Abstract
In the final year of Queen Anne’s reign, the infamous publisher Edmund Curll printed a collection of short fictional pieces titled The New Atalantis, for the year 1713.1 The six texts brought together in this collection were not new; but in issuing them together under the rubric of the atalantis, Curll made a particular claim for their public significance. The collection’s title suggests the texts gathered under its banner follow the example set five years earlier by Delarivier Manley’s New Atalantis, revealing the secrets of real-life Londoners in order to generate political scandal. However, the stories bear little resemblance to Manley’s original. They relate aspects of domestic or civic life rather than political gossip, and deal in characters that have no real-life counterparts. The collection forms part of a new and striking phenomenon of the London publishing scene: nearly half of the fictional works published in 1713 and 1714, the final years of Queen Anne’s reign, claimed kinship to Manley’s succès de scandale through their title.2 This phenomenon provides a clear indication of the extent to which the relationship between politics and literature had been reconfigured.
At twelve, a Wit and a Coquette; Marries for Love, half Whore, half Wife; Cuckolds, elopes, and runs in Debt; Turns Auth’ress, and is Curll’s for Life. Her Common-Place-Book all gallant is, Of Scandal now a Cornucopia; She pours it out in Atalantis, Or Memoirs of the New Utopia
Jonathan Swift, ‘Corinna’, 1711
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
This fact is noted by Paula Backscheider in ‘The Novel’s Gendered Space’, in Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century ‘Women’s Fiction’ and Social Engagement, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 3.
This advertisement is appended to Sarah Butler’s novel, Irish Tales: or Instructive Histories for the Happy Conduct of Life (London, 1716). It is also discussed by Kathryn King in ‘The Novel before Novels (with a Glance at Mary Hearne’s Fables of Desertion)’, in Eighteenth-Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms, ed. Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), pp. 36–57.
Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century, (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 90.
Barker was among the community of faithful followers who followed James II and his court into exile in France after the Revolution of 1688. King has also discovered a government abstract of a letter written by Barker to James Butler, the Duke of Ormonde, in 1718. The letter declares in coded language that the swelling support for James Edward Stuart (the Old Pretender) means that the time is ripe for a Jacobite invasion of England. See Kathryn King with Jeslyn Medoff, ‘Jane Barker and Her Life (1652–1732): The Documentary Record,’ Eighteenth-Century Life 21, no. 3 (1997): 26.
Kathryn King, Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career, 1675–1725 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 189.
Paul Baines and Pat Rogers, Edmund Curll, Bookseller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 154.
See Edmund Curll, ‘To The Reader’, in Delarivier Manley, Mrs Manley’s History of Her Own Life and Times. Published from Her Original Manuscript (London: E. Curll, 1725), pp. iii–viii.
Hugh E. L. Collins, The Order of the Garter, 1348–1461: Chivalry and Politics in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 12
Nicholson, ‘“Revirescit”: The Exilic Origins of the Stuart Oak Motif,’ in The Stuart Court in Rome: The Legacy of Exile, ed. Edward Corp (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), p. 25
Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 205ff.
Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 364–77.
It is estimated that eighty of the Tories elected in 1713 were committed Jacobites. For further details of the election results, see W. A. Speck, Tory and Whig: The Struggle in the Constituencies, 1701–1715 (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 113–23.
Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714–60 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
See Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, pp. 62–9, and Murray Pittock, Jacobitism (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 68–70.
Paul Monod, ‘The Politics of Matrimony: Jacobitism and Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England’, The Jacobite Challenge, ed. Eveline Cruickshanks and Jeremy Black (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), pp. 34–5.
Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 149–208.
Ralph Straus, The Unspeakable Curll: Being Some Account of Edmund Curll, Bookseller (London: Chapman & Hall, 1927), p. 25.
The Dunciad Variorum, book 2, lines 65–9, 149–80. For further discussion of this episode, see: Sophie Gee, ‘The Sewers: Ordure, Effluence, and Excess in the Eighteenth Century’, A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, ed. Cynthia Wall, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), p. 118.
Eric V. Chandler, ‘Pope’s Emetic: Bodies, Books, and Filth’, Genre 27, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 363.
Bertrand A. Goldgar, ‘Pope and the Grub-Street Journal’, Modern Philology 74, no. 4 (May 1977): 366–80.
David Foxon, ‘Pope and Copyright’, in Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
Pat Rogers, ‘The Case of Pope v. Curll’, in Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984).
Paul Korshin, Afterword to ‘Jacobitism’, special issue, ELH 64, no. 4 (1997): 1091.
For instance, Jane Spencer once declared that critics were ‘safe in assuming [Barker’s] works to be autobiographical’. ‘Creating the Woman Writer: The Autobiographical Works of Jane Barker’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 2, no. 2 (1983), p. 166.
Carol Shiner Wilson, Introduction to The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems of Jane Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 26.
Jane Barker, Love Intrigues, in Popular Fiction by Women, 1660–1730, edited by Paula Backscheider and John J. Richetti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 89.
Tonya Moutray McArthur, ‘Jane Barker and the Politics of Catholic Celibacy’, SEL 47, no. 3 (2007): 595–618.
Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 98.
Leigh A. Eicke, ‘Jane Barker’s Jacobite Writings’, in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 143.
Jane Barker, Dedication to the Honourable Countess of Exeter, in Popular Fiction by Women, 1660–1730: An Anthology, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 82.
Toni Bowers, ‘Sex, Lies, and Invisibility: Amatory Fiction from the Restoration to Mid-Century’, in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John J. Richetti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)
Jacqueline Pearson, ‘History of The History of the Nun’, in Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, Criticism, ed. Heidi Hutner (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993)
Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Jane Barker, The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen; Design’d for the Farther Entertainment of the Ladies, in The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems of Jane Barker, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 216.
See, for example, Pearson, ‘History of The History of the Nun’; and Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Copyright information
© 2009 Nicola Parsons
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Parsons, N. (2009). A Newer Atalantis: Political and Generic Revolutions. In: Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244764_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244764_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36113-7
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-24476-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)