He next goes out of his way to associate the contents of The Merry-Thought with The Spectator:
But I may venture to say, That good Things are not always respected as they ought to be: The People of the World will sometimes overlook a Jewel, to avoid a T‑‑d.... Nay, I have even found some of the Spectator's Works in a Bog-house, Companions with Pocky-Bills and Fortune-telling Advertisements....
In a series of essays in The Spectator (Nos. 58-61; May, 1711), Addison had earlier, of course, been at pains to distinguish between "true wit" and "false wit." Particularly abhorrent to him was the rebus. The first part of The Merry-Thought alone contains seven rebuses from "Drinking-Glasses, at a private Club of Gentlemen" (pp. 12-13), as well as several examples of other kinds of "wit" which Addison would have disdained.
During the twenty-five years that followed the publication of the Merry-Thought series, a few additional pieces of graffiti were published in England and America.[13] In 1761 The New Boghouse Miscellany appeared, but the contents of this book had little in common with the Merry-Thought pamphlets. Only the scatological humor of the subtitle:
A Companion for the Close-stool. Consisting of Original Pieces in Prose and Verse by several Modern Authors. Printed on an excellent soft Paper; and absolutely necessary for all those, who read with a View to Convenience, as well as Delight. Revised and corrected by a Gentleman well skilled in the Fundamentals of Literature, near Privy-Garden
and the generally anti-intellectual thrust of its preface were reminiscent of the Merry-Thought pamphlets. Not until the last half of the twentieth century would the graffito in English receive the kind of attention that had been paid it in England in the 1730s.
University of California
Los Angeles
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1.] Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (New York: New American Library, 1964), pp. 71-72.