The Merry-Thought | Page 3

know why she was unable to marry the man she truly
loved; but her bitterness may have been short-lived. Just after this
inscription comes a cynical comment identifying the lady as a member
of the Walker family. And the writer insists that like all women she was
inconstant, since he kissed her the next night.
This cynical approach to love and women dominates The
Merry-Thought. Part three, for instance, contains a poem that reads
like a parody of Belinda awaking in the first canto of Pope's Rape of
the Lock. The author, identified as W. Overb - - ry, presents a realistic
morning scene without either the charms and beauties that surround
Pope's Belinda or the viciousness and focus of Swift's similar pictures
(see pt. 3, p. 26).
Prevailingly, women are depicted as sexually insatiable, as in a piece
written by a man who takes a month's vacation from sex to recoup his
strength (pt. 2, p. 12). And the related image of the female with a sexual
organ capable of absorbing a man plays a variation on the vagina
dentata theme (e.g., pt. 2, pp. 19, 24). A drawing of a man hanging
himself for love raises a considerable debate on whether such a thing
can indeed occur (pt. 2, pp. 17-18). In a more realistic vein, though
equally cynical, is the poem on the woman who complained of her

husband making her pregnant so often:
A poor Woman was ill in a dangerous Case, She lay in, and was just as
some other Folks was: By the Lord, cries She then, if my Husband e'er
come, Once again with his Will for to tickle my Bum, I'll storm, and I'll
swear, and I'll run staring wild; And yet the next Night, the Man got
her with Child. S. M. 1708. (Pt. 2, pp. 10-11)
S. M. is clearly unsympathetic to the plight of married women in an age
with only the most primitive forms of birth control.[4] The picture of
her as a long-suffering person is undercut by the casual male
assumption that giving birth was not really dangerous and that women
make too much of the pain and difficulty. That women were often
forced to go through thirteen or fourteen deliveries when little thought
had yet been given to creating an antiseptic environment for childbirth
is apparently of little concern to S. M., who finds in the apparent
willingness of the woman to have sexual intercourse one more time
sufficient reason for contempt.
[Footnote 4: For an account of the horrors associated with childbirth,
see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England,
1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 79-80.]
In addition to giving glimpses into social attitudes, The Merry-Thought
has a variety of inscriptions that show the way these writings
functioned. Professor George Guffey, in his introduction to the first
part of this work (ARS 216 [1982], iii-iv), remarks upon the proposal
scene carried on in Moll Flanders between Moll and the admirer who
will prove her third husband and her brother. Such scenes involving
witty proposals and responses cut into the windows of taverns were
real enough at the time. The exchange in part two of The
Merry-Thought is not, however, half so satisfactory. The woman takes
umbrage at her admirer's suggestions that the glass on which he writes
is "the Emblem" of her mind in being "brittle, slipp'ry, [and]
pois'nous," and writes in retort:
I must confess, kind Sir, that though this Glass, Can't prove me brittle,
it proves you an Ass. (Pt. 2, p. 27)

Though an easy cynicism about women's availability and about the
body's insistently animal functions predominates, there is enough
variety in The Merry-Thought to provide something of a picture of
eighteenth-century society were any future anthropologist to come
upon this volume as the sole remnant of that period. He would see a
society engaged rather more in animal functions than in intellectual
pursuits--a society rather more concerned with drinking, love, and
defecation than the picture presented by the polite and intellectual
literature of the time allowed. But he would also find in the satirical
squibs on Corny, the Cambridge bookseller and printer, evidence of
learning and university life (pt. 2, pp. 4-6) as well as a criticism of
opera (pt. 2, pp. 14-16). He would see numerous young men longing for
their mistresses to soften their hearts toward them, and cynical older
men who had lost their illusions about love. But he could also come
upon a straight piece of philosophy taken from the still fashionable
Flask tavern in Hampstead (pt. 2, p. 24) or lowly bits of pious folk
wisdom (pt. 2, p. 10). More often, however, he would uncover a society
in which there was little of the generalized style that characterizes even
the most personal formal