For modern readers, one of the most intriguing scenes in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) occurs during the courtship of Moll by the man who is to become her third husband. Aware that the eligible men of her day have little interest in prospective wives with small or nonexistent fortunes, Moll slyly devises a plan to keep her relative poverty a secret from the charming and (as she has every reason to believe) wealthy plantation owner who has fallen in love with her. To divert attention from her own financial condition, she repeatedly suggests that he has been courting her only for her money. Again and again he protests his love. Over and over she pretends to doubt his sincerity.
After a series of exhausting confrontations, Moll's lover begins what is to us a novel kind of dialogue:
One morning he pulls off his diamond ring and writes upon the glass of the sash in my chamber this line:
You I love and you alone.
I read it and asked him to lend me the ring, with which I wrote under it thus:
And so in love says every one.
He takes his ring again and writes another line thus:
Virtue alone is an estate.
I borrowed it again, and I wrote under it:
But money's virtue, gold is fate.1
After a number of additional thrusts and counterthrusts of this sort, Moll and her lover come to terms and are married.
The latter half of the twentieth century has seen a steady growth of serious scholarly interest in graffiti. Sociologists, psychologists, and historians have increasingly turned to the impromptu "scratchings" of both the educated and the uneducated as indicators of the general mental health and political stability of specific populations.2 Although most of us are familiar with at least a few of these studies and all of us have observed numerous examples of this species of writing on the walls of our cities and the rocks of our national parks, we are not likely, before encountering this scene in Moll Flanders, to have ever before come into contact with graffiti produced with such an elegant writing implement.
Glass being fragile and diamonds being relatively rare, it is not surprising that few examples of graffiti produced by the method employed by Moll and her lover are known to us today. Interestingly enough, we do, however, have available to us a variety of Renaissance and eighteenth-century written materials suggesting that the practice of using a diamond to write ephemeral statements on window glass was far less rare in those periods than we might expect. Holinshed, for example, tells us that in 1558 when Elizabeth was released from imprisonment at Woodstock, she taunted her enemies by writing
these verses with hir diamond in a glasse window verie legiblie as here followeth:
Much suspected by me,
Nothing prooued can be:
Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.3
And in John Donne's "A Valediction: of my Name in the Window," we find two lovers in a situation reminiscent of that of the scene I previously quoted from Moll Flanders. Using a diamond, the poet, before beginning an extended journey, scratches his name on a window pane in the house of his mistress. Here is the first stanza of the poem:
My name engrav'd herein,
Doth contribute my firmnesse to this glasse,
Which, ever since that charme, hath beene
As hard, as that which grav'd it, was;
Thine eyes will give it price enough, to mock
The diamonds of either rock.4
While he is absent, the characters he has cut in the glass will, the poet hopes, magically defend his mistress against the seductive entreaties of his rivals.
In 1711 in a satiric letter to The Spectator, John Hughes poked fun at a number of aspiring poets who had recently attempted to create works of art by utilizing what Hughes called "Contractions or Expedients for Wit." One Virtuoso (a mathematician) had, for example, "thrown the Art of Poetry into a short Problem, and contrived Tables by which any one without knowing a Word of Grammar or Sense, may to his great Comfort, be able to compose or rather erect Latin Verses." Equally ridiculous to Hughes, and more relevant to the concerns of this introduction, was the practice of another poet of his acquaintance: "I have known a Gentleman of another Turn of Humour, who, despising the Name of an Author, never printed his Works, but contracted his Talent, and by the help of a very fine Diamond which he wore on his little Finger, was a considerable Poet upon Glass. He had a very good Epigrammatick Wit; and there was not a Parlour or Tavern Window where he visited or dined ... which did not receive some Sketches or Memorials of it. It was his Misfortune at last to lose his Genius and his Ring to a Sharper at Play; and he has not attempted to make a Verse since."5
But "Epigrammatick Wits" of this sort were not universally despised in the eighteenth century. In 1727 in a "critical dissertation prefix'd" to A Collection of Epigrams, the anonymous editor of the work argued that the epigram itself "is a species of Poetry, perhaps, as old as any other whatsoever: it has receiv'd the approbation of almost all ages and nations...." In the book proper, he found room for a number of epigrams which he evidently copied from London window panes. Here is an example:
CLX.
To a Lady, on seeing some Verses in Praise of her, on a Pane of Glass.
Let others, brittle beauties of a year,
See their frail names, and lovers vows writ here;
Who sings thy solid worth and spotless fame,
On purest adamant should cut thy name:
Then would thy fame be from oblivion sav'd;
On thy own heart my vows must be engrav'd.
One of the epigrams in this collection suggests that, unlike Moll's lover and Hughes's poet, some affluent authors had even acquired instruments specifically designed to facilitate the practice of writing poetry on glass:
Written on a Glass by a Gentleman, who borrow'd the Earl of CHESTERFIELD's Diamond Pencil.
Accept a miracle, instead of wit;
See two dull lines by Stanhope's pencil writ.6
As the title of this epigram also suggests, window panes were not the only surfaces considered appropriate for such writing. A favorite alternate surface was that of the toasting glass. The practice of toasting the beauty of young ladies had originated at the town of Bath during the reign of Charles II. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the members of some social clubs had developed complex toasting rituals which involved the inscription of the name of the lady to be honored on a drinking glass suitable for that purpose. In 1709 an issue of The Tatler described the process in some detail:
that happy virgin, who is received and drunk to at their meetings, has no more to do in this life but to judge and accept of the first good offer. The manner of her inauguration is much like that of the choice of a doge in Venice: it is performed by balloting; and when she is so chosen, she reigns indisputably for that ensuing year; but must be elected a‑new to prolong her empire a moment beyond it. When she is regularly chosen, her name is written with a diamond on a drinking-glass.7
Perhaps the most famous institution practicing this kind of ceremony in the eighteenth century was the Kit-Kat Club. In 1716 Jacob Tonson, a member of that club, published "Verses Written for the Toasting-Glasses of the Kit-Kat Club" in the fifth part of his Miscellany. Space limitations will not permit extensive quotations from this collection, but the toast for Lady Carlisle is alone sufficient to prove that complete epigrams were at times engraved upon the drinking glasses belonging to this club:
She o'er all Hearts and Toasts must reign,
Whose Eyes outsparkle bright Champaign;
Or (when she will vouchsafe to smile,)
The Brilliant that now writes Carlisle.8
Part I of The Merry-Thought: or, The Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany was almost certainly published for the first time in 1731. Arthur E. Case (Bibliography of English Poetical Miscellanies, 1521-1750) notes that this pamphlet was listed in the register of books in the Gentleman's Magazine for October 1731.9 An instant success with the reading public, second and third editions of the pamphlet, the third "with very Large Additions and Alterations," were also published in 1731.10 Because, as its title-page declared, the third and last edition was the fullest of the three, a copy of that edition has been chosen for reproduction here.11
The title-page of Part I of The Merry-Thought states that the contents of the pamphlet had been taken from "Original Manuscripts written in Diamond by Persons of the first Rank and Figure in Great Britain" and that they had been "Faithfully Transcribed from the Drinking-Glasses and Windows in the several noted Taverns, Inns, and other Publick Places in this Nation. Amongst which are intermixed the Lucubrations of the polite Part of the World, written upon Walls in Bog-houses, &c." These statements suggest one of the principal leveling strategies of the pamphlet as a whole: the nobility and the rich, whatever their advantages otherwise, must, like the lowest amongst us, make use of privies; and, in the process, they are just as likely as their brethren of the lower classes to leave their marks on the walls of those conveniences.
A number of the verses included in the pamphlet continue the leveling process. One in particular (p. 20) adopts the principal strategy employed on the title-page:
From the Temple Bog-House.
No Hero looks so fierce to Fight,
As does the Man who strains to sh-te.
Others suggest that sexual relations are essentially leveling activities. Here (p. 24) is an example:
Toy, at Hampton-Court, 1708.
D---n Molley H---ns for her Pride,
She'll suffer none but Lords to ride:
But why the Devil should I care,
Since I can find another Mare?
L.M. August.
Another target of the pamphlet was The Spectator in general and Addison in particular. In his dedication, J. Roberts first insists that the graffiti in his collection are notable examples of wit.12 He next goes out of his way to associate the contents of The Merry-Thought with The Spectator:
But I may venture to say, That good Things are not always respected as they ought to be: The People of the World will sometimes overlook a Jewel, to avoid a T‑‑d.... Nay, I have even found some of the Spectator's Works in a Bog-house, Companions with Pocky-Bills and Fortune-telling Advertisements....
In a series of essays in The Spectator (Nos. 58-61; May, 1711), Addison had earlier, of course, been at pains to distinguish between "true wit" and "false wit." Particularly abhorrent to him was the rebus. The first part of The Merry-Thought alone contains seven rebuses from "Drinking-Glasses, at a private Club of Gentlemen" (pp. 12-13), as well as several examples of other kinds of "wit" which Addison would have disdained.
During the twenty-five years that followed the publication of the Merry-Thought series, a few additional pieces of graffiti were published in England and America.13 In 1761 The New Boghouse Miscellany appeared, but the contents of this book had little in common with the Merry-Thought pamphlets. Only the scatological humor of the subtitle:
A Companion for the Close-stool. Consisting of Original Pieces in Prose and Verse by several Modern Authors. Printed on an excellent soft Paper; and absolutely necessary for all those, who read with a View to Convenience, as well as Delight. Revised and corrected by a Gentleman well skilled in the Fundamentals of Literature, near Privy-Garden
and the generally anti-intellectual thrust of its preface were reminiscent of the Merry-Thought pamphlets. Not until the last half of the twentieth century would the graffito in English receive the kind of attention that had been paid it in England in the 1730s.
University of California
Los Angeles
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The Merry-Thought: or, The Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany is reproduced from a copy of the third edition in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. A typical type page (p. 20) measures 173 x 87 mm.
