On a recent visit to Co Cavan, it was surprising to discover little local interest in Henry Brooke, the 18th-century writer and politician. The author of one of the most extraordinary and widely read of the early sentimental novels, The Fool of Quality, Brooke was a distinguished member of the parish of Rantavan, near Mullagh. The local heritage centre also fails to mark Brooke's contribution to English literature and the radical role he played in the politics of his day.
Henry Brooke was born in 1703, the second of three sons of the Rev William Brooke, rector of Moybolgue (now Bailieborough). He attended the school of Dr Thomas Sheridan, grandfather of the playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, in Dublin. Dr Sheridan's opinion of his young pupil was that "nature intends that this child should act some great part on the theatre of human life". Although Jonathan Swift considered Brooke "a young man of genius", he was sorry to see his gifts initially inclined to poetry.
Play withdrawn
Having attended Trinity College, Brooke studied law in London at the Temple in 1724.
However, it soon became obvious that his part in the theatre of human life would be a dissident one. His first play, Gustavas Vasa, which had been described as "the foremost production of human powers", was hastily withdrawn from production at Drury Lane by order of the Lord Chamberlain because of certain defamatory references thought to apply to Sir Robert Walpole.
Brooke then returned to Ireland, where he produced a number of religious and economic tracts, including a pamphlet entitled The Farmer's Letters to the Protestants of Ireland, which was seen as intending to rouse the spirit of freedom. In 1748, his opera, Little John and the Giants, was withdrawn after just one night because of its political allusions, satire mixed with political allegory and quotations against tyrants and tyranny. In 1761 he published a pamphlet, The Tryal of the Roman Catholics, which was the first written by a Protestant in favour of reforming the laws constraining Catholics. And in his tract The Interests of Ireland Considered, Stated and Recommended, Brooke argued for equal treatment for Ireland with Britain in regard to the construction of canals. He was also interested in Irish history and language and issued a prospectus for a work on Irish mythology and a for a history of Ireland, which unfortunately were never completed.
Economic tract
When Brooke's first novel, The Fool of Quality, was published serially between 1765 and 1770, he inserted almost verbatim large segments of his earlier economic tract, The Interests of Ireland, into the text, only changing certain words so that the characters might ventriloquise his earlier arguments fluently. In one section of the novel, he advocated the construction of canals as a remedy for the general poverty of the country. Using the metaphor of canals as the veins of the body politic, he observed that wealth flowed to those who had canals. Canals disseminated goods and good feeling, carrying not only the products of industry but reinforcing relationships of trust and association.
Apart from Brooke's economic theories, the novel reflected the anxieties and discourses of his time. For example, on the education of children, Brooke advocated that in addition to academic learning, teachers should cultivate in their pupils good nature, friendship, generosity and affection in order to make "men of worth in a new nation of men". On the status of women, which was also exercising the 18th-century mind, Brooke opposed general opinion. While the Protestant reformers advanced the status of women in the home, Brooke saw no forms of human government that should exempt them and no laws that should exclude their authority, as they were part of "the great brotherhood of man". And while class-conscious 18th-century society guarded the subtleties of class distinction, Brooke in his novel questioned the concept of the word "gentleman" when he stated that a capital quality of the true gentleman was that of being concerned about others.
The other surprising aspect of Brooke's novel was its appeal for John Wesley, the Methodist founder and evangelist, who saw in it an illustration of what he thought the "noblest in the conduct of life". Attracted by the emotional force of the work and its solidarity with the poor, Wesley republished and promoted the novel in America, where it ran to several editions. In the period from 1740 to 1762, Brooke was actively engaged in Irish politics. Although he declined to stand for parliament for the city of Dublin, he entered political debates and was editor of the Freeman's Journal, the literary organ of the Patriot Party, whose aim was to render the Irish legislature independent of the British Government and to seek constitutional rights for Ireland. The Patriots also supported the American Revolution, seeing the cause as resembling their own, and when Benjamin Franklin visited Dublin in 1771, he found the party "disposed to be friends of America in which I endeavoured to confirm them, with the expectations that our growing weight might in time be thrown into their scale and by joining our interests with others, a more equitable treatment from this nation [the English] might be obtained for them as well as for us."
Charles Kingsley
Perhaps the last word in Brooke's favour should be left to Charles Kingsley (1819-75), who regarded Brooke as "in the very best sense of the word a liberal."
Kingsley's opinion of Brooke, reproduced in the preface to the 1906 edition of The Fool of Quality, was that "against all tyranny, cruelty and wrong, against all the chicaneries of the law and the chicaneries of politicians, his voice was always loud and earnest. He held political opinions which are now held - or at least acted on - by every rational Englishman whether Whig or Tory, but which were then considered dangerous, destructive, immoral; and he suffered for his opinions, in fame and in pocket, and held them still."