Dueling by sword and pen: The Vauxhall Affray of 1773

Prose Studies

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 160-172

  Brant, Clare ^a  

^a KING'S COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0042692164     PISSN: 17439426     EISSN: 01440357     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01440359608586584     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. The Vauxhall Affray; or, the Macaronies Defeated (London, 1773), 15-16
2. The North Briton (Dublin, 1763), 2 vols., vol. 2, Appendix, 5
3. A Dissertation on Duelling (Cambridge, 1784), 81
4. Samuel Richardson, "Six Original Letters upon Duelling" in The Candid Review and Literary Repository, I, March 1765
5. reproduced in Richardson's Published Commentary on Clarissa and Related Writings, with an introduction by Jocelyn Harris and headnotes by Tom Keymer, The Clarissa Project, vol. 9 (New York, AMS Press), in press. I am grateful to Tom Keymer for his generosity in sending me this material
6. Essays on the Bilious Fever (Jamaica and London, 1752), 47. This is a harrowing text: against all the rules, Williams shot Bennet through a part-opened door. But Bennet managed, before dying, to draw his sword and sever Williams's jugular
7. For a subtle account of the specular relations in this collection, and their effects on masculinities, see Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1992), 16-23.
8. As one fictional character described a proposal of public humiliation in 1771, "My uncle said it was a matter of such delicacy to meddle with a gentleman's nose, that he declined the office. " Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Jery Melford to Watkin Phillips, 18 April
9. See for example Christopher Hervey, Letters from Portugal, Spain, Italy and Germany in the Years 1759, 1760 and 1761 (London, 1785), vol. 2, 525, in which the author gives a droll account of how, when living in Spain, he used the services of a local bully to recover a stolen dog
10. At least one writer argued that though notions of fair play in boxing matches made them a species of justice, yet the sport did not carry the ideological overtones of dueling: "Professed 'boxing matches' in cold blood, which are now so inhumanly and illegally encouraged by the fashionable amateurs of that bloody science, are of a different nature [to duels]. They are rather a species of tilts and tournaments among the vulgar, fought for fame and the honour of victory alone. These brawny knights of the fist have nothing to do in their combats with 'satisfaction,' or the personal revenge of gentlemen, but 'lay in their blows' with the most disinterested prowess" (Charles Moore, A Full Enquiry into the Subject of Suicide (London, 1790), vol. 1, 254). A French commentator remarked in 1726 on an English practice whereby persons of quality boxed versus mean people, against whom they must not draw their swords, and a later writer contrasted the manliness of English boxing to the perfidy of the Italian knife
11. The Buskin and the Sock: being Controversial Letters between Mr Thomas Sheridan, Tragedian, and Mr Theophilus Cibber, Comedian (Dublin, London repr. 1743), 26
12. William Webster, A Casuistical Essay on Anger and Forgiveness (London, 1750), 72.
13. Reflections on Duelling and on the most effectual means for preventing it (Edinburgh, 1790), 20
14. A Tract on Duelling (1st ed. 1773; rpt. London, 1790), 70. The heavily militarized Malta was apparently the only Western country where dueling was permitted in law
15. A Casuistical Essay, 48.
16. A Dissertation on Duelling, 55.
17. The Principles of Duelling; with Rules to be observed in Every particular respecting it (London, 1790), 64
18. An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (Philadelphia, 1778), 43-4
19. A Full Enquiry, vol. 2, 122. Moore is here discussing the dangers of Chesterfield's letters
20. Most of the rudest people I have met have been male academics. But for a powerful analogy between academic life and ungendered murderousness, see Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York, 1992), Epilogue, especially 231-2: "although it's not the same thing to savage a person's book as it is to kill them with a six-gun, I suspect that the nature of the feelings that motivates both acts is qualitatively the same."
21. V.G. Kieman, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford, 1988), 21
22. J.P.D. Dunbabin, "British elections in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a regional approach," English Historical Review 95.375 (April 1980): 241. I am very grateful to E.H.H. Green for this reference. The controversy was about the rise of the Labour party and how it related - or not - to the decline of the Liberals; though it was in articles rather than letters, it illustrates a paradigm of epistolary disagreement. Peculiarly, the author invokes ethnicity: "Is this", as the Irishman might have said of the Matthew-McKibbin-Kay versus Clarke dispute, "a private fight, or can anyone join in?" His motive is avowedly only to modify the arguments of both sides; he disclaims any pugnacity of temperament himself, of course