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.The paragraph appeared in the Daily Advertiser, and noted that the King s messengerswere searching for the Authors, Printers and Publisher of the Old Woman s Magazine.Surelythey could have found them quite easily, as it was no secret that Carnan , the advertisedprinter of the Midwife, was a family name connected to John Newbery.See Ann.Bib., 171 3.Mahony and Rizzo also cite Smart s friend George Colman s comment in his Terrae Filiusthat An information in the King s Bench, or a visit from a King s messenger will carry off adozen impressions : Ann.Bib., 173.Another possible reason for the placing of this disclaimeris that it appeared in the same number as the most risky single article ever published in theMidwife: The Little Lighterman is discussed later in this chapter.5 Bertrand A.Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature,1722 1742 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 20, 218. 136Christopher Smart and Satirepolitics.To regard them as merely playing with lucrative alarmism, is to concur withthose who, like H.T.Dickinson, suggest that those in power allowed some forms ofextra-parliamentary dissent as a safety-valve for popular discontent.6Equally, though, in this disclaimer the typical Midnightian double or eventriple speak is demonstrably going about its subtle work at the level of the lexiconitself.In the 1750s the word obnoxious was in the process of changing its meaningfrom its most frequently-used and now obsolete one of subject to the authorityof another , into its present signification of offensive.7 So that where Mrs.M.appears to be stating that she does not want to offend her Friends in Power , totake the word in the older sense means to understand that she refuses to situate herwritings in a position of craven slavery towards those Friends.Quentin Skinner hastraced the older usage of this word to the neo-roman theory of liberty , later usedby Harrington, and later still, in the 1730s, by the errant ideologue of the PatriotOpposition, Lord Bolingbroke: a Roman slave was obnoxius in that he was totallydependent upon the benevolence of his master.Smart knew Tacitus, whose use ofthe word in this sense was frequent, and also that some of his readers would havedone so too.8Thus, an alarmist piece of sales-gingering also carries a subtle paranomasic digat those who are obnoxius in their lucubrations, and stands as an indication ofrobust independence.The writing in this magazine repays careful attention to theway that words are working within it, which often is supple and inventive to such adegree that, in direct contradiction to Christopher Devlin s claim that in the Midwifethere is no sign that the author is a poet , the magazine triumphantly demonstratesexactly that.9 It is not too much to say that this disclaimer could be understood onno fewer than three separate levels: at face-value as a sincere protestation of loyaltyto church and state; ironically via the obnoxious pun as an indication of themagazine s actual oppositional stance (and we shall later see that the Jacobite Earlof Wharton, in his outspoken True Briton, sarcastically employed the same happy6 For Namierite and post-Namierite positions on this, see H.T.Dickinson, Politics of thePeople in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 2 5.7 Three major groups of usages given by the OED are applicable: the last example itgives of the older usage ( subject to the authority of ) is from Smart s friend Arthur Murphy,in his Gray s Inn Journal (1754).The newer usage of offensive is listed as in use from 1675onwards.The other sense in which it can be taken, as liable, or exposed to harm was alsocurrent: Johnson does not give the offensive definition at all in his Dictionary of 1755, but onlythe older two.Mrs.M.could be implying any or all of these three meanings.It is worth notingthat in his late Munificence and Modesty , and his early Hop-Garden, Smart uses it in the senseof liable to harm th obnoxious worm : PW4, 350, 43.Bunyan (1666) uses it as subjectto the authority of and Olaudah Equiano (1789) as vulnerable : Grace Abounding (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1998), 27; The Interesting Narrative (London: Penguin, 1995), 190.8 Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998), 42 9, 69 72, and 90.Also see SB, 38, 42.9 Devlin, Poor Kit Smart (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961), 54. 137 Inwardly Working a Stirre to the MyndeEstablishment phrase in 1723);10 or, in certain knowledgeable quarters, as a cynicalattempt to promote interest and thus sales.The most consistent political theme in the Midwife is glaringly evident in articleafter article: Mrs.Midnight stands as a Tory opponent of Whig corruption withinthe body politic, as did the Samuel Johnson of the early Juvenal imitations.YetJohn Cannon has shown that the definition of Johnson as a Tory is not wrong but& inadequate , and equally, with Smart a Tory position is complicated by certainfactors that we are about to explore.11 After all, already we have seen the way thatmeanings are put into question within the text, and how commercial considerationsmay trouble a straightforward reading of the magazine s political position, so that totry to present the Midwife as maintaining a coherent and consistent political stancethroughout the three volumes is an exercise inevitably open to frequent revision.If this is so for the magazine itself, still less is it possible confidently to extrapolatehard evidence concerning Smart s personal political position from the Midwife.Quiteapart from the slippery problems of attribution (see Appendix 1), Bertrand Goldgarmakes a salient point in his discussion of the political writings of the Scriblerians: hepoints out that they were not politicians, nor, except for Swift, even political thinkers;they were writers pursuing literary careers. We should register, he says, their biastowards traditional, Tory, humanistic and aristocratic values, without attempting tosuggest that they were presenting any sort of coherent political manifesto: this pointis equally applicable to Smart.Additionally, if the Gentleman s Magazine in 1741could not furnish its readers with an explanation of even the roughest indicationof the political positions of the elected representatives in the House of Commons,then no wonder present-day scholars struggle to allot fixed positions to writersFielding, who tended to change allegiances with more frequency than was apparentlyconsistent with honour, is a case in point.Finally in this context, it should be notedagain that I differ here from Chris Mounsey, who sees the Midwife as a primarilypolitical organ with solely political (though disguised) aims, and I would hesitate toascribe any fixed political position to Smart himself.Mounsey conclusively shows,however, the anti-Pelhamite nature of the magazine.12It is not necessary or possible, finally, to confine the satire in the Midwife to anyrigid party conformity, and this point in itself is indicative of its indebtedness tothe writings of Henry St.John, Viscount Bolingbroke, as we are about to see: theextinction of unreal party divisions had long been one of Bolingbroke s principalaims.The concern here is with the nature and style of that satire, and its status aseffective satire in the mid-eighteenth century.There was an interregnum , Vincent10 there being so Glorious a Spirit in both Houses for the Support of our present happyEstablishment : The True Briton 3, 10 June 1723.11 John Cannon, Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian England (Oxford:Clarendon, 1994), 117
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