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akademiskacademic quarterkvarterThe Transgressive Literacy of the Comic Maidservant inTobias Smollett’s Humphry ClinkerKathleen Alvesticoat to ward off evil, marking her back to her lower-class placewith a superstitious practice specifically tied to rural culture. Win“scorns…to exclose the secrets of the family” but gossips freely ofLydia’s scandalous amour with an actor, evoking a common complaintof servants. Several levels of comedy can be appreciated here,but only with the discerning audience, those in on the joke.Third, writers can impose punster humor on the servants for ideologicaleffect. Servants are, after all, ignorant and unrefined – atleast, these writers make them out to be so. Joseph Andrews’ veryown Fanny Goodwill could not read and her Christian name is suggestiveof the pudendum (Rawson, 1996). As good, beautiful andkind as Fielding paints her in the novel, her name and illiteracy remindsthe reader that she belongs in the lower ranks of life.Punning servants surprised few of Smollett’s readers. In responseto the popularity of punning with the lower orders, the period produceda body of antipunning rhetoric. Alexander Pope, though apunster himself, describes punning as “a contagion that first creptin amongst the First Quality, descended to their Footmen, and infuseditself into their Ladies” (cited in Ault, 1935, p. 270). AlexanderHamilton, a Scottish emigré living in Maryland, laments the shift ofelite punsters in James I’s reign to the dregs of society: “the onlyremains of [“elite” punning] are to be found scattered about inAle-houses, Bawdy houses, Chop houses, Bethlehem Hospital, andamong the black Guard boys, water men, porters, in the precincts ofWapping, the Garrets of Grubstreet…” (cited in Micklus, 1990, p.227-228). The lower-class ignorant can easily access the pun, a modeof wit not specifically exclusive for the social and intellectual elite.Punning, thus, invites “social topsy-turveydom” for social commentatorsin the early part of the century. Antipunning rhetoricregulates social interaction at the public level to maintain educationaland polite hierarchies (Alderson, 1996). Considering eighteenth-centuryregard of the pun, its ideology in confirming andcrossing class lines is palpable.Fourth, this allows writers to still touch on coarse subjects in otherwise“high” works of art without broaching social and aestheticdecorum. In polite society, especially towards the end of the centurywhen sensitivity to tawdry subjects was becoming an identifyingethos, the pun’s capacity to verbally frame crudeness heightenedits appeal. Men of wit could allude to base subjectes withoutVolume03 285