(Anonymous)
(1727)
Introduction by
Samuel L. Macey
PUBLICATION NUMBER 140
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles
1970
GENERAL EDITORS
William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles
Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
David S. Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles
ADVISORY EDITORS
Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia
Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
Earl Miner, University of California, Los Angeles
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles
Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
James Sutherland, University College, London
H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles
Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY
Edna C. Davis, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Roberta Medford, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
[INTRODUCTION]
A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling and its Key (Pudding and Dumpling Burnt to Pot) are typical satiric pamphlets which grew out of the political in-fighting of the first half of the eighteenth century. The pamphlets are distinguished by the fact that the author’s level of imagination and writing makes them delightful reading even today. In Dumpling the author displays a considerable knowledge of cooks and cookery in London; by insinuating that to love dumpling is to love corruption, he effectively and amusingly achieves satiric indirection against a number of political and social targets, including Walpole. The Key is in many ways a separate pamphlet in which Swift is the central figure under attack after his two secret visits to Walpole during 1726. Dumpling had a long life for an eighteenth-century pamphlet and was published as late as 1770. Dr. F. T. Wood has even suggested that it may have influenced Lamb’s Dissertation on Roast Pig;[1] readers might wish to test this for themselves.
Dumpling and its Key were first claimed for Henry Carey by Dr. Wood (pp. 442-447). Carey (1687-1743) is generally thought to have been an illegitimate scion of the powerful Savile family,[2] with whose name he christened three of his sons. He was perhaps best known as a writer of songs. “Sally in our Alley” is a classic, and he has even a tenuous claim to the authorship of the English national anthem. Carey’s Dramatic Works appeared in 1743, the year in which he met his death, almost certainly by his own hand. Several of the plays were successful and particular reference should be made to the burlesques Chrononhotonthologos (1734) and The Dragon of Wantley (1737). The latter even outran the performances of The Beggar’s Opera in its first year. Not only do these plays show Carey’s satiric bent, but so also do a considerable number of his poems. In 1713, 1720, and 1729 Carey published three different collections of his poetry, each entitled Poems on Several Occasions. Although a few of the poems were repeated, almost always revised, each edition is very much a different collection. An edition was brought out in this century by Dr. Wood.[3]
I am strongly inclined to support Carey’s claim to the authorship of Dumpling and its Key despite Dr. E. L. Oldfield’s more recent attempt to invalidate it.[4] There were at least ten editions of Dumpling in the eighteenth century. The first seven (1726-27) appeared during Carey’s life, and these (I have seen all but the third) contain the Namby Pamby verses which later appeared under Carey’s own name in his enlarged Poems on Several Occasions (1729). There was also a “sixth edition” of Dumpling (really the eighth extant edition) in Carey’s own name published “for T. Read, in Dogwell-Court, White-Friars, Fleet-Street, MDCCXLIV.” Though Namby Pamby was not added to the first edition of the Key, it appears in the second edition. Both editions were published by Mrs. Dodd, of whom Dr. Oldfield says: she “seems to have been a neighbour, and known to Carey” (p. 375). Dr. Wood indicates that “at the foot of a folio sheet containing Carey’s song Mocking is Catching, published in 1726, the sixth edition of A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling is advertised as having been lately published” (p. 442). Dr. Wood adds in a footnote that this song “appeared in The Musical Century (1740) under the title A Sorrowful Lamentation for the Loss of a Man and No Man.” Even more striking would seem to be the fact that although there are ninety-one entries in his Poems (1729), Carey has placed the Sorrowful Lamentation directly adjacent to Namby Pamby.
Dr. Wood maintains of Dumpling that “the general style bears a close resemblance to that of the prefaces to Carey’s plays and collections of poetry” (p. 443). I should like strongly to support his statement. Dr. Oldfield says that an inviolable regard for decency “is nowhere contradicted in Carey’s works . . . . Yet the pamphlets, besides being palpably Whiggish, are larded passim with vulgarity of the ‘Close-Stool’ and ‘Clyster’ variety” (p. 376). The reader need look no further than Namby Pamby to see that Carey satisfies Northrop Frye’s very proper observation: “Genius seems to have led practically every great satirist to become what the world calls obscene.”
As for the pamphlets being “palpably Whiggish,” the reader will not look far into the allegory before he realizes that one of the central attacks is against those well-known Whigs Walpole and Marlborough and their appetite for Dumpling (i.e.,
bribery and perquisites). Furthermore, the attack on Swift, which is central to the Key, is based on the very real fear that the Dean’s two recent private interviews with Walpole might presage a return to that leader’s Whig party in exchange for Dumpling. The last pages of the Key (pp. 28-30) deal with the possibility of an accommodation between Swift and Walpole which is, I feel sure, the main target of attack. In his poems (Poems, ed. Wood, pp. 83, 86, 88, and passim) Carey claims to stand between Whig and Tory, just as he does in the pamphlets (Dumpling, p. 1, and Key, p. 15 and passim).
Dr. Wood perceptively points to two parallels between Dumpling and the satiric Of Stage Tyrants (1735) which Carey openly addressed to the Earl of Chesterfield. Dumpling’s “O Braund, my Patron! my Pleasure! my Pride” (p. [ii]) becomes: “O Chesterfield, my patron and my pride” (Poems, ed. Wood, p. 104). The passage which follows, dealing with “all the Monkey-Tricks of Rival Harlequins” (Dumpling, p. [ii]), becomes:
Prefer pure nature and the simple scene
To all the monkey tricks of Harlequin
(Poems, ed. Wood, p. 106).
Even more striking is a passage in the Key: “Mr. B[ooth] had spoken to Mr. W[ilks] to speak to Mr. C[ibber] . . .” (p. 111). This is similar to the following lines in Stage Tyrants:
Booth ever shew’d me friendship and respect,
And Wilks would rather forward than reject.
Ev’n Cibber, terror to the scribbling crew,
Would oft solicit me for something new
(Poems, ed. Wood, p. 104).
What is particularly impressive is that Carey not only refers to the three managers of Drury Lane but mentions them in the same order and as bearing the same relationship to himself. Several highly topical theatrical allusions in the pamphlets, by which the works can be dated, accord closely to the life, views, and writings of Carey. All three managers of Drury Lane were subscribers to Carey’s Poems on Several Occasions (1729), which
was dedicated to the Countess of Burlington, who (like the Earl of Chesterfield) was closely related to Carey’s putative family. In the Poems these people and many others (including Pope) would have seen Namby Pamby under Carey’s name and drawn the obvious conclusion that Namby Pamby, Dumpling and the Key were by the same author.
We have already seen how closely Dumpling and Stage Tyrants can be tied together; the reader can compare for himself that part of Namby Pamby containing “So the Nurses get by Heart / Namby Pamby’s Little Rhymes,” with the passage from the Key: “It was here the D[ean] . . . got together all his Namby Pamby . . . from the old Nurses thereabouts” (Key, pp. 16-17).
There exists in the Bodleian an early copy of Namby Pamby (1725?) “By Capt. Gordon, Author of the Apology for Parson Alberony and the Humorist.” The joke here is surely in not only letting the Whig Gordon attack the Whig Ambrose Phillips but then, also by association, connecting Gordon’s name with the attack on Walpole and Marlborough. There is a parallel to this: Carey’s “Lilliputian Ode on Their Majesties Succession” appeared in Poems (1729), separated from the pieces previously mentioned by only one short patriotic stanza. Yet in the Huntington Library there is an almost identical version (1727) which was ostensibly published by Swift.
The first six editions of Dumpling appeared in 1726 and both editions of the Key are dated 1727. Apart from the dates on the title page, this can be verified externally by the initial entries in Wilford’s Monthly Catalogue (1723-30) of February 1726 and April 1727 respectively. Swift’s first return visit to England (in March 1726 after twelve years) was subsequent to the publication of Dumpling; his second visit was in the same month as the publication of the Key, which assigns him ex post facto the authorship “from Page 1. to Page 25.” of Dumpling (Key, p. ix).
Sir John Pudding and his Dumpling are manipulated throughout these pamphlets to carry a multiplicity of meaning which brings them almost as close to symbolism as they are to the allegory that Carey claims to be writing (Key, pp. 18, 24 and 29). Collation of Dumpling with its Key clearly reveals (with due allowance for satiric arabesque) a series of allegories moving backwards and forwards through history. At various
stages, Sir John Pudding (ostensibly Brawn [or John Brand], the famous cook of the Rummer in Queen Street who appears in Dr. King’s Art of Cookery [1708]), becomes identifiable with King John, Sir John Falstaff, Walpole, Marlborough, and even Queen Anne (for the change in sexes see Key, p. 18). All of these enjoyed Dumpling, and their tastes are ostensibly approved while at the same time being heavily undercut with satiric indirection. Naturally enough, Walpole (although a Dumpling Eater) is treated with considerable circumspection. Carey has warned us that he is a bad chronologist (Key, p. 21), and the Sir John Pudding (be he Walpole or Marlborough [d. 1722]), who at the end of Dumpling is referred to as “the Hero of this DUMPLEID,” is for good reason spoken of in the past tense.
The fable of Dumpling, in the true spirit of lanx satura, allows Carey to attack by indirection a complete spectrum of traditional eighteenth-century targets. Like the musician and the satirist that he is, he builds up to a magnificent crescendo (pp. 19-24 of his “Dumpleid”) which results in one of the finest displays of sustained virtuosity in early eighteenth-century pamphlet writing.
The notes which follow the texts point to a number of the contemporary allusions, but the reader will surely wish to recognize some of the references and the more delicate ironies for himself. As the author puts it on page 17 of Dumpling:
O wou’d to Heav’n this little Attempt of Mine may stir up some Pudding-headed Antiquary to dig his Way through all the mouldy Records of Antiquity, and bring to Light the Noble Actions of Sir John!
What scholar could refuse?
University of Victoria
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1.] “An Eighteenth-Century Original for Lamb,” RES, V (1929), 447.
[2.] An exception is Henry J. Dane who denies the relationship in “The Life and Works of Henry Carey,” unpublished doctoral dissertation (University of Pennsylvania, 1967), pp. xxix-xxx, and passim.
[3.] Poems, ed. F. T. Wood (London, 1930).
[4.] “Henry Carey (1687-1743) and Some Troublesome Attributions,” BNYPL, LXII (1968), 372-377.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
These facsimiles of A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) and Pudding and Dumpling Burnt to Pot (1727) are reproduced from copies in the Bodleian Library and the British Museum.