A SECOND BITE AT THE CHERRY
[WYNNE, John Huddlestone.]
The Child of Chance; or, the Adventures of Harry Hazard.
London, T. Hookham, ‘1796’ [recte 1786].
Two vols, 12mo, pp. I: iv, 258, [2 (ads)]; II: iv, 224; the imprint is misdated in volume I; a very good copy in contemporary half calf, and marbled boards; front joints cracked (vol. I just holding, vol. II sound); ownership inscription ‘Mary Hillsborough’ to title-pages, Hillsborough monogram to spine.
First edition of a very rare picaresque novel in the manner of Tom Jones. Though largely London-based, there are interludes in India (where Wynne had served two years) and the West Indies. Many of the tropes of Wynne’s earlier novel The Man of Honour are present – orphans, female duplicity, highwaymen, gambling, debtor’s prison, adultery; while both novels have main characters named Harry who are raised in Somerset and go to Oxford, and ‘Sophia Carey’ reappears here as an object of brief romantic interest. Although The Child of Chance was published anonymously, contemporary reviews and later Hookham advertisements named Wynne as author. The Critical and Monthly Reviews thought it ‘a pleasing little novel’ displaying ‘a fertile imagination’, suggesting it reworked the older material more effectively.
The ‘orphan’ Harry Hazard is raised by a guardian in Somerset but after his benefactor’s death is falsely excluded from the will and forced to go his own way. ‘It is impossible, reader, for me to guess what sort of philosopher thou art who just now porest, or who skimmest over this page, or whether thou art any philosopher at all … or a second-sight man, a dreamer of dreams, and a seer of visions …’. Thus Wynne introduces a dream in which Harry follows a golden path to riches, but his mansion’s gardens are full of ‘venomous reptiles’, and the house itself becomes a tomb – a foretaste of the coming plot arc.
On his way to Bristol, Harry meets the Irishman Malone, who is to become his loyal and constant companion, his first good turn being to rescue Harry from highwaymen. After a brief Fieldingesque farce at an inn, Harry takes up a job in Bristol. There he is led into dissolution by a certain Fairside, and conquers his landlady’s niece Charlotte ‘in an unguarded hour’; the poor girl duly flees with her ‘burden’. Moving to London, Harry drops Fairside and takes up with Morton, who shows him the delights of the gaming tables, loans him funds, and advises him to spend lavishly and seek an advantageous marriage. He follows ‘the fashionable vice of keeping,’ but relegates his mistress Annabella to the country while he pursues a wealthy merchant’s widow, Mrs Seymour. This leads in turn to a duel with a rival, Melford, who then becomes a firm friend (it is Melford’s backstory that includes time in India, a section that suggests Wynne had little sympathy with the East India Company).
Meanwhile an assignation with a ‘lady of easy virtue’ at ‘one of those places of polite reception which serve as private nunneries’, sees Harry rescue a young lady, Peyton (remember the name), from attempted rape by Fairside. Finally, debts catch up with him and he finds himself in a sponging-house, where a mysterious visitor suggests an indecent proposal: Harry is to use his charms to seduce a married woman so that she might be caught in ‘criminal conversation’ and divorced. Harry refuses, and so passes the test of character set him by Melford and his new wife, who pay his debts and set him up as a land steward. Various matrimonial intrigues follow, in which he shows his growing sense of honour, until a chance encounter with the orphan Julia Amyand sets his heart racing. Their secret meetings are inevitably discovered and she is forced into an unwanted match that she then flees. Meanwhile Harry has been taken on as acting-partner to an elderly West India merchant, on whose behalf he travels to Jamaica and discovers his true father, a planter named Hartwell.
In a desperate rush to tie up all loose ends, Fairside (now reformed) and the unfortunate Charlotte (she had miscarried) are now married, and their servant is Harry’s old mistress Annabella, while Peyton is revealed as Harry’s half-sister, born out of wedlock. Harry inherits from the India merchant, from his old guardian, and his father, and marries his lady-love Julia, whose guardian has conveniently died.
‘And thus ends our eventful history; in the course of which it will be obvious to every reader, that the hero of it is by no means held forth as a model of perfection – but his example may perhaps serve in some instances as a warning to youth.’
Provenance: from the library of Mary Hill (née Sandys, 1764–1836), as Countess of Hillsborough (1789–1793); later Marchioness of Downshire and Baroness Sandys (see above).
ESTC and OCLC record two copies only: British Library, and University of Connecticut.
ESTC N027833; Garside, Raven, and Schöwerling 1786: 40.
