Rev. Samuel Madden, the Lover of His Country

Samuel Madden was born in Dublin in 1686. His father was a physician, and his mother was part of the prominent Molyneux family.

Even before completing his studies at Trinity College Dublin in 1705, Madden inherited a considerable estate from his father. Therefore, while he became the Church of Ireland minister for the parishes of Galloon and Drummully, he never had to rely on those salaries.

(Some sources say Madden was chaplain or tutor to Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, but I don’t see when that would have been.)

Madden married Jane Magill (also written as Jean McGill) in 1709, and the couple had ten children over the next twenty-five years.

According to the Rev. Philip Skelton, who lived with the family as a curate and tutor early in his career, Mrs. Madden was “haughty” about her family background, indulgent to her children, and so strict in managing the family finances that she “took care to keep [her husband’s] pocket empty of money” so he couldn’t give it away.

The Rev. Mr. Madden was known for his charity. He made donations, collected money for causes, and helped to set up the Dublin Society. Through that organization and Trinity College he offered prizes or “premiums” for various discoveries and feats to benefit the nation, and was thus remembered as “Premium” Madden.

Madden’s other talent was for writing. In 1729 his play Themistocles, the Lover of His Country was performed in London to good reviews. Nine years later, his Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland, as to their Conduct for the Service of their Country, as Landlords, as Masters of Families, as Protestants, as Descended from British Ancestors, as Country Gentlemen and Farmers, as Justices of the Peace, as Merchants, as Members of Parliament described Irish society and the responsibilities of its ruling class. Madden corresponded with Dr. Samuel Johnson and other British literary lights.

In 1733, between those two major works, Madden anonymously wrote and published Memoirs of the Twentieth Century: Being Original Letters of State under George the Sixth, volume 1. In the vein of Gulliver’s Travels, published seven years before by the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift, this book critiqued contemporary society through a fictional narrative set at a distance. But instead of going to outlandish places, Madden invited readers into the far future—1997!

Madden’s first narrator, in the preface, is an opportunistic politician who’s lost his seat in Parliament and is sliding toward becoming a Jacobite. He describes how in 1728 his “good Genius” appeared to him during an illness. This spirit showed him “several large Volumes” of letters written to his descendant, the Lord High Treasurer of Great Britain at the end of the twentieth century.

By that time, these dispatches from British diplomats report, Jesuits ruled much of the world. Their pope held vast lands in Africa, Paraguay, and China; dominated the weak governments of Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire; and was making inroads among the Russians and Tatars. But Britain was standing firm and united under the House of Hanover. The narrator therefore returns to his patriotic support of the British system, and his Protestant determination to oppose Jesuits.

Memoirs of the Twentieth Century was a milestone in speculative fiction, the first fictional narrative built around time travel. In daring to imagine a future, it denied the possibility of imminent end times. The book may not qualify as science fiction, however, since Madden didn’t imagine technology any different from what he knew in 1733. And it had very little literary influence since hardly anybody got to read it.

According to a footnote in John Nichols’s Biographical and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer: Printer (1782):

A thousand copies were printed, with such very great dispatch, that three printers were employed on it (Bowyer, Woodfall, and Roberts); and the names of an uncommon number of reputable booksellers appeared in the title-page. In less than a fortnight, however, 890 of these copies were delivered to Dr. Madden, and probably destroyed. The current report is, that the edition was suppressed on the day of publication.

The promised five additional volumes never appeared.

Madden had apparently trodden on some sensitive toes, but it’s not clear whose. The picture of parliamentary politicking isn’t flattering, and some sources guess that Sir Robert Walpole suppressed the book. There’s a long dedication to the Prince of Wales, who would be estranged from his father, George II—but that young prince wasn’t yet the anchor of formal opposition. Modern scholars suggest that Madden had the bad luck to publish just when Britain had to deal with the War of the Polish Succession, and continental turmoil made any hint of sympathy for the Stuarts problematic.

Few copies of Memoirs of the Twentieth Century survived. This one is at Oxford University. Charles James Fox owned another. But word of the book must have gotten around because by the end of the 1700s it was famous for being rare.

In the fall of 1757, the Rev. Mr. Madden sent a letter to the Royal Society praising Benjamin Franklin’s Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America. He wrote:

I am rejoiced at Mr. Franklin’s coming over with so good a Plan which to the shame of Governments has been overlooked such a number of years. If our Colonies be not properly modelled and protected nothing but Ruin and disgrace can follow.

That proved to be a better prophecy than Memoirs of the Twentieth Century.

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Madden died in 1765. A few years after that, his grandson Thomas Hawkshaw joined the British army, only to be wounded on the first day of the American war.