156 У* SHADY CHARACTERS

to my particular conduct, that it is not be expected I
should set my name or the account of my family to this
work[.]47

Later, when Moll’s mother explains to her the true disposition of
some of the seeming gentlefolk at large in Virginia, Defoe male«
reference to the brands received in punishment for past crimes and
redacts the names of the branded as if to avoid offense:48

“You need not think a thing strange, daughter, for as I told
you, some of the best men in this country are burnt in the
hand, and they are not ashamed to own it. There’s Major
,” says she, “he was an eminent pickpocket; there’s

Justice Ba r, was a shoplifter, and both of them were

burnt in the hand; and I could name you several such as
they are.”49

When Samuel Richardson published Pamela; or, Virtue Rewardti
in 1740, he chose to frame his narrative as a series of letters from the
virginal Pamela Andrews to her God-fearing parents. The preternatu¬
ral eloquence and copious free time possessed by this fifteen-year-old
housemaid notwithstanding, Pamela's epistolary form was intended
to heighten the novel’s realism, presenting the characters’ subjective
experiences directly to the reader without the distorting lens of a nar¬
rator.’ For all this grandeur of vision, though, Richardson was not
above employing the dash when discussing Pamela’s lecherous suitor
Mr. В , implying that for such importunate advances to become
public knowledge would surely have ruined the reputation of any real-
life gentleman.5'

Ellipsis by way of dashes continued to pepper eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century fiction of all genres. Jane Austen saw fit to hide
the name of the “ shire regiment,” from which the rakish Mr.

THE DASH 157

Wickham elopes with Lydia Bennet, and Robert Louis Stevenson
sought to lend Treasure Island an air of documentary reality by stating

only that the adventure took place in “17 ” and declining to give

the longitude and latitude of the island in question.52

Throughout this period the desire for realism was tempered by
strict attitudes toward blasphemy and cursing, and much as a char¬
acter might wish to d someone to h , writers and publishers

could not afford to offend the reading public. Again, such modesty
was in evidence well before the Victorians began cinching their moral
corsets, as shown in 1751’s Adventures of Peregrine Pickle by the Scottish
author Tobias Smollett. The foulmouthed pronouncements of Per¬
egrine’s guardian, Commodore Hawser Trunnion, required judicious
deployment of dashes:

They make a d—d noise about this engagement with the
French: but, egad! it was no more than a bumboat battle,
in comparison with some that I have seen. There was old
Rook and Jennings, and another whom I’ll be d—d before
I name, that knew what fighting was.53

Just as Trunnion will “be d—d” before he names the third man,
Smollett will be d—d before he dares write the word “damned” itself.
Anthony Trollope’s epic account of The Way We Live Now-“now”
being 1875, in the midst of a series of financial scandals serves as a
more typically Victorian example, and as such Trollope s bombastic
financier Augustus Melmotte often finds his exclamations softened
by censorious dashes in the same way (“The d you do! ).’4

By 1878, the librettist W. S. Gilbert (more famous as one half of
Gilbert and Sullivan) could poke fun at the increasingly euphemistic

use of “d ” for “damn,” and had the captain of HMS Pinafore sing,

"Bad language or abuse, /1 never, never use J...] I never use the big,
big D.”55 The use of the dash as a stand-in for various profanities was