The Reverend James Beresford (1764-1840) was an English
cleric, better known for his popular satirical volumes than his work as a
clergyman. An obituary in The Gentleman's
Magazine gives a long list of his books and a begrudging acknowledgement
that; `In his clerical capacity Mr.
Beresford was highly and universally respected'.
Beresford was born in the small village of Upham, Hampshire in
1764. His father, Richard Beresford Esq.,
was a wealthy landowner and barrister from South Carolina who had been a
delegate in the Confederate Congress of 1783. After attending Charterhouse
school, James Beresford attended Oxford university, graduating with his
bachelors degree in 1786. The next year he was elected a fellow of Merton College.
Beresford successfully avoided any administrative roles that would disturb his
scholarly work until 1812, when he became rector of Kibworth Beauchamp, a small
village in rural Leicestershire. He lived as an unmarried rector at Kibworth
until his death in 1840.
This volume, The Miseries
of Human Life (sub-titled or The last
groans of Timothy Testy and Samuel Sensitive, with a few supplementary sighs
from Mrs Testy, in Twelve Dialogues) was written by James Beresford and
published anonymously in 1806 by William Miller. It was an immediate
bestseller, it went through eight editions in a year (this is the fourth
edition) and provoked numerous imitations; The
Pleasures of Human Life, The Comforts
of Human Life and An Antidote to the
Miseries of Human Life. Sir Walter Scott reviewed the book and says that, `… on the whole we strenuously recommend
this work to all who love to laugh'.
In the sixth edition, Beresford's name was accidentally
included on the title-page as the author. By September 1808, he was well known
enough to appear in a coloured etching that appeared in the Satirist magazine. The image, titled Miller's Asses, shows a procession of
asses and donkeys entering the Albermarle Street shop of the bookseller and publisher
William Miller. Beresford is shown as an ass with the head of a parson saying: `Oh! Ah! alack aday! alas! / What burden for
a reverend Ass'.
Some of the miseries described in the book are typical of
Beresford's time and social class;
The harrowing necessity of asking a person to dine in your house, who is in that critical class of life which makes him not quite a proper guest at your own table, and at the same time, a few grades too high for that of the servants:- no second table.
Others are recognisable even today; `Finding that the person with whom you thus claim acquaintance has
entirely forgotten you, though you perfectly remember him’.
The Oxford English Dictionary has nearly five hundred
quotations from this book, including quotations to illustrate the following
words;
abominable, blister, cat-o'-nine-tails, dead man's fingers, embranglement, ferret, gawky, harrow, jargon, keep, limp, mizzle, nickname, overdressing, pantaloon, quaggy, ringleader, slabby, throttle, unutterable, villainous, waxwork, yerk, zigzag.
For mizzle (very
fine misty rain), it quotes Beresford as; `A
mist, which successively becomes a mizzle, a drizzle, a shower, a rain, a
torrent'. Each of these progressively heavier forms of rain would no doubt
have been recognised by his readers as some of the miseries of their daily
lives.
Image
The coloured frontispiece cartoon engraved by W.H.
Pyne for the first edition. It shows Mrs Testy, Mr Testy and Samuel Sensitive
suffering some of the common miseries of life. The latin phrase being spoken by
the gentleman on the right; Sunt lacrimae
rerum, is the first half of a famous line from The Aeneid by Vergil. This had been translated by James Beresford
from Latin into English blank verse in 1794. This line is subject to many and
varied interpretations and translations, but the sense of the line that was
proposed by Arthur Keith in 1922; Here
are tears for man's adversities, seems somehow appropriate for the subject
matter of Beresford's book.
References
Keith, A.L. (1922). `A Vergillian Line'. The Classical Jnl. Vol 17, No 2, pp. 398-402.
Roberts, S.C. (1958) Doctor
Johnson and Others. CUP, Cambridge.
Scott, W. (1806). `On The
Miseries of Life'. Edinburgh Rev.
October 1806.
The Book is HERE.
