Memoirs Of A Coxcomb By John Cleland

Published in 1751, John Cleland’s second novel (after the notorious Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) is a witty and complex portrait of aristocratic British society in the mid-eighteenth century. Its young protagonist, Sir William Delamore, meets, falls in love with, and pursues the mysterious heiress Lydia. Rather than a conventional romance, however, the novel is an acerbic social satire, and Sir William an unreliable narrator and incomplete hero. In its experiments with narrative form and its sophisticated examination of masculine identity, Memoirs of a Coxcomb is an important marker in the development of the eighteenth-century novel. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction that places Memoirs in the context of Cleland’s life and literary career. Also included is a broad selection of appendices, including Tobias Smollett’s review of the novel, selections from Cleland’s criticism, three texts by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and contemporary documents on masculinity (particularly the figures of the coxcomb and the fop) and prostitution.

John Cleland is among the most scandalous figures in British literary history, both celebrated and attacked as a pioneer of pornographic writing in English. His first novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill, is one of the enduring literary creations of the eighteenth century, despite over two hundred years of legal prohibition. Yet the full range of his work is still too little known. In this study, Hal Gladfelder combines groundbreaking archival research into Cleland’s tumultuous life with incisive readings of his sometimes extravagant, sometimes perverse body of work, positioning him as a central figure in the development of the novel and in the construction of modern notions of authorial and sexual identity in eighteenth-century England. Rather than a traditional biography, Fanny Hill in Bombay presents a case history of a renegade authorial persona, based on published works, letters, private notes, and newly discovered legal testimony. It retraces Cleland’s career from his years as a young colonial striver with the East India Company in Bombay through periods of imprisonment for debt and of estrangement from collaborators and family, shedding light on his paradoxical status as literary insider and social outcast. As novelist, critic, journalist, and translator, Cleland engaged with the most challenging intellectual currents of his era yet at the same time was vilified as a pornographer, atheist, and sodomite. Reconnecting Cleland’s writing to its literary and social milieu, this study offers new insights into the history of authorship and the literary marketplace and contributes to contemporary debates on pornography, censorship, the history of sexuality, and the contested role of literature in eighteenth-century culture.

Stories of transgression–Gilgamesh, Prometheus, Oedipus, Eve—may be integral to every culture's narrative imaginings of its own origins, but such stories assumed different meanings with the burgeoning interest in modern histories of crime and punishment in the later decades of the seventeenth century. In Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England, Hal Gladfelder shows how the trial report, providence book, criminal biography, and gallows speech came into new commercial prominence and brought into focus what was most disturbing, and most exciting, about contemporary experience. These narratives of violence, theft, disruptive sexuality, and rebellion compelled their readers to sort through fragmentary or contested evidence, anticipating the openness to discordant meanings and discrepant points of view which characterizes the later fictions of Defoe and Fielding. Beginning with the various genres of crime narrative, Gladfelder maps a complex network of discourses that collectively embodied the range of responses to the transgressive at the turn of the eighteenth century. In the book's second and third parts, he demonstrates how the discourses of criminality became enmeshed with emerging novelistic conceptions of character and narrative form. With special attention to Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, Gladfelder argues that Defoe's narratives concentrate on the forces that shape identity, especially under conditions of outlawry, social dislocation, and urban poverty. He next considers Fielding's double career as author and magistrate, analyzing the interaction between his fiction and such texts as the aggressively polemical Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers and his eyewitness accounts of the sensational Canning and Penlez cases. Finally, Gladfelder turns to Godwin's Caleb Williams, Wollstonecraft's Maria, and Inchbald's Nature and Art to reveal the degree to which criminal narrative, by the end of the eighteenth century, had become a necessary vehicle for articulating fundamental cultural anxieties and longings. Crime narratives, he argues, vividly embody the struggles of individuals to define their place in the suddenly unfamiliar world of modernity.

John Cleland (1709-1789) was educated at the Westminster School. He spent his early adulthood in Smyrna as British Consul and in India as an employee of the British East India Company. He later returned to England where he devoted himself to the study of philology, writing essays on the nature of language and contributing columns to the Public Advertiser.