Barkilphedro’s resentment of Josiana after receiving her favor

Barkilphedro’s resentment of Josiana after receiving her favor turns a relationship of apparent patronage into one of concealed hostility. Duchess Josiana gives him shelter, welcomes him into her household, and helps secure his employment; he interprets these benefits not as grounds for gratitude but as injuries that entitle him to revenge. Their connection is shaped by a sharp disparity between her casual confidence and his precarious dependence—and by his ability to hide his hostility from the woman who has helped him.

Surveillance and Access

At the outset, Barkilphedro is already a point of connection between Duchess Josiana and Lord David Dirry-Moir. She has him discreetly observe Lord David; Lord David, in turn, uses him to watch her. Queen Anne also relies on Barkilphedro to keep informed about the conduct of both. The arrangement makes him useful to several powerful people, but it does not make him their equal: his access depends on their confidence and on the service he performs for them.

His route into Duchess Josiana’s favor is marked by need as well as calculation. After falling into poverty, he takes up a literary identity but remains so destitute that he is sometimes without a place to sleep. He invokes old associations with James II, stories of loyalty, and other affecting accounts to reach Duchess Josiana’s sympathies. The narrative describes his persistence as a means of working upward through barriers. His appeal succeeds: she takes an interest in the combination of poverty and wit she sees in him.

Patronage and Dependence

Duchess Josiana’s response is concrete. She presents Barkilphedro to Lord David Dirry-Moir, gives him shelter among her household servants, retains him as one of her attendants, treats him kindly, and sometimes speaks with him. Through her, he moves from hunger and cold into a protected place in the household. His position also gives him increasing access to her private rooms. He is careful not to seem troublesome, and she grows so accustomed to his presence that she behaves with little reserve around him.

One aspect of this intimacy matters especially to Barkilphedro: Duchess Josiana addresses him in the familiar second person, a form of address that the narrative associates with the social fashion for great ladies speaking to men of letters. He takes this familiarity as proof that he has advanced. It delights him because he has wanted precisely this recognition, and he privately savors the way she speaks to him. Yet the same practice will become, in his later account of his grievances, evidence of insult. What she offers as ease and favor, he stores as a mark of his dependence.

Barkilphedro does not regard the household place as an end in itself. He is aiming at a more secure position, and Duchess Josiana’s influence offers a route toward it. With her exertions and Lord David Dirry-Moir’s influence, he is installed at The Admiralty a week after the position is promised. He receives lodging, board, and a salary of one hundred guineas. This changes his material circumstances: his earlier insecurity is replaced by a regular post and provision. It does not, however, produce loyalty to the patron whose assistance helped make the change possible.

The Reversal into Resentment

The narrative presents Barkilphedro’s response to his benefits as deliberate ingratitude. After receiving so much from Duchess Josiana, he makes revenge his governing thought. His hostility is sharpened by the contrast between their circumstances: she is beautiful, young, wealthy, powerful, and celebrated; he is described as old, poor, dependent, obscure, and physically unprepossessing. Her favor has improved his situation, but the disparity between them also gives his resentment a personal object.

The account complicates any simple claim that her kindness creates his malice. Barkilphedro’s hostile intentions are described as directed toward Duchess Josiana from early in their association, before the narrative sets out his later list of supposed wrongs. At first, his hatred is diffuse; he eventually fixes it on a particular person. Duchess Josiana, unaware of the danger he represents to her, supplies that focus by trusting him and allowing him close. The relationship thus carries an asymmetry of knowledge: she treats him as a dependent she has helped, while he watches and waits with concealed ill will.

His Case Against His Benefactor

Barkilphedro supplies himself with a justification for the revenge he has already chosen. He claims that Duchess Josiana’s charity reduced him to the status of a beggar receiving crumbs from her enormous wealth, and that she bound him to an office beneath his abilities. He imagines himself as nearly a clergyman, learned and broadly talented, with the potential to become a bishop. Against that self-image, his actual work appears to him humiliating: he is confined to the upper room of a register office, where he must register troublesome fragments from the sea, open bottles, decipher old parchments and wills, and deal with other illegible records.

His grievance over the work is entangled with his grievance over intimacy. The familiar way Duchess Josiana addresses him, once a source of private delight, becomes in his self-justifying account another offense for which he must punish her. The reversal exposes the instability of his gratitude: he can experience her attention as advancement when it pleases him and recast the same attention as contempt when resentment requires a reason. He treats dependence as an injustice inflicted on him, even though her shelter and influence helped him escape the destitution from which he had sought relief.

A Relationship of Concealed Hostility

Barkilphedro’s resentment is not simply a complaint about an unsatisfactory post. The narrative describes his determination to cast despair into Duchess Josiana’s life as it intensifies while he waits, and presents her as the unwitting object on whom he concentrates his malice. Her confidence allows him to remain close without appearing dangerous; his dependence gives him grievances to rehearse rather than gratitude to acknowledge. Their relationship therefore joins private access to a profound absence of mutual understanding.

The irony lies in the way aid and injury become entangled in his account. Duchess Josiana’s patronage provides shelter, household standing, and the connection through which Barkilphedro obtains paid work. He nevertheless treats those outcomes as evidence of insult and constraint. The evidence establishes his desire for revenge and his chosen target, but does not, in this relationship alone, specify the final consequences of that intention. What it does establish is the mechanism of the reversal: a benefactor sees a poor and witty dependent worthy of kindness, while the dependent converts kindness, familiarity, and employment into an indictment of the benefactor.