Testing the Market

Like their imitators, Eliza Haywood and even Daniel Defoe have been called mercenaries who wrote to formula for low readers with limited intellects. Yet Love in Excess and Robinson Crusoe inaugurated a decade of lively, market-driven narrative experiment aimed at sophisticated gentry readers. When low scandal titillated, it originated in high life. Highly inventive, Jane Barker, Mary Davys, Penelope Aubin, and some authors of the many lives and surprising adventures in the Crusoe manner read their rivals with professional care. They adapted and contested as well as adopted Defoe’s distinctive fictional memoir, Haywood’s equally modern amatory sublime. So did Jonathan Swift when he parodied Robinson Crusoe’s strategies in Gulliver’s Travels, an anonymous narrative that matched its commercial triumph. Swift hastened the vogue’s end, but these novelists’ commercial and literary legacy endures.

Mrs. Mary Davys: Forerunner of Fielding

After the scores of “secret histories,” “authentick memoirs,” and “true relations” written by Mrs. Eliza Haywood and other female novelists of the 1720's, the four volumes of fiction by Mrs. Mary Davys produce much the same “cheerful, sunshiny, breezy” effect that Coleridge attributed to Fielding's work, in contrast to “the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson.” The double comparison is more than subjectively valid, for Mrs. Davys stands in much the same relation to Fielding's ebullient masculine genius that Mrs. Haywood's distressed damsels do to Richardson's heroines—both as a forerunner and as an influence upon the early eighteenth-century reading public.Many of the qualities which distinguish Mrs. Davys from her contemporaries may be explained by her background and by the circumstances under which her works were written and published. She was born in Dublin in 1674 and married the Reverend Peter Davys, a friend of Jonathan Swift and headmaster of the free school attached to St. Patrick's. Swift considered the marriage an indiscretion on the headmaster's part but, indiscreet or not, it was apparently a happy one until Davys'early death in 1698. Soon after this, his young widow “went for mere want to England.” She appeared briefly in London in 1700 and then settled in York where she lived for the next fifteen years. Little is known of her during this period. Swift's correspondence and his Journal to Stella indicate that she occasionally visited London, that she tried by various ruses to maintain contact with him from York, and that he grudgingly sent her several sums of money before his return to Ireland in 1714. Such irregular charity could hardly have been sufficient for the most frugal existence, and from pictures of life in a York boarding house and the recurrent character of a settled but good-natured female companion in her plays and novels, one may conjecture that Mrs. Davys enacted a similar role in private life.