The Disaster Artist of the long eighteenth century

The Vale of Felicity: Pourtrayed in a Series of Letters, Moral and Entertaining. By a Lady (1791)

Non-narrative poems do not need complication or conflict, or any thickening agents, for that matter. According to generic norms readers have internalized over millennia, poets writing in lyrical, pastoral, bucolic and other verse forms are not required to foreground conflict. To be sure, epic poets must skilfully employ thickening agents in their stories, but the sonneteer and the lyric poet are not bound to do so. Such poets, in fact, are entirely excused from this necessity because the forms in which they write carry different readerly expectations. Whereas a story, whether in prose, epic poetry, drama or other forms always carries the promise of conflict, whether explicit or implied, non-narrative poetry does not. In the case of the lyric, for example, poets are expected to write of moods, emotions and states of mind in ways that do not necessarily rely upon thickening agents. Wordsworth’s ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ is a clear example of a brilliant and beautiful poem in which the speaker, with no use of complication, recounts/constructs a rapturous memory of a beautiful morning. Although some critics have tried to argue for an implied conflict in the speaker’s state of mind, most would agree that the ‘story’ he tells is not a narrative in the traditional sense. Indeed, there can be no compelling story, in the conventional sense, about a man who wanders in the morning and then becomes happy on a bridge. That is not a true narrative because there is no complication. Such a story as a story is no story at all because the man encounters no hardship, no obstacles, no challenges and no loss. There are no successful romantic comedies without blocking figures or forces that prevent the couples’ coupling, but there are surely lyrics that serve as pure expressions of romantic love without reliance upon any form of complication. Poets can sing of an uncomplicated joy because the foreground of non-narrative poetry is language-play and the use of tropes. Novelists and other storytellers, however, simply cannot do this without being exceedingly uninteresting and, consequently, egregiously violating internalized generic conventions of the narrative – ideas that say the foreground of storytelling is character in relation to the complication.

The author of The Vale of Felicity flouts such conventions, at least for most of the first half of the novel, which consists simply of an exchange of letters in which several woefully flat characters proclaim the happiness they have found in the joys of community and marriage with its ‘silken band of hymen’ (Anon., 1791: 18). Of course, there is indeed great potential for happiness and fulfilment in sexual gratification, communion with another soul in a sacred bond, and socializing with relatives and friends. Contemporary research on happiness even supports such notions. ¹ The problem here is not with the content but with the form. It is almost as if the novelist entered a wager with a friend over whether it is possible to write a sunny novel about happiness in which there is no conflict. In this case the writer roundly lost the bet. The great novelist, intending to write about happiness, would enliven the narrative with thickening agents. The author of The Vale, however, relies upon fiat and does not even take the trouble to show – whether through suggestion, imagery, irony, symbolism or action – such happiness. The dictum ‘show, don’t tell’ apparently did not factor in the novelist’s writerly preparation.

The narrative does take a somewhat interesting turn about halfway through (letter XXXV onwards) when the two principal male characters, T. Warton and R. Mitford, begin exchanging their compelling and rather complicated histories. In Warton’s letters the reader learns that he and his sisters were sent, on the death of their parents, to live with an uncle in Barbados who owns a rather lucrative slave-holding plantation. In the even more interesting Mitford letters the reader learns the backstories of several characters, some of whom are involved in shipwrecks and forced into slavery, while another is seduced into prostitution, and still another is presumed dead but later found to be alive. And there is much else besides. These elements could surely serve as compelling, complicating forces in the hands of the skilled storyteller, but the author of The Vale badly bungles them, cramming them episodically, in not so subtle ways, into the second half of the narrative for some reason, instead of properly centring and pacing them throughout. It is almost as though someone gave the writer feedback mid-way through the draft, at which point she then realized the necessity of complication and began weaving it into the narrative.

In addition to these artistic blunders, the author’s vision of happiness relies upon some questionable means. The two friends, Warton and Mitford, are able to marry one another’s sisters and settle themselves and several others comfortably in the bucolic Vale of Felicity because of a generous benefactor, Lord C____ and his altruistic gift of copious funds, as well as a tidy little fortune Warton earns from the slave-holding plantation he inherits from his rich slave-holding uncle. Locating felicity in pecuniary means is not necessarily inaccurate, as the rich do seem to report slightly higher levels of happiness than the rest of us (Seligman, 2012). Moreover, it is virtually impossible for most people (although there are indeed exceptions here) to find happiness when their basic needs are not being gratified. In the complexities of human happiness, money does matter to some extent. It is important to know, however, that, adjusting for basic needs, earning more money results in only a marginal corresponding increase in one’s happiness levels, according to a sizable body of contemporary research (Seligman, 2012). But the author of The Vale seems to imply that money does indeed buy happiness because in nearly all cases when a character in the novel finds felicity, it is the direct result of a change in socio-economic status. It could be argued that in the eighteenth century far more people were concerned with meeting basic needs than those who live in the United Kingdom today. The point is well taken: happiness is not likely when basic needs for such necessities as food, shelter, clothing and others go ungratified. But why did the author choose something like a monetary deus ex machina for literally every character in the novel who finds happiness? Why did she not show happiness in ways unrelated to, or at least not entirely dependent upon, material wealth? Of course, she did not have the privilege of knowing about contemporary science and happiness studies, but since the debates on happiness are truly ancient, the author might have explored other conceptions of felicity, especially those not informed by wealth, such as Aristotelian eudaimonism or some other. There is a decidedly Epicurean element in the narrative – indeed the first half is a celebration of pleasure – which Norton says was common in eighteenth-century fiction (2012: 33). The novelist repeatedly stresses the phrase ‘silken band of hymen’ to designate the bliss of marital ecstasy, and the entire cast of characters travels to London for a series of post-nuptial celebrations in eighteenth-century-style pleasure gardens. Still, such Epicurean delights cost money and are thus available only to the privileged. The novelist thus cannot seem to escape locating happiness in monetary sources.

Undoubtedly more problematic is the delineation of happiness as a direct result of the proceeds from a plantation in Barbados. The novelist does seem to condemn slavery, a point that can be seen in Georgiana Mitford’s stated disapprobation of the institution’s odious nature. It can also be seen in T. Warton’s own misgivings about the plantation he inherited. To demonstrate the seeming anti-slavery stance more forcefully, the novelist has Warton continue the practice, which he has learned from his uncle, of buying and freeing slaves, mostly white people, whom he feels are worthy of their freedom because of their noble natures. And when he can no longer tolerate the thought of being a slave-holder, Warton sells the plantation, nevertheless using the proceeds to comfortably settle himself, his sisters and several others in the Vale of Felicity, where they all live, presumably conscience-free, happily in the ‘silken band of hymen’. The novel’s subtext says life is good when you are getting laid, even when such bliss is made possible from the sweat of forcibly enslaved people.

Is it unfair to hold past generations accountable to current standards and values? Probably. Notions of human equality and discourses on social justice were just emerging during the eighteenth century. Because of ignorance and institutionalized racism, many well-meaning people held what today would be considered racist views. Still, it is important to remember that it was the eighteenth century itself that offered the world new notions of human equality and liberty, ideas that contributed enormously to the end of slavery as a legal institution. The novelist, it seems, was not enlightened enough to see the problems inherent in the novel’s central premise. To close a narrative purporting to offer a moral perspective on happiness in such a way – the character finds the ethics of slavery untenable, so he sells his plantation but still immensely enjoys the economic advantages it has given him – is highly questionable.

Despite its subtitle, the novel is neither moral, given its ethically questionable premises, nor entertaining, for its problems with complication, pacing and one-dimensional characters. The numerous flaws in The Vale of Felicity explain why it was all but forgotten as an eighteenth-century text. Those same artistic flaws are replicated in Benignity.

Benignity: or, The Ways of Happiness. A Serious Novel. Selected (with Additional Conversations) from the Works of Henry Brooke, Esq. By a Lady (1818)

Despite Aristotle’s principles on the unities of time, place and action, not all narrative forms call for unity of plot. Although a tightly interwoven yarn is today considered by most to be a benchmark of compelling storytelling, the episodic is not always a flaw. In film one immediately thinks of Quentin Tarantino’s sometimes (though by no means always) rather masterful handling of loosely related episodes in larger narratives. In fiction one of the oldest novel forms is the picaresque, which, originating in Spain in the sixteenth-century, is perhaps the most episodic of all narrative types. ² One of the most important and influential novelists of all time, Miguel de Cervantes, made picaresque conventions famous, using many of the form’s elements in his famous Don Quixote (1605). Perhaps what redeems the picaresque narrative for its episodic excess is the foregrounding and development of a roguish but lovable narrator whose low-class social standing and satirical adventures expose the hypocrisy of society. After all, who does not love a lovable rogue who represents the working class’s perspective on societal hypocrisy?

But can an episodic novel with a third-person narrator who tells the story of a privileged boy from the upper class succeed? This is a difficult question to answer, as it seems anything is possible in narrative forms. Imaginative authors almost always seem to find ways of undermining the reader’s expectations. Judging solely by the novel Benignity, nevertheless, suggests a forceful ‘no’ to the question. Benignity is an episodic Bildungsroman, but unlike its picaresque forebears, it completely lacks spice, like salsa without jalapenos, in the use of a third-person narrator and the dreary flatness of the two principal characters, the result of which is a vapid narrative without a bubble of effervescence.

The novel is, according to its subtitle, an adaptation of the work of Henry Brooke: as the editors of The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles indicate (Raven and Forster, 2000), it is an offshoot of Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1765–70), a similarly episodic, sentimental narrative with nearly the same characters and action, a book that has been criticized for its flaws but simultaneously praised for its language and spiritual enthusiasm. Walter Allen, for instance, called it ‘one of the worst novels ever written, but a remarkable book’ (1958: 86). Benignity thus has much in common with The Fool of Quality, serving as a sort of alternative version in what is called identikit fiction, a common eighteenth-century form in which authors borrowed plots and characters but added something original to them (Raven and Forster, 2000: 22). The extent to which such borrowing was acceptable is debated in the present day, just as it was in the eighteenth century. But surely there were limits. Raven and Forster, for example, chose to exclude The Story of David Doubtful (1798) from their bibliographical survey because it is ‘little more than a verbatim extract of Henry Brooke’s Fool of Quality’ (2000: 22), a tendentious, Methodist selection of the novel that John Wesley himself oversaw. But they did include an entry on Benignity, presumably seeing it as original in its own way. The ‘additional conversations’ referred to in the novel’s subtitle are enough, according to eighteenth-century identikit standards, to merit a free-standing identity. Still, although the anonymous author replicates Brooke’s characters and action, she does not achieve the same felicity of language or spiritual enthusiasm, and the characters are five shades of grey beyond drab. This identikit novel is by no means like its forebear.

Much like The Vale of Felicity, Benignity surely has enough complicating elements to make for a rather compelling story. The main narrative thread concerns the illegal ‘adoption’ (kidnapping by today’s standards) of a young boy named Henry by an older, mysterious neighbour, not coincidentally named Henry, as he proves to be the boy’s uncle, who tutors him in the principles of Christian charity. The older Henry’s backstory is also quite fascinating, as he, like his young ward, is the spurned second son of an earl who neglects him and apprentices him to a merchant from whom he ultimately inherits over a million pounds. Although happily married with two children, he eventually loses his entire family, except one daughter, as the narrative later reveals, to smallpox. After a peculiarly short period of grieving over nine days, he is smitten by a 14-year-old girl who, unbeknownst to him, is attempting to evade the lascivious advances of the king of France himself. Henry nevertheless successfully courts and woos her, and the two marry and quickly have a child. On their return to England, however, his second wife dies after falling from a horse, and soon after the baby follows her to the grave. At this point he takes a liking to the young Henry and effectively kidnaps him but promises to return him to his father (who turns out to be the older Henry’s brother) ‘a perfect gentleman’ (1818: 33). In the end he does deliver on this promise. The novel ends as Henry returns the boy, now perfectly educated in the principles of Christian charity, to his father, the earl of Moreland, who has himself just suffered the losses of his wife and firstborn son, the young Henry’s own mother and brother. The earl dies soon thereafter, leaving the young Henry with a title and a fortune. Henry also marries his long-lost second cousin, mistakenly thought dead but now very much alive. Both Henrys end up happy, as the elder is reunited with his granddaughter and the younger can enjoy the pleasures of the ‘silken band of hymen’ so touted in the Vale of Felicity.

There is enough complication here for a rather compelling narrative if it were told differently, that is, with some measure of skill and subtlety. The episodes involving the older Henry’s backstory, though compelling, have nothing whatsoever to do with the main narrative thread. It is entirely possible such episodes represent the author’s way of suggesting the folly of locating happiness in romantic love, since the central point seems to be that real happiness lies in transcending selfish interest in altruistic action. But if that were the case, then why does the novel end with Henry marrying his long-lost, second cousin? The novel thus contains numerous unrelated episodes, any one of which might have served as the basis for an independent narrative were the author to make clear the connections between them and the theme of altruism.

Surely, altruism and self-sacrifice are important subjects that a good writer might use in powerful ways that capture the reader’s interest. Human beings have been able to emerge as a relatively minor, defenceless African species and ultimately dominate the entire planet in part because of the ability to self-transcend, to see other members of the species with compassion and empathy, and to engage in acts that help the family, the tribe, the village, and so on. Socialization, contrary to Freud’s (2010 [1930]) perspective in Civilization and its Discontents, is not purely a matter of keeping anti-social impulses at bay but likely the result, at least in part, of the hormone oxytocin and the bonding it prompts in most people, psychopaths and narcissists notwithstanding. The author of Benignity, therefore, seems to be on the mark with the idea that there is a link between happiness and altruistic action and the self-transcendence in which it results. According to Martin Seligman (2012), one of the world’s most frequently cited psychologists, contemporary research rather compellingly shows the connection between happiness and altruism as well as other-directed emotions such as gratitude, love, elevation, and the like (2012: 112).

The problem, again, is not with content but with form. Through rather heavy-handed didacticism, the author tells the reader of the moral development of the young Henry without showing it through the character himself, who is rather drably painted in one dimension and, however strange, not given much dialogue at all. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with a didactic novel, provided there is enough artistry for the reader’s entertainment. The form was rather popular in the eighteenth century, serving as a kind of counterbalance to the perceived licentiousness (and thus morally dangerous aspects) of certain other novels. ‘Staking their vindication on the instructive efficacy of their fictions’, writes Sarah Raff, many ‘novelists tried to draw a hard and fast line between seductive novels, which corrupt readers, and their own, which teach readers virtue’ (2006: 466). The extent to which such instruction could be foregrounded, nevertheless, was by no means unlimited: too much of it exposed the novelist as tendentious. The marriage of instruction and entertainment was central to the genre, and readers readily expected to be instructed in knowledge and wisdom while also being entertained. But if they were not sufficiently entertained and also saddled with too much didacticism, then the novel was forgotten and left in obscurity, much like the three in question here.

Benignity, an obvious Christian attempt at rescuing readers from the allure of seductive novels that might lead one morally astray, is problematic because what counterbalances a rather heavy-handed treatment of Christian charity are several unrelated episodes that have nothing whatsoever to do with the novel’s central figure or its main themes. What does a Bildungsroman about the moral development of a young rich boy have to do with the king of France’s lust after a barely pubescent teenage girl and the older Henry’s successful wooing of her? Perhaps the novelist used these as a means of mitigating the strong didactic tone, but they simply do not fit the overall narrative and its central theme of charity.

Shortly before the publication of Benignity, Keats famously wrote in a private letter to his brother of his distrust in literature that ‘has a palpable design upon us’ (1970 [1848]: 117). Unfortunately, the letters were not published until 1848, and so the principle never found its way into the imagination of the anonymous author of Benignity. At least to some extent, a didactic novel must obscure, with pleasure and entertainment, its instructional designs upon the reader. In his preface to Clarissa (1748), Samuel Richardson does say that ‘amusement should be considered as little more than the vehicle to the more necessary instruction’ (1986 [1748]: 12), a statement implying that the moral lesson is more important than the entertaining yarn in which it is spun. The vehicle, nevertheless, is important and should serve to lighten the heaviness of instruction to some extent, much like Richardson’s gripping narrative does. Benignity does not. The author sorely needed to have tightly interwoven some of the didacticism-mitigating elements to achieve a better effect. The result is philosophy or, to be more precise, Christian theology, dressed up to look like fiction in clothes that do not properly fit and thus expose the author’s tendentious proselytizing.

Edward: Or the Pursuit of Happiness (1820)

In a similar didactic gesture the author of Edward also fails to mitigate didacticism with aesthetic delights, tiresomely dragging the reader through the muck of a highly episodic, somewhat philosophical narrative centred on the maturation, however problematic, of a 24-year-old nobleman with some mysterious baggage: he is married but estranged from his wife in circumstances the novelist chooses to leave unexplained, perhaps hoping the mystery adds some measure of depth to the character. It does not. Although he is a protagonist in a book-length narrative, Edward is one-dimensional, a simple personification of the enduring human search for happiness and the manner of living that best facilitates it.

And there are other flaws. The novelist clearly borrows from other literary sources without enriching the material. One of the major characters in Edward, for instance, is a philosopher named Manfred, who bears little resemblance to Walpole’s (1764) famous villain but does slightly resemble Byron’s infamous anti-hero (see Byron, 1978 [1817]) of the same name: he is an exceedingly learned philosopher and nobleman, conducting undisclosed experiments in his leisure. Beyond this, however, he bears no further resemblance to any literary predecessor of the same name, and he is surely far less interesting than the Manfred of Walpole or Byron. The anonymous author’s Manfred lives in a place called The Happy Valley, where he enjoys a pleasant social circle that bonds regularly in intimate gatherings characterized by social intercourse, mirth and a little wine consumed in Stoic moderation. In a not-so-subtle allusion the author also pays homage to Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, which also begins and ends in The Happy Valley, and which also features a young man who leaves such a paradise on an unsuccessful, circular quest to find happiness in the greater world. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with borrowing character names, locales and even action: Shakespeare, for example, filched every one of his plots from histories, predecessor plays and other sources, while Wordsworth famously mined his sister Dorothy’s prose journals for lyrical inspiration. But the canons of eighteenth-century identikit fiction said that one must offer the appropriated elements in a fresh, titillating way. The author of Edward does no such thing, giving the reader a boring, untroubled Manfred and an utterly flat protagonist who wanders in an episodic journey that leads him back to where he started. One cannot publish a narrative on the heels of Byron’s infamous, somewhat autobiographical closet drama while using Johnson’s influential circular journey and search for happiness without doing something interesting with such well-known material. A more derivative novel has never been published.

Although it lacks originality, the vision of happiness the author didactically propounds does slightly depart from that of the other two novels. Since Edward is estranged from his wife, and he engages in no further amorous pursuits throughout the entire novel, it would seem likely the novelist does not endorse the idea that happiness can be found in the sexual ecstasies of the ‘silken band of hymen’. The other two novels, by contrast, end happily with the main characters dizzy from the heady raptures of newlywed sex.

But there is nothing new in the narrative on the question of finding happiness, even by eighteenth-century standards. Manfred inculcates in his young charge the tenets of Stoicism and its call for extinguishing extreme passion and affect. (Like Epicureanism, Stoical ideas find frequent expression in eighteenth-century fictions, according to Norton (2012)). Edward quickly learns the truth of Manfred’s Stoicism, enjoying his circle of intimates and the little bit of wine they never drink to excess. After witnessing the philosopher’s two young sons bloodying each other’s noses, however, Edward mistakenly concludes that Manfred’s ideas must be flawed. He thus undertakes an episodic journey in pursuit of the real means of happiness, searching for but never really finding it in numerous adventures in politics, society, philosophy, farming and the military.

He does seem to fulfil the search with his stay at a greengrocer’s garden, where he learns that a bit of labour and commerce can be quite spiritually rewarding. Such an episode might again be a passing nod to Johnson’s Rasselas, the first American edition of which included on its title page a quote from La Rouchefocauld: ‘The labour or Exercise of the Body, freeth Man from the Pains of the Mind; and this constitutes the Happiness of the Poor’ (cited in Keymer, 2012: 12). But the author seems to inexplicably abandon this offered solution to the problem of happiness by having Edward return to The Happy Valley and declare that Manfred was correct all along. It is almost as if the novelist is suggesting a schizoid vision of happiness, one for the poor involving work and commerce and one for the wealthy elites characterized by social intercourse and the pleasures of a little bit of wine. A better writer would have further developed the element or left it out entirely. In any case it is derivative and casts no new light on the ancient problem of human happiness.

Of the three novels, Edward is perhaps the better artistically, as there is indeed enough complication throughout in the protagonist’s many challenges; and its episodic nature is justifiable because each narrative thread is centred on the common theme of finding the source of happiness. But it is a didactic novel that teaches nothing new in a heavy-handed manner that by no means serves to illustrate the depths of the protagonist, who remains essentially undeveloped and flat to the end.

Although it is not exactly like the immensely popular sentimental novel, ‘the clear fashion leader of the period’, according to Raven and Forster (2000: 27), Edward does contain the central feature of such works: the protagonist’s lachrymose death, which typically occurs in the final chapter. Jonathan Williams (2017) insightfully observes that death is the central trope in the sentimental narrative, a form that teaches not only bonding, affect and socialization but also how to prepare for death. Yet the question remains whether Edward meets the benchmarks of this form. Most readers will shed no tears and learn nothing about death after finishing Edward because its protagonist was never alive to begin with, which is to say, the author was not skilled enough to enable him to step off the page into the room of one’s imagination, something many great storytellers accomplish.

Happy endings

All three novels end on a happy note, with tidy resolutions to rather complex problems. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with a happy narrative that ends happily. Traditional comedies, for instance, often end with a marriage and its festivities. Despite an unspoken negativity bias in literary studies in which scholars do seem to favour the tragic (Moores, 2018), there is no justifiable canon that says happiness is a taboo subject in serious literature. The three anonymous novels are problematic not because of their common subject matter of felicity; they are flawed because they violate generic norms and aesthetic taste in the worst possible way. Literary forms, one might argue, are not bound by such rigid rules, and the great artist almost always violates them. The difference, of course, is that the talented do so with brilliance and bravura, whereas lesser wits do so in ways that call attention to the deviation itself, not the genius of the innovation.

The three novels are also flawed philosophically, as they represent a perspective on happiness that cannot seem to disentangle itself from the question of wealth. All three represent an elitist vision, one in which happiness is made possible almost entirely through pecuniary means. In the epistles of The Vale of Felicity, numerous characters proclaim their happiness, but this is a bliss made possible because of the generosity of the aristocrat Lord C____ , the equivalent of a one-percenter by today’s standards, someone who immensely benefits from a centuries-old, exploitative socio-economic system and the woefully unfair and unequal distribution of wealth it fostered in the UK. Such bliss is also possible because of the copious wealth T. Warton has acquired by overseeing the slaves on his plantation in Barbados. Benignity offers a different conception of happiness rooted in altruism, but it never deviates from the idea that happiness and excessive wealth are intertwined: the protagonist is a young aristocrat taken in by an uncle who has himself inherited over a million pounds. At one point in the story, the elder Henry gives the younger a thousand pounds, itself a fortune in the eighteenth century, as a charity fund to give to prisoners. Such charity and altruism are indeed noble ideas, but to present them in such an aristocratic context, which amounts to the noblesse oblige of old, renders them entirely suspect. Isn’t it easy to be charitable and give drippings to the poor when one has an unlimited supply of wealth effectively stolen from them? Edward, in the novel by the same name, is also an aristocrat, an eighteenth-century one-percenter who has failed to find happiness in marriage and then undertakes a quest to find it in other places. He does learn the Stoic secret to the conditions of happiness in his circular journey, but the quest itself is only possible because he is a man of leisure. And it is also worth noting that he undertakes his quest only after tutelage and prompting from another aristocrat, Manfred, who himself lives comfortably in The Happy Valley, where he enjoys sufficient leisure to conduct a dilettante’s scientific experiments and drink wine in boring moderation with his family and friends. That is all lovely and wonderful, but what about everyone else in the eighteenth century? Not everyone can be the recipient of a generous aristocrat’s gifts; some people need to work. The novelist does suggest that a little bit of work and industry can be a good facilitator of happiness, but these will not do for Edward, apparently, as he is not of common working-class stock and thus inexplicably abandons his good life with the greengrocer. All three novels implicitly suggest that happiness is possible either when one has gobs of wealth or when one has the good fortune of a boon from an eighteenth-century one-percenter with such gobs. And that is not philosophically supportable.

Since this aristocratic value system informs all three novels, and since all three seem to be deficient artistically in the same areas, particularly in character, plotting, obtrusive didacticism and complication, it is entirely likely that they were penned by the same author. Of course, the discussion offered here by no means definitively proves the point, and it will take a better literary historian than I am, or perhaps a linguist doing syntactical and lexical analysis, to definitively determine authorship. The foregoing analysis is merely a starting point, since there is, to my knowledge, only bibliographic information available about these novels: there is virtually no mention of them in the critical record. ³ The one critical comment that has survived the ravages of time is pointed at The Vale of Felicity but could just as well be applied to all three texts: ‘We are extremely happy’, a harsh reviewer opines, italicizing the term, ‘when we had made our escape from this Vale of Felicity, into which we are sorry we cannot advise any of our readers to enter’ (cited in Raven and Forster, 2000: 529). Harsh but entirely deserving.

It is quite understandable why the three have been essentially forgotten, as few people remember and re-read badly written narratives, the fate, incidentally of most of the novels published in the eighteenth century (Raven and Forster, 2000: 517). The type of writing one sees in them calls to mind the contemporary film The Disaster Artist, starring and directed by James Franco (2017). The film depicts the true-life story of Tommy Wiseau, an exceedingly bad but aspiring actor who decides, given his unlimited wealth, to make a feature-length movie, The Room (Wiseau, 2003), which ends up being so badly written, directed, filmed and acted that audience members mistake it for a comedy, and it goes on to become an underground cult classic. ⁴ The Vale of Felicity, Benignity and Edward are surely the stuff of an eighteenth-century disaster artist, someone privileged with leisure and means, much like the preponderance of novelists who published in the age of enlightenment (Raven and Forster, 2000: 520), but woefully lacking in talent and imagination; the three novels provide ample material for a cult of readers who delight in deplorably bad writing. There are enough artistic and philosophical blunders in them to supply such a reading group with enough material for endless laughs and good times. Reading such novels might indeed increase the reader’s happiness but for reasons the author(s) likely did not envision.

So why write about such novels? If they are so bad they are not even worth reading, why should one critically attend to them? Let me give first a shorter answer and then a longer one.

First, as previously mentioned, besides the one line from a harsh reviewer, I could find no extant criticism on these texts whatsoever. They are a part of the historical record and emerged out of the century that saw the rise of the English novel. With their aesthetics of happiness and various forms – epistolary, picaresque, identikit, Bildungsroman, sentimentalism, the circular journey, didacticism and others – they bear the stamp of the age that produced them. While they embody little artistic value, they are part of the history of English, whether one likes them or not. Since there is no extant criticism on them, I thought it would be potentially valuable for other scholars to have a critical starting point, should they decide to include them in future discussion, especially those focused on happiness in the eighteenth century. There is now an ongoing project in literary studies to attend to all art of a given period, even if it is lacking in merit, in the interests of analysing the totality, not just the handful of influential texts that so often serve to represent, in a kind of literary apartheid, an entire historical period.

Second, in the twenty-first century there is a broad, multi-disciplinary movement that has reignited ancient discussions of happiness. The work of Positive psychology has spilled over into other disciplines with its enormous academic and popular influence. Today, there are literally thousands of scholars around the world engaging in statistically supported research on such subjects as well-being, happiness, eudaimonia and other related topics, and there are countless academic journals eager to publish their findings. While some Positive psychologists continue to write fluffy and insubstantial pop psych books (and, incidentally, threaten the entire enterprise by undermining its credibility), the study of happiness they have inspired is extremely important because the subject is a centrality in human affairs. It is nearly impossible to escape the question of happiness when discussing some aspect of human life. It is always there, sometimes in the foreground, as it was so often in eighteenth-century literary and philosophical discourse, but typically in the background. But it is there all the same, informing our values, beliefs, prejudices, courses of action, our sense of meaning and purpose and our sense of belonging – in short, our entire lives.

As Soni (2006) and others have pointed out, however, the subject of happiness has received, relatively speaking, an insufficient amount of attention in critical and literary theory. Of course, scholars working in the areas of identity politics have a vested interest in advancing the well-being of people of colour, women, the LGBTQQIA community, the exploited working class and others. But by and large literary scholarship has eschewed the question of happiness, instead continuing in textual form the noble cultural projects and political fights that began on the streets in the 1960s.

Why have we avoided the subject? Rita Felski (2015), in her daring, and what will likely be considered landmark work The Limits of Critique, discusses the mood of literary studies from the 1970s to the present day, which, using Paul Ricœur’s image, she argues is characterized by hermeneutics of suspicion. Critique, as she observes, is ‘driven by a gnawing dissatisfaction that comes within striking distance of a full-blown pessimism’ (2015: 33). She also takes a stab at the ethos of graduate programmes, which too often beat the enthusiasm out of students if they are made too happy by the texts they are supposed to be interrogating with suspicion. If so, they could be branded ‘insufficiently critical’, which, as Felski observes, could lead to ‘excommunication from the field’ (2015: 44).

In his influential study The Story of Joy, Adam Potkay (2007) offers another important perspective on why subjects like joy and happiness exist in such impoverished forms in literary and cultural studies: the various upheavals, genocides, famines, major world wars and proxy wars of the twentieth century, Potkay compellingly shows, left scholars thoroughly disenchanted with the concept of progress and thus suspicious of all notions of happiness. ‘While post-WWI modernists set the tone with their eschewal of happiness, the rest of the century followed suit’, writes Potkay (2007: 226). This trend intensified to such a degree that by the 1970s happiness was met with a high degree of distrust and suspicion. By then, ‘happiness was considered embarrassing, a mark of shallowness’, according to Potkay (2007: 226). To be a happy academic in the last century (and still to some extent today) meant that one was not paying attention to the real evils of the world, variously conceived. Happiness came to represent a shallow neurosis of denial. One smiled not to affirm some sunny aspect of life but to childishly negate the existence of something darker. Or so this flawed line of reasoning said.

We academics have so thoroughly conflated happiness with faux happiness that it has become a knee-jerk reaction to trash the subject entirely. In numerous conversations with colleagues I routinely hear dismissals of happiness either on the grounds that it is apolitical fluff, a distraction and perhaps a means by which we are oppressed by political forces, or that it has been discredited by political madmen like Stalin, Pol Pot and others who tried to socially engineer it for whole populations, sending off to the Gulag, the death camp, or the killing field those who refused such a version of civic felicity. But surely there is more to the subject than either of these general perspectives will allow for. Both perspectives, and numerous others that find expression so routinely in academe, by no means represent a holistic understanding of a complex totality, but serve as mere caricatures of the character of happiness. Logic says there is much more to the dense concept. Simply because there is evil in the world or because a few megalomaniacs tried to employ happiness as a means of population control does not mean the subject is philosophically and psychologically invalid and thus unworthy of critical attention. Should we tell our tender young children that happiness is a delusion? I suggest not doing so. Perhaps throwing the baby out with the bath water is not the right approach. Happiness is not the disease; no, the problem is a diseased conception of happiness.

And then there are our great authors, those who justify our critical existence, those who serve as subjects of the courses we teach and the articles and books we publish. So many of them write about happiness and declare it to be so worthy of our attention that it occupies a central space in their writing. Take Whitman, for example, among countless others. In Song of Myself (2002 [1892]), his most influential poem, the poet tries to articulate the ineffable holism of being, his central theme declaring, it is ‘form, union, plan – it is eternal life – it is Happiness’ (line 1318). To casually dismiss the subject, as so many serious intellectuals do, is to call someone like Whitman a stupid bliss ninny, a yellow smiley face on a nineteenth-century blue sky of optimism. And he is not. Regardless of how sophisticated our literary theorists have become, Whitman dwarfs them all with his penetrating wisdom, his buoyant optimism and his disturbing happiness. Whereas Derrida is surely clever and learned, Whitman is intuitive and wise beyond limits.

For all this, the tide seems to have shifted, and there are many members of the new ‘post-theory’ generation, and even some theorists who have become disenchanted with disenchantment, now challenging the assumptions of the hermeneutic of suspicion that characterized literary discourse from the 1970s to the end of the century. Such scholars, with their affirmative reading strategies (Felski, 2015: 99), seem to recognize the impoverished conception of happiness handed down from the theory generation, itself a by-product of the twentieth century’s disillusionment. Surely, happiness is more than neurotic denial; it is more than the saccharine smiley face of emojis; it is more than Seinfeld’s Kramer saying ‘serenity now’ whenever he feels stress but winding up completely neurotic as a result; and surely it is more than what psychologists, in their scientism, are claiming with their rats and stats. Literary scholars could enrich the discussion of happiness immeasurably with their methods and acumen, whether from a position of suspicion and disenchantment or, more likely, from a hermeneutic of affirmation. They have slowly begun to do so, as my colleague and I point out in The Eudaimonic Turn (Pawelski and Moores, 2013), but given the scope and complexity of the subject, what is necessary is something like an entire theory of happiness in the same way that we have theories of race, class, sexual identity, gender and the like. With a little time, this will surely happen.

So my discussion of these bad novels is intended to attend to three texts that, while woefully deficient, are nevertheless part of the history of the novel in English. And their subject matter – happiness – although poorly rendered, is an important topic not only in the eighteenth-century discourse that spawned it but also in current discussions, not in the sense that happiness studies has become a fashionable trend – indeed it has – but in the larger sense, in the sense that the question of happiness occupies a central role in human endeavour but has been trivialized and ignored by some of our greatest minds. I wrote about these three shitty novels because they are aspects of a history that scholars of the long eighteenth century are attempting to recover and because their subject matter, despite the twentieth century’s suspicious, distrustful reception of it, has become important to us once again in academic discourse.