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MONTHLY BLOG 147, A Great Painted Tribute to an Eighteenth-Century Cultural Ambassador between Global East & West

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If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2023)

Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Omai

Image 1: Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Omai (c.1776)
This cultural ambassador to Britain from the other side of the world
is shown in ‘exotic’ robes and with bare feet –
but his pose is open and friendly,
and his gaze (said to be a good likeness) is candid

As British sailors and explorers increasingly travelled the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,1 so the public back home clamoured to read all about it. Fictional fantasias like Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) became instant best-sellers. And factual accounts were eagerly consulted too.

In 1703, London society was enthused by the presence of a strange traveller, purporting to have arrived from Formosa (today’s Taiwan).2 He had exotic habits; and recounted tall tales about life in the orient. His Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (1704) had a huge success – and was quickly translated into German and French. The book included details of the Formosan language; and provided a Formosan translation of the Lord’s Prayer.

Alas, however, it was all invented nonsense. The author turned out to be a mendacious Frenchman, named George Psalmanazar (c.1679-1763). His imposture was soon discovered; and his fame collapsed. Oddly, however, the man himself did not disappear, shamefaced. He continued to live in London as a jobbing writer, and later repented his Formosan hoax. Psalmanazar’s brief surge to fame had, however, undeniably shown that there was great public curiosity to learn about the wider world.

Another exotic visitor reached Britain in the 1770s. But this youthful Polynesian newcomer was the real thing. Omai (c.1751-c.1779), also known as Mai in his own language, was a cultural ambassador, bearing witness to his own people’s distinctive way-of-life.3 In personality, he was gracious, charming and amusing. And he was also willing to learn, managing after a while to speak good English, with his own accent.

Omai had arrived in 1774, on one of the ships returning from Captain Cook’s second voyage of discovery in the Pacific; and was greeted with immense excitement. He socialised with many luminaries, including King George III, Dr Samuel ‘Dictionary’ Johnson, the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, and the novelist Fanny Burney. All who met Omai could observe differences of race, language, culture and clothing – as well as their shared humanity.4

The eminent artist Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) painted Omai as a princely visitor, majestic yet with his feet well and truly on the ground. He was no threat; no monster; no fiction.

Eventually, Omai returned to the island of Tahiti with Captain Cook (1728-79), when the great explorer made his third voyage to the Pacific – a voyage that took Cook on to discoveries, misunderstandings, quarrels and his own death in Hawaii.5 Reflecting upon the impact of the Tahitian traveller, the playwright John O’Keefe sought to dramatise the case for peaceful co-existence. In the pantomime, Omai, the heir to the throne of Tahiti, is due to marry Londina, the daughter of Britannia. Yet they struggle against many obstacles. The play helped to gild the reputations of both Cook and Omai. However, by the time that Omai: Or, a Trip Round the World was first performed in 1785, the real-life hero had died young in Tahiti.

Given that global encounters throughout the eighteenth century were very often marred by misunderstandings and conflicts, Omai’s peaceful embassy was a model for the constructive exchange of global knowledge. He did not do amazing things. Nor did he write his memoirs (shame!). Instead, he was a living cultural ambassador, whose message is as relevant today as it was then.

Today there is a campaign to save the Portrait of Omai for the nation.6 If successful, the painting will be sent on tour in Britain and possibly also at some future date to Tahiti, to continue the mutual cultural exchange that the real man himself undertook. Would Omai, Captain Cook, and Joshua Reynolds (to name but three eminent Georgians) have approved? They certainly would. They valued shared global knowledge; and so must we.

Images 2 and 3: Details from separate portraits of Omai and of James Cook,
here with their heads put together as if conversing,
as they undoubtedly did in real life.

ENDNOTES:

1 P.J. Corfield, The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 2022), pp. 20-40.

2 M. Keevak, The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (Detroit, Michigan, 2004).

3 G. Rendle-Short (ed.), Cook and Omai: The Cult of the South Seas (Canberra, 2001); R.M. Connaughton, Omai: The Prince who Never Was (London, 2005).

4 L.H. Zerne, ‘“Having a Lesson of Attention from Omai”: Frances Burney, Omai the Tahitian, and Eighteenth-Century British Constructions of Racial Difference’, Burney Journal, 10 (2010), pp.  87-104.

5 G. Williams, The Death of Captain Cook: A Hero Made and Unmade (London, 2008); N. Thomas, Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (London, 2018).

6 J. Gapper, ‘Joshua Reynolds’ “Painting of Omai” is a National Treasure. Why Are We Struggling to Save It’? Financial Times, 23 Feb. 2023 https://www.ft.com/content/bfa30b2c-b1bc-446a-89ad-03b558f37ba5 (consulted 24-4-2023). For information on the appeal, see artfund.org/donate.

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MONTHLY BLOG 144, A YEAR OF GEORGIAN CELEBRATIONS – 12: Celebrating the annual late-November Jonathan Swift Festival in the City of Dublin, where the Anglo-Irish wit, satirist and cleric was born and where he served as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral from 1713 to 1745.

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Marble Bust of Jonathan Swift (1749)
by Louis François Roubiliac (1695-1760):
displayed in Old Library, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
Image is probably based upon earlier portrait of Swift,
while the casual robes and bonnet
are similar to those depicted on a number of other Roubiliac busts.

Where does humour come from? It’s a great question to ask, when contemplating the life and times of the twelfth hero in my year of Georgian commemorations. The Anglo-Irish Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was an exceptionally sharp and witty man.1 Many jokes and wisecracks in circulation throughout the eighteenth century turn out, upon close inspection, to have derived from Swift.

Yet his position in life made him an unlikely public humourist. He was an Anglican clergyman, who rose to the position of Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin – dignified enough, albeit below the rank of a Bishop. At the same time, Swift was becoming renowned as an essayist, a political pamphleteer, a novelist, a poet, and a satirist, whose preoccupations included a scatological frankness that was unusual in any era. His unexpurgated verses on ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ (1732)2 hymn the disgust of the spying lover who discovers that his radiant Celia is an earth-bound mortal: ‘Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia, shits!’

Such eclectic interests and activities do not necessarily preclude a clerical career. Plenty of ministers of the faith have a kindly sense of humour. Yet the combination of a sharply irreverent laughter with a soberly reverent faith is comparatively unusual, to say the least.

Other than Jonathan Swift, the most celebrated clerical wit in Britain in the long eighteenth century – running from c.1680 to 1830 – was Sydney Smith (1771-1845). He too was an Anglican minister, who became famed as a wit, polemicist and preacher. Yet there were not many men like these two – and Smith, like Swift, was never promoted to a Bishopric.3

Sardonic humour was seen by ecclesiastical patrons as a risky companion to piety. ‘Promises and pie-crusts are made to be broken’, commented Jonathan Swift. Apt enough – but such a cheery dictum might not be understood as the words of the strictest Christian moralist.

In fact, Swift in the pulpit was an urgent and compelling preacher, whose sermons in Dublin on every fifth Sunday were very popular.4 He sought to expound religious precepts in plain terms, that all could understand. And Swift bluntly warned young men starting their clerical careers to avoid sallies of wit from the pulpit: ‘because … it is very near a Million to one that you have none’.

Nonetheless, he was too much his own man to make him an easy candidate for church patronage. Swift sought to tell the truth as he saw it – and he avoided empty pieties. Moreover, he often sounded like a secularist, far above the mundane struggles of the rival faiths. ‘We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another’, Swift observed in 1706.5 Apt again, but somehow cool and very definitely non-sectarian.

During his lifetime as a polemicist, indeed, Swift’s viewpoints were always robustly personal. In the 1710s he was aligned with the High Church-and-King political group in England, known as the Tories. Yet the pro-Tory Queen Anne, offended by Swift’s bluntness, denied him any substantial clerical promotion. Then in the 1720s and 1730s, the moderate reform Whigs took over. Swift had no further hopes of clerical advancement in England. He retreated to his Dublin Deanery, to live ‘like a rat in a hole’, as he wrote, ungraciously.

Residence in Ireland, however, brought significant new issues to his attention. Swift polemicised vigorously on behalf of Irish causes. Published in 1729, his Modest Proposal for Preventing the Poor Children in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country [by being eaten as delicacies] remains one of the most savage polemics, under the guise of sweet reason, ever written. Swift did not define himself as an ‘Irish patriot’. Yet it is no surprise to find that he has later become hailed as a nationalist hero.6

Swift faced life’s twists and turns with an intent intelligence and coruscating wit, which were allied (as he specified in his auto-epitaph) with a ‘savage indignation’. He’d had a disrupted childhood. His father predeceased the son’s birth, leaving Swift in the care of a paternal uncle. The mother returned to England, leaving the baby with a wet-nurse, who took him to Cumberland. Two years later, the child was parted from his nurse, and returned to his uncle’s care in Ireland. Later, as an adult, Swift had an unpleasant disorder of the inner ear, which gave him nausea and vertigo. He never married but he had fervent friendships with a few favoured female friends (how fervent remains debated). And he wrote and wrote, voluminously.

So where did the humour come from? His disturbed life experiences might have promoted both intensity and insecurity. But not necessarily humour. At the same time, it’s likely that the witty Anglo-Irish Swift, who was born in Dublin to English parents, would draw from the jesting cultures in which he was immersed. He was thus acquainted with English ‘deadpan’ humour and irony,7 as well as with the closely-related Irish traditions of whimsy and wordplay.

Cultural traditions provide fodder for the creative imagination. Think of Gulliver’s Travels. Could Lilliputia, with its diminutive citizens, have drawn some inspiration from traditional Irish tales of ‘little folk’ and leprechauns?8 Gulliver then visits Brobdingnag, a land of giants. Had Swift heard Irish tales of the exceptionally tall people of Antrim? (Interestingly, scientists today confirm that there is a ‘giant hotspot’ in that region, where an unusually high proportion of the population have a genetic predisposition to be very tall).9 And Gulliver later explores the flying island of Laputa, peopled by ‘mad’ scientists. How far did Swift’s sardonic improvisation rely upon his own familiarity with Stuart England’s lively culture of scientific experimentalism?10

But, of course, the creation in 1726 of an original masterpiece of world literature came from one man only. No doubt, there were some Anglo-Irishmen in these years, who had no sense of humour. And there may have been others, who were very jovial but never set pen to paper.

Jonathan Swift once remarked that: ‘Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others’.11 He had that gift. And he conveyed his vision in a memorably sardonic style. It’s appropriate therefore that the world should both commemorate his achievements – and laugh. After all, as Swift aptly noted in 1733 (extending his earlier jibe at novice clergymen):12

All Human Race would fain be Wits,

And Millions miss, for one that hits.

ENDNOTES: 

1 See I. Ehrenpreis, The Personality of Jonathan Swift (London, 1958); D. Johnston, In Search of Swift Dublin, 1959); I. Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, his Works and the Age, Vols. 1-3 (1962-83; repr. 2021); D. Nokes, Jonathan Swift – A Hypocrite Reversed: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1985; 1987); L. Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and his World (New Haven, Conn., 2013); D. Oakleaf, A Political Biography of Jonathan Swift (London, 2015); J. Stubbs, Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel (London, 2016).

2 J. Swift, ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ (1732; slightly corrected 1735); in unexpurgated version in website: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50579/the-ladys-dressing-room (consulted 30 Nov. 2022).

3 H. Pearson, The Smith of Smiths: Being the Life, Wit and Humour of Sydney Smith (London, 1934; and later edns); A.S. Bell, Sydney Smith, Rector of Foston, 1806-29 (York, 1972; Oxford, 1980); P. Virgin, Sydney Smith (London, 1994).

4 See website https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sermons_of_Jonathan_Swift (consulted 30 Nov 2022); and context in L.A. Landa, Swift and the Church of Ireland (Oxford, 1954).

5 J. Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting, in J. Hawkesworth (ed.), The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. of St Patrick’s Dublin, Vol. 2 (1755).

6 O.W. Ferguson, Jonathan Swift and Ireland (Urbana, Ill., 1962).

7 H.J. Davis, ‘Swift’s Use of Irony’ in M.E. Novak and H.J. Davis (eds), The Uses of Irony: Papers on Defoe and Swift (Los Angeles, Calif., 1966), pp. 41-63. For contextual discussions, see also J.B. Priestley, English Humour (London, 1929); H. Nicolson, The English Sense of Humour: An Essay (London, 1946); B.J. Blake, Playing the Words: Humour in the English Language (London, 2007).

8 See e.g. H. McGowan, Leprechauns, Legends and Irish Tales (London, 1988).

9 See report in Daily Mail (October 2016), available in website: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3834804/Land-Celtic-giants-Northern-Ireland-revealed-hotspot-abnormally-tall-people.html (consulted 30 Nov. 2022). It was this part of Ireland that produced Charles Byrne, the ‘Irish Giant’, who was put exhibited in London in the 1780s as a human curiosity.

10 M. Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain (Woodbridge, 1995)

11 Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, in Hawkesworth (ed.), Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. 2 (1755).  

12 J. Swift, ‘On Poesy: A Rhapsody’ (1733), in H. Davis (ed.), Swift: Poetical Works (London, 1967), p. 569. This volume also contains an expurgated version of Swift on ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ (cited above, n.2), pp. 476-80.

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MONTHLY BLOG 44, QUOTATIONS AND IRONY

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Quotations should never be mangled and should always be cited honestly, with due attention to context. Yes – absolutely yes.  It’s axiomatic for all scholarship – but also for proper communications. It does happen that words are taken out of context and twisted into another meaning. But it’s never right.

To take an example: if a theatre critic sees a controversial play and writes: ‘The very last thing that I’d say is that this production is brilliant’, then the theatre’s publicity team could put the critic’s name in lights alongside the quotation: ‘This production is brilliant’. Factually, those attributed words are correct. The critic did write them. Yet the truncated quotation gives the reverse meaning to that intended. Both the critic and any members of the audience, who were deceived into attending on the strength of the critic’s recommendation, have grounds for complaint.

Another potential for misunderstanding comes when heavy irony is taken at face value. In one of Shakespeare’s famous oratorical set-pieces, Mark Antony mourns the assassination of Caesar by Brutus and his allies with the repeated phrase: ‘And Brutus is an honourable man’ … [They are all] ‘honourable men’. The stress upon the repeated phrase, like a refrain, urges the Roman crowd to understand that the words mean the reverse of what they apparently say.

By the end, the citizens turn against the assassins: ‘They were traitors: honourable men!’1  On the face of it, Mark Antony has given Brutus a favourable character reference. In context, however, he stands condemned, not just as an assassin but as one who has basely betrayed his closest friend and colleague. ‘This was the unkindest cut of all’.

Nonetheless, there is a problem for anyone who uses irony. If the listeners or readers fail to get the implied message, then they will come to an erroneous conclusion. A Roman citizen who left the forum after the opening phrases of Antony’s speech (or who wasn’t listening carefully) could depart thinking: ‘I was sorry to hear of  Caesar’s death but it must be acceptable as Brutus, a man of honour, explained why he had to do it, and Antony confirms that Brutus is an honourable man’.

Irony, then, is powerful but risky. It depends upon an attentive community between speaker/writer and audience/readers which allows the words to be decoded successfully.

For historians, quoting from sources whose authors have long gone, there is always a challenge to understand meanings in their full context. When does a word or phrase in use mean its opposite? And did people in the past always get the hidden message?

When Jonathan Swift published his Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to their Parents or Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick (1729), he provided an exercise in sustained irony that revealed itself through the moral enormity of the proposed solution. ‘A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food.’ Poor parents would solve their financial problems by selling their children, who would provide good food for the rich. Infanticide? Cannibalism? Class callousness? Swift does not advocate these. Instead, his irony conveys outrage at the poverty of the poor and the indifference of the rich.

Jonathan Swift’s famous use of sustained irony in his Modest Proposal (1729)Why am I writing about this now? Because I am currently thinking about the use of evidence and the dangers of inadvertent misinterpretation. The question really arises when using a lot of sources in a historical collage.

I have just done that in an essay, published in Social History, on eighteenth-century Britain as an ‘Age of Infidelity’.2  It cites at least 75 contemporary verdicts on the state of religion and irreligion. Many are book titles, some are declarations within books, some are printed texts reporting upon speeches and sermons.

A proportion of these works were clearly using overblown rhetoric, uttered in times of crisis. When John Bowlder agonised in 1798 that the British nation’s lack of faith seemed to portend nothing less than ‘the eradicating [of] Christianity in this Quarter of the World’,3  it is hard not to smile. Religion had more staying power than he was ready to admit. On the other hand, Bowdler’s deep anxiety was typical of many committed Christians in the later 1790s, when Britain was struggling in the prolonged war against France. Why such extreme danger? It could only be that God was angry with the nation for its irreligious ways.

Bowdler not only wrote to chastise the people but took practical steps to offer a remedy. He co-founded the Church Building Society,4  which provided new places of worship in the newly expanding towns. In my Social History essay, I am able to give further information about Bowdler, as he was a particularly notable contributor to the debates. His name on its own attracts interest. Two of his children, Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler, removed all the saucy bits from Shakespeare, in order to make the bard acceptable for respectable family reading.5  Their reward was much public ridicule – and the invention of a new verb ‘to bowdlerise’. Such contextual information illuminates the era’s culture wars, in which the Bowdlers were eager partisans.

But, in an essay of approximately 7,000 words, it’s not possible to devote equal attention to the other 74 eighteenth-century contemporaries – laypeople as well as clergymen – who expressed views on the state of religion. It would overrun the restricted length of a scholarly essay – and confuse the unfolding analysis. Naturally, I checked all the sources that I used, for both content and context. And I especially searched for rival tracts, arguing that the eighteenth century was an ‘Age of Faith’ or equivalent.

Is it possible that I missed some exercises in irony? Logically, yes, although I hope not. (Please check my sources, all duly footnoted!) Sustained Swiftian-style irony is comparatively rare. Moreover, people writing on the state of irreligion tended to be heated and passionate rather than coolly playing with double meanings.

What I do claim to have found is not a debate without the potential for irony but instead one which circulated a new eighteenth-century cliché. It stated that the era was ‘an Age of Infidelity’. By this phrase, the commentators did not refer to people’s unfaithfulness to their marriage vows. That constituted ‘conjugal infidelity’, plentiful enough but far from unique to the eighteenth century. Nor did the commentators refer to apostacy: Christians in this period were not turning into Islamic or Jewish or any other religious variety of ‘infidels’.

No, it was the spread of secularisation that was being noted, chiefly in alarm: the advent of a society, officially Christian, where people had the option of not going to church, not following Christian lifestyles, and (even) not sharing Christian beliefs. It is possible that some eighteenth-century references to the ‘Age of Infidelity’ were meant ironically. But, if all that the commentators left were the unvarnished words, then they are liable to be read literally.

Ironists beware. Unless your double meaning is suitably signalled, it will become lost in time.

1  W. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (written 1599/1600), Act 3, scene 2.

2  P.J. Corfield, ‘“An Age of Infidelity”: Secularisation in Eighteenth-Century England’, Social History, 39 (2014), pp. 229-47; available via Taylor & Francis publishers online = www.tandfonline.com.

3  J. Bowdler, Reform or Ruin: Take Your Choice! (Dublin, 1798), p. 21.

4  For the CBS, now part of the National Churches Trust, see www.churchplansonline.org.

5  See Wikipedia, sub Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825): en.wikipedia.org.

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