Books of the Day A HOAX ON MR. HULTON, Graham

Greene

296

ALL OF NEW YoaK, D. W. Brogan

297

THE CHURCH AND THE TYRANT STATE, The Dean of

Chichester . .

297

A PRESCRIPTION FOR PEACE, Archibald Crawford

298

GOOD TRAVELLERS, Evelyn Waugh 300 FICTION, Forrest Reid

302

A HOAX ON MR. HULTON

By GRAHAM GREENE

No one, I suppose, will ever discover the authors of the odd elaborate hoax played on Mr. Hulton, the elderly printseller of Pall Mall, in 1744; the story itself has been hidden all these years in an old vellum MS. book I bought the other day from a London bookseller. With its vivid unimportance it brings alive the geography of eighteenth-century tradesman's London, the wine-merchants at Wapping, the clockmakers in Fleet Street, the carriers and printers and bust-makers, all the aggrieved respectable victims of an anarchic imagination, and in the background memories of Layer's conspiracy and the word " Jacobite " and a vague uneasiness.

The story is told in letters and occasional passages of dialogue with notes in the margin on the behaviour of the characters. It might be fiction, if these people did not all belong to fact. Who copied it out? It is hard to believe that any innocent person could have known so much. Mr. Hulton suspected his apprentices, and the whole world ; there was a young man called Mr. Poet Rowzel, who knew more than he should have done; and an auctioneer, for some reason of his own, spoke of an upholsterer.

It began quite childishly on January 21st, 1744, with a letter which purported to come from Mr. Scott, a carpenter of Swallow Street, who wrote that he had many frames to make for the Prussian Ambassador, that he was ill of the gout and his men were overworked, and would Mr. Hulton call on him. Mr. Huston had the gout himself, but he limped to Mr. Scott's house, when " finding the whole was an imposition upon him and Scott, he hobbled back again muttering horrible imprecations against the letter-writer all the way." Two days later the hoax really got under way. A stream of unwanted people arrived at Mr. Hulton's shop: Mr. Hazard, a cabinet maker of the ' Hen and Chickens' in Lincoln's Inn, with a quantity of Indian paper ; Mr. Dard, a toy maker from the ' King's Arms' in the Strand, who had received a letter from the pseudo-Hulton offering to sell him a curious frame ; a surgeon to bleed him, and a doctor from Bedlam. It would take too long to describe the events of these crowded days ; how a Mr. Boyd brought snuffboxes and Mrs. Hulton had to buy one to quiet him before her husband returned ; how Mr. Scarlett, an optician, arrived loaded with optic glasses, and was so ill-used by Mr. Hulton that he threatened proceedings ; hbw Mr. Rutter, a dentist of Fleet Street, came to operate on an imposthume, and was turned away by Mrs. Hulton, who pretended her husband had died of it. Three pounds of anchovies arrived, and the printer of the Harleian Miscellany, who was pushed roughly out of doors, and Mr. Cock an auctioneer of the Great Piazza, who " muttered something of an Irish upholsterer," and a female optician called Deane—Mrs. Hulton bolted the door against her, and spoke to her through the pane, which Mrs. Deane broke. " Mr. Hulton at the noise of breaking the glass came forth from his little parlour into the shop, and was saluted by a porter with a dozen of port wine." By this time he was losing control, and when Mr. Rogers, a shoe maker, of Maiden Lane, wanted to measure him, " Mr. Hulton lost all temper . and cursing, stamping and swearing, in an outrageous manner, he so frightened Mr. Rogers that the poor man, who is a Presbyterian, ran home to Covent Garden without once looking behind him." After that Mr. Hulton shut up his shop, and went to bed for three days, so the man who had been told he had a peruke-maker's shop to dispose of failed to get at him. Even when the shop reopened Mr. Hulton thought it safer to stay upstairs, and leave things to his son. His son too was choleric, and what he did to a young

oculist who thought his father needed spectacles is unprintable here.

On February and there is a break in the record, 27 pages are missing ; but when the story begins again on September 4th Mr. Hulton is still on the ran. Three dozen bottles of pale ale arrived that day ; Mr. Hulton was obliged to pay for them, and " Mrs. Hulton and her maid were fuddled while it lasted." We must pass over the incident of the silversmith's wife, who pulled off Mrs. Hulton's nightcap and the venison-pasty man who saw through the deceit, and enclosed the pseudo-Hulton's letter in piecrust and sent it to Mr. Hulton (the crust was given to the dog Cobb as they suspected poison). A more subtle form of hoax was in train. It began with an illiterate letter to Mr. Pinchbeck (son of Edward Pinchbeck, inventor of the alloy), accusing Hulton of having abused him " in a monstrous manner " at a tavern, but this plot misfired ; the two victims got together over a 4s. bowl of punch.

It was then that the Reverend Aaron Thompson, of Salisbury, came on the scene (he who had baptised the conspirator Layer's child and allowed the Pretender to be a godparent by proxy). Somebody using his name ordered a number of articles which he said his agent Hulton would pay for—four canes with pinchbeck heads, a bust of Mr. Pope, a set of The Gentleman's Magazine, " the books (of which you know the titles) against Bishop Berkeley's Tar-Water," a complete set of Brindley's Classics, and even a chariot. This persecution caused Mr. Hulton to write to Mr. Thompson accusing him of being a Papist and a Jacobite and threatening him with the pillory, and the amazed Mr. Thompson "re- ceiving this letter kept himself three weeks in a dark room lest he should see a letter of any kind: by the persuasion of his wife, he at length came forth ; but wore a thin handker- chief over his eyes for above a month." A lot of people's nerves were getting jumpy as the hoax enlarged its scope, taking in Bath and such worthy local characters as Mr. Jeremy Peirce, author of an interesting little book about a tumour, and Mr. Archibald Cleland, the surgeon who, it may be remembered, was concerned with Smollett in a controversy over the Bath waters. They all received letters from the psudo-Hulton, Cleland being told that Thompson had libelled him and Peirce that Thompson had ordered him a set of The Rake's Progress. The real Aaron Thompson was by now convinced that he was the victim of a mad printseller, just as Hulton believed he was the victim of a mad clergyman, and they both—egged on by their pseudo-selves—appealed to a Mr. Pitt of Salisbury, who assumed they both were mad. The story becomes inextricably confused with counter- accusations, the pseudo-Hulton writing to the real Aaron Thompson:

" You write, you read, you muzz or muse as you call it, till you are fitter for Bedlam often than the Pulpit: poor man!' poor Aaron Thompson. I remember you in Piccadilly knocking at the great Gates and returning bow for bow to the bowing Dean, your lean face, your awkward bow, your supercilious nod of the head are still in my mind . . ."

and the pseudo-Thompson would send the accusation flying back, regretting to hear that Hulton and all his family had gone mad, and recalling his strange way of walking about his shop " and turning his thumbs one over another, a sure sign

of madness." And all the while goods continued to pour in, particularly drink—three gallons of the best Jamaica rum from Wapping New-Stairs, which Mrs. Hulton drank and paid for, a gallon of canary, a gallon of sherry and a pint of Madeira.

We shall never know the end—the last pages are torn out with any clue they might have contained to the hoaxer. It was an age of practical jokes, and he may have been one of those who baited Pinchbeck because he was a " King's friend," mocking at his nocturnal remembrancers and writing odeq about his patent snuffer. Perhaps Hulton, by his careful prosperity, had aroused the same balked malice which floats idly around after a revolution, the malice of men who sym- pathise with the defeated and despise the conqueror and dare to do nothing but trivial mischief to assert their independence —as next year proved when Charles Stuart turned back from

Derby.