Printing like a post-colonialist: The Irish piracy of Sir Charles Grandison

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2000 by Temple, Kathryn

A postcolonial reading is not one that inscribes the temporal and spatial distance between metropolis and colony but one that reinstitutes their mutual imbrication at that moment of rupture (decolonization), when they were supposed to have been finally separated.

-Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness

Every generation gets the pirates it deserves.

-Janice Thomson, quoting Robert I. Burns, 1999

During the London printing of Samuel Richardson's influential The History of Sir Charles Grandison, the novel was pirated by the Irish. In August of 1753, a Dublin printer bribed Richardson's own employees to ship the first six volumes and portions of the seventh to Ireland, where the book was quickly reproduced and sold.1 Richardson recorded his reaction to the Irish piracy in two sensationalist tracts that positioned the dispute firmly in the internal colonial politics of the 1750s. In response to Irish claims that English overreaching had prompted a perfectly legal reprinting of Grandison, Richardson branded the Irish "pirates," thus transforming a commercial matter into a highly politicized dispute involving crimes against the nation. The tracts' extravagance and overstatement suggest that for Richardson the piracy effected a shocking interruption, one akin to the fictional ruptures of kidnapping and rape he had employed throughout his novelistic career, not least in Sir Charles Grandison itself.2 That novel begins with what has often been read as a false start: the kidnapping of that virtuous but misread text Harriet Byron by Sir Hargrave, one of the novel's libertines. Quickly supplanted by the hero, Hargrave fades into the novel's background, but given the many other kidnappings in Grandison, his attempt on Harriet can be read as a palpable manifestation of the subtler cultural kidnappings that inform the rest of the novel. Rereading this first kidnapping as an exposure of Englishness to dissemination and cultural diffusion suggests a major reinterpretation of all of the kidnappings that inform the novel, including the Irish abduction of the novel itself.

Curiously, Grandison criticism has more or less ignored the Irishness of the Irish piracy even though Richardson appended his anti-Irish tracts to many subsequent editions of the novel and said that the piracy delayed and impacted Grandison's writing.3 Integral to a critical system that focuses on the novel's interiority at the expense of its production and circulation, this critical elision is particularly interesting because it cooperates both with the project of the novel and with late twentieth-century efforts to disown imperialism, to see England, as Gikandi puts it, as "finally separated" from its colonialist past. Prompted by the Irish printers who resisted English ways of reading the conflict, I want to suggest a resistant reading of Sir Charles Grandison that interprets the piracy as a challenge to the novel's construction of a version of English authorship suitable for international export. This version of authorship, one that both informs Grandison and is constituted by it, appropriates cosmopolitanism and remakes it in the context of the middle-class English virtues of tolerance and restraint that Richardson had been inventing throughout his career.4 Specifically postcolonial in Gikandi's sense in that it describes the "mutual imbrication" of the colonies with Englishness at a moment of eighteenth-century symbolic decolonization, this reading brings Richardson's tracts and the issues of internal colonization they evoke from the literal appendix to the interpretive center of the text (Gikandi 228). Turning novel and production process, center and periphery against each other reveals England as profoundly implicated in the violent history of internal colonialism at a moment of attempted erasure.

Of course, both Grandison's national preoccupations and its eponymous hero's Englishness have been the objects of critical attention since the novel's publication.5 Almost immediately the novel itself became an emblem of the English nation; it was the only novel held at the newly national library at Cambridge prior to 1780.(6) Richardson positioned Grandison-who advocates Protestantism and proclaims the virtues of Englishness at every turn-no less carefully.7 But critical observations regarding Grandison's Englishness have been at the expense of any real analysis of Grandison's role in constructing a place for Englishness-as constituted through the authority of authorship and its textual productions-in the context of interpenetrating international and internal colonial relations. Perhaps critics have under-emphasized internal colonialism in Grandison because while Richardson registers his concerns with intra-British relations in ways well recognized by postcolonial theory, bolstering Englishness by juxtaposing Grandison to infantilized Welshmen, brutal Irish, and Frenchified Scots, he consistently subjects Englishness to a seemingly separate and more complex threat in the international context. Certainly, Grandison's international operations have always intrigued critics. From the moment the book was published, the too-friendly relationship Richardson constructed between Grandison and Catholic Italy drew much critical fire from anti-Papists who argued that a loyal son of Britain should never consider marrying outside the Protestant faith. This tendency also appears in modern criticism. Those recent critics who have treated the book as having political significance focus on English-Italian relations while ignoring internal colonialism. Such a critical interest in English-Italian relations is in itself a continuing symptom of internal colonialism, a ratification of Grandison's direction of attention away from internal colonial strife and towards a sanitized version of international European relations. Grandison offers an already achieved transcendent internationalism that trivializes if not erases local difficulties with the British colonies. Indeed, Grandison's internationalism must have been deeply comforting to English readers eager to exoticize, displace, and thus distance the violent past of English oppression and the continuing vexation presented by Irish resistance in the 1750s. Demonstrating an internationalism that translated European cosmopolitanism into English tolerance worked particularly well in the international context. As Brett Levinson argues, the nation is dependent on borders, both metaphorical and actual: "For a nation to come into being ... it must already be in touch with another, since borders are precisely this being-in-touch: not enclosure but a foundational exposure of one nation to a different one. ( ... [I]t is at the border where nations are exposed to, rather than enclosed from, others.)" National imaginings that depend on the simplistic displacement of the self's rejected elements onto an "other" are subject to immediate dissolution given that national identity can occur only in the context of "liminality, exposure, relationality" (146). Richardson's appropriation of tolerance to Englishness and his reassignment of brutality to Italy may seem at first glance to fall into the category of simplistic displacement. But by choosing tolerance-an attribute only imaginable if directed towards another-as a way of defining English difference he puts the simple displacement model to work in the liminal context of boundaries, borders, and difference. Thus its adoption as a specifically English trait offers a powerful way of bolstering Englishness at the moment of its exposure to the other.