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Part II

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    26441
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    The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley is an anonymous novel of romance and marriage published in Dublin in 1760, just a few months after the riotous response to rumours of union – rumours often articulated in terms of marriage and sexual congress – and it would surely require a stretch of the imagination to believe that it is not in some way implicated in this debate. Allegory is, again, the wrong word for the popular fiction published in Ireland in this period, but by employing the same language and tropes as political pamphleteers and Gaelic poets, romantic novels certainly ‘symbolically spread’ beyond the details of their repetitious plots and, to a population trained to see analogies for the politics of the nation everywhere they looked, love stories were coded commentaries on political realities.

    Placing The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley in the allegorysaturated context of Irish political debate of the mid-eighteenth century is the best way to understand how it can (should?) be read as a text deeply concerned with making meaning for its readership and providing a way in which sense could be salvaged out of the rhetorical chaos persisting in a Dublin political arena. This is not to say that reading the novel politically is the only legitimate response for a critic, or to suggest that affect should be ignored. However, cutting this novel off from the white heat of political debate in which it was first launched would be seriously misleading. Moreover, as an epistolary novel, it is always already implicated in politics. Although obviously influenced by masterpieces like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), which deal with the history of a woman and her love plot (successful or tragic), it is important to remember that this romantic tradition existed alongside a much more explicitly political epistolary tradition which included Letters Written by a Turkish Spy (1687–94), Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721) and Oliver Goldsmith’s Letters from a Citizen of the World (1762). Rather than seeing these traditions existing separately, though, perhaps it would be better to consider them as cross-contaminating, although as Ruth Perry has argued, the political spy letter did give way to the love letter novel through the course of the century.27

    In his analysis of epistolary culture in eighteenth-century Germany, Simon Richter concluded that ‘any effort to draw clean lines separating public, private, and intimate spheres, virtual or real, must fail’.28 As Mary A. Favret argues, ‘The cabalistic quality of intimate correspondence in the political works persisted both in the epistolary novel and in popular imagination, although it often remained hidden beneath the dynamics of ‘romance’ . . . sexual intrigue becomes a metaphor for political intrigue’.29

    Moreover, if The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley is to be considered as a partial commentary on the politics of mid-century Ireland, its anonymous status is hardly surprising, given that, as James Kelly has explained, ‘most entrants into the public sphere’ during and after the Money Bill dispute, ‘chose to occlude their identity by publishing their sentiments anonymously’.30 Far too much emphasis has been placed on the way novels relate to each other in literary history and not enough, as Paul Hunter has demonstrated, on the way novels borrow from, depend upon, other genres, including political pamphlets, travel narratives and poetry, a point emphasised as well by Harriet Guest who argues that novels ‘participate in debates that cut across genres; they assume readers who are also immersed in periodical literature, in poetry, in histories, readers who discuss plays and parliamentary debates, who perform music, and peer into the windows of the print shops’.31 Retrospective attempts to insist on a clear distinction between fiction and fact when looking at eighteenth-century literature are, as Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook emphasises, ‘anachronistic’,32 especially given that fictional letters, such as those by Pamela, posed as genuine letters, and therefore purposefully blurred such distinctions anyway.

    The anonymity of Sophia Berkley, and the unnamed editor’s claims of having ‘discovered’ these letters in the papers of a deceased friend, does lend a sense of authenticity to the novel. Moreover, in the ‘pamphlet war’ generated by the Money Bill dispute, many of the pamphlets took the form of anonymous or pseudonymous epistles, sometimes even between allegorical female figures, such as The P**** Vindicated, and 118 The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction the Affairs of I-----d Set in a true Light, in a Letter from The Honourable Hellen O’Roon, to the Right Honourable Lady Viscountess ****** in London (1754), which describes England as a ‘Mother-SisterCountry’;33 The Conduct of a Certain Member of Parliament During the Last Session; and the Motives on which he acted; Explain’d in a Letter to a Friend (Dublin, 1755); and A Letter from Dionysius, to the Renowned Triumvirate (1754). The provenance of The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley is rather more difficult to discern when placed in this context.

    For Mary A. Favret, there was always a political force to the epistolary novel, a political force latent until the 1790s when it was made manifest in the aftermath of the polemical debate waged in the form of letters between Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791–2) and the foundation of the London Correspondence Society in 1792. Letters made public through publication indicate the relationship between the private and the public long before the notion of the personal as political became a popular slogan.34 In its investment in the language of sexual intimacy, love, marriage, rape and abduction, Sophia Berkley revisits the material that formed the basis for many allegorical versions of Ireland in Gaelic poetry, Swift’s Injured Lady and the pamphlets that followed the Money Bill dispute and the anti-union riot, and this also suggests that the novel needs to be read with these contexts in mind. As Heckdendorn Cook has established, ‘the eighteenth-century letter-novel was never not political’.35

    My main argument about The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley is that its plot of sexual intrigue ‘symbolically spreads’ from the actual events of the plot to cover the politics of the day, and does so from a particular political perspective: that of the Irish Anglican Patriots. At this stage, the Irish Anglican literate public felt betrayed by the supposedly patriotic politicians in whom they had placed their faith during the Money Bill dispute and who they then mocked so powerfully during the anti-union riot. For this reading public, union was not marriage but unnatural congress, incest and rape; like the Ireland of the aisling poems, the patriot crowd waited the return of the true lover who could rescue them all from the depredations of the foreign, perverted abductor who wanted to force a union, and this true lover was the genuine patriot politician who had been so mistakenly lionised during the start of the Money Bill dispute as Ireland’s real saviour. The issue of what kind of fiction Irish Anglicans were reading is very important in this context, especially if it uses the same tropes and characters as are prevalent in the political culture.

    The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley, written by ‘a young Lady’ and published by James Hoey, is one of the most important neglected texts in Irish literary history. If the categorisation of Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber is correct, not only is this the ‘first’ ‘Irish Gothic’ novel but, given that it pre-dates Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) by four years, it may also have a claim to be the ‘first’ Gothic novel. It is important to pause here, of course, and repeat the warnings given in the Introduction against searching for the ‘ur’ text of any genre, an exercise not only pointless but, in fact, damaging. As has been pointed out, the notion that Walpole’s novel is the point of origin of the Gothic genre is a complete misunderstanding of how literary history works. Anne Williams insists that the idea that Otranto ‘sprang fully armed from Horace Walpole’s dreaming brow in 1764’ is a Gothic myth of origins,36 and one that, for example, marginalizes female writers by establishing a kind of primogeniture mirrored by its thematic centrality in much Gothic fiction itself.

    With the publication of Sophia Berkley we have, if not a point of origin, certainly a significant moment, and it is worth pausing here to explain what we know about this novel and to suggest in what ways it can be seen as a Gothic novel at all. We actually know very little. I have located no contemporary reviews, no advertisements for the novel, it is unaccompanied by a subscription list, and Christina Morin counts it among the ‘forgotten’, having ‘disappeared’ ‘from the cultural memory of British and Irish Gothic fiction’.37 Indeed, the novel is apparently so easy to forget that the Loebers, having been the first to rediscover the novel, promptly forgot it again, and it does not appear in their extraordinary Guide. The author is unknown, identified only as a ‘young Lady’ on the title page, though this presumably refers to Sophia herself, whose letters to a friend Constantia (mysteriously absent from the actual story itself, given her apparent closeness to Sophia) form the body of the novel, which is introduced by an unnamed editor who has supposedly found these letters in the papers left by a ‘deceased friend’ (2),38 (also unnamed – though presumably not Constantia, as the editor would surely otherwise have mentioned this).

    For an eighteenth-century Gothic novel, the plot is relatively simple. Just before her marriage to the rich and cultured Horatio, our heroine, Sophia Berkley, is left bereft when he is apparently killed by pirates on the British coast. When her father dies very soon after this and leaves her destitute, Sophia goes to London to earn her living as a partner in a millinery firm. Unfortunately, her beauty enflames the depraved desires of Castilio, who, having been rebuffed, demonstrates he can’t take no for an answer. He kidnaps Sophia and imprisons her in his mansion, where he attempts to convince her to willingly become his lover or suffer the consequences. Luckily, Sophia manages to escape from the mansion by picking a hole in one of its walls, Escape from Alcatraz style, and returns to London, where she is almost captured again by Castilio’s associates, saved only by the intervention of the rich and kind Dorimont, who also (and immediately) falls in love with her. Sophia, however, is a one-man woman and insists she can never recover from the loss of her Horatio – given which declaration, she is fortunate indeed when the supposed corpse turns up on her doorstep, very much alive and insisting that rumours of his death were exaggerated.

    It transpires that Horatio has been having adventures of his own. Kidnapped, not killed, by the murderous pirates and carried to Algiers, where he was kept prisoner, he built a getaway boat and escaped with a number of other prisoners only to be shipwrecked on a deserted island (rather like Sycorax, Caliban’s mother in The Tempest [1623]). Horatio was then rescued by a French aristocrat, the Marquis de Bellville, who quickly became his best friend, took him to France to meet his family and then tried to convince him to marry his sister, who had fallen in love with him. Unfortunately, the hot-headed Marquis was enraged when Horatio refused to marry Mademoiselle de Bellville (it seems that Horatio was also hung up on his first love) and forced him to take part a dual. In the fight the Marquis was killed. Horatio’s loyalty to the dead Marquis was such that he was extremely reluctant to reveal the reasons why they fought, and he was prepared for execution by guillotine. Literally on the chopping block, Horatio was saved once again, this time by Mademoiselle de Bellville, disguised as a man. So deeply in love with Horatio was she that she was willing to give her life for him, claimed that s/he was, in fact, the killer of the Marquis and that Horatio was covering for his/her crime. Having both been sent off for execution by the French king who had grown irritated with the farce being played out with his criminal justice system, they were saved when her mask fell off and her identity was revealed. The king, and her father, were so touched by the self-sacrifices both parties have been willing to make that Horatio and Mademoiselle de Bellville were forgiven. Horatio then returned to England to be reunited with his beloved Sophia.

    Understandably, given this plot, there have been objections to the description of Sophia Berkley as a Gothic novel. Maurice Levy has influentially deplored the apparent expansion of the term ‘Gothic’ so that ‘each component of the notion becomes in itself sufficient justification for using the whole concept’, an expansion that results in Gothic becoming the equivalent of ‘non-realistic’.39 I wouldn’t share Levy’s general concerns with policing the term ‘Gothic’, though I certainly wouldn’t use it to incorporate everything non-realist. However, even for Levy, Sophia Berkley would surely be at least a candidate for inclusion, since he admits that the term ‘conjures up’ for him, ‘female innocence engaged in labyrinthine pursuits and threatened by monachal or baronial lubricity’, although admittedly there are no ‘ruined castles and abbeys’ to be found here.40 More specifically, Richard Haslam has asked, using Levy as a starting point, that we ‘reduce the critical temptation to make “Gothic”’ mean practically everything, asking pointedly, ‘What does it mean to label . . . The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley (1760) “Irish Gothic” when [it was] published before the mode’s generally accepted terminus a quo – Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)?’41 The answer to this specific question is not really very difficult: it means that Otranto’s claims to startling originality will have to be tempered a bit, no bad thing given the novel’s inflated sense of its own importance. The idea that Otranto sets the limits to the genre is to take Walpole rather more seriously than he took himself. The answer to generic complexity is not to close down the porous borders – particularly not of a term like Gothic which has undergone a number of mutations in its relatively long history.

    Sophia Berkley is certainly not straightforwardly a ‘Gothic’ novel in the way that Walpole’s is, not least because the term Gothic is not used by it as a self-description (it does not have that disquieting sub-title, A Gothic Story). It also lacks the medieval setting that was the most basic meaning of the term when used by Walpole (which helps to explain why Longsword [1764] is a much more self-evident addition to the genre), and is a novel set in contemporary England. However, Sophia Berkley combines a number of elements which would become basic to the genre: a long Catholic Continental interlude; an emphasis on horror and terror; the abduction of a virginal girl followed by numerous (and serious) threats of rape and murder by an older, aristocratic and sexually dissolute male; images of death and torture; scenes of confinement and entrapment; an overall sense of persecution and paranoia that runs throughout the novel and adheres to both the main characters, Sophia herself, and her lover Horatio. This last element is extremely important because an atmosphere of persecution is one for which the Gothic novel later became famous, especially in novels like William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). As in these novels, the characters in Sophia Berkley are sometimes persecuted for clear reasons (Castilio’s sexual desire being the most obvious), but more often they suffer for reasons unknown and unknowable that expand outward and make it appear, at times, as if they are living in a hostile and threatening universe pitted against them. As Sophia herself puts it, ‘I considered that everybody around me was in the plot against me’ (56).

    Both Sophia and Horatio sometimes appear caught up in an incomprehensible web which conspires to keep them apart, so that letters mysteriously go missing or unanswered, parent figures die without warning (one kindly mother dispatched by an unlucky kick to the face by a cow) and even apparently inconsequential bits of paper come back to haunt Sophia with a signature she doesn’t remember making. Moreover, these moments of existential and even cosmic paranoia and crisis force the characters to attempt to decipher the meaning of their own lives and the world into which they have been thrown – in other words, this is a novel that does indeed ‘mean’, and whose meaning ‘symbolically spreads’ well beyond its pages to address very seriously the concerns of the public who first read it, the rioting, unsettled, existentially distressed, paranoid and persecuted Irish Anglicans who, like Sophia, felt betrayed and threatened, and whose reading habits often led them to fictional representations of their plight in the pamphlet literature of the day. Moreover, it also demonstrates that although one of the important aspects of Gothic is indeed its affective qualities, its ability to incite dread and fear in the characters and the readers, the response of the characters to that dread and fear here is to try to seek meaning, or to remake it cognitively, in the face of existential terror. Meaning and feeling are not separate and unrelated categories in the Gothic; instead, the latter provokes a search for the former.

    The implication of the novel in the political discourse of the 1750s is not difficult to demonstrate. As patriotism became a significant discourse in Irish Anglican political life, patriots became obsessed with discussing the Irish situation relative to Britain by utilising the language of freedom and slavery. By the late 1750s, the discourse of liberty and opposition to slavery had a respectable patriotic history in Irish Anglican writing, beginning with William Molyneux’s Case (1698) arguing ‘that Ireland should be Bound by Acts of Parliament made in England is against Reason, and the Common Rights for all Mankind’.42 The analogy made by Molyneux here is between the (Irish Anglican) nation and the free individual: just as an individual citizen has the right to self-determination so too has an individual nation, and any usurpation of that right by a foreign parliament is basically an act of enslavement. Archbishop William King too warned that ‘the mischiefs of tamely submitting to the tyranny and usurpation of a Governor may be worse and have more dangerous consequences to the Commonwealth, than a War’.43 In the third Drapier’s Letter (1724), Swift pointedly asked, ‘were not the People of Ireland born as free as those of England? . . . Am I a Free-man in England, and do I become a Slave in six Hours, by crossing the Channel?’44 Opposition to Irish slavery is a persistent theme in Swift’s work, and in A Short Character (1710) he attacks the Earl of Wharton, accusing him of ‘finishing the Slavery of that People, as if it were gaining a mighty Point to the Advantage of England’.45 Swift’s feelings were echoed by the contrarian Charles Lucas, who in 1748 described as ‘of slavish and corrupt stamp’ Irish parliaments which allowed English MPs to ‘impose’ laws on Ireland,46 and declared (rather proudly) ‘I disdain the Thought of representing a People, who dare not be free’.47 For Lucas, as for Molyneux and Swift, ‘LIBERTY . . . the best Gift of Heaven, is your [Irish Anglican] inheritance’, but this inheritance was under threat from those within the Irish Anglican nation who would simply give up this natural right.48

    Importantly, those who attempted to take away these supposedly natural rights by ‘selling out’ to the British parliament (that is, the supposed Patriots like Boyle who had resolved the Money Bill dispute apparently to their own advantage) were excoriated in an anonymous pamphlet (probably by Henry Brooke), Liberty and Common-Sense to the People of Ireland, Greeting (1759):

    Wherefore, when we elect Persons to represent Us in Parliament, we must not be supposed to depart from the smallest Right which we have deposited with them. We make a Lodgement, not a Gift . . . And, were it possible that They should attempt to destroy the Constitution which We had appointed them to maintain, They can no more be held in the Rank of our Representatives, than a Factor, turned Pirate, can continue to be called the Factor of those Merchants whose Goods he had plundered.’49

    Given the centrality of the dichotomy between freedom and slavery in Irish patriotic discourse in this period, that a significant portion of The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley is taken up with Horatio’s peons to freedom and his disparagement of those who would give up their liberty without a fight to foreign despots would seem to suggest a conscious and deliberate discursive connection between it and what has been called ‘colonial nationalism’.50 Like the Irish Anglican nation, Horatio too must also resolve an identity crisis, and this resolution is articulated in terms of his refusal to be treated like a slave – the exact language being used by Irish Anglican ‘colonial nationalists’ trying to explain the reasons for their refusal to accept a union with Great Britain. After he is abducted by a gang of pirates, Horatio is informed that his captor, the ‘inhuman Rodolpho’ (113), intends to keep him as a slave for the rest of his life ‘and that no ransom, however great, should purchase [his] liberty’ (112). Horatio insists that he would rather commit suicide than remain in service, since death is preferable to slavery (114). What disgusts him most, however, is the fact that some of those with whom he is trapped appear resigned to life in servitude, and in despair he asks ‘how they could bear life under such unmanly usage’ (114). Some, he finds, ‘preferred even a miserable existence to death; and would rather have languished their days in the most abject slavery, than perish in a moment’ (117). Such an option is anathema to Horatio, who – like Charles Lucas – chooses to risk his life than remain quiescent in the face of tyranny. In other words, Horatio talks a lot like an Irish Anglican Patriot and this is hardly a coincidence in a novel published after a decade when the language of patriotism was pouring from the presses in political pamphlets, satires, allegories. In eventually marrying him (and resisting the seduction of the villain), Sophia unites with a figure whose symbolic significance spreads over the class from which the author of the novel itself most probably came.

    Horatio’s determination to escape slavery leads to a dramatic escape on a raft which is then wrecked, causing him to be ‘thrown upon a small island’ (118). The shipwreck had long been a conventional way to image the supposed collapse of the Gaelic world in the face of the Jacobite defeat, perhaps most memorably by Dáithí Ó Bruadair in ‘An Longbhriseadh’, or ‘The Shipwreck’. Horatio’s island is ‘a desert one’, ‘totally uninhabited’ (119, 118), a highly significant plot twist coming in the same century as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which, as many critics have argued, is essentially a story about identity and subjectivity. In her examination of island literature, Diana Loxley argues that Robinson Crusoe was a central text in the formation of the modern individual, and the Crusoe figure on the deserted island became a paradigmatic example of the human subject coming to existential awareness.51 Deserted islands, particularly, are spaces where ideas of origin and identity can be pondered in a kind of Utopian space, ‘the site of that contemplation being the uninhabited territory upon which the conditions for a rebirth or genesis are made possible’52 and where the individual can go through a process of ‘reformulation and renewal’. Having felt abandoned by a metaphorical parent – the Big Daddy England – Irish Anglicans too had to go through a dramatic process of rebirth and reconstitution – only, the island on which this rebirth took place was far from uninhabited, and was rather populated by extreme expressions of otherness, Irish Catholics. Horatio uses his deserted island to demonstrate that he is not going to be treated as a slave, and it is where he begins the process of becoming a man, effectively starting from scratch, and – shockingly for a mid-eighteenth-century Irish Anglican publication – is assisted by a French aristocrat.

    The emphasis on French benevolence is perhaps the most surprising element of the novel and, given the Francophobia prevalent in the 1750s, would have surely worried contemporary readers. Britain and France had been at war since 1756, and rumours of a French invasion of Ireland had been rife for about a decade. Even before the Seven Years War broke out there had been invasion scares in Ireland, and in April 1755 there were rumours abounding that the French had actually landed in the west of Ireland.53 These fears were increased during 1759, when the increased build-up of the French navy led by Jacobites encouraged leading British politicians to consider that Ireland would be subject to a French incursion. Indeed, even the anti-union riot was blamed on French spies by the British Prime Minister,54 and by making the French wholly and genuinely sympathetic here, the author of Sophia Berkley dangerously shifts her novel, indeed radicalises it so that it is not simply patriotic but seems prepared to continence all manner of alliance in order to ensure that its characters do not have to endure a life of slavery. The implication of this for the Anglican readership is that it too may have to consider new alliances (perhaps with the reviled Catholic majority) in order to avoid being subjected to the political servitude of which so many of them were terrified.

    This radicalisation would also help explain the very sympathetic treatment of Roman Catholics in the novel as a whole. Sophia’s best friend as a girl is Isabella, a Catholic, who is presented as morally incorruptible and extraordinarily loyal, given that she falls in love with Horatio first yet graciously steps aside to allow Sophia to marry him without guilt. She is depicted as a kind, considerate and extremely self-sacrificing girl, prepared to give up her own happiness to secure that of her closest friend, and although Sophia articulates the common anti-Catholic distaste for the institutional church, describing Catholicism as a ‘religion which, as it addresses itself to the passions of mankind, can never chuse a better opportunity of taking possession of the mind, than when it is weakened by grief’ (11), this rhetoric does not spill over into a denigration of any particular Catholic in the novel at all. Individual Catholics are good and even heroic.

    In one sense it is not surprising that patriotic literature could sometimes articulate a measure of sympathy towards Irish Catholics since Irish Anglicans felt that they now occupied a similar position to the previously reviled Other. If the Irish Anglican enclave felt surrounded by a nefarious Catholic population and abandoned by the English, then individual Irish Anglican Patriots felt even more isolated, fighting against a corrupt political system operating through graft and self-interest. Periodicals such as the Universal Advertiser ‘popularised the sense of a black-and-white political firmament, filled by virtuous patriots struggling against a venal Castle administration, corrupt placement, and an English ministry intent on further subjugating the Irish parliament and draining the Irish treasury for non-Irish purposes.’55 In this kind of atmosphere, Catholics could be seen as potential allies rather than default enemies. Taking into account the toleration extended towards Catholics in the novel, the sympathetic representation of France, the hero’s defence of liberty and freedom and his attack on the ‘enslaved mentality’ of those who would submit to tyrannical rule, the implication of the novel in the patriotic politics of the 1750s is difficult to dispute.

    This relatively benign version of Catholics and Catholicism was not maintained later in the Irish Gothic novel. Anne Fuller’s The Convent, Or the History of Sophia Nelson (1786), for example, recycles quite a scandalous version of the Church for its readership. In a plot which, as Christina Morin has pointed out, anticipates Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, 56 an orphaned girl (Sophia Nelson) is singled out for marriage to her first cousin Dick by his nefarious father, her uncle Woodville. Sophia is imprisoned in a French convent where – rather like Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853) – she finds her Protestantism under natural and supernatural pressure as great efforts are made to convince her to renounce her faith and convert. Like Lucy, Sophia’s national status as a ‘British subject’ (and therefore by implication, naturally Protestant and free) is what saves her from conversion, although significantly, again like Lucy, she is attracted to Catholicism as well as revolted by it. Although Sophia Berkley clearly regrets the loss of Isabella to a French convent and considers Catholicism as theologically dodgy, it does not indulge in delusions about Catholic plots that abound in the later Gothic novel.


    This page titled Part II is shared under a CC BY-NC license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Jarlath Killeen via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.

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