Arbuthnotiana: The Story of the St. Alb-ns Ghost (1712) A Catalogue of Dr. Arbuthnot's Library (1779) — Background and Themes

Oldisworth had apparently given up the struggle against unwilling printers. Arbuthnot, Roper and Manley are not very interested in the matter, and neither are other pamphleteers published by Morphew during the months immediately following Swift's _Proposal_. The items included in the so-called _Miscellaneous Works of Dr. Wagstaffe_, on the other hand, fall into three groups chronologically: those which precede Swift's _Proposal_, and include many apostrophied verb forms; those which immediately follow Swift's _Proposal_, and include abnormally few apostrophied verb forms; the two "late" pieces (1715, 1719), which are back to the proportion of apostrophied verbs to be found in the early items. If Pseudo-Wagstaffe was indeed a single writer, then he followed the same pattern as Oldisworth, but began later and continued longer to use verbs with an _-ed_ ending. Since the genuine signed prose works of Dr. Wagstaffe come "late" (1717, 1721) and have a fairly large (i.e., normal) number of apostrophied verbs, there is no evidence here as to whether or not Pseudo-Wagstaffe is Wagstaffe; at least there is no contradiction. In the light of these facts, we can see that neither Swift nor Arbuthnot is a probable author of the _Story_; Swift would presumably have altered verb typography in the first and all editions, and Arbuthnot would not have altered it at all.[7] In these two projects on authorship we find that authors other than Wagstaffe tend to be eliminated, but that Wagstaffe himself is not strongly confirmed. The authorship remains as problematic as before, and the _Story_ may as well for this century continue with the Arbuthnotiana, as it did during the nineteenth with the Swiftiana.

The device of using a ghost story as vehicle for political satire was by 1712 a well-established one. Elias F. Mengel Jr. refers to "the 'ghost' convention, so popular in the Restoration,"[8] and an important poem of Queen Anne's reign shows some similarities with and perhaps provided a model for the _Story_. In _Moderation Display'd_ (London, 1705) the recently deceased second Earl of Sunderland rises from Hell to confound his guilty Whig companions. Tonson (Bibliopolo) is the most terrified, and as in the _Story_ Wharton (Clodio) is so wicked that he is not frightened at all. The _Story_, however, is both more subtle and more flexible than most other satiric "ghost" narratives. It compresses the actual apparition into the last quarter of the narrative, despite the perhaps deliberately misleading title. Nearly half of the _Story_ deals with previous events; much of the rest is machinery, introduction of seemingly irrelevant details with a mischievous verisimilitude which actually advances the main satiric aims. The opening paragraph, for example, first denounces Roman Catholic superstition, a denunciation which almost every Englishman could join, and then turns the fire toward "Our Sectarists." The war on heterodoxy continues in the references to Dr. Garth, the Whig poet and physician noted for his scepticism in religion, to William Whiston who during the winter of 1711-1712 was transcribing documents and writing elaborate treatises to uphold his view that Christian churches and theologians had all been essentially heretical since the time of Athanasius, and to the Reverend and Honourable Lumley Lloyd, a low-church minister whose sermons attracted at least two Tory satires.[9] None of these men belongs in the narrative, and only Garth was even remotely connected with the Marlboroughs, but all of them were Whigs, and in various ways serve to "demonstrate" that Whigs must be false brethren to the Church of England.

This charge, although a cliché of Tory satires, is here made indirect and witty, as are the staple charges against the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. Whereas, however, the wickedness of nonconformity had been attacked for decades, the Duke of Marlborough had been associated with the Whigs for a relatively short time. As late as 1706 Wagstaffe could generously declare that "_Woodstock's_ too little" a reward (_Ramelies, a Poem_), but since Swift's "Bill of British Ingratitude" in the _Examiner_ (17 November 1710) the Tory press had begun to say that the rewards were too many and too great. The _Story_ repeats the charge that Avaro and Haggite "grew Richer than their Mistress" (p. 11), together with the ridiculous insinuations of cowardice and incompetence found constantly reiterated in the second volume of _Examiners_. The Duchess of Marlborough attracted massive satire earlier than her husband, in such books as _The Secret History of Queen Zarah_ (London, 1705),[10] and her habit of saying "Lawrd" with an affected drawl is mentioned in _The Secret History of Arlus and Odolphus_ (n.p., 1710), pp. 21, 22, 23.