Weekly Miscellany, No. XXVII (27). Saturday, June 16, 1733

I hope I shall be excus’d for postponing several excellent Letters, while I entertain my Readers with a pleasant one from a young Lady. As it is the first which have received from the Sex, I could do no less than give it a Preference, tho’ some may be of Opinion that I should have consulted my own Credit better by not publishing it at all. If the Lady intended it only as a private Admonition, she should have given me some Intimation of her Meaning, but as it came without any Injunction of Secrecy, I thought myself at Liberty to make my own Use of it. The Ingenuity of it, I dare say, will make it agreeable to the Publick; and the good Humour of it cannot fail of making it inoffensive to the old Lady and the Curate who, next to myself, are most affected by the seeming Severity of her Banter. I shall give it exactly as it came to me.

To Richard Hooker, Esq;

SIR,

I cannot say that I am ever a Reader, or often an Admirer, but it is my Misfortune that I am always a Hearer, of your Miscellany. I live with an old Maiden Aunt, who mightily likes the Piety of your Design, and the Gravity of your Performances. She longs for the coming in of the Post with as much Impatience as I should expect a Letter from my Lover. As soon as the Letter-Carrier knocks at the Door (which is generally in the Evening) the Candles, the Curate, and Miss are call’d for in great haste. When the good old Gentlewoman has properly placed a little Instrument to her Ear, and the Reverend Gentleman has fixed another upon his Nose, your dry Discourse is bawled out with a Voice as loud as would reach the largest Church in your City, and in a Tone as canting as any that was in Fashion in the Times of old Noll.1 If any Part be duller; I ask your Pardon, good Sir, I mean graver, than ordinary, it is sure to strike their Want of Fancy, and we must needs have it over again.

During the first two decades of his printing career, Richardson was associated with seven journals: The True Briton (1723–1724), The Plain Dealer (1724–1725), The Daily Journal (1721–1737), The Prompter (1734–1736), The Daily Gazetteer (1735–1746), The Weekly Miscellany (1733–36), and The Citizen (1739). Years before the appearance of his first work of fiction, he was already known among his fellow printers for being a gifted writer. In the January 1736 issue of the Gentleman's Magazine (p. 51), Edward Cave, the editor, observed that Richardson had “often agreeably entertain’d with Elegant Disquisitions in Prose.” Among these anonymous works were likely pieces contributed to some of these journals as well as such pamphlets as The Infidel Convicted (1731), The Oxford Methodists (1733), The Apprentice's Vade Mecum (1734), and the Seasonable Examination of the Pleas and Pretensions of the Proprietors of, and Subscribers to, Play-Houses, Erected in Defiance of the Royal License (1735).

Since anonymous publication in this period was a closely guarded secret between writers and printers, the inquisitive reader today has few opportunities to establish authorship beyond a reasonable doubt. The only recorded attribution by early commentators to identify Richardson's anonymous contributions, one to the True Briton, is found in John Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, where in a footnote he states that “it seems highly probable that the sixth [No. 6 (June 21, 1723)] was written by himself as it is much in his manner.” Although earlier Richardson scholars have dismissed this attribution, after a more thorough examination of this journal, I found grounds for suspecting that this and at least 11 other issues owe something to this printer. In any case, the political themes in letters signed A.B. in True Briton No. 9 (July 1, 1713); No. 19 (August 19, 1723); No. 24 (August 23, 1723); and No. 25 (August 26, 1723) are closely connected and appear to be written by the same person. As I will argue, the five letters in this journal signed with women's names also appear to be written by the same person, and most likely Richardson.

William Webster and Richardson

If, as printer of the True Briton, Richardson took considerable risks to support the Duke of Wharton's campaign against Walpole's government, his work for the improvident clergyman William Webster (1689–1758) reveals again how seriously he regarded the press as a medium equivalent to the pulpit in promulgating the business of the state church.

As we shall see while tracing his own interventions in this journal, besides his genuine concern for poor clergymen, it is not unlikely that Richardson valued the ample opportunity this journal provided him as a developing writer and a means of advertising his publications.

Webster himself confessed that he was seduced by Richardson's fictional female voice: “while you are alive you can, whenever you please, make any body Cry, or Laugh; and when you Die, you’ll make Every body Cry whether you write, or not.” A few years after this remark, while undergoing bankruptcy and failing to get relief from the archbishops and bishops, Webster wrote A Plain Narrative of Facts, or, the Author's Case Fairly and Candidly Stated, By Way of Appeal to the Publick. After profuse thanks to a parishioner for his financial support, Webster singles out

The True Briton. No. 21. Monday, August 12. 1723. [A. Z.]

Vol. 1, pp. 178–185.

THE great Care which the Parliament hath taken for the Publick Welfare, is evident thro’ the whole Course of their Proceedings; but their [sic] is no greater instance of their Zeal, than the Act which pass’d the last Sessions to oblige the Female Part of this Kingdom to take the Oaths.

OUR wise Administration justly call’d to mind the fatal instance of a certain Island, where the Women murder’d the Men, and therefore, thought it prudent and necessary, for the security of our happy Establishment, to oblige them to take those Oaths which are the Bulwarks of the Protestant Succession.

THERE is another Reason which might be of some Weight on this Occasion; which is, That many Great Men are influenc’d by the Ladies in all Matters whatsoever, and therefore, it is certainly most proper to try their Loyalty in the strictest Manner we can.

I COULD have wish’d the little Ebony Doctor would have thought proper to imploy his Pen at this Juncture, to shew the Nature of Oaths; for the Ladies, I fear, will generally take them without understanding any of them, except the Abjuration, which is conceived in plain and easy Terms. I dare say the Bishops will supply his Defect, and will not decline giving any scrupulous Conscience all possible Satisfaction.

IT is said, That since the supposed Riot at Cripplegate a certain Eminent and Honest Lawyer has represented to his Friends, that it would be proper this Law should be extended to the Women; and that it should be Felony for Twelve Females to meet together, and not disperse on the Reading of the Proclamation; but it is hoped, that a certain Lady not far from St. James's will have Interest enough to prevent this Attempt, which would intirely destroy her Assemblée.

WHATEVER secret Methods the Ladies have of concealing their Sex, and creeping into Power, are unknown; yet it is certain, That there has scarce been an Age formerly, but Old Women have sate in the Cabinet, as M — rs; in Westminster-Hall as J—es, and in the H—se of L—ds as B—ps. [180] The Little Ebony Doctor at present bears that Character among the rational Part of Mankind.

During the first two decades of his career, Richardson's role as printer was hardly limited to setting the type for the periodicals that were issued from his shop. Perhaps the most glaring evidence of his intervention in producing text is the fact that both The True Briton and The Weekly Miscellany just happen to have letters supposedly from women who protested the legal restraints against their participation in the public sphere. Neither the Duke of Wharton, the owner of The True Briton, nor William Webster, the desperately impecunious producer of The Weekly Miscellany, launched their journals with the objective of advancing radical views about political equality for women. But almost inadvertently, this middle-aged, rotund printer at Salisbury Court was quietly feminizing journalism.

As an outlier in what was perceived to be a corrupt, predatory political world, Richardson readily assumed a female role as victim and the subversive strategy of passive resistance. The Non-juror TB females voiced dilemmas over being required to swear oaths of loyalty to a government that their consciences could not support:

This oath of obedience to government authority also includes the dilemma concerning marriage vows and the legal dominance of husbands over wives, as Sarah Chapone argues:

Film noir, like the beautiful but deadly oleander bush, was a European import that took root in California and flourished.

Noir, which was named retroactively by French film critics Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton (Fine in Crow, Companion to American Gothic p. 476), was a style that developed early in the silent era in Germany and Austria. Noir combined an expressionistic aesthetic involving deep shadows and odd-angle shots with a largely Gothic subject matter. Early noir films included such obviously Gothic titles as The Golem, Nosferatu, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. When noir directors, including Paul Wegener, Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene, and F. W. Murnau, fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, they joined other creative émigrés from Germany and Austria in Southern California. In Hollywood, the expat directors blended their noir aesthetic with plots drawn from hard-boiled crime fiction to create California film noir, which, as David Fine indicates, is “a twentieth-century manifestation of American Gothic, contemporaneous with Southern Gothic fiction” (p. 475).

The scripts for Hollywood film noir were often adaptations of hardboiled crime stories by such alumni of The Black Mask as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and Raymond Chandler. Studios, in fact, often employed the authors to adapt their fiction into screenplays. The resulting noir crime films are filled with Gothic tropes: masks and doubles, buried secrets, and the incursion of the past into the present. The ambiance of dread in these screenplays draws in part on the shared traumas of the twentieth century, the Great Depression, and the thirty-year war soon to enter its terrible second act (Scruggs pp. 123–37). But there were also local concerns coloring California noir, including the morbidity of a land of sunshine filled with the sick and the dying, as discussed in Chapter 6, the corruption of local politics and law enforcement that continued despite the reforms of the Progressive Era, and the sex scandals plaguing the film industry. These scandals, as catalogued by Kenneth Anger in his salacious history of Hollywood Babylon, were reflected in the erotic charge of many Hollywood movies, even during the era of the Hayes Act.

This chapter will use the term “noir” to describe both noir film and the fiction that exists symbiotically with it.