A man lying in bed is disturbed by a strange sound. He fears for his life–it could be thieves. He leaps from his bed and yells for his servant to bring a candle to the room; both search the room to no avail. Lying down again (no doubt a bit embarrassed about looking foolish before his servant), the man hears the same noise, an “odd sort of humming” like a person “struggling to speak.” Curious, he lifts his pillow and finds nothing more than his pants. In his pockets he has stashed a small collection of coins from England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy. He puts these on the little table beside his bed and, to his great surprise, that humming emanating from the coins slowly grows, slowly becomes clearer, until it begins to sound just like a human voice!

Thus begins Charles Gildon’s The Golden Spy of 1709, a tale that is not quite as unusual as it seems. It is part of a sub-genre of writings from eighteenth-century Britain in which a corkscrew boasts of its workmanship, a bank note makes allusions to Shakespeare, and coins complain about the misers that hoard them. Such playful examples of anthropomorphism might bring to mind characters from children’s literature or, perhaps more likely, the animate inanimate objects of Disney features. But the eighteenth-century examples are quite different from Mrs. Potts, the teapot played by Angela Lansbury in Beauty and the Beast, and her teacup-son, Chip. These mundane objects with human qualities from an earlier time served much more adult purposes.