Hermsprong: or, Man as he is Not

388 Pages·2002·1.369 MB·English

by  Robert Bage, Pamela Perkins

HER-FRON.QXD 1/11/2002 8:41 AM Page 1
This electronic material is under
copyright protection and is
provided to a single recipient
for review purposes only.
HERMSPRONG
MEMOIRSOFMODERNPHILOSOPHERS 1
HER-FRON.QXD 1/11/2002 8:41 AM Page 2
Review Copy
HER-FRON.QXD 1/11/2002 8:41 AM Page 3
Review Copy
HERMSPRONG;
or MAN AS HE IS NOT
ROBERT BAGE
edited by Pamela Perkins
broadview literary texts
HER-FRON.QXD 1/11/2002 8:41 AM Page 4
Review Copy
©2002 Pamela Perkins
All rights reserved.The use of any part of this publication reproduced,trans-
mitted in any form or by any means,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,
recording,or otherwise,or stored in a retrieval system,without prior written
consent of the publisher — or in the case of photocopying,a licence from
CANCOPY(Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency) One Yonge Street,Suite
1900,Toronto,Ontario M5E 1E5 — is an infringement of the copyright law.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bage,Robert,1728-1801
Hermsprong;or,Man as he is not
(Broadview literary texts)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-55111-279-5
I.Perkins,Pamela Ann. II.Title. III.Title:Man as he is not.
IV.Series.
PR4049.B5H4 2002 823’.6 C2001-903863-1
Broadview Press Ltd.is an independent,international publishing house,incor-
porated in 1985
North America
Post Office Box 1243,Peterborough,Ontario,Canada K9J 7H5
3576 California Road,Orchard Park,NY 14127
Tel:[phone];Fax:[phone];
e-mail:[email protected]
United Kingdom:
Thomas Lyster,Ltd.,
Unit 9,Ormskirk Industrial Park,Old Boundary Way,Burscough Rd,
Ormskirk,Lancashire L39 2YW Tel:[phone];Fax:[phone];
E-Mail:[email protected]
Australia:
St.Clair Press,P.O.Box 287,Rozelle,NSW 2039
Tel:[phone];Fax:[phone]
www.broadviewpress.com
Broadview Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program,Ministry of Canadian Heritage,
Government of Canada.
Typesetting and assembly:True to Type Inc.,Mississauga,Canada.
PRINTED IN CANADA
HER-FRON.QXD 1/11/2002 8:41 AM Page 5
Review Copy
Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction 9
Robert Bage:A Brief Chronology 49
A Note on the Text 51
Hermsprong 53
Appendix A:Bage’s Life
1. William Godwin,from a letter to Mary Wollstonecraft,15 June,
1797 341
2. From William Hutton,“Memoirs of Mr.Bage,”The Monthly
Magazine (Jan.1802) 342
Appendix B:Bage’s Fiction
1. Monthly Review on Bage’s early fiction
1. a.Mount Henneth 345
1. b.Barham Downs 347
1. c.The Fair Syrian 348
1. d.James Wallace 352
1. e.Man as he Is 355
2. Selected responses to Hermsprong
1. a.William Taylor 360
1. b.Mary Wollstonecraft 361
1. c.The British Critic 362
1. d.The Critical Review 362
1. e. Anna Laetitia Barbauld 362
1. f. Sir Walter Scott 363
3. Robert Bage on novel-writing
1. a.Preface to Mount Henneth 364
1. b.Preface to Man as he Is 366
Appendix C:America and Eighteenth-Century Literature
1. Europeans observing Americans
1. a.From Pierre de Charlevoix,Journal of a Voyage to North-America
(London,1761) 369
1. b.From Benjamin Franklin,“Remarks concerning the Savages of
North America”(London,1793) 370
1. c.From John Shebbeare,Lydia,or Filial Duty(London,1755) 372
HER-FRON.QXD 1/11/2002 8:41 AM Page 6
Review Copy
1. d.From William Smith,An Historical Account of the Expedition
against the Ohio Indians (Philadelphia,1765) 373
2. “Americans”observing Europeans
1. a.From Baron de Lahontan,New Voyages to North America
(1703) 375
1. b.From Joseph Addison,The Spectator (April 27,1711) 377
1. c.From Voltaire,L’Ingenu;or,the Sincere Huron:A True
History (London,1768) 377
3. Eighteenth-Century Michillimackinac
1. a.From Pierre de Charlevoix,Journal of a Voyage to North-America
(London,1761) 380
1. b.From John Long,Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter
and Trader (London,1791) 381
1. c.From Alexander Henry,Travels and Adventures in Canada and
the Indian Territories (1809) 383
1. d.From Jonathan Carver,Travels through the Interior Parts of
North America (London,1778) 384
Select Bibliography 385
6 CONTENTS
HER-FRON.QXD 1/11/2002 8:41 AM Page 7
Review Copy
Acknowledgements
In preparing this edition, I have consulted earlier editions of
Hermsprongby Stuart Tave and Peter Faulkner;I have learned a great
deal from their scholarship,and I would like to acknowledge a gen-
eral debt to their work in addition to the specific debts that I have
noted in the introduction and the text of the novel.I am also grate-
ful to the Birmingham Public Library for arranging to have Bage’s
letters to William Hutton microfilmed for me and for allowing me
to quote from them.Finally,I would like to thank George Toles and
Cliff Eyland for reading and commenting on a draft of the intro-
duction and Lea Stirling for her help with the translation of the
Latin epigraph.
HERMSPRONG 7
HER-FRON.QXD 1/11/2002 8:41 AM Page 8
Review Copy
8 INTRODUCTION
HER-FRON.QXD 1/11/2002 8:41 AM Page 9
Review Copy
Introduction
Hermsprong is “a very ugly name,”a young woman says dubiously
after first meeting the eponymous hero of Robert Bage’s 1796
novel (89);other characters agree,mangling the pronunciation and
forming dark suspicions about the mysterious origins and inten-
tions of the outspoken,intensely radical,and oddly-named young
man who suddenly appears in their Cornish village.Readers today,
hearing the title of the novel, are likely to find the name just as
strange and off-putting as do Bage’s characters,as Hermsprongis not
a book that has ever received much attention.That neglect might
initially seem easy enough to understand.A novel defending the
new, radical philosophies of 1790s England, by an author whose
other books are even more obscure,might not,after all,appear to
have much to offer readers more than two centuries later.Yet how-
ever much it has tended to be overlooked,Hermsprongcontinues to
charm many of those who do read it,and for reasons that might not
be expected of a book that focuses on two-hundred-year-old polit-
ical controversies. Peter Faulkner, who edited the novel in the
1980s,called it “one of the liveliest and most entertaining political
novels in English” (vii); Stuart Tave, another of Bage’s very few
twentieth-century editors,praises the book’s “active play of mind,
and its likable and equable manner”(12).Lively,entertaining,lik-
able,and equable — these are adjectives that might not immediate-
ly spring to mind when one thinks of political fiction,but they are
entirely appropriate to Hermsprong,a book that focuses as much on
the pleasures offered by clever,witty debate as it does on the ideas
developed in such conversation.Indeed,Bage not only presents his
ideas with wit and tolerant good-humour,but suggests that these
are the deeper values underlying his characters’ calls for specific
reforms.While the details of 1790s politics might not be a matter
of pressing interest to most twenty-first century readers, what
Hermsprong offers is more than a program for late-eighteenth-
century reformers; more generally, it suggests that wit, tolerance,
and the free play of intelligence are not merely tools for political
change, but the human qualities that any political system worth
endorsing must foster.
Good-humoured tolerance is not,perhaps,the first quality one
thinks of in connection with political reformers of any sort,then or
now, and a brief overview of Bage’s life around the time that
Hermsprongwas written might lead one to expect to find more anger
HERMSPRONG 9
HER-FRON.QXD 1/11/2002 8:41 AM Page 10
Review Copy
than humour in the novel.The 1790s were not an easy time for
Bage,a provincial paper manufacturer who had earned a moderate-
ly comfortable living from his business on the outskirts of Birming-
ham since the 1750s.He had suffered serious financial losses in the
late 1770s,and by the mid 90s,when he was in his late sixties,his
livelihood seemed threatened again by rising wages,rising costs,and
falling profits.1 Nor were his troubles limited to business. His
youngest son had died in 1793,a loss that apparently contributed to
his decision to move from the tiny village where he had spent his
entire adult life to the nearby town of Tamworth.His strongly-held
political views were increasingly unfashionable, even dangerous;
Bage’s long-time friend and business associate, William Hutton
(1723-1815),had lost property to looting and fire in the Birming-
ham Church-and-King riots of July 1791, and matters did not
improve much in the following years.Shortly after the riots,Bage
wrote that “in every company I have had the misfortune to go into,
my ears have been insulted with the bigotry of fifty years back;”2
later,in a 1793 letter to Hutton,he reported bitterly that “I abstain
from all society,because respect for my moral principles is scarce suf-
ficient to preserve me from insult on account of my political —”
(106).His uneasiness about speaking his mind seems justified,as in
1796,two speakers from the radical London Corresponding Society
were arrested and put on trial in Birmingham after holding a pub-
lic meeting to call for annual Parliaments and universal suffrage.3
Under such circumstances, it would not be surprising to find in
Hermsprong something along the lines of the bleak view of society
provided by Bage’s younger contemporary William Godwin (1756-
1836) in his extravagantly pessimistic Caleb Williams (1794),one of
the most influential political novels of the era.Yet as critical as it is
of existing British society,Hermsprongdiffers from the work of God-
1 Bage had invested in some ironworks which had gone bankrupt;he
alludes to this loss in the preface of Mount Henneth,his first novel.For a
more detailed discussion of this episode,see Hutton (Appendix A) and
Faulkner,Robert Bage,18.
2 Robert Bage’s letters are owned by the Birmingham City Archives,in the
Birmingham Central Library (catalogued as Robert Bage’s Letter Book
486802 IIR 29),and are quoted by permission;this quotation appears on
page 76 of the manuscript.All further citations from the letters will refer
to this manuscript and will be by page number in the body of the text.
3 The activities of the Society in Birmingham are recorded in Mary Thale’s
Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society.
10 INTRODUCTION