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Printing like a post-colonialist: The Irish piracy of Sir Charles Grandison

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2000 by Temple, Kathryn

A postcolonial reading is not one that inscribes the temporal and spatial distance between metropolis and colony but one that reinstitutes their mutual imbrication at that moment of rupture (decolonization), when they were supposed to have been finally separated.

-Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness

Every generation gets the pirates it deserves.

-Janice Thomson, quoting Robert I. Burns, 1999

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During the London printing of Samuel Richardson's influential The History of Sir Charles Grandison, the novel was pirated by the Irish. In August of 1753, a Dublin printer bribed Richardson's own employees to ship the first six volumes and portions of the seventh to Ireland, where the book was quickly reproduced and sold.1 Richardson recorded his reaction to the Irish piracy in two sensationalist tracts that positioned the dispute firmly in the internal colonial politics of the 1750s. In response to Irish claims that English overreaching had prompted a perfectly legal reprinting of Grandison, Richardson branded the Irish "pirates," thus transforming a commercial matter into a highly politicized dispute involving crimes against the nation. The tracts' extravagance and overstatement suggest that for Richardson the piracy effected a shocking interruption, one akin to the fictional ruptures of kidnapping and rape he had employed throughout his novelistic career, not least in Sir Charles Grandison itself.2 That novel begins with what has often been read as a false start: the kidnapping of that virtuous but misread text Harriet Byron by Sir Hargrave, one of the novel's libertines. Quickly supplanted by the hero, Hargrave fades into the novel's background, but given the many other kidnappings in Grandison, his attempt on Harriet can be read as a palpable manifestation of the subtler cultural kidnappings that inform the rest of the novel. Rereading this first kidnapping as an exposure of Englishness to dissemination and cultural diffusion suggests a major reinterpretation of all of the kidnappings that inform the novel, including the Irish abduction of the novel itself.

Curiously, Grandison criticism has more or less ignored the Irishness of the Irish piracy even though Richardson appended his anti-Irish tracts to many subsequent editions of the novel and said that the piracy delayed and impacted Grandison's writing.3 Integral to a critical system that focuses on the novel's interiority at the expense of its production and circulation, this critical elision is particularly interesting because it cooperates both with the project of the novel and with late twentieth-century efforts to disown imperialism, to see England, as Gikandi puts it, as "finally separated" from its colonialist past. Prompted by the Irish printers who resisted English ways of reading the conflict, I want to suggest a resistant reading of Sir Charles Grandison that interprets the piracy as a challenge to the novel's construction of a version of English authorship suitable for international export. This version of authorship, one that both informs Grandison and is constituted by it, appropriates cosmopolitanism and remakes it in the context of the middle-class English virtues of tolerance and restraint that Richardson had been inventing throughout his career.4 Specifically postcolonial in Gikandi's sense in that it describes the "mutual imbrication" of the colonies with Englishness at a moment of eighteenth-century symbolic decolonization, this reading brings Richardson's tracts and the issues of internal colonization they evoke from the literal appendix to the interpretive center of the text (Gikandi 228). Turning novel and production process, center and periphery against each other reveals England as profoundly implicated in the violent history of internal colonialism at a moment of attempted erasure.

Printing like a post-colonialist: The Irish piracy of Sir Charles Grandison

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2000 by Temple, Kathryn

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