SOURCE: "Dangerous Sissy: Gendered 'Lives,' John Gay and the Literary Canon," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 3, Summer, 1996, pp. 339-60.

[In the following essay, Dugaw asserts that late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century notions of class and literary propriety led to a reluctance on the part of Gay's contemporaries to consider him a significant contributor to the literary culture of his era.]

John Gay's reputation tumbled as literary criticism metamorphosed in the eighteenth century from a descriptive project to a determinant of taste and values. His own era judged him a prominant figure, an author who sparked controversy and emulation. By the nineteenth century Gay's "official" stature shrank. At the same time, English literary historiography took the form it still holds today. The two phenomena are not unconnected. The changing narratives that successively represented Gay's "life" and his "character" disclose the social, moral, and ideological imperatives that have shaped the valuing of authors and texts from the satiric sensibility of the early Georgian age to the Modernism of the twentieth century. Critiques of Gay open a window onto the historiography of English letters. Analysis of them shows how ideas about gender have shaped the authorial canon of English literary history with patterns of exclusion as well as of "excellence."

Samuel Johnson, moralist of his age, brought to English literature and its authors a quest for personal character and worth based on an idea of heroic manliness. Johnson found in Gay a negative lesson: a man womanishly trivial, childishly dependent, a "poet of a lower order." The history of Gay's literary reputation illuminates how commentators, especially after Johnson, enlisted the valences of gender that intersect with what we currently term "sexual orientation" in their presentation of authors as biographical subjects. These elements appear differently in the earlier period than in the later. Critics since the eighteenth century have extended the "queering" of Gay's character and life that began in Johnson's era. By the twentieth century, critics dismissed a decadent, feminized Gay presented through a "Life" contemptible in its unmanliness and indolence. The terms and emphases of this dismissal reflect similar evaluations rendered to find other writers unworthy of high regard. The trajectory of Gay's "Lives" supplies a model for how biographical and personal assessments serve the dismissal of unsuitably "unmanly" writers—a category that of course includes all women.

Today Gay is "minor." Critical studies of him and editions of his work are shorter and fewer than those of "major" authors. Commentary about him has in many cases emphasized, even assumed, his dependence upon other writers. Around him on the shelves of the library reside "bigger" names—authors studied with heavily annotated multi-volume editions, long critiques, and probing biographies. Here are his friends, Swift and Pope; his elders, Milton and Dryden; his adversary, Defoe. John Gay and his work have not commanded the same scholarly review. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century appraisals of the poet map a fascinating history to this review as the applause and contentious critique of his own era gave way to uneasy questioning and eventually outright disparagement.¹

Our own era seems perplexed by Gay, with assessments more tentative and hopeful than fixed. Presently our view is under reconstruction, as recent scholars argue for his greater accomplishment, significance, and respectability.² His ironic sensiblity resonates with our own. The social bent of his satire has sparked the imaginations of key twentieth-century writers: Bertolt Brecht who penned his admiring reworking of Gay, Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) in the 1920s, and Vaclav Havel with his Zebracka Opera (Beggar's Opera) of the 1970s. With seemingly postmodern self-consciousness, Gay's writing exposes the gaps and ironies of attempts to convey experience and its meanings in language, as well as the unavoidably political dynamics of these representations.

John Gay's satire insists that meaning is unstable and relational, exposing through parody the socially determined, and determinant, nature of art's representations.³ Gay interrogates injustice, conflict, exploitation, and value in burlesques set up to expose the dynamic between those wielding power and acting upon it, and those deprived of it and acted upon. In other words, Gay's art articulates the politics of relational individualism that stands at the core of the capitalist modern world, particularly as expression itself always remains inscribed within this politics. At our late-century moment of reflexivity, deconstruction, and cyberspace, we can appreciate Gay's art perhaps more than any audience since his time; we too inhabit a world of (sometimes alarmingly) contingent, rather than absolute, forms and values.

Gay's often controversial poems and plays were subject to critique in his own time, that Georgian era when depreciation had its heyday. Nonetheless, his success was obvious. The Beggar's Opera remained in production every year for a century and spawned nearly 200 imitations. His farce, The What-d'Ye-Call-It, continued to play through the century. Eighteenth-century publishers brought out editions of his plays and poems for all ranks: lavish editions for the wealthy, duodecimos and chapbooks for common readers. The initial acclaim and polemical responses that met Gay's work on its own satiric terms, however, gave way in the latter part of his century to a didactic resistance that shifted attention from the poet's works to his life and person. This essay traces in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century "Lives" of Gay the increasingly moral and fictionalizing attention given to Gay's biography, his character, and finally his body.

Within a generation, the sensibility of Gay's era, rooted in a profound and comic irony, gave way. The discordant critiques of Tory satire—inherited from Dryden and present in the works of Swift, Delarivier Manley, Gay, and others—yielded to a view of art as an expressive (and stable) signifier.⁴ Literature became the creation of striving individuals—increasingly understood as gendered—within the context of an expanding and determining empire. The literary canon we have inherited emerged from this mid-eighteenth century reimagining of the function and nature of literature.⁵ The transformation of John Gay's reputation reveals some of the assumptions embedded within this cultural project of establishing art's "seriousness" and its function as the product and shaper of persons of a lofty mind. Tracing Gay's reputation from his own first third of the eighteenth century, into the Age of Johnson, and finally through the Victorian Era, we find increasingly fictionalized critiques. In them Gay becomes a dangerous and unheroic model, a threat to an ethical code whose reference is as biographical as it is aesthetic. The story of Gay's reputation discloses the gendered and sexualized underpinnings of this system of literary value.

1. "The Envy of the Playwrights": Gay's Importance to His Times

Eighteenth-century commentators assumed the importance of Gay's writing. Early in the century, while his works drew extensive comment, his life received little or none. John Mottley is the supposed author of "A Compleat List of all the English Dramatic Poets, and of All the Plays ever printed in the English Language to the Present Year 1747";⁶ Mottley's account of Gay is complimentary and respectful. His "Compleat List" is a survey that presents dramas not as literature to be read but as staged works forming a public and ongoing theatrical tradition. Plays appear with brief remarks about their character and performance history. Notably, the "Compleat List" focuses entirely on the works, spending almost no time at all on the lives or even the characteristic sensibilities of particular authors. Nevertheless, Mottley's comments and especially the size of his entries reveal his weighting of authors. Of the ninety playwrights from Mottley's own era—the reigns of Anne, George I, and George II—only Cibber, Fielding, and Mottley himself are accorded longer entries than that for Gay (who died early in the reign of George II). Of the 184 writers from the era immediately preceding Gay's—the reigns of Charles II, James II, and William and Mary—only the discussions of Dryden and Behn extend beyond the three pages allotted to Gay. For the period before Cromwell's closing of the theaters, only Shakespeare and Jonson occupy more attention. In Mottley's history of the "English Dramatic Poets" Gay was a major figure.⁷

Other critics at mid-century and after remark on the excellence and popularity of Gay's work. In 1745 William Ayre finds Gay unexcelled in the pastoral.⁸ In Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753), Theophilus Cibber conveys the prevailing admiration. With a sweep, his discussion of Gay proclaims:

As to his genius it would be superfluous to say any thing here, his works are in the hands of every reader of taste, and speak for themselves.⁹

Oliver Goldsmith praises Gay with the commonplace apogee for writers of pastoral that "he more resembles Theocritus than any other English pastoral writer whatsoever."¹⁰ The editor of a 1772 edition describes The Beggar's Opera as "an unrivalled master piece" and accords The Fables "the same rank of estimation."¹¹Biographia Dramatica (1782) says that The What-d'-Ye-Call-It, almost forgotten today, "became so popular that it excited the envy of the playwrights."¹² In his History of England (1790), Tobias Smollett praises Gay's "genius for pastoral" and his fables which "vie with those of La Fontaine, in native humour, ease, and simplicity."¹³ These commentators assume Gay's importance among influential authors ancient and modern. Moreover, they focus on his works, not his life.

Not all eighteenth-century responses to Gay were praising. Throughout the period his satire, along with that of his colleagues Swift and Pope, sparked heated discussion. A moral outcry at The Beggar's Opera's mock-heroic underworld of highwaymen and whores followed the play's first run."¹⁴ Indeed, the social tenor of Gay's satire, its sensitivity to the emerging politics of class, caught the attention of critics from the start. Futhermore, the politics in Gay's ongoing targeting of Robert Walpole's Whig ministry was not lost on his contemporaries. At least one later commentator remarked on its panache. A 1770 Dublin editor suggests Gay's political audaciousness, with notable reference to the context of social and economic class:

There is scarcely, if at all, to be found in history an example, where a private subject, undistinguished either by birth or fortune, had it in his power, to feast his resentment so richly at the expense of his sovereign.¹⁵

Already in 1746 Eliza Haywood located the troubling social politics readable in Gay: "a constant Strain runs through it [The Beggar's Opera], of putting the whole Species pretty much upon a Level."¹⁶ Certainly Gay's satiric preoccupation with power in relationships is rooted in awareness and exposure of what since the nineteenth century has been termed social and economic "class." The characterization of Gay as "womanish" and "queer" follows upon this uneasiness with his reading of class. Both take place at precisely that mid-century time when English politics and culture shifted irretrievably away from a Tory world of satire and wit, a world increasingly seen—in gendered terms—by a "manly" Whig hegemony as foppish and decadent.

At mid-century, the remarks of the clergyman Joseph Warton disclose an ambivalence toward Gay that foreshadows later responses. While placing him in then-accepted fashion among poetry's elite ("such as possessed the true poetical genius"), Warton responds with a perplexed discomfort at the destabilizing class politics that Haywood noticed. Despite his respectful ranking of the poet, the troubled Warton finds little to commend when he turns to specific works. His response is a moral one. Admitting that he "could never percieve [sic] that fine vein of concealed satire supposed to run through [The Beggar's Opera]," he says:

[T]hough I should not join with a bench of Westminster Justices in forbidding it to be represented on the stage, yet I think pickpockets, strumpets, and highwaymen, may be hardened in their vices by this piece; and that Pope and Swift talked too highly of its moral good effects.¹⁷

Uncertain how to read the burlesque, Warton fears its dangers for a class of people indelicate as well as threatening. He misses the ironic social reversals at the heart of Gay's satire: pickpockets, strumpets, and highwaymen stand in for prime ministers and politicians, tradesmen and kings. At the same time, he responds uneasily to the slippage of social categories that such reversals make imaginable.

As eighteenth-century commentary focused on the characters of authors as well as the nature and importance of their works, Gay's life assumed greater importance. Accounts by early commentators—in accordance with the then-current practice of discussing writers' works rather than their lives—gloss over or elevate the poet's ambiguous social rank.¹⁸ Born in Barnstaple in 1685 into a Devonshire trading family, Gay was the orphaned younger son of a younger son. As recent scholars point out, his financial prospects were from the beginning precarious, and his education, if solid, was gained only in a provincial grammar school.¹⁹ Indeed, almost the only records we have from the future poet's early years are connected with his unfinished tenure as an apprentice to a London draper.²⁰ The facts are these: Sometime as a teenager, the orphaned John Gay went from his hometown of Bamstaple to London, apprenticed to one Willet, a silk mercer in the Strand. In the summer of 1706, about halfway through the usual term, he was released and returned to Devon. Little else is certain.

Recently David Nokes has seen in the apprenticeship and other facts of the poet's biography evidence suggesting that Gay indeed was (as we now say) gay. Nokes states: "During his early years in London, Gay had been employed as a draper's apprentice at Willet's shop in the New Exchange, an area notorious as a favourite haunt of sodomites."²¹ Nokes suggests—his prose suggesting some squeamishness of his own—that Gay's friends and Pope in particular closeted this information, their "guilty secret" as he calls it. "When Pope was approached by Richard Savage in 1736 for biographical information about Gay's early life," Nokes observes, "he was keen to draw a veil over this period. 'As to his being apprenticed to one Willet, etc.,' he protested, 'what are such things to the public? Authors are to be remembered by the works and merits, not accidents of their lives."'²²

Nokes' research and his biographical "outing" of Gay fit into a tradition of critical attention to the poet's personal life. By the end of the eighteenth century wary and ever more negative readings of Gay's character began to accumulate. As we shall see, the apprenticeship episode supplies a measure of the growing importance of Gay's "life" to his reputation and also demonstrates a change in the values enlisted to interpret that "life."²³ Moreover, Nokes' uneasy and anachronistic psychologizing of Gay's life in terms of "secret homosexual tendencies" puts his biography directly in the tradition of Gay's "lives" that I am tracing here: presentations of Gay increasingly colored by terms that project-sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly—delineations of "manliness' and "womanliness." Applying to his subject a psychology based upon gendered traits, Nokes thus finds in his explicitly (and negatively) queered Gay a "painful sense of inferiority" (364) and "anxieties about his own sexuality" (329). According to Nokes, these stem from the poet's failure as a (normal) "predatory male" and his "basic psychological" discomfort at being an "emasculated one," an "honorary female" (340). Such disapproving feminizing of Gay's character is a traceable thread in the history of accounts of his life and one that is not evident from the beginning.

The first commentators on Gay's life invariably see in his youthful engagement and then failure as a silk mercer's apprentice a mark of superiority, strength, and genius. They move quickly over the provinciality and apparent financial precariousness in Gay's background, and justify his leavetaking. The Ayre account of 1745 is quick to see Gay's gentlemanly love of books beneath his failure at the "Slavery" of trade:

[H]e grew so fond of Reading and Study, that he frequently neglected to exert himself in putting off Silks and Velvets to the Ladies.… Not being able to go thro' this Slavery, and doing what he did in the Shop with a mind quite bent another Way, his Master seldom put him forward to serve, but some other, who had the Business more at Heart: By Degrees Mr. Gay became entirely to absent himself from the Shop, and at last, by Agreement with his Master, to withdraw from it, and retire into the Country.²⁴

The 1760 preface to the Plays published by the Tonsons describes Gay's apprenticeship as a "station not suiting his liberal spirit," likewise casting his leavetaking in an approving light:

Having thus honourably got free from all restraint, he followed the bent of his genius, and soon gave the public some admirable proofs of the character for which he was formed by nature.²⁵

A 1770 Dublin edition of his works depicts his departure from the mercer's shop in similar terms. Characterizing Gay as "an original poetic genius," the biographer says approvingly:

[H]aving thus purchased the ease of his mind, he indulged himself freely and fully in that course of life, to which he was irresistibly drawn by nature. Genius concurred with inclination; poetry was at once his delight and his talent.²⁶

This version of the curtailed apprenticeship serves a portrait of the poet's innately genteel genius. As we shall see, however, new attitudes applied to the same facts in a short time produced a different tale.

2. "Poet of a Lower Order": An Unheroic Gay in the Age of Johnson

Samuel Johnson's considerations of poets' works and lives created criticism of a new kind, which conferred on the individual writer a moral heroism that until well into this century undergirded the literary canon. In The Lives of the English Poets (1779), Johnson took up with keen, if sometimes perplexed attention the interplay of a writer's works and of his life (the masculine pronoun is definitional).²⁷ The individual poet became an exemplary lesson: Johnson articulated a moral ideal of autonomous, forceful, and prevailing manliness. Necessarily excluding women from serious discussion, the new criterion introduced questions of character framed by gender: How "manly" are the poet's life and works?

Johnson's apotheosis of the individual writer ennobled private life and thus fit the emerging sensibility of an increasingly privatized and nationalized modern world.²⁸ His view stands utterly at odds with the parodic and utterly parodic and relational ethos that underpins the satire of John Gay. Moreover, this late-century criticism served a new cultural function: where earlier commentary had articulated prevailing performance practice (and the taste it implied), Johnson's opinions formed and led assessments of aesthetic merit and inferiority. His declarations about Gay, like his opinions of others treated in the Lives, echo through the remarks of subsequent writers of prefaces, biographical dictionaries, and works of literary commentary.²⁹

Johnson begins with a qualified and chary discussion of Gay's poetry and drama. Although the sixteen-page account is not Johnson's most damning portrait, his disaffection emerges—and with explicit reference to gender. "As a poet he cannot be rated very high," Johnson declares, "He was, as I once heard a female critick remark, 'of a lower order.' He had not in any great degree the mens divinior, the dignity of genius."³⁰ Early in the discussion, however, the poet's "life," or rather Johnson's version of it, becomes a charged and determining presence. Johnson the moralist delineates faults in Gay's person and habits—pliancy, dependence, awkwardness—which take over the discussion. A charge of failed personal heroism permeates his account of John Gay.

The life as "moral tale" structures Johnson's reading of the works. However, from the outset Johnson and Gay display not only different but competing moral agendas. Gay, the satirist, for his part sees a world that human beings negotiate relationally and in terms of power—that is, politically—at every turn. By contrast, Johnson is a moralist of the individual, and of an ostensibly depoliticized individual at that. As Jeffrey Plank has recently observed, literature in Johnson is, at least overtly, "separated from politics."³¹ For Johnson morality transcends the dynamics of the social and the political. Of course, from our vantage point, Johnson's individual seems altogether political: with his morality of personal striving and reason, he fittingly reflects the socio-economic currents and nationalist ideology of Hanoverian England. Plank identifies Johnson's method in the Lives as a "recombination" of the poetic device of inserting an "inset narrative as a moral tale in descriptive poetry" (335). Both the writers and their works serve a didactic purpose.³²

The "moral" in Gay's "life" emerges in the telling as Johnson shapes the poet's biography. In the first ten paragraphs he takes up the known facts: Gay's parentage; his early schooling and apprenticeship; his service to the Duchess of Monmouth; his writing of The Shepherd's Week and other early "trifles"; the poet's failure to gain court patronage. Johnson's account of the apprenticeship story embroiders tellingly on what little is known:

How long he continued behind the counter, or with what degree of softness and dexterity he received and accommodated the Ladies, as he probably took no delight in telling it, is not known. The report is that he was soon weary of either the restraint or servility of his occupation, and easily persuaded his master to discharge him.³³

Johnson, in notable contrast to earlier writers, uses the possessive pronoun to identify the young and future poet with "his occupation." Even more significant, Johnson's language feminizes the "pliant" Gay, suggesting in the latter's "accommodation" the "softness and dexterity" of the very "Ladies" he served. Such gendering, as we shall see, dominates subsequent descriptions of Gay.

As Johnson renders it, Gay's "life" supplies an "unheroic" caveat: pliancy, awkwardness, eagerness to please, and success through luck cannot lead to great literary production. From this point in the account Johnson's fictionalizing increases as he infers from known events the imagined "hopes," thoughts, and feelings that create for the poet a character that serves the intended lesson. He finds in Gay,

… a man easily incited to hope and deeply depressed when his hopes were disappointed. This is not the character of a hero; but it may naturally imply something more generally welcome, a soft and civil companion. Whoever is apt to hope good from others is diligent to please them; but he that believes his powers strong enough to force their own way, commonly tries only to please himself. (2:272)

The remainder of the account presses home the homily. Johnson scoffs that Gay "had been simple enough to imagine that those who laughed at the What d'ye call it would raise the fortune of its author" (2:272). Later he retells an account of Gay's awkwardness at court, describing how the poet, "advancing with reverence, too great for any other attention, stumbled at a stool" (2:274). A subsequent paragraph ends accusingly: "[Gay] is said to have been promised a reward, which he had doubtless magnified with all the wild expectations of indigence and vanity" (2:274). Projecting into the mind of his subject "magnifications" and "expectations," Johnson castigates his protagonist as a dangerous example: "This is not the character of a hero."

Not surprisingly, given their competing ethical visions, Johnson saw nothing of morality in Gay's work. The Beggar's Opera he describes as "without any moral purpose" (2:278). Of the fables he says:

For a Fable he gives now and then a Tale or an abstracted Allegory; and from some, by whatever name they may be called, it will be difficult to extract any moral principle. (2:283)

However, Gay's satires, especially the fables, insistently question the configurations and delusions of human power, not least of which delusions is moral expression.³⁴ Indeed, with conscious self-implication, it is often moralizing per se about which Gay moralizes. Exposing the inherent self-deception in pontification, Gay targets the danger of imagining morality in absolute terms apart from specifics governed by social relation, context, and power.

Johnson's blindness to the moral seriousness of The Beggar's Opera and The Fables fits with his dismissal of Gay's use of the pastoral as the site for interrogations of power.³⁵ The conclusion to Johnson's "Life of Gay" discloses the critic's blindness to both the politics of the pastoral as well as the politics embedded in his own moral viewpoint.

There is something in the poetical Arcadia so remote from known reality and speculative possibility, that we can never support its representation through a long work. A Pastoral of an hundred lines may be endured; but who will hear of sheep and goats, and myrtle bowers and purling rivulets, through five acts? Such scenes please barbarians in the dawn of literature, and children in the dawn of life; but will be for the most part thrown away as men grow wise, and nations grow learned. (2:285)

This closing scene of "wise men" and "learned nations" looking with superior satisfaction on "barbarians" and "children" resonates like a parodic image from one of Gay's fables. It is little surprise to find Samuel Johnson an unsympathetic reader of John Gay. How could this moralist fail to rebuke the fabulist who playfully imagines the absurdity of didactic assurance like Johnson's own—from a Monkey who moralizes after "seeing the world"?

Hear and improve, he pertly crys,
I come to make a nation wise.
(Fable 14)

The two writers offer inimical moral readings of the world and its creatures. For Samuel Johnson, both the works and the unheroic character of John Gay supply a negative model for "wise men" intent upon building "learned nations." Were Gay asked to comment on Johnson as a model, one can imagine him fabling of a monkey "come to make a nation wise."

3. "The Little Fat Poet": Censuring a Feminized Gay

Johnson's negative assessment of Gay in The Lives of the English Poets tremendously influenced subsequent criticism and biography. In particular, later editors enlisted Johnson's didactic reading of the character and works of Gay to counter the widespread and dangerous popularity of his poems and plays among readers of the lower ranks whose behavior became the concern of educators. Gay's writing and character came to represent not only an individual warning but also the failed sensibility of his witty and decadent satiric age.

Commentators after the 1780s almost invariably contend with Johnson's verdicts, engaging his language and assessment even when they disagree. Gay's admirers testify to the sway of Johnson's taste by objecting to it as a reference point. In 1790 the flippant author of The Bystander; or, Universal Weekly Expositor by a Literary Association questions Johnson's own character, inferring that his dismissal of Gay stems from a dour envy:

… though Oliver [Johnson], in compliance to a lady, will not allow him to have been more than of the lower order—which expression one would think the world has imitated—yet I will venture to say if he himself could have boasted half his lyric merits, he would have maintained a much higher rank in poetic fame.³⁶

In a 1796 edition of the Fables, William Coxe complains:

Johnson certainly did not sufficiently estimate the poetical works of Gay.… Though Gay cannot be classed among the highest ranks in the Temple of Fame, yet he certainly does not deserve to be placed in the lower order.³⁷

The "Life of the Author" appended to a 1794 Poetical Works of John Gay counters Johnson using his terms: "[Gay's] compositions, though original in some parts, are not of the highest kind." The anonymous editor then goes on to complain that "The estimate of his poetical character, as given by Dr. Johnson, is, in some instances, too severe to be approved by readers uncorrupted by literary prejudices."³⁸ This objection to a tainting "literary prejudice" comments suggestively on the (then in-process) formation of a national literary history and canon, and Johnson's role in this emerging cultural project.

Subsequent critics and historians extended Johnson's moral agenda. As Gay's works entered the stream of literature especially printed for the instruction of youth of various classes, the poet's early biography took on a new homiletic significance, especially the anecdotal history of his apprenticeship. In new editions of Gay's "life" and works, this "biographical" incident metamorphoses further, and with pointed application to the new market for instructional literature for children and for the lower-classes.³⁹

Popular editions from the end of the century extend Johnson's warning tone. Far from giving evidence of Gay's genius, the apprenticeship episode signals the moral lapse of an individual of a particular class. Following Johnson's lead, biographers identify the young Gay with the job of apprentice and suggest that poetry is no excuse for shirking one's duties. In a telling maneuver, two accounts shift the reader's perception of the event from Gay's point of view to that of the unnamed silk mercer. A "Life of the Author" of 1793, for example, describes Gay's leavetaking with the following sentence: "Of an occupation ill suited to his talents he soon became weary, and easily procured a discharge from his master, to whom he was like to be of little service."⁴⁰ An 1801 version supplies the feelings of apprentice and master, sympathy clearly residing with the latter:

… the accommodating nature of moving behind a counter became disgusting. His consequent want of attendance and assiduity gave much dissatisfaction to his master, which procured his release on easy conditions, long before the expiration of his term of servitude.⁴¹

Voicing concern for correct behavior in apprentices, this account adds to Johnson's legacy of biography as a moral tale a farther purpose: instruction for a lower-class audience through school editions and cheap popular prints.

The identification of Gay with a perplexing and barbarous past—an idea already raised by both Warton and Johnson—added to the criticism of both his work and his life. Gay represented not only a failure of personal character but of the moral and aesthetic sensibility of his age as well. His works continued to be enjoyed, especially The Beggar's Opera, The Fables, and Trivia. However, by the late eighteenth century expurgated versions appeared, trimmed of their "savage," "heathen," and "indelicate" elements.⁴² The Library of Standard Music published The Beggar's Opera in the 1830s with "the objectionable poetry altered. "⁴³ James Plumptre's remarks of 1823 capture the tone of this trimming. In his preface to a school edition, Plumptre declares to "the Special and Sub-committees of the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge" that he has relieved the fables of "a very considerable portion of alloy" so that "nothing should appear inconsistent with the faith, the conversation, and the practice of a Christian."⁴⁴ In an unpublished manuscript, Plumptre makes the point even more bluntly: "[Gay] was promoted into a walk, which rendered his talents a snare to himself, and in general a nuisance to his fellow creatures … Let his example prove a warning to others, and it will not have been in vain."⁴⁵

In his 1849 edition of Select Works of the British Poets, John Aikin identifies Gay as an epitome of his indelicate Augustan times. Aikin passes over the poetry and drama with dispatch to focus on the character of both poet and era. Despite a "sweetness of disposition," Gay "was indolent and improvident;"⁴⁶ the success of The Beggar's Opera indicates "a coarseness in the national taste which could be delighted with the repetition of popular ballad-tunes, as well as a fondness for the delineation of scenes of vice and vulgarity" (283).

Later in the century, presenting a sampling of works by Addison, Gay, and Somerville, Charles Cowden Clarke similarly critiques Gay with scarce mention of the works at all.⁴⁷ Focusing his "reading" on the poet himself, Clarke (1875) declares briskly: "Gay's works lie in a narrow compass, and hardly require minute criticism" (158). The fables Clarke understands entirely in terms of Gay's character: "He understands animals, because he has more than an ordinary share of the animal in his own constitution" (159).

The most influential Victorian critic of Gay was William Makepeace Thackeray, whose lecture in "The English Humourists" (1853) is remarkable in its concurrent attention to and trivializing of the poet's person.⁴⁸ With a breezy tone Thackeray reads Gay as Johnson's "playfellow of the wits."

In the portraits of the literary worthies of the early part of the last century, Gay's face is the pleasantest perhaps of all. It appears adorned with neither periwig nor nightcap … and he laughs at you over his shoulder with an honest boyish glee—an artless sweet humour. He was so kind, so gentle, so jocular, so delightfully brisk at times, so dismally woebegone at others, such a natural good creature that the Giants loved him. (587)

Thackeray describes Gay's physical attributes in terms that diminish him and make this "natural good creature" utterly frivolous.

As Thackeray continues, Gay becomes, in the Johnsonian manner, an object of personal critique and warning. His habits and indeed his body itself become the critic's curious fixation:

But we have Gay here before us, in these letters—lazy, kindly, uncommonly idle; rather slovenly, I'm afraid; for ever eating and saying good things; a little, round, French abbe of a man, sleek, soft-handed, and soft-hearted. (590)

Thackerary's discussion consistently passes over the works in favor of a critique of his subject's presumably "lazy," "idle," "slovenly" character. With this insistent gaze upon the poet's person, finally even his body, Thackeray constructs a caricature of the kind more often found in criticism of women writers. His imagined Gay is suggestively "sleek, soft-handed, and soft-hearted."

In turn, Thackeray dismisses the "morality" of Gay's Fables, arguing not from the texts themselves, but from their imagined failure to improve the infant prince to whom Gay dedicated them in 1727. Thackerary enlists the figure of this prince, grown to manhood to be "The Butcher of Culloden" in 1745, as a measure of morality in Gay's poems:

Mr. Gay's Fables, which were written to benefit that amiable prince, the Duke of Cumberland, the warrior of Dettingen and Culloden, I have not, I own, been able to peruse since a period of very early youth; and it must be confessed that they did not effect much benefit upon the illustrious young prince, whose manners they were intended to mollify, and whose natural ferocity our gentlehearted Satirist perhaps proposed to restrain. (591)

The contrast between the naturally ferocious warrior prince and the soft, "gentle-hearted Satirist" continues the text's feminizing of Gay.

As this novelistic depiction proceeds, Thackeray adds to his portrait a further projection of class and ethnic otherness, imagining the poet as a "Savoyard" performer in a figurative circus:

… but the quality of this true humourist was to laugh and make laugh, though always with a secret kindness and tendemess, to perform the drollest little antics and capers, but always with a certain grace, and to sweet music—as you may have seen a Savoyard boy abroad, with a hurdy-gurdy and a monkey, turning over head and heels, or clattering and piroueting in a pair of wooden shoes, yet always with a look of love and appeal in his bright eyes, and a smile that asks and wins affection and protection. Happy they who have that sweet gift of nature! It was this which made the great folks and Court ladies free and friendly with John Gay—which made Pope and Arbuthnot love him—which melted the savage heart of Swift when he thought of him—and drove away, for a moment or two, the dark frenzies which obscured the lonely tyrant's brain, as he heard Gay's voice with its simple melody and artless ringing laughter. (591-92)

Thackeray's discussion has little connection with the satirist or his work. This simile of the dancing dark-skinned boy hoping for "affection and protection" from such (men) as are "lonely tyrants" proceeds from the same aesthetic and moral promontory from which Johnson looked out over "barbarians" and "children." In his trivializing fiction of Gay, Thackeray speaks from the position of Johnson's wise and manly writer. The sexualized effeminacy and racial inferiority of his "Gay" make strikingly explicit the troubling larger implications of Johnson's view.

Late nineteenth-century commentators turned biographical description into stridently personal attack on the poet's habits and appearance. Austin Dobson in 1899 recast a now familiar anecdote with added emphasis on Gay's supposed passivity:

In his boyhood … it must be assumed that Gay's indolence was more strongly developed than his application, for his friends could find no better opening for him than that of apprentice to a London silk mercer.⁴⁹

A few pages later, Dobson reiterates the by now familiar images of women and children:

He was thoroughly kindly and affectionate, with just that touch of clinging in his character, and of helplessness in his nature, which, when it does not inspire contempt… makes a man the spoiled child of men and the playfellow of women. (271)

Placing Gay in the company of women, Dobson at the same time feminizes him as "kindly and affectionate," "clinging" and "helpless."

Duncan Tovey's essay of 1897 dismisses Gay with a striking fixation on his body. Tied to the material, Gay is "unsuited for high themes": "This plump Artaeus had no strength but when he touched earth."⁵⁰ Once again Gay's works are bypassed as the poet, now become an objectified body, stands only in the company of others to whom he owes whatever work he has:

"Let us lend friend Gay a hand," we can fancy these greater gods [Swift, Pope, &c.] saying, bursting in upon the little fat poet who is racking his brains in that most painful of all tasks, the quest of things sprightly or naive. (117)

With the overdetermined bodily imagery of "the little fat poet… racking his brains," Tovey fully trivializes his fictionalized Gay's "quest" with the adjectives "sprightly" and "naive," words customarily reserved for women and children.

Tovey explicitly conflates character and works in the construction of literary reputation when he proposes that:

We may … treat [Gay's] memory with the good-humoured indulgence which his friends extended to his life. (137)

This sweeping dismissal contrasts sharply with the prestige accorded Gay by such Georgian writers as Cibber, Mottley, and even the troubled Warton. Tovey's portrait stands in a long line of highly inferential—indeed fictionalized—treatmeilts of Gay's biography.⁵¹

The story of Gay's "Lives" discloses the concern with moral biography in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literary history. A long tradition of ethical controversy has followed Gay's work and reputation. Particularly after Johnson, this discourse proceeded from a focus on Gay's character as a negative example. Indeed, the telling of his life transformed to meet didactic needs, as the variants of the apprenticeship episode show. Moral uneasiness about Gay solidified in the nineteenth century, in part owing to the potentially threatening facts of his popularity and the plebeian rank of a good many of his readers. Gay's character became feminized, an "unheroic" and dangerous model. His works required censure, alteration, and careful sifting. This tradition of dismissal supplies an important context for our perceptions of Gay today. Indeed, he supplies a case in point for examining the ways biography, character, and life have been turned to the service of literary history and its gallery of reputable authors and works.

The story of Gay's "lives" discloses the interbraiding of gender and moral biography in the literary history we inherit from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not only does this story bring us to reconsider John Gay in light of the diverging reputations and cultural valences he accrued for different audiences and different generations of critics. In addition, it opens a window onto the politics—notably the politics of gender and sexuality—that frames and determines what from the past we remember, and what we eclipse and forget. The literary "lives" of John Gay is a case study in English literary history that invites us to investigate the conceptual legacies of that history, and, even more important, to articulate the unspoken assumptions that it has bequeathed to our very ways of seeing.

Notes

¹ William Irving offers a sketchy overview of Gay's reputation in the last chapter of John Gay, Favorite of the Wits (Duke U. Press, 1940), 292-316.

² See David Nokes, John Gay, A Profession of Friendship (Oxford U. Press, 1995); Calhoun Winton, John Gay and the London Stage (U. Press of Kentucky, 1993); and Peter Lewis and Nigel Wood, eds. John Gay and the Scriblerians (London: Vision Press; New York: St. Martin's, 1988).

³ See Dianne Dugaw, "The Female Warrior, Gay's Polly, and the Heroic Ideal," Chapter 8 in Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (Cambridge U. Press, 1989; paperback edition, U. of Chicago Press, 1996), 191-211. See also, Dianne Dugaw, "Folklore and John Gay's Satire," SEL 31 (1991): 515-33.

⁴ For discussion of this shift with regard to women writers, see Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story (U. of California Press, 1994).

⁵ For discussion of this overarching cultural phenomenon, see William Weber, The Rise of the Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Clarendon Press, 1992).

⁶ Mottley's account is an appendage of well over two hundred pages attached to Thomas Whincop's Scanderberg; or, Love and Liberty: A Tragedy (London: W. Reeve, 1747), 87-320.

⁷ Gay's near contemporaries, of course, considered the writing of plays to be more significant than later commentators found it.

⁸ Gay is here favorably contrasted with Pope: "It is plain that Mr. Pope esteem'd himself a Writer only of that Sort of Pastoral which painted the Golden Age. Mr. Gay, on the contrary leaves that behind, and gives his Shepherds and Shepherdesses a Turn altogether modern and natural." Some pages later (184), it is said that comedy was "his natural Genius." See William Ayre, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Alexander Pope, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster by his Majesty's authority, 1745), 2:129. It has been argued that Edmund Curll is the author of these Memoirs. See Ralph Straus, The Unspeakable Curll (London: Chapman and Hall, 1927), 194-97 and 312.

⁹ Theophilus Cibber, et al., The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 5 vols. (London: Printed for R. Griffiths, 1753), 4:259. This work was compiled mainly by Robert Shiels with revisions and additions by Cibber.

¹⁰ Oliver Goldsmith, Works, ed. J. W. Gibbs, 5 vols. (London, 1884-86), 5:156. His 1758 review of The Beggar's Opera observes that "so sweet and happy a genius as Mr. Gay possessed of could achieve anything." See Oliver Goldsmith, The London Chronicle; or, Universal evening post, 4, no. 278 (Oct. 7-10, 1758).

¹¹ John Gay, The Beggar's Opera … to Which is Prefixed the Life of the Author (Glasgow: np, 1772), 7. This editor observes, with admiration, that these works are "universally read" and "represented."

¹² David Erskine Baker (continued from 1764 to 1782 by Isaac Reed), Biographia Dramatica, A new edition carefully corrected, greatly enlarged, and continued from 1764 to 1782, 2 vols. (London: Printed for Mess. Rivingtons, &c., 1782), 2:401. Reed notes that this "good-natured burlesque" was still "frequently performed" in 1782.

¹³ Tobias Smollett, The History of England from the Revolution to the Death of George II, 5 vols. (London: T. Cadell and R. Baldwin, 1790), 2:460.

¹⁴ Most twentieth-century discussion of the debate about morality and Gay has focused on The Beggar's Opera. See Winton, op. cit., 109-27. See also William E. Schultz, Gay's Beggar's Opera: Its Content, History and Influence (Yale U. Press, 1923).

¹⁵ John Gay, The Works … to Which is Added an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author, 4 vols. (Dublin: James Potts, 1770), I:vii.

¹⁶ [Eliza Haywood], The Parrot (London: T. Gardner, 1746), No. 9, P2 verso. The lines of the play she quotes underscore the extent to which her discomfort stems from concepts of class and the social order. She says: "The late witty and ingenious Mr. Gay … tells us, I very well remember, "Your little Villains must submit to Fate, / That great Ones may enjoy the World in State." I SHOULD be extremely sorry indeed to be assured that this Piece of Satire were as just as it is severe."

¹⁷ Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 5th ed., 2 vols. (London: W. J. and J. Richardson, &c., 1806), 1:245-46. Warton's discussion was first published in 1756.

¹⁸ Later commentators often follow this assertion of the "gentlemanliness" of Gay's background. Cf. Irving, 5-14.

¹⁹ See Nokes, op. cit., 16-35.

²⁰ Irving contextualizes this skeleton of a story with discussion of trade in Bamstaple and in Gay's family. See op. cit., 17-27.

²¹ David Nokes, "The Smartness of a Shoe-Boy: Deference and Mockery in Gay's Life and Work," TLS, January 20, 1995, 13-14. For discussion of Gay in terms of sexual orientation, see Nokes' John Gay, 42-50. Nokes cites John Dunton's "The He-Strumpets," a poem describing Willets' clientele as "Men worse than goats / Who dress themselves in petticoats … / These doat on men, and some on boys, / And quite abandon female joys" (42).

²² Nokes, "Smartness of a Shoe-Boy," 13. Nokes proposes that "the urgent attempts of Pope and Swift to suppress and sanitize the details of Gay's early private life would seem to confirm a suspicion that there was something they wished to conceal more shameful than a mere background in trade" (John Gay, 44). This "something" Nokes believes to be that Gay was "at least a latent homosexual" (50). Whatever the poet's affectional life and sexual expression, Nokes' comments stand squarely within the tradition I trace here of discussing Gay in terms of "manliness" and a gendered identity.

²³ What we know of Gay's life has been significantly shaped by anecdotal traditions connected to Swift and Pope. In these accounts, Gay is routinely mentioned, typically as a lesser figure who functions to enhance the stature of his friends. It is reasonable to be skeptical of the retrospective downsizing of Gay in these memoirs. On the shaping of Gay's life by Pope and Swift. see Nokes, John Gay, 36ff.

²⁴ Ayre, op. cit., 2:97.

²⁵ John Gay, Plays … to Which is Added an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author (London: J. and R. Tonson, 1760), iii-iv.

²⁶ John Gay, The Works … to Which is Added an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author, 4 vols. (Dublin: James Potts, 1770), 4:ii.

²⁷ Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905). Commissioned by his publishers, Johnson's three-volume Lives should be seen in the context of the general eighteenth-century preoccupation with retrospective collecting and cataloguing in dictionaries, memoirs, collections, and checklists of various sorts. Johnson infused this codifying impulse with a compelling morality. For discussions of Johnson and biography see William H. Epstein, Recognizing Biography (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), especially chapter 4, "Patronizing the Biographical Subject: Johnson's Life of Savage," 52-70. (For a survey of biographical scholarship in general, see pp. 1-12.) See also Park Honan, "Dr. Johnson's Lives" in Authors' Lives: On Literary Biography and the Arts of Language (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 17-25.

²⁸ On heroism and writing in the eighteenth century, see Michael McKeon, "Writer as Hero: Novelistic Prefigurations and the Emergence of Literary Biography" in William H. Epstein, ed., Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism (Purdue U. Press, 1991), 17-41. See also Robert Folkenflik, "The Artist As Hero in the Eighteenth Century," Yearbook of English Studies 12 (1982): 91-108.

²⁹ By the first decade of the nineteenth century, Johnson's "Life" was already being reproduced—without attribution—in disparate publications of Gay's works. See, for example, editions of The Fables … With the Life of the Author published in Vienna by R. Sammer in 1799 and in Dublin by William Porter in 1804.

³⁰ Johnson, op. cit., 2:282. All subsequent quotes are from this edition.

³¹ Jeffrey Plank, "Reading Johnson's Lives: The Forms of Late Eighteenth-Century Literary History," in Paul Korshin, ed., The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, vol. I (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 351.

³² As Plank observes, Johnson's "lives" may counter, sometimes even parody authors' works. He points to Milton and Pope as examples, noting that "the life of Milton is thus a parody of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, an d Samson Agonistes. … If th e life of Milton is a moral tale that parodies the epic and the epic hero … then the life of Pope is a moral tale that demonstrates the superiority of the moral tale to the mock epic for the dealing with the figure of the poet" (343-44).

³³ Johnson, op. cit., 2:267-68.

³⁴ See Jayne Lewis, "Risking Contradiction: John Gay's Fables and the Matter of Reading," chapter 6 in Fables and the Foundations of Literate Culture in England, 1652-1740 (Cambridge U. Press, 1996).

³⁵ As Annabel Paterson shows, the pastoral up to the Romantic era conventionally carried moral and political implication. See Pastoral and Ideology (U. of California Press, 1987). See also Sven Armens, John Gay, Social Critic (New York: King's Crown Press, 1954) and William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935).

³⁶The Bystander; or, Universal Weekly Expositor by a Literary Association (London: H. Thomas, 1790), 195.

³⁷ William Coxe, "Life of Gay," in John Gay, Fables, Illustrated with Notes and the Life of the Author (London: T. Cadell, jun. and W. Davies, 1796), 65-66.

³⁸The Poetical Works of John Gay … to Which is Prefixed the Life of the Author (Edinburgh: Mundell and Son, 1794), 262.

³⁹ Gay's works were widely popular across class lines from the beginning. Their appropriation by those marketing children's literature—for example, the Bow Churchyard printshop of William and Cluer Dicey—both contributed to and resulted from this popularity. Eventually moral reformers involved themselves in the promulgation of literature for lower-class people and children. The cautionary presentation and editing of Gay's works traced here is best understood in the context of this larger development in the field of popular literature as a whole. See Dugaw, Warrior Women, 140-42.

⁴⁰ John Gay, Fables … with a Life of the Author, 2 vols. (London: J. Stockdale, 1793), 2:163-64.

⁴¹ John Gay, Poems … with the Author's Life (Poughmill: George Nicholson, 1801), i.

⁴² See the editor's remarks about the fables in Poems by John Gay … to Which is Prefixed, A Sketch of the Author's Life (Manchester: G. Nicholson, 1797), 2.

⁴³The Beggar's Opera … the Objectionable Poetry Altered … with New Symphonies and Accompaniments for the Piano-forte, by John Barnett (London: Library of Standard Music, [183?]). See also a series of letters by the clergyman, John Lettice on "the defective morality" of Gay's Fables published in European Magazine in 1815 and 1816. Cf. "Letters on Gay's Fables," European Magazine 68 (1815): 17-18, 114-15, 213-14, 325-26, 407-8, 505-6, and 69 (1816): 29-30, 119-21, 218, 314-15, and 415-16.

⁴⁴ John Gay, A Selection from Fables … Selected by James Plumptre (Huntingdon: T. Lovell, 1823), iii and ix-x. Plumptre cites both Johnson and Lettice as authorities.

⁴⁵ Plumptre wrote an unpublished biography of Gay (Cambridge University Library, Manuscript Add. 5829) from which Winton quotes, op. cit., 107.

⁴⁶ John Aikin, Select Works of the British Poets (London: Longman, Rees, &c., 1849), Alr.

⁴⁷ Charles Cowden Clarke, ed., The Poetical Works of Joseph Addison; Gay's Fakles; and Somerville's Chase (London: Cassell Petter and Galpin, [1875]).

⁴⁸ William Makepeace Thackeray, "The English Humourists of the 18th Century: A Series of Lectures delivered in England, Scotland, and the United States of America" [lst edition 1853], in Henry Esmond, The English Humourists, The Four Georges, vol. 14 of The Oxford Thackerary, ed. George Saintsbury (Oxford U. Press, 1908).

⁴⁹ Austin Dobson, Miscellanies (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1899), 241.

⁵⁰ Duncan C. Tovey, "John Gay" in Reviews and Essays in English Literature (London: George Bell and Sons, 1897), 136.

⁵¹ Arthur Salmon included an admiring chapter on Gay in his Literary Rambles in the West of England (London: Chatto and Windus, 1906), 72-86. In a letter of 1906, he voiced his dilemma of going against the prevailing current saying, "You may be surprised to hear that the Times reviewer censured me for including this writer at all in my book; but to my mind he is a most interesting literary character, and my fear is that I hardly did him justice." (From MS Postcard to E. L. Gay, September 6, 1906 in Harvard University, Widener Library copy of Salmon's Literary Rambles.)

I am grateful to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles for support of this project. I also extend heartfelt thanks to Jayne Lewis, Rachel Fretz, and especially Amanda Powell for their help in the planning and writing of this essay.