The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) | Page 3

as suits her mood. Your house will be all awry if she has but a slight headache. When the baby comes, the place will be filled with old women and baby-linen and medical apparatus, and you will have all the anxieties of a father added to the discomforts of a neglected husband. For the rest, your wife will know how "to cuckold, jilt, and sham" as well as any gay lady of Covent Garden. And so on.
Much of the satire is acute and well-turned, often novel in expression if not in thought. But it is, as has been suggested, in the picture of English middle-class life under James II. that the importance of the book lies. Here is the domestic side of what the great diarists and the great poets hint at, and the excess of which municipal records, those treasuries of private appearances in public, chronicle with the severity of judgment. You have the young couple going (alas that the river for this purpose has, so to speak, been moved farther up its own course!) for a row on the Thames, with Lambeth, Bankside and Southwark echoing to their laughter. They might visit the New Spring Gardens at Vauxhall; but they would probably avoid the old (second) Globe Theatre on Bankside, for it was a meeting-house at which the formidable Baxter preached. Or they might go into Kent and pick fruit, even as "beanfeasters" do to this day; or to Hereford for its cider and perry, the drinking of which is a custom not yet extinct. Or maybe only for an outing to the pleasant village of Hackney. They would see the streets gay with signs which (outside Lombard Street) few houses but taverns wear to-day--the sign of the Silkworm or the _Sheep_, or that fantastic schoolmaster's emblem, the Troubled Pate with a crown upon it. And when they stopped for rest at the sign of a bush upon a pole, how they would fall to upon the Martinmas beef, the neats-tongues, the cheesecakes! It is true they might find prices high and crops poor; but such things must be.... "This is the use, custom, and fruits of war. If the impositions and taxes run high, the country farmer can't help that; you know that the war costs money, and it must be given, or else we should lose all." Had they learnt that as long ago as 1682?
As a genre work the book is not unique; rather is it typical. The gradual social settlement after the Civil War, destined to develop into stagnation under the first Georges, caused didactic works, guides to manners, housewifery and sport, society handbooks, to proliferate. The Ten Pleasures mentions some standard works, which every good housewife would probably possess--Nicholas Culpepper's medical handbooks, for instance, and _The Complete Cook_, which indeed, as part of _The Queen's Closet Opened_, had reappeared in its natal year 1682-1683. The same year saw the birth of such works as _The Complete Courtier_, _The Complete Compting House_, _The Gentleman Jockey_, _The Accomplished Ladies' Delight._ Life was being scheduled, tabulated, in readiness for the complacent century about to open. It was also being explored, not only in such works as The Ten Pleasures and _The Woman's Advocate_, but in others (entered as published, but in many cases not known to be now extant) like _The Wonders of the Female World_, _The Swaggering Damsel_, or _Several New Curtain Lectures_, and _Venus in ye smoake, or, the nunn in her smock, in curious dialogues addressed to the lady abbesse of love's parradice_--all produced in that same annus mirabilis of outspoken domesticity.
_The Ten Pleasures_, apart from its intrinsic interest, is exceptionally important from a book-collector's point of view. It is of the utmost rarity. There is no copy in the British Museum and none in the Cambridge University Library. In fact, there are only two copies known of the whole work--one in the Bodleian (wanting one plate), and that from which the present text is taken. The Huth Collection had a copy of the first part only. Both the fuller copies contain the second part--_The Confession_--and evidently the two parts, though they have separate title pages, and were published at different times, were intended to form a complete work.
Who wrote the book? "A. Marsh, Typogr. [apher]," says the title page. A. Marsh cannot be traced, nor is the work included in the Stationers' Registers for the period. It may be that Marsh thought it too licentious for registration (an improbable supposition), and so, as Hazlitt suggests, printed it abroad.
But the initials A.B. at the end of the Letter in the first part may be a clue, though a perplexing one. It is a plausible guess that they are those of Aphra or Aphara Behn, the dramatist and poet, the first woman to earn