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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
After the scores of “secret histories,” “authentick memoirs,” and “true relations” written by Mrs. Eliza Haywood and other female novelists of the 1720's, the four volumes of fiction by Mrs. Mary Davys produce much the same “cheerful, sunshiny, breezy” effect that Coleridge attributed to Fielding's work, in contrast to “the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson.” The double comparison is more than subjectively valid, for Mrs. Davys stands in much the same relation to Fielding's ebullient masculine genius that Mrs. Haywood's distressed damsels do to Richardson's heroines—both as a forerunner and as an influence upon the early eighteenth-century reading public.
Many of the qualities which distinguish Mrs. Davys from her contemporaries may be explained by her background and by the circumstances under which her works were written and published. She was born in Dublin in 1674 and married the Reverend Peter Davys, a friend of Jonathan Swift and headmaster of the free school attached to St. Patrick's. Swift considered the marriage an indiscretion on the headmaster's part but, indiscreet or not, it was apparently a happy one until Davys'early death in 1698. Soon after this, his young widow “went for mere want to England.” She appeared briefly in London in 1700 and then settled in York where she lived for the next fifteen years. Little is known of her during this period. Swift's correspondence and his Journal to Stella indicate that she occasionally visited London, that she tried by various ruses to maintain contact with him from York, and that he grudgingly sent her several sums of money before his return to Ireland in 1714. Such irregular charity could hardly have been sufficient for the most frugal existence, and from pictures of life in a York boarding house and the recurrent character of a settled but good-natured female companion in her plays and novels, one may conjecture that Mrs. Davys enacted a similar role in private life.
1 Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York, 1884), iv, 380. The Reform'd Coquet: A Novel appeared in 1724. The Works of Mrs. Davys, 2 vols. (London, 1725), contain two additional novels, The Lady's Tale and The Cousins, an autobiographical narrative, The Merry Wanderer, a series of “familiar letters,” two plays, and a poem. Her final work, The Accomplish'd Rake, was published anonymously in 1727.
2 The erroneous statement in the DNB that she flourished about 1756 is apparently based on the publication in that year of a second edition of The Accomplish'd Rake. In The Merry Wanderer Mrs. Davys remarked: “I once had a Husband . . . whom I lost in the twenty-fourth Year of my Age, and the twenty-ninth of his.” Rev. Peter Davys died on 4 Nov. 1698. Swift mentioned the recent death of Mrs. Davys in letters to the bookseller Motte, dated 4 Nov. 1732, and 1 Feb. 1733 (Correspondence, ed. F. E. Ball, London, 1900, iv, 361-362, 383-384).
3 On 12 Nov. and 23 Dec. 1708 Swift records letters received from her, the second with “3 d. postage due.” On 12 Feb. 1713 he writes to Stella about “Mrs Davis at York, she took care to have a Lettr delivred for me at Ld Tr's, for I would not own one she sent by Postt: She reproaches me for not writing to her these 4 Years; & I have honestly told her, it was my way never to write to those whom I never am likely to see, unless I can serve them, wch I cannot her, &c. Davis the Schoolmastr's Widow” (Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, Oxford, 1948, ii, 625). In 1732, he told Benjamin Motte that he did not “believe I ever writ her a dozen letters, and those chiefly to tell her I had sent her some money, which I did I believe nine or ten times or oftener.”
4 In The Merry Wanderer she says that her “Fortunes depended on the Return of a Brother, who was then in the East-Indies, and whose coming was uncertain.” If this brother was more than the familiar deus ex machina of later 18th-century drama, he did not, in any case, improve Mrs. Davys' fortunes.
5 “I know nought they [men of quality] are good for, but to make Wark, and get one's Maid with Barn”; “to think an Alderman's Son of York should disgenderate so as to be like neither Father nor Mother”; “come no more salivating under our Windows”; “I don't want your Device.”
6 From 1711 until the summer of 1714, Mrs. Manley was a Tory pamphleteer and for a time she assisted Swift in the publication of the Examiner.
7 Mrs. Davys had the precedent of Ned Ward, who combined letters with tavern keeping in Moorfields from 1712 until his death in 1731. The analogy did not escape her detractors; the Grub Street Journal (15 July 1731) mentions her resolution “in imitation of a late Brother of ours, to turn an additional penny, by selling an inspiring cup, not of your insipid Parnassian Water, but of true Heliconian Punch.” Records of coffeehouses outside of London during this period are scanty. Aytoun Ellis (The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee Houses, London: Secker and Warburg, 1956, p. 188) mentions “the Johnian Coffee-house [in Cambridge] of which nothing appears to be known beyond the fact that it stood in All Saints' Yard in 1740.” The Grub Street Journal attack referred to Mrs. Davys' “famous Jonian Punsters, Orators, and Poets,” but since Johnian was the generic name for members of St. John's College, the novelist cannot conclusively be connected with the coffeehouse in All Saints' Yard. According to records of licenses issued by the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University (Victuallers, 1718-77, Vol. iii, University Archives, and the George Chawner Collections, Add. 6105 M, University Lib., Cambridge), a “Widow Davies” received a license in 1718. Thereafter the name of “Mary Davies” appears frequently in the registries, sometimes with the notation “For brandy only” (as opposed to being licensed for an “ale or tippling house”). There may, however, have been two licensees of the same name, for in 1731 she is registered in the parishes of St. Michael's and St. Sepulchre's. I am indebted to Mr. J. C. T. Oates of University Library for his assistance in the search for Mrs. Davys' establishment.
8 In the preface to her Works, she said that she wrote The Lady's Tale in 1700, sold it for three guineas, and later rewrote it. I have found no edition of the first version, if it was ever printed. The Ladies Tale: Exemplified in the Vertues and Vices of the Quality, with Reflections (1714) is a different work. Perhaps she was actually referring to The Fugitive (1705) which she revised extensively for inclusion in the Works as The Merry Wanderer.
9 Publication by subscription was rarely used for novels, and never, to my knowledge, for an author's total production. Mrs. Davys said that this method was suggested by two students who advised her to print The Reform'd Coquet by subscription “into which Proposal many of the Gentlemen enter'd, among whom were a good Number of both the grave and the young Clergy, who the World will easily believe had a greater view to Charity than Novelty; and it was not to the Book but the Author they subscribed.” The printed list of 169 subscribers at three shillings a copy includes 107 students, three duchesses (of Rutland, Richmond, and Albemarle), and the interesting trio of Mr. Gay, Mrs. Mar. Blount, and Alexander Pope, Esq. Her Works was “printed for the Author” and The Accomplish'd Rake was simply issued as “Printed in the Year 1727, and sold by the Booksellers of London and Westminster.”
10 In The Fugitive she declared that she was deliberately experimenting to see “whether it was not possible to divert the Town with real events, just as they happen'd, without Running into Romance.”
11 “Preface to the Reader,” Incognita, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith (New York, 1922).
12 Charlotte E. Morgan, The Rise of the Novel of Manners (New York, 1911), p. 66.
13 “When I had written a Sheet or two of this Novel, I communicated my Design to a couple of young Gentlemen whom I knew to be Men of Taste and both my Friends; they approv'd of what I had done, advis'd me to proceed” (Preface, The Reform'd Coquet).
14 Mrs. Davys apologizes for this “little Story in the beginning of the Book, of the Courtship of a Boy, which the Reader may perhaps think very trifling; but as it is not Two Pages long, I beg he will pass it by; and my Excuse for it is, I could not so well show the early Coquetry of the Lady without it.”
15 “And where, said she, are t'other two [rogues]? Why, Madam, said they, we cou'd not persuade ‘em to be quiet, but they wou'd needs go and help to carry your Ladyship away, so we knock'd ‘em down with our Oars, and they fell plum into the Water, and we ne'er thought ‘em worth diving for, but e'en let ‘em go down to the Bottom; they will serve to fatten the Salmon” (pp. 117-118).
16 “Mr. Congreve tells us, A Contemplative Lover can no more leave his Bed in a Morning than he can sleep in it.” Here Mrs. Davys paraphrases a remark by Bellmour, The Old Batchelor, i, i.
17 Dedication to Mrs. Eliza Haywood of The Prude (1724).
18 Rise of the Novel of Manners, p. 70. Lord Lofty also calls Formator “a queer old Prig.”
19 The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), pp. 17-18.
20 In the 1756 edition, for obscure reasons, Galliard is changed to Gaylove, Sir Combish Clutter to Sir Trifling Flutter, and Squire Clownish Cockahoop to Toby Wimble, Esq. of Wimble-Hall.
21 According to Ellis (The Penny Universities, p. 187), Lounger or Nugax was the Cambridge counterpart of the Oxford Smart and the later London Macaroni. He also quotes Steele's description of the Cambridge “Lownger” as “seized all over with general inability, indolence and weariness and a certain impatience of the place they are in.”
22 She also admits that she is Irish, although in the 1705 version she claimed that she was “in the sixth year of my Age . . . carried by my Mother into Ireland.” Her remark that “the very brightest Genius in the King's Dominion drew his first Breath in that Nation” was probably an oblique bid for Swift's favor. The Fugitive had been dedicated to “Mrs. Esther Johnson in Dublin.” Mrs. Davys, however, admitted that she was “almost a Stranger” to Stella and that she had only recently heard of her departure for Ireland (four years earlier, in Sept. 1701).
23 The closest parallel is Mrs. Mary Manley's Letters (1696) which in 1725 was reissued as A Stage Coach Journey to Exeter.
24 The 21 Familiar Letters in her Works also reflect the influence of Addison and Steele. In mildly satirical manner they trace the courtship of Berina (a Whig) by Artander (a Tory).
25 The setting is Iberian; Sebastian, rejected by Elvira in favor of her cousin, Lorenzo, soliloquizes in thinly disguised blank verse: “Will nothing reach the Lives of them I hate, but must I still thirst for Revenge . . . I'll make that proud Beauty know it had been safer to have stood a Thunderbolt, just hissing from the Sky, than to have scorn'd me for that Toy, Lorenzo.” It is indicative of contemporary reading tastes that The Cousins was pirated in 1732 as The False Friend: Or the Treacherous Portugueze.
26 In a letter printed in the 15 July 1731 issue, Mrs. Davys is made to apply for admission to the Grub Street Society on the basis of “my Plays, my Novels, my Wit (of which the young Students here can testify)” and as “being a perfect Mistress in the finesses of Love.” The signature, “Philo-Grubaea,” is identified as “Mrs. D. [who] wrote several bawdy Novels, and the Northern Heiress.” She replied in the next issue of the paper, accusing the “Glib-Tongued Wife of a certain Gentleman Tailor” of helping “Bavius” in the composition of his slander.
27 Thomas Ewin, grocer and brewer of Cambridge, wrote to Swift that Mrs. Davys had left him (Ewin) “all her fortune.” Swift's irritation, which led him to call her “a rambling woman with very little taste of wit or humor,” had several bases: she left her impoverished sister in Dublin only the value of her clothes (about £5 when sold); she “pretended to have many years ago writ a book, or part of a book which the world laid to me”; and through her, Ewin had come into possession of letters written by Swift to the Davyses—letters which he presumably threatened to publish, unless Swift purchased them. According to F. E. Ball (Correspondence, iv, 361, n. 5), these 36 letters have disappeared. In any case, Swift's fears were ungrounded. See also in the same edition, iv, 383-384, and v, 217. Ewin appears to have been, as Swift thought, a rascal and was noted in Cambridge for his avaricious and meddlesome disposition. It is possible that Mrs. Davys died in debt to him, since he owned property in the parish of St. Sepulchre's, in which she had received a victualer's license and which, by some chance of municipal division, included All Saints' Yard where the Johnian Coffeehouse stood. Perhaps Ewin was landlord as well as provisioner of her establishment.