Spatial Mobility as Social Mobility in the Early Seventeenth Century: Henry Peacham Jr.’s Picaresque Novel “A Merry Discourse of Meum and Tuum”

Abstract

The theme of migration and travel occupies a prominent position in the literature of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Travelogues, travel notes, poems, and disparate accounts of the booming explorations towards the New World(s) abundantly embody the spirit of adventure of the age. The energetic spirit promoting the appropriation of new and distant lands did not, however, belong exclusively to the class of sailors, pirates, merchants. It seems, on the contrary, to define a widespread political and cultural attitude on the part of different social groups, at all levels of society.

A significant sign of this phenomenon is the rise of the picaresque novel whose sagacious protagonists travel primarily for material gain and partly for entertainment. Their spatial movement is clearly the means of a new upward social mobility. This movement is obviously very different from the present day migrations prompted by wars and political persecution, but, mutatis mutandis, it is somehow similar to contemporary migrations in search of economic improvement and amelioration of one’s social status.

I will discuss the many implications of this kind of narratives in the XVII Century by examining Henry Peacham Jr.’s A Merry Discourse of Meum and Tuum, a 1639 short novel (for which no modern edition was available until I produced one in 1997, after a period of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.) (Locatelli 1998).

The protagonists of Peacham’s picaresque novel, the twins Meum and Tuum, move across England from the Fenlands to Cambridge and from there to London, thus providing a rich and amusing picture of the geographical, social and cultural situation of England in Early-modern times. Through their keen observant gaze the reader is taken to farms and universities, taverns and churches, and thus meets a rich variety of social types, and is given a unique perspective on the mores and shifting values of Jacobean England. The utilitarian purpose of the movement of picaresque heroes is certainly distant from the devotion prompting Mediaeval pilgrims; moreover, their social ambition is usually combined with their ability to provide witty and satirical comments on their surroundings. The story of their adventures is thus much more than just a lively “Michelin Guide” of England avant la lettere, it is a vivid illustration of social situations and a convincing anticipation of the emergent entrepreneurial mentality of the XVIII century.