The Fine Ladys Airs | Page 3

a portrait of the author's own former character, whose understanding having at length pointed out to him the folly he had so long been guilty-of, he reformed it altogether ... and wrote this character, in order to ... warn others from that rock of contempt, which he had himself for some time been wrecked on.
Nothing on its face more improbable than this could well be imagined. And that Baker could have "died ... of that loathsome Distemper the _Morbus Pediculosus_" (sketch of him in _Scanderbeg,_ 1747) does not sound likely, either.[6]
A lead to more solid information is furnished by the circumstance of Baker's having been educated at Oxford. We have seen (above) that he was barely twenty-one when The Humour of the Age was printed in March of 1701. A Thomas Baker, son of John Baker of Ledbury, Hereford, was entered at Brasenose College, Oxford, on March 18, 1697, aged seventeen.[7] The ages falling so pat, this must be our dramatist. Upon taking his B.A. at Christ Church in 1700 he must immediately have set to scribbling his first play (the Dedication says that it was "writ in two months last summer"). Perhaps at this time he lived in London in some such boarding-house as furnishes the scene for the play.
He may have been already studying law, for at least by 1709 (we cannot tell how much earlier) he was "by trade an Attorney."[8] It seems likely that various touches in the comedies reflect his training for this calling. In The Humour of the Age, Pun and Quibble, the principal fops, are a pair of articled law-clerks who detest green-bags and (it comes out at one point) are collaborating on a play. (Readers of the present reprint will note, also, that the money which Master Totty brings with him from the country is to recompense an attorney for training him in law). Perhaps Baker could never afford to study law as those well off did: there may be a tinge of sour grapes in the observation in _Tunbridge-Walks_ that "since the Lawyers are all turn'd Poets, and have taken the Garrets in Drury Lane, none but Beaus live in the Temple now, who have sold all their Books, burnt all their Writings, and furnish'd the Rooms with Looking-glass and China." But this is light-hearted, as becomes a man who has not yet had a setback as a stage-poet. Two years later, after the stopping of An Act at Oxford had put him to much trouble, he is souring somewhat, for the poor Oxford scholar says in Hampstead Heath that no profession nowadays offers much prospect of success for a man trained as he, and, as for poetry, one can only expect to be "two years writing a Play, and sollicit three more to get it acted; and for present Sustenance one's forc'd to scribble _The Diverting Post, A Dialogue between Charing-Cross and Bow Steeple_, and Elegies upon People that are hang'd."
When in December 1708 _The Fine Lady's Airs_ gained only a moderate success Baker must have thought of a living in the Church as a pis aller, for he enrolled at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, March 8, 1709, and took an M.A. there the same year. In a final attempt to succeed with his pen he seems to have tried periodical journalism in the guise of "Mrs. Crackenthorpe" in _The Female Tatler. The British Apollo_, at least, pinned this on him. "The author poses as a woman," it says, in effect, "and some may thus be taken in,"
But others will swear that this wise Undertaker By Trade's an At--ney, by Name is a B--r, Who rambles about with a Female Disguise on And lives upon Scandal, as Toads do on Poyson.[9]
Perhaps it was this which, taken quite literally, produced the _Biographia Dramatica's_ canard as to Baker's effeminacy (see above).
After grinding out a greater or less amount of this hack-work,[10] Baker gave up trying to write. His disappearance from the scene thereafter is accounted for by his appointment (1711) to a living in Bedfordshire, where he was Rector of Bolnhurst till his death, and (1716-31) Vicar of Ravensden. As the Bolnhurst school was founded upon a bequest from him in 1749,[11] he presumably died in that year--but not, I should guess, of morbus pediculosus.
_John Harrington Smith University of California, Los Angeles_
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
[Footnote 1: The other was William Burnaby. His plays have been given a modern editing by F.E. Budd (Scholartis Press, 1931).]
[Footnote 2: Nicoll, Early Eighteenth Century Drama, Handlist of Plays. For all subsequent statements as to dates of production I follow this source.]
[Footnote 3: It was still too lively, however, to be acted outside London. The Harvard Theatre Collection has a copy once owned by Joe Haines with "cuts" designed to soften it for playing in the provinces. Such