From Essayist to Author: Roger North and Evolving Narrative Forms

Abstract

One of the most recent and full accounts of the late seventeenth-century moral essay is by J. Paul Hunter in his Before Novels.1 Hunter regards the essay as precursor to the eighteenth-century flourishing of the novel and notes that its major contribution to this genre is its didacticism. This study of the essay takes its starting point from Hunter's perception of the link between the essay and the novel, but takes account also of other, common, aspects of each. Beside Hunter's focus on the successors of the late seventeenth- century 'guide' literature we need to consider the essay's origins: in the work of Montaigne and what the English development of the Montaignean essay contributes to larger narrative forms. Hunter's focus is on 'guide' literature in print publication, and he convincingly shows how the didactic purpose of this literature found a new medium in the novel. Nevertheless, the seventeenth-century essay takes a multitude of forms, is not only a print genre, and has purposes besides didacticism. Perhaps one reason for its comparative neglect by scholars is that those essays written for manuscript circulation lie uneasily in the world of print culture and print is, often anachronistically, imposed as a model for all seriously intentioned literature.2 A print culture both creates and reflects its own audience, and at the same time sets genre firmly within boundaries, giving its authors a certain role within those boundaries. A manuscript culture, such as that which survives throughout the seventeenth century (although alongside a burgeoning print culture), had different restrictions, particularly in the case of the dissemination of texts.3 In the case of the manuscript essay, people wrote for all sorts of purposes, and often for dissemination among a very small group. The seventeenth-century manuscript essay retains throughout its period of popularity an awareness of its origin in the French meaning of the word: literally an essai, an attempt, not a treatise.None of Roger North's moral essays was printed in his lifetime but several, perhaps many, were intended for circulation - primarily among his family members but possibly also among close friends.4 By focusing on the more informal, manuscript, essays of North I wish to show how many elements of this eclectic genre contributed not only, as Hunter has claimed, to the content and purpose of later novels, but may have, more generally, influenced evolving narrative forms - as they did in North's own case.North's own purposes in his prolific writing were several, and different at different times. He rarely wrote, however, for print publication, and when he did, he did not reveal his own name. The idea of being an 'author' was something he specifically wished to avoid. In his Preface, as translator, to Pierre de Villiers's Reflections on our Common Failings (1701), he wrote: 'Men of Families and Affairs may, at subsecive hours, and out of generosity Translate, whose daily Imployments are above the drudgery of Composing; for that will not bear intermissions, and is therefore more proper for meer Scholars, State-Fugitives, or idle Companions, whose fortune it is, to be no otherwise imployed' (Sig. A9v).5 North speaks here for many of his contemporaries who neither necessarily, nor usually, regarded themselves as published or professional writers - what North himself often termed 'formal' writers. For instance, when he sent a copy, with his own annotations, of Francois de Prendcourt's instruction books for the harpsichord and thorough bass to a friend, he satirised Prendcourt's pretensions: 'Here is a very thin composition, and yet the garb and livery of an author, so much hath he of chaptering, articling, firsting and seconding, as if he had amassed together and digested the whole materia musica.'6North perceived Prendcourt's 'formality' as pomposity, partly because his subject-matter was so slight. He also saw the name of author as making claims to a certain style, to fixed genres. …