The History of Pompey the Little Or, Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog

272 Pages·2008·3.862 MB·English

by  Francis Coventry, Nicholas Hudson

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The hisTory of PomPey The LiTTLe;
or The Life and advenTures of
a LaP-dog
broadview editions
series editor: L.W. Conolly
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frontpiece of the first edition of The History of Pompey the Little,
courtesy of the Thomas fisher rare Books Library, university
of Toronto.
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The hisTory of PomPey The LiTTLe;
or The Life and advenTures of
a LaP-dog
francis Coventry
edited by
Nicholas Hudson
broadview editions
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© 2008 nicholas hudson
all rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Coventry, francis, 1725?-1759
The history of Pompey the little, or, The life and adventures of a lap-dog / francis
Coventry ; edited by nicholas hudson.
(Broadview editions)
includes bibliographical references.
isBn 978-1-55111-734-8
1. dogs—fiction. i. hudson, nicholas ii. Title. iii. Title: Life and adventures
of a lap-dog. iv. series.
Pr3369.C7h5 2008 823’.5 C2008-903386-8
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Contents
Acknowledgements  •  6
Introduction  •  7
Francis Coventry: A Brief Chronology  •  27
A Note on the Text  •  28
The history of Pompey the Little; or the Life and Adventures of a
Lap-Dog  •  31
appendix a: omitted section from Book II, Chapters VI-VII in the
Third Edition  •  216
appendix B: from anonymous, The Life and Adventures of a Cat
(1760)  •  221
appendix C: anonymous, An Essay on the New Species of Writing
Founded by Mr. Fielding (1751)  •  231
Appendix D: Poems by Francis Coventry  •  252
1. Penshurst (1750)  •  252
2. “To the hon. Wilmot vaughan, esq. in Wales” (1755)  •  262
Appendix E: Eighteenth-Century Discussions of Animals  •  265
1. Pierre Bayle, “rorarius,” from The Dictionary Historical and
Critical (1696)  •  265
2. samuel Johnson, The Idler, no. 24 (1758)  •  267
3. from anonymous, A Dissertation on Mr. Hogarth’s ... The
Four Stages of Cruelty (1751)  •  268
Select Bibliography  •  272
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Acknowledgements
many thanks to friends and colleagues who provided encourage-
ment and information towards the completion of this edition. These
include derek Carr, Brian Cowan, alex dick, rick gooding,
alex hudson, Tina Lupton, greg morgan, Claude rawson, Peter
sabor, and mark vessey. many thanks to Colleen franklin for her
skilful and knowledgeable copy-editing of the typescript. my cat
hodge, who couldn’t care less whether this book was published,
nonetheless provided inspiration. This edition is dedicated to my
wife deb, who contributed happiness.
6 acknowledgements
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Introduction
Francis Coventry
What little we know of the short life of francis Coventry (1725-54)
suggests a man of high ambition and thwarted potential: he came
from a good family, the son of a Buckinghamshire merchant and
the daughter of a clergyman. his father appears to have been
comfortable but not prosperous. he sent francis to eton College,
a school designed to fashion gentlemen and the english elite, and
later magdelene College, Cambridge, though only as a “pensioner”
rather than as a more privileged “fellow-commoner.”1 in Pompey
the Little, Coventry reflects rather bitterly on the fawning of
college tutors on these fellow-commoners, “who are heirs to great
estates” (194).2 But he did inherit noble blood from his father: the
elder Coventry was the younger brother of William, fifth earl of
Coventry. The Coventry family had an illustrious history in english
court and political life dating back to the fifteenth century.
Coventry’s noble ancestry seems to have exerted an important
influence on his view of the world. Pompey the Little, whatever its
virtues, is a novel of haughty snobbery. he viewed servants with
disdain, calling “the lower sort of men-servants ... the most inso-
lent, brutal, ungenerous rascals on the face of the earth” (62–63).
he treats the poor in general with disgust at their vulgarity and
dirtiness. Book one, chapter nine, contains a remarkably vicious
portrait of a rich merchant’s son and his family, suggesting that he
valued his father’s noble links rather more than his profession. in
contrast, Coventry seems at home in the world of the aristocracy,
which he criticizes for its idleness and decadence, but whose accents
and lifestyle he represents in knowing detail. in 1750, he published a
poem, Penshurst, dedicated to William Perry, heir by marriage to the
1 at Cambridge in the eighteenth century, fellow-commoners were undergraduates
of high rank or wealthy family permitted for this reason to join the college fellows
at meals and other occasions. a “pensioner,” or undergraduate of modest rank, was
not permitted such privileges. he was nonetheless of a higher rank than the “sizars,”
whose fees were paid by the college but had to wait on the fellows and the other
undergraduates.
2 all parenthetical references in the introduction are to the present edition.
the history of pompey the little 
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elizabethan poet sir Philip sidney’s celebrated country estate. The
poem, which shows Coventry sauntering with admiration around
the estate, is filled with gleaming tributes to the sidney family and
the noble heroes of english history. he later wrote a poem praising
Wilmot vaughan, the future earl of Lisburne. There is also evidence
that Coventry moved, at least peripherally, in high circles in fash-
ionable London society: Lady mary Wortley montagu, the leading
literary lady of her day, claimed to recognize herself in the character
of mrs. Qualmsick, along with “many others of my acquaintance.”1
This habit of privilege probably contributed to his anxiety about the
loss of dignity in english life which underlies Pompey the Little, and
which will be discussed later in this introduction.
Coventry’s own life, rather like Pompey’s, proceeded with
perhaps rather less dignity than he had hoped. he entered
Cambridge very late by eighteenth-century standards—he was
over twenty—and he would not receive his m.a. until six years
later, in 1752. in 1751, having been ordained an anglican priest,
his uncle the earl of Coventry presented him with a parish in
edgware, middlesex, but it was a small church and one wonders
what francis was doing with himself. his poem Penshurst bore
signs of his literary and social ambition, and even of some talent,
but it was a slight production in the crowded literary marketplace
of the time. Then, very early in 1751, came Pompey the Little,
which the poet Thomas gray, who knew Coventry at Cambridge,
said was a “hasty production.”2 Coventry published the novel
anonymously, without a dedication, and there is evidence in the
novel to suggest that he regarded it as an undignified trifle for a
learned young man with a genteel pedigree. he must, therefore,
have been pleasantly surprised by the favorable notice it received.
his probable acquaintance, Lady mary, read it at one sitting
and called it “a real and exact representation of Life as it is now
acted in London.”3 John Cleland, though he must have noticed
1 The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. robert halsband, 3 vols.
(oxford: Clarendon, 1965-67), 3:4.
2 Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Thomas Gray, Richard West, and Thomas Ashton,
ed. W.s. Lewis, g.L. Lam, and C.h. Bennett, 2 vols. (London: oxford uP geoffrey
Cumberlege, 1948), 2:48.
3 Complete Letters, 3:4.
8 introduction
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that Coventry twice sneers at his pornographic novel, Memoirs of
a Lady of Pleasure (1748), applauded the author’s “great humour,
fancy, and wit” in the Monthly Review.1 The novel was quickly
reprinted by its prestigious bookseller, robert dodsley, who
then gave Coventry what was a tidy sum in eighteenth-century
terms, thirty pounds, to revise the novel as he saw fit. This was
a task that Coventry undertook with more anxiety for fame than
with wisdom. he added a fawning dedication to the novelist he
particularly admired and emulated, henry fielding, who also had
noble blood and a background at eton. But Coventry also slashed
and added to the novel to make it more ribald and marketable,
more in the style of his racy contemporary Tobias smollett than of
the comparatively polite fielding. Pompey the Little represented the
high-point of Coventry’s short life. he subsequently fell back into
obscurity, wrote a rather despairing poem addressed to his friend
Wilmot vaughan, and died, like many of his characters, in the
bloom of life, aged twenty-nine, reportedly of smallpox. he was
buried in January 1754; no memorial or headstone survives.
PoMPEy THE LITTLE and The eighTeenTh-
CenTury noveL
from his opening pages to his conclusion, Coventry seems
painfully self-conscious that he has written a “little piece” (35)
about a subject, “little Pompey” (44), whose physical smallness
is matched by his moral unimportance. in Coventry’s own
estimation, Pompey is a slight production in a genre, the “novel,”
that his readers will contemptuously dismiss as degrading “the
dignity of their understandings” (32). But the modern reader is
likely to feel that Coventry has underestimated the interest and
importance of Pompey the Little on several levels. Certainly the
novel no longer suffers under the stigma of being an artistically
“low” and undignified literary genre. and in the long history
that led to the current status of the novel as the most popular
and even the most prestigious genre, Coventry’s book has an
1 The Monthly Review, 4: 316-17.
the history of pompey the little 
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interesting place: it is the first so-called “it-narrative,” a short-
lived movement of novels that utilize non-human points-of-
view. This fashion for “its” both facilitated certain narrative aims
and reflects significant features of eighteenth-century British
society at an important juncture of expanding capitalism. finally,
Coventry’s use of a dog as his “hero” opens up a series of questions
about the status of heroism in mid-eighteenth-century literature,
the nature of property and commercial exchange in a consumer
culture, and the philosophical characteristics of human beings in
relation to animals.
That the novel was considered such an unworthy literary genre
in the early 1750s might well surprise us. But it is important to
keep in mind that the novel form was still in its early years of
development. The very term “novel” was still only rarely used in
its modern sense—Coventry actually being one of the first writers
to use this word regularly in a modern sense. Previously, “novel”
was used almost interchangeably with “romance” to mean fiction
dominated by improbable and even miraculous events distant
from the more mundane realities of common life. a standard
assumption in modern scholarship, pioneered by ian Watt in The
Rise of the Novel (1956), locates the birth of the true “novel” in
the fiction of daniel defoe and samuel richardson. in novels
like Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1721), Pamela (1740),
and Clarissa (1746-7), it is said, defoe and richardson introduced
a new “realism” characterized not only by the nature of events
treated—these works dramatize the lives of ordinary eighteenth-
century people—but also by a new detail in the treatment of
time, place, and character. The romance typically concerned the
adventures of stock characters such as noble princes and beautiful
virgins in some vaguely described land over a undetermined span
of time. robinson Crusoe or Clarissa harlowe, on the other
hand, are fully rounded individuals who act in detailed settings
and within a precise time-frame. it is interesting, therefore, that
Coventry seems to credit the “rise of the novel” not to defoe
and richardson, whom he never mentions, but rather to a third
writer whom Watt and others have routinely excluded from
the main line of this literary evolution—henry fielding. in a
pamphlet sometimes ascribed to Coventry, An Essay on the New
10 introduction
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