The Crying of Lost Things

Abstract

By means of gesture, or of deputy or direct speech, things have their say in the eighteenth century. Whether these speaking objects are animate, such as Laurence Sterne’s ass, Gulliver’s horses and Sir William Temple’s parrot; or whether they are ingenious mechanisms such as Professor Faber’s Euphonia or Erasmus Darwin’s talking head; or merely inert, such as the feathers, slippers, pins, and coins whose autobiographies are so prolific in this period, they all claim to possess in some degree the attributes of reason, speech, and soul that human beings have reserved (and still reserve) as peculiarly their own. The speech of the nonhuman may arise from sympathetic identification, from the manipulation of hidden levers, from metempsychosis, or from what Michel de Certeau calls an event in the throat. Generically it draws upon animal fables and tales of metamorphosis and overlaps with what is now known as the itnarrative. I’m going to suggest that another source of nonhuman language is to be found in advertisements, specifically advertisements for lost property. Furthermore I want to claim that under certain circumstances the rhetoric of crying lost things, and of lost things crying, is imitated by humans calling for their kind: Lucy Lockit and Polly Peachum, for example, when in The Beggar’s Opera they advertise the loss of Macheath; or Moll Flanders when she cries the loss of herself.