Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
first of minutes taken during or composed immediately after the sessions.
Then there is another "Record Book," a revised and expanded "Record of
the Tuesday Club" with portrait drawings of individual members and other
sketches of the group together and an appendix of music prepared by the
Reverend Thomas Bacon for the favorite songs of the club, an elaborate
unified production indicating by its references to past and future meetings
that it was deliberately organized. Later Hamilton composed the "History
of the Tuesday Club," again carefully planned, and perhaps written in two
versions, the second of which is a highly allusive mock-heroic work using
facetious names for the members and following to some extent the alleged
original plan of facetiously recapitulating the long literary history of
Britain. In doing the last, Hamilton burlesques in one section (Chapter I
of Book II of the "History") Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and in
describing the literary battles of colonial Maryland he employs the method
of Pope's Dunciad. Lemay sees Fielding's Tom Jones as contributing more
than any other single work to the structure and style of the "History."
As he developed the "History," Hamilton made several changes from
the earlier manuscripts, all together reminding one of Byrd's method as
he worked toward the final version of the "History of the Dividing Line."
Hamilton provides a background and pedigree for the club (compare
Byrd's introductory chapter on the history of Virginia ) and a good deal on
the whole club concept in Scotland, not England, and in America. For it
should be noted that several of the original members of the Tuesday Club
were Scottish-born and that several later members were also, and that
Hamilton compares the Annapolis Club to an Edinburgh one, not to the
London clubs of Dryden or Addison or Dr. Johnson. Byrd's facetious tag
names are in his earlier "Secret History"; Hamilton's appear in his final
version, with himself as "Loquacious Scribble, M.D."; Anthony Bacon,
former Maryland and at the time British overseas representative as "Comely
Coppernose"; the latter's brother Thomas the musician as "Signior Lardini";
Hamilton's brotherin-Iaw Walter Dulany, "Slyboots Pleasant"; Colonel
William Fitzhugh, former Virginian, "Col. Comico Butman"; learned
cleric John Gordon, "Rev. Smoothum Sly"; Jonas Green, in view of his
favorite punch, "Jonathan Grog"; Witham Marshe, the Indian expert,
"Prattle Motely, Esq."; and so on for resident and honorary members and
for visitors, such as Benjamin Franklin, "Electro Vitrifrico."
"The History" is an elaborate work of literary satire including repre·
sentations of many forms of humor and burlesque, irony and mock-epic,
in addition to the "imitations" of Burton and Pope mentioned above. One
mock-elegy on the perpetual (because he was wealthy and willing to
entertain ) president Cole, "Lugubris Cantus," is avowedly modeled on
Spenser, though in it Milton is silently burlesqued or travestied. As noted