S. M. is clearly unsympathetic to the plight of married women in an age with only the most primitive forms of birth control.4 The picture of her as a long-suffering person is undercut by the casual male assumption that giving birth was not really dangerous and that women make too much of the pain and difficulty. That women were often forced to go through thirteen or fourteen deliveries when little thought had yet been given to creating an antiseptic environment for childbirth is apparently of little concern to S. M., who finds in the apparent willingness of the woman to have sexual intercourse one more time sufficient reason for contempt.

In addition to giving glimpses into social attitudes, The Merry-Thought has a variety of inscriptions that show the way these writings functioned. Professor George Guffey, in his introduction to the first part of this work (ARS 216 [1982], iii-iv), remarks upon the proposal scene carried on in Moll Flanders between Moll and the admirer who will prove her third husband and her brother. Such scenes involving witty proposals and responses cut into the windows of taverns were real enough at the time. The exchange in part two of The Merry-Thought is not, however, half so satisfactory. The woman takes umbrage at her admirer’s suggestions that the glass on which he writes is “the Emblem” of her mind in being “brittle, slipp’ry, [and] pois’nous,” and writes in retort:

Though an easy cynicism about women’s availability and about the body’s insistently animal functions predominates, there is enough variety in The Merry-Thought to provide something of a picture of eighteenth-century society were any future anthropologist to come upon this volume as the sole remnant of that period. He would see a society engaged rather more in animal functions than in intellectual pursuits--a society rather more concerned with drinking, love, and defecation than the picture presented by the polite and intellectual literature of the time allowed. But he would also find in the satirical squibs on Corny, the Cambridge bookseller and printer, evidence of learning and university life (pt. 2, pp. 4-6) as well as a criticism of opera (pt. 2, pp. 14-16). He would see numerous young men longing for their mistresses to soften their hearts toward them, and cynical older men who had lost their illusions about love. But he could also come upon a straight piece of philosophy taken from the still fashionable Flask tavern in Hampstead (pt. 2, p. 24) or lowly bits of pious folk wisdom (pt. 2, p. 10). More often, however, he would uncover a society in which there was little of the generalized style that characterizes even the most personal formal poetry of the period. Many of the writers identify themselves and the names of the women they love or detest. In short, if these volumes do little else, they do provide a vivid glimpse into the personal life of the time, and to that extent an injection of some of these inscriptions into the anthologies of the period might help in providing a lively and piquant context for the serious artistic production of writers like Gay and Swift.

The announced “publisher” of this olio was one Hurlothrumbo, a character drawn from the theatrical piece of that name by Samuel Johnson of Cheshire (1691-1773). Professor Guffey has proposed that James Roberts, for whom the four parts were printed, “was almost certainly the collector of the graffiti” and that the name of Hurlothrumbo was invoked in order to attract some of the attention that Samuel Johnson of Cheshire and his play were still receiving two years after the play’s first performance and publication.5 But Roberts would appear an unlikely candidate for the role of editor;6 I would suggest, rather, the possibility of a more direct and active connection with Samuel Johnson of Cheshire: that he was himself likely the compiler of the four parts of The Merry-Thought and that, whatever the individual versifiers may have intended, this infamous collection of graffiti--as collection--shares very closely with Johnson’s other work a spirit of wild variety, eccentric juxtaposition, and essential anarchism that is meant to lead, not to clever parody of polite literature, but to a new, almost apocalyptic vision of the sublime.

At the first level, Hurlothrumbo: Or, The Super-Natural (1729) itself appears to be quite simply a parody, in this case of opera in the form of a work mixing dialogue and song in a manner similar to but much wilder than Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. Johnson’s apparent takeoff on the heroics of opera managed to include in its attack a commentary upon the absurdity of contemporary tragedy as well as some specific references to those works that aimed at the sublime. Lines like “This World is all a Dream, an Outside, a Dunghill pav’d with Diamonds” (48) seem to call the very nature of metaphor into question, especially when juxtaposed with other delirious lines such as “Rapture is the Egg of Love, hatched by a radiant Eye” (14) or by songs such as that sung by the king on contemplating the effects of swallowing gunpowder and brandy together:

Hurlothrumbo may be mostly nonsense, but from the standpoint of literary history, it is highly significant nonsense. It represented a revolt against all dramatic conventions and shared a number of qualities with graffiti, including the sense of spontaneity.

Had Johnson’s intention been something as relatively uncomplicated as literary parody he would have achieved some minor fame in a century which could boast any number of geniuses who had specialized in deriding the pretentiousness of the more established literary forms, particularly tragedy, the epic, and the pastoral. But Johnson of Cheshire lacked the aesthetic distance required of sustained irony and had a grander purpose in mind. His tradition was not that of the parodist but rather that of the visionary--the mystic whose tendency is to merge the high and the low, the sublime and the absurd, within a single work.7 He was not attacking the extravagant rants of the heroic play as Fielding was to do in his Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) or reflecting on opera and pastoral as Gay had done in The Beggar’s Opera (1728); rather he was trying, however unsuccessfully, to maintain his own work at the highest reaches of sublimity. He was like one of Pope’s “Flying Fishes,” who “now and then rise upon their fins and fly out of the Profound; but their wings are soon dry, and they drop down to the bottom.”8

In his preface to The Blazing Comet; or the Beauties of the Poets (1732), Johnson of Cheshire noted that “the same thought that makes the Fool laugh, may make the wise Man sigh” (ix). Given such an equivocal approach to the ways in which the audience responded to his work, the poet could easily shrug off audience laughter to his most “Sublime” lines. He was always ready “to leap up in Extasy; and dip ... [his] Pen in the Sun” (iv). Parts of Hurlothrumbo, particularly the scene between Lady Flame and Wildfire (both of whom are described in the list of characters as “mad”) in which Wildfire threatens to cast off his clothes and “run about stark naked” (48), bear an odd resemblance to “The King’s Cameleopard” in Huckleberry Finn. But the disconnected verbal structure, along with the music and dancing, achieves a strange mixture that must have amused and, to a certain extent, bemused its audience.

Johnson called upon “Variety” as his most important artistic principle, and he developed his ideas on this subject in A Vision of Heaven (1738), a work which bears a striking resemblance to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.9 Johnson argues that all surface appearances are merely a form of “Hieroglyphic” concealing a true vision of things (6). His narrator is capable of what Blake was to call “mental flight,” and there is a particularly vivid passage in which the stars are seen as throwing down “freezing Daggers” at the poor starving children in the streets and another in which we encounter an aged woman who wields a broom against spiders and against all the young women who threaten to come near the narrator (26).10 The mystic temperament is often capable of making connections between the spiritual and the excremental,11 between the sublime and the bathos of “Thunder-bolts from Anus.” Blake, we should recall, has poems depicting himself defecating.12

Whether Johnson actually collected The Merry-Thought or not, the reasons for the association of these volumes with his name should then be clear enough. While Fielding might appropriate the title “Scriblerus Secundus” by way of staking out a line of descent for his humor and satire, Hurlothrumbo was so thoroughly connected with Johnson and his play that I can see no reason why he should not be considered the likely editor of such a varied and eccentric collection of verse and prose as The Merry-Thought. That the “Variety” bears no resemblance to that of serious art, however, should be as obvious as the difference between a William Blake and a Samuel Johnson of Cheshire. As William Hogarth was to remark, “variety uncomposed, and without design is confusion and deformity.”13

Of course, miscellanies by their very nature are likely to be organized according to principles of variety. What makes The Merry-Thought different from those appealing to polite taste is the wide swings of emotion that prompt the writers of these poems and catch the compiler’s fancy. As we have seen, the verses themselves vary from the grossest comments on shit to the most passionate expressions of love. That the one is likely to appear on the walls of latrines and the other to be cut in glass by a diamond is part of what Johnson would have called the “Hieroglyphic” significance of this collection. In Johnson’s plays, there is the odd mixture of vulgarity and sublimity, the comic and the serious, the satirical and the nonsensical. If his dramas bear a resemblance to Jarry’s Ubu Roi, so The Merry-Thought resembles the kind of anthology that Jarry might have put together to illustrate the absurd anarchy of the human spirit. Johnson, on the other hand, regarded this seeming anarchy of human thoughts and feelings optimistically as an emblem of human spirituality.

University of California,

Los Angeles