Roseberry Topping is really a modest hill, yet in 1761 a fictional country girl called Margery Murpoot declared it the tallest thing going. She says so in Joseph Reed‘s farce ‘The Register Office’, a play with about as much subtlety as a brick through a window. Her exact words, dialect and all, have survived the centuries better than most marriages:
“It’s t’ biggest hill i’ all Yorkshire. It’s aboon a mahle an’ a hauf heegh, an’ ez caud ez ice at t’ top on t’ yattest daa i’ Summer; that it is.”
Grand claim. Not remotely true, but nobody watching a farce at Drury Lane in 1761 was there for the geography.
The play itself had a rougher ride than Margery’s hill walk. Two characters, Lady Wrinkle and Mrs Snarewell, were cut by the stage censor, though Reed got his own back by publishing the full uncensored version anyway. In the closing notes he also accused a rival playwright, Samuel Foote, of nicking his Mrs Snarewell character after Reed had shown him the manuscript back in 1758. Nothing like a good grudge to keep a footnote alive. When the farce was revived at Drury Lane in February 1768, Reed added a fresh character called Mrs Doggerel, presumably to needle someone else. The play refused to die quietly and turned up in various collections.
As for Reed himself, he was born in Stockton, County Durham, in March 1723, the son of a presbyterian ropemaker. Schooling was thin on the ground, so he simply took over the family business and made a decent go of it. Literature was his hobby, not his living, and he never fancied himself anything grander than an amateur. When he did publish, he happily put “a halter-maker” on the title page instead of “playwright” — which takes a rare sort of nerve, or a rare sort of modesty, depending how you look at it.
Leave a Reply