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Robert Dodsley’s work of prose fiction, The Oeconomy of Human Life, was first published in London in November 1750. Partly perhaps to cash in on the emerging fashion for all things vaguely oriental and partly to create a teasing sense of mystery, he set out to give his work an air of eastern exoticism. Its full title was The Oeconomy of Human Life, translated from an Indian manuscript written by an ancient Bramin, to which is prefixed an account of the manner in which the said manuscript was discovered, in a letter from an English Gentleman, now residing in China, to the Earl of ****. In order to throw suspicion of the work’s provenance away from himself, Dodsley arranged for his friend Mary Cooper to publish it. The title page; facing illustration, which the anonymous author claims is “a copy of one found with the original manuscript”; advertisement to the public; and prefatory letter to the similarly anonymous Earl, from the English gentleman, with the dateline “Peking, May 12, 1749”; were each part of an elaborate apparatus designed, however playfully, to authenticate the work’s oriental origin. Most readers seem to have intimated, at a fairly early stage, that the work was by Dodsley. Few, however, knew for certain and for a while many readers thought Dodsley’s friend, the Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773) might be the author. Dodsley seems to have been happy for such false assumptions to circulate. The mystery did no harm to the sales and the wrong attribution continued for many years.
The work, which is a succinct set of aphorisms as to how human beings should order their moral lives (the “oeconomy” of the title means something like “management” in today’s terms), is presented as the thoughts of an Indian Brahmin (a member of the highest priestly caste among the Hindus), of an indeterminably early date. The fictional English Gentleman claims they were translated by Cao-tsou, one of the Chinese Emperor’s priests, from an original manuscript in the language of the ancient Brahmins found in the temple of the Tibetan Grand Lama at Lasa on the top of Mt. Toupala. The work therefore purports to be an English translation of a Chinese translation of an ancient Indian manuscript.
Anticipating his friend Samuel Johnson’s more imaginative oriental tale exploring human nature, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, 1759, by nearly ten years, Dodsley opens in hortatory style: “Bow down your heads unto the dust, O ye inhabitants of earth! Be silent, and receive with reverence, instruction from on high.” Where Johnson’s work is an enquiry, however, Dodsley’s purports to be “an ancient piece of eastern instruction”. As the fictional, English, gentleman translator tells us in his advertisement, he has formed his style on “our version of the book of Job, the Psalms, the works of Solomon and the prophets.”
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