SOURCE: "Edmund Curll, Mrs. Jane Barker, and the English Novel," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 4, October, 1958, pp. 385-99.

In his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, published in 1711, the Earl of Shaftesbury declared that "our modern authors … are turned and modelled (as themselves confess) by the publick relish and current humour of the times…. In our day the audience makes the poet, and the bookseller the author."¹ Of no literary or sub-literary field was this statement more true than of the novel. Because of a combination of economic, social, and political circumstances, the sale of copy to booksellers, rather than subscription, patronage or governmental subsidization, was the most likely resource of the writer of prose fiction.² The business arrangements of the London publishing world, therefore, had considerable influence, through the focal figure of the bookseller, upon the form, content, and aims of the emerging genre.

Unfortunately this influence was seldom directed to-ward cultivation of higher literary standards. In the early eighteenth century the novel was still a matter of financial speculation rather than a product with predictable sales value as, for example, were religious treatises.³ As a result, any pressure exerted by the bookseller upon the novelist was usually toward increased marketability. Study of this intangible but real formative influence on the English novel is complicated by the lack of extensive publishers' records and by the general obscurity of the more than 250 booksellers and printers who by 1700 crowded Grubstreet and controlled its large body of professional translators, compilers, hack-writers, and aspiring authors from the universities and the provinces.⁴

From this noisy multitude few figures emerge so clearly, and none in such an unfavorable light, as the bookseller Edmund Curll. Pope assured him a degree of immortality by a place of unsavory prominence in the Dunciad, but as early as 1710 Curll's shop at the Sign of the Dial and Bible was well known for its scurrilous and sensational publications. And, though Defoe had not yet coined the term "Curlicism,"⁵ the bookseller's name was already synonymous with unethical publishing methods. Whether or not his hackney authors actually starved to death or "his translators in pay lay three in a bed at the Pewter Platter in Holborn,"⁶ is debatable. There can be no doubt, however, that his "poetical Garret"⁷ was filled with versatile writers who produced a variety of wares designed to please any and all tastes of the Town.

Curll's career followed with only slight exaggeration the general practices of the Trade, and his publications reflected, with equal accuracy, the reading tastes of the times. As James Bramston later pointed out in ironic tribute,

How oft has he a Publick Spirit shown
And pleas'd our Ears regardless of his own?
But to give Merit due, though Curll's the Fame,
Are not his Brother-Booksellers the same?⁸

Certainly, any publishing venture by Curll was a strong indication that a lucrative market for such a product existed. Since his flamboyant career is more easily traced than those of most of his fellow-inhabitants of Grubstreet,⁹ his expeditions into the field of the novel are especially valuable in illuminating its obscure but important pre-Richardsonian phase.

Generally speaking, the time of Curll's first novelistic publication in 1713 was not auspicious. It was axiomatic among the Trade that "the best time for bookselling is when there is no kind of news stirring."¹⁰ This condition was definitely lacking in the days of intense political and religious controversies which disturbed the reign of Queen Anne and were intensified by the Hanoverian succession. For a time, Mrs. Mary Manley had capitalized on the unfavorable situation by astutely adapting the French chronique scandaleuse to the English political scene in such works as The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705) and the New Atalantis (1709). She had delighted such polite readers as the future Lady Mary Wortley Montagu with her lush anti-Whig confections, but the years which immediately followed her successes were marked by a considerable decline in fictional publication.

If the time was inappropriate, Curll's choice of copy would also seem to have been unwise or highly uncharacteristic. Certainly Love's Intrigues; or, the History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia (1713), a very moral semi-autobiographical work, and Exilius; or, The Banish 'd Roman (1715), a belated seventeenth century romance, both by Mrs. Jane Barker, were unlikely company for his more typical publications such as The Cases of Unnatural Lewdness and The Case of Insufficiency Discuss 'd, which were already on his shelves, or under his counter. Nor was the presence of Mrs. Barker, a provincial Catholic maiden lady, in the Dial and Bible which was frequented by "all the high whores in town" who came "to buy his dialogues and other lively books"¹¹ any less incongruous. It must be remembered, however, that Curll pleased all publics, and that Sir Thomas Browne and the Bishop of Winchester were as welcome as Ovid and the Earl of Rochester, if they sold as well—and, with Curll's expert advertising, they undoubtedly did.

Perhaps the reason for these strange ventures in fiction was a new shop which he had just opened in 1712 in fashionable Tunbridge Wells. Mrs. Barker's works could hardly be classified as "lively books" but were probably intended as suitable summer reading for ladies such as Addison's Leonora, whose library included six heroic romances and "a Book of Novels." In any case, Mrs. Barker was the first of a number of minor women novelists to find a market at the Dial and Bible, and her novels, curiously enough, set a pattern for the fiction which Curll was to issue during the next thirty years. Thus, he must be given credit not only for a willingness to experiment with non-political types of fiction,¹² but also, in a sense, for the continuation of the short seventeenth-century "novel" during the second and third decades of the eighteenth century, as opposed to the longer "histories" then coming into vogue.

Whatever his motives (and they were certainly not the same that led him to blackmail the notorious Mrs. Manley into writing her fictionalized autobiography, The Adventures of Rivella, which he published in 1714), the bookseller reduced the risks involved in accepting Mrs. Barker's anachronistic Exilius by a title-page of excellent "Curlicism":

Exilius: or, The Banish'd Roman, a new Romance in Two Parts. Written after the Manner of Telemachus, for the Instruction of some Young Ladies of Quality.

In addition to emphasizing the instructive and genteel elements of the work, he also managed to trade upon the popularity of Archbishop Fénelon's Adventures of Telemachus, which by 1715 had had at least seven English editions and, by showing the possibilities of the romance as an educational vehicle, had revived to some extent the popularity of that waning literary form.¹³

Actually, Mrs. Barker had begun her romance a decade before the publication of Fénelon's work in 1699, and the form, content, and tone of Exilius were natural outgrowths of her life.¹⁴ Born of a staunchly Royalist family about 1660, she spent most of her youth in the village of Wilsthorp, near Stamford in Lincolnshire, where she received her education from a country clergyman. Her first poetic and prose works were written for a rural literary circle, which continued the tradition of the "Society of Friendship" over which Mrs. Katherine Philips had presided in Cardigan earlier in the century.¹⁵ Upon reading the verses of "the matchless Orinda," Mrs. Barker "began to emulate her Wit, and aspired to imitate her Writings."¹⁶ She adopted the name of Galesia and was addressed as such in laudatory verses by the "several Gentlemen of the Universities and others" with whom she shared the authorship of Poetical Recreations, published in 1688. In addition to occasional versifying, she began a prose work, "the excellent Romance of Scipina," which an admirer urged her to continue:

On then, brave Maid, secure of Fame advance,
Gainst the Scaroons & Scudderies of France.
Shew them your claim, let nought your Merit awe,
Your Title's good spight of the Salique Law.
Safe in the Triumphs of your Wit remain:
Our English Laws admit a Woman's Begin.¹⁷

Praising the same work, another friend declared that Mrs. Barker's Muse "out-strips the Dedalean Scuddery,"¹⁸ thereby describing with almost embarrassing accuracy the style and model of her fictional work which Curll published twenty-seven years later in an expanded form as Exilius.

Mrs. Barker's gift for imitating the Scudéry romances was doubtless strengthened by her residence in France, to which she went as a Stuart sympathizer and Roman Catholic after the flight of James II.¹⁹ There, despite increasing blindness, she continued her versifying, often with a strong political tinge,²⁰ and worked on her prose romance. During the reign of Queen Anne, she returned to Lincolnshire, and in 1715 was described in a list of Catholic Non-Jurors as "Jane Barker of Wilsthorp, spinster," possessor of a small annual income which had been granted to her father, Thomas Barker, for eighty years by Charles I.²¹ Her continued pro-Stuart sympathies brought her to London in 1718, where she engaged in clandestine correspondence with the exiled Jacobite peer, James Butler, Duke of Ormond. Of this phase of her activities, however, we are as ignorant as, apparently, her French correspondents were of her identity.²² It is tempting to picture her as a bizarre figure using Curll's shop as a cover for international political intrigue, but her fictional works reflect none of the Pretender's troubles and seem to indicate a placid if impecunious rural existence, under the patronage of the Countess of Exeter, whose country seats were at Burleigh and Worthorp near Mrs. Barker's native Wilsthorp. To her in 1715 Mrs. Barker dedicated Exilius.

In this dedication Mrs. Barker stated that her aim was "to reform the World & restore Heroic Love to its ancient Jurisdiction." Her pointed defense of romances showed an awareness of the diminished appeal of that type of fiction, and she attempted to justify its composition with arguments very similar to those of Bishop Huet, whose Essai sur l'origine des romans appeared in a new English translation that same year:

The Study of these Books helps to open the Understanding of young Readers, to distinguish between real Worth and superficial Appearance…. But beside these Love Lectures the young Readers may also reap Handfulls of good Morality, and likewise gather some Gleanings of History, and Acquaintance with the Ancient Poets. In short, I think I may say of Romances as Mr. Herbert says of Poetry, and hope, that a pleasant Story may find him, who flies a serious Lecture.

To these familiar arguments of the moral, educational, and social benefits to be derived from the reading of fiction, Mrs. Barker added the prestige of Sir Philip Sidney, "whose Steps, with awful Distance, I now take Leave to trace," of Fénelon, and of Dryden,

whose Writings have pleas'd all the World; tho' I think I may say, None have found better Reception than their Romances, Telemachus for the one part, and Chaucer's Tales reviv'd on the other.

The structural outline of Exilius is negligible. Seven short novels are woven into the title-story in imitation of the earlier Arcadian and heroic romances, but with much less skill. The artificiality of construction is so marked that there can be little doubt that Mrs. Barker wrote the individual "novels" separately—a conjecture which is supported by a reference (probably to the story of Scipiana) in the dedication:

As I was extreamly confused to find my little Novel presenting itself to your Ladyship without your Leave or Knowledge, so I am as delighted in having permission to lay this large Composure at your Ladyship's Feet.

The romance, which Bridget MacCarthy describes as a "deplorable medley of hair-raising adventures in which female paragons incredibly become entangled,"²³ tells of two groups of noble Roman lords and ladies who, led by the banished Exilius and his beloved Scipiana respectively, wander about on different parts of the great. Sardinian estate of Publius Scipio. They recount their adventures and decide to end their lives in pious sorrow and solitude. Finally, through the aid of the goddess Aurora, the two bands meet, and after more story-telling the reunited lovers are married.

In addition to the romantic narrative method, a number of close parallels between Mrs. Barker's characters, action, and description and those of Mlle de Scudéry's Clélie have been pointed out, especially in the story of "Clelia and Marcellus, or, the Constant Lovers."²⁴ The French romances of Cléopatre and Cassandre may also have furnished hints for the Egyptian background occasionally depicted,²⁵ and the short inserted novels suggest familiarity with the works of Mme de Villedieu, such as Cléonice, ou le roman galant (1699) and Les Exiles (1672).

In some minor respects Exilius is not merely a composite of material borrowed from the romans de longue haleine. Stanglmaier speculates on political and auto-biographical identifications for many of the characters, and the romance is, or was intended by the author to be, short and "free from long Speeches, and tedious Descriptions of Towns, Places, Sieges, Battles, Horses, & their Trappings." Mrs. Barker's digressions are often tinged with highly unromantic and practical sentiments,²⁶ and she departed from precedent by attempting to write in "the familiar Stile of the Age, neither so obsolete nor so refin'd, as to render it obstruse." In practice, however, Exilius resembles earlier romances and one may apply to it with equal validity Dorothy Osborne's criticism of the Earl of Orrery's Parthenissa:

'Tis handsome language: you would know it to be writ by a person of good quality though you were not told it; but, in the whole I am not much taken with it. All the stories have too near a resemblance with those of other romances, there is nothing new or surprenant in them.²⁷

In contrast to Exilius Mrs. Barker's second composition in the form, Love's Intrigues; or, the History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia, shows clearly the change in fiction which came about during the reigns of William III and Queen Anne. Since Curll provided a panegyrist for the novel from among his hack-writers, the prefatory poem by Dr. George Sewell reflects the advertising aims of the publisher:

Condemn me not, Galesia, fair unknown,
If I, to praise Thee first my error own;
A partial View & Prejudice of Fame
Slighted thy Pages for the Novel's Name.
Methought I scorn'd of Nymphs & Knights to dream,
And all the Trifles of a tortur'd Brain,
Where we see none but the Composer's Pain.
Thus, I, by former Rules of Judgment led,
But soon my Fault recanted as I read.

Instead, he finds that her novel presents "the Charms of Nature, & those painted True":

All this, so well, so naturally dress'd,
At once with Wit and Innocence express'd,
So true appears, so just, & yet so plain,
We mourn thy Sorrows, & we feel thy Pain.

However unspontaneous, this praise serves to under-score the new and more "natural" tone which was becoming increasingly current. Love's Intrigues is placed in a conversational framework and has a very briefly suggested historical background. Galesia, who is awaiting news of the outcome of "King James' Affair," meets a friend, Lucasia, in the gardens of St. Germain and tells the story of her unrequited love for her cousin Bosvil. For him she rejected Mr. Brafort, and through his machinations she lost a second suitor. Finally she was left to the consolations of piety and study when he married someone else.

The first awakening of Galesia's emotions, her struggles against recurring love for the villain, and Bosvil's mixture of fickleness and jealousy are depicted with considerable skill reminiscent of the short novels of Mrs. Aphra Behn. At the same time, the middle-class material and the didacticism of Lucasia's critique which concludes the novel show the influence of the early eighteenth-century periodical essay. Love's Intrigues thus fits naturally into the progressive development of English prose fiction, its introspective analysis both reflecting the seventeenth-century romances and looking forward to the translations of works by Prévost and Marivaux. Mrs. Manley's characteristic salaciousness was lacking, but the remaining popular fictional elements gave Love's Intrigues sufficient sale to justify a second edition in 1719, inclusion in the first edition of Mrs. Barker's collected works in the same year, and, presumably, a contract from Curll for any future productions.

In the preface of her next novel, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies, or Love & Virtue Recommended in a Collection of Instructive Novels (1723), she wrote:

My Two former Volumes of Novels having met with a favorable Reception (much beyond their Desert) encourages me to perform my Promise in pursuing the Sequel of Galesia's Story.

The volume is not actually a sequel to Love's Intrigues, but a slight autobiographical element provides what general unity it possesses. Galesia leaves London and travels northward by stage coach. The coach overturns and she is befriended by a lady with whom she spends the summer making a patchwork screen out of pieces of "Romances, Poems, and Letters." The novel ends as Galesia and her hostess abandon their work to participate in rural festivities.

Mrs. Barker's fourth and final novel, The Lining for the Patch-work Screen: Design 'd for the Farther Entertainment of the Ladies, was published by Curll in 1726. Her idea was apparently to write a companion volume to A Patch-Work Screen recounting Galesia's activities during the fashionable London winter season. Once again, however, autobiography provides only minimal unity and the secondary framework of the "lining" is so poorly contrived that the only merit of the book must be found in the fifteen short novels which are unusually vivid and well-written.

In A Patch-Work Screen she begins with five stories told in the stage coach after the passengers have been alarmed by the appearance of a band of horsemen. Four of these are exempla for homely proverbs, and the detailed backgrounds of isolated farmhouses, inns, and barns seem to have as their source rural story-telling under very similar circumstances. A second group of five novels placed on the screen deal with urban characters and also have a realistic tone which shows that Mrs. Barker had profitably studied Defoe's novels, which she mentions in the preface.²⁸

The Lining for the Patch-Work Screen also shows considerable skill in utilizing contemporary material. For instance, in the story of Mrs. Goodwife the reader is given a well-sketched vignette of an impoverished but worthy Irish couple in London. The wife is forced by the hunger of her children to sell boiled wheat from door to door. By running errands for servants of great households and by virtuously avoiding the advances of London rakes, she manages to set up a barter exchange and restores the family to middle-class respectability. Of special interest is the sentimental portrayal of Mrs. Goodwife's children and an early attempt to reproduce childish speech.

The best of this group of realistic stories dealing with English material is that of Dorinda, a young lady of quality who reads plays, novels, and romances "till I began to think myself a Heroine of the first rate." She embarks upon a series of innocent but dangerous escapades in London playhouses, parks, and taverns, which culminates in a quixotic proposal of marriage to her footman. His unexpected presumption and the conflict of desire, shame, and anger at the attempted interference of other servants which lead her into the unfortunate alliance are recounted briefly but with a clarity and psychological insight foreshadowing later treatments of similar situations in Pamela and Joseph Andrews.

In many of these stories Mrs. Barker showed a genuine but rarely exercised gift for realistic description. Out-standing is her picture of the ale house to which Galesia is taken after her coach overturns in a stream:

All wet and dropping she got to this House, which was a poor Village-Alo-house; and a poor one indeed it was; it being Evening, the Woman of the House was gone out a Milking, so that the Good Man could come at no Sheets, so that she might have got rid of her Wet Cloaths, by going to Bed; However, he laid on a large Country Faggot; so she sat smoaking in her wet Cloaths, 'till the good Woman came; who hasten'd and got the Bed sheeted, into which she gladly laid herself; but the poorest that her Bones ever felt, there being a few Flocks that stank; and so thin of the same, that she felt the Cords cut through. The Blankets were of Thread-bare Home-spun Stuff, which felt and smelt like a Pancake fry'd in Grease; There were four Curtains at the Four Corners, from whence they could no more stir than Curtains in a Picture; for there were neither Rods nor Ropes for them to run upon; no Testern, but the Thatch of the House; a Chair with a Piece of a Bottom, and a brown Chamberpot, furr'd as thick as a Crown Piece.²⁹

Despite this Defoesque verisimilitude, Mrs. Barker's fictional techniques remained reminiscent of the seventeenth-century novelle, and her two final publications provide confirmation of a probable but unacknowledged debt to Mrs. Aphra Behn. In the second story told by Philinda in The Lining for the Patch-Work Screen an erring wife drowns her husband as he disposes of the body of a lover whom she has murdered. According to Mrs. Barker, the story was taken from "an Old Book." Actually it is an abbreviated version of Mrs. Behn's History of the Nun; or, The Fair Vow-Breaker (1689) with a slightly altered ending.³⁰ Several religious characters and such stock situations as escapes from and unexpected reunions in convents may also have been derived from the same source. These borrowings from her predecessor become even more interesting when a scene in A Patch-Work Screen is noted: Galesia, when questioned by a city lady upon the relative literary merits of Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Katherine Philips, replies "with blunt Indignation that they ought not to be nam'd together"³¹

The influence of Mrs. Behn, however, should not be over-emphasized, for Mrs. Barker was equally familiar with Continental prose fiction. The story of the Portuguese nun in The Lining for the Patch-Work Screen is an attempted continuation of the famous French letter-sequence, just as the story of the chevalier and the nun in A Patch-Work Screen is a non-tragic reworking of the same basic plot. The histories of "the Lady Gypsie" and of "the Gentleman Gypsie" have elements of the Spanish picaresque tradition, and some acquaintance with Cervantes' works is shown by several references to Don Quixote.

Less evident are the influences of contemporary English writers, an independence which may be explained by her residence in Lincolnshire. There are occasional resemblances to the periodical essays of Addison and Steele,³² to the key device of Mrs. Manley, and to the moralizing of Mrs. Penelope Aubin's Defoe-like novels. Actually, she did not wish to compete with her fellow novelists, for "the Stories of our Times are so black, that the Authors can hardly escape being smutted, or defil'd in touching such Pitch."³³ She doubted that any character in Exilius "will hit the Humour of the Age" and in the preface of The Lining for the Patch-Work Screen she pictured herself as trying to divert her feminine readers "with a Dance at your Closet-Doors, whilst my Crowdero-Pen scrapes an old Tune, in fashion about threescore and six years ago." The metaphor was particularly apt, and the book ended with a dream vision fantasy in which Mrs. Katherine Philips is crowned "Queen of Female Writers." With this continued devotion to the literary modes of the Restoration period it is strange that she did not continue to write romances modelled on Mlle de Scudéry or Sir Philip Sidney. That she did advance from Exilius to the realism of her short stories makes her of interest in tracing the varied influences upon the evolving novel in the early eighteenth century.

Especially significant, and strange, when one considers her publisher, was Mrs. Barker's avoidance of the moral license which was still prevalent in English fiction during the 1720's. In this respect she may represent the delayed appearance in the novel of the influences of the reign of William and Mary which produced the most important writing of Mary Astell, whom Mrs. Barker resembled in background, education, and general morality. Unquestionably she is one of the first of the new school of "lady" novelists who, shunning the tradition of the earlier "female gallants," were beginning to emphasize the instructive and edifying potentialities of the novel. Like her successor in this movement, Sarah Fielding, she missed no opportunity to advance the cause of feminine education by a display of learning, and her attempts to elevate the novel as a genre led her to embellish it with her own verse and that of better-known poets.

In her inability or unwillingness to attempt "Histories at Large" she was probably encouraged by Edmund Curll, whose fictional publications between 1713 and 1745 show a definite predilection for short "novels" which he could issue either separately or in groups. In general, the popularity of native collections of short anecdotes and jests had declined after 1700, and such publications had descended to a lower level of readers along with abbreviated versions of the chivalric, Arcadian, and heroic romances. The fictional trend of which the bookseller was aware doubtless came from France, where numerous collections of Arabian, Persian, Turkish, Tartarian, Chinese, and Indian tales were being produced in imitation of Galland's great success, Les Mille et une nuits (1704-1711).

Charles Gildon, one of Curll's hacks, in the dedication of a novel (or collection of tales) published by his employer in 1718, attempted to give such publications classical sanction:

This Prosaic Poetry is of as ancient a Date as the Milesian Tales, which so charm'd Antiquity it self. The Moderns since the time of Heliodorus have often vary'd their Form; some Years ago they swell'd them into large Volumes, but of late the general Taste runs for such as are compriz'd in a much narrower Compass; from whence, we derive so many Books of Tales, which have not yet fail'd of Success.³⁴

Although Gildon had some reputation as a classical scholar and critic, his remarks bear the stamp of Curll's familiar method of prefatory advertisement rather than of serious study of literary origins. Nor was Gildon himself entirely disinterested, for he had published a miscellany of fictional letters entitled The Post-Boy Robb'd of his Mail in 1692 and in 1718 was writing The Post-Man Robb'd of his Mail, which appeared in the following year.

The "Prosaic Poetry" mentioned by Gildon was Mrs. Sarah Butler's Milesian Tales, which followed and was perhaps identical with her Irish Tales, advertised by Curll in 1716.³⁵ The latter title was designed to utilize the publicity provided by a two-volume edition, published by Curll and William Taylor in 1717, of The Adventures of Theagenes and Clariclea, translated from the Greek of Heliodorus or an intermediate French version. In reality, Mrs. Butler's tales had as little connection with their alleged classical predecessor as Mrs. Barker's Exilius had with Fénelon's Télémaque, In a separate preface the "Fair Authress" asserted the historical basis of the stories in the Danish invasions of Ireland and by a series of quotations from ancient and modern authorities defended her method of "dressing" the words of her characters in "as becoming a Phrase as my weak Capacity could frame or the time I did it in would allow." Despite the impressive introductions and the unusual setting, the action of Milesian Tales is a series of romantic commonplaces recounted in an inflated style. Disregarding both content and structure Curll typically declared it to be a collection of Instructive Novels for the Proper Conduct of Life.

His evident belief in the unfailing success of "Books of Tales" led to the publication of a number of such works by a succession of authoresses even more shadowy than Mrs. Jane Barker and probably as pseudonymous as Mrs. Sarah Butler. Among them were The German Atalantis … Written by a Lady (1715) and The Lover's Week; or, the Six Days Adventure of Philander and Amaryllis (1718) by Mrs. Mary Hearne, who admittedly followed in the steps of Mrs. Manley with this tale of a willing seduction and happy liaison. The latter publication, which went into three editions in two years, was followed promptly by a sequel entitled The Female Deserters (1719) and this in turn, by "Curlicized" combination with The Lover's Week, became Honour the Victory and Love the Prize. Illustrated in Ten Diverting Novels (1720). Mrs. Martha Fowke's epistolary effusions of Clio and Strephon (1720; Part II, 1728) likewise reappeared as a "new" work, The Platonic Lovers, in 1732 and Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas, like Mrs. Barker, offered the public an account of her amours under the title of Pylades and Corinna. Still more to Curll's taste were Mrs. Lydia Grainger's Modern Amours (1733) containing ten contemporary scandals "with a Key prefixed," and the short romans à clef of "Lady Margaret Pennyman." In addition to these native products, Curll also issued, usually in heated competition with rival booksellers, translations of such Continental collections as Chinese Tales (1725) and Peruvian Tales (1734) by Thomas-Simon Gueulette, and among his last six publications was Iberian Tales and Novels. Translated from the Spanish Originals (1745).

Thus, for twenty years after the death of Mrs. Jane Barker Curll did not advance beyond the standards for prose fiction set by her Exilius and A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies. This taste for short romances, often advertised as a series of novels, and for collections of short stories characterized much of the fiction published between 1700 and 1740 and was not greatly altered even by the works of Richardson and Fielding. The effect of this continued emphasis of variety upon the structure of the new literary genre was considerable. For this, Edmund Curll, Mrs. Barker, and his other "ladies" must be given much of the dubious credit.

Notes

¹ Ed. John M. Robertson (London, 1900), 1, 172-173.

² James Ralph in The Case of Authors (1758) could suggest as alternatives to dependence upon booksellers only writing for the stage or "for a faction in the Name of the Community." The early eighteenth century, however, had seen a serious decline in the theater (and in particular there was a strong prejudice against the works of "female wits"). At the same time the corruption of the Walpole administration and the anti-cultural attitude of the first Hanoverian court had resulted in a decline in political and social patronage.

³ Between 1668 and 1709 religious publications listed in The Term Catalogues (ed. Arber, I, xv) outnumbered all other kinds of books. The largest single payment in the surviving records of the publisher Bernard Lintot was one of £ 252 to the Rev. Mr. Fiddes for his Body of Divinity. See Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, VIII (1814), 296.

⁴ Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books (London, 1939), p. 64.

⁵Weekly Journal, ed. Nathaniel Mist, April 5, 1719 (William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings: Extending from 1716 to 1729 [London, 1869], II, 30-33).

⁶ Thomas Amory, The Life and Opinions of John Bunch, Esq. (London: Routledge, 1904), p. 392.

⁷ "I comforted myself that Mr. Curll had not made a Fool of me, as he has done of many a better Writer and secured me a Prisoner in his poetical Garret."—Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs (London: Routledge, 1928), p. 260.

⁸The Man of Taste (Printed for Lawton Gilliver, 1738), p. 8.

⁹ The most thorough study of Curll's career, and one to which I am indebted for many details, is the sympathetic portrait by Ralph Straus, The Unspeakable Curll (London, 1927).

¹⁰ James Lackington, Memoirs, 10th ed. (London, 1792), p. 386.

¹¹ Amory, John Buncle, p. 393.

¹² In the fictional field he had previously published only translations from the French and two imitations of Mrs. Manley's New Atalantis by John Old-mixon and by Captain Bland in 1712 and 1713.

¹³ Still more to the point is the fact that John Ozell, the chief of Curll's hackney translators, was then at work on a new version of Télémaque which was published in July 1715.

¹⁴Exilius was the first piece of prose fiction written by Mrs. Barker, although not the first published. A detailed study of Mrs. Barker's writings, with special reference to her poetry, was made by Karl Stanglmaier in Mrs. Jane Barker: Ein Beitrag zur Englischen Literaturgeschichte (Berlin, 1906). For detailed bio graphical information see G. S. Gibbons, "Mrs. Jane Barker," Notes and Queries, 12th ser., XI (1922), 278-279.

¹⁵ There is no evidence that Mrs. Barker's circle actually included "younger members of that circle … which had formerly surrounded Mrs. Katherine Philips," as Charlotte Morgan suggests in her Rise of the Novel of Manners (New York, 1911), p. 103. Mrs. Barker's use of "Lucasia" as auditor in Love's Intrigues seems imitative rather than indicative of any connection with Mrs. Anne Owen, the Lucasia of the Philips coterie.

¹⁶ Barker, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723), p. 3.

¹⁷ "On the Most Charming Galecia's Picture," Poetical Recreations, Part II, p. 36.

¹⁸Ibid., p. 196.

¹⁹ In the preface to her translation of The Christian Pilgrimage (1718) she wrote: "I shall not regret the Time I pass'd in a foreign Country, where I learn'd so much of the Language, as to bring Home this valuable Book in English for Use of those who have not taken the Trouble to learn French."

²⁰ A manuscript volume of Mrs. Barker's verse, preserved in the British Museum, is entitled A Collection of Poems Refering to the Times. It is stamped with the arms of Armand Louis du Plessis Richelieu, Duc d'Aiguillon, and dedicated to the Prince of Wales (James Francis Edward, then twelve years old) whom she prays to "disperse all vapor of Rebellion" and to whom she wishes "not only a happy new year, but a happy new Century." This remark seems to date the collection in 1700, and the poems show Mrs. Barker (in the guise of Fidelia) in a French convent garden lamenting various political events in England which have been occasioned by "that monster Orange and his crew/Who never honor, nor yet conscience knew."

²¹ Gibbons, op. cit., p. 278.

²² In Stowe MS 232, British Museum (Hanover State Papers, 1692-1719, Vol. XI, "Jacobite Correspondence, 1717-1719"), Mrs. Barker writes to the Duke of Ormond from London on March 19, 1718, telling him that the number of his adherents increases daily and that they hope to see him soon with "vostre jeune amy et qu'il puisse deposseder eux qui luy retiennent injustment son bien." She warns him cryptically that "si vous voulez touver icy des maisons à bon marché, il y faut venir apres la fin de la session du Parlemt, lorsque chacun va à la campagne. Je ne vous conseillerai jamais de venir pendant la session tout estant alors trop cher." A marginal note remarks, "On ignore qui est Barker."

²³Women Writers: Their Contribution to the English Novel, 1621-1744 (Cork University Press, 1945), p. 252.

²⁴ Stanglmaier, op. cit., pp. 48-50.

²⁵Ibid., p. 50.

²⁶ Morgan, Rise of the Novel of Manners, pp. 104-105.

²⁷Letters, ed. E. A. Parry (London, 1903), p. 220.

²⁸ "My Reader will say … why a History redue'd to Patches? especially Histories at Large are so Fashionable in this Age; viz. Robinson Crusoe, and Moll Flanders; Colonel Jack, and Sally Salisbury; with many other Heroes and Heroines."—"Address to the Reader," A Patch-Work Screen.

²⁹Patch-Work Screen, Introduction, n.p.

³⁰ In Mrs. Behn's novel Isabella kills Henaut and persuades Villenoys to throw the body into a river. They place the corpse in a sack, which she sews to Villenoys' collar so that he is pulled into the water and drowned. Mrs. Barker makes her heroine's second murder accidental.

³¹Patch-Work Screen, p. 44.

³² The story of Captain Manley in A Patch-Work Screen includes the desscription of a fop's day much in the manner of The Spectator.

³³Lining, pp. 128-129.

³⁴ "The Epistle Dedicatory," Milesian Tales, pp. ix-x. Gildon also declared that "the following Sheets … are allow'd by the Learned to be a useful sort of Poetry, tho' without the advantageous Harmony of Verse. For as all Poetry is an Imitation, as Aristotle justly observes, it is plain that all Fables are Imitations of Actions, which is the essence of both the Dramatic and Epic Poesie" (p. ix).

³⁵ Curll advertised the publication of Irish Tales by Mrs. Sarah Butler is The Post-Man, June 30, 1716. Advertisement by Curll did not invariably mean publication, and although his announcement has been noted by several bibliographers of the period, I can find no mention of an actual copy. Since Milesian Tales advertised two years later deals with ancient Irish history, it is not unlikely that this second work by Mrs. Butler was a second edition (or a reissue) of Irish Tales with a new title page. For that matter, the "Fair Authress" who, according to Gildon, is dead may be a fiction herself like Curll's "Joseph Gay" and "Lady Margaret Pennyman." Certainly Gildon's dedication and Mrs. Butler's preface might have come from the same pen.