Thomas Amory, 'The Life of John Buncle, Esq' (1756): a critical edition

1916年，乔治·桑茨伯里写道：“人们可能会怀疑，没有人真正了解18世纪，直到他读完约翰·邦克尔的书。”圣茨伯里指的是盎格鲁-爱尔兰作家托马斯·阿莫里（Thomas Amory）在上世纪中叶写的一本如今已不为人知的小说。这本小说——《约翰·邦克尔先生的一生》。（1756）——当然在18世纪和19世纪早期享有广泛的成功。《每月评论》和《批判评论》分别用长篇评论（16页和9页）来庆祝它。它启发了阿莫里的续集，由约瑟夫·约翰逊于1766年出版了第二卷，两卷分别于1770年和1825年再版。在伦敦版和都柏林版的小说（托马斯·科根，《约翰·邦克尔，少年，绅士》[1776-1778]）和删节版（《邦克尔的精神》，1823年）中，它也受到了漫画模仿的启发。克拉拉·里夫在《浪漫的进展》（1785）中称赞它是“一个异思天开、离奇古怪的故事，夹杂着些许智慧和知识，是一部真正的天才原创作品”。残余物书商先驱詹姆斯·拉金顿声称，通过阅读这本书，他从一个“贫穷、无知、偏执、迷信的卫理公会教徒”转变过来，因为这本书迫使他“在宗教问题上自由思考”。在浪漫主义时期，威廉·黑兹利特（他将阿莫里描述为“英国的拉伯雷”）、查尔斯·兰姆和利·亨特等作家都曾庆祝过这一节日。尽管在18世纪和浪漫主义时期，人们对《邦克尔》颇有兴趣，然而，这部小说现在几乎完全不为人所知，甚至连18世纪小说专家也不知道。这个研究项目旨在纠正书目前的忽视，通过生产一个新的批评版的第一卷约翰·邦克尔的生活，Esq。(1756)。虽然许多学术读者可以通过ECCO （Gale Thomson的数字化十八世纪在线文集）获得传真文本，但Amory的文本需要现代版本的设备-关键的介绍，完整的注释，文本编辑和补充材料-使二十一世纪的读者能够欣赏和理解这篇引人入胜，丰富多彩的文本。邦克尔滔滔不绝的叙述给我们讲述了他的生活和学习。这本书是邦克尔“所有值得注意的事情的备忘录”（第1页）的合集，包括哲学、数学和神学的思考。但它也可以被解读为一段前往前威斯特摩兰斯坦莫尔地区的旅行记录，其中经常与其他地理位置进行比较——从爱尔兰到波兰再到秘鲁——英格兰北部与更大的世界有着精确而又令人难以置信的关系。它也是一神论神学的作品，它试图说服读者理性探究的重要性；以及一本与有学问的女人相遇的概要，其中包括住在伯特科特府邸的一百个女人组成的“小女性共和国”。这部小说充满了引人入胜的人物和事件，但其相当渊博的知识——对自然史（例如贝壳、地震和潮汐）、解剖学（肌肉的运作）、数学、哲学和神学的反思——使注释文本成为其现代再发现的一个重要特征。《爱默里》中复杂的事实与虚构的混合也需要解开。该项目建立在我关于社区表现的工作基础上，作为专著《Pope to Burney， 1714-1779: Scriblerians to Bluestockings》（Palgrave, 2003）出版。书中有一章（“女性社区”，第三章）特别讨论了女性社区的文学描述，包括阿莫里的《大不列颠几位女士的回忆录》（1755）和《约翰·邦克尔先生的一生》中对女性社区的描述。(1756)。这里提出的版本也巩固了爱尔兰文学在现代时期的长期研究兴趣，特别强调在18世纪。

In 1916, George Saintsbury wrote: 'it may be doubted whether anybody really understands the eighteenth century, as it was and as it might have been, until he has read John Buncle through'. Saintsbury's reference was to a now-obscure mid-century novel written by the Anglo-Irish author Thomas Amory. This novel - The Life of John Buncle, Esq. (1756) - certainly enjoyed popular success in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was celebrated in lengthy reviews in The Monthly Review and The Critical Review (sixteen and nine pages respectively). It inspired a sequel by Amory, which was published by Joseph Johnson in 1766 as volume two, and both volumes were republished in 1770 and 1825. It also inspired a comic imitation, in a novel published in both London and Dublin editions (Thomas Cogan, John Buncle, Junior, Gentleman [1776-1778]) and an abridged version (The Spirit of Buncle, 1823). It was praised by Clara Reeve in The Progress of Romance (1785) as 'a whimsical and outré story, intermixed with sprinklings of wit and Learning, and a Genius truly original'. The pioneering remainder bookseller James Lackington claimed that he had been converted from 'a poor ignorant, bigoted, superstitious methodist' by reading the book, as it had forced him to 'reason freely on religious matters'. And it was celebrated in the Romantic period by such authors as William Hazlitt (who described Amory as 'the English Rabelais'), Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt. Despite the considerable interest in Buncle in the eighteenth century and Romantic period, however, the novel is now almost entirely unknown, even to specialists in eighteenth-century fiction. This research project seeks to redress the book's current neglect, by producing a new critical edition of the first volume of The Life of John Buncle, Esq. (1756). Although a facsimile text is available to many academic readers through ECCO (Gale Thomson's digitised Eighteenth-Century Collections On-line), Amory's text requires the apparatus of a modern edition - critical introduction, full annotations, textual editing and supplementary materials - to enable the reader of the twenty-first century to appreciate and understand this engaging, exuberant text. Buncle's loquacious narration gives us a comic account of his life and learning. It is a collection of Buncle's 'memorandums of everything worth noticing' (p.1), including philosophical, mathematical, and theological musings. But it can also be read as a travel account of a journey to the Stainmore region of former Westmoreland in which frequent comparisons to other geographies - from Ireland to Poland to Peru - situate northern England in a precise but also fabulous relationship with the greater world. It is also a work of Unitarian theology, which seeks to persuade its reader of the importance of rational enquiry; and a compendium of encounters with learned women, including the 'little female republic' of one hundred women living together at Burcott-Lodge. The novel is appealingly full of character and incident, but its considerable erudition - its reflections upon natural history (shells, earthquakes, and tides, for example), anatomy (the working of the muscles), mathematics, philosophy and theology - makes an annotated text an essential feature of its modern rediscovery. Amory's complex mixing of fact and fiction also needs to be unravelled. The project builds upon my work on representations of community, published as the monograph Pope to Burney, 1714-1779: Scriblerians to Bluestockings (Palgrave, 2003). One chapter of that book in particular ('Female Communities', chapter three) discussed the literary depiction of female communities, including those described in Amory's Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1755) and The Life of John Buncle, Esq. (1756). The edition proposed here also consolidates long-term research interests in Irish literature in the modern period, with particular emphasis upon the eighteenth century.