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Polygamy in Early Fiction: Henry Neville and Denis Veiras

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

A. Owen Aldridge
A. Owen Aldridge*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland College Park, Md.
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Extract

Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines was one of the most popular romances of the seventeenth century. A lusty account of one man's extraordinary generative powers, the work published originally in 1668 went through thirty different issues, including six in English, three in French, one in Italian, four in Dutch, ten in German, and six in Danish.1 Its primary appeal lay probably in its salaciousness, for the tale is short, no longer than a single book of Gulliver's Travels, and its theme is simple. Surprisingly enough, up to the present no critics have perceived this theme, which may be expressed by the Biblical maxim, “In the multitude of people, is the king's honor.” There is no question that population is Neville's theme, but his purpose in treating it is more difficult to decide. Since The Isle of Pines is on the surface merely a display of pornographic primitivism, we cannot know whether it is intended as an allegorical essay on population problems or merely a travesty on contemporary schemes to increase population.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , June 1950 , pp. 464 - 472
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1950

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References

1 Worthington Chauncey Ford, The Isle of Pines, 1668, An Essay in Bibliography (Boston, 1920).

2 The History of the English Novel (London, 1929), III, 149.

3 Ibid., III, 160.466

4 The interpretations in this paragraph are documented in Ford's edition. See footnote 1 above.

6 “In 1658 ‘a writer seriously proposed to Cromwell that he should introduce polygamy …’ ‘On January 22, 1658, Cromwell ordered a Committee to consider of the book concerning polygamy and to report.’” H. J. C. Grierson, Cross Currents in English Litera-

8 C. H. Hull, ed. The Economie Writings of Sir William Petty. Together with the Observations upon the Bills of Mortality More Probably by Captain John Graunt (Cambridge, 1899), II, 320.

7 (London, 1667), p. 206.

8 Works (London, 1814), i, 49-50.

9 Swift in Examiner No. 22; Voltaire in Philosophical Dictionary (Boston, 1836), II, 401; Delany in Reflections upon Polygamy (London, 1739), p. 26. Burnet's tract in the British Museum is transcribed by Martin Madan in Thelyphthora (London, 1821), i, 291-297.

10 The Parliament of Ladies (London, 1647), The Ladies, a Second Time Assembled in Parliament (London, 1647), Match Me These Two, … with an Answer to the Parliament of Ladies (London, 1647).

11 Discussions of Histoire des Sévarambes are found in Geoffrey Atkinson, The Extraor- dinary Voyage in French Literature Before 1700 (New York, 1920), pp. 27-139; Frédéric Lachèvre, Les Successeurs de Cyrano de Bergerac (Paris, 1922), pp. 172-178; Nicolaas Van Wyngaardin, Les Odyssées philosophiques en France entre 1616 et 1789 (n. p., 1932), pp. 70-78; Emanuel von der Mühll, Denis Veiras et son Histoire des Sévarambes (Paris, 1938). None of these authors mentions Neville or The Isle of Pines.

12 Richard Aldington, ed. Voyages to the Moon and the Sun (London, 1923), pp. 306-307.

13 Mühll, op. cit., p. 74.

14 The History of the Sevarambians (London, 1738), I, 32.

15 Ibid., i, 177.

16 Ibid., i,250-251.

17 Mühll, p. 163.

18 L'Histoire des Sévarambes (Paris, 1677), iiij. For further information on polygamy in literature see: A. O. Aldridge, “Polygamy and Deism”, JEGP, XLVIII (July, 1949), 343360; “Population and Polygamy in Eighteenth-Century Thought”, Journal of the History of Medicine, Iv (Spring, 1949), 129-148.