Collection No. # Every One Has His Fault, by Elizabeth Inchbald

Collection No. [#] Every One Has His Fault, by Elizabeth Inchbald

1. Publication details

Author: Inchbald, Elizabeth Author dates: 1753-1821 Title: Every One Has His Fault

First played: 1793 First published: 1793, for G. G. J. and J. Robinson [etc.] 114 p.

C18th availability: Available from ECCO (1793) http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO? dd=0&locID=utoronto_main&d1=0605200800&srchtp=b&c=3&SU=All&d2=1&docNu m=CW3313540684&b0=every+one+has+his+fault&h2=1&vrsn=1.0&b1=KE&d6=1&st e=10&dc=tiPG&stp=Author&d4=0.33&n=10&d5=d6

Modern availability: Available from LION (1996) http://lion.chadwyck.com/toc.do? action=new&divLevel=0&mapping=toc&area=Drama&id=Z000090847&forward=tocM arc&DurUrl=Yes

2. Genre / subgenre: Comedy

3. Trend(s): Class, Contemporary Satire; Popularity

4. Brief Synopsis

5. Secondary commentary 5a. Spencer, Jane. ‘Inchbald , Elizabeth (1753–1821)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 28 May 2008.

In general Inchbald managed to please her audience by combining relatively liberal social views with the maintenance of social order, often through the actions of a benevolent male authority figure. In Everyone has his Fault (1792), for example, Mr Harmony manages to reconcile Sir Robert Ramble to the virtuous former wife he had failed to appreciate, and Lord Norland to the daughter he had disowned on her marriage to a poor man; to induce Mr Placid to take a firmer line with his domineering wife, and to marry the old bachelor Solus to Miss Spinster. A strong theme throughout this play is the critique of aristocratic extravagance and the championship of poverty-stricken middle- class virtue, also found in Next Door Neighbours (1791), one of her French adaptations… [she made] £700…from Every One has his Fault (1793).

5b. Patricia Sigl. ‘Elizabeth Inchbald: October 15, 1753-August 1, 1821.’ Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 89: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Dramatists, Third Series. Edited by Paula R. Backscheider, University of Rochester. The Gale Group, 1989. Literature Resource Center. 8 July 2008. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/LitRC? vrsn=3&OP=contains&locID=utoronto_main&srchtp=athr&ca=2&c=2&ste=6&t ab=1&tbst=arp&ai=U13706562&n=10&docNu

Every One Has His Fault , which came out on 29 January 1793, in the same week Louis XVI was executed, is her most finished seriocomic compound. Amid family breaches and quarrels and marriage infidelities, there moves the whimsical figure of the compulsive philanthropist Mr. Harmony, who resorts to benevolent lies in order to bring disputing parties together. Charles-Albert Demoustier produced on 29 September 1791, in Paris, Le Conciliateur, ou l'homme aimable (a comedy in five acts), which may well have given Inchbald the idea for a character like Harmony, but the form she gave him is wholly hers. Never before in a high-comic frame had the benevolent liar been used to such advantage. Harmony's humor is drier, less farcical, than Reynolds's caricatures. As originally created by the comedian Joseph Munden, Harmony's lines were spoken in a tone of comic satire, even on the first night, when, in the mood of political crisis, one ultraconservative paper, The True Briton, claimed it caught Munden trying to mouth democratic sentiments with his line "Provisions are so scarce!" Inchbald replied with a letter denying the charge; the other papers rallied to her side, and audiences applauded more loudly on the following nights. She had nothing to gain by playing with politics in the theater. Nineteenth-century critics were amused that the comedy could ever have been considered revolutionary. Every One Has His Fault seemed to them to be merely a satisfying combination of domestic drama and drawing-room comedy, for which Harmony served as an ingenious pivot. He was also an embodiment of an amiable ethics. With his way of glossing over people's faults, he was as representative of Inchbald's theater as anything she ever created.

6. Overview of varieties / dialects

7. Variety 7a. Sample of dialect 7b.1 Orthography 7b.2 Grammar 7b.3 Vocabulary 7c. Dialect area represented 7d. Density of dialect representation 7e. Location of dialect 7f. Characteristics of dialect speakers 7g. Consistency of representation

8. Narrative comments on dialects and varieties

9. Other points of interest: Note: field 7 is recursive; where several varieties are represented a separate record is completed for each variety."