ABSTRACT
This is the first of Patmore’s series of imitations of articles originally published in the New Monthly. The magazine, absorbed as it was with fashionable life and preoccupations, itself became voguish and successful in the 1820s. As Patmore writes in Letters on England, ‘Not to have read such or such an article in the last New Monthly ... is an imputation not to be thought of; you might almost as well admit that you had not read the last Scotch novel, or been to Paris.’ 1 The magazine’s ‘Original Papers’, which defined its tone, featured a great deal of comic writing, both in prose and verse, often dealing with ephemeral social preoccupations. Many of the original papers were contributed by James and Horace Smith in non-collaborative mode and ‘To-morrow; A Gaiety and Gravity’ is the first of the individual imitations of the brothers Smith in the Rejected Articles (though of course in one sense the whole volume is an imitation of the duumvirate’s most notable work). After the publication of their immensely successful Rejected Addresses (1812), both of the Smiths made second literary careers in comic prose. Horace published a number of triple decker novels, the most successful being Brambletye House (1826) and, in the early 1820s, poured out comic poems and essays in the New Monthly (for which he was paid twenty guineas a sheet, significantly above the journal’s standard rate of twelve guineas 2 ). Many of these were collected in Gaieties and Gravities: A Series of Essays, Comic Tales and Fugitive Vagaries (1825), a title reflected in Patmore’s own subtitle. In Letters on England, Patmore pays tribute to the Smiths as writers ‘who enjoy the most brilliant reputations of the day as writers of comic verse’. 3 However, he goes on to laud their prose contributions to the New Monthly: ‘Each of these latter also furnish the magazine with prose papers on various subjects, written in styles quite peculiar to themselves’ 4 Patmore 46describes Horace’s discursive prose as ‘delightful from its playful and elegant terseness’ and it is this quality which he captures in ‘Tomorrow’. The formal model for the essay is Smith’s ‘To-day’, a whimsical meditation on temporality which was published in the New Monthly in January 1823:
To-day is like a child’s pocket-money, which he never thinks of keeping in his pocket. Considering it bestowed upon us for the sole purpose of being expended as fast as possible in dainties, toys, and knick-knacks, we should reproach ourselves for meanness of spirit were we to hoard it up, or appropriate it to any object of serious utility. It is the only part of life of which we are sure; yet we treat it as if it were the sole portion of existence beyond our control. We make sage reflections upon the past, and wise resolutions for the future, but no one ever forms an important determination for to-day. Whatever is urgent must be reserved for tomorrow; 5
