Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century Literature

The Politics of Private Virtue in the Age of Walpole

Emrys Jones

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349453122, 9781137300492
• eBook ISBN: 9781137300508
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Friendship and Allegiance explores the concept of friendship as it was defined, contested and distorted by writers of the early eighteenth century. Setting well-known canonical texts (The Beggar's Opera, Gulliver's Travels) alongside lesser-known works, it portrays a literary world renegotiating the meaning of public and private virtue.

Part I

Friendship in Crisis

1

Scriblerian Friendship and Public Crisis

When the South Sea Bubble collapsed in the autumn of 1720, it not only ruined the financial hopes of countless investors, but also had a huge impact on the political landscape of early eighteenth-century Britain.¹ The crisis effectively inaugurated the period of Sir Robert Walpole’s political supremacy, which was to last for over twenty years but which would always be overshadowed by questions of the minister’s own involvement in the affair and his role in protecting the surviving directors of the ill-fated scheme. The South Sea disaster can be described as a public crisis, because both the rise and fall of stocks were, of course, dependent on the state of public confidence in the company; however, this can also be considered a public event in the sense that its outcome was closely tied up with the nation’s parliamentary representation, and because the question of where to apportion blame would inform debate for the subsequent two decades.

This chapter, and Part I of the book more generally, will explore how ideas and ideals of private friendship were challenged in response to such moments of public crisis: how events like the South Sea crisis not only demonstrated the potential political impact of public hysteria, but also revealed a fundamental instability in the conception of friendship as it related to participation in spheres of public activity. One of the most popular ways of discussing public crises, particularly financial crises like the South Sea Bubble, has often been to use the language of pestilence, madness, plague and providence.² These are tropes which explain human actions and movements on a macroscopic level, treating them as general, mass phenomena. However, the financial crises of Walpole’s time, perhaps to a greater or more traceable extent than those today, were also caused by individual decisions, by networks of friends spreading information and advice, and by individual justifications for actions which might have run counter to a person’s avowed ideological stance.

Colin Nicholson has touched upon this idea by examining the way that the supposed Tory satirists of the Scriblerus Club – Pope, Swift, Gay – engaged in the fashionable vice of stock-jobbing in the 1710s and in South Sea year, in Gay’s case to his great financial disadvantage.³ Though the South Sea scheme could be perceived as inimical to the landed interest which all three writers defended in their works, through a mixture of social pressure and political ambivalence they participated enthusiastically in a world of innovative credit that they would elsewhere condemn. Some might identify such Scriblerian stock-jobbing as an offshoot of the same hypocrisy that would allow Pope to attack the literary marketplace in The Dunciad at the same time as catering quite specifically for that marketplace.⁴ However, what makes the poet’s involvement in the South Sea crisis all the more problematic for his self-representations is the way that it serves to undermine the discrete, morally idealistic model of friendship which he would continue to advocate throughout his life. Chapter 4 will specifically examine this problem for Pope by turning to his Epistle to Bathurst, a work intimately concerned with the events of South Sea year, but also written shortly in advance of another momentous public crisis, the furore over Walpole’s Excise Bill in 1733.⁵ In order to pave the way for this reading, but also to emphasise the social dimensions of the South Sea crisis and their longer-term impact on political discourse, it is worth outlining the ways that this later event may be read alongside the earlier calamity.

At first glance, the connections between the South Sea crisis and the excise crisis might not be obvious. Their similarity as events with an emphatically public dimension is demonstrated both by their impact on the career and attitudes of Sir Robert Walpole, and by the similar ways that widespread popular involvement in each crisis was envisaged. In some ways Walpole resembled Pope, not simply in the sense that both men were the foremost masters of their respective crafts throughout the 1720s and 1730s, but also because both reacted to the notion of a powerful, vocal public with ambivalence. The rise of a public sphere, as it has been described by Habermas, brought with it new opportunities for both men, demonstrated by Pope’s crusade against the hacks of Grub Street and by Walpole’s manipulation of burgeoning news outlets to combat his detractors.⁶ Yet both minister and poet remained eager, as did other political and literary figures of the time, either to distance themselves from rising public arenas, or to portray themselves as unfortunate victims of the new order.

In February 1722, Walpole told the House of Commons that he was no longer in possession of his Bank of England stock, and that in fact his sole investments were now in the South Sea Company itself.⁷ Thus he could undermine allegations that he was seeking to sabotage the company for his own gain. At the same time he could present himself not as a corrupt and cunning beneficiary of the general misfortune, but as a fellow investor, chastened by the occurrences of the preceding years and so naturally reluctant to grant too much power to unchecked public whims. The dramatic events of South Sea year had catapulted Walpole and Townshend into power, precipitating the deaths of Lord Stanhope, Craggs the Elder and Craggs the Younger, and also resulting in the resignation of Lord Sunderland.⁸

It is characteristic of Walpole’s cautious approach to politics in the wake of the South Sea collapse that he should himself have been responsible for saving Sunderland from parliamentary retribution.⁹ At the same time as he was benefiting most clearly from the national calamity caused by the speculative disaster, his actions showed him determined to resist any public outcry for political scapegoats. He is keen in his 1722 speech to put himself forward as a man with ‘the public good principally in view’, but the crisis has itself demonstrated that the public is not necessarily capable of recognising its own good and acting with it in mind. In this light, it is expedient for Walpole to remind his colleagues that even if he were driven by no great altruism or hope for public profit, his own self-interest would still make him a firm supporter of the troubled company.

Walpole’s desire not to concede too much power to public opinions and moods extends naturally into his involvement in the political press during his two decades of power. Indeed, it translates into a much broader disapproval of public controversy. When he himself entered the print arena anonymously in 1735, he sought to justify his management of Britain’s finances from 1720 onwards with an outright attack on the era of ill-informed and destructive public debate which the South Sea crisis had seemingly ushered in:

the Characters of Men in high Stations have generally been their Protection, not from Parliamentary Enquiries, not from regular and just Accusations, not from due and legal Prosecutions for Offences committed, or supposed to be committed; but from public Defamation, from publick Insults, from scandalous and seditious Libels, rendring [sic] that Authority contemptible, which can only support Magistracy, and without which Government cannot subsist.¹⁰

In a work chiefly concerned with the details of the South Sea rescue and of the so-called ‘Bank Contract’ which Walpole had allegedly been present for the signing of, there is an unspoken connection between the public’s temptation to invest rashly and its gullibility in accepting printed falsehoods and seditions.¹¹ Nevertheless, the ‘publick Defamation’ to which Walpole refers had reached its true height in 1733, when he had attempted to alter the way that taxes were levied on wine and tobacco.

The principle behind Walpole’s Excise Bill was simple and apparently innocuous enough: replacing customs duties with inland taxation, levied at the point of sale, would help in the fight against smuggling, further Britain’s reputation as a trade hub and ultimately allow for reductions in the unpopular land tax.¹² As is well known, however, the public were not easily convinced of the scheme’s merits. Unexpectedly strong resistance was organised by the forces of the political opposition, presumably fearful that one of their strongest lines of attack against Walpole would be denied them if he ever succeeded in abolishing the land tax altogether. Objections to Walpole’s Bill focused on its supposed mean-spiritedness and on its tyrannical implications. The public outrage against the excise scheme stemmed from a sense that the government wanted ever increasing and ever more intrusive involvement in the marketplace. Perhaps the end result would be nothing less than a general excise, a notion which for Walpole’s opponents came to take on an almost apocalyptic dimension, implying a tax on one’s rights and freedoms as much as on one’s goods.

This co-ordinated stirring of public anger of course had an impact on the government’s perceptions of public debate. Walpole’s supporter John Henley summed up the widely held Court Whig view when he complained in the immediate aftermath of the Bill’s withdrawal, that ‘Instance of popular Mistakes are Innumerable’.¹³ James Pitt – under his regular pseudonym Francis Osborne – likewise articulated Walpole’s frustration with the public uproar, when he ridiculed the modern definition of public wisdom in the pro-ministerial London Journal. Is it true wisdom, he asks there, ‘To make them meet in Bodies all over the Kingdom, and resolve strenuously to oppose an imaginary Monster in any Form or Shape?’¹⁴

These Court Whig arguments against a writing and reading public that had found its oppositional voice are perhaps not particularly surprising; on their own, they may be seen only as the most obvious weapons of a reactionary press against a spirit of popular discourse which was openly criticising or questioning the government’s position. Such an argument might be adopted not just by Walpole and his apologists, but by almost any insecure political leader in any time or place. What makes the press’s reaction to the excise crisis more unique and emphasises the continuity between events of 1720 and those of 1733, is a shared imaginative framework for understanding the public discontent, certain echoes of the previous disaster in the way the more purely political – and arguably more trivial – crisis was discussed. The fear of contagious public lunacy which had been expressed during the South Sea crisis manifested itself in much the same imagery, with hysterical, ailing stock-jobbers replaced by naïve, infected electors.

In January 1734, one pro-ministerial publication, the Corn-Cutter’s Journal, describes a visit to a fictional madhouse where certain, miserable inmates live in total fear of ‘an Excise upon Cucumers’ [sic].¹⁵ The trope of insanity here is reminiscent of several moments in literature from the time of the Bubble. In one journal from June 1720, with the fortunes of the South Sea Company and its stockholders still in the ascendant, news was posted from ‘the City of Whimsey’ where many citizens were seen to ‘run so madly’ after profit that they invested not only in the ‘Mer del Zud Company’ but also in countless other insubstantial schemes.¹⁶ The updates from Whimsey were fairly constant throughout the spring and summer of 1720, and while not always relevant to the financial state of Britain, did stress the worry that irrational impulses and compulsions could all too easily hijack the public imagination. Gary Hentzi has described this phenomenon with reference to Daniel Defoe’s novels and contributions to the periodical press, as a recognition of ‘the intrusion of intangible psychological factors – desire, fantasy, even compulsive behavior – into the rational world of economics’.¹⁷

Indeed, this intrusion is perhaps most thoroughly and explicitly described in relation to the South Sea crisis by The Director, an outlet for Defoe’s political and financial views which has been cited as one of the most consistent exponents of the investment-as-madness trope.¹⁸ In November 1720, the journal commented that the plummeting of stock prices was due to ‘a common Frenzy’ which spread ‘like a Disease’ through the people.¹⁹ Several weeks later, referring to the growing fashion among desperate investors for selling off their estates to foreign owners, Defoe commented that

a National Kind of Madness possesses us at this Time, and, which indeed is too much our peculiar, (viz.) To run away with our own Notions and Fancies, with a violent fury even against ourselves, without considering either Reasons or Remedies.²⁰

In each case, Defoe specifically envisages madness as contagious, general and consuming, a disease spread through social contact and the sharing of anxieties. Cases of much the same disorder can be diagnosed in the press at the time of the excise crisis and after it. Some weeks after the trip to the asylum is described early in 1734, the Corn-Cutter’s Journal publishes a letter, supposedly from a member of a society of freeholders, one Samuel Bevil:

There never yet was an Epidemical Disease so universally cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Tilte
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Friendship in Crisis
• Part II Friendship by Trope
• Epilogue: Friendship and Rural Retreat
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index