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.