The Translator’s Invisibility

Nott’s frequent travel, including a stint on a colonial expedition, no doubt increased his willingness to resist domestic values. After studying medicine in Paris as well as London, he spent years on the Continent as physician to English travellers (1775–1777, 1786–1788, 1789–1793) and made a trip to China as surgeon on a vessel of the East India Company (1783–1786). The class in which Nott travelled must also be included among the conditions of his cultural work: the aristocracy. His father held an appointment in the household of George III, and Nott’s patients were generally aristocrats. This class affiliation is important because it indicates a domestic motive for his interest in foreignizing translation. As a physician, Nott was on intimate terms with a group whose sexual practices, far from exhibiting any bourgeois sense of moral propriety, rivalled those of Catullus’s Rome in their variousness and sheer frequency, even if they were discussed less openly and with greater refinement— “gallantry” often served as a euphemism for adultery during this period. Lawrence Stone has referred to “plenty of evidence that there was a great deal of extramarital sexual activity among many aristocratic husbands and some aristocratic wives at least as late as the first decade of the nineteenth century” (Stone 1977:534; Perkin 1989:89–96).

In Nott’s case, we can be more specific. A confirmed bachelor himself, he served as physician to Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, when she travelled on the Continent between 1789 and 1793 (Posonby 1955; DNB). The fashionable, trend-setting Duchess had been banished abroad by her husband William, the fifth Duke, because gambling losses had driven her deep into debt. In 1792, the Duchess gave birth to a daughter who was assumed to be the offspring of her adultery with Charles Grey, an aggressive young politician who led the Whig party and later became Prime Minister. The Duke himself fathered three illegitimate children, one by a woman with whom he had an affair at the time of his marriage, two by Lady Elizabeth Foster, who separated from her own husband in 1782 and was befriended by the Duke and Duchess. Nott’s interest in erotic literature, his refusal to expurgate Catullus’s poetry, even the sexual frankness of his translations, were due in some part to the casual sexual morality that characterized his aristocratic milieu during the late eighteenth century. His foreignization of the Latin text did in fact answer to {96} domestic values, however different from those that influenced the periodical reviewers and Lamb.

George Lamb (1784–1834) was born into the same aristocratic milieu as Nott, but thirty years later. The fourth and youngest son of Penniston, Viscount Melbourne, he practiced law for a short While, but left it to pursue various literary and theatrical interests, reviewing for the Edinburgh, contributing prologues to revivals at the Drury Lane, and writing a comic opera that was staged at Covent Garden (Gentleman’s Magazine 1834:437–438; DNB). He eventually entered politics, first as an MP in the Duke of Devonshire’s interest and then, on the accession of the Whig ministry, as Under Secretary of State to his brother William, Lord Melbourne. In 1809, George married Caroline St. Jules, one of the Duke of Devonshire’s illegitimate children with Lady Foster; George’s own birth was illegitimate, the result of Lady Melbourne’s adultery with the Prince of Wales. Everyone concerned knew of these relations.[16] It was Lamb who informed Caroline of her father’s identity a few years before their marriage. The Duke gave her a dowry of £30,000; Lamb’s response was that “I can only thank him by devoting my future life to Caroline’s happiness” (Posonby 1955:4). The knowledge of these relations extended past the family. In the obituary on Lamb in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Caroline was described as “a relation of the Duke of the Devonshire” (Gentleman’s Magazine 1834:438). Still, everything was treated very discreetly. Lady Foster concocted a genealogy to explain Caroline’s unusual name, “a certain obscure Comte de St. Jules being the supposed father” (Posonby 1955:4). The most public scandal in Lamb’s family did not involve him: in 1812, Lady Caroline Lamb, his brother William’s wife, was engaged in a notorious affair with Byron. George himself seems to have been happily married. His obituary referred to “the tranquillity of his domestic life,” stating that with the “estimable” Caroline, “of a character entirely assorting with his own, he enjoyed the truest domestic felicity” (Gentleman’s Magazine 1834:438).