قراءة كتاب The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1
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The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1
The texts cited use a variety of long and short dashes, generally with no relationship to the number of letters omitted. For this e-text, short dashes are separated, while longer dashes are connected:
D---n Molley H——ns for her Pride.
The Augustan Reprint Society
THE
MERRY-THOUGHT:
OR, THE
Glass-Window and Bog-House
MISCELLANY.
Part I
(1731)
Introduction by
George R. Guffey
Publication Number 216
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles
1982
GENERAL EDITOR
David Stuart Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles
EDITORS
Charles L. Batten, University of California, Los Angeles
George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles
Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
Thomas Wright, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
ADVISORY EDITORS
Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia
William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
Earl Miner, Princeton University
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
James Sutherland, University College, London
Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY
Beverly J. Onley, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Frances M. Reed, University of California, Los Angeles
INTRODUCTION
For modern readers, one of the most intriguing scenes in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) occurs during the courtship of Moll by the man who is to become her third husband. Aware that the eligible men of her day have little interest in prospective wives with small or nonexistent fortunes, Moll slyly devises a plan to keep her relative poverty a secret from the charming and (as she has every reason to believe) wealthy plantation owner who has fallen in love with her. To divert attention from her own financial condition, she repeatedly suggests that he has been courting her only for her money. Again and again he protests his love. Over and over she pretends to doubt his sincerity.
After a series of exhausting confrontations, Moll's lover begins what is to us a novel kind of dialogue:
One morning he pulls off his diamond ring and writes upon the glass of the sash in my chamber this line:
You I love and you alone.
I read it and asked him to lend me the ring, with which I wrote under it thus:
And so in love says every one.
He takes his ring again and writes another line thus:
Virtue alone is an estate.
I borrowed it again, and I wrote under it:
But money's virtue, gold is fate.1
After a number of additional thrusts and counterthrusts of this sort, Moll and her lover come to terms and are married.
The latter half of the twentieth century has seen a steady growth of serious scholarly interest in graffiti. Sociologists, psychologists, and historians have increasingly turned to the impromptu "scratchings" of both the educated and the uneducated as indicators of the general mental health and political stability of specific populations.2 Although most of us are familiar with at least a few of these studies and all of us have observed numerous examples of this species of writing on the walls of our cities and the rocks of our national parks, we are not likely, before encountering this scene in Moll Flanders, to have ever before come into contact with graffiti produced with such an elegant writing implement.
Glass being fragile and diamonds being relatively rare, it is not surprising that few examples of graffiti produced by the method employed by Moll and her lover are known to us today. Interestingly enough, we do, however, have available to us a variety of Renaissance and eighteenth-century written materials suggesting that the practice of using a diamond to write ephemeral statements on window glass was far less rare in those periods than we might expect. Holinshed, for example, tells us that in 1558 when Elizabeth was released from imprisonment at Woodstock, she taunted her enemies by writing
these verses with hir diamond in a glasse window verie legiblie as here followeth:
Much suspected by me,
Nothing prooued can be:
Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.3
And in John Donne's "A Valediction: of my Name in the Window," we find two lovers in a situation reminiscent of that of the scene I previously quoted from Moll Flanders. Using a diamond, the poet, before beginning an extended journey, scratches his name on a window pane in the house of his mistress. Here is the first stanza of the poem:
My name engrav'd herein,
Doth contribute my firmnesse to this glasse,
Which, ever since that charme, hath beene
As hard, as that which grav'd it, was;
Thine eyes will give it price enough, to mock
The diamonds of either rock.4
While he is absent, the characters he has cut in the glass will, the poet hopes, magically defend his mistress against the seductive entreaties of his rivals.
In 1711 in a satiric letter to The Spectator, John