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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
But in a demonstration of the relationship between English tolerance, European excess, and internal colonialism, Richardson complicates the story at its margins. Hargrave does not act alone, nor does he turn solely to fellow aristocrats for aid. Instead, his servant Wilson hires two Scots to kidnap Harriet. That Wilson operates as a crucial hinge between aristocratic force and the Celtic periphery is supported by the novel's exaggerated concern with his reform (1: 123). Long after Harriet has been rescued and returned to her family, her corrupt coachman is restored to the world of order. He plans a job as a "tide-waiter," a border guard whose job is to board foreign ships and inspect them in light of custom house regulations (1: 176).9 While Grandison's successful recovery of Harriet (he "adopts" her, a word the novel uses repeatedly to signify tolerant acceptance of difference) replaces brutality with tolerance, it also demonstrates the complexity of revisionary threats against Englishness, always internal and external simultaneously, and complicated by the workings of the Celtic periphery.
In a second kidnapping scene embedded even more deeply within the novel, Richardson offers us a view of Grandison in direct conflict with the Irish. Here Grandison protects his ward, Emily Jervois, from her drunken mother's plans to marry her off to an Irishman. Emily's kidnappers, like Harriet's, mix the Celtic and the European. Described variously as "a man of one of the best families in Ireland" and "a low man," her stepfather, Major O'Hara is accompanied by Salmonet, "middle way between a French beau and a Dutch boor" (3: 27, 21, 21). Perhaps most significant here is Grandison's refusal to incorporate O'Hara into the family system of adoption and affiliation used so successfully to encompass other differences encountered in his travels. Echoing Harriet's kidnapping, a seemingly international threat is reduced to one comically Celtic, as the kidnappers' admiration of Grandison's international paraphernalia, a sign of cosmopolitan enlightenment, is quickly dismissed and they are instead revealed to be "[c]ommon men of the town," so clumsy that they bump each other in the head (2: 66). After the two men enter Grandison's London home and attempt to carry Emily away with them, Grandison disarms them and-in one of the famous scenes meant to display his "flaw," a bad temper-turns them out of the house (3: 65-67). Ironically, the novel "forgets" this triumphant moment as it sums up Grandison's achievements six pages later where Harriet characterizes Grandison as all the greater for being the "Friend of Mankind" rather than the "Conqueror of Nations" (3: 70).
Foregrounding Richardson's peripheral kidnapping scenes with their embedded references to the Celtic periphery suggests a new way of reading Grandison's relationship with the Italian Clementina, Harriet's primary rival for Grandison's affections. Having famously designated his characters "men," "women," and "Italians" in the apparatus, thus naturalizing Englishness and gender in one stroke, in the novel itself Richardson places Englishness under stress. Harriet's fear that Grandison has "mistaken some gay weeds for fine flowers, and pick'd them up, and brought them with him to England" serves to frame his letters from Italy (1: 194). The fascination that all of elite England felt for Italy's gay weeds translates into anxiety: "Sir Charles has so much anxiety ... I wish this ugly word foreign were blotted out of my vocabulary; out of my memory, rather" (3: 110). Her sentence-underscoring and thus emphasizing the "foreign" as much as the desire to erase it-expresses an ambivalence central to the text, one that explains why learning to control the "foreign" rather than "blot it out" dominates Grandison's account of events in Italy and on his return.
