The Merry-Thought | Page 4

poetry of the period. Many of the writers
identify themselves and the names of the women they love or detest. In
short, if these volumes do little else, they do provide a vivid glimpse
into the personal life of the time, and to that extent an injection of some
of these inscriptions into the anthologies of the period might help in
providing a lively and piquant context for the serious artistic
production of writers like Gay and Swift.
The announced "publisher" of this olio was one Hurlothrumbo, a
character drawn from the theatrical piece of that name by Samuel
Johnson of Cheshire (1691-1773). Professor Guffey has proposed that
James Roberts, for whom the four parts were printed, "was almost
certainly the collector of the graffiti" and that the name of
Hurlothrumbo was invoked in order to attract some of the attention
that Samuel Johnson of Cheshire and his play were still receiving two
years after the play's first performance and publication.[5] But Roberts
would appear an unlikely candidate for the role of editor;[6] I would
suggest, rather, the possibility of a more direct and active connection
with Samuel Johnson of Cheshire: that he was himself likely the

compiler of the four parts of The Merry-Thought and that, whatever the
individual versifiers may have intended, this infamous collection of
graffiti--as collection--shares very closely with Johnson's other work a
spirit of wild variety, eccentric juxtaposition, and essential anarchism
that is meant to lead, not to clever parody of polite literature, but to a
new, almost apocalyptic vision of the sublime.
[Footnote 5: See ARS 216, x, n. 12. Professor Guffey offers parallels
between The Merry-Thought and Hurlothrumbo in "Graffiti, Hurlo
Thrumbo, and the Other Samuel Johnson," Forum: A Journal of the
Humanities and Fine Arts 17 (1979): 35-47.]
[Footnote 6: Michael Treadwell has demonstrated that the "trade
publishers" of the eighteenth century, such as James Roberts, acted
almost exclusively as binders and distributors of books and were
therefore different in kind from the printers and booksellers, who were
directly involved in the selection and production process. Roberts and
the other "trade publishers" dealt almost exclusively in "works
belonging to others," and Treadwell singles out Roberts as the purest
example. Despite putting his name to "literally thousands of works," he
never purchased any of the copyrights on works during his long career.
See "London Trade Publishers, 1675-1750," Library, 6th ser., 4 (1982):
99-134.]
At the first level, Hurlothrumbo: Or, The Super-Natural (1729) itself
appears to be quite simply a parody, in this case of opera in the form of
a work mixing dialogue and song in a manner similar to but much
wilder than Gay's Beggar's Opera. Johnson's apparent takeoff on the
heroics of opera managed to include in its attack a commentary upon
the absurdity of contemporary tragedy as well as some specific
references to those works that aimed at the sublime. Lines like "This
World is all a Dream, an Outside, a Dunghill pav'd with Diamonds"
(48) seem to call the very nature of metaphor into question, especially
when juxtaposed with other delirious lines such as "Rapture is the Egg
of Love, hatched by a radiant Eye" (14) or by songs such as that sung
by the king on contemplating the effects of swallowing gunpowder and
brandy together:

Then Lightning from the Nostrils flies. Swift Thunder-bolts from Anus,
and the Mouth will break, With Sounds to pierce the Skies, and make
the Earth to quake. (P. 42)
Hurlothrumbo may be mostly nonsense, but from the standpoint of
literary history, it is highly significant nonsense. It represented a revolt
against all dramatic conventions and shared a number of qualities with
graffiti, including the sense of spontaneity.
Had Johnson's intention been something as relatively uncomplicated as
literary parody he would have achieved some minor fame in a century
which could boast any number of geniuses who had specialized in
deriding the pretentiousness of the more established literary forms,
particularly tragedy, the epic, and the pastoral. But Johnson of
Cheshire lacked the aesthetic distance required of sustained irony and
had a grander purpose in mind. His tradition was not that of the
parodist but rather that of the visionary--the mystic whose tendency is
to merge the high and the low, the sublime and the absurd, within a
single work.[7] He was not attacking the extravagant rants of the
heroic play as Fielding was to do in his Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) or
reflecting on opera and pastoral as Gay had done in The Beggar's
Opera (1728); rather he was trying, however unsuccessfully, to
maintain his own work at the highest reaches of sublimity. He was like
one of Pope's "Flying Fishes," who "now and then rise upon their fins
and fly out of the Profound; but their wings are soon dry, and they drop
down to