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The Trial of Giuseppe Baretti, October 20 1769

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The Trial of Giuseppe Baretti, October 20 1769 THE TRIAL OF GIUSEPPE BARETTI, OCTOBER 20TH 1769: A LITERARY AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE BARETTI CASE by MATTHEW FRANCIS RUSNAK A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Italian written under the direction of Professor Laura Sanguineti-White and approved by ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ ________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May, 2008 ©2008 M. F. Rusnak ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Trial of Giuseppe Baretti, October 20th 1769: A Literary and Cultural History of the Baretti Case By MATTHEW FRANCIS RUSNAK Dissertation Director: Laura Sanguineti-White On October 20, 1769, Giuseppe Baretti (1719-1789) stood on trial at the Old Bailey for a murder that occurred during a street brawl in central London. Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick and other English luminaries spoke in Baretti’s defense, and he was acquitted se defendendo. As news of the crime spread from London to Milan, the Baretti case generated controversy, public opinion, and critical commentary. Usually regarded merely as a curious footnote in the annals of literature, this case provides insight into the life and works of Baretti as well as the Age of Blackstone and Beccaria. A careful reconstruction of the crime scene, teased out of primary documents and unpublished manuscripts, reveals an event rich in cultural significance. A complex set of motivations can be seen behind the stabbing of Evan Morgan, an assault viewed at the time as manifestly Italian. Chapter Two analyzes the defense arguments in unlocking subtle rhetorical and legal strategies and locating it within a courtroom theater. Chapter Three focuses on C. F. Badini, Baretti’s arch rival, who “testified” against him in libel and invective. Chapter Four explores the back-story: over a year before the trial, Samuel Sharp, a London surgeon who had written on the Italian national identity in Letters from Italy, provoked an extended print feud with ii Baretti. Ironically, a central point of disagreement between the writers concerned the relative violent tendencies of Italians, the use of stilettos instead of fists to resolve petty disputes. Chapter Five places the case in context of homicide law and legal debates in the period that seem to be speaking directly Baretti. Chapter Six records and explores the literary repercussions of the “The Haymarket Affair” in controversies that persisted through the 1780s. The Conclusion shows how later critics and scholars manipulated and repackaged the event, eventually flattening it and removing its ambiguities. The purpose of the study is not to defame Giuseppe Baretti, but rather to uncover the far-reaching cultural and literary implications of a day that would haunt the Italian writer for the rest of his English life. iii PREFACE “Some day I shall write an account of the whole affair, containing some strange stories, which will give you a better idea of the characters of the various classes of this nation than anything that has appeared in our tongue. But at present I have other things to do,” Giuseppe Baretti wrote to his brother Filippo on December 26, 1769. He must have been relieved that Christmas, for he had passed a very difficult year. Just two months earlier, he faced a judge and jury at the Old Bailey, defending himself against the charge of murder. Although Baretti would survive the trial and live another twenty years, the so-called “Haymarket Affair” haunted him and became, in the years that would follow, a metaphor for his writing life. The unusual case of Baretti generated controversy and debate, as appeals were brought in the court of public opinion. The image of a furious Italian writer stabbing an English music hall minstrel—and then being let go free—seemed a travesty of justice, at least to some observers. Others stood by the verdict as a victory for honor, a display of the quality of English justice system, so much less barbaric than in the past. When people thought of Baretti from 1769 on, they thought of his trial, and they did not know what to think. In every generation since, historians and critics, tempted by the innate appeal of Baretti, would express surprise that no one ever explored the rich nuances of the most literary courtroom battle of the eighteenth century. Baretti wanted to write about this affair, but he never did. In the work that follows, I have tried to fill Baretti’s pages by weaving together a wide variety of documents, from travel books to newspaper editorials, from vicious iv lampoons to nasty marginalia, from manuscript letters to jokes, from legal commentaries to obituary notices. Some of my observations have been made before, but in scattered footnotes, in appendices, and in foreign scholarship difficult to obtain. I will be “observing trifles” on the pages that follow, putting together the pieces of an Enlightenment puzzle, some of them lost for more than two centuries. In the early stages of working on this project, several colleagues rejected it wholesale. “It sounds more like history than literature,” one of them sniffed. There was no dissuading him. If this is history, it is what Robert Darnton calls “messy history.” It is the history of the Italian microhistorians that gives voice to the voiceless and shows the rich fabric of texts that create our understanding of the complex world. The life and times of Baretti on these pages, furthermore, will be viewed through the microscope of the literary productions. I will be looking at literary works in the wide range of genres that writers like Baretti and Johnson had in their arsenals, travel works, speeches, and personal letters, book reviews, anecdotes. Some refined readers will likely consider this investigation nothing more or less than a wallowing in the literary gutter of a fallow period in literary history. To them I have no self-defense, as this is not an interpretation of confirmed masterpieces, but rather a critical consideration of the literary underbrush, some of which is very closely related to gossip, rumor mill, and petty propaganda. I will consider cruel invectives, offensive jokes, and parodies. Many of the important texts discussed are so obscure that they are not only out-of-print, their authors, publishers, and date-of-publication may never be determined. Like a collection of forensic evidence – bone fragments and blood splatters v – it may raise some reasonable doubts about an important case in literary and legal history. Another of my colleagues was convinced, whenever I mentioned this project, that I have some personal gripe with Baretti, a warped desire to re-open the Baretti case in the Tribunale di Torino. In the pages of this study of Italian culture, I hope my inquiry into how Baretti unfolded in all of its literary mystery is not reduced to my wanting to find him guilty as charged. By examining the circumstances of the case and the literary circumstantial evidence, I would like the reader “to retain some sense of the multiplicity of voices and avoid slipping into the role or retrospective judges who render verdicts by deciding who is telling the truth.” The point is not whether Baretti was innocent or guilty. Rather, the aim here is to put in context an event that caused tremendous commotion in his life, a moment that became a metaphor and captured the attention of an age. In this investigation, my concern is “less about the truth of the denunciation than the social atmosphere in which the accusations took place.” (ix) I have no interest whatsoever in judging Baretti, but only in exposing the “multitude of voices” that told his story, long hidden in the stacks of libraries and archives. By opening “a series of gaps and disjunctures,” I hope to illuminate the Age of the Grand Tour and shed light on the greatest period of law reform in modern times. (xx) Why does this trial matter more than others do? It touched the lives of the best minds of the generation. Baretti bragged that three thousand people--sometimes he said five thousand--attended his trial. Word of the crime spread from the Old Bailey to Edinburgh to Milan, changing in the process as inevitably as a phrase in the child’s game vi of whisper-down-the-lane. In the documents and exhibits related to this case, included in the text and Appendices, we see what Natalie Zeon Davis calls “the social creativity of the so-called inarticulate” (ix) The following account of a celebrated trial will not be presented as representative of the criminal justice system of the middle of eighteenth century. How could it be? The case was an exceptional one, for many reasons. Thousands of people knew about the Baretti case, and an astonishing list of cultural icons played a direct or indirect role in it. There has never been—before or since—a case that involved so many figures from art, literature, politics and law. The police reports, populated by the unfortunate, uneducated and unlucky, are routine and ephemeral, while Baretti slipped into history. Baretti was a case of wild contrasts, in which accusations of collusion fought with pronouncements of justice served. Nasty antagonisms led to character assassination, as self-defense became a mode of self-preservation in the literary arena. Finally, this is the story of the most extraordinary period in Baretti’s life. Much of what I am documenting is the material of rumor mill and innuendo, diatribe and propaganda. However, it is also an investigation of his works, his style, and his bizarre life.
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