The Toy Shop (1735) The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737) Part 1

The Toy Shop (1735) The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737).

by Robert Dodsley.

INTRODUCTION

The career of ROBERT DODSLEY (1703-1764), or "Doddy" as Samuel Johnson affectionately called him, resembles nothing so much as the rise of Francis Goodchild in Hogarth's _Industry and Idleness_ (1747) series.

Like Goodchild, Dodsley began as a humble apprentice and, through energy, ingenuity, and laudable ambition, grew prosperous and gained the esteem of all London. Today Dodsley is remembered as the most important publisher of his period, a man who numbered among his authors Pope, Young, Akenside, Gray, Johnson, Burke, Shenstone, and Sterne.

His long-labored _Collection of Poems_ (1748) rescued many of his contemporaries' works from pamphlet obscurity and even now provides both the best and the most representative introduction to mid-eighteenth-century English poetry. His twelve-volume _A Select Collection of Old Plays_ (1744) made the lesser Elizabethan dramatists, long out of print, available again.

It is one of the minor ironies of literary history that the man who did so much to insure the survival of the poems and plays of others has had his own almost entirely forgotten. For Dodsley was not always a bookseller. When he escaped his country apprentices.h.i.+p and fled to London to work as a footman, Dodsley had his heart set on literary distinction; and it was first as poet and later as playwright that he came to the attention of the Town. Although a few of his poems are as ingratiating as Dodsley himself is reported to have been, most are now aesthetically irretrievable. His dramas, in contrast, remain interesting. Two of the best--_The Toy-Shop_ (1735) and _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_ (1737)--were much more popular than his earlier poems and for a time made him seem the equal of fellow dramatist Henry Fielding. So great was the vogue of these two works that Dodsley has been described as the princ.i.p.al developer of the sentimental or moralizing afterpiece.[1] Both works are short afterpieces intended to complement or contrast with the full-length play on the day's bill and both moralize conspicuously; the two plays could, however, hardly be more different in tone and technique.

_The Toy-Shop_ grew out of Dodsley's admiration of and consequent desire to emulate the witty raillery of Augustan satire. When he sent Pope his newly minted collected poems, _A Muse in Livery_ (1732), Dodsley also included an orphan muse in the packet. In February of 1733 Pope politely responded that he liked the play and would encourage John Rich to produce it, but that he doubted whether it had sufficient action to engage an audience. Dodsley apparently did all he could to strengthen his acquaintance with Pope, including publis.h.i.+ng a laudatory _Epistle to Mr. Pope, Occasion'd by His Essay on Man_ in 1734; and the following February when Rich finally produced _The Toy-Shop_ at Covent Garden, some thought that Pope was the author and Dodsley's alleged authors.h.i.+p a diversion. Understandably, Dodsley was delighted to have his play even momentarily mistaken for the work of Alexander Pope.

_The Toy-Shop_ was enormously popular. "This little Performance, without any Theatrical Merit whatsoever," the _Prompter_ wrote on 18 February, "received the loudest Applauses that I have heard this long while, only on Account of its General and well-Adapted Satire on the Follies of Mankind."[2] Dodsley's afterpiece was performed thirty-four times during the 1735 season. In print it was even more in demand. For his benefit performance on 6 February, Dodsley advertised that "Books of the Toy-Shop will be sold in the House."[3] There were at least six legitimate editions of the piece within the year. It was pirated, translated into French, and subsequently anthologized in almost every collection of English farces.[4]

Every critic has concurred with Pope in finding the play plotless. The short first scene establishes the premise: that the Master of the shop is "a general Satyrist, yet not rude nor ill-natur'd," who moralizes "upon every Trifle he sells, and will strike a Lesson of Instruction out of a Snuff-box, a Thimble, or a c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l" (p. 10). Working within a tradition that includes Lucian's sale of philosophers and, just after _The Toy-Shop_, Fielding's auction in _The Historical Register, For the Year 1736_ (1737), Dodsley acknowledged that his premise was adopted directly from Thomas Randolph's _Conceited Pedlar_ (1630). His metaphor of the world as "a great Toy-shop, and all it's [_sic_] Inhabitants run mad for Rattles" (p. 45) recalls the brilliant penultimate verse paragraph of "Epistle II" of Pope's _Essay on Man_, wherein mankind is shown as eternally addicted to "toys" of one kind or another:

Pleas'd with this bauble still, as that before; Till tir'd he sleeps, and Life's poor play is o'er!

(Lines 281-82)

With so many unmistakable resemblances to Pope in Dodsley's play, it is not surprising that some spectators thought they detected the hand of the author of _The Rape of the Lock_.

Following a hint from Pope that the strength of his afterpiece lay in its mixture of morality and satire, Dodsley t.i.tled his work "A Dramatick Satire" and begged indulgence in the epilogue for his "dull grave Sermon" (p. 5). In fact, the merit of the work is the wit with which the Master of the shop extemporizes over each sale. "Why, Sir,"

one character says, "methinks you are a new Kind of a Satirical Parson, your Shop is your Scripture, and every piece of Goods a different Text, from which you expose the Vices and Follies of Mankind in a very fine allegorical Sermon" (p. 17). Jean Kern lists the satiric allegory as one of the five major forms of dramatic satire during this period, but judges _The Toy-Shop_ a failure in that genre because, instead of a sustained allegory, Dodsley provides "a jumble of annotated sales of abstractions with no controlling metaphor. The toys for sale are interesting only for the value which the characters a.s.sign to them; the result is a miscellany of characters a.s.signing a miscellany of values."[5] Thus, the problematic nature of a genre that attempts to dramatize satire with no more than perfunctory recourse to plot or characterization and Dodsley's failure to sustain consistently his comparison between those objects that mankind values and mere toys both contribute to the play's lack of "Theatrical Merit." It may also suggest why _The Toy-Shop_ was even more popular in print than on the stage. Nevertheless, even with all its dramatic inadequacies acknowledged, the play retains a charming Tatler-esque ingenuity that still amuses.

Income from _The Toy-Shop_ and the gift of a hundred pounds from Pope allowed Dodsley to open, under the sign of Tully's Head, the bookshop that was to become so important in the history of English literature.

Dodsley the bookseller did not cease writing; when _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_ opened at Drury Lane on 29 January 1737, with young Colley Cibber in the role of Henry II, it was evident that Dodsley's stagecraft had improved. The play was a triumph, with thirty-seven performances in 1737--the most popular play of the year and one of the most popular plays of the century.

_The Toy-Shop_ had been Dodsley's attempt to adopt sophisticated city ways; _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_ is a return to his "native Sherwood." Instead of indulging in the sometimes labored, sometimes second-hand wit and contemptuous satiric stance of the earlier play, _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_ reflects the earnest sentimentality and democratic impulse of the ballad, later printed in Percy's _Reliques_ (1765), upon which the play is modeled. The plot is simple. Henry II, lost and separated from his courtiers in Sherwood Forest, is given shelter by honest John c.o.c.kle, a miller in nearby Mansfield and one of His Majesty's Keepers of the Forest. Meanwhile, at the miller's house, his son d.i.c.k and d.i.c.k's former sweetheart Peggy plan how to gain access to the king so that he might redress the wrongs done to their innocent love by the l.u.s.t of the haughty Lord Lurewell.

By coincidence Lurewell is one of the courtiers lost in the forest. In the final scene, with all the princ.i.p.als a.s.sembled, the king's ident.i.ty is made known and distributive justice dispensed.

Allardyce Nicoll argues that the success of _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_ makes Dodsley the most important sentimentalist of the thirties.[6] Certainly the play was frequently produced with revivals of earlier sentimental works like Cibber's _Love's Last s.h.i.+ft_ (1696) and Steele's _The Conscious Lovers_ (1723); and, in fact, it would be difficult to find a list of definitive characteristics of sentimental drama that Dodsley's play does not satisfy in every particular. The bourgeois n.o.bility and integrity of d.i.c.k and Peggy poignantly engage the audience's pity and admiration, while the improbable resolution affirms the inevitable triumph of goodness. There is even--what some critics have required of sentimental drama--love of rural scenery and use of native setting.[7]

Dodsley has cleverly integrated scene and theme in _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_. The moral and social problem stressed in the play is the existence and abuse of aristocratic privilege. Implicitly the play a.s.sumes that rank should correlate with goodness. The king himself is the best example of this. Alone at night in Sherwood Forest, Henry asks himself, "Of what Advantage is it now to be a King? Night shews me no Respect: I cannot see better, nor walk so well as another Man" (p.

11). Cut off from the trappings of monarchy he finds his common humanity and, at the conclusion of the play, redresses the wrongs of rank when he knights the instinctively n.o.ble miller and reproves the vicious but hereditarily t.i.tled Lord Lurewell. His accidental separation from the corruption of court and courtiers initiates Henry's contact with John c.o.c.kle, representative of all the middle-cla.s.s virtues. Significantly, they are in the miller's environment: rural England, symbol of uncorrupted beauty, correlative to the innocent beauty of young Peggy before her acquaintance with Lords "of Prerogative."[8]

As critics have noted, the whole sentimental movement in English drama is opposed in tone to the cynical ethos of aristocratic privilege; but Dodsley explicitly advocates a democratic sensibility that estimates individual worth independent of the accident of birth. The "bourgeois sententiae" of _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_ are certainly as ideologically explicit as the arguments for the value of the mercantile middle cla.s.s in Lillo's _The London Merchant_ (1731).[9] Dodsley did, after all, have working-cla.s.s credentials; his years in "service"

furnished the materials for _Servitude: A Poem_ (1729) and _A Muse in Livery_ (1732). The allegorical frontispiece to _A Muse in Livery_ shows a young man aspiring to knowledge, virtue, and happiness but manacled by poverty to misery, folly, and ignorance, his foot chained to a giant stone inscribed "Despair."

Despite the play's clear egalitarian sympathies, it seems excessive to characterize Dodsley's work as "revolutionary" and to be reminded too forcibly of the coming events in France. And yet, as has also been suggested, things might now look different had there been a revolution in England. Plays like Dodsley's discomforted the government. As Fielding notes in the dedication of _The Historical Register, For the Year 1736_, the _Gazetteer_ of 7 May 1737 had accused his play and Dodsley's _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_ of aiming at the overthrow of Walpole's ministry. "Bob Booty" reacted to this threat from the stage by enacting legislation in June requiring that all new plays and all alterations of old plays be approved by the Lord Chamberlain; in contrast, the reaction of the monarchy to Dodsley's work was much more ingenious. The third performance of _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_, that from which the author was to receive the proceeds, was held "By Command of their Royal Highness the Prince and Princess of Wales." Both royal personages were present to honor the apprentice from Mansfield. "The Boxes not being equal to the Demand for Places, for the better Accommodation of the Ladies, Side Boxes [were]

made on the Stage."[10] Although the production of Dodsley's best play, _Cleone_ (1758), was still twenty years in the future, it seems safe to regard this night as the height of Dodsley's dramatic career.

_Auburn University_

EPILOGUE.

_Well, Heav'n be prais'd, this dull grave Sermon's done.

(For faith our Author might have call'd it one) I wonder who the Devil he thought to please!

Is this a Time o' Day for Things like these?

Good Sense and honest Satire now offend; We're grown too wise to learn, too proud to mend.

And so divinely wrapt in Songs and Tunes, The next wise Age will all be----Fiddlers Sons.

And did he think plain Truth wou'd Favour find?

Ah! 'tis a Sign he little knows Mankind!

To please, he ought to have a Song or Dance, The Tune from_ Italy, _the Caper_ France: _These, these might charm----But hope to do't with Sense!

Alas, alas, how vain is the Pretence!

But, tho' we told him,----Faith, 'twill never do.-- Pho, never fear, he cry'd, tho' grave, 'tis new: The Whim, perhaps, may please, if not the Wit.

And, tho' they don't approve, they may permit.

If neither this nor that will intercede, Submissive bond, and thus for Pardon plead._

_"To gen'rous Few, to you our Author sues His first Essay with Candour to excuse.

'T has Faults, he owns, but, if they are but small, He hopes your kind Applause will hide them all."_

THE TOY-SHOP.

SCENE _a Parlour._ _A Gentleman and two Ladies, drinking Tea._

_Gent._ And you have never been at this extraordinary Toy-shop, you say, Madam?

_1 La._ No, Sir: I have heard of the Man, indeed; but most People say, he's a very impertinent, silly Fellow.

_Gent._ That's because he sometimes tells them of their Faults.

_1 La._ And that's sufficient. I should think any Man impertinent that should pretend to tell me of my Faults, if they did not concern him.

_Gent._ Yes, Madam. But People that know him take no Exceptions. And really, tho' some may think him impertinent, in my Opinion, he's very entertaining.

_2 La._ Pray, who is this Man you're talking of? I never heard of him.

_Gent._ He's one who has lately set up a Toy-shop, Madam, and is, perhaps, the most extraordinary Person in his Way that ever was heard of. He is a general Satyrist, yet not rude nor ill-natur'd. He has got a Custom of moralizing upon every Trifle he sells, and will strike a Lesson of Instruction out of a Snuff-box, a Thimble, or a c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l.

_1 La._ Isn't he cras'd?

_Gent._ Madam, he may be call'd a Humourist; but he does not want Sense, I do a.s.sure you.

_2 La._ Methinks I should be glad to see him.

_Gent._ I dare say you will be very much diverted. And if you'll please to give me Leave, I'll wait on you. I'm particularly acquainted with him.