’s actions are those of a reasonable man in fear of his life, Pope continues to offer reasons why his contemporaries should excuse Hector’s flight. The physical danger, he suggests, is secondary to the moral situation in which Hector, through little fault of his own, has been placed. Pope’s third ‘reason’ for Hector’s flight is not a discussion of his flight at all but a fatalistic discussion of why he stayed to watch Achilles in the first place, why he was still in danger and not hidden safely behind the walls of Troy with the rest of his companions.

Emphasizing Hector’s inherently staunch, manly nature, Pope reminds readers that

Hector, unlike the rest of the Trojans, was willing to stand face to face with Achilles. Pope’s

Hector muses on the shame of acting like his fellow warriors “Woman-like to fall, and fall without a Blow,” embedding Pope’s defence of Hector within the text of the Iliad (VIII.460). In his notes, Pope admits that this shame has been looked on as a fault by Eustathius, and that

Homer explains Hector’s immobility as the “Will of Heaven” rather than as a virtue, but carefully refrains from commenting on this judgement himself. Although Hector’s death dooms Troy,

Pope seems to approve of his courage in facing Achilles.

It is “no part of a Hero’s Character to be impious” Pope grandly concludes (VIII.462).

While he establishes Hector’s real physical danger and his courage in attempting an attack, Pope concludes by suggesting that the only real excuse would be impiety. “Deprest [sic] by Heaven” as Pope insists, Hector sees himself as already shamed, dragged into an impious act, and deserted by the gods (VIII.461). In this context, Achilles appears not as an attacking man but as a god

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come to punish Troy’s misdoings. If Achilles takes the place of a god, then a firm stance would show disrespect to the gods. In the very next paragraph, however, Pope rejects all of these to declare that Hector’s flight is dishonorable, but he redeems himself by turning at the end, and acting as though he indeed has “A brave Man’s soul” which is “still capable of rouzing [sic] itself and acting honorably in the last Struggles” (VIII.462). Pope presents a conception of manhood that is hard to live up to, condemning one of the greatest heroes for a single failure in courage.

Even as his note condemns Hector, Pope’s translation mitigates Hector’s actions. While the Greek shows that “Ἕκτορα δ᾽, ὡς ἐνόησεν, ἕλε τρόμος: οὐδ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ἔτλη / αὖθι μένειν,

ὀπίσω δὲ πύλας λίπε, βῆ δὲ φοβηθείς:” (Hector was grasped by trembling that did not suffer him to stay, but left the gates behind him and ran in fear,) and Pope’s English predecessor and inspiration, John Ogilby, moves from a neutral description of Achilles as a man whose “Armes like Lightning Shone” to a declaration of Hector’s fear, Pope adjures any description of Hector’s terror.240 Instead, Pope’s translation focuses on the cause of Hector’s fear, describing Achilles not merely as “ἐλάμπετο εἴκελος αὐγῇ” (shining like the light of the sun) but as shooting forth

“trembling Rays” like “Jove’s own Lightning” (VIII.460-1) around him.241 By transferring

Hector’s shivers and trembling to the light itself and describing Achilles as “dreadful” or inspiring of dread, Pope transfers the effects of cowardice from Hector to the reader.

Moving beyond Hector’s emotion to his reaction, Pope removes Hector’s volition to mitigate the charge of cowardice and writes, not that he is terrified, but that he is “struck by some

God” and under that irresistible influence, “he fears, recedes, and flies” (VIII.461), and it is to

240 “Homer, Iliad,” Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, accessed Feb 29, 2016, http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc1:22.224-22.259, XXII.136-7; John Ogilby, Homer, his Iliads translated (London, 1660), 461. 241 “Homer, Iliad,” XXII.134.

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this line that Pope’s long note excusing Hector’s flight is attached. Compare this to the same line in Ogilby, who declares that “When Hector saw AEcides draw near /He stay’d no longer, struck with suddain Fear.”242 Pope recedes from the reality of Hector’s fear by insisting on the responsibility of an unknown god rather than of his hero.

Ogilby’s Hector declares that “I shall no more/ fly thee” and in the original Greek

Achilles says “οὔ σ᾽ ἔτι Πηλέος υἱὲ φοβήσομαι,” (No more, son of Peleus, will I flee from you).243 Pope, on the contrary, edits his Homer so that Hector spares no circumlocution to excuse his flight. Perhaps ashamed of his actions, Pope’s Hector avoids the subject position. “Troy,” he says, “has viewed / Her Walls thrice circled, and her Chief pursu’d” (VIII.469) His phrasing rejects responsibility, reporting his own panicked flight around the walls of his city in passive voice and without description. Pope is usually more rather than less descriptive than Homer, and the brief and spare description in this section highlights Pope’s editorial changes.244

Repeating the phrasing of Pope’s narrator in describing the flight itself, Hector declares that “some God within me bids me try / Thine, or my Fate: I kill thee, or I die” (VIII.469). This sentence, like the last, opens by rejecting responsibility, volition, and the subject position, but then immediately reverses itself as Hector make the standard heroic declaration, “I kill thee, or I die.” Hector’s sudden shift in subject reflects his shift in tone. Abandoning responsibility for his past actions, he begins again. From this point on, Pope’s Hector speaks as though he has just stepped onto the battlefield, ready for a new day. His declaration that “I kill thee, or I die” sounds almost as though he is the challenger, heroically stepping forward to throw down the gauntlet, rather than the reluctant acceptor of Achilles’s challenge, cornered and unable to flee.

242 Ogilby, Homer, 461. 243 Ogilby, Homer, 464; “Homer, Iliad,” XXII.250. 244 Morgan Strawn, “Homer, Sentimentalism, and Pope’s Translation of ‘The Iliad,’” Studies in English Literature 53.3 (2012): 585-608.

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Pope’s Hector shows more courage and willingness to stand firm than does Homer’s, but

Pope still chastises him for being unable to resist the influence of the gods. While Pope’s Hector is less fearful, he is also more condemned than the original Hector. Looking down over the battlefield, Jove watches Hector’s panicked flight and sighs.

‘ὢ πόποι ἦ φίλον ἄνδρα διωκόμενον περὶ τεῖχος

ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ὁρῶμαι: ἐμὸν δ᾽ ὀλοφύρεται ἦτορ

Ἕκτορος, ὅς μοι πολλὰ βοῶν ἐπὶ μηρί᾽ ἔκηεν

Ἴδης ἐν κορυφῇσι πολυπτύχου, ἄλλοτε δ᾽ αὖτε

ἐν πόλει ἀκροτάτῃ: νῦν αὖτέ ἑ δῖος Ἀχιλλεὺς

ἄστυ πέρι Πριάμοιο ποσὶν ταχέεσσι διώκει.

(Oh shame! He the beloved one forced to run about the wall, these eyes of mine see and

my heart laments Hector, who to I myself has many times cried and thigh-bones kindled

on Ida’s heights, and at other times in the city of Troy: now again is heavenly Achilles

pursuing him round about the city of Priam on swift feet.)245

Ogilby’s Jove is equally moved by the sight of “One whom I much respect . . . And needs must pity” being “pursued” by Achilles.246 Compare this to the reaction of Pope’s Jove, who cries,

Unworthy Sight! The Man, belov’d of Heav’n,

Behold, inglorious round yon’ City driv’n!

My Heart partakes the gen’rous Hector’s Pain;

Hector, whose Zeal whole Hecatombs has slain,

Whose grateful Fumes the Gods reciev’d with Joy,

245 “Homer, Iliad,” XXII.168-173. 246 Ogilby, Homer, 462.

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From Ida’s Summits, and the Tow’rs of Troy :

Now see him flying! to his Fears resign’d,

And Fate, and fierce Achilles, close behind. (VIII.464-5)

Taking the opposite part to Pope’s narrator and to Hector himself, Pope’s accusations of unworthiness are in stark opposition to the original’s lament over a worthy and beloved hero.

This differentiates his translation from his predecessors, including Mme. Dacier, whose translation of the passage runs:

Jupiter, rompant le silence, leur dit ; «Je vois donc dans le plus grand danger un

homme que j’aime! Je ne puis n’être pas touché du malheur d’Hector, qui m’a

offert tant de sacrifices sur les sommets du mont Ida et dans la haute forteresse de

Troie. Voilà Achille qui le poursuit avec la dernière fureur…» (Jupiter, breaking

the silence, says to them, “I see there in the greatest danger a man who I love! I

cannot fail to be touched by the misfortune of Hector, who offered many sacrifices

to me on the summits of mount Ida and in the high fortress of Troy. See Achilles

who pursues him with the final rage…”).247

Pope retains the declaration that Hector is loved, a constant throughout these texts, but Pope’s

Jove dissociates himself from that love. Pope consistently connects Jove with the Christian god, which makes it imperative for him to dissociate him from faults as much as is possible when working with Homer’s text. At the same time, the appellation “belov’d of Heaven” which Pope’s

Jove uses is a Christianized form of the personal love that appears in other translations. This tension, which runs throughout Pope’s translation, is one result of Pope’s attempt to make his

247 Anne Dacier, L’iliade (Paris, 1892), 444-5.

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writing moral, manly, and up-to-date. The notes highlight Pope’s changes, inviting readers to be aware of and to approve his alterations.

In this case, Pope separates Hector from Jove just as Pope divorces Hector from his fear.

Instead of talking about the sacrifices Hector has made to him, Pope’s Jove references oblations to “the Gods” and while Pope’s Hector does his best to elude responsibility for his fear, Pope’s

Jove makes all the accusations that Pope’s note ostensibly refutes. Instead of beginning by describing Hector as beloved and then describing the chase, Jove begins by exclaiming that the sight of Hector’s flight is “unworthy” and only then admits that Hector is nevertheless beloved.

Pope’s Jove insists on Hector’s unworthiness, on the “inglorious” nature of his flight, and the “Fears” to which Hector is “resigned.” The position Pope takes here is complicated. He appears to attempt a mitigation of Hector’s ‘unmanly’ actions, but in fact Pope’s alterations highlight and castigate Hector’s flight. While Pope defends Hector in his commentary, offering a nod to human fallibility and to his own position as someone who, due to his physical deformity, is unable to demonstrate the type of courage that he wishes Hector to show, his final position rejects Hector’s actions. Crippled himself, Pope displays little sympathy for the man whose perfect physique is not matched by perfect courage.

Pope’s response to the death of Patroclus, who is struck from behind by a god, stunned by the spear of another fighter, and finally killed by Hector while he is attempting to flee the battle, is much less mixed. Although he tells the story as it is written, and concedes that “no Mortal” can compete with Homer for “Wisdom, Learning, and all good Qualities,” he declares that he feels like he is following not Homer the great writer of epics but “Don Quixote,” the crazy parody of romance. Pope portrays himself “at a loss to excuse” this manner of his death (VIII. 283-4). It seems, like the flight and defeat of Hector, to contradict the manly principles which Pope

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ascribes to epic, and Pope seizes the opportunity to chide Homer for the deviation. By condemning Homer’s descriptions, Pope emphasizes his own good judgement.

This judgement is especially visible in Pope’s attempts to make Homer more Christian.

Nearer the end of his preface, Pope attacks Homer’s gross and imperfect “representations of the gods” as well as displaying “vicious and imperfect manners” in his heroes (VII.14). Although

Homer has many thoughts that are “sublime and noble,” he also has “many thoughts that are low and vulgar” (VII.9) by eighteenth-century standards, and Pope attacks these thoughts in his notes while often replacing them, in his text, with his own phrasing. Pope declares that he is joining a wider debate on Homer’s heroes

It must be a strange partiality to antiquity, to think with Madame Dacier, ‘that

those times and manners are so much the more excellent, as they are more

contrary to ours.’ Who can be so prejudiced in their favour as to magnify the

felicity of those ages, when a spirit of revenge and cruelty, joined with the

practice of rapine and robbery, reigned through the world: when no mercy was

shown but for the sake of lucre; when the greatest princes were put to the sword,

and their wives and daughters made slaves and concubines? (VII.14)

This move was one part of Pope’s attempt to inflate his own reputation by praising his own era.

While Madame Dacier and others claim that the further Homer’s world was from their own the more virtuous it was (VII.li), Pope praises his own society. This allows him to use the morally problematic moments in the poem that he has chosen to translate as a display of his superiority, not only over Addison and those others who defend these moments, but over Homer himself.

Beginning a lengthy note on Juno by claiming the moral high ground, Pope declares that

Juno’s deception of Jove contains the greatest amount of “Impiety and Absurdity” (VIII.166) of

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any story from its period. His note takes up two and a half pages of the modern version, and took up considerably more space on the original, with its larger print and wider margins, creating a visible moment of intervention in the text. Denigrating the tendency of ancient writers to write their gods as human and fallible, Pope sets himself as the arbiter of the existing conversation while distancing himself from the criticism of Homer by quoting from M. de St. Evremond.

Pope snidely claims that some “mystical or allegorical sense might atone for the appearing Impiety” of the passage and create an “Excuse” for Homer. This insistence that Homer needs an excuse overlays his own century’s moral code onto the classical writer and shows how deeply Pope believes in his own correctness. His warning that readers should withhold judgement “lest what we decry as wrong in the Poet, should prove only a Fault in his Religion”

(VIII.167), emphasizes Pope’s certainty that there is a “Fault” and one that he is qualified to judge.

Pope’s alterations to the text of the Iliad are visible from the very beginning of the story of Juno’s description of her husband where he emphasizes the numinous rather than the human nature of the gods. His Juno “trembles at the Sight” (VII.168) of her husband, and even when he is about to be deceived, Pope’s Jove is still “all-beholding” (VIII.168) and awe- inspiring. Even

Juno, the deceiver, is viewed “With Awe divine” (VII.172) in Pope’s version of the poem.

Pope’s claim to “give up the morality” (VIII.166) of Book XIV, which tells the tale of

Juno’s seduction of Zeus, is a refinement on Addison, whose moral interpretation of the tale is criticized in Haywood’s The Female Spectator for ignoring the Homeric context and ratifying the deceit practiced by Juno upon her husband. While Pope quotes Addison’s lines in the Tatler without open judgement, he positions this quotation as the capstone to a note that has been

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consistently skeptical of Homer’s morals.248 Pope’s overtly neutral description of Addison as

“ingenious” further emphasizes Pope’s dubious response to this interpretation. When he returns to the question later, he ironically calls Juno’s deception a “Propriety in the Character of the

Fair” and a “Folly which in all Ages has possest her Sex” (VIII.171).

In the part of Homer’s story that is supposedly impossible to reconcile to Christian morality, Pope finds a very different moral message than Addison does. While Addison focuses on the fact that Juno dresses herself up to prepare herself for her husband, comparing her to slovenly modern women, Pope focuses on the simplicity of her dress, comparing her favourably to the modern woman who requires “Washes for the Face,” “Dies for the Hair,” and so many

“artificial embellishments” that they require a “Tire-Woman, or waiting maid” to help them dress

(VIII.169). Pope connects this to biblical stories, comparing Homer’s image of Juno dressing to

Isaiah’s critical description of Asiatic women’s dress, and then turning “to ask the Ladies, which they should like best to imitate” (VIII.170). Pope offers a sermon to his readership in this note, combining moral teaching with scriptural reference.

In passages like this, Pope asks readers to notice his attention to the ways in which he has, as Joseph Spence declares, made Homer “resemble our sacred Writings.”249 Pope’s choice to emphasize these passages and to play up their scriptural connections shows his attempt to demonstrate what Spence calls his “virtuous generous soul” (Spence I.105). On the one hand, the

Christian ideas he incorporated in his translation displayed his own virtue and morality. On the other hand, he can blame Homer’s pagan beliefs for any places in his text which do not suit the sensibilities of his contemporaries. This allows Pope to claim superiority throughout the text,

248 Joseph Addison, The Tatler (London, 1777), I.183. 249 Joseph Spence, An Essay on Pope’s Odyssey (London, 1726), 104. Cited as Spence.

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claiming the moral high ground both in places where Homer is aligned with Christian virtues and in places where he is not. Using Homer to improve his reputation, for Pope, meant showing that he understood Homer’s moral purpose and bringing him closer to Scriptural ideas.

Commenting at length on Homer’s hero and gods and rejecting the popular image of

Homer as the arbiter of morality, Pope positions his own judgement against Homer’s. Homer, these passages and their commentary implies, simply did not understand the demands of the manly virtues as thoroughly as Pope and his contemporaries do. This finicky reaction to Homer’s text is not merely a personal response. By placing himself against Homer, in direct opposition to his declaration in the Essay on Criticism that “Those are but Stratagems which Errors seem, Nor is it Homer Nods, but We that Dream” (I.261), Pope displays his ability to refine and improve on his predecessors, and even on Homer himself.

Horace

After his great effort on the Homeric translations, Pope looked for a form which allowed him to retain his connection to ancient writers but gave him fuller control, and found it in his

“Imitations of Horace.” Howard Weinbrot, who established the autobiographical nature of

Pope’s response to Horace’s satires, examines Pope’s claims about his life in the satires. In these, as in his Homeric translations, Pope simultaneously connects himself to his works and elevates himself above his author.250 More recently, James Turner, Laura Brown, and Brean Hammond have questioned the authenticity of Pope’s self-presentation.251 Despite Pope’s claims that

250 Howard D. Weinbrot, Alexander Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 251 James Grantham Turner, “Pope’s Libertine Self-fashioning,” The Eighteenth Century 29.2 (1988): 123-144;

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“taking to imitating was not out of vanity, but humility,” Pope’s imitations were a self-conscious boast.252 What is missing from these is a clear connection between Pope’s self-conscious editorial strategies in his imitations and his translations and earlier editorial work. Seen together, these are part of a larger strategy that uses translations to shape Pope’s self-presentation in ways that original writing could not.

Horace’s autobiographical style presents him as exactly what Pope was or wanted to be: an “upwardly mobile” self-made man who was lionized for his innate talent.253 In fact, as

Gowers points out, Horace’s style is so autobiographical, especially in his first book of satires, that some readers have taken his statements in his satire as purely factual accounts of his life, and the question of how much of Horace’s literary persona is autobiographical and how much fictional has become a popular subject amongst classical scholars.254 Pope’s advertisement to the first of his Horatian imitations claims that he felt this “Answer from Horace” was more compelling than “any I cou’d have made in my own person” (IV.3). Although this appears to disclaim Pope’s own authorship, in his very next sentence he speaks of “the Example of much greater Freedom in so eminent a Divine as Dr. Donne” in copying Horace, inviting readers to discover the liberties that he has taken with his author.

Pope uses his connection to Horace to disguise his hubris as faithfulness to his original, but at the same time he encourages readers to search for his changes. Horace was a friend to the leading politicians of his own day, and, unlike Pope, could therefore afford to ignore libel laws,

Laura Brown, Alexander Pope, ed. Terry Eagleton (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 1985); Brean Hammond, introduction to Pope (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1-25. 252 Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, 49. 253 Emily Gowan, “Fragments of Autobiography in Horace Satires I,” Classical Antiquity 22.1 (2003): 55-91. 254 Ellen Oliensis, Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 13-14.

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but here he flatters a patron by comparing himself to a Lucilius who is dedicated to Virtue.255

Elsewhere in Horace, Lucilius is treated more ambiguously, and even here his virtue is the grace of a man whose openness and looseness Horace gently mocks even as he claims it for his own.

Pope takes the lines as purely laudatory and reorients his translation so that he takes Lucilius’ place throughout. 256 Pope translates Horace’s phrase, “TO VIRTUE ONLY and HER FRIENDS,

A FRIEND” (IV.16-17). With its large capital letters, this is “the loudest statement in the poem,” showing a “self-assured egotism” that David Fairer argues Pope makes acceptable by presenting it as “part of a conversation between texts.”257 Griffin points out that when this change was discovered, Pope reverted to less pointed italics in an attempt to rebut charges of hypocrisy, suggesting a hope that translation would hide his hubris from unfriendly eyes.258

Pope’s position, as the friend of rebels, exiles, and Catholics, also sharpens the line so that it leads to a very different conclusion. Horace, who Pope criticized as a flatterer to a tyrant, can “pull Caesar out of his hat” at the end of the poem as his final defender.259 When Pope, always quarreling with those in power, does the same thing, it becomes an attack on the willingness of critics to accept Walpole’s ruling even in literary matters. But Pope also appropriates Homer’s claim to be a friend to the virtuous men of his day, applying it to himself rather than to his model. Here, as in his letters, Pope gives friendship a central place and defends himself against accusations that he had been an ungrateful friend.

255 Frances Muecke, “Law, Rhetoric, and Genre in Horace, Satires 2.1,” in Homage to Horace: A Bimillenary Celebration, ed. S.J. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 203. 256 Weinbrot, Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire, 46, 299. 257 David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789 (New York: Routledge, 2014), 62. 258 Griffin, Poet in Poems, 15. 259 Weinbrot, “Pope and the Classics,” 81-3; Michèle Lowrie, “Slander and Horse Law in Horace, Sermones 2.1,” Law and Literature 17.3 (2005): 417.

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Where Horace humorously associates his choice to write satire with “a series of criminals,” with “two wild beasts and an even more savage human being,” and with “the highly unnatural but effective arts of criminals,”260 Pope has worked to contrast himself with the same.

Pope follows tradition in rendering the Latin of Horace’s text

Quid faciam? . . .

quot capitum vivunt, totidem studiorum

Milia: me pedibus delectat claudere verba

(What should I do? . . . .

for each person that lives there are as many thousand studies:

for me, it is sweet to shut up words into metrical feet)

But in his imitation, Pope separates the ideas that Horace connects. The first line of this quotation appears in response to Horace’s examples of a fool and two famous athletes, connecting these to his writing, but Pope moves this section. Instead of connecting the fools to his own practice, he replaces Horace’s question, “What should I do?” with a statement that

“Each Mortal has his Pleasure” (IV.9) and a strident declaration that “None deny” the pleasures of the flesh to fools. While these fools are allowed to eat and drink until they make themselves ill, Pope’s imitation claims, Pope is not allowed his own pleasure and must defend himself.

While the Latin text connects the two types of pleasure, Pope’s English imitation separates the pleasure of fools from his own, beginning a new sentence to describe the pleasures which he enjoys. He loves, he claims, “to pour out all myself” and he again commandeers the description Horace gives to Lucilius, describing himself as plain, open, and fully exposed in his

260 William S. Anderson, “Ironic Preambles and Satiric Self-Definition in Horace "Satire" 2.1,” Pacific Coast Philology 19.1 (1984): 40.

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text. This shift, which distances Pope from previous examples and identifies him with Horace’s moral example presents Pope as a more virtuous, less foolish version of Horace.

Modern interpretations differ as to the seriousness of Horace’s defence. He is generally agreed to be witty, but some scholars believe that this satire is “a kind of inspired buffoonery,” or even “humorous innuendo,” while another view, that which Pope takes here and in his advertisement, is that Horace’s text offers “a serious discussion of the moral and legal issues involved with the writing of satire.”261 Whichever Horace would have agreed with, it is clear that

Pope offers a more serious and sustained moral defence against a more serious threat than

Horace faced.

Like translation, formal imitation is a confused topic in English literature. Dryden classed imitation as a problematic type of translation, and despite his brilliant imitations in “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” Johnson disparaged them in his “Life of Pope.” Johnson declared that in imitations “nothing was required but to accommodate as he could the sentiments of an old author to recent facts or familiar images; but what is easy is seldom excellent” and therefore imitations will “be generally uncouth and party[sic]-coloured; neither original nor translated, neither ancient nor modern.”262 This same condemnation is directed at translations, and Pope’s response to such claims shows his worries about appearing derivative. Pope’s insistence, in his advertisement for the collected poems, that they were written “at the Desire of the Earl of Oxford . . . and of the Duke of Shrewsbury” (IV.3) shows his defensiveness about his choice of work.

261 G. Harrison, “The Confessions of Lucilius (Horace Sat. 2.1.30-34). A Defense of Autobiographical Satire?” Classical Antiquity 6.1 (1987): 39; Kirk Freudenburg, “Horace’s Satiric Program and the Language of Contemporary Theory in Satires 2.1,” The American Journal of Philology 111.2 (1990): 192, 187. 262 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), IV.78.

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Writing to Swift, Pope says “I have translated, or rather parodied, another of Horace’s” satires, demonstrating an underlying uncertainty about his relationship to Horace’s text (2[0]

April, 1733, III.367). Calling his poem both a translation and a parody underscores the complexity of Pope’s alterations, inviting realization of the fact that Pope’s self-promotion through these poems replaces Horace’s fundamentally self-deprecating verse. The different titles under which Pope published his formal imitations echo this linguistic uncertainty. The first satire is “Imitated” (IV.1), the second “Paraphrased” (IV.51), and the “Sober Advice” which Pope disclaimed is published with the tag, “Imitated in the Manner of Mr. Pope” (IV.71), the two odes are given no tags at all, and Pope finally settles into calling the remainder of the poems

“Imitations.” While Richard Steiger shows that the eighteenth century was “a period notoriously lax about the consistent denotative use of words,”263 Pope’s struggle for an acceptable term here shows how important these words and their connotations were despite their wide range of use.

Pope’s use of older poems as models, criticized by both modern scholars and contemporaries, makes him hesitant in assigning a firm name to these imitations.264 He is uncertain “how far the liberty of Borrowing may extend” and for that reason does not want to classify them as originals (Letter to Walsh, 2 July 1706, I.19). But Pope needs to foreground the connection between his poems and Horace’s in order for the poems to succeed. His declaration that the second satire is “Paraphrased” attempts to find a middle path between calling it a translation and the exaggerated label of parody he uses in his letter to Swift. The text is, Pope seems to admit, not altered enough to be a formal imitation, but he refuses to call it a translation

263 Richard Steiger, The English and Latin Texts of Pope’s Imitations of Horace (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988), 7. 264 Richard Terry, “Pope and Plagiarism,” The Modern Language Review 100.3 (2005): 594; Deutsch, Resemblance & Disgrace, 22.

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and settles on the word which he must know that Dryden used for interpretations too free to be acceptable as translations.265

Pope’s unwillingness to write translations was offset by the increased “Dignity” of the connection to the ancients which formal imitation and translation offers and, which Pope had already exploited in his Homeric translations (IV.3). Horace was especially apt for Pope, who needed a defence after his “Epistle to Burlington” involved him in a scandal. As his enemies accused him of making “a wanton attack on one of his supposed benefactors,” Pope scrambled to disprove an attack that modern scholars agree he had no intention of making, and in so doing found himself working to defend his satires and the practice of writing satire itself.266

Pope published many of his imitations separately, and did not include the sort of defensive preface, simultaneously praising and denigrating originality, that he offered in his Iliad and his edition of Shakespeare. Indeed, Pope’s advertisement for the collected Imitations of

Horace is closest to that for the Dunciad, which initially promises to include “The Imitations of the Ancients. . . together with some of the Parodies, and Allusions of the most excellent of the

Moderns” as well as some of his original poems, insisting that his imitations do “the same thing in jest, which Boileau did in earnest, and upon which Vida, Fracastorius, and many of the most eminent Latin Poets professedly valued themselves.”267 Pope’s declaration that his models, the

Latin poets, only “professedly” prided themselves on writing translations, imitations, and conglomerations of foreign works shows Pope’s hesitation, but does not prevent him from taking part in the same practice.

265 Dryden, Works, IV.87. 266 George Sherburn, “‘Timon’s Villa’ and Cannons,” The Huntington Library Bulletin 8 (1935): 131-2; James R. Aubrey, “Timon’s Villa: Pope’s Composite Picture,” Studies in Philology 80.3 (1983): 327. 267 Alexander Pope, “Advertisement” in McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning, 88.

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Pope spoke of his first imitation from Horace “in a tone of disparagement” (IV.xiii), calling it “the work of two mornings” in a note to Jonathan Richardson and “a slight thing, the work of two days” in his letter to Caryll (18 Feb 1732/3, III.350 ; 8 March 1732/3, III.353). In later letters, Pope continues to insist on the shortness of his formal imitation and the speed of its composition, telling Caryll that though his friends “do not believe me when I speak truth,” he has written his second formal imitation in “much in the same space of time” as he did the first (20

March, 1732/3, III.358). This stands in stark contrast to the “Epilogue to the Satires,” which

Warton reports was “more diligently laboured, and more frequently corrected than any of our

Author’s compositions.” As was his usual practice, Pope sent his manuscript back to the publisher many times, and his friend and editor Warton reports that “Every line was written twice over” by the time his manuscript was finally published.268 The contrast between Pope’s self-presentation in the first and last of this series shows how his worry about the genre changed.

Instead of fearing that imitations are too low for him, Pope’s “Epilogue” shows him defending their virtue, morality, manliness, ability, and strength of conviction, the same concerns with which his Homeric translations were occupied.

Pope’s publication style, followed consistently in editions within his lifetime was to print

“the relevant portions of the Latin original,” facing his English verse.269 This style visually emphasizes his alterations even as he verbally downplays their craftsmanship. The “Imitations of

Horace” have no scholarly apparatus, but rely on visual differences to display their superiority to the original. While less overt, Pope’s alterations follow the pattern of inflating his reputation at the expense of the classical originals that he used in his translation of Homer. Commandeering

268 Joseph Warton, The Works of Alexander Pope (London, 1797), 298. 269 Mack, Alexander Pope, 566.

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Horace’s autobiographical elements and twisting them into straightforward positives in place of

Horace’s own self-deprecating poetry, Pope creates a flattering self-presentation. Even in his original “Epilogue to the Satires,” Pope continued the autobiographical pattern that he began in his first satire. Trying to reframe public opinion, he addresses criticisms directly in a dialogue with an unknown ‘friend, in which he reframes the worry about originality that has plagued his writing.

“Why now, this moment, don’t I see you steal?” his friend asks, quoting Horace himself as he accuses Pope of taking his imitations “from Horace,” rather than writing his own work

(IV.297). But the accusation of slavish copying soon reverses itself. “Horace,” Pope has his accuser say, “was delicate, was nice” (IV.298). This is a direct response to Lady Mary Wortley

Montagu’s accusation that while Horace “is delicate, is clear,” while Pope can only “coarsely rail” with veiled accusations.270 Pope puts her words in the mouth of his foolish ‘friend’ as an insult. Pope declares that “Bubo observes” that Horace “lash’d no sort of Vice,” but used euphemisms to shelter those he accuses. In fact, this is not Horace’s practice at all. While Horace does recommend using euphemisms in Satire 2.1, he commends this practice for use with one’s friends, the men of whom it can be said, “He’s a good man, none better.”271 Horace calls for poets to “assign just penalties to just offences,” and certainly does not scruple to use names both in praise and in blame.272 When Pope’s friend offers examples to support Horace’s difference from himself, therefore, Pope is not trying, as Niall Rudd suggests, to “assert his independence”

270 Montagu, Verses, 4. 271 Howard Erskine-Hill, Pope: Horatian Satires and Epistles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 172; Horace, Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), 35, 39. 272 Horace, Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry, 43; Niall Rudd, The Satires of Horace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 132-59.

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by portraying Horace as “a smooth, malicious toady.”273 Instead, Pope is agreeing with the accusation of theft and claiming that he prefers theft to the style, “So Latin, yet so English all the while” which loses satire’s pointedness and ability to wound (IV.304).

In this piece, Pope admits to being unoriginal, something he has already admitted in his previous translation. In his Homeric translations, Pope responds by balancing originality and literary judgement; here Pope balances originality with moral judgement, leading the dialogue away from writing into a discussion of the proper targets of satire, the “Vice and Folly” which

Pope accuses ‘friends’ like Lady Mary of trying to protect (IV.302). Pope does not attempt to defend his invention here not only because he is not attempting to create an original work but also because, by disclaiming ownership of the ideas he rephrases, he can avoid discussing his true fault in these satires – hubris. Pope admits to charges of copying, of harshness, even of cruelty to those who deserve it, and he uses these to distract readers from the pretension in lines like these, from the second of the dialogues that make up his “Epilogue to the Satires.”

Names, which I long have lov’d, nor lov’d in vain,

Rank’d with their Friends, not number’d with their Train;

And if yet higher the proud List should end,

Still let me say! No Follower, but a friend. (VI.318)

In lines like these, Pope’s defence against charges of flattery thinly veils a boast about the rank and quality of his friends, and his quick movement from there to a defence against the charge of merely flattering those who are his friends allows him yet more scope for puffing himself up. His verse follows virtue, he claims, but only that of the great. Pope “cannot stoop” to befriend the

“Number,” or the populace. Even “half the Greatest of these days” can barely hope “To ‘scape

273 Niall Rudd, “Pope’s Farewell to Horace: ‘Dialogue’ I, 1-22,” Translation and Literature 14.2 (2005): 244.

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my Censure, not expect my Praise,” in Pope’s formulation (IV.319). His quick shift from personal language to the more distancing “a Poet,” “the Muse’s friendship,” and the example of

“Virgil” shows his awareness that he has nearly overstepped his bounds (IV.319-20) and revealed to the reader his true purpose, which is not so much to satirize others as to praise himself.

Pope’s Audience

Despite scholarly interest in Pope’s self-presentation, comparatively little has been written about the ways in which readers responded to Pope’s self-fashioning strategies, especially his emphasis on judgement and morality in the Iliad and Odyssey. There are several reasons for this apparent oversight. The first is the difficulty, at a remove of nearly three hundred years, of creating a map of reader responses. Making Pope’s case more difficult is the virulent and personal nature of so much of the published material we have relating to him. These responses tell us little about how readers responded to Pope’s writings, however much they may add to our sense of the way contemporary literary society responded to him personally.

Disregarding, then, the portion of the reading populace who examined and wrote about

Pope’s books from a predetermined position of antagonism, a few sources remain to scholars wishing to examine Pope’s reading reception. Moving from the mocking reaction of Henry

Fielding to Pope’s readership to what the publication history can tell us about Pope’s readership itself, and ending with Spence’s scholarly response, this section examines the reactions of the public and publishers to Pope’s Homeric translations and his Collected Works to show how central a role the Homeric translations played in Pope’s reputation.

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When speaking in his position as the author, Fielding “stresses,” as Henry Power argues,

“his awareness that [Pope’s translation] is not the real thing,” drawing comparisons between

Pope’s translation and Homer.274 Thus he compares Sophia’s constancy and love to that of

Penelope in the Odyssey, mockingly pointing out the way that Homer ascribes her love to a desire for glory, and then firmly adding, “The English reader will not find this in the poem; for the sentiment is entirely left out in the translation” which, he implies, is all that the common

Englishman will read.275 This demonstrates a belief that knowing the original is a mark of superiority and that Pope’s translation was the real thing for some. “Pope’s Homer” offers a new conception of Homer himself, as literary readers mistake Pope’s views for Homer’s and illiterate readers mistake the translation for the original. Parson Adams, in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, is nearly thrown out as an illiterate imposter when he claims that although he has “heard great commendations of” Pope as a poet, he has “never read nor knew any of his works” not even his

Homer, which his interlocutor thinks is a necessary part of a clergyman’s education.276

After all, as Fielding shows in Tom Jones, even the common soldiers have read Homer in one translation or other. The most learned of them, a “worthy lieutenant,” speaks of “Pope’s

Homer” and Pope’s rather than Homer’s comparison between soldiers and geese. The less learned French soldier, who speaks an abominable mixture of French and English, claims no acquaintance with Homer but says he remembers the Greeks and Trojans very well, for he read them at school in “Madam Daciere,” Pope’s greatest rival. Only the complete ignoramus, who

274 Henry Power, Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 42. 275 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, ed. Martin Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 202, n. 276 Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin Battestin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 196-7.

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cannot even pronounce Homer’s name but calls him “Homo,” has not read Homer, but all of these readers look at Homer through the lenses of modern translations.277

The most telling of these examples is that of the lieutenant, who cannot separate Homer from Pope but speaks as though Homer is a character in one of Pope’s poems. Pope’s plan to use

Homer to bolster his own manly, moral, and original character is here fulfilled in a way that he probably did not anticipate and would not have approved. These soldiers do indeed see the views that Pope espouses in his translations as his own, but not because he has successfully differentiated himself from Homer. Fielding’s common reader judges Pope by his translations because the common reader is not fully aware of Homer’s relationship to Pope’s work.

Neither Fielding nor his characters offer a judgement about the literary merits of Pope’s

Homeric translations. Fielding criticizes translation and writers whose goal is money, as Pope’s is often seen to be, in Amelia, where his Grub Street translator exclaims rapturously that Pope’s

Homer is “the best translation in the world” because of how much money Pope received from it, and Fielding is scathing on the subject of translators who are unfamiliar with their original or not equal to the task of understanding their source, but he has nothing to say about the quality of

Pope’s work.278 Indeed, Fielding seems to appreciate Pope’s ability as a poet and many of his sentiments. Tom Jones is sprinkled with quotations from Pope’s Essay on Criticism and praise for his judgement in the matter of taste.

While Fielding is careful to separate Pope from Homer and to point out the flaws in those who cannot tell the two apart, he also disapproves of Parson Adams’ position as someone who has never read Homer in anything but the original. While Adams’ ability to cite large passages of

277 Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, 372-3. 278 Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin Battestin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 326; Henry Fielding, “The Author’s Farce,” in Plays, ed. Thomas Lockwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), I.248-9.

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Homer by heart is impressive, it is also, as G. F. Parker claims, “in its utter unconsciousness of the immediate circumstances” and of “his actual contemporary company” more than a little absurd.279 It would have been more appropriate, under the circumstances, for Adams to abandon his pure Homeric simplicity and to quote from “Pope’s Homer” rather than Homer’s Greek, but it would also have shown a greater ability to recognize and adhere to the standards of the modern day than Adams possesses. Fielding, whose Adams illustrates many of the difficulties Pope sees in Homer, seems to approve of Pope’s translations so long as readers realize that he is not

Homer.280 What Fielding’s comments show, however, is that for many readers Pope was indeed

Homer, and that Fielding does not approve.

Pope may not have approved of the popular conception of his works either. McLaverty deals at length with the way that Pope manipulated his published works in order to give himself

“the status of a classical author,” writing to his booksellers about “the beauty of the Impression,” and insisting that pieces be “made to match in colour & Size” so that his published books look like a collected set.281 He took care to arrange copyright terms with his booksellers so that he retained control over future publications, using them to create his own collected edition of his

Works in 1717.282 But while Pope intended his focus to be on himself, and claimed to prefer original writing, his market did not always agree. Even before his death, Pope succeeded in becoming one of the great literary figures of his age, and during the mid-eighteenth-century process of canon formation, Pope figured prominently next to Milton as a part of the English poetical canon.

279 G. F. Parker, “‘Talking Scripture out of Church’: Parson Adams and the Practicality of Translation,” Translation and Literature 14.2 (2005): 182. 280 Parker, “‘Talking Scripture,” 183, 185. 281 McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning, 46; Alexander Pope to Tonson the younger, The Literary Correspondence of the Tonsons, ed Stephen Bernard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 232, 280. 282 Foxon and McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, 47.

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But when the Foulis brothers began their series of English poets in 1766, they followed

Milton’s Poetical Works first with Pope’s translations, advertised as “Pope’s Homer’s Iliad and

Odyssey” and only later with Pope’s Poetical Works. This order can be ascribed partially to the

Foulis brothers’ uncertainty about what type of series they were in the process of creating.

Although they began by advertising the Iliad to be printed “in the same Size as Milton’s Poetical

Works,” implying that they were in the process of publishing a series of English writers, their next advertisements combine the Iliad and the Odyssey into a group of ‘ANCIENT GREEK

HISTORIANS’ to which they later add Milton, and it is not until 1769, two years after they began to advertise Pope’s translations, that they add Pope’s Poetical Works along with a promise to add Dryden’s Virgil to the series.283

The progression of this series shows how these publishers viewed the English writers.

Pope’s separation of original from translated works prevails, but the order and titles of the works suggests that the Foulis brothers subscribed to Dryden’s belief that English writers gain their reputations through classical connections. Although advertised as “Pope’s Translation of

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey,” the published books reversed the order of names, being titled “The

Iliad of Homer” and “The Odyssey of Homer” with “translated by Alexander Pope” in significantly smaller letters under the primary title and attribution.284 Pope’s name offers a major selling point, and so appears first on the advertisement, but the prestige of the work itself comes from its classical author, and the Foulis brothers find it easier to conceive of publishing a collection of Greek writers and historians than a collection of English texts.

283 Thomas Bonnell, The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765-1810 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 56-7. 284 Glasgow Journal (5-12 May, 1768), cited in Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 57; Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer (Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1771); Alexander Pope, The Odyssey of Homer (Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1768).

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The Foulis brothers’ focus on translations from classical writings may seem strange to modern literary scholars, most of whom find the original work of these authors to be more interesting than their translations, but this policy reflected the habits of the contemporary reading public. This is evident from the fact that, seven years after their series had ended, the Foulis brothers decided to reprint only one of Pope’s works – the Iliad.285 Evidently, they found a larger market for the Iliad, which was widely agreed to be the better of Pope’s two Homeric translations, than for his other works.

In 1770, Bell’s Works of the English Poets reflected a more modern conception of the works of Pope and Dryden. In this series, “Fragments of Ovid and Statius were admitted into

Pope’s works, but not his Homeric translations, nor Dryden’s Virgil.”286 Bell did include

Dryden’s translations from Horace, declaring rather facetiously that “‘The Translations which follow are foreign to the purpose of this Publication, which is confined solely to the Original

Poems of Mr. Dryden; but having a few spare pages toward the close of this volume, it is hoped the Reader will not be displeased to find these occupied by any thing from the hand of this inimitable Writer.”287 This claim clearly articulates a belief in a hierarchical movement from original to translated literature, if one that Bell felt it was acceptable to overrule when it suited him.

His public, however, was, as Thomas Bonnell writes, “Disappointed that Pope’s Homer and Dryden’s Virgil were to be left out” and “readers urged that they be added” to the series.288

Not wanting to disappoint his public, Bell promised that once his current series was finished he would make a “continuation of this work” which would include “all the eminent translations and

285 Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 65. 286 Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 102. 287 John Bell, The Poetical Works of John Dryden (Edinburgh, 1777), III.205. 288 Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 102.

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fugitive pieces of merit” which his readers desired.289 Although Bell never followed through on his promise, the desire for Pope’s translations to be included with the remainder of his works continued so strongly that in the 1790s, publishers Martin and Bain offered the translations “in volumes identical to Bell’s” so that readers could have a complete collection.290

While later publications of Pope’s work offer evidence of a popular response, they say little about the scholarly reaction to Pope’s texts. This is most evident in the writings of Joseph

Spence, a rising author with no apparent connection to the controversies in which Pope embroiled himself, who published the anonymous An Essay on Pope’s Odyssey: in which some particular Beauties and Blemishes of that Work are consider’d, possibly the earliest attempt at a purely literary criticism of Pope’s translation. This measured response, which mixes judicious criticism with overall approval, won him Pope’s friendship and the approbation of his university, leading to his appointment as a Professor of Poetry at Oxford.291

Spence offers a piece that is not only anonymous but hides behind the fiction that his dialogues are merely a record of what is “chiefly [the] thoughts” of two other distinguished gentlemen (Spence I.a9). Although he cannot have hoped to preserve his anonymity for long in eighteenth-century England, Spence removes himself as much as possible from the conflict over personalities, asking readers to focus purely on the texts before them. Nineteenth-century writers, after Pope had fallen from favour, suggested that Spence wrote his Essay, which falls rather on the side of praise than blame, in an attempt to curry favour with Pope.292 Spence himself told

Warburton in a private note that although his Essay was “not so blunt and ill-natured” as other

289 Morning Post (24 July, 1777), cited in Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 103. 290 Bonnell, Most Disreputable Trade, 103. 291 Baines, Critical Guide to Alexander Pope, 28; Austin Wright, Joseph Spence: A Critical Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 28, 33-34. 292 George Saintsbury, History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1902), II.454-5; Thomas R. Lounsbury, The Text of Shakespeare (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1906), 194.

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criticisms it was “blunt, & rough” enough that he “did not care to be known” by Pope, and tried his best to hide his identity.293 Although Spence allowed Pope to look over the manuscript of his second book, Spence does not invariably follow Pope’s suggestions, and the majority of

Spence’s criticisms of Pope were permitted to stand.294 It would be unfair to conclude that

Spence is entirely unbiased, but this stance together with his attempt to blend praise and criticism, suggest that he is attempting to write an impartial response to the text, and that his comments reflect the real concerns of his era.

Spence’s primary concern is the uncertain authorship of the Odyssey, and he insists that the judicious reader can clearly distinguish that, although “Mr. Pope is not the sole Translator,”

Pope “gives the finishing stroke to everything” (Spence I.a6-a7). Therefore, he decides, it is fair to ascribe the work as a whole to Pope, and to let his seconds take silent pleasure in passages that pertain to them. An Essay on Pope’s Odyssey responds reservedly but positively to Pope’s alterations to his author, praising him for the “improvements” he makes to Homer’s “coarse, rustick Dialect” but also hesitating over whether it is really proper to alter Homer’s sense, even if a direct translation would be “unpolite and even shocking” (Spence I.49-50) Spence finally decides against Pope’s substantive changes to Homer’s text, but approves Pope’s alterations to

Homer’s language. Spence criticizes Pope’s shift from “low” to more “decorous” language only because it does not go far enough, and he includes a long discussion of the “Lownesses” in

Pope’s translation (Spence I.105). Spence especially approves Pope’s habit of “Transferring

Beauties” from other texts into Homer’s, noting “how he introduces the Elegance of Virgil,” as well as the beautiful phrases of “Dryden, Addison, Milton, and several others of the most

293 Joseph Spence, Egerton MS 1960, in Arthur E. Case, “Pope, Addison, and the ‘Atticus’ Lines,” Modern Philology 33.2 (1935-36): 187-93. 294 Wright, Joseph Spence, 11.

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celebrated Moderns” and makes good use of “Expressions borrowed from our Translation of the

Sacred Writings” (Spence I.86, II.13, I.94, 96-7).

Moreover, Spence notices and admires the way that Pope changes Homer to fit the moral values of eighteenth-century England. He admits that he had expected the translation’s morals to contain “Improvements from Mr. Pope” and that he approves of these changes, despite preaching a general policy of faithfulness to the original (Spence II.105). He especially approves of Pope’s

“Sententious passages and moral reflections,” which are much more clearly drawn than in the original Greek, and which shows that Pope’s bid for a moral reputation was both expected and at least partially successful (Spence I.87).

Although he finds much to criticize, Spence’s primary response is praise. In some places, he claims, Pope’s version is “enliven’d and improv’d” rather than simply “well translated,” which is “too narrow a commendation” for a translation that so clearly attempts to improve on its original (Spence I.81). While Spence does not always agree with Pope’s alterations, he is generally in harmony with the sentiment that actuated those changes, and he believes that they

“serve to establish a poet’s moral character,” exactly as Pope intended (Spence II.108). Whether he approves or disapproves of a particular change, therefore, the very expressing of the dilemma which Pope faces: to keep Homer’s words when they go against contemporary morals, or to make Homer’s heroes into “the most accomplish’d, finest Gentlemen in the world,” shows that

Pope’s project succeeded. He may not have created the perfect translation, but he convinced at least one countryman that he was agreeable to the tastes of educated men and that he knew better than Homer did what makes a gentleman (Spence I.50, 95).

This claim is supported by the reception which Spence’s text received. During the eighteenth century, while Pope’s reputation remained contested, Spence’s work was almost

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universally admired. Although Johnson complained in his Lives that Spence’s “learning was not very great,” yet he admitted that “His criticism . . . was commonly just” and his Essay on Pope’s

Odyssey an accurate commentary on that poet.295 Joseph Warton, in 1797, offered much less mixed praise when he claimed that “no critical treatise [is] better calculated to form the taste of young men of genius” than Spence’s Essay.296 The market was nearly as kind to Spence as the critics. A second edition was called for only a year after the first, and ten years later Spence signed a contract with Dodsley for a third edition.297 Although no other full-length responses to

Pope’s Homeric translations exist, these responses, together with the Oxford position which

Spence was granted soon after the Essay’s publication, indicate popular approval of Spence’s observations, which is echoed in contemporary works such as the Lives of Cibber and Johnson and Addison’s Freeholder.298

After Life of Pope’s Translations

As these examples show, Pope’s literary reputation rested largely on his translations, and despite what his enemies claimed, his bids for increased manliness, morality, and connection with the ancients resonated with his readers. When James Thomson remembered Pope in his

Seasons, he complimented Pope’s “self-cultivation as the virtuous recluse or Horatian happy man” which Pope had emphasized in his Imitations, and “the enduring Song” of his life, but

295 Johnson, Lives, IV.31. 296 Warton, Works of Alexander Pope, I.xxxvi. 297 British Museum, Eagerton MS 738, cited in Wright, Joseph Spence, 28. 298 Cibber, Lives, V.242-4; 257-8; Johnson, Lives, IV.31; Joseph Addison, The Freeholder 40, 7 May 1716.

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mentions only one of Pope’s literary works – his Homer.299 Thomson judges that it is Pope’s

Homer that wins him a place on “the Muses’ Hill.”300 Although Thomson does not view Pope’s

Homer as equal to the original, he believes that it is these translations that make Pope one of the giants of literature.

Pope’s epitaph also emphasizes his translations, coming to a triumphant conclusion in the words, “being without a Rival in his own Age, [Pope] imitated and translated, with a Spirit equal to the Originals, the best Poets of Antiquity.”301 The conception that Pope’s translations show him among the best of the classical poets, shows a merging of Dryden’s belief that translation would lift him out of the ranks of the mere English poets and Pope’s attempts to set himself up against his classical models. Although Pope’s implicit claims to have bettered his originals was rarely accepted, the responses shown in this chapter demonstrate that Pope succeeded in two out of his three attempts. He established himself as a manly and a moral man, but the belief in his derivative nature continues to this day, and his best translations garnered more favourable attention from his literary contemporaries than did his original works. Even Samuel Johnson, leader of literary taste after Pope’s death, offers much stronger praise for “that poetical wonder, the translation of the Iliad; a performance which no age or nation can pretend to equal” than he does for Pope’s original works.302

The ambivalence which Pope felt about his editorial focus and his translations created many of the problems that he hoped to solve. His desire to be seen as the sole translator and primary creator of the Odyssey robbed Pope of the prestige he could have had as the editor of a multiple-hands translation. Instead, he attempted to claim full responsibility and faced a scandal.

299 James Thomson, The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 230. 300 Thomson, Seasons, 230. 301 Mack, Alexander Pope, 618. 302 Johnson, Lives, IV.72-3.

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His desire to be seen as a scholar and not an editor robbed him of the ability to create a popular reinvention of Shakespeare. Instead, he attempted to present a scholarly edition and was mocked for his eagerness to alter his original. His greatest success, his translation of Homer’s Iliad, emphasizes the changes he made to his original, accepting and flaunting his position as translator and editor.

Pope and Dryden both used their translations to establish and cement their literary reputations, but Pope instituted a change in the publication and focus of translations. Pope began by following the pattern that Dryden had set, submitting his short translation for the judgement of both bookseller and public in a group of similar poems by other hands. In fact, his first published poem appeared in one of the Tonson Miscellanies, but he ended by setting the standard for self-publishing in his day. Moreover, while Dryden popularized the “multiple hands” style of translation and its cousin the miscellany, Pope began to turn the focus back toward single-author texts, using even his most famous translations as a way to talk about himself. This reading of

Pope’s self-fashioning not only establishes the centrality of the Homeric translations to Pope’s reputation during his life and after his death, it also highlights some of the primary themes which he dealt with throughout his life. Responding to constant accusations of unmanliness, theft, plagiarism, and immorality, Pope showed his mastery of the contrasting virtues through his most prized literary device: his judgement.

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Chapter 3 Haywood: Consistency of Purpose

From the beginning of her career in 1719, Haywood struggled with an unstable reputation. Even after her death, her image has varied drastically. She has been portrayed as an emotional moralist, an unrepentant scandal-monger, and a reformed pornographer. In the twenty- first century, her story is being revised yet again by the current generation of scholars. While still representing the novels she wrote at the end of her life as her best and most mature work and her primary output as amatory fiction, scholars are increasingly taking into account her secret histories, her pamphlets, and her political works. Feminist approaches, beginning with Walter and Clare Jerrold (1929), have reclaimed Haywood as a writer who thrived in the steamy underground of Grub Street, writing in genres that more conventionally respectable authors would not touch and creating a place for herself outside conventionally acceptable female discourse. More recently, the apparent contradictions of Haywood’s heterogeneous career have become a focal point for scholars. Paula Backscheider describes Haywood’s career as standing for “the nexus and the point of tension between a number of things — the transgressive, outspoken woman and the moral, admonishing woman writer, between amatory fiction and the new novel,” a comment which demonstrates a worrying tendency to see her as a writer divided, separating her novels into early scandal fiction and later moralistic work.303 Using her translations as case studies, this chapter attempts to reconcile Haywood’s dichotomous writings, demonstrating how, throughout her career, she attempts to establish and maintain a reputation based on a stable moral self-representation. Her books balance a progressively positive depiction

303 Paula Backscheider, “The Shadow of an Author: Eliza Haywood,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11.1 (1998): 80.

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of female sexuality and independence with a firm insistence on sexual fidelity, contractual obligation, and marital compromise. These works not only, as scholars increasingly recognize, sought to improve the situation of the women they entertained, but also portrayed Haywood within a constant moral and social milieu.304

Backscheider’s essay, “The Story of Eliza Haywood’s Novels: Caveats and Questions,” argues that the story of her conversion is troubled by a continuous “participation in hegemonic processes” and a desire to raise questions of “pathology, personality, and evil.” Although, two years after her portrayal of Haywood as divided between “transgressive” and “moral,”

Backscheider recognizes the problematic nature of this story, her work does not closely examine the false dichotomy the story creates between Haywood’s moralistic and amatory fiction.305 Even

Kathryn King, whose work questions the scandalous nature of Haywood’s early amatory productions, separating them from the intentionally shocking personal attacks that appear in her secret histories, views Haywood’s anonymous publications as attempts to separate her works into more and less polite groups. By following the different translations she carried out during her career and examining her advertisements and the varying quality and price points of her works, I argue that Haywood’s moral and social claims were part of a single rather than a divided self- representation. Recognising that, despite differences of genre and form, Haywood’s books demonstrate a consistent vision of her ideal moral and social behaviour helps to explain her continual shifts from moralizing to entertainment, and creates a more holistic understanding of her life and works.

304 Kathryn King, A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 91. 305 Backscheider, “Shadow of an Author,” 80; Paula Backscheider, “The Story of Eliza Haywood’s Novels: Caveats and Questions,” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on her Life and Work, ed. Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 11, 42.

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The perceived divide between her early scandalous and late moral fictions can be traced back to an unfortunate tendency in early scholarship to take Pope’s accusations in the Dunciad as reflecting both her life and her literary output. George Whicher’s 1915 Life and Romances of

Mrs. Eliza Haywood rescued her from obscurity despite his feeling that “with the passing of

Ramillies wigs and velveteen small-clothes the popularity of her novels vanished once for all.”

This book offered a valuable opening for Haywood studies by placing her within the history of the novel, but it also uncritically accepts several claims which still trouble scholars today, including the idea that she abandoned her erotic writing to re-invent herself as a Richardsonian moralistic novelist.306 Richetti’s 1969 Popular Fiction Before Richardson encourages scholars to understand Haywood as an accomplished literary figure, examining the sophisticated techniques she used to create characters and interest her readers in her social and moral programs, but leaves her situated firmly among “the lower reading classes” when, as this chapter shows, she aimed many of her publications, and especially her early translations, at a higher-class audience. While never literally entering either the French or the English court, Haywood encouraged readers to think of her as though she was part of that social world, and she strove to attract noble and even royal readers.307 By emphasizing similarities between herself and the authors of her source text,

Haywood attempted to create a narrative of acceptance, implying that her books were commonly read by the noble ladies of the court and would be easily accepted by nobles such as those her dedications addressed.

Haywood’s work to position herself as an accepted author is contrary to the scholarship of the 80s and 90s, when feminist writers like Deborah Nestor emphasized her former

306 George Frisbie Whicher, The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915), vii. 307 John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Walter and Clare Jerrold, Five Queer Women (London: Brentano’s Ltd., 1929), 210.

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disenfranchisement and celebrated her new place in the English canon, rejecting “official histories of the novel [which] ignore Haywood’s contribution.”308 Since this period, she has

“received much needed critical attention,” and her works are accepted as an important part of the development of proto-feminist literature and the rise of the novel.309 Although her books are still considered “forerunners” of later, and implicitly better novels, her shorter works have appeared in canonical anthologies and book lists since the mid-1990s.310 As late as 1992, Ros Ballaster could claim that “Haywood did not indulge in any form of political journalism,” a statement which rediscovered political periodicals such as the 1746 Parrot show to be incorrect.311 This newly complex picture of Haywood is encouraging closer examination of the scanty biographical details of her life. Scholars like Elizabeth Kraft and Kathryn King now challenge the idea, accepted by early scholars of Haywood, that she was crushed by Pope’s attack on her in the

Dunciad and responded by shifting from emotional, descriptive, amatory fiction to more

Richardsonsian moralizing romances.312

Questioning the standard narrative that Haywood was shamed into altering her style has led some scholars to adopt the cynical view that she shifted away from amatory fiction near the end of her life in a purely mercantile move. This view, which Clara Reeve first presented in her

1785 Progress of Romance, presents Haywood as operating purely from mercenary and

308 Deborah Jean Nestor, “Women’s Discourse and the Construction of the English Novel, from Eliza Haywood to Jane Austen” (PhD Diss., University of Michigan, 1993), 8. 309 Dwight Douglas Codr, “A Store Yet Untouched: Speculative Ideologies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2005), 72. 310 B. G. MacCarthy, The Female Pen: Women Writers and Novelists 1621-1818 (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 13, 212, 194. 311 Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 156; Patrick Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), 490-2. 312 Elizabeth Kraft, Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814: In the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 88.

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commercial motives, removed from literary and artistic concerns.313 King, for example, argues that Haywood moved away from amatory fiction toward a more Richardsonian style in response to new market pressures and her consistent desire for recognition.314 Catherine Ingrassia also sees Haywood’s goals as largely mercenary, describing her early attempts to solicit noble

“patron-subscribers,” and the relatively high quality of her first translation, but claiming that her aim was merely “to benefit from the financial opportunities available in an increasingly commercialized literary marketplace,” a claim which ignores her attempts to use noble patrons and subscribers both to financially support her and to position her works within an upper-class literary society. 315 Like other authors of the time, Haywood’s writing was driven by a variety of motives both pecuniary and social. Just as Dryden’s translations are both lucrative sources of income and important parts of his reputation-building strategy, Haywood’s writing demonstrates the complexity of her motives, which incorporate monetary need, proto-feminist concerns, and a desire to be known by upper-class society.

This chapter argues that her literary shifts were not as dramatic as these authors assume.

As King suggests, Haywood always hankered after fame, and the shape which her self- promotion took in her later works was not significantly different from that of her early publications. Combining literary and book-historical methodology, this chapter uses extant copies of her translations and other books, with special reference to Patrick Spedding’s recent and monumental, if contested, bibliography, to show how both Haywood’s erotic and her didactic translations demonstrate a consistent elitist and moralistic focus throughout her

313 Backscheider, “Eliza Haywood’s Novels,” 19. 314 King, Political Biography, 30. 315 Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 80-81.

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career.316 Although the lack of information about Haywood’s life and her practice of anonymous and pseudonymous publication means that her canon is necessarily speculative, Spedding’s bibliography is the most recent and comprehensive summary of her works. Leah Orr is one of several scholars raising questions about Spedding’s attributions, but her arguments are, as she herself admits, not definitive, nor do they question the specific works discussed in this study.317

Instead, the difficulty of determining authorship supports my argument that the division of

Haywood’s works into moral and scandalous categories needs to be questioned. She used varying levels of anonymity, including publications that have her name on the title page, books which she signed in the dedication, books marketed as by the author of one of her known works, and books which appear completely anonymous, throughout her career in each of her genres, periods, and levels of publication quality. This calls into question the viability of dividing her writing by genre or content. Instead, I argue that she consistently endeavoured to present her works as part of court society, as promoting morality, and as part of a coherent authorial plan. By focusing on her translations as evidence of her self-presentation throughout her career, this chapter will offer a holistic view of Haywood’s oeuvre and her self-perception. Far from being incompatible or at odds with each other, I argue, Haywood’s erotic amatory novels, straight- laced moralizing prose, and pointed political satires followed consistent ethical, social, and moral strategies that can be traced throughout her long, productive career.

316 Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. Because this bibliography provides such an important reference point for this study, it has been cited parenthetically throughout this chapter. 317 Leah Orr, “The Basis for Attribution in the Canon of Eliza Haywood,” The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 12.4 (2011): 335-375.

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Who Wrote That? Reputation and Anonymity

Examining Haywood’s attempt to establish herself is complicated by a publication history which includes many works that appeared anonymously. In order to study her self- presentation, close attention must be paid to which books she put her name to and which she signed with a pseudonym or left unsigned. King divides Haywood’s works into different

‘brands,’ identified by what she calls “lateral attributions,” in which she identifies herself as “the author of” one of her better-known texts. It is true that fewer than half of her sixty-nine published books bear her name, while eight others are identified by lateral attributions, but by the end of her lifetime only five books that we know of remained unidentified.

While King’s image of Haywood brands is useful, her depiction of Haywood as trying to separate her amatory novels and her “high-toned Gomez translations” from both each other and

“the contaminations ensuing from” her “scandal narratives” must be problematized.318 Although her long series of translations from the French novels by Madeleine-Angelique de Gomez were taken from popular, well-known texts and given sophisticated French titles which set them apart from her vernacular offerings, Haywood maintained a unity between her publications through her thematic content and dramatic, romantic plots. The emotional and sexual intensity of her works varies, but her content consistently emphasizes women’s rights, proper behavior, morality, romance, and the restrictions her society placed on women. These similarities are frequently heightened by productions which publicize her authorship and concentrate attention on her moral values and upper class subjects. From the initial publication of the 1724 La Belle Assemblée,

318 King, Political Biography, 32-3.

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translated from Madeleine-Angelique de Gomez’s Journées amusantes, the advertisements for

Haywood’s texts connect her “ultra-polite” translation to her other works.

Haywood’s control over her publication and promotion can never be fully ascertained, a problem enhanced by the paucity of evidence, primary or secondary, on the authorship of literary advertisements.319 As early as 1996, critical work on advertising raised what has now become what Liz McFall calls “an increasingly embarrassing tendency within the academy for detailed analyses of advertising to be carried out without any reference to the production context.”320

Theoretical profiles of early advertising, examinations of placement and cost, and discussions of the percentage of a publisher’s outlay spent on marketing have begun to fill this gap. The first advertising agents can be traced, using letters, bills, and contemporary references, to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Terry Nevett argues that the earliest agents were Taylor and Newton, operating in 1786.321 Little evidence, however, remains for the authorship of earlier copy.

C. J. Mitchell argues that some “authors were closely associated with the production and marketing of their work,” not only correcting proofs and deciding on paper type and quality but also participating in the creation and distribution of advertising material.322 Christopher Smart, arranging for a 1746 publication, declares that “the advertisement may be carefully copied from the title page,” where he has written the information he wishes to distribute, and insists that the

319 James Tierney, “Advertisements for Books in London Newspapers, 1760-1785,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 30 (2001): 154. 320 Liz McFall, “What About the Old Cultural Intermediaries? An Historical Review of Advertising Producers,” Cultural Studies 16.4 (2002): 532. 321 Terry Nevett, “London’s Early Advertising Agents,” Journal of Advertising History 1 (1977): 15 –18. 322 C. J. Mitchell, “Women in the Eighteenth-Century Book Trades,” in Writers, Books, and Trade: an Eighteenth- Century English Miscellany for William B. Todd, ed. O M Brack, Jr. (New York: AMS Press, 1994), 36.

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book be advertised “only for three days & only in one paper each day.”323 While few authors left such clear records of their intentions, these examples demonstrate the existence of authorial intervention within advertising copy.

Advertisements of Haywood’s works offer consistent references to the aristocracy, as in the puff for La Belle Assemblée which insists that it was written “for the ENTERTAINMENT of the

324 KING,” and to the titles of her characters. These advertisements highlight the cautionary nature of works like The Fortunate Foundlings, which follows eighteenth-century conventions in claiming to offer both “Entertainment and Improvement.”325 The heightened emotion and focus on feminine concerns typical of Haywood’s work also appear in her paratexts and the stylistic similarities between the advertising copy for Haywood’s books throughout her career help to suggest that a single author may have been responsible for her marketing.

In 1724, Haywood and Cogan published identical advertisements to promote her 1742 translation of The Virtuous Villager. This book, published while Haywood was her own bookseller and distributor, is advertised by Haywood in the Champion, or Evening Advertiser on

March 18.326 Only two days later on Saturday, March 20, the same paper carries an identical puff for the book, only this time it is listed as “Printed for F. Cogan.”327 This duplication is not in itself evidence that Haywood provided Cogan with advertising copy. It could suggest that he saw her text, liked it, and copied the blurb for his own version several days later, or even that it was cheaper to reprint the same text than to reset the block. Even if she wrote this piece of advertising copy, that would not prove that she had similar input into the marketing of her other

323 Christopher Smart to Robert Dodsley, 6 Aug. 1746. The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley 1733-1764, ed. James E. Tierney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 100-1. 324 Daily Journal (London), August 28, 1742. 325 Daily Post (London), January 4, 1744, Issue 7610. 326 Champion, or Evening Advertiser (London), March 18, 1742; Issue 367. 327 Champion, March 20, 1742; Issue 368.

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publications. But it does suggest that booksellers preferred to use pre-written copy for their advertisements which she as the author may have been expected to supply.

The difference in textual style and emphasis between the advertisements she published during her time as a bookseller strengthen the suspicion that she depended on authors to provide their own puffs. The advertisements for the Virtuous Villager and the 1749 Letter from Henry

Goring, an original work by Haywood, demonstrate similarities that they do not share with the puffs that she published for Hatchett’s 1742 A Remarkable Cause on a Note of Hand and an unknown author’s 1744 The Humours of Whist, A Dramatick Satire. The Humours of Whist is particularly interesting because it appeared in a succession of advertisements from January 10th to 13th, and over this period its text changed. The original text read as follows

The Humours of Whist, A Dramatick Satire. As acted at White’s, and other

Coffee-Houses and Assemblies. Founded on a late notorious Fact, and very

proper to be had in all Families of Condition, as a necessary Caution to the Youth

of Both sexes.328

But in later versions, the second sentence is expanded to “Founded on three well-known Facts: 1.

The Case of a noble Lord’s Son. 2. That of two celebrated Fair Whist-Players, near Hanover

Square. 3. That of the Son of a certain Alderman,”329 and the reference to its potential audience is removed. These changes bring the text more closely into line with advertisements for Haywood’s books. While some puffs for her scandalous secret histories, like her 1726 Court of Caramania, focus more on physical format than content, the majority of the advertisements for her novels, like her 1744 The Fortunate Foundlings, 1724 Memoirs of a Certain Island, and the 1725 Lady’s

328 Daily Advertiser (London), January 10, 1744; Issue 4050 329 Daily Advertiser, January 12, 1744; Issue 4052.

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Philosophers Stone, tended to focus on the social status of the characters and the author.330 The advertisement for her pamphlet Letter from Henry Goring, which was published anonymously and circulated to be sold in other bookshops, shows how the changes echo the style she used throughout her early career.

A Letter from H___ G___G, Esq; one of the Gentlemen to the Young Chevalier,

and the only Person of his own Retinue that attended him from Avignon in his

late Journey thro’ Germany and elsewhere. Containing many remarkable and

affecting Occurrences which happened to the P___ during the Course of his

mysterious Progress. To a particular Friend.331

In contrast to Haywood’s emotional and social description, which neatly avoids open discussion of the dangerous political content of the work, Hatchett’s puff, below, demonstrates his immediate legal and political concerns.

A Remarkable Cause on a Note of Hand, tried in the COURT of CONSCIENCE,

Anno 1741, by a special Jury; wherein B____n D____n, Esq; was Plaintiff, and

W____m H___t, Defendant. Made public, by order of the Court, for general

Introduction, and address’d in Particular

To the Worthy Citizens of YORK.332

While the description of Hatchett’s books is dictated in part by its legal conceit, its lack of particulars, address to a specific group of readers, and open participation in a contemporary quarrel between private persons all set it apart from Haywood’s advertisements for her own works. Haywood’s advertisements, like her texts, often focus on class connections. In novels and

330 Daily Journal, September 24, 1726; Issue 1777; Daily Gazetteer (London), January 26, 1744; Issue 3089; True Briton (London), January 24, 1724; Issue LXVIII; Daily Post, January 22, 1725; Issue 1662. 331 London Evening Post (London), November 28, 1749 - November 30, 1749; Issue 3445. 332 Champion, April 3, 1742; Issue 372.

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pamphlets like A Letter from Henry Goring, this interest shows in her descriptions of her subjects. While Hatchett’s puff buries the title of his antagonist in the middle of his text and claims no title for himself, Haywood’s puts her protagonist’s name in her title and emphasizes his status as a “Gentleman” and as an attendant to the young Prince Charles. The alterations to the ad for The Humours of Whist work to do the same, inserting a reference to “a noble Lord’s

Son,” to “celebrated” women, and to the son of an “Alderman,” in each case highlighting the social rank and connections of its subjects.

Advertisements for her translations often highlight the court connections of her original author, as in the Virtuous Villager, in addition to the rank of her subjects.

THE VIRTUOUS VILLAGER; or VIRGIN’S VICTORY. Being the Memoirs of a

very great Lady at the Court of France Written by Herself. In which the Artifices

of designing Men are fully detected and exposed; and the Calamities they bring

on credulous believing Women, are particularly related.

Translated from the Original, by the author of LA BELLE ASSEMBLEE

In vain are musty Morals taught in Schools,

By rigid Teachers, and as rigid Rules,

Where Virtue with a frowning Aspect stands,

And frights the Pupil from her rough Commands;

But charming Woman can true Converts make,

We love the Precepts for the Teacher’s sake;

Virtue in them appears so bright, so gay,

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We hear with Transport, and with Pride obey.333

Although the Virtuous Villager and A Letter From Henry Goring are very different, and the

Virtuous Villager was given much more space, the puffs display a similar focus on class and a similar type of emotional specificity. As she does for A Letter from Henry Goring, Haywood promises readers a specific emotional experience. The Letter directly promises to be “remarkable and affecting” while the Villager more subtly offers a picture of “Artifices” and “Calamities,” clearly referencing the emotional upheavals of amorous fiction, while identifying the book as a

“charming,” “bright,” and “gay” Woman who will teach virtue in a way that inspires “love” in readers. By telling readers the type of event that her book deals with and indicating the response she intends to elicit, Haywood sets up an expectation that her books will create a specific type of experience. In contrast to Haywood’s experiential emphasis, Hatchett’s advertisement shows clear factual specificity, and its reference to a “COURT of CONSCIENCE” promises to appeal to the crowd’s morality, but neither this ad nor that for The Humours of Whist tell audiences about the emotional tone that their pieces will take.

Following the supposition that Haywood’s marketing strategies worked toward a pairing of emotionality and “Virtue,” I argue that her advertisements, whether published under her name or not, helped to create the reputation she desired. Despite the number of her works published without her name on them, Haywood’s anonymity was usually temporary. While fewer than half of the first editions of her sixty-nine published books bear her name, the majority of her books were acknowledged in advertisements, discussed in newspapers, or issued as part of a collection within a few years of their publication, and many others use lateral attribution to establish their

333 Champion, March 18, 1742.

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position within her canon. Other works were revealed to be Haywood’s in subsequent editions or are referred to as hers in contemporary works, such as book lists, so that despite a general policy of initial anonymity, all but five of her works were recognized as Haywood titles by the end of her life (Spedding 160-221).

Haywood’s five truly anonymous works were commissions. Her 1724 A Spy Upon the

Conjurer was published anonymously and authorship was first attributed to Haywood in 1824, but her name appeared in later eighteenth-century editions as a reviser (Spedding 143). The

Dumb Projector (1725), The Sopha (1743), Memoirs of a Man of Honour (1747), and Dalinda

(1749) are the other anonymous works whose authorship was established after the eighteenth century, as opposed to the many pseudonymous works whose authorship was publicly recognized during her lifetime. Phyllis Guskin calls A Spy Upon the Conjurer and The Dumb

Projector “advertising copy in epistolary form.”334 They promoted the famous eighteenth- century seer and magician Duncan Campbell, and it is hardly surprising that Haywood did not associate her name with these pieces.

Dalinda, The Sopha, and Memoirs of a Man of Honour have a more complex relationship to her other works. Dalinda is a scurrilous secret history that was attributed to Haywood in court when she was arrested and questioned about her Jacobite pamphlet on Henry Goring (Spedding

520-3). It is uncertain why this book was rarely counted among her works, unlike her other pseudonymous secret histories, unless the lack of attribution stems from a lack of interest in the book. The Sopha, contrarily, is an erotic book that Haywood found herself commissioned to translate at very short notice in conjunction with William Hatchett. She almost certainly agreed

334 Phyllis J. Guskin, ed., Clio: The Autobiography of Martha Fowke Sansom (1689-1736) (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 49 n19.

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to participate in the translation in part because of the high rate of pay she was offered, estimated at £2 2s every four to seven days (Spedding 375), a rate of pay which might have been intended to compensate her for the possibility of discovery. This book, which has been described as “one of the most obscene works that have seen the light of day,” was a more openly and exclusively erotic story than her other texts, lacking the romantic and emotional connections for which

Haywood was best known. Further, this text was, according to Spedding, sold along with a naughty illustration of its contents, a sign to readers that its sexual content was its primary attraction (Spedding 372).

There seems to be less reason why she would not wish to acknowledge her 1747 commissioned translation of the Abbé Antoine François Prévost d’Exile’s Memoirs of a Man of

Honour. This French text was neither scandalous, like The Sopha, nor tied to commerce, like The

Dumb Projector, but Mary Helen McMurran suggests that its anonymity may be attributed to

Haywood’s “calculated” project of associating herself “with femininity, with Frenchness, and with novels,” while the Memoirs is a factual description of French modes of character.335 This is purely speculative, of course, but does suggest how unusual it was for one of her works to be truly rather than only apparently anonymous. Despite these five outliers, her anonymity was nearly always temporary, and rarely complete, as the example of La Belle Assemblée demonstrates. While King sees Haywood’s pseudonymity in this series as “cannily distinguish[ing] this ultra-polite offering from both the risqué amatory fictions that preceded and the scandal chronicles that would soon follow,” her authorship was openly known from at least the 1730s.336 Indeed, King elsewhere emphasizes Haywood’s intentionality in making her

335 Mary Helen McMurran, The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 89. 336 King, Political Biography, 33.

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authorship of her first scandal novel, Memoirs of a Certain Island, known in a form of “patron- stalking” that showed “that her talents, including a flair for personal abuse on exhibit in the preceding pages, were at their disposal.”337 This simultaneous self-advertising and apparent anonymity, I argue, shows Haywood capitalizing on the possibilities of anonymity but it also shows that she is not ashamed of these books despite their scandalous possibilities.

In one example of the complex web of interactions that reveal her identity, she used her advertisements to connect The Virtuous Villager to a previously-known work, La Belle

Assemblée. These works were published without Haywood’s name on either title page or advertisement, but she made her authorship public through other means. Her first step toward making her authorship of La Belle Assemblée known was in the marketing. In the Daily Journal for the day of publication, her publisher presented only two items as “This day published.”. La

Belle Assemblée was the first of these and its lengthy description, concluding with “Printed for . .

. without Temple Bar, and . . . in Pall Mall” was immediately followed by the legend, “Where may be had, The WORKS of Mrs. Eliza Haywood.”338 While not an admission of authorship, this creates an immediate link between acknowledged and unacknowledged texts that continues in later advertisements for her works. The puff for the 1725 pseudonymous translation, The

Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone, also includes a reference to the availability of her collection of

Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems, Memoirs of Baron de Brosse, and La Belle Assemblée, and only after these four works by Haywood are works by other authors mentioned.339 By creating a connection between her supposedly anonymous works and her recognized works, the

337 King, Political Biography, 37; King, “Of Grub Street and Grudges: Haywood’s Court of Caramania and Pope’s Ire,” Review of English Studies 67.281 (2016): 720. 338 Daily Journal, August 26, 1724; Issue 1123. 339 Daily Post, January 22, 1725; Issue 1662.

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advertisements that appear both in the newspaper and the final leaves of the published book helped to create a cohesive canon for Haywood.

Internal advertisements cannot be implicitly trusted, but her next link is more explicit.

We have two letters from 1728, a year after the publication of the second volume. These letters, sent to the Countess of Oxford and an unknown figure that Haywood calls “Your Honr,” are signed with her name although not written in her hand, and in these she claims authorship of La

Belle Assemblée (Spedding 166-7). In addition to these private letters, addressed to members of the nobility from whom she might have hoped for money or other forms of patronage, she took other steps to ensure that her wider audience was aware of her authorship. In 1732, the year after volume three of La Belle Assemblée was published, she took on the daringly sexual role of the

Lady Flame in Samuel Johnson of Chester’s The Blazing Comet and used the name of Madame de Gomez, author of La Belle Assemblée, as her pseudonym in advertisements for the play, while giving her real name in the published cast list. This connection complicates the picture King paints of a Haywood who separates her risqué and her respectable productions. The role of the

Lady Flame “verges on indecency” and the “publicity stunt” involved in claiming de Gomez, who is not recorded as ever having performed on the English stage, as the actor in this publication shows a crossover of roles that King fails to take into account.340 While Haywood certainly used her various pseudonyms to group her published works by type, there is no evidence that she strove for true anonymity in any but a very few cases, such as the frankly erotic translation of The Sopha. In fact, while she does, as King suggests, use lateral attribution to La

Belle Assemblée for her 1734 L’Entretien des Beaux Esprits, she appeared in The Blazing Comet

340 M. Heinemann, “Eliza Haywood’s Career in the Theatre,” Notes and Queries 20.1 (1973): 11.

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two years before the latter publication, which negates the possibility that she was still, if she had ever truly been, anonymous by the time of the second Gomez translation.

With so little biographical information available, it is not possible to say for certain why

Haywood chose her temporary anonymity. Anonymity was, as John Mullan argues, a complicated phenomenon in the eighteenth century, when “it is difficult to distinguish between an anonymous and a pseudonymous work” or to be certain of authorial intention in either temporary or long-term anonymity.341 Writers like Swift and Pope used anonymity to add spice to their reception, and Mullan argues that their anonymity was “more promotional than shy,” but although Haywood enjoyed the use of anonymity it seems unlikely that she was following Pope and Swift’s example in her publication of La Belle Assemblée.342 The long period of time which passed between initial publication and official public revelation of identity, and the fact that even after her stage performance La Belle Assemblée was never published with her name on the title page, suggest that she aimed for a gradual rather than a sudden and attention-grabbing revelation of her identity. But her willingness to use the Gomez name to promote one of her scandalous theatre roles in the middle of the publication of La Belle Assemblée, one of her most popular and most respectable works, and only a few years before the publication of the next book in the series argues against a desire to separate her career into more and the less respectable parts.

Indeed, La Belle Assemblée, which offers a modern spin on Boccaccio’s Decameron, acts as an argument for thinking of Haywood as a part of polite, upper-class society. The spin that she puts on her translation emphasizes this double purpose. While Haywood introduces her characters as “set above the Vulgar World” both morally and socially, the phrase that Gomez’

341 John Mullan, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 6. 342 Mullan, Anonymity, 17.

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original uses is “pour se passer du reste du monde” (to pass the rest of the world).343 Haywood not only adds the damning adjective “Vulgar,” she also changes the sense of “passer,” thus altering the sentence from a statement that the group had the physical resources necessary for their comfort and support to a declaration of social status.

The status that she claims for her characters helps to reinforce the story’s claim that love is a purifying power which strengthens the effect of a virtuous example. Both Gomez and

Haywood agree that love need not destroy the goodness in a man with “les dispositions nécessaires pour la vertu, qui profitera par elles de son éducation & de les exemples,” which

Haywood translates as “a Person born with a natural Disposition to Virtue, will improve his

Education and Examples” (Assemblée I.28; Journées I.15). But Gomez highlights the virtues that her ideal man will have, insisting that “l’ame noble et bienfaisante ne lui inspire que de grands sentimens” (the noble and beneficent soul can only be inspired by great sentiments), and that

“lorsque l’Amour viendra l’assujettir il ne s’offrira à ses regards que sous sa véritable figure: il ne fera que cimenter les principes de l’éducation” (when love comes to this subject, it never offers anything other than its true face: it does nothing but cement the principles of his education), while Haywood focuses on the power of love (Journées I.15). Ignoring Gomez’ description of her hero’s soul and sentiments, Haywood moves directly from the virtuous man to the time when “subdued by Love, [love] but strengthens the Principles he before adhere’d to”

(Assemblée I.28). While both agree that one can tell a good man by the fact that he wants to love virtuously, Haywood’s translation highlights the overwhelming power of love and its ability to reveal men’s true character. Her love does not merely come to a man, it subdues him, and her

343 Eliza Haywood, La Belle Assemblée (London, 1724), I.1; Cited as Assemblée; Angélique de Gomez, Les Journées Amusantes (Paris, 1737), I.1. Cited as Journées.

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shift from education to principles shows her belief that education, while important, can be overcome by inward virtue.

The emphasis that Gomez places on external aids to virtue, and Haywood’s rejection of them, appears most strongly in the inserted “Instructions” which are left to Julia by her mother.

Haywood’s translation closely follows Gomez as they discuss the perils of the “Virgin or

Widow-State” (Journées I.103) which Haywood emphasizes only slightly, changing Gomez’

“exposé à des accidens qui ne me paroissent pas moins dangereux” (exposed to accidents which seem to me no less dangerous) (Journées I.178) to “seems to me as much, or more expos’d to danger” (Assemblée I.103) than the wifely state. Both writers point out that there is no safe way for independent women to behave, but Gomez is much more strict in her advice. For those who do not wish to retire, Gomez counsels:

du moins je voudrois qu’elle choisît, dans les femmes les plus sages, celle qui lui

paroîtroit la plus capable de conserver sa réputation, & qui la regardant comme sa

mère, la mît à l’abri d’une médisance qui ne trouve toujours que trop à se

manifester. (at least I would have her choose the wisest woman, who seems the

most capable of conserving her reputation, and who she could regard as a

mother, she would give protection from the scandal that always finds a way to

manifest) (Journées I.178).

Herself a woman living alone, Haywood refuses to repeat such restrictive advice. Her ideal woman should guard herself carefully, and many of her books reveal the dangers of letting that guard down. But while she is willing to agree that for some women it is better to live retired from the world, she refuses to sanction the sort of retreat into childhood that is advocated in the original. Indeed, even Haywood’s call to retirement is less constraining than that of Gomez.

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Gomez’ mother suggests “la retraite; mais sans faire de vœux” (retirement without making vows)

(Journées I.178), implying that her young woman should go into a convent but as someone who is not bound to remain. Haywood’s “Retirement, but without entering into religious Orders”

(Assemblée I.103), suggests, on the contrary, that she advocates a retreat within the world rather than a retreat outside it.

This image of retreat might allow Haywood herself to claim retirement from the world, although her participation in the publishing world would make this a dubious claim. Certainly, many of her heroines attempt to flee from the cruel or disappointing world to a retreat where they will be safe, though, as Anadea learns in the 1724 The Fatal Secret, even removing to a “solitary place” in the country is no protection from rape.344 Although these women may stay hidden for a long time, there is no place which is completely safe from men’s wicked desires. Indeed the best and safest position, for Haywood and women like her, might be the one she portrays her narrators taking in works like The Female Spectator, which ran from1744 to 1746. In the company of virtuous women and men, like those on display in La Belle Assemblée and the

Spectator, but not mingling freely with others, a woman is shielded from the evils of the world without being either restricted by the presence of a guardian or removed from the chance to develop her intellect.

Although “femmes en général ne sont point sçavantes” (women in general are not scholars), both Gomez and Haywood agree that they “possedent la délicatesse des expressions & la facilité de bien écrire” (Journées I.210). Haywood strengthens the point, insisting that “the brightest Men of Learning often esteem their Decisions well enough to refer to them,” where

Gomez says only that these men “estiment quelquefois assez leur décision pour s’y rapporter”

344 Eliza Haywood, The Fatal Secret (London, 1724), 46.

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(sometimes esteem their decisions enough to report them) (Journées I.210). The events of the text support both Haywood’s and Gomez’ claims for the importance of female understanding.

Within the first volume of La Belle Assemblée, many of the long pieces of writing which are read to the company are by women and with a few notable exceptions these pieces are praised as both moral and witty, demonstrating feminine writing and virtue.

Given its emphasis on virtue and its determination to justify Haywood’s participation in literary society and her views of proper femininity, it is easy to see why authors like King would call La Belle Assemblée “ultra-polite.”345 But by separating this book from the other works by

Haywood which are advertised in its pages, we run the risk of ignoring the connections between her different styles of publication. The advertisement, in the pages of La Belle Assemblée, for an edition of her 1725 Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems must not be ignored or overlooked.

Although the Secret Histories does not contain the risqué Memoirs of a Certain Island, it does include the first and only known publication of Fantomina, one of her most daring and sexually adventurous stories. The connection between these demonstrates the dangers of speaking of her temporarily anonymous publications, like her 1719-20 Love in Excess and La Belle Assemblée, separately from the works she openly claimed from their initial appearance. The existence of the few works that can be proven to be hers but which were not publicly attributed to Haywood suggests that she was capable of hiding her authorship when she wished, and creates a clear separation between her actually and her temporarily anonymous publications. As so few of her pseudonymous works were unknown by the end of her lifetime, all of her known works, both her amatory novels and her more polite offerings, must be seen as part of her attempt at fashioning

345 King, Political Biography, 33.

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an identity and a reputation in the public eye and must be read carefully to reveal the different ways in which she understood and explained femininity, class, and morality.

Establishing a Reputation

Throughout this argument, Haywood is referred to as the primary agent in regard to her publications. This provides an easy and necessary shorthand for discussion, but it risks oversimplifying a situation that was, in reality, very complicated. Her interactions with booksellers fall into three main forms: she wrote books of her own choosing and sold them to a bookseller to print and distribute, she was hired by booksellers or other clients to write books that her client or bookseller then printed and distributed, and for a short period she wrote books that she distributed at her own shop.

Each of these interactions gives her a different amount of control over the finished work.

None offers her complete autonomy, and it is difficult to be certain which, if any, of her books were ideas which she presented to a bookseller and which were suggested to her by her publishers. At least eight of her works are known or believed to be commissions, and others, such as the series of books collected in the 1724 Works of Mrs Eliza Haywood, were agreed on by her bookseller before she began to write.346 Even when she owned her own bookshop, The

Sign of Fame, in 1741-2, there is no evidence to suggest that Haywood owned a printing shop.347

Some of the books she sold at her shop were printed primarily for her own sale, but others,

346 The Fair Captive (1721), A Spy Upon the Conjurer (1724), The Dumb Projector (1725), Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1725), The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Carmania (1726), The Dramatic Historiographer (1735), The Sopha (1743), and Dalinda (1749) are known or believed to have been commissioned. 347 King, Political Biography, 8.

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including The Virtuous Villager, were printed for a larger group of booksellers and publishers, who appear on different issues of the same edition (Spedding 366). Her role as a bookseller may have given her greater control over the finished product, especially in cases where she was financially responsible for the printing, but she was still subject both to the printer’s decisions and to the exigencies of trade.

As an author of the mid-eighteenth century, Haywood could expect to make some decisions about the title page, advertisements, and format of her publications, though she did not have as much control over typeface, format, illustration, and decoration as Pope demanded from his own booksellers. Although she was impecunious during some points of her life, both

Backscheider and King argue against the view of Haywood as impoverished. Backscheider claims that “Haywood could not have been the solitary, bedraggled hack peddling her works bookseller to bookseller that she is so frequently described to be” and there is no evidence to show that her financial situation was so dire as to make accepting commissions a necessity.348

King, examining a recently discovered advertisement for the sale of Haywood’s house and goods, argues that her “household items are not what one expects to find in the possession of someone thought to be chronically beset with pecuniary distress.”349 If she found a suggested job distasteful or felt that it would damage her reputation, this suggests, she could either refuse it or, as she appears to have done in the case of The Sopha, effectively conceal her authorship.

In addition, although she did not keep the role of bookseller for long, she succeeded in gaining the respect of the more established booksellers. These, as Ingrassia argues, viewed her as

“some sort of colleague, a person of the trade,” and allowed her a good deal of control over the

348 Paula R. Backscheider, introduction to Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood, by Eliza Haywood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xvi. 349 King, Political Biography, 101.

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appearance and publication of her works.350 Although Ingrassia focuses on her time as a bookseller, examining the language of fellowship other booksellers used toward Haywood when questioned over the publication of the Letter from Henry Goring, she argues that Haywood’s

“high level of involvement with the production of her works” is demonstrated by her “intensive and extended involvement in all factors of book production” during her brief tenure as a bookseller in 1741 and 1742 and her participation in distribution and production networks.351

She certainly kept a close eye on the proofs of her work, as is suggested by Elizabeth

Woodfall who, in testifying to Haywood’s authorship in court, claimed that she recognized

Haywood’s maid from 1726, when Haywood’s maid servant “came very often” with revised versions of “the proof sheets” for The Double Marriage (Spedding 753). These repeated revisions create a marked contrast to the prevalent idea that she published her writings as fast as she could scribble the words, leaving her bookseller or publisher to control the revisions, proofs, and formatting of her work. Her close attention to proofs was part of her shrewd assessment of her market, her ability to write to her audience, and her willingness to market her books to the most appropriate demographic.

Working within these constraints Haywood asserted her identity and established her reputation. Her first novel, Love in Excess, began as an anonymous octavo priced at the middle of the range for popular productions at one shilling (Spedding 90). This was an ambitious opening to her career, demonstrating confidence on the part of both Haywood and her publisher, and she moved quickly to capitalize on her success, putting her name on the title page of the second part of the novel and preparing to publish a new work with her name on the title page. At

350 Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender, 119. 351 Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender, 120.

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this point, she was an author on the make. She had succeeded in placing her name in the public eye, and she needed something to cement her reputation and establish herself as an author. She may even, as Spedding argues and she hints in the opening of the Letters, have succeeded in acquiring a patron who “encourag’d” her writing at this time (Spedding 99).352 At the same time, she needed to produce a work that would repay her readers for their support. Finally, she needed a publication that would signal her connections and place her among the writers who could circulate within what she continually refers to as the court (Assemblée I.iv, v).353

To fulfill all these needs Haywood turned, as Pope and Dryden had before her, to translation. She did not have the Latin or the Greek to attempt a translation from the classics, but she chose a well-known story to translate. Her translation of Edmé Boursault’s 1700 Treize

Lettres amoureuses d’une dame à un cavalier joined the popular genre of epistolary romance which, in England, was spurred by Sir Roger L’Estrange’s translation of the Portuguese Letters as Five Love-letters from a Nun to a Cavalier in 1678. Ros Ballaster claims that these letters were “taken to be the epitome of a natural rhetoric of passion” and that their effect “cannot be overestimated.”354 Early eighteenth-century romances took up the Portugese Letters with an eagerness similar to that with which a later generation embraced Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded, creating numerous continuations, responses, copies, and imitations.355 By 1721, when Haywood published her translation, the genre was established, popular, and respected.

Like Aphra Behn, whose politicized version of the same story first appeared in 1684 as

Love-Letters from a Nobleman to his Sister, Haywood chose a piece in the established and

352 Eliza Haywood, Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier (London, 1720), iii. 353 Champion, March 18, 1742. 354 Ros Ballaster, “Preparatives to Love: Seduction as Fiction in the Works of Eliza Haywood,” in Living by the Pen: Early British Women Writers, ed. Dale Spender (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), 63, n. 355 Ballaster, “Preparatives to Love,” 63.

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popular letter-writing tradition begun by L’Estrange, adding the legitimacy of tradition to her writing, and like Behn she transformed the text. Haywood’s finished work, a love-story and commentary on the uses and traditions of amorous letters, is very different from Behn’s intricate political commentary, but both writers chose a recognized tradition and used its popularity to drive their agendas. For Haywood, her immediate agenda was to establish her own reputation by publishing her first translation by subscription. This meant that her work had to be attractive to subscribers. Since her first book had been popular, she could hope that her name would draw some interest, but she could not count on being enough of a draw to attract the titled patrons she needed. Although Spedding points out that she did not gain enough subscribers to sell the final book at the price and quality she and her publisher first planned (Spedding 101), she succeeded in attracting 309 subscribers, many of whom had a title, and in realizing a profit, both great steps for a new author. Her name was now, through her public subscription list and promotions, advertisements, and publications, associated with the upper-class audience that she hoped to attract.

The subscription list shows her high aspirations. Publication by subscription was a popular contemporary method of gaining both money and reputation. This type of publication often relied on existing contacts. Pat Rogers argues that Mrs. Stanley, publishing by subscription only four years after Haywood’s Letters, “was not aiming at a general book-buying public, least of all one for works of literature,” but building on existing contacts in an attempt to rebuild the family fortunes.356 As Adam Budd shows, however, while Stanley used family contacts and

356 Pat Rogers, “Family, Kinship, and the Evidence of Subscription Lists: Dorothy Stanley and Arcadia Moderniz’d,” The Review of English Studies 66.275 (2015): 517.

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authors like Pope and Dryden played on existing reputations in their subscription publications, authors like Mary Barber attempted to use the same method to begin a literary career.357

Subscription publication required the author to be closely involved with the audience of her books, and the surviving letter soliciting subscriptions for this work demonstrates the immediacy of Haywood’s involvement with her noble readers (Spedding 100). In the final publication the names in the Letters are divided alphabetically rather than by rank. This ploy allows a smaller number of titles to be spread out over a longer series of pages, and also serves to conceal the lack of eminent names. If Haywood, like Stephen Duck, had the royal family on her list she would probably have imitated him in placing them at its head.358 Instead, although more than half of her subscribers had some sort of title, these were primarily courtesy or military titles and there is no evidence that she retained a supporting patron after this publication. She continued to seek aristocratic patronage in her dedications for some years, but her first translation was her only attempt at subscription work.

The price her bookseller, Chetwood, set on this work underscores the importance

Haywood placed on the Letters. While her initial, anonymous, publication of Love in Excess was sold at only one shilling and her publicly attributed second and third volumes, after the first had garnered applause, were priced at 2s, the publication of the Letters attempted to improve this price. Advertised at 3s “in Quires” or 5s “Bound in Calf, Gilt Back” (Bib 104), the book was finally issued at 2s, a significant drop from the ambitious plan for a 5s calf and gilt production.

The high quality and price of the initial advertisements reflected the class of clientele she and her publisher hoped to attract.

357 Adam Budd, “‘Merit in distress’: The Troubled Success of Mary Barber,” The Review of English Studies 53.210 (2002): 209. 358 Budd, “‘Merit in distress,’” 206.

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The belief that translation would sell better than original work is further revealed in the pricing of her next two publications. The 1721 play The Fair Captive, printed for Jauncy and

Cole, and the 1722 novel The British Recluse, published by Browne, Chetwood, and Woodman, were both priced at 1s 6d. Although Haywood’s publisher raised the price on her third novel, The

Injur’d Husband, which was part of the series on the Danger of Giving Way to Passion which she had promised would follow Love in Excess, the price on the next of these books, the 1723

Idalia, had dropped back to the 1s 6d that quickly became Haywood’s average sale price. This average remains relatively consistent during her career, although she moves from bookseller to bookseller and even publishes her own books for a short period. While this certainly demonstrates, as Spedding suggests, that she found it difficult to attain the kind of popularity or patronage that she desired, her repeated attempts to produce works for a higher-end market show her desire for increased prestige. Her trajectory from an anonymous publication that, while it was, as Kathryn King points out, bound and made handsomely, was no larger and priced no higher than the majority of her early works, to an “even more elegant” subscription work shows that she viewed translation as the type of work that would help her to break into the upper levels of the literary world to which she aspired.359

Haywood’s preface to the Letters offers yet more evidence of her high hopes for this work. Her claims of an “insignificant lowness” carry little conviction when followed by the assertion that the “unquestionable Judgement of those Persons who encouraged me to undertake the Translation” is “a sufficient Protection from whatever Malice or Ill-Nature might suggest.”360

Here she not only insists that the translation is good enough and supported by powerful enough

359 Kathryn King, “New Contexts for Early Novels by Women: The Case of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and the Hillarians, 1719–1725,” in A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, ed. Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005), 266. 360 Haywood, Letters from a Lady of Quality, iii-iv. Cited as Letters.

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patrons that its only criticism could come from “Ill-Nature,” but also turns her “lowness” into praise of the unknown patrons who had the wit to recognize her merit and exercise their judgement on her behalf.

In this context, Haywood’s assertion that she has taken so many liberties with her text that it would “appear to be more properly call’d a Paraphrase than a Translation” appears to be a boast, inviting her readers to examine the language of the text more closely (Letters iv). Her discussions of her work to “retrench” and “heighten” the “Beauties” of her text echo the conventional images that Pope uses when he speaks of Virgil “working up a more intractable language” to create the Aeneid from Homer’s Odyssey or his own “chimerical hope” of “raising and improving” the text.361 At the end of her preface, she clinches her position by assuming the same tone of lofty self-sufficiency that Pope increasingly used as he collected more enemies over the course of his career. It is telling that she concludes her short preface by saying that “If those few I wish to please are satisfied” she will not “be Sollicitous [sic] what Opinion the rest of the

World may have of it altogether,” not trying to persuade the readers of her text to support her in the lowly position her opening words imply but inviting respect for her inferred connections and her self-sufficiency (Letters vi).

Her “Discourse Concerning Writings of this Nature,” which she appended to her translation and which formed an important part of her advertisement for the book, showcases the steps she took to present her translation as an addition to the works of the learned. James

Sterling’s later inclusion of Haywood in the so-called “fair triumvirate of wit,” a group of female writers which also included Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley, demonstrates a public

361 Haywood, Letters, v; Alexander Pope, Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, Maynard Mack, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939-67), VII.11, 19.

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recognition of the primacy of wit and femininity.362 These women all wrote novels of passion, but the collective title Sterling gives them emphasizes their desire to join the ranks of philosophical and political writers who shaped public opinion and taste. For Haywood, this group of wits would have included not only Pope, Swift, and Addison but also the commissioned writers and newspaper editors whose writing, while often produced quickly and at the orders of a bookseller or patron, had a national influence which the government was unable to fully suppress and which led Walpole’s administration to spend tens of thousands of pounds on propaganda during the 1720s and 30s.363

Haywood did not have the literary connections of Aphra Behn, whose mid-career inclusion in Dryden’s multiple hands edition of Ovid’s Epistles demonstrates an acceptance by polite society which Haywood seems never to have attained. Behn’s birth may have been unexceptional, but she had noble friends, connections to the government due to her time as a spy, access to the libraries at Penshurst and other noble seats, and a relationship with Dryden, who was “conspicuously kind” to her in his public writing. Haywood, without any of these advantages, reached for fame as soon as she had published one successful book.364 There is no evidence that she attempted to join a multiple hands translation or to submit to one of the

Miscellanies that were still popular throughout England, but she was not a classicist nor, although several of her works include poetry, was she a popular enough poet to earn a living through her verse.

362 James Sterling, “To Mrs. Eliza Haywood on Her Writings,” quoted in Nancy Cotton, Women Playwrights in England: c. 1363-1750 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 204. 363 Tone Sundt Urstad, Sir Robert Walpole’s Poets: The Use of Literature as Pro-Government Propaganda, 1721- 1742 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 107. 364 Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 28, 128-9; 369.

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In an attempt to gain something like the same cachet that a classical translation would have given her, Haywood advertised the Letters as being written by “the Famous Monsieur

BOURSAULT,” one of “the most celebrated WRITERS of that Nation” (Spedding 103). In fact, her work appears to be a loose translation of a text by the minor writer Edmé Boursault. While

Boursault insists that the letters are from a lady who sent them to him after they had been refused by a publisher, thus questioning the worth of the letters even in his own preface, Haywood puffs up the importance of both writer and work. Her “DISCOURSE concerning Writings of this

Nature, by the TRANSLATOR, by way of ESSAY” (Spedding 103) shows her treating this form of letter-writing as an important genre and as worthy of study.365 Her discourse focuses on the dangers of letter-writing for women and the impossibility of securing one’s reputation when sending letters. Here she rehearses many of the themes which she explores later in her career, lamenting women’s unstable position in the world, how easily men discard women, and how often women are taken advantage of. This whole “Discourse” is mingled with relationship advice and ends with a claim that her writing “may be of so general a Service to my Sex” in their relations to the other that it will help them to mend the “Extravagance,” “Deceit, Inconstancy, and Ingratitude” of men.366

These themes are typical of the lifelong concern for women’s matters that has made

Haywood’s current reputation as a proto-feminist author, but the discourse also includes a subtler bid for women’s place in the literary sphere. She does not make the same move as Bluestockings or feminists like Wollstonecraft, who insist that women should be allowed to participate in the

365 Donna Kuizenga, “Writing in Drag: Strategic Rewriting in the Early Epistolary Novel,” in Studies in Early Modern France Volume 8: Strategic Rewriting, ed. David Lee Rubin (Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 2002), 157. 366 Haywood, “Discourse Concerning Writings of this Nature,” in Letters from a Lady of Quality, 29, 25. Cited as “Discourse.”

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masculine sphere. Instead, she argues for a different but equal position for women, claiming that

“There is certainly an Influence in an artful, tender, and passionate Way of Writing, which more sensibly affects the Soul, than all the Tongue can utter” and which women should beware of despite their intrinsic suitability for such writing (“Discourse” 6).

Writing novels, Haywood’s “Discourse” suggests, is a way for women to escape the bind of being most suited for an unseemly way of writing. She claims that “what a Woman gains by her Condescension [in writing letters to a man] (besides the Reputation of a Talent which had better be eternally concealed, than made use of this way) I cannot find out,” but insists that a novel or a translation offers the same scope for talent without threatening her reputation

(“Discourse” 2). Her opening bid for reputation in the “Discourse” is reminiscent of Dryden’s insistence on the quality of his audience in the prefaces to his translations. She claims that her discussion of letter-writing “may perhaps be looked on as impertinent by Ladies, who boast of a

Superiority of Discernment” and who should already know of the dangers inherent in writing letters to men, but insists that “it is by those [ladies] only [that] I am ambitious to be read”

(“Discourse” 1). While Haywood is not as consistent in her focus on a specific readership as

Dryden, she reveals a similar preoccupation with her audience when she opens her “Discourse” with an address to “ladies,” assuring them that she knows their rank, respects their abilities, and has something interesting and important to offer.

Instead of making references to the titles of her readers as Pope does or directing them to read works available only to the learned as does Dryden, Haywood flatters them. She assumes that the majority of her readers will be women, and she offers these women advice on how to maintain their position in society. At the same time, she refuses to directly accuse men of any fault. Although she describes a world in which a woman’s reputation rests on the number of her

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admirers, but in which they are penalized for performing the practices that gain them admirers, she refuses to attribute this unfairness to the men who are the benefactors of society’s double- standards. In this discourse, she describes several occasions in which “Gentlemen” seduced and abandoned or destroyed women, but in no case does she blame the man.

In the first of these stories, Haywood introduces her characters with an excuse, claiming that the Gentleman in question must have “either loved, or had some potent Reasons to feign a

Passion for” the lady who is really at the bottom of his sinister plot. Only after having first excused him and then thrown the culpability on another does she admit that his actions were

“base to the last degree.” She immediately declares that “we cannot imagine there are many Men

. . . who would, in this manner, sacrifice one Woman to the Resentment of another,” thus simultaneously insisting on the moral fibre of the majority of men and repeating her insistence that this action was the fault of a woman. In another inserted story, this time dealing with an even clearer account of masculine perfidy in which women played no mitigating role, Haywood begins by insisting that the gentleman in question is “the nearest to Perfection, of any that yet graced Humanity: and yet this lovely, this most charming Man, had an Inconstancy, and

Ingratitude in his Nature” which she deplores. Instead of admitting his failure to live up to his apparent perfection, she attributes his imperfection to women who encourage him through a

“Correspondence” of amorous letters (“Discourse” 28, 29).

These stories serve several purposes. They connect her to the genteel world, showing that she is at least enough one of them to hear their gossip, know their secrets, and enter their chambers. They allow her to show her abilities as a writer, displaying her talent for love stories and affecting letters. They flatter men, who are portrayed as capable of gaining and keeping women’s affection but as only partially responsible for their unwillingness to follow through on

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their promises and their inability to be faithful to a single woman. They reinforce her claim that even witty, intelligent, beautiful women can fall into danger because of the practice of writing letters, serving her didactic purpose. And they display her concern for her own reputation, establishing her as the type of woman likely to warn others away from writing letters such as the set she has just translated and establishing novel writing as a more moral and acceptable pastime by contrast.

This need to justify her writing helps to explain the way that Haywood directed her works toward an apparently female audience.367 The femininity of her audience must be suspect from the beginning, as readers remember the subscription list in which nearly two hundred out of her three hundred and nine subscribers are male. In fact, it might surprise readers, a hundred pages into the book, to discover that Haywood is only “ambitious to be read” by “Ladies” (“Discourse”

1). Perhaps it is the dangers Haywood warns of in her “Discourse,” where she declares that

“Letters from a Woman” are “so great and valuable a Token of her Regard” that they can never be safe in the hands of a man, which drive her abrupt shift from a general to a specifically feminine audience (“Discourse” 1). If she is not writing to men, which might be dangerous, or making promises or protestation of love, which might ruin her, she can retain her claim to be decorously following social rules by enforcing social conventions.

She follows the conventions of moral literature, from conduct books to adventure stories like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, by portraying herself as a teacher, displaying the concerns with jealousy, reputation, and promises which inform her writing from her early amatory fiction to her late political and educational periodicals. She sprinkles both quotations and original poetry throughout, connecting her discourse to the larger world of discussion and claiming a place

367 Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 40.

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amongst the poets who were still read as moral authorities. Her anecdotes are mixed with general moralizing and she directs several of her remarks against the writer of the letters she has just translated, using them to show the force of her claims and using the “Discourse” to ratify her position in response. Finally, she claims to have “touch’d” on “the several Causes which lead to this Extravagance and pointed out some few of the Inconveniencies which attend it” in the hopes that her message will be “of Service” to an audience attempting to follow moral and societal guidelines (“Discourse” 29).

Internal advertising confirms her self-identification as a moral writer. Whether the copy was chosen by Haywood or her publisher, Chetwood, the focus on her forthcoming works displays both a hope for her future career and the moral pretensions under which she wrote.

There are several pages of advertisements for novels published by Chetwood, including what appears to be a complete list of extant and forthcoming titles at the beginning and end of the volume, but the book also includes a single page promoting her next project. She promises to write “Five Exemplary Novels” on the “Danger of giving way to Passion,” the same subject that she examines in both Love in Excess and the “Discourse” she has just finished. These novels were never collected in the form she and Chetwood suggest here, and in fact Chetwood slowly relinquished control of the series, being joined by Woodman, Browne, and Chapman. Browne and Chapman replaced Chetwood in the final two books, but Haywood completed her series, successfully bringing the books to print both separately and as part of her 1724 collected Works, which were themselves a bid for an improved literary reputation (Spedding 55).

By publishing her own Works, she followed in Pope’s self-aggrandizing footsteps, publicly declaring her importance. Haywood, who published her collected Works only four years after her first novel appeared, may have hoped that her Works would jumpstart a career that had

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thus far not been as rewarding as she had initially hoped. Pope was criticized for his hubris in publishing his Works so early in his career, and Haywood’s published Works, given her lower social standing, demonstrates comparatively greater ambition.368 She also designed her collection to continue the work that Letters from a Lady had begun, establishing her as a moral, reputable, well-connected lady. Unlike Pope, who excluded his longer translations from his Works,

Haywood includes her translation of Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier in her Works as well as her original Love in Excess, the “Five Exemplary Novels” she had promised in her earlier advertisement, and a play written by request and which she implies was supported by

Viscount Thomas Gage (Spedding 104). This combination shows her focus on her reputation as a literary writer with ties to the aristocracy and to moral teaching. At the beginning of her career, she hoped that she could gain patronage and a position by connecting herself to peers and to the court, and she saw her translations as moral, virtuous books that would help her to achieve that position.

Translation as Intervention

Although Haywood never reached the social heights of Pope or Dryden, she took pride in the part she played in making foreign literature into English literature that was not only beautiful but also virtuous and instructive. Her novels are both sexually explorative and cautionary, acknowledging the pleasures of transgression while warning women of the dangers of pregnancy and abandonment. She experimented with many different forms and styles throughout her career,

368 Dustin H. Griffin, Alexander Pope: The Poet in Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 93-9.

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but, as Mary Schofield discusses in her 1985 biography, Haywood’s entire career “was interlaced with her translating efforts.”369 Although her translations, like all of her works, appeared at different prices and formats, the translations rarely appeared below the quality of the surrounding novels, and they were integrated into her larger oeuvre. She used her translation of La Belle

Assemblée, one of her most popular works (Spedding 162, 167-8, 775-6), to promote not only her books but also her appearance in a sexually innovative play. One of her later translations, the

1742 Virtuous Villager, marked a movement down the social scale both in its price and its presentation of a girl who began as a peasant, but it also allowed her to experiment with a new form, responding to existing market pressures. In addition, by beginning her movement into the

Richardsonian novel with a translation from the French, she stressed the continuity of her oeuvre, making a silent argument for the singleness of her creative vision.

This singleness is especially important in light of a modern tendency to interpret

Haywood as a writer who, as Karen Hollis says, “exploited the commercial popularity of the erotic, and then the sentimental” novel.370 In fact, while she certainly experimented with form, there is surprisingly little variation in her main subjects. These subjects, as King points out, include a demand for “justice for men and women in the middling and lower social rank,” a condemnation of “power-seeking,” and a powerful “feminist dimension” in her support for social and political change.371 Haywood examines women both as authors and as readers, demonstrating the literary and physical dangers of eighteenth-century femininity. What she is perhaps best known for, however, both in her own time period and today, is her intense emotionality.

369 Mary Anne Schofield, Eliza Haywood (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985), 36. 370 Karen Hollis, “Eliza Haywood and the Gender of Print,” The Eighteenth Century 38.1 (1997): 44. 371 King, Political Biography, 37, 83, 74.

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In order to maintain these trends, she took ownership of her translations. From the beginning of her career, she added descriptive passages and expanded emotional scenes in her material in order to maintain the passionate, emotional intensity for which she is now known.

Her first translation, Letters from a Lady of Quality, whose subscription publication, driven both by newspaper advertisements and a letter campaign, clearly shows her attempt to establish her reputation was, like her first publication, Love in Excess, written while she was a part of Aaron

Hill’s literary circle, “a major unifying force in British literary culture” which aided in the promotion of women’s literature.372 Earla Wilputte’s book shows how Haywood’s introduction to “Hill’s literary circle” encouraged her emotional, sublime language and formed the style for which she became known.373 The passionate, almost erotic intensity of feeling that readers found so compelling in Love in Excess was an important part of her early style, and becomes especially evident when comparing her translated material to its source. In the Letters from a Lady of

Quality, Haywood’s “emotional heightening” alters what Séverine Genieys-Kirk calls

Boursault’s “minimal” aesthetic which downplays the “expression of one’s feelings.”374

Although Marina Grossi argues that Boursault’s focus on individual action and her style of cascading punctuation already displays “l’accavallarsi caotico dei pensieri e delle emozione” (the chaotic overload of thoughts and emotions) which Haywood’s translation echoes, she agrees that this is “accentuano nella parafrasi della Haywood” (accented in Haywood’s paraphrase), which

372 King, “New Contexts for Early Novels,” 264; Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector, 1685-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 67-71; Spedding, Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, 99-100. 373 Earla Wilputte, Passion and Language in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Aesthetic Sublime in the Work of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and Martha Fowke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 55. 374 Séverine Genieys-Kirk, “Eliza Haywood’s Translation and Dialogic Reading of Madeleine-Angélique de Gomez’ Journées amusantes (1722-1731),” in Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers 1700-1900, ed. Gillian E. Dow (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 40.

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shows increased description of emotional response.375 These changes both connect the Letters to her previously published book and prepare the reader for the didactic essay with which she concludes her text.

Her movement toward increased emotionality appears throughout Letters from a Lady of

Quality. Where Boursault’s heroine merely says “elle m’a coûté des larmes en la lisant . . . et je la garde” (it has cost me tears in the reading . . . and I retain it), Haywood’s heroine declares that “I keep it in my Bosom—— press it to my Heart, which, while it bounds with tender

Transports to meet the welcome Treasure, upbraids, in bursting Sighs, the niggard Bounty of injurious Fate, which, for substantial, gives but imaginary Joys.”376 The constrained admission of an emotional connection which in the original acts to supplement a description of the man’s letter becomes, for Haywood, a display of female emotionality. This increased physical response highlights the warnings against passion, especially as expressed through the written and spoken word, that run throughout her works and that forms the subject of her concluding “Discourse.”

Most interestingly, Haywood’s revision alters the subject of the passage. Instead of showing a woman writing about a man’s ability, her character writes about a woman: the narrator herself. This pattern continues throughout the text, as Haywood shifts quickly away from

Boursault’s concentration on the addressee of the letters, and is especially visible in her revision of Boursault’s condemnation. Boursault’s “Si vous m’aimiez avec autant de désinteréssement que je vous aime, mettriez-vous ma pudeur à cette épreuve; et vous serviriez-vous du pouvoir que vous avez sur moi, jusqu’à trouver du plaisir à en abuser?” (If you loved me with as much disinterest as I you, would you put my decency to this test; and serve yourself with the power you

375 Marina Grossi, “La Retorica Della Passione,” in Sheherazade in Inghilterra: Formule Narrative Nell’evoluzione del “Romance”Inglese (Milano: Instituo Editoriale Cisalpino, 1983), 23. 376 Edmé Boursault, Treize lettres amoureuses d’une dame à un cavalier, ed. Bernard Bray (Paris: Editions Desjonquere, 1994), 95; Haywood, Letters, 52.

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have over me, until you find pleasure in the abuse?) focuses on the actions of her selfish lover.377

Haywood’s version of this passage, “Lovely Encroacher! Can you expect yet more?” is immediately connected to the lady’s feelings. Far from being skeptical of the value of an unselfish love, her lady cries that she “know[s] too well the boundless Wishes of that Passion, and the Pangs, the burning Pangs it suffers when restrained,” suggesting that, although she still recognizes that her lover “seek[s] to ruin” her, she is in sympathy with him because of their shared desire (Letters 45). This revisionist interpretation of Boursault’s original, which brings the female experience to the forefront, continues in varying degrees throughout Haywood’s translations.

This is especially evident in her 1727 Love in its Variety, translated from Matteo

Bandello’s Le Novelle. In this translation, Haywood not only offers her usual heightening of both male and female emotions throughout but also adds a story at the end for which, as Spedding demonstrates, no Bandello original has been found (Spedding 287-8). It is difficult to be certain of Haywood’s source text, as both French and English translations and adaptions of the 1554 and

1573 Novelle had been popular since the sixteenth century and it was common for writers to follow an intermediary French translation rather than working with an Italian source. Regardless of her immediate source, Haywood’s alterations clearly modify the misogynist, androcentric, vision of Bandello’s original text. In doing so, Haywood encourages readers to subscribe to her idea of feminine sexual morality, not the traditional conduct-book image of removed, disinterested chastity, but a vital, enthusiastic fidelity which accepts and encourages women’s sexual desire within the context of faithful love.

377 Boursault, Treize lettres amoureuses, 87.

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While all of the stories in Love in its Variety are emotionally-charged romances, the last of these offers the most female agency. Bandello sometimes shifts to the female perspective in other stories, but it is the desires and intentions of the male protagonists which shape the stories and drive the plots. In the final story, “The Witty Reclaimer: Or, a Man made Honest,” contrarily, we see hero Fabritio’s emotions only briefly and the story turns on the plot devised by

Christiana, his jilted lover, to oust his wife and take her place at his side. Bandello’s stories often turn on men discovering the unfaithfulness of their wife or lover and putting them to death, but in this story not only Christiana but Fabritio’s wife, Villaretta, are satisfied by the ending. Rather than wait for her rival to die, Christiana puts on man’s dress to persuade Villaretta that Fabritio does not love her, seduces her, and arranges to be found in bed with her. Although her romance with Christiana is disappointed, Villaretta leaves triumphant, not only free of an unwanted husband but also claiming that “she doubted not but to find Friends who shou’d oblige him to return her dower,” giving her both monetary and sexual freedom.378

This story’s sexual freedom and agency change the way that readers must view the other texts, putting previous revenge narratives into a new context and challenging readers’ acceptance of androcentric views of marriage. “The Witty Reclaimer” upturns the world of “Female

Revenge,” the third of the six stories in the book, which shows a woman who takes ‘revenge’ on her husband, who has remained faithful despite his love for another woman, by sleeping with another man. Her husband discovers this, bests his rival in a duel, uses the affair as an excuse for divorce, and leaves her, abandoned by husband and lover, to swallow poison and die “truly repenting her ill Conduct.”379 By ending the collection with a proto-feminist text, Haywood

378 Eliza Haywood, Love in its Variety (London, 1727), 248. 379 Haywood, Love in its Variety, 139.

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forces a revised interpretation of infidelity, implicitly comparing male to female infidelity and demanding that lovers who are equally guilty should be equally punished or equally unpunished.

If the unfaithful woman in “The Witty Reclaimer” ends her story “truly repenting” the wrong she has done to her husband, Fabritio concludes “Female Revenge,” and the novel, by recognizing

“how ungrateful” he has been and by doing penance in the form of telling “the whole Story of this Adventure to as many as knew them.”380

While Haywood did not, as Pope and Dryden did, explicitly highlight these changes in prefaces or notes appended to her translations, she did use her dedications to stress her ability to maintain and heighten the “beauties” of the original (Letters v). Moreover, while her real translations do not contain the kind of scholarly apparatus other authors in this study use,

Adventures of Eovaai (1736), one of her more interesting but less successful anonymous secret histories and pseudo-translations, did include a full scholarly apparatus, highlighting the function of the supposed translator. By showcasing the translator’s incompetence, Haywood’s footnotes call attention to the variety and scope of change, adaption, and interpretation which translation entails. In this novel, as Ros Ballaster argues, “The instability of the act of ‘translation’ is central to the narrative machinery of the novel.”381

The foregrounding of translation in this novel invites Haywood’s readers to question what changes have been made to her other translations, demonstrating a meta-textual awareness that goes beyond the standard insistence on stylistic and linguistic improvement. From the beginning of the book, the figure of the translator is suspect, as a foreigner translating a text into

English for a nation he admits to not understanding. Haywood’s translator claims to be working

380 Haywood, Love in its Variety, 249-50. 381 Ros Ballaster, “A Gender of Opposition: Eliza Haywood’s Scandal Fiction,” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood, 158.

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from a translation made by a “Cabal” so useless that after “Ninety and seven Moons,” or eight years, these seven scholars were “able to translate” only “three, out of twenty one” books.382 As

Wilputte explains, “An ambience of intrigue which makes the reader suspicious of the

Authorities with which she is presented is . . . part of Haywood’s point,” and she calls readers to be suspicious not only of her fictitious translator and the political figures she satirizes but also of the process of translation.383

The translator’s partisan, politically-charged, and suspect authority is evident in his

Scriblerian interventions, which appear in footnotes throughout the book. From the first note, which purports to place Eovaii’s kingdom on the globe, both Cabal and translator are implicated in the political message of this pseudo-translation. The kingdom of Ijaveo is “near the South

Pole” so “it must be,” the translator says, “the Antipodes to England” and the perfect political example (Eovaii 1). Continual references to the Cabal, which “differ’d very much” on many important points, emphasize the untrustworthiness of both levels of translation within the text

(Eovaii 7). The translator underscores the ridiculousness of both the cabal and her own decisions in the footnotes, in one declaring that “it would be unmannerly to doubt [the cabal’s] Veracity on this Point,” and thus the text accepts an understanding of women’s sexuality that, she insists, is

“very different from the present” (Eovaii 75). This note not only highlights Haywood’s teachings about the proper place of female sexuality, but demonstrates the ability of the translator to make judgements about the text in light of contemporary ideas.

Although The Adventures of Eovaii was not one of her more commercially successful works, the methods she uses within the text to talk about the process of translation and her means

382 Eliza Haywood, Eovaii (London, 1736), xiv-xv. Cited as Eovaii. 383 Earla Wilputte, introduction to The Adventures of Eovaii, by Eliza Haywood (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1999), 28.

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of calling attention to and devaluating the translator speak to the working of translation in the literary world. The Adventures of Eovaii shows a Haywood who is aware of the importance of the translator to the finished text and the way in which translations exposed their writer to both praise and ridicule. Her notes highlight both textual and stylistic changes, demonstrating the interconnectedness of style and function in notes discussing “the Meaning of [a] Word” and the ease with which readers can discover the political leanings of a historian or translator even when the events of the original are faithfully reported (Eovaii 156, 126). In combination with her discussion of ownership in The Virtuous Villager, her awareness of translation as revision gives an indication of how she saw translations working in the public sphere and why she used translation as such an important part of her work to establish her reputation.

The Virtuous Villager, the only Haywood translation that includes both a dedication and a preface, and also the only translation dedicated to a patron who is not a member of the nobility, provides useful insight into how she and her publishers positioned her translations in the literary marketplace. Despite its smaller size and lower quality production comparative to her other works, The Virtuous Villager was a more expensive version of the anonymous 1740 translation,

The Fortunate Country Maid (Spedding 367). Its preface demonstrates Haywood’s feelings of ownership over both her translations and the originals that she translated. She not only defends herself against accusations of having copied the earlier translation, she also insists that she was not translating from “the same Original, but from the real Manuscript.”384 This is in part a puff for her translation, suggesting that is closer to the original than the previous version, but it is also part of a discussion of ownership. Although translators had no legal claim on their source, she admits that it would be “scrupulously just” to “imagine a second Translation, [as] a kind of

384 Eliza Haywood, The Virtuous Villager (London, 1742), vii. Cited as Virtuous Vllager.

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Invasion on the Property of the first,” and insists that she began hers before the other was published, thus giving her at least an equal right to the work (Virtuous Villager ix).

Not only does she claim to have begun her translation first, Haywood suggests that she has a better source and is a better writer. Although she does not claim great artistry, she insists that the manuscript was sent to her because she “is qualified to do it justice, both as to the Spirit and Expression” (Virtuous Villager ix). This phrasing emphasizes her declaration in the dedication that “The noble Authoress has doubtless done her part, and as I have taken the utmost care that none of her beauties shall suffer by being put into an English Dress” her patron should be pleased with the work (Virtuous Villager v). While Haywood spends much of her dedication in praise of her source, the phrasing here subtly denigrates the original author, raising the spectre of doubt with the word “doubtless” and dismissing her contribution with the phrase “done her part,” which suggests “her part” was less important than Haywood’s. Contrarily, Haywood describes her own involvement as requiring “the utmost care,” suggesting that she saw her “part” as just as important as, if not more important than, that of her “Authoress.”

Establishing a Career: Haywood’s Respectability

Her early fiction, perhaps in an attempt to avoid the scandalous implications which she was quick to see and point out in her 1741 Anti-Pamela, is set in the polite world. The few exceptions to this are commissioned pieces such as The Dumb Projector, though it is impossible to be certain that her novels and translations were not commissioned, and responses to contemporary publications, such as her Anti-Pamela. Many of her known commissions are also directed to a respectable audience, including her provocative 1723 play, A Wife to be Lett.

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Moreover, while many of Haywood’s works evoked eroticism and would certainly have been criticised by stern moralists, the only publication that we know to be Haywood’s that is clearly too erotic for women to be comfortable reading it openly is The Sopha, one of the works whose provenance was so well hidden that her authorship was only discovered in 1999.385 While it is quite possible that more erotic titles will come to light in the future, the difficulty encountered in finding this publication and the fact that it was not widely known to be hers suggests that she did not want her name to be associated with this type of writing. The difference in her treatment of this work suggests a difference in respectability that appears to have been lost today. In fact, I argue that even in her stylistically eroticized early texts, Haywood predominantly used her books, and especially her translations, to portray herself as a moral figure, attempting to establish women’s sexual desire as part of a socially-acceptable understanding of femininity.

Unfortunately, through a combination of the willful misinterpretation of her detractors and later confusion about the complex world of eighteenth-century morality, this purpose has been lost.

From her first racy publication, Haywood’s novels are surprisingly concerned with proper behaviour, especially that of married women. It is easy to overlook, amidst a plot full of sexual intrigue, girls in their nightgowns, and midnight meetings, that Love in Excess uses Alovysa to offer the same very practical advice about jealousy and letter-writing that she addresses in

Letters from a Lady of Quality. When Alovysa intercepts a letter to her husband’s former lover, her “Impertinent Curiosity and Imprudence” drive him away, allowing him an excuse to abandon her in favour of his younger, prettier, mistress.386 In the context of Haywood’s late advice books,

The Wife and The Husband, both published in 1756, which advise wives to turn a blind eye to

385 David Brewer, “‘Haywood,’ Secret History, and the Politics of Attribution,” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood, 217-39. 386 Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess (London, 1719), II.23.

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their husband’s infidelities, and husbands to keep only lower-class mistresses and to keep them quietly out of sight, this scene takes on a new importance. While Alovysa has reason to be jealous of her new husband, her failure to trust him and her betrayal of her jealousy to the servants demonstrate her unfitness to be a wife and she suffers exactly the fate The Wife predicts:

first, it would expose her to his contempt; – secondly, it would give him a pretence for

absenting himself from home more than ever; – and thirdly, it would make her rival, who

perhaps always receives him with a smile, still dearer to him.387

Love in Excess acts as a dramatization of Haywood’s insistence that jealous women drive their husbands away when they most wish to draw them closer. It also offers a demonstration of the reward of virtuous behaviour in Melliora, whose attempts to resist her beloved even when she is

“in his Arms” in a state of “Sweet Confusion” and he is “gathering Kisses from her soft Snowy

Breast,” demonstrate the sexual temptation she undergoes, the susceptibility to emotion that marks her as one of Haywood’s heroines, and the virtue that leads to her happy marriage.388

Eighteenth-century texts taught moral lessons in two very different ways: through portraying a bad character as a negative exemplum and through showing a good character who was rewarded. Haywood always framed her novels and translations as moral tales of one sort or another, even the erotic translation of The Sopha. This was not a universal practice, but was a common one, proven in the omission as much as the practice. Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of

Pleasure, for instance, does not describe itself as a moral tale and does not discuss morality except in the final paragraphs, where it moves immediately from a sex scene to Fanny’s marriage

“where, in the bosom of virtue, I gathered the only uncorrupt sweets,” but it does excuse itself

387 Eliza Haywood, The Wife (London, 1756), 263. 388 Haywood, Love in Excess, II.49-50.

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with a brief preface insisting that “those scandalous stages” of the life it describes are only included at the insistence of the friend who asked for the book to be created.389 The practice of disguising erotic books with a thin veil of morality was common during the period and can be seen even in the shockingly violent and sexually adventurous books of the Marquis de Sade, whose Misfortunes of Virtue begins by promising “to cast light upon the mysterious ways in which Providence moves to achieve the designs it has for man.”390 The “punitive tendency” of erotic literature makes it difficult for both historians and contemporaries to judge whether they are reading a moral tale with a few titillating pieces for verisimilitude and delight or an erotic tale with a few moral sentences thrown in for form’s sake.391

Something of this confusion is evident in the varied initial responses to Richardson’s

Pamela, whose lower-class heroine and amorous adventures connect him to the sexual novels which he condemns in his insistence on her virginity and its reward. Modern scholars recognize

Haywood’s tendency to punish characters who step outside society’s moral guidelines and to use

“eroticism for pedagogic ends” by teaching them to manage “aesthetic pleasure,” but are much slower to recognize her positive moral exemplars.392 By recognising Haywood’s innovative responses to social and moral conventions and reading her books in conversation with each other and with other popular novels rather than attempting to interpret them through the stringent moral declarations of religious texts and conduct books, we can trace Haywood’s punitive tendencies to a consistent understanding of marriage and sexuality.

389 John Cleland, Fanny Hill, or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Wagner (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 239-40, 39,. 390 de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and other Early Tales, translated by David Coward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1. 391 Alexander Pettit, “Adventures in Pornographic Places: Haywood’s Tea-Table and the Decentering of Moral Argument,” Papers on Language and Literature 38.3 (2002): 246. 392 Kathleen Lucy, “Eliza Haywood’s Amatory Aesthetic,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39.3 (2006): 310.

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Part of the modern uncertainty about Haywood’s sexual mores derives from the amorphous nature of eighteenth-century marriage. As Martin Ingram explains, any promise of marriage or declaration of marriage in front of witnesses could be considered as binding under law.393 In fact, as Lawrence Stone dramatically declares, “as a result of the glaring defects in the laws of marriage, very large numbers of perfectly respectable people in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century could never be quite sure whether they were married or not,” an ambiguity which Haywood exploits in her narrative depictions of innocence and trust.394

Haywood’s stories must be read within an atmosphere in which, as Matthew Kinservik claims, premarital sex was a “widespread practice” and “clandestine marriage itself was very common” as a way to legitimize this practice among both the lower and upper classes.395 These facts are generally known, but often scholars fail to apply them to the morality of contemporary novels. Unlike Richardson, whose heroine’s insistence on a narrow idea of virtue invited satire, or Fielding, whose Tom Jones both insists on a virtuous heroine and presents a realistically fallible hero, Haywood examines the pitfalls of eighteenth-century sexual culture from the perspective of realistically fallible women.396 Even as she immerses readers in the pleasures of sexual desire, I argue that she foregrounds not only sexual temptations but also the temptation of clandestine marriage and the ways in which this legitimate act could be used by unscrupulous men to destroy innocent victims who believe men’s claims that they will honor the private vows they exchange.

393 Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 15701-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 189-218; R. B. Outhwaite, Clandestine Marriage in England, 1500-1850 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1995). 394 Lawrence Stone, Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England 1660-1753 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3. 395 Matthew J. Kinservik, Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 43. 396 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), 83.

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Her heroines are often carried away by passion, and those who act on purely sexual desire outside of marriage are punished, even Fantomina, the most sexually adventurous and least socially-constrained of her heroines. Fantomina, like many of Haywood’s women, becomes pregnant as a result of her sexual experiments, demonstrating the immediate physical dangers of sexual activity. When this is discovered, she is banished from society and spends the rest of her life in confinement.397 Although Fantomina’s banishment to a foreign monastery appears less drastic than the death many of her characters face, the loss of character she suffers in her mother’s final declaration that “The Blame is wholly her’s” establishes Haywood’s method of judgement.398 Beauplaisir may have introduced Fantomina to sexuality, and he was certainly the only man with whom she had carnal relations, but Fantomina’s choice to put herself in the position of a prostitute and her failure to ask for any mark of permanence exonerate him and leave her with neither freedom nor reputation.

Haywood’s credulous heroines do not suffer the same fate as women like Fantomina. In none of her books does she require the proper church wedding and crowds of witnesses that

Richardson’s Pamela insists on before she will allow her master to touch her. On the other hand, she is very careful about the promises that her characters make and accept. In La Belle

Assemblée, as Séverine Genieys-Kirk notes, Haywood transforms the story of Orsame and

Fatyma, both inserting a story of Fatyma’s past to create one of the earliest black heroines in

English fiction and refusing to allow her hero to promise himself to her in marriage when she intended him for another woman.399 Her French original was content to have him break his promise in response to Fatyma’s violent actions and his own aversion, but Haywood is more

397 William Beatty Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 195. 398 Eliza Haywood, Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems (London, 1725), III. 290. 399 Genieys-Kirk, “Eliza Haywood’s ... Journées amusantes (1722-1731),” 41.

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concerned about promises. For her a promise, which is by English law contractually binding, is at least as important, if not more important, than the kind of church ceremony that Pamela desires.

In The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone, a 1725 translation of de Castra’s La Pierre

Philosophale des Dames, ou les Caprices de l’Amour et du Destin which was published anonymously but advertised as part of a collection of Haywood’s novels only three years later, we see several examples of marriages that take place outside the proper structure of English law and tradition. There are several tragic love affairs, spanning several generations, but the story which most clearly reveals Haywood’s conception of proper sexual morality is the story of the love of Semigarbus for Bellacaris. She takes many liberties in translating this story. Most importantly, while the story of their courtship and exchange of letters is very similar in the translation and the original, Haywood significantly changes the circumstances of their marriage.

Both authors describe a meeting in the garden that is interrupted by her father and his chosen suitor who, without seeing the lovers, discuss their desire to marry her immediately. De Castra, however, has them flee outside the garden to escape, returning “jusques à la porte du jardin pour la faire rentrer chez elle; mais nous trouvâmes que l’avoient fermée” (to the garden gate in order to return home, but found that [her father and fiancée] had made it fast) while Haywood’s

Semigarbus “lock’d the Door as softly as [he] could and took the Key on the inside” so that the lovers were safely ensconced within the walls.400

While de Castra’s lovers hesitate outside the walls, Bellecaris accuses her lover of arranging to dishonour her. In response, he insists that “vous penetrez mal mes intentions,” (you

400 L’Abbé de Castra, La Pierre Philosophale des Dames, ou les Caprices de l’Amour et du Destin. Nouvelle Historique (1733), 110; Eliza Haywood, The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone (London, 1724), 47. Cited as Philosopher.

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misunderstand my intentions) which “sont legitimes & pures” (are legitimate and pure).401

Haywood’s Semigarbus declares that

It was now my time to plead, and as she saw the Necessity she was in of being mine that

Moment, or never being mine; she yielded to the former, to avoid the latter: and after she

had received my solemn Vows of making her my Wife in the Morning ... suffered me to

conduct her into [my house] (Philosopher 48-9)

This single sentence replaces de Castra’s several pages of recriminations, pleadings, and promises of virtuous intentions and demonstrates Haywood’s very different concerns. Both writers establish the virtuousness of their heroine, but Haywood’s Bellacaris is satisfied with a vow while de Castra, writing in France with its much stricter marriage laws, cannot allow his heroine to be so easily satisfied.

When they finally are married, the wording of the different descriptions further emphasizes the differences in the two country’s laws and how this affects authorial perceptions of virtue. De Castro describes how “Dés le lendemain nous fumes mariex en secret dans le

Temple d’Amide, & cette puissante Deesse fut la depositaire sacrée de l’amour mutual & de la foi que nous nous jurâmes” (on the next day we were married in secret within the Temple of

Amide, and this powerful Goddess was the sacred depositary of the mutual love and of the faith that we swore).402 This description emphasises the power of the church, or temple, and its

“puissant” Goddess, focusing on the sacredness of their love and faith. Haywood, contrarily, focuses on the legal and human side of their marriage, describing how “early in the Dawn, we

401 de Castra, La Pierre Philosophale des Dames, 111. 402 de Castra, La Pierre Philosophale des Dames, 124-5.

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went, with all the Privacy imaginable, to the Temple of Erathis: where a holy Priest confirmed that happy Union which our Souls had made before” (Philosopher 49).

Secrecy is important to both writers, as is making their vows in a temple rather than in their own home, but Haywood’s description shows a greater concern with the presence of a witness and of the character of the priest who witnesses their vows, while de Castro’s phrasing does not actually necessitate the presence of any human at all. Moreover, Haywood says that the priest “confirmed” their marriage, emphasizing the veracity of Semigarbus’ earlier vows. This is a theme that she takes up in other works, stressing men’s responsibility to honour their vows whether made in church before witnesses or alone with a lover. Her insistence on these vows goes beyond common law, which required at least two witnesses to make a marriage legal, but highlights the uncertainty of that law and the importance of private practice.

Haywood’s alterations show her moving to establish the morality of her heroines, but they also show how the different cultures of eighteenth-century England and France encourage different views of marriage. After de Castra’s heroine is finally persuaded to return to her lover’s house to be married she loses her restraint, and her lover “counduisis mon amiable maîtresse dans une chambre, où par mon ordre Bremusoal venoit de préparer un lit” (conducts [his] amiable mistress to a chamber where, by [his] orders Bremusoal has prepared a bed).403

Haywood, more conservative or more cautious, avoids mention of beds entirely. Her lovers spend “the few remaining Hours, till Morning,” and their wedding, “in reiterating [their] mutual

Vows” (Philosopher 49). While there is certainly room to interpret this sexually, Haywood removes de Castra’s several references to privacy, to a chamber, and to a bed prepared for them,

403 de Castra, La Pierre Philosophale des Dames, 124.

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and instead emphasizes their “Vows,” hearkening back to the “solemn Vows” that Semigarbus had made to marry his beloved.

Underscoring the morality of her heroine, Haywood edits this text to make it more acceptable to her audience and to remove the titillating suggestion of what might have happened in those hours before marriage, very unlike her sensual descriptions in both Love in Excess and the last love affair in The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone. By emphasizing the purity of this heroine,

Haywood creates a greater shock in the final story, where translator and original are united in describing the stratagem by which Tristant tricks his beloved into first sleeping with and then marrying him in order to save her from the greater evil of a credulous and irreligious faith in the

Philosopher’s Stone. This subjugation of sexual to religious morality expands the story from considerations of love, romance, and marriage to discuss authority, religion, innocence, and greed, and parallels Haywood’s continual insistence on the subjugation of sexual purity to fidelity. In the final story, we see how Haywood portrays virtuous innocence as a shield against all moral stain, a theme she returns to in stories of women ravished, abandoned, and finally triumphant. This type of moral story, with a virtuous heroine triumphing over a scoundrel, as in

The City Jilt, or triumphing with a virtuous hero, as in The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone, is just as prominent in Haywood’s canon as the more commonly-discussed form of immorality punished that we see in Fantomina and Love in Excess. These two types of moral teaching appear throughout her works, even her more scandalous commissions, which focus on the punishment of vice.

In 1748 when, with Life’s Progress through the Passions, she discovered a formula for the long, three-part novel, her pattern changed. She began a new style of moral presentation, beginning with The Virtuous Villager, a translation that also acted as a test for the style of

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virtuous book which she continued in her later novels. Although she attributed this work to ‘the author of La Belle Assemblée,’ its physical quality is remarkably lower than both of the other books connected to the Gomez name and the internal advertisements suggest its confused history. Inside the book, J. Hodges promotes first The New Atalantis, Manley’s famous scandal novel; then a series of humorous Miscellanies in Prose and Verse co-written by Oxford and

Cambridge dons; then another secret history “Interspersed with Moral and Instructive Incidents;”

The Devil Hermit, which appears to be an early gothic piece translated from French; then The

Compleat Gamester . . . the Art of Riding, Fowling, Archery, Cocking, and Bowling. Written for the Use of the Young Princesses; a Polite Correspondence, or Rational Amusement, and finally

Haywood’s Eovaii, under the title of The Unfortunate Princess (Virtuous Villager [332]). This confused mass focuses on light amusement and scandal, an amusing contrast to the “Virtue” and

“Morals” that the novel announces on the title page.

Despite its confused internal advertising, this book is an important step in Haywood’s self-fashioning. The Virtuous Villager begins an increased attention to positive and overt morality, showing her moving from moral tales which warn against evil by showing what happens to immoral villains to moral tales which promise good things to virtuous heroines. Many scholars believe that this text was a response to Richardson’s Pamela, and Christine Blouch even calls it “an imitation” of Pamela.404 But while the book certainly responded to the new moral story which Richardson popularized, Haywood was not yet ready to give up her stories about aristocrats and write about a mere commoner as Richardson had. Although The Virtuous

Villager’s heroine begins as a villager rather than a lady, her rise to the court is clearly

404 Christine Blouch, introduction to The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, by Eliza Haywood (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998), 11.

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anticipated in the advertisements for the novel which call her “a very great Lady at the Court of

France,” a claim which is repeated on the title page of the printed book.405

Moral instruction is an important part of the book’s presentation beginning with the title, which is a moralising version of the original. Although she maintains the alliteration, she transforms Mouhy’s La Paysanne Parvenue, (the Upstart Peasant), to The Virtuous Villager, a title which foregrounds both moral and class-based distinctions.406 Within the text, the moral applications of her story are foregrounded by the “Lessons” given to her heroine by her mother, who “related ... many Examples of young Maids, who from a low Degree, had been raised to

Greatness, by a strict Adherence to the Rules she laid down for my Behaviour; and of others who had fallen into extreme Misery and Infamy by swerving from them” (Virtuous Villager 3). Janet

Todd argues that “a new respectable image” began to be important to the female writer in this period, and Catherine Craft-Fairchild insists that the “explicit sexuality that . . . early woman writers built their romantic fictions upon was no longer possible,” suggesting that her 1746 biographer’s view of this period of her life as a reformation might reflect contemporary literary trends.407 Despite the increased attention to propriety in books like Haywood’s Virtuous Villager and 1753 History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, however, the morality of the period when she published The Sopha as well as Betsy Thoughtless is questionable, and her position as a writer who espoused moral behaviour, even if not quite according to the strict standards of contemporary conduct literature, was not a new one.

405 Champion, March 18, 1742; Haywood, The Virtuous Villager, vii. 406 le Chevalier de Mouhy, La Paysanne Parvenue (Rouen, 1788), i. 407 Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660-1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 3; Catherine Craft-Fairchild, Masquerade and Gender Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth- Century Fictions by Women (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993), 11; David Erskine Baker, Biographia Dramatica (London, 1746), II, Q1r.

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Haywood’s greatest change in this book is her response to the triumph of the new

Richardsonian mode of writing in the first person to promote virtue by presenting a virtuous, ideal, model for readers to imitate. Neither of these, notably, appear in her most popular moral work, Betsy Thoughtless, which returns to her early strategy of offering a heroine who, as

Betsy’s name suggests, is flawed. In the first of her late moral books, The Virtuous Villager,

Haywood follows Richardson’s virtuous model more closely, but this book also shows her resistance to many of Richardson’s ideas. While she copies the emphasis on virtue in the subtitle of Richardson’s blockbuster novel, Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded, Haywood insists on the agency of her main character. In order to do so, in fact, she gives her book two different subtitles, each of which carries strong ideological implications, in contrast to her source text, which uses the neutral subtitle Les Memoirs de Madame la Marquise de L. V. The Virtuous Villager, like

Richardson’s title, displaces agency. But Haywood is less willing to allow agency to another figure. While Richardson’s title claims to show virtue rewarded, presumably by the all-powerful hand of God, Haywood’s half-title sub-title, Fortunate Country Lass, makes Jeanetta’s fortune a personal characteristic rather than a reward given by an outside force. Even this much agential displacement is more than she wishes, however, and the sub-title that appears on her advertisements and in her running title is Virgin’s Victory, which gives Jeanetta responsibility and agency.408

Haywood’s differences from Richardson and her unwillingness to let go of her existing mode of moral instruction continue within the novel itself. While Richardson’s story is told almost entirely from the point of view of his main character, Haywood often includes digressions. Even in those stories which focus on a single heroine, she gives her readers personal

408 Champion, March 18, 1742.

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insight into the thoughts and feelings of all her characters. This tendency is evident as early as

Love in Excess where she examines the passions of each of her characters in turn, and continues throughout her career. In Betsy Thoughtless, Haywood uses this technique to emphasize the vanity that Gayland shares with her heroine by she that “he resolved to continue his visits” after

Betsy had scorned him “because miss Betsy would plume herself” if she thought she had “by her scorn triumphed over his audacity and drove him from the field of battle.”409 Later in the book, she concentrates on Betsy’s suitors, comparing “how much it rejoiced the sincerely devoted heart of mr. Trueworth” to see Betsy and the “tender sentiments with which his soul overflowed” to

Betsy’s own carelessness.410 In The Virtuous Villager, where Haywood’s experimental new style requires her to offer an unfallen heroine, she uses digressions to return to her preferred, multi- voiced style.

Haywood not only, as Beatrijs Vanacker points out, “frequently inserts intradiegetic narrations” where “Mouhy only infrequently interrupts his plot to insert stories,” the printing of her book also calls attention to these stories as separate from the larger plot. The first of the interpolated stories in the novel provides a good example of this emphasis.411 Haywood moves this story earlier in the novel and, unlike Mouhy’s original, sets it clearly apart from the text with a thick border and its own title, “The History of Charlotta” (Virtuous Villager 8). Within this interpolated story, she offers a different view of correct social and moral behaviour than the

French. Mouhy emphasises Charlotta’s wilfullness and unwillingness to obey the dictates of her family, saying that “Son père, qui les sentoit, la pressoit vivement de sa déclarer, & de choisir un mari” (her sensible father pressed her strongly to decide and to choose a husband) which she

409 Eliza Haywood, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (London, 1751), 35. 410 Haywood, Betsy Thoughtless, 227. 411 Beatrijs Vanacker, “‘On the Inconstancy, the Perfidy and Deceit of Mankind in Love Affairs’: Eliza Haywood’s Translation of La paysanne parvenue,” in Translators, Interpreters, Mediators, 58.

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refuses and therefore causes the events that made him “regretter, mais trop tard, de ne s’être pas soumise aux volontés des siens” (regret, but too late, not having made her submit to the will of the people).412 Haywood, on the contrary, attributes the fault to Charlotta’s father. While she certainly blames Charlotta for her “Vanity and Credulity,” faults which she warns of throughout her writing career, even before she describes Charlotta’s beauty Haywood shows her father’s fault. For Haywood, his fault is not that he failed to force her into a good marriage but that he is greedy. Although “Every body blamed him for sending young Charlotta on such Errands, which cou’d not fail of laying her under dangerous Temptations,” his greed leads him to send her alone and unprotected to the houses of strange men to sell fruit and thus leads directly to her downfall

(Virtuous Villager 8). This alteration emphasizes her warning that women should avoid places where they could be exposed to temptation or assault, reinforcing the continuity of her moral vision.

Haywood’s overt intention in both her didactic late text, The Virtuous Villager, and her most respectable early translation, the 1725 La Belle Assemblée is to “improve in general the

Ladies of my Country,” an aim similar to the desire to warn of “the Foibles Youth and

Inexperience is [sic] likely to fall into” that she expressed in the 1722 The British Recluse, one of her early amorous novels.413 In fact, although scholars are eager to discuss the scandalous nature of Haywood’s oeuvre, very few of her novels fit easily within such simplistic categorization and writing novels and translations which appeared respectable and which shared important moral characteristics clearly interested her as much as the emotionality and sensuality she infused into much of her writing. Although the means by which she spread her moral messages and her

412 Mouhy, La Paysanne Parvenue, 19-20. 413 Haywood, La Belle Assemblée, I.vii; Eliza Haywood, The British Recluse (London, 1722), 1.

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warnings about proper female behavior changed, she presented a stable position as a moral instructor. Her discussions of the proper means of communication with men, her warnings about letters and private speech, and her simultaneous enforcement and denunciation of the strict rules laid on women remain consistent throughout her career.

From her 1721 Letters from a Lady of Quality to her 1742 The Virtuous Villager,

Haywood used her translations to create connections between herself and writers whose works were read by members of the French and English courts. She foregrounded her agency as a translator in Eovaii, demonstrating the power to alter and interpret which she exercises in translations such as The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone and Love in its Variety. And, whether writing sensual, erotic adventures like Love in Excess or straightforward, didactic prose like The

Wife, she retained her strong sense of behavioral integrity and her focus on female empowerment.

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Chapter 4 Elizabeth Carter: Hidden Fame, Subtle Teaching

I want my works to have “the comfort of sneaking quietly through the world, and being read by nobody,” Elizabeth Carter declared more than once in her lifetime.414 The care that she took to establish and maintain her reputation, however, gives the lie to her modest desire to be unknown. What she wanted was not anonymity, but a controllable circle of readers. Writing in the context of her coterie where, as Betty Schellenberg explains, her writing could function “as an extension of the social self,” helped her to avoid the misinterpretations that Haywood is still struggling against.415 Carter wanted to present herself as a moral teacher within the conservative elements of eighteenth-century society, working from within to challenge the normative educational limits that were considered suitable for her sex. Although she rejected some church doctrines and many patriarchal norms, in order to establish her ability to teach what women were culturally supposed to learn, she had to create a reputation as a good Christian and a traditionally feminine woman. She could not, as Dryden had, use her source texts as an excuse for sexual content. Her translations had to come from a place of moral superiority in order to establish the reputation she wanted, a reputation which would encourage her audience to accept her changes to and commentary on the pieces she translated.

To convince others to follow her example, she needed to build a public persona for them to copy. Unlike Dryden, whose reputation-building focused on his literary status, Carter’s self- presentation asserted her right to her education and worked to establish her within the social and

414 Montagu Pennington, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter (London, 1807), 123. Cited as Memoirs. 415 Betty A. Schellenberg, Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture 1740-1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 98.

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moral limits of her society. Her focus on morality as the centre of both her private life and her public reputation is an important force in her writing and one that has been too often rejected or misunderstood. Carter’s moral and religious focus must be read as something more than the submission to dominant masculine ideals which Carolyn Williams sees as an attempt to “avoid the bitterness which might otherwise have accompanied the thought of so much wasted female talent.”416 It must be understood as more than what Lisa Freeman views as a half-conscious cover for a rebellious “vision of freedom for the female mind that was less than commensurate with Christian piety.”417 Instead, her staunch belief in her own rectitude gave her the confidence to stand up for her own interpretations of texts, even against the advice of bishops and the opinion of theologians.

Carter’s nephew, Montagu Pennington, tells one such story in his Memoirs, remembering that she used to enjoy speaking about an argument she had with an archbishop. She had read 1st

Corinthians in the Greek and was complaining that the modern translation supported the superiority of the husband over the wife by telling the husband “let him not put [his wife] away” if she does not believe in Christ, but saying to the woman “let her not leave” her husband.418

Thomas Secker, the Bishop of Oxford, refused to believe that the words used for the actions of man and wife were the same, but she insisted until he consulted the original and admitted that

“‘tis I that must be confuted and you are in the right” (Memoirs 110). This charming story demonstrates both her refusal to give up a point that she was certain of, even when her opponent

416 Carolyn Williams, “The Consistency of Elizabeth Carter,” in Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth- Century Canon, ed. Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 23. 417 Lisa Freeman, “‘A Dialogue’: Elizabeth Carter’s Passion for the Female Mind,” in Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon. 1730-1820, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 56. 418 1 Corinthians 7:12-13 KJV.

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was a high-ranking clergyman, and the satisfaction that she gained from believing herself in the right. By using Biblical phrasing to argue for equality between men and women, Carter used

Christian texts and beliefs, supported by her linguistic study, to create social acceptance for her ideas.

Her insistence on the primacy of reason is one of the factors that led her to write translation as well as her more traditionally feminine personal and religious poetry. Paula

Backscheider argues that friendship, domestic and common life, and religious poetry were particularly associated with women’s writing during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and

Carter’s poems are carefully structured to fit within these forms.419 Her religious poetry fell within the standard narrative of Christian feminine duty, in opposition to her learned writing and her “working through religious controversy,” which fell within a more masculine realm of study and which, as Kathryn Steele argues, contemporary conduct manuals prohibited.420 As part of the

Bluestocking circle, Carter participated in contemporary debates on feminine education, agreeing with fellow writer and friend Hester Mulso Chapone in recommending a course of mental improvement, but demonstrating a wider range of languages and supporting a more interpretative reading of Anglican theology. Carol Percy demonstrates that perceptions of women as illiterate and unable to learn either vernacular or foreign languages continued throughout the century despite the increasing availability of grammar books aimed specifically at women.421 Carter’s knowledge of languages, which included not only English, French, Italian, Greek, and Latin but also Arabic and Hebrew, made her exceptional, and Chapone, writing several decades after

419 Paula Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), xviii. 420 Kathryn L. Steele, “Hester Mulso Chapone and the Problem of the Individual Reader,” The Eighteenth Century 53.4 (2012): 474; 480. 421 Carol Percy, “J. Matlock’s Young Ladies Guide to the Knowledge of the English Tongue (1715): Contextualising the First Grammar of English for Ladies,” Transactions of the Philological Society 111.2 (2013): 237.

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Carter’s final publication, worried that women following in her footsteps would become pedants, unable or unwilling to conform to normative conversational practices or to submit to patriarchal instruction.422

In many respects, however, Carter and Chapone agreed on proper educational practice.

Both women were part of the Bluestocking circle which formed in the 1750s, “dedicated to intellectual conversation,” and grew over the following decades to create a network which, as

Anni Sairio argues, both demonstrated and influenced eighteenth-century linguistic and grammatical structures.423 Although some scholarship broadens the definition of the

Bluestockings to include any woman known for her writing, the term used throughout this paper and in most studies of the eighteenth century refers to a group which Harriet Guest describes as

“well-educated but not aristocratic women linked through correspondence as well as social interaction . . . from around 1750 to the early decades of the nineteenth century” and who

Elizabeth Child defines as “that informal circle of learned, literary eighteenth-century English women and men who gathered in person at London salons hosted by Montagu and her friend

Elizabeth Vesey, and who also maintained an epistolary network.”424 This group, as Gary Kelly argues, was committed to a “progressive-aristocratic” program which promoted the middle-class values of egalitarian sociability and created a forum for the proto-feminist movement.425 Despite the radical nature of these ideas, Deborah Heller suggests, the Bluestockings were “judged by standards of femininity that potentially constrained them,” internalizing these judgements to

422 Steele, “Hester Mulso Chapone,” 488. 423 Anni Sairio, “Language and Letters of the Bluestocking Network. Sociolinguistic Issues in Eighteenth-Century Epistolary English,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 110.4 (2009): 526. 424 Harriet Guest, “Bluestocking Feminism,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65.2 (2002): 60; Elizabeth Child, “Elizabeth Montagu, Bluestocking Businesswoman,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65.1 (2002): 153. 425 Gary Kelly, “Bluestocking Feminism,” in Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona Ogallchoir, and Penny Warburton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 167.

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become a conservative group like those domesticating groups Lisa Moore views as “willing to serve a hierarchized ideology” which reifies existing power relations.426

Carter and Chapone were both members of the Bluestocking circle, and their different opinions on education demonstrate the conservatism of the circle alongside its internal divisions.

Chapone argues that “learned languages” such as Greek and Latin are not necessary for women because England and France have “tolerable translations of all the most valuable productions of antiquity,” and Carter’s actions show her sympathy with this idea, as she worked to translate foreign works for women rather than to encourage them to read the originals.427 Moreover, she shares Chapone’s worries about the “danger of pedantry and presumption in a woman,” insisting that her domestic duties are at least as important as her literary work and that “The true post of honour consists in the discharge of those duties” given by “Providence,” whether in the world or in the home. Although Carter insisted that she had no special gifts, declaring that her abilities came from persistence and struggle rather than genius, she maintained that her duty called her to the abstruse languages and sciences (Memoirs 165). Through her religious poetry and commentaries, and her translations of literary criticism and philosophy, she entered into the world of learning and encouraged other women to follow her example. Uncertain about her reception, Carter, like Eliza Haywood, published her first works anonymously and allowed her identity to be leaked to the public only after she had been reassured by her initial reception.

Again like Haywood and the other authors examined in this project, Carter used translation to shape her public image. Edmund Cave, a friend of her father, supported her by

426 Deborah Heller, “Bluestocking Salons and the Public Sphere,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998): 72; Lisa Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 3. 427 Hester Mulso Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady (London, 1773), II.121.

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publishing her early poems, and once he realized her abilities, he commissioned her 1739 translations of Jean-Pierre Crousaz’ Examination of Mr Pope’s Essay on Man and Algarotti’s

Newtonianismo per le Dame and suggested other translations, assisting her transition to the form that would dominate the rest of her career. In fact, with the exception of the individual poems she published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in the 1730s, every publication of Carter’s included translation. Translated poems appear in the twenty-four page private printing of her 1738 Poems

Upon Particular Occasions and her last publication, the 1762 Poems on Several Occasions, but her reputation rested on her longer translations, particularly her Epictetus.

Although she had been writing poems for the Gentleman’s Magazine and engaging in public correspondence in the form of riddles and poems through the magazine for some time, and already put her name to a private edition of these poems for presentation to the queen, the first published book that was widely attributed to Carter was her translation from Crousaz. As

Pennington relates, her Examination of Mr Pope’s Essay on Man was generally seen as “her launching into the world” (Memoirs 29-30). Despite this early publicity, it was not until late in her career, after she had retired to Deal, that Carter put her name on the title page of one of her works, the 1758 Works of Epictetus. The length of time between publications and the number of works published without direct attribution encourages me, in the chapter that follows, to track

Carter’s ideas through their interaction with societal norms rather than using a chronological structure. Many of her works revealed their authorship through social connections which slowly filtered through coterie groups and into public consciousness, making it difficult to date revelations of authorship and creating an illusion of concealment.

This combination of publicity and personal privacy can be compared to that of Eliza

Haywood, who, despite her many publications, left so little personal information behind that

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scholars still struggle to determine even the most basic facts about her life. Although Haywood and Carter worked in entirely different areas, both writers share important characteristics. Both women worked in a narrow and clearly gendered sphere, and both used translation as a means of creating a positive reputation. While Haywood wrote primarily romantic fiction, and used translations from modern French texts to reach the upper levels of polite female society, Carter, like her fellow Bluestockings, focused on expanding the range of knowledge available to women. Both writers aimed at an explicitly female audience, but through her subject matter and genre Carter worked to create a more individualized form of education.

Carter’s writing draws on a tradition of female educational reform beginning in the late seventeenth century with Mary Astell’s 1694-7 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and An Essay in

Defence of the Female Sex. Moving away from the traditional focus on what Hilary Brown calls

“women’s decorative accomplishments or moral conduct and duties,” women such as Catherine

Talbot, posthumously published by Carter, Hester Chapone, Hannah More, Elizabeth Montagu,

Stéphanie Genlis, and Catharine Macauley created an environment in which calls for literature, science, and philosophy to be added to women’s education became socially acceptable.428 These women reacted against Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s image of the girl whose main motivation is vanity and who uses her education only in the service of her husband. Connie Titone argues that these women saw an equal education as “the first thing” in the progress toward more independent, creative lives.429 Kathryn Sutherland describes the new curricula these women designed as “neither unrigorous nor merely auxiliary,” claiming that they created “a tradition of female intellectual inquiry” which allowed women to participate in eighteenth-century literary

428 Hilary Brown, “The Reception of the Bluestockings by Eighteenth-Century German Women Writers,” Women in German Yearbook 18 (2002): 114. 429 Connie Titone, “Chapone, Genlis, and Macaulay: On Human Nature and the Purposes of Education,” Counterpoints 171 (2004): 84.

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culture.430 Carter’s advocacy of female classical education positions her within this tradition, as she argues for a female education that paralleled that of an upper-class gentleman.

A firm believer in the power of reason and the necessity of training the minds of both men and women, she was not, as her nephew and biographer Matthew Pennington suggests, a staunch and uncritical supporter of all female writers. Melanie Bigold shows that Carter

“frequently confesses ignorance” of “contemporary female writers” and refuses to contribute laudatory poems to writers such as Mary Leapor, who was not part of Carter’s close social group.431 She was as critical of female authors, especially those “in the last” age, before the appearance of moralists such as Mrs. Rowe, as she was of any authors that she felt failed to adhere to Christian standards, complaining that the Gentleman’s Magazine failed to live up to her standards of morality.432 Despite these criticisms, Carter wished to associate herself with the female authors of her century who shared her beliefs and goals, and she used her writing to encourage women’s education and authorship. Insisting that no one could properly serve God in ignorance, Carter’s translations, poems, and religious commentaries present education as a religious duty, justifying her education and participation in public debates as obedience to God’s commands. In this chapter I argue that Carter stood up for her beliefs when necessary, bowed to social conventions when expedient, and used existing beliefs about God, reason, and piety to argue for a broad-based classical education for both women and men.

430 Kathryn Sutherland, “Writings on Education and Conduct: Arguments for Female Improvements,” in Women and Literature in Britain 1700-1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 29; Anna Miegon, “Biographical Sketches of Principal Bluestocking Women,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65.1 (2002): 34-5. 431 Melanie Bigold, Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 175, 180. 432 Bigold, Women of Letters, 174

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Contesting Beliefs

Both Carter’s choice of subject and her translation style are heavily influenced by her religious focus. While Haywood’s principles were shaped by the realities of life for women, which led her to argue against some of the strict boundaries and sexual standards of eighteenth- century England, Carter’s father sheltered her from the style of sexual transgression that is

Haywood’s focus. Carter’s ability to choose her own company allowed her to shelter herself further, and her often harsh moral judgements on anyone who stepped outside social boundaries prevented her from attaining empathetic sympathy toward sexual desire that Haywood demonstrates. Instead Carter, to whom conformity to contemporary standards of sexual morality came easily, condemned those who transgressed, both privately in her letters and publicly in her poem to Mrs. Rowe, which condemned the “lawless Freedoms” of amorous verse.433 Her declaration that “beauty much admired and caressed by the world often chokes better feelings” shows how her condemnation stemmed not from seeing sexual morality as a priority but from her belief that this type of transgression was part of a larger and more problematic fault – failing in one’s religious duties.434

Between a father in the church and her many friendships with bishops and preachers,

Carter was immersed in a religious way of life and her poems and translations show her focus on piety. Her poem “Written at MIDNIGHT in a THUNDER STORM” accepts that there are many

“diff’rent Ways” to pursue God, but insists that God should be the most important part of life, and found the focus on frivolous worldly things she saw in other women to be the worst possible

433 Elizabeth Carter, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1772), 10. Cited as Poems. 434 Elizabeth Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, to Mrs. Montagu (London, 1817), 55.

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fault (Poems 37). Claiming that the entertainments of the town encouraged “a perverseness of head and corruption of heart,” she performed “the utmost contempt and detestation” of worldly matters.435 From a focus on frivolous pleasure, she insisted throughout her letters and poetry, came biases, spite, discontent, envy, and malice. Her solution to these problems was to spend time in prayer, read the Bible and the sermons of great pastors, meditate on God, and remove herself from the “deplorable slavery to the world” which she saw in the women around her.436

Although these ideas conform to contemporary social standards, and she uses Biblical teaching and references to support her claims, she does not accept limitations on her independent judgement. Her emphasis on morality is not only, as Jennifer Wallace suggests, due to the boundaries of female propriety in the eighteenth century. Wallace argues that the stresses on female writers meant that Carter was “constrained” to write in a moralizing tone, and that this socially-enforced piety negates many of the potential benefits of reaching the public eye.437

Ignoring the broad concern with translating classical authors into acceptable, moral forms that appears in the works of prominent male poets, including Pope and Dryden, Wallace simplifies a general eighteenth-century practice in order to make it fit within feminist stereotypes. Carter’s emphasis on piety in her translations shows her idiosyncratic response to the same pressures that led Pope to stress courage and masculinity or Dryden to transform Lucretius’s nihilistic elements into celebrations of sexual pleasure. Moreover, she fails to recognize the changes that Carter makes to her texts in order to reinforce her wider messages about education, responsibility, and reason.

435 Elizabeth Carter, A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot from the Year 1741 to 1770 (London, 1808), I. 229. 436 Carter, A Series of Letters, I.298. 437 Jennifer Wallace, “Confined and Exposed: Elizabeth Carter’s Classical Translations,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 22.2 (2003): 327.

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Carter certainly wrote within a system of rigorous moral restraint. Nevertheless, the narrative of masculine persecution that Wallace offers is not reflected in Carter’s writing or the responses of her contemporaries. In fact, the cultural forces which Wallace highlights as creating

“exoticising” constraints offered Carter the opportunity to create and shape a public persona which was just as self-assured and as ready to defend her position against official Anglican theology as her male contemporaries.438 She came by her stubborn assurance of her own moral and intellectual rectitude honestly. Her father was one of the churchmen who found it impossible to believe fully in the Athanasian Creed, one of the founding documents of the church which teaches that the three beings who make up the Holy Trinity are co-equal. He believed strongly that God the Father was superior to God the Son and to the Holy Spirit, and refused to speak the established prayer in front of his congregation. This caused dissension within his parish and he was called before the corporation of Deal, but the parish eventually accepted his offer to hire someone else to say the words he found it impossible to believe.439

Following her father’s example, Carter took her moral and religious beliefs into the public sphere. Her criticism of the Athanasian Creed, published in 1752, joins a group of

Anglican reformers, both men and women, who questioned the creed’s Trinitarian statements.440

Importantly, although Carter’s attack on the Athanasian creed aligned her with her father, it set her against Secker, the Bishop of Oxford and one of Carter’s most influential patrons. Secker was a radical in some ways, beginning his career as a radical Presbyterian and subscribing to

Arianism, the belief that Jesus is human and not divine. Robert G. Ingram demonstrates, however, that after he joined the Anglican church he became a firm supporter of the orthodox

438 Wallace, “Confined and Exposed,” 320. 439 John Laker, History of Deal (Deal: Dain & Sons, l921), 269. 440 Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 136.

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church and producing “a detailed, systematic defence of the Apostle’s Creed,” the basis of the

Athanasian Creed in his 1769 Lectures on the Catechism of the Church of England.441 Bishop

Secker’s belief in the Creed brought him into conflict with reformers like Francis Blackburne, whose anonymous support of John Jones’s 1749 Free and Candid Disquisitions against the

Athanasian Creed was a major source of disagreement.

For Blackburne, like John Locke, and the Cambridge Platonists who based their philosophy on Protestant doctrine, the Bible was the only source of religious doctrine, an argument that Carter picks up in her use of Biblical passages to support her argument against the

Athanasian Creed. Carter’s insistence on women’s right to rationally interpret theology using scripture is, as Julie Straight demonstrates, in line with the concerns of Chapone, who “asserts women’s need to find rational bases for their religious beliefs, advocates their awareness of religions other than Christianity, and invites them to study scripture in ways that inevitably expose them to disputes regarding its translation and interpretation.”442 Such invitations to controversy demonstrate the heterodoxy of Christian belief during the tumultuous eighteenth century, but also encouraged the government to stricter measures to support orthodox teaching.

Although rarely used in small-scale cases like that of Nicholas Carter and his daughter, the

Blasphemy Act of 1697, not repealed until 1967, declared that the penalty for denying the Holy

Trinity, as Carter and her father did in rejecting Jesus’ equality with God the Father, was being rendered incapable of holding office. Repeat offenses could lead to denial of legacies or guardianship and eventually to imprisonment without bail.443 More immediately, clergymen, like

441 Robert G. Ingram, Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker and the Church of England (Woodbridge: Boydell Publishing, 2007), 103. 442 Julie Straight, “Religious Controversy in Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind,” Nineteenth Century Contexts 27.4 (2005): 316. 443 R. K. Webb, “From Toleration to Religious Liberty,” in Liberty Secured? Britain before and after 1688, ed. J.R.

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Nicholas Carter, could be forced from their posts for professing this heresy.444 While the existence of other outspoken reformers may have encouraged Carter’s unorthodox stance, her willingness to publish the 1752 Remarks on the Athanasian Creed must have been tempered by caution.

Despite these factors, the anonymity of Carter’s Remarks on the Athanasian Creed is only one layer deep. Although Carter does not sign her name to her critique, a closer look shows her unfolding her identity like a riddle that was meant to be correctly interpreted by contemporaries. Carter addresses herself against specific declarations made by her local rector, beginning in her title “Remarks on the Athanasian Creed; on a Sermon preached at the Parish

Church of Deal, October 15, 1752; and on a Pamphlet . . By a Lady.”445 The title’s specificity and focused address demonstrates a willingness to create a public dialogue. Moreover, despite her apparent anonymity, this pamphlet would have been easy for contemporaries to attribute. In

1752, she had not yet published her Epictetus, which would bring her widespread public recognition and financial stability, but she was already known as the writer of two translations and of several poems, one of which had been printed, without her initial awareness or permission, in Richardson’s prestigious Clarissa. In the small parish of Deal, where she was well known as the daughter of the Reverend Carter, as a writer, and as a prominent intellectual member of the Bluestocking circle, the signature “by a lady” would certainly turn her neighbours’ thoughts toward Carter.446 In the wider circle of London, the focus on Deal would have encouraged the same suspicion of authorship. Her arguments from the original Greek, later

Jones (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 162. 444 Bigold, Women of Letters, 230. 445 Elizabeth Carter, “Remarks on the Athanasian Creed,” in A Letter to the Ven. and Rev. FRANCIS WRANGHAM, M. A. F. R. S. Archdeacon of Cleveland (York, 1822), Appendix.1. Cited as “Remarks.” 446 Brigitte Sprenger-Holtkamp, “Miss Epictetus, or, The Learned Eliza: A Literary Biography of Elizabeth Carter,” (PhD diss., University of London, 1996).

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in the pamphlet, would have strengthened this suspicion, as ladies with knowledge of Greek were rare enough that her knowledge of the language was several times called into question. Finally, her father was already deeply invested in questioning the veracity of the Creed, a fact which would have helped establish her authorship for interested readers.

Anonymous on paper, Carter would have been easily discovered by her readers. Given the dangerously unorthodox nature of her speculations, it is unsurprising that Pennington obscures any mention of this pamphlet, but his insistence that “She was warmly attached to the

Established Church” demonstrates his awareness that her orthodoxy was in question and needed to be bolstered (Memoirs 302). Indeed, Carter herself recognizes this, insisting in her pamphlet that she is “sincerely attached to the Church of England” and that she believes in “the principle that the Holy Scriptures are the only rule of necessary faith,” a belief which separates her from the Catholic reliance on tradition as a means of interpreting scripture. Only after she has thus established her position within the church does she introduce her primary argument, and she ends with a repeated insistence that “no one whatever can have a greater veneration for the Gospel revelation than I have” and she wants “to speak and think of [her] Saviour Jesus Christ” just as the Bible does (“Remarks” Appendix 1, 26).

All of these assurances are necessary because Carter’s next words are a blunt attempt to overturn a major part of the doctrine of the church. Insisting that the foundation of the Church of

England is “the right of private judgement,” she demands that her interlocutor convince her that

“the Athanasian creed contains no difficulties” so severe that the Church of England ought “to lay it aside” and give up this part of their doctrine (“Remarks” Appendix 2). In these words,

Carter sets herself up against both the reverend and the official doctrines of the Anglican church

– hardly the actions of a woman whose moralistic writing is an attempt to conform to society.

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Although Randolph’s sermon was a local matter, Carter’s stance endangered her position within the community and her good relations with her neighbours as she declares the sermon is

“wrote with so little connection, precision, or just reasoning, and intermixed with so many angry, and indeterminate reflections,” that its “confusion and obscurity” make it impossible to reconcile with common sense (“Remarks” Appendix 8). Only, she declares, once he has followed her instructions and acted “like a Christian, a scholar, and a candid reasoner,” will she be willing to answer his arguments (“Remarks” Appendix 9). She even criticizes “the great Athanasius,” who she claims failed to properly understand the clear text of the scriptures (“Remarks” Appendix 24,

16). Although most contemporary Christian writers demanded respect for the church fathers, and indeed Anglican theologians distinguished themselves from other Protestant denominations partly by their respect for past authorities, Carter declares that “truth loses nothing by being new,” aligning herself with contemporary Anglican reformers who wished to bring the church into line with the strict Protestant focus on the Bible as the only source of religious truth.447

Moreover, the foundation of her argument lies in her translating abilities which she believes give her a greater understanding of the Bible.

These examples show Carter’s self-certainty. By setting an unknown lady against a reverend of the church, she places the power of reason above external authority, and insists that reason does not cohere to one man more than another, or to a man more than a woman, but is something that may be grasped by anyone. In doing so, she establishes her participation in theological debates and reforms and a willingness to argue with established beliefs that echoes her participation in the proto-feminist Bluestocking circle. Carter’s radical ideas are visible in the

447 Jean-Louis Quantin, “The Fathers in Seventeenth-Century Anglican Theology,” in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus (New York: E. J. Brill, 1997), 987; Carter, “Remarks on the Athanasian Creed,” Appendix.16.

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subtle changes she makes to her translations and the even more subtle adherence to original phrasing despite contemporary practice, something that is especially evident in her 1758 translation of the Works of Epictetus, which she began circulating in manuscript for the benefit of her friend, Catherine Talbot.

Epictetus, who had been a popular author among both men and women because of his

“profoundly and pervasively theistic” moral focus, was an unsurprising choice for a pious eighteenth-century woman.448 Despite the common Christian usage of Epictetus, however,

Wallace’s suggestion that Carter’s Epictetus is “Christian in all but name or, in other words, like herself” is not borne out by the text, which is remarkably faithful.449 Carter chooses “to undertake the cause of the poor heathen,” defending him against accusations which she finds

“too severe,” but she does this by insisting on his lack of Christian values.450 Far from believing that Epictetus is almost Christian himself, she sees his lack of knowledge as an excuse for following Stoic ideals rather than conforming to the Christian beliefs which were spreading during his lifetime. Indeed, Wallace admits that “tensions” are evident “in the footnotes, where the reader is repeatedly warned about the dangerous implications of the Stoic philosophy,” thus showing Carter’s separation of Epictetus from Christian beliefs.451

Carter’s view of Epictetus responds to the popular upsurge in Christian stoicism during the eighteenth century. This view narrowed traditional reverence toward classical writers by seeing them as proto-Christians. By emphasizing similarities between the stoic disregard of worldly pleasures and despairs and the Biblical command to view oneself as children of God and not children of this world, Christian stoicism rewrote the historical view of classical philosophy

448 Gillian Wright, “Women Reading Epictetus,” Women’s Writing 14.2 (2007): 325. 449 Wallace, “Confined and Exposed,” 324. 450 Carter, A Series of Letters, II.228. 451 Wallace, “Confined and Exposed,” 326.

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in an attempt to claim philosophers as part of Christian society.452 While supporting Christian stoicism’s attempts to import Stoic ideals into Christian behaviour, Carter’s translation resisted contemporary attempts to rewrite history by presenting classical writers such as Epictetus as already Christian. In a continuation of her argument with Talbot, in which Carter insists that

Epictetus was not to be held accountable for not joining the Christian church, she uses her notes to insist that Epictetus “knew little, if anything, about the Gospel itself,” although she sometimes attributes his manners or tendencies to social principles that stemmed from Christianity.453

It is not only in her footnotes that Carter works to separate Epictetus from Christianity, although she certainly points out “the Difference of the two Systems” of Stoicism and

Christianity in her notes throughout (Epictetus 168). Gillian Wright argues in “Women Reading

Epictetus” that the many prior English translations of the Enchiridion work to “homogenize and familiarize” the text by rendering all singular forms simply as “God,” a practice which Carter rejects.454 Not only does she refer to Epictetus’ god as Jupiter, she retains references to “the

Fates, who spun in His presence the Thread of your Birth,” showing how Epictetus splits the powers of his deity between the several gods of the Greek religion (Epictetus 49).

This separation between Christian and Stoic principles appears most clearly when

Carter’s Epictetus is compared to contemporary translations. Although Epictetus’s Enchridion had been translated into English many times, beginning with James Sandford’s 1567 edition, a

1610 version by John Healey, and a 1692 edition by Ellis Walker, the translation of which she appears to have been most aware was Stanhope’s 1694 Epictetus his Morals, with Simplicius his

452 Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 65. 453 Elizabeth Carter, The Works of Epictetus (London, 1758), 32. 454 Wright, “Women Reading Epictetus,” 325.

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Comment.455 Indeed, Pennington claims that Carter’s dislike of Stanhope’s Enchiridion, which found “much too vague and diffuse” for her purposes, was the primary motivation behind her decision to translate the entirety of Epictetus (Memoirs 137-8). Unlike Carter, who presents a relatively unadorned primary text with extensive footnotes, the text of Stanhope’s Epictetus is enlarged several times over by the commentary of Simplicius, several pages of which follow every paragraph from Epictetus.456

Stanhope’s translation also tends to regularize and Christianize Epictetus’ Greek. Lee

Behlman suggests that “The presumed hardness of Roman Stoicism in its purest form needed to be translated in order to conform better” to the sentimentality of eighteenth and nineteenth century ideals.457 A.A. Long argues that, in Justus Lipsius’ influential 1584 De Constantia,

“Stoicism loses its distinctive character and becomes a largely bland anticipation of Christian theism” in the early stages of a revisionist bowdlerization that continued well into the twentieth century.458 For instance, where Carter accurately renders “θεοὺς,” as “Gods,” Stanhope translates this as “God,” making the passage directly applicable to his Christian readers.459 Again, when

Epictetus ends his Enchiridion with a quote from Plato, Carter renders the line “if thus it pleases the Gods, thus let it be,” a reasonably faithful translation of “ἀλλ᾽, ὦ Κρίτων, εἰ ταύτῃ τοῖς θεοῖς

φίλον, ταύτῃ γενέσθω.”460 Stanhope renders the same line as “If this be God’s pleasure concerning me, His Will be done,” a phrase that echoes the “Thy will be done” of the Lord’s

455 Wright, “Women Reading Epictetus,” 326. 456 For readers wishing to compare translations, note that Stanhope and Carter’s chapter numbers do not correspond. 457 Lee Behlman, “The Victorian Marcus Aurelius: Mill, Arnold, and the Appeal of the Quasi-Christian,” Journal of Victorian Culture 16.1 (2011): 2. 458 A.A. Long, “Stoicism in the Philosophical Tradition: Spinoza, Lipsius, Butler,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, ed. Brad Inwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 367. 459 Epictetus, Epicteti Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae, ed. Heinrich Schenkl (Perseus Project: http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0557.tlg002.perseus-grc1:1); Carter, The Works of Epictetus, 435; George Stanhope, Epictetus his Morals, with Simplicius his Comment (London, 1694), 52. 460 Carter, The Works of Epictetus, 464; Epictetus, Epicteti Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae, http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0557.tlg002.perseus-grc1:53

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Prayer.461 Although at times Stanhope finds himself unable to convey Epictetus’ meaning without reference to the Greek religion, wherever possible, he Christianizes the language. Thus,

“θεοὺς εὐσεβείας” (reverence to the gods) becomes the “most important Duty in Religion” while

Carter’s “essential Property of Piety towards the Gods” maintains a more literal phrasing and makes her translation more consistently pagan.462

Philosophy is important to Carter because she believes that even without direct religious instruction, philosophy leads people to God and to virtuous living. This is directly evident in her translation from Epictetus, where her primary argument is that while Epictetus ultimately fails to discover the source of happiness and while his doctrines are greatly inferior to the Christian doctrines, the Greek philosopher shows how close heathen wisdom can come to true Christian wisdom. She makes this argument, an extension of the Christian stoicism prevalent among the

Bluestockings and especially Talbot, for whom this book was written, most clear in her notes.463

In one such note, she compares Epictetus’ view of the body as “a Garment” to “the sacred

Writers.” Some of these writers, she points out, show the body as “a House, or Tabernacle,” but

Saint Paul “joins the two Metaphors together,” showing the body as both a house and a garment

“in a strikingly beautiful Manner” that builds on the image of the body as a garment and improves on it (Epictetus 84). Although this note does not explicitly say anything about

Epictetus, her comments connect the Greek philosopher to Christianity by showing that, through different routes, both the Christian and the non-Christian philosophers have come to the same understanding about the body. At the same time, “How gloomy, how empty the Stoic consolation

461 Stanhope, Epictetus his Morals, 550; Matthew 6:10 KJV. 462 Epictetus, Epicteti Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae, http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0557.tlg002.perseus-grc1:31; Stanhope, Epictetus his Morals, 346; Carter, The Works of Epictetus, 449. 463 O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 65.

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is,” Carter says, reflecting that without Christianity the Stoics have nothing positive to hope for, only the assurance that nothing can harm them (Epictetus 131).

Most shockingly to her Christian audience, Carter allows Epictetus to demand “what is

Jupiter to me, if he cannot help me: or, again; what is he to me, if he chuses I should be in the

Condition that I am?” (Epictetus 76). To a Christian who is taught, as she says in her contribution to the Rambler, which she prints in her edition of her Poems, “patient Dependence on that Providence, which looks through all Eternity . . . silent Resignation, [and] ready

Accommodation of his Thoughts and Behaviour to it’s [sic] inscrutable Ways,” such a declaration would have been unthinkable, but when Carter’s Epictetus repeats the assertion only a little later, she shows him going even further (Poems 113). Insisting that “unless Piety and

Interest be placed in the same Thing, Piety cannot be preserved in any mortal Breast,” Epictetus proves that the Stoic doctrines were not “fitted to influence the Generality of Mankind,” because they offer no sense of the heavenly reward which moral behaviour earns (Epictetus 91, xv). She compares this section, in her notes, to the “blasphemous Impatience” of the Jews in Isaiah, who cursed God because they had no food. By comparing the Greeks and the Jews, Carter displays her conviction that the Greek philosopher has attained the same level as God’s chosen people before the revelations of Christ. This creates a justification for her translation, but also clearly separates the philosopher from Christian writers.

Contrarily, Stanhope’s translation Christianizes Epictetus, a practice which Carter decisively rejects. Carter’s ability and willingness to Christianize classical poetry when it suits her purpose is visible in her 1738 imitation of Horace’s Ode 22, Book I, a poem, which appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine signed by “EL” and which was only attributed to her after her death by her nephew Pennington. This imitation closely follows Horace’s first two stanzas on

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virtue, but then abandons Horace entirely and where the original poem turns into self-praise,

Carter’s moves toward generalities, examining the principles of virtuous men rather than looking at a specific man. Guided not only by Horace’s “Virtue” but also by Christian “Providence,”

Carter’s verse argues that the man “whose acts and thoughts are pure,” remains steadfast against all temptation in a mingled classical and Christian security.464

In Epictetus, contrarily, Carter may comment on the “Likeness to Christian Phrases and

Doctrines,” but she prefers to use neutral words and phrases to express this likeness (Epictetus

441). In some places, her desire to avoid making Epictetus sound Christian leads her to use additional notes to explain her meaning. Where Stanhope says “As no Man sets up a Mark, with a Design to shoot beside it, so neither hath the Maker of the World” created evil,465 Carter uses passive voice to elide agency altogether and then adds a note explaining that “Happiness . . . is the Mark which God has set up” and what we think of as evil is “a mere Negative” result of missing the mark of happiness (Epictetus 448-9). Here, she supplies in her notes the context which is not clearly given in the Greek, while Stanhope’s looser translation allows him to incorporate his explanation into the text. Both writers agree in their interpretation of the passage, but Carter’s desire to separate Epictetus from Christianity leads her to remove her interpretation from the translated text.

Carter’s separation of commentary and original offers a strong contrast to the contemporary practice of Christianizing texts. In an attempt to align Epictetus with Christian doctrine, Stanhope uses “the Things of this World” in one place and “Humours of the World”

464 Elizabeth Carter, “Integer Vitae . . . Hor. Lib. I. Ode 22.: Imitated,” Gentleman’s Magazine VIII (March 1738): 159. 465 Stanhope, Epictetus his Morals, 258.

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elsewhere to render the idea that Carter translates as “Externals.”466 Epictetus’ language in this section allows for interpretation, and both Stanhope’s phrase and Carter’s single word convey

Epictetus’ premise that men should not care about external things. But Stanhope’s translation uses standard Christian phrasing meant to separate the things which please God from the things that are pleasurable only to men. This phrasing is problematic not only because of its

Christianizing impact but also because the Christian standard which separates the things of this world and the next does not exclude as much of this world as Epictetus’ division between things which the individual can and cannot control.

In other places, Stanhope’s translation narrows the range of possibilities. When Epictetus explains how keeping death in mind helps create a balanced perspective, Stanhope narrows his view to “those Calamities which Mankind are most afraid of.”467 Neither Epictetus nor Carter mention man in this passage, and in fact Carter reduces this line “Things which appear terrible,” but Stanhope is so aware of the Christian world in which he writes that he feels the need to exclude the things that God and his angels might find terrifying.468 After all, Stanhope does not want his readers to believe that Epictetus has no fear of sin, shame, or immorality. Epictetus certainly has a strong sense of right and wrong, good and evil, but he is also willing to accept that different people have different principles and that “the Principles that they form, are to them their supreme Rule,” as he shows in the Discourses (Epictetus 63). This may help to explain why

Carter was the first to translate the Discourses into English. Previous translators had rendered the shorter Enchiridion into English, but Carter’s translation of the longer, more complex, and more

466 Stanhope, Epictetus his Morals, 170, 218. Carter, The Works of Epictetus, 441, 445. 467 Stanhope, Epictetus his Morals, 206. 468 Carter, The Works of Epictetus, 444-5; Epictetus, Epicteti Dissertationes ab Arriano digestae, http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0557.tlg002.perseus-grc1:21

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obviously pagan Discourses was the first of its kind and opened a new window into the Stoic philosopher’s pagan religion.

This view of the ancient philosophers as righteous heathens whose works were precursors to Christianity is central to Western philosophical thought. Christianity was seen as “the fulfillment of philosophy,” Cindy Vitto argues, and early Christian writers, including Aristides,

Clement of Alexandria, and Augustine, debated the place of the heathen philosophers in a

Christian afterlife.469 Carter explores this idea that philosophy leads to Christianity in several places, including her early poem, the “Ode to Wisdom,” where she traces the history of wisdom back to Greece. Here, “Plato’s sacred Spirit” teaches his hearers what “Perfect, Fair, and Good” mean and leads both the ancient Athenians and Carter’s narrator to “Virtue’s soft persuasive

Charms” and the beginning of wisdom. Only after she has imbibed this wisdom from the ancients and learned from them how to find virtue does her narrator learn to look for God, the creator of wisdom (Poems 88-9).

Carter is eager to discuss the ways in which pagan philosophy prefigured Christianity and the universality of ideas of good and evil, self and other, and moral behaviour. At the same time, she works to clearly separate Epictetus from Christian philosophers. Although, as Wallace highlights, Carter does bowdlerize her text in places, these alterations avoid social improprieties and not religious doctrines.470 In fact, these changes are similar to those that Pope makes throughout his Homeric translations. She removes Epictetus’ reference to the shame of carrying out a chamber pot, declaring in a footnote that “The Translation here gives only the general

Sense, as a more particular Description would be scarcely supportable in our Language,” in the

469 Cindy L. Vitto, “The Virtuous Pagan in Middle English Literature,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 79.5 (1989): 9. 470 Wallace, “Confined and Exposed,” 325.

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same way that Pope removes references to the “domestic practicalities” of Odysseus and

Telemachus, which he feels are equally unfit for the station of his epic heroes, but she leaves in references to polytheism and to everyday activities.471 Carolyn Williams argues that Carter’s translation shows an “unflinching brutality,” eliding only the chamber pot and a later reference to castration, which Carter calls an “ignominious Amputation” of a “morbid part.”472 The most surprising thing about her changes, in fact, is that there are not more of them.

Indeed, although Jennifer Wallace focuses on “the chastening tone of the reviewers,” and claims that contemporary criticisms are delivered “in ways that would not have been used to discuss a man’s translation,” the negative responses to Carter’s translation were surprisingly similar to contemporary reactions to Pope’s Homer.473 The overwhelming public response to both works was positive, and both authors made their fortunes by their translations. While

Carter’s Epictetus was not as lucrative as Pope’s work, she “earned £1000 from the publication, enough to support her for the rest of her life.”474 Carter, most likely because of her less combative public persona, received much more public praise than did Pope, who had made so many enemies that only one well-known work remains which praises his greatest, most popular, and most lucrative translations.

Criticism of both Carter and Pope focused on their beautiful language and their lack of spirit. Although many reviewers praised Carter’s “pure and elegant language,” the Monthly

Review declared that her translation, though not completely “spiritless, is, in some few places, rather languid, for want of using a liberty which the Writer seems well qualified to manage

471 Carter, The Works of Epictetus, I.8; Carolyn D. Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness (New York: Routledge, 2014), 122-3. 472 Williams, “The Consistency of Elizabeth Carter,” 19; Carter, The Works of Epictetus, I.10. 473 Wallace, “Confined and Exposed,” 329. 474 Priscilla Dorr, “Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806) UK,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5.1 (1986): 139.

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discreetly,” a polite counterpart to contemporary claims that Pope’s “Softness and Harmony”

475 create a “a pretty poem” “with sound so gracious! and with sense so weak!” While these responses to Pope can be placed in a tradition of using feminization as an insult, the similarities demonstrate that Carter’s detractors responded to by her using language of softness and beauty to both praise and detract from her poem in a way similar to Pope’s opponents. Her femininity may have influenced responses to her person, but her reviewers responded to her text in the same way that they responded to texts by men. Indeed, she is criticized not for taking more liberties than she ought and pressing herself into the world of men, but for not doing so strongly enough. Her translating style leads her to make only subtle changes, keeping her commentary external rather than making the extensive alterations common to contemporary translations.

While this translation and its reception may show Carter’s socially-conforming beliefs, it certainly does not show her constraining herself by following the example set by previous translators or moralists. Far from attempting to make her author a Christian, she highlights his non-Christian elements, ensuring that her audience could not miss the foreign, pagan nature of the text she had chosen to translate. Her dedication, or rather, the lack of a dedication to this work, further highlights her independence. While she refused to put her name to her translation of Algarotti’s Newtonianismo per le Dame without having a patron to whom she could dedicate the book, Carter did not look for a titled patron to this, her most prominent public production and the first work to which she publicly signed her name.476

It is true that by the time the book came to publication the list of subscribers, headed by

475 Anon, “All the Works of Epictetus, which are now extant, by Elizabeth Carter,” Critical Review: or Annals of Literature, 6 (1758): 158; Anon, “Mrs. Elizabeth Carter’s Translation of the Works of Epictetus,” The Monthly Review, 18 (1758): 588; Charles Gildon, Complete Art of Poetry (London: 1718), I.xii; Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), IV.74, n; Bezaleel Morrice, To the Falsely Celebrated British Homer (London, 1742), 15. 476 Bigold, Women of Letters, 171.

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the Prince and Princess Dowager of Wales, was long enough to suggest that she had noble patrons who could protect her work. But long lists of subscribers rarely prevented authors from writing dedications and indeed Dryden, with one of the longest lists of subscribers in the long eighteenth century, dedicated his Virgil to not one but several patrons. Carter had several options from which to choose if she wished to write a dedication. Instead of asking the bishop who had been helping her with her Greek, or any of the nobles or highly-ranked clergymen that she knew, she wished to dedicate the Epictetus to the friend who had asked her to begin the translation.

When Talbot refused, Carter decided that she would do without a dedication entirely, and let the work stand on its own terms.

Willingness to stand on her own terms and by her own logic, in fact, characterizes

Carter’s career as a translator and as an author. Her anonymous publications and her early translations were designed to convince readers of their truth, to inspire imitation, and to begin the process of her self-fashioning. Despite the sometimes radical nature of these publications, she did not attempt true anonymity but instead, as she did in her Remarks on the Athanasian Creed, left encoded hints for readers to interpret, or circulated her authorship in private letters to friends and patrons. She never published her translations from Crousaz or Algarotti with her name on them, for example, even though their authorship was well known by the end of her career. These may be the indications of a cautious writer, but they do not show a personality constrained by the overbearing demands of society into making declarations of which she was not convinced.

Social Acceptance

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Although she claims that there is no “deference due either to the ignorance of trifling heads, or the perverseness of worthless hearts,” and that she can therefore write what she likes, bearing “with great tranquillity the scandle [sic] of absurdities I never committed, and of nonsense that I never wrote,” Carter is careful of her reputation.477 In the increasingly strict milieu of the late eighteenth century, she may have worried that her 1739 translations of Crousaz and Algarotti, with their focus on masculine philosophy and science, would earn her a position among the “unsex’d” women who were increasingly attacked in this period. Wollstonecraft and her imitators, writing in the 1790s, were the final straw for the alarmed moral guardians who troubled Carter from the 1730s onward, when rumors of a romance encouraged her to flee

London and declare herself in self-imposed exile in Deal.478 Carter wanted to be known for her learning and her poetry, but she wanted to appear unconcerned with fame, a conflicted response to her own publicity that is echoed by scholars. While most modern writers accept her reports of an almost crippling shyness, enhanced by her self-presentation as retired from the world, there is a simultaneous recognition of the care with which she approached her public persona. As

Melanie Bigold examines, Carter was “conscientiously image-driven,” working to shape public perceptions of her life and work.479

This care for her reputation was necessary to Carter not only because of the potential for hostile reaction, but also because her intended aim – to become a philosophical and moral teacher to other women – required her to have the kind of reputation that she wanted her pupils to imitate. Although Pope and Haywood were content to base their reputations on their own works, Carter, like Dryden, wished to leave a dual legacy. Dryden, as I examine in Chapter 1,

477 Carter, Series of Letters, I.189. 478 Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (London, 1798), 28. 479 Bigold, Women of Letters, 176.

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saw himself as the father of a new generation of poets working to make English literature great.

Carter, more focused on people than on language, worked to create a legacy of confident, competent, and educated women who could lead the nation toward a more religious way of thinking and writing.

She and her father were deeply concerned with the value of her work, and she abandoned at least one translation after discovering that it was “not highly regarded,” declaring to Edward

Cave that she had “laid aside all Thoughts of translating” a work by Joanne Maurocordato because “it is in no very great Esteem.”480 Together, the Carters discussed whether scarcity would make her more desirable, whether it was better that she circulate in manuscript or print, and whether publication was worth the risk of being seen next to undesirable works. As she reports later, her printer “had a hearty twinkation once for suffering” her poems to be printed along with others that she considered “bad company.”481 Her coinage of the word twinkation shows Carter’s ability to laugh at her own irritation, but her recognition of the folly inherent in such worries doesn’t stop her from fretting about her reputation. Worst of all, she and her father were faced with other contributors to the Gentleman’s Magazine who chose the same pen name but whose writing she did not want to be associated with, and she and her father determined that it would be “very right and prudent” to publish an advertisement insisting on distancing her from these verses (Memoirs 25). This experience informed her uncertainty about print, and influenced her attempts to control her reputation throughout her life.

480 Sylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth- Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 57; Elizabeth Carter, Letter to Edward Cave, Elizabeth Carter, 1717-1806: An Edition of Some Unpublished Letters, ed. Gwen Hampshire (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 77. 481 Carter, A Series of Letters, II.203.

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Although she eventually published many of her works, Bigold has shown that Carter often preferred the elite world of manuscript circulation. Pennington recollects that she had to be persuaded to put even the poems which had already appeared in manuscript and in the

Gentleman’s Magazine into a published book (Memoirs 150). Publishing her poems reduced her control over her readership and increased the chance of damaging her reputation. Later in life, she was to claim that she had made a mistake in allowing her poems to be published in the

Gentleman’s Magazine, even anonymously. Her youth and her “personal acquaintance with and esteem for Mr. Cave” had led her into an indiscretion that she was determined not to repeat.

When approached with a flattering request from Robert Dodsley, Carter declared that she

“should rather chuse to publish” her poems herself “than have them published by any body else” who might link her name to other, undesirable authors.482 Dodsley’s miscellany Collection of

Poems was widely influential, but, like many publishers, he ran what Michael Suarez calls a

“low-budget publishing venture” and had no scruples about printing poems without consent of their authors. In Carter’s case, her refusal to grant Dodsley permission to publish her poem, did not prevent it from appearing in the Collection of Poems without her permission or her name and in a less correct copy than the one she finally released.483 She complained that she has “had the mortification” of her name several times appearing “in some trumpery advertisement or other,” having been “stolen” by “miscellany mongers, magazine mongers, and roguery mongers” so that her name appeared not only in the Gentleman’s Magazine, to which she had at least given permission, even if she later regretted that permission, but in other magazines, miscellanies, and collections.484 She furiously exclaims to Miss Talbot against “the person, whoever it was, who

482 Carter, A Series of Letters, II.203. 483 Michael F. Suarez, Introduction to A Collection of Poems by Several Hands (London: Routledge, 1997), I.5-7. 484 Carter, A Series of Letters, II.214.

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gave away copies without my leave,” declaring that “to see it fluttering in two or three journals is beyond all sufferance.”485 Here, her works become property that can be advertised, stolen, and sold.

That this scene was repeated several times throughout her life infuriated Carter and encouraged her careful control of her printed texts. Although she considered dedicating several of her books, only one received a dedication, a fact attributable as much to Carter’s determination not to offer her work to anyone unsuitable as to the refusal of her chosen dedicatees. Even in Poems on Several Occasions, which does contain a dedication, she is sparing of her praise. Although she wrote to Miss Talbot about Lord Bath’s “great politeness, his sensibility, his constant cheerfulness,” and his kindnesses, she insists that she “should be as far from putting it into a dedication, as he from suffering me to do it,” and in the end she allowed

Bath to write the dedication to himself, which resulted in a very reserved final text.486 Instead,

Carter structures her Poems on Several Occasions, to show off her classical education and her abilities as a translator. The quotation on the title page is not the standard English or Latin, but

Greek, and the laudatory poem she includes highlights her classical and religious connections.

While many publications include such laudatory poems, Carter highlights her agency in choosing this poem by prefacing it with a paragraph of introduction. Her introduction offers a standard, self-deprecatory thanks to her patron, Lord Lyttelton, for writing these lines but her insertion of her own words accepting the “Honour the Author of this Collection may derive from the following fine verses” emphasizes her ability to choose, accept, and judge the verses that she includes (Poems 61).

485 Carter, A Series of Letters, I.249. 486 Carter, A Series of Letters, II.390.

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This laudatory poem opens by echoing a hymn, “Glory to God on high,” which contemporary Anglicans would have recognized not only from the story of the birth of Christ in the gospel of Luke but also from the Sunday service, where the hymn forms part of the Gloria.

After making this acknowledgement to religious propriety, the poem focuses on classical connections. Lyttelton calls her poems “More pow’rful than the Song of Orpheus,” better than

“Lesbian Sappho,” and worthy of “A nobler Wreath” to crown her brows (v). These comparisons link her to famously charming figures, glossing lightly over her scientific connections and emphasizing her literary and classical focus.

This classical focus and desire for control were never more apparent than in her translation of Epictetus. Carter’s friends, Secker, the Bishop of Oxford, and Miss Talbot, provided the impetus for moving her translation of Epictetus from manuscript to print in part by demonstrating the circulatory power of the manuscript. Although Carter asserted that her translation was intended as a private gift for Miss Talbot, Talbot and Secker showed her work to others. Secker’s declaration to her that “The Bishop of Norwich hath blabbed, that the translator is a lady” shows the type of pressure her friends used in order to encourage Carter to publish. He admits that showing her unfinished manuscript to others “is a little premature,” but requests that she “be not grieved” that he has not asked permission, recognizing that she has a right to control who sees her work, even as he consistently flouts that right.487

While Carter certainly appears to have been startled at the speed with which her manuscript escaped her hands, this should not be taken to mean that she intended it to be read only by Talbot, to whom she sent the translation. Talbot’s declaration to her that Secker, “the

Bishop of Oxford is an idle man, and has not read over your Epictetus” implies that Carter had

487 Secker to Carter, March 31, 1753, in Memoirs, 121.

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expressed a desire for the bishop to read the translation.488 Carter’s argument with the Bishop over translation strategies demonstrates worries about her readers which show that she intended a wider readership than the circle of three with which she began. Sylvia Myers describes Carter’s stubborn insistence on a more ornamented style than the bishop approved, an insistence which turned on the question of whether anyone would “mind” a writer who was presented in “an easy and natural style.”489 That this was the central argument demonstrates that, even at the beginning of this supposedly private translation, Carter hoped for a wider readership.

Despite her hesitations about what to print and where and her worries about appearing like Macaulay, who “suffered herself to be flattered, and almost worshipped” with what Carter called a “farcical parade of foolery,” Carter nursed a powerful desire for fame.490 Her paired poems on the laurel branch, published in the 1762 Poems on Several Occasions, use the trope of advising another writer to show her struggle with a sense of unworthiness and the importance of overcoming that struggle. When her first speaker approaches the laurel bush it accuses her of being too “Weak and Vain” to aspire to the “Honours [which] to the Wise belong,” but her

“ANSWER” encourages poets to overcome these fears (Poems 42). Instead of listening to the condemnations of the world, symbolized by Daphne, poets must remember that Daphne rejected

“Apollo, Pow’r of Wit and Verse.” Thus if the world rejects them, that is no reflection on them but only on the world’s judgement.

Carter’s advice seems to contradict her insistence on her own privacy, but it is borne out in her actual practice. Worried, as the first of her narrators is, about her own reputation and especially about the accusation of vanity, she published the majority of her early pieces

488 Carter, A Series of Letters, II.31. 489 Myers, Bluestocking Circle, 161-3. 490 Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 88-9.

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anonymously, including her first two lengthy translations. Famously, Carter found learning languages difficult, but it is hard to believe in the inherent dullness of a woman who, in addition to Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French, taught herself German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and

Arabic.491 The emphasis which both she and her nephew put on her lack of inherent skill with languages is part of a larger self-portrait of a woman without genius who supplies her lack of brilliance with hard work. Her nephew recollects in his Memoirs that she was “determined to overcome” her trials and to attain her goals (Memoirs 6). This determination inspires her insistence on the culpability of the uneducated in her translation of Crousaz’ Examination and led her to insist that fame answers not to genius but to perseverance.

After a visit to Pope’s garden in 1738 inspired friends to write a series of poems, including a Latin epigram by Samuel Johnson and an “Englished” version which claimed that

“Phoebus himself” would give her the laurel crown of poetic fame, Carter hid her pleased response behind a claim of modest denial.492 Her immediate public response, published in both

Latin and English in the same issue, was to insist that “Remov’d from Pope’s, the wreath must face / On ev’ry meaner brow,” taking the same guise of humility that the speaker in her “To Miss

___.: In ANSWER to the foregoing” condemns. Declaring that she was a “climate” not suited to genius, Carter wrote that poetic thoughts would “Lose all their lively bloom, and droop/ Beneath

[the] paler sun” of her mind after having flourished in Pope’s brilliant mind.493 Notwithstanding this public demurral, she allowed herself to be painted standing in a garden, with a spray of leaves and flowers in her hair that echoes the laurel crown being given to an allegorized female

491 Mirella Agorni, “Women Manipulating Translation: The Case of Elizabeth Carter,” in The Knowledges of the Translator: From Literary Interpretation to Machine Classification, ed. Malcolm Coulthard and Patricia Anne Odber de Baubeta (Queenston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), 136. 492 Samuel Johnson, “Ad Elisam Popi Horto Lauros carpentem,” Gentleman’s Magazine VIII (July 1738):327; Alexis, “To Eliza plucking Laurel in Mr. Pope’s Garden,” Gentleman’s Magazine VIII (August 1738):429. 493 Elizabeth Carter, “Untitled,” Gentleman’s Magazine July 1738, VIII.429.

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figure behind her.494 This image, like her answer to Johnson, refrains from explicitly claiming to be Pope’s heir or his equal, but demonstrates an attempt to follow in his footsteps. The spray of leaves in her hair and her position within a garden recollect the series of laudatory poems which followed her visit to Pope’s garden. Moreover, as Peltz shows, Carter’s pose, with one hand up as if she is about to rest her chin on it, recollects the positioning which Pope used to “represent himself as a brooding genius” in his portraits.495 This painting offers a physical counterpart to her admission that her “daring hand/ Usurp’d the laurel bough,” reaching for the fame that she modestly refuses to demand.496

The paintings depict Carter’s literary and scholastic achievements without blatantly demanding admiration. Pope’s high-profile arguments about his literary genius, and the public fallout over his hubris provided an example of the devastating accusations of pride which open self-satisfaction could incur. In order to avoid following in Pope’s embattled footsteps, Carter encourages others to praise her but responds to this praise with modest demurrals. The portraits which depict her as Pope’s rightful heir and as Minerva, goddess of wisdom, offer visual examples of this tendency. By celebrating Johnson’s praise and Pope’s legacy, her garden portrait displays submission to male judgement. This submission to masculine works is emphasized by the Minerva portrait, where Carter displays Plato’s works rather than directing viewers to her own writings or even to her translations.497 These portraits remind readers of

Carter’s genius and her translations, but they do so while retaining a pose of feminine modesty.

494 Peltz, “Living Muses,” 69-71. 495 Peltz, “Living Muses,” 69; William Kurtz Wimsatt, The Portraits of Alexander Pope (London: Yale University Press, 1965), 22, 61, 71, 72, 318. 496 Carter, Gentleman’s Magazine July 1738, VIII.429. 497 Peltz, “Living Muses,” 70, 72.

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Her worries about vanity and her real shyness, which led her to declare that when company came “I doubt [not] I shall feel frightened, and run into holes and corners like a wild kitten” do not prevent Carter from wanting the fame that she writes about.498 Although she did not put her name to her early translations she, like other writers of the eighteenth century, divulged her authorship through other means. Her desire for recognition is evident early in her career in her furious response to Richardson, who read her anonymous “Ode to Wisdom,” in manuscript and inserted it in Clarissa. Feeling that he had no right to her text, Carter declared herself “extremely surprized” that he has printed something that “no one had a right to publish if

[she] did not choose.”499 Calling his actions “ungenerous and unworthy,” she appears to have caught him by surprise, and his response shows his uncertainty in the face of this challenge to his masculine, print authority. While Richardson appears to believe that anonymous manuscript pieces are free for public use so long as he does not claim to be the author, and seems aggrieved at her not recognizing the “trouble” and “expense” of publication, Carter felt that her anonymity should protect her and that her works, no matter under what name she sent them into the world, were her sole property.500 Although anonymous published poems were often borrowed by publishers of miscellanies, Schellenberg argues that manuscript authors expected more consideration and that Richardson “broke the rule of respecting a scribal author’s wishes regarding publicity.”501 The start of this poem’s career, unwillingly shoved into the spotlight, may help to explain why Carter was later hesitant to accept even generous offers of publication.

498 Carter, A Series of Letters, I.288. 499 Bigold, Women of Letters, 181; Elizabeth Carter, “Original Letters of Miss E. Carter and Mr Samuel Richardson,” Monthly Magazine 33 (1812), 533-4. 500 Samuel Richardson, “Original Letters,” 534. 501 Schellenberg, Literary Coteries, 65.

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Near the end of her career, Carter was still showing the same irritated response to anyone who seemed to infringe on her right to control her own works. Although she had established herself as a learned woman, and despite the translation from Anacreon’s Greek with which she had opened her career, some people were still skeptical of her ability to translate the difficult

Greek of Epictetus. In one letter, Chapone explains that the men around her “could no otherwise account for the thing, or comfort themselves under it, but by attributing its excellence to the archbishop’s [formerly the Bishop of Oxford’s] assistance,” and others gave the credit for the translation to her father.502 Carter was deeply troubled by this lack of acknowledgement, although she tried to show this unhappiness through circuitous routes.

In one letter to Miss Talbot, she exclaims against a story attributing her friendship to

Lord Bath to another lady, asking “Did my Lord B. ever take the very nosegay from its button hole, and deliver it to the hand of my Lady A___?” Carter’s list of incidents involving herself escalates until she ends with her most bitter complaint, that “when people are not allowed to call their Greek their own, it would provoke the most dove-like patience to speak” (Memoirs 152).

By opening with a complaint about her friendship being attributed to another woman, she can connect her socially acceptable and even laudable pride in her friends with her pride in her own reputation.

Furious at her own works being attributed to others, Carter was nearly as unhappy to have her friend’s work credited to her. When it was first suggested that Mrs. Montagu’s essay on

Shakespeare was Carter’s work, she retreated in horror, calling it “theft” to take on “any part of the justly acquired reputation of my friend” (Memoirs 288). This reaction shows something of the resentment that she felt on seeing her own works ascribed to other writers, as her

502 Hester Mulso-Chapone, The Posthumous Works of Mrs Chapone (London, 1807), 106.

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encouragement of Montagu’s temporary anonymity shows her attitude toward her own. Cater encouraged Montagu to publish anonymously in order to see the true reactions of the public, unstained by partiality or politics, but after the work had been received, she declared that “it seems to me to be downright affectation to conceal it any longer,” and encouraged her friend to make her authorship known or, as she had done, to allow her friends to tell the world that she had authored the book (Memoirs 287).

In the last years of her life, Carter was agreeably surprised to be presented with “a little pamphlet, containing a French translation of some of my poems,” and hastened to spread the news to her friends. Declaring that “the translation is excellent,” she desired Mrs. Montagu to read the publication also.503 Her request for her friend’s opinion gave her an excuse to talk about her own pleasure in her spreading fame. This submission to outside opinion is a common trope in eighteenth-century publications, and one she uses several times with her Epictetus, writing to

Miss Talbot that she believes her translation is “a most intolerably bad one; and yet . . . from a conviction that my Lord and you are much better judges than I am, out of an odd kind of humility” she must look at her translation in the best possible light.504 This type of disclaimer, like her earlier hope that another translator will take up the task so that her author “will appear to more advantage than in my vile disguise” retains a guise of modesty and humility even as it invites her readers to praise her writing.505

Unfortunately for her ambitions, while both of her early translations were immediately popular, neither gained lasting fame and it was not until her translation of Epictetus that she gained her reputation as a translator. Although they were well thought of, and the Algarotti went

503 Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 349. 504 Carter, A Series of Letters, II.82. 505 Carter, A Series of Letters, II.30.

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through several editions, by the time Pennington wrote his Memoirs in 1807 the books were already scarce. Indeed, he claims that Carter herself seems to have decided later in life that they were unworthy of her reputation. She had chosen Crousaz and Algarotti in preference to several other works suggested to her by her bookseller, among them a work by contemporary Greek author Joanne Maurocordato, but later in life she preferred to be known as a translator of difficult

Greek and Latin texts rather than as a poet who worked with less respected modern languages

(Memoirs 31). There is little evidence for this outside Pennington’s Memoirs, but her choice to focus on poetry in the last years of her life may show her worries about these earlier texts. She was certainly worried about the reputation of the Bluestocking circle of which she was a part.

This circle offered several systems for the education of women and supported women with many different talents, and some of these were coming under attack by the end of the century. While

Carter’s carefully-cultivated reputation earned her a place among the Bluestockings that was almost universally admired, she knew that she was admired as much for her “Modesty and

Beauty” as for her “Sense and Genius.”506

Whatever her later sentiments, she was proud to acknowledge all of her translations at the time of writing. Carter was especially pleased by her translation of Algarotti, which she sent to several people, including Algarotti himself, who she asked friends to speak with, lamenting that she could not “get a Book ready to be presented to him” as soon as she would like.507 Other recipients included the Duchess of Hertford, to whom she wished to dedicate the piece and who later became a friend and correspondent, and Mr. Rowe, who had sent her a copy of his deceased wife’s works and biography (Memoirs 45). Both of these commented on the beauty of the

506 Monthly Review, or Literary Journal, XVIII (June 1758): 588. 507 Carter to Edward Cave, Some Unpublished Letters, 66.

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translation as well as their inability to read the original, suggesting that Carter’s translation may have succeeded in replacing the original for her readers and thus in hiding its problematic sexual references. The widespread inability to read Italian may also suggest a reason why she was more proud of her Italian than her French translation, including a pair of side-by-side Italian-English translations from Pietro Metastasio in her Poems on Several Occasions.

Divinely Reasoned Education

Carter’s insistence on the importance of a wide education led her away from literature, which she enjoyed but did not find as useful to a pious education, to philosophy and science.

These were subjects which were often untranslated because contemporaries viewed them as unsuitable for women and for the lower classes. In 1787, the Reverend John Bennet declared that studying “politics, philosophy, maths, [or] metaphysics,” was “unwomanly” and would “destroy the ease and softness which are the very source of [women’s] grace,” a worry that Carter works to alleviate.508 In a letter to Montagu on Montagu’s defence of Shakespeare, she explains that

“There is no doubt great merit in every work that helps to polish the understanding,” but that the best works were those that were “consecrated to the honour and service” of God and that led readers to learn about him, either directly or through learning about his creation.509 By defining science as an attempt to understand and appreciate God, she redefines philosophical and scientific works as religious texts. This allows her to claim that while she read voraciously, she

508 John Bennett, Strictures on Female Education; Chiefly in Relation to the Culture of the Heart (London 1787), 46. 509 Elizabeth Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Montagu, Between the Years 1755 and 1800. Chiefly Upon Literary and Moral Subjects, ed. Montagu Pennington (London, 1817), II.21-22

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confined her reading to books whose primary focus was to improve the character or to inform the mind. Her desire for authority led Carter to use the religious language of the day to justify and support her desire for a philosophical and scientific education based on in-depth reasoning.

“Thinking,” she claims in a letter to Mrs. Vessey, “must always tend to peace, when it is exercised under an awful sense of the presence of the Supreme Being,” and this twofold focus is evident throughout her work (Memoirs 244). Her focus on reason as the path to religion shares characteristics with many eighteenth-century religious works, including the “Shew of Reason” that appears in William Law’s popular Dialogue Between a Methodist and a Churchman, but

Carter’s focus on reason was more inclusive, including pagan and scientific as well as religious truths.510

The omnivorous nature of Carter’s reading may stem from the superficiality that Michèle

Cohen sees as the defining feature of women’s education. Although women were not encouraged to read in the sciences, and were in fact counselled to avoid works that required “abstraction, comprehensiveness,” and persistence to understand, women’s education was broader than men’s, including a wider “range of subjects,” but examining these subjects only superficially.511

Rejecting this idea, Carter insists on the suitability of philosophy to women’s education, and stresses persistence in her poetic injunctions to make “Repeated Efforts” to acquire “Happiness and Fame” (Poems 43). Instead of ascribing poetic success to genius, she claims that

That beauteous Prize the patient Toils

Of Perseverance claim:

Whose Hand alone must weave the Wreath

510 William Law, Of Justification by Faith and Works. A Dialogue Between a Methodist and a Churchman (London, 1760), 65. 511 Michèle Cohen, “‘A Little Learning’? The Curriculum and the Construction of Gender Difference in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.3 (2006): 329.

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Of undecaying Fame (Poems 43-5).

By making Perseverance, not Genius, the price of fame and success for adherents of poetry,

Carter emphasizes the worth of fame, both as a prize which will reward the diligent writer and as something that is inherently beautiful while also subtly reassuring readers that she does not believe her fame makes her better than them. In letters to Miss Talbot she insists that she has

“nothing to assist me, but industry” and certainly no claim to “genius,” but this does not prevent her from learning classical languages, reading philosophy, and translating scientific texts.512

Carter’s insistence on the feminine virtue of perseverance rejects the superficial education most women received, including a wide variety of texts but choosing these texts from different sources than standard female curriculums.

Carter, unlike her fellow Bluestockings, was uncertain about the importance of literature, and her dubious response to even great literature that does not directly improve and inform the mind is evident in her translation of Metastasio’s sonnet on truth, which she prints in side-by- side Italian and English verses. This style of side-by-side translation is rare in longer works, more prevalent in poetry than in prose, and in literary texts it seems to mark the author’s desire for immediate comparison between versions. Here, the side-by-side translation emphasizes her changes. While Metastasio writes that everything is folly, echoing the “all is vanity” of

Ecclesiastes, Carter focuses on specific examples of folly, expanding the fourteen-line sonnet to eighteen lines in order to decry both earthly vanity and imagination. Although she insists that people take personal responsibility for their actions in her translation of Crousaz, her image of the imagination in this poem shows her worry that the imagination destroys control of the self.

Where Metastasio declares that “folle ch io son” (I go mad) because “prendo tal parte” (I take

512 Carter, A Series of Letters, I.95-6.

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part) in creating fables and dreams, Carter describes her narrator as “Caught by their magic

Force” and unable to break free. Her image of the “inventive Head” which “betrays the simple

Heart,” is nowhere in her original and shows her concern over the imagination (Poems 48-51).

This worry causes her to expand the first stanza, translating “Che de mal ch inventai, piango e mi sdegno,” (I cry and am outraged at the evils I have myself invented) as “Imagin’d

Woes with real Grief I mourn, / Imagin’d Wrongs resent with real Scorn,” emphasizing the conflict between the real, tangible world and the real movement of the mind and the falsehood of the imagination. All of these insertions make her first stanza the longest stanza of the poem at six lines to Metastasio’s four, a significant comparison in light of the following stanza, where she follows his numbers exactly.

Following Metastasio’s numbers, however, does not mean directly following his thought, and she rejects his suggestion that “l’agitato Ingegno” (the working of genius) may be able to offer tranquility. Instead of genius, she looks to “Wisdom” and to “calmer Thoughts” to

“compose” her “ruffled Mind,” to restore her to herself. Neither author answers the question of whether these things can help bring people closer to Metastasio’s “vero” and Carter’s “Truth,” finally achieved through a direct appeal to God, but Carter’s verse offers a greater possibility that wisdom can. Her final stanza condenses Metastasio’s two-line address to God so that she can add a warning about worldly “Cares” and “Starts,” ending not simply with his plaintive cry to God for help but a description of how “from Folly’s fev’rish Sleep I wake.”

Carter’s juxtaposition of wisdom to folly, dreams, and imagination stems from her lifelong focus on education. In this poem, she finds a simple solution in rejecting all fables, but she found this a difficult value to live by. Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneis were idealized portrayals of history, so she could enjoy these with a quiet conscience, poring over her maps of

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ancient Greece to find where Homer’s heroes had travelled until, as Pennington claimed, she

“could give a better account of the wanderings to Ulysses and Æneas,” than of the modern discoverers, and knew Greece better than England, but she was constantly confronted with novels and plays that offered no such claim to historical or philosophical truth (Memoirs 11). In a letter to a friend, she complained of “the vile practice of exalting some characters and abusing others, without any color of truth or justice,” and insisted that telling the true story was more important than even “the finest genius in the world” (Memoirs 85). Her fear of imagination and the effects of the uncontrolled fancy may have encouraged her to accept Cave’s suggestion that she translate

Crousaz and show how Pope’s poetic imagination carried him beyond the boundary of Christian thought. The desire to combat this focus on imagination with reasoned wisdom certainly played a large part in her decision to translate Algarotti’s Newtonianismo per le Dame.

Sir Isaac Newton’s PHILOSOPHY Explained for the Use of the LADIES, Carter’s second translation, written shortly after her translation of Crousaz, is an educational treatise, but, as

Mirella Agorni explains, close reading of its source material “reveals that the appeal to ladies was in fact only a decorative element in the structure of the original work” and that Algarotti used education as “a pretext for denouncing the static nature of Italian culture.”513 Carter, uninterested in Italian cultural criticism as a tool to learn about Italy, found Algarotti’s praise of the English system congenial to her own beliefs but disagreed with his statements about Italian culture, shifting his meaning to reify her own preconceptions about the country. Where his introduction calls for “il Secolo delle cose venga una volta anco per noi” (the century of true things [to come] some time also for us), she translates this as “let the Age of Realities once more

513 Mirella Agorni, Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century: Women, Translation and Travel Writing 1739-1797 (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2002), 72, 74.

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arise among us,” recalling her favourite classical authors and rejecting Algarotti’s implication that Italy had not yet enjoyed an age of reality.514 She is not interested in Algarotti’s view of modern Italy as backward, but instead wishes to present Italy as more forward-thinking than

England, offering scientific education and enlightenment to women as well as to men.

Similarly, Carter rejects Algarotti’s hints that his book is intended for men rather than women. Algarotti’s narrator uses a liberal, rakish style whose erotic allusions troubled Carter’s view of proper educational material. In order to create a usefully educational work, which could teach women philosophy without exposing them to impropriety, she needed to remove passages which, as Agorni shows, put women in their “traditional position” as objects.515 She removes the most egregious of the erotic references to women’s bodies and alters the remaining text to emphasize Enlightenment ideas of reason and sensibility. Thus when Algarotti uses a blind sculptor to demonstrate the importance of using the senses to understand reality, Carter not only cuts out Algarotti’s mocking remark that the sculpture would have preferred to make portraits that included women’s busts as well as their head, she changes his “uno scultore, che benché cieco scolpiva però palpando” (a sculptor who, although blind, sculpted through touching) the body he was to recreate to “yet, by help of his Feeling made” recognizable sculptures (Algarotti

I.153).516 Her change removes the gross physicality of “palpando,” in order to apply the lesson to a greater variety of tasks. Using the neutral words “Feeling” and “made,” Carter expands on the initial lesson, encouraging students of words and of painting to also use more than one sense in their rendering of likeness.

514 Francesco Algarotti, Il Newtonianismo per le Dame Ovvero Dialoghi Sopra la Luce e i Colori (Naples, 1737), xi; Elizabeth Carter, Sir Isaac Newton’s PHILOSOPHY Explain’d for the Use of the LADIES (London, 1739), I.xvi. Cited as Algarotti. 515 Agorni, Translating Italy, 78. 516 Algarotti, Newtonianismo, 94.

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She continues this process, both removing sexual imagery and increasing the scientific rigour of her text, throughout the translation. In discussing how women understand the world, she describes them as preferring to “perceive than understand,” rendering Algarotti’s “sentire”

(to feel) as “perceive” in order to give women more scope for scientific understanding (Algarotti

I.v).517 This type of increased focus on science rather than sexuality is especially evident in a passage about microscopes where Algarotti refers to “Un certo umore, in cui è riposte l’origine de’ vivente, e per cui si rinovella tutto dì dolcemente la Natura,” (A certain humour, in which resides the origins of life, which renews itself through this in the sweetness of Nature) as an example of the wonders which microscopes can explore.518 Although this reference to sperm is indirect and quite tame by modern standards, Carter replaces the whole passage with a discussion of philosophy, discovery, and its uses. “The Microscope,” she says, “is the Compass of

Philosophy,” but while the Compass has been used to destroy the things that it finds, the

Microscope furthers “the Discovery of new Worlds” without encouraging greed or destruction.

The new worlds that the Microscope reveals, she continues, show that “all Art and Curiosity” can be aroused and satisfied by something as small as a grain of sand (Algarotti I.176, 177).

Carter’s additions here, as in her translation of Crousaz, encourage a more holistic worldview, asking readers to apply the lessons that they learn from the science of optics to other sciences and philosophies. Her discussion of “how little a Compass” of space and material is needed to inspire and encourage scientific inquiry creates a subtle reference to and rebuke of other female scholars who complained of the limited scope for learning. If even a “Grain of

Sand” provides enough scope for all the world’s sciences, then her readers have no excuse for

517 Carter, Newton’s PHILOSOPHY, I.xiv; Algarotti, Newtonianismo, v. 518 Algarotti, Newtonianismo, 109.

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failing to learn and profit by nature and by the many books available for them (Algarotti I.177).

She argues with Algarotti, in one of her few critical notes on the text, when he criticises classical writers, declaring that “the greater part of those, who are acquainted with the Character of

Socrates, will think Signor Algarotti has passed too severe a Censure,” in believing that he and the other Greek philosophers tried to stamp out rather than improve philosophy of a kind that

Christians can approve (Algarotti I.22).

Carter’s approbation of science appears in her poem to Miss Montagu in which she reminisces about the time they spent together, claiming that those hours will last for ever because they were spent “in Life’s great Task” and saved “from the Waste of Time” not by religious meditations or domestic duties but by “Science.” Although she never specifies what type of

“Improvement” this science is meant to create or even whether she is speaking of the physical sciences, of philosophy, or even of the gaining of knowledge, Carter’s poem shows that learning is an important part of women’s lives. Learning, she claims, both improves the mind and aids religion, and she declares that the hours they spent in study “shall fly to Heav’n, / And claim the

Promise of eternal Years” (Poems 74-5). Her belief that studying science improves the mind is visible in the introduction to Algarotti’s text, where she translates his “a moda di coltivarsi lo spirito” (a fashion of cultivating the spirit) to refer to her favourite subject, the “Mind.”519 At the same time she enlarges the opportunities for learning, assuring her readers that philosophy is not only, as Algarotti suggests, a pastime for the “Tolette delle Dame” (toilets of the ladies) but also for their “Circles” and places of discussion (Algarotti I.ii).520 Because she herself was a copious letter-writer and found great enjoyment in being part of a group of educated women with whom

519 Algarotti, Newtonianismo, x. 520 Carter, Newton’s PHILOSOPHY, I.ii; Algarotti, Newtonianismo, iii.

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she could discuss politics, literature, and philosophy, she alters Algarotti’s text so as to encourage other women to find similar circles of learned women.

Wishing to make philosophy attractive, Carter strengthens Algarotti’s declaration that

“Nè cognizioni, nè piaceri a noi mancheranno purché buon uso di que sensi facciamo” (We miss neither knowledge nor pleasures as long as we make good use of the senses).521 While the original suggests that the senses can offer pleasures additional to those of common life, Carter’s translation speaks of being “destitute of either Knowledge or Pleasure” without the philosophy which teaches how to “make a good Use of the Senses” in learning more about the world

(Algarotti II.246). She feels more strongly than Algarotti the importance of philosophy and the negative consequences attendant on neglecting to spend one’s time and senses to good advantage.

In both her translation of Epictetus and her “Remarks on the Athanasian Creed,” Carter shows her belief in the primacy of reason. Her opening to the “Remarks,” in which she declares that her goal is to understand how to interpret the Creed “consistently with the principles and deduction of reason” shows her belief that religion must be conformable to reason (“Remarks”

Appendix 1). At the same time, she condemns Jean Jacques Rousseau for expecting “that every thing is to give way to his reason” and for rejecting “all authority, human and divine, unless he is able to account for every thing by his own faculties.”522 This willful refusal of authority, she declares, “will soon reduce his mind to a state of confusion, error, and extravagance” which more reasonable people will avoid by careful study of the scriptures.523 While she insists that no

521 Algarotti, Newtonianismo, 299. 522 Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 180. 523 Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 180.

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“necessary Doctrine of Scripture” can be beyond the power of the common man’s reason, she bows to the primacy of the Bible and allows a need for authority (“Remarks” Appendix 24).

The original poem that opens both her first published book of poetry and her last, “In

Diem Natalem” (On the day of birth), shows how she sees reason in relation to religious devotion. This poem appears in English in the books that she published, but Pennington includes a Latin version of the poem in his Memoirs, showing that here as elsewhere in her life, Carter worked in two languages at once although she refrained from publishing the Latin version herself. Instead, she publishes the piece in English so that her lesson about how best to serve God may be clearly understood by her readers. After praising God for creating her, Carter asks him to

“Increase my Faith, and rectify my Mind,” connecting faith and reason as two of the most important ways to show her love for God. When she speaks of her need for guidance, she does not mention virtue or morals, but asks that God “point [her feet’s] Motions to the Paths of

Truth.” In her image of the soul on the path to God, it is imperative to “My Reason strengthen, and my Passions still” so that she can follow the paths of truth that will lead her to her heavenly reward (Poems 2-3). In her “Ode to Wisdom,” she calls God the “Supreme, all-perfect Mind,” from whom all the “Force” of wisdom and “intellectual Light” is derived (Poems 89). This image of God as a mind is echoed by her use of the mind, in other poems, where most writers would talk about the soul.

By connecting the mind to the Christian notion of the eternal soul, which is the most important part of the human being, Carter can discuss the exercise of the mind as the most important duty of humankind. This connection between religion and the mind, which Carter holds in common with many religious texts of the period, especially dissenting texts that used reason and biblical exposition to argue against established beliefs, informs her relationships with

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other writers and her willingness to engage in intellectual debate. Although she does not explicitly comment on the argument of Crousaz’ An Examination of Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man, her translation shows a delicate balance between her firm intellectual and religious support for

Pope’s poetry and her respect for the orthodoxy and authority of Crousaz. Her respect for Pope is particularly evident in synergy between the comments, which point to places in Pope’s text where he answers Crousaz’ objections, and the close translation of the original, which leaves

Crousaz’ argument intact, demonstrating the rational philosophy which Crousaz supports.

Like many works by well-connected authors, the completed translation owed debts to many scholars. Carter certainly worked more independently than Pope did in his Homeric translations. She did not, as both Pope and Dryden did, rely on other writers to translate important secondary or even primary documents. But like these authors, Carter sent her translations to literary friends or connections for correction and revision. She sent her Epictetus to the Bishop of Oxford to receive his corrections, and even allowed Lord Bath to write the dedication to himself that prefixes her Poems on Several Occasions (Memoirs 127, 160-1). In light of this, it is likely that she accepted corrections to her Examination from Johnson, a great friend of hers at the time of its writing and one whose comments and help with her translation she mentions in letters to her father.

Johnson may also have helped her to write the footnotes for her Epictetus. While

Pennington believes the notes to be Carter’s, O M Brack suggests that Johnson supplied the scanty footnotes to Carter’s translation. Brack’s argument rests on the basis of Cave’s withdrawing his claim that the book would contain remarks by the translator, of Johnson’s familiarity with the text, and of some stylistic echoes that appear between these and “that used by

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Johnson in his Commentary” translated from the same author.524 The evidence Brack presents is not conclusive, and the stylistic similarities that drive his declaration that it was Johnson who

“revised Carter’s manuscript” and “rewrote the text to accommodate the verses” are of uncertain value.525 Some similarities would be expected due to their friendship and Carter’s declaration that she has shown the piece to him for criticism and comment. Nevertheless, the infrequency of the notes and their generally factual rather than critical character suggests that she was not invested in annotating this text. She may have accepted suggested annotations to supplement her own observations, as she did in her Epictetus, or even have permitted Johnson, as Brack suggests, to write annotations in her place (Memoirs 137).

More important than their authorship, the infrequency and minimalism of the annotations and the lack of a translator’s preface to the work are of a piece with Carter’s translation of

Epictetus, to which she only reluctantly allowed herself to be convinced to add an explanatory preface. To Talbot, Carter claimed that she believed “none but very good Christians” would read her translation of Epictetus because she believed that no “infidel” would enjoy “finding himself obliged to practice the morality of the Gospel without its encouragements and supports” to that morality (Memoirs 128). This claim shows both her belief that any scholar who understood the classical authors would become a Christian and her assurance that right reasoning would lead others to Christian morality, as she believed it had already led the unwitting stoics. Unwilling to accept arguments from authority herself, she refuses to force a similar argument on her readers.

In part because of this willingness to allow her readers to learn for themselves, her translation of Crousaz’ Examen de l’essay de Monsieur Pope sur l’homme is remarkably faithful

524 Pennington, Memoirs, 29; O M Brack, Jr. “Samuel Johnson and the Translations of Jean Pierre de Crousaz’s ‘Examen and Commentaire,’” Studies in Bibliography 48 (1995): 81. 525 Brack, “Johnson and the Translations of Jean Pierre de Crousaz,” 84.

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to her original – much more faithful than the translations of many contemporary authors. While

Carter and Johnson may have agreed that Crousaz was too harsh on Pope, Crousaz’ philosophical ideas strongly appealed to her. Like her, he emphasized the importance of reason and learning, and one of his main objections to Pope is that Pope does not place enough importance on the necessity of training the mind. This is especially evident in Crousaz’ lengthy retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, where he declares that “Adam & Eve avoient été créés dans innocence, leur esprit étoit sans prévention, & leur cœur sans mauvais penchant, mais leurs lumiéres étoient bornées, ils n’avoient pas encore eu le tems de les étendre par l’exercices.”526

Adam and Eve were created without sin and, in his view of the story sinned without intending disobedience, but their “Understanding was bounded,” as Carter translates the passage, and so, as she believes, they were easily led into sin.527

Crousaz’ belief that even those created without sin or prejudice need to “enlarge [their minds] by exercise” foreshadows Carter’s claims in “While Clear the Night” about the importance of allowing “curious Thoughts” and “active Contemplation” the freedom to explore the world around them (Crousaz 86, Poems 5, 6). In keeping with her belief that “the fashionable world in general” was a “dreadful school of profligacy,” she presented herself as removed from it, but in fact, while she may have lived in the country, she had perfect freedom of motion and as much of society as she cared for.528 Famously declaring that she could not work on her translation of Epictetus because she had “a dozen shirts to make,”529 Carter enjoyed presenting herself as a country-woman, safely removed from the pleasures and temptations of the city and busy with purely domestic duties. But even among the less educated country people, she was

526 Jean-Pierre Crousaz, Examen de l’essay de Monsieur Pope sur l’homme (Lausanne, 1737), 79. 527 Elizabeth Carter, An Examination of Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man (London, 1739), 86. Cited as Crousaz. 528 Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 297. 529 Carter, A Series of Letters, II.202.

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rarely without congenial company and had “often as much Business upon [her] Hands” and “as good a Title to the Epithet of Gossiping” as anyone in town.530 As her nephew recalls, she “lived with much hospitality, visited all her neighbours, saw a great deal of tea and dinner company,” and as she admitted herself, was “much more frequently in society than in solitude.”531

The choice to move from Crousaz’ Examination to Algarotti’s text on Newton rather than to follow Johnson’s oft-cited suggestion that she translate Boethius’ Consolations of Philosophy confirms Carter’s focus on expanding knowledge in all circles rather than focusing on religious texts.532 She viewed religion and reason as inseparably linked, so that studying any text would improve one’s belief in God. Her fellow bluestocking Hannah More was led by her concern for social stability to declare that women’s sphere is “not in that wider range of distant prospects, which he who stands on a loftier eminence commands” but in home scenes and charities which make allowance for her lesser “integral understanding,” “deep and patient thinking,” and “faculty of comparing, combining, analysing and separating” ideas, which distinguish men, but Carter disagreed.533 Her priorities are clear in her poem to her father, where the first thing that she finds to thank him for is not her life, or even her religious instruction, but the “Hand” that guided her

“infant Mind to Science” (Poems 62). This primacy is echoed in the attachment to her will that

Pennington includes in his Memoirs, where she claims to be “indebted to my father for his kindness and indulgence . . . and especially in the uncommon care and pains he has taken in my education” (Memoirs 446). More than any of the indulgences and the freedoms that her father offered her throughout her life, she insists on the importance of the education that he passed on to her.

530 Carter to Miss Highmore, Some Unpublished Letters, 137. 531 Pennington, Memoirs, 269; Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 242. 532 Brack, “Samuel Johnson and the Translations of Jean Pierre de Crousaz,” 70. 533 Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (London, 1799), 27, 28.

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Although Pennington’s Memoirs claims that “she advised her friends never to read books” which raised objections to the Scriptures, she felt no such compunction about books written by heathen philosophers or pieces which offered varying interpretations of the Bible

(Memoirs 13). This is shown by her translation of Epictetus, her own religious pieces, and in her translation of Crousaz’ Examination, which is primarily concerned to explain and refute the philosophies of Leibniz and Spinoza. In a letter to Miss Talbot, she wrote that the “Wise and good men in all ages, who sincerely applied their hearts to the discovery of their duty” must have reached some success, despite their lack of the “proper authority” and “sufficient encouragements” which the Christian religion offered.534

Carter believed that, because reason always led to God, therefore all forms of study which strengthened the reasoning faculties were not only acceptable but praiseworthy. It is, as she says in her imitation of Horace’s Ode 10, Book II, “wisdom’s precepts” that render a soul

“great,” and to learn these it is necessary to reach for the widest possible education.535 She worried that “long habit” and lack of attention to educating the mind could make her readers, like one poor girl she knew, “totally incapable of application, except by such a strictness and regularity of discipline as cannot, at her age, be exercised by a governess.”536 Although usually strict in condemning immoral behaviour, she believed that when a person has not “met with any restraint from a regular education” then even the “very best dispositions of heart are no defence against” mistaking “a moral appearance” for true morality.537 Their lack of sufficient education leaves them incapable of maintaining moral discipline.

534 Carter, A Series of Letters II.229. 535 Elizabeth Carter, “Hor. Lib. II. Ode 10,” Gentleman’s Magazine VII (November 1737):692. 536 Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 175. 537 Carter, A Series of Letters, I.82.

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Carter’s belief in the primacy of mind, thought, and reason and their inability to lead men away from Godly and moral truth is visible in her presentation of Crousaz. Her title page emphasizes Crousaz’ titles and authority, showing the international character of his scholarship and his connections. She calls him a “Member of the Royal Academics of Sciences at Paris and

Bourdeaux; and Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at Lausanne,” highlighting his secular and scientific studies. Crousaz’ position as a member of the Académie royale gave him authority to comment on the combination of scientific, philosophical, and religious ideas in Pope’s “Essay on Man,” but it was his theology that Crousaz most wanted to criticize. Despite this, Carter emphasized his mathematics and philosophy rather than stressing his position as a rector at

Lausanne or his theological credentials. While she adds to the titles granted to him in the French, which calls him only a “Membre des Académies Royales” and does not mention his

Professorship at Lausanne, the focus on mathematics and philosophy shows her preoccupation with reason.538

In her translation, Carter emphasizes the importance of reason and of sharing knowledge.

Crousaz, in his preface, claims that men who think like him “répand avec plaisir ses biens extérieurs, & on fait part avec encore plus d’empressement de ses biens intérieurs,” (give with pleasure their exterior goods and share with even more eagerness their interior goods).539 Carter translates this passage as “they distribute with Joy their external Goods and with still greater

Earnestness those of their Mind” (Crousaz vii). Although she closely follows the sense of

Crousaz’ French in this passage, as she does throughout the book, her movement away from the symmetry of Crousaz’ “biens extérieurs” and “biens intérieurs” highlights the importance of the

538 Crousaz, Examen, title page. 539 Crousaz, Examen, xv.

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mind to her conception of the world. In the context of the preface, this specification draws reader’s attention away from the emotional and social enjoyments which Crousaz has been discussing and toward Carter’s focus on intellectual pursuits.

In order to strengthen this focus on education and reasoned examination, Carter alters

Crousaz’ conclusion on Pope’s first epistle. Unlike Crousaz, who suggests in this text that even to read a work which suggests un-Christian doctrines can be enough to lead people astray, and blames Pope for making a text capable of being wrongly interpreted, Carter blames the people who allow themselves to be led astray by wrong doctrines. Crousaz worriedly insists that the men who are capable of truth are “capables aussi d’embrasser avec précipitation des opinions favorables à des penchans qu’il leur est pénible de combattre” (capable also of embracing with precipitation the opinions favourable to the penchants that it is difficult for them to fight),540 but

Carter changes the implications of this conclusion. Her translation, “capable too of hastily embracing those opinions which favour the Inclinations they find it troublesome to resist” makes those who do not fight against their desires more culpable. Instead of the French “pénible,” with its implications of pain and suffering, she uses “troublesome,” a word which suggests irritation rather than real difficulty. This focus on the culpability of the unlearned echoes her insistence throughout her writings that “the stubborn and invincibly prejudiced” remain in “wilful blindness” that neither the ancient philosophers nor the teachings of the Gospel can penetrate.541

Taken together, the changes that Carter makes to this passage heighten the importance of study in many different fields. She suggests that it is not only dangerous for men to be without a breadth of knowledge and study but also that they are responsible for the results of their failure

540 Crousaz, Examen, 103. 541 Carter, “Objections against the New Testament, with Mrs. Carter’s Answers to them,” Memoirs, 583.

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to make the “attentive Examination” which would save them from being duped by false ideas.

She insists on the importance of a wide range of study, refusing to accept the solution Crousaz implies, that Pope should only write and men only read things which conform to Christian doctrine and cannot be misunderstood or misapplied. Carter denies this idea both by establishing the fault of those who do not educate themselves and by insisting on the neutral “instructing” in place of Crousaz’ “s’éclairer.” By refusing to limit her studies to a predetermined truth, Carter opens more opportunity for exploration.

Her work shows her eagerness to learn about different philosophical systems, to find the ways in which each connects to her own Christian beliefs. In several of her poems, as well as her responses to Biblical objections, she declares her belief that God’s “watchful Providence” gives

“Divine assistance to secure [the heart] from falsehood,” so that it is impossible that a man who truly and earnestly seeks the truth should be deceived (Poems 58).542 Although she claims in her

Remarks on the Athanasian Creed that “all Men are not required to be Scholars, and Subtle

Disputants,” she does believe that all knowledge is good and that all writing should be clear enough to be understood by the common mind (“Remarks” Appendix 25). In a letter to Mrs.

Vesey, she declares that “all truths unnecessary for us to know are involved in uncertainty and darkness, and the search must end in disappointment and confusion” but that in all “points essential to our present state and condition, the powers of the understanding are invariably adequate to its subject” (Memoirs 245). In another letter to Mrs. Montagu, she speculates that it is only in “countries ignorant of all information” that people can be totally alienated from God.543

542 Carter, “Objections against the New Testament,” 583. 543 Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 354.

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Because she believes that all of the things which are essential to the mind and to religion are capable of being understood, Carter sees it as a duty to attain the reasoned education that creates that understanding. It is this ability to reason that sets the educated man or woman apart from “vulgar Minds,” she declares in “Written at MIDNIGHT in a THUNDER STORM,” and frees them from the “fantastic Terrors” that assault the minds of the uninformed (Poems 37). Virtuous behaviour, she believes, stem from a good education, and when she hears of sexual immorality, she worries that “there was some great original error in the young lady’s education, for had she early had right and proper principle [sic] instilled into her mind, she would not, at the age of eighteen, have disgraced herself and family so completely” but would have known the correct

544 way to act. She warns in “To ___.: On his Design of cutting down a SHADY WALK” against sacrificing “to sensual Taste, / The nobler Growth of Thought,” encouraging instead contemplation and study in imitation of Plato, Aristotle, and Virgil (Poems 41). Her belief in the universal applicability of knowledge is most evidence in her translation of Epictetus, whose stoic philosophy she believed would help to strengthen religious beliefs.545 Epictetus is not the only ancient philosopher who Carter found useful. Her poetry is sprinkled with references to “Plato’s

Thought” and “soaring fancy,” and the Aristotelian idea of the Prime Mover or the “first Great

Cause” (Poems 17, 21). In deference to these pre-Christian philosophers, her early teachers, she refused to follow Crousaz in saying that the study of their writings led men astray. Instead, she encouraged women to read widely, both in her poetry and through her translations of Crousaz’ theological criticism, Algarotti’s science, and Epictetus’ philosophy.

544 Carter, Letters … to Mrs. Montagu, 121. 545 Myers, Bluestocking Circle, 160.

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Cautioning readers about the dangers of education, Carter nevertheless saw these dangers as present only for minds that are “obstinately set against conviction” and “full of wicked prejudices.”546 She warns in “While clear the Night” that without the “soft’ning” virtues of a generous heart and a willingness to listen to others, “Science turns Pride, and Wit a common

Foe” (Poems 7). These social virtues help men to avoid bias and conceit and prevent them from losing sight of important things, as they might if they focus only on study. In the “Morn of

Reason, and the Prime of Thought,” her readers are to cultivate their minds, but she warns in “To

___. On a WATCH” against forgetting that their ultimate aim should always be to improve “the undecaying Soul” through “Integrity of Heart” and refusal to boast in foolish things (Poems 30,

31). Philosophy led her to a greater belief in God, and did the same for her friends but, she admits, this is only true for a “mind undisturbed by passion, and unbiased by prejudice,” while no matter how “speculative and philosophical” a man is, if his mind is prejudiced, vain, or dissolute, his learning will only tend toward that which will justify his own actions (Memoirs

293).

Believing that anyone who is open to truth will find it, and that reading the works of past philosophers is the best way to come to God, Carter places education first, both figuratively and, in one translated paragraph, literally. When Crousaz discusses the most important factors in shaping a man’s character, Carter rearranges his paragraph to focus on the primacy of education.

The original began by declaring that “Le tempérement a moins de part aux inclinations dominantes que l’éducation,” but Carter opens her paragraph with “EDUCATION,” putting first the part of a man’s life and character which she considers to be of primary importance.547 Although

546 Carter, “Objections against the New Testament,” 577. 547 Carter, Examination of Mr. Pope’s Essay on Man, 119; Crousaz, Examen, 110.

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it is impossible to be certain that typographical choices are Carter’s rather than her publisher’s, the small capitals, inconsistently applied to the first word of many of the paragraphs in the second epistle but consistently used for proper names in the first, lend this word additional impact on the printed page. Carter’s rearrangements and revisions alter Crousaz’ argument so that it appears that Crousaz supports her view of education. This alteration takes advantage of the way that translation adds authority by adding the weight of tradition to individual interpretation.

By using translation to create a sense of authority, Carter acts out the tenets of her educational beliefs. Because she sees learning as rooted in classical and philosophical authority, translation is an ideal method of teaching. Translation connects her to respected figures and gives her the space to make her own judgements, alterations, and suggestions about what these figures say. By coming to her public through the medium of translation and to print through the medium of the manuscript, she follows in print the same strategy that she used in public by coming to

London only to visit her friends. She did not, as many still think, actually isolate herself, but she gained the appearance of isolation. She was not, as some argue, primarily a feminist author but she used the dialogue of femininity to her own advantage, stretching the limits of what women could and should do not only for herself but for her imitators. She was not bound by social convention, nor did she submit blindly to either secular or religious authority, but she used her connections to figures of authority to her own advantage in order to argue with social narratives and conventions. Working through translation gave Carter the ability to simultaneously publicize her ideas and modestly disclaim her ownership. By apparently submitting to the authority of her source, Carter invented a community of moralists, scholars, and educators for whom she could speak and whose voices she could use, subjugating masculine voices to her own while appearing to accept her own subjugation.

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Conclusion

When John Dryden writes of “my meanness” which has “traduced” the “full strength and vigour” of Virgil’s Georgics, he sounds very different from Alexander Pope, who insists that readers will prefer his “uniform and bounded walk of art” to the Iliad’s “wild paradise.”548

Rejecting both Dryden’s praise and Pope’s divisions, Eliza Haywood insists that her goal is to equal the authors she translates. 549 Elizabeth Carter takes a different approach entirely by refusing to write prefaces to any of her translations except her Epictetus, where she insists that she has been “strictly literal,” that her translation still has “great faults,” and that she expects her readers to look for the “intrinsic Beauty and Excellency in moral Goodness” which her translation displays rather than at her literary abilities.550

Claiming different priorities and priding themselves on different qualities, these authors nevertheless share important approaches to translation. While many authors focused either on one or the other, these four writers created both original and translated works throughout their careers, offering an important opportunity to examine the unique role translation played in their self-creation and self-presentation. Whether they viewed translation as the kind of “pleasing” fit or “Paroxism” that Dryden describes in the preface to Sylvae, or as menial drudgery, as Pope continually describes the work in his private letters, each author used translation to perform self- promotion.551 Each of them published their most eminent translation by subscription, a form

548 John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, ed. Vinton A. Dearing, H. T. Swedenburg, Alan Roper, et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956-90), V.137; Alexander Pope, Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, Maynard Mack, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939-67), VII.3. 549 Eliza Haywood, La Belle Assemblée (London, 1724), ix. 550 Elizabeth Carter, Works of Epictetus (London, 1758), xxxiii-iv; xvi. 551 Dryden, Works, III.3.

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which both uses an author’s reputation to create an audience for a work and gambles that reputation on the work’s reception. Each writer highlighted the similarities and differences between their work and that of their source author in order to create relationships of affinity that tied them to an existing canon or group.

For Dryden, translation offered a space where he could compare himself favorably to canonical authors. In the preface to his Fables, Dryden claims he “may say without vanity” that few poets can create “the same turn of verse” as their original, thus proclaiming superiority to others in the same breath as he claims equality with his source.552 In order to encourage comparisons, Dryden created and promoted a style which incorporated intentionally Latinate words and elements. This played an important part in Dryden’s self-presentation as part of an elite group which consisted of both producers and consumers of literature and which he addressed in and through his translations and their prefaces. Dryden used this readership to extend his literary genealogy, using the combination of original and translated material in his poetic Miscellany volumes to establish a line of descent from the glories of the classical ages to

Chaucer, who Dryden saw as the father of English verse at “the Beginning of our Language,” to himself, as the improver and polisher of modern poetry, giving “his Thoughts their true

Lustre.”553 It was this position as a reformer, through translating and improving “imperfect” works, through introducing new and beautiful works into the English language, and through supporting future generations of poets, that Dryden hoped to establish his name and to position himself in literary history.554

552 Dryden, Works, VII.24. 553 Dryden, Works, VII.30. 554 Dryden, Works, VII.2.

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Compared to Dryden, Pope demonstrates a conflicted and often hostile relationship with his sources and other writers. Recognizing that his strength lay in his editorial capabilities, Pope nevertheless longed for the “great and fruitful” originality of being, like Homer, the first to write about plots, characters, and ideas.555 Envious and striving to achieve what he portrayed as a virile, masculine invention, Pope simultaneously celebrates and deprecates originality, using translation as a stepping-stone to publicity as Dryden did but refusing the attitude of uncomplicated admiration which Dryden performed. Pope demands where Dryden suggests, and his quasi-autobiographical adaptation of Horace insists on Pope’s superiority to Horace’s “sly, polite, insinuating style.”556

Pope never escaped the reliance on the ideas and writing of other authors that was both his greatest strength and his final enemy, but while he struggled to differentiate himself and his ideas from his classical background and court friends, Haywood encourages conflation between herself and the authors she translates. She often structures advertisements and prefaces to stress the aristocratic nature of her sources, assuring her upper-class readers and the recipients of her dedications in The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone that as she “need not apologize for the Author,” of the work, she as its translator should also be accepted.557 When Haywood reinvented her career late in life, she changed many elements of her style, but maintained her primary moral and proto-feminist concerns. She also continued to present herself and her heroines as members of or in dialogue with the English and French court, a position which is most evident in her translation

The Virtuous Villager where Haywood insists that the book really is the memoir of “a very

GREAT LADY at the Court of France,” the main character in the story, and not merely an

555 Pope, Poems, VII.3. 556 Pope, Poems, IV.298. 557 Eliza Haywood, The Lady’s Philosopher’s Stone (London, 1725), vii.

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invention. Haywood then declares that she is in possession of “the real Manuscript of the

Marchioness.” She traces the manuscript through a list of aristocratic personages to the “English

Lady of Quality” who gave “Permission to send it over to a Person,” which Haywood leaves her readers to infer is meant to be herself, “who she is pleased to think qualified to do it justice.”558

This imagined history connecting Haywood, through her abilities as a translator, to the aristocracy of both England and France, shows how she used her texts to create the illusion of belonging to a class which was, physically and financially, out of her reach.

Morality and femininity were central to Carter’s use of translation to make classical learning an acceptable pastime for respectable women. Rather than choosing authors whose careers or reputations she wished to identify herself with, Carter chooses authors who wrote philosophical texts and whose works placed her, as the translator, clearly within the world of higher learning. Avoiding the self-referential paratexts that Pope, Dryden, and Haywood used to establish their literary bona fides, Carter relies on the reputation she established in her letters, her poems, and her choice of source material to support her claims to respectability. Combined with her apparently unassuming competence, her reputation for feminine, Christian, and socially acceptable scholarship allowed her to use her remarkable linguistic abilities to promote female learning.

While these authors used translation in order to promote and popularize their original ideas, it is difficult to claim that they are truly representative of the average eighteenth-century writer. Each created and maintained a reputation as an important figure in the literary world.

Haywood’s marginalized position was predetermined by her class and gender, Carter’s writing was circumscribed by her desire to maintain the role of a good daughter and housewife, and Pope

558 Eliza Haywood, The Virtuous Villager (London, 1742), ii, vii, ix.

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and Dryden were restricted by religious and political affiliations, but each was a well-known figure whose writing provided them with a form of monetary success. Carter, who used translation to move from the coterie world of anonymous and manuscript circulation to a wider, more public arena, offers a link to another set of translators: those whose career began with, rather than moved toward, translation. The primacy of translation to her public persona, in contrast to the other authors in this study, who used translation to support a career based primarily on original material, suggests several further avenues for scholarly exploration.

Further studies could examine other authors of both original literature and translations, such as Samuel Johnson, who happily abandoned early attempts at translation to make a living as a literary critic, and Tobias Smollett, who hid or downplayed the authorship of his translations throughout his life, using them, unlike the four authors studied here, primarily for monetary gain.

Other possible avenues for future research include writers who are remembered only for their translation, such as Charles Jervas, the painter whose posthumous edition of Don Quixote became a standard eighteenth-century text. His translation, like his friend Pope’s Odyssey and

Iliad, insists on finding and enhancing “pious reflections and ejaculations.”559 Often dismissed by readers as a posthumous and potentially unplanned publication, I believe that closer attention to the translator’s preface will demonstrate Jervas’ desire to join, and indeed to supersede, the extensive list of translators that he gives the reader. Finally, although space constraints have encouraged this study to focus on how translations affected reputation and positioning within a marketplace, an underlying theme of this study has been the belief that translation should be studied as a creative form in its own right. Rather than seeing translations only or primarily as

559 Charles “Jarvis,” The Life and Exploits of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha (London, 1747), vi.

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influencing authors’ original literature, this study insists on viewing them as an essential part of an author’s canon and encourages close attention to their creativity, style, and literary qualities.

This project will necessarily encourage the continual expansion of the canon to include writers such as Jervas, who currently appears in bibliographies of Cervantes and in art-historical scholarship but is not considered an important literary figure, and broaden our understanding of canonical figures such as Johnson and Smollett.

Translation Strategies

For the authors in this study, beginning with original work signalled their creative powers and the modern relevance of their literary ambitions. Both Dryden and Pope were household names by the time they began their major translations, and Carter had established a supportive coterie audience. Haywood is the only one of these authors to publish a book-length translation without first establishing a stable social position, and she suffered for it, forced to lower the intended price of her Letters from a Lady of Quality and to sell her subsequent novels at a still lower price. Samuel Johnson fell into the same pattern of over-ambition in his initial publications, attempting to break into publishing with a translation of Jerónimo Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia. His 1738 formal imitation, London, shows a second, and more ambitious attempt to use translation to break into the literary market, imitating a respected classical author rather than a modern writer and using a form that was enormously popular at the time. Not only did Pope’s

“Epilogue to the Satires,” the final piece of his imitations of Horace, appear on the same day as

Johnson’s London, James Boswell points out that “Boileau had imitated the same satire” and

“Oldham had also imitated it.” These versions, both published in the latter half of the previous

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century, show both the work’s enduring value and its contemporary currency.560 Johnson’s intent, as Baird explains, was to use London to gain a literary foothold which he intended to capitalize on with a translation of Paolo Sarpi’s 1619 History of the Council of Trent. This he proposed to his bookseller, advertised as an impressive subscription volume “on a large paper, in three volumes, at the price of three guineas,” and abandoned only in the face of strong opposition. 561 Johnson appears to have been attached to this project, engaging in what Boswell describes as “light skirmishes” with another would-be translator before admitting defeat and retiring from London in despair.

Johnson’s attempt to catapult himself to literary success failed, but the fact that two of his initial attempts used translation to bring him to public notice demonstrates an awareness of its importance to eighteenth-century authors. William Diaper’s version of Oppian’s Halieutica, the

Halieuticks, which was interrupted by his early death, appears to follow a similar pattern. Diaper first came on the literary world with a book of original poetry: Nereides, or, Sea-Eclogues. This book and his two subsequent books of original poetry brought him to the attention of Jonathan

Swift, and Diaper dedicated a 1715 imitation of Horace to Swift in thanks. From there, he turned to translation in an attempt to capitalize on the attention of Swift and his circle and to cement his reputation. Although he died before the book could be published, Diaper follows the same progression as Johnson’s early career, moving from original work to imitation and finally to classical translation.562 Joseph Addison similarly, as the first chapter shows, was brought to public attention by Dryden’s praise and support of his translation.

560 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. C. B. Tinker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 86. 561 John Baird, “Boswell Exploded and the Secret History of the Publication of Johnson’s London Finally Revealed,” Paper presented at CSECS Secrets and Surveillance, Kingston, Ontario, October 2016; Boswell, Life of Johnson, 98. 562 Richard Greene, “Diaper, William (1685–1717),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G.

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Other authors, such as Aaron Hill and Peter Motteux discovered the darker side of translation’s attention-getting nature. Hill, despite his wide range of plays, poems, and essays, was known, as Arthur Murphy explains, “chiefly by his translation of the Zaire and Alzire of

Voltaire.”563 Similarly, although, as Shaun Regan explains, Motteux saw his translation as part of a respectable, protestant discourse and indeed provided “suggestions for how a modern readership might engage with Rabelais's text without compromising its own literary and cultural values,” he suffered by being identified primarily with his “vulgar” translation of Rabelais.564

Translation could help authors to establish themselves with the public, but it could also be dangerous.

The Trap of Translation

For women, translation could be even more important, and even more dangerous, than it was for men. While translation was, as Mirella Agorni declares, “one of the few genres open to women in the early modern period” it was also limiting, forcing them to work within the confines of another author’s thoughts and, as Sherry Simon claims, condemning them “to the margins of discourse.”565 One aspect of this study has been to examine ways in which authors used translation creatively, subverting or contradicting the meanings and intentions of their source’s author. Unless the original was known to the audience, however, these creative

Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004). 563 Arthur Murphy, The Life of David Garrick, Esq. (London, 1801), 106. 564 Shaun Regan, “Translating Rabelais: Sterne, Motteux, and the Culture of Politeness,” Translation and Literature 10.2 (2001): 176; Stephen Ahern, “Prose Fiction: Excluding Romance,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English ed. Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005-11), III.329. 565 Mirella Agorni, Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century: Women, Translation and Travel Writing 1739-1797 (Northampton: St. Jerome Publishing, 2002), 45; Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (New York: Routledge, 1996), 46.

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subversions would not be attributed to the translator’s creative talents. The primary difficulty with using translation as a source of reputation was the ease with which translators could be identified with their source authors. For this reason, many of the paratexts which this study examines focus on the differences between translation and original, highlighting the improvements authors have made and the importance of the translator in editing a work for a new audience and in conveying emotion and style. For translators who worked with modern languages rather than the highly-valued classical translations, there was often little paratextual space available. While dedications were common, and provided a space for translators to discuss their own work under the pretext of praising their dedicatee, few modern translations include the kind of lengthy introduction that Dryden and Pope used.

Publishers hesitated to commit expensive paper and labour to producing paratextual material that would directly contribute neither to the sale nor the profits of the book. Haywood’s

“Discourse Concerning Writings of this Nature,” at the end of her Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier, offers an example of how authors and publishers justified exceptions to this rule.

This long discourse on letter-writing, female authors, and novels appears in the newspaper advertisements as a form of essay, suggesting to prospective customers that they will receive two products, a novel and an essay, for the price of one book.566 While a high-quality production, however, including a list of subscribers that stretches over eight pages, the Letters only allows

Haywood four pages for her “Preface,” in which she defends her translation and insists on the creative liberties that she has taken with the text.567

566 Patrick Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), 103. 567 Eliza Haywood, Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier (London, 1721), ii-xiv.

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This four-page preface is more than many modern-language translations received and the majority of Haywood’s translations include no prefatory material beyond their dedication. This lack of space was of minimal importance to original works but offered considerable restrictions to translators, for whom prefatory matter was the only space in which their own ideas could be conveyed directly to the reader. This restricted the ways in which authors could shape readers’ understandings of the text, and encouraged readers to identify the translator with the author of the source texts, an identification which creates an important challenge to the image of translation as a reputation-building device that I have constructed in this project, and which must be taken into account when reading translations as authorial projections.

Even translations that did include lengthy paratexts and which did clearly separate original author and translator posed difficulties for writers. The most visible of these difficulties is the stereotype of the Grub Street hack. The Grub Street stereotype originated in a proliferation of writers and publishers working on a literal Grub Street who, as Brean Hammond claims, established a “primordially generated” form of literary energy by “developing forms that could succeed in the literary market-place.”568 This idea of a group of professional authors unsupported by aristocratic patronage offered a threat to the power of the aristocracy and the dominance of existing literary figures, and professional authors soon found themselves operating under the label of the Grub Street Hack. The ideological Grub Street writer, whether English or French, is stuck on Grub Street, unable to gain the patronage he needs to move to a better-class neighborhood, and unable to take advantage of the opportunities offered by “the republic of letters.”569 Although, as Pat Rogers explores, Grub Street itself was in a historically poor

568 Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670-1740: 'hackney for bread' (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). 569 Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),

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neighborhood, the negative image of the Grub Street hack, which first appeared in the 1640s, is based more on stereotypes than on the actual indigence of writers.570 Scholars like Elizabeth

Eisenstein argue that there were many lucrative options for these writers, that many of the writers associated with Grub Street were financially secure, and that some even had court connections, but the negative stereotype which existed during the eighteenth century encouraged writers to dissociate themselves from Grub Street and the implications of writing on demand for a bookseller.571 The prefaces of many modern-language translators focus on defending themselves against this stereotype, often accepting the very biases they attempt to combat by working to establish their own cases as exceptional.572

Tobias Smollett offers one example of the lengths to which authors would go in order to avoid the taint of Grub Street. Smollett began his career in prose fiction with a translation of The

Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, but published this secretly, needing the money it brought him but unwilling to deal with the negative ramifications of writing what he called a

“Bookseller’s Job.”573 He only admitted his authorship, after a hugely popular first print run, giving his identity in the second edition as “the author of Roderick Random,” thereby subsuming his translations under his original works.574

Smollett’s example raises the problem of how the actual or perceived audience of a work might affect the reputation of a writer or translation. Future research is needed to determine

23. 570 Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1972), 30; Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 10. 571 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 142-156. 572 Agorni, Translating Italy, 46-49. 573 O. M. Brack, Jr. and Leslie A. Chilton, introduction to The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, by Tobias Smollett (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), xvii. 574 Brack and Chilton, The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, xvii-xix.

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whether translation becomes, as Smollett appears to fear, less viable as a reputation-building strategy as the source moves from classical to modern authors and the target audience shifts from the upper to the middle classes, and what role gender played in this distinction. This project has looked only at one writer who wrote for a popular audience, and Haywood was continually trying to move up the social scale, which problematizes any use of her career to examine popular writing aimed at a middling or lower-class audience. Indeed, although Haywood is often considered in terms of lower-class consumption, personalized by Ann Lang, commonly identified as a “servant-girl” based on her ownership of Haywood’s books, we have, as Christine

Blouch argues, very little direct evidence regarding Haywood’s readership.575 Both Haywood and Dryden were popular across a broad social spectrum, and both writers worked to establish a perception that they were patronized by an upper-class audience.

Translation helped Haywood and Dryden to connect themselves to the audience and the social circles they wished to be associated with, and Smollett could have followed the same path that Haywood did. Gil Blas of Santillane was written by Alain-René Lesage, whose decidedly middle-class origins had not prevented him from gaining patronage and an admiring audience in the French court.576 In this situation, Haywood would likely have stressed the work’s audience while downplaying the status of the author, but Smollett absented himself entirely from the book’s publication and promotion. He feared the negative implications of being hired by a bookseller to write, and this fear outweighed the potential for gaining a reputation as a writer and translator.

575 Christine Blouch, “‘ What Ann Lang Read’: Eliza Haywood and Her Readers,” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work, ed. Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 300-325. 576 Roger Laufer, Lesage: ou, Le Métier de Romancier (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 15-17.

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Smollett’s fear, expressed in his description of translation from both modern and classical sources as “a mere drug” written by authors in “the Grub Street manner” and read only by

“chairmen, draymen, hackney-coachmen, footmen, and servant maids,” is exaggerated, but it is also supported by contemporary descriptions.577 Elizabeth Griffith, a prolific translator of the

1770s, called Grub Street translators “Hackneys,” who “are paid so much per sheet for translating” and create “horrid Stuff” which more conscientious translators like herself were unable to compete with because “there are but Few People nice enough to go to the Expence of a good Edition, after having paid for a bad one.”578 Henry Fielding is even harsher in his depiction of hack translators in The Author’s Farce, where his translator declares that “I understand no language but my own,” having translated Virgil by reading Dryden’s English translation, and being prepared “to translate books out of all languages, especially French, that were never printed in any language whatsoever,” to invent as much as translate and steal as much as write.579

These examples suggest that for gentlefolk with literary pretensions writing for money was perceived as shameful, but many women took the opposite course in defending themselves against the stereotype of the Grub Street Hack. Indeed, some women used their need for money as an excuse for taking the immodest step of publication. In her translation of the Death of Abel, for example, Mary Collyer claims to have “taken up the pen” to support her family, a common prefatory conceit which presented writing as a feminine, and even domestic, occupation.580

These claims, now often dismissed as a way for women to excuse their entry into a masculine realm by reference to their accepted feminine duties, must be re-examined in light of the culture

577 Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. James G. Basker, Paul-Gabriel Boucé, Nicole A. Seary, and O. M. Brack, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 327. 578 Elizabeth Griffith, A Series of Genuine Letters Between Henry and Frances (London, 1789), IV.30. 579 Henry Fielding, Plays, ed. Thomas Lockwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004-2014), I.248-9. 580 Mary Collyer, The Death of Abel (London, 1761), iv.

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of professional authorship led by Samuel Johnson, whose famous praise of his bookseller as the

“Maecenas” of his age was part of a rebellion against the patronage system.581 After establishing himself as London’s foremost critic and arbiter of good taste, Johnson created what Lawrence

Lipking calls a “new authorial identity” which reified the commercial status of authorship.582 If

Johnson’s assertion that he can fund his lifestyle with his writing is a claim of individual power, then the claim of these women that they have taken the place of the primary breadwinner must also be closely examined. These claims, like Johnson’s glorification of professional authorship, subvert the denigrating narrative of translator as plebeian worker, using that image of translation as a job in order to claim the power and position of the worker and to showcase their own position within the family.

Translation, then, could be used to build a literary reputation, but it is also implicated in literary failure and stereotypical images of eighteenth-century translators include both cultural icons like Pope and Dryden and the starving Grub Street hack. By examining the many ways in which both men and women used translation, and especially by expanding the focus of our studies from authors who wrote both translation and original work to include authors who never wrote original material, such as Charles Jervas, we will discover more about how translation worked in the literary marketplace and why someone like Jervas, whose friendship with Pope would have familiarized him with the pitfalls of literary production, would have viewed translation as both desirable and within his reach, or at least, worth trying for after his death, when the publication was unlikely to harm him. Translation was not an easy route to fame.

Translators had to fight the tendency to identify the translator with the original author, and they

581 Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1200; Harry M. Solomon, The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 297, note 2. 582 Lawrence Lipking, Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 109.

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had to establish their literary focus, showing that they cared about their production and were not churning out substandard material in an attempt to win fame and money. Yet many writers, particularly women, still used translation in order to create and establish a reputation, creating new discourses around translation as a hobby, a profession, and a genre.

Reputation consists of many factors, and no one strategy serves all writers. Some writers fail to achieve literary fame because they do not have the literary ability to command recognition. Others fail due to lack of funds, or lack or cultural capital, or public scandals that destroy their reputation, and Adam Rounce, who argues that “literary failure is a necessary concomitant to our understanding of artistic success,” demonstrates the provocative possibilities opened by the study various styles and “types” of failure.583 The vast majority of writers never have a chance to reach the status which these four authors attained. But for those authors with the talent, the drive, and the connections to succeed in the eighteenth-century literary marketplace, translation was an important strategy for building a reputation, a source of creative energy, and a method of forging connections, implying relationships, and demanding equality with other literary figures.

583 Adam Rounce, Fame and Failure 1720–1800: The Unfulfilled Literary Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 8; 3.

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