My university library recently de-owned a number of books in its collection and gave students, faculty and staff a chance to take as many free as they liked before moving on to donate or sell copies to Internet Archive and other places. Naturally, I grabbed a few dozen, including a 1962 edition of The Prodigal Rake: Memoirs of William Hickey, edited by Peter Quennell. Hickey (1749-1830) was an English solicitor’s son and eventually went into law, himself, but he was also a ne’er-do-well, drinking, womanizing, spending money he didn’t have (or, in some cases, have a right to spend), and generally being the kind of profligate libertine who’s great fun to read about but who I expect would be a trial to know in person, unless of course you were getting yourself into trouble right alongside him. His memoirs were published after his death, and Quennell’s shortened 1960s edition restores some of the salacious tidbits cut out of the longer but more sanitized first edition.
Hickey’s life was tumultuous and great fun to read — how much is strictly true to fact and how much embroidered, it’s impossible to tell, of course — as long as you’re comfortable with the 18th-century memoir narrative style, which is formal in tone and complex in sentence structure and vocabulary choice. (The preceding sentence, I suppose, indicates why I feel quite at home with this style….) He’s frank about his misdeeds and failings, often — but not always — complimentary about others’ accomplishments and deeds, and dramatic in his descriptions of, for example, the rising tensions between captain and guests on a voyage to India, the organization of wildly expensive dinner clubs at which guests got falling-down drunk, or the devastating experience of being onboard a ship in the middle of a hurricane. For better or for worse, my own life pales in comparison.
I also love learning new information and getting glimpses of different modes of thinking. Hickey’s memoirs sent me to the internet regularly to find out, for example, what was the round-robin signature mentioned in passing on p. 107, or in surprise when I read that a young man met on board a ship “was accordingly shipped as a ‘guinea-pig’ (the name given to boys on their first voyage) on board the Cruttenden….” on p. 138 — I’d assumed that “guinea pig” was a term adopted for experimental subjects in modern times, but here it was being used in the 1700s! In the experimental sense, it is a new term, apparently first so coined in 1913 by George Bernard Shaw; back in the 1700s, the term likely had to do with young midshipmen paying guineas for their post in the East India Company. Still, I assume one usage led to the other.
While I was reading the memoirs, I also did some digging on the side to understand how the network of mutual introductions, being invited to stay for months in strangers’ homes, lending huge sums of money to each other, etc., actually worked — was the upper class in the 18th century simply more generous than now? Was this generosity all class-based status-signaling? Was it a complicated system of favors owed? Did money eventually exchange hands even if it wasn’t described in the memoir? I can’t say my quick skim over the subject provided me with a very satisfactory answer; more research is definitely required.
Finally, Hickey didn’t describe clothing nearly often enough for my taste, but I did appreciate this description: “his dress then being a white coat, cut in the extremity of ton, lined with a garter-blue satin, edged with ermine, and ornamented with rich silver frogs; waistcoat and breeches of the same blue satin, trimmed with silver twist à la hussar, and ermine edges” (p. 163). Lovely! Descriptions of clothing were much more common in Giacomo Casanova’s multi-volume memoirs, which I worked my way through in the early 2000s.
Speaking of other 18th-century memoirs I’ve read, earlier this year I skimmed through a lively collection of letters, diary excerpts, and the like describing day-to-day life, politics and scandal in 17th- to 18th-century Versailles Palace, and on my “to read” stack is a musty-smelling 1919 volume titled Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, of Madame de Pompadour and of Catherine de Medici that was another library-giveaway find. We’ll see whether I’ll be able to read it or not; I don’t usually object to “book smell,” but sometimes these old volumes can be overwhelming!
As a writer, I always wonder whether I could tell a memoir-style story set in the Anglo-European 18th century — well, in a vaguely accurate fantasy version of it, anyway. Would many contemporary readers have the patience for such an elegant, complex, leisurely narrative style? I suspect we’re limited in number; even I have to be in the right mood for such prose. Would that kind of world even make sense to a reader, or would I have to adjust it for modern sensibilities? I was raised in a late capitalist system of tit-for-tat, pay-to-play, and I was struggling to understand how William Hickey’s socioeconomic environment worked — how often were fortunes lost, and how often were businesses whose creditors never paid them ruined, and how equitable was the apparently favor-based hospitality network, etc. A writer needs to understand such systems well enough to decide where plot problems and conflicts can realistically arise. And then there are the characters’ manners — under all the exquisitely polite language and emphasis on personal honor in these memoirs are numerous cruel or crude practical jokes, adulterous liaisons with friends’ paramours, heedless embezzlement from one’s own family … would such a character perforce need to be written as an anti-hero, or a parody? I suppose there is some selection bias here — the memoirs that have survived to be reprinted are those most likely to excite, outrage, and titillate us, and my own tastes affect what I read and therefore what I know — but still, there was clearly a different way of thinking of self and other at work that might be tempting to describe but would very much risk losing a contemporary reader.
Although, come to think of it, I do have a partially written series of fantasy journal entries inspired by Casanova’s memoirs that might be fun to revisit someday, or at least dropped into a “Fragments” page on this site, perhaps. Hmmm, now where did I put those….?