The Merry-Thought: or the Gla.s.s-Window and Bog-House Miscellany.

Part 1.

by Samuel Johnson [AKA Hurlo Thrumbo].

INTRODUCTION

For modern readers, one of the most intriguing scenes in Daniel Defoe's _Moll Flanders_ (1722) occurs during the courtship of Moll by the man who is to become her third husband. Aware that the eligible men of her day have little interest in prospective wives with small or nonexistent fortunes, Moll slyly devises a plan to keep her relative poverty a secret from the charming and (as she has every reason to believe) wealthy plantation owner who has fallen in love with her. To divert attention from her own financial condition, she repeatedly suggests that he has been courting her only for her money. Again and again he protests his love. Over and over she pretends to doubt his sincerity.

After a series of exhausting confrontations, Moll's lover begins what is to us a novel kind of dialogue:

One morning he pulls off his diamond ring and writes upon the gla.s.s of the sash in my chamber this line:

You I love and you alone.

I read it and asked him to lend me the ring, with which I wrote under it thus:

And so in love says every one.

He takes his ring again and writes another line thus:

Virtue alone is an estate.

I borrowed it again, and I wrote under it:

But money's virtue, gold is fate.[1]

After a number of additional thrusts and counterthrusts of this sort, Moll and her lover come to terms and are married.

[Footnote 1: Daniel Defoe, _Moll Flanders_ (New York: New American Library, 1964), pp. 71-72.]

The latter half of the twentieth century has seen a steady growth of serious scholarly interest in graffiti. Sociologists, psychologists, and historians have increasingly turned to the impromptu "scratchings" of both the educated and the uneducated as indicators of the general mental health and political stability of specific populations.[2] Although most of us are familiar with at least a few of these studies and all of us have observed numerous examples of this species of writing on the walls of our cities and the rocks of our national parks, we are not likely, before encountering this scene in _Moll Flanders_, to have ever before come into contact with graffiti produced with such an elegant writing implement.

[Footnote 2: For example, E. A. Humphrey Fenn, "The Writing on the Wall," _History Today_, 19 (1969), 419-423, and "Graffiti,"

_Contemporary Review_, 215 (1969), 156-160; Terrance L. Stocker, Linda W. Dutcher, Stephen M. Hargrove, and Edwin A. Cook, "Social a.n.a.lysis of Graffiti," _Journal of American Folklore_, 85 (1972), 356-366; Sylvia Spann, "The Handwriting on the Wall," _English Journal_, 62 (1973), 1163-1165; Robert Reisner and Lorraine Wechsler, _Encyclopedia of Graffiti_ (New York: Macmillan, 1974); "Graffiti Helps Mental Patients," _Science Digest_, April, 1974, pp. 47-48; Henry Solomon and Howard Yager, "Authoritarianism and Graffiti," _Journal of Social Psychology_, 97 (1975), 149-150; Carl A. Bonuso, "Graffiti," _Today's Education_, 65 (1976), 90-91; Elizabeth Wales and Barbara Brewer, "Graffiti in the 1970's,"

_Journal of Social Psychology_, 99 (1976), 115-123; Ernest L. Abel and Barbara E. Buckley, _The Handwriting on the Wall: Toward a Sociology and Psychology of Graffiti_ (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977); and Marina N. Haan and Richard B. Hammerstrom, _Graffiti in the Ivy League_ (New York: Warner Books, 1981).]

Gla.s.s being fragile and diamonds being relatively rare, it is not surprising that few examples of graffiti produced by the method employed by Moll and her lover are known to us today. Interestingly enough, we do, however, have available to us a variety of Renaissance and eighteenth-century written materials suggesting that the practice of using a diamond to write ephemeral statements on window gla.s.s was far less rare in those periods than we might expect. Holinshed, for example, tells us that in 1558 when Elizabeth was released from imprisonment at Woodstock, she taunted her enemies by writing

these verses with hir diamond in a gla.s.se window verie legiblie as here followeth:

Much suspected by me, Nothing prooued can be: Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.[3]

[Footnote 3: _Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland_ (London, 1808), IV, 133.]

And in John Donne's "A Valediction: of my Name in the Window," we find two lovers in a situation reminiscent of that of the scene I previously quoted from _Moll Flanders_. Using a diamond, the poet, before beginning an extended journey, scratches his name on a window pane in the house of his mistress. Here is the first stanza of the poem:

My name engrav'd herein, Doth contribute my firmnesse to this gla.s.se, Which, ever since that charme, hath beene As hard, as that which grav'd it, was; Thine eyes will give it price enough, to mock The diamonds of either rock.[4]

While he is absent, the characters he has cut in the gla.s.s will, the poet hopes, magically defend his mistress against the seductive entreaties of his rivals.

[Footnote 4: John Donne, _The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets_, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 64.]

In 1711 in a satiric letter to _The Spectator_, John Hughes poked fun at a number of aspiring poets who had recently attempted to create works of art by utilizing what Hughes called "Contractions or Expedients for Wit." One Virtuoso (a mathematician) had, for example, "thrown the Art of Poetry into a short Problem, and contrived Tables by which any one without knowing a Word of Grammar or Sense, may to his great Comfort, be able to compose or rather erect _Latin_ Verses." Equally ridiculous to Hughes, and more relevant to the concerns of this introduction, was the practice of another poet of his acquaintance: "I have known a Gentleman of another Turn of Humour, who, despising the Name of an Author, never printed his Works, but contracted his Talent, and by the help of a very fine Diamond which he wore on his little Finger, was a considerable Poet upon Gla.s.s. He had a very good Epigrammatick Wit; and there was not a Parlour or Tavern Window where he visited or dined ... which did not receive some Sketches or Memorials of it. It was his Misfortune at last to lose his Genius and his Ring to a Sharper at Play; and he has not attempted to make a Verse since."[5]

[Footnote 5: _The Spectator_, No. 220, November 12, 1711.]

But "Epigrammatick Wits" of this sort were not universally despised in the eighteenth century. In 1727 in a "critical dissertation prefix'd" to _A Collection of Epigrams_, the anonymous editor of the work argued that the epigram itself "is a species of Poetry, perhaps, as old as any other whatsoever: it has receiv'd the approbation of almost all ages and nations...." In the book proper, he found room for a number of epigrams which he evidently copied from London window panes. Here is an example:

CLX.

_To a Lady, on seeing some Verses in Praise of her, on a Pane of Gla.s.s._

Let others, brittle beauties of a year, See their frail names, and lovers vows writ here; Who sings thy solid worth and spotless fame, On purest adamant should cut thy name: Then would thy fame be from oblivion sav'd; On thy own heart my vows must be engrav'd.

One of the epigrams in this collection suggests that, unlike Moll's lover and Hughes's poet, some affluent authors had even acquired instruments specifically designed to facilitate the practice of writing poetry on gla.s.s:

_Written on a Gla.s.s by a Gentleman, who borrow'd the Earl of _CHESTERFIELD_'s Diamond Pencil._

Accept a miracle, instead of _wit_; See two dull lines by _Stanhope's_ pencil writ.[6]

[Footnote 6: No. CCCLx.x.xII, in _A Collection of Epigrams. To Which Is Prefix'd, a Critical Dissertation on This Species of Poetry_ (London, 1727).]

As the t.i.tle of this epigram also suggests, window panes were not the only surfaces considered appropriate for such writing. A favorite alternate surface was that of the toasting gla.s.s. The practice of toasting the beauty of young ladies had originated at the town of Bath during the reign of Charles II. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the members of some social clubs had developed complex toasting rituals which involved the inscription of the name of the lady to be honored on a drinking gla.s.s suitable for that purpose. In 1709 an issue of _The Tatler_ described the process in some detail:

that happy virgin, who is received and drunk to at their meetings, has no more to do in this life but to judge and accept of the first good offer. The manner of her inauguration is much like that of the choice of a doge in Venice: it is performed by balloting; and when she is so chosen, she reigns indisputably for that ensuing year; but must be elected a-new to prolong her empire a moment beyond it. When she is regularly chosen, her name is written with a diamond on a drinking-gla.s.s.[7]

[Footnote 7: _The Tatler_, No. 24, June 4, 1709.]

Perhaps the most famous inst.i.tution practicing this kind of ceremony in the eighteenth century was the Kit-Kat Club. In 1716 Jacob Tonson, a member of that club, published "Verses Written for the Toasting-Gla.s.ses of the Kit-Kat Club" in the fifth part of his _Miscellany_. s.p.a.ce limitations will not permit extensive quotations from this collection, but the toast for Lady Carlisle is alone sufficient to prove that complete epigrams were at times engraved upon the drinking gla.s.ses belonging to this club:

She o'er all Hearts and Toasts must reign, Whose Eyes outsparkle bright Champaign; Or (when she will vouchsafe to smile,) The Brilliant that now writes _Carlisle_.[8]

Part I of _The Merry-Thought: or, The Gla.s.s-Window and Bog-House Miscellany_ was almost certainly published for the first time in 1731.

Arthur E. Case (_Bibliography of English Poetical Miscellanies_, 1521-1750) notes that this pamphlet was listed in the register of books in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for October 1731.[9] An instant success with the reading public, second and third editions of the pamphlet, the third "with very Large Additions and Alterations," were also published in 1731.[10] Because, as its t.i.tle-page declared, the third and last edition was the fullest of the three, a copy of that edition has been chosen for reproduction here.[11]

[Footnote 8: _The Fifth Part of Miscellany Poems_, ed. Jacob Tonson (London, 1716), p. 63.]

[Footnote 9: _A Bibliography of English Poetical Miscellanies, 1521-1750_ (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 275.]

[Footnote 10: Case, p. 276, points out that the second edition was advertised in the November 13, 1731, issue of _Fog's Weekly Journal_ and that the third edition was advertised in the December 11, 1731, issue of the same journal. Three additional parts were also published within a year or so, see Case, pp. 276-277.]

[Footnote 11: Although, as the t.i.tle-page of the third edition advertises, the third edition does contain materials not to be found in the second edition, it does not indicate that the second edition itself contained materials omitted from the third edition. Among the materials not reprinted were the following verses:

_Red-Lyon_ at _Stains_.

My Dear _Nancy P---k---r_ I sigh for her, I wish for her, I pray for her. Alas! it is a Plague That _Cupid_ will impose, for my Neglect Of his Almighty, Dreadful, Little Might.

Well, will I love, write, sigh, pray, sue, and groan Ah! where shall I make my Moan!