Dr. John Armstrong, littérateur, and associate of Smollett, Thomson, Wilkes, and other celebrities / Lewis M. Knapp.
- Knapp, Lewis M. (Lewis Mansfield)
- Date:
- [1944?]
Licence: In copyright
Credit: Dr. John Armstrong, littérateur, and associate of Smollett, Thomson, Wilkes, and other celebrities / Lewis M. Knapp. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![ire, an attack on the well known quack, Dr. Joshua Ward. These activi¬ ties suggest that Armstrong, aged about twenty-four, was an ambitious young doctor utilizing all means of promoting a successful career without allowing the muses to interfere very much with his scientific profession. But he found time to write and publish anonymously the next year what has always seemed to its readers a very curious, humorless, equivo¬ cal, and erotic piece of writing called The Oeconomy of Love.10 It is chari¬ table, and perhaps true, to assume, as some critics have done, that Arm¬ strong intended this poem partly as a playful satire on erotic writing, but its seeming lack of humor has suggested to others that his intention was partly didactic. This is my own belief. Whatever the author’s mo¬ tives, the piece became the joy of the prurient and a financial plum to various publishers from 1736 to 1768, when according to the rather vague declarations of Armstrong’s bibliographers, he expurgated certain pas¬ sages. At any rate he did not publish it in his Miscellanies in 1770. Upon Armstrong and his subsequent literary and medical career the effects of The Oeconomy of Love are difficult to estimate. The poem made him well known among the gay blades of the time. However, it must have produced among his sobersided Scotch friends and relatives considerable consternation. For Armstrong himself the reception of the poem could only have created much irritation and embarrassment because, even if he were something of a sly young dog, he wanted to succeed as a doctor by gaining the patronage of a respectable clientele. The reaction to the poem or to gossip about it by many prospective patients may have been pretty accurately summed up by a certain Mr. Meyrick, who told Charles Bucke, Dr. Akenside’s biographer, that Armstrong “ruined himself . . . by that foolish performance of his, the Economy of Love. How, in the name of heaven, could he ever expect that a woman would let him enter her house again, after that? The man was a fool! He, who undertakes to be a physician, must be chastity itself.”11 This view was also held by Rob¬ ert Chambers, who declared that the poem “greatly diminished the repu¬ tation of the author,” asserting in the same breath, that it was clear from “one of the ‘Cases of Literary Property,’ that Andrew Millar, the book¬ seller, paid [? Armstrong] fifty pounds for the copy-right of this poem.”12 It was also recorded by Timperley that the author received fifty guineas 10 See the C.B.E.L. for the numerous editions of this poem, including one in Italian in 175$. I have not compared the alleged revision in 1768 with the earlier versions. My copy, dated 1747, is not included in the list in the C.B.E.L. This edition contains forty-three pages, the same number as in the first edition, according to Williams’ bibliography. The poem itself offers practical advice to the young man of 1736 as to how to behave in the art of love. 11 Charles Bucke, On the Life, Writings, and Genius of Akenside (London, 1832), p. 30. 12 Chambers, op. cit.} p. 59.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b30632018_0003.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
