“Lord W. has now nothing more to do than to throw in some dozen of the most popular works of the day.”

1844

London: Published at the Office.

Custom-bound edition of vol. 6–7 of Punch, or The London Charivari, produced by Kerr and Richardson of Glasgow, with fetching marbled edges. [2] i–vi 1–264 1–272 [6] pp. 28 x 23cm. “The New Patent Novel Writer” appears on p. 268 of vol. 7.

Accession Number: 2021.7.12

Under the heading “The New Patent Novel Writer,” a curious machine is described and endorsed in a column of vol. 7 of Punch magazine. It begins with this letter from one “J. Babbage”:

I have to apologise for some delay in answering your obliging favor, in which you did me the honour of suggesting to me the manufacture of a [mechanical] Lawyer's Clerk. After much consideration, I regret that I have found it impossible to produce an article which should be satisfactory to myself, and to the profession. I have, however, been completely successful in the production of a New Patent Mechanical Novel Writer—adapted to all styles, and all subjects; pointed, pathetic, historic, silver-fork, and Minerva. I do not hesitate to lay before you a few of the flattering testimonials to its efficacy, which I have already received from those most competent to judge.

As one endorsement remarks, the machine appears to work by a kind of simulative procedure not unlike the computational story generators of today:

I may mention that some days since I placed my hero and heroine, peasants of Normandy, in the surprising-adventure-department of the engine; set the machinery in motion, and, on letting off the steam a few hours after, found the one a Duke, and the other a Sovereign Princess; they having become so by the most natural and interesting process in the world.

Of course, the fictional “J. Babbage” is a construction referring to the inventor Charles Babbage, then at work on the Analytical Engine, and indeed the entire column is a farce, likely concocted by the editorial staff of this important satirical publication.

While no Patent Mechanical Novel Writer was constructed at this time, its description and accompanying illustration here constitute an early literary antecedent to the automatic story generators that would appear in various forms throughout the twentieth century. Amusingly, one endorsement suggests “the manufacture of a Patent Poet on the same plan,” a call that would improbably be answered the following year, when John Clark’s Eureka machine appeared at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London. Amid this context, the column herein demonstrates the surprisingly murky delineation between the farcical and the possible in the technological consciousness of the middle nineteenth century.