Remaking the Self in John Dunton’s The Life and Errors of John Dunton (1705)

Melanie Ord

doi:10.1080/01440357.2018.1433966

Abstract

John Dunton (1659–1732) is a bookseller and writer best known today as a tireless self-promoter whose I-centred and experimental work contributed to the development of the novel and autobiography in the eighteenth century. This article is the first full-length study of his own autobiographical record, The Life and Errors of John Dunton (1705). Dunton the showman is in plentiful evidence in this text, but he also presents another, more sober and serious-minded version of the self by following accounts of earlier stages of his life with their reformed versions. His coupling of religious-led self-examination with a commitment to literary novelty makes The Life a most unusual form of spiritual autobiography in its early stages. Yet The Life is a composite text in an even more obvious sense than this. For around half-way through the text Dunton abandons his close focus on the self for hundreds of cursory character sketches of his contemporaries, and in doing so swaps spiritual considerations for indirect comments on his own social activities and commercial concerns. This article studies these two main, ostensibly opposed, sections of The Life – its autobiographical and biographical material – and suggests points of contact between them.

Highlights

It is well known that religion, in encouraging introspection, provided a key impetus to the growth of autobiography in the seventeenth century
The significance of this turning point is underscored by the fact that, at the time of writing, Dunton had recently turned 40: a landmark that may have prompted, and at least gives psychological plausibility to, this act of taking stock of his life
There are yet other key influences on what Dunton represents as his new-found religious conviction. He models himself in places on Sir Thomas Browne’s non-partisan form of spirituality, and signals his wish to be known by the non-denominational term “Christian” rather than, as hitherto, “Presbyterian.” He tells us, too, that he has in preparation a book called “The New Practice of Piety – Writ in Imitation of Dr Brown’s Religio Medici” (268). He follows John Bunyan’s archetypal Protestant spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), in detailing his inability as a youth to maintain a religious frame of mind