How to Best Torment People
by
Teresa Teklić, translated by Maike Meßmann
The book at hand is a German translation of An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting with Proper Rules for the Exercise of that Amusing Study. But don’t you worry – it isn’t a treatise on sadomasochism. The book isn’t related to Marquis de Sade or Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, although that was admittedly my first association when I read the title. No, as the subtitle suggests, it is a typical satirical work of the 18th century. The author mainly denounces how people that are economically and legally better off than their counterparts abuse their power to the detriment of those who depend on them: masters abuse their servants, parents their children and husbands their wives. By explaining to her readers in a highly ironic way how to best torment other members of one’s household, the author obviously does the exact opposite with her etiquette book: demonstrating how not to treat others.
Artikeltext:
A Manual Providing Proper Rules
The essay opens with sharp words. The English, the author writes, apparently show a talent for tormenting the people around them. And if there’s talent, one must develop it! It would be a shame to let it go to waste. That’s why she kindly offered her services to provide instructions, proper rules in this book on how to best torment and distress your fellow men. And the author is quite modest about her work. She did not even come up with these rules by herself, she states. No, she is not that well versed in this art. She merely compiled best practice examples and wrote them down. After all, she says, one can find plenty of such examples in England. Ouch!
The first part of the book is addressed to those who are vested with external powers over others due to their social status: masters and mistresses, parent, husbands. The second part is dedicated to those who exert “interior power” – this may be a good friend or a lover. So, what is the best way to torture your fellow men? Let’s have a look at some examples.
How (Not!) to Treat Your Employees
1. Don’t ever make any distinction between your employees. If you accuse a maid (let’s call her Susan) of having made a mistake and Susan defends herself by saying that it wasn’t her but the cook (let’s call her Martha), don’t let her get away with it! Tell her that you don’t have time for such nonsense, and that you are going to fire all servants in case such a mistake should ever happen again, period.
2. Make sure to give contradictory instructions on purpose and scold your servant if he cannot observe them.
3. Deliberately visit your friends when the weather is bad and insist on walking through the rain instead of taking the carriage. If your servant is surprised that you want to go there without carriage, scold him and tell him to mind his own business. If he does not prepare the coach the next time you want to go visit someone, also scold him and ask him how he could have the audacity to send you out into such bloody awful weather without a carriage.
And so on. You get the idea of the game.
The Master of Satire
The author of The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting was clearly inspired by another great satirist of her time: Jonathan Swift. The Irish-born author is best-known for his adventure novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in which Gulliver strands on distant islands and encounters all sorts of strange folk. What became a well-known children’s book over time, started off as a sharp criticism of England’s colonial politics regarding Ireland.
If you ask me, however, perhaps the best title of a satirical pamphlet ever written was Swift’s 1729 polemic A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick. In the work he proposes to fight poverty in Ireland by selling the children of poor families to rich lords and ladies so they could eat them. The pamphlet was not only the stylistic model for the essay on the art of tormenting. Similarities can also be found in terms of content. After all, both works give a voice to the oppressed, the ruled, the colonised. And, in line with the spirit of the early Enlightenment, they both made a case for treating (especially) these people with respect and dignity.
Author: anon.
But who is the author of this book? Until now, I kept this a secret. Deliberately. After all: we all know that the best comes last. The title page of the German translation only gives the name of “Ms Lenox”. There was a Scottish author called Charlotte Lennox (1730-1804), who might be meant by this. She wrote novels, plays and poetry, including a very popular rewriting of Cervantes’ classic Don Quijote. However, she isn’t the author of The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting.
When I was unable to find a source that connected Lennox to The Art of Tormenting despite a lot of research, I started wondering. Something wasn’t right. Of course, it can happen that it is impossible to find a lesser-known text or that it does not appear in an author’s bibliography. But a scenario in which a digitized version of an 18th-century translation of an English text can be found online while the English original is nowhere to be found seemed very unlikely.
Finally, I found what I was looking for. Yes, An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) does exist in English. However, the text was written by Jane Collier (1714-1755). After comparing parts of the English original to the German translation I was sure: it was the right text. But how come the German publishing house Grund und Holle published it under the wrong name?
Well, the solution to the riddle is probably that Lennox was the translator, which is why the German title says “aus dem Englischen der Frau Lenox” (from the English of or by Ms Lenox). When Collier’s The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting was first published in England in 1753, it happened anonymously. That’s why the name of the author isn’t given in the German translation. Lennox, on the other hand, was a well-known author and translator in Germany at the time. And we know that there was a connection between her and the Grund und Holle publishing house because they also published her above-mentioned novel The Female Quixote in the same year (1754). You see, everything adds up in the end. You just have to look closely…
Other Things You Might Be Interested in:
Here you can find the complete digitized English original text of Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting.
We have not discussed Lennox’ The Female Quixote in the MoneyMusem’s collection (yet). However, you can read our review of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote de la Manche.
From the Manesse Library of World Literature: In this article we presented the satirical picaresque novel Barry Lyndon by William M. Thackeray.
This episode of a BBC podcast discusses Jonathan Swift’s satirical pamphlet A Modest Proposal.
