The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) | Page 2

Pecksniff, Esq., to Kingsgate Street, High Holborn.
It has likewise many touches which show knowledge of the average fairly prosperous English life--the merchant's, the shopkeeper's, the sea-captain's. The author clearly knew the routine of trade. He knew that at New Year's Day the "day-book" had to be fully written up for scrutiny and stock-taking and sending out of accounts. (But the pleasures or torments of love are such that "the squire is so full of business that he can't spare half-an-hour to write it out." The brief description of his feelings which follows, conventional, perhaps, to some extent, has a certain life in it, as if the writer, embittered, was recalling his own youthful experience.) He knew, too, what to-day we only know in the mass through the newspapers, that a merchant's business depends not only upon watching the markets, but upon the actual supply of material--"what commodities are arrived or expected," and whether tea is up ?d. or tin ?d. down, or if hogs closed firm. The commercial world changes only its methods of communication and expression.
The first chapter, indeed, is of genuine historical and literary interest. From the literary point of view, it is a near descendant--collateral, if not direct, and anyhow based on the same English empirical humour of life--of Thomas Overbury's A Wife (1614--only one unique copy of this is known to exist), John Earle's Microcosmographie (1628), in prose, and Thomas Bastard's _Chrestoleros_* (1598), in verse. It is an early instance of the stringing together, in a connected narrative, of the material previously used only in short sketches or "characters"; and so it is directly in the succession which in the end produced what is perhaps the most enduring and individual phenomenon in our literature--the English novel.
* A copy of the very rare first edition fetched ￡155 at the Britwell sale in February 1922.
Of course the book says things we do not say now openly--though the traditional corpus scriptorum nondum scriptorum which almost all men and even some women know is handed on, a rather noisome torch, from generation to generation, solely by word of mouth, and flickers now and again in The Ten Pleasures. But they were said openly then, and by great writers. There is nothing here so nauseatingly indecent as the viler poems of the Rev. Robert Herrick and the Very Rev. the Dean of Dublin, Jonathan Swift, D.D. There are salacious hints, there are bawdy words, but no more than Falstaff or the wife of Bath or the Summoner or Tom Jones might have used--less, on the whole. There is no need, to borrow a phrase from the book's sequel, to "make use of the gesture of casting up the whites of the eyes." "True-hearted souls will solace their spirits with a little laughter, and never busy their brains with the subversion of Church and State government."
Certainly the writer favoured the jovial life. Food and wine flow in his pages like milk and honey in Canaan. There is no room in his house for the Puritans, not even, apparently, in the bringing up of his child. "Those that frequent Mr Baxter's Puritanical Holding-forth" must be merry when they come to his feast. He will have no _Catechizing of Families_--a discourse published by Richard Baxter in this very year 1683; and the only _Compassionate Counsel_--a Baxter pamphlet of 1681--he is likely to offer to young men is to take life lightly, as his hero does, and above all, not to marry.
For that is the true point of this lively piece of irony (the irony is less well sustained in the sequel, _The Confession of the New Married Couple_, and dropped altogether in the bitter Letter at the end of _The Ten Pleasures_). It is a savage attack upon women--upon (to quote a Rabelaisian sentence) "the quarrelsome, crabbed, lavish, proud, opinionated, domineering and unbridled nature of the female sex." Women, he says, "are in effect of less value than old Iron, Boots and Shoes, etc., for we find both Merchants and money ready always to buy those commodities." The analogy is an unfortunate one, for one of his implications is that women can easily be bought. But he--if it is a "he"--is in deadly earnest. Love, marriage, he asks scornfully--what are they? A romance, are they? The true happiness of life? Very well: here are the pleasures of them. You will be in love and make a match--and look at all the worry of the settlement, in which, by the way, you may often be defrauded. You will get married--a fine ceremony, with a fine feast; and all the nasty old women of the neighbourhood will come and tell bawdy stories to enliven the occasion. You get married, and thereafter you are at the mercy of your wife, who will indulge your wishes or not