A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726)

Title: A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726)

Author: Henry Carey

Editor: Samuel L. Macey

Release date: February 17, 2009 [eBook #28105]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28105

Credits: E-text prepared by Louise Hope, Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

E-text prepared by Louise Hope, Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

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Editor’s Introduction (1970)

Dissertation on Dumpling: Dedication Dissertation Namby Pamby Advertising

Key to the Dissertation: Preface Introduction The Key

Notes to Dumpling and the Key (1970)

Augustan Reprints (1970)

The Augustan Reprint Society

A Learned Dissertation

ON

DUMPLING

(Anonymous)

(1726)

PUDDING AND DUMPLING BURNT to POT.

OR,

A COMPLEAT KEY

TO THE

Dissertation on Dumpling

(Anonymous)

(1727)

Introduction by Samuel L. Macey

PUBLICATION NUMBER 140 WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY University of California, Los Angeles

1970

GENERAL EDITORS

William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles

Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

David S. Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles

ADVISORY EDITORS

Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan

James L. Clifford, Columbia University

Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia

Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles

Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago

Louis A. Landa, Princeton University

Earl Miner, University of California, Los Angeles

Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota

Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles

Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

James Sutherland, University College, London

H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles

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.

Dr. Wood maintains of Dumpling that “the general style bears a close resemblance to that of the prefaces to Carey’s plays and collections of poetry” (p. 443). I should like strongly to support his statement. Dr. Oldfield says that an inviolable regard for decency “is nowhere contradicted in Carey’s works . . . . Yet the pamphlets, besides being palpably Whiggish, are larded passim with vulgarity of the ‘Close-Stool’ and ‘Clyster’ variety” (p. 376). The reader need look no further than Namby Pamby to see that Carey satisfies Northrop Frye’s very proper observation: “Genius seems to have led practically every great satirist to become what the world calls obscene.”

As for the pamphlets being “palpably Whiggish,” the reader will not look far into the allegory before he realizes that one of the central attacks is against those well-known Whigs Walpole and Marlborough and their appetite for Dumpling (i.e., iii bribery and perquisites). Furthermore, the attack on Swift, which is central to the Key, is based on the very real fear that the Dean’s two recent private interviews with Walpole might presage a return to that leader’s Whig party in exchange for Dumpling. The last pages of the Key (pp. 28-30) deal with the possibility of an accommodation between Swift and Walpole which is, I feel sure, the main target of attack. In his poems (Poems, ed. Wood, pp. 83, 86, 88, and passim) Carey claims to stand between Whig and Tory, just as he does in the pamphlets (Dumpling, p. 1, and Key, p. 15 and passim).

Dr. Wood perceptively points to two parallels between Dumpling and the satiric Of Stage Tyrants (1735) which Carey openly addressed to the Earl of Chesterfield. Dumpling’s “O Braund, my Patron! my Pleasure! my Pride” (p. [ii]) becomes: “O Chesterfield, my patron and my pride” (Poems, ed. Wood, p. 104). The passage which follows, dealing with “all the Monkey-Tricks of Rival Harlequins” (Dumpling, p. [ii]), becomes:

Prefer pure nature and the simple scene

To all the monkey tricks of Harlequin

(Poems, ed. Wood, p. 106).

Even more striking is a passage in the Key: “Mr. B[ooth] had spoken to Mr. W[ilks] to speak to Mr. C[ibber] . . .” (p. 111). This is similar to the following lines in Stage Tyrants:

Booth ever shew’d me friendship and respect,

And Wilks would rather forward than reject.

Ev’n Cibber, terror to the scribbling crew,

Would oft solicit me for something new

(Poems, ed. Wood, p. 104).

What is particularly impressive is that Carey not only refers to the three managers of Drury Lane but mentions them in the same order and as bearing the same relationship to himself. Several highly topical theatrical allusions in the pamphlets, by which the works can be dated, accord closely to the life, views, and writings of Carey. All three managers of Drury Lane were subscribers to Carey’s Poems on Several Occasions (1729), which iv was dedicated to the Countess of Burlington, who (like the Earl of Chesterfield) was closely related to Carey’s putative family. In the Poems these people and many others (including Pope) would have seen Namby Pamby under Carey’s name and drawn the obvious conclusion that Namby Pamby, Dumpling and the Key were by the same author.

We have already seen how closely Dumpling and Stage Tyrants can be tied together; the reader can compare for himself that part of Namby Pamby containing “So the Nurses get by Heart / Namby Pamby’s Little Rhymes,” with the passage from the Key: “It was here the D[ean] . . . got together all his Namby Pamby . . . from the old Nurses thereabouts” (Key, pp. 16-17).

There exists in the Bodleian an early copy of Namby Pamby (1725?) “By Capt. Gordon, Author of the Apology for Parson Alberony and the Humorist.” The joke here is surely in not only letting the Whig Gordon attack the Whig Ambrose Phillips but then, also by association, connecting Gordon’s name with the attack on Walpole and Marlborough. There is a parallel to this: Carey’s “Lilliputian Ode on Their Majesties Succession” appeared in Poems (1729), separated from the pieces previously mentioned by only one short patriotic stanza. Yet in the Huntington Library there is an almost identical version (1727) which was ostensibly published by Swift.

The first six editions of Dumpling appeared in 1726 and both editions of the Key are dated 1727. Apart from the dates on the title page, this can be verified externally by the initial entries in Wilford’s Monthly Catalogue (1723-30) of February 1726 and April 1727 respectively. Swift’s first return visit to England (in March 1726 after twelve years) was subsequent to the publication of Dumpling; his second visit was in the same month as the publication of the Key, which assigns him ex post facto the authorship “from Page 1. to Page 25.” of Dumpling (Key, p. ix).

Sir John Pudding and his Dumpling are manipulated throughout these pamphlets to carry a multiplicity of meaning which brings them almost as close to symbolism as they are to the allegory that Carey claims to be writing (Key, pp. 18, 24 and 29). Collation of Dumpling with its Key clearly reveals (with due allowance for satiric arabesque) a series of allegories moving backwards and forwards through history. At various v stages, Sir John Pudding (ostensibly Brawn [or John Brand], the famous cook of the Rummer in Queen Street who appears in Dr. King’s Art of Cookery [1708]), becomes identifiable with King John, Sir John Falstaff, Walpole, Marlborough, and even Queen Anne (for the change in sexes see Key, p. 18). All of these enjoyed Dumpling, and their tastes are ostensibly approved while at the same time being heavily undercut with satiric indirection. Naturally enough, Walpole (although a Dumpling Eater) is treated with considerable circumspection. Carey has warned us that he is a bad chronologist (Key, p. 21), and the Sir John Pudding (be he Walpole or Marlborough [d.

1722]), who at the end of Dumpling is referred to as “the Hero of this DUMPLEID,” is for good reason spoken of in the past tense.

The fable of Dumpling, in the true spirit of lanx satura, allows Carey to attack by indirection a complete spectrum of traditional eighteenth-century targets. Like the musician and the satirist that he is, he builds up to a magnificent crescendo (pp. 19-24 of his “Dumpleid”) which results in one of the finest displays of sustained virtuosity in early eighteenth-century pamphlet writing.

The notes which follow the texts point to a number of the contemporary allusions, but the reader will surely wish to recognize some of the references and the more delicate ironies for himself. As the author puts it on page 17 of Dumpling:

O wou’d to Heav’n this little Attempt of Mine may stir up some Pudding-headed Antiquary to dig his Way through all the mouldy Records of Antiquity, and bring to Light the Noble Actions of Sir John!

What scholar could refuse?

University of Victoria

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. “An Eighteenth-Century Original for Lamb,” RES, V (1929), 447.

2. An exception is Henry J. Dane who denies the relationship in “The Life and Works of Henry Carey,” unpublished doctoral dissertation (University of Pennsylvania, 1967), pp. xxix-xxx, and passim.

3. Poems, ed. F. T. Wood (London, 1930).

4. “Henry Carey (1687-1743) and Some Troublesome Attributions,” BNYPL, LXII (1968), 372-377.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

These facsimiles of A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) and Pudding and Dumpling Burnt to Pot (1727) are reproduced from copies in the Bodleian Library and the British Museum.

A

Learned Dissertation

ON

DUMPLING;

Its Dignity, Antiquity, and Excellence.

With a Word upon

PUDDING.

AND

Many other Useful Discoveries, of great Benefit to the Publick.

Quid Farto melius?

Huic suam agnoscit corpus energiam,

Suam aciem mens: ——————

—— Hinc adoleverunt præstantissimi,

Hi Fartophagi in Reipublicæ commodum.

Mab. de Fartophagis, lib. iii. cap. 2.

LONDON.

Printed for J. Roberts in the Oxford-Arms-Passage, Warwick-lane; and Sold by the Booksellers of London and Westminster. 1726. [Price 6 d.]

TO

Mr. BRAUND.

SIR,

et Mercenary Authors flatter the Great, and subject their Principle to Interest and Ambition, I scorn such sordid Views; You only are Eminent in my Eyes: On You I look as the most Useful Member in a Body-Politic, and your Art far superior to all others: Therefore,

Tu mihi Mecænas Eris!

O Braund, my Patron! my Pleasure! my Pride! disdain not to grace my Labours with a kind Perusal. Suspend a-while your more momentous Cares, and condescend to taste this little Fricassee of Mine.

I write not this, to Bite you by the Ear, (i. e.) flatter you out of a Brace or two of Guinea’s: No; as I am a true Dumpling Eater, my Views are purely Epicurean, and my utmost Hopes center’d in partaking of some elegant Quelque Chose tost up by your judicious Hand. I regard Money but as a Ticket which admits me to your Delicate Entertainments; to me much more Agreeable than all the Monkey-Tricks of Rival Harlequins, or Puppet-Show Finery of Contending Theatres.

The Plague and fatigue of Dependance and Attendance, which call me so often to the Court-end of | the Town, were insupportable, but for the Relief I find at Austin’s, your Ingenious and Grateful Disciple, who has adorn’d New Bond-street with your Graceful Effigies. Nor can he fail of Custom who has hung out a Sign so Alluring to all true Dumpling-Eaters. Many a time and oft have I gaz’d with Pleasure on your Features, and trac’d in them the exact Lineaments of your glorious Ancestor Sir John Brand, vulgarly call’d Sir John Pudding.

Tho’ the Corruption of our English Orthography indulges some appearance of Distinction between Brand and Braund, yet in Effect they are one and the same thing. The ancient Manor of Brand’s, alias Braund’s, near Kilburn in Middlesex, was the very Manor-House of Sir John Brand, and is call’d Brand’s to this Day, altho’ at present it be in the Possession of the Family of Marsh.

What Honours are therefore due to One who is in a Direct Male Line, an Immediate Descendant from the Loins of that Great Man! Let this teach You to value your Self; this remind the World, how much they owe to the Family of the Braunds; more particularly to You, who inherit not only the Name, but the Virtues of your Illustrious Ancestor. I am,

SIR,

With all imaginable Esteem and Gratitude, Your very most Obedient Servant, &c.

Page 5. line 15, &c. for Barnes read Brand.

A

Learned Dissertation

ON

DUMPLING;

Its Dignity, Antiquity, &c.

he Dumpling-Eaters are a Race sprung partly from the old Epicurean, and partly from the Peripatetic Sect; they were brought first into Britain by Julius Cesar; and finding it a Land of Plenty, they wisely resolv’d never to go Home again. Their Doctrines are Amphibious, and compos’d Party per Pale of the two Sects before-mention’d; from the Peripatetics, they derive their Principle (2) of Walking, as a proper Method to digest a Meal, or create an Appetite; from the Epicureans, they maintain that all Pleasures are comprehended in good Eating and Drinking: And so readily were their Opinions embrac’d, that every Day produc’d many Proselytes; and their Numbers have from Age to Age increas’d prodigiously, insomuch that our whole Island is over-run with them, at present. Eating and Drinking are become so Customary among us that we seem to have entirely forgot, and laid aside the old Fashion of Fasting: Instead of having Wine sold at Apothecaries Shops, as formerly, every Street has two or three Taverns in it, least these Dumpling-Eaters should faint by the Way; nay, so

zealous are they in the Cause of Bacchus, that one of the Chief among ’em has made a Vow never to say his Prayers ’till he has a Tavern of his own in every Street in London, and in every Market-Town in England. What may we then in Time expect? Since by insensible Degrees, their Society is become so numerous and formidable, that they are without Number; other Bodies have their Meetings, but where can the Dumpling-Eaters assemble? what Place large enough to contain ’em! The Bank, India, and South-Sea Companies have their General Courts, the Free-Masons and the Gormogons their Chapters; nay, our Friends (3) B2 the Quakers have their Yearly Meetings. And who would imagine any of these should be Dumpling-Eaters? But thus it is, the Dumpling-Eating Doctrine has so far prevailed among ’em, that they eat not only Dumplings, but Puddings, and those in no small Quantities.

The Dumpling is indeed, of more antient Institution, and of Foreign Origin; but alas, what were those Dumplings? nothing but a few Lentils sodden together, moisten’d and cemented with a little seeth’d Fat, not much unlike our Gritt or Oatmeal Pudding; yet were they of such Esteem among the ancient Romans, that a Statue was erected to Fulvius Agricola, the first Inventor of these Lentil Dumplings. How unlike the Gratitude shewn by the Publick to our Modern Projectors!