Last
night I was the “featured author” at a book launch at our town’s big
independent bookseller, Labyrinth Books.
There probably were about forty people there, only half of whom were
close friends or family members.
Such an unusually bookish experience gave me the occasion to think a bit
not merely about my book but the state of the
book in general.
It
is hardly news that the entire book trade is in a state of crisis or of
transition--or maybe it is “critical transition”—and I do not pretend to be
able to predict the commercial future of the printed book. I have not yet fully absorbed the
implications of the advent of the mega-publisher, the mega-store, and
e-commerce; yet much more is likely coming soon. I recently met my first bookless English professor, that is,
a literary scholar who, confident that everything he will ever want or need to
read will be available in electronic form, refrains from buying printed books
on principle. Under these
circumstances a large, high quality independent bookshop that gracefully
navigates the markets for both learned and trade books is a precious community
asset.
I
was talking about my new book, The Dark
Side of the Enlightenment. If
ever a topic were tailor-made for bookshop chatter the Enlightenment ought to
be it. For although there is no
universal agreement as to what, when, or how the Enlightenment was, it’s easy
enough to see that books had a great deal to do with it. For convenience of chronology I am
willing to follow Harold Nicolson in associating Enlightenment origins with two
famous English books: Newton’s Principia
of 1687 and Locke’s Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (1690)—two enormously influential books that, I claim,
“mark a decisive shift in the way thinkers regarded the natural word around them,
and the way they thought about thinking itself.” I suppose the books that most people naturally call to mind
when they hear the word “Enlightenment” are the large volumes of the great
French encyclopedia published in Paris in the third quarter of the eighteenth
century.
Fortunately
for us mere mortals, not all writings of the Enlightenment period were so
difficult and high-minded. My old
friend and long-time colleague Robert Darnton, now the University Librarian at
Harvard and one of the key players in some of the more benign of the vast
electronic projects characteristic of our age, has written brilliantly about
the print culture of the eighteenth century, demonstrating its extraordinary
vitality and variety.
One
of the major figures dealt with in my book is “Count” Cagliostro, a famous
alchemist, sooth-sayer, table-rapper, healer and Freemason of the second half
of the eighteenth century. If you
believe Thomas Carlyle Cagliostro was “the most perfect scoundrel that in these
latter ages has marked the world’s history…Gold-cook, Grand Cophta, Prophet,
Priest, and thaumaturgic moralist and swindler, really a Liar of the first
Magnitude…what one may call the King of Liars.” If on the unlikely other hand you believe Fleming,
Cagliostro was an unconventional social reformer and a Rosicrucian “friend of
mankind” whose exploitation of celebrity just happened to be a bit advanced for
his time.
Charles Thévenau de Morande, ace reporter
The
Carlylian view of Cagliostro derives directly from a particularly seedy French
journalist, active in London in the 1780s, named Thévenau de Morande. His specialties were pornography and
blackmail, not infrequently conjoined in interesting ways. You may well think our gutter press is
pretty bad, but a perusal of a few numbers of Thévenau’s Courrier de l’Europe will offer enlightening perspective. The public revelation that journalists
from Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World
had hacked the telephone of an abducted and murdered girl in search of
publishable information was a death sentence for that venerable yellow sheet. Mr. Murdoch was dragged penitent before
a tribunal to declare himself shocked, shocked by what had been going on. The paper’s actual editors Rebeka Brooks and Andy Coulson are even at
this moment being tried in court, where, ironically, the exposure of their own intimate misbehavior became a gratuitous and incidental point of testimony.
Naughty, naughty!
A
journalist of the school of Thévenau would have spared himself the labor and
simply have made up whatever information he wanted. There are after all distinct advantages to fictional
journalism. In the early part of
the eighteenth century the great Jonathan Swift, who was among other things a
journalist, took a dislike to the popular astrologist John Partridge. (Astrology was very big during the
Enlightenment). This Partridge was
a compiler of almanacs in which he published astral predictions concerning the
high and mighty: what the stars had to say about the stars, so to speak. So Swift, alias Bickerstaff, decided to make a prediction of his own.
Jonathan Swift, especially with his wit
