CHAPTER XVIII.
“Joe Miller’s Jests”—History, Character, and Success of the Publication—John Mottley The Editor.
POSSIBLY it might be more correct to regard Joe Miller’s Jests as marking a new era in this branch of literature and department of ingenuity than as a work possessing pretensions to rank as a model to succeeding editors of similar collections. I am speaking of the little shilling volume originally issued under the care of John Mottley in 1739, and not of the modern publication which bears the same name, and has little beyond the name in common with it.
Mottley’s book appeared just when the stage and the literary world were beginning to assume an importance and to exhibit a development favourable to the formation of coteries and centres; and as the conditions and spirit of contemporary life govern so completely the facetious and satirical speech of an age or a century, the social and political changes which accompanied the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty introduced a new school of wit among the frequenters of the theatres, clubs and coffee-houses. In fact, the popularity and success of Joe Miller’s Jests at the commencement mainly arose from their association with a defunct actor and their share, such as it was, of dramatic flavour. There had been, and was, an abundance of books dedicated to a similar object, in the market; but this particular one was supposed in some special and mysterious manner to depict, in the first place, the hitherto unknown and unsuspected humorous side of Joe’s character, and, secondly, to embody master-strokes of other great wits of the day and brother comedians of Drury. The new Court and Government of the Georges were to have their own fresh appointments and effects throughout, authors and actors included; and the light literature of the time shared the universal influence. The merriments and drolleries of the Stuart era were discarded to make room for a different style of production, of which Joe Miller happened to be the first in the field, though by no means so in order of excellence.
Yet, in spite of the shortcomings of this famous volume, there remains the important consideration, that it contained a certain enduring element in its cast and tone, and that substantially all those books which have poured incessantly from the press since that day follow the same lines and general principle. The older collections are archæological and pre-historic; the precedent Ana and Facetiæ are as saurians to the ordinary reader; and Miller and his humble imitators—the Sheridans, the Footes, and the Sydney Smiths—shut out from observation, so far as the community at large goes, the jocular treasures and triumphs of ante-Millerian Britain.
In the last century, among Dr. Johnson and his friends, the Elizabethan and Jacobean literature of all kinds met with limited acceptance and lukewarm admiration; its principal utility and interest were from the point of view of the adapter or plagiarist; and innumerable appeals to public favour presented themselves in forms with which the reader and the buyer had more immediate touch and sympathy. The rarest and most precious editions of Shakespear and other writers of his epoch were to be had for a smaller sum than the Life of Joe Hains, the Jests of Polly Peachum, or any other fugitive performance damp from the printers. Malone tells us that Dr. Johnson could not admire the Duke of Buckingham’s Rehearsal, and thought that “it had not wit enough to keep it sweet, nor sufficient vitality to preserve it from putrefaction”—a truly Johnsonian pleonasm, but also a key to the sentiment of the generation to which Johnson belonged, and of which he was decidedly a more than average representative. But here we have a case where the writer could hardly have been viewed as obsolete or illegible in the same manner and sense as the older playwrights; but Johnson nevertheless—and thousands would have concurred with him—did not relish the humour of a piece produced only some twenty years before he was born. The context and atmosphere were wanting; and if such was the feeling about the Rehearsal—of which the merit has recommended it, by-the-bye, to a recent editor—what prospect of survival could exist for the swarm of popular cates with which the English press had teemed from the reign of Henry VIII. to the Revolution?
Malone preserves an anecdote which helps to illustrate the difference between the old and modern schools tolerably well:
“Mr. Lock, of Norbury Park, well known for his collection of pictures, statues, etc., was a natural son. On his marriage with the daughter of Lady Schaub, who had been very gallant, Horace Walpole said very happily, ‘Then everybody’s daughter is married to nobody’s son.’”
The jeu d’esprit was reserved for Walpole, though the circumstance on which it was founded had happened often enough before; but in point of fact it was a saying strictly characteristic of the period, and in the author of it we recognise a signally representative type of the latter-day, as contrasted with the old-world, wit.
Walpole, indeed, belonged to the modern school of humourists, which may be said to date back to the era of the Restoration, but which did not, so to speak, attain adult growth till the fuller development of the club and the coffee-house as aids to the theatre in the establishment of new jocular canons and doctrines.
The book called Joe Miller’s Jests was, both in its inception and its progress, an emanation from the altered state of feeling in regard to such matters. The early editions were, in a literary aspect, wretched enough, and destitute alike of judgment and taste on the part of the compiler. But if the sponsorship of Miller was originally of a nominal and shadowy character, it must be said that, as the volume received from time to time additions, which doubled and trebled its bulk, from an endless variety of fresh sources, the fatherhood of the worthy actor became by degrees absolutely fictitious—a mere nom de plume; and it is not too much to allow that, with all its weaknesses, the work in its augmented shape, as the ordinary reader is accustomed to come across it, is a creditable sample of its kind, and will probably yield a better insight into the particular field of inquiry than any other single publication in our language.
Of course, the first impression of 1739 and the current text are so distinct from each other as to have practically little in common between them beyond the name and the tradition. It started by being a strange tissue of deceptive pretences; but it hit the nail on the head; the notion tickled the public fancy; and the title is almost part of the British constitution. The ancient lines have long been obliterated; the pamphlet of seventy pages has swollen into a volume of five hundred; and the editor and publisher are recollected only by the curious; while in all literary centres and among nearly all classes of readers the man whose name was affixed to the venture without his consent or knowledge, and whose personal capabilities in the joking way were below zero, remains a household word from century to century, like the superscription over a venerable house of business of partners who have been dead and buried these hundred years, and survive above the door and on the bill-heads from considerations of expediency.
John Mottley, who strang together the editio princeps of Joe Miller in 1739 for a bookseller, cannot be commended for the skill and care with which he executed his task. It is a singular jumble of anecdotes of all complexions about persons in various walks of life. The seventy-two pages were reckoned, no doubt, dog-cheap at a shilling, under all the imposing circumstances and seeing the choice nature of the miscellany, and the highly distinguished personages to whose memorabilia it strictly limited its cognisance—videlicet and to wit, King Charles II., Mr. Gun Jones, Sir Richard Steele, the Duchess of Portsmouth, a country clergyman, Ben Jonson, Mrs. C——m, Sir William Davenant, two free-thinking Authors, a very modest young gentleman of the County of Tipperary, Tom Barrett, Lord R., Henry IV. of France, the Emperor Tiberius, and others. A richer bill of fare was barely possible, and it is difficult to understand why Mottley should not have been proud to associate himself with such company and with such a feast of delights, instead of employing the pseudonymy of Jenkins. This playful piece of supercherie, however, was outdone by the courageous declaration that the contents were mostly “transcribed from the mouth” of Joe himself, and the remainder collected in his society; for, as a serious matter of truth, the sole item in the thin octavo, which the collection makes, really attributable to the then recently deceased comedian, is of a nature calculated to inspire us with satisfaction that the title-page is less veracious than it ought to have been, and almost as much a truant in an opposite direction as was perhaps practicable. The material gathered by Mottley in the first instance was indifferent enough surely; but the solitary specimen which he actually furnishes of the facetious vein of his hero must induce everybody to feel thankful that he stopped short there:—
“Joe Miller sitting one day in the window of the Sun Tavern, in Clare Street, a fishwoman and her maid passing by, the woman said, ‘Buy my soles, buy my maids!’ ‘Ah, you wicked old creature!’ said honest Joe. ‘What! Are you not content to sell your own soul, but you would sell your maid’s too?’”
The benevolent forbearance of Mottley was advantageous to the sale of the book confided to his editorship; and the best jest of all was the title and conception. To put forward as the author of all good things a poor fellow who could not make a joke, or even see it when it was made by a friend, was an idea as happy as if some speculative genius were to announce a jest-book by Mr. Spurgeon or the philanthropic Earl of Shaftesbury. But the most popular of preachers or philanthropists would not have answered the purpose so well at the moment as a defunct theatrical performer, equally impervious to humour, but to the play-going public infinitely more familiar, not as a wit, nor even as the cause of it in others, but on purely negative grounds. A notable piece of triumphant charlatanry, as this Joe Miller in the first beginning was, has happened, from a singular caprice of fortune, to overshoot the original design and proportions, to change its fugitive and perishable nature, and to accommodate itself from time to time to enlarged and different requirements.
The circumstance must be treated as accidental; for, looking at the question on every side, the book has had from the commencement a host of competitors, possessing at least equal merit, at least equally inviting forefronts, and even the superstitious prestige of the green-room. But these, one and all, unaccountably disappeared from the public view; and Miller proved the only phœnix, the only sterling coin, the only lasting trademark.
Spiller’s Jests, Penkethman’s, Quin’s, nay, Garrick’s, were things of a season, the nugæ canoræ of their day. Joe witnessed their coming and going; and he is with us yet! He will endure as long as the earth’s crust—as long as Shakespear, and longer, perchance, than Milton.
One of the consequences of this huge and matchless renown is that, in the amplified Vade Mecum for Wits of Joe the Great, a considerable assortment of comic incidents is enrolled under that talismanic name an age or twain after the date, when all that was soluble of the Miller of Millers had been lifted across from the purlieus of Clare Market to the hospitable shelter of St. Clement’s opposite.
