Gulliver's Master Bates Once Again - article ; n°1 ; vol.55, pg 85-95
Description
XVII-XVIII. Bulletin de la société d'études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles - Année 2002 - Volume 55 - Numéro 1 - Pages 85-9511 pages
Informations
| Publié par | SOCIETE_D-ETUDES_ANGLO-AMERICAINES |
| Publié le | 01 janvier 2002 |
| Nombre de lectures | 49 |
| Langue | English |
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GULLIVER'S MASTER BATES ONCE AGAIN
In my article, "Gulliver Phallophorus and the Maids of Honour in
Brobdingnag," published in the November 2001 issue of this journal,
1
the
assertion that the use of
masturbate
was not recorded in Swift's time
should be qualified and emended. The dates given by
OED
are quite
misleading: 1855 for
masturbator
and
mastuprator
, 1857 for
masturbate
,
while the earliest quotation of
masturbation
is taken from A. Hume's title,
Onanism; Or, a Treatise upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation
(London, 1766), a translation of Tissot's
L'Onanisme, ou dissertation
physique sur les maladies produites par la masturbation
(Lausanne,
1760).
As I pointed out to Christopher Fox
2
in the early 1980s, John Marten
used the word
masturbation
in his
A Treatise of All the Degrees and
Symptoms of the Venereal Disease
(London, c. 1708-09). Closer to the
publication date of
GT
(1726), Mandeville's
A Modest Defence of Publick
Stews
(1724) also mentions "Manufriction,
alias
Masturbation."
3
Anyhow, more antedatings may be found. Frank Brady spotted an
occurrence of the word in Florio's celebrated translation (1603) of
Montaigne's
Essays
.
4
It also occurs in Sir John Floyer's
The Ancient
Psychrolousia Revived; Or, an Essay to Prove Cold Bathing Both Safe
and Useful
(London, 1702), more specifically in a "Letter of Dr
Baynard's Containing an Account of Many Eminent Cures Done by
Cold
Baths
in England." Dr Edward Baynard (1640-1721)
5
in his postscript to
Sir John's four letters writes about the loss of erection due to ill-cured
1
. See
BSÉAA
53 (2001): 81-98. On
OED
's faulty dating of
masturbate
, see 84.
2
. See Christopher Fox, "The Myth of Narcissus in Swift's
Travels
,"
Eighteenth-
Century Studies
20 (1986): 17-33, especially 19n7. This is a sensible and scholarly study
of narcissistic trends in Gulliver's character and his "simultaneous fascination with and
rejection of his own body – or, one-half of his being" (25).
3
. Fox 18.
4
. Fox 18n4.
5
. The dates of Baynard's life are those given in Peter John and Ruth V. Wallis,
Eighteenth-Century Medics
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Project for Historical Bibliography,
1988) 39. Hereafter quoted as
Medics
. On Dr Baynard, see
DNB
.
BSÉAA XVII-XVIII
55 (2002)
PAUL-GABRIEL BOUCÉ
venereal complaints and also "sometimes by that cursed School
wickedness of
Masturbation
, (
res foeda dictu
) by which many a young
Gentleman has been for ever undone, which so weakens the Parts, that
when they come to Manhood renders them (to Women ridiculous,
because) Impotent [. . .]" (278).
Psychrolousia
, or as it came to be known
in later editions,
The History of Cold Bathing
, was reprinted in 1706 and
1722. Baynard goes on to explain how he cured a young masturbator (in
his late twenties) of his impotence by repeated immersions in very cold
spring-water and an adequate regimen. Although the aim of this note is
definitely not to add yet another series of speculations on Swift and
masturbation
6
in order to explain his sly joke and pun on
masturbates
/
Master Bates
,
7
it is all the same relevant to note that Dr Baynard was
merely anticipating by a few years the beginnings of the great
masturbation-scare that swept through the whole of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries and well into the early twentieth in Britain, on the
Continent and in America.
8
The phenomenon was sparked off by such
fire-and-brimstone SPCK pamphlets as Josiah Ward's
A Rebuke to the
Sin of Uncleanness
(London, 1704). Ward (1660-1712) was a minister of
the Church of England whose
Rebuke
was reprinted in 1720 and 1740.
But the main firebrand and fuel to that conflagration of anxiety and
sexual repression through induced guilt was the notorious piece of very
astute, mealy-mouthed, yet traumatizing quackery,
Onania: Or the
Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and All Its Frightful Consequences (in
Both Sexes) Consider'd
, first published in London about 1708, constantly
reprinted throughout the eighteenth century, so that it had reached its
fourth edition by 1725 (?), and its seventeenth or eighteenth by 1758.
9
6
. The most thorough study, although, unfortunately, it contains little on
GT
, is Hugh
Ormsby-Lennon, "Swift's Spirit Reconjured: Das Dong-an-Sich,"
Swift Studies
3 (1988):
9-78, a long essay uniting wit and scholarship, if at times somewhat self-indulgent.
7
. Jonathan Swift,
Gulliver's Travels
, 1726, ed. Paul Turner (1971; Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1998) 5-6. Bates's surname appears five times in these opening pages of
GT
: "Mr
James Bates
, an eminent Surgeon in
London
"; "Mr
Bates
"; "my Good Master Mr
Bates
";
"Mr
Bates
, my Master"; ""my Good Master
Bates
." All further references to this Oxford
World's Classics edition will appear within parentheses, with the title abbreviated as
GT
followed by the page number.
8
. The topic is by now well documented: see Tim Hitchcock,
English Sexualities,
1700-1800
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997) 146-66 (a useful bibliography): on the great
eighteenth-century masturbation scare see 54-57, and passim. See also, written from a
historical point of view, Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck,
Histoire d'une grande peur,
la masturbation
(1984; Paris: Pocket, 1998) 49-65 on
Onania
; 67-74 on the influence of
Onania
.
9
. See
The Critical Review
5 (1758): 525 on "that profound treatise intituled
Onania
which has gone through seventeen editions by dint of perpetual advertising." On
Onania
,
see the relevant books, chapters, articles listed in Tim Hitchcock's bibliography (n8 supra)
BSÉAA XVII-XVIII
55 (2002)
86
GULLIVER'S MASTER BATES ONCE AGAIN
Whether Swift had read or heard of Dr Baynard's postscript to Sir
John Floyer's
The Ancient Psychrolousia
(1702), Josiah Ward's
A Rebuke
to the Sin of Uncleanness
(1704), or the various editions of
Onania
from
1708 onwards, is nearly impossible to determine with any certainty.
However, it may seem unlikely that such a brilliant "causeur" and sceptic
wit who relished nothing more than stalking popular fallacies, myths and
blatant quackeries, would never have come across a copy of
Onania
, or
an advertisement for the pamphlet or the miraculous medicines it cried up
and peddled so assiduously, especially during his London years (1707-
1714). But unlike those, as it were, "masturbatory" critics who, from
Phyllis Greenacre's
Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of Two
Lives
(New York: International Universities P, 1955) to Frank Boyle's
Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist
(Stanford: Stanford UP,
2000),
10
make so much of Swift's pun on Master Bates – probably far too
much – the author of this note, a "new historicist" of old, even before the
critical movement became fashionable in the late seventies, strongly
believes that
GT
refers to and is referred to by socio-cultural phenomena,
historical events, and a symplectic intertextuality. A protean referentiality
infuses
GT
with inexhaustible vitality, which ensures that it is in no
manner possible to view it as a self-enclosed construct without any links
to Swift's mind, life, times, as well as his readership. Thus, in view of the
masturbation-scare spread by clergymen, quacks, sham and genuine
physicians (as in the case of Dr Tissot), why shouldn't Swift's off-colour
pun on poor Master Bates be read as a joke at the expense of the anti-
masturbation anxiety-makers? Wouldn't this be consonant with Swift's
dazzlingly paradoxical technique of turning the tables on corrupt
politicians, fawning courtiers, crazy scientists, ranting clerics, not to
mention his increasingly alienated
persona
, Gulliver? If so, the dubious
Master
Bates
pun
has
proved
successful
far
beyond
Swift's
contemporaneous expectations, as it still triggers off the meningeal
masturbation of some of his modern critics. But before relinquishing
153-56. As some editions of
Onania
are undated, it is often difficult to establish their
chronological sequence with absolute certainty.
10
. On psychoanalytical criticism and Swift's works, especially
GT
, see Hermann J.
Real and Heinz J. Vienken, "Psychoanalytic Criticism and Swift: The History of a
Failure,"
Eighteenth-Century Ireland
, ed. Andrew Carpenter, 1 (1986): 127-41, and
Boucé, "Some Psychoanalytical Approaches to Swift's
Gulliver's Travels
(1726),"
Symposium du CREAACTIF, 17 et 24 novembre 2001
(Paris: Éditions du CREAACTIF,
2001) 1-5. To my survey should be added the section devoted to "Psychoanalytic
Criticism and
Gulliver's Travels
" in Christopher Fox's helpful edition of
GT
(Boston: St
Martin's P, 1995) 425-64, which proposes yet another psychoanalytic perspective on
GT
,
Carol Barash's "Violence and the Maternal: Swift, Psychoanalysis, and the 1720s," 442-
64.
BSÉAA XVII-XVIII
55 (2002)
87
PAUL-GABRIEL BOUCÉ
those critics to their effusions, perhaps it would not come amiss to point
out to them a physiological clue Swift impishly planted in
GT
, but which
– to my knowledge – they seem to have missed, because they are
palpably stronger on psychopathological and psychoanalytic theories than
on eighteenth-century medical and/or paramedical lore. To any one who
in 1726 had read
Onania
or its sequels, or to any one even moderately
versed in contemporaneous medical beliefs, Gulliver's admission that in
Lilliput he has secreted a pair of spectacles in a "private Pocket," because
he sometimes uses them "for the Weakness of [his] Eyes" (
GT
23), must
have made the masturbatory implication seem obvious. Swift probably
indulged in a sly chuckle when writing about Gulliver's dim eyesight,
since this was repeatedly recorded in the various editions of
Onania
11
and
other anti-masturbation pamphlets as one of the dire consequences
afflicting the addicts to self-pollution. Even the respectable Dr Robert
James
(1703-1776)
in
his
monumental
three-volume
Medicinal
Dictionary
(London, 1743-45)
sub voce
"Amaurosis" (or "Gutta Serena")
stresses "the remarkable Consent which, in this Case [amaurosis] is found
betwixt the Eyes and the genital Parts; since we observe, that Blindness is
frequently the Result of immoderate and ill-timed Embraces." Then Dr
James gives nearly a whole page (in folio) to the clinical analysis of a
young masturbator's case who from "about fifteen Years of Age, learnt of
a wicked School-fellow, the execrable trick of Mastupration" with the not
unexpected results, at least by mid-eighteenth-century medical beliefs,
that at the age of 23 he is become a wretched wreck, as "Venery, us'd
either too soon, or too much, not only impairs the Strength of the Body in
general, but also debilitates the noble Functions of the Brain and Eyes, to
such a Degree, that the Loss becomes almost irreparable." In spite of his
weak eyesight, Gulliver hardly seems to have plunged into such depths of
physiological or mental debility.
12
Finally, without attempting here to trace the age-old connection of
masturbation and literature
13
– fiction as friction? – Swift's "gentle
11
. See, for instance, Chapter 2 "Of the Frightful Consequences of Self-Pollution" in
the 19
th
edition of
Onania
(London, 1759) 12-38.
12
. Dr Robert James's
Medicinal Dictionary
was translated into French by Diderot,
Eidous and Toussaint and published in 6 folio volumes, Paris 1746-48. The mythical
connection of masturbation and weak eyesight survived throughout the nineteenth century
and into the early years of the twentieth. See J. Stengers and A. Van Neck [n8 supra]
passim, and especially 205-06 the excerpts from a self-tortured Henri-Frédéric Amiel's
Journal intime
for the years 1840-1841: "Je me répète avec terreur le mot du médecin:
chaque pollution est un coup de poignard pour vos yeux!" Pseudo-medical myths die
hard: a worn out joke rooted in the popular, if fallacious, notion that masturbation causes
deafness is still current in Britain and France.
13
. See Ormsby-Lennon passim, especially nn87, 246, 248, 250.
BSÉAA XVII-XVIII
55 (2002)
88
GULLIVER'S MASTER BATES ONCE AGAIN
Reader" should be aware that such Latin poets as Catullus (87-54? BC)
and Martial (AD 40?-103?) allude to masturbation – which they stridently
disapprove of, especially Martial. Swift owned copies of both poets'
works.
14
In very earthy language, Martial in epigram 41, book 9, rails at
Ponticus "quod numquam futuis, sed paelice laeva / uteris et Veneri servit
amica manus" ([. . .] "you never fuck but use your left hand as a mistress
and make it a kindly servant to your lust" [Loeb Classical Library
translation]).
15
Had Horatius and Mars resorted to the same loathsome
practice ("si masturbatus uterque"), Horatius would not have begotten the
Horatii triplets and Mars the Romulus and Remus twins, with a final
punch line propounding the argument of a wicked waste of life. Such
insistence on the vital need for spermatic economy is often to be found in
eighteenth-and nineteenth-century anti-masturbation literature: "istud
quod digitis, Pontice, perdis, homo est" ("What you waste with your
fingers, Ponticus, is a human being"). In epigram 104, book 11, Martial in
a very crude and graphic manner reproaches his wife vehemently with
not being much sexual use in bed and not letting him indulge in his erotic
fantasies. He reminds her that "masturbabantur Phrygii post ostia servi, /
Hectoreo quotiens sederat uxor equo" ("The Phrygian slaves used to
masturbate behind the door whenever Hector's wife sat her horse").
Finally, in a two-line epigram (203, book 14), Martial sketches a Cadiz
belle so adept at arse-waggling that "she would make a masturbator out of
Hippolytus himself" ("masturbatorem fecerit Hippolytum"), Hippolytus
being taken here as a type of unsullied, if tragic, chastity. As there was no
dearth of editions of Martial's
Epigrams
in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, both in Britain and on the Continent,
16
it should be
obvious by now that the lexemes,
masturbation
,
masturbate
,
masturbator
would be perfectly familiar not only to Swift but to all educated
gentlemen well grounded in Latin poetry even before attending
university. Martial's
masturbatus
,
masturbabantur
, and
masturbatorem
14
. See William Le Fanu,
A Catalogue of Books Belonging to Dr Jonathan Swift
(Cambridge: Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1998) 15 (Catullus, 1686 and 1702
editions, with the works of Tibullus and Propertius), 23 (Martial, 1568 Plantin edition,
Antwerp).
15
. All translations of Martial's epigrams quoted here are taken from the 3 vol. Loeb
Classical Library edition, Martial,
Epigrams
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993).
16
. On Martial's reputation see John Patrick Sullivan,
Martial, the Unexpected Classic
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 291-95 ("Scholarship and Censorship: 1550-1700");
295-300 ("The Eighteenth Century: Enlightenment and Romanticism"). Sullivan suggests
an interesting parallel between Martial's horrendous description (epigram 93, book 6) of
Thais, a stinking decrepit whore, and Swift's olfactive obsessions in such poems as "The
Lady's Dressing Room" (1732), "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed" (1734),
"Strephon and Chloe" (1739).
BSÉAA XVII-XVIII
55 (2002)
89
PAUL-GABRIEL BOUCÉ
provided his readers with the etymon of their English (and French)
cognates. So, this solves the problem (at least for the better educated part
of Swift's readership), of the currency of the words in Swift's day. As
already pointed out, finding occurrences that antedate those on record is a
harmless but futile scholarly game. Such educated people, into whose
heads Latin had been sedulously drilled for years, who were made to talk,
read and write in Latin at school and in academic institutions had no need
to be told, or taught (?) what
masturbation
,
masturbate
,
masturbator
meant, even if these words may be reckoned "hard words." The problem
is somewhat different for uneducated readers of
GT
, those mythical
"common readers," or "the man in the street," unfamiliar with Latin
etymology. The cheap, popular anti-masturbation literature of the
Onania
description, which addressed poorly educated individuals (who could at
least
read
, no mean achievement for lower-class men and even more so,
women, in the earlier years of the eighteenth century) repeatedly used a
surprising number of "hard words," such as "self-pollution," "self-abuse,"
"onanism," not to mention pharmaceutical terms flaunted by quacks to
vend their nostrums: "The Strenghtening Tincture," "The Prolific
Powder," "decoction," "injection," "Viol of the Restoring Drink" (all
examples culled from the 1759 edition of
Onania
). Apparently, such
fairly
learned
vocabulary
hardly
prevented
the
anxiety-ridden,
uneducated readers of
Onania
from catching the general
in terrorem
drift
of such strident and public persuaders. Swift's servants may well have
tittered over their good master's "Master Bates" pun, (mis)taken, rightly
or wrongly, as just a piece of schoolboyish smut at the expense of a
somewhat pompous Gulliver launching into the tale of his "Travels into
Several Remote Nations of the World."
At this point, bearing in mind not only Swift's love of verbal juggling
as an inveterate punster, but also his creative skills as a wordsmith and
ingenious creator of at least four different languages in
GT
, it seems
worthwhile to examine
Gulliver
and
Bates
from an onomastic
viewpoint,
17
and also in the case of
Bates
from a referential angle. To put
it differently, do the etymologies of those surnames, or the socio-cultural
connotations attached to them, if any, bear any relevance to the
17
. For all the onomastic information used in this note, see (in chronological order) the
following reference works: Basil Cottle,
The Penguin Dictionary of Surnames
(London:
Allen Lane, 1978) 50, 168; Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges,
A Dictionary of Surnames
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988) 37, 230; Percy H. Reaney,
A Dictionary of English Surnames
,
rev. 3
rd
ed. with corrections and additions by R. M. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997)
31, 208.
BSÉAA XVII-XVIII
55 (2002)
90
GULLIVER'S MASTER BATES ONCE AGAIN
eponymous character and his surgeon master and friend?
Gulliver
appears to be a nickname for a glutton, a greedy-guts, from Old French
goulafre
. In fact, this is still used in north eastern and western France,
especially in Normandy where it is quite current. It is recorded both in
Littré
and the
Trésor de la langue française
as
gouliafre
and dates back
to the thirteenth century, ultimately derived from Latin
gula
,
18
the etymon
of a large and voracious family. According to Alain Rey's
Dictionnaire
historique de la langue française
(1992),
goulafre
appears as
golaffre
about 1220, when it was applied to the devil.
19
Gulafrius
is recorded in
1106 as a medieval surname in France, while
Gulafra
,
Golafre
,
Golefer
,
Gullifer
,
Gulliford
may be found in Britain from 1086 to 1654.
Interestingly enough, in view of Gulliver's proclaimed Nottinghamshire
origins (first line of book 1, chapter 1), the surname fits in well with the
hero's "middle estate" – geographically and socially – as Basil Cottle
notes it is "chiefly a Northants surname," Northamptonshire like
Nottinghamshire being part of the Midlands and close enough to
Cambridge where Gulliver attended Emmanuel College.
20
Swift's
onomastic choice of Gulliver is either extraordinarily lucky or well
informed. If the surname was meant to convey an impression of
Rabelaisian gluttony,
this tallies perfectly with the Lilliputians'
astonished shouts at beholding the pinioned giant's face: "
Hekinah
Degul
" (
GT
8), which Émile Pons deciphers as a Lilliputian rendering of
"Hé, qu'il a de gueule!"
21
Likewise, the Lilliputians wonder at the vast
quantities of food and drink the Gargantuan Gulliver gulps down when
they give him his first meal, and again shout "Hekinah Degul" twice (
GT
10). More generally, in a figurative sense, a case might well be made for
Gulliver's greed for honours, especially in Lilliput, but perversely in
Brobdingnag as well, where, as a dwarfish buffoon honoured with the
King's and the Queen's attentions, he soon feels the narcissistic focus of
the Court. In the third voyage his unbridled appetite for all sorts of
knowledge – scientific, historical, metaphysical – far from being sated,
ends up on a Barmecide's feast of deprivation: his failure after the
Struldbruggs episode (
GT
book 3, chap. 10) to understand that death is
18
. See
OED
under
gola
/
gula
,
gool
,
gulch
:
gulchin
, †
gule
(meaning gluttony),
gules
,
gull
n3,
gullet
,
gully
n1. Joseph Wright in his
English Dialect Dictionary
(London, 1898-
1905) mentions
gullock
(Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire), a verb meaning
"to swallow greedily, to gulp."
19
. In Pechon de Ruby,
La Vie généreuse des mercelots, gueux et bohémiens
, 1596
(Paris: Allia, 1999) 45,
Gueliel
is listed as a cant term for the Devil.
20
. On Gulliver's median status, see
GT
292n5.
21
. Swift,
Œuvres de Swift
, ed. Émile Pons (Paris: Gallimard, 1965) 17.
BSÉAA XVII-XVIII
55 (2002)
91
PAUL-GABRIEL BOUCÉ
the ontological warranty of human liberty.
22
In Houyhnhnmland he
hungers for the feast of reason and virtue embodied by the all-too perfect
Houyhnhnms who eventually expel him from their pseudo-paradise. In
the final pages of
GT
doesn't the alienated Gulliver behave like a glutton
for self-punishment?
The etymology of
Bates
is either a pet form for
Bartholomew
, or may
be traced to Old English
bāt
, a boat, hence a "metonymic occupational
term for a boatman" (Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges), a surname
chiefly to be found in the Midlands.
Bate
and
Bates
are just onomastic
variants before the spelling of surnames was finally settled in the
nineteenth century. Apart from the Midlands location already detected in
Gulliver
, the etymological analysis of
Bates
yields little information
relevant to Swift's tale of maritime adventures, except that Mr James
Bates seems somehow to be connected with the sea, as he is able to
recommend Gulliver "to be Surgeon to the
Swallow
, Captain
Abraham
Pannell
Commander" (
GT
5).
"What's in a name?" Not only an etymology, as examined above, but
a potential nexus of socio-cultural, historical, or more or less oblique
professional references. A surname does not only mean something
etymologically, it is also fraught with possible connotations – not always
crystal clear – that build up a loose set of onomastic associations: "The
name rings a bell." For Swift and the readers of his
GT
in 1726,
Bates
definitely rang a bell, a medical one, so to say. The point of the following
remarks is certainly not to identify Master Bates with either Dr George
Bate (1608-69), or the more obscure Thomas Bates (?-1770), a surgeon.
23
George Bate, a successful court physician, was still well-known in
Swift's time for his posthumous
Pharmacopoeia Bateana
(London, 1688)
which went through at least five other editions in Latin (1691, 1700,
1709, 1711, 1719) and five English ones (1694, 1700, 1706, 1713, 1720).
It was Dr William Salmon who collected, edited and enlarged the late Dr
George Bate's prescriptions and medical formulae, for the English
editions of the
Pharmacopoeia Bateana
. In the third English edition
(London, 1706) William Salmon in the preface lavishes praise on Bate, a
Fellow of the College of Physicians and also of the Royal Society, a
professional turncoat who served successively as physician to Charles I,
then to Cromwell, and finally to Charles II: "The Original Author of this
22
. See Boucé, "Death in
Gulliver's Travels
: The Struldbruggs Revisited,"
Q/W/E/R/T/
Y
11 (2001): 37-46.
23
. See
DNB
entries for both. In
Medics
(see n5 supra) there are ten entries under
"Bate," forty-six under "Bates" (physicians, surgeons, apothecaries). There is no "James
Bates," and the entries are not all relevant to Swift's time.
BSÉAA XVII-XVIII
55 (2002)
92
GULLIVER'S MASTER BATES ONCE AGAIN
Book was the Eminent and Learned Dr
Bate
, a Man who in his Station
had been
Physician
to
Two Kings of England
, and a
Protector
; and of
such approved Skill in his Profession, that to make any Descants thereon,
would be to draw a Vail [sic] over his Lustre, and blemish that
Excellency, which in this following Work, gives a convincing Proof, that
he was one of the greatest Masters of his Art in the Universe [n.pag.]."
High praise, indeed, nearly as bombastic as the Emperor of Lilliput's
full title given in the preamble to the nine "Articles upon which [Gulliver]
recovered [his] liberty" (
GT
30). Incidentally, if only to illustrate the
point made supra about onomastic instability in Swift's time, Bate's name
appears as
Bates
on the titlepages of the 1685 and 1688 London editions
of his
Elenchus Motuum nuperorum in Angliā simul ac juris regii ac
parliamentarii brevis narratio
.
Thomas Bates's life is less well-documented and certainly not as
illustrious as George Bate's. From his
Enchiridion of Fevers, Incident to
Sea-Men – during the Summer – in the Mediterranean; Explicating Their
Causes [. . .] and Method of Cure
(London, 1708, second edition 1709),
24
the reader learns he served for five years as a naval surgeon in the
Mediterranean and subsequently settled in London. A devastating cattle-
plague, which, according to the
DNB
article on Bates, "destroyed a
million and a half of cattle in western Europe in 1711-14," had by 1714
reached "England [the Islington cowyards] where it had been unknown
for centuries." Bates suggested stamping-out-measures to the Privy
Council, who adopted them at the price of six thousand slaughtered head
of cattle. But the epidemic was checked within three months. Bates was
made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1718/1719. That Bates was
initially a sea-surgeon appears of some interest as the fictitious Master
James Bates – see supra – must have been somehow connected with
maritime activities.
In his
Vanity of Human Wishes
, published in London a mere four
years after Swift's death in 1745, Samuel Johnson, blending the acerbic
spirit of Juvenal's tenth satire and the humbling lesson of Ecclesiastes 1.2,
"Vanitas vanitatum, dixit Ecclesiastes; vanitas vanitatum, et omnia
vanitas," refers to the tragic final years of the Dean: "And
Swift
expires a
24
. According to
ESTC
, only one copy of the 1708 edition seems to have survived
(University of Göttingen Library). The British Library holds the second edition, 1709.
Both editions were "printed for John Barns: and sold by B. Bragg," with identical
pagination: xi+96, 12.
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PAUL-GABRIEL BOUCÉ
Driv'ler and a Show."
25
Swift's reputed lunacy excited abundant
speculation about its causes. In Letter 21 of his
Remarks on the Life and
Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift
(1752), Lord Orrery tries to analyse the
possible aetiology of the disease that from 1742 to his death turned Swift
into an aphasic vegetable. Long before Dr Prosper Paul Ménière (1799-
1862) described in 1861 the affection now referred to as "Ménière's
syndrome,"
26
which causes severe disturbances of the inner ear, with fits
of giddiness, migraine, loss of balance and vomiting, Lord Orrery
surmised that Swift's fits of deafness may have been brought about by
physiological causes: "Possibly some internal pressure upon his brain
might first have affected the auditory nerves, and then, by degrees, might
have encreased, so as entirely to stop up that fountain of ideas, which had
before spread itself in the most diffusive, and surprising manner."
27
Not a
bad intuitive guess in view of the state of medical knowledge at the time.
Unfortunately, not only Master Bates but Gulliver
28
and Swift himself
have been accused of indulging in debilitating autoerotic practices. Dr
Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808), a well-known, hyperactive medical writer,
entrepreneur and philanthropist (see
DNB
) in his
Hygeia; Or, Essays
Moral and Medical, on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of Our
Middling and Affluent Classes
(1802-1803) devotes a dozen pages to a
would-be clinical diagnosis of Swift's terminal illness, which he
(deviously) ascribes to masturbation.
29
Beddoes's study of Swift's implied
masturbatory insanity is a (small) masterpiece of mealy-mouthed,
canting,
pseudo-medical,
insinuating
hypocrisy.
Such
words
as
"masturbation," "self-pollution," "self-abuse," "uncleanness," etc. are
never used once. The gist of his devious argumentation is simple enough.
Since Swift was attracted to women and loved by at least three of them
25
. See Samuel Johnson,
The Poems of Samuel Johnson
, ed. David Nichol Smith and
Edward L. Mc Adam (1941; Oxford: Clarendon, 1974) 130, l. 318.
26
. See Peter Wingate,
The Penguin Medical Encyclopedia
(1972; Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1980) 282.
27
. John Earl of Orrery,
Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift
, 2
nd
ed. (London: A. Millar, 1752) 178.
28
. See Frank Boyle,
Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and Its Satirist
(Stanford: Stanford
UP, 2000) 27-29. Boyle refers to Gulliver's "masturbatory apprenticeship" (28) under his
"good Master Bates," which is totally unwarranted and gratuitous in an otherwise sane
study of Swift's satire.
29
. See Thomas Beddoes,
Hygeia; Or, Essays Moral and Medical, on the Causes
Affecting the Personal State of Our Middling and Affluent Classes
, 3 vols. (Bristol, 1803)
3: 184-96. On Dr. Thomas Beddoes's diagnosis of masturbatory insanity see Ormsby-
Lennon 72-77 and Roy Porter, "Forbidden Pleasures: Enlightenment Literature on Sexual
Advice,"
Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of
Autoeroticism
, ed. Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario (New York: Routledge, 1995)
87-89.
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GULLIVER'S MASTER BATES ONCE AGAIN
(Varina, Stella and Vanessa), but probably never knew them carnally,
Beddoes infers that "never man appears to have hovered with more
lingering fondness than Swift about the honey he could not sip" (191).
Hence, he must have relieved his sexual desires by practising
masturbation. This pseudo-diagnosis is entirely consonant with the anti-
masturbatory apotropaic rantings in the numerous editions of
Onania
. But
in spite of the masturbatory bee in Beddoes's bonnet, as well as in some
modern critics', Swift remains "an immense genius,"
30
and his Gulliver
and "good Master Bates," with their seemingly inexhaustible fictional
vitality, are unlikely to be ever critically masturbated out of literary
existence and fame.
Paul-Gabriel BOUCÉ
Université de Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle
30
. William M. Thackeray,
The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century
, 1851
(London: Dent, 1949) 46.
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