ABSTRACT
The political circumstance that had occasioned the Shortest Way pamphlet was the protracted debate in the House of Commons over a series of bills to prevent Occasional Conformity, or the practice by which Dissenters received communion in the Church of England in order to hold posts in cities, boroughs, corporations and crown offices. The Consolidator is narrated by a gentleman-tradesman, an author who is similar in some ways to the projector of schemes for building highways or educating women in An Essay Upon Projects , though his optimism is more tempered than his predecessor’s. The disappointment that permeates The Consolidator, together with its sprawling length, its looping redundancies and its plaintive tone, makes it a difficult book to read. The allegorical naming of such characters in the Memoirs as Mynheer Coopmanschap, whose name includes the Dutch word for ‘Merchant’, is one aspect of the marked change in genre between this pamphlet and The Consolidator.
