Pope to Burney, 1714-1779

Scriblerians to Bluestockings

Moyra Haslett

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350317581
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Englische Literaturkritik

This essential guide defines literature of the eighteenth century as a literature written and received as public conversation. Moyra Haslett discusses and challenges conventional ways of reading the period, particularly in relation to notions of the public sphere. In her wide-ranging study, Haslett reads key texts - including The Dunciad, Gulliver's Travels and Pamela - in their literary and cultural contexts, and examines such genres as the periodical, the familiar letter, the verse epistle and the novel as textual equivalents of coterie culture.

Part I

Conversational Forms

1 Literary Communities

The more … refined arts advance, the more sociable men become: nor is it possible, that, when enriched with science, and possessed of a fund of conversation, they should be contented to remain in solitude, or live with their fellow-citizens in that distant manner, which is peculiar to ignorant and barbarous nations. They flock into cities; love to receive and communicate knowledge; to show their wit or their breeding; their taste in conversation or living, in clothes or furniture. Curiosity allures the wise; vanity the foolish; and pleasure both. Particular clubs and societies are everywhere formed: both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace. So that, beside the improvements which they receive from knowledge and the liberal arts, it is impossible but they must feel an increase of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together, and contributing to each other’s pleasure and entertainment.

(Hume 1996, 169–70)

In this passage from his essay ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, David Hume identifies the ‘spirit of the age’ as one of sociability. Men, and women, meet in polite and easy company and together they create a revolution in manners and thinking. Crucially, they need one another: men can educate and elevate female understanding, women can refine and make more polite the behaviour of men.¹ Although Hume’s is the more famous, Henry Fielding’s essay ‘On Conversation’, published in his Miscellanies (1743), makes broadly similar points: ‘Man is generally represented as an Animal formed for and delighted in Society’ (DeMaria 1996, 825). Similarly, if more briefly, Samuel Johnson referred to his own period as a ‘clubbable’ age (1775). Clubs, societies, coteries, conversational circles, literary groups, salons, coffee houses – all of these are ideas and spaces we associate with the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century literature also associated these ideas with its own culture. While other cultures and histories have just as good a claim on many of these terms, it is the eighteenth century that presents these ideas as its own dominant self-image. The very term ‘sociability’ was coined by natural law theorists in the early eighteenth century as a response to the sense that ‘society’ existed outside of the state. This is the foundation on which Habermas builds his theory of an eighteenth-century public sphere.

This chapter takes the theme of ‘literary communities’ as a deliberately capacious trope in which various aspects of eighteenth-century society and literature can intertwine. Literary communities here include historical literary groups, writers meeting together, formally or informally, inspiring and encouraging each other’s work; literary representations of community; and the interactions between readers and writers. All of these different kinds of literary formation figure in this chapter as a way of considering eighteenth-century self-representations. However, the idealised consensus of Habermas’s public sphere is also under challenge in the eighteenth century, as writers and artists fear the splintering as much as they celebrate the consolidation of community. Eighteenth-century literature self-consciously adopts the task of representing society to itself, but this then entails showing the splits, factions and divisions which characterise society as much as the ideals of community. Hume’s and Fielding’s ‘sociable’ and Johnson’s ‘clubbable’ era resonate with Gay’s much darker vision of eighteenth-century society in The Beggar’s Opera (1728), especially in Lockit’s expression of it: ‘Lions, wolves, and vultures don’t live together in herds, droves or flocks. Of all animals of prey, man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his neighbour, and yet we herd together’ (Gay 1986, 98–9). Similarly, while many books dedicated to the art of conversation presented talk as a sociable and ethical ideal, they also articulated anxieties about the talker’s capacity to lie to and to bully others.² The tropes of textual conversations and literary groups that underlie this book, then, are not always ideal formations, but they present debates that are distinctive to the eighteenth century in their pervasiveness and significance. Central to the ideas and practices of literary sociability are the literary groups – real and fictional – which pervade eighteenth-century literature.

Literary groups

When Virginia Woolf imagined her hero/heroine Orlando returning to eighteenth-century London, she represented her as being mesmerised by the image of Dryden, Addison and Pope together at the Cocoa Tree chocolate house. Woolf’s own footnote draws attention to the obvious historical error here which can be corrected with reference to ‘any textbook of literature’. (Dryden died in 1700, when Pope was only 12, too young to drink chocolate in public places.) The error is never corrected however, because the names of the three writers function as an ‘incantation’ to Orlando, awakening her own aspiration to be a writer. This ambition will also draw her to the social parties of the Countess R——, where, it is reported, Pope occasionally visits. Woolf’s cameo portrait attempts to represent the era, even if only in caricature. Her talismanic image of the eighteenth century is of writers meeting together, in coffee houses and in drawing rooms. Eighteenth-century literary clubs and writers often drew upon the images of the circle of wits surrounding Dryden which met at Will’s Coffee-house or of Addison’s ‘little Senate’ at Button’s or of Pope’s group of Scriblerians meeting around St James’s Palace. Steele announced in the first issue of The Tatler (12 April 1709) that accounts of poetry would be dated from Will’s Coffee-house, in obvious allusion to Dryden’s circle. The Guardian set up a famous lion’s head at Button’s, through which readers might post letters to the periodical (No. 98 3 July 1713). Fielding and Sterne drew on aspects of Scriblerian culture: Fielding signing many of his plays as ‘Scriblerus Secundus’, Sterne rewriting the Scriblerian work of The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus in Tristram Shandy. Other writers also paid homage to the Scriblerian name: Bonnell Thornton published occasionally under the pseudonym ‘Martin Scribbler, Jun’, Burney signed herself in a whimsical letter to her father as ‘Francesca Scriblerus’ and the labouring poet James Woodhouse published The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus (c.1795). The appeal of the literary group was obvious. Whether literary or not, groups certainly offered writers an immediate audience for their works, a supportive and safe environment in which to experiment and to innovate, a group of friends who might aid in the publication and positive reception of their books.

Of the formal literary groups, the Scriblerians are certainly the most significant. Their interaction fostered writings and publications that are now central to our ideas of early eighteenth-century literary culture. In addition to the support and inspiration which they gave to one other, there are a number of collaboratively written works. The most interesting of these is The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, the account of the education of an eccentric pedant, brought up by his father Cornelius according to a slavish devotion to the ancients. Although the full text was not published by Pope until 1741, its origin can be dated to early 1714, when the Scriblerians met as a club in Arbuthnot’s rooms in St James’s Palace. Martinus is first introduced to us as ‘a certain Venerable Person, who frequented the Out-side of the Palace of St James’s’ (Kerby-Miller 1988, 91), as if a Scriblerian-manqué. Accused of criminal conversation by a Spanish man – when, Martinus claims, he had looked upon his wife’s inner thigh only in the interests of the purest science, to study the miraculous pomegranate which blossomed there – Martinus Scriblerus now roams the world, outcast from society, trusting in the editor of the memoirs to make known his discoveries. In an introduction addressed to the reader, Pope assumes the guise of Scriblerus’s historiographer, he who found the manuscript of the memoirs on the pavement of Pall-Mall (haunt of the Scriblerians who met at least once in a Pall-Mall coffee house outside St James’s). This introduction immediately frames Martinus as a central figure for the Scriblerians as a group:

he for some years continued his Correspondence, and communicated to me many of his Projects for the benefit of mankind. He sent me some of his Writings, and recommended to my care the recovery of others, straggling about the world, and assumed by other men. The last time I heard from him was on occasion of his Strictures on the Dunciad; since when, several years being elaps’d, I have reason to believe this excellent Person is either dead, or carry’d by his vehement thirst of knowledge into some remote, or perhaps undiscover’d Region of the world. (93–4)

The explicit allusion to Scriblerus’s commentary on Pope’s Dunciad, the implicit allusion to Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, and the correspondence of projects by which to reform mankind all point to the Scriblerian circle. Within the Memoirs itself, the account of Martinus’s birth, education and early life draws upon the knowledge and interests of all the Scriblerians. For example, Martinus’s birth prefigures the rage against hack writing: ‘on the night before he was born, Mrs Scriblerus dream’d she was brought to bed of a huge Ink-horn, out of which issued several large streams of Ink’ (98) and such quarrels as that of Cornelius Scriblerus with his son’s wet-nurse over her eating beef (105–7) draw upon Arbuthnot’s knowledge and interests in medical debates. Not only does the penultimate chapter hint at Martinus’s voyages to those lands Gulliver would explore, but as a child his father invented for him ‘a Geographical suit of cloaths’ to help him understand the world: ‘He had a French Hat with an African Feather, Holland Shirts and Flanders Lace, English Cloth lin’d with Indian Silk, his Gloves were Italian, and his Shoes were Spanish: He was made to observe this, and daily catechis’d thereupon, which his Father was wont to call “Travelling at home”’ (107). Pope later noted that the character of Martinus Scriblerus was chosen as that of ‘a man of capacity enough; that had dipped into every art and science, but injudiciously in each’ (Sherburn 1934, 76). Martinus as an individual stands as an inverse image of the group (who would see themselves as having dipped judiciously into many arts and sciences). Martinus’s fractured, contradictory nature is invoked as a satire on Locke’s theories of the discontinuities of identity, because the self is constituted by a consciousness which can always alter:

Crambe would tell his Instructor, that All men were not singular; that Individuality could hardly be praedicated of any man, for it was commonly said that a man is not the same he was, that madmen are beside themselves, and drunken men come to themselves; which shews, that few men have that most valuable logical endowment, Individuality. (119)

Passages of this sort satirise theories of individual identity and figure Martinus, appropriately, as many-selved. In this way, Martinus can be seen as an inverted image of his many creators and a mirror of the medley form of Memoirs themselves in which ‘whenever [the Reader] begins to think any one Chapter dull, the style will be immediately changed in the next’ (94).³

Pope’s conversations with Spence concerning The Memoirs suggest that its collaborative publication was important to the Scriblerians’ self-image as a group. He spoke, for example, of how the project ‘was begun by a club of some of the greatest wits of the age. Lord Oxford [Robert Harley], the Bishop of Rochester [Francis Atterbury], Mr Pope, Congreve, Arbuthnot, Swift, and others. Gay often held the pen; and Addison liked it very well, and was not disinclined to come in to it’ (Sherburn 1934, 76). Here, Pope extends the image of collaboration beyond the Tory interests of the formal Scriblerian group (Pope, Swift, Parnell, Arbuthnot, Gay and Oxford). He boasts how ‘[t]he Deipnosophy consisted of disputes on ridiculous tenets of all sorts’, alluding to the art of learned discussion while dining which takes its name from Athenæus’s Deipnosophistae (written after A.D. 228). This recounts imagined discussions at a series of fictitious banquets attended by a varied and extensive cast of prominent intellectuals. These discussions are riddled with quarrels and conversations on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from the dishes before them to literary criticism. The Scriblerians were certainly proud of their status as a group, or ‘deipnosophy’. They wrote many joint letters to fellow members, composed humorous poetic invitations to club meetings and referred to themselves as a club long after they had all dispersed from St James’s Palace. The following playful invitation, each couplet written by a different contributor, illustrates the self-consciousness of the Scriblerians as a club:

The Invitation [April 10?, 1714]

My Lord, forsake your Politick Utopians,

To sup, like Jove, with blameless Ethiopians.

Pope.

In other Words, You with the Staff,

Leave John of Bucks, come here and laugh.

Dean.

For Frolick Mirth give ore affairs of State,

To night be happy, be to morrow great.

Parnell.

Give Clans your money, us your smile

your Scorn to T[ownsh]end & Ar[g]ile

Doctor.

Leave Courts, and hye to simple Swains,

Who feed no Flock upon no Plains.

Gay.

The Reply Apr: 10: [1]714

You merry five who filled with blisful nectar

Can Phillips sing as Homer chanted Hector

I wil attend to hear your tuneful Lays

And wish yr merits meet with one who pays –

(Kerby-Miller 1988, 353–4)⁴

Each couplet names the club member by handwriting, signature and theme. Pope echoes his translation of The Iliad (in which the Greek gods do not deign to ‘grace / The Feasts of Aethiopia’s blameless Race’); Swift uses the most comic rhyme (‘Staff’/’laugh’) and, like Parnell, exhorts Oxford to leave politics and join their fun; the Scottish Arbuthnot writes of the topical case of the government giving money to the clans; and Gay was to publish his mock-pastoral series, The Shepherd’s Week, just five days later (15 April 1714). In turn Oxford’s reply alludes to the Scriblerian feud against Ambrose Philips, whose pastorals had been praised in The Guardian at the seeming expense of Pope’s. Although this was initially Pope’s battle, it quickly became a Scriblerian one too. Philips told his friends at Button’s Coffee-house, according to Pope’s own report, that Pope ‘was entered into a cabal with Dean Swift and others to write against the Whig interest, and in particular to undermine his own reputation and that of his friends Steele and Addison’ (Pope 1956, I 229).

In addition to sharing literary feuds and cultural values – a disdain for shallow or arcane knowledge, contempt for what they perceived as populist writing – we can find countless textual echoes among their works. Both Swift and Pope use the image of the spider to symbolise the modern hack writer (in the Battle of the Books and An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot). In the introduction to A Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, Swift invokes ‘bamboozle’ and ‘bite’ as colloquialisms still in use (Swift 1995, 113); in The Beggar’s Opera, Lucy laments how she has been ‘bamboozled and bit’ (Gay 1986, 91). References in their letters and reported conversations also make explicit the extent to which they inspired and encouraged each other’s work. The inspiration for Gay’s ballad opera, The Beggar’s Opera, is usually traced to Swift’s suggestion that he write a ‘Newgate Pastoral’ (1963–5, II 215). In Pope’s poem An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735), Pope dramatises himself as in deep conversation with Swift (ll.272–8) and Pope’s later dialogue poems might be read as attempts to recreate the context of the Scriblerian club after its demise. Pope’s comments to Spence about the writing of The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus suggest a nostalgia for the heady days of 1714 when the group met regularly in London: ‘The design [of The Memoirs] was carried on much farther than has appeared in print; and was stopped by some of the gentlemen being dispersed or otherwise engaged (about the year 1715)’ (Sherburn 1934, 76).

Many later groups might be cited as continuing the kind of literary camaraderie evident among the Scriblerians. The Nonsense Club, for example, fostered collaborative writing. Colman and Thornton’s joint editing of the essay journal The Connoisseur with contributions from other club members and the Two Odes (1760) which burlesqued the poetry of William Mason and Thomas Gray and which were written by Colman and Lloyd are the most notable examples. They also produced many works inspired by the group and addressed to group members,...