Hieroglyphic State Machine

Abstract

On Saturday, 26 June 1702, William Fuller lost his left eye. It was his second day in the pillory. The morning before, he had spent two hours on display at Charing Cross, his head and hands securely fastened between locking wooden boards. He had been “sadly abused” by the Friday crowd, he claimed. But the Saturday crowd at Temple Bar would prove far worse. “I was stifled with all manner of Dirt, Filth, and rotten Eggs,” Fuller later recalled, “and my Left Eye was so bruised with a Stone flung, that it swelled out of my Head immediately.” The blow knocked Fuller unconscious, and he “hung by the Neck” for nearly an hour before he was eventually dragged from the stocks. “I was a miserable Object to behold, and hardly any that saw me thought it possible for me to survive,” he wrote, “all over bruised from Head to Heel; and on the small of my Back, as I stood stooping, a Stone struck me, which being taken up, was found to weigh more than six Pounds.” There was to be no respite. On the following Monday, he would be returned to the pillory for his third and final stint before being transferred to Bridewell, where thirty-nine lashes and two months hard labor awaited.1What was Fuller's crime? Or perhaps, more accurately, his crimes, for there were many. Fuller was variously a notorious debtor, fraudster, perjurer, and quondam Jacobite courier. But on this occasion, he knew precisely why he found himself in the pillory: “I stand here for writing and publishing two Books” (108). More specifically, Fuller had been convicted under the old English common law of seditious libel. Definitions of seditious libel were always fluid, encompassing any act of writing that tended toward insurrection against the state. On a practical level, this meant that seditious libel could be whatever the attorney general and his judges wanted it to be. For this offense, the pillory was the chief punishment in an arsenal that included imprisonment, fines, and the lash. In recent decades, there has perhaps been a tendency to underestimate the potential brutality of this form of corporal punishment. As Fuller's experience vividly attests, though, the pillory could leave its victims maimed, disfigured, or dead. Another potentially more disturbing aspect of punishment by the pillory was its unpredictability. In the summer of 1702, Fuller lost an eye. One year later, when pilloried for his seditious pamphlet The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters, Daniel Defoe was famously greeted by a sympathetic crowd who “hallow'd him down from his Wooden Punishment, as if he had been a Cicero that had made an Excellent Oration in it, rather than a Cataline that was Expos'd and Declaim'd against There.”2 Part of the terror of the pillory was that it left one exposed to a capricious and volatile mob that could as easily prove friend as foe.In his wonderful new book, Poetics of the Pillory, based on his 2014 Clarendon Lectures at the University of Oxford, Thomas Keymer explores the imaginative pull of what Defoe called that “Hi'roglyphick State Machin, / Contriv'd to Punish Fancy in.”3 At its core, this book chronicles how, during an era conventionally associated with the liberation of the press and the emergence of free expression, the shadow of the pillory continued to loom over writers who dared to challenge the authority of the state. The arguments of the book may be stated easily enough. On the one hand, Keymer wants to argue a “historical case about the persistence and residual power of censorship, even while we can see it as on the wane” (21). Running alongside this historical case is a literary argument: that the pressures of censorship forced writers to “cultivate complex literary strategies of indirection, or even on occasion misdirection, in order to communicate dissident meaning while also rendering it deniable” (22). To say that Keymer succeeds in both aims would be true, but would understate what he actually accomplishes. As an essay in both literary criticism and cultural history, Poetics of the Pillory is of the very highest tier: a work of uncommon rhetorical force, expository power, and unwavering clarity.The book itself is divided into four substantial chapters, each based on one of the four original lectures, and each grounded in one or two authorial case studies. The opening chapter examines the poetry of Dryden and the vacillations of the Restoration censorship regime; the second chapter explores the writings of Pope and Defoe in the early eighteenth century, focusing on the vexed question of royal succession; the third chapter looks in detail at the interventions of Fielding and Johnson and at how they linked the seemingly distant worlds of surreptitious libeling and the literary marketplace; the fourth chapter surveys the prosecution of authors during the Romantic era, focusing on Robert Southey and his early incendiary play Wat Tyler, dug up by his enemies in 1817 to discredit him in his role as Poet Laureate; a coda follows the story as far as Shelley and his brazen assault against the villains of Peterloo. Along the way we encounter a seemingly boundless cast of variously ingenious and unfortunate libelers, ranging from the belligerent to the moronic. It may perhaps be alleged that these lesser figures merely form a vibrant tapestry that serves as a backdrop to the more substantial case studies. And yet I think one of the many virtues of this book is Keymer's ability to weave together the luminaries of the literary canon with the unwashed dunces of Grub Street, to illustrate commonalities in how writers across the ideological spectrum and from all backgrounds avoided the threat of state retribution.From this quick overview it will become apparent that Keymer is making a distinct intervention in three core areas. First, he complicates the standard narrative of burgeoning press freedom after the lapse of the Printing Act in 1695, routinely trotted out as a key date in histories of the “Enlightenment” in England. The story goes something like this: a free press led to the free circulation of ideas, which led in turn to political, philosophical, and scientific progress. Against such generic pieties Keymer marshals huge quantities of archival and textual evidence, without ever succumbing to the fanciful delusions of Foucault and his disciples. Far from being the iron glove of an omniscient state, Keymer shows that retribution against Opposition writers was ad hoc, arbitrary, and often “alarmingly unpredictable” (23), much like treatment in the pillory itself. There was no coherent system of censorship in eighteenth-century England. There were only the whims of individual state functionaries, who doled out legal and extralegal vengeance in accordance with their own caprice.The second issue for Keymer is literary technique. The pillory was a hungry beast. For writers seeking to elude its maw, there were two options. Either one could protect one's identity by deploying the cloak-and-dagger techniques familiar in the underground book trade: depositing a manuscript with a printer by dead drop or through a masked intermediary. Or alternatively, one could include enough indirection, innuendo, and ambiguity that no uniform meaning or message could possibly be pinned down in the courtroom. Shaftesbury summed up this link between irony and equivocation at the start of the century: “If men are forbid to speak their Minds seriously, on certain Subjects, they will do it ironically.”4 In practice, of course, irony did little to protect an author against charges of sedition, and nothing whatsoever to protect against the hired thugs whom a secretary of state might quietly send to rough up a particularly troublesome writer in the middle of the night.Nonetheless, as Keymer outlines here, a calculated evasion came to dominate certain kinds of political writing in the eighteenth century, not in the gutter press, perhaps, but in the panegyrics, satires, and plays that might today be described as literary. It could be as simple as writing “Nero” where one meant “King George,” a technique that Dryden memorably termed “Scourg[ing] by Proxy.”5 It could be a more complex system of allusion and inference such as Pope and Defoe deployed in their respective “allegoric histories” (148) of Britain under the Stuart dynasty, Windsor-Forest and Robinson Crusoe. In its essentials, this mode of reading will be nothing new to scholars familiar with Annabel Patterson's classic Censorship and Interpretation (1984). In Patterson's telling, the obscurity and difficulty that we now associate with literary writing evolved during the seventeenth century as a means of dodging government censure, a technique that she called “functional ambiguity.”6 Seldom has the case for this mode of evasive political writing been set out with such subtlety or chronological sweep as in Poetics of the Pillory, which traces the story from the English Civil Wars beyond the French Revolution, modifying and refining Patterson's paradigm along the way.Here Keymer makes his third intervention, in the history of reading. Sophisticated writing demanded equally sophisticated readers. Borrowing a phrase from the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, Keymer diagnoses an eighteenth-century “hermeneutics of suspicion” in which readers were expected to unmask “criminal subtexts in which the author's own complicity is deeply knowing” (25). Eighteenth-century readers became suspicious of surface meaning, alert to seditious implications that could lie latent in texts, dormant until awoken by the reader. As Defoe himself jokingly protested in the preface to his satirical poem The Dyet of Poland in 1705, if his readers discovered seditious implications in his text, then “the Action of Slander lyes against you, and not the Author. In the Writing ’tis a Poem, you, in the Reading turn it into a Libel, and you merit Punishment for the Metamorphosis.”7 Under these circumstances, authors might reasonably expect readers of different political outlooks to draw divergent meanings from their texts. And while some adversarial Whigs such as John Dennis were hyper-attuned to the Jacobite dog whistle, liable to be set barking by even the most innocuous of texts, there can be little doubt that authors such as Pope expected their friends in the Jacobite underworld to discover local seditious meanings in otherwise seemingly innocent poetry.A key exercise for Keymer is therefore unlocking those latent local meanings. In some virtuosic acts of literary decoding, he discovers new political nuances in works that have been combed over by generations of literary critics: Dryden's elegies, Johnson's London, Fielding's journalism and drama. It is perhaps far-fetched to expect the average eighteenth-century reader to have been so acutely sensitive to the subtleties of form and allusion and genre. Instead, what Keymer captures, through capacious historical contextualization and his technical mastery as a close reader, is something closer to what an inside circle of cognoscenti may have encountered when reading those texts for the second or third time. As a fellow literary scholar, I find that much of the pleasure of this book comes from watching Keymer at work, riddling out the hints and winks and nudges that slip past the unsuspecting reader.Poetics of the Pillory covers much ground, then, and in more depth than might be expected from such a concise book. An obvious question remains. Where next? One potentially fertile area for further exploration must surely be the methods used by printers and publishers to evade the pillory. Throughout, Keymer notes that book-trade professionals bore more than their fair share of government retribution, not least because it was usually easier to apprehend a printer than an author. Indeed, in his introduction he yokes together the “literary techniques of functional ambiguity” with “clandestine presses and decoy imprints” as twin “strategies of circumvention” (22–23), the one favored by authors, and the other by printers. And yet Keymer has very little to say about the methods of bibliographical dissimilation devised by printers, many of them equal in ingenuity to the methods of rhetorical dissimulation devised by authors. Just as those rhetorical methods prompted a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in eighteenth-century readers, might not the bibliographical methods have prompted a similar attitude toward books as physical objects? I suggest this as an avenue for future research not merely because it corresponds to my own current monograph project on the underground book trade in eighteenth-century England, and how clandestine publications prompted bibliographical skepticism in the reading public, but also because Keymer's monograph presents an opportunity for historically minded literary critics to reconsider the link between textual content and physical form. The only reason seditious libels got printed was because certain printers thought the risk would be worth the reward. That calculus seems worthy of further attention.Revising a series of lectures into the form of a monograph is a difficult business. The qualities of a good lecture are not necessarily those of a good book. In transformation for the page, Keymer's Clarendon Lectures have lost none of their original verve or spark, and have gained much by the application of layer upon layer of archival sleuthing and historical contextualization. Poetics of the Pillory is an engaging and informative book. Read it.