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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In 1709 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, days not already taken for the publication of The Tatler, its pugnacious rival, The Female Tatler, by Mrs. Crackenthorpe, a Lady that knows every thing, appeared regularly for fifty issues with Mrs. Delariviere Manley as its editor and chief contributor. Mrs. Crackenthorpe's journalism reads like so much copy for the printer, turned out hastily against the time of going to press. It has the freshness and crudity of gossip. Nourished on “intelligence” and dealing in personalities, local color, and realistic detail, it treats the everyday life and occupations of Queen Anne's England with coarse pungency and colloquial vigor. It presupposes in author and in readers a competent knowledge of the compact eighteenth-century English world both of London and the more important country towns.
page 100 note 1 P. B. Anderson, “The History and Authorship of Mrs. Crackenthorpe's Female Tatler,” MP, xxviii (1931), 354–360. Cf. R. T. Milford's comment, MP, xxix (1932), 350–351, calling attention to the complete file of twenty-six issues, Nos. 19–44, (printed by B. Bragge) of the spurious Female Tatler as preserved in the Bodleian library. Mrs. Crackenthorpe gave a circumstantial and satirical portrait of the assistant to the editor of the rival periodical in No. 35, and apparently an earlier character of the same individual in No. 22 under the name of Tom Careless. Thomas Lydal is the person described. His Accomptant's Assistant was persistently advertised in the original Female Tatler beginning with No. 6, but after Mrs. Crackenthorpe had transferred the original enterprise to the shop of (Mrs.) A. Baldwin, it is advertised only in the spurious Female Tatler. The coming publication of his Measurer and Gauger's Guide is announced in spurious Female Tatler Nos. 42, 43, and 44. His “Calculated Tables”—referred to contemptuously by Mrs. Crackenthorpe—is the work he published in 1710: A New Interest Pocket-Book: Containing Tables of Simple Interest .. . Also Tables of Compound Interest.. .. By Thomas Lydall, one of the Accomptants to the Honourable Commissioners of Her Majesty's Revenue of Excise; it is dedicated to one of the commissioners, Whitlock Bulstrode. Another publication of 1710, dedicated to Thomas Sadler, was Thomas Lydal's Vulgar and Decimal Arithmetic Demonstrated and Made Easie to the Meanest Capacity. Spurious Female Tatler No. 29 at any rate seems to be drawn directly from Thomas Lydal's experience, for it tells of “a certain Attendant of the T—, … an Upstart Jack in an Office … making a Tour to Her Majesty's Yard at Woolwich, with a Retinue of 7 or 8 Female Players. …” The author's friend, the commissioner, is needed to put this impudent fellow in his place.
page 101 note 2 Manuscript annotations in a contemporary hand in the Bodleian file of the Female Tatler identify Deputy Skinner, probably of the hosier's company, and Sir Richard Guy as favorite victims of Mrs. Crackenthorpe. Richard Guy was sworn in as one of the sheriffs of London and Middlesex, Sept. 28, 1708, and was knighted at Windsor, Sept. 8, 1709. See Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, vi (1857), 355, 486.
page 101 note 3 The Characters, or the Manners of the Age. By Monsieur De La Bruyere, of the French Academy. Made English by several hands. With the Characters of Theophrastus, Translated from the Greek. And a Prefatory Discourse to them, by Monsieur de la Bruyere. The Second Edition, Corrected throughout, and Enlarged. With the Key inserted in the Margent, London, 1700, 141–142.—She uses La Bruyère in this the second edition of the English translation, announced as published this day in The Post Man, May 16, 1700. The first edition (1699), according to the preface to the second edition, “was deficient, being rendred mostly from the 7th of the French, (the two last not having then reach'd England).”
page 101 note 4 A name and, in part, a character out of Ben Jonson's Volpone. An odd but often effective feature of her use of the ‘character’ form is her trick of borrowing names for her characters from plays popular on the contemporary stage. Emphasizing this peculiar practise, the author of a letter addressed to Mrs. Crackenthorpe in spurious Female Tatler No. 37 accused her (or him) of being “very judicious and witty, in giving each Person in Company a pretty Name suited to their odious Dispositions and different ways of Deportment; this with no small reason, he reckons one of his flaming Accomplishments—You can hardly imagine how many Dramatis Personæ in the Plays he was forc'd to get without Book, before he could arrive at any tolerable Proficiency in this way.” Four particularly interesting papers on the theatre (Nos. 6, 37, 41, 45) should not be neglected, for like the characters mentioned in Note 7 they represent Mrs. Crackenthorpe in her most characteristic vein as a crudely competent English equivalent for La Bruyère.
page 102 note 5 The Characters, 1700, 216–217.
page 102 note 6 Ibid., 66–69.
page 102 note 7 She gave a character—presumably of her own composition—of Thalassiarchus [Thomas Herbert (1656–1733), 8th Earl of Pembroke]. Other characters which may be identified with some probability as actual contemporaries of Mrs. Crackenthorpe are Sir Andrew Please-All (Matthew Prior) and Ben Resistance (Benjamin Hoadly) in No. 27; Volpone (Christopher Rich) in No. 37, and Edmund Smith in No. 36. Her satirical account in No. 18 of Mr. Sullen and Madam Sullen and their Party-School within three miles of London, and her praise of the antitypes Mr. Affable and Mrs. Affable in No. 19 and their ideal school within three miles of Epsom are strong and intelligent papers and put to shame, as she says with satisfaction in No. 20, her rival's attempt in his first issue (No. 19 printed by B. Bragge) to give the promised character of Mr. Affable, “knowing nothing of the Man.”
page 102 note 8 The Characters, 1700, 325–327.
page 103 note 9 Section 36, “Of the Heart,” The Characters, 1700, 74, is quoted in Mrs. Manley's New Atalantis (1720), ii, 242. Her sharply observant sketch, ibid., i, 191–194, of the conversation and behavior of the gay, young St. John of 1709, for the moment out of office and giving “Snuff to the Ladies upon his Knees, that his fair Person may appear to Advantage,” includes a personal and curiously precise judgment as to the principal source of his wit: “He talks of Rochefoucault, Fontenelle, la Bruyere, as his intimate Acquaintance, and even gives the latter the Preference; when I can't but find what seems most eminent in him, is but borrowed from the other two.” Set a thief to catch a thief!