SOURCE: Fitzmaurice, James. “Barker and the Tree of Knowledge at Cambridge University.” Renaissance Forum 3, no. 1 (spring 1998): 1-15.

[In the following essay, Fitzmaurice examines the 1723 version of Barker's poem “An Invitation to my friends at Cambridge” to show that later in life the author was not as enamored of the opinions of academic men as she had been as a younger woman, because she saw the limitations of worldly knowledge and no longer felt she needed to justify her lack of formal education.]

Jane Barker is perhaps most widely known these days as a writer of novellas who was active during the early eighteenth century. The 1997 Oxford University Press paperback edition of three of these pieces is testimony to considerable scholarly interest in her, particularly as a woman author who published her fiction and who was much read during her own lifetime. (Barker 1997) She is often mentioned in conjunction with Mary Manley and Eliza Haywood, but John Richetti argues that in the more precise view she falls into a group of women writers for whom the ‘public image of the lady novelist’ was, contrary to the cases of Manley and Haywood, without blemish. The reputation for rectitude that marked Barker's group, according to Richetti, also contributed to publishing successes for men like the ‘unscrupulous but astute’ Edmund Curll. (Richetti 1969, 230) Richetti, unsurprisingly, finds Barker's fiction itself rigorously ‘moral and free of erotic detail’, though I would argue that her moral sense is more complicated and nuanced than might appear to be the case at first glance. Jane Spencer, in the influential monograph The Rise of the Woman Novelist, notes the same sort of difference between Manley and Barker as is to be found in Richetti: ‘Virginity, instead of eroticism, was the keynote’. (Spencer 1986, 62) Spencer, however, is as much interested in Barker as an autobiographer as in her as a novelist, and Spencer contends that the fiction routinely is intended to reveal aspects of Barker's life as a writer, a woman who devoted herself to pen and ink rather than to marriage. Spencer's view makes sense and is widely held, but Kathryn R. King and Jeslyn Medoff warn that Barker's biographers should use make use of archival material and not confine themselves to interpretation or overinterpretation of the fiction. (King and Medoff 1997, 16-38) Barker's fiction may strike the modern reader as slightly odd, for it often appears to be rambling and sometimes contains snippets of verse that seem pointless beyond being homespun. At the same time, her narratives frequently explore issues of sex and gender in ways that appeal to the modern sense of life's complexities and of the difficulties in drawing easy, clear-cut moral judgments.

While Barker wanted her novellas to be published, she did not seek print for her poetry except as it is sometimes found revised and interspersed in the fiction. If her verse has received less attention than her prose, it is by no means ignored and plays a prominent part in Carol Barash's recent study of women poets. (Barash 1996, 174-198) Barash finds strong connections between Barker's poetry and verse by Katherine Philips, though Spencer believes Cowley's odes to be the main influence. (Spencer 1986, 63) An essay by Kathryn R. King corrects the common misapprehension that Barker had little interest in the world of men. (King 1994, 551-70) Rather, many of her friends were male academics. Barker's poetry, itself, treats a broad range of topics including medicine and religion. It, like the fiction, deals with the complexities of various aspects of sex and gender, and it, too, suggests the difficulties involved in making easy, clear-cut moral judgments.

In a poem titled ‘An Invitation to my Friends at Cambridge’, a poem among those printed without her permission in Poetical Recreations in 1688, Barker advanced a claim for a special relationship with the exclusively male academy. The male friends of the poem's title, she suggested, should come to visit her home in Lincolnshire, for the area was a haven of rural solitude and beauty. Barker was very much under the spell of academics in general and of Cambridge men in particular when this first version of the poem was published. She had not had an opportunity to pursue a university education because she was a woman. Nevertheless, she found herself being treated, she said, as a ‘copartner’¹ in writing by a group that included at least one fellow of St. John's College.² These same men, individually and taken as a group, clearly had devoted a good deal of time to discussing with her a wide variety of serious and lighthearted subjects. Serious dialogue between a member of Cambridge University and an intelligent woman, of course, was not without precedent, for Anne Finch, Countess of Conway, not long before had enjoyed a fruitful correspondence with Henry More. Nevertheless, Barker was delighted both with the respect accorded to her by well-educated men and by the attendant opportunities for what amounted to informal tuition. She was able to learn from learned men. When a second and heavily revised version of the poem appeared in 1723 as part of the novella A Patch-Work Screen, Barker was some thirty years older and not quite so dewy-eyed about what university men might have to offer. Indeed, the full title of the book is A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies, and domestic issues, as well as observations regarding the dangers of associating with young men and old, are paramount. University men drift towards the background of this later book and males of genteel upbringing, educated or not, are rarely admirable. Rather, such a man is likely to seduce an unwary woman, to be hanged for committing robbery as part of a ‘frolick’ (Barker 1997, 104) or to end up as a suicide. (Barker 1997, 138)

It would be a mistake to say that Barker had seen the error of her infatuation with academe when she published the 1723 version of ‘To My Friends’ in A Patch-Work Screen.³ After all, she only revised the poem and did not exclude it. Nevertheless, she did leave out many others of her academically oriented poems and instead chose to include such homespun domestic verse as ‘A Receipt for making Welsh Flummery’ and ‘The Czar's Receipt to make Punch’. A Patch-Work Screen is, then, quite definitely a book for women, written by a woman, though this is not to say that it is relentless in its depictions of men as seducers and corrupters. A man, like a woman, can be a victim, a dupe who falls prey to those who are unscrupulous. (Barker 1997, 134ff) The book also is professedly ‘a patch work’, that is, a collection of odds and ends that in its structure recalls other collections including Margaret Cavendish's The World's Olio (1655) and Nature's Pictures (1656).

The version of ‘To My Friends’ included in A Patch-Work Screen leaves out two sections, one of six and the other of eight lines. These sections, taken in context, cast a good deal of light on the feelings that were generated just prior to the 1688 publication of Poetical Recreations in an intelligent and talented woman who had a great many male academics as friends. While she clearly was delighted to be taken seriously by these men, she also understood that there was a large gap between the kind of life she found herself obliged to lead as a genteel woman and many aspects of existence in the world in which they resided. She apparently envied them their knowledge derived from this world but knew that as a genteel woman she could not quite live the kind of life that would open it up to her fully. Indeed, in other poems she shows that she was not entirely convinced that she really wanted the knowledge that she seems to envy in ‘To My Friends’. The world of academe, unlike the world of rural Lincolnshire, was sophisticated but also a little sullied. While academe concerned itself with serious ethical questions that might have been discussed after dinner at Barker's home in Wilsthorp, academe did so in a very different environment, one where intelligent and well-educated men actually tested the limits of morality. Such men sometimes tried out precepts derived from their ‘Father Hobbs’ on ‘Orange-wenches’. (Barker 1688, 5) They drank alcohol beyond what was moderate, they swore, and they ‘Kick[ed] Tavern boys’. (Barker 1688, 5) Bad behaviour of this sort was certainly to be found in Lincolnshire, but most of the men—and women—who practised it were not likely to have pondered questions derived from The Leviathan. Not all Cambridge academics were so worldly, of course, but many had experience of this environment, if not as participants then as direct observers. Any considerable time spent in such observation itself might have been repugnant to Barker. At the same time, she was unabashed about claiming direct knowledge, or learning, not requiring experiences that were of dubious morality.

The 1688 Poetical Recreations version of ‘To My Friends’ offers men from the academy not merely solitude and beauty but innocence—a characteristic denied to a person, male or female, with too much worldly knowledge. After a brief introduction, the poem continues as follows.

Hail, Solitude, where Innocence do's shroud
Her unvail'd Beauties from the cens'ring Croud;
Let me but have her Company, and I
Shall never envy this World's Gallantry:
[The following lines were dropped in 1723 Patch-Work Screen:]
We'll find out such inventions to delude
And mock all those that mock our solitude
That they for shame shall fly for their defence
To gentle Solitude and Innocence.
Then they will find how much they've been deceiv'd,
When they the flatt'ries of this World believ'd.

(Barker 1688, 1 and 2)

Barker is so concerned with getting across the importance of innocence that she overworks the word a little, an artistic weakness not to be found in the 1723 Patch-Work Screen version. In this later version, the first ‘Innocence’ is replaced with ‘Peace and Vertue’, though the line is not otherwise changed. The last six lines of the passage quoted above, however, are simply dropped. One reason they might have been removed is that Barker, who had just turned seventy, no longer felt the need to justify her lack of worldly knowledge to anyone, least of all to herself. She did not fear being mocked nor did she want to take the time to point out what must have been obvious to her, that one should not believe the flatteries of the world in general and of Cambridge academics in particular.

Both versions continue with a description of the natural beauties of Lincolnshire and both condemn ‘Emulation’, the petty rivalries for power and honour that beset men at Cambridge. Barker does not deny the complexities of the situation, however, for she ends each version with an admission of what is lacking for women like her in rural Lincolnshire:

But that the Tree of Knowledge won't grow here:
Though in its culture I have spent some time,
Yet it disdains to grow in our cold Clime,
Where it can neither Fruit nor Leaves produce
Good for its owner, or the public use.
[Eight-line section left out of 1723 Patch-Work Screen:]
How can we hope our Minds then to adorn
With any thing with which they were not born;
Since we're deny'd to make this small advance,
To know their nakedness and ignorance?
For in our Maker's Laws we've made a breach,
And gather'd all that was within our reach
Which since we ne're could touch; Altho' our Eyes
Do serve our longing Souls to tantalize,
[text resumed in 1723 Patch-Work Screen:]
Whilst kinder fate for you do's constitute
Luxurious Banquets of this dainty Fruit.
Whose Tree most fresh and flourishing do's grow,
E'er since it was transplanted amongst you;
And you in wit grow as its branches high,
Deep as its Root too in Philosophy;
Large as its spreading Arms your Reasons grow,
Close as its Umbrage do's your Judgments show
Fresh as its Leaves your sprouting fancies are,
Your Vertues as its Fruits are bright and fair.

(Barker 1688, 3 and 4; Barker 1997, 94 and 95)

Knowledge is what is in short supply in Lincolnshire, but it is knowledge associated with the experience of evil as well as good, knowledge of the sort that had to be obtained by eating the forbidden fruit and that was involved in the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Barker begins the biblical metaphor early in the poem when she says that the beauty which she offers to Cambridge men is ‘unveil'd’, beauty such as was naked with Adam and Eve before the fall. This beauty, she writes, is protected from criticism by innocence. Innocence was seen as a substantial if not always successful protector of beauty in Barker's day, and in another poem she writes that she needs no guard for her heart ‘but its own innocence, / Under which Fort, it could fierce storms endure’.⁴ ‘Peace and Virtue’, substituted for ‘Innocence’, in the revision of ‘To my Friends’ don't work quite so well as guardians. Peace, in particular, is more a pleasant state of being than a protector. The threat against beauty, however, is less serious in the revised than in the 1688 Poetical Recreations version of the poem.

The set of eight deleted lines from the earlier version quoted above makes another interesting point about the complexities of gender relationships. Innocent people often do not have full knowledge about their innocence as regards the opposite sex.

… we're deny'd to make this small advance,
To know [our Minds'] nakedness and ignorance.

It is an observation that Aphra Behn, Margaret Cavendish, and others had already made in slightly different circumstances. When innocent people fall in love, they do not at first recognize that they are in love.⁵ They understand that they are full of emotion, but do not have knowledge of the cause or of possible courses of action. It takes someone who is experienced in love, often someone who is himself or herself a little sullied, to point out to them what is happening. With Barker, writing ‘An Invitation’ prior to 1688, certain sorts of important knowledge are always out of reach for the innocent, if they remain innocent. These people may want to pluck fruit from the Tree of Knowledge but ‘ne're could touch’ and the effort merely ‘serve[s] [their] longing Souls to tantalize’. Barker, recasting the same poem for A Patch-Work Screen, feels far less desire to know more about the worldly side of Cambridge life.

The second version of the poem, curiously, does leave in some small reference to the less than laudable world of university—or, perhaps, of college—life in lines which originally were:

Whilst kinder fate for you do's constitute
Luxurious Banquets of this dainty Fruit.

There is only a minor change in the revision, which follows:

Whilst God and Nature for you do's constitute
Luxurious Banquets of this dainty Fruit.

In the first version with the undeleted eight lines, ‘Luxurious Banquets of this dainty Fruit’ can refer to the sexual adventurism of fellows and students among ‘Orange-wenches’. That interpretation is not impossible in the rewritten poem, but the removal of the eight lines taken together with the change of ‘fate’ to ‘God and Nature’ strengthens a reading that stresses the enjoyment of college feasts and of such activities as philosophical discussion. A little overeating was a failing, but a trivial one, among academics.

The revision of ‘To my Friends’ also offers an opportunity to fine tune the interpretation of the first version of the poem offered here. Two footnotes in A Patch-Work Screen provide interesting information concerning what Barker may have thought about the earlier version. ‘Our’ (preceding ‘cold Clime’) is glossed by Barker as ‘A Female Capacity’, and ‘you’ (in the phrase ‘you do's constitute’) she explains as ‘The Men’. Thus, the problem of knowledge and innocence in ‘To my Friends’ in Poetical Recreations, if we figure in the footnotes of thirty years later, becomes less general and more specific. That is, men have certain sorts of worldly knowledge, and women, in their ‘capacity’ as women, do not. ‘Capacity’ here probably means something like ‘force of mind’ or ‘mental ability’.⁶ ‘What’, it might be asked, ‘of ‘fallen women’? Do they have ‘female capacity’ or have they lost it?’ Jane Spencer believes that Barker's heroine and alter ego, Galesia, is fearful that poetry will ‘unleash the dangers of sexuality’ that will, in turn, lead to Galesia's own seduction. (Spencer 1986, 67 and 68) Whether or not Spencer is right, there is, finally, good reason to believe that the footnotes from the revised version of the poem may be used in a legitimate fashion to explain the poem as it was printed in 1688. It makes sense to argue that the first versions of all the poems were intended for an educated and sophisticated coterie readership. When the poems were revised and printed in 1723, Barker no doubt expected that they would be seen by a less educated and more general audience. Thus, in the 1723 version, we find Orinda glossed as ‘Mrs. Katherine Philips’. (Barker 1997, 127) A footnote of this sort would have been unnecessary for Barker's Cambridge friends, who also may not have needed the explanations for ‘The Men’ and ‘A Female Capacity’.

Whatever Barker may have thought about ‘fallen women’ in 1723, she certainly was interested in knowledge generated by the dubious behaviour of Cambridge men when she wrote prior to 1688. The second poem in Poetical Recreations is ‘To Mr. Hill, on his Verses to the Duchess of York, when she was at Cambridge’. In ‘To Mr. Hill’, Barker praises the addressee, who is able to ‘induce the Gallants to forsake / Their dear-lov'd Town’ and draw them to listen to eloquence in the service of the Royal Household. Her praise, however, does not keep her from taking a careful look at the intellectual and dissolute life from which she is excluded.

And for their Father Hobbs [they] will talk so high,
Rather than him they will their God deny:
And lest their wit should want a surer proof,
They boast of crimes they ne're were guilty of.
Thus hellish cunning drest in Masquerade
Of Wit's disguise, so many have betray'd,
And made them Bondslaves, who at first did fly
Thither Wit's famine only to supply.
But now I hope they'll find the task too great,
And think at last of making a retreat:
Since here's a Pisgah-Hill whereon to stand
To take a prospect of Wit's holy Land,
Flowing with Milk of Christian innocence,
And Honey of Cic'ronian Eloquence.

(Barker 1688, 5 and 6)

Barker points out the irony that those who pretend to greater wit because they have greater knowledge of dissolute life are liable to have lied about whom they have seduced or what brawls they have experienced. Further, these ‘Machavillians in a Coffee-house’ have as their master someone, who, while possessing a reputation for intellect, was often seen as a promoter of amorality if not immorality. Barker's biblical metaphor of the addressee, Mr. Hill, as the hill from which Moses saw the Promised Land fits nicely because Cambridge is ‘such a foggy level place’ both morally and geographically. Nevertheless, Barker betrays an infatuation with some aspects of the life she condemns. Despite what might seem to be an angry and sarcastic tone found in phrases like ‘dear-lov'd Town’ and ‘Father Hobbs’, the poem is full of wit of the sort that those who frequented taverns would have appreciated, and it is Mr. Hill's ‘witticisms’ as well as his ‘innocence’ that she praises.

What appears to be a bad rhyme, ‘surer proof’ and ‘guilty of’ may simply be another example of wit—if the rhyme was, indeed, as bad at the time as it is now. Barker may use this poem to redirect the academy's attention away from the tavern but she does so in a poetic style that would not be uncongenial to a public house wit. For somebody who could not ‘lead the life’, she nevertheless was able to duplicate some of the writing that it generated.

Barker goes on to flirt with actual participation in bad behaviour by using slightly off-colour puns in ‘To my Friend Exillus, on his persuading me to Marry Old Damon’,⁷ a piece that might seem at first glance to be a ‘virginity’ poem and a poem that Elaine Hobby cites as a serious attack on the institution of marriage. (Hobby 1988, 160) While the serious import is certainly there, it is found in the context of slightly dubious jollity. This is another poem with Cambridge connections, for Exillus (Exilius in A Patch-Work Screen) was at St. John's in some capacity prior to 1688.⁸ Barker, or her speaker, teasingly says she is not entirely averse to the marriage. The reasons for deciding against the union are, in the end, two, the first almost purely comic and the second at once comic and serious. First, Barker, or her speaker, will have to sleep with Old Damon, and, second, he later on mistakenly will think her guilty of adultery.

Thou [Exillus] with Idolatry mak'st me adore,
And homage do to the proud Conqueror [Damon],
Now round his Neck my willing Arms I'd twine,
And swear upon his Lips, My Dear, I'm thine,
But that his kindness then would grow, I fear,
Too weighty for my weak desert to bear.
…
… after all my kindness to him shown,
My little Neddy, he'll not think't his own:
Even thou my Dear Exillus he'll suspect
If I but look on thee, I him neglect.

(Barker 1688, 14; Barker 1997, 111)

Barker, or her speaker, might go so far as to kiss Damon but will not proceed to ‘bear’ his weight. It is not her ‘desert’ to become his ‘dessert’, that is his ‘fruit or sweetmeats’. Further the ‘thine’ of the section has an ambiguous antecedent. Perhaps Damon is to be told that Exillus is loved. These are instances of word play that might be included in the speech of a character from a play by Aphra Behn, someone like Hellena from The Rover, but they are probably a little risqué for a woman taken to be a rigorously moral poet, one who denies that she has the ability to touch the Tree of Knowledge. If nothing else, the lines are more examples of the wit that Barker displayed in the poem on Mr. Hill. It is a little surprising, then, that when Barker revised the poem and included it in A Patch-Work Screen she let the puns stand as they were, for she certainly was not interested in impressing the Cambridge University community with her daring in 1723. On the other hand, she had no desire to be labelled a ‘prude’, and there was heightened danger of that for ‘old maids’ after the publication of Rape of the Lock some ten years earlier. Perhaps most important, even in old age she occasionally seems to have liked to attach a crude label. One finds ‘old Whoreson’ and ‘impudent Slut’, used to tag characters in A Patch-Work Screen. (Barker 1997, 113 and 114) Barker did drop the lines about twining her willing arms around Damon and about swearing ‘My Dear’ upon his lips from the 1723 version of the poem. She may have preferred witty puns and crude labels to a mildly salacious image. The second reason given for the rejection of Damon is that he would be a jealous old fool in the tradition of Shakespeare's Leontes, a man who seriously damaged his family life and lost a male heir due to ‘horn madness’. Nevertheless, male jealousy was as often comic as serious on the Restoration stage and finds itself expressed in unforgettable characters like Wycherley's Pinchwife. Barker is just a little arch when she suggests that Damon will suspect that Exillus has fathered a son on the poem's speaker—or perhaps on Barker, herself.

If Barker indulges her fondness for wit in ‘To my Friend Exillus’ by including only one slightly less than ‘ladylike’ image, she is considerably less restrained in “A Bachanalian Song”, printed in Poetical Recreations and not included in A Patch-Work Screen. An observation made by Katheryn R. King about Barker's character Galesia, might be applied to Barker herself at this point: she ‘writes as if male, using the language and discourses of university … men.’ (King 1993, 95) This poem, which could pass for the product of an undergraduate evening at the Pope's Head Tavern in Cambridge (an institution with which she was familiar presumably by reputation)⁹ begins with an obvious pun and in the process seems to strain after wit.

Troy had a Breed of brave stout Men,
Yet Greece made shift to rout her;
'Cause each Man drank as much as Ten,
And thence grew Ten times stouter.

It is tempting to speculate that Barker wrote ‘A Bachanalian Song’ just to show her coterie audience that she could mimic undergraduate writing style and subject matter. Indeed, the poem may be intended to be silly in the way that some of Rochester's poems are silly. Rochester, for example, produced the double rhyme ‘his bone’ and ‘Lisbon’—if tradition has it right—for Charles II extempore. Barker has no trouble with doggerel of this sort when she combines double rhyme with bathroom humour thus:

Though Hector was a Trojan true,
As ever Piss'd 'gen Wall, Sir;
Achilles bang'd him black and blue, For he drank more than all, Sir.

The poem does return to Barker's interest in the problem of knowledge, or at least of the sources of wit, for she notes that a drunken Grecian, ‘was ne'er asham'd on's Writing’.

He that will be a Souldier then,
Or Witt, must drink good Liquor;
It makes base Cowards fight like Men,
And roving Thoughts fly quicker.

Barker's own thoughts were probably given to a tamer sort of roving, and it is unlikely that she admired a drunk in actuality any more than she wanted to be a soldier.

‘On my Mother and my lady W——— who both lay sick at the same time under the Hands of Dr. Paman’ is a far more serious effort than ‘A Bachanalian Song’, and one that begins with an unexpected, almost Metaphysical, comparison. The women are likened to two naked boys who foolishly think to swim in the ocean, perhaps about to act on a dare.

Like two sweet Youths strip'd naked on the Strand,
Ready to plunge, in consternation(10) stand,
Viewing the dimples of that smiling Face,
Whose frigid Body they design t'imbrace,
Till by their Guardian Angel's care, some friend
Snatches them from the danger they intend:
So did these Pious Souls themselves prepare,
By putting off the Robes of worldly care.
Thus fitted (as they were) in each degree,
To lanch into a bless'd Eternity.

(Barker 1688, 42, Dropped from the Magdalen manuscript.)

If the poem begins with an unexpected comparison, it continues in an odd direction. Barker loses interest in the women's sickness and preparation for ‘making a good end’. Instead she uses the occasion to give medical advice to Dr. Paman, who had been Public Orator at Cambridge University between 1674 and 1681 and who had been elected, in the 1640s, a fellow of St. John's.¹¹

Ah happy Paman, mightily approv'd,
Both by thy Patients, and the Poor belov'd.
Hence(12) let no Slander light upon the Fame
Of thy great Art, much less upon thy Name:
Nor to bad Druggs let Fate thy Worth expose,
For best Receipts are baffl'd oft by those:
Nor let no Quack intrude where thou do'st come,
To crop thy Fame, or haste thy Patients doom;
Base quackery to Sickness the kind Nurse,
The Patient's ruine, and Physicians curse.

(Barker 1688, 42)

Barker's praise for the doctor in the first two lines is generous, but she does Paman no favour when she says that she hopes there will be no slander on his professional reputation. Specifically she warns him not to allow ‘bad Druggs’ to be used in the preparation of his prescriptions. Her attitude is a little like that of a gifted undergraduate who feels knowledgeable enough to offer advice to a senior, indeed an elderly, professor. She felt qualified to discuss the topic of drugs, no doubt because her own prescriptions were being filled by pharmacists. Indeed, she openly takes pleasure that she, as a woman, was treated as if she were a physician in ‘On the Apothecary's Filing my bills amongst the Doctor's’.

I Hope I shan't be blam'd if I am proud,
That I'm admitted 'mongst this Learned Croud.
The sturdy gout, which all Male power withstands,
Is overcome by my soft Female hands.
No Deb'ra, Judith, or Semiramis
Could boast of Conquests half so great as this.

(Barker 1688, 31-4)

The poem on Dr. Paman does not appear in A Patch-Work Screen. Paman, who died in 1695, was a matter of history rather than of current events when the book was published in 1723. More importantly, the poem is a little too irreverent in what might have seemed, thirty years later, to be a silly way. Barker, however, continued to be proud of her medical learning, in part because it was not derived from the Tree of Knowledge. The poem on apothecaries, unsurprisingly, is included in A Patch-Work Screen. (Barker 1997, 116-119)

Barker is considerably more respectful of her addressee in ‘To my Honoured Friend, Mr. E. S——t’. Mr. E. S——t has not been identified but he seems to have been a serious poet and may have been one of her less worldly Cambridge friends.

I often read your Lines, and oft admire,
How Eloquence and Fancy do conspire,
With Wit and Judgment to make up a Quire,
And grace the Music, of Apollo's Lire.
But that which makes the Musick truly sweet,
Virtue and Innocence in Chorus meet.

As with the poem on Mr. Hill, Barker here chooses to praise her subject using the word ‘innocence’. She goes on to consider worldly verse by what may be Mr. E. S——t's Cambridge associates.

If I with other Authors them [Mr. E. S——t's writings] compare,
Methinks their Modish wit to me do's shew,
But as an Engyscope to view [his] through:
Nor do [his] Writ'ngs only smoothly glide,
Whilst [his] whole life's like some impetuous tide,
But both together keep a gentle pace,
And each other do each other grace.

It is not just the man's verse that partakes of innocence, but also his entire existence. His lack of worldly knowledge, in something of an oxymoron, may be the source of ‘perfection’ in his poetry and his life, that is both the source of incomplete (or innocent) completeness and of unmatched quality. If so, then Barker could scarcely find a more complicated way to praise the man's status regarding gender. He is at once a whole man and one who is thoroughly lacking in forbidden knowledge. The image of the engyscope, or microscope, is interesting, for it suggests that the verse of ‘Modish’, of more worldly, wits is large, obvious, and even ‘gross’. With John Donne, Mr. E. S——t may not need ‘half-acre tombs’ in which to enshrine his art.

Mr. E. S——t is probably the subject of ‘A Second Epistle. To my Honoured Friend Mr. E. S’. E. S., like Mr. E. S——t, has persuaded Barker to continue writing after she decided to ‘banish’ her muse. It is tempting to speculate that E. S. gave her encouragement and boosted her self-confidence when she was full of doubts, but the cause of Barker's reasons for deciding to give up writing is not made explicit.¹³ She does, however, take a light-hearted approach to the situation and indicates that she has sent her muse packing more than once.

Oft has my Muse and I fall'n out,
And I as oft have banish'd her my Breast;
But such, alas, still was her interest,
And still to bring her purposes about;
So great her cunning in insinuation,
That she soon gain'd her wish'd-for restoration.

(Barker 1688, 70-72)

Barker then puts the muse to a ‘Violent Death’, but E. S. uses his ‘All-pow'rfull Pen’ to raise ‘[the muse] from the Dead again’. This levity would suggest that Barker now looks back on her previous self-doubts and finds them to be a little comic. Nevertheless, she shows genuine gratitude to E. S. for his taking the time to persuade her to return to writing.

And now, alas, what can she [the muse] doe,
Or speake or shew,
How very much she is oblig'd to you?
For where the Boon's so great, it were a rude
Presumption to pretend to Gratitude;
And a mad project to contrive to give
To you, from whom she do's her All receive.

While Barker's professions of gratitude may seem a little overblown by modern standards or at least somewhat conventional in their use of the inability topos, there is absolutely no reason to question her sincerity. E. S. convinced Barker to continue writing and she, under the name of her muse, owes him a debt. More importantly, the muse in some way has been given her ‘All’ by E. S. Again Barker is not explicit, but it seems likely that she uses the phrase ‘her All receive’ to allude to tuition that she, Barker, received in the writing of poetry. Elsewhere she alludes to receiving instruction in medicine from what appears to be a Cambridge man.¹⁴ She goes on to say:

Yet if she [the muse] Traffick on your Stock, and thrive,
'Tis fit, how e'er the Principal be spent,
To pay the Int'rest of Acknowledgment.

If the metaphor begins in the world of business and commerce, it ends with what is, at least today, a word with literary associations, ‘acknowledgment’. It is, of course, possible that Barker thanks E. S. for his praise of her poetry rather than for his instruction in writing. Chances are that she thanks him for both.

And with her [the muse] I [Barker] must acknowledge too,
The honour which you did on me bestow.

It seems likely that the muse, Barker as poet, offers thanks for instruction and that Barker the person says ‘thank you’ for praise. The learning involved, of course, is far removed from undergraduate taverns in Cambridge and the fatal tree.

A poem contained in a manuscript at Magdalen College, Oxford, and not found in Poetical Recreations is more specific about tuition and praise. Its lengthy title seems to connect this poem to both universities and to a variety of learned and witty men: ‘To my friends who prais'd my Poems and at the beginning of the little printed book placed this motto—pulcherrima virgo Icedit, magna juventum stipante caterva.’¹⁵ Barker did not authorize the printing of her poems, but neither was she altogether unhappy that the book had appeared. As with her poem to E. S., she offers thanks both for tuition and for praise.

This band of gallant youths, bears me along,
Who teach me how to sing, then praise my song.

It is in this poem that Barker claims to be ‘copartner’ with a group of learned and witty men, but even in her somewhat breathless self-congratulation she does not forget the problem of worldly knowledge.

'Twas not for beauty, learning, eloquence
No, 'twas your vertue, lov'd my innocence,
My rural muse, which never higher aimes
Than to discourse of shepherds and their lambs,

Innocence is once again brought forward, even if a few of Barker's verses in Poetical Recreations are a little more suited to undergraduates in a tavern than to shepherds tending their sheep.

‘What’, one might ask, ‘did Cambridge academics think of Barker?’ Did they treat letters and conversations connected with her as a pleasant diversion from time spent in more difficult and sophisticated pursuits, or did they take her seriously? Was she just a mascot or, as she thought, a ‘copartner’? Benjamin Crayle, her publisher, does Barker no favour when he writes in his preface that genteel men and women will treat her verses with respect out of civility.

[Barker's poems] are the effects of a Ladies Wit, and I hope all the Courtly will (though out of a Complement) allow them for valuable.

Gerard Langbaine offers similar dubious praise for the plays of Margaret Cavendish on the same ‘Courtly’ basis, and other women writers were likewise treated to male condescension.¹⁶ Barker may well allude to Crayle's words when she writes the following lines in ‘To my friends who prais'd my Poetry’.

… these young sons of Phoebus dance around
And sing the praise of her themselves have crown'd
Not like those Idole-makers heretofore
Who had no right to praise, much less adore.
No, justly I a poet's honour claim.

Crayle—like Curll some thirty years later—may turn Barker into an ‘Idole’ by publishing her writing, but, since Crayle is less than convinced about the poetry's quality, he is in no position to praise it. Further, this hypocrite should not ‘adore’ the author. Crayle offers a set of love poems directed to Barker at the end of Poetical Recreations, poems that might have caused her some annoyance.

The men who are clearly identified both with Barker and with Cambridge in the 1688 volume, however, offer a vastly different set of attitudes from Crayle's. Perhaps most interesting is an ode by Exillus, the unidentified man associated with St. John's. Rather than offer stock praise of the sort directed by gentlemen to ladies, he couches his lines on her poetry in a sophisticated religious metaphor. Exillus, while twisting around the beginning of the gospel of St. John, says that God created order out of chaos not by thought but by action.

Nothing of Beauty did appear,
But all was a continu'd boundless space,
Till the Almighty's powerfull Command,
Whose Action ev'r more quick than thought,
The Infant World out of confusion brought.

(Barker 1688, sig A7v)

Barker, like God acting upon chaos, takes the thoughts of Exillus and gives them form by the act of writing.

So where my [Exillus'] Thoughts, if Thoughts can be
Design'd from Wit, and Poetry,
Nothing but Ignorance appear'd,
Dull ignorance, and folly too,
With all that Crew,
And home-bred Darkness held the regencie,
Till your Almighty Pen
This Chaos cleared,
And of old arm'd Men,
Strange Miracles rose out o' th' Earth

(Barker 1688, sig. A8)

Exillus, as is the case with Barker elsewhere, is just a little Metaphysical in his comparison. Barker is not likened to the Virgin Mary, a kind of comparison attacked by Johnson in comments on Donne's poem on the death of Elizabeth Drury. Nevertheless, the likening of Barker to God is not much more restrained. More importantly for the purposes of this essay, Exillus admits of something like a collaboration between himself and Barker. He provides the material for composition, and she produces the finished product. Barker went on to publish this romance some years later as Exilius or the Banish'd Roman (1715). (See McBurney 1958, 338 and 389) The collaboration would have constituted a sort of tutorial for her, but one in which she was an active participant rather than a passive auditor. Exillus is probably the author of a second and more conventional poem, specifically on the topic of ‘Scipina’. The second poem is far less accomplished and is considerably less revealing of their interactions. (Barker 1688, [part II] 35)

The first poem, as it turns out, can be interpreted as something of an effort at seduction. Exillus continues as follows:

And as the Heav'ns, to which we all things owe,
Scarce own those Bounties which they do bestow:
So you're as kind as they,
Submit your kinder influence,
To be by us determin'd, us obey,
And still from them
Give us ev'n for our weakness a reward,
Without regard
To Merit. …

The reward is not specified, but Old Damon, of ‘To My Friend Exillus’, would have had his suspicions.¹⁷ The ‘us’ is quite clearly Exillus, himself. Although seduction poems were quite conventional, Barker actually may have needed recourse to her innocence when dealing with Exillus. While her life fits with Richetti's ‘public image of the lady novelist’ as morally upright, the life of at least one close friend does not appear to have been so unspotted.

A poem by John Newton, fellow of St. John's College, is less sophisticated and complex than the verses by Exillus concerning Barker, God, and chaos. Nevertheless, ‘To Mrs. Jane Barker, on her most Delightful and Excellent Romance of Scipina, now in the Press.’¹⁸ contains further indications of what Cambridge men thought about her.

Thy Lines may pass severest Virtue's Test,
More than Astrea's soft, more than Orinda's chast.
Young Country Squires may read without offence,
Nor Lady Mothers fear their debauch'd Innocence.
Only beware, Incautious Youths beware,
Lest when you see such lovely Pictures there;
You, as of old the Fair Enamour'd Boy,
Languish for those feign'd Beauties you descry,
And pine away for Visionary Joy.
Then if by day they kindle noble Fire,
And with gay thoughts your nightly Dreams inspire
Bless, Bless the author of your soft desire.

(Barker 1688, [Part II] 32)

The suggestion that Barker's poetry manages to combine the ‘softness’ of Aphra Behn's (Astrea's) verse with the virtue of Katherine Philips' (Orinda's) poetry is fairly obvious as a compliment and one that might have been offered to many woman poets of the time. Newton is more revealing of his, and perhaps other Cambridge men's views of Barker, in suggesting that young men may read her verse without offense. When he goes on to write that the ‘Lady Mothers’ of rural England need not ‘fear’ that Barker will corrupt the innocence of their sons, he obviously is having a little joke. He teases her about the poems she had written concerning the taking of young lovers. These poems are innocent enough, and love poems in which the speaker pretends to a substantial age difference with the beloved were not unusual.¹⁹ Since there seems to be the evidence of an actual romantic attachment between Exillus and Barker and since Exillus could have been an undergraduate, the joke might have been just a tiny bit cruel.²⁰ If so, Barker could take the ribbing. In ‘To my friends who prais'd my Poems’, she says that her friends are ‘of all your Reverend mothers sons the prime’. (Barker 1997, 308) The point, finally, is that Newton is comfortable enough with Barker to tease her and in doing so treats her as something like a ‘copartner’. Further, the final line of ‘To Mrs. Jane Barker’ shows that her poetry's evocation of ‘soft desire’ in a young man, that is her affinity with Behn, struck Newton as more important than her poetry's chaste content. In this case, Barker's moral rectitude did not preclude a bit of teasing from friends on amorous topics.

If Fidelius was another Cambridge man, and his coterie name would suggest that such is the case, then ‘To the Incomparable Galaecia, on the Publication of Her Poems’ shows that the academy was well aware of Barker's interest in the Tree of Knowledge. The poem begins with an ordinary comparison: Barker is like a new star in the sky. The poem continues as ‘The Sons of Art’ are amazed by the star's ‘Noveltie’. Barker was new and unusual as a woman poet, a novelty, and she was also a star that was very bright, a ‘nova’. The Sons of Art, then would want to admire her ‘theory’, her ‘spectacle’ in a now obsolete sense of the word ‘theory’, and would have to come to terms with her ‘theory’ in a second and more modern sense: the system of her thought. Fidelius concludes the poem by paying metaphorical tributes to Barker's beauty and her unreflected brilliance.

And may your piercing Wit shine always bright
As th' Ev'ning Star in a clear frosty Night,
Unrival'd by the Moon's faint borrow'd light.

(Barker 1688, sig a2v)

Barker is beautiful as Venus, the evening star, and does not give off light at second hand, as does the moon. It is with a reference to her specific interests rather than in such stock compliments that the poem ends, however.

But may your Rhimes be still imploy'd to tell,
What satisfaction do's in Knowledge well;
And as you have begun, so yet go on,
To make coy Nature's secrets better known;
And may we learn in purest Verse, from thee,
The Art of Physick, and Anatomie.

Fidelius understands that Barker aspires to knowledge—medicine in particular—but he also knows that she does not want to write in a worldly way.

Not all of Barker's Cambridge friends were so genteel. One such man, who went by the initials S. C., may be identified with Cambridge only on the basis of the content of his poem.

'Tis true, at Ten, we're sent to th' whipping fry,
To tug at Clasick Oars, and trembling lye
Under Gill's heavy lash, or Buzby's Eye.
At Eighteen, we to King's or Trinity are sent,
And nothing less than Laureate will content.

(Barker 1688, sig. a)

According to S. C., Cambridge undergraduates do not aspire so much to ancient learning as to being included as wits in this or that miscellany of verse.

We search all Sects, (like Systematick Fools)
And sweat o'er Horace for Poetick rules.
Yet all these Mountain-throes and din,
At length drops out some poor crude Sooterkin,
And makes ——cob Tonson vex'd he e'er put in.

S. C. is given to the sort of comparison that was to be made in Cambridge's Pope's Head tavern and not at the dinner table in Wilsthorp. Indeed, his crude punning goes beyond what Barker was likely ever to have written. A ‘sooterkin’ was an imperfect literary composition, but it was also, literally, an ‘afterbirth’. Tonson, the publisher, was according to S. C., a ‘cob’, that is a ‘lumpish person’ but also a ‘testicle’. The string of sexual puns concludes with Tonson sorry that he included poetry from the boys at King's and Trinity in his collection and also sorry that he ‘put in’ in another sort of way. It is, of course, possible that Barker had read S. C.'s poem in private and acceded to its undergraduate wit in those circumstances. She might not have been so happy to have the piece used as a commendatory poem in an anthology that introduced her to the literary world in print for the first time.

In A Patch-Work Screen, Barker explicitly claims Katherine Philips as a poetic model and at the same time is careful to put a good deal of distance between herself and Aphra Behn. Philips, after all, was known for her modesty and Behn was taken to be a brazen woman. (Barker 1997, 108) It is as if Barker were saying in 1723 to the likes of S. C., ‘I am no longer interested in your academic world with its dubious knowledge’. Jacqueline Pearson observes that the heroine of A Patch-Work Screen and Barker, too, exemplify the eighteenth-century ideal of ‘chaste, domestic, unassertive authorship’. (Pearson 1993, 241) Barker apparently had put her Cambridge days behind her. In a general sort of way, such is the case. Nevertheless Barker borrowed freely from the fiction of Behn for many of the plots in her last book The Lining of the Patch Work Screen (1726) and seems in temperament more tolerant of the worldliness of Behn than committed to replicating exactly any supposed modesty of Philips.²¹ A sentence from Barker's first novella, Love's Intrigues (1713), helps to sum up Barker's position on academe late in life: ‘But let the World confine, or enlarge Learning as they please, I care not; I do not regret the time I bestow'd in its Company, its having been my good Friend … though I am not so generous, by way of Return to pass my word for its good Behaviour in our Sex always, and in all persons’. (Qtd from Greer et al. 1984, 355) Barker's Cambridge days and their connections to undergraduates of dubious morality were indeed behind her, but she was by no means ready to turn her back on the ‘Friend’ that they had provided for her.

Notes

1. The word comes from a manuscript poem, ‘To my friends who prais'd my Poetry,’ discussed later in this essay.

2. King (1994, 555) identifies this man, who carried the coterie name of Philaster and the initials of J. N. He was John Newton, first a student (1678-1685) and then a fellow (1685-1700) of St. John's. Another member of college, who carried the coterie name Exillus has not been identified but is discussed by King (1994, 568).

3. Revisions of the 1688 poems contained in the 1723 volume are often the same as what is to be found in the Magdalen College, Oxford manuscript.

4. ‘To my Friend Exillus, on his persuading me to marry old Damon’ (Barker 1688 14; Barker 1997, 111). The lines are identical in both printings.

5. Isabella in Behn's ‘The Nun or the Fair Vow Breaker’ needs to ask a confidant about her feelings, and Deletia in Cavendish's ‘The Contract’ is similarly unable to explain her emotions to herself.

6. OED

7. Barker uses the name Exillus in Poetical Recreations and changes it to Exilius in Exilius or the Banish'd Roman (1715).

8. See note 1.

9. See ‘Absence for a Time’ (Barker 1688, 87), for Barker's reference to this establishment:

   I Dread this tedious time more than
   A Fop to miss a Fashion,
   Or the Pope's Head Tavern can
   Dread the long Vacation.

10. Amazement and terror.

11. Henry Paman, who took an M.D. degree in 1658, was for a time professor of physic at Gresham College. He was an important fellow at St. John's at the time when Barker was composing the poems that were printed in Poetical Recreations. Along with gaining other powerful positions, he became bursar and held the Linacre lectureship in medicine. Another very slim possibility would be Dr. Clement Paman, who published verse in Poems by Several Hands, Dublin, 1663. Clement Paman's death around the time of the publication of Poems by Several Hands, would seem to make him an unlikely candidate for a connection with Barker's poem. I would like to thank Mr. Underwood, archivist, at St. John's for providing me with access to biographical information contained in the Rent Books of St. John's for the 1670s and 1680s.

12. The Cambridge University Library copy of Poetical Recreations was used for all transcriptions in this essay. There is, however, a hole in the paper where ‘Hence’ should appear in that copy. The emendation comes from the University Microfilms copy.

13. In the Magdalen manuscript, number 47, it is titled ‘To my friend mr—on his perswading me to poetry’.

14. Her early understanding of her medical conversations with ‘Strephon’ seems to have been that such talk would lead to a long-term relationship, probably marriage. Apparently Strephon lost interest in his association with her, and she later came to believe that she had avoided the ‘sottish ease’ of a housewife and instead had acquired knowledge in an important profession. ‘On the Apothecary's Filling my Bills,’ (Barker 1688, 32; Barker 1997, 117).

15. The Latin is translated in The Galesia Trilogy: ‘The most beautiful virgin goes [to the temple] with a vast company of youths thronging about her’ (Barker 1997, 307).

16. ‘Sure I am, that whoever will consider well the several Epistles before her Books, and the General Prologue to all her Plays, if he have any spark of Generosity, or Good Breeding, will be favourable in his Censure’. Langbaine does praise the originality of her plots. (Langbaine 1691, 391) Katherine Philips specifically attacks such false gentility in letter 42 to Sir Charles Cotterell. (Philips 1705, 206).

17. Exilius also hints at a romantic connection between Exillus and Barker. Scipiana (Scipina in the unpublished version) seems to be another alter ego of Barker and is loved by Exilius in the romance. See McBurney (1958, 301).

18. If the book was printed before 1715 when it appeared as Exilius, all trace of it has been lost.

19. See Rochester's speaker in ‘Ancient Lover of My Heart’.

20. See also notes 15 and 18 [17?—Technical Editor] for other evidence of romantic attachment.

21. Philips, in her letters to Sir Charles Cotterell, is far more ambitious for public recognition as a writer than she was given credit for being at the end of he seventeenth century. In letter 21, she is, for instance, very impatient that the duchess of York see her translation of Corneille's Pompey while it is in manuscript. (Philips 1705, 99). Janet Todd sees Barker as ‘decorous’ in comparison with Behn, Manley, and Haywood, but Todd also writes that A Patch-Work Screen has ‘an uneasy, unsettling nature reminiscent of the short tales of Behn’. (Todd 1989, 50)

List of Works Cited

Barash, Carol. 1996. English Women's Poetry 1649-1714. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Barker, Jane. 1997. The Galesia Trilogy. Edited by Carol Shiner Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Greer, Germaine, et al. Eds. 1984. Kissing the Rod. New York: Noonday.

Hobby, Elaine. 1988. Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing, 1649-88. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

King, Kathryn R. 1993. ‘Galesia, Jane Barker, and a Coming to Authorship.’ In Anxious Power: Reading. Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, edited by Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. Albany: State University of New York Press.

King, Kathryn R. 1994. ‘Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations, and the Sociable Text’. ELH 61 (fall): 551-70.

King, Kathryn R. and Jeslyn Medoff. 1997 ‘Jane Barker and Her Life (1652-1732): The Documentary Record.’ Eighteenth Century Life 21: 16-38.

Langbaine, Gerald. 1691. rpt. 1973. An Account of the English Dramatick Poets. Oxford. [New York: Garland].

McBurney, William H. 1958. ‘Edmund Curll, Mrs. Jane Barker, and the English Novel,’ Philological Quarterly 37: 388 and 389.

Pearson, Jacqueline. 1993. ‘The History of The History of the Nun.’ In Rereading Aphra Behn. Edited by Heidi Hutner. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia.

Philips, Katherine. 1705. Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus. London.

Richetti, John. 1969. Popular Fiction Before Richardson. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Spencer, Jane. 1986. The Rise of the Woman Novelist. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Todd, Janet. 1989. The Sign of Angellica. London: Virago.