Chapter 1 SPECIES INTIMACIES

I

The prototypical other-than-human protagonist of the circulation narrative is the thing that stands at the heart of contemporary exchange—money, coin, or “specie”: a shilling, a bank note, a six-and-nine pence, a silver penny, or a rupee. At the outset of the development of this genre in the first decade of the eighteenth century, Joseph Addison in a Tatler essay (1710) provides a thumbnail sketch of the thing that becomes the model protagonist for the genre. In a “most unaccountable reverie” brought on by a friend’s reflection on the life of business, which is characterized by ceaseless motion, the Tatler describes how a coin on his bedtable comes to life: “Methoughts the Shilling that lay upon the Table reared it self upon its Edge, and turning the Face towards me, opened its Mouth, and in a soft Silver Sound gave me the following Account of his Life and adventures.” This coin then observes, “I found in me a wonderful Inclination to ramble,” and proceeds to narrate his own motion “from Hand to Hand … into almost every Corner of the Nation.”⁷

The story of the circulation of an animated coin reflects the premise of this genre—that exchange confers power and efficacy on the circulating thing itself.⁸ And the particular, active character of the coin indicates this narrative’s engagement with the nature of being: the coin-protagonist is fully realized as an individual actant in the world of human beings. The first sustained circulation narrative, Charles Gildon’s The Golden Spy (1709), for example, begins with an assertion on the part of the frame narrator of “the Sensibility of Things which we generally not only esteem mute but inanimate” and the access of these things to “Rationality, … discoursive Faculty, Observation, Memory, and Reflection.” And the following pages go on to express the fundamental premise of the circulation narrative as a genre, systematically advancing the Newtonian materialist notion that “ev’ry part of the Universe [is] compos’d of animal sensible, and perhaps rational Particles.”⁹ Following upon this founding testimony, the story that the golden coin itself then tells reflects this ontological notion in the actions of the coin itself—as it speaks and travels about. And in a corollary way, the coin possesses, by means of its own animation, a seamless integration with and insight into the active as well as the affective properties of human being. The gold piece has an efficacy such that “nothing is more powerful … in War, and Peace; in Courts, and Camps; in Church, and State, with the Great and the Fair” and by extension in penetrating the human soul in all its varied physical forms: “Gold would make the Silent speak, and the Loquacious dumb.”¹⁰

Gildon’s work is a popular reflection of the contemporary controversy around “thinking matter”—the notion that matter might have actant properties. John Yolton, in his definitive study Thinking Matter, describes the widespread influence of John Locke’s speculation in the Essay concerning Human Understanding that “God could add to matter the power of thought.”¹¹ Canvassing this debate, Yolton invokes Isaac Newton’s provocative “Query 31” from the Opticks. Here Newton suggests that “the small particles of bodies [have] certain powers virtues or forces by which they act at a distance.… It’s well known that bodies act one upon another by the attractions of gravity magnetism & electricity, & these instances … make it not improbable but that there may be more attractive powers than these.”¹² Gildon’s coin is thus a literary enactment of Newton’s “subtle Spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies,” in a counterhuman exchange of a thing-protagonist for the conventional human one.¹³ But Gildon’s narrative reaches beyond the philosophical debate, in popularizing this active and affective thing across a much broader audience and in initiating its long-standing visibility in literary history.

The period’s most widely read exemplar of the circulation narrative’s materialist focus on specie is Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea (1761). Chrysal went through six editions, including significantly expanded versions, between 1761 and 1797. Like Gildon’s shilling, Chrysal travels across the economic scenario of western Europe and expresses the contemporary imaginative engagement both with modern concerns of economic exchange and with “thinking matter,” in a way that represents the material thing as an active agent and that experiments with the counterhuman potential of the thing to integrate a material form and an affective mode of being.

Johnstone’s Chrysal demonstrates the ways in which the circulation narrative utilizes specie to create this distinctive imaginative experiment with active, material being. We learn at the outset of Chrysal’s story that this narrator / piece of gold was extracted as ore from the earth in a mine in Peru and was from that original material shaped into a gold coin. His discoverer and first owner, aptly surnamed Traffick, is the son of a wealthy London merchant and is “bred … to business” but has gone astray through excessive avarice and vanity. The gold coin, Chrysal, is a concretization of the abstract experience of exchange, and as such, the coin participates both in the material substance of the ore and in the power and scope of global economic circulation. Thus the narrative voice, initially that of the speaking piece of gold, merges with the voice or perspective of his first human possessor, Traffick, as the coin describes an ability to “enter into the heart” of the characters he encounters—seamlessly and immediately crossing what would appear to be the absolute boundary between the material thing and the human being. Here is the account of Chrysal’s first encounter with Traffick, in Chrysal’s own words: “I therefore immediately entered into his heart, to read the events of his life, which I doubted not but I should find deeply imprinted there.”¹⁴ Chrysal explains this special power in a full conceptualization of the ability of specie to access human affect:

And as you may be at a loss, to know how I could arrive at the knowledge of such facts, many of which happened long before my converse with those persons, I shall inform you, that besides that intuitive knowledge common to all spirits, we of superior orders, who animate this universal monarch GOLD, have also a power of entering into the hearts of the immediate possessors of our bodies, and there reading all the secrets of their lives. And this will explain to you the cause of that love of gold, which is so remarkable in all who possess any quantity of that metal. (1.5)

The access to human affect that empowers the coin also generates “love” in the possessors of gold; the other-than-human protagonist is both a motive for human action and an intuitive participant in human being. In this way, then, the narrative voice readily melds with the human affect of Traffick, as the gold piece says: “this man … as I am his self, I shall henceforth, for conciseness and perspicuity, call my self” (1.9). What follows then enables the gold piece to provide a direct narrative account of the struggles of Traffick’s life in Traffick’s own words. And most significant in that narrative is the consistent suffusion of Traffick’s story—as told by the gold piece—with affect: the sorrows, regrets, and recollected affinities of Traffick’s early years.

This distinctive counterhuman effect of suffusion is pursued consistently throughout Chrysal’s story, which is constituted by an almost encyclopedic sequence of owners. The gold coin exercises the same immediate power of access to the direct experiences and sentiments of a range of individuals from gentlemen to beggars, from fashionable ladies to prostitutes, and from Peru to London to Lisbon. Passing from the mine and its owners and tradesmen, Chrysal’s next sustained engagement occurs within the confessional, when the other-than-human protagonist comes into the possession of a Catholic priest who is hearing confessions. These interactions—in the confessional itself—between those who are exposing their souls and the (corrupt) priest who is Chrysal’s instrument of engagement with them, further foreground the depth of the circulation narrative’s access to and suffusion with affective modes of human being.

From the confessional onward, Chrysal’s movement through the hands and sentiments of the novel’s varied characters unfolds at a pace whose rapidity underscores the persistent integration of matter and affect. Chrysal is cast into a doubloon (1.52) and paid to an English man of war. He makes her way to England, where Chrysal reflects again on the special power of specie to access human subjectivity, a power that makes him both “very different” from and very intimately engaged with human being:

I must premise to you, that our knowledge [the knowledge characteristic of things] is very different from that of men. I have told you, that we know all things intuitively, without the trouble, delay, and errors of discourse or reasoning. I must now further inform you, that this intuition extends not only to the present face of things, but also has a retrospect to the whole series of their existence, from its first beginning: the concatenation between cause and effect being so plain to our eyes, that let us but see any one event of the life of a man, and we immediately know every particular that preceded it. (1.78)

Here the ontological leveling of thing and human being, in its immediacy, even extends to a challenge to human temporality, in the assertion that the guinea’s intuition “immediately” transcends time.

Chrysal’s efficacy in accessing human existence, as the thing-protagonist then explains, is directly attributable to the status of British specie in European economic exchange; and here the Spanish coin describes his transformation into a guinea—with the consequent affirmation of the “most extensive state” of his power. “I here came into the possession of a new master, and immediately changed my Spanish appearance for the fashion of the country [that is, England], and, in the shape of a guinea, entered into the most extensive state of sublunary influence, becoming the price of every name, that is respected under heaven” (1.77). Once in England, Chrysal passes through the hands of a range of human characters including a noble lord, a virtuoso, an author, “the most celebrated courtesan of the age” (1.122), and a justice of the court. The coin encounters many people at a charity feast, including a gentleman and lady of high life, a servant, and a general, and travels between London and Lisbon, among societies and companies military, aristocratic, female, criminal, judicial, religious, and occult. The specificity of human beings in this sequence underscores the local, bodily, delimited nature of merely human being, in contrast to the counterhuman scope of the other-than-human, which implicitly claims a much broader scenario of engagement than any human can compass.

In the course of the narrative, the other-than-human protagonist exposes the affections of each of the encountered individuals through the extensive scope of the coin’s “sublunary influence,” its unique form of intuitive knowledge, and its distinctive access to core aspects of human affect. By this means, specie—the material concretization of economic exchange—is directly correlated with an unmediated convergence with human being and thus with a kind of transcendence of all human beings. The thing-protagonist ends the adventures of the second volume in the hands of the human frame narrator, the “master,” who is on the verge of receiving through the necessary mediation of Chrysal “the occult wisdom … which links the animal and the material worlds together” (2.218). That revelation fails, due to the insuppressible bodily impulse of the human coin-holder. Thus, in the narrative’s last scene, the “consummation of human knowledge” offered by specie vanishes forever (2.219), leaving this text ironically failing to fulfill what had promised to be a full convergence of human and other-than-human being—ultimately an impossibility.

That such an impossible convergence is an ongoing opportunity and even a premise of the circulation narrative is emphasized in the early development of the subgenre in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The circulation narrative in this formative period is dominated by narratives that place the human being in a physical proximity with the narrator-object: the human either wears or is installed upon or within the nonhuman narrator. The relevant works include The Secret History of an old Shoe (1734), The Sopha (Claude Crébillon, 1742), The Settee (1742), The Adventures of a Black Coat (Edward Philips, 1750), The Memoirs and Interesting Adventures of an Embroidered Waistcoat (1751), The Stage-Coach (1753), Travels of Mons. Le Post-Chaise (1753), The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes (1754), and The Sedan (1757).¹⁵

That latter narrative—The Sedan: A Novel: In Which Many New and Entertaining Characters are Introduced—exemplifies repeatedly this premise of physical proximity that generates the affective convergence of human and thing that we have seen to be at stake in Chrysal. For The Sedan, of course, the proximity of the sedan-narrator to the human is materially generated by the enclosed and private physical environment of the sedan chair, which accommodates one person. The sedan-narrator—after briefly establishing their “furnishing” and “finishing” in “a shop somewhere on Leicester-street”—“issues forth,” arrives at the stand where potential passengers convene, and begins a seriatim account of the intimate confidences of a series of customers or “visitors” whose confessions and revelations and speculations make up two volumes of sequential vignettes of human affect—from politics to poetry to romance—in which the sedan-narrator is a direct and immediate auditor-plus-participant.¹⁶ The sedan-narrator voices the revelations of these passengers in the first person, as if the material proximity of the enclosed physical space makes such an immediacy natural or necessary. In some chapters, this intimacy between the sedan-narrator and the passenger is explicitly described as a conversation: “she amus’d me with some anecdotes of some private families” (1.8). Sometimes the sedan-narrator represents the revelation of their passenger as overheard: “But little thinking I had the faculty of hearing, she whispered” (1.9). And at some points the words of the passenger are represented by the sedan-narrator as a straightforward, deliberate confidence: “What followed I had from his own lips” (1.30). As the narrative proceeds, one of the human sedan-bearers, Paddy, is included as a corollary interlocutor alongside the sedan-narrator, but his role only augments the sedan-narrator’s primacy in engaging in these intimacies. Throughout The Sedan, the boundary between the sedan-auditor and their human confidant is ambiguous or flexible or—most often—nonexistent. Here the full, five-page inner life of a hypocritical Methodist clergyman—“our first fare this morning”—emerges naturally and immediately upon his entrance into the space of the sedan chair:

He had scarce entered and sat down but he began—Well, as my old friend Shakespear says, though I dare not now read him in publick, all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Bishops, deans, and dignitaries, may laugh if they will, but the homage we have is more than ever their paltry feathers can command—we have it … as high as the church of Rome; and as to income, I declare I would not change with the dean of St Paul’s; … I do declare I starved till I fell into this method. Now I have twenty invitations in a day to dine, and, though we preach abstinence, we eat as well as the bench of bishops.… But I see we are near arrived; I must rub my eyes to make them look weak, as if with much affliction for the sins of mankind, or much reading for their good. (1.155–59)

These confessional words belong as much to the sedan-chair-narrator as to the human passenger; the discursive convergence of human and thing is pervasive in this narrative, enacting that suffusion of matter and affect, and that ontological leveling of thing and human being, that defines the counterhuman form of the circulation narrative.

II

Aside from specie—the prototypical guinea, shilling, or rupee—the circulation narrative has another prototypical protagonist, the animal: a parrot, a cat, a mouse, a canary, a hare, a little pony, and others, including, most famously, a lapdog. Published in the same decade as Chrysal, Francis Coventry’s The History of Pompey the Little, or the Life and Adventures of a Lapdog (1751) was an immensely popular novel that went to a third edition within the year of its initial publication and was widely read through the first quarter of the nineteenth century. By 1824, Pompey the Little had seen at least ten English editions, two Dublin piracies, and a French and an Italian translation.¹⁷ Coventry’s Pompey the Little is not only the century’s most visible circulation narrative but also the first widely read modern dog narrative. In the nineteenth century, the animal narrator comes to dominate the circulation narrative, and this animal-protagonist circulation story continues as a popular narrative form into the twenty-first century.

The guinea and the pet, then, are the two primary protagonists of the circulation narrative for eighteenth-century readers. The equivalency of the thing and the lapdog that is suggested by this concurrence uncovers a conjunction between the imaginative engagement with “specie” and with “species”: both propose ontological challenges around autonomy and identity, and both experiment across the boundaries of the human and the other-than-human. In fact, in this period, as Wolfgang Schmidgen demonstrates, the term “species” itself referred broadly across material things and animate beings, putting into semantic play those ontological challenges referenced in each of these terms separately.¹⁸ Thus, when the lapdog occupies the place of the guinea as the protagonist of circulation, the power of specie that we have already canvassed in Chrysal is aligned with the imaginative challenge of species difference.

The dog-protagonist of Pompey demonstrates the same counterhuman power as the thing-protagonist of Chrysal—to penetrate human affect wherever it is found. Pompey is born in Bologna and raised in the home of a “celebrated Courtesan” (7); his early adventures first demonstrate his close affinity with his female mistresses. He is given to a fashionable gentleman on his grand tour who takes him to England—in a transnational transfer typical of the circulation genre—and presents him to his mistress, Lady Tempest. There, Pompey “becomes a Dog of the Town, and shines in High-life,” attending Lady Tempest everywhere—to the playhouse and the opera, even learning “to play at Cards” (30). In these episodes, the lapdog’s special engagement with the woman are decisively highlighted. In fact, Pompey’s connection with her Ladyship is so close that he shares, at her side, the prototypical site of the female fashionable world, and “in less than three Months … sit[s] down with her Ladyship to Piquet” (31).

Pompey then moves from the world of fashion to the City; he is passed to an innkeeper and then to a blind beggar who travels with him to Bath. Like Chrysal’s movements, these changes introduce various human portraits—of the world of high fashion, bourgeois social climbing, marriage, Methodism, usury, and coffeehouse conversation—whose intimacies Pompey readily penetrates. Finally, Pompey returns to fashionable life, as he is given to a pair of good-natured sisters, sold to a prosperous widow milliner, stolen by a Lord, given to a penniless poet, and then passed to a Cambridge scholar. Pompey’s perspective opens up an inclusive scope of human affects and affections—female folly, doctors, lawyers, modern science, education and pedantry, and poetry and the contemporary theater. Finally, Pompey returns to the world of women when he is rediscovered by his original mistress, Lady Tempest, where, in his fourteenth year, he is “gathered to the Lapdogs of Antiquity” (200).

At all points in these peregrinations, the dog-protagonist’s animal status offers a direct opportunity for ontological questioning about the nature of being and for specific reflection on species boundaries, which make explicit the counterhuman boundary-crossing that we saw portrayed in the thing-protagonist’s penetration of the human heart. This specific reflection is expressed on two occasions in Coventry’s story of the lapdog. First, one night Pompey accompanies one of his masters to a tavern, where his presence inspires a heated debate on animals’ capacity for reason. The freethinker in the group advances a current, challenging boundary-crossing argument: that animals are capable of reasoning and morality. He summarizes, “I have a curious thesis now by me, … those dogs there put me in the head of it.… I undertake to prove that brutes think and have intellectual faculties.… I go farther … and maintain that they are reasonable creatures, and moral agents” (171). The other participant, a parson, then counters with the conventional theological defense of the uniqueness of the human soul—a uniqueness based on the idea of the human participation in the divine. In this context, both the parson and the freethinker are objects of ridicule, but their extended discussion reproduces one of the central ontological debates of the period, into which Pompey the Little explicitly inserts itself.

And earlier in Pompey’s travels, the topic of species difference and boundary crossing is raised through another debate. Lady Sophister, arguing with two physicians on the topic of the immortality of the soul, makes use of a sketch of Locke’s idea of matter to summarize a current strain of thinking that directly engages the problem of species difference and that of the status of the material thing, at once:

Mr. Locke observes, there are various kinds of matter.… Matter … is an extended solid Substance—… out of this matter some … is made into roses and peach-trees; then the next step which matter takes, is animal life; from whence you know we have lions and elephants, and all the race of brutes. Then the last step, as Mr. Locke observes, is thought and reason and volition, from whence are created men, and therefore you very plainly see, ’tis impossible for the soul to be immortal. (37)

Their argument ultimately turns to Pompey himself, whom Lady Sophister cites as an immediate example of her case:

“You say, I think, Sir, … that a multitude of opinions will establish a truth. [This would be the multitude of opinions supporting the immateriality of the human soul, which the physician has just cited.] Now you know all the Indians believe that their dogs will go to heaven along with them; and if a great many opinions can prove any thing to be true, what say you to that, Sir? [In other words, that absurdity should call into question his rejection of materialism. And she adds,] … For instance, now, there’s lady Tempest’s little lapdog” [as a way of emphasizing the absurdity of the argument based on a multitude of opinions and of implying that one certainly could not accept the heathen notion that a little lapdog like Pompey could go to heaven, no matter how many Indians believe it. And then Lady Tempest counters]—“My dear little creature,” said lady Tempest, catching him up in her arms, “will you go to heaven along with me? I shall be vastly glad of your company, Pompey, if you will.” (39)

Lady Tempest is here both asserting and physically demonstrating a cross-species affinity, which reaches across a challenging, categorical boundary through the explicit evocation of affect. This episode from Pompey the Little reveals the corollary positions of species difference and specie in the counterhuman imaginary of the circulation narrative. The pet and the material thing coincide here, as equivalent other-than-human reference points both for difference from and then for intimacy with the human.

These instances from Pompey the Little anchor the circulation narrative in a visible intellectual context—that of the vital contemporary engagement with theological, ontological, and scientific ideas both about species difference and about materiality and immateriality. In the realm of species difference, a range of debates can be identified as they emerge through ongoing adjustments in the hierarchical conceptualization of the Platonistic chain of being: new thinking on the topics of animal intelligence, language, and anatomy supported revisions in those concepts in which the principles of continuity and plenitude began to take precedence over doctrinal notions of the separation of human from other-than-human beings and of other-than-human beings from matter. Closely related to these developments was the debate about animal souls, in which the Cartesian analogy between animal and automaton—decisively distinguishing man from beast in this regard—met with dispute from a range of perspectives, including the arguments of rationalizing theology and the rise of the new humanitarianism.¹⁹ Meanwhile, and along corollary routes, Enlightenment materialism developing from Descartes and from Lockean empiricism, from the experimental practices and discourse of the British Royal Society, and from the influential European and French metaphysical debates proposed a continuity along and throughout the chain of being that extended to the matter of its first stage. Coventry’s novel places the circulation narrative explicitly within these contemporary discussions of difference—between human and other-than-human beings.

III

These occasions in which other-than-human modes of being encounter or challenge or exceed the human through the evocation of affect or intimacy can be further illuminated through a comparison between the circulation narrative and the corollary subgenre that we reviewed at the outset of this chapter—the lapdog lyric. As we have seen, as a distinctive generic innovation, the circulation narrative is invented alongside the lapdog lyric in the early part of the eighteenth century; the juxtaposition of these two genres extends our understanding both of the imaginative status and of the formal function of affect and intimacy in the counterhuman imaginary. Pompey the Little supplies a direct link to the lapdog lyric. As the preceding summary suggests, Pompey’s affective insights highlight women and the supposed sexual excesses that are central to the eighteenth-century stereotypes of female petkeeping. The lapdog’s immoderate intimacy with the woman of quality is a prominent dimension of Pompey the Little: a recurring scene in this narrative is the appearance of the lapdog in an intimate connection with a lady of fashion. For example, here is Pompey in the embrace of the fashionable lady, Aurora, with whom “he was a great favourite.… Aurora … caressed him with the fondest tenderness, and permitted him to sleep every night in a chair by her bed-side. When she awoke in a morning, she would embrace him with an ardour, which the happiest lover might have envied” (132). Aurora’s “ardour” is a direct allusion to the innovative engagement with cross-species intimacy that is at the center of the lapdog lyric. Pompey’s narrative explores the counterhuman impact of ontological leveling across an extended narrative scenario. But the lapdog lyric takes up this engagement with intimacy especially intensively and almost exclusively, through a focused format that develops in a concentrated generic movement in the first three decades of the eighteenth century.

The lapdog lyric is consumed with the problematic of the lady’s love for her favorite lapdog. These poems include a range of ironic tributes—from epitaphs and praise poems to satiric, envious reflections on the favorite lapdog, who is inevitably preferred to the husband or suitor. All across this genre, certain key images indicate these works’ contribution to a common, developing discourse of embodied cross-species connection—images focused on the lapdog’s proximity with the woman, her dress and accoutrements, her breasts and thighs. These poems can become investigations of a surprising cross-species intimacy, usually expressed as a sexual connection.

In the circulation narrative, the challenge of the other-than-human is a destabilizing force. The peripatetic activity of the thing-narrator as it operates across the globe and across the social strata, together with the power of this narrator to engage and expose the most intimate affections of human being, emphasizes the counterhuman disruption of conventional expectations around the necessity for a human actor and around the human specificity of affect. In the lapdog lyric as well, the challenge of the other-than-human generates ontological instability—based in this case on cross-species transposition or substitution and on a corollary sense of immeasurability represented through the corporeality of the woman-lapdog intimacy.

Corporeality and female sexuality are the implicit and explicit conditions of this poetry’s evocation of cross-species intimacy. The lapdog lyric alludes, on the one hand, to the early modern blazon anatomique, best characterized by John Donne’s “The Flea”—where the animal enables a direct physical and aesthetic exploration of the female body—and on the other hand to the classical topos of the dead pet, where animal mortality serves as a pretext for the portrayal and exploitation of female affective excess. In the lapdog lyric, the animal is often named as the lady’s “bedfellow,” and the venue of this poetry is consistently depicted as the female bed.²⁰ The opening scene of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1714), for instance, famously places Belinda in her bed dreaming of her lovers—with the lapdog Shock, “who thought she slept too long, [and] / Leapt up, and wak’d his Mistress with his Tongue.”²¹

The lady’s “lap” creates the same venue for corporeal contact. Jonathan Smedley’s “On the Death of a Lap-Dog” (1723) describes the typical scene:

To him her softest things she’d say:

Oft on her downy Breast he lay;

And oft he took a gentle Nap,

Upon her Sleep-inticing Lap.²²

Isaac Thompson’s “The Lap-Dog” (1731) describes this scene as well:

Securely on her Lap it lies,

Or freely gazes on her Eyes;

To touch her Breast, may share the Bliss,

And unreprov’d, may snatch a Kiss.²³

And this intimacy is often extended to an explicit portrayal of sexual contact. “An Epitaph upon my Lady M^______’s Lapdog” (1731) portrays an embodied cross-species intimacy directly:

Beneath this Stone, ah woful Case!

Poor little Doxy lies,

Who once possess’d a warmer Place

Between his Lady’s T^_______hs.²⁴

The Rival Lapdog and the Tale (1730) develops a full account of an embodied cross-species connection. This work tells the story of a King Charles spaniel who “was Courtly-bred”: “Court-Company he always kept, / With Lords he din’d, with Ladies slept.”²⁵ His “monst’rous” act is to supplant his lord in his lady’s bed. He takes “sawcy Freedoms” (8) with his lady’s belongings and her clothes, but beyond that, he is seen to “towze Her, with his Paw,” while the lady in turn “was proud to have her dear Dog rude, / As rude with Her, as e’er He cou’d” (36). The poem climaxes with a sustained interspecies love scene:

Breast to Breast, incorporate

Almost, He lay like Dog in State;

.….….….….….…

Fair-Lady, all in Raptures, to

Be so caress’d by such a Beau;

She hugg’d, and kiss’d, and cry’d, and clung,

And He return’d all with his Tongue;

Put Lady-Fair quite out of Breath,

And buss’t her, e’en a’most to Death;

Sir Lick Lips was so tir’d too,

He fell a sleep while One tell’s Two. (39)

The typical transposition here, of dog for lord, signals this poetry’s persistent disruption of ontological stability. For instance, “On a Lap-Dog” (Thomas Brown, 1721) addresses the dog with this exclamation: “Nice, pretty Nice, … ah! Could’st thou know / How thou dost my Envy raise.” Then as the dog lies in “that Lap,” the speaker asks his mistress whether she will consider an “Exchange” of “Place” and “Station” so that the dog’s “Privilege” will instead be his.²⁶ “The Lap-Dog” (Isaac Thompson, 1731) goes further, by proposing a magical transformation:

Give me a Spell, a potent Charm,

To turn myself to MINNY’s form!

In sportful Dance, and wanton Play

On Silvia’s Lap I’ll spend the Day.²⁷

John Hewitt’s “Upon Cælia’s having a little Dog in her Lap” (1727) expresses a clear preference—to be a “four-footed” being rather than a man:

’Tis four-footed Cloe, your Smiles can engage,

Whilst a Shape that is human must bear with your Rage,

Since, thus, my Addresses by Cælia’s refused,

Pray, who wou’d be Man? when a Dog’s so well us’d?²⁸

The speaker wishes himself into the animal’s place—and the animal into the human’s place—in a way that engages with contemporary debates around human rationality, animal souls, and being itself. Transposition or even transformation is an ongoing theme, as this poetry posits a multiply directed counterhuman experiment in simultaneous intimacy and alterity. The dog is both close and distant, both a source of a special intimacy with the lady and a problematic or unnatural or negative model for affective connection.

Both multiplicity and transformation shape the definition of love in Henry Carey’s “The Rival Lap-Dog” (1713), where the male suitor issues a complaint to the lady that takes the form of a rhetorical question that is further evocative of a complex cross-species connection:

Corinna, pray tell me,

When thus you repel me,

When humbly I sue for a Kiss,

Why Dony, at pleasure,

May kiss without measure,

And surfeit himself with the Bliss?²⁹

Again, the male speaker is both a jealous observer of cross-species “bliss” and a critic- competitor, implicitly presenting his unsuccessful intraspecies suit as the preferable form of intimacy. The “pleasure/measure” rhyme in this poem, exemplifying and extending “kiss/bliss,” places “pleasure” in an unstable—even disruptive—relationship to all the participants: the woman and the lapdog, as well as the male observer or would-be lover. Though “pleasure” and “bliss” refer grammatically to Dony’s experience, these words point also to the imputed pleasure of the female recipient of these cross-species kisses, as well as the projected pleasure of the intraspecies suitor with his imagined kiss. In this context, the indication that this experience of embodied affect is “without measure” registers its disruptive and challenging form. The lapdog lyric is characterized by these counterhuman formal structures—where difference is superseded by connection, where transformation problematizes hierarchy as well as alterity, where pleasure is multiply determined, and where the outcome is represented as an unexpected and “unmeasurable,” and even—from the human perspective—inexplicable or impossible, affect.

IV

These two genres—the circulation narrative and the lapdog lyric—constitute corollary, contemporary, sustained innovations in eighteenth-century literary history that arise directly from the representation of other-than-human being and the incursion of a counterhuman imaginary through or alongside that representation. We have seen the local and the conceptual connections between these genres, in their evocation of contemporary debates around the definition of the human in relationship to the other-than-human. And we have also seen, derived from their engagement with the challenge of the other-than-human, their mutual attempts to design new modes of imaginative engagement with action, affect, and affinity, which step beyond or outside conventional or human agency or connection—generating instability along corollary pathways.

In the one case—the circulation narrative—this experiment in creating an active thing-protagonist opens up the surprising possibility that the material thing or specie—in possessing access to and in melding with human affect—might itself represent a mode of being equivalent to that of the human. In this regard, the circulation narrative offers an experiment in materialist form that shows how the literary imagination both shapes and is shaped by a material actant. In the other case—the lapdog lyric—the experiment in cross-species corporeal intimacy challenges or multiplies or destabilizes conventional notions and representations of affinity. Based on embodied cross-species intimacy, a new definition of affect emerges as a result—a definition based on multiplicity and immeasurability rather than identity and coherence, and on a fundamental questioning of a human-dominated and exclusively human affectivity. In this context, embodied affect advances formal innovation by providing an imaginative site for transposition. These two genres address fundamental challenges around matter and affect that are posed by the experience of modernity. They place human being into surprising, direct, intimate contact with the other-than-human. This contact propels the imaginative experience both of matter and of affect beyond the bounds of convention and creates the opportunity for a new and vital framework in which ideas about efficacy and intimacy, and about being itself, may be reimagined. The counterhuman imaginary is the enactment of this reimagining.

1. 1. See Ileana Baird and Christina Ionescu, Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context: From Consumerism to Celebrity Culture (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2013); Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007).

2. 2. See for example Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Coole and Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–44; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Christina Ionescu, “Introduction: Through the Prism of Thing Theory: New Approaches to the Eighteenth-Century World of Objects,” in Baird and Ionescu, Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory, 17–29.

3. 3. See for example Patricia Ticineto Clough, introduction to The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Clough and Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn, “Affect,” Body & Society 16 (2010): 7–28; Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Gregg and Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); 1–25; Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2010): 434–72; and Marguerite La Caze and Henry Martyn Lloyd, “Editors’ Introduction: Philosophy and the ‘Affective Turn,’ ” Parrhesia 13 (2011): 1–13.

4. 4. Aileen Douglas, “Britannia’s Rule and the It-Narrator,” in Blackwell, Secret Life of Things, 149.

5. 5. See P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688–1756 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1967); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Knopf, 1989); Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

6. 6. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 119. See also Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Ingrid Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015); and Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). I have described the literary impact of the invention of petkeeping in Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).

7. 7. Joseph Addison, The Tatler 249 (November 11, 1710), in The Tatler, vol. 3, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1987), 269, 270.

8. 8. For an account of the social, cultural, and personal relevance and attributes of exchange media in this period, see Deborah Valenze, The Social Life of Money in the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

9. 9. Charles Gildon, The Golden Spy (London: J. Woodward, 1709), 2.

10. 10. Gildon, 2–3.

11. 11. John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 4.

12. 12. Isaac Newton, “Draft Versions of the Queries (c. 1704–1718),” catalog entry NATP00055, 273r, Newton Project, Cambridge University Library, https://www.newtonproject.ox.uk/. Also cited in Yolton, Thinking Matter, 93.

13. 13. Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, vol. 2 (London, 1729), 393. Also cited in Yolton, Thinking Matter, 93.

14. 14. Charles Johnstone, Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea, 2 vols. (Dublin: Dillon Chamberlaine, 1760), 1.10, 7. Subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text.

15. 15. For the complete “Chronological Catalogue of Circulation Narratives,” see Liz Bellamy, “It-Narrators and Circulation: Defining a Subgenre,” in Blackwell, Secret Life of Things, appendix B, 135.

16. 16. The Sedan: A Novel, 2 vols. (London: R. Baldwin, 1757), 1.3–5. Subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text.

17. 17. Robert Adams Day, introduction to The History of Pompey the Little, by Francis Coventry (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), xiv. Subsequent references to the novel are cited parenthetically in the text.

18. 18. Wolfram Schmidgen, “The Metaphysics of Robinson Crusoe,” ELH 83 (2016): 104.

19. 19. For an account of the debate about animal souls, see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 139–42; and Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 15–27. For a thumbnail summary of the religious arguments regarding animal souls and of the developing new ideas of humanity, see David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 27–41. For the French theriophilist movement of the period, which was influential in England, see George Boas, The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century (1933; repr., New York: Octagon Books, 1966). Ingrid H. Tague describes the treatment of animal souls and of metempsychosis in pet epitaphs, concluding that “the view that animals might have immortal souls like humans was not that of the majority, but ideas that stopped short of this position were common.” Tague, “Dead Pets: Satire and Sentiment in British Elegies and Epitaphs for Animals,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42 (2008): 299.

20. 20. For instance, a contemporary letter of condolence, “To a Lady on the Death of her Lapdog and Squirrel in One Day,” describes “little Dory” as having “the charmingest Creature in the World for his Bedfellow.” In Serious and Comical Chapters (London: J. King, 1710), letter 16, 180.

21. 21. Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, in Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 1.115–16.

22. 22. Jonathan Smedley, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1723), 122.

23. 23. Isaac Thompson, A Collection of Poems (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1731), 94.

24. 24. Mr. Bavius, The Grub-Street Miscellany (London: J. Wilford, 1731), 45.

25. 25. [Stephen Fox?], The Rival Lapdog and the Tale (London: W. Smith and G. Greg, 1730), 7. Subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text.

26. 26. Thomas Brown, The Fifth Volume of the Works of Mr. Thomas Brown (London: Sam. Briscoe, 1721), 333.

27. 27. Thompson, Collection of Poems, 94.

28. 28. John Hewitt, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (Bristol, UK: Penn, 1727), 29.

29. 29. Henry Carey, Poems on Several Occasions (London: J. Kent, A Boulter, and J. Brown, 1713), 25.