Comic maid-servants in Swift and Smollettt: The probervial idiom of Humphry Clinker

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2003 by Rogers, Pat

The letters written by Win Jenkins in Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker (1771) have certainly not gone without scholarly comment. Until now, however, attention seems to have been directed entirely toward linguistic vagaries narrowly conceived rather than toward the broader stylistic and representational mode that these eccentricities of idiom serve. In particular, an exchange between W. Arthur Boggs and Arthur Sherbo raised the issue as to whether Win's fractured word-forms could properly be seen as coinages.1 I wish here to widen the discussion a little and propose that the mode of writing Smollett uses for Win's letters is modeled directly on Swift's poems composed, wholly or partly, in the voice of a serving maid. In fact, the evidence suggests that Smollett may have taken some of his particular usages and expressions quite openly from this source.

The best known of Swift's exercises in the vein described here is "The Humble Petition of Frances Harris," written c.1701, first published in 1709, and included in Swift's Miscellanies of 1711. A second and equally effective use of the mode comes in "Mary the Cook-Maid's Letter to Dr. Sheridan," written c.1718 and first published in 1732. A number of Swift's later poems on Irish subjects incorporate similar versions of the "cook-maid" theme, however, especially within the so-called Market Hill group of poems. The most relevant of these for our purposes is "The Grand Question Debated," which includes passages written in the voice of Lady Acheson's waiting woman, Hannah. This poem, composed c.1729, was first published in 1732. All three of these works were included in George Faulkner's canonical edition of the Works in 1735, the basis for subsequent collections of Swift throughout the eighteenth century. All were therefore available to Smollett. It should be added that scholars have observed minor raids on Swift's work on previous occasions, including a possible recollection of A Modest Defence of Punning in one of Win Jenkins's verbal distortions.2 This suggestion is made in the standard edition of Humphry Clinker; no reference is made there to the poems, except in a single case where the editor, Thomas R. Preston, glosses the expression "Hail fellow, well met" by citing an instance in one of Swift's other Market Hill poems, "My Lady's Lamentation and Complaint against the Dean" (Smollett 332).3

The characteristics that define the mode under review and that point toward Smollett's imitation of it might be listed under several headings. Swift employs what is fundamentally a trope of garrulity: a single voice is allowed to soliloquize at length. In the cases of "The Humble Petition" and "Mary the Cook-Maid's Letter" we have a complete monologue. In "The Grand Question Debated," the maid-servant rattles on, with only a brief interjection by her mistress; we are led to understand that Lady Acheson feels she ought to stop her tattling maid but enjoys the gossip too much to be able to do so. The first two poems employ an unusually long line, spilling over from about fourteen to sixteen syllables; the third poem manages to convey a similar air of garrulity with a basic eleven-syllable line. All three use a headlong syntax, exemplified by these lines in "The Humble Petition of Frances Harris": "Now you must know, because my Trunk has a very bad Lock, / Therefore all the Money, I have, (which God knows, is a very small Stock,) / I keep in my Pocket ty'd about my Middle, next my Smock" (5-7) .4 The essence of the style is found in a racy demotic language, including dialect forms-here Irish, of course-along with distorted word forms (as when Hannah uses "creter" for "creature"), colloquial cliches of the sort Swift collected for Polite Conversation, below-stairs slang, and many proverbial or folk expressions. There is no use of malapropism in the narrow sense, although Mrs. Harris produces a kind of malapropist proper noun when she converts Lord Drogheda into "Lord Dromedary" (1. 28). All these stylistic features are transmitted in an intimate, familiar manner: despite the fact that the first two poems are respectively a petition to the Lord Justices of Ireland and a letter to Thomas Sheridan (and both parody the formal devices of such a missive), they are founded on the spoken word. Perhaps this is intended to convey the woman's lack of ease and experience with the written word. Finally, it should be noted that Swift makes use of gendered language with what were widely regarded as "feminine" expressions ("O law! the sweet Gentleman!") and that he reinforces the vocative effect by repeated forms of address, such as "Mr. Sheridan" "Dear Madam," and the like (Swift, Poems 3: 869,985).

Virtually every linguistic detail is replicated in the idiom of Win Jenkins, even though verse has been replaced by prose. Smollett makes more frontal use of malapropism-it has often been pointed out that Win actually anticipates Mrs. Malaprop by six years. Smollett also places more stress on the appearance of words wrongly spelt, though in most cases the comic effect is to the eye alone: when a letter begins "Heaving got a frank . . ." (41), we do not suppose that Win really pronounced the opening word to rhyme with "leaving." Such orthographical tricks are distinct from actual perversions of a word-form, something found in both Swift and Smollett. It may be added that Win distorts place-names, as when she refers to landmarks in Bath as "the Crashit, the Hottogon, and Bloody Buildings" (42), for the Crescent, the Octagon and Bladud's Buildings. This is very much what Mrs. Harris had done with personal names. Dialect is again prominent, this time with a canting Welsh and Methodist idiom substituted for Irish. Win's conversion has not stopped her from using exclamations and expletives ("Ah Laud help you!") almost as freely as Mrs. Harris ("God knows . . . Lord!"). There is naturally a good deal of the language of the servant's parlor, with domestic detail and housekeeping lore. Win learns from Mrs. Patcher, my Lady Kilmacullock's woman, "to wash gaze, and refrash rust silks and bumbeseens" (43), much as Hannah had "dizened" up her mistress like a queen ("Grand Question" 102). The form "bumbeseen" has in it an enfolded obscenity of a kind Swift could certainly perpetrate, but which he does not use in these poems. All three poems by Swift are conversational in two ways: their own manner is colloquial, but in addition they each incorporate direct speech by others. Win employs reported speech more widely, with expressions such as "which Mrs. Drab, the manty-maker, says will look very well" (41). She makes use of "feminine" endearments and tender expressions ("she's a dear sweet soul"), as well as "odorous" for "odious," which was one of the most gender-inflected words in the Augustan vocabulary. It occurs, for example, in line 240 of Swift's "The Journal of A Modern Lady" (a poem also written at Market Hill around 1729), as well as line 395 in Cadenus and Vanessa, and in Polite Conversation. The vocative form is used with frequent appeals by name to the writer's friend "Molly."