Chrysal; Or, The Adventures Of A Guinea

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Money & Finance

[In Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea] Chrysal, a supernaturally sentient piece of gold, narrates how he was dug from a Peruvian mine as raw gold, transformed by various new masters into a crucifix and a Spanish doubloon, and finally reconceived into his final, superlative form, a British guinea (Source: Kvande & Grover 2020, p.535).

One of the first of the immensely popular 18th-century ‘it-narratives’, Chrysal ... tells the tale of a coin and the human intrigue to which it finds itself bearing witness. After a rather dramatic and wonderfully overwrought beginning in which we learn of the coin being bestowed with consciousness and dug from a Peruvian mine, the monetary narrator proceeds to dish the dirt on various celebrities of the time as it passes from hand to hand, being conveniently present for a variety of gossip-worthy conversations, romps, and scandals. Spending some time circulating among the streets and elite of London, the coin also finds itself in the courts of Lisbon and Vienna, and the front-lines of war in Germany (the Seven Years’ War was raging at the time), Canada, and the Caribbean (Source: Anon 2016, np link).

While Chrysal has no over-arching story, it does contain a series of elaborately-developed narratives, none of which is extended beyond the length of time during which Chrysal happens to be possessed by one of his owners. And while each story is brought to a satisfactory conclusion, Johnstone carefully maintains the pretense that the moment at which each story ends is entirely determined by the one at which Chrysal passed out of the ownership of the person whose story he is telling (Source: Mandelkern 1966, p.10).

[T]the rapidity of Chrysal’s changing ownership shows a healthy economy at work, even when the owners include scoundrels and cheats. When individual transactions go awry, Chrysal keeps circulating; for example, after the lady of fashion gives Chrysal to a coachman to pay the farrier, the coachman intercepts this exchange by using Chrysal to pay off his bar tab instead (1:295–96). Despite the farrier’s not getting paid, another creditor, the publican, does get paid. Transactions are not stopped, only diverted. The persistence of these transactions creates a sense that mediation is somehow unstoppable. From the beer-house, Chrysal is paid to an attorney in defense of a neighbourhood gang of thieves, to a knight of the post for some trial evidence; from there, the coin is stolen by a highwayman and subsequently lost at a horse race to a nobleman (1:296). This series of owners is by no means honourable, yet Chrysal’s movement among them is healthy and necessary. The publican and the attorney are legitimately owed payment for their services. Paying someone to testify does seem a less legitimate use of money, but as the novel has shown at the charity dinner, the transaction certainly functions to keep society moving. Despite the illegitimacy of many of these transactions, Chrysal’s remaining of value to everyone is evidence of a working social consensus (Source: Kvande & Grover 2020, p.543).

[The book was originally p]ublished anonymously but [is] known to be the work of Charles Johnstone (Source: Anon nda, np link).

Johnstone justifies this approach by claiming, in typical eighteenth-century fashion, that the work is not fictional; rather, he maintains, it consists of material that was derived from a manuscript which was “discovered” (a claim which he makes in the Preface to the first two-volume edition and the Advertisement to the continuation). Indeed, in the Preface and the Advertisement to the continuation, he styles himself, not as the author of the work, but as the “editor.” This fiction was perpetuated by the title pages of early editions of the novel, wherein the author was referred to as “An Adept,” or alchemist. Nor does the perpetuation end there; on the title pages of several of his subsequent novels, Johnstone is referred to as “The Editor of the Adventures of a Guinea” (Source: Mandelkern 1966, p.62).

Chrysal was composed and published during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63). Virtually global in scope, the war saw English victories over the French in Canada, the West Indies, Africa, and India which laid the foundations of the British Empire and strengthened trade and commercialism as vital elements in the English national identity. As trade flourished, new goods became available. Such availability (for example, of cheap calico and muslin from India) stimulated demand and consumption. As Peter Mathias remarks, “the expansion of foreign trade was intimately associated with the extension of effective internal demand.” During the last fifteen years of the century the consumption of tobacco, soap, candles, printed fabrics, spirits, and beer was “increasing more than twice as fast as population.” While moralists often singled out the tea-drinking of the lower classes as a particularly blatant symptom of luxury, the consumption of more substantial articles was also on the rise. Examining wills from the period, D.E.C. Eversley finds confirmed “the general impression that the number of people possessing goods they must have bought in their lifetime, rather than inherited, grows steadily,” and observes that “the new products are striking.” Horrified moralists, confronted with a “convulsion of getting and spending” which, historians have argued, represented nothing less than the “birth of a consumer society,” denigrated consumption as luxury and listed its enervating effects (Source: Douglas 1993, 69-70).

The rapid transit of things in trade and commerce provided the impulse behind a genre of fiction that became popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with titles such as The Adventures of a Watch and The History of a Lady’s Slipper. They were called ‘it-narratives’ or ‘novels of circulation’ and they recorded (usually in the first person singular) the experience of things as they pass through the hands of a series of owners. The things that lent themselves most readily to this new format were those that were most mobile — money and vehicles. Two of the most popular it-narratives in the latter half of the eighteenth-century were Chrysal; or Adventures of a Guinea (1760) and the anonymously authored Adventures of a Hackney Coach (1783) (Source: Lamb 2012, np link).

While figures on sales are lacking, there is no question that Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea was enormously popular when it appeared in 1760, and that it was this popularity which prompted Johnstone, at the publisher’s request, to add a continuation in 1765 (Source: Mandelkern 1966, p.6).

It is easy to discern exactly what the audience saw in the novel: it was widely read as a supposedly truthful account of the personal lives of some of the most famous people of the era. The British have always had a relish for scandal, and the scandal is even more appealing when it is tied to famous persons. There is also little doubt that the audience had no trouble identifying many of the characters through whose hands Chrysal passes, as they were, indeed, highly recognizable (Source: Mandelkern 1966, p.7).

Chrysal … went through twenty editions between 1760 and the end of the century and was included in Sir Walter Scott’s canon-making Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library (1822), and yet the Critical Review of December 1781 contemptuously proclaimed: ‘‘This mode of making up a book and styling it the Adventures of a Cat, Dog, a Monkey, a Hackney-Coach . . . is indeed a convenient method to writers of the inferior class, of emptying their commonplace books, and throwing together all the farrago of public transactions, private characters, old and new stories . . . to afford a little temporary amusement to an idle reader’’ (quoted … by Aileen Douglas, 148). In 1929, Ernest Baker witheringly dismissed the it-narrative ilk as ‘‘a misuse and often prostitution of the craft of the novelist. … Their literary interest is insignificant’’ (quoted by Mark Blackwell, 188) (Source: Wall 2010, p.E43).

[The same 1781 Critical Review piece described Chrysal as] a work we remember with great pleasure, and which displayed indisputable matrks of taste and genium (Source: Anon in Lines 2017, p.12).

[Chrysal was] the century’s most successful it-narrative (Source: Lupton 2006, p.407).

Upon publication in 1760 … the book was a runaway success, being issued in five separate editions in its first three years alone. Capitalising on the demand, Johnstone brought out an expanded four-volume version in 1765, which like-wise was lapped up by the readers. On the back of Chrysal‘s success there came a slew of similar titles told from the perspective of inanimate objects, nearly always in the form of “The Adventures of a ….”, including a black coat, a watch, a corkscrew, and a Hackney coach. Not everyone, however, was enamoured by this new sensation (Source: Anon 2016, np link).

[W]hile Johnstone cannot be said to have invented [the It-Narrative genre], the success of Chrysal gave rise to a series of works which perpetuated it. In fact, so pervasive was Johnstone’s influence that the anonymously written Adventures of a Hackney Coach (1781) begins with a young woman remarking on Chrysal as the reason for what follows; and at least one of these works – The Adventures of a Rupee (1782) , which is also narrated by a coin- probably was directly inspired by him. … In any case, the fad had become so widespread (and many of the works were considered to be so devoid of merit) that the Critical Review complained in 1781 that the genre was becoming a nuisance (Source: Mandelkern 1966, p.11).

Critics since [the 1800s] … have been more or less united either in ignoring eighteenth-century it-narratives altogether or in viewing the likes of Chrysal as scandalous romans-à-clef interesting mostly for their scathing topical satire, and certainly not for any noteworthy innovations, formal or otherwise. Yet a growing body of scholarly work published during the last ten years or so is reviving interest in the it-narrative and reassessing its significance by discussing it in the context of broader literary, cultural, and social questions about late eighteenth-century England. Critics are beginning to explore the relationship between it-narratives and the novel as a genre by using these odd tales to make sense of the career of prose fiction in the 1760s and 70s, decades often overlooked in standard accounts of the novel’s ‘rise’ (Source: Blackwell 2004, p.2).