Fame and Fortune by Clare Brant & George Rousseau

Author:Clare Brant & George Rousseau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Taking advantage of his position as editor of the British Magazine , Hill published his ‘A Dissertation on Royal Societies’ in its March issue of 1750, as well as selling it in separate pamphlet form.

Hill was directing this particular invective at a mistake made by Rev. Henry Miles and Henry Baker whereby they had falsely identified objects Miles had found in ditch water. Believing them to be tiny living animals, they related their findings in Philosophical Transactions but, embarrassingly for them, the objects turned out to be seeds. 42 In ‘A Description of a Meeting of a Royal Society in London and a Coffee-House Conversation’, the narrator relates an incident where he hears wildly exaggerated tales being told as he follows the fellows into a coffeehouse. One gentleman tells of a frightful monster ‘with Wings and Claws, voided by a Lady, on taking a single Dose of his Worm-Powder; a second, of a living Wolf in one of his patient’s Breasts, and a third, of a Toad in a Block of Marble’. 43 These wags collected at ‘Wits Corner in the Bedford Coffee-House, and behind the sacred Veil at Rawthmell’s’, 44 coffeehouses being a meeting place for the discussion of London’s natural philosophers, including members of the Royal Society. 45 Hill, who frequented the Bedford Coffee-House , obviously abhorred the ridiculous claims to which he had been party in discussions at this establishment by Royal Society members. He was not alone in his condemnation of such declarations. The Gentleman’s Magazine mocked the Royal Society in reports made of a mother who gave birth to a leonine monster ‘with nose and eyes like a lyon, no palate to the mouth, hair on the shoulders, claws like a lyon instead of fingers, no breast-bone, something surprising out of the navel as big as an egg, and one foot longer than the other’. 46

In earlier sex guides, such as Nicholas Venette’s Mysteries of Conjugal Love and Aristotle’s Masterpiece, sexual activities were closely connected with the desire to conceive, with advice on the best way to perform in order to become pregnant. Hill’s satires did the opposite. In his experimental world, sex could take place without pregnancy, and pregnancy without sex, freeing couples from both moral castigations and parental obligations. The disengagement of these two hitherto intertwined activities took place in Hill’s mind more than three centuries before it was actually possible. In this sense, Hill was a visionary, able to imagine a world in which women were biologically free from men, where men were no longer necessary for conception. In overturning contemporary views (both religious and scientific), that the male was responsible for creating the vital force in the production of babies, he had attacked the speculators and their attempts to understand female fertility. Implicit in his writing, however, is the underlying (and common) assumption that women were sexually rapacious by nature.

In reality, at this time Hill was more interested in the damage he could cause to his detractors—and he seems to have hit his mark.

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