Even though the disasters which overtook John Stubbs and William Prynne in the days of Elizabeth and Charles I no longer faced the pamphleteer, the eighteenth century saw many an anonymous publication, for while hands and ears were less in jeopardy, author and publisher might well suffer imprisonment, as William Cooley and the printer of the Daily Post learned in the winter of 1740-41, and John Wilkes in the 1760's. One can understand why, despite the absence of personal danger, a public figure like Lord Chesterfield should yet conceal his connection with a piece on the Hanoverian troops, or why Horace Walpole might often not put his name to an item listed in his Short Notes of his life or young Boswell to his communications to the press. Indeed, many an innocuous writing appeared anonymously, for the bashful author, protected against the miseries of conspicuous failure, could always shyly acknowledge a successful production. Later, perchance, it could appear in his collected works.

The two pieces here reprinted, typical verse pamphlets of the 1770's, illustrate both a type of writing and an age. The subject of both is contemporary—the best-selling Letters to his Son of Lord Chesterfield. The method falls between burlesque and caricature; the aim is amusement; the substance is negligible. Neither poem made more than a ripple on publication, neither initiated a critical fashion, and neither survived in its own right, yet each has merit enough to justify inclusion today in such a series as the Augustan reprints.

Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, the subject of these two burlesques, were announced as published on April 7, 1774, scarcely a year after his death; that they became an immediate best seller, every schoolboy knows. Reaction to the letters took several modes of expression. These included comments in conversation by Dr. Johnson and by George III, as reported by Boswell and by Fanny Burney; in letters, from Walpole, Mrs. Delaney, Voltaire, and Mrs. Montagu; and in diaries, such as those of Fanny Burney and John Wesley. Reviewers sprang to words if not into action. Entire books came to the defence of morality. A sermon announced "The Unalterable Nature of Vice and Virtue" (a second edition placed Virtue before Vice); the Monthly Review for December 1775 praised it: "This sensible and well written discourse is chiefly directed against the letters of the late Lord Chesterfield, though his Lordship is not mentioned." All of these approached the subject directly. Indirect reactions included an ironic Apology for Mrs. Stanhope (the son's widow, who had sold the letters to James Dodsley the publisher for £1575 and was represented as the editor), two novels showing the pernicious effects of the Chesterfieldean "system"—The Pupil of Pleasure, by Courtney Melmoth (Samuel Jackson Pratt), and The Two Mentors, by Clara Reeve—and a parody by Horace Walpole of the first three letters (published years later in his Works). The Westminster Magazine carried a "Petition of the Women of Pleasure" and the London Chronicle a farcical skit on Lord Chesterfield's refined manners.[1] In a play called The Cozeners, Samuel Foote took advantage of current interest in Chesterfield to ridicule the graces. Not the least interesting examples of the indirect reaction to the Letters are the two verse caricatures or burlesques here reprinted.

The earlier of the two poems, The Graces, bears the date 1774 on the title page. A second edition of 1775 at first glance appears to be a reissue with new title page, but minor changes and the straightedge test are evidence of resetting. The authorship was soon known: The London Chronicle for February 16-18, quoting 88 lines of the total 170 and working from the first edition, mentioned that the piece was written by Mr. Woty, but so far as bibliography was concerned this attribution remained hidden until recently, for Woty's obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine for March 1791 omitted mention of The Graces, as did the DNB and its additional sources, John Nichols' Leicestershire and David Erskine Baker's Biographia Dramatica (1812 ed.).[2] That Woty did indeed write The Graces one may assume from his including it in 1780, with minor changes, in Poems on Several Occasions. He too used the first edition.

Of William Woty's life little need be said; the DNB, relying essentially on the Gentleman's Magazine, gives the salient events: after preparing to enter the law, he became companion and a kind of legal secretary to Washington, Earl Ferrers, who prior to his death in 1778 made Woty independent by establishing an annuity of £150 for him. His first book of verse was The Sporting Club, 1758; the next, The Shrubs of Parnassus, by "James Copywell," he published in 1760. Two others, which he acknowledged, followed in the next three years; then in 1763 he joined Francis Fawkes in editing The Poetical Calendar, in 12 volumes, to which Samuel Johnson contributed a character sketch of William Collins (Boswell's Life, ed. Hill-Powell, I, 382). In 1770, Woty issued a two-volume Poetical Works. The Gentleman's Magazine, mentioning four other publications from 1770 to 1775, adds, "and some other miscellaneous pieces since that time." These, possibly unnamed because published outside of London, included Poems on Several Occasions, Derby, 1780 (in which, as noted above, he reprinted The Graces), Fugitive and Original Poems, Derby, 1786, and Poetical Amusements, Nottingham, 1789. "Mr. W. was a true bon vivant," the notice continues, "but by a too great indulgence of his passion for conviviality and society he unfortunately injured his constitution." He died in March 1791, "aged about 60."

Woty seems to have been on the periphery of Samuel Johnson's list of acquaintances. Under what circumstances Johnson agreed to write the sketch of Collins for the Poetical Calendar, Boswell does not specify—whether for Woty or for Fawkes or for J. Coote, the publisher—but write it he did. The index to the Hill-Powell Boswell lists Woty (and Fawkes) only in this connection, but someone had sufficient interest with the lexicographer to induce him to subscribe to Woty's anonymous Shrubs of Parnassus, 1760; the subscription list of some 500 names includes not only Samuel Johnson, A.M., but David Garrick, Mr. William Mason, Dr. Smollett, Mr. Strahan, and Mr. Newbery, of St. Paul's Church Yard, who bought 6 books—not unnaturally, for he was the publisher. A decade later, the subscribers to The Poetical Works of William Woty included James Boswell, Esq., George Colman, Esq., Mr. Garrick, Dr. Johnson, and this time for but one set, Mr. Newbery. After still another decade, when Woty published in Derby his Poems on Several Occasions, the list of subscribers included none of these names, even though this collection included The Graces, with its dozen lines on Samuel Johnson (now omitting from page 11 the couplet on Bute) which reveal no degree of intimacy, but do show respect and admiration for him.

The Fine Gentleman's Etiquette; or, Lord Chesterfield's Advice to his Son, versified, By a Lady, is both longer and later than The Graces; unlike that poem, it remains anonymous. The lady versifier, though somewhat repetitious in her matter (her defence would of course be that she followed her source), cannot be accused of incompetence in her prosody. Of the 366 lines, she has precious few which scan roughly or rhyme inaccurately; those few come within legitimate poetic license—on the whole, a slightly smoother versification than in Goldsmith's then popular "Retaliation," dashed off in response to a jest at The Club but not published until shortly after his death in 1774. Alike in verse form, the two poems differ significantly in ideas and style; there the discrepancy justifies the different fates of the two. In the poem here reprinted, the only passage deserving individual comment is the anecdote of Philip and the blanc mange (see pages 13 and 14). Lord Charlemont, in the course of answering a query from Lord Bruce about young Stanhope's character, recounts the incident, having had it from an eyewitness: the food was baked gooseberries and whipped cream, and the Earl's comment, "John, why do you not fetch the strop and the razors? you see your master is going to shave himself" (Charlemont MSS., I, 327-328).

The reviewers did little for The Fine Gentleman's Etiquette; most ignored the pamphlet. The Monthly Miscellany for June 1776 provided a few kindly lines: "This didactic rhapsody, the precepts contained in which are founded upon passages referred to in his Lordship's letters, is written in hendecasyllable measure, and is not destitute of humour." The Monthly Review for the same month had less to say: "We should be miserably deficient in the fine Gentleman's Etiquette, were we to criticise a lady for employing her time as she pleases."

In one sense, both burlesquers hit the weak spot in Chesterfield's Letters. Since his purpose is to entertain through exaggeration, a parodist is not required to be fair or to distinguish between an editor without judgment and the writer of intimate letters; so long as something can be made ludicrous, 'twill suffice. Yet essentially the burlesquers and many a critic then and since have missed what Chesterfield was writing in his letters and living in his long life. Blinded by the trivia inevitable in hundreds of letters carrying anxious parental advice, the critics have too often ignored or misinterpreted Chesterfield's passion for helping. He lavished countless hours, during the busiest part of his life, writing to his son in an effort to round out his education where it was distressingly deficient—not in strengthening it where it was strong. The pattern of trying to help is repeated: Chesterfield did his level best with his godson; he gave what was seemly to his young friend Huntingdon and likewise to Solomon Dayrolles. Five unpublished letters at Yale, to a Mr. Clements of Dublin, repeat the formula on a minor scale, the fifty-five-year-old earl laying out a plan of education for the family hopeful. Chesterfield's interest to do good shows at its best in his too little known letter to the Duke of Bedford condemning the brutal treatment of French prisoners (Dobree, VI, 2960). These all reveal something more praiseworthy in the man than the common interpretation of him.

Refreshing, sophisticatedly unsophisticated, yet genuinely revealing of Lord Chesterfield's character, are a half dozen unknown couplets which almost summarize his philosophy of manners. Since his sense of humor can be questioned only by those themselves blind and deaf to humor, his dislike here for laughter should be taken for what he intends—disgust at vacuous guffaws. The society he praises has fun without attendant headaches or regrets. Surely, one could do worse than to be, with him, "innocently gay." The verses appeared in the London Chronicle for May 28-30, 1776; an autograph copy, said to be dated 1761 and forming part of the Alfred Morrison collection, was sold at auction in 1918.[3]

Sidney L. Gulick
San Diego State College