The 18th century: Publication of political literature
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. During the
next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two factors combined to produce an
enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert
Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering
electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played
their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–
13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection,
current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions
to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again
overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument
against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe
and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the
attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that
was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous
works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of
a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his
prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter
generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in
preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the
subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism. After Defoe’s Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements
of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–
12). In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from
aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to
see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with
descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances
were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic.
Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy,
and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an
adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account
of “Chevy Chase” and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply
influential on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Milton’s
Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature
and as a source of religious wisdom. The success with which Addison and Steele established the
periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than
300 imitators before the end of the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity about
the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its
mark on much subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of
the “magazine,” founding the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of its most
prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of
Johnson’s career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the
status of criticism were transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded 1749) and
the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period
the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their
importance.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals. His
early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism (1711) combining ambition of
argument with great stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-
Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of topographical poetry. The mock-heroic The Rape of
the Lock (final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary
allusiveness and a delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a
potent sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It explores
with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of five-stress rhyming lines). Much
of the wit of Pope’s verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis.
That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by “Eloisa to Abelard”
(1717), which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisa’s struggle to
reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labors between 1713
and 1720 was his energetically sustained and scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be
followed by the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpole’s
England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and
despairing. In this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the
writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on
Man (1733–34) was a grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling
writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series of Horatian
imitations, and the final four-book version of The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to
anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and perversion of once-
hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much
more optimistic vision. In The Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but then
massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson meditated upon and described with
fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition
and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian
science), from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of man’s
relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization
and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England
enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is Spenserian, and its wryly
developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat
and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the
World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the
most direct and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s principal competitor as a writer
of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)
catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s
Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain sharp, subtle writing, and
his work for the stage, especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours After Marriage
(1717; written with John Arbuthnot and Pope), and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a
sustained ability to breed original and vital effects from witty generic cross-fertilization.
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay
favored octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His
technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humor of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published
1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime distinction is, of course,
as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His period as secretary to the distinguished
man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend and consolidate his reading,
and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning to chart the
anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom
from Christian or Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art
thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant
ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy through the carefully assumed voice
of a “nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political
goals is demonstrated by The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to
prevent the imposition of a new, and debased, coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for
preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent nature of his
relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an
invented persona achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court,
and that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger
prey. At its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part readers from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge them to rethink from first
principles their notions of humanity. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends
as a maddened misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury, which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s
rejection of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated
with his sense of aesthetic form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic,
benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial
than now seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems
warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714–29),
which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do. Mandeville stressed the
indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s prosperous
functioning. He thus favored an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts than
Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw
it. Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly
skewering unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by, among others, William Law, John
Dennis, and Francis Hutcheson. George Berkeley, who criticized both Mandeville and
Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the age’s irreligious tendencies and the
obscurantist defiance by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of common sense. His
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between
Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about the nature of human
perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of
Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the
human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by
reason. He uniquely merged intellectual rigor with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully
turned essays, including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and
his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in
1779. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the
spectator’s or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain. An
equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious,
socially oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s masterpiece of
laissez-faire economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William
Robertson, and Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of intellectual
life centered in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
