A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature

John Richetti

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781405135023
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119082125
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature is a lively exploration of one of the most diverse and innovative periods in literary history. Capturing the richness and excitement of the era, this book provides extensive coverage of major authors, poets, dramatists, and journalists of the period, such as Dryden, Pope and Swift, while also exploring the works of important writers who have received less attention by modern scholars, such as Matthew Prior and Charles Churchill. Uniquely, the book also discusses noncanonical, working-class writers and demotic works of the era.

During the eighteenth-century, Britain experienced vast social, political, economic, and existential changes, greatly influencing the literary world.  The major forms of verse, poetry, fiction and non-fiction, experimental works, drama, and political prose from writers such as Montagu, Finch, Johnson, Goldsmith and Cowper, are discussed here in relation to their historical context. A History of Eighteenth-Century British Literature is essential reading for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of English literature.

Topics covered include: 

• Verse in the early 18th century, from Pope, Gay, and Swift to Addison, Defoe, Montagu, and Finch
• Poetry from the mid- to late-century, highlighting the works of Johnson, Gray, Collins, Smart, Goldsmith, and Cowper among others, as well as women and working-class poets
• Prose Fiction in the early and 18th century, including Behn, Haywood, Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett
• The novel past mid-century, including experimental works by Johnson, Sterne, Mackenzie, Walpole, Goldsmith, and Burney
• Non-fiction prose, including political and polemical prose
• 18th century drama

1
Verse in the Early Eighteenth Century, I: Pope, Gay, Swift

I. Alexander Pope

In An Essay on Criticism, the young Alexander Pope observes that: “True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,/As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance” (ll. 362–3). There is an element of pathos in this elegant couplet from the crippled, dwarfish (from spinal tuberculosis) Pope (no dancer he!). But the larger lesson Pope draws is that writing (and especially verse) is an acquired skill, a professional technique, a hard won mastery. At the same time, Pope links the highest literary craft to the larger cultural and social world compactly evoked in learning to dance, thereby demystifying poetry to some extent as an exalted or privileged cultural practice. Pope’s poem outlines the difficulties of acquiring that skill, dispensing advice not just to would‐be critics and appreciators of verse but to poets themselves, who are urged to “First follow Nature” (l. 68), that is to imitate the natural order and regularity of the cosmos, qualities enshrined in the ancient “RULES of old,” which were not, he reminds us, arbitrarily “devis’d” but “discover’d” (l. 88) by the ancient writers. So one must study the classics, especially Homer: “Be Homer’s Works your Study, and Delight,/Read them by Day, and meditate by Night” (ll. 124–5) and Virgil, “And let your Comment be the Mantuan Muse” (l. 129). But the crucial next step from the general imperatives of observing “Nature” and imitating the classics is the hard work of specific poetic elaboration and articulation: “True Wit is Nature to advantage drest,/What oft was thought, but ne’er so well Exprest” (ll. 297–8), as Pope puts it in a famous summarizing couplet.

Pope’s emphasis is on the form of poetry rather than its content, although among the errors in judgment he condemns is judging “by Numbers,” that is by metrical smoothness (ll. 337–8). Such “tuneful Fools” seek only to please their Ear:

Not mend their Minds; as some to Church repair,

Not for the Doctrine, but the Musick there.

(ll. 342–3)

Overall, however, for Pope poetry would seem to be the art of memorable and forceful “restatement,” as it were. Samuel Johnson remarked to James Boswell in 1781 of Pope’s virtuosity as a poet, as a peerless master of technique: “Sir, a thousand years may elapse before there shall appear another man with a power of versification equal to that of Pope.”¹ In his “Life of Pope” in The Lives of the Poets (1779–81), Johnson finds in Pope’s An Essay on Man (1733–4), a poem he disliked as banal and self‐satisfied, an extraordinary triumph of form over nearly empty subject matter, a perfect exemplification of what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed:

This Essay affords an egregious instance of the predominance of genius, the dazzling splendour of imagery, and the seductive powers of eloquence. Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised. The reader feels his mind full, though he learns nothing…Surely a man of no very comprehensive search may venture to say that he has heard all this before; but it was never till now recommended by such a blaze of embellishment, or such sweetness of melody. The vigorous contraction of some thoughts, the luxuriant amplification of others, the incidental illustrations, and sometimes the dignity, sometimes the softness of the verses, enchain philosophy, suspend criticism, and oppress judgement by overpowering pleasure.²

Pope’s work represents the poetic high point of the first half of the eighteenth century, recognized as such by Johnson, the greatest critic of the latter part of the century. Johnson’s praise of Pope’s skill emphasizes his command of stylistic and tonal variations from dignity to softness; the “contraction” and “amplification” he so admires speak to Pope’s control and sense of pacing, his avoidance of the monotony and clockwork predictability to which the rhyming couplet in lesser hands is prone. At the beginning of his “Life of Pope,” Johnson muses on Pope’s beginnings as a poet who recognized that he was the heir to the style of verse that Dryden had perfected: “Dryden died May 1, 1701 [actually 1700], some days before Pope was twelve, so early must he therefore have felt the power of harmony, and the zeal of genius” (XXIII, 1041). Johnson quotes Dryden on the affinities between poetry and music, the latter being for Dryden “inarticulate poetry,” and thus says Johnson “among the excellencies of Pope, therefore, must be mentioned the melody of his metre” (XXIII, 1225). In his “Life of Dryden,” Johnson quotes Pope’s praise of Dryden in An Essay on Criticism: “Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join/The varying verse, the full‐resounding line,/The long majestick march, and energy divine.” For Johnson Dryden is nothing less than the inventor of modern English verse in its fullness and metrical sweetness: “Dryden knew how to chuse the flowing and the sonorous words; to vary the pauses, and adjust the accents; to diversify the cadence, and yet preserve the smoothness of the metre” (XXI, 491).

Johnson’s “melody” of versification is, largely, a subjective feature that is hard to pin down (the “smoothness” he speaks of might be a better, less metaphorical term), but one always hears in reading Pope and his great predecessor, Dryden, language and rhythms that to our contemporary ears sound unforced, invariably eloquent and stylized speech, but restrained and controlled, creating to some extent a cultivated and always urbane voice speaking to us rather than shouting or hectoring. Although bombast and declamatory excess are common enough in lesser eighteenth‐century verse, as we shall see, Pope we may say could learn from reading Dryden how to avoid it.

Consider as two examples of what Pope would have absorbed from his predecessor but at the same time altered by his distinctive style. First, here are the opening lines of Dryden’s satire, Mac Flecknoe (1681), an attack on his rival dramatist and poet, Thomas Shadwell. Flecknoe muses about who shall succeed him as the emperor, as it turns out, of dull and supremely bad writing:

All humane things are subject to decay,

And, when Fate summons, Monarchs must obey:

This Fleckno found, who, like Augustus, young

Was call’d to Empire, and had govern’d long:

In Prose and Verse, was own’d, without dispute

Through all the Realms of Non‐sense, absolute.

Dryden’s poem is a mock‐heroic satire, employing in these opening lines the tone and diction of heroic verse (the “melody” or the smoothness that Johnson praised in his verse), with its dignified evocations of timeless truths as they apply to the mortality even of monarchs ironically inappropriate for what will be revealed as inane, utterly worthless and nonsensical writing, and of course in the reference to Augustus Dryden invokes what seems at first like a temporarily resonant equation between Flecknoe’s empire of (bad) writing and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Verse in the Early Eighteenth Century, I
• 2 Verse in the Early Eighteenth Century, II
• 3 English Verse, III: Mid‐Century Onwards
• 4 Eighteenth‐Century Verse, IV
• 5 Prose Fiction in the Early Eighteenth Century
• 6 Prose Fiction in the Mid‐Eighteenth Century
• 7 The Novel Past Mid‐Century: New Directions and Experiments
• 8 Non‐Fictional Prose, I
• 9 Non‐Fictional Prose, II
• 10 Eighteenth‐Century Drama
• Index
• End User License Agreement