Prose Immortality, 1711-1819 by Sider Jost Jacob;

Author:Sider Jost, Jacob;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

A passage already quoted from Pilkington’s many complaints against her husband shows a similar logic: “And if my Quondam Husband arrives at Fame, or ever goes to Heaven, either of which I very much doubt, I think he must still rest my Debtor” (87). In this passage Pilkington considers oblivion rather than satiric infamy to be the earthly equivalent of posthumous damnation, but in this case too she sharpens the often-complacent eighteenth-century association of literary and personal immortality into a satiric weapon.

The Afterlife of Laetitia Pilkington, or Autobiography in Sheets

Given that the Memoirs show Pilkington again and again deflecting a male interlocutor’s desire for sex into the consumption of text, it is entirely fitting that at the climax of the first volume, the scene in which Pilkington’s husband catches her alone in a bedroom with another man, she claims that the only thing going on was reading. As Pilkington tells it: “I own myself very indiscreet in permitting any Man to be at an unseasonable Hour in my Bed-Chamber; but Lovers of Learning will, I am sure, pardon me, as I solemnly declare, it was the attractive Charms of a new Book, which the Gentleman would not lend me, but consented to stay till I read it through, that was the sole Motive of my detaining him” (88). Elias’s edition supplies the following note:

L[aetitia] P[ilkington] anticipated that many would doubt her story, and a bon mot ascribed to Samuel Foote, seemingly her ally at the time this volume of the Memoirs appeared, bears this out. Somewhat garbling the story, William Cooke reports Foote commenting on an “intrigue” between “Surgeon-general A[dai]r,” then a young Army surgeon, and an unnamed “married woman of high fashion,” whose friends maintained that when he was caught in her bedroom he was reading to her from a rare book she had to return the next day. Foote strenuously defended the lady and said he could even specify which book it was, “namely, The Christian’s Daily Practice, in sheets.” (475–76)

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