In The Warden (1855), the first of Anthony Trollope’s novels about the
micro-climate of ecclesiastical life in the fictional English cathedral town of Barchester, the true character of the archdeacon, Dr Theophilus
Grantly, is revealed to be somewhat at odds with his ferociously upright public persona by the nature of his private reading:
After breakfast, on the morning of which we are writing, the Archdeacon, as usual, retired to his study, intimating that he was going to be very busy, but that he would see Mr Chadwick if he called. On entering this sacred room he carefully opened the paper case on which he was wont to compose his favourite sermons, and spread on it a fair sheet of paper and one partly
written on; he then placed his inkstand, looked at his pen, and folded his blotting paper; having done so, he got up again from his seat, stood with his back to the fire-place, and yawned comfortably, stretching out vastly his huge arms and opening his burly chest. He then walked across the room and locked the door; and having so prepared himself, he threw himself into
his easy-chair, took from a secret drawer beneath his table a volume of Rabelais, and began to amuse himself with the witty mischief of Panurge; and so passed the Archdeacon’s morning on that day.
Not only does Dr Grantly read this volume behind a locked door but, we learn a few paragraphs later, he also keeps a key for his ‘secret drawer’ so that he can ‘fasten up his Rabelais’ away from his wife and the rest of the household.
We are not told whether the archdeacon is reading the tales of gluttonous, bibulous giants and their fantastic adventures by François Rabelais (ca. 1483–1553), collectively known as Gargantua and Pantagruel and published in five books between 1532 and 1564, in the original French or in English translation. Given the difficulty of Rabelais’s sixteenth-century French, it is more likely the translation begun by Sir Thomas Urquhart in the 1650s and completed by Peter Motteux in the 1690s—the sole English version of Rabelais before the 1890s—that
Trollope has in mind. If so, Grantly is following assiduously the sort of advice to possessors of an English Rabelais given in The Foreign
Quarterly Review in 1843:
To a reader of modern times the obscenity of Rabelais appears something tremendous; there is no book admitted as literature, which will bear a moment’s comparison with Pantagruel for indecency [. . .]. Therefore we do advise every father of a family
to keep from his house, or at any rate, under very secure lock and key, the English version of Rabelais. The French version
is not so dangerous, as it is furnished with a kind of natural
barrier against indiscriminate reading, by the old style and spelling; but as for the translation, we can conceive of no event more horrible than the opening of it, by chance, in the midst of a respectable family. The terror excited by a bomb-shell, flung into the midst of a quiet tea-party [. . .] would be trivial compared
to that of perceiving Urquhart’s Rabelais opened by a young lady in white muslin.
This wonderfully hyperbolic warning against the threat of Rabelais in English to female sensibility and family respectability might be taken as typically Victorian in its prudishness. After all, the English version of Gargantua and Pantagruel became the focus of protests by the Society for the Suppression of Vice in the 1870s, leading the bookseller W. H. Smith to withdraw an 1873 edition of the Urquhart and Motteux translation with illustrations by Gustave Doré. The secretary of the Society, Charles Hastings Collette, insisted that if the work was to be ‘sold at railway stalls’ in English, then it must first be bowdlerised of its many ‘filthy passages’. In this light, Grantly’s closet reading of Rabelais while he pretends to be writing sermons for the Christian edification
of the people of Barchester might be taken as emblematic of the hypocrisy of a character whom we constantly see scheming to preserve the material comforts of the ecclesiastical establishment.
This assumption has some justification, but it does not tell the whole
story. Grantly’s fondness for Rabelais is also meant to tell us something more complex about a man who, the narrator insists in the final pages of The Warden, is ‘represented in these pages as worse than he is’, and whose ‘aspirations are of a healthy, if not of the highest, kind’; the pleasure he takes in Rabelais is indicative, like his ‘huge arms’ and ‘burly chest’, of a man of large but predominantly natural appetites. Indeed, even Hastings Collette allowed that Rabelais might be kept to the confines of both the difficult original French and a gentleman’s
library: it was specifically the easy availability of the translation to which he lodged moral objection. The author of the piece in The Foreign Quarterly Review does not simply condemn Rabelais for his indecency, but rather regards him as reading fit only for educated and experienced men of the world, able to appreciate the true sophistication of his provocative wit. The author goes on to describe Rabelais as ‘the literary parent of so many authors, since without him we would probably have never known a Swift, a Sterne [. . . ;] an
author who did not appear as a steadily shining light to the human
race, but as a wild, startling meteor, predicting the independence
of thought, and the downfall of the authority of ages: an author who, for the union of heavy learning with the most miraculous power of imagination, is perhaps without a competitor.’
The notion that Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was a type of Rabelais in
English was already commonplace in Swift’s own lifetime. Indeed, Trollope’s description of Grantly settling down in ‘his easy-chair’ to read Rabelais alludes to Alexander Pope’s address to Swift in the opening of the 1729 Variorum edition of The Dunciad (1st edn 1728) as a master of various satiric styles:
O Thou! Whatever title please thine ear,
Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver!
Whether thou choose Cervantes’ serious air,
Or laugh and shake in Rab’lais’ easy chair.
A few years later, this comparison was common enough for Voltaire to dispute, in Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733), the ascription of ‘the title of the English Rabelais which is given the Dean’. ‘Dean Swift’, declared Voltaire in a striking phrase, is rather ‘Rabelais in his senses’—a kind of Enlightenment version of Rabelais who ‘posseseth all the delicacy, the justness, the choice, the good taste, in which particulars our giggling rural vicar Rabelais is wanting’. Voltaire’s ‘rural vicar Rabelais’ sounds more like Archdeacon Grantly than one of the great writers of the European Renaissance.
If Voltaire regarded Rabelais as lacking in taste and reason compared to Swift, Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) went out of his way to cultivate an association with Rabelais both in his fiction and in his correspondence, and encouraged his friends to do likewise. Here was the English Rabelais: so pronounced William Warburton, bishop of Gloucester and self-perceived arbiter of English letters, on the publication of the first volumes of Tristram Shandy (1759–67). The association has persisted as a key aspect of modern critical views of
Sterne, due in large part to D. W. Jefferson’s landmark, frequently reprinted 1951 essay, ‘Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit’, in which Jefferson declared that the survival into the eighteenth
century of the ‘type of learned wit’ on display in Sterne’s novel—a
type of wit which derives from ‘intellectual habits belonging to the pre-Enlightenment world of thought’ and ‘against which the Enlightenment set its face’—may be attributed ‘partly to an isolated event in literary history: the publication of the English Rabelais’, in the form of the Urquhart and Motteux translation. While Sterne undoubtedly drew on the humanist tradition of learned satirical wit of which Gargantua and
Pantagruel was a significant part, the noise made about the comparison with Rabelais by Sterne and his promoters has more recently been seen as strategic, enabling Sterne to ‘pre-empt allegations of indebtedness to his immediate contemporaries and so assist his standing, paradoxically, as an original himself. Yet this noise was also designed to catch the ear of the urbane, self-consciously
literate audience who had come to regard Rabelaisian satire as
their sort of thing. As one of Sterne’s first biographers put it, carefully placing his subject in a line of satiric inheritance: ‘All read, most approved, but few understood [the opening volumes of Tristram Shandy]. Those who had not entered into the ludicrous manner of Rabelais, or the poignant satire of Swift, did not comprehend them.’ Sterne and his circle evidently believed the title of the ‘English
Rabelais’ would give his fiction the status of a ‘classic’ of learned
wit and guard against it being dismissed as mere bawdy nonsense catering to the crude tastes of an unsophisticated readership. The adjective ‘Rabelaisian’ was, according to the OED, coined by the same early memoirist: ‘[Sterne] decently lived a becoming ornament of the Church, till his Rabelaisian spirit, which issued from the press, immersed him into the gaieties and frivolities of the world.
Excerpted from Comic Enlightenment: Rabelais and English Literature Copyright ©2026 by Nicholas McDowell. Used with permission of the publisher, Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.
