_____________________________________________________________________

BACHELOR OF ARTS
DIPLOMA IN ARTS

LITERATURE 3
LITERATURES OF THE SEVENTEETH AND EIGHTEENTH
CENTURIES

WRITERS

PART 1: SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Units 1-11: Richard Hayes, NUI Maynooth
Dr Mary C. Newbould, Newnham College, Cambridge

PART 2: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Units 12-21: Dr Aileen Douglas, Trinity College Dublin
Dr Mary C. Newbould, Newnham College, Cambridge

EDITOR
Dr Amy Prendergast
Dr Kay MacKeogh MPhil PhD
Dr Edel Semple, PhD
_____________________________________________________________________

LITERATURE 3
LITERATURES OF THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH
CENTURIES

PUBLISHED BY
Oscail
Dublin City University

PRODUCED BY
EvriBooks

TYPEFACE
Verdana

TYPESETTING AND LAYOUT

Paul Moore
Gráinne Reddy
Úna Ryan

COPYRIGHT
© Oscail Dublin City University, 1994-2013

PUBLICATION DATE
2013.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted,

in any form or by any means, without permission.
 CONTENTS: LITERATURE 3
UNIT 1: INTRODUCTION: AN INCENDIARY AGE
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW 1-3
‘FROM THIS CHYMIC FLAME’ 1-6
THE FLAME OF ‘ENLIGHTENED’ THOUGHT 1-10
THE PHYSICAL AND MENTAL EYE/I 1-15
REVIEW 1-20

UNIT 2: LOSS AND RENEWAL: PASTORAL POEMS BY JOHN MILTON

MILTON’S CAREER AND ‘OCCASIONAL WRITING’ 2-2
MILTON AND LOSS 2-4
PASTORAL POETRY AND THE ELIZABETHAN TRADITION 2-7
LYCIDAS: LOSS AND RENEWAL, AND FORGING AN INDEPENDENT POETIC IDENTITY 2-10
REVIEW 2-24

UNIT 3: CIVIL WAR TO INTERREGNUM: ENGAGEMENT IN THE PUBLIC

SPHERE AND THE ‘COUNTRY HOUSE’ POEM
THE ‘COUNTRY HOUSE’ POEM 3-2
JOHN DENHAM AND COOPER’S HILL: A ROYALIST ESTATE POEM? 3-7
ANDREW MARVELL: UPON APPLETON HOUSE AND TENDING THE NATION’S GARDENS 3-13
ANDREW MARVELL: ‘AN HORATIAN ODE UPON CROMWELL’S RETURN FROM IRELAND’ 3-19
REVIEW 3-26

UNIT 4: SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL PROSE: JOHN MILTON'S

AREOPAGITICA
MILTON’S OCCASIONAL PROSE WRITING: A CONTROVERSIAL AUTHOR? 4-2
CENSORSHIP 4-3
MILTON’S PROSE STYLE 4-5
AREOPAGITICA 4-7
AREOPAGITICA AS ‘LITERATURE’ IN AND OF ITS TIME 4-26
REVIEW 4-27

UNIT 5: LOSS AND RENEWAL IN JOHN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST

APPROACHES TO PARADISE LOST 5-2
PARADISE LOST: STYLE AND STRUCTURE 5-6
THE EPIC POEM 5-6
THE STRUCTURE OF PARADISE LOST 5-7
STYLE 5-9
SECTION 1: THE OPENING OF PARADISE LOST 5-12
SECTION 2: THE FALL OF MAN 5-14
PARADISE LOST AS TRAGEDY 5-15
PARADISE LOST, BOOK XII: THE EXPULSION FROM PARADISE 5-21
OTHER ASPECTS OF PARADISE LOST 5-24
REVIEW 5-24

Contents: Literature 3 1
UNIT 6: JOHN BUNYAN'S THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS: AN ALLEGORY OF
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF JOHN BUNYAN (1628-1688) 6-2
THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS AND ALLEGORY 6-5
‘THIS BOOK WILL MAKE A TRAVELLER OF THEE’ 6-11
APOLLYON AND THE PROBLEM OF FREE WILL 6-14
REVIEW 6-19

UNIT 7: RESTORATION TO REVOLUTION (1): DEBAUCH AND DISABILITY

‘A PERIOD OF PARADOXES’ ? 7-2
IMPERFECT ENJOYMENT: JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER (1647-1680) 7-4
THE ‘IMPERFECT ENJOYMENT’ POEM 7-7
DEBAUCHERY AND DISABILITY: ROCHESTER’S IMPERFECT ENJOYMENTS 7-8
‘A PERIOD OF PARADOXES’: TWO POEMS BY ROCHESTER 7-19
‘IMPERFECT ENJOYMENT’: APHRA BEHN AND THE FEMALE PERSPECTIVE 7-23
REVIEW 7-32

UNIT 8: RESTORATION TO REVOLUTION (2)

RESTORED WIT: THE POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN
‘BRICK INTO MARBLE’: DRYDEN, NEOCLASSISM, AND THE‘AUGUSTAN AGE’ 8-3
THE HEROIC COUPLET: ‘THE VEHICLE FOR DIGNIFIED EXPRESSION’ 8-11
ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL 8-14
THE OCCASION: THE POPISH PLOT 8-15
ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL: A PUBLIC POEM 8-17
ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL: THE PREFACE ‘TO THE READER’ 8-18
ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL: THE POEM 8-19
‘CHARACTERS’ IN ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL 8-23
MAC FLECKNOE: LITERARY SATIRE AND THE MOCK-HEROIC POEM 8-25
MAC FLECKNOE: THE BACKGROUND 8-29
MAC FLECKNOE AND THE MOCK-HEROIC 8-30
MAC FLECKNOE: THE SATIRICAL PURPOSE OF THE MOCK-HEROIC 8-32
REVIEW 8-36

UNIT 9: RESTORATION BEYOND REVOLUTION:

WILLIAM CONGREVE’S THE WAY OF THE WORLD
THE CAREER OF WILLIAM CONGREVE (1670 – 1729) 9-2
RESTORATION COMEDY 9-3
THE WORLD OF THE WAY OF THE WORLD 9-5
‘MORAL REALISM’ AND SATIRE IN THE WAY OF THE WORLD 9-8
‘TRUE WIT’ AND ‘AFFECTED WIT’: MIRABELL AND FAINALL 9-11
THE DEDICATION 9-12
TWO WAYS WITH THE WORLD: MIRABELL AND FAINALL 9-16
TWO WAYS WITH THE WORLD: MIRABELL AND LADY WISHFORT 9-18
TWO WAYS WITH THE WORLD? MIRABELL AND MILLAMANT 9-21
THE ‘OLD’ WORLD AND THE NEW 9-23
REVIEW 9-24

UNIT 10: ALEXANDER POPE: THE RAPE OF THE LOCK

THE RAPE OF THE LOCK: THE BACKGROUND 10-2
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK: THE POEM 10-3
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK AND MOCK-HEROIC 10-5

Contents: Literature 3 2
THE SOCIAL WORLD OF THE RAPE OF THE LOCK 10-10
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK’S ‘METAMORPHOSES’ 10-15
REVIEW 10-16

UNIT 11: CREATIVITY AND GENDER: POPE, FINCH, BARBER

ALEXANDER POPE AND AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM 11-3
CONTINUITIES: POPE AND THE POETIC PAST 11-4
NATURE AND THE ANCIENTS IN THE ESSAY 11-6
POETRY AND PUBLICATION: THE CONTEXT 11-11
POETRY AND PUBLICATION: THE FEMALE PERSPECTIVE 11-12
STRATEGIES OF THE FEMALE AUTHOR 11-14
ALTERNATIVE POETICS: RE-DEFINING KEY TERMS 11-16
ALTERNATIVE POETICS: FINDING NEW SUBJECT MATTER FOR POETRY 11-19
REVIEW 11-21

UNIT 12: TRAVEL WRITING AND THE LETTER IN THE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY: LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
THE LETTER IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE 12-2
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU: LIFE AND WRITINGS 12-3
THE LETTER AS A LITERARY GENRE 12-4
TRAVEL LITERATURE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: MONTAGU’S CONTRIBUTION 12-7
TRAVEL WRITING AS SOCIAL COMMENTARY 12-9
THE TURKISH EMBASSY LETTERS IN THEIR EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXT 12-10
QUESTIONS OF ‘DIFFERENCE’ IN THE TURKISH EMBASSY LETTERS 12-11
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORIENTALISM 12-12
‘OTHERNESS’ AND ‘ORIENTALISM’ IN THE TURKISH EMBASSY LETTERS 12-12
REVIEW 12-16

UNIT 13: DANIEL DEFOE: A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR (1722)

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR: THE BACKGROUND 13-2
THE JOURNAL AND LONDON LITERATURE 13-3
FACT AND FICTION: THE QUESTION OF GENRE 13-5
THE STRUCTURE OF THE TEXT 13-7
H.F. AND THE MODERN 13-8
THE SEEING ‘EYE/I’ 13-12
‘EYE/I’: SUBJECTIVE INTERPRETATION AND SCIENTIFIC TRUTH 13-13
REVIEW 13-14

UNIT 14: JONATHAN SWIFT AND IRELAND

SWIFT AND IRELAND 14-2
SWIFT’S WRITING IN THE 1720S 14-3
POLITICAL PAMPHLETS 14-4
IRONY AND IMPERSONATION: A SHORT VIEW AND A MODEST PROPOSAL 14-6
A SHORT VIEW OF THE STATE OF IRELAND 14-7
A MODEST PROPOSAL: INTRODUCTION 14-9
A MODEST PROPOSAL: STRUCTURE 14-10
THE MEANING OF A MODEST PROPOSAL 14-11
REVIEW 14-12

Contents: Literature 3 3
UNIT 15: ‘THE RISE OF THE NOVEL’ (1):
SAMUEL RICHARDSON’S PAMELA (1740)
IAN WATT’S THE RISE OF THE NOVEL 15-3
PAMELA AND ‘FORMAL REALISM’ 15-5
PAMELA’S ‘MORAL PURPOSE’ 15-10
PAMELA AS A ‘REVOLUTIONARY’ TEXT 15-17
REVIEW 15-18

UNIT 16:‘THE RISE OF THE NOVEL’ (2):

HENRY FIELDING AND THE ‘PAMELA CONTROVERSY’
WHAT’S WRONG WITH PAMELA? 16-2
‘THE PAMELA CONTROVERSY’ 16-3
‘THE PAMELA CONTROVERSY’: SHAMELA 16-4
IS SHAMELA SUBVERSIVE OR CONSERVATIVE? 16-7
FIELDING’S ‘MORAL PURPOSE’ AND THE COMIC NOVEL 16-8
REVIEW 16-12

UNIT 17: ‘THE RISE OF THE NOVEL’?

LAURENCE STERNE’S TRISTRAM SHANDY
TRISTRAM SHANDY AND THE ‘RISE OF THE NOVEL’: SOME CRITICAL APPROACHES 17-3
TRISTRAM SHANDY: FORM 17-7
TRISTRAM SHANDY: CONTENT 17-13
‘WHAT IS ALL THIS STORY ABOUT’? 17-22
TRISTRAM SHANDY: LIFE AND WRITING 17-30
WHAT KIND OF ‘NOVEL’ IS TRISTRAM SHANDY? 17-31

UNIT 18: SENTIMENTAL FICTION:

HENRY MACKENZIE’S MAN OF FEELING
SENTIMENT AND SENSIBILITY: DEFINITIONS, ORIGINS 18-2
HENRY MACKENZIE’S MAN OF FEELING 18-11
HARLEY AS SENTIMENTAL HERO 18-14
SENTIMENTAL EXCESS AND SATIRE 18-21
REVIEW 18-24

UNIT 19: JOURNEY NARRATIVES: TOBIAS SMOLLETT’S

EXPEDITION OF HUMPHRY CLINKER
TOBIAS SMOLLETT AS TRAVEL WRITER 19-2
THE GENRES OF HUMPHREY CLINKER 19-4
HUMPHRY CLINKER: A NOVEL OF DISCOURSE 19-7
SUBJECTIVITY IN HUMPHRY CLINKER 19-9
GEOGRAPHY IN HUMPHRY CLINKER 19-11
REVIEW 19-14

Contents: Literature 3 4
Unit 20: THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY: GOLDSMITH AND CRABBE
THE COUNTRY AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION 20-3
GOLDSMITH’S THE DESERTED VILLAGE 20-7
GEORGE CRABBE’S THE VILLAGE AND ANTI-PASTORAL 20-10
REVIEW 20-11

UNIT 21: GOTHIC FICTION: HORACE WALPOLE’S CASTLE OF OTRANTO

AND BEYOND
WHAT IS GOTHIC FICTION? 21-3
THE ‘ORIGINS’ OF GOTHIC FICTION: HORACE WALPOLE’S CASTLE OF OTRANTO 21-6
GOTHIC SUBLIMITY 21-13
REVIEW 21-18

UNIT 22: REVIEW

AUTHORS 22-1
GENRES 22-1
CONTEXTS 22-2
PURPOSES 22-3

Contents: Literature 3 5
___________________________________________________________________________

UNIT 1

INTRODUCTION: AN INCENDIARY AGE

AIMS
The aim of this unit is to introduce you to a period sometimes called
the ‘long’ eighteenth century, which we will expand in this module to
run from 1640 to about 1800, and to become familiar with the very
diverse range of literature which was produced during this period. You
should also come to recognise how the turbulent political, social and
economic events that took place right across this period were both a
shaping force of the literature produced throughout these years, and in
many respects was shaped by it.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Identify some of the key historical events that took place between
1640 and 1800.

Recognise that these events inspired many of the important

literary works produced during this period, and were sometimes
even driven by them.

Understand how this is a period of paradoxes, involving both

continuity with the past and immense change.

Grasp how this was a period in which very diverse literary forms
emerged, both variations on existing ones and entirely new ways of
writing.

Identify some of the central preoccupations of both citizens and

writers in this period, including literature, politics, economics and
social class.

Challenge some seemingly clear-cut ways of defining this period,

from the political allegiances of the Civil War period, to seeing the
eighteenth century as an ‘Age of Enlightenment’.

REQUIRED READING
Hammond, Paul and David Hopkins (eds). 2007. Dryden: Selected
Poems (Longman Annotated Poets Harlow: Pearson)

Lonsdale, Roger (ed.). 2009. The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-

Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

We shall discuss broader themes and topics in this introductory unit,

illustrating our discussion with three different poems from across the
period:

Extract from John Dryden, Annus Mirabilis (1666)

Extract from James Thomson, To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton
(1727)
Ann Yearsley, To Mr. ****, an Unlettered Poet, on Genius Unimproved
(1787)

Unit 1: Introduction 1-1

___________________________________________________________________________

The relevant stanzas from Annus Mirabilis are reproduced below. The
extract can also be found in Stephen Greenblatt (ed.). 2012. The
Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edn, vol. 1 (New York: W.
W. Norton and Co.).

You should, however, read the poem in full, which can be found in Paul
Hammond and David Hopkins (eds). 2007. Dryden: Selected Poems,
Longman Annotated Poets (Harlow: Pearson).

The extract from James Thomson’s poem and the full text of Ann
Yearsley’s poem can be found in Roger Lonsdale (ed.). 2009. The New
Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University
Press).

Please note: All texts are available via the Literature Online website,
but you should note that the versions used contain textual variants
which may be at odds with printed versions. The Literature Online
website is available from the DCU online A-Z of databases:
<[Link]

INTRODUCTION
The period running from 1640 to the end of the eighteenth century is
complex: forming a cohesive narrative about it risks vastly simplifying
this complexity. This is because these years witnessed a phenomenal
sequence of cataclysmic events, in both the human and natural worlds,
which initiated rapid changes in people’s everyday lives; these affected
in equal measure the written means by which many individuals sought
to express their responses to the changes they witnessed around
them. This is a period in which social and economic upheaval resulted
from wars both national and international, where geographical
boundaries were constantly redrawn, where political allegiance was
constantly unstable, where travel for trade or for leisure enjoyed an
unprecedented surge in popularity, and where the ways in which
people wrote and read about their experiences took increasingly
divergent forms.

Major authors of the early part of this period include Milton and
numerous lyric poets, such as Marvell, Herrick and Waller, and
polymath authors like Dryden; the eighteenth-century, meanwhile,
produced such eminent poets as Pope, Thomson, Gray, many of whose
literary biographies were included in Samuel Johnson’s seminal work,
Lives of the Poets (1779-81). In the latter part of the eighteenth
century, poets such as Crabbe, Goldsmith and Cowper were active, as
were at its very end Wordsworth, Blake and Coleridge. Meanwhile,
recent critical work has uncovered the diverse poetry produced by
women writers throughout this period, from (for example) Aphra Behn
to Charlotte Smith.

Prose-writing witnessed equally important landmarks and changes

throughout this period. From the early part, Milton and Bunyan
articulate alternative religious points of view in varied styles, while
Hobbes and Locke lay the foundations of political philosophy in striking
prose texts; meanwhile Pepys and Evelyn’s diaries provide yet another
perspective on how personal experience and opinion can be shaped in
prose. The prose works of women writers and translators appear in
increasingly greater number throughout this period, from Behn and
Eliza Haywood to Mary Wollstonecraft, and challenge the forms and
purposes of literary publications in equally interesting ways to their
male counterparts.

1-2 Literature 3
___________________________________________________________________________

The eighteenth century witnessed significant changes in prose fiction,

from the early narratives of Defoe and Haywood, to the so-called ‘Rise
of the Novel’ around the middle of the century, with writers such as
Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne challenging the ways in
which a story might be told in prose. Political differences, particularly in
the wake of the American and French Revolutions, also provoked a rich
array of prose writings in the late eighteenth century, from Edmund
Burke and Thomas Paine to Wollstonecraft.

Drama, meanwhile, was an equally active area of productivity,

particularly with the ‘Restoration’ theatre of Wycherley, Etherege, and
Congreve in the latter part of the seventeenth century; the eighteenth-
century stage was perhaps less brilliant, but important landmarks such
as John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera of 1728, or the plays of Richard Brinsley
Sheridan at the end of the century, must not be neglected.

It is, however, important to recognise how throughout this period

creative forms of expression were not limited to one literary form or
genre, but in fact took shape in a wide array of formats – from poems,
prose pieces and plays to diaries, letters, periodical essays and
newspapers. An explosion in print culture, partly due to innovations in
printing technology, enabled many new forms of literary expression to
be produced in increasingly significant numbers.

Nor was an individual’s experience and its expression limited to texts:

increasingly, the complex relationship between words and images
enabled writers and artists to respond to one another’s work, with the
illustration of books and, towards the end of the eighteenth century,
the considerable popularity of caricatured prints that often incorporated
references to famous literary works. The world surrounding citizens
throughout this period was a lively and dynamic environment of printed
texts and visual images, of sounds, sights and smells that we can only
imagine through the rich variety of artistic material produced
throughout these years.

This unit shall be divided into three main sections, using extracts from
literary works from different points across the period to illustrate our
arguments: each of these represents some of the central
preoccupations of writers at the time and the developments that had
taken place in literary forms as the period moved on. We shall begin to
get a grip on how vital the historical context is to the production and
reception of literature in this period by identifying some of its key
events and when they took place.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
Charles I (1600-1649), King of England, Scotland and Ireland, clung to
the notion of the Divine Right of Kings – the idea that a monarch was
innately chosen by God to rule his people – and although not a ‘bad’
King in a tyrannical sense the latter part of Charles’s reign was riddled
with tensions resulting from the authoritarian way in which he chose to
run the nation, and in particular the tight controls he held over how
Parliament was run. Relations with the other nations of the British Isles
were also fraught: Charles attacked Scotland with military force in an
attempt to impose his policies of taxation and religious innovation. The
way that he ruled as King increasingly caused great discontent among
several key public figures, as well as amongst the populace more
generally. After constitutional reforms that resulted in political and
religious deadlock, there followed a period of Civil War in 1642 and
1648 characterised by turmoil in the political and social spheres, which
culminated in the execution of the King in January 1649. After a brief
phase of political uncertainty about who should take over in running
the country, Oliver Cromwell was installed as head of state in 1653

Unit 1: Introduction 1-3

___________________________________________________________________________

under the title ‘Lord Protector’, which provoked as many violent

reactions from Royalist supporters as the monarchy had done among
Parliamentarians. Many writers during this period expressed the strong
passions that they (like everyone else) felt about these unequalled
events through the poems, plays, pamphlets and fictional narratives
that they produced; we shall encounter some of the most important of
these in subsequent units.

From the fires of Civil War a phase of peaceful calm seemed to reign,
and the nation could slowly try to rebuild itself after the considerable
devastation wreaked during the various conflicts the war years had
witnessed. However, the newfound harmony was in many ways
superficial: many people remained outraged by the bloody removal of
the King and clung to the idea of a divinely appointed monarch, whilst
the new Parliament did not entirely live up to its promise of delivering
a more just society. Turbulence seemed to threaten again with
Cromwell’s death in 1658.

Although Charles II (1630-1685), son of Charles I, had been crowned

King of Britain and Ireland at Scone in 1651, he had fled to the
Continent when the new Republican armies invaded Scotland; but in
1660 many Britons found fresh hope of rebuilding a coherent nation
with his Restoration to the throne. If the last years of his father’s reign
had been heated by the fires of war and destruction, then Charles II
promised to bring the warmth and vital growth that the sun brings to
the earth: like his French contemporary, ‘The Sun King’ Louis XIV
(1638-1715), Charles is often described as a blazing sun in poems
designed to celebrate the new monarch.

The Restoration period is often heralded as one of licentious

extravagance, sexual libertinism and excess – at least, amongst the
wealthier classes – partly represented by the erotic verse of poets such
as Rochester, and by the boisterous and witty comedies that flooded
the stage following the reopening in 1660 of the theatres closed during
the years of Puritan government.

Not all was peace and prosperity, though, as Britain still endured
warfare (this time abroad, against the Dutch), political factionalism
remained rife within the Parliamentary system, and contentions over
religious tolerance continued to inflame relations between Catholics,
Protestants and Dissenters. Besides the festering nature of political
relations at this time, Charles’ reign was to witness a more physically
rampant and equally destructive event that made a lasting impression
on all who experienced it, the Great Plague of 1665 in which many
thousands of Britons died across the country. Britain seemed doomed
to disaster when her capital city, and the centre of all her trade,
economic activity, and the biggest area of population density, was
ravaged by fire in 1666: indeed, in a society where religious conviction,
and even superstition, held a firm grasp, many regarded this as a
series of portents or evidence of divine judgement on man’s activities
over recent years.

However, if we return to our earlier metaphor, with devastation comes

the possibility of renewal: London’s fire in fact removed many of the
winding, insanitary medieval streets that had become impractical for
the modern, global city that she hoped to be, and opened up the
prospect for completely redesigning her topography and buildings. A
newly rebuilt London would show the rest of the world how important,
prosperous and content the nation had become after the years of Civil
strife.

In many ways, she sought to rival the greatness of Rome in the new
empire Britain strove to build: many poems of this period imagine

1-4 Literature 3
___________________________________________________________________________

London as a new Rome, Charles as a new Caesar, yet both surpass the
greatness that the older empire ever managed to achieve. The classical
connection is important to notice here; the nature of education at this
time meant that almost all learned men (and many women) were very
familiar with the literature and history of Greece and Rome: the latter
in particular provided many sources of inspiration, and many models,
for politicians, thinkers and writers at this time. We shall notice such
influences right across the texts we study in this module.

We shall see here, and in subsequent units, how the idea of destruction
and reconstruction applies to literary forms just as much as buildings,
and in particular to the constant remodelling of classical precedents
that characterise many literary works across this period.

Britain was, nonetheless, to endure further upheavals following

Charles’ death in 1685, after which his Catholic brother, James II
(1633-1701), was crowned king. James was a greatly unpopular
monarch whose reign was riddled with disagreements over his policies
upon religious tolerance and his encouragement of political
factionalism. In 1688 James was forced to flee to France when the
Dutch head of state, William of Orange (1650-1702), invaded Britain
so as to procure a free Parliament and to form an Anglo-Dutch alliance
against Louis XIV’s France. Following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ William
and his wife Mary, James’ daughter, were crowned joint rulers and an
era of superficial peace and toleration seemed to follow.

The subsequent period, however, was as riddled with the strife of

warfare, political factionalism, religious antagonism and social upheaval
as the years of the Civil War and after. Various wars raged throughout
the eighteenth century, both at home and abroad, from the War of
Spanish Succession to the Seven Years’ War, to the Jacobite Uprisings
of 1715 and 1745 (which sought to restore the exiled Stuart monarchy
to the throne), to Britain’s involvement with the American and French
Revolutions in the latter part of our period. Britain was constantly
engaged in a series of conflicts which simultaneously threatened her
peace and stability, and reinforced her national pride and sense of
what it was to be British. This included the forms and content of the
rich and diverse literature produced within the British Isles throughout
this period, whilst the pan-European spread of so-called
‘Enlightenment’ thinking fundamentally changed its thought and
writings.

By the mid-eighteenth century writers sought to explore the growing

interest in psychology – addressing such questions as whether a
person’s identity is fixed or stable, and how each of us channels the
experiences we encounter in our everyday lives. A significant way in
which such questions were mapped out in the literary world was the
appearance of a new form of prose narrative that increasingly focussed
on the connection between an individual’s actions and his or her
thoughts: the so-called ‘rise of the novel’, with authors such as Samuel
Richardson at the vanguard, reshaped the ways in which earlier
authors had presented personal experience to present a much more
intimate, fictional exploration of an individual person’s psychology.

Almost as soon as such ‘novel’ ways of presenting human experience

appeared, however, the conventions that authors, such as Richardson,
seemingly put in place were challenged and remodelled by authors
such as Laurence Sterne, whose prose fiction, The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is sometimes described as an ‘anti-novel’
in the way that it overturns all expectations of how a narrative should
be presented to the reader.

Unit 1: Introduction 1-5

___________________________________________________________________________

This was an age of breaking and remaking, of remodelling old systems

and creating new ones, of tradition and of innovation manifested in the
physical, geographical, demographic and social character, of Britain as
much as in her literature and arts.

Throughout this module you should constantly ask yourself how far a
text is shaped by, or helps to shape, the context of its production.

Activity
To get a fuller picture of the historical background to this period, and
the vital impact it had on the literature produced between 1640 and
1800, you might like to read the following: ‘The Restoration and the
Eighteenth Century: Topics. Introduction’, in The Norton Anthology of
English Literature Online.
[Link]

This site provides links to other topics such as ‘A Day in 18th Century
London’. Relevant images, texts and quizzes are also available here.

‘FROM THIS CHYMIC FLAME’

One way to understand how the seemingly opposite processes of
destruction and renewal repeatedly characterise this period is to
imagine the metaphor of a fire, which destroys something that is
much-loved and familiar, but is also old and decrepit: its disappearance
incurs loss and regret, but also means we can replace what was
destroyed with something new, perhaps something better. Of course,
the early part of the period covered by this module was defined by
precisely such an event – an actual fire, the Great Fire of London of
1666 – but in many ways the metaphor also applies to many of the
other significant and turbulent events of this early part of our period.

We shall look at the work of the late seventeenth-century poet John

Dryden (1631-1700) more fully in a later unit; for now, read the
extract ‘London After the Great Fire, 1666’ from his long poem Annus
Mirabilis, an important literary document reflecting some of the key
events that took place at this time. Although we shall be concentrating
on just a few stanzas here, you should read the whole poem to get a
fuller sense of their context and of Dryden’s writing in general. The
eight stanzas that we shall consider in close detail bring together some
of the main points you have discovered so far about the historical
events witnessed in the mid-seventeenth century and beyond, and
about how hopes for building a better future can be founded on
clearing away the rubble of earlier devastation.

‘London After the Great Fire, 1666’.

CCXCIII
Methinks already from this chymic flame
I see a city of more precious mould,
Rich as the town which gives the Indies name,
With silver paved, and all divine with gold.

CCXCIV
Already, labouring with a mighty fate,
She shakes the rubbish from her mountain brow,
And seems to have renewed her charter’s date,
Which heaven will to the death of time allow.

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CCXCV
More great than human now, and more august,
New deified she from her fires does rise;
Her widening streets on new foundations trust,
And opening into larger parts she flies.

CCXCVI
Before, she like some shepherdess did show,
Who sat to bathe her by a river’s side;
Not answering to her fame, but rude and low,
Nor taught the beauteous arts of modern pride.

CCXCVII
Now, like a maiden queen, she will behold,
From her high turrets, hourly suitors come;
The East with incense, and the West with gold,
Will stand like suppliants to receive her doom.

CCXCVIII
The silver Thames, her own domestic flood,
Shall bear her vessels like a sweeping train;
And often wind, as of his mistress proud,
With longing eyes to meet her face again.

CCXCIX
The wealthy Tagus, and the wealthier Rhine,
The glory of their towns no more shall boast;
And Seine, that would with Belgian rivers join,
Shall find her lustre stained, and traffic lost.

CCC
The venturous merchant, who designed more far,
And touches on our hospitable shore,
Charmed with the splendour of this northern star,
Shall here unlade him, and depart no more.

What are your initial impressions of this extract from Annus Mirabilis,
in view of the historical context we have sketched?

What strikes you as particularly interesting in Dryden’s language and

the images he uses?

Can you connect these elements to some of the things you know about
the period so far?

Steven N. Zwicker writes of Annus Mirabilis that ‘Dryden’s subjects are

military exploit and civic fortitude’, including ‘the triumph of London
over war, fire, and plague’ (1998: 188). Looking in detail at some of
the words and images used in this extract from the poem helps us to
understand how it is partly a lament for what has been lost, but mostly
a celebration of what might be gained from this unexpected turn in
historical events.

An important tool for the literary critic is to recognise the multiple

applications a single word can have; we can discover this both through
tracing multiple possible definitions in such important resources as, say
the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (which is accessible online), which
usefully provides us with information about a word’s etymology and
historical usage – that is, when it first appeared and in which contexts
it was used. However, dictionary definitions only go so far in
understanding how a writer might use a word: it is the context in which
it appears in the particular text in question which can lead us to judge
how and in what ways a word or phrase is being employed – both its

Unit 1: Introduction 1-7

___________________________________________________________________________

relation to other words in the text, the syntax or form of the passage,
and the possible connection with ideas that lie beyond the text, in the
historical context of its production.

Firstly, let us look more closely at the first stanza of this extract: what
do you notice about its opening line? The word ‘chymic’ is particularly
striking, and perhaps you have not come across it before; according
the Oxford English Dictionary, it is a variant of the word ‘chemic’,
meaning related to chemistry. Dryden uses it here to describe the
‘flame’ of the fire that destroyed London. But why should a flame be
considered ‘chemical’? Let’s look further at the variant meanings of the
word within their historical context.

Activity
Look up the definitions and etymology of ‘chymic’ in the Oxford English
Dictionary.

As you see from the OED, ‘chemic’ can act both as a noun (that is, to
describe a person as ‘a chemic’ is to call him or her a chemist), and as
an adjective, used to describe a person or thing as possessing chemical
qualities. When Dryden uses the word to describe the ‘flame’ he
suggests the chemical nature of fire itself – a reference that reminds us
of the keen interest in science and experimentation at this time; after
all, the Royal Academy of Science, an important landmark in the
promotion of invention and scientific research, was chartered in 1662,
and Isaac Newton (one of the most important scientific figures in
British history), was active at this time.

As a verb, though, one obsolete meaning of ‘chemic’ is ‘To transform or

transmute by alchemy’. Does Dryden encourage us to think of this
meaning of the word too, and why? Perhaps one way of presenting the
fire as something both devastating and positive is to suggest that that
which it destroyed was somehow outdated – obsolete, even. By
invoking a mental image of old-fashioned ideas about alchemy, Dryden
prompts us to connect ‘old’ London with superstitious ideas and beliefs,
and the outmoded buildings that were best suited to them. Indeed,
many people at the time held the Plague and the Fire of the following
year to be evidence of Divine Wrath, a form of retribution for the strife
and upheaval witnessed throughout the Civil War years, and a portent
of the end of the world that would ensue as a form of punishment.
Now, however, the ‘new’ London of a Restored nation is most
appropriately represented by shining new buildings, broader streets
and healthy waterways that allow her to trade with the rest of the
world but can also provide pleasure, both to look at and on leisurely
boat-trips.

Look again at the first stanza: what is interesting about the second
line’s phrase, ‘precious mould’? Does it, like the first line, contain a
paradox in the variant meanings of ‘mould’?

Activity
Look up ‘mould’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

‘Mould’ can be a lump of earth, rot, a tomb, the shape of a man’s head,
or the cast in which a sculpture is made. Why does Dryden use this
word here? Perhaps he is again implying a connection between the

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‘old’, destroyed earth of London and the new ‘city’ formed out of its
rubble: the word ‘precious’ implies the superior quality of the new
capital compared to that which it had replaced, which is confirmed with
the final line of the stanza: ‘With silver paved and all divine with gold’.
This last phrase is striking, in that it confers a ‘divine’ blessing on the
marvellous new city that London will become.

Let us trace some of these ideas throughout the remaining stanzas.

You might, for instance, notice the contrast between words connected
to duress, to hardship and to suffering (‘labouring’, ‘rubbish’, ‘rude and
low’) and words that suggest renovation and triumph (‘widening
streets’, ‘beauteous arts’, ‘glory’). How does Dryden’s choice of words
help to promote the ‘message’ his poem conveys?

The new London he describes is that of a restored monarchy – a city

that is the nation’s hub of commerce and of society; it is built out of
the rubble of the destruction witnessed in earlier years, and out of the
festering waste of the Great Plague, but promises even greater glory
than Britain has ever known before. Note the images that promote
these ideas, like ‘She shakes the rubbish from her mounting brow’, or
‘New deified she from her fires does rise’; this last line is particularly
interesting, not only because it reminds us that religious sensibility was
an especially prominent feature of this age, but also in that it alerts us
to one of the major elements characterising literature throughout this
period, the interest in the classics.

Remember that the education all men of a certain social class received
at this time was heavily weighted towards much-admired ‘Ancient’
authors, a tradition inherited from the notions of Renaissance
humanism you will already have encountered, and which persists into
the subsequent century (as we shall see). (However it is worth noting
here too that much of the population remained illiterate, and that
women received no formal education as such). Note the ordered
regularity of Dryden’s verse: we shall discuss his approach to poetic
form in greater detail in a later unit, but it is worth observing here that
the ‘neoclassical’ style he adopts favoured harmony, symmetry and
balance, all aspects present in the iambic pentameter and cross-rhyme
of these stanzas.

The line ‘New deified she from her fires does rise’ draws on this
heritage of classical literature and myth. According to ancient
mythology, the phoenix is a firebird that lives for centuries before it
constructs a funeral pyre ignited by the sun on which it burns itself, the
flames fanned by its own wings, but then rises from its own ashes with
renewed youth and lives through another cycle of life. Why is this
imagery particularly pertinent to describing London’s renewal? Is this
because it conveys an idea of both continuity and change, of Britain
retaining vestiges of its former glory but also rising anew out of its
discarded rubbish to attain an even more glorious future? Also, might
we consider the Restoration of Charles as monarch as, in some sense,
phoenix-like?

Whilst the oblique reference to the phoenix provides a mythological,

classical connection, Dryden is insistent that we should not forget the
religious nature of London’s rebirth within a Christian context: the
phoenix image can also offer a parallel to the Resurrection of Jesus,
while words like ‘divine’ ensure that this new splendour is sanctioned
by God and does not risk being hubristic. The ‘domestic flood’ recalls
the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark found in the book of Genesis, in which a
sinful generation was entirely wiped out save for a few pious
individuals, confided with starting the human race anew. Although it is
the contrary natural disaster of a fire rather than a flood that had
destroyed London, in Dryden’s poem it has a similar cleansing power:

Unit 1: Introduction 1-9

___________________________________________________________________________

it washes away that which was dirty or shameful, and similarly allows a
new phase of growth to ensue.

The river image is important in the poem, both through connecting

post-Fire London to a post-deluge Biblical world, but also because it
provides the means by which Britain can reassert her prominence on
the international stage. Look back to the first stanza, and the ‘silver’
paving of the new city’s streets; compare this to ‘The silver Thames’:
this is Britain’s ‘own domestic flood’, at once a powerful force (like
Noah’s flood) and a familiar, comforting reference-point (‘domestic’). It
is both a symbol of Britain’s potency and of its magnificence. London’s
river surpasses ‘The wealthy Tagus and the wealthier Rhine’, and
France’s ‘Seine’, both in the beauty of its ‘lustre’ and in the wealth of
trade (‘traffic’) it promises to bear.

The Thames is imagined here as a stately Queen who ‘Shall bear

vessels like a sweeping train’, at once beautiful and mighty, which
connects to the imagery used in previous stanzas to describe the
‘virgin’ city itself: ‘like a maiden queen she will behold / From her high
turrets hourly suitors come’ – a phrase perhaps reminiscent of a
golden, chivalric age – in the increasing wealth that such a magnificent
new city will attract. She will be the most revered of all the world’s
cities, as will the nation that she represents: ‘The East with incense
and the West with gold’ will pay her homage. This connection between
Britain and the world beyond is important to bear in mind as we pursue
future modules, and address how these international relations are
reflected in different types of literature.

These stanzas bring together all the earth’s elements to describe new
London: the earthly plot, the winding waterways, the blazing fire, and
the airiness of her streets that liken her to the Celestial City of
‘Heaven’ itself, which helps to confirm the city’s identity as both
venerably ancient, formed out of the earth’s most basic components,
and splendidly new, just as the new political and social world born out
of the fires of Revolution and of the Great Fire will incorporate what
was best of that which is lost, and create anew to replace the defunct
and decayed.

SAQ 1
Describe how Dryden’s use of specific words and images capture the
dual sense of loss and renewal in the light of recent and
contemporary historical events.

THE FLAME OF ‘ENLIGHTENED’ THOUGHT

We have looked at some of the ways in which historical events and
literature intertwine in an excerpt from Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis, using
the image of the fire to describe both the actual incendiary London
experienced in 1666 and as a metaphor to describe some of the
political and social turmoil characterising the historical circumstances
surrounding the poem’s appearance. We have seen how some of the
preoccupations of citizens in the earlier phase of our period are
manifested in their writings – political instability, the forging of a new
national identity, the endurance of tradition but also its reshaping, the
interest in the classics, the rebirth of London as an emblem of future
prosperity and global empire.

The subsequent phase of our period did not experience the same civil
strife or warfare that had characterised the latter part of the
seventeenth century. Nonetheless, struggles both at home and abroad

1-10 Literature 3
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often threatened the peace and stability of Britain’s political systems,

economy and society. There was no cataclysmic, devastating fire on
the scale witnessed in London in 1666; however, the metaphor of the
blazing flame – and some of the elements of Dryden’s poem – provide
a strong counterpoint illustrating some of the new preoccupations,
changing ideas, and emerging literary forms evident by the middle of
the eighteenth century.

This has often been called an ‘Age of Enlightenment’, but what do we

mean by this term, and what are its limitations in describing the
emergence of new ways of thinking and writing throughout the period?
Crudely put, the ‘Enlightenment’ describes a movement away from the
superstitious religiosity of preceding generations, and the promotion of
rational, philosophical thought. Enterprises such as the famous
Encylcopédie produced in France by Diderot and D’Alembert between
1751 and 1772 offers one example of the apparent march of the
Enlightened pursuit of knowledge, while in England philosophers such
as David Hume questioned the validity of beliefs not based on
experience or hard evidence, such as miracles.

However, we should also question whether this is just a convenient

narrative that simplifies what were in fact very complex changes in
thought and literary activity as the century wore on. In some sense,
the narrative of ‘Enlightenment’ adopts a crudely pejorative attitude to
the preceding centuries (as somehow ‘darkened’) to promote what is
called a ‘Whig interpretation of history’, that is, one which envisages
each age to be progressive, or an improvement on the last. As we have
seen in the extract from Annus Mirabilis, whilst the new and innovative
is often championed as a sign of progress, it is also constructed on the
foundations of what had gone before.

When we use the term ‘Enlightenment’, therefore, we should be

cautious to understand what it does and does not involve, so as to use
it with the same efficacy and flare as writers on the topic such as Roy
Porter.

Let us turn to a poem written at a mid-point in the eighteenth century,

which illustrates both some of the preoccupations of writers at the time
and changes in literary forms and tastes within this context, but also
links to the extract previously analysed from Dryden’s poem.

Read extract from James Thomson, To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton
(1727), ll. 1-105.

James Thomson (1700-1748) is one of the most prominent and

important poets writing in the eighteenth century, and is particularly
famous as the author of a long poem sequence called The Seasons
(published 1730), which was hugely popular and influential in its time.
The elegiac poem addressed to Isaac Newton (1643-1737) adopts a
similar verse form to The Seasons, blank verse, but adopts as its
theme the achievements of one of the greatest men of science
produced by the preceding age. Many of the qualities Thomson selects
for praise prompt us to think about this period as an ‘Age of
Enlightenment’, but also to challenge the easy assumptions of using
such a term. Thomson’s poem also connects to Dryden’s poem in ways
that signal both the continuity and change in thought and in poetic
forms between these two historical moments.

We saw how in Annus Mirabilis the fire came to represent several

different things at once, and was a symbol both of destruction and
potential renewal. We saw how the divine blessing on London
confirmed its future prosperity, and noted how the idea of resurrection
represented by the phoenix offered a parallel to the revival of

Unit 1: Introduction 1-11

___________________________________________________________________________

monarchy with Charles’ Restoration to the throne. By the time that

Thomson wrote his poem to Newton in 1727, who died that year,
monarchy had long been re-established with a succession of
Hanoverian Kings – the crown passed from George I to George II in
this very year.

Unlike Dryden’s, Thomson’s poem is less preoccupied with affirming

allegiance to the crown or promoting a particular political agenda.
Instead, it laments the death of a ‘monarch’ in the metaphorical sense,
Isaac Newton, who is the father of a rationalistic way of thought. You
shall come to encounter in a future module how far Blake – a poet who
championed the liberty of the imagination – was repulsed by the
rationality that Newton represented; however, for Thomson, his life
and work are emblematic of the achievements of the age,
characterised by scientific discovery, invention and a greater evidence-
based understanding of the world.

Many of Newton’s major theories were put forward in his most

important work, the Principia Mathematica, which had been published
in 1687 and exerted a lasting influence on all subsequent scientific and
philosophical thought. This book proposed the three universal laws of
motion, including gravitas, or what we call gravity. The Principia also
describes the elliptical form of planetary orbits, offers a method of
geometrical analysis of ‘first and last ratios’, gives the first analytical
determination of the speed of sound in air, and describes how the
earth’s equinoxes were a result of the Moon’s gravitational attraction
on the Earth’s spherical surface. This suggestion encouraged others to
study the irregularities in the motion of the moon, and provided a
theory for determining the orbits of comets.

Newton’s publication proposed a heliocentric (sun-centred) view of the

solar system that firmly replaced the earlier Copernican notion that the
earth was the centre of the universe. Thomson refers to some of the
major discoveries for which Newton was famous – ‘Of gravitation and
projection’, for instance, recalls his significant articulation of the Law of
Gravity, while the ‘All intellectual eye’ Thomson describes hints at
Newton’s work on Optics (ll. 1-4).

Let us look more closely at some of the details of Thomson’s poem to

elucidate these ideas, and the points of contact and of departure
between Annus Mirabilis and To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton – this
is not to say, though, that Thomson is deliberately responding to
Dryden in his poem; rather, it is part of our job as literary critics to
notice potential connections that might illuminate our readings of
certain works and the period in which they were produced.

Firstly, are there particular words or images that strike you as similar
in either poem? In Annus Mirabilis we had the image of the blazing fire
transmuted into that of the sun of a new empire; the first line of this
extract from Thomson’s poem also draws attention to the image of fire
and light, the ‘solar round’, but also broadens the focus beyond the
visible light of London’s fire, and the imaginary one of its symbolic
blaze as a magnificent empire, into the vast expanse of space.

Thomson describes how Newton ‘fixed the wandering Queen of Night’

(l. 8); who is this ‘Queen’? Is she like the ‘maiden queen’ whom
Dryden chooses to represent the newly rebuilt city? Think about how
this figure is connected to the aquatic imagery that Thomson uses in
his poem, and compare it to the symbolic uses of water we found in
Dryden’s verse; there, we found that a ‘domestic flood’ embodied the
powerful and cleansing nature of the Thames river, and offered a
paradoxical mirror to the sanitising nature of the Great Fire. In To the
Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, however, the water imagery is connected

1-12 Literature 3
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to this mysterious ‘Queen of Night’, who Newton ‘fixed’, and of whom

he determined:

Whether she wanes into a scanty orb,

Or, waxing broad, with her pale shadowy light,
In a soft deluge overflows the sky.
Her every motion clear-discerning, he
Adjusted to the mutual main, and taught
Why now the mighty mass of waters swells
Resistless, heaving on the broken rocks,
And the full river turning; till again
The tide revertive, unattracted, leaves
A yellow waste of idle sands behind. (ll. 9-18)

The epithet ‘Queen of Night’ would have been familiar to Thomson’s

readers, but modern-day readers for whom it is obscure can get clues
as to her identity in the descriptive phrases Thomson uses to talk
about her: she moves in ‘a scanty orb’, throws a ‘pale shadowy light’,
and makes the ‘mighty mass of waters’ swell against the mainland (the
‘mutual main’) and determines the flow of the ‘tide’. These hints gather
together to suggest that the ‘Queen of Night’ refers to the moon,
whose gravitational pull on the earth is responsible for determining the
movement of the tides, an idea, as we have seen, Newton put forward
in Principia Mathematica.

Thomson’s poem thus reminds us of some of the main aspects of

Newton’s most famous and important publication; but does the
language he uses – both the words and syntax – seem to you like that
of a scientific tract? Think about phrases like ‘orb’, ‘motion clear-
discerning’, ‘mass’, and ‘unattracted’: these could all potentially be
scientific terms, used to describe precisely the sorts of discoveries that
Newton made. Yet, just as Dryden encourages us to read words in
more ways than one, so too we can perceive multiple meanings in
those Thomson uses here, which fit his scientific subject matter to the
imaginative context of his poem.

Activity:
Look up ‘orb’ and ‘mass’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

What does the definition and etymology of these words tell us about
the different ways we might interpret their presence in Thomson’s
poem, as both an elegy to a notable scientist, and as a poetic exercise?

Are there other aspects of this extract that strike you as particularly
interesting, both in the poem’s status as a homage to Newton, and in
its identity as a creative enterprise? For instance, does the phrase ‘the
mighty mass of waters swells / Resistless, heaving on the broken
rocks’ (ll. 13-14) have suggestive connotations beyond its apparently
immediate scientific application to the movement of the tides? We
know from our reading of poetry in general that love and physical
passion can be major sources of inspiration: perhaps here the
evocative description Thomson uses is one way of bringing the
seemingly dispassionate language of scientific prose into the poetic
sphere, with compound phrases such as ‘clear-discerning’ being at
once clarifying (or ‘enlightening’) and eloquent. What of other, less
familiar words in this passage?

Unit 1: Introduction 1-13

___________________________________________________________________________

Activity:
Look up the word ‘revertive’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

What do you notice about the first recorded appearance of this word?
Is it paradoxical in the relation between its sense, as in ‘going back to’,
and the forward-movement involved in coining (or creating) a new
word? What does it tell you about Thomson’s role as an inheritor and
as an innovator? Perhaps, like the ‘full river turning’ that Thomson
describes, the flow of poetic inspiration is one that draws on existing
waterways but also rushes onwards, just as Dryden’s Thames is both a
potently destructive and a rejuvenating force.

How does this description, surrounding the Queen of Night and the
water images related to her, connect to the feminised descriptions of
London’s waterway that Dryden uses in Annus Mirabilis? Are there
similarities, or is there a difference between the decorous, courteous
language Dryden uses and the more passionate description Thomson
employs? Might this nudge us towards thinking about changes in poetic
subjects and the ways in which they are treated in 1666 compared to
1727, as much as the enduring points of contact in transcendental
metaphors and images?

Think again about the kinds of words Thomson uses, compared to

Dryden’s: are they longer and more ornate? Is Thomson’s syntax more
convoluted? Just as we thought about how Dryden both incorporated
classical models and reworked them to fit the new contexts of the
contemporary events and sensibilities he describes, so too we might
look at Thomson’s poem as built on the foundations of earlier poetic
works and making fresh departures to create something new.

We might trace how similar threads throughout this extract from

Thomson’s To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton both connect it to some
of the ideas and images we encountered in Annus Mirabilis, but also
suggest that here is something new. For instance, the ‘unprofuse
magnificence divine’ (l. 30) that characterises Newton’s ‘wisdom truly
perfect’ positions this scientist as a near-religious figurehead, who is
‘beloved / Of heaven’ (ll. 34-5) in ways that were earlier used to
describe the divinely-appointed monarch. Newton is even hubristically
placed in a position of divine authority and power himself, for whom
‘The heavens are all his own’ (l. 44) through the knowledge he has
gained via the use of the telescope that he developed to observe the
skies. Does this suggest that the new rationalistic science Newton
fathered offered an appealing alternative to earlier ideas about the
divine right of kings – and perhaps even to traditional organised
religion itself?

Activity:
Note down phrases and images within Thomson’s poem that might
support such a suggestion.

This possible interpretation of Thomson’s poem, as representing the

‘Enlightenment’ of knowledge that blossomed in a newly rationalistic
age, is perhaps most aptly represented in the imagery that Thomson
uses to celebrate Newton’s discoveries about light. Whereas the light of
London’s fire was tangible and physically destructive, Newton’s work

1-14 Literature 3
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on light was more intellectual and experimental, illustrating the

illuminating power of his ‘wisdom’:

Even light itself, which everything displays,

Shone undiscovered, till his brighter mind
Untwisted all the shining robe of day.
(ll. 58-60)

Newton embodies the ultimate achievement of man’s mind in its

capacity to deduce scientific theories about the natural world through
reason and experiment, enabling him to rationalise even seemingly
mystical forces such as light. Newton’s discernment of the refraction of
light, which when shone through a prism reflects all the colours of the
rainbow, is a further testament to the powers of intellectual enquiry
that characterises this so-called ‘Age of Reason’. While the Biblical
deluge invoked in Dryden’s poem, and the rainbow which, according to
Genesis symbolised God’s covenant of hope with his saved people,
Newton discovers the ‘gorgeous train / Of parent-colours’ in his man-
made rainbow. As such he is, Thomson claims, a ‘prophet, to whose
rapture heaven descends’.

Nonetheless, we must be careful to consider this interpretation of

Thomson’s poem as a hymn to the ‘Enlightenment’ with a certain
suspicion, and indeed the usefulness of that term at all: after all,
Thomson is keen to affirm that, for all his wonderful discoveries and
amazing intellectual powers, Newton is the ‘favourite’ of heaven but
not its usurper, and his gifts in fact come from heaven itself. His
findings confirm Thomson’s existing conviction that the great force
behind the natural world is divine:

What wonder thence that his devotion swelled

Responsive to his knowledge? For could he,
Whose piercing mental eye diffusive saw
The finished university of things
In all its order, magnitude and parts,
Forbear incessant to adore that Power
Who fills, sustains and actuates the whole?
(ll. 99-105)

Thomson’s poem shows that science and religion need not be

incompatible, and so that the stark dichotomies that might result from
using such a term as ‘Enlightenment’ to mean just one thing are of
limited value.

SAQ 2
How does Thomson use images of light to promote the idea that
Newton is a ‘prophet of the Enlightenment’, and how far is a reading
of the poem along these lines of limited value in understanding the
complex ideas and poetic preoccupations of the period?

THE PHYSICAL AND MENTAL EYE/I

In the poem To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton we noticed how
images relating to light, sight and the eye were used to illustrate both
some of Newton’s major scientific theories, and the intellectual insight
he was seen to possess in order to make such discoveries. In the final
section of this unit, we shall shift our attention from the physical eye,
and its connection to the ‘mind’s eye’, to think about how the latter
part of the eighteenth century witnessed an increasing interest in
subjectivity, one which was perhaps to reach its fullest blossoming in

Unit 1: Introduction 1-15

___________________________________________________________________________

the literature of the ‘Romantic’ authors you will be studying in a

subsequent module.

The eighteenth century, however, was a vital space for the emergence
of new ideas about who the individual self was, and how he or she
might express his or her experiences of the world in creative ways. In
subsequent units we shall look at how these preoccupations took shape
in new approaches to writing fictional narratives, particularly the so-
called ‘rise of the novel’ and the increasing interest in a character’s
psychology that fictional works from the last part of the century
demonstrated. Here, we shall briefly consider how the changing roles
played by the ‘eye’ manifest newly emerging approaches to the ‘I’.
Peter de Bolla has described the middle part of the eighteenth century
as one that witnessed the birth of ‘the visual’, which he relates to
prevalent notions about ‘the sublime’; he reminds us that this was a
period when people were surrounded by visual images, and
encouraged to find ways of channelling personal experience through
the mental eye (2003: 4). To illustrate some of these ideas, and both
the continuities and the changes that might have taken place in
preoccupations and literary forms by the end of our period, we shall
look at a poem by a less famous writer than Dryden or Thomson, yet
which points us in some interesting directions when thinking about
literature from the late-eighteenth century.

Read Ann Yearsley, To Mr. ****, an Unlettered Poet, on Genius

Unimproved (1787).

In the two previous poems we looked at, we noted the continuing

presence of imagery relating to the flame or fire, but also the altered
applications it had come to have in response to different interests and
preoccupations prevalent at the time of writing. Can you detect how in
Yearsley’s poem the same image once again comes to acquire a new
range of meanings?

Activity:
Note down words relating to the image of the flame or fire.

When do such terms or phrases appear, and in relation to which other

words?

Perhaps you were struck by the opening two lines of this poem: here,
we have two phrases relating to the imagery of fire which are
connected to each other:

FLORUS, canst thou define that innate spark

Which blazes but for glory? (ll. 1-2)

How does the image of the flame compare to that of Annus Mirabils or
Thomson’s poem addressed to Newton? Is it being used in different
ways?

Let us use the technique of trying to ascertain a word’s usage by

thinking about its relation to other words in the text, and how it fits
into the overall pattern of the text’s form. Firstly, you might be struck
by the juxtaposition of ‘spark’ with ‘innate’: whereas Dryden’s fire was
one that violently raged across London, here the flame is inward,
literally ‘born within’ the poet herself; perhaps it is more closely
connected to the ‘spark’ of genius that characterises the wisdom of
Thomson’s Newton. Certainly, the ‘blaze’ of ‘glory’ suggests a similarly
high rhetoric to that which eulogises the famous scientist.

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However, read through to the end of the first stanza of Yearsley’s

poem: is ‘wisdom’ used in a different way to how Thomson refers to
Newton? Look back at To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton briefly: here,
you will remember, the ‘wisdom’ that is ‘truly perfect’ describes the
divine power that created the orderly solar system, but also slips into
Thomson’s praise of Newton as a divinely-wise individual, inspired by
heaven to pursue his scientific enquiries. In Thomson’s poem, we had a
fusion of the mystical and the rational, where the gift of wisdom
enabled Newton as a scientist to deduce and describe the laws of
nature.

How does this compare to Yearsley’s use of the word ‘wisdom’? She
suggests that, rather than being an enabling power, wisdom has its
limitations: under its influence, the pen (interchangeable with ‘brush’
at this time) ‘Can never paint the wild ecstatic mood’. Compare
Yearsley’s register – the types of words she uses – with the scientific
phrases Thomson employs as best suited to his subject-matter: in To
the Memory, order, reason and recognisable shapes and forms are
used to celebrate Newton’s achievement – the ‘orbs’ and ellipses of the
solar system, which whilst vast and infinite have been captured by
Newton’s scientific reasoning.

For Yearsley, however, discernible boundaries are broken down in the

‘wild’ disorder of the ‘mood’ she describes. A little further on in the
poem, Yearsley tells the addressee of the poem that she is

Like thee, estranged

From Science and old Wisdom’s classic lore,
I’ve patient trod the wild entangled path
Of unimproved idea.
(ll. 34-7)

She purposely distances herself from ‘Science’ and ‘old Wisdom’ – the
juxtaposition of these last two words suggest that somehow wisdom is
now redundant – and instead favours the ‘wild entangled path / Of
unimproved idea’, that is, the raw data of her ‘Fancy’ – her imagination
– which is (like the poem’s addressee’s) ‘unlettered’. Rather than being
inflamed by the fiery, divinely-inspired power of scientific knowledge,
like Newton, the poet here finds an equally potent source of inspiration
from the ‘innate spark’ of her own imagination.

Let us trace the appearance of this imagery throughout the poem

following the list you compiled earlier, and think about the ways in
which Yearsley uses it to promote a very different set of ideas to those
of classical decorum as found in Dryden’s poem, or ‘enlightened’
rational thought in Thomson’s. Look, for instance, at the lines

Ne’er hail the fabled Nine, or snatch rapt thought

From the Castalian spring; ’tis not for thee,
From embers where the pagan light expires,
To catch a flame divine. From one bright spark
Of never-erring faith more rapture beams
Than wild mythology could ever boast. (ll. 19-24)

Let’s unpick these lines: here we have again the image of the ‘flame
divine’. How does it compare with the ‘innate spark’ in the poem’s
opening lines? Who is the poet addressing in these lines, and who are
the characters she talks about, the ‘fabled Nine’?

Unit 1: Introduction 1-17

___________________________________________________________________________

Activity:
Look up words or references you are unsure about, such as ‘the fabled
Nine’, or ‘the Castalian spring’, for instance in a dictionary or an
encyclopaedia (such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Observe how Yearsley uses classical references – as did Dryden and

Thomson – but in relation to negatives (‘Ne’er’, ‘’tis not for thee’); does
this support the suggestion that knowledge of classical authors can
only go so far in helping the poet to write? Note, by contrast, the
paradoxical negative of ‘never-erring faith’: it is the mystical power of
‘faith’, which issues from ‘one bright spark’ (repeating and varying the
opening line’s phrase), that acts as the best inspiration for the ‘rapture’
in which, Yearsley suggests, the poet produces verse. The image of the
flame here is one of passionate inspiration; contrast this with the use
of the metaphor in Dryden and Thomson’s poems.

We can better understand the claims that Yearsley makes here about
her own poetic talents by going right back to the beginning of the
poem, to its title and to its opening line. Who, for instance, is
‘FLORUS’, and why does Yearsley address her poem to this figure? How
does this relate to the titular addressee of the poem? Connecting these
two elements together might help us to understand the sentiment that
the poet expresses towards the end of the opening stanza, that ‘the
pen, / Though dipped in Wisdom’s deepest tint, /Can never paint the
wild ecstatic mood’ (ll. 8-10).

The name ‘Florus’ again evokes classical imagery, as the Latinate

ending of the word indicates; however, in Yearsley’s poem it is a
pseudonym for the ‘Mr. ****’ addressed in the title. Does the potential
connection between classical mythology and the ‘Unlettered Poet’ of
the title strike you as interesting? You might, for instance, note the
enduring interest in the classical past and its writers, such as we noted
in Dryden’s period; but the ‘Poet’ Yearsley addresses is both unnamed
(represented by a series of asterisks), and ‘Unlettered’. Does she imply
that learning and formal education are not necessarily essential to
being a poet? Does the remainder of the title, which tells us about the
poem’s subject-matter – ‘on Genius Unimproved’ – further confirm for
us that learning one’s ‘letters’ is not that important to being a ‘Genius’
in poetry? How does this relate to the imagery of the fire – the ‘innate
spark’ – that we have already talked about? And how does this
compare to the ‘fire’ metaphor present in both Dryden and Thomson’s
poems?

When Yearsley tells the poem’s addressee later on that she is ‘Like
thee’ in the way that she composes poetry, we can see that she claims
a similar source of poetic inspiration, from within. We can, perhaps, get
a better sense of the claims that she makes for her poetic talent by
looking more closely into her biography.

Activity:
Read the entry on ‘Ann Yearsley’ in the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (available online).

Yearsley’s identity as an ‘unlettered’ poet, one who writes from her

own inspiration, consolidates her connection with the poem’s addressee
– as does her pseudonymous identity as ‘Lactilla’, a Laicisation for her

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real-life profession as a milkmaid given to her by ‘learned’ enthusiasts

for her poetry among the literary community, such as Hannah More.
The pursuit of both the poet and Florus’ genius refutes scientific or
rationalistic methods: indeed, she tells us that

Dauntless thought
I eager seized, no formal rule e’er awed;
No precedent controlled; no custom fixed
My independent spirit.
(ll. 37-40)

Compare this ‘unfixed’ ‘spirit’ to the kind of fixity that Newton gave to
the mystical movement of the planets, or to the Comet: in Thomson’s
poem,
He, first of men, with awful wing pursued
The comet through the long elliptic curve.
(ll. 38-39)

Yearsley’s ‘Genius’, by contrast, follows no discernible curve or pattern,

but is instead ‘wild’ and ‘disordered’, and defies any kind of definition
(as the rhetorical question of the opening line suggests). Look again at
the section from lines 42-48: what do you notice about the kinds of
words being used here? How do they compare with Dryden’s regular
lines, or with Thomson’s measured diction? You might, for instance, be
struck by terms such as ‘transport’, ‘spirit-raising wing’, and ‘artless
rapture’ – very different indeed to the orderly phrases of these earlier
poems; is this reflected in the verse form? Think a little about the
metre of the poem: does it roughly fit a pattern of iambic pentameter,
like Thomson’s? Yet does it also frequently rupture this pattern – with
the troche of the first foot of the first line (‘FLORUS’), for example?
How might this support what Yearsley tells us about the way she writes
poetry – not according to ‘rules’, but in an inspired ‘transport’?

Look at lines 11-18 more closely: here we have terms potentially

relating to the movement of a comet (‘shoot’) yet which in fact refer to
the way in which the poet receives and transforms mental images in
his or her mind’s eye: what do you notice about the relationship
between terms such as ‘eye’ and ‘Fancy’? Is there a parallel between
what is seen and visible in the real world, and what is conceived as a
mental picture? Does this compare to the way in which the flame
imagery in Yearsley’s poem refers to an invisible, ‘innate spark’ of
Genius rather than an actual fire?

We mentioned at the beginning of this section that we would be

thinking about the relationship between the actual ‘eye’ and the
psychological ‘I’: can you trace a connection between these in
Yearsley’s poem? Is there a greater focus on the individual self – the
source of ‘innate’ rather than divinely conferred Genius – than we
detected in Dryden and Thomson’s poems? For instance, what is the
difference between the ‘eye’ that Yearsley describes and that present
in Thomson’s poem, which we recall referred to Newton’s work on
optics?

We might, perhaps, see Yearsley’s poem as evidence of changing

approaches to concepts such as ‘Genius’ and to the role or identity of
the poet: from the formally-educated, patron-seeking poet of Dryden’s
day, to the educated poet of Thomson’s, to the innately inspired
‘unlettered’ poet pictured in Yearsley’s poem. Perhaps, though, we
might detect a certain tension in Yearsley’s poem: whilst at times the
disruption of its formal qualities seem to complement the unruliness of
Genius it promotes, the overall form and structure of the poem
nonetheless suggest that she wishes her contemporary (and lettered?)
readers to recognise it as poetry, as they knew it. Nonetheless, we can

Unit 1: Introduction 1-19

___________________________________________________________________________

trace an increasing stress on the abilities of the individual, subjective

self to conceive and produce poetry, which was to reach its fullest
fruition in the writings of the Romantic poets you will go on to discover
in the subsequent module.

SAQ 3
How does Ann Yearsley use imagery relating to the fire or the flame
to reflect a new sensibility about poetic genius and the individual self
emerging towards the end of the eighteenth century?

REVIEW
In this unit we have covered some very different types of poems from
a wide chronological span, from disparate points in our period, to open
up some of the ways in which prevalent ideas and preoccupations
might have changed over the course of these years, using the
flame/fire image as a linking thread. We have also thought about how
poetry can be used to reflect contemporary historical, political and
social circumstances or events, as well as literary tastes and interests.
We must not, of course, neglect the wide variety of literary forms that
such expressions of experience or ideas took throughout this period: as
we shall go on to discover, poetry was just one of an array of artistic
activities practised by writers across the period. We should, however,
look back to some of the concerns and ideas we have encountered in
this unit when addressing new topics in subsequent units, where we try
to grasp the rich variety of material belonging to this lively and
fascinating period.

ADDITIONAL READING
Black, Jeremy. 2008. Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1688-1783
(Basingstoke: Palgrave)

Cohen, I. Bernard and George E. Smith (eds). 2002. The Cambridge

Companion to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
(Parts available online via Google Books)

Franklin, Caroline. 1996. ‘Introduction’, in The Rural Lyre; A Volume of

Poems by Ann Yearsley (London: Routledge/Thoemmes)

Gregory, Jeremy and John Stevenson. 2000. The Longman Companion

to Britain in the Eighteenth Century, 1688-1820 (London and
New York: Longman)

Keeble, N. H. (ed.). 2001. The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the

English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
(Parts available online via Google Books)

Richetti, John (ed.). 2005. The Cambridge History of English Literature,

1660–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) (Parts
available online via Google Books)

Wootton, David (ed.). 2003. Divine Right and Democracy: An

Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986; repr. Indianapolis: Hackett)
(Parts available online via Google Books)

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REFERENCES
De Bolla, Peter. 2003. The Education Of The Eye: Painting, Landscape,
and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press) (Parts available online via Google
Books)

Loewenstein, David and Janel Mueller (eds). 2002. The Cambridge

History of Early Modern English Literature 1 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press) (Parts available online via Google
Books.

Porter, Roy. 2000. Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the

Modern World (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, Penguin Press)

Zwicker, Steven N. 1998. ‘Dryden’, in Steven N. Zwicker (ed.), The

Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 185-203 (Parts
available online via Google Books)

THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ON THE INTERNET

BBC History provides an interactive timeline, available at:

[Link]
[Link]> It also offers an overview of the period examined in this unit
(in Britain) in ‘Civil War and Revolution (1603-1714)’ and ‘Empire and
Sea Power (1714-1837)’: <[Link]
[Accessed 24 April 2013]

Irish history links has a section on ‘Ireland in the Early Eighteenth

Century’, which provides some very interesting links to external sites,
such as county council websites as well as to academic articles on
university websites. Be careful, however, of using material on those
links which offer non-peer-reviewed material, such as Wikipedia, for
example:
<[Link]
nth_Century.html#Historical_Overviews> [Accessed 24 April 2013]

Unit 1: Introduction 1-21

___________________________________________________________________________

ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
Q. Describe how Dryden’s use of specific words and images capture
the dual sense of loss and renewal in the light of recent and
contemporary historical events.

Dryden employs contrasting words that evoke the two alternative

feelings of loss and new hope that the occasion of the Great Fire
brought to the people of London. For instance, terms such as ‘chymic
flame’ remind us of the old and the new at once, and suggest that
the burning brightness of a reconstructed city is like the hopeful
promise of the monarch, Charles II, restored to the throne in 1660.
After years of devastation and destruction, the ‘silver’ pavements
and the ‘silver Thames’ of London’s remodelled city promise a new
era of prosperity, happiness and peace.

SAQ 2
Q. How does Thomson use images of light to promote the idea that
Newton is a ‘prophet of the Enlightenment’, and how far is a
reading of the poem along these lines of limited value in
understanding the complex ideas and poetic preoccupations of
the period?

Thomson draws on several aspects of Newton’s scientific discoveries

relating to light and vision so as to show how important he was in
promoting the kinds of scientific enquiry and thirst for knowledge
characterising the ‘Enlightenment’. The reference to the multi-
coloured light of the rainbow, for instance, recalls Newton’s
refraction of light through a prism, and his intellectual ‘eye’ refers
both to Newton’s work on optics and his mental capacities. However,
Thomson stresses that Newton’s discoveries fit into a divine pattern
that affirms rather than contradicts the existence of an organising
deity, contrary to the idea some might ascribe to ‘Enlightenment’
thought, which tried to discredit traditional or superstitious forms of
religion. Thomson’s poem shows that science and religion need not
be incompatible, and therefore that the starkness of such a term is
of limited value.

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SAQ 3
Q. How does Ann Yearsley use imagery relating to the fire or the
flame to reflect a new sensibility about poetic genius and the
individual self emerging towards the end of the eighteenth
century?

Unlike Dryden or Thomson, Yearsley’s use of images relating to the

fire adopts a movement from within to the outside: that is, she
describes an ‘innate spark’ of Genius that inspires her to write
poetry. Whereas the two earlier poems place an emphasis on the
order and stability brought by the ‘enlightenment’ of the flame, in
Yearsley’s poem the fire is chaotic and unruly, which coheres with
her suggestion that the true poetic genius is ‘unlettered’, wild and
disordered. This signals an increasing focus on interiority in the latter
part of the eighteenth century, and a growing appreciation of the
individual’s ability to create something original, in defiance of rules
or precedents. There is, however, a slight tension in the formal
qualities of the poem which, whilst complementing this unruliness at
times, nonetheless suggests a yearning on Yearsley’s part to
produce verse recognisable by her contemporaries as poetry.

Unit 1: Introduction 1-23

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UNIT 2

LOSS AND RENEWAL: PASTORAL POEMS

BY JOHN MILTON

AIM
The aim of this unit is to consider the themes of loss and renewal in
three of John Milton’s shorter poems.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Identify key aspects of Milton’s biography and career, but also ask
how far such information is useful in analysing literary texts.

Describe the nature of ‘occasional writing’.

Explain why a number of poems by John Milton can be considered

poems of loss, but also recognise the potential for renewal or new
growth this can open up.

Describe how the theme of loss and renewal reflects historical

circumstances surrounding these poems.

Define ‘pastoral’ and describe ways in which Milton’s poetry

contains pastoral elements.

Show how Milton can be considered an Elizabethan writer, but also

how he reworks earlier poetic models to create something new.

Identify continuities between Milton’s work and other works you

have studied in this module so far, and in other modules.

REQUIRED READING
In this unit we will consider how loss features - or does not feature - in
some of Milton’s most important early, shorter poems. The poems we
will read are:

‘L’Allegro’ (c. 1631)

‘Il Penseroso’ (c. 1631)
Lycidas (1638)

All the above poems are included in volume one of Stephen Greenblatt
(ed.). 2012. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edn (New
York: W. W. Norton and Co.).

Your reading of Milton should not be restricted to the poems addressed

in detail here, or to the material covered in subsequent units; to get a
full grasp of the range and quality of his writing you should browse
through your edition of Milton’s poems, reading them alongside the
explanations provided in the textual apparatus.

Another edition of Milton’s poems is John Milton. 1997. John Carey

(ed.), Complete Shorter Poems, Longman Annotated Poets, 2nd edn
(London and New York: Longman)

Unit 2: Loss and Renewal: Pastoral Poems By John Milton 2-1

_____________________________________________________________________

They are also reprinted in George Campbell (ed.). 1994. Complete

English Poems, Of Education, Areopagitica (London: Everyman).

It is important to read these poems before you begin reading the

material for this unit, so as to form your own impressions before we
begin to analyse their details and some of the themes they elucidate.

INTRODUCTION
In this unit we will examine a number of poems by John Milton. The
major theme we will consider is the theme of loss.

In our introductory unit we considered some of the ways in which

writers of the middle part of the seventeenth century expressed
conflicting responses to the historical events surrounding them in the
Civil War and its aftermath. We found that whilst many discovered a
sense of loss, devastation also allowed an opportunity for renewal and
new growth in the political, social and economic sphere. We will
address this more closely in the ‘Country House’ poetry in the
subsequent unit, but here we will trace the origins of pastoral in
Milton’s poetry and consider some of the ways in which they express
these themes of loss and renewal.

We will read one of Milton’s early poems, ‘L’Allegro’ and the closely-
related poem, ‘Il Penseroso’, in the light of these considerations.
Our examination of one of Milton’s most important early poems,
Lycidas, demonstrates the idea of continuity and inheritance in poetic
form, as we discuss how far it represents Milton as a writer in the
Elizabethan tradition rather than one who is like other writers of his
day; but we will also think about ways in which Milton appropriates this
tradition and makes it his own in ways that have important implications
for his broader poetic career.

We used some techniques of close reading in the previous, introductory

unit, tools that we will employ here to analyse individual poems
carefully, an approach that is particularly beneficial when encountering
the varied and challenging written style of Milton’s poetry. You will
benefit most from this unit if you read the poems very carefully in
conjunction with the commentaries on the poem provided in the course
material.

Before we begin to examine these texts, we should first of all get some
idea of who Milton was, and of the scope of his writings.

MILTON’S CAREER AND ‘OCCASIONAL WRITING’

Who was Milton, and what kind of writing did he produce during his
career?

It is useful here, and in relation to subsequent units about this author,

to grasp some idea of Milton’s biography the better to understand the
variety and nature of his writings.

Activity:
Look up the entry for ‘John Milton’ in the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (available online).

We might legitimately ask what these personal details have to do with

Milton as a writer and with an appraisal of his writings. Surely we are

2-2 Literature 3
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concerned in these units with literature and the appreciation and

evaluation of literature, and not with accounts, however interesting
they may be, of people’s lives?

One can argue that it is important to know something of the author’s

life before embarking on a study of his writings because by examining
the author’s life we can elucidate the author’s intention in writing a
particular text. Thus we can, more easily, understand what that text is
supposed to mean. However, one school of literary criticism argues
that the meaning of a literary text is embedded in the text itself, and
that the search for meaning in the text does not necessitate the
invocation of some authority from ‘beyond’ the text, such as the
author’s life, to verify what the text means. Another, related school of
literary criticism argues that, even if the author’s biography does
provide some clues as to the meaning of the text, biographically
verified meaning is only one possible interpretation of the text among
many.

Furthermore, some critics argue that we should be suspicious of trying

to recover an author’s accurate biography, and of using that
information to ‘explain’ the text by using it to grasp the author’s
intention in writing. Catherine Belsey writes that ‘interpretation is not -
cannot be - an activity of reconstructing an intended meaning which
preceded the writing process’ (1988: 6). Belsey goes on to argue that
this ‘authorial intention’, often seen as providing the definitive
explanation of a text, is

a phantom - not merely elusive and probably illusory, but also dead.
The author’s intended meaning died in the moment the text came into
being, and the text is necessarily more than the author conceived or
knew. (1988: 6)

From one point of view, then, for a number of reasons, a record of the
kind of person John Milton was has limited value in assessing his
writings.

However, the nature of Milton’s writings nonetheless seems to

necessitate the utilisation of some elements of his biography,
particularly those ‘occasional’ pieces that are written in response to an
event in his personal life or in the nation at large, as our reading of
Lycidas in this unit will discover. We might revise the position that
critics such as Belsey adopt to suggest that, whilst we should be
cautious of the limitations – or even the possibility – of discerning an
author’s ‘intentions’ through biographical details, we can nonetheless
sometimes use such information in a judicious manner to elucidate our
readings of certain texts.

Occasional writing, such as Milton’s, seems to highlight important

theoretical questions about the appreciation of the literature of the
past. Firstly, we might ask whether occasional writing is appreciable in
any context other than that of the occasion which prompted its
composition. For example, can one appreciate Milton’s pamphlet
Eikonoklastes in the present day when it was written as a response to
a particular political occasion in 1649? Is it necessary to have
experienced this event first-hand to fully appreciate the writing?
Occasional writing also seems to prompt a second question: is it
necessary to understand fully the occasion before one can fully
appreciate the writing? In other words, should we be able to grasp
completely the context of a literary text to fully grasp its meaning?

Quite clearly, we can never know what it was like to live at a certain
time, nor can we ever gain all the knowledge needed to understand the
context of a text’s appearance in its entirety. However, we can,

Unit 2: Loss and Renewal: Pastoral Poems By John Milton 2-3

_____________________________________________________________________

perhaps, reshape these questions to enhance their usefulness to the

kinds of enquiry we pursue as we study literary texts. We might, for
instance, ask whether we can actually appreciate a piece of occasional
literature outside the context in which it was written. We might also
ask whether we can appreciate the original meaning of a piece of
literature unless we understand fully the occasion that prompted its
composition. If we think of a text as a product of its time – one which
we can appreciate more fully if we know something about that time,
and its author, even if we remain aware that we can never know
everything – but also think of a text as something that we read in the
here and now, as words on the page, then we can perhaps overcome
any sense that our ‘belatedness’ from a particular period in history
disables our appreciation of a text.

Our reading of occasional literature perhaps prompts the recognition

that the meaning we seem to ‘discover’ in a text is, in fact, a meaning
we ourselves have constructed, based on our own knowledge (or lack
of knowledge) of a certain time or author, and influenced by our
preconceptions. This need not trouble us, however: we can combine
our present-day knowledge with the knowledge that we gain through
careful research into and reading about a particular period or author to
gain a fuller appreciation of a text, both as a product of its time and as
one that has relevance and interest for us as present-day readers.

Whilst we bear these reservations, and possibilities, about reading

literature in tandem with biographical information in mind, we should
try to outline the contours of Milton’s career as a writer. One helpful
way of approaching this is divide it into three periods: ‘early’, ‘middle’,
and ‘late’. Early Milton can be taken as referring to writings produced
by Milton between 1629 and, roughly, 1639 when Milton returned from
a journey to Italy on hearing of the political turmoil in England. Early
writings by Milton include poems such as ‘On the Morning of Christ’s
Nativity’ (1629), ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ (c.1631), and Lycidas
(1638). Milton’s middle period runs from 1639 to, roughly, 1660. In
this period Milton wrote very little poetry, writing instead a number of
important and influential pamphlets. These include The Doctrine and
Discipline of Divorce (1643), Areopagitica (1644) and The Ready and
Easy Way to Establish A Free Commonwealth (1660). Late Milton refers
to writing by Milton from about 1660 until his death in 1674. Milton
mostly wrote poetry during this period, creating those works for which
he is now most famous: these include Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise
Regained and Samson Agonistes (both 1671). We shall address each of
these major aspects of Milton’s career in separate units, concentrating
on the ‘early’ phase here of his pastoral poetry.

MILTON AND LOSS

In the previous unit, we addressed questions about loss and renewal
from a slightly different, but nonetheless related perspective to that
which we shall be addressing here. We considered how, at various
points in the history of the period covered by this module, there is a
dual sense of loss and renewal brought about by contemporaneous
historical events, and by the changes in the literary forms that reflect
them. So, too, in Milton’s pastoral poetry we can chart the seemingly
paradoxical sense of yearning back to a lost past, and the promotion of
a new and future ideal.

We have seen how the loss of authority and instability that

characterised the execution of Charles I in 1649 challenged established
ideas about divine order and the individual monarch’s ability to
maintain harmony and unity amongst the nation. Yet we have also
seen that for many the loss of Charles as King brought the potential for
renewal, and for new hope in the Parliament that replaced his rule. We

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shall see that, in Areopagitica, Milton expresses a certain loss of faith

in that Parliament, which had passed laws which contradicted the
principles on which it had been founded. Milton sought, through his
essay, to encourage parliamentary reform, an aim which failed with the
restoration of monarchy in 1660. Milton’s Areopagitica foreshadows
some of the literature of the Restoration period, which is characterised
by a dual sense of loss and of new, liberating political possibilities.

The pastoral poetry by Milton that we address in this unit coheres with
this narrative of loss and renewal in significant ways, as our discussion
of the rejuvenation of the pastoral tradition elucidates.

Michel Foucault in his important essay ‘What is an author?’ argues

that:

the motivation ... of Arabian narratives - such as The Thousand and

One Nights - was ... the eluding of death: one spoke, telling stories
into the early morning, in order to forestall death, to postpone the
day of reckoning that would silence the narrator. (1988: 198)

The story-telling that Foucault describes here in some respects mirrors

the narrative we can map onto Milton’s treatment of the idea of loss
as an evasion of finality (the finality of death), partly through drawing
on the past to create future narratives: ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’
capture this two-way motion of looking backwards so as to step
forwards.

Re-read ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’.

It is not certain when exactly Milton wrote this pair of poems, but it is
thought both were written together sometime in the summer of 1631
(Milton 1997: 130). It is important to read these two poems as a pair,
whose form and themes complement one another. Both poems aim to
evoke a particular mood, personified through a central character or,
perhaps more accurately, a divinity: ‘L’Allegro’, literally ‘the joyful
man’, is concerned with Mirth; by contrast, ‘Il Penseroso’, literally ‘the
pensive man’, addresses Melancholy.

Whilst the mood of each poem is different, the complementary

relationship between their themes is mirrored in their shared structure.
Both poems are written in the same metre: the preludes of both
poems, their opening ten lines, are composed alternately of six and ten
syllables, with an abbacddeec rhyme scheme. In each case, the body
of the poem consists of octosyllabic (eight syllable) couplets.

Because of the similarities between both poems, we will examine

‘L’Allegro’ in a little detail and you should make the connections and
contrasts with ‘Il Penseroso’ by yourself.

‘L’Allegro’ begins with the speaker seeking to banish Melancholy as a

prelude to issuing an invitation to Mirth. The speaker encourages
Melancholy to occupy a haunt suitable to itself, some ‘uncouth cell’, it
is suggested, ‘Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous
wings,/And the night-raven sings’ (ll. 6-7). Having banished
Melancholy, the speaker invites Mirth to join him:

But come, thou Goddess fair and free,

In heaven yclept Euphroysne,
And by men heart-easing Mirth.
(ll. 11-13)

Who or what is ‘Euphrosyne’? Check in the editorial notes to your

edition of the poem who or what ‘Euphrosyne’ refers to; how does this

Unit 2: Loss and Renewal: Pastoral Poems By John Milton 2-5

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fit into the classical qualities of the narrative Milton describes about
Mirth’s history? He offers a set of possible ‘parentages’ for Mirth: she
could be the daughter of Bacchus (the Greek and Roman god of wine)
and Venus (the goddess of love), or of Aurora (the goddess of the
dawn) and Zephyr (god of the west wind). Mythological figures appear
frequently in both ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, and are an important
reminder of Milton’s interest in classical literature.

Not only does the speaker invite Mirth to come to him but also he
invites her to bring her companions, ‘Jest’, ‘youthful Jollity’, ‘Quips’,
‘Cracks’, ‘wanton Wiles’, ‘Nods’, ‘Becks’ and ‘wreathed Smiles’ (ll. 26-
28). Such companions brush Care aside. Significantly, Mirth is also
asked to bring with her the ‘mountain-nymph, sweet Liberty’. With
Liberty, we can argue, comes the freedom to indulge. Mirth is told by
the speaker in ‘L’Allegro’ to ‘trip it as you go’. We could argue that this
is what characterises ‘L’Allegro’: the poem trips lightly, indulgently
along, often jumping from thought to thought in a way that can be
difficult to follow. How is this mirrored in the formal structure of the
poem, its metre and rhyme-scheme?

Can you discern a contrast with ‘Il Penseroso’? Is ‘Liberty’ invoked

here, and how does the ‘even step, and musing gait’ of Melancholy
compare to Mirth’s footfall? How is this mirrored in the rhythm and flow
of the poem?

In l.38 of ‘L’Allegro’, the speaker asks to be admitted to Mirth’s ‘crew’,

and from line 41 almost to the end of the poem the speaker details the
‘unreproved pleasures free’ that he would find if permitted to live with
Mirth. First of all he details what he would hear and see on a Mirthful
morning. Next, in lines 57 to 90, he describes what he would see on
the Mirthful walks he would take, ‘By hedgerows elms, on hillocks
green’,

While the ploughman near at hand,

Whistles o’er the furrowed land,
And the milkmaid singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his scythe,
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale.
(ll. 63-68)

He would see:

Russet lawns, and fallows grey,

Where the nibbling flocks do stray,
Mountains on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest.
(ll. 71-74)

He would also, we are told, visit the ‘upland hamlets’ and listen to the
stories people like the shepherds, the milkmaids and the ploughman
would have to tell, stories of the ‘Faery Mab’ or the ‘drudging goblin’.
Finally, he would visit ‘Towered cities’,

Where throngs of knights and barons bold,

In weeds of peace high triumphs hold,
With store of ladies, whose bright eyes
Rain influence, and judge the prize,

Of wit, or arms, while both contend

To win her grace, whom all commend.
(ll. 119-124)

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In the towered cities envisaged by the poetic voice, he would visit the
theatre, as well as seeing jousting competitions in the court, but
alongside such physical activities he would enjoy the more sedate
pleasure of reading poetry. Does this lead towards creating a more
pensive mood towards the close of the poem? Having described all
these joys for Mirth, as an encouragement for her to come to the
speaker, the poem concludes with the promise:

These delights, if thou canst give,

Mirth with thee, I mean to live.
(ll. 151-152)

What do you notice about these closing lines? Do they combine a

hypothetical mode – a kind of wishful thinking that is partly nostalgic –
with a hopeful look towards the future? How does this fit into the
narrative we have traced about Milton’s relationship with the pastoral
tradition, and his position as a poet of the future?

SAQ 1
How can ‘Il Penseroso’ be seen as a poem of loss, in contrast to or
comparison with ‘L’Allegro’?

PASTORAL POETRY AND THE ELIZABETHAN TRADITION

We have given some close attention to two of Milton’s pastoral poems
in terms of the narrative of loss that they embody, and the promise of
future hope that they might give. We might consider such a narrative
to be embedded in a relationship with the past, both in terms of its
history and its literary traditions. To identify how far Milton’s pastoral
poetry is one of loss and regret, or one of future hope, we must embed
it more carefully in the literary traditions in which it participates.

How far can Milton be considered a poet of his time, how far an
inheritor of earlier poetic traditions? We can begin to address this
question by thinking carefully about one of the poetic forms favoured
by Milton, the pastoral, which will inform our readings of ‘L’Allegro’, ‘Il
Penseroso’ and ‘Lycidas’. We might come to realise that Milton builds
on the traditions established by earlier poets but also reshapes them to
form his own distinctive poetic style, much as the new, post-Fire
London that Dryden describes in Annus Mirabilis is constructed on the
foundations of the old city.

We shall address examples of the endurance – and the transformation

– of pastoral traditions in subsequent units of this module, so it is
worth grasping what pastoral involves, and how it encountered poetic
treatment at different points in literary history. Pastoral is a form of
literature originating in ancient Greek and Roman writing. Ancient
pastoral idealised the Greek state of Arcadia, a rural idyll populated by
herdsmen and rustics, and which centred around worship of the
mythological deity Pan – the god of shepherd and flocks. ‘Pastoral’
refers to the tradition in classical poetry of idealising Arcadia, which
pictures it as a simple, idealised rural world.

In the Renaissance, the interest in Greek and Roman literature grew

alongside an interest in pastoral. The form was revived and became
highly popular, with works such as Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherd’s
Calendar, written in the late 1570s, setting the trend for future
experiments with the form. Other important examples from this period
include Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The
‘Country House’ poem is grounded in this tradition, stemming from

Unit 2: Loss and Renewal: Pastoral Poems By John Milton 2-7

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Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ to Denham’s Coopers Hill and Marvell’s Upon

Appleton House, as the following unit shall address.

We might also note how the pastoral enjoyed continuing popularity

well into the eighteenth century. The important French painter, Claude
Lorraine, depicted many Italian landscapes as a rural idyll, a new
‘Arcadia’ on the model formed by Virgil and other Latin poets. These
left a lasting impression on eighteenth-century tourists steeped in
classical literature.

Pastoral represents an idealised society, and we can see this idealised,

perfect society represented in the hamlets and towered cities, the
shepherds, maidens and beautiful natural landscapes pictured in
Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’, as we shall go on to discuss in closer detail. In a
sense, the pastoral world is a paradise, an unfallen world without the
complexities, cares and evils of the world that we see around us; this
provides an important context for Milton’s most famous poem, Paradise
Lost, as we shall discover in a subsequent unit. The pastoral genre
presents a rural idyll that imagines a perfect, unproblematic world: the
poems by Milton that we shall be considering here contrasts the
idealism of the pastoral world with the very different world in which he
lives.

There is a sense of belatedness belonging to pastoral poetry – a sense

that the world it describes existed in the past and no longer exists, and
is perhaps irrecoverable. Pastoral is characterised by nostalgia, a
longing for a golden world that has now disappeared. This sense of loss
endures through all subsequent reworkings of the pastoral tradition
during the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and beyond;
‘Romantic’ poets such as Keats, for instance, felt an immense sense of
insufficiency when he compared his own poetry to that of important
writers within the pastoral tradition, such as Spenser and Milton.

The connection that writers like Keats made between Spenser and
Milton is important in helping us to address why Milton chose to write
poetry within the pastoral tradition, one which was not particularly
popular amongst his contemporaries and which seemed, in many
respects, to be outdated and even irrelevant. Milton was writing in
what might, at the time, have been considered an archaic tradition
favoured by Elizabethan writers, and so distinguishes his poetry from
that of most other writers at the time in such examples as ‘L’Allegro’,
‘Il Penseroso’ and Lycidas. However, in subsequent units we will see
the limitations of describing Milton’s writing as belonging to one
particular tradition or style: Areopagitica (his major prose work) and
Paradise Lost both offer important counterpoints to these earlier
poems.

The publication of Lycidas in 1638 nonetheless made its difference to

other contemporaneous poems explicit. The poem first appeared in a
collection of poetry by various authors, dedicated to the memory of
Milton’s friend, Edward King. John Carey notes that:

Milton’s Spenserian pastoralism in Lycidas contrasts markedly with

the ‘metaphysical’ diction and imagery of the other contributors to
the 1638 volume. (Milton 1997: 234)

Unlike other poetry of this period, Carey suggests, ‘Lycidas’ tends to

echo Elizabethan poets like Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare
more than it echoes poets like Donne, Marvell and Herbert.

Both the pastoral form and specific details within ‘L’Allegro’, ‘Il
Penseroso’, and Lycidas enable us to identify echoes of Elizabethan
poetry. Occasionally Milton uses individual words which have a

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particularly Elizabethan resonance, such as ‘yclept’ in l.12 of ‘L’Allegro’:

this is a word form found frequently in Spenser’s writing (and one later
favoured by Keats when trying to emulate Spenser). Not only do
Milton’s poems use particularly Elizabethan words but they also
duplicate phrases and echo lines from particular Elizabethan texts.

John Carey suggests that the principal literary model used in ‘L’Allegro’
is Shakespeare: the poem contains a total of fourteen echoes of his
plays, including four to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Milton 1997:
131), such as the phrase ‘Come, and trip it as you go’ (l. 33), which
mirrors ‘Each one tripping on his toe [...]’ in The Tempest (IV.1.46).
Similarly, the speaker in Milton’s poem describes the sunrise with the
phrase ‘Right against the eastern gate’ (l. 59), which recalls Oberon’s
similar image in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘the eastern gate, all
fiery-red’ (III.2.391).

Lycidas similarly incorporates references to this play by Shakespeare,

such as the ‘fresh lap’ of the valley (l. 138) which compares with the
‘fresh lap of the crimson rose’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(II.1.108). Again, ll.48-49 of Milton’s poem – ‘More tuneable than lark
to shepherd’s ear, / When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds
appear’ – directly echo the play’s I.i.184-5.

Lycidas is also filled with references to and echoes of other Elizabethan

poets, especially Spenser: the unusual word ‘guerdon’ (l. 73), which
means ‘reward’ or ‘recompense’, is frequently used by Spenser. The
shepherd’s ‘oaten flute’ (l. 33) echoes the ‘oten reeds’ of shepherds in
Spenser’s pastoral poem The Shepherd’s Calendar. Meanwhile
Spenser’s Tear of the Muses which reads ‘Due praise that is the spur of
dooing well’ resonates in Milton’s line, ‘Fame is the spur that the clear
spirit doth raise’ (l. 70).

Milton did not simply write in an Elizabethan tradition to be different

from the poets of his day or, conversely, as a result of poetic
conservatism. He saw the Elizabethan tradition as following in a direct
line from the classics: we saw how pastoral poetry idealises a
vanished, classical world, which was captured by Latin poets such as
Virgil and Horace. Milton greatly admired such classical authors, and
saw the world they belonged to as providing an ideal model for human
beings to follow, a golden world inherited by his Elizabethan
predecessors. As we shall see, Milton compares and contrasts the
Parliament in England with the ancient Areopagitica of Greece to
suggest how the present-day world might learn from former ages.

Whilst pastoral poetry idealises a past that is now lost, it can also serve
an active, present-day purpose by which the poet can satirise, and
perhaps help to reform, the society in which he lives. By holding up his
contemporary world and comparing it to the perfect idyll that pastoral
represents, he can affect a satiric critique of it that might encourage
the poem’s readers to strive to improve it. In this sense, the loss
registered in pastoral poetry also allows a potential for renewal, the
backward-looking gaze it involves can also be two-faced, forward-
looking towards a brighter future. ‘L’Allegro’ can be seen as a poem
imbued with a certain sense of loss, but it can also be seen as
prompting society to reach for an ideal; the desire to change society
that it envisages is, paradoxically, also connected to the sense that
that society is in some way lacking. How far does ‘L’Allegro’ offer an
optimistic hope for renewal in spite of the loss registered in its
nostalgic use of pastoral?

Milton considered other subsequent forms of writing, such as the

Metaphysical tradition, to hold a less direct connection with classical
literature than the Elizabethan age. The Elizabethans’ link to the

Unit 2: Loss and Renewal: Pastoral Poems By John Milton 2-9

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classics, and in particular their preference for pastoral, offered Milton a

perfect model for writing the kind of idealistic, potentially reformative
poetry he strove to produce. Milton’s interest in this mode provided an
essential staging post on his development as a poet.

Lois Potter (1986: 82) points out that the writing of pastoral was, in
classical tradition, associated with the early stages of a writer’s career.
Virgil, for instance, wrote his Eclogues in the early part of his career,
before he went on to write his major epic, the Aeneid. Spenser, in
imitation of Virgil and this classical tradition, began his career with the
publication of the pastoral The Shepherd’s Calendar before going on to
write The Faerie Queene. Milton’s decision to write pastoral early in his
career can be seen as an imitation of the classics, through an imitation
of Spenser. As such, he partly anticipates the classicism of much late
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poetry, as we shall go on to
discuss in greater detail. We might, therefore, see Milton’s interest in
pastoral traditions and the Elizabethan poets not only as a nostalgic
longing for a now lost past, but also as a developmental – even
revolutionary – way of creating something new in poetry that responds
to the present moment of writing, building something different on the
foundations of the old and familiar.

Thomas Carew, in his ‘An Elegie upon the Death of the Deane of Pauls,
Dr. John Donne’, describes Milton as the first of a new and dreadful
breed of poets. Carew saw Donne as a poet who purged the ‘Muses
garden’, which had been filled with ‘Pedantique weedes’, and as a poet
who threw away the ‘lazie seeds/ Of servile imitation’ and planted
‘fresh invention’. However, Carew saw the rise of a new generation of
poets after Donne’s death who did not live up to the admirable
precedent he had set:

will repeale the goodly exil’d traine

Of gods and godesses, which in thy just raigne
Were banish’d nobler Poems, now, with these
The silenc’d tales o’th’Metamorphoses
Will stuffe their lines, and swell the windy Page,
Till Verse refin’d by thee, in this last Age
Turne ballad rime, or those old Idolls bee
Ador’d againe, with new apostasie.
(Carew in Dalglish, 1961: 56. ll. 63-70)

Lois Potter suggests that Carew’s prophecy was accurate: Milton can
be seen as the first of this new generation of poets who employed and
imitated the classics in their poetry (1986: 77). But how far should we
consider this to be something negative, the ‘servile imitation’ that
Carew describes? Or how far might we see drawing on the past as a
potential source of renewal and creation? How far does the inevitable
loss belonging to our relationship with the past also allow the poet
freedom to develop his own individual style?

LYCIDAS: LOSS AND RENEWAL, AND FORGING AN

INDEPENDENT POETIC IDENTITY.
In this section we will be considering some of the ways that Lycidas is
similar or different to ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, both in terms of its
relation to the narrative of loss and renewal we have so far traced, and
in terms of its form and its relation to the pastoral. We shall also think
about the poem’s identity as a piece of ‘occasional writing’ in the
context of the discussion we outlined earlier in the unit, about
biographical knowledge and its uses or limitations in appreciating a
text.

2-10 Literature 3
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In the previous unit, we used the method of selecting particular words

and themes to elucidate the differences between preoccupations
shared by each of the three poems we addressed. Here, we will adopt
a different method of analysis: we shall move through Lycidas
chronologically, as it were, addressing each of its verse paragraphs in
turn. This is partly because the poetic voices, as well as the themes,
change as the poem moves on. Although usually when we discuss
poems we describe each verse as a ‘stanza’, Lycidas’ continuous series
of stanzas run into each other. We will, therefore, break the poem
down into separate ‘verse paragraphs’ to make our analysis easier,
focussing on alternative expressions of the theme of ‘loss’ as a running
thread. Each paragraph possesses distinct qualities of its own but also
links into the other paragraphs, which allows the poem to cohere as a
whole.

Re-read Lycidas.

Firstly, let us look at the structure of the poem. It is written in a form

that bears close resemblance to the canzone, a popular form in Italian
poetry. Canzone means ‘song’, and the form is irregular because it is
intended to give the impression of the spontaneity of an inspired
singer. The poem consists of eleven verse paragraphs of varying
lengths and of varying rhyme schemes. The lengths of the paragraphs
are (in lines): 14, 10, 12, 13, 14, 21, 18, 29, 33, 21, 8.

Paragraph 6 exceeds the length of paragraph 5 by 8 lines, and

paragraph 8 exceeds the length of paragraph 7 by 11 lines. According
to John Carey, this serves to emphasise the conclusions of paragraphs
5 and 8 (1968: 233). We will examine this contention in more detail
when we come to read the poem. Let us examine the three elements
which make up the poem:

(i) the title

(ii) the epigraph
(iii) the eleven verse paragraphs

What is the significance of the title of the poem? The name ‘Lycidas’
appears in the writings of Theocritus, where it means ‘the best of
pipers’. Theocritus, a Greek poet living in Sicily in the third century
B.C., is generally considered the originator of the pastoral mode. The
title ‘Lycidas’ therefore suggests, through the echo from Theocritus,
that the poem will be in the pastoral mode. J. Martin Evans also points
out that Lycidas is the name given to the protagonist in one of the
most important models for Milton’s poem, Virgil’s ninth Eclogue, which,
like Lycidas, calls into question ‘the power of poetry to shape events’
(1999: 44) – an anxiety we must bear in mind as we analyse the poem
in closer detail. The connection with Virgil’s Lycidas reminds us both of
the poetic tradition in which Milton’s verse is written, and of the dark
outlook promoted in the particular Eclogue in which he appears.

However, how might the reader’s expectations be altered by the

epigraph to the poem?

In this monody the author bewails a learned friend, unfortunately

drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637.
And by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy then in
their height.

The epigraph does two things:

Firstly, it proposes that the poem is not only a pastoral poem but also
that it is some form of elegy. Secondly, it also presents the poem as a
piece of ‘occasional’ literature.

Unit 2: Loss and Renewal: Pastoral Poems By John Milton 2-11

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We shall address the meaning and purpose of ‘occasional’ literature in

other contexts in subsequent units. Here, we might observe that the
occasion – the motivation for – the composition of this poem was the
death of Milton’s ‘learned friend’, Edward King, shipwrecked and
drowned in the Irish Sea at the age of twenty-five, in 1637. The word
‘monody’ (meaning a dirge spoken by one person) alerts us to this
elegiac purpose.

Activity:
Check a full explanation of the term ‘monody’ in the Oxford English
Dictionary.

Does the second sentence of the epigraph somehow surprise us? Does
it seem to sit strangely with the first sentence, and with the proposed
purpose of lamenting the loss of a friend? The epigraph tells us that
the occasion of King’s drowning prompted the poet to consider the
current state of the clergy, and by addressing its failings foresee its
downfall. Lycidas’ status as an elegiac poem allows us to address the
question of whether it transcends the occasion for which it was written.
Is the poem limited by its occasional nature – or rather, are we as
readers limited in the readings we can propose for the poem by
knowing something about the actual events that had prompted its
composition? Or does the poem transcend the original motivation for
writing it to talk about themes and subjects beyond its immediate
scope?

We shall discuss the occasional purpose of literature in different

contexts more fully in subsequent units – in particular, when we
address Milton’s Areopagitica as a response to the political situation
surrounding its appearance – but it is worth bearing in mind here that
a personal motivation for writing a poem can be married to a more
transcendental, ‘universal’ theme or subject-matter.

Recent critics, such as James Hanford (2008), have suggested that

Milton’s poem is not just a pastoral elegy, but in fact combines
numerous different styles in an ongoing exercise of formal play. For
our purposes here, we might consider how Lycidas combines two
literary forms in one: it is a ‘pastoral elegy’, a particular form of both
elegiac and of pastoral writing. Again, the pastoral elegy is considered
to have originated in the writings of Theocritus: in the ‘Lament for
Daphnis’ in his Idylls, Theocritus described how Nature mourned the
death of Daphnis, a shepherd, whom the goddess of love Aphrodite
killed because he loved a nymph rather than her. Lycidas follows in this
tradition by lamenting the death of the drowned shepherd, and
according to J. Martin Evans is most closely modelled on Virgil's Tenth
Eclogue, which commemorates the death of Cornelius Gallus – ‘soldier,
statesman, and poet’ (1999: 41). Poetry of the ‘Romantic’ era that you
will subsequently encounter also follows in this tradition, such as Percy
Bysshe Shelley’s poem ‘Adonais’ (1812), as does the Victorian poet
Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Thyrsis’ (1886).

The pastoral elegy conventionally contains a number of elements.

These include the lament by all of nature for the dead person, a
contrast between the fixity of death and the reawakening of spring,
and the idea that the dead person is immortal. You might connect
some of these dual themes to those we encountered in our first unit,
where loss does not preclude regeneration, but can in fact encourage
it. Some, or perhaps even all of these features belonging to pastoral
elegy are present in Lycidas. It is, for instance, directly concerned with
loss, that of the deceased friend; we might also question how far this

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opens up the potential for renewal in the poem. We might,

furthermore, ask of Lycidas why Milton chose to write a pastoral elegy
at all as a response to his friend’s death. Why, in other words, did
Milton respond to loss in the particular form that he does?

One argument is that this is not an authentic poem of loss. We have

seen earlier how Milton wishes to imitate the classics, and we argued
that he wrote pastoral poetry in his early career because imitating the
classics was one means by which a young poet could forge his own
poetic identity – an idea we will encounter later when considering the
work of the early eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. Is Lycidas a
response to loss, or an exercise in imitation? Is Milton less concerned
with lamenting his friend’s death than with exploring the poetic
possibilities of the pastoral elegy? Does it invalidate the poem’s status
as an elegy if Milton is using the death of his friend as an excuse to
write a pastoral elegy? Or can both purposes be present at once? This
might lead us to question how far ‘art’ can be an ‘authentic’ expression
of experience or personal feeling, or just an artificial demonstration of
the artist’s skill or talent, issues which we will repeatedly encounter
throughout this module.

However, we should always be cautious of presuming too much

knowledge about an artist’s ‘intentions’, let alone his or her feelings or
emotions. After all, why could Milton not respond ‘authentically’ to his
loss in the form of a pastoral elegy? Moreover, what is meant by
‘authentic’ here? By asking whether or not Lycidas is ‘authentic’, are
we asking whether or not Milton was being ‘true’ to himself and to his
pain when he wrote the poem? Surely this is something we can never
know: the absence of the author means that Milton himself can never
be answerable to such charges. But would we even want him to be, or
should we be encouraged to read his poems on their own merit, which
additional biographical material may or may not elucidate, but which
should always come second to our appreciation of the words on the
page?

Finally, the argument that the poem is unauthentic perhaps presumes

that the loss to which Milton responds in the poem is purely personal:
it may, in fact, address more than one type of ‘loss’. Perhaps Lycidas is
less a poem responding to personal loss, but rather uses this as a
springboard to address broader issues and concerns similarly related to
this overarching theme: this is hinted in the epigraph’s suggestion that
the poem is also a response to the demise of the clergy. As we
investigate the poem more carefully, we should ask ourselves what
alternative types of loss it addresses, and how these are dealt with in
different ways within the overall format of the pastoral elegy. We
should, perhaps, heed J. Martin Evans’ observation on the apparent
disjunction between the impersonality of Lycidas’ form and the
personal event that inspired it: ‘It was precisely through his dialogue
with the tradition of the pastoral elegy […] that Milton first came face
to face with some of his most profound and personal anxieties about
the future direction of his own life’ (1999: 41). The poem itself, then,
comes to speak about much more than just an individual event in the
poet’s life, or his interest in a particular literary form.

SAQ 2
Discuss some of the reasons why the title and the epigraph to Lycidas
are important.

Having addressed some of the potential themes surrounding the poem,

Unit 2: Loss and Renewal: Pastoral Poems By John Milton 2-13

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and the nature of its structure, let us analyse the poem itself in closer
detail.

Re-read the first six paragraphs of Lycidas.

PARAGRAPH 1
Who is speaking? The nature of the narrative voice in the poem has
been discussed by several scholars: although, as we have seen, the
poem is a monody, it in fact projects two distinct voices. The first of
these, which opens the poem, is the ‘uncouth swain’ who grieves for
the loss of his friend, Lycidas. As we shall see a second voice, that of
the ‘pilot’, is introduced from line 109 onwards.

The first paragraph of the poem seems to suggest that the poem was
not written voluntarily. The speaker describes plucking the berries of
the laurel (the tree of victory), the myrtle (the tree of Venus,
traditional patron of amatory verse), and the ivy (used by Bacchus to
crown the first poet) with ‘forced fingers’, and how he was compelled
to write the poem. Does this suggest that he is somehow not in control
of writing his own poem?

We encountered in Ann Yearsley’s poem the notion that a poem is

‘innately inspired’; here, that idea of inspiration seems to come from
an external, and perhaps divine source. This recalls the original sense
of the word, ‘inspired’, from the Latin in-spirare, ‘to breathe into’, and
the creation of the first man: according to Genesis, God breathed life
into Adam.

What form does this section of the paragraph take? Count the number
of lines: its fourteen lines identify this as a form of ‘broken sonnet’. In
your copy of the poem, make a note of the rhyme scheme used here:
from what you know already about the sonnet form, how do Milton’s
lines compare to traditional rhyming patterns?

The abccbbdebdebfb pattern approaches that of a sonnet, but is

irregular and includes two unrhymed and isolated lines (ll.1 and 15).
Perhaps in this irregularity Milton sought to illustrate formally the
tension and strain of the ‘birthing’ of a poem: through its structure,
this ‘broken sonnet’ presents the struggle of the poet to force the
poem into being. The sense that the poem is the result of a forced
creative process complements the idea that an external force
compelled the poet to write it, against his own desire. Yet perhaps by
rupturing the expected formal structure of the sonnet Milton also
shows how he can both draw on and break with existing poetic forms
and traditions.

Lycidas has died, the speaker tells us, and asks ‘Who would not sing
for Lycidas?’ (l.10). We already know from the epigraph, however, that
the person who has died is not Lycidas, the mythological figure, but
Milton’s friend, Edward King. The opening paragraph proposes that
Lycidas and King are equivalent; this is highly significant in prompting
us to think that the poem might simultaneously be a lament for the
loss of a friend, but also for many other things besides. Lycidas
emblematises the traditional role ascribed to the shepherd in pastoral
poetry, that of the poet. By linking Lycidas to King, we are prompted to
make the connection between Milton’s friend and the role of poet.

Think back to the unusual juxtaposition of the two sentences of the

epitaph we discussed. Edward King occupied two roles during his
lifetime, that of minor poet and that of clergyman. Whilst the shepherd
in the pastoral tradition was a poet, in the Christian tradition the
shepherd is the leader of the worshipping community. In lamenting the
death of a shepherd in Lycidas, therefore, Milton laments the death of

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the shepherd-poet and the shepherd-cleric, both of which roles were

filled metaphorically by Edward King. However, Lycidas as shepherd
represents more than King: he occupies a more archetypal role than
the individual, real-life friend of Milton, standing in for all poetry and all
the clergy. Milton uses this slippage between the real-life and the
mythical to move beyond the lament for the death of King alone, to
address issues pertinent to all mankind: importantly, King is never
mentioned by name. Rather, Milton laments the death of the shepherd,
who can be identified with King, but who also comes to represent much
broader, universal concerns.

PARAGRAPH 2
The second paragraph begins with an appeal to the Muses to sing.
Once again this reference raises the question ‘who is speaking?’ The
answer to this question is important. The speaker appeals to the Muses
to sing a lament for his dead friend, and expresses the hope that, just
as the Muses sing on the occasion of his friend’s death, they will also
lament him when he dies:

Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse,

So may some gentle muse
With lucky words favour my destined urn,
And as he passes turn,
And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud. (ll.18-22)

The speaker justifies his claim that he should be lamented in the same
way as Lycidas by telling us that both ‘were nursed upon the self-same
hill, / Fed the same flock; by fountain, shade, and rill’ (ll.23-24). The
speaker claims some form of equivalence between himself and Lycidas,
which prompts us to ascertain two important dimensions belonging to
the poem. Firstly, it lends the poem authority. From the first
paragraph the poet has praised Lycidas’ greatness, which is such that
it compels the Muses to mourn his death. By aligning himself with
Lycidas in certain respects, the speaker of the poem allies himself to
this greatness and makes himself a figure of authority who would
similarly compel the Muses to lament his death. But the evidence of
the poem before us suggests that, in some respects, the speaker even
surpasses Lycidas: he has succeeded in making the Muses sing even
while he is still alive. He establishes his identity as an authoritative
figure who carefully controls and constructs his poem.

The second important point raised by the equivalence established

between Lycidas and the speaker is the suggestion that the poem
becomes a lament not only for Lycidas, but for the speaker too. This is
the form, he suggests, that a lament for great ‘shepherds’ should take,
and which the Muses’ elegy for his own death will take.

The poem, therefore, does not simply mourn Lycidas: it prefigures

future mourning by imagining what might take place when the speaker
himself dies. The poem responds not only to the loss of a single human
being, but also to the inevitability that that loss will be repeated
continually as long as humans exist. In this respect, it takes the
individual, or the particular circumstance, and applies it to a universal
concern common to all mankind.

PARAGRAPH 3
This equivalence between the speaker and Lycidas continues in the
poem’s third paragraph, which describes the pastoral landscape in
which both Lycidas and the speaker grew up. Think back to our
discussion of Arcadia, as a site of simultaneous perfection and
unattainability. How far does the nostalgia of this paragraph suggest
that the idealised childhood world picture here is tainted by the
inevitability of death?

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PARAGRAPH 4
At the start of the fourth paragraph, we are told that everything has
changed as a result of Lycidas’s death:

But O the heavy change, now thou art gone,

Now thou art gone, and never must return!
(ll.37-38)

All nature laments Lycidas’ death, a significant characteristic of

conventional pastoral elegies. Yet in Milton’s poem, as nature
simultaneously laments and is disabled by Lycidas’ passing, as
creativity and regeneration become arrested:

The willows, and the hazel copses green,

Will now no more be seen,
Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.
(ll.42-44)

The poem suggests that all future shepherds will be as impotent as

their natural surroundings:

As killing as the canker to the rose,

Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze,
Or frost to flowers, that their gay wardrobe wear,
When first the white-thorn blows;
Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd’s ear.
(ll.45-49)

What does this suggest about the poem’s potential purpose of speaking
about circumstances beyond its immediate subject-matter? Recall our
suggestion that shepherds and clergymen are in some sense equated:
does this hint that, following the death of Lycidas, both shepherd-poets
and cleric-poets alike are impoverished and disabled, unable to lead
their flocks and unable to write? As we shall see, in paragraph eight
this extends into a more critical claim that the ‘shepherds’, or
clergymen, of Milton’s time have become too incompetent to fulfil the
duties belonging to their role.

PARAGRAPH 5
Having established the sense of loss that Lycidas’ death has brought
about and its implications, the poem moves into an interrogative
mode. Paragraph five begins with the speaker questioning the Nymphs,
asking where they were when Lycidas needed them and asking why
they did not rescue him as he drowned. This interrogation is
interrupted by a moment of speech seemingly filled with emotion that
is directed at the Nymphs: ‘Ah me, I fondly dream! / Had ye been
there ...’ (ll.56-57). This musing is quickly interrupted, however, by
another question: ‘for what could that have done?’ (l.57). The poem
continues with an expression of uncertainty and the suggestion that no
one, not even the gods, could have saved Lycidas:

What could the muse herself that Orpheus bore,

The muse herself for her enchanting son,
Whom universal nature did lament,
When by the rout that made the hideous roar,
His gory visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore.
(ll.58-63)

This passage seems to betray an uncertain attitude towards poetry.

The classical reference in the passage is to Calliope, the muse of epic
poetry; she was the mother of Orpheus, himself a poet whose song

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had the power to charm the wild beasts, according to the legend
perhaps familiar to us from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. However, as Milton
points out, Orpheus’s song did not save him from being torn apart and
killed by wild creatures. If even the son of the muse cannot be helped
by her, Lycidas suggests that there is little hope for others. Does this
suggest that poetry is somehow powerless, perhaps even useless?
Does this alter our assessment of Milton’s poem, and of the broader
potential for poetry to connect to the real world in which it is produced
and received?

The apparent uncertainty present in Milton’s lines here is highly

significant in terms of what we might deduce about his identity as a
poet. We have already hinted at a sense in which Lycidas can be seen
as something of a ‘career’ poem in which Milton imitates Greek poetic
practice, as well as betraying evidence of his admiration for the
Elizabethan poets who favoured the pastoral form. Can we consider
Lycidas to be a poem purposefully constructed by Milton in a form
appropriate to a particular point in his chosen career as a poet? And
how might this be affected by the potential doubts about the capacities
of poetry itself?

Perhaps such doubts indicate an ambivalence towards the poet’s ability

to assert a real and significant voice in his contemporary world.
Perhaps the death of a friend prompts darker thoughts about the poet’s
own mortality, and prompts him to recognise that in the face of the
inevitability of death poetry is powerless. Does this suggest that
Lycidas is a poem concerned not only with the loss of a friend, but also
with the loss of confidence in poetry?

PARAGRAPH 6

This potential uncertainty about the purpose of poetry and the identity
of the poet persists through the sixth paragraph of Lycidas. Here, the
speaker initially asks

What boots it with incessant care

To tend the homely slighted shepherd’s trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless muse,
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangle of Neaera’s hair?
(ll.64-69)

Who are ‘Amaryllis’ and ‘Neaera’? Why does Milton refer to them here?
Perhaps, as Evans suggests, this suggests an ‘intensely sexual anxiety’
in the poem, given these nymphs’ traditional role as agents ‘who
alternately torment and gratify the shepherds in pastoral poetry’
(1999:46). How might this sexual frustration connect to the poet’s
anxieties – or feared impotence – about composing his verse? Recall
the observations we made upon the poem’s opening section, about the
difficult ‘birthing’ of a poem: how does the challenge of creativity, both
sexual and artistic, relate to what Milton tells us about the role and
identity of the poet?

What does he mean by the ‘shepherd’s trade’ here? Think back to our
earlier observations, about how the shepherd tended sheep and was a
poet; how does the comparison between writing poetry as a kind of
‘trade’, and the shepherd’s labour, alter our perceptions of how the role
of the poet is portrayed here? Perhaps we can answer this by
addressing the ensuing lines, in which the poetic voice goes on to
express uncertainty about the value of fame, towards which other
writers often seem to aspire:

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Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise

(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life.
(ll.70-76)

Fame, this passage tells us, might not be something one lives to enjoy:
other forces – the Furies – intervene and steal life away before fame
can be enjoyed. Alongside the Elizabethan word ‘guerdon’, which we
encountered earlier in this unit, again we see here a classical
reference: to the gods’ tool for punishing erring mankind, the vengeful
‘Furies’ who will pursue a doomed man across the earth until justice is
exacted upon him.

According to classical mythology, each man’s life is a thread spun by

the three blind sisters of Fate: a man reaches the end of his life as the
thread runs out. (Although note here, as John Carey observes in the
Longman edition of the poem, Milton misidentifies the Fate Atropos as
a Fury). The last line of this passage, ‘the thin-spun life’, refers to this
idea; what effect does the adjective ‘thin’ have in describing it? Does it
imply fragility and transience? This recognition has significance for the
speaker of Lycidas, for, as we have seen, he seeks to establish himself
as someone who deserves the Muses’ lament. The passage above,
therefore, acts as something of a warning to the speaker of the poem:
the fame he seeks in and through the poem is something he may not
live to enjoy.

This passage points towards a vision of the universe where humans

and other elements in the universe are at strife with one another, and
where vengeful Furies pursue those who incur the gods’ wrath.
Humans exert themselves in the search for and attainment of fame:
the Furies tear life away from humans before they can enjoy or benefit
from that fame. A combination of universal forces beyond the
individual human being conspires to bring about man’s downfall, and
men have little power to control their own destinies: they are the
playthings of the gods. However, as well as being agents of
destruction, the Furies are also paradoxically forces for renewal and
regeneration.

How might this elucidate our understanding of the theme of loss here
in relation to the role of the poet? Does his own mortality – the decay
of his physical body – sit in juxtaposition with the immortality
potentially conferred by poetic fame, gained through this poem,
unstable though that is?

We might address these questions, and temper the potentially negative

conclusions reached about human endeavour, by analysing Phoebus’
speech at the end of paragraph six, in which he argues that:

Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,

Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies,
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove.
(ll.78-82)

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Fame does not reside on earth but in Jove’s heavenly realm, where the
father of the gods will make the final judgement about who deserves to
be immortalised through his memorable verse. What might we surmise
about this suggestion in relation to the young Milton’s attempt to forge
a poetic identity and career, in view of how he will be perceived by
posterity? Recall, for instance, the opening equation of the poetic voice
with Lycidas, and the rival claims made for the Muse’s favour.

This passage’s significance is emphasised by its length, compared to

that of the other passages. It seems to place some value in poetry,
thus rescuing poetry from the charge of redundancy which the speaker
of the poem had earlier partly proposed. Whilst its true worth may not
be fully recognised on earth, poetry is held in high value in heaven,
recalling the idea that the poet writes under some kind of divine
inspiration.

The poem thus shifts the focus from anxiety about the powers of
poetry to a more confident assertion of its authority, and of man’s
ability to control both his own destiny and the artistic means by which
he expresses his experiences. Yet at the same time, the passage
seems to propose also that humans cannot themselves judge, and that
judgement - and ultimately power - resides always in the realm of the
gods. As Evans argues, Phoebus’ response is dissatisfactory: his
suggestion ‘that true fame is to be found not on earth but in heaven
[…] completely misses Milton’s point, which had to do not so much with
losing fame as with losing the chance to earn it’ (1999: 48).

Paragraph six articulates a difficulty with thinking about authority for

the speaker of the poem: humans at once seem to be granted and
then denied authority, or perhaps only granted limited authority. This
paragraph perhaps brings us to assess the poem so far as one that
poses as many difficulties as it pretends to solve in relation to what we
know about Milton at this stage of his career.

Re-read paragraphs seven to eleven of Lycidas.

PARAGRAPH 7
Paragraph seven returns to the pastoral mode after the ‘higher’ tone of
Apollo’s speech. Here Neptune – god of the ocean – is questioned
about the death of Lycidas, who drowned in his waters. Like the
previous section, this passage is concerned with questions of authority.
Neptune claims that he was not responsible for Lycidas’ death; rather,

It was that fatal and perfidious bark

Built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.
(ll.100-102)

It was the man-made object, the ship’s ‘bark’ that killed Lycidas: so to
some extent it was man’s hubris (his arrogance in presuming to rival
the gods’ inventiveness and creativity) that caused the tragedy. This
offence against the gods has two causes: Lycidas built the ship during
an eclipse, but he should have known that eclipses are evil omens and
that to attempt any workmanship or labour during such a period is to
tempt fate. Secondly, Lycidas offended Neptune by sailing his ship in
his dominion, rather than staying within the boundaries given to man’s
world. It was Lycidas’ hubris – his reaching above his mortal status –
that brought about his death.

After Neptune, the next figure to appear is Camus, which represents

the river Cam on which the University town of Cambridge is built,
where both Milton and King attended as students. What does the
river’s request for its ‘pledge’ (the archaic term for ‘child’) mean in the

Unit 2: Loss and Renewal: Pastoral Poems By John Milton 2-19

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context of the poem’s lament for Edward King, a metaphorical ‘child’ of

Cambridge? Is there an irony that the City is represented by a river,
when the cause of King’s death was drowning?

The water theme continues in the subsequent passage, as Camus is

followed by ‘the pilot of the Galilean lake’ who carries two ‘massy keys
... of metals twain’. This introduces the second main poetic voice that,
as we noted earlier on, speaks within the poem. There has been some
argument as to who this figure is: most commentators agree he
represents St. Peter, who was a fisherman before Jesus called him to
be one of his chief disciples. Peter means ‘Rock’, and it was on this firm
foundation that Christ chose to build his Church: the main church of
the Vatican in Rome – the heartland of the Roman Catholic Christian
faith – is called St. Peter’s. Peter is traditionally associated with the
symbol of a set of keys, and is ascribed the role of guardian of the
gates of Heaven; he is responsible for admitting all who hope to enter
Christ’s kingdom.

Other commentators have argued, less persuasively, that this is the

figure of Christ himself: Christ saved his disciples from a shipwreck,
and thus can be seen as a pilot on the lake. Whoever the figure is,
there is no ambivalence about the message he speaks: he roundly
criticises the shepherds of the day, arguing that they ‘Creep and
intrude, and climb into the fold’, and that they

scarce themselves know how to hold

A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else the least
That to the faithful herdsman’s art belongs!
(ll.119-121)

These shepherds may sing, but

their lean and flashy songs

Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw,
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoll’n with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.
(ll.123-127)

Think about the types of words used here, and their contrast with the
diction used elsewhere in the poem: are terms such as ‘scrannel’
eloquent or attractive? What does it mean, exactly? Check in the
editor’s notes in the Longman edition, or look up the term in the
Oxford English Dictionary. How does it fit in with other terms used in
this passage, such as ‘wretched’, ‘hungry’, ‘rank’, ‘foul contagion’?
Contrast such uncouth words with the more eloquent and attractive
phrases we noted in the earlier sections of the poem, which describe
the rural idyll of the pastoral Arcadia. What do you notice about the
metre here, and how does it complement this harsher, more critical
tone? ‘Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw’, for instance,
corrupts the regular rhythm evident elsewhere in the poem, and
matches the deplorable picture of the ‘rot’ and ‘contagion’ the speaker
describes.

The paragraph ends with a threatened punishment:

that two-handed engine at the door,

Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.
(ll.130-131)

Note the paradoxical repetition of ‘smite’ here, which seems to

contradict the sense of the line: does this echo the ‘two-handed’ nature
of the ‘engine’ of justice, and suggest the resounding finality of the

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judgement passed on these shepherds? This ‘engine’ (or ‘instrument of

war’), however, has puzzled some commentators: it might refer to the
two-edged sword that issues from the mouth of God, according to the
Book of Revelation. In this reading the engine refers to God’s word:
the final couplet refers to the Protestant Reformation which, basing its
authority on the word of God as recorded in Scripture, came to smite
away the corrupt Catholic clergy, whose authority did not derive
directly from God’s word but from the Church.

In support of this view, some commentators have noted that Milton

shared the belief that the Protestant movement was rapidly ushering in
the kingdom of God on earth. Whatever our understanding of what the
‘engine’ is, St. Peter seems to suggest here that the corrupt clergy will
not remain at their present ‘height’ for much longer. St. Peter’s
criticism of the shepherds is a criticism of the churchmen of Milton’s
day, which had been promised by the epigraph: as you will recall, this
indicated that the poem would speak of the ‘corrupted clergy’ of the
day and promised that the poem would foretell the ruin of the clergy.

However, some critics find St. Peter’s ‘solution’ to the problems Milton
poses as unsatisfactory as Phoebus Apollo’s. Evans, for instance,
argues that Peter’s solution is only a partial one, which defers
judgement of the clerics to a future point in time. As Evans concludes:

‘To a sensibility as passionately concerned as Milton's certainly

was with the social and political realities of his immediate
situation, an eschatological solution to a contemporary problem
could scarcely have been satisfying’. (1999: 47)

The saint’s enigmatic promise that corrupt ministers will be punished

by ‘that two-handed engine at the door’ (130) postpones the reform of
the church until the day of judgement. To a sensibility as passionately
concerned as Milton’s certainly was with the social and political realities
of his immediate situation, an eschatological solution to a
contemporary problem could scarcely have been satisfying. For Milton
the most important question was always: what should be done now?

It is worth asking ourselves such questions, even if there is no

immediate obvious response, when we try to address how far an
‘occasional’ poem can hope to exert any real or significant influence on
important issues of the day. Can a poem have a say in the here and
now?

We can also extend our reflections on the contemporary referentiality

of Lycidas – its potential role as a critique of the clergy – to consider
how far Milton’s poem also offers a comment on the poetry of the day:
recall the identification we made earlier of shepherds with poets as well
as with the clergy. Does the poem suggest that there has been a
decline in the quality of poetry since King’s death? Can the metaphor of
the ‘two-handed engine’ also apply to contemporary poetry? Perhaps
negative judgement will be cast on shepherd-clergymen and shepherd-
poets alike.

The notion that the engine is a reference to the word of God allows for
a particularly interesting reading of this passage. Perhaps the word of
God – ultimately a more ‘real’ judge of all things than the mythical
Jove who stands in a parallel position of authority in the poem – will
take the form of a criticism of poetry; the superior and transcendent
word of God will, finally, overcome all the many inferior words uttered
by incompetent poets. Milton proposes that Lycidas is a poem filled
with the word of God; its lasting, and divinely-inspired quality, will
finally survive beyond all the ‘bad’ poetry that has been written since
King’s death. However, does this make Milton’s position as a poet

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potentially precarious? How can he ensure that he will not be maligned

alongside the host of poor-quality poets? Perhaps this lies beyond his
control, and he can only lay his words before God as judge – and in the
interim we readers, as earthly and inferior judges.

PARAGRAPH 9
The legitimacy of Lycidas’s claim to project God’s word depends on its
differentiation from the ‘lean and flashy songs’ of the corrupt
shepherds. Paragraph nine can be seen, in its delicacy, as an attempt
to place Lycidas above its own criticisms of poetry. Catherine Belsey
argues that this section demonstrates to inferior poets what can and
should be achieved in poetry (1988: 20). Now that the ‘dreaded voice’
of St. Peter has passed, the writer calls on the muses to return, and
summons all nature to lament Lycidas: all the flowers must cast their
petals on the ‘laureate hearse’ where the shepherd lies dead. In
describing this scene, the poetic voice suggests that

For so to interpose a little ease,

Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
(ll.152-153)

Carey (1997: 254) points out that the ‘surmise’ is false because (like
Lycidas’) King’s body is missing, lost in the watery depths, meaning
that there can be no ‘laureate hearse’ upon which the flowers might
strew their petals. How does this dalliance with falsity connect to
observations we have already made about artificiality? Does this
phrase suggest that all good poetry is an enchanting cheat or, as
Catherine Belsey (1988: 31) argues, a form of escapism?

Various elements within the passage prompt the impression that it

offers poetry as a form of escapism in both bodily and mental terms -
from tangible sources such as the ‘dreaded voice’ of the previous
paragraph, the terrible truth of King’s absence to the inevitability of all
human death and decay. Does poetry offer an ideal world into which
one can escape from the doom and corruption of human mortality?
Does it promise immortalisation of the poet’s life through his printed
words?

PARAGRAPH 10
The subsequent paragraph begins with an instruction to all the
shepherds that live not to mourn for Lycidas any longer with the
surprising suggestion that Lycidas is not actually dead, ‘Sunk though
he be beneath the watery floor’. The speaker compares the drowned
Lycidas to the sun which also sinks ‘in the ocean bed’

And yet anon repairs his drooping head,

And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore,
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.
(ll.169-171)

How does this connect to some of the ideas we have encountered so

far about loss and renewal, about the dual nature of destruction and
reconstruction? Does Milton suggest here that, although dead in
earthly terms, Lycidas comes to enjoy a new life in heaven?
This presentation of the dead person as immortal is a conventional
feature of pastoral elegy, but also connects in important ways to the
Christian ideology that Milton also projects through this poem, and
elsewhere in his writings, as we shall see in greater detail in
subsequent units.

The paragraph ends with an optimistic claim that recalls the opening
elision of the poetic voice and Lycidas, as not only is the shepherd in
heaven, but he has also become the ‘genius of the shore’, the protector

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of those who travel by sea – and perhaps, by implication, the speaker

of the poem also faces a similar fate to Lycidas.

PARAGRAPH 11
What should we make of the conclusion of Lycidas? Is it puzzling? We
noted at the very beginning of our discussion that the first speaker of
the poem is ‘the uncouth swain’, but it is only in the final, short
paragraph that this figure is identified as such:

Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills,

While the still morn went out in sandals grey,
He touched the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay.
(ll.186-189)

Catherine Belsey(1988: 33) says of this section of the poem that an

‘anonymous third-person narrative suddenly comes to frame the text
we have read, turning it into a dramatic monologue’.

The dramatic monologue is a form of writing where a writer creates a

character, or uses one from legend or from history, and writes in that
characters ‘voice’ from that character’s point of view. How might this
relate to the poem’s proclaimed form as a ‘monody’? The ‘character’
adopted by Milton in Lycidas is the character of the ‘uncouth swain’;
the last section reveals that the poem is spoken from this swain’s point
of view. According to Evans, the poem’s close is one of the most
extraordinary moments in English poetry. For Milton’s unexpected
introduction of a third-person narrator at the end of a first-person
poem violates one of the oldest and most fundamental covenants
governing a writer’s relationship with his reader: the implicit
understanding that the genre of the work will remain constant, that a
play will not turn into an epic half-way through, or vice versa (Evans
1999: 50).

The possibility that the poem is in fact not spoken by Milton but by
another prompts a realisation that the poem adopts multiple
viewpoints so as to project several different possibilities as to what its
‘message’ might be. As Evans (like others) suggests, the range of
shifting viewpoints allows Milton both to identify with and distance
himself from the array of contrasting ideas presented in the poem.
What Evans describes as a ‘radical disjunction’ between ‘fact’ and
‘fiction’ takes place at the end of the poem, in which the real-life
scenario of King’s death is inextricably conflated with the imaginary
world that the poem has projected, and yet from which Milton-the-poet
remains distinct (1999: 51). Our experience at the end of the poem
represents less a sense of closure, or a conclusion of grief, but instead
challenges our certainty about the identity of the poetic voice and the
nature of the poem itself.

How might this lead us to think about the ways in which Milton uses
loss – in its various forms – as a site for renewal, and ultimately for
forging his own distinct identity as a poet?

As Evans’ comments suggest, and as Lois Potter (1986: 21) observes

in closer detail, the last paragraph is written in a different metre to the
rest of the poem, ottava rima – that is, an eight-line stanza rhymed
abababcc – which was traditionally used for epic poetry. How does this
shift in metrical pattern, combined with the altered nature of the poetic
voice’s identity, affect our understanding of Lycidas as an important
developmental stage in Milton’s formation as a poet? The final lines
speak of moving away ‘to pastures new’: perhaps the close of Lycidas
indicates Milton’s desire to explore new poetic territory as he pursues
the next stage in his poetic career.

Unit 2: Loss and Renewal: Pastoral Poems By John Milton 2-23

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SAQ 3
Suggest ways in which Lycidas can be seen as a poem concerned
with loss and the potential it brings for renewal.

REVIEW
In this unit we have discussed the theme of loss in Milton’s poetry in
tandem with the potential for renewal and for new creativity that its
seeming devastation can bring. In the first part of the unit we
considered potential connections between how these themes emerged
in the previous unit and Milton’s pastoral poetry. We discussed the
origins of pastoral poetry – both in classical writing and in Elizabethan
literature – as an important backdrop to understanding how Milton’s
interest in pastoral formed an important stage in his poetic career.

We also saw how, like Dryden, Thomson and Yearsley in Unit 1, Milton
uses ‘occasional’ poetry as a vehicle to comment on and respond to the
world around him whilst seemingly writing within an archaic literary
mode. In subsequent units we will explore both the occasional nature
of Milton’s writing, and the further developments in his poetic career,
alongside the parallels in contemporary literature, which is both fuelled
by and helps to form historical events.

ADDITIONAL READING
Eagleton, Terry. 1988. ‘Editor’s Preface’ to Catherine Belsey (ed.), John
Milton: Language, Gender, Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell)

Hill, Christopher. 1977. Milton and the English Revolution (London:

Faber and Faber)

REFERENCES
Belsey, Catherine. 1988. John Milton: Language, Gender, Power
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell)

Carey, J. and Fowler, A. (eds). 1968. The Poems of John Milton

(London and Harlow: Longman)

Dalglish, Jack. 1961. Eight Metaphysical Poets (London: Heinemann)

(Parts available online via Google Books)

Evans, J. Martin. 1999. ‘Lycidas’, in Dennis Danielson (ed.), The

Cambridge Companion to John Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), pp. 39-53 (Parts available online via Google
Books)

Foucault, Michel. 1988. ‘What is an author?’, in D. Lodge (ed.), Modern

Criticism and Theory: a Reader (Longman: London and New
York) (Parts available online via Google Books)

Hanford, James Holly. 2008. ‘The Pastoral Elegy and Milton's Lycidas’,
PMLA, 19.10: 403-437 (Available on JSTOR)

Milton, John. 1997. Complete Shorter Poems, in John Carey (ed.),

Longman Annotated Poets (London and New York: Longman)
(Parts available online via Google Books)

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Ricks, Christopher. 1963. Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon

Press)

Potter, Lois. 1986. A Preface to Milton, rev. ed. (Longman: Harlow)

Womack, Mark. 1997. ‘On the Value of Lycidas’, Studies in English

Literature, 1500-1900, 37: 119-136 (Available on JSTOR)

INTERNET RESOURCES
BBC4’s radio programme ‘In our Time’ is an excellent resource for
students, and the archive offers various podcasts arranged by genre.
The following is a discussion between Melvyn Bragg and his guests
regarding Milton:
<[Link] [Accessed April 24
2013]

Unit 2: Loss and Renewal: Pastoral Poems By John Milton 2-25

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ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
Q. How can ‘Il Penseroso’ be seen as a poem
of loss, in contrast to or comparison with ‘L’Allegro’?

There are, perhaps, four ways in which ‘Il Penseroso’, the companion
poem to ‘L’Allegro’, can be seen as a poem of loss.

Firstly, as a poem containing elements of pastoral, like ‘L’Allegro’, ‘Il

Penseroso’ has built in a sense of the loss of a distant, or even
vanished world. The poem’s identity as a pastoral means that it
includes a sense of nostalgia for this lost world.

Secondly, connected to this, the pastoral traditionally was satirical,

and hankered after a lost world as a way of criticising the present
one. ‘Il Penseroso’ is no exception to this: as pastoral, it too can be
seen as partially criticising the world in which the poem was written.

Thirdly, whereas ‘L’Allegro’ represents universally-shared human

experiences, ‘Il Penseroso’ embodies a more personal, intellectual
exploration. This is evident in the speaker’s desire for Melancholy,
and for a form of intellectual profundity. Paradoxically, this indicates
a sense of loss for something that the speaker hints he has never
actually experienced. The speaker’s wish for a ‘strange mysterious
dream’ (l.139) perhaps suggests the mental abstraction needed to
reach the state of intellectual profundity for which he yearns.

Fourthly, and perhaps connected to this, the speaker invokes

Musaeus and great poets of the past from l.103 onwards. This
demand partly indicates a loss of poetic inspiration, or perhaps a
desire to create a different kind of poetry, to move in a new direction
as a poet. The demand can be seen as an indication that the speaker
feels at a loss regarding his ‘speech’, that his ‘speech’ (this poem,
and even others) is in some way inadequate for his purposes. The
demand can be seen as signalling the end of one part of the speaker-
poet’s career.

SAQ 2
Q. Discuss some of the reasons why the title and the epigraph to
Lycidas are important.

Firstly, the title of Lycidas signals the poem’s connection to classical

precedents, amongst them Theocritus’ Idylls (considered the first
pastoral text) and Virgil’s Eclogues. This identifies Lycidas’
participation in the pastoral tradition, to which these classical texts
belong, and sets up the reader’s expectations about the kind of poem
it promises to be. The epigraph is significant for several reasons: it
proposes that the poem is a pastoral elegy, which provokes certain
generic expectations in the reader, and it also alerts us that this is an
‘occasional’ poem, which also provokes a certain generic expectation
in the reader. Both epigraph and title together, in the expectations
they raise, perhaps bring us to question how far the poem is an
‘authentic’ lament for a departed friend (the ostensible ‘occasion’ of
the poem), and how far this event is used simply as an excuse for an
exercise in writing a pastoral elegy.

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SAQ 3
Q. Suggest ways in which Lycidas can be seen as a poem
concerned with loss and the potential it brings for renewal.

Lycidas’ incorporation of the seemingly antagonistic themes of loss

and renewal – which are in fact subtly interdependent – operates on
several different levels. The poem’s formal identity as a pastoral
indicates the genre’s lament for the ‘fall’ of the present world and a
yearning for an idyllic, rural Arcadia. Beyond this seemingly
impersonal classical framework, the epigraph to the poem indicates
that Lycidas addresses personal loss: it was written in response to
the death of a friend of the poet’s, Edward King. However, the
epigraph also suggests that the poem moves beyond the personal,
and the individual, to address wider issues belonging to the world in
which Lycidas is written and read: it directs its themes of loss
towards a criticism of the clergy, and so signals the loss of certain
values and principles among contemporary clerics. It also, however,
encodes a potential agenda for how reforming the clergy might
bring renewal to the Christian church in Britain.

Lycidas also prompts us to think about the combination of loss and

renewal in the identity of the speaker of the poem: he is equated
with the dead shepherd Lycidas (and by implication King), and
foresees his own death and the potential obscurity into which he will
fall, unless the Muses sing his fame and he is remembered by
posterity through his poetry. This indicates Lycidas’ identity as a
poem about personal loss written within a seemingly impersonal
poetic tradition, and yet one whose themes are adapted to suggest
potential future directions for the poet and his career.

Unit 2: Loss and Renewal: Pastoral Poems By John Milton 2-27

___________________________________________________________________________

UNIT 3

CIVIL WAR TO INTERREGNUM:

ENGAGEMENT IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE AND
THE ‘COUNTRY HOUSE’ POEM

AIM
The aim of this unit is to address how literature is both produced by
and might exert influence upon the public sphere by comparing
‘Country House’ poems written in the Civil War and Interregnum eras.

OBJECTIVES
In this unit you will learn how:

Poetry of the period from c. 1640-50 is similar or different to the

pastoral poetry of John Milton addressed in the previous unit.

An ‘occasional’ poem might reflect pressing concerns within the

public, political and social world, and perhaps even help to shape
them.

The ‘Country House’ poem is particularly well suited to affect a

critique of the contemporary world of this period.

These poems show enduring interests in certain literary forms and

models, but also adapt them to fit the new circumstances that call
for the poet’s attention.

Different political allegiances can be manifested in estate poems,

and how they can influence real events in the world surrounding
them.

Changes in historical circumstances and events matches changing

literary preoccupations, genres and forms.

The supposed ‘message’ of a poem is not always clear-cut, but

may indicate ambivalence in the poet’s political opinions about the
current state or future of the nation.

REQUIRED READING
Cummings, Robert (ed.). 2000. Seventeenth-Century Poetry: An
Annotated Anthology Blackwell Annotated Anthologies (Oxford:
Blackwell)
Stephen Greenblatt (ed.). 2012. The Norton Anthology of English
Literature, 9th edn, vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Norton and Co.)

We shall be addressing three major poems in this unit:

John Denham, Cooper’s Hill (1641)

Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House: To My Lord Fairfax (c. 1654)
Andrew Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from
Ireland’ (1650)

These poems can be found in Robert Cummings (ed.). 2000.

Seventeenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, Blackwell

Unit 3: Civil War to Interregnum: Engagement in the Public Sphere 3-1

and the ‘Country House’ Poem
___________________________________________________________________________

Annotated Anthologies (Oxford: Blackwell). The two poems by Marvell

can also be found in Greenblatt 2012.

These, and other poems referenced in this unit, are available on

Literature Online, although there are textual variants with the versions
used here.

While these poems are the major focus of this unit, you should also be
familiar with other pieces identifiable as Country House poems, in
particular Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’. A good selection of these can be
found in Cummings’ Seventeenth-Century Poetry, which is Required
Reading for this Unit.

INTRODUCTION
In the previous unit, we addressed how Milton was both a poet of his
time and somehow separate from it, by considering his participation in
the tradition of ‘archaic’ pastoral poetry, as practised by classical and
Elizabethan authors. In this unit, we shall see how some of the themes
and elements of pastoral poetry endure in the Country House genre,
but also how writers who produce ‘estate’ poems also adapt these
themes to fit the new political and social circumstances surrounding
them at the time of writing.

We shall see how, in the early 1640s, estate poems reflect a political
discourse that favours allegiance to the monarch; by the 1650s, when
the King has been executed, a new rhetoric about the public sphere –
and the engagement of key public figures within it – takes place
through the changing form and function of the Country House poem.
We will also learn, however, that political opinions and messages are
not always clear-cut, but that such poems can project the poet’s
uncertainty about the current state and future of the nation.

THE ‘COUNTRY HOUSE’ POEM

We saw in the previous unit how Milton’s interest in classical and
Elizabethan authors brought him to forge his own poetic identity and
career through adopting poetic traditions that they favoured, and
reshaping them in his own style and for his own purposes. While we
noted that Milton was unusual in his influence by Renaissance writers,
he was by no means exceptional in his knowledge of the classics.

We observed in Unit 1 that educated gentlemen studied classical

authors as an integral part of their education; the enduring influence
that such models exerted on writers during the period addressed in this
Unit, c. 1640-50, is equally evident in a genre of poetry that enjoyed a
particularly fruitful popularity at this time, that of the Country House
poem. Alongside the classical element, however, aspects of the
pastoral tradition that we learned about in Unit 2 can also be discerned
in poems belonging to this genre: you should be alert to such features,
and ask yourself how and why writers may or may not draw on such
traditions.

What, then, is the Country House poem, and what place does it take in
the history of a period that, as we have learned, was characterised by
violent civil upheavals, and political and religious tensions? Is this in
fact the best term to describe poetry belonging to this genre? Alastair
Fowler has argued that perhaps ‘estate poem’ is a more appropriate
title for this kind of writing, because poems collectively grouped under
the term ‘Country House poem’ are generally more interested in the
garden or agricultural land of the estate surrounding a great house,
rather than architectural features (1994: 1). Although we might choose
to describe these texts as ‘estate’ rather than ‘Country House’ poems,

3-2 Literature 3
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we can nonetheless recognise common themes and preoccupations

that allow them to be grouped together under such a title.

Fowler identifies ten key themes that these poems share, related to
their form and purpose, some of which we shall address here in
connection with specific texts (1994: 14-16). G. R. Hibbard’s important
essay, ‘The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century’,
describes poems within this genre as written ‘in praise of the English
country house and of the whole way of life of which the country house
was the centre’ (1956: 159). But what is this ‘way of life’, which poems
from the period that we shall be addressing seek to praise, and why?

In order to understand this more fully, we should first of all address

the history of the genre of what might alternately be called ‘Country
House’ or ‘estate’ poetry. Its origins are, like the pastoral tradition
looked at in the previous unit, classical; again, Virgil’s Georgics offer an
important source of the ideas adopted by this literary genre, and some
of its forms, as do the writings of the Latin poets Martial and Horace.

In his Satires and Epistles – an important text for understanding

classical influences on this and subsequent periods, and one which you
should try to look at for yourself – Horace describes the perfect life
that a man busy with politics and affairs of state might only dream of
enjoying: he praises ‘the virtues of plain living’ (Satire II.2.1), where in
his country retreat away from the bustle and business of the city of
Rome man can enjoy the fruits of his estate. Essential to this vision are
moderation and balance: the ideal life is not one of over-indulgence,
but of enjoying the bounty of the country estate in due proportion. As
Horace says, ‘The man who is pale and bloated from gluttony / will
never enjoy his oysters’ (Satire, II.2.21-22).

Horace asks, ‘Why should any decent man / be in need when you are
rich?’ (Satire, II.2.102-3). All the dependents on the rich man’s estate
– the labourers in the field and his household staff – have the right to
enjoy its bounty and produce as much as the rich man, but all in due
proportion: this is a hierarchical ideal world, in which the owner of the
estate is like a monarch who rules over his subjects with justice and
goodness. In this respect, poetry written in praise of the country house
imagines the estate as a microcosm of the state – a miniaturised
version of the nation itself – where all its virtues, and its faults, are
encapsulated and condensed. It is important to bear this in mind when
thinking about how Country House poems of the 1640-50 period use
the genre, and the ideas belonging to it, to talk about the current state
of the nation.

While Horace advocates and promotes the ideal life as one in retreat in
the countryside, he is nonetheless aware that it is a man’s civic, or
public, duty, to engage in public affairs: no man is isolated, but each
member of society is interconnected. Gaining benefits and rights from
the state means that one has certain obligations or responsibilities
towards supporting or improving it – just as one would one’s own
private estate – whether that is through engaging in political matters
or, if need be, warfare. In fact, Horace suggests, by enjoying the
benefits of his country retreat, in moderation and balance, the ‘retired’
public figure can better prepare himself for serving his nation when the
need arises:

In times of crisis
which of the two will have greater confidence – the man who has
led
his mind and body to expect affluence as of right,
or the man with few needs who is apprehensive of the future

Unit 3: Civil War to Interregnum: Engagement in the Public Sphere 3-3

and the ‘Country House’ Poem
___________________________________________________________________________

and who in peacetime has wisely made preparations for war?

(Satire, II.2.107-11)

How do you think writers working in the time of immense strife and
uncertainty experienced around the Civil War, such as we charted in
Unit 1, might apply such lines to their present-day circumstances? We
shall address this, and related questions more fully as we move
through this unit, where it will be important to remember the
sentiment Horace expresses and its influence on the classically-inspired
poets of the mid-seventeenth century.

Alongside the thematic trends belonging to estate poems, which

structural features do they share in common? The classical model that
we have just described provides one clue: whilst you might note some
points of contact between this genre and the pastoral poetry we
addressed in Unit 2, Alastair Fowler suggests that a more appropriate
model is that of the georgic, which Latin poets such as Virgil use. You
will recall from our analysis of Milton’s pastoral that this was also an
important source for his poetry; so, too, features of pastoral reappear
in estate poems, but as Fowler points out, the georgic’s interest in
‘estates’, ‘gardens’, ‘houses’ and ‘seasonal employments’ make it a
more obvious literary point of contact for Country House poems than
the pastoral (1994: 16). However, whichever classical model we
consider to be the most appropriate ‘origin’ of the estate poem, it is
sufficient here to bear in mind that all writers of the period we are
interested in would have been familiar with these sources, and to
differing degrees they would have written their own poems as
exercises within these already established traditions.

The themes and ideas of estate poetry, however, did not suddenly
reappear around the time of the Civil War and after; in fact, the
tradition of praising the good country life – and connecting it to the
individual’s role in the wider society – enjoyed several revivals in the
centuries following such Latin poets as Horace and Martial. Perhaps one
of the most important to take note of here is by Ben Jonson, a poet
and playwright you will have encountered in a previous module, whose
poem ‘To Penshurst’ (printed 1616) was an important model for
subsequent experiments in the genre. We shall not look at this poem in
detail here – you might like to do so separately for yourself – but we
shall select a few lines that best exemplify both the themes and styles
of Jonson’s poem.

Jonson directly addresses the house at Penshurst in Kent as though it

were a person, and praises its antiquity: it is an ‘ancient pile’, seat of
an ancient family (Sidney, the same as the poet), and so alerts us to
the praise of long-established social (as well as poetic) traditions that
the Penshurst estate embodies. By implication, it represents all the
best elements of the ‘golden age’ of England. It is unostentatious, and
distinctly ‘English’, having no ‘marble’ or ‘polished pillars’, such as
architecture influenced by foreign styles might possess (ll. 2-3).
However, the classical influence is present in the mythological
references Jonson makes (to Pan and Bacchus), which evoke the
classical literature belonging to the well-rounded education of Sidney,
who owns the estate.

Like Horace, Jonson praises the private estate that, through judicious
management and careful regulation by its owner, produces bountiful
crops and goods that all those who live on the estate can enjoy,
provided this is in moderation and balance. Jonson describes how the
‘copse’ ‘never fails to serve thee seasoned deer’, how ‘Thy sheep, thy
bullocks, kine, and calves do feed’ on the winding river, how the wood
is ‘Fertile’ and houses gamebirds such as ‘The purpled pheasant’ and
‘The painted partridge’ (ll. 19-29). The river Medway, meanwhile,

3-4 Literature 3
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provides the Sidney estate with ‘tribute fish, / Fat, agèd Carps’ and
‘Pikes’, whilst the orchards supply a plentiful harvest of fruits –
cherries, plums, grapes, quinces, apricots and peaches (ll. 32-33).

The bounty of the Penshurst estate, where the goods it produces amply
supply the need of its judicious master, exemplifies the important
concept of sponte sua, which we will detect in different manifestations
in the poems we shall come to analyse; a Latin phrase meaning
‘spontaneously’, in the context of this genre of poems this means the
natural bounty that comes of its own accord to the master of a well-
regulated estate. Everyone and everything observes its place in
Penshurst’s societal model, from the birds and beasts, to the labourers,
to the household staff, and to the family and its important visitors:
even the King, James I, has benefited from Penshurst’s bounty in a
visit to the house, as Jonson observes. As William Alexander McClung
suggests, ‘the functioning of the estate depends upon the observing of
the proper relationships between the classes of society or between the
offices of the estate’ (1977: 105).

In its entirety, the Penshurst estate embodies the order and regularity
of a well-run household and land, overseen by a careful but bountiful
master, and so offers a microcosm of how a nation should most
successfully be run – to which Sidney’s role as a public figure allows
him to contribute. As Jonson says, the architectural edifice embodies
the living virtues of its owner, as past owners of Penshurst ‘May say,
their lords have built, but thy lord dwells’ (l. 102). As Virginia C. Kenny
puts it, the country-house ‘ethos’ is ‘not merely a description of the
well-spent life of a small class of men in seventeenth-century England’,
but incorporates ‘classical and aristocratic attitudes’ such as ‘the
Horatian image of man as master of himself’, but extends to become ‘a
metaphor for the state’ (1984: 3).

How do the themes and preoccupations Jonson addresses in ‘To

Penshurst’ remain the same, or change, by the mid-seventeenth
century? What, in view of what you know about the historical context
of the 1640s, do you think might remain pertinent, and what might
have become redundant, in Jonson’s vision of the good society?

According to Virginia C. Kenny,

Historical forces and personal values were noticeably at odds in

the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and a wide-
spread consciousness of the fragility of social constructs was
forcing a reassertion or adjustment of the idea of the good
society. (1984: 2)

You might like to browse some poems in this genre in anthologies,

such as the Norton Anthology, or through Literature Online, to get a
fuller grasp of which types of texts we might consider as ‘Country
House poems’.

Subsequent poems written within the Country House genre, of the

period on which we are focussing here, include Thomas Carew’s To
Saxham (1631-2) and To my Friend G.N. from Wrest (1639), Robert
Herrick’s The Country-life: To Endymion Porter (1625/48) and A
Panegyrick to Sir Lewis Pemberton (1617-40).

With the Restoration of Charles II to the throne, a new brace of poems

that also praise an architectural edifice and the virtues of a well-
ordered estate nonetheless adapt these themes and elements to a new
political and social context, where the restored Stuart monarchy is
metaphorically embodied in the buildings reconstructed after the
turmoil of Civil War. Edmund Waller’s On St. James’s Park, As Lately

Unit 3: Civil War to Interregnum: Engagement in the Public Sphere 3-5

and the ‘Country House’ Poem
___________________________________________________________________________

Improved by his Majesty (1660) demonstrates this particularly

effectively, and also alerts us to a shift in the style and nature of estate
poems: as you will notice from the title, it is a park in central London,
‘St. James’s’, rather than a country house and park that attracts the
poet’s praise. Can you identify connections between this city-based
focus and some of the observations we made in Unit 1, about Dryden
and the reconstructed city of London following the devastating fire of
1666?

In both poems, perhaps, there is a sense that devastation brings

renewal and fresh opportunities for the monarch to display his wealth
and bounty through the rebuilding programmes he introduces. The
specifically ‘English’ style of architecture Jonson praises in ‘To
Penshurst’ becomes morphed into a more continental range of
influences: think about significant post-Fire buildings such as St. Paul’s
Cathedral in central London. This adopts ‘classical’ elements, such as
pillars and ornate decorative sculptures, which show the influence of
foreign models on the architect, Christopher Wren. As Kenny suggests,
this new style of building promotes a ‘neoclassical’ ideal that is well-
suited to the new vision of the restored monarchy, as it ‘formalised
links with the spiritual past and looked forward to the perpetuation of
present importance in the future’ (1984: 26). The idea, as we
encountered with Annus Mirabilis, is that the ‘new’ nation can rival and
surpass Rome’s great empire, as embodied in the city’s buildings; as
Malcolm Kelsall suggests, ‘As Rome, so England’ (1993: 11).

This signals us to the growing importance of Britain’s relation to other

European countries, such as we noted in Unit 1 when tracing the flow
of Dryden’s ‘silver Thames’. In England, the increasing wealth among
upper ranks of society was manifested in a surge in the construction of
lavish country houses, which to some extent reflected the wealth and
power of absolute monarchies in Britain’s continental neighbours, such
as France (Kenny 1984: 204). The poems that reflect these changing
architectural, political and social circumstances, however, continue to
embody the formal harmony and simplicity evident in earlier examples
of estate poetry, such as Jonson’s, embodied in formal features such as
rhyming couplets. This is important to bear in mind when we come to
address more carefully the ‘neoclassical’ style of poetry by John Dryden
in a later unit, and the ‘Augustan’ ideals it fathered in the writings of,
for instance, the early eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope.

As we shall discover, however, the contexts shift as political and social

circumstances change just a few years later, where support (or
disapproval) of a monarch or political viewpoint becomes more
ambivalent, from the influential estate poem of John Denham, Cooper’s
Hill, to the poetry of Andrew Marvell.

3-6 Literature 3
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SAQ 1
What might be the most attractive themes and features of the
Country House genre for a writer keen to show how a nation should
be run, particularly in view of what you now know about the
historical contexts of this period as one of both upheaval, uncertain
peace, and instability?

JOHN DENHAM AND COOPER’S HILL: A ROYALIST ESTATE

POEM?
We have seen how the origins of Country House poetry, both in
classical writings and in important precedents such as Ben Jonson’s ‘To
Penshurst’, provide a model for commenting on the present state of
the nation, and for suggesting how far the statesman should be
engaged in public affairs. We have seen that a judiciously-run estate is
a microcosm for the nation as a whole, and suggested that whilst
retirement brings many benefits – and renewal for the individual –
nonetheless he must not neglect his responsibilities in helping to run
the nation. This is particularly pertinent at times of marked national
crisis: the Civil War provides one such vital context in which the
Country House poem’s themes and ideas might be applied.

Whilst John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1641) deals with a cityscape

rather than a country estate as such, it nonetheless focuses on a ‘great
house’, perhaps one of Britain’s greatest, Windsor Castle. In Denham’s
poem, we can detect several aspects of the Country House genre
based on the knowledge we have gained so far, and so in turn address
how the poet uses these features to talk about the present state of
national affairs. By praising a particular location Denham promotes a
Royalist agenda that supports Charles I at a time of special crisis in his
reign, but we should also question the clarity of this ‘political message’
when thinking about the ambivalent way in which the poet uses certain
symbols within the poem.

Read Cooper’s Hill.

Based on some of the historical background we sketched in Unit 1, and

your additional reading about the contexts and implications of the Civil
War, what are your initial impressions of Denham’s poem? How does it
engage in contemporary political discourse? And how does it open up
broader questions about the role of poetry in civic society?

We shall focus here on several key passages that illustrate different

aspects of the political position Denham adopts at this time of crisis,
and the ways in which the conventions and structure of the estate
poem can help to project this.

To get a fuller grasp on which political position Denham adopts, and

how this might be important to developing our reading of Cooper’s Hill,
it is worth looking briefly at a biographical account of his life.

Activity:
Look up the entry for ‘John Denham’ in the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography.

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and the ‘Country House’ Poem
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You should bear some of the details of this biographical background in

mind as we pursue our analysis of Cooper’s Hill, alongside your
knowledge so far of the historical context of this period. However, as
we found in Unit 2, you should also be cautious about the extent to
which such extra-textual knowledge can either add to or detract from
our reading of a literary work.

Let us begin exploring Cooper’s Hill by thinking first of all about what
type of poem it is, and how far we might identify it as belonging to the
‘estate poem’ tradition we have sketched so far. Your reading of the
poem might lead you to question how far it can be described as a
‘Country House’ poem at all, and how far Alastair Fowler’s suggestion
that ‘estate poem’ is a more appropriate term which might in fact fit
Denham’s poem more accurately. Does the ‘house’ that it describes,
Windsor Castle, fit the conventional presentation of the country house
within this genre of poetry, and how does the Castle’s identity as the
King’s own seat affect what we know about the ‘country house’s’
function as a metaphor for the state itself?

Look at the poem’s opening lines: what strikes you as particularly

interesting – either typical or unusual – about these lines in view of
what you know so far about the Country House genre of poetry, and
this period of literary history? You might, for instance, notice the
mixture of familiar and more unusual reference-points: we have
‘Parnassus’ and the lofty description of the ‘Poets’’ role, alongside talk
of ‘Courts’ and ‘Kings’. What is typical, and what is unusual, about such
references within a poem of this period, and in particular of this genre?
Note, for instance, the metrical structure of these opening lines: ‘Sure
we have Poets, that did never dream / Upon Parnassus’. The metrical
regularity we had come to expect in a poem like, for instance, ‘To
Penshurst’ is immediately ruptured by the troche of the first line’s first
foot, which supports the initial suggestion that Denham is unlike other
‘Poets’ who, unlike him, never dreamt of ascending Mount Parnassus to
compose their verse.

You may have come across the word ‘Parnassus’ in your reading
elsewhere; if you are unsure as to what it means, check it in a
reference work, such as the online Oxford English Dictionary. To
summarise, Parnassus is a mountain that, according to classical
mythology, was the home of poets and literature, and was the source
of poetic inspiration. How does this relate to ‘the stream / Of Helicon’,
referred to in the third line? Both references, perhaps, remind us of the
classical background that, as we have learned, surrounded poets and
their writings at this time. What do you think the relevance of
Parnassus and Helicon might be in the context of a poem apparently
about a place called Cooper’s Hill?

There are two possible ways of addressing this, which inform our
reading of the poem as a whole. Firstly, we might like to think of how
Denham situates his poem, and himself as its author, in relation to the
classical precedents he invokes through making such references: do we
think of him, perhaps, as gaining a place for himself on the lofty
heights of Parnassus, alongside revered classical predecessors, by
writing this poem? You might observe, for instance, that Denham
consciously adopts Virgil’s Georgics as a model for Cooper’s Hill; in
turn, this poem sets an important precedent for subsequent pieces
within this genre of poetry, inspiring authors such as Alexander Pope
who similarly wrote ‘estate poems’ on this model. Perhaps Denham’s
opening equation between his role as poet and that of Parnassus’ poets
came to be realised in the appreciation future generations expressed
for Cooper’s Hill.

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Secondly, the mythological ‘geographical’ features Denham mentions

offer a provoking parallel to the local details of the very real, very
familiar topographical landscape the poem describes. For instance,
does the invocation of Mount Parnassus affect the way in which we
might think about ‘Coopers Hill’ as a place? Does Denham use this
comparison so as to try to attract a similar glory for the location his
poem describes as that belonging to such a widely-recognised and
admired place as Mount Parnassus? And does the connection between
the Helicon and the river Thames equate both as equally important?

Or, on the other hand, do such comparisons potentially expose the

locations that Denham describes to a certain degree of ridicule, if we
think that London’s topography can never equal that of the idealised,
classical past? In turn, maybe the ‘Kings’ and ‘Courts’ that Denham
juxtaposes with these classical references seem either more significant,
or more derisory as a result. It is worth asking yourself such questions
as you pursue your analysis of the poem.

Whichever reading you favour, the stress on location is significant in

view of Cooper’s Hill’s identity as a ‘Country House’ poem. Trace those
elements of the poem that refer to the location itself, its topographical
features and what the poet describes. Where, after all, is Cooper’s Hill?
Check in the notes to the poem, which tell us that this is a situation
within Windsor Great Park that commands views over the Park and the
river Thames.

From this spot, Denham adopts a position of transcendence and

superiority, both actually and metaphorically, as the reference to
Mount Parnassus hints: from Cooper’s Hill, Denham is ‘Exalted to this
height’, and commands views over the surrounding landscape that
make him into the proverbial ‘monarch of all he surveys’. In turn, he
commands a superior overview of contemporary state affairs, and
considers himself to be in a sufficiently ‘exalted’ position to comment
upon them. As a poet, elevated to the British equivalent of Mount
Parnassus, he asserts his right as a poet to offer insights upon his
contemporary world and, perhaps, to shape its circumstances, just as
we saw Milton attempting to do in Lycidas.

What do you notice about the way in which Denham presents his
contemporary world, and how might his comments try to alter it? Let’s
focus on the idea of monarchy, which as we know from our reading
about this period’s history is a particularly fraught and vexed topic.
Note the terms that Denham uses to describe the King, and the details
that he gives us about him. What, for instance, might we make of his
description of how Windsor was ‘Preserved from ruin by the best of
Kings’ (l. 20)? Does this phrase unite the destruction and desolation of
a distant history with the very real threat of upheaval present in 1641?
Trace those terms that refer to ruin or catastrophe in the poem’s
opening lines: ‘winds’, ‘storms’, and ‘meteors’, for instance, are
metaphors that apply to civil upheaval.

We must, of course, be wary when reading such metaphors of

imposing the knowledge that we have gained by hindsight, about the
actual historical events that took place during this period, upon our
reading of the poem: after all, in 1641 Denham did not know the
precise nature of the upheavals that were to follow in the subsequent
years, nor could he necessarily foresee the King’s execution in 1649.
Yet does his lack of such knowledge in fact add extra poignancy and
urgency to his description of what might yet come to pass? Think about
how Denham describes the gathering storm in lines 24-28: does this
create the impression of an impending disaster in the social and
political world through the use of a natural metaphor? And are the

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and the ‘Country House’ Poem
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ways in which Denham refers to the King and to the monarchy

consistent, or potentially ambivalent?

Activity:
Read through the poem again, and note down those phrases which
refer to monarchy.

How does Denham’s use of such symbols and metaphors project a

‘royalist’ position, and how far is his support of the monarchy
constrained by an awareness that an unjust or profligate king will incite
civil unrest? The symbolic connotations of the water imagery, which
the poem’s location as overlooking the Thames makes possible,
provides Denham with an array of devices for describing both good and
bad monarchs. Note, for instance, the way in which he describes the
‘profuse Kings’ as like ‘a furious, and unruly wave’: a careless and
ruthless monarch will initiate a tidal flood, an ‘Inundation’, of civil
unrest that will threaten the peace and prosperity of the whole nation
(ll. 197-199). Think back to examples within the Country House genre
that promote the image of a bountiful and fecund estate to exemplify
the judicious and careful management of the estate’s owner. The
tyrant King clearly perverts such a model.

But what of the ‘wise King’? He ‘first settles fruitful peace / In his own
Realmes, and with their rich increase, / Seeks war abroad’ (ll. 205-7).
Denham, then, does not suggest that the most prosperous nation is
one completely at peace: rather, whereas the ‘profuse Kings’ bring
wrack and ruin on the nation by causing civil strife, which prevents
good husbandry and corrupts the fruitful productivity of the land, the
‘wise King’ cultivates the nation-state by bringing it peace, and making
it prosperous; but it is this prosperity, the ‘rich increase’ of the nation’s
natural bounty and its economic affluence, which permits him to
conduct ‘war abroad’, and thereby to bring even greater wealth to the
nation: he ‘then in triumph brings / The spoils of kingdoms, and the
crowns of kings’ (ll. 207-8). Note the balanced rhythm of these lines,
with paired clauses of ‘spoils of kingdoms’ and ‘crowns of kings’: the
unity and cohesion of the good king’s nation is suggested structurally,
just as the alliteration of the final clause (‘crowns of kings’) suggests
ever-increasing wealth.

How do these images of affluence and abundance, conveyed through

the description of the landscape, embed Cooper’s Hill within the
tradition of estate poetry?

As with other pieces within the genre, the location provides the
principal means of presenting an idealised world through the specific,
and actual detail of the place, which here revolves around the river’s
role as the nation’s main artery. Just as the ‘silver Thames’ of Dryden’s
Annus Mirabilis is a conduit sustaining trade between London and other
places, and so increasing Britain’s wealth, so Denham imagines the
nation’s principal waterway as the means to national affluence under
the good king’s reign:

So Thames to London doth at first present

Those tributes, which the neighbouring countries sent,
But as his second visit from the East,
Spices he brings, and treasures from the West.
(ll. 209-12)

The exotic flavour of these ‘Spices’ suggests the global power that the
thriving British nation might have, which is juxtaposed with the very

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local and familiar details of the poem so far. From his superior
vantage-point, Denham can both command a view over the area’s
topography, allowing him to make such detailed observations about the
‘valley’ and its various features, and command an overview that covers
Britain’s history and looks forward to what its future prosperity might
be. As he goes on to describe, Britain ‘Finds wealth’ through its
ambitious international expansion and commercial interests, making
London the hub of all global economic activity: ‘thy fair bosom is the
world’s Exchange’ (l. 218), the ‘Exchange’ referring here to the city’s
financial centre. This very modern affluence is nonetheless placed
within an historical, and classical, framework: both the classical world
(of ‘gods’ and mythological places, such as the river Eridanus) and the
modern, familiar world share qualities that promise Britain’s future
shall be as sparkling and glorious, just as Denham imagines his poetry
shall equal that of classical precedents. His metaphor of the river to
describe the successful nation thus extends to describe his own poetry,
as he imagines how ‘could my verse freely and smoothly flow’ to
produce a ‘harmony’ similar to that of the mythological world he
describes (l. 219, l. 229).

The more general description of kings and the kind of nation they
might father becomes more specific as the poem moves on, where the
archetypal imagery is displaced by more specific historical details: do
these potentially unsettle the images of prosperity and abundance
established so far, in view of the actual events taking place at this
time? And how far do Denham’s more explicit references to the
monarch affect the political position he might be seen to adopt in the
poem? He goes on to imagine the scene of a hunt in Windsor Great
Park, and pictures King Charles himself as the huntsman who succeeds
in killing a stag. Denham presents himself as personally present at this
imaginary scene, suggesting a degree of historical accuracy gained
through first-hand experience that sits alongside the affirmation of
authority given in the opening idea of the vantage-point the poet has
gained atop Cooper’s Hill. He claims that

Here have I seen our Charles, when great affairs

Give leave to slacken, and unbend his cares,
Chasing the royal stag, the gallant beast
(ll. 263-5)

Denham’s description of the King as ‘our Charles’ lends the monarch a

quality of personal appropriation by and familiarity with his subject,
who while ruled by him feels a certain closeness with him as father of
the state. In contrast to the more generalised account of the good and
bad kings earlier in the poem, here Charles’ responsibilities as monarch
are stressed: he is weighed down with the ‘great affairs’ of state, but
like the good estate owner described in poems such as ‘To Penshurst’
he establishes the right balance between work and leisure, and orders
his affairs so well that he can have sufficient time to engage in pursuits
such as hunting.

This, in turn, exemplifies his success as an ‘estate manager’: the Park

at Windsor is so flourishing under Charles’ stewardship that it abounds
in beasts that willingly offer themselves to his feast-table, just as
Penshurst’s abundant deer and carp furnish Sidney’s feast. Indeed,
when Charles succeeds in killing the stag, the ‘royal’ beast that belongs
to him, as both a king amongst the animal kingdom and as his
property, he demonstrates the skill as a huntsman that any
accomplished male should have, and the beast is happy to die by his
royal hand:

[…] Charles from his unerring hand lets flie

A mortal shaft, then glad, and proud to die

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and the ‘Country House’ Poem
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By such a wound he falls, the crystal flood

Dying he dyes, and purples with his blood
(ll. 297-300)

The nobility of the beast is second only to that of the royal master who
has slain him; the flowing blood recalls the images of the Thames’
waterway described earlier in the poem – an equally successful
demonstration of the nation’s fruitfulness under Charles’ stewardship –
but is both clear in its ‘crystal’ quality and opaque, a ‘purple’ flood that
dyes the ground, in Denham’s pun on the word ‘dye’. The associations
that the colour purple has with nobility – and its identity as an
exclusive colour which only the nobility could wear – allies the stag
with the royal master whose bounty had reared and fed him, and so
who rightfully brings his life to an end.

How does this scene connect Cooper’s Hill with the conventional
images used to describe the successful estate and its owner in Country
House poems? And how far is the idea that the estate acts as a
microcosm of the state itself rendered more effective, or more
complex, when that estate belongs to the king himself, and Charles
himself is its successful manager?

While Denham incorporates many images and symbols that reaffirm

Charles’ role as the bountiful owner of his own estate at Windsor, and
therefore as father of a thriving nation, should we consider Cooper’s
Hill to project a purely royalist political stance, or is Denham’s position
more complex than this? Indeed, in view of the complicated nature of
political opinions and events at this difficult moment in the nation’s
history, is it wise to consider any poem or piece of writing as projecting
a single, unified response to contemporary circumstances, or is it
inevitable that there might be some degree of ambivalence?

Consider lines 307-320, which follow the description of the stag’s

willing sacrifice to his noble pursuer. Here, Denham claims, ‘armed
subject can have no pretence / Against their Princes’, which suggests
that openly rebelling against a monarch is dangerous and, moreover,
unjust. This is particularly resonant in view of what we know about the
civil strife that was shortly to ensue, and the strongest act of popular
rebellion with the King’s execution.

Yet Denham also suggests that the relationship between the monarch
and his subjects functions in two directions: just as the stag would
never have willingly died if it were not part of the bountiful estate of
Windsor Park (like the beasts pictured in Penshurst), so too the King
has a responsibility to cultivate his country’s land and to care for its
people. Only then will his subjects willingly defend him, rather than rise
up against him. Denham stresses that this is not just a tacit
understanding either, but is rooted in political ordinance, by ‘that
Charter sealed, wherein the Crown / All marks of arbitrary power lays
down’ (ll. 313-14). The ‘Charter’ refers to Magna Carta, the charter
originally issued in 1215 which curtailed the monarch’s powers and
promised certain liberties to Britain’s subjects.

By recalling it here, does Denham propose a similar threat to King

Charles’ role as monarch? Or does he, instead, propose that with the
Magna Carta all tyranny and ‘arbitrary’ power was permanently laid
aside, and set the precedent for the just rule that all future kings
should follow? As such, by recalling it here Denham reminds us that
the relationship between king and subjects is reciprocal – one in which
both have rights and responsibilities towards the other – but one
whose principles are founded on long-standing laws. Whereas before
‘Tyrant and Slave’ described the King’s relation to his people, now ‘The
happier style of King and Subject bear’ (ll. 316-17).

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Denham thus offers a warning here to those subjects who might seek
to ‘arm’ against their monarch – that such an uprising is unlawful and
unjust – but also suggests that the monarch himself must act in a
certain way to deserve the loyalty of his people. He must rule
judiciously and fairly so as not to incite the kinds of uprisings
witnessed under previous, tyrannous monarchs. To reinforce this
message, Denham returns to the image of the river, whose powerful
waters offer a fitting parallel to the nature of the king’s power: if
unchecked, it ‘First to a Torrent, then a Deluge swells’ (l. 340) and
bursts its banks, flooding the land and corrupting all its fruitful
prosperity. Similarly, the king’s power should be held in balance to
ensure the peaceful affluence of the nation:

Therefore their boundless power tell Princes draw

Within that channel, and the shores of Law,
And may that Law, which teaches Kings to sway
Their Sceptres, teach their Subjects to obey
(ll. 251-54)

Denham thus concludes his poem with a reference not to the specific
topographical features of the specific location it claims to describe,
Cooper’s Hill, but with a metaphorical reference to the correct ‘channel’
of the king’s powers and to the ‘shores of Law’, which represent both
the boundaries of the Magna Carta and the shorelines of the island
nation. The ‘estate poem’, Cooper’s Hill, thus ends with a vision not of
a particular place as such, but uses the vantage-point of both the
hillside on the borders of the Thames, and the allegorical prospect-
point of Parnassus that Denham attains in writing his poem, to produce
a vision of the state as a whole. It offers both a warning and a
potentially optimistic vision, based on historical precedent, and in
response to the very real circumstances surrounding the poem’s
appearance.

SAQ 2
How far can Cooper’s Hill be described as a ‘Country House’ poem,
and how does it adopt themes belonging to the genre to comment
upon the contemporary circumstances of this particular period?

ANDREW MARVELL: UPON APPLETON HOUSE AND

TENDING THE NATION’S GARDENS
In the previous section, we discussed how John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill
draws on conventions belonging to the estate poem genre to respond
to events happening at a time of national crisis; traditional ideas about
the well-run estate, which is fruitfully productive under the careful
stewardship of the owner, offer a microcosm for how the state itself
should be run. These ideas are used with particular poignancy in a
poem that focuses on the King’s castle of Windsor, and describes him
as the ideal owner. However, as we saw, the King has both rights and
responsibilities as head of his nation, and must respect the proper
limits of his power to deserve the loyalty and support of his subjects.

Andrew Marvell’s long estate poem, Upon Appleton House, similarly

draws on conventions belonging to this literary genre; but like
Denham’s poem the political message or standpoint it adopts is not
necessarily always clear-cut. Marvell uses the themes and images
familiar to his readers from this type of poem, but shapes them to fit
the particular geographical location he describes (Nun Appleton) and
the virtues of this estate’s owner (Fairfax); yet by describing the

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and the ‘Country House’ Poem
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estate, its gardens and its owner, again using the idea of the
microcosm of the nation, Marvell also urges us to think about the
owner’s wider role in society. Can Fairfax contribute his skills and
talents towards the running of his country successfully if he lives in
retirement upon his private estate?

There are several ways to approach this long, and perhaps difficult
poem; however, we should bear in mind the points mentioned here,
and the poem’s potential to provoke ambiguous readings, as we pursue
our analysis of some of its most striking passages, their participation in
the Country House genre, and their connection to wider questions
about national identity.

Read Upon Appleton House.

As with all examples of this genre of poetry, it is important to have

some knowledge of the particular place described, and of the owner
whom the poet implicitly or explicitly praises through celebrating his
well-run estate. In this case, Marvell chooses Nun Appleton, situated in
West Yorkshire: already we have a very different type of Country
House poem to the prospect poem we found Cooper’s Hill to be, with
its situation on the Thames and its focus on Windsor Castle as its
‘great house’. Marvell’s house might well have been a nunnery in
earlier times, hence the name; however, you may notice that he drops
the word ‘Nun’ from the title of his poem – is this significant, in view of
the poem’s comments on religion? You might like to ponder upon this
yourself as one aspect of Appleton House’s potential ambiguities. The
owner of the estate is Thomas Fairfax, a nobleman whose biography
offers illuminating insights into how Marvell describes him and his
estate in this poem.

Activity:
Look up the entry for ‘Sir Thomas Fairfax (1612-71)’ in the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography.

As you will see from this account of Fairfax’s personal history, he was
instrumental in helping to shape the course of political events during
one of the most turbulent times the nation had known. Yet Fairfax’
position was not necessarily always unequivocal – both a supporter of
parliamentary reform and outraged by the King’s execution, Fairfax’s
complex response to the events surrounding him is perhaps an apt
representation of the response registered by many of his
contemporaries, some of which emerge in Marvell’s poem. In his role
as tutor to Fairfax’s daughter, Mary, Marvell has both the responsibility
of forming her education and the duty of praising his employer and his
family, and the ideal opportunity to observe and reflect upon how his
particular location at Nun Appleton physically represents some of the
important political questions surrounding Fairfax (and the whole
nation) at the time. As Donald Friedman suggests, the poem is about
more than just a house: Marvell, by ‘identifying the subject of his
poetry and the art of its making, and his understanding that the central
concept of 'the house' includes not only the building but its history and
the history, past and to come, of the family that inhabits it’ (1993:
287).

The precise date of Upon Appleton House is not certain – Alastair

Fowler suggests that it was written after 1651 but before 1657, and
estimates that it may have been written in 1654 (1994: 294) – but we
can be certain that the poem is addressed to Fairfax and his home
after he had retired from public life to live upon his estate. It is

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important to bear some of the details of this history in mind as we

focus our reading of Upon Appleton House on several significant
passages.

We shall approach the poem from two angles, firstly by thinking about
its identity as a ‘Country House’ poem, and secondly by thinking about
how Marvell uses conventions belonging to this genre to pass comment
on Fairfax himself as a public figure, and upon the nation as a whole.
We shall do this be offering close readings of a few key stanzas.

Alastair Fowler in fact questions how far we might describe Upon

Appleton House as a ‘Country House’ poem at all, and suggests that
actually ‘it is something more unusual’ (1994: 295). For instance, the
house itself is dealt with in comparatively little detail compared to
other examples of the genre – think back to ‘To Penshurst’, and
consider how far Jonson’s attention to architectural detail resurfaces in
Marvell’s poem; think back to Cooper’s Hill, too – how does Denham’s
use of Windsor Castle compare to Marvell’s use of Nun Appleton?

In ‘To Penshurst’, you might suggest that the actual details of the
house’s features are dealt with in less detail than those of the estate
itself; but here, too, Marvell’s poem is strikingly different: the land
surrounding the house does not really attract in-depth comment, which
is particularly surprising in a poem of Appleton House’s length
(compared, say, to ‘To Penshurst’). Instead, Marvell is more interested
in the design of Fairfax’s garden, which he describes in particular
detail, from line 281 onwards. This is perhaps not so surprising in view
of some of Marvell’s other poems, such as ‘The Garden’. More
importantly however, Marvell uses his description of the garden’s
particular features to project a political allegory onto the poem, suited
to the history of the individual who owns and tends the garden.

Let us look in closer detail at some of these features. Consider, for

example, the following stanzas:

From that blest bed the hero came,

Whom France and Poland yet does fame:
Who, when retirèd here to eace,
His warlike studies could not cease;
But laid these gardens out in sport
In the just figure of a fort;
And with five bastions it did fence,
As aiming one for every sense.

When in the east the morning ray

Hangs out the colours of the day,
The bee through these known allies hums,
Beating the dian with its drums.
Then flowers their drowsy eyelids raise,
Their silken ensigns each displays,
And dries its pan yet dank with dew,
And fills its flask with odours new.

These, as their Governor goes by,

In fragrant volleys they let fly;
And to salute their Governess
Again as great a charge they press:
None for the Virgin Nymph; for she
Seems with the flowers a flower to be.
And think so still! though not compare
With breath so sweet, or cheek so faire.
(ll. 281-304)

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and the ‘Country House’ Poem
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Having described Fairfax’s prowess as a soldier – he is famed on the

continent for his martial success, which was for the benefit of his
native country – Marvell establishes his present position at Nun
Appleton as a natural consequence of his labours on the battlefield:
having fought so long, and incurred such personal injuries, Fairfax now
retires to his country estate – a fitting home indeed for one who is
‘blest’, in view of Nun Appleton’s former identity as a religious place.
Marvell nonetheless suggests that even in a time of ‘peace’ Fairfax
cannot forget ‘His warlike studies’. What is particularly interesting
about this phrase? You might, for instance, note that rather than
describing Fairfax’s soldierly activities explicitly in terms of fighting and
bloodshed, Marvell calls them ‘studies’. Does this suggest that, rather
than just showing brutish physical strength, Fairfax also possesses the
intellectual qualities that make him not just a good soldier, but a good
statesman too?

That he continues to exercise these ‘studies’ even while in retirement

suggests that Fairfax is an innately active man: rather than simply
relaxing, or idling away his time, he transfers those skills he showed
most effectively on the battlefield to the fields and open spaces of his
country seat. Rather than waging warfare, now he pursues a much
more peaceful military enterprise on the garden-scape at Nun
Appleton: he lays out ‘these gardens’ not in hostility but ‘in sport’, and
recreates features of military fortification using the natural features of
his garden, ‘In the just figure of a fort’. The word ‘just’ is interesting
here: it has multiple meanings, which you might like to trace for
yourself in the Oxford English Dictionary. Amongst these, for instance,
is the sense of being correct, or accurate; but of course ‘just’ also
suggests someone or something that is morally upright, a particularly
apt compliment to pay to Marvell’s patron and an active participant in
Britain’s recent political manoeuvrings.

What might this hint about which ‘side’ Marvell himself adopts in the
debates surrounding parliamentary reform and the removal of the
monarch? Or, perhaps, we should be rightly cautious in making a
single word carry such weight, whereas we need to see it in the
context of the whole poem fully to grasp the kinds of opinions we
might think that Marvell holds.

The suggestion that Fairfax creates ‘five bastions’ in his garden design,
like those of a military fort, but which also correspond to the five
senses further supports the idea that his leisure pursuits at Nun
Appleton are not just physical or idle, but also have an intellectual
dimension that remind us of Fairfax’s personal qualities – his
intelligence, his learning, his judicious planning (of a military campaign
as much as a garden). For this reason Marvell employs martial
metaphors throughout the ensuing stanzas, to remind us of his
employer’s former role as a soldier and to remind us of the personal
skills which Fairfax can apply in equal measure in whichever sphere of
life he finds himself. The ‘colours of the day’ that the morning sun
‘Hangs out’ are like the banners and ensigns of a military troop; the
bee is described as ‘Beating the dian with its drums’ (which refers to
the soldier’s trumpet-call); the flowers’ colours are like the ‘silky
ensigns’ seen on the battlefield.

Although in retirement, Fairfax is still the leader of his military troop:

as the ‘Governor goes by’ the whole garden gives tribute to him, as ‘In
fragrant volleys they let fly’ the flowers salute him. Like these ‘volleys’,
the ‘charge’ of pollen and scent they release is a pseudo-military term,
anachronistic in the context of a garden’s features and yet suited to
the soldierly ‘Governor’ who designs and tends it. This aligns Upon
Appleton House with other poems in the Country House genre: as we
saw with, for instance, ‘To Penshurst’, the owner’s judicious

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management means that the whole estate renders its bounty to the
master in fruitful abundance. So here, Fairfax’s wisdom and care mean
that his garden is well tended and prosperous, so that all its produce
pays tribute to him.

In fact, Fairfax’s success in nurturing a bountiful and fertile garden

extends to his family: in the final stanza here, the ‘virgin nymph’ whom
Marvell describes stands in for Mary, his own pupil and Fairfax’s
daughter. In his retirement, Fairfax not only cultivates a beautiful and
flower-filled garden, but also produces a healthy and virtuous family.
Mary is virgin-like in her youth and innocence, like the flowers of the
garden: she ‘Seems with the flowers a flower to be’; but like them she
too will follow her father in tending her own garden, and producing her
own family, in future years. As Friedman suggests, ‘Nunappleton and
the greater cosmos are indeed made of the same stuff, but it is a stuff
of pain and peril; the best that can be said is that the world that
Fairfax has shaped and passed on to the promise of his daughter
upholds a “decent Order tame” ’ (1993: 290).

We can trace these images – and their allegorical significance – in the

poem’s subsequent stanzas. For instance, the ‘equal fires’ of the
flowers’ scent-laden volley; their appearance as a multicoloured
‘regiment’ in their beds; the ‘vigilant patrol /Of stars’ that watches over
the garden, like a military sentinel, whilst the family sleeps: all these
images contribute to present the image of Fairfax as a military man in
peaceful and abundant retirement – the abundance of his garden is
precisely the result of the peace that his soldierly prowess has helped
to establish, just as in Cooper’s Hill the king’s military campaigns bring
a time of greater prosperity and abundance to his nation.

Activity:
Note down those images which support the parallel between
Fairfax’ garden design and his former career as a soldier.

However, is Marvell’s praise of Fairfax and his decision to retire to the

rural delights of Nun Appleton so straightforward? Think back to the
opening section of this unit, where we considered the origins of the
Country House poem. You may recall that Latin poets such as Horace
celebrate the benefits and delights of a country retreat, and present
the estate’s bounty and delights as a direct result of the owner’s
successful management. Yet we also found that in order to be a good
citizen, the individual must not retire completely from public life: he
must use the benefits gained by resting on his country estate to make
him into a better statesman. In view of this, read again the following
lines by Marvell:

Oh thou, that dear and happy isle

The garden of the world ere while,
Thou paradise of foür seas,
Which heaven planted us to please,
But, to exclude the world, did guard
With watery if not flaming sword;
What luckless apple did we taste,
To make us mortal, and thee waste? (ll. 321-328)

The idea of Britain as a garden is commonplace among poems of this

time, in which the island’s cultivation is unrivalled elsewhere in the
world; you may, for instance, recall John of Gaunt’s famous speech in
Shakespeare’s Richard II, in which he describes Britain as ‘this

Unit 3: Civil War to Interregnum: Engagement in the Public Sphere 3-17

and the ‘Country House’ Poem
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sceptred isle’. This idea resurfaces here in Marvell’s description of ‘that

dear and happy isle’, which brings out the idea of the private estate as
a microcosm of the state itself: the ‘isle’ is both Fairfax’s garden and
Britain, Fairfax a monarch (or ‘governor’) in his own private kingdom,
but also a key political figure in the nation at large. Does Marvell
prompt us to think here of Fairfax’s retirement upon Nun Appleton’s
metaphorical ‘island’ as somehow neglecting his duty to that greater
‘isle’ which is his country?

The remaining lines of this stanza conjure an image of the archetypal

idyllic garden, the Garden of Eden, which was in itself a kind of island
amidst a world of chaos, in which Adam and Eve lived in peaceful,
blissful innocence. Yet, as Marvell suggests, this bliss was precarious:
the very fruits that made it so delightful, and which like the well-run
estate yielded itself to its masters, was the means by which man was
expelled from paradise, the ‘luckless apple’ which Adam and Eve tasted
contrary to God’s instructions. It was their expulsion from the Garden
of Eden that made it ‘waste’, that meant that its plants went untended
and its animals neglected.

As we shall see in a subsequent unit that addresses Milton’s famous

poem on this theme, Paradise Lost, this biblical story provides a fitting
allegory for commenting upon the contemporary national context.
Here, Marvell uses this double idea – both happy in the blissful image
of paradise, and tragic in the terrible knowledge that this paradise was
lost – to warn Fairfax that the island idyll he cultivates at Nun Appleton
is perhaps equally precarious. Future warfare, after all, might break
out, as the phase of civil unrest is far from settled at the time of the
poem’s appearance; just as Fairfax helped to establish the current, if
precarious ‘peace’, so he has a duty to participate in how the nation is
run to ensure its future stability – and that of his own home and
family.

It is through yet another Biblical reference further on in the poem that

Marvell further cements his message that the peaceful idyll of Nun
Appleton is not necessarily safe from potential threats, and that neither
the estate nor its owner is isolated from the rest of the world – just as
‘no man is an island’ (to invoke Donne’s famous phrase). Having
described some of the estate’s features, including its river and the
plentiful fish that swim in it, Marvell describes how ‘I, retiring from the
flood, / Take sanctuary in the wood’ (l. 481-2). He imagines this
location to be a ‘yet green, yet growing Ark’, like the immense vessel
Noah built to save himself, his family, and the beasts of the earth from
the flood with which God wiped out an errant mankind. We
encountered other uses of this story as a metaphor for commenting on
the national situation in our discussion of Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis,
where there is a comparable use of images related to waterways as
that found in Appleton House.

Here, Marvell describes how the tranquillity of the wood – as ancient as

the Fairfax family itself – provides him with a space for contemplating
his surroundings and for composing poetry. But rather than remaining
within the wood permanently, where the poet stretches himself out
upon ‘my lazy side’ (l. 643) on one of its verdant banks, it is only by
coming out of the wood and engaging again with human life – his pupil
Maria – that Marvell finds true contentment and fulfilment. He
dismisses the instruments of his poetic trade – ‘away my hooks, my
quills’ (l. 649) – to admire the living person who embodies the
continuance of the Fairfax family. So, too, he suggests, permanent
retirement of whatever form – be it on one’s country estate, or in
private poetic contemplation – means that man fails to engage with the
truly important things in life, be they affairs of state, or pursuing the

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personal relationships necessary to ensuring that no man remains

isolated within himself, but can connect to those around him.

The detailed allegories of Upon Appleton House are complex and

require much careful analysis, of which we can only give a sketch here:
in your own reading of the poem, you should take time to unpick these
details, using some of the ideas and themes that we have identified so
far. What, for instance, qualifies this as a Country House, or estate
poem? How does Marvell use the allegories belonging to this genre to
provide a commentary on contemporary political events? To further
elucidate this, it is worth taking a moment to address biographical
information about this poet, his political interests, and his poetic career
– just as details about Fairfax’ personal history help us to understand
how, in what ways, and for what purposes Marvell presents him and
his home in the way that he does in Appleton House.

Activity:
Look up the entry for ‘Andrew Marvell’ in the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography.

You should apply some of this knowledge to your reading of the poem
– but also ask yourself how far such biographical information is useful
to elucidating a literary work, how far it might impede our readings.
Such questions are highly pertinent to the final poem we shall look at
in this unit, also by Marvell, and indeed pervade the subject-matter we
shall address in subsequent units.

Perhaps Donald Friedman’s sequence of paradoxical descriptions of

Marvell best captures the tensions at work in his poetry, those

between participation and withdrawal; the relative moral

positions of the creative human mind and the natural world it
operates upon; the sources of civil power and the place of
religious belief in authorizing it; the rights of the flesh and the
spirit in the government of man's lesser state; the relation of
tradition to innovation in the creation of art; the status of images
with respect to what the mind makes of them. (1993: 298)

SAQ 3
How far is Upon Appleton House representative of the ‘Country
House’ genre of poetry, and in which ways does Marvell draw on its
conventions to project a response to contemporary historical events?

ANDREW MARVELL: ‘AN HORATIAN ODE UPON

CROMWELL’S RETURN FROM IRELAND’
The final poem that we shall look at in this unit is not a Country House
poem in the sense that we have been describing; instead, it provides
us with a further step in addressing how a poet can offer a
commentary on contemporary historical events, and perhaps express
his own opinions upon them, through his writing. ‘An Horatian Ode
upon Cromwell’s return from Ireland’ also helps to elucidate further
aspects of the career of Andrew Marvell, and to remind us that the
political opinions a poet expresses are not always consistent, or
straightforward. Marvell’s poem shows us how the complexity of recent

Unit 3: Civil War to Interregnum: Engagement in the Public Sphere 3-19

and the ‘Country House’ Poem
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and current events at the time of writing produces ambiguous and

challenging poetry.

The ‘Horatian Ode’ nonetheless possesses some features, besides

these thematic ones, that connect it to the estate poems we have
addressed earlier in this unit. For instance, we have already seen how
Horace was an important model for poets writing within the Country
House genre; what might the reference to him mean in the context of
this piece? Rather than a retirement poem – such as the Satires we
looked at previously – this announces itself as an ode.

The ode is a form of lyric poetry characteristically between 50 and 200

lines long, in a grand and exalted style, and written with a serious
purpose. The form was established by the Greek poet Pindar, whose
odes were written to glorify the winners in the Olympics and other
games.

A ‘Horatian’ ode follows the form as developed by Horace, which were

imitations of Pindar’s odes, but were generally more personal and
meditative in tone. They were also written in a more regular stanza
form. Marvell’s poem therefore places itself explicitly in a classical
tradition by adopting this form, just as the Country House poems we
have already looked at are overtly modelled on well-known classical
precedents. By using this model, Donald Friedman suggests, Marvell
‘invoked both the perspective and the historical circumstances of
Horace, a supporter of the Roman republic who became the poet of
empire by creating a mode that could celebrate and criticize at the
same time, in the service of an ideal of humane conduct’ (1993: 276).
As Friedman (1993: 279) notes, the demanding verse-form Marvell
adopts, the tetrameter structure, suggests the constraints and
difficulties facing the historical events surrounding him at the time of
writing.

There are other points of contact between the ‘Horatian Ode’ and other
poems addressed in this unit. For instance, we saw how King Charles’
role as manager of his own estate and of the state involved the right
balance between leisure and labour. Similarly, the retirement that
Fairfax enjoys in Appleton House should only be temporary, and is in
fact conditional: to be a truly responsible citizen he should be actively
engaged in contributing to the nation’s smooth running. So too in this
poem Marvell describes how his subject emerged from ‘his private
gardens, where / He lived reservèd and austere’ (ll. 29-30), and where
his planting and nurturing activities only provided a temporary respite
from the more widely beneficial labours of tending the nation.

Rather like the ‘prospect’ poem Cooper’s Hill, in which Denham

assumes a vantage-point from which both to observe the landscape
physically and the nation’s current state metaphorically, and like the
detached observation that Marvell introduces at various points in Upon
Appleton House – when he does not specifically involve himself with
the family and their history – so too the speaker of the ‘Horatian Ode’
adopts a pose of detachment and objectivity in his comments. This
differentiates its identity as an ‘occasional’ poem from that of Milton’s
Lycidas, which we discussed in Unit 2, but nonetheless enables Marvell
to project a particular political commentary through the seemingly
dispassionate voice he adopts, prompted by the public event that
inspires the poem.

Marvell’s poem, as the title declares, was specifically written upon the
occasion of a precise event in history, Cromwell’s return from his
conquests in Ireland in May 1650, shortly after which Marvell’s poem
was presumably written. However, just as the seemingly local
geography and history described in Cooper’s Hill and Upon Appleton

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House actually allow their authors to make broader comments on

political and national events, so here the ostensible occasion for the
poem’s composition enables Marvell to address the current state of the
nation in the wake of the King’s execution in 1649, and Cromwell’s role
as the new head of state. As Donald Friedman argues, ‘Marvell
responded to the occasion [of Cromwell’s return] for his poem in a way
that expanded its significance, to encompass not only the poet's
understanding of his relation to the event, but also the place of the
event in a larger and more shadowy national history’ (1993: 276).

Just as Fairfax’s role as a military leader is incorporated into the

metaphors and images that Marvell uses, so in the ‘Horatian Ode’
Cromwell’s prowess is pictured through martial rhetoric. Initially,
Marvell suggests, the present state of the nation – riddled by
uncertainty in the wake of civil strife – means that this is not a time for
poetry. Rather, this is a time for military action:

The forward youth that would appear

Must now forsake his muses dear,
Nor in the shadows sing
His numbers languishing.
’Tis time to leave the books in dust,
And oil the unusèd armour’s rust:
Removing from the wall
The corslet of the hall.
(ll. 1-8)

The speaker of the poem suggests that the ‘Arts of Peace’ – which
involve creative arts such as reading and poetry – have no real role to
play in what is to come; the gardening activities we noted earlier fall
into this category, being an art-form that is redundant at a time of war
– and even pernicious in detracting from real action. This foreshadows
the warning that Marvell was later to make to Fairfax, in retreat at
Appleton House. The rhyme between ‘sing’ and ‘languishing’ here
suggests a plaintive yearning for these neglected pastimes; but the
rhyme between ‘rust’ and ‘dust’ confirms the necessity of oiling the
armour that will enable military action.

Cromwell is proposed as a precedent by having sacrificed these ‘Arts’

for activity, pictured in a startling and dynamic metaphor: he is
described as a bolt of lightning, ‘burning through the Air’, which is
reminiscent of the comet that features in poems of this time and
beyond (recall our analysis of Thomson’s poem to Newton), and which
symbolises both a fearful portent and a blaze of light. Cromwell is both
destructive in his military prowess and a hopeful symbol of the nation’s
future, through the peace and prosperity he may help to ensure.
Indeed, the divine wrath or providence that the comet can symbolise is
suggested by the couplet

’Tis madness to resist or blame

The force of angry heaven’s flame.
(ll. 25-6)

Cromwell, the poem proposes, is divinely sanctioned in pursuing his

course of action – and just as the Biblical flood and the Great Fire of
London alike both destroyed and cleansed, so too Cromwell’s actions
will bring a necessarily restorative desolation to the country. As
Friedman (1993: 281) argues, an Ode must contain both praise and
prophecy, and warn its addressee of future events. Marvell suggests
that Cromwell should be followed and obeyed in his role as an
instrument of Heaven.

Unit 3: Civil War to Interregnum: Engagement in the Public Sphere 3-21

and the ‘Country House’ Poem
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Marvell supplies various details that characterise Cromwell beyond this

archetypal image of him as the scourge of God. Initially, he is
described as ‘reserved and austere’, but someone who

Could by industrious valour climb

To ruin the great work of time,
And cast the kingdom old
Into another mold.
(ll. 33-36)

Do you recall the variant meanings that we discovered in Unit 1, in

Dryden’s use of the word ‘mould’? Some of these are evident here, in
Marvell’s slightly earlier poem. Cromwell is portrayed as a kind of
sculptor, ‘casting’ a new state out of the old metal: it was necessary to
recast this old metal because, although one may appeal to ancient
rights for allowing the monarchy to retain its supreme position, those
ancient rights have no applicability to a weak monarch. How does this
connect to the argument that Denham makes in Cooper’s Hill about the
‘wise’ and the ‘profuse’ king?

Marvell goes on to claim that:

Nature that hateth emptiness.

Allows of penetration less:
And therefore must make room
Where greater spirits come.
(ll. 41-44)

Just as the successful estate needs a just manager to fill its ‘emptiness’
and nurture its natural abundance, so the leader of the nation must
show that he has substance. Cromwell is a ‘great spirit’ who revealed
his greatness in his contriving to make Charles flee Hampton Court: an
ineffectual King was incited to action, which opened the way to his
removal – firstly through his dethronement, and then by his execution.
He is replaced by a man of substance who can create, or sculpt, a new
nation out of the old metal: he can retain the existing qualities in the
nation, but cast them into a better shape.

Given this portrayal of Cromwell as an artist we can argue that the first
lines of the poem suggest not the giving up of art altogether, but
simply the replacement of the ‘Arts of Peace’ with the ‘Arts of War’, of
necessary activity, arts of which Cromwell is the greatest practitioner.
This suggests that the art of statesmanship is one of political skill,
proved through action, and put to the service of creating a more
successful nation.

Whilst Cromwell seems to be unreservedly praised in these lines, can

we detect a potential ambiguity in how Marvell treats King Charles in
the subsequent part of the poem? Does his presentation of a monarch
whose removal he had apparently considered necessary complicate
how far we can consider a poem to convey an unequivocal political
message? Marvell praises the noble manner in which Charles died,
describing how on the scaffold,

He nothing common did or mean

Upon that memorable scene:
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try:
Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right,
But bowed his comely head,
Down, as upon a bed.
(ll. 57-64)

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The description of Charles as humble and meek – but noble in his

demeanour – seems to support his image as a divinely-appointed
monarch. The presentation of the King as a cruel sacrifice also aligns
him with the martyr-like way in which many of Charles’ supporters
denounced his execution, following the precedent in the King’s own
famous account of his trials, Eikon Basilike, to which Milton was later to
produce a riposte. Yet his ‘helpless right’, which refers to the notion of
the ‘divine right of kings’, is one of impotence, his power is ineffectual.
As a man he possesses pious virtues – he has a ‘comely head’ that he
humbly ‘bowed’ towards the executioner’s block – but perhaps as a
leader of his nation he shows himself incapable of fulfilling his role as
effectively as, say, a man possessed of the multiple ‘arts’ that
Cromwell implicitly owns.

Nonetheless, Marvell’s ambivalent presentation of Charles – neither

wholly perfect nor reviled – has led many commentators to question
whether Marvell’s poem is, in fact, celebratory of Cromwell at all, as
Elizabeth Story Donno (1996: 238) suggests. This argument is perhaps
supported by the lines immediately following this scene:

This was the memorable hour

Which first assured the forced power.
So when they did design
The capitol’s first line,
A bleeding head where they begun,
Did fright the architects to run;
And yet in that the state
Foresaw its happy fate.
(ll. 65-72)

These lines refer to the story of how, when the Roman architects laid
the foundations for the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline hill, they
discovered a human head, which was taken as a good omen for the
future of the state. In the same way, the poem wittily proposes, a
human head - the head of Charles I - is a good omen for the state
under Cromwell. What is significant here is that Marvell has already
used the image of Rome earlier in the poem, but in a different context,
where Cromwell is described as destroying temples and palaces, and
eventually killing Caesar. Perhaps the suggestion is that, just as a
Rome can be built, so a Rome can be destroyed, and that just as a
Cromwell can kill a Caesar, so a Cromwell can become a Caesar, to be
killed again in turn.

Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, lurks behind these lines, with its
ambiguous portrayal of the justice of Caesar’s assassination: both a
suffering victim, and potentially a leader who had passed his
usefulness, did he deserve his fate? Similarly, both Cromwell and
Charles are aligned as sharing alike in the benefits and the pitfalls of
power: he, too, might prove to be an ineffective leader, and so would
rightfully deserve the same fate as Charles. Marvell thus offers a
warning to Cromwell – perhaps in a similar way to his message to
Fairfax, that he must be active in helping to run the nation effectively –
otherwise potential peace could be sacrificed to further bloodshed and
instability.

It is only in the final section of the poem that Ireland and Cromwell’s
campaigns come to be mentioned, surprising given the apparently
‘occasional’ nature of the poem. This delay in describing the main
event perhaps suggests Marvell’s ambivalence towards Cromwell’s
military prowess and potential as a leader of the nation. Nonetheless,
Marvell presents the experience of the Irish under Cromwell as
exemplifying his might and power:

Unit 3: Civil War to Interregnum: Engagement in the Public Sphere 3-23

and the ‘Country House’ Poem
___________________________________________________________________________

now the Irish are ashamed

To see themselves in one year tamed:
So much one man can do,
That does both act and know.
They can affirm his praises best,
And have, though overcome, confessed
How good he is, how just,
And fit for highest trust.
(ll. 73-80)

Again, is there ambivalence in the way in which the rebellious Irish are
presented? Just as Charles was shown meekly but nobly bending his
head to the greater might of the axe in the wake of popular rebellion,
so too do the Irish deserve pity for having been ‘tamed’ like wild beasts
under Cromwell’s military might? He is, nonetheless, described as
‘good’ and ‘just’, confirming his seeming promise as ‘fit for highest
trust’, both in his ability to serve as a figurehead for England and for
having obtained the ‘highest’ form of approval from Heaven itself.

Marvell suggests that Cromwell’s victory over Ireland promises a great

future for England, which he resoundingly celebrates:

What may not then our isle presume

While victory his crest does plume!
What may not others fear
If thus he crown each year!
A Caesar, he, ere long to Gaul,
To Italy an Hannibal,
And to all States not free
Shall climactéric be.
(ll. 97-104)

What does Marvell mean in these lines? Again he brings in references

to classical history – comparing Cromwell to Caesar, or to other mighty
leaders such as Hannibal – and thereby suggests a similar glory awaits
Britain. The word ‘climactéric’ means ‘epochal’ or ‘final’: Cromwell’s
actions are decisive, and will forever decide Britain’s fate. Yet while the
triumphant images of the ‘crest’, ‘plume’ and ‘crown’ seem to confirm
the positive nature of this future, is there also an implicit doubt, or at
least uncertainty, about it?

‘Climactéric’ might suggest variability, given its connection to the word

‘climate’, that suggests a critical moment that still hangs in the
balance: both temperate weather and storm might equally result from
the great tempests of civil upheaval just experienced. As Donald
Friedman suggests in relation to this particular word, Marvell ‘implies
that the triumphant Protestant general embodies the force of change
that marks a crucial moment of history’, and that ‘The occasion for his
writing the ‘Ode’ is also a climacteric moment in the poet's own
development’ (1993: 275).

Similarly, the ‘plume’ could be that of a smoking fire as much as the

victory feather of a soldier’s ‘crest’; and the marked poignancy of the
word ‘crown’ in the context of a poem about unseated monarchy
reminds us of the potential pitfalls facing any national leader. Could
Cromwell yearn for a crown himself, and present himself as a monarch
rather than the nation’s new political leader? Our suspicions may be
further raised by the depiction of Cromwell as a Caesar, just as Charles
I was portrayed as a Caesar earlier in the poem, both leaders who
showed themselves to be fallible.

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These suspicions are confirmed by the final lines, addressed to

Cromwell, which seem both to encourage and to warn him about the
future:

But thou, the Wars’ and Fortune’s son,

March indefatigably on,
And for the last effect
Still keep thy sword erect:
Besides the force it has to fright
The spirits of the shady night,
The same arts that did gain
A power, must it maintain.
(ll. 113-120)

Cromwell’s position of power is born of unstable forces – ‘War’ and

‘Fortune’ – and his own success is subject to the fickleness of Fortune
herself. Noticeably, it is not through resuming the creative ‘arts’
enjoyed in peacetime – poetry, or even gardening – but those of
warfare, and of politics, that Cromwell can retain his grip on ‘power’.
He must be ever-alert, and never relax his hold on his ‘sword erect’, or
else he risks destabilising his own position and the nation itself. Unlike
Fairfax, who retreats into the peaceful bliss of Appleton’s garden,
Cromwell can never retire to his ‘private gardens’; just as Fairfax’s
tranquillity is shown to be precarious, so this new national leader must
be constantly vigilant in nurturing the garden of the newly moulded
state.

The final couplet pitches the poem in a very interesting direction: it

proposes that some measure of ‘Art’ is necessary to maintaining
political power. ‘Art’ here may be read as the Arts of War, of activity,
that have been celebrated throughout the poem. Thus, the end of the
poem encourages Cromwell to continue to use his Arts of War because
the use of such force is necessary for the maintenance of his power.

These final lines strain against the movement of the rest of the poem,
which has striven to show that Cromwell is a great spirit whom all
should follow and support. This jeopardises the poem’s apparent role
as a public announcement of support for Cromwell through celebrating
his achievements: in spite of all his qualities, he remains an object of
suspicion through the uncertain future that potentially unknown
aspects of this new leader’s character might possess, and through the
fickle vicissitudes of Fortune, which no one can anticipate. Ultimately,
like Charles, Cromwell’s fate – and the nation’s – lies in the hands of a
Higher Power.

Perhaps, however, the final lines of the poem also lend another
potential message to Cromwell, where ‘Art’ means not the Arts of War,
but, literally, artistic creations, like poems. Marvell suggests that,
rather than through military prowess, it is art-works, poems such as
this one, which support and help to maintain political power. This poem
ostensibly proposes itself as a celebration of Cromwell’s qualities so as
to incite public support; so, in turn, future occasions – future examples
of Cromwell’s ‘just’ actions – will prompt future laudatory poems. A
leader’s success is based on the fruitful creativity his just management
brings to his nation – just as the estate owner’s careful husbandry
helps to nurture its natural abundance – and Marvell stresses that this
includes arts such as poetry as much as military action.

There is, we can suggest, a reason behind why Marvell draws attention
to the power of poetry at the end of the poem. Its ambivalence
towards Cromwell is evident in the dual way that it both praises and
warns him: in drawing attention at the end of the poem to the power

Unit 3: Civil War to Interregnum: Engagement in the Public Sphere 3-25

and the ‘Country House’ Poem
___________________________________________________________________________

of poetry and to the necessity of art to uphold power, perhaps Marvell

suggests that art can destabilise and interrogate those in power. Just
as the poem can be seen as supportive of Cromwell in its celebration of
him, it can also be seen as an act of resistance against him through
praising Charles I, and through warning Cromwell of the need to show
that he deserves his new position of power. Perhaps, therefore, ‘An
Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s return from Ireland’ is less a celebration
of Cromwell than a celebration of poetry, and of the ability for poetry
to effect commentary upon – and perhaps even effect change within –
the public sphere. To extend the argument further – and to connect
this ode to the previous poems we have looked at in this unit –
perhaps we can also suggest that while estate poems urge their
addressees to be actively engaged in affairs of state, so (Marvell
suggests here) poets should also not neglect their public role, of
commenting upon, and even striving to alter, national affairs.

SAQ 4
How can Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s return from
Ireland’ be seen as a poem which questions political authority by
addressing the individual’s role within public affairs?

REVIEW
In this unit we have addressed questions relating to how far the
individual should be involved in national affairs of state through the
medium of the Country House poem. We have addressed some of the
principal features of this poetic genre, from its classical origins
onwards, and considered how these conventional features might be
adapted to fit a new set of political, social and historical circumstances.
We have seen that the period between c. 1640-50 was a time of
particular upheaval in the face of Civil War, and that the individual’s
engagement with reshaping the nation could be figured through the
microcosm of the personal country estate. We have also seen how, in
turn, the poet has a responsibility to comment upon, and potentially
help to shape, national events through his verse. Furthermore, we
have considered how the ‘message’ of a literary work is not always
clear-cut and may reveal ambivalence on the part of the author. As we
have seen, different and even conflicting views on the present state
and future of the nation are detectable in different texts and even
within the same text.

In the next unit we shall consider the pamphlet Areopagitica by John

Milton, his plea against censorship, which can also be seen as
concerned with the relationship of literature and art to the political
process.

ADDITIONAL READING
Eliot, T. S. 1934. ‘Andrew Marvell’, in Selected Essays, 2nd edn
(London: Faber and Faber), pp. 292-304

Fish, Stanley E. 1972. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of

Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of
California Press) (Parts available via Google Books)

Monette, Sarah. 2002. ‘Speaking and Silent Women in Upon Appleton

House’, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 42.1:
155-71 (Available on Literature Online (LION))

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Partner, Jane. 2008. ‘'The Swelling Hall': Andrew Marvell and the
Politics of Architecture at Nun Appleton House’, The Seventeenth
Century, 23.2: 225-243 (Available on Literature Online (LION))

Patton, Brian. 1996. ‘Preserving property: history, genealogy, and

inheritance in Upon Appleton House’, Renaissance Quarterly,
49.4: 824-39 (Available on Literature Online (LION))

Ricks, Christopher. 1978. ‘Its Own Resemblance’, in C.A. Patrides

(ed.), Approaches to Marvell (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul), pp. 108-135

Rudd, Niall (ed.). 2005. The Satires of Horace and Persius

(Harmondsworth: Penguin)

REFERENCES
Fowler, Alastair (ed.). 1994. The Country House Poem: A Cabinet of
Seventeenth-Century Estate Poems and Related Items
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press)

Friedman, Donald M. 1993. ‘Andrew Marvell’, in Thomas N. Corns

(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to
Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 275-303
(Parts available online via Google Books)

Hibbard, G. R. 1956. ‘The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth

Century’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XIX:
159-74 (Available on JSTOR)

Kenny, Virginia C. 1984. The Country-House Ethos in English Literature

1688-1750: Themes of Personal Retreat and National Expansion
(Brighton: Harvester)

Kelsall, Malcolm. 1993. The Great Good Place: The Country House and
English Literature (New York; London: Harvester Wheatsheaf)

McClung, William A. 1977. The Country House in English Renaissance

Poetry (London: University of California Press) (Full text
available via Google Books)

Story Donno, Elizabeth (ed.). 1996. Andrew Marvell: The Complete

Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin)

Unit 3: Civil War to Interregnum: Engagement in the Public Sphere 3-27

and the ‘Country House’ Poem
___________________________________________________________________________

ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
Q. What might be the most attractive themes and features of the
Country House genre for a writer keen to show how a nation
should be run, particularly in view of what you now know about
the historical contexts of this period as one of both upheaval,
uncertain peace, and instability?

The Country House genre of poetry presents a microcosm of the

ideal state, where a judicious and careful owner manages his estate
with such prudence that it naturally produces an abundance of
produce that supplies all the wants of his household. This is a
particularly effective image for how a nation as a whole should be
run, where the rightful leader wins the love and loyalty of his people
through justice and benevolence. He will, in turn, cultivate the fruits
of the nation, both agriculturally and through his people’s happiness.
This is a particularly important model for poets writing at times of
crisis, such as during the Civil War and Interregnum, as by
describing country houses and estates they can show the
devastation and destruction wrought by civil unrest, but also the
potential for renewal made possible by careful and judicious
management of the nation and its people.

SAQ 2
Q. How far can Cooper’s Hill be described as a ‘Country House’
poem, and how does it adopt themes belonging to the genre to
comment upon the contemporary circumstances of this particular
period?

Although Cooper’s Hill does not describe a country house, or even a

conventional estate, as such, nonetheless it can be discussed
alongside more obvious examples of this genre as it uses similar
themes and ideas, which it also projects onto the national arena. It
describes the landscape surrounding the ‘vantage point’ of Cooper’s
Hill, encompassing Windsor Great Park and Windsor Castle, to show
how (like other estate poems) a well-run estate produces bountiful
vegetation and animal life. The head of this estate is the King
himself, Charles I, and Denham uses the scene of a stag hunt to
show how (like other ‘Country House’ poems) the natural world
willingly gives itself up to its rightful owner. Denham extends this
allegory to describe Charles’ role as head of the whole nation, in
which the role of the King is to rule with justice and prudence to gain
the trust and loyalty of his subjects, and to prevent any future civil
strife. This is particularly pertinent in view of the historical context
surrounding the poem’s appearance.

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SAQ 3
Q. How far is Upon Appleton House representative of the Country
House genre of poetry, and in which ways does Marvell draw on
its conventions to project a response to contemporary historical
events?

Upon Appleton House draws on several features of the Country

House genre, which partly justifies its description as a poem written
within this literary tradition. For instance, it describes a house, an
estate, and its owner, and shows how the virtues and qualities of the
well-run estate reflect those of the owner. However, the poem does
not address the house itself in any particular detail, unlike other
examples of the genre (such as Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’), nor does it
discuss the estate itself at any length. Instead, Marvell describes the
garden in extensive detail, using its features to project an allegory
representing Lord Fairfax’s role as a military man, whose
engagement in recent political events was significant. Through his
descriptions of the garden, Marvell suggests that Fairfax – while
justified in wanting rest upon his private estate, justly deserved after
his exertions on the battlefield – should not be completely
disengaged with public affairs. Rather, future prosperity is ensured
by continually contributing his personal qualities to successfully
running the country. The idea of retirement only bringing a
temporary haven of peace is reaffirmed in Marvell’s account of his
enjoyment of the peace and tranquillity of the wood, but his
recognition that it is only by interacting with the living person – his
pupil Maria – that he can gain true fulfilment in life.

SAQ 4
Q. How can Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s return from
Ireland’ be seen as a poem which questions political authority by
addressing the individual’s role within public affairs?

In the final lines of ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s return from
Ireland’, Marvell can be seen to be celebrating the power of art in
the political process when he says: ‘The same Arts that did gain/ A
power must it maintain.’ Art is necessary, the poem seems to say,
for the maintenance of political power. ‘An Horatian Ode upon
Cromwell’s return from Ireland’ seems to be a celebration of
Cromwell, and thus part of the process by which Cromwell’s power is
maintained. However, the poem, on closer examination, is revealed
as being quite ambivalent with regard to Cromwell, making parallels,
through the imagery of Rome, between Cromwell and Charles I and
suggesting that what happened to Charles I could just as easily
happen to Cromwell. The last words of the poem thus can be read
not as confirming the poem as a part of Cromwell’s maintenance of
power but as a warning to Cromwell that he needs art to maintain
power but that this piece of art may not be on his side. In this sense,
the last lines of the poem become a warning to Cromwell about the
poem itself. With this interpretation, the poem reveals itself to be
politically questioning what it purports to celebrate and so the poem
can be read as questioning political authority. As such, Marvell
prompts us to think about the need for the politically engaged
individual – whether he is a military leader such as Cromwell, or a
poet – to engage with affairs of state so as to contribute most
effectively towards its successful functioning, like the well-ordered
country estate.

Unit 3: Civil War to Interregnum: Engagement in the Public Sphere 3-29

and the ‘Country House’ Poem
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UNIT 4

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL
PROSE: JOHN MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA

AIMS
The aims of this unit are to:

(a) give a detailed reading of John Milton’s Areopagitica and

(b) outline the questions that the text poses to the process of reading
and studying literature in its historical context.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Explain what is meant by the term ‘occasional literature’.

Outline the questions such writing poses for your study of literature
in general.

Critically evaluate Milton’s prose work, Areopagitica (1644).

Describe the prose style Milton adopts in the work.

Summarise the arguments presented by Milton and critically

evaluate them.

Describe the function of censorship in society.

Explain the role that literature can play in society, by both

commenting on and aiming to reform it.

REQUIRED READING
Milton, John. 1994. Areopagitica in George Campbell (ed.), Complete
English Poems, Of Education, Areopagitica (London: Everyman) pp.
575-618.

Extracts are also included in volume one of Stephen Greenblatt (ed.).

2012. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edn (New York:
W. W. Norton and Co.). When referring to Areopagitica we will use only
paragraph numbers, to allow for the use of other editions of the text.

INTRODUCTION
In the previous three units we have addressed different aspects of the
ways in which literature might interact with the society in which it is
produced, by reflecting and commenting upon current events and,
perhaps, thereby aiming to shape their course. So far, we have only
discussed poems; but it would give a very skewed impression of
literary productivity in the period covered by this module to suggest
that poetry was the only means by which writers expressed
themselves. Here, we shall turn to one of the great prose works of the
early part of our period, John Milton’s Areopagitica, and address ways
in which it engages with aspects of the social and political context from

Unit 4: Seventeenth-Century Political Prose: John Milton’s Areopagitica 4-1

_____________________________________________________________________

which it emerged.

We have already probed some thoughts about ‘occasional writing’ and

what it might involve in the poems we have analysed by Dryden,
Thomson, and Marvell, and in Milton’s Lycidas. Areopagitica, too, is an
example of occasional writing; but rather than being prompted by the
death of a close friend or an admired public figure, or by a recent
disaster such as the Great Fire, Milton’s motivation for writing
Areopagitica comes from a very different source, which leads us to
think about how literature and society interact from a different
perspective to the one we have considered so far.

The occasion which prompted the writing of Areopagitica was the

passing of censorship laws by the Parliament in England in 1643:
published in 1644, Areopagitica argues for the abolition of these laws.
To understand Milton’s arguments more fully, we shall briefly look at
how censorship functions in society and suggest reasons why
censorship laws are passed, alongside why this might provoke
disagreement among certain writers. We shall then discuss
Areopagitica itself, firstly by examining its prose style – and thinking
about how this might fit into our impression of the literature of the
period so far, gained chiefly through the poetry we have analysed –
and then by discussing Milton’s arguments against censorship in close
detail. The unit will conclude with the proposition of some important
questions concerning our study of literature, and its role within society,
which seem to emerge from a reading of Milton’s text.

MILTON’S OCCASIONAL PROSE WRITING: A

CONTROVERSIAL AUTHOR?
In Unit 2 we looked at some aspects of Milton’s biography, and placed
these within a broader perspective of his poetic career: the kinds of
writings he produced, and how these changed over time. You might
find it useful to look back to the material covered in Unit 2 as you
approach another aspect of Milton’s career, his identity as a
‘controversial’ author whose prose work is both provoked by and
provokes current events.

At the beginning of his seminal work, Milton and the English

Revolution, Christopher Hill claims that ‘Milton is a more controversial
figure than any other English poet’ (1977: 1). The tense of the verb in
this sentence, in what is, ostensibly, an historical book, is arresting: it
reminds us that Milton is controversial, and continues to be so although
now a figure from what might seem a distant historical past. As Hill
goes on to show, however, Milton also was controversial in his own
time. The ‘controversy’ that he provoked and provokes, in both the
present and the past, operates in very different ways.

Hill claims that ‘The popular image of Milton is of a sour Puritan, an

arrogant and hypocritical male chauvinist who ill-treated his own wife
and daughter’ (1977: 1). Present controversies regarding Milton seem
to centre on this popular image: he is seen as misogynistic, prejudiced
(especially against Catholics), and thus in many ways deeply
conservative. At the same time, Hill records that Milton’s
contemporaries ‘denounced him as a libertine who encouraged the
insubordination of women, as an advocate of “divorce at pleasure” and
polygamy’. Milton also defended regicide, having supported the
execution of Charles I in 1649, and promoted revolution: in his own
day, we can argue, no one revolted against institutional authority more
than John Milton. And yet the critic Terry Eagleton, writing in 1988,
argues that ‘John Milton is something of an English institution, as much
a part of the English landscape as fox-hunting or the Bank of England’
(1988: x).

4-2 Literature 3
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What might we make of these contrasting accounts of Milton’s identity

as a writer both in and out of his time? Is Milton the liberal his
contemporaries depict him as, or the conservative he has come to be
seen as today? Or is he at once both liberal and conservative? How are
we to decide between the different pictures of the man that emerge?
When thinking about these, and related questions, we should bear in
mind the arguments for and against reading literature in relation to
extra-textual information – about biography and history – to produce
our own interpretations of a text as both a product of its time and
available to new readings in the present day.

To approach these issues, we should address the nature of conditions

facing the writer at the time Milton produced Areopagitica and his other
writings, in particular the context supplied by censorship.

SAQ 1
How far should we employ biographical information in our reading of
literary texts?

CENSORSHIP
There was no organised censorship of writing in English before the
reign of Elizabeth I. However, under Elizabeth writers were frequently
censored, apparently so as to protect the monarchy and the
established church. Elizabeth’s policies were enforced and expanded by
her successors; until 1641, for instance, it was illegal to print any
home news of any sort. In 1637, as Civil War loomed, the Star
Chamber (a court established by the monarchy to deal with offences
which affected its own interests) issued a decree increasing the powers
of the censor. The results of this decree were drastic: the number of
licensed printers in London was reduced to twenty, and savage
penalties were introduced for those who printed books illegally; all
foreign books had to be read and approved by the Bishops before they
could be distributed; and even books already in print could not be
reprinted without being approved.

One of the first actions of the Long Parliament, which Charles I was
forced to assemble in 1640 and which sat for about twenty years
thereafter, was to abolish the Star Chamber, thus destroying the
machinery of censorship. However, the Long Parliament soon began to
implement its own censorship, and in June 1643 passed a law for the
regulation of printing.

Firstly, the order noted that many works had recently been published
‘to the great defamation of Religion and government’ and that many
private printing-presses had been set up; from now on, the only
approved printing company was to be the Stationer’s Company.
Secondly, the order commanded that no book ‘shall from henceforth be
printed or put to sale, unless the same be first approved of and
licensed’ – the license had to be approved by the Houses of Commons
and Lords. Furthermore, no book could be imported from overseas
without a license. Thirdly, officers of the Stationer’s company and
those approved by the Houses of Commons and Lords, with the
support of the police, had the authority to search out and destroy any
unlicensed printing presses and to confiscate unlicensed books. It was
against this law that Milton’s Areopagitica was directed.

Unit 4: Seventeenth-Century Political Prose: John Milton’s Areopagitica 4-3

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How might we understand the relevance of these censorship laws as a

context for the appearance of Milton’s prose text, and what relevance
do such ideas have for us as present-day readers? We might, for
instance, think about what censorship means for us today.

Article 40/6 of the Irish Constitution guarantees ‘the right of citizens to

express freely their convictions and opinions’. However, the article
goes on to say that

The education of public opinion being, however, a matter of such

grave import to the common good, the State shall endeavour to
ensure that organs of public opinion, such as the radio, the press,
the cinema, while preserving their rightful liberty of expression,
including criticism of Government policy, shall not be used to
undermine public order or morality or the authority of the State.

The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or

indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in
accordance with law. (Bunreacht na hEireann/Constitution of
Ireland, 1990: article 40/6)

In the effort to protect public order, morality, and the authority of the
state, it is forbidden in Ireland, under Section 31 of the Broadcasting
Act, for members of certain proscribed political organisations to speak
on Irish radio and television. Members of Sinn Fein were banned under
Section 31 from speaking on Irish radio and television from 1976 until
1994. Section 31, however, is only one example of an Irish law which
provides for control of the media; independent radio stations, for
example, require a government license to broadcast.

In one sense, the provision of censorship in Ireland offers an instance

of the relationship between censorship and power: censorship can be
an important state apparatus for maintaining political power. In one
sense, the more information available to the people of a nation, the
greater their power; therefore, the restriction upon how much
information may be available to the public is one means of limiting its
ability to challenge the power of the governing body. If one does not
possess certain information, one cannot undermine the authority of the
state, or disrupt public order: in other words, without certain
information one does not have the authority to undermine the state,
morality, or public order.

The Constitution of Ireland sees the presentation of radically opposing

viewpoints to that enshrined in the Constitution, and therefore that
upheld by the State, as potentially disruptive of morality, the authority
of the State, and of public order. Censorship provides a mechanism
whereby the arguments of those who propose opposing viewpoints to
those upheld by the State can be managed and controlled. Obviously,
if one does not come into contact with these radical arguments one
cannot adopt the viewpoint they suggest, so censoring the availability
of such opinions is one means of ensuring the authority of the position
upheld by the State.

How do you think present-day censorship, as one means of securing

the authority of a State or governing body, might compare with the
situation of seventeenth-century England, on the basis of what you
now know about the censorship law passed by Parliament?

To protect itself and to preserve its power, the monarchy in

seventeenth-century England created mechanisms by which
information liable to undermine its authority was suppressed, and only
that which supported its claims to power was permitted to be
published. The decree passed by the Long Parliament in 1643 similarly

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sought to preserve its authority: information that could challenge

Parliament’s power was suppressed, and only those publications which
upheld it were permitted. Milton’s Areopagitica can be seen as an
exploration of the relationship between censorship and power. As we
shall see, in his prose text Milton argues that such measures as
censorship are not necessary to maintaining a society founded on the
principle of liberty. Measures such as censorship, he argues, do not
strengthen society and add to the authority of the State, but actually
weaken social cohesion and dilute any power the State might have.

How might such ideas relate to present-day ideas about the

dissemination of information? Without necessarily agreeing with such
justifications as Milton makes, it is reasonably easy to justify, for
instance, the banning of the proclamations of a political party or the
limitation on the availability of secret information to the general public,
in particular at a time of war; the less one knows about one’s own
defeats, for instance, might improve morale. Similarly, where a
political party proposes radical views which constitute a complete
overthrow of the principles by which a state is governed, one can
arguably be justified in censoring that party’s proclamations: not to
censor them is to admit that the state could be governed in a different
way, thus proposing alternatives to the public, which might lead to
one’s own demise. In both these cases, the provision of certain
information can lead to a state of affairs where the power of a
governing authority can be questioned and eventually usurped.

However, might the case be different when we come to censoring what

is called ‘art’? Art, one can argue, does not seek to supply information,
or does not seek to inform in the same way as photographs, news
reports or political speeches. In many cases, art does not claim to
represent fact, and may even claim to offer the complete opposite:
fictional narratives, by nature, create an imaginary world and story
that might be related to the ‘real’ world, but does not necessarily seek
to replicate its qualities directly. Yet certain novels have been censored
over the course of history, the most famous being D.H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The relationship between art and power is
then, perhaps, more complex than the relationship between
information and power. Though Milton in his arguments does not
explicitly distinguish between ‘art’ and ‘non-art’, he does present a
defence of books which can, in some of its elements, be seen as a
defence of art and an argument against the censorship of art.

SAQ 2
Is a government justified in imposing censorship on the publication of
information, and does this depend on what kind of text is published?

MILTON’S PROSE STYLE

Before we analyse the arguments proposed in Areopagitica, we should
make some observations upon Milton’s written style. This might,
initially, seem to be opaque, due to his complex sentence-structure
and use of words. Milton drew on the syntax and diction of other
languages, in particular Latin, in constructing his sentences in English.

The classical model is important in another sense, too: Milton identifies

himself with Cicero, the great Roman orator and politician, who
proposes to reform certain aspects of the state through reasoned
argument. ‘Ciceronian prose’, meanwhile, is a term used to describe
fairly long and convoluted sentences, which as we shall see is perhaps
one feature of why we might find Areopagitica challenging to read. Yet

Unit 4: Seventeenth-Century Political Prose: John Milton’s Areopagitica 4-5

_____________________________________________________________________

as the critic Martin Dzelzainis suggests, ‘the usual classification of

Areopagitica as a deliberative oration (one urging or dissuading from
some course of action) is incomplete: it is also a forensic performance
in which Milton is the prosecutor and the Licensing Order the accused’
(1999: 74).

We should, perhaps, beware of categorically classifying the essay’s

form or intended purpose, and continually ask ourselves how Milton’s
written style qualifies Areopagitica’s status as a literary enterprise.
Indeed, as Thomas N. Corns suggests, classifying Milton’s prose style
in the essay as ‘Ciceronian’ only has limited value; in fact, he argues,
‘Long sentences are so much the norm for serious English prose of the
time, and are so pervasive among such a diversity of authors, that a
specific, foreign, literary influence or model seems improbable’ (1999:
87). Rather, Milton engages with conventions and tendencies prevalent
at the time, practised by all men of learning.

On the level of the Latinate words and phrases Milton employs,

sometimes this combination of different linguistic forms and registers is
remarkably effective, such as in the opening of Paradise Lost, which we
shall come to analyse in closer detail in a subsequent unit.

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse.
(I, ll.1-6)

Here, the verb ‘sing’ comes close to the end of the sentence while the
object of the sentence – ‘Man’s first disobedience’ – appears at the
beginning, while the subject – ‘Heavenly Muse’ – appears at the very
end of the sentence, after the verb.

For Christopher Ricks, ‘the word-order [of the first six lines] quite
literally encompasses the huge themes’ of the book (1963: 28). The
justification for withholding the verb until the thirty-ninth word is,
according to Ricks, ‘that it states the magnitude of the poem’s subject
and so the magnitude of its task ... while still insisting that this
vastness is within the poet’s compass’ (1963: 28). It is a construction
that is notably Latinate, and successfully conveys an impression of the
poem’s ambitions and the scope of its subject-matter.

The powerful opening of Paradise Lost can be compared, however, with

the second sentence of Areopagitica:

And me perhaps each of these dispositions, as the subject was

whereon I entered, may have at other times variously affected;
and likely might in these foremost expressions now also disclose
which of them swayed most, but that the very attempt of this
address thus made, and the thought of whom it hath recourse to,
hath got the power within me to a passion, far more welcome
than incidental to a preface. (para. 1)

The sentence is very difficult to disentangle and lacks the grandeur of

the opening of Paradise Lost; whereas the Latinate construction of the
poem’s first few lines add to its powerful effect, here a similarly
Latinate structure lends the sentence an awkwardness that might
confuse its meaning. Fortunately there are few such sentences in
Areopagitica; but the difficulty of the second sentence of Areopagitica
nonetheless alerts us to two things. Firstly we are reminded of Milton’s
learnedness and that of his audience. As we have already discovered,

4-6 Literature 3
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the educated classes of this period would have been steeped in the
classics, and so, familiar with the sorts of references and forms that
Milton incorporates into his writing. Milton’s use of Latinate models
thus alerts his readers to his comparable level of learning, which he
also uses as a means of compounding the arguments he makes.

The difficulty of the second sentence also alerts us to the challenges

posed by the text as a whole: Areopagitica demands slow and careful
reading, perhaps even out loud so as to grasp particularly challenging
sentences, and may require you to check the meanings of unfamiliar
words in the textual notes of your edition, or in resources such as the
Oxford English Dictionary.

Areopagitica’s difficulty results not only from its challenging prose

style, but also proceeds from the seeming opaqueness of some of the
arguments Milton makes. His method can appear convoluted at times,
as he frequently seems to restate arguments, albeit in slightly different
forms. We are compelled to pause, perhaps to look back at previous
sections, and certainly to digest each stage in his argument with
careful consideration.

However, we should not allow ourselves to be daunted by the

intricacies of Milton’s prose; in fact, careful and close readings reveal
to us the very rich nature of his written style. As we shall see, many of
its sentences are as eloquent or beautiful as those of a poem. As
Thomas N. Corns suggests in his useful introduction to Milton’s writing,
his ‘earliest vernacular prose’ is ‘characterized by a flamboyant style,
rich in imagery and lexically innovative to the point of playfulness. In
it, metaphors and similes abound, often in great elaboration’ (1999:
84). Such features enrich the text, rather than render it more
confusing.

Our subsequent analysis of this text adopts the form of a paragraph by

paragraph commentary, which aims to help you disentangle Milton’s
arguments. It is advisable to read first each set of paragraphs, then to
read the commentary, and then to re-read the paragraphs in question
before moving on to the next set.

AREOPAGITICA
Milton’s learning is revealed in the very title of his essay. The
Areopagitica was the name of the democratically elected supreme court
of Athens in ancient Greece, so named because the court met on the
hill of Areopagus. In calling his pamphlet Areopagitica, Milton was
implying a comparison between the English Parliament, to which the
pamphlet was addressed, and the ancient Greek court. This
comparison is both challenging and flattering: on the one hand, to be
compared with the much-admired Greeks was a great honour, and it
implied that the Parliament emulated the wisdom and effectiveness of
that ancient assembly. On the other hand the comparison is also a
challenge, as it implies that although the English Parliament sets up
the Greek court as a model it fails to measure up to it; in this reading,
the comparison is ironic. Thus, in the title of the essay, Milton manages
both to challenge and to praise those to whom the essay is addressed.

It is useful in reading Milton’s essay to divide it into a number of

manageable sections. For our purposes, we shall divide Areopagitica
into the following:

Part I: paragraphs 1-7

Part II: paragraphs 8 - 19
Part III: paragraphs 20 - 33
Part IV: paragraphs 34 - 45

Unit 4: Seventeenth-Century Political Prose: John Milton’s Areopagitica 4-7

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Part V: paragraphs 46 - 54
Part VI: paragraphs 55 - 59
Part VII: paragraphs 60 - 90

These divisions are artificial: Milton does not divide the essay into
sections, and often sections overlap. However, this sectional division of
the essay makes approaching and analysing it more manageable.

Read Part I of Areopagitica.

In these opening, introductory paragraphs Milton makes a number of

points. Firstly, he is anxious to show that his essay is directed by
feeling and ‘passion’, one of the ‘joy and gratulation’ to be found in
promoting one’s country’s liberty. What do you notice about the word
‘gratulation’? Is it unusual or striking in any way, or perhaps
unfamiliar? Check its meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary: here,
we learn that this word connotes exultation; its origin is Latinate,
which immediately demonstrates the classical learning that Milton has
already signalled in the title.

Milton then outlines the kind of liberty which his country aims to
create:

this is not a liberty which we can hope, that no grievance should

ever arise in the Commonwealth - that let no man in this world
expect; but when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered
and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty
attained that wise men look for. (para. 2)

For Milton, no country is so free that hardship, injury or oppression do

not exist: the only place exempt from any form of ‘grievance’ is
heaven. However, a country can be deemed free when these
complaints and problems are spoken about, listened to by those in
charge, and quickly dealt with.

Milton also argues that England, under the government of the day, was
actually approaching this ideal relationship between state and subject:
in large part, the ideal of liberty had been achieved. Milton praises ‘the
strong assistance of God’ for having achieved this, alongside the
‘faithful guidance and undaunted wisdom’ of those in power, the Lords
and Commons. Yet the commendation he gives to Parliament has been
earned: Milton is not simply flattering those in power, or seeking
favours.

In paragraph five, Milton introduces the comparison between the

English Parliament and the Grecian Areopagitica. Men who ‘professed
the study of wisdom’, he notes, were esteemed by the Greek
assembly, and their speech was listened to with great respect. It will
be a significant testimony to the present Parliament, he suggests, if it
pays the same level of attention to him and his tract as the ancient
rulers gave to the wise men of their day.

Finally, Milton argues that not only will the Parliament deserve praise if
it listens to him, but if it acts on the reasonable arguments he presents
for the repeal of the order regulating printing it will also display its
‘love of truth’ and the ‘uprightness’ of its judgement.

Milton lays out the four arguments that he will present:

(i) That those who invented censorship are, in fact, the enemies of the
Parliament and the people loathed by Parliament.

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(ii) That reading is of great benefit, and hence its censorship a

negative act.

(iii) That the order has not had the intended effect, as it has not
stopped the publication of seditious, scandalous, and libellous
books.

(iv) That censorship will discourage learning and will hinder the pursuit
of wisdom.

Throughout this opening section Milton skilfully presents the repeal of

the order not as a change in political direction, and therefore as a sign
of weakness, but as a sign of strength: Parliament will show its wisdom
and judiciousness if it repeals the order it has passed. Rather than
providing evidence of back-tracking, this repeal would be an expression
of a love for truth, and so provide an opportunity for progress.

Read Part II of Areopagitica.

Milton begins to make the first of his four arguments against

censorship with a defence of books, which perhaps belongs more
properly to the second of his arguments. It is important, he writes, to
recognise that books are ‘not absolutely dead things’ and that they
contain ‘a potency of life in them to be as active as the soul was whose
progeny they are’. For this reason he goes on to argue that, ‘unless
wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book’:

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he

who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of
God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the
earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master
spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond
life. ... We should be wary ... how we spill that seasoned life of
man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of
homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if
it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; whereof
the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but
strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason
itself, slays an immortality rather than a life. (para. 9)

Milton describes man’s spirit as ‘embalmed and treasured’ by a ‘good

book’, rather like the sacred reliquaries that for Roman Catholics
enshrined the relics of holy men and women, such as blood or body-
parts. Here, however, the anti-Catholic Milton transfers this image to
talk about books in a metaphorical way – it is not actual ‘blood’ that
they enshrine, just as the ‘spirit’ is intangible and evanescent. As such,
books acquire a transcendent quality that means that they preserve a
man’s life beyond death itself: they ensure he ‘lives’ through his
publication. How does this compare to ideas we have already
encountered in Unit 2, about the poet’s ‘life’ enduring beyond his actual
death through the publication of his writing? How might this elucidate
the importance that Milton places on a writer being allowed to express
his opinions freely in the published book?

While ‘good books’ are given this vital role in sustaining a man’s life, by
implication ‘bad’ books fail to express or contain the human spirit in
the same way. Perhaps, in making this distinction, Milton differentiates
books containing well-argued, reasonable arguments, and those that
are illogical or unconvincing by comparison. How, do you think, might
this affect the way in which Milton would like his readers to perceive
his own ‘book’?

Unit 4: Seventeenth-Century Political Prose: John Milton’s Areopagitica 4-9

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The destruction of a ‘good’ book - that is, a reasonable book,

containing reasonable arguments - is equivalent to the destruction of
reason itself; destroying a ‘bad’ book, however, is of little
consequence. This distinction is significant in that Milton does not
differentiate between books on the basis of their content, as the censor
does, but according to the quality of the arguments they contain. The
stress on judgement, on the basis of quality, is significant: it provides
the foundation on which Milton goes on to form his arguments against
censorship later in the essay.

Milton’s argument against censorship, based on the quality of reason

found in particular books, could potentially extend into an argument
against the censorship of art in general. How far art is or is not
‘reasonable’ might be a vexed question; yet could we say that art, in
whichever form, is an expression of the human ‘spirit’, such as Milton
describes here? Censoring ‘good’ art destroys the ‘human’ quality that
it can represent. Although this is not an argument that Milton explicitly
makes here, could we nonetheless extend his point to address art and
its potential censorship more generally, particularly if we see
Areopagitica as one element within the oeuvre of a renowned creator
of art-works?

In this section, Milton goes on to give an account of the development

of censorship through history: the Greeks and Romans, he claims,
were very tolerant towards the expression of opinion in all forms, and
magistrates took little interest in what was said in books. It was not
until the Catholic Church became powerful that censorship became
commonplace: its leaders ‘extended their dominion over men’s eyes,
as they had before over their judgements, burning and prohibiting to
be read what they fancied not’. Among the orders passed by the
Church, it commanded that ‘no book, pamphlet, or paper should be
printed ... unless it were approved and licensed under the hands of two
or three glutton friars.’ As Milton concludes,

thus ye have the inventors and the original of book-licensing

ripped up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not,
that can be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity, or church;
nor by any statute left by our ancestors elder or later; nor from
the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad; but
from the most antichristian council and the most tyrannous
inquisition that ever inquired. Till then books were ever as freely
admitted into the world as any other birth. (para. 19)

As the Catholic Church invented censorship, in passing censorship laws

Parliament follows in a tradition begun by an institution that was the
sworn enemy of the Parliament. As we have seen, Milton himself
promotes this anti-Catholic rhetoric, and employs images and
references that undermine some of its ideas; by aligning Parliament
with this much-maligned institution, he achieves a damning critique of
its recent actions.

Milton further compounds this by suggesting that the Greeks and

Romans provide a more appropriate model for Parliament: they wisely
tolerated all opinion and did not recruit censors, and achieved the
highest level of civilisation known in human history. Milton thus seeks
to expose Parliament, and its position on censorship to critique, by
suggesting that it goes against the principles on which it was founded.
Parliament, in post-Reformation England, was specifically opposed to
the Catholic Church; by comparing Parliament to the Church Milton
makes a very bitter attack on Parliament indeed.

Read Part III of Areopagitica.

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In this part of Areopagitica Milton considers ‘what is to be thought in

general of reading books, whatever sort they be’. He begins by
recounting how the early Christians considered it a great injury to be
deprived of Hellenic learning, even though their own teachings did not
always correspond with those of the Greeks. The early Christians’
willingness to preserve books which could potentially be considered evil
from the Christian point of view illustrates, for Milton, that all books -
whether considered good or evil – have value. Even those books which
express opinions or arguments we might consider evil are useful
because, through our encounter with them, we can learn to distinguish
between evil and good: ‘What wisdom,’ Milton asks, ‘can there be to
choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil?’
Furthermore, coming across ‘evil’ in this way strengthens our own
virtuous qualities:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and

unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but
slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run
for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence
into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies
us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore
which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows
not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it,
is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an
excremental whiteness. (para. 27)

Milton concludes by arguing that it is safer to ‘scout into the regions of

sin and falsity’ by ‘reading all manner of tractates and hearing all
manner of reason’ than to encounter evil any other real or tangible
way. In one sense, then, the sinfulness we might encounter through
certain books provides a form of knowledge necessary to our
apprehension of good. Censorship, by implication, frustrates that
learning and strengthening process.

From this conclusion, Milton raises a number of other points in this part
of his essay.

Firstly, in a direct argument against censorship, Milton argues that God

gave everyone the gift of reason and therefore the ability to choose
between good and evil. In paragraph 24 he writes:

For books are as meats and viands are; some are good, some of
evil substance; and yet God, in that unapocryphal vision, said
without exception, Rise, Peter, kill and eat, leaving the choice to
each man’s discretion. ... I conceive, therefore, that when God did
enlarge the universal diet of man’s body ... He then also, as
before, left arbitrary the dieting and repasting of our minds; as
wherein every mature man might have to exercise his own
leading capacity. (para 24)

There are several unusual words here that make this passage
particularly striking: check the meanings of those you find unfamiliar in
the textual notes, or in the Oxford English Dictionary. The word
‘unapocryphal’ in Milton’s text, for instance, is the sole recorded
example in the OED: does this remind us of Milton’s inventiveness as a
writer, significant in the context of his argument about an author’s
ability to express his opinions freely?

Milton refers here to the Biblical story found in the New Testament, in
which God presented Jesus’s disciple Peter with a cloth laid with all the
foodstuffs that Jews had hitherto been prohibited from eating, because
it was considered unclean. God’s command to Peter, to ‘kill and eat’,
eliminated these restrictions, and left him the choice of what he might

Unit 4: Seventeenth-Century Political Prose: John Milton’s Areopagitica 4-11

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or might not eat: he ‘left arbitrary the dieting and repasting’ (another
striking, and unusual, word) of what Peter might consume. So, Milton
suggests, God has left us the choice to select what we might or might
not consume to feed our minds, through allowing us to discriminate
between what we choose to read or not. As such, this kind of choice is
a necessary condition of the idea of Free Will that is central to the
Christian tradition. God trusts humans with ‘the gift of reason to be his
own chooser’ - censorship denies us the right to exercise that gift, and
so threatens to deny man the essential right to exercise his Free Will in
the discovery of truth.

In paragraph 32 Milton makes a second direct argument against

censorship, which is almost an aside:

If it be true that a wise man, like a good refiner, can gather gold
out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the
best book, yea or without book; there is no reason that we should
deprive a wise man of any advantage to his wisdom, while we
seek to restrain from a fool, that which being restrained will be no
hindrance to his folly. (para 32)

What does Milton mean here? There are several main strands to his
argument: that books add to a wise man’s store of wisdom, and
therefore should not be censored; that books will not prevent a fool
from being foolish, and so the fool cannot benefit from a book’s
censorship; and that censorship, therefore, is pointless, as it benefits
neither the wise man nor the fool.

Milton cites a number of objections that could potentially be raised

against reading ‘evil’ books that he sets out to answer:

1. Evil is infectious, and one can be infected by evil by reading an evil

book.

Milton makes three counter arguments to this view:

(i) As the Bible and many other well-respected books describe evil
incidents, were evil infectious these books would have to be
destroyed, clearly an outrageous suggestion in the predominantly
Christian society of the time.

(ii) Books are not infectious in themselves: it is only when teachers

and commentators begin to expound lessons from them that they
can be considered ‘infectious’: ‘It will be hard to instance,’ writes
Milton, ‘where any ignorant man hath been ever seduced by
papistical book in English, unless it were commended and
expounded to him by some of that clergy.’ (para. 32)

(iii) If books are infectious, then surely the licensers themselves have
been infected and, therefore, could not be trusted.

2. The second objection is that people should not expose themselves

to temptation unnecessarily.

3. The third argument is that people should not engage in vain

endeavours, such as reading.

Milton answers the last two objections together simply by referring to a

point he has argued earlier: all books are useful, and therefore
engaging even with evil books is a necessary process to acquiring
greater knowledge and understanding, and to reaffirming one’s virtues.

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SAQ 3
Summarise, in point form, Milton’s objections so far to the English
Parliament’s decision to introduce censorship.

Read Part IV of Areopagitica.

In this part Milton outlines reasons why, for him, the ‘order of licensing
conduces nothing to the end for which it was framed’. He notes in
paragraph 42 that everyone sees, ‘not once or oftener, but weekly,
that continued court-libel against the Parliament and City, printed, as
the wet sheets can witness, and dispersed among us, for all that
licensing can do’. It is obvious to everyone that the law has failed, and
Milton goes on to present a number of reasons why that failure will
continue.

He argues that if books are to be censored, so must all pastimes and

recreation activities: all music must be grey and solemn, all movement
must be ‘honest’; clothes would also have to be referred to the
authorities, to see if they could be ‘cut into a less wanton garb’. Such
wide-ranging censorship would require recruitment of licensers on a
massive scale: there would have to be special licensers for clothes and
music, for books and dance, for ‘household gluttony’, for architecture,
even for conversation. Such measures would, of course, be impractical,
and yet such measures seem to be demanded if one is to argue that
the censoring of books has as its aim the rectification of manners: it
would be pointless to attempt to reform current moral standards by
controlling books unless all other areas of life were similarly
constrained.

In addition, Milton argues, the volume of work produced by censorship,

if it is to be pursued rigorously, would be enormous. As well as every
book that might be published, all books previously published would
have to be scrutinised by the censor, as would every imported book.
He suggests that some books will have excellent passages, whose
wholesome qualities certain officials must be employed to preserve.
The sheer volume of work to be done would necessitate restructuring
the office of the licenser ‘according to the model of Trent and Seville,
which I know ye abhor to do’ (para. 42). In other words, the volume of
work that this would create for the censor’s office means that it would
have to be organised in the same way as that of the licenser’s office of
the Catholic Church: once again, the abhorrent nature of such a
possibility reinforces Milton’s critique, and aims to persuade the reader
of the unreasonableness of Parliament’s edict.

Milton also argues those who would work in the censor’s office would
need to possess intelligence, and to be ‘studious, learned, and
judicious’: there are simply not enough people of such qualities in
England able to work in an office with such a potential work-load.
Furthermore, such a wise person’s talents would be wasted in such an
enterprise, when he might exercise them more effectively elsewhere,
for the greater benefit of the state. Are there parallels here between
Milton’s argument, and those advanced by poets who warn the public
figure about the need to contribute his skills to the successful running
of the state, such as we encountered in Unit 3?

Milton thus argues that the practical application of the licensing order
is bedevilled by tremendous difficulties; alongside outlining such
problems, Milton also proposes several further arguments against
censorship in this part of the pamphlet.

Unit 4: Seventeenth-Century Political Prose: John Milton’s Areopagitica 4-13

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He rehearses an argument previously made when he argues, in

paragraph 39, that it is not praiseworthy to do good under compulsion
since God gave man the ability to choose. By censoring all evil books,
and so compelling a man to read only good books, he is denied the
right to exercise his Free Will – and so essentially denied the ability to
act rightly out of choice, which is to the detriment of his moral
character as a Christian. Furthermore, we have considered how the
‘message’ of a literary work is not always clear-cut and may reveal
ambivalence on the part of the author. As we have seen, different and
even conflicting views on the present state and future of the nation are
detectable in different texts and even within the same text.

Milton also argues that ‘They are not skilful considerers of human
things, who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin’
(para. 40): although one can take away everything belonging to the
covetous man, his covetousness can never be removed. In the same
way, prohibiting the publication of a book deemed to be sinful can
never eradicate sin, which will remain even if the sinful book does not.

Finally, Milton argues that ‘God sure esteems the growth and
completing of one virtuous person more than the restraint of ten
vicious’ (para. 41). In other words, doing of good is always greater
than preventing evil, and is more esteemed in God’s eyes, as it shows
man’s ability to exercise his choice to act well.

Read Part V of Areopagitica

In these paragraphs, Milton turns from considering the failure of

Parliament’s licensing order to do any good to addressing ‘the manifest
hurt it causes’. Initially he advances two sets of arguments to show
that censoring books is an affront to the dignity of people and to the
whole nation, both of which demonstrate censorship’s ability to inflict
damage. Firstly, in a set of arguments that recall several points that he
has advanced already, Milton argues that censorship shows a profound
distrust of ‘the judgement and the honesty of one who hath but a
common repute in learning’ and that such a distrust ‘is the greatest
displeasure and indignity to a free and knowing spirit that can be put
upon him’ (para. 46). Secondly, he produces several reasons showing
that licensing ‘seems an undervaluing and vilifying of the whole Nation’
and of her people. We shall look briefly at both sets of arguments in
turn.

Milton claims that censorship is an affront to the dignity of ‘a free and

knowing spirit’, because it treats adults as though they were children:

What advantage is it to be a man over it is to be a boy at school,

if we have only escaped the ferula to come under the fescue of an
Imprimatur, if serious and elaborate writings, as if they were no
more than the theme of a grammar-lad under his pedagogue,
must not be uttered without the cursory eyes of a temporizing
and extemporizing licenser? (para. 47)

What does Milton mean here? Check the meanings of the words ‘ferula’
and ‘fescue’: these refer to splints of wood or rushes, used to chastise
an errant child either at home or at school. Note, however, the
significant suggestion that such punishment is administered by an
‘Imprimatur’ – a key word in the context of this publication.

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Activity
Look up ‘imprimatur’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

You will see from the dictionary entries that Milton’s use of this word
here is, perhaps, puzzling: how can the imprint at the front of a book
administer chastisement? By thinking about the multiple potential
meanings a single word can hold, we can grasp the striking and clever
way in which Milton engages with linguistic richness here. The
italicisation of the word here suggests that it is a foreign word, in this
case Latin, and alongside its capitalisation suggests that it is used as a
name for someone: in this instance, the Imprimatur is the teacher or
instructor who punishes a naughty child with a cane or similar
instrument.

That this word holds variant meanings, which relate to the apparatus
and visual appearance of a printed book, is significant in terms of its
situation in an argument about the writer’s freedom to publish his own
writings. Do you think that Milton uses his textual medium – words
themselves – to exemplify the argument he makes, one which is about
the printed form that those very words might take?

What, too, might we make on the variation between the words

‘temporizing’ and ‘extemporizing’, which sound similar but have quite
different meanings? Does this again show Milton playing with the tools
of his trade – the very words from which his prose is constructed – to
make his argument more compelling?

Milton goes on to argue that, by not trusting people, licensing suggests

that people have no reputation and standing: they are considered to be
fools and foreigners in their own country.

Thirdly, Milton claims, censorship greatly demeans learning and the act
of writing; above all, it dishonours the writer:

When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason

and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditates, is
industrious, and likely consults and confers with his judicious
friends; after all which done he takes himself to be informed in
what he writes, as well as any that writ before him; if, in this the
most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness, no years, no
industry, no former proof of his abilities can bring him to that
state of maturity, as not to be mistrusted and suspected, unless
he carry all his considerate diligence, all his midnight watchings
and expense of Palladian oil, to the hasty view of an unleisured
licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps far his inferior in
judgement, perhaps one who never knew the labour of book-
writing; and if he not be repulsed or slighted, must appear in print
like a puny with his guardian, and his censor’s hand on the back
of his title to be his bail and surety that he is no idiot or seducer,
it cannot be but a dishonour and derogation to the author, to the
book, to the privilege and dignity of learning. (para. 47)

Activity
Work through this passage, and note any words that seem to you
particularly unusual or striking; look up those that are unfamiliar, and
references that might seem strange.

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As we found with the previous passage, from paragraph 47, how far do
the words and syntax of Milton’s writing here exemplify the argument
he is making?

Here, Milton argues that the unwillingness of licensing laws to permit a

writer to change his work once it has been licensed (and diligent
writers inevitably and continually see ways in which their work can be
improved) displays the contempt with which the censor and those who
approve of censorship treat the effort exerted by the writer, and the
visible results of his accumulated learning evident in a book. In fact,
Milton argues, learning itself is demeaned by censorship: ‘I endure not
an instructor that comes to me under the wardship of an overseeing
fist’ (para. 48), he writes; in other words, learning is demeaned by the
fact that a teacher is required to teach only certain approved things,
and not to exert his creativity in broaching other, ‘unofficial’ subjects.

The willingness of the censor to destroy the writings of now deceased

authors is a further demonstration of the contempt in which writing
and learning are held. Such writings, preserved from the past, are then
lost to generations in the future: such a loss can only be to the general
detriment of all generations. Milton concludes that the disdain with
which those who promote censorship treat learning discourages people
from pursuing education at all:

Henceforth let no man care to learn, or care to be more than

worldly-wise; for certainly in higher matters to be ignorant and
slothful, to be a common steadfast dunce, will be the only
pleasant life, and only in request. (para. 51)

Whilst censorship is damaging, because it shows contempt for ‘a free

and knowing spirit’ and so discourages people from being ‘free and
knowing’, Milton also argues that censorship is deleterious to the
nation as a whole, which he establishes with five main points:

(i) He claims that ‘the invention, the art, the wit, the grave and solid
judgement’ of the people of England cannot be served by only
twenty printing houses, besides the fact that it must also be
‘strained’ by the censors. The talents of the English people are
badly served by the licensing laws.

(ii) It is a species of servitude to require people to sharpen their

intellects simply according to that which is approved by the censor,
which once again shows an unwillingness to acknowledge people’s
ability to choose for themselves.

(iii) Even if one agreed with censorship of certain offences, it is

ridiculous to subject the whole nation to laws prohibiting actions of
which most people are innocent.

(iv) Censorship is a reproach to the common people, for it accounts

them ‘a giddy, vicious, and ungrounded people’, who are ‘in such a
sick and weak state of faith and discretion, as to be able to take
nothing down but through the pipe of the licenser’. Such a
disregard for the majority of the nation is surely misguided and
wrong.

(v) Finally, in the same way, censorship is a reproach to the Ministers

of the English Church because it implies that they are unable to
instruct and control their flock, an implication which is deeply
insulting to the established Church.

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Read Part VI of Areopagitica.

These paragraphs mark a brief digression from the central argument of

these final parts of the essay, that whilst censorship fails to achieve
any beneficial results it actually causes harm. In Part VI Milton seems
to make two points: firstly, he confirms the legitimacy of his own
outspokenness by claiming that his essay is not the ‘disburdening of
some particular fancy’ but the expression of a grievance felt by all who
have ‘prepared their minds and studies above the vulgar pitch to
advance truth in others’. By using this argument, Milton isolates those
who support censorship and accounts them ignorant men.
Furthermore, he makes it clear that this is not merely a personal
opinion, but a widely-held view, thus avoiding accusations of individual
eccentricity.
The second point Milton makes in this section has, as yet, not been
made before: he argues that censorship is only the first step in the
creation of what he calls a ‘tyranny over learning’, which recalls the
despotism of the Spanish Inquisition and of the recently-deposed
monarchy. Once again, by these comparisons Milton aligns the
Parliament with its own enemies, and shows that the measures it
implements are similar to, and have the same consequences as, the
tools of government wielded by such inimical forms of power as the
monarchy and the Catholic Church.

SAQ 4
Summarise, in point form, Milton’s objections to censorship put
forward in parts IV, V, and VI of Areopagitica.

Read Part VII of Areopagitica.

In this final section of Areopagitica Milton returns to discussing the

negative effects of censorship, producing two basic points that both
revolve around the damage it inflicts on Truth. He argues that
censorship fails to support and uphold Truth, and that it inhibits man’s
search for it. This final section of the essay is perhaps the most
important, for it is in the vision of Truth revealed here that
Areopagitica is shown to be a truly radical document, and leads us to
think about Hill’s (1977) claims about the ‘controversial’ nature of
Milton’s reputation at this time from a different perspective.

Milton argues that ‘our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well
as our limbs and complexion’, and goes on to describe how:

Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her

waters flow not in perpetual progression, they sicken into a
muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic
in the truth; and if he believes things only because his pastor says
so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason,
though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his
heresy. (para. 60)

The classic notion of the fountain of knowledge is aptly applied here in

Milton’s metaphor of how the waterways of understanding are sullied
by ‘conformity and tradition’: true genius and creativity are found by
allowing man to express himself freely, to ‘exercise’ his mental
faculties just as he would his body, if he were an athlete. To attain true
wisdom one must exercise one’s own reason, and not simply follow
others’ ideas or dictates. Just as exercising our moral righteousness is
a matter of Free Will and individual choice, so discovering Truth

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through reason is a personal endeavour: denying man the means to

achieve this, by censoring what he can and cannot encounter in the
field of knowledge, is to crush his ability to explore himself and the
world in which he lives – and even the next world. Milton develops and
makes more explicit this vision of Truth later on in the essay.

Some people, Milton goes on to argue in paragraphs 61 to 63, readily

give up on the struggle to attain Truth for themselves, to their own
detriment. As Dzelzainis observes, ‘Milton accepts that these freedoms
are to be defined negatively; that is to say, that citizens are free only
to the extent that they are not constrained by the state into conducting
themselves otherwise than they would have done if left to their own
devices’ (1999: 76). Milton elucidates this idea with a number of
examples. ‘There is not any burden that some would gladlier put off to
another,’ he says, ‘than the charge and care of Religion’; a wealthy
man who is ‘addicted to pleasure’ finds religion a burden and often
seeks out some ‘Divine of note and estimation’ ‘to whose care and
credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs.’

He devolves responsibility for his own moral development, and so

believes he can pursue a pleasurable life without interference:

his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped, and

sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted, and after the
malmsey, or some well-spiced brewage, and better breakfasted
than he whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on green
figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at
eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop trading all day
without his religion. (para. 61)

Milton goes on to compare the wealthy man who negligently casts of

his religion with those men who,

when they hear that all things shall be ordered, all things
regulated and settled, nothing written but what passes through
the custom-house of certain publicans that have the tonnaging
and poundaging of all free-spoken truth, will straight give
themselves up into your hands, make ‘em and cut ‘em out what
religion ye please ... What need they torture their heads with that
which others have taken so strictly and so unalterably into their
own purveying? (para. 62)

The idea that the search for truth becomes devolved upon others –
that we shirk our responsibility for seeking knowledge for ourselves,
and instead follow the dictates of those in authority – ties into the
suggestion made earlier in paragraph 60. Knowledge is reduced to
being a merely commercial commodity, easily bought and sold in the
marketplace of public life. Implicitly, then, knowledge is devalued in
the process as it loses all individuality or the stamp of unique genius:
‘free-spoken truth’ is debased by the ugly words, ‘tonnaging’ and
‘poundaging’, used to describe its trade in the seedy ‘custom-house’.

Such attitudes as these, Milton argues, will be bred in a society in

which knowledge is not constantly exercised, and such attitudes can
only lead to a society frozen in dull conformity.

Further, he argues, the lack of exercise for knowledge can lead to

complacency, even among figures who should be held in high regard
for their wisdom, such as the clergy – those whose teachings the
censorship laws seek precisely to protect. As we have seen in our study
of Lycidas, Milton warns against the future demise of a clergy that does
not aim to uphold moral righteousness, or to improve itself. Here, he
suggests, by having nothing to argue against, the clergy could be lulled

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into self-satisfaction, and might be inclined to write sermons that are

thoughtless, loose and uncrafted. On the other hand, if a cleric and his
congregation occasionally encounter a ‘bad’ book,

it will concern him to keep waking, to stand in watch, to set good

guards and sentinels about his received opinions, to walk the
round and counter-round with his fellow inspectors, fearing lest
any of his flock be seduced, who also then would be better
instructed, better exercised and disciplined. (para. 63)

It is only by allowing a wide array of opinions to flourish and of books

to appear that the clergy and their congregations can best be served:
censorship does not protect the clergy and their flocks, but rather
denies them the opportunity to rise out of complacency and to improve
their quest for morality.

Finally in this section, Milton goes on to argue that the unwillingness to

exercise the Truth seems to indicate that those who are in possession
of it do so ‘guiltily’, and that they do not believe in their own teachings
nor in those they claim to teach. Truth is not served, he argues, by
being hidden away; rather, it should be paraded openly, for all to see.
Therefore, those who hold what they consider to be the Truth should
be willing to dispute publicly with those who hold contrary opinions,
and who assert a different idea of what Truth is. It is only in open
dispute, and thus in exercising Truth, that it can be maintained and
nourished.

From paragraph 67 onwards, Milton argues that, just as censorship

retards the maintenance of Truth, so it holds back its search. In
paragraph 67 he relates the story of how Truth came into the world
and its present state of existence, which supplies a radical vision of
Truth:

Trust indeed came once into the world with her divine master,
and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he
ascended, and his apostles after Him were laid asleep, then
straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes
of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with
the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into
a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From
that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst
appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the
mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by
limb, still as they could find them. (para. 67)

All the pieces of the body of Truth have not yet been found, Milton
argues, and the search continues; yet the prohibitions on printing have
disturbed this search, making it even more difficult to recover all of
Truth’s limbs and restore her to her previous beauty. ‘Suffer not these
licensing prohibitions,’ Milton admonishes the Parliament, ‘to stand at
every place of opportunity, forbidding them that continue seeking, that
continue to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyred saint’.

Notice, in this passage, the shift from classical Greek and Roman
mythology to an Egyptian frame of references: how do these operate
within this passage, and in the text as a whole? Do they estrange the
argument even further, by embedding it within a series of allusions to
a time, place and ideology that is unfamiliar to us? Or do they further
reinforce a sense of Milton’s wide-ranging learning? Perhaps these
references remind us of the exotic and alluring nature of Truth, and her
potential unobtainability.

Milton nonetheless returns to a previous point to argue that the

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continual search for Truth is necessary to uphold harmony in the

Church, in the State, and in the nation as a whole. He argues that:

To be still searching what we know not by what we know, still

closing up truth to truth as we find it ... this is the golden rule in
theology as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony
in a church; not the forced and outward union of cold and neutral,
and inwardly divided minds. (para. 68)

How does Milton’s phrasing work here, as a means of reinforcing his

argument? Do the repetitions within the opening sentence further
impress a sense of the forcefulness of his points, and of the skill of his
written style?

Having made this suggestion, Milton goes on to argue that England, as

a nation, was chosen by God to be wise above all the earth’s nations,
and as a leader in the search for Truth. He likens England to a vast
city, ‘a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and
surrounded with His protection’ (para. 71). Within this city there is a
great desire for learning, and so there will necessarily be ‘much
arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but
knowledge in the making’. It is only through the fruitful exchange of
ideas – by debate and discussion – that the search for knowledge can
be pursued.

The censorship laws, however, prevent this process from taking place;
they seem to have emerged from a fear of disagreement and
difference, which are vital to the dynamic interaction between
individuals that drives on the quest for Truth. As Milton suggests, with
these laws ‘we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge
and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city.’ It is
demeaning and despairing, Milton argues, to see the search for Truth -
in England, of all places - frustrated and disturbed by dictates which
have inhibited the country’s progress.

That the image of the city is a familiar metaphor in literary writing –

from Dante’s paradise to St. Augustine’s City of God – is significant
here: as a metonymic version of heaven, England should enshrine
God’s laws and promote the quest for the knowledge of his love and
Truth. Instead, by imposing constraints on this individual, personal
striving towards such knowledge, we deny the divinely-appointed
nature of our task as human beings to establish a relationship with
God.

It is at this point in Areopagitica that the radical nature of Milton’s

vision of Truth becomes explicit. He equates the search for and
reassembly of the body of Truth with the building of ‘the temple of the
Lord’, and he argues that ‘there must be many schisms and many
dissections made in the quarry and the timber before the house of God
can be built.’ In other words, Truth is built not from conformity, dogma
and constraint, but by difference and individual expression. As Milton
further elaborates,

when every stone [of the temple of the Lord] is laid artfully
together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can be but
contiguous in this world; neither can every piece in that building
be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, that,
out of many moderate varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that
are not vastly disproportional, arises the goodly and the graceful
symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure. (para. 73)

The idea of ‘contiguity’ formed out of disunity – the idea that an

assemblage of disparate parts somehow comes to create a unified

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whole – presents mankind itself as a building whose constituent parts

are all different, and perhaps misfitting, and yet which serves its
purpose effectively. ‘Perfection’ is not likeness, or exact similitude, but
rather the beauty of a harmonious whole created from ‘dissimilitudes’
and ‘disproportional’ parts. Note how here, again, Milton’s language
further helps to cement his argument: the disproportionately long and
ungainly phrases which he uses exemplify his point, as they are
carefully woven into a syntactic structure that achieves cohesion in the
argument it proposes.

Later in the essay Milton adds that ‘is it not impossible that she [Truth]
may have more shapes than one’ (para. 81). In these passages, Milton
proposes a notion of Truth as plural: it is not something absolute, but
rather differs from person to person. This is a radical conclusion, for it
seems to indicate that Truth is not external to humans and to human
society but is, instead, constructed by humans. The use of the building
metaphor further reinforces this conclusion: Truth does not exist, in
this vision, as an external reference point to which humans can look,
but is constructed by humans from within human society. Thus what is
considered ‘Truth’ will differ from person to person, society to society,
culture to culture.

How far this cultural relativity is a viable or acceptable way of

constructing a society is a vexed question; for instance, how might a
government pass laws that must be accepted by everyone, if each
person has a different notion of what is right or wrong? These are
problems of which Milton, however, becomes aware in subsequent
paragraphs, as we shall discover.

Milton proceeds from the notion of Truth as plural to demand a more

‘considerate’ approach to building the temple of the Lord and to the
reconstruction of the body of Truth. By ‘considerate’ Milton means
‘tolerant’, encouraging us to embrace difference – the varying opinions
and viewpoints of all those who make up society. He makes this
explicit later on in the essay when he asks:

if all cannot be of one mind - as who looks they should be? - this
doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian
that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled. (para. 83)

However, this view is quickly tempered in a way that suggests Milton

does not truly embrace the notion that Truth is plural, or certainly in a
way that suggests he is suspicious of the notion. Immediately after
having made this statement, he asserts that:

I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it

extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be
extirpate, provided first all charitable and compassionate means
be used to win and regain the weak and the misled; that also
which is impious or evil absolutely, either against faith or
manners, no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw
itself, but those neighbouring differences, or rather indifferences,
are what I speak of, whether in some point of doctrine or of
discipline, which, though they be many, yet need not interrupt the
unity of spirit, if we could but find among us the bond of peace.
(para. 83)

So the plural society is promoted, as long as it does not include

Catholics, and others we might disagree with…? Milton seems to
encounter here the realisation that, once one admits that Truth is
plural, one opens the door to all sorts of unsavoury possibilities: it
becomes possible for that which seems evil, and for threatening ideas,
to propose themselves as ‘true’ – in particular those proposed by the

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Catholic Church. Milton seems compelled to admit that, in the light of

such potential threats, Truth is, after all, an absolute. This retreat has
perhaps been pre-figured in Milton’s choice of metaphors in talking
about Truth. Just as the metaphor of building suggests a belief that
Truth is something constructed, so the metaphor of the fragmented
body suggests it is absolute: no matter how fragmented Truth may be,
all these fragments are part of one body, one absolute and united
whole.

We can perhaps rescue Milton, however, from charges of prejudice or

wayward reasoning by referring to an argument he had made earlier in
Areopagitica. In part II of the essay he distinguished between ‘good’
and ‘bad’ books, and one way in which we can interpret this distinction
is to argue that by ‘good’ he meant ‘reasonable’ and by ‘bad’ he meant
‘unreasonable’. Like these bad books, for Milton Catholicism was
completely unreasonable - it was a religion, for him, based around
emotional responses to stimuli provided by manipulative priests, not
around reasonable argument. Therefore, in paragraph 83, Milton’s
argument is perhaps that the unreasonable - Catholicism, popery -
need not be tolerated. Truth, for Milton, is to be discovered through
and by reason: that which lies beyond it, therefore, can have no claim
to Truth. This argument perhaps preserves a sense of Truth as
something fragmentary and plural, while allowing Milton to dismiss
certain possible unsavoury claims on Truth.

However, this is only a partial rescue of Milton and, eventually, not

entirely successful, for it seems merely to push Milton’s argument back
a step. It presents Reason as an absolute to which everything is
referred, to which Milton and those he supports alone have access.
Milton refuses in this to countenance the possibility that different
groups of people may think of Reason differently, which surely negates
the elaborate argument he had previously constructed about how the
disparate, and different, parts of a nation cohere to produce a unified
whole.

Do Milton’s arguments seem to take control in the essay, and threaten

to overturn its eventual persuasiveness? In a marvellously witty aside
at an earlier point in the essay, Milton wrote at the end of a series of
arguments: ‘See the ingenuity of Truth, who, when she gets a free and
willing hand, opens herself faster than the pace of method and
discourse can overtake her’ (para. 33). In his presentation of what
seemed like the notion that Truth is plural, Milton is deceived by her
‘ingenuity’ into constructing arguments that he cannot subsequently
uphold. He struggles to contain the wild lengths to which Truth, when
unleashed, may run: Milton shows that he is aware of the power of
knowledge and of argument, and in some sense he is anxious to censor
his own arguments before they proceed too far, and cease to cohere
logically.

Could we even suggest that he attempts to place prohibitions on his

own conclusions? We might say that although throughout the essay
Milton has been arguing against censorship, when his arguments seem
to lead to concessions on his own part, he also appreciates the value of
control in some form, and even its necessity, even if it is through the
writer’s form of self-expression. Does Areopagitica, in a sense, argue
for censorship, as much as against it?

That Milton is aware of these potential problems, however, is revealed

later in the essay. In paragraphs 75 to 78 he presents a number of
arguments to show that diversity in a community is a sign of its
strength. It demonstrates, and is the result of, good government,
showing ‘a singular goodwill, contentedness and confidence in [the
government’s] prudent foresight and safe government.’ It also reveals

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‘a lively and cheerful presage of our happy success and victory’, and
demonstrates how a country casts off the ‘wrinkled skin of corruption’
to ‘wax young again’. He develops this vision of renewal and future
growth further, saying that:

Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing

herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible
locks; methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth,
and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging
and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of
heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking
birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed
at what she means, and in their envious gabble would
prognosticate a year of sects and schisms. (para. 76)

Milton argues here that ultimately the diversity that Parliament wishes
to discourage by its prohibitions on printing is produced by Parliament
itself, and by its ‘mild and free and humane government.’ Having
introduced liberty to the people, Milton argues, the Parliament cannot
now take it away.

How do Milton’s metaphors, used to describe the ‘puissant nation’, help

to support his argument? Does the movement from comparing it to ‘a
strong man’ to ‘an eagle’ seem strange, or is it an effective elaboration
of the eloquent strain of Milton’s prose here? Perhaps using such
figures, or images, helps to provide a visual correlative to the
argument Milton makes, encouraging his readers to understand his
vision and, perhaps, to agree with it.

At this point in the essay, Milton makes what might be considered the
plea that summarises all the arguments he presents in Areopagitica:
‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to
conscience, above all liberties’ (para. 78).

As we have already seen, however, elsewhere in the essay Milton is

careful to outline that this liberty should not be granted to everyone.
Regarding this seeming intolerance, Catherine Belsey suggests that
Milton’s liberalism is limited even as it is defined, and so characterises
the nature of liberalism throughout the ages (1988: 78).

How does Milton tie the seeming generalisations of such ideas about
freedom and liberalism to the particularities of the current events he
addresses?

In support of his arguments, in paragraph 79 Milton maintains that his

opinions are not new, but were learned from a former member of the
Parliament itself, Lord Brook. According to Milton, in some of his
writings Brook

exhorts us to hear with patience and humility those, however they

be miscalled, that desire to live purely, in such a use of God’s
ordinances, as the best guidance of their conscience gives them,
and to tolerate them, though in some disconformity to ourselves.
(para. 79)

The book in which these sentiments were expressed, Milton adds, was
dedicated to Parliament, suggesting that Brook’s advice is designed to
improve the system of government then in place, and should ‘not be
laid by without perusal’.

Milton here presents the opinions proposed in the Areopagitica as

having previously existed within the Parliament, at a time envisaged as
embodying the ideals that Milton himself espouses; he suggests that

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Parliament has strayed from these founding ideals, and that now is the
time to return to the principles it had previously upheld with such
success.

Milton supports this vision in the final paragraphs of the essay by

advancing further arguments against censorship. He returns to the
idea of Truth, suggesting that it has a strength that cannot be ever
doubted. Those who support censorship claim that such a measure
protects Truth; but as Milton claims, supporting such a constraint upon
Truth demonstrates a lack of faith in her strength, which ultimately
disparages its true qualities. In fact, she does not need protection,
being sufficiently strong to defend herself: ‘Let her and Falsehood
grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open
encounter?’ (para. 80).

Milton also suggests that supporting censorship indicates cowardice,

which he proposes through an elaborated metaphor:

When a man hath been labouring the hardest labour in the deep
mines of knowledge, hath furnished out his findings in all their
equipage, drawn forth his reasons as it were a battle ranged,
scattered and defeated all objections in his way, calls out his
adversary into the plain, offers him the advantage of wind and
sun, if he please, only that he may try the matter by dint of
argument: for his opponents then to skulk, to lay ambushments,
to keep a narrow bridge of licensing where the challenger should
pass, though it be valour enough in soldiership, is but weakness
and cowardice in the wars of Truth. (para. 80)

What are the different strains of the metaphor that Milton uses to
reinforce his point? Note how, as with the previous passage, he moves
from the idea of man ‘labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines
of knowledge’ to imagining him as a warrior, called to defend the
treasures of knowledge he has obtained on the battlefield. How do the
words used to describe this wise man compare with those that refer to
his ‘adversary’? We see how he is nobly presented – with ‘equipage’,
his ‘reasons’ his weapons, but also sufficiently self-confident that he
confronts his opponent in both ‘wind and sun’. In contrast, the ungainly
words used to describe the adversary present him as one who will
‘skulk’, ‘lay abushments’, and construct ‘a narrow bridge of licensing’ to
trap his ‘challenger’. The noble knight in ‘the wars of Truth’ is
presented as truly valorous by the eloquent rhetoric used to describe
him, compared to the presentation of those who employ base tactics
such as ‘licensing’ when they confront him.

Besides the ‘weakness and cowardice’ that such underhand tactics

demonstrate, Milton argues that supporting censorship is a sign of our
‘sloth, our self-will, and distrust in the right cause.’ It demonstrates an
unwillingness to give those perceived as being in the wrong ‘gentle
meeting and gentle dismissions’, which might guide them towards the
right path. Supporting censorship proclaims not a love but a distrust of
Truth, as it denies men the ability to pursue the difficult path towards
gaining knowledge through discussion and argument. As Milton goes on
to argue,

there is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself;

whose first appearance to our eyes, bleared and dimmed with
prejudice and custom, is more unsightly and implausible than
many errors, even as the person is of many a great man slight
and contemptible to see to. (para. 84)

Truth, Milton claims, will always appear to the ignorant as implausible

and unsightly, as they are blinded by ‘prejudice and custom’ – recalling

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the previous suggestion that simply following the course laid out by
others blunts a man’s intellect, and prevents him from exercising his
own reason. By censoring the implausible and the unsightly, one may
actually frustrate the progress of Truth, which reinforces the argument
Milton makes earlier in the essay for allowing men to access both
‘good’ and ‘bad’ books in the pursuit of knowledge.

Milton’s conclusion to Areopagitica is apocalyptic:

But if neither the check that Moses gave to young Joshua, nor the
countermand which our Saviour gave to young John, who was so
ready to prohibit those whom he thought unlicensed, be not
enough to admonish our elders how unacceptable to God their
testy mood of prohibiting is, if neither their own remembrance
what evil hath abounded in the church by this let of licensing, and
what good they themselves have begun by transgressing it, be
not enough, but that they will persuade and execute the most
Dominican part of the Inquisition over us, and are already with
one foot in the stirrup so active at suppressing, it would be no
unequal distribution in the first place to suppress the suppressors
themselves; whom the change of their condition hath puffed up,
more than their late experience of harder times hath made wise.
(para. 88)

By using Biblical references, to both the Old and New Testaments,

Milton reinforces the authority of his argument here; compare his
references, for instance, to those of classical or Egyptian mythology.
Does concluding his essay with examples drawn from the most
important book available to readers at this time – the Bible – which is
the ultimate expression of Truth, Divine Truth, help to persuade
Milton’s readers of the strength of his arguments?

Again he returns to the negative model of the Catholic Church,

responsible for instigating the ‘Inquisition’, to instil fear as to what
Britain might become if she follows a similar system of oppressive
government. He warns that we are ‘already with one foot in the stirrup’
of such tyranny by imposing such laws as those that ‘suppress’
freedom. Note the repetition and variation of the word ‘suppress’ –
‘suppressing’, ‘suppress’, suppressors’ – does this help to reinforce the
damning critique of those who impose constricting laws upon men’s
freedom? That they are described as ‘puffed up’ – self-important – is
perhaps exemplified in the ‘puffing up’ of the word that most aptly
describes them and their actions. It is the ‘change of their condition’
which brings them to have such misplaced self-confidence; the
preferable alternative, being ‘wise’, is by contrast conveyed in much
simpler terms, as though it does not need such puffed-up rhetoric to
reinforce its superiority.

Milton suggests that in passing such tyrannical ordinances as the

censorship laws Parliament may expose itself to a similar fate as that
of the monarchy, through the tyranny of which it was guilty: in the
onward march of history, it may repeat itself if judicious care is not
taken to alter the vices of the past which led to such cataclysmic
change. Milton suggests that if Parliament wishes to avoid the same
fate as that which faces the monarchy, it ought to reform willingly and
not wait for destruction to befall it; the poignancy of such a suggestion,
in 1644, when the fate of King Charles I still hangs in the balance,
adds particular strength to Milton’s argument.

Milton concludes Areopagitica on this note by repeating an argument

he made at the beginning of the essay:

to redress willingly and speedily what hath been erred, and in

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highest authority to esteem a plain advertisement more than

others have done a sumptuous bribe, is a virtue (honoured Lords
and Commons) answerable to your highest actions, and whereof
none can participate but greatest and wisest men. (para. 90)

By ascribing the members of Parliament qualities such as ‘virtue’,

greatness and wisdom, Milton implicitly flatters them at the same time
as rebuking their past errors, and issuing a warning that their willing
and speedy ‘redress’ is necessary to preserve those qualities, and to
allow for the future progress of this system of government. It is,
however, perhaps appropriate to conclude our reading of the essay on
a questioning note: how far can we confidently claim that we know and
understand ‘Milton’s politics’, on the basis of one pamphlet? Perhaps,
as Dzelzainis urges, Milton ‘may never in his life have lived under a
political regime of which he could wholeheartedly approve’ (1999: 82);
likewise, we should avoid definitively saying that Milton does or does
not support Parliament, on the basis of his refutation of one unpopular
measure it adopted.

SAQ 5
Summarise, in point form, the arguments proposed by Milton against
censorship in Part VII of Areopagitica.

AREOPAGITICA AS ‘LITERATURE’ IN AND OF ITS TIME

To conclude this Unit, we might legitimately ask ourselves what
qualifies Areopagitica to be described as ‘literature’. This, of course,
partly depends on what we mean by this term; but broadly considering
this essay as an art-work, comparable to, say, the poems, plays and
novels you will encounter throughout this module. What qualities does
it share with such works, and what makes it different?

As we have seen, Areopagitica is an essay that proposes several

different arguments in response to current events in the public sphere,
which partly qualifies its identity as an example of ‘occasional writing’.
Our readings of several poems in previous units that similarly respond
to real-life events perhaps link this seemingly factual prose piece with
what we might consider to be more imaginative literary works. Yet if
we address the form and style of Areopagitica, we can discern qualities
that distinguish it from dry, factual accounts or pamphlets: while it
does not elaborate a story as such, it employs numerous figures or
images and rhetorical devices that create an imaginative world in the
reader’s mind, designed to reinforce the strength of Milton’s
arguments. We could say that its very form, and its proposed function,
qualify this essay’s description as ‘literature’, demonstrating as it does
the skill with which Milton employs words and arranges them into his
own unique prose style. Areopagitica both contributes to our
knowledge of the diversity of Milton’s written style – which operates
across poems and prose pieces – and enhances our understanding of
what kind of writer Milton was, what motivated him to write, and how
he engaged with the world surrounding him.

Finally, the occasional nature of Areopagitica, and its very real purpose
in trying to encourage Parliamentary reform, reminds us of the ways in
which literature and the context in which it is produced might interact:
Milton responds to urgent and pressing circumstances in the
contemporary world, just as Dryden responds to the Great Fire, or
Thomson to Newton’s death, in the poems we addressed in Unit 1;
perhaps Milton’s essay, however, is different from these poems by
actively seeking to change the course of current events. The strength

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of Milton’s arguments, reinforced by varied literary devices, as well as

their support of artistic freedom, perhaps allow us to confidently assert
its position as a fine example of polemic literature.

REVIEW
We began this unit by addressing the controversial nature of Milton’s
reputation, in view of what we had already learned from previous units
about his career. We saw how, like Lycidas, Areopagitica is an example
of occasional writing, and yet one which responds to a very different
set of real-life circumstances, which it seeks to change.

We addressed questions surrounding ‘censorship’, both in its historical

context and how such issues might still be relevant today, basing our
discussion on the censorship laws passed by the English Parliament in
1643 that provoked Milton to write his essay. We examined the
function of censorship in society, and we drew particular attention to
the relationship that seems to exist between censorship and political
power.

We discussed some of the key features of Milton’s prose style, which

helped to elucidate readings of several discreet passages throughout
the unit. We subsequently outlined in detail the arguments Milton
proposes in Areopagitica, and showed various ways in which he
employs the unique qualities of his prose techniques to reinforce his
arguments. This allowed us to draw some conclusions about
Areopagitica’s status as ‘literature’, and the ability of art to interact
with the contexts of its production.

In the subsequent unit we shall address these, and related questions,

as we consider perhaps Milton’s most famous piece of writing, Paradise
Lost.

ADDITIONAL READING
Corns, Thomas N. 2001. A Companion to Milton (Oxford: Blackwell)
(Parts available online via Google Books)

Corns, Thomas N. 1982. The Development of Milton's Prose Style

(Oxford: Clarendon)

Pocock, J. G. A. 1987. ‘Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of

Political Thought’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds),
Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-
Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press) pp.
21-34 (Full text available online via Google Books)

REFERENCES
Belsey, Catherine. 1988. John Milton: Language, Gender, Power
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell)

Bunreacht Na hEireann/Constitution of Ireland. 1990. (Dublin:

Government Publications)

Corns, Thomas N. 1999. ‘Milton’s Prose’, in Denis Danielson (ed.), The

Cambridge Companion to John Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), pp. 84-97 (Parts available online via Google
Books)

Dzelzainis, Martin. 1999. ‘Milton’s Politics’, in Denis Danielson (ed.),

The Cambridge Companion to John Milton (Cambridge:

Unit 4: Seventeenth-Century Political Prose: John Milton’s Areopagitica 4-27

_____________________________________________________________________

Cambridge University Press), pp. 70-83 (Parts available online

via Google Books)

Eagleton, Terry. 1988. ‘Editor’s Preface’, in Catherine Belsey, John

Milton: Language, Gender, Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell)

Hill, Christopher. 1977. Milton and the English Revolution (London:

Faber and Faber)

Ricks, Christopher. 1963. Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon

Press)

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ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
Q. How far should we employ biographical information in our reading
of literary texts?

Biographical information about an author can provide some important

clues to deciphering certain aspects of his or her text; for instance,
we may need to identify certain references, or allusions to particular
people, which we could only know by conducting some research into
the author’s personal history. This is also particularly important if we
want to understand the historical significance of a text within its
context of production: that is, if a piece of writing is ‘occasional’, or
seeks to respond to current events, we can better understand how
far it achieves this aim by knowing something of the context
surrounding it, which may include details of the author’s biography.

However, we should also exercise caution when using such

information: to some extent, the ‘words on the page’ alone should be
sufficient to conduct an in-depth analysis, and we should never risk
ascribing ‘intentions’ or ‘meanings’ on an author’s behalf that we can
never verify.

SAQ 2
Q. Is a government justified in imposing censorship on the publication
of information, and does this depend on what kind of text is
published?

We can argue that governments are justified in employing censors to

limit the dissemination of certain information and certain arguments to
certain groups of people in society at particular times of crisis, such as
during wartime. Certain groups of people are seen as a threat to the
authority of the government, and the provision of certain information
and certain arguments to those people is seen as potentially allowing
that threat be realised. In limiting the dissemination of that
information and those arguments, the censor limits the potential
threat to the government’s authority and security. This is most
important in times of crisis, where the resources of the government
are stretched and thus the possibility of the government’s demise is at
its highest, and when public morale may be threatened by incendiary
publications. Thus in times of crisis governments often impose rigid
censorship laws. A state which has few censorship laws is usually a
very secure state with a very secure government.

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SAQ 3
Q. Summarise, in point form, Milton’s objections so far to the
English Parliament’s decision to introduce censorship.

Milton proposes the following arguments against censorship in Parts

I, II and III of Areopagitica:

To destroy a reasonable, well-argued book, as the censor often does,

is to destroy reason itself. Reason is an ‘immortality’ that makes
humans human. Censorship therefore seeks to destroy that which
makes us who we are, and therefore should be opposed.

Censorship was invented by the Catholic Church, the arch enemy of

the Parliament. Since censorship is the production of the enemy it
should be opposed.

Censorship frustrates the process of learning to tell the difference

between good and evil because one needs to encounter both good
and evil before one can differentiate between them and censorship
does not permit an encounter evil. Censorship, therefore, because it
frustrates such a necessary process, should be opposed.

Censorship fails to recognise and respect the human, God-given

ability to choose: because of this lack of respect for human ability it
should be opposed.

Censorship does not benefit the fool (who will be foolish no matter
what he reads) or the wise man (whose wisdom is frustrated by his
prohibition from reading what are considered evil books). Since
censorship does not benefit either of these sectors of the community,
it should be opposed.

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SAQ 4
Q. Summarise, in point form, Milton’s objections to censorship put
forward in parts IV, V, and VI of Areopagitica.

Milton proposes the following arguments against censorship in parts

IV, V and VI of Areopagitica:

Censorship does not work - one need only look to the number of illegal
books for sale around the streets. Experience shows that one can do
nothing to stop the printing of illegal books, so one should end
censorship as it is a useless law.

The practical problems of censorship, if rigorously applied, would be

enormous: one would not only have to censor books but all forms of
expression, including conversation, architecture, clothing - the volume
of work would be enormous. In addition, one would need an enormous
number of qualified licensers, who would have to be people of
intelligence and sound judgement - there are not that many qualified
people in England. These huge practical problems which would be
revealed, were censorship laws applied rigorously, show the ridiculous
nature of censorship laws. Censorship law should, therefore, be
repealed.

Those who support censorship claim that people will be inclined to do

good because of censorship: yet one cannot be counted as doing good
- even if one does the right thing - if one does good under compulsion.

Also, the claim that censorship promotes the doing of good can be
contested: censorship does not promote the doing of good but rather
prevents the doing of evil, a much less honourable activity. Thus
censorship should be opposed because it does not promote the doing
of the most praiseworthy, honourable activity.

Those who support censorship argue that sin is removed by

censorship: yet one does not necessarily remove sin by removing the
matter of sin - the covetous man does not become less covetous when
that which he covets is removed. Censorship therefore should be
opposed: it does not remove sin as it claims.

Censorship treats adults as though they were children by denying

them the freedom to choose and therefore it should be opposed. It
also treats people like foreigners in their own country by not allowing
them to exercise their right to have the freedom to choose for
themselves.

Censorship dishonours the acts of learning and writing and it

dishonours the writer. It does so by rejecting that which the writer has
worked tremendously hard to make as learned and as reasonable as
possible merely because the writer disagrees with the government.
Because it causes this dishonour, censorship should be opposed.

Censorship is hurtful to the nation: the people’s talents are not served
by limiting the means by which they can express themselves;
censorship places the people in a kind of servitude; it treats every
citizen as an offender and punishes everyone, even those who have
done nothing; censorship treats the people as silly, uneducated
people. Because of these hurts it causes to the nation, censorship
should be opposed.

Censorship disparages the ministers of the Church because it implies

that they cannot do their job of instructing the people about what is
good and evil. Because of the way it insults the clergy, censorship
should be opposed.

Unit 4: Seventeenth-Century Political Prose: John Milton’s Areopagitica 4-31

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SAQ 5
Q. Summarise, in point form, the arguments proposed by Milton
against censorship in Part VII of Areopagitica.

In Part VII of Areopagitica Milton proposes the following arguments

against censorship:

Censorship retards the maintenance of Truth by prohibiting Truth from

exercising itself in battle against Falsehood: therefore censorship is
destructive and should be opposed.

Censorship retards also the search for Truth. Truth can only be
recovered by continually searching and thus by continually
encountering the new, the unrecognisable, and the implausible: it is
only through such encounters that knowledge of the Truth can grow.
Censorship retards that process, and therefore should be opposed.

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UNIT 5

LOSS AND RENEWAL IN JOHN MILTON'S

PARADISE LOST

AIM
The aim of this unit is to consider Milton’s Paradise Lost as a poem that
combines themes of both loss and renewal.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Outline a variety of approaches to reading Paradise Lost.

Compare these approaches to one another and select one that suits
your purposes in analysing the poem.

Address the form and style of Paradise Lost by understanding ‘epic’

and Milton’s ‘Grand Style’.

Offer detailed readings of selected sections of Paradise Lost.

Identify ways in which the poem is tragic.

Establish continuities between Paradise Lost and other poetry by

Milton.

Identify ways in which Paradise Lost is similar to or different from

other literature of this period, in its form and as a response to
historical events.

REQUIRED READING
John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)

Paradise Lost is included in volume one of Stephen Greenblatt (ed.).

2012. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edn (New York:
W. W. Norton and Co.).

Another reliable edition of the poem is included in John Milton, 1968.

John Carey and Alastair Fowler (eds), The Poems of John Milton
(Longman: London and Harlow).

The book of Genesis from the Bible, chapters 1-3, King James’ Version.

INTRODUCTION
We have already looked at two different aspects of John Milton’s career
as a writer in previous units, his early pastoral poetry and his political
prose pamphlet Areopagitica, and thought about ways they connect to
what we know about literature produced during this period. We have
thought about how far Milton is ‘typical’ of his time, how far his writing
stands out as unusual; and also some of the ways in which it both
reflects and attempts to shape contemporary political events or
culture.

Unit 5: Loss and Renewal in John Milton’s Paradise Lost 5-1

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In this unit we will consider Milton’s most famous achievement,

Paradise Lost. A long, and perhaps challenging poem, we shall
organise our analysis by outlining some of the many approaches that
can be adopted to understand the poem. We shall address important
aspects of its style and structure, thinking about which literary
traditions it emulates and how it breaks away from them.

We shall then give a detailed reading of several key passages from the
poem, focussing on Book I, Book IX, and Book XII. You should
nonetheless read Paradise Lost in its entirety to get a fuller grasp of
the stylistic and theoretical discussions we shall address, the critical
debates surrounding the poem, and the function of these selected
passages within the whole work. Reading the poem in full will also help
you to place it in the spectrum of Milton’s career as a writer, and to
consider more carefully how it demonstrates its development from the
early poems we discussed in Unit 2.

To focus the thematic structure of our discussion, we shall return to

the ideas of loss and renewal that we have encountered in previous
units, and ask ourselves how Milton uses his ostensible subject-matter
– about Man’s fall from grace and expulsion from Paradise, but with
the ultimate hope of redemption through Christ’s sacrifice – as an
allegory for the political upheavals experienced during the Civil War
period and beyond.

APPROACHES TO PARADISE LOST

WHAT IS PARADISE LOST?

The first answer we can give to this question is, perhaps, to follow
Margarita Stocker’s suggestion that Paradise Lost is ‘a text
representative of Western culture, an accepted “classic” of English
literature’ (1988: 9). The second answer we can give to the question
perhaps explains the text’s cultural centrality. Paradise Lost is an epic
poem. Epic poetry is a species of narrative poetry - that is, poetry
which tells a story - concerned with the exploits of superhuman heroes
told in an elevated style. The origins of epic, in the classical texts of
Greece and Rome, provide an important source for how Milton writes
his poem, and the claims that he makes through choosing to write it in
this style.

The heroes who are the subjects of epics are often representative of a
particular culture or race: in the case of Paradise Lost, Adam is
representative of the human race; epic thus provides an articulation of
a particular culture. Is it the case, therefore, that Paradise Lost is
central in our culture because it articulates our culture, because it is
‘our’ epic, the epic of Western culture? This is partly true. Many critics
argue that Paradise Lost deals with certain archetypal themes that
exemplify the binary opposites characterising man’s struggle with the
nature of human existence: good and evil, innocence and experience,
heaven and hell. In some respects, one cannot fully conceive of either
term in each set of binaries without invoking its opposite. So, too, to
create a full impression of man’s worldly experience the epic deals with
a series of archetypal opposites that capture the entirety of his
struggle. In turn, reading about these archetypes in an epic helps us to
identify a part of ourselves within its story: they ‘have exercised a
compulsion upon readers’ imaginations that reflects their [these
archetypes’] role in Western thought’ (Stocker 1988: 10).

This connects to an approach adopted by some of the poem’s critics,

who liken its appeal to the power that myth exerts over our minds,
one ‘which is quite independent of belief’ (Stocker 1988: 23) and

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instead exemplifies the universal archetypes we might identify in

Paradise Lost. Northrop Frye argues that the archetypes Milton’s poem
reproduces are common to many myths which operate within our
cultural mindset, and belong to our ‘race memory’; Paradise Lost
presents the polarisation between the sexes, which Frye claims is a
division representative of the polarisation between God and Nature,
creator and creation.

But what are these common themes of Western thought, these stories
and myths with which we might all identify? To get a fuller sense of
this, and of what Milton chooses to write about as the subject for his
epic, we must understand the religious context within which he writes,
and which provides the subject-matter for his poem.

Activity:
Read the book of Genesis in the Bible.

The universal concerns that Milton addresses in the poem suggest that
it thereby overcomes the potential difficulty of cultural relevance: after
all, the very different culture that generated Paradise Lost could
hamper its ability to talk about our culture. The poem considers central
concerns of Western thought, and so stands as an epic articulating the
concerns of Western culture, and by reflecting them promotes their
importance: the poem thus has a powerful role within culture in
validating certain ways of thinking.

However, whilst we might want to read Paradise Lost as a poem that

speaks to us and our present-day concerns through the universal
themes it deals with, we should not forget that it is a product of its
time. As we have discovered in previous units, this was a period of
intense struggle and stress, of cataclysmic change, and of uncertainty:
we should be keen to address how the universal themes Milton treats
in Paradise Lost are applicable to his own, as much as to subsequent
generations as we read through and analyse the poem.

Before we undertake this examination, let us first review some of the

different approaches which various critics have taken to Paradise Lost.
Margaret Stocker, in her history of the critical reception of Paradise
Lost, divides the responses it has provoked into a number of different
approaches, including

(i) thematic,
(ii) generic
(iii) historical
(iv) ideological
(v) reader-response.

We shall address each of these possible approaches in turn.

(i) The Thematic Approach

In the module so far we have adopted a thematic approach to
analysing certain poems as elucidating particular themes or ideas: in
earlier units, for instance, we thought about the dual relationship
between loss and renewal, exemplified in numerous different ways
(the loss of a friend and the perpetuity of his memory, the loss of
poetic precedents and the forging of a new poetic identity, the
destruction of a city and its subsequent rebuilding). We could, in turn,
apply the same method to thinking about Paradise Lost, which we
could also see as addressing the binary relationship between loss and
renewal.

Unit 5: Loss and Renewal in John Milton’s Paradise Lost 5-3

_____________________________________________________________________

This thematic approach asks: what is Paradise Lost about? However,

we should be wary of the assumptions implicit within such a question:
for instance, is the poem ‘about’ one thing, and does such an
implication exclude the possibility that it has multiple ‘meanings’, or
perhaps that it is not ‘about’ anything at all? We should be wary,
perhaps, of the assumption that adopting the thematic approach
assumes, ‘that literature reflects or at least attempts to express
certain verities about human life’ (Stocker 1988: 14).

However, as we have found in adopting this approach in previous

units, identifying common themes and ideas in works of literature can
be a rewarding way of analysing texts in themselves, and as belonging
to the contexts of their production. Rather than dismissing the
thematic approach in the face of the limiting assumptions it seems to
impose upon a literary text, we can instead qualify our usage of it –
just as we are urged to exercise caution in employing biographical
details to elucidate our understanding of an author’s work. After all,
concentrating on a particular ‘theme’ – and recognising that it is one
possible thread among many potential ones, and that this is a reading
imposed by us as readers rather that necessarily ‘intended’ by the
author (insofar as we can judge that) – helps us to break down a
complex literary text, such as Paradise Lost, to a manageable level.

(ii) The Generic Approach

Some literary critics favour a generic approach to Paradise Lost. This
approach begins by asking ‘what kind of literary text is Paradise Lost?’
We have already provided one, partial answer to this by describing
Paradise Lost as an epic poem; but we might also like to ask more
probing questions about the form and structure of the poem, and how
far it fits into this generic categorisation. A generic approach takes a
close look at the form of a text, and asks how this identifies it in
relation to other texts which seem to adopt a similar structure; for
instance, we might wonder how far Paradise Lost is or is not like other
‘epic’ poems, and what such contrasts might reveal about our
understanding of the poem.

To some extent, however, a generic approach risks an artificial division

between form and content: we should not neglect the substance of the
poem itself by focussing solely on the way in which it is written.
Rather, the most effective form of analysis is one that connects the
two: as we have discovered at various points in previous units, the
structure or method used by an author can often support the meaning
he or she hopes to convey – such as the metrical regularity of
Dryden’s lines, which reinforce a sense of Restoration decorum, or the
linguistic registers Milton uses in Areopagitica variously to condemn his
opponents or reinforce his own arguments.

(iii) The Historical Approach

The historical approach begins by addressing when Paradise Lost was
written, and proceeds to read the poem as an historical document, as
a text responding to history. We have adopted this method in several
respects in previous units, and often found it to be a rewarding way of
understanding why an author writes a particular text at a particular
time, how, and with what potential purpose. The historical approach
helps us to realise that the text has its own historical existence, and
highlights the differences between the culture that produced it and our
own. This also helps us to avoid the dangerous trap of reading a text
with historical insensitivity – that is, assuming that all people at
different points in history thought the same thing in the same way,
and that their ideas and ways of thinking are the same as ours now.

By knowing something of the history surrounding a text’s production

we can better understand the motivations for its composition, and how

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in turn it may have helped to shape the course of subsequent events.

However, as with biographical information, we should always be
careful about overusing historical background to analyse literary texts:
the substance of the text itself should be the prime focus of our
analysis, which extra-textual information might elucidate, but which
should never override it.

(iv) The Ideological Approach

The ideological approach begins by asking ‘what ideology informs
Paradise Lost?’, and proceeds to examine the ‘ideological bias’ of the
text, the vision of the world the text proposes. We might firstly
question what we mean by ‘ideology’ when considering adopting this
approach: you may like to check variant meanings of the word in the
Oxford English Dictionary, and its potential implications for literary
analysis, but we can take it here loosely to refer to a particular way of
thinking about and relating to the world. Many feminists, for example,
read Paradise Lost as a text deeply imbued with patriarchal ideology;
and it would be difficult to understand the poem fully (its motivations
and its meanings) without some awareness of the theological ideas
that Milton deals with.

This approach can inform us of certain important ideas that connect

the subject-matter of the poem together with its composition, or
conversely that enable us to take it apart and to present it as
promoting or attacking a set of ideas that we subsequently impose on
it as readers. However, this approach risks imposing interpretations on
the poem that are, in fact, inimical to its actual content: we can read
too much into a text, and fall into the danger of seeing it as a
construct of our own ideas, rather than a literary work in its own right.
This could also risk devaluing the text as an artistic production, making
it just a convenient tool for propounding certain theories – and
certainly risks destroying the pleasure of reading it.

(v) The reader-response approach

Reader-response theory is a complex area of literary analysis, and one
that we shall return to in subsequent units when we come to think
about the ‘rise of the novel’. In its basic sense, this approach suggests
that the meaning of a literary text is created by the reader him or
herself, who constructs that meaning through the process of reading.
The American critic Stanley Fish approaches Paradise Lost from this
perspective by considering the responses which are provoked in the
reader who encounters it; he argues that this encounter is in fact an
experience of the Fall itself.

The emotive power of the reader-response approach is significant: to

be moved by Milton’s poem is an important part of how we might fully
appreciate it, and perhaps of why Milton presents the subjects and
ideas in the way he does. Surely this is more effective than a simply
dispassionate, disinterested reaction to the poem. Yet we might also
wish to be cautious about how far we should take our own personal
responses to be the ‘right’ or only ones to a text; rather, we should
hold our own reactions alongside other elements of critical analysis,
some of which we have outlined here, and some of which we already
have exercised in previous units.

Unit 5: Loss and Renewal in John Milton’s Paradise Lost 5-5

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Activity:
Read Book I, ll.1-26 of Paradise Lost. Analyse these lines from the
following perspectives, and make notes on each reading:

(i) A generic point of view: ask ‘what is the form of this section, and
how is that form important?’

(ii) An historical point of view: ask ‘when was this written, and how is
that important?’

(iii) A feminist point of view: ask ‘how are women represented in this
section, and how is that representation important?’

PARADISE LOST: STYLE AND STRUCTURE

To some extent, we might consider adopting a generic approach when
analysing the form and structure of Paradise Lost: after all, a solid
understanding of the literary mode in which it is written is essential to
grasping the nature of how Milton wrote the poem, and the nature of
his achievement. However, we should also bear in mind the limitations
of following this approach alone: instead, analysing both form and
content in tandem helps us to appreciate the scope, quality and
potential interpretations of Milton’s poem.

As critics and readers have long been aware, Paradise Lost involves
many different literary influences and styles, what Barbara Kiefer
Lewalski calls an ‘Edenic profusion of thematic and structural elements
from a great many literary genres and modes, as well as a myriad of
specific allusions to major literary texts and exemplary works’ (1999:
113). We shall focus our discussion on one significant literary model
that Milton adopts in his poem here, the Epic Poem.

THE EPIC POEM

Which literary mode does Milton select as the model for his greatest
poem, and how does he adapt it for his own purposes? Paradise Lost is
an epic poem, written in a longstanding tradition that stretches back to
the oral epics of the Ancient Greek poet Homer, The Iliad and The
Odyssey. The Latin poet Virgil’s great epic, The Aeneid, adapts the
Homeric model to the new purposes of his account of the origins of the
Roman empire, and its role as a propagandist piece that celebrated the
Emperor Augustus’ reign.

As with the works we have addressed in previous units, these classical

precedents are significant when considering why Milton chose to write
Paradise Lost as an epic poem; he was implicitly invoking these great
models for readers who would invariably have been familiar with them,
and perhaps making a statement about the scope and ambitions of his
own work. However, whereas these classical models present a
mythological, polytheistic world, Paradise Lost is a manifesto for a
theocentric, monotheistic vision: that is, it centres on and celebrates
one God, and explores man’s relationship with this deity through the
Biblical story of man’s expulsion from Paradise – the Garden of Eden –
and his future redemption by the sacrifice of God’s son, Jesus.

Whilst we might identify threads of continuity between classical epics

and Milton’s, therefore, we can also note differences; in fact,
classifying epic as a single and unified literary mode misrepresents its
evolution through history. C.S. Lewis, in A Preface to Paradise Lost,
argues that there are in fact two types of epic, ‘Primary Epic’ and

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‘Secondary Epic’. He classes as Primary Epics works such as the Old

English poem Beowulf; the Odyssey and the Iliad; the French medieval
poem, the Chanson de Roland. Primary Epics belong to a community’s
oral tradition, have what Lewis calls a ‘festal, aristocratic, ceremonial
tone’ (1960: 19). The Primary Epic is ritualistic, and in its language is
at once both familiar and extraordinary. It was delivered at a particular
occasion, which added to the solemnity already generated by its
ritualistic language. For instance, Homer typically deploys ‘epithets’
that describe each character: ‘ox-eyed Hera’, ‘swift-footed Achilles’.
These become like mental tags, or clichés, by which the listening
audience might identify and be able to remember the qualities
belonging to that character each time he or she is introduced.

For Lewis, Secondary Epic by contrast lacked these ritualistic features,

or ‘external aids to solemnity’:

there is no robed and garlanded aoidos, no altar, not even a feast

in a hall - only a private person reading a book in an armchair
(1960: 40)

The Secondary Epic does not deal with more abstract themes than the
Primary Epic; but it must nonetheless encourage the reader to feel
that he or she ‘is assisting at an august ritual, for if he does not, he
will not be receptive of the true epic exhilaration’ (Lewis 1960: 40). It
is, therefore, the ‘sheer writing’ of a Secondary Epic which must create
the solemnity which in the Primary Epic was created, in part at least,
by the occasion of its recital out loud. Among Secondary Epics Lewis
classes complex works such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy,
Spenser’s Faerie Queene and – of particular importance for our
purposes – Paradise Lost. These epics are composed by an educated
and learned author to be read by a literate audience.

It is worth bearing Lewis’s distinctions in mind as we think about the

form and structure of Paradise Lost as an epic poem intentionally
written in a particular way, to be read by an educated audience. You
might, for instance, have been struck in your acquaintance with the
poem so far how Milton makes frequent references to classical
mythology – references which remind us of the kind of education most
of his first readers would have been likely to have received. The
linguistic resonance of his poetry is similarly resonant with earlier
literary models.

SAQ 1
What is an epic, and how might we describe Paradise Lost as an ‘epic
poem’?

THE STRUCTURE OF PARADISE LOST

On a structural level, we might observe the ‘decorum’ or regularity of
his metre; yet, in some senses, does this set up a rhythmic quality
similar to the patterns of speech? The iambic pentameter, after all –
Milton’s metre in Paradise Lost – is likened to the rhythm of the
everyday voice. In this respect, does Milton’s so-called ‘Secondary
Epic’ have qualities belonging to the ‘Primary Epic’, both in its speech-
like rhythms and in the universalising concepts it deals with? Perhaps
we should bear in mind the permeability of such distinctions when
addressing the poem.

How, though, does Milton structure his epic poem? What similarities
does it bear with other types of epic poem? Virgil’s Aeneid, for

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instance, is composed of twelve books, each of which focus in on

different aspects of the story of its hero, Aeneas, who escaped the
flames of Troy to become the founder of Rome. Milton’s epic poem
adopts a similarly reader-friendly structure, being divided into twelve
books of varying lengths, each written in a series of verse paragraphs,
and each dealing with a different aspect of Paradise Lost’s story.

Whilst this sectioning makes the poem easier to read and digest, it
also serves to heighten the tension by dividing up the poem into
sections, each of which tells the next stage of the story and leaves the
reader on a cliff-hanger as one book ends and before another begins:
Books I finishes, for instance, with the beginning of the council of
fallen angels in Hell; we must then read on into Book II to discover the
content of that council’s deliberations.

Each book is prefaced by a short piece of prose called ‘The Argument’,

which serves a number of purposes: it serves as a guide through the
section which follows it; it also highlights the most important events,
but it also distracts us from these events and directs our attention to
the poem itself. Perhaps ‘The Argument’ before each book of Paradise
Lost prompts us to feel as though we participate in a ritual,
appropriately enough in the context of the poem’s identity as an epic,
even if we choose to follow Lewis by calling it a ‘Secondary Epic’, in its
written nature.

In some respect, Lewalski claims, Milton uses the different generic

formats he incorporates into Paradise Lost to determine the different
themes worked out in each book; she argues that:

Milton employs specific literary modes in his epic to characterize the

various orders of being: the heroic mode for Satan and his damned
society; mixed for the celestial society of the angels; pastoral (opening
out to georgic and comedic) for prelapsarian life in Eden; tragic
(encompassing at length postlapsarian georgic, pastoral, and heroic)
for human life in the fallen world. These modes establish the affective
quality of the several segments of the poem, through appropriate
subject matter, motifs, tone, and language, and each mode is
introduced by explicit literary signals. (1999: 117)

You might identify for yourself the different registers and literary
modes at work in diverse parts of Milton’s poem, and observe how the
different styles he variously adopts help to support or convey a fuller
impression of the nature of the subject-matter he treats.

Activity:
Look again at each book of the poem, and note down the main ‘events’
or content of each book, using ‘The Argument’ as a guide.

What do you notice are the most significant continuing themes

between the books? What are the significant differences between
them?

SAQ 2
What is distinctive about the structure of Paradise Lost, and how
might this assist our reading of the poem?

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STYLE
We have made some observations on the structure of Paradise Lost,
and suggested some of the ways in which Milton organises his material
in a series of Books, each prefaced by an Argument. What might we
make of the content of those books, and the formal qualities belonging
to the written style Milton adopts? This is often referred to as Milton’s
‘Grand Style’, which Christopher Ricks identifies as central to the epic
nature of Paradise Lost, as

the epic is of all literary kinds the most dignified, the most concerned
to fulfil expectation rather than to baffle or ignore it. (1963: 22)

Ricks argues that the striking qualities of Milton’s style bring us to pay
closer attention to what he says, by overturning our expectations of
what an epic poem should be like. Ricks claims that Milton succeeds in
achieving a delicate balance in his style between the extraordinary and
the expected by combining ‘two fervours’:

A heroic dedication to tradition; and an heroic dedication to himself, a

confidence in his own greatness which will prevent his suffocating
under the weight of a great tradition. (1963: 23)

Think back to Unit 2, where we discussed how the young Milton both
drew on and remodelled literary precedents to forge his own poetic
identity; by this, much later stage in his career, Milton reforms one of
the most sublime and respected literary forms to present his own
version of epic, one firmly identifiable as possessing epic
characteristics, but also distinctly unique to him. Ricks identifies four
key aspects of the ‘Grand Style’ Milton adopts to achieve this:

(i) rhythm and music

(ii) syntax
(iii) metaphor
(iv) word-play

We shall address each of these features in turn to grasp more fully the
nature of Milton’s style in Paradise Lost.

(i) Rhythm and Music

We can see the effectiveness of what Ricks calls ‘Milton’s sound-
effects’ in the following passage from Book I:

He trusted to have equalled the most high,

If he opposed; and with ambitious aim
Against the throne and monarchy of God
Raised impious war in heaven and battle proud
With vain attempt. Him the almighty power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the omnipotent to arms.
(Bk I, ll.40-49)

As Lois Potter points out, ‘it is the sound of the passage that directs
our response to it’ (1986: 126). Lines 41 to 44 demand a vocal rise
from their initial insistence on God’s majesty, to Satan’s outrageous
assault on that majesty, towards an expected crescendo in l.44.
However, that expectation is frustrated: the sentence does not end on
a crescendo, but imposes an anticlimax as we read the first half of
l.44.

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The ‘almighty power’ then takes over the passage, overwhelming

Satan’s presence in the line: it begins forcefully with a strong, active
word, ‘hurled’, which is made more striking by the inverted foot – the
trochee – which upsets the expected rhythm of the iambic pentameter
here. For the final four lines of the passage Satan’s descent into the
bottomless pit is described in completely non-visual terms: we cannot
imagine ‘ethereal sky’, ‘bottomless perdition’ or ‘adamantine chains’,
making his exile seem strange and unfamiliar, as though visually
dissociating us the readers from his sinful descent.

The imagery of the passage is striking, but it is made more effective

by the resonant sonority of these lines – by the way in which Milton
makes us hear them as we read, an effect that is more readily
discernible if we read these lines out loud.

Activity:
Take a section of about ten lines of Paradise Lost and read it quietly to
yourself; make some notes on how you respond to the passage. Then
take the same passage and read it aloud: how does your response
differ from the ‘quiet’ version, if at all?

(ii) Syntax
Look back at Unit 4, where we briefly considered the effectiveness of
Milton’s syntax by comparing the opening sentences of Paradise Lost
with those of Areopagitica. As we saw, Ricks suggests that the word-
order of the opening lines of the poem encompass the huge themes of
Paradise Lost. Fowler, in The Poems of John Milton, similarly makes
insightful observations about Milton’s poetic syntax; he argues that, in
a single passage, there is ‘a series of very temporary stopping places,
from which the thought darts off in unforeseen directions’ (1968: 431).
The first line of Paradise Lost offers a good example of this. As Fowler
observes, we expect to read ‘Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
[of that disobedience]’; however, Milton gives us ‘Of Man’s first
disobedience, and the fruit/ Of that forbidden tree’. By flouting our
expectations of which words we think should follow each other in a
sentence, Milton succeeds in driving the passage forward forcefully and
provoking us to think about it anew, from multiple perspectives; he
conveys the sense of a thought-process in action as he continually
forges links between unusual or seemingly incongruous ideas.

(iii) Metaphor
We encountered some of the ways in which Milton uses metaphor in
his prose writing when we discussed Areopagitica. In Paradise Lost,
Ricks claims, Milton did not always use metaphor appropriately:

The dignity of the epic is not compatible with such metaphors as are
boldly and explosively new. (1963: 57)

Does this suggest that Milton’s innovativeness is somehow less

successful than when he uses existing formats, what Ricks terms
‘ancient metaphors’? Milton’s use of the word ‘transport’, for instance,
is often extended into the phrase ‘to be carried away [transported]
with emotion’. This might seem redolent of cliché – it is, after all, a
fairly commonplace expression; but Milton averts any sense of the
mundane, by overcoming the familiarity of the phrase he ‘re-
establishes the power of the original metaphor’. He achieves this
by setting the word [‘transport’] in a context which stresses the
physical roots of the emotional meaning, so that we see a transport as
something that does literally move you (Ricks 1963: 59).

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In this sense, Milton is being innovative even when seemingly using

familiar or old-fashioned phrases, showing his versatility in adopting
and adapting precursor materials to create something new – just as
we saw in Unit 2. The use of this revitalised metaphor can be seen in
the following passage from Book III, where God addresses his son:

Only begotten Son, seest thou what rage

Transports our adversary, whom no bounds
Prescribed, no bars of hell, nor all the chains
Heaped on him there, nor yet the main abyss
Wide interrupt can hold; so bent he seems
On desperate revenge, that will redound
Upon his own rebellious head. And now
Through all restraint broke loose he wings his way
Not far off heaven.
(Bk III, ll.80-88)

The passage is richly expressive of physical energy, which results in

God’s announcement: ‘seest thou what rage/ Transports our
adversary’. As Ricks suggests, ‘the words compress his knowledge of
Satan’s single motive with his observation of his escape from Hell’
(1963: 60). Satan is ‘moved’ both emotionally – into a rage – and
physically, into Hell.

(iii) Word-play
We have seen in previous units how Milton engages with the multiple
meanings that a single word can hold to reinforce his arguments or to
create a particular, striking effect. Generally, the most common form
of word-play in Paradise Lost is that which insists on the derivation of
a word. Milton sometimes oversteps the bounds of ‘decorum’ and uses
word-play unsuccessfully: an example of a particularly atrocious pun,
according to one critic at least, is the phrase ‘ravenous ravens’ (Ricks
1963: 68-69). Elsewhere Milton uses word-play more effectively, such
as the following example Ricks gives from Book IX:

Were it I though death menaced would ensue

This my attempt, I would sustain alone
The worst, and not persuade thee rather die
Deserted, than oblige thee with a fact
Pernicious to thy peace.
(Bk IX, ll.977-81)

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘fact’ could mean ‘crime’;

‘oblige’ also has two meanings: ‘to drag along with’ or ‘to make guilty,
punishable, to devote to death’. Milton engages with these multiple
meanings by conjoining the meaning of ‘fact’ as ‘crime’ with the words
‘death’, ‘die’, and ‘pernicious’, to harden the meaning of ‘oblige’ into
what might seem like a death-sentence:

The harder sense [of ‘oblige] insists on the tragedy; the milder sense
allows Eve ... to suggest that perhaps things will not be so bad after
all. (Ricks 1963: 75)

This is one, isolated example of a technique that Milton employs

throughout his poem – as, indeed, throughout all his writings. Milton
engages with word-play to convey a range of different, often
contradictory meanings to the reader, which exemplify his facility with
language and his skill in manipulating words and their various
meanings to create a wide range of effects.

You should bear all of these aspects of Milton’s style in mind as you
approach and analyse the poem, and employ the critic’s tactic of
dissecting particular lines and passages according to the criteria we

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have outlined here. This is a skill that you should constantly practice
for yourself in your analysis of literary texts. We shall now pursue
close readings of select passages of Paradise Lost together.

SAQ 3
What is Milton’s ‘Grand Style’, and how do its features emerge in
Paradise Lost?

SECTION 1: THE OPENING OF PARADISE LOST

Re-read Paradise Lost Book I, ll.1-26.

The first twenty-six lines of Paradise Lost serve three purposes: firstly,
they provide an invocation to the Muse; secondly, they outline the
story the poem as a whole will consider in much more detail; thirdly,
they outline the reasons behind the telling of that story.

Paradise Lost begins with an invocation of the ‘heavenly Muse’. As with

the other poems by Milton we have examined, this invocation of the
Muse raises certain problems about the speaking voice: who is
speaking in Paradise Lost? Are there multiple personae, as in Lycidas?
And does the poetic voice project a personal view, or does he (or she)
adopt a detached viewpoint from which to present the subject-matter?
Perhaps if we take Lewalski’s point, that Paradise Lost incorporates
numerous genres and styles, we can affirm John Leonard’s claim that
‘Paradise Lost is a poem peopled with strong presences and many
voices, each distinguished from the others, yet all distinctively Milton’s’
(1999: 138). Thus, where it seems that a different ‘voice’ is speaking,
it is yet another example of Milton’s skill and versatility.

We might, for instance, consider the opening lines to be spoken by a

divinity, thus lending the poem authority; yet their syntax frustrates a
sense that it is the Muse speaking. It is only in the sixth line that the
Muse is asked to sing, by which point the main features of the story
have already been outlined. Another voice, that of the poet, has
already voiced the scope of the poem that he apparently invokes the
Muse to help him compose.

In one sense, therefore, the opening lines seem to request that the
Muse assume authority over the poem while at the same time
displaying a certain assumption of authority by the poet himself; at a
later point, he simply asks the Muse to assist him in what he calls ‘my
adventurous song’. Later still, in l.16, the poet seems to congratulate
himself by envisaging the ambitious scope of his poem, which will
broach ‘Things unattempted yet in prose and rhyme.’ Does the
opening section of the poem pose a confusing challenge over who
exerts authority in the poem?

Perhaps this is related to the nature of the poet’s ambitions in relation

to important poetic precedents. The classical model invoked by calling
for the Muse’s aid and this might seem incongruous in a poem that
apparently aims to ‘justify’ the ways of one God – the Christian deity –
to men; yet here we have a mythological reference, belonging to a
world of many gods found in classical literature. What effect does this
have? Does this prompt us to think of the poet as a fully-rounded
‘modern’ man (in the seventeenth-century sense), as being both well-
educated (in knowing classical literature) and having a religious
sensibility shared by other men of his day? The self-assurance with
which he pursues the opening lines – regardless, it would seem, of the

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Muse’s help – perhaps suggests that he is sufficiently confident in his

beliefs to pursue his story about God’s relationship with man using his
own reason and talents. His gift as a poet, after all, is God-given.

Paradise Lost presents the story of the assumption of authority by the

human from the divine on several different paradigms: the fallen
angels’ challenge to God’s power, under their leader Satan, prefigures
Adam and Eve’s disobedience, which results in a similar fall from
another kind of paradise. The poet’s assumption of authority over the
poem perhaps offers yet another version of this pattern of the Fall.
Perhaps in acting out the pattern characterising the human condition –
one of overreaching authority followed by fall – the poet recreates the
Fall as much as tells its story. On the other hand, the assumption of
authority by the poet from the Muse can be seen as a deliberate act of
defiance and an assertion of man’s ability to fulfil his own destiny: the
performance that is Paradise Lost is a deliberate assertion of human
freedom to create.

The first twenty-six lines of Book I also outline the reasons motivating
the present composition,

That to the highth of this great argument

I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.
(Bk I, ll.24-26)

The no doubt familiar line,‘ And justify the ways of God to men’, holds
alternative meanings: on the one hand, it signifies ‘to bear witness
before men and women to the justice of God’s ways’; on the other, it
means ‘to bear witness to the justice of God’s ways towards men’. On
the first reading, the declared purpose is to teach humans about God’s
ways; on the second, the focus is narrowed and its role is proposed as
that of teaching, in particular, the justice of God’s actions towards
humans. What is implicit here is that an abyss of some kind exists
between humans and God, a separation of sufficient magnitude to
necessitate that God’s ways be justified: if there were no such gulf
between God and men, his ways would not require vindication. There
is also an implication here that God’s ways are not perceived as just,
or even that they are not just at all, and so must be shown to be just.

How does Paradise Lost exemplify the theme of loss in the light of
these opening lines, and is there any hope of renewal? In its opening,
Milton suggests that the poem explores the loss of a connection of
some kind between humans and God, and the loss of authority – be it
human or God’s, depending on the perspective adopted. These
opening lines might, nonetheless, prompt hope when we consider that
this pattern of broken trust has been played out before in several
Biblical stories; we have, for instance, come across the idea of the
flood in relation to different poems, and the idea it carries of God’s
forgiveness after having punished sinful man. The ultimate expression
of this forgiveness is also hinted in these opening lines in the figure of
the Son, who reminds us that the New Covenant replaces the old, with
the death and resurrection of Jesus as described in the New
Testament.

SAQ 4
Consider how Paradise Lost Book I, ll.1-26 conveys ideas of loss and
potential renewal.

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SECTION 2: THE FALL OF MAN

Re-read Paradise Lost, Book IX.

How might we summarise the main events of this Book?

Book IX narrates the events of the Fall and of the time immediately
after. It begins with an invocation of the Muse, followed by a
description of Satan’s entry into the Garden of Eden as a serpent. The
story then turns to the relationship between Adam and Eve: we are
told how, on setting out to work in the Garden, Eve persuaded Adam
that it would be best for them to work separately, as this would serve
God most productively. Alone, Eve is then tempted by Satan, who has
assumed the form of a serpent – an idea, as you will recall from your
reading of Genesis, which does not actually appear in the Biblical story
itself. Eve in turn tempts Adam, which incites a quarrel described in
the final paragraphs of the book. Book IX narrates how humanity first
encounters loss, when its parents (Adam and Eve) buckle under the
temptation to commit sin, and by doing so flout the divine authority
that allows them to remain in Paradise, which becomes forfeit for their
error.

Let us look first at the invocation of the Muse in the first few
paragraphs, from [Link] is one of four invocations of the Muse in
the poem (the others are Book I, ll.1-49; Book III, ll.1-55; Book VII,
ll.1-50). It differs from all the others, however, in that it avoids
directly addressing the Muse, who is only invoked in the third person
as ‘my celestial patroness’. Why does the poet adopt this indirect way
of speaking of the Muse here, and not elsewhere? We can argue that
Milton does not wish to address the Muse directly here because it is
here that the abyss is opened up between humans and God: this loss
of closeness is reflected in Milton’s decision to write indirectly about
the Muse, and not to present her as speaking at this point in the story,
or even as someone who can be spoken to.

This sense of a disconnect between man and God is affirmed by

Christopher Ricks, who argues that the most important words in the
opening lines of Book IX are ‘distance’ and ‘distaste’ in l.9. These
words act as a ‘clash of the cymbals’ at the end of a series of
alliterative words - ‘discourse’, ‘distrust’, ‘disloyal’, ‘disobedience’. Our
attention is thereby drawn to the significance that the theme of loss
holds in this section, and in the poem as a whole, through the
resonant terms that describe various features of such a severance
between God and man. Yet it is not God himself who is described as
‘alienated’, or who feels ‘distance and distaste’, but Heaven. What is
the effect of replacing a being we might conceive of in human terms,
God, with an abstract entity or space? By replacing the expected word,
‘God’, with ‘Heaven’ it introduces the notion of space and of physical
distance, as well as moral and spiritual distance: God is now physically
and spiritually distant from humans, an effect that will be reinforced by
man’s expulsion from the Garden.

Milton plays on the word ‘distance’ to increase further the sense of loss
of closeness with God. What are the variant meanings this word might
hold?

Activity:
Look up ‘distance’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

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As you can see from the dictionary entry, etymologically speaking

‘distance’ can mean ‘quarrel’ or ‘discord’, as well as ‘estrangement’:
what implications might this have for man’s relationship with God?
Perhaps it implies that humans are not only estranged from God, but
in discord with him.

Milton also puns on the word ‘distaste’, which reinforces the sense of
distance between God and his creations. This resonates with the
reference ‘taste’ that ripples throughout the poem; as Ricks notes, the
Fall is repeatedly described in terms of ‘tasting’ the apple, but this also
coheres with the idea that the physical tasting is a metaphorical one
too, a first taste of sinful knowledge, something that is both
tantalisingly desirable and yet prohibited.

The notion of ‘taste’ as referring to something one selects or chooses,

an expression of one’s personal desires, relates to this idea of man’s
assertion of his own individual will over God’s authority. That humans
are presented here as creatures of ‘taste’ while God is connected to
the word ‘distaste’ suggests that man is one who is tempted to sample
forbidden knowledge, whereas God is an unfallen being, one who does
not taste the apple of sin (Ricks 1963: 69-72).

These notions of fall, of a man’s fateful descent from a position of

favour by a deity, align Paradise Lost with themes and ideas found in
expressions of tragedy from classical writers onwards. It is worth
exploring these themes, as expressed in Book IX, a little more closely
here.

PARADISE LOST AS TRAGEDY

Book IX begins with the sorrowful reflection that there will be ‘No more
of talk where God or angel guest / With man’, and goes on to suggest
that the close talk enjoyed between God and humans must now
change to ‘tragic’ talk.

Milton originally conceived of Paradise Lost as a tragic drama. Seeing

the poem as a tragedy casts the poem in a very interesting light. The
nature of tragedy has been worked out in artistic works from the
earliest times onwards; the Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles
and Euripides, for instance, all treat mythological subjects in their
tragic plays that project certain common themes and ideas. Amongst
them is the notion that, in trying to rise above his station, one
commits an act of ‘hubris’ that offend the gods, and so incurs their
divine wrath and punishment. Also central to classical tragedy is the
idea of a man’s unavoidable fate: Oedipus, for instance, one of Greek
tragedy’s most familiar figures, cannot escape the horrible destiny that
the Three Sisters of Fate have spun out for him, an idea we
encountered in our discussion of Lycidas.

From this perspective, tragedy can be seen as involving the

destruction of an individual’s potential, an idea that emerges in Greek
and subsequent tragic drama. For instance, Shakespeare brings out
this theme numerous times in his tragedies, with Hamlet, Macbeth and
Othello variously showing how the essential flaws of their protagonists’
characters leads to their inevitable downfall, but that it is one made
even more terrible by the considerable potential each individual had
that must remain forever unfulfilled.

How might Paradise Lost be considered from the perspective of a

tragedy? From one angle, this involves raising the engaging question
of who the tragic hero of the poem might be. There are a number of
possible candidates: Adam and Eve certainly both qualify as tragic
heroes, as does, more disturbingly, Satan. This figure has excited a

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broad range of critical comment, with numerous critics engaging with

the (albeit misunderstood) suggestion that William Blake originally
made, that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it, through
analysing the apparently sympathetic treatment Satan receives in
Paradise Lost. John Carey lays out the critical debates surrounding this
figure, and proposes that whilst in one respect ‘Milton’s Satan’ is just
that – his own creation, and a projection of his psychology – he is also
a projection of our own readings (1999: 172). We should bear such
reservations in mind when thinking about what it means to have such
a supposedly attractive figure, as Satan is presented as being, in such
a poem as Paradise Lost.

The perhaps glamorous and appealing way in which Milton depicts this
character poses problems for the theology of a poem that apparently
celebrates the triumph of sin over evil, although Milton himself was
definitely not attempting to undermine religion in the poem; perhaps,
if Satan is presented in a sympathetic – even attractive – way, it is the
unwitting result of Milton’s skill as an eloquent poet. Furthermore, it is
possible that in falling for Satan’s alluring rhetoric the reader, in part,
simulates the Fall and so can more fully identify with the plight of
Adam and Eve: we suffer the loss and share the hope for salvation
with our first parents. Whether he was intentionally portrayed in this
way or not, the character of Satan certainly qualifies for assessment as
a tragic hero, which Book IX exemplifies in various ways. And after all,
as Lewalski points out, Milton both incorporates and parodies tragic
elements in his treatment of Satan: he is not unequivocally presented
as a tragic hero, but as one who has lost the right to behave in such a
straightforward way, and can now only ape the actions and fate of
tragic human heroes (1999: 120).

However, from one point of view, Satan can be seen as a possible

spokesman for humankind in this book, and in the poem as a whole:
he is a fallen creature, just as Adam and Eve are in this book. Satan
represents the fallen, and is their monarch; he does not only speak for
the angels who fell with him, but also for the fallen humans in the
poem. Besides his potentially representative role in this respect, Satan
is a complex character in his own right, revealed in such passages as
his response upon first seeing the Earth’s beauty: ‘from inward grief/
His bursting passion into pliants thus pour’d’, and goes on to address it
as though it were a sentient being:

O Earth, how like to heaven, if not preferred

More justly, seat worthier of the gods, as built
With second thoughts, reforming what was old!
(Bk IX, ll.99-101)

Satan can assume a dual perspective: his experience means that he

has first-hand knowledge of Heaven, and now he also beholds the
Earth. Yet while he grieves for his loss of Heaven, his devastation is
also the result of his inability ever to enjoy the pleasures of Earth. He
praises the home of humankind, perhaps again suggesting his ability
to act as man’s spokesman; indeed, he actually suggests that he finds
Earth even more wondrous than Heaven itself. He presents Heaven as
a test-run, a sample, for the truly great achievement that is the
creation of the Earth, the fruits of ‘second thoughts’. Milton’s
suggestion that this demonstrates creating even greater beauty by
‘reforming what was old’ is also, perhaps, a suggestion of his poetry’s
ability to surpass even revered models, as he creates anew by building
on the existing foundations of poetry.

Satan’s admiration for the Earth becomes even more impassioned as

he beholds the creatures that inhabit it, and is momentarily dazzled by
his first sight of Eve:

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Such pleasure took the serpent to behold

This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve
Thus early, thus alone; her heavenly form
Angelic, but more soft, and feminine,
Her graceful innocence, her every air
Of gesture or least action overawed
His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the evil one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed,
Of guile, of hate, of enmity, of revenge.
(Bk IX, ll.455-466)

Satan temporarily becomes ‘stupidly good’, so overpowering is the

vision of Eve, and he forgets all his hellish thoughts. In one respect,
this is because of ‘her heavenly form’, resembling as it does the
‘Angelic’ shape that Satan himself once owned; his amazement is
partly nostalgic as he recalls what he once had, and has now lost. Yet
it is not just Eve’s seeming divinity, but her humanity which attracts
Satan most powerfully: her ‘feminine’ qualities, characterised by
‘graceful innocence’, gestures and movements that identify her as a
human woman. Even lustful thoughts of ‘rapine’ vanish as Satan
beholds Eve’s pure ‘innocence’ and beauty. The structure of the final
sentence, ‘Of guile, of hate, of enmity, of revenge’, conveys a
simplicity akin to Satan’s ‘stupid’ amazement at this moment.

Does this suggest that Satan is not entirely evil? Perhaps such
moments show that he is a creature capable of noble and worthy
passions, and who can even cast aside evil and experience goodness.
The terrible ‘inward grief’ that he suffers for the bliss he has now
permanently lost presents him as a tragic figure, one subject to
conflicting passions and whose ‘fall’, although the result of his arrogant
presumptions in attempting to usurp God, may deserve pity when his
lost potential is considered.

The role of Satan in this book, and in the poem as a whole, also
prompts us to think about one way in which we might consider the role
that human beings themselves play in bringing about their Fall.
One important part of the relationship of trust that God established
with his first human creations was their ability to make their own
choices through their possession of Free Will. Not only this, but by
making the choices that led to their Fall it actually freed them to be
themselves, and allowed them greater liberty than they ever
experienced in paradise – just as Satan’s exile from heaven is a
perverse sort of freedom from God’s perceived tyranny.

This potential interpretation poses us with a direct contradiction to the

way the Fall story is conventionally read. Can we be justified in reading
the account of the Fall in Book IX like this? A partial justification for
such a reading can, perhaps, be gleaned from several different places
within this book. For one thing, Eve seems to hint at the possibility
that Eden is not the paradise it might seem to be, and even that it is a
false paradise and their happiness in the Garden is imperfect. She
says, in response to Adam’s warning to her about their enemies,

If this be our condition, thus to dwell

In narrow circuit straitened by a foe,
Subtle or violent, we not endued
Single with like defence, wherever met,
How are we happy, still in fear of harm?
(Bk IX, ll.322-26)

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Furthermore, she says:

Let us not then suspect our happy state

Left so imperfect by the maker wise,
As not secure to single or combined;
Frail is our happiness, if this be so,
And Eden were no Eden thus exposed.
(Bk IX, ll.337-41)

Given what happens later in the story, when Paradise is shown to

contain an enemy, Eve’s argument suggests that Eden is not a perfect
paradise, and perhaps that she and Adam would find greater
happiness if they did not inhabit it.

The fact that Adam and Eve have an argument in Eden perhaps also
indicates their unsuitability to living in the Garden, which in any case
reveals its imperfection by enabling such discord. Yet rather than
exposing the problems belonging to the place itself, the dispute
between Adam and Eve perhaps shows they have an innate capacity to
express themselves in ways other than those sanctioned by the rules
or conventions of the Garden; perhaps they have the potential within
themselves to be more than their life in the Garden permits them to
be. That potential emanates from their ability to reason, and belongs
to their possession of Free Will. This raises the vexed issue of how this
gift from God, who created man with the capacity to make his own
choices, meant that man would inevitably make the choices that would
lead to his expulsion from paradise. This suggests that the Fall was
inevitable, that it was a certain result of the way humans were
created.

In Book III of Paradise Lost the Fall is, in fact, foreseen, and Christ
volunteers to be humankind’s Redeemer: thus it seems that man’s
expulsion from Paradise was, in one sense, part of the divine plan for
God’s relationship with man. It was, almost, a ‘happy fault’ (in the
words of the Catholic Church’s liturgy) because, by entering mankind
into a life of sinfulness Adam and Eve also set in motion the
circumstances by which humanity might in future be saved. It is only
because man is sinful that Jesus comes to earth and establishes an
even stronger relationship between God and man through the New
Covenant of divine forgiveness.

Could we argue, therefore, that the Fall is the result of Adam and Eve
exercising the faculties they possess, their human potential? When
looked at from this point of view, could the Fall even be considered as
something of a triumph for God’s relationship with man? This idea is
perhaps reinforced when we consider the nature of what Adam and
Eve lose by their Fall: their innocence, and their place in the Garden of
Eden (as Book XII shows). The word ‘innocent’ derives from the Latin
in, meaning ‘not’ and nocens, present participle of the verb nocere, ‘to
hurt’: in the etymological sense, in losing their innocence Adam and
Eve realise their capacity to hurt someone or something, in this
instance God. Once again, Adam and Eve exercise an innate capacity
they possess, to inflict pain, so that the Fall becomes a moment where
human capacities are exercised.

On the other hand, their loss of innocence involves a loss of purity, of

naivety, that they can never again possess: ‘naivety’ derives from the
Latin natiuus, meaning ‘native’, and from natus, meaning ‘born’. In
this respect, although the loss of moral and bodily purity is a cause for
lament, it is also a birth into greater knowledge and self-awareness,
and so something of a gain. Does this suggest the combined forces of
loss and renewal? In losing Paradise, Adam and Eve also gain
something of themselves.

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How might the account of the fall of Eve, which runs from ll.664-833,
exemplify some of these ideas? Here, in her discourse with Satan, Eve
detects the nature of her present limitations and her potential to
transcend them. Satan promises Eve that she will become wise by
eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, and that she will also become as
a god if she eats the fruit. Satan implies that an essential quality of
godliness is knowledge; by gaining this, through eating the fruit, Eve
can acquire the kinds of knowledge which, he suggests, God
possesses. In his omniscience, God knows that

Ye eat thereof, your eyes that seem so clear,

Yet are but dim, shall perfectly be then
Opened and cleared, and ye shall be as gods,
Knowing both good and evil as they know.
...
So ye shall die perhaps, by putting off
Human, to put on gods, death to be wished,
Though threatened, which no worse can this bring.
(Bk IX, ll.706-709; 713-715)

It is the envy of God, Satan suggests, which has led to him forbidding
Eve from eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, and perhaps also his
fear. Satan thus presents Eve with the potential to be as God, to step
out from under the yoke that God has cast upon her and stand with
Him as an equal. Goaded by Satan’s words, Eve senses the presence
of this yoke and the limitation placed upon her that curtail her
potential, and comes to see God’s prohibition as preventing her from
exercising her human potential. Yet Satan also encourages her to
envisage how she might shake off such constraints, and so move
beyond her present limitations to a greater sense of self-fulfilment.
Her fall becomes, therefore, a moment where she decides to escape
her imprisonment and to realise her own potential as a human.

This reinforces the idea that the Fall is a realisation of the negative
human capacities to inflict hurt and to be selfish. This emerges in Eve’s
resolution to bring Adam with her in her fall by encouraging him to
commit the same sin as she contemplates:

but what if God have seen [her fall],

And death ensue? Then I shall be no more,
And Adam wedded to another Eve,
Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct;
A death to think. Confirmed then I resolve,
Adam shall share with me in bliss or woe:
So dear I love him, that with him all deaths
I could endure, without him live no life.
(Bk IX, ll.826-833)

Eve’s desire for greater knowledge, and her imminent fall, causes her
to realise the selfishness of which she is capable, a human capacity
that perhaps should never have taken shape. She is motivated by
jealousy, and a selfish desire to prevent Adam from enjoying the
pleasures of Paradise if she should be expelled from it through death –
and worse, to be ‘wedded to another Eve’.

How does this passage make us think about Eve, as the first woman?
Does it raise questions that touch upon one theme running throughout
Paradise Lost, the representation of gender? On the one hand, Eve is
presented as vain, trivial, and selfish; but while some critics have used
this as an argument to attack Milton as misogynistic, as Diane
McColley points out, much recent critical work has focussed not on
how Milton reinforces these stereotypes about women, but actually
breaks them (1999: 175). You might like to consider issues relating to

Unit 5: Loss and Renewal in John Milton’s Paradise Lost 5-19

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gender yourself in greater depth, in conjunction with suggestions for

further reading, and as we pursue our analysis of Paradise Lost.

After all, might this passage be read in a different way, which exempts
her from the charge of self-interest? When viewed from another point
of view, could Eve’s resolution to bring Adam with her be seen as a
resolution to enable him to exercise fully his individual potential as a
human being, as she has done? In this respect, Eve is not the
conniving temptress of Adam but his liberator, who enables him to
escape a limiting, constrained existence.

Nature is thrown into discord as Eve eats the fruit:

her rash hand in evil hour

Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate:
Earth felt the wound, and nature from her seat
Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.
(Bk IX, ll.780-784)

The sense of foreboding is intense, as the ‘evil hour’ darkens at the

moment Eve commits this sin, and her capacity to inflict pain adopts a
tangible force as she ‘wounds’ the hitherto beautiful and perfect earth,
and unseats nature with a terrible sense of permanent loss. This is
later echoed in the account given of Adam’s fall.

Why is Nature thrown into discord by the Fall? Let’s return to the word
‘naïve’, which we previously defined from one of its etymological
origins; there is, however, another root to this word, as ‘naive’ is the
French word for ‘natural’, naive being the feminine form of naif. In
falling, Adam and Eve become in some way unnatural: they become
creatures set apart from all others, and so disrupt the harmony of the
Earth’s created order. Adam and Eve become displaced from this
divinely-organised world, and no longer rightfully belong in it; as a
result, they must be cast out from Paradise and become wanderers in
a place that is forever alien to them.

Yet does this passage also suggest that Nature, for the first time,
recognises human power and agency? By responding to man’s sinful
act, the discordance and chaos of the natural order reflects a certain
sympathy between Nature and man that is based on fear and ‘woe’:
this establishes the basis of man’s subsequent relationship with the
earth and nature as one of reciprocal tension, as man both depends on
the earth for his sustenance, and the earth needs man to cultivate it,
but at the same time each can inflict injury on the other. The Fall
realises man’s difference from Nature and the possibility that he can
dominate it.

The story of Adam’s fall is recounted in the passage running from

ll.886-959 of Book IX. This fall is presaged in the relationship he has
with Eve, which he describes as characterised by a ‘vehemence of love’
that urges him to join her in tasting the fruit. Adam’s fear of losing
Eve, and his decision to join her permanently by tasting the fruit, is
perhaps a metaphor depicting the sexual union they enjoy as man and
wife: being united in this way, they recall Eve’s origin (born of Adam’s
flesh), to form a bond that can never be dissolved – this is, after all,
an idea that resurfaces in St. Paul’s letters in the New Testament,
where he describes man and wife as ‘one flesh’, and the bond of
marriage one that should never be dissolved. Here, Adam’s love for
Eve is perhaps both fleshly and spiritual: his desire is for her body, but
also for the mental anguish he feels when he contemplates losing her.
By committing a sinful act himself he cements his union with Eve –
and thereby realises his human potential to love – but also implicitly
severs, or at least damages his relationship with God.

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The motivation of love that compels Adam’s decision to follow Eve in

committing the same sin is presented as the most powerful force in
the universe; it overrides reason, and is even more powerful than any
sense of duty to God. How does this quite radical idea fit in the context
of a poem that purports to be about God’s power, and God’s love?
Does man’s love for another human being get in the way of his love for
the divine being? Perhaps, however, we might consider love as a gift
from God like that of Free Will; in expressing his love for Eve – even
though it involves a terrible action – does Adam exercise a God-given
capacity to love that implicitly expresses love for God himself?

How does this tension, characterising Adam’s dilemma and how he

resolves it, support our idea of the joint relation between loss and
renewal?

Perhaps, through the Fall, Adam and Eve gain each other in a way
they had never known before. The sexual intercourse they have after
the Fall perhaps confirms this, as this enables them to reproduce the
entire human race. In one sense, they themselves become creators,
on a smaller scale and pattern to God’s power of creation, by initiating
the productivity of all mankind. We find a tension between this image
of bountiful fertility, perhaps, in the sense that all subsequent
generations must bear the sin of their first parents as an eternal divine
curse. Yet, on the other hand, Adam and Eve’s error not only releases
human potential in all time to come, but also creates the conditions for
humanity that will bring about the greatest, ultimate expression of
God’s love for man, the sacrifice of his only Son.

SAQ 5
How does Book IX of Paradise Lost convey dual notions of loss and
renewal?

PARADISE LOST, BOOK XII: THE EXPULSION FROM

PARADISE
Re-read Book XII.

In Book XI the Archangel Michael, who was sent by God to lead Adam
and Eve out of the Garden, began to relate to Adam the future story of
the human race, which he continues to tell in the first part of Book XII.
Here, Michael relates stories that feature in the Old Testament, and
which would have been very familiar to Milton’s readers as examples of
man’s sinfulness, disobedience, pride and arrogance since the First
Sin, such as that of the Tower of Babel. Other stories, however, show
the potential for human beings to pursue a more fruitful and holy
relationship with God through good and noble acts; the story of
Abraham and the founding of the Tribes of Israel, and the story of
Moses all reflect man’s ability to love and serve God on earth.

Michael finally comes to the story of Christ, the ultimate expression of

God’s love for man. Adam and Eve find great consolation in this future
vision of man’s forgiveness and redemption, and in the hope that
mankind might live a fulfilling existence on earth. Michael then leads
them out of the Garden of Eden, but their expulsion from Paradise is
more a sorrowful departure than one filled with divine or human wrath,
and one tempered by their hope for their future and that of mankind
as they step forward, ‘hand in hand with wandering steps and slow’
(Book XII, l. 648), into this strange new world.

Unit 5: Loss and Renewal in John Milton’s Paradise Lost 5-21

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How might we analyse Michael’s conversation with Adam? His

prospective history of the human race seems to have three effects: it
teaches Adam about himself by reflecting aspects of his own story,
such as the error he committed in eating the fruit. This serves as a
lesson to Adam that, in future, he must exert his reason rather than
act on his emotions. The story of the Tower of Babel, meanwhile,
provokes Adam to a degree of thoughtfulness, as he questions Michael
about some issues the story seems to raise regarding authority, and
human beings’ desire to usurp authority or to assert more power than
they rightfully possess; Adam’s own sin, indeed, reflects such an
overreaching beyond the place God has appointed for him.

The didactic power of this story is reinforced as Michael goes on to

teach Adam the importance of using his reason, as exemplified in this
story and its parallels with Adam’s own error:

Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed,

Immediately inordinate desires
And upstart passions catch the government
From reason, and to servitude reduce
Man till then free.
(Bk XII, ll.86-90)

It was Adam’s suspension of reason which led him to fall and to his
expulsion from the Garden; although he can never revoke the sin he
has committed, he might nonetheless strive to conduct a good life in
the future by exercising his God-given capacity to use his reason.

Whilst teaching Adam, through an implied rebuke, this account of

human history also offers him consolation; Michael later reminds him
of the future hope that awaits man in Christ’s redemption, which
promises that humankind will ultimately be saved and reunited with
God. When the Archangel finishes his story, Adam confidently says
that:

Greatly instructed I will hence depart,

Greatly in peace of thought, and have my fill
Of knowledge, what this vessel can contain;
Beyond which was my folly to aspire.
Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best,
And love with fear the only God, to walk
As in his presence, ever to observe
His providence, and on him sole depend,
...
that suffering for truth’s sake
Is fortitude to highest victory,
And to the faithful death the gate of life;
Taught this by his example whom I now
Acknowledge my redeemer ever blest.
(Bk XII ll.557-564; 569-573)

Adam’s speech reveals several significant points about how he

assesses his own action, the sin of eating the fruit, and how he
recognises that perceiving its error can act as a warning that will
shape his future actions. He realises that his desire for ‘knowledge’
surpassed his capacity to accept it: like a ‘vessel’ he can only hold so
much substance, which God in his divine wisdom knew, and which
brought him to impose restrictions on how much knowledge man
might have. In striving to surpass this limit Adam not only incurred
God’s displeasure but also went beyond his own personal capacity. He
sought an authority that came from himself alone, and by neglecting
his duty towards God was led to commit an act of ‘folly’ whose dire
consequences he can only vaguely realise as yet.

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However, this terrible disobedience, and wrongful confidence about his

own capacities, instils more sober and peaceful ‘thought’, which
teaches Adam that the happiest life is one pursued in ‘fear’ of God (in
the Biblical sense of awe-inspired love, rather than terror), and
obedience to his laws, which Adam must nonetheless follow by
exerting his own reason in each act of his future life. As such, he can
accept his fault and look forward with hope to regaining the love of
God – one which, however, has never disappeared but which Adam
himself compromised through his sin, and which will be expressed by
the ‘redeemer ever blest’, Christ, in time to come.

Whilst man’s ability to act independently in exerting his reason and

Free Will seem to be inherent in the story of future generations, might
we also see human beings merely as acting their part in a divine plan?
Everything is inevitable and is foreseen, from the Fall to Christ’s
redemption of humankind. Does God even mock men, his playthings?
When Michael tells the story of the Tower of Babel, he tells Adam that
‘great laughter was in heaven’ upon ‘looking down, to see the hubbub
strange / And hear the din’ (Book XII, ll.59-61). Does Adam’s speech,
redolent as it is with hope for his human capacities, actually suggest
an eternal submission of Adam’s will to God’s that destroys man’s
personal potential?

We must, however, hold such potential readings with a certain

suspicion in the context of Milton’s poem: as we found with the
potentially attractive figure of Satan, the implied critique of these
theological conundrums is a reading that we as readers impose on the
text. How far can we say that Milton wants us to perceive such
potential holes in the justification of God’s ways that the poem
promises? It is, of course, impossible to determine this; and while this
does not mean we cannot legitimately query the text, and the ideas it
proposes, we should always remember that Paradise Lost is a work
produced at a particular time – when religion was a part of everyone’s
lives – by an author who, we know from elsewhere, holds certain
views that support the theological arguments his poem proposes.

After all, Paradise Lost ends with a moment of hope and a sense of
opportunity that confirms the argument repeatedly made throughout
the poem, that the despair facing sinful man will ultimately be
redeemed by Christ, and that in the meantime he might pursue a
fruitful existence on earth. As Adam and Eve leave the Garden,

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;

The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
(Bk XII, ll.645-649)

‘Eden’ here does not refer to Paradise but to the surrounding

countryside, the as-yet unknown landscape that, although ‘solitary’,
Adam and Eve must now explore as though they were lonely
adventurers. Perhaps they are even fortunate to leave Paradise: it
opens for them a wealth of opportunity they might not otherwise have
had.

The strange new world they face, and explore with ‘wandering steps
and slow’, is a land of choice: hard choices, perhaps, and without the
luxuries and pleasures of paradise, but nonetheless a space in which
they can exercise their individual potential as human beings. At the
same time, we must remember that, as Michael’s relation shows, the
future history of humankind has already been mapped out: how far is
human choice eventually limited by this awareness of God’s plan?

Unit 5: Loss and Renewal in John Milton’s Paradise Lost 5-23

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The theological debates surrounding Free Will, and its potential conflict
with the divine plan, are as we have noted implicit in the ideas Milton
raises, which he does not necessarily challenge as such; it is, rather,
left for us to question these aspects of the text and the ideas it
presents. Perhaps we should instead consider Paradise Lost as a
tragedy about loss – the expulsion from the Garden, the loss of God’s
trust, and perhaps of human choice – but also consider this idea in
tandem with the more optimistic vision of man’s potential – which can
be realised in conjunction with God’s will, rather than in opposition to
it. While man is cast out in the wilderness, our awareness that there is
a divine plan is perhaps a consolation, reassuring us that no matter
what our sufferings God watches over and cares for us, a message
which is ultimately confirmed by Christ’s redemption of man’s sins.

SAQ 6
How might we detect themes of loss and renewal in Book XII of
Paradise Lost?

OTHER ASPECTS OF PARADISE LOST

Our treatment of Paradise Lost has focussed on several key passages,
which have allowed us to address questions both specific to those
passages and related to the text as a whole. As you look back upon
this Unit, and review the entire poem itself, you might like to think
about a range of questions that the text raises, which we have not
addressed in detail here. For example,

How are women portrayed in Paradise Lost, and how does their
portrayal prompt us to think about the representation of gender in this
poem, and at this time?

How is God portrayed in the poem, and what effect does this have on
the theological issues with which Paradise Lost deals?

Is this partly complicated by the portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost?

Can Paradise Lost be seen as reflective of aspects of seventeenth-

century history, and in what way?

In relation to the last question, for instance, you might like to look in
closer detail at the council of the fallen angels in the early books of the
poem, and ask yourself how far this might offer an allegory for the
parliamentary debates that, as we know from previous units, were
raging at this time.

REVIEW
In Unit 2 we addressed the themes of loss and renewal in examples of
Milton’s early poetry; in this unit, we have thought about ways in
which these themes might have endured in Milton’s later poem,
Paradise Lost, but also ways in which they may have changed to fit the
subject-matter of the poem. We have considered various theoretical
perspectives that we might adopt in approaching the poem, and have
addressed issues relating to Milton’s style that elucidate our
understanding of it. We have applied these skills to analysing several
key passages in the poem, addressing both discrete details and the
wider questions they raise about Paradise Lost as a whole, and the
ideas it presents. In the next unit we shall be addressing John
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which like Milton’s presents a theological

5-24 Literature 3
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argument about man’s relationship with God; but, as we shall see,

both form and content are very different to those of Paradise Lost.

ADDITIONAL READING
Benet, Diana Treviño. 2005. ‘Adam's Evil Conscience and Satan’s
Surrogate Fall’, Milton Quarterly, 39.1: 2-15 (Available on
Academic Search Complete)

Benet, Diana Trevino, and Michael Lieb (eds). 1994. Literary Milton:
Text, Pretext, Context (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press)

Blessington, Francis C. 1997. Paradise Lost and the Classical Epic

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul) (Parts available online via
Google Books)

Corns, Thomas N. 2001. A Companion to Milton (Oxford: Blackwell)

(Parts available via Google Books)

Erickson, Lee. 1997. ‘Satan's Apostles and the Nature of Faith in

Paradise Lost Book I’, Studies in Philology, 94.3: 382-394
(Available on JSTOR)

Revard, Stella P. 1973. ‘Eve and the Doctrine of Responsibility in

Paradise Lost’, PMLA, 88.1: 69-78 (Available on JSTOR)

Shullenberger, William. 1986. ‘Wrestling with the Angel: Paradise Lost

and Feminist Criticism’, Milton Quarterly, 20: 69-85

Stanwood, P. G. (ed.). 1995. Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on

Milton and His World (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance
Texts and Studies)

Webber, Joan Malory. 1980. ‘The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and

Paradise Loss’, Milton Studies, 14: 3-24

Wittreich, Joseph. 1987. Feminist Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press)

REFERENCES
Carey, John. 1999. ‘Milton’s Satan’, in Dennis Danielson (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), pp. 160-79

Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. 1999. ‘The Genres of Paradise Lost’, in

Dennis Danielson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Milton,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 113-129

Leonard, John. 1999. ‘Language and Knowledge in Paradise Lost’, in

Dennis Danielson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Milton
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 130-43

Lewis, C. S. 1960. A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford University Press:

London)

McColley, Diane K. 1999 ‘Milton and the Sexes’, in Dennis Danielson

(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Milton (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), pp. 175-92

Potter, Lois. 1986. A Preface to Milton, rev. edn (Longman: Harlow)

Unit 5: Loss and Renewal in John Milton’s Paradise Lost 5-25

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Ricks, Christopher. 1963. Milton’s Grand Style (Clarendon Press:

Oxford)

Stocker, Margarita. 1988. Paradise Lost: An Introduction to the Variety

of Criticism (Macmillan: London and Basingstoke)

INTERNET RESOURCES

A recording of Paradise Lost, organised by the School of English at

Trinity College Dublin, is available online:
[Link] [24 April
2013]

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ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
Q. What is an epic, and how might we describe Paradise Lost as an
‘epic poem’?

According to C. S. Lewis, there are two kinds of ‘epic’, ‘Primary’ and

‘Secondary’: the first kind refers to poems belonging to the oral
tradition of story-telling, which is ‘ritualistic’, and involves using catch-
phrases, repetition and recurring structural patterns that keep the
listener’s attention and help him or her to remember the story and its
characters. Examples include Beowulf and Homer’s Greek poems. The
second type of epic is more abstract, without the same ritualistic
quality, and is written down by an author who intends his audience to
read it. Alongside examples such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Paradise Lost
might be considered a ‘Secondary Epic’ because it is written down,
composed by a learned author for a literate audience. Yet arguably it
also blends qualities of the Primary Epic, with its recurrent phrases
and the lulling rhythm of its verse. All epics present great figures who
endure trials and are in some sense heroic, a theme which Paradise
Lost exemplifies in numerous respects, such as through the
challenging figure of Satan.

SAQ 2
Q. What is distinctive about the structure of Paradise Lost, and how
might this assist our reading of the poem?

The structure of Paradise Lost is, in some senses, not unique: like
examples of epics such as Virgil’s Aeneid, it is divided into twelve
books, each of which deals with a different aspect of the poem’s story.
Yet each book of Milton’s poem is also prefaced by an ‘Argument’
which outlines the principal events of each book, and conveys a sense
of some of the key ideas it will explore. This helps us as readers to
grasp how the poem’s various parts fit together, while our attention is
kept by the ‘cliff-hanger’ effect of finishing one book, then beginning
the next to find out the next stage of the story.

SAQ 3
Q. What is Milton’s ‘Grand Style’, and how do its features emerge in
Paradise Lost?

Christopher Ricks describes Milton’s ‘Grand Style’ as central to the epic

mode in which Paradise Lost is written. This treats high and lofty
subject-matter in an appropriately elevated fashion. Ricks identifies
several features of the Grand Style as evident in Paradise Lost. These
include Milton’s use of rhythm and music, syntax, metaphor and word-
play. Milton manipulates both the types of words he uses, the way in
which he organises them (the syntax), and the effects created by the
rhythm and metre of his poetic form to reinforce the images and ideas
that he incorporates into his poem at different points.

Unit 5: Loss and Renewal in John Milton’s Paradise Lost 5-27

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SAQ 4
Q. Consider how Paradise Lost Book I, ll.1-26 conveys ideas of loss
and potential renewal.

The purpose of Paradise Lost, as outlined in the first twenty-six lines

of Book I, can be seen to declare that the poem is concerned with
loss. The purpose of the poem, we are told, is to `justify the ways of
God to men’. This seems to indicate, firstly, the loss of a connection
between God and humankind. If such a connection existed, and God
and humankind were in any way close, God’s ways would not need
justification. Secondly, the purpose of the poem seems to point
towards a recognition of the loss of human authority. God, perhaps
the implication is, will act towards humans anyway. Perhaps, the
purpose of the poem seems to imply, the only possible response to
those actions is to seek to justify them. Thus human authority over
human lives can be seen to be recognised as lost, and divine
authority recognised as most significant. Nonetheless, the poem
seems to promise even from the outset that there is hope for
mankind, in the ultimate redemption of Christ’s sacrifice, which re-
establishes the renewal of man’s relationship with God.

SAQ 5
Q. How does Book IX of Paradise Lost convey dual notions of loss and
renewal?

Book IX of Paradise Lost narrates the story of the entry of loss into
human life: the book tells the story of the Fall. Loss appears as a
concern in the very form of the opening of Book IX. The book begins
with an invocation of the Muse, though crucially that invocation differs
from others in Paradise Lost in that it does not address the Muse
directly. The Muse is not addressed directly in this part of the poem
because Milton wishes to suggest that the spheres of the divine and
the human have been separated from one another and all connection
between them lost. Book IX can also be seen to be concerned with loss
in its representation of the complexity of the figure of Satan. Satan
seems to be presented here as a tragic figure, torn by `inward grief’,
mourning his loss. This representation prompts us, perhaps, to
consider Satan’s loss and the loss of Adam and Eve to come.

However, this part of the poem also concerns itself with that which
appears to be loss but which is, in fact, triumph, and so proffers the
hope of renewal even in the face of devastation. The loss of Paradise,
for instance, we can argue is presented in this part of Paradise Lost as
something of a triumph for humankind. Firstly, Eden is spoken of by
Eve at least as a false paradise, where the happiness of the humans
who live there is incomplete. Secondly, the Fall can be seen as an
acting out of human potential, as a mark of Adam and Eve’s growing
up, and as an act whereby they assume some authority over their own
lives, transcending the limitations placed by God on them. This
triumph is dressed up as loss: Paradise Lost can be seen to expose the
victory beneath the dressing.

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SAQ 6
Q. How might we detect themes of loss and renewal in Book XII of
Paradise Lost?

Book XII tells the story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the
Garden of Eden. In this sense, the book is concerned with the loss of
Paradise. However (as we have seen already), that loss can be seen as
the dressing over a triumph, for the Fall can be seen as a magnificent
moment of assertion for humankind. The Archangel Michael’s history of
the human race seems to indicate further that the Fall is certainly not
a defeat for humanity, for the story shows that humankind will actually
be redeemed by Christ and so that the Fall is not the final defeat it
seems. Consoled by this story, Adam and Eve leave Paradise with a
world of opportunity before them. The poem seems to end not on a
note of loss, but of gain: Adam and Eve, by the end of the poem, seem
through their fall to have gained the power to choose. At the same
time, however, Michael’s story can be also seen to have indicated that
the power of choice Adam and Eve seem to have gained is precisely
that, only a seeming power, for, as his story indicates, the path of
human history has already been set out and cannot be altered.
Paradise Lost thus partly ends on an ambiguous note: man’s incipient
freedom is at the same time tempered by our awareness of the divine
plan that has already predestined his future. For Milton, a Christian
writer, we may perhaps see that this message is nonetheless one of
ultimate salvation: we can be reassured that, in the despair and
uncertainty of being cast out into the wilderness, God is aware of our
suffering and watches over us. This is ultimately confirmed in the
knowledge of Christ’s sacrifice for the redemption of mankind’s sins.

Unit 5: Loss and Renewal in John Milton’s Paradise Lost 5-29

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UNIT 6

JOHN BUNYAN'S THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS: AN

ALLEGORY OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

AIMS
The aims of this unit are to introduce John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s
Progress and to consider how it compares or contrasts to other texts
studied in this module in reflecting the historical context of its
production.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Summarise the plot of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Outline key aspects of Bunyan’s life and writings, and identify how
this might contribute to a reading of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Define ‘allegory’, and identify ways in which The Pilgrim’s Progress is

an allegorical test.

Identify ways in which the book differs from other kinds of

allegorical writing.

Identify different meanings of ‘progress’ and how these might

elucidate alternative ways of reading the story.

Outline Bunyan’s attempts to solve various theological difficulties in

The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Think about ways in which The Pilgrim’s Progress is a product of its

historical context, and how it compares to other texts studied so far
in reflecting this context.

REQUIRED READING
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part 1 (1678)

All quotations in this unit are taken from John Bunyan. 2008. Roger
Pooley (ed.), The Pilgrim’s Progress,Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth:
Penguin), which features an introduction and notes by Pooley.

Many reasonably priced and relatively reliable editions of this work are
readily available, such as the Oxford World’s Classics edition – W. R.
Owens (ed.). 2008. The Pilgrim’s Progress (Oxford University Press),
and there are extracts in Stephen Greenblatt (ed.). 2012. The Norton
Anthology of English Literature, 9th edn (New York: W. W. Norton).

INTRODUCTION
In this Unit we look at an example of late-seventeenth-century prose,
John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. The text was published in two
parts, Part I in 1678 and Part II in 1684. We shall be discussing Part I
only, but you might like to read Part II to get a fuller sense of how the
text coheres as a whole.

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We shall approach The Pilgrim’s Progress from several different angles,

which collectively allow us to address the objectives outlined for this
unit. We will adopt the ‘biographical’ approach that, as we have found
from previous units, goes some way to providing us with an idea of
who a writer was and his possible motivations for producing a
particular work. This may also help us to understand more fully the
context in which the work was produced, in terms of the social,
religious or political background behind a work, and allow us to address
how the text we are studying fits into this bigger picture.

We shall also approach The Pilgrim’s Progress from a generic, and

structural, angle: by considering the nature of allegory, and its
potential function, we can address why Bunyan chose to write his prose
text in this way, and the possible effects that presenting the story as
an allegory might have on its readers. We shall compare and contrast
Bunyan’s text to other allegorical stories, revealing both the similarities
and the differences between them. We shall address this through a
brief consideration of Bunyan’s preface to The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Finally, we will situate this text in relation to the religious framework in

which it seems to belong by considering some of the doctrinal
difficulties that seem to be raised by The Pilgrim’s Progress and, in a
consideration of one episode from the text, how Bunyan attempts to
solve those difficulties.

THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF JOHN BUNYAN (1628-

1688)
What might we learn about John Bunyan, his life, and his works, and
how might this inform our reading of The Pilgrim’s Progress?

Activity:
To get a full account of Bunyan’s biographical history, consult the entry
for ‘John Bunyan’ in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

We can summarise some of the main points from the biographical

account provided in the Dictionary here to elucidate our understanding
of how life and work might fit together in the case of this writer.

For instance, we know that he was the son of a tinsmith, and was
expected to follow in his father’s footsteps by becoming a tradesman.
We also know that, in 1644 at the age of sixteen, he was drafted into
the Parliamentary forces to fight the Royalists and was stationed at
Newport Pagnell, although little else is known of his military activities,
except that he left the army in 1647. What might this early history tell
us about Bunyan, as regards his participation in national events that,
as we have found in previous units, had a significant impact on literary
activity at this time?

Perhaps more important to understanding Bunyan’s life and work,

however, is the religious context in which he produced his major
writings, in which life and work seem to intertwine inseparably. It is
thought that in 1648 Bunyan suffered a serious religious crisis which
affected him deeply and set him on the road to conversion. His book,
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), written sometime in
the 1650s, is a spiritual autobiography which details events in
Bunyan’s spiritual life from his leaving the army and his return home in
1647 to the year 1655.

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In 1655 Bunyan moved to Bedford where he joined a Nonconformist,

Puritan religious group. The group he joined were radical millenarians,
and Bunyan shared in their millenarianism. What do these terms mean,
and what are the beliefs of these groups? How might this provide one
aspect of the background to Bunyan’s motivation in writing The
Pilgrim’s Progress?

Activity:
Look up the terms ‘Nonconformist’, ‘Puritan’ and ‘millenarian’ in the
Oxford English Dictionary.

As the brief definitions provided by these Dictionary entries show, in

joining this group Bunyan espoused a set of religious beliefs that
sought to overcome the perceived shortcomings of the Protestant
Church in its current state; aspects of church practice that were
deemed frivolous or distracting, such as music or decoration of the
church building, were seen as perverting the true message of scripture.
The Puritans sought to re-establish the ‘Purity’ of the Gospel texts by
dispensing with all these distractions to achieve a closer affinity with
the word of God. Puritans, however, did not necessarily break away
from the established Church completely: instead, they sought to
reform it, with groups such as ‘Nonconformists’ adhering to the
Church’s doctrine but disagreeing with the ways in which it practised
that doctrine, through ceremony and worship.

The ‘millenarians’ were, in the early seventeenth century, a group

within the Christian Church who believed in the imminent return of
Christ, the ‘Second Coming’ which he had promised when he left his
disciples on earth, and which they envisaged as lasting for a thousand
years. By the latter part of the seventeenth century, and after the
controversial Act of Uniformity of 1662, ‘millenarian’ came to denote
those who broke away from and refused to conform to the Church –
and may be described as ‘Protestant Dissenters’ – yet who still believed
in the principal doctrines it promoted.

Enthused by the religious ideas that he espoused in joining this group,

Bunyan began preaching; such was his vehemence and persuasiveness
that he became well-known, even in London. For Nonconformists like
Bunyan, preaching was seen as a principal means for salvation: it was
a means of doing the Lord’s work by fighting the enemies of the Lord in
the open.

Although Puritans had been politically and religiously supreme in

England from, approximately, 1650 to 1660, with the Restoration of
the monarchy England became quite a different place in many
respects, both socially, politically, and in the religious sphere: Puritans
were persecuted, denied participation in the Church of England and
refused rights of free religious worship. It was not until 1689 that
Puritans gained the right to practice their beliefs freely – and it was not
until 1829 that ‘Nonconformists’ could run for Parliament in England.

Given the climate of persecution in 1660, it is no surprise that Bunyan

was arrested for preaching, and that, in 1661, he was imprisoned for
twelve years. The authorities in the recently-restored regime and
church construed Bunyan’s preaching as dangerous: it was seen as
prompting discontent, although it may not have deliberately incited
rebellion. Grace Abounding, as well as a number of other books like
The Holy City, were written in the early part of Bunyan’s period in
prison; he began to write The Pilgrim’s Progress in the later phase of
his imprisonment.

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How might we situate Bunyan’s writings in relation to other works

published in this period? As you will recall from previous units, John
Milton published three major works – Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise
Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671) – at around this time;
however, these are very different both in literary style and content to
Bunyan’s writings. We shall examine some of the differences between
Milton’s work and Bunyan’s at a later point in this unit, but for now it is
important to bear in mind that some aspects of the historical
background to The Pilgrim’s Progress were partly responsible for
producing a work very different to those of contemporaries such as
Milton.

Bunyan was released from prison in 1672 but was imprisoned again in
1676. It was during this second period in prison, a period of about six
months, that he may have finished the first part of The Pilgrim’s
Progress, first published in 1678; Bunyan later added a second part,
and the two-part work was published in 1684. In 1680 he published
another important work, The Life and Death of Mr Badman, and in
1682 a book called The Holy War. Bunyan died in August 1688.

The Pilgrim’s Progress was, and continues to be, astonishingly

successful: almost every home in England could count Bunyan’s book
among even the most meagre library, alongside the Bible, and even
those with very low levels of literacy would probably have been familiar
with it. As N. H. Keeble suggests, the availability of Bunyan’s book –
both in cheaply printed formats, and in the accessibility of its prose to
contemporary audiences – participated in the Puritan vision of
educating as many people as possible through such printed texts. As
Keeble states,

Puritan writers were especially anxious to reach the socially

disadvantaged and marginalised who had never before been supposed
capable of literary engagement. They addressed their texts to the
‘vulgar’, that is, the mass of the common people. For this market,
Bunyan’s publications were all cheaply produced and sold at the lowest
prices. (2010: 14)

We shall address further some of the ways in which The Pilgrim’s

Progress might appeal to a broad readership, and how it fits into the
literary, religious and social landscape of late seventeenth-century
England, as we consider in detail both the content and form of
Bunyan’s book. We might end this section by reflecting on an
observation that Keeble makes, which reminds us that Bunyan was a
writer whose work was produced within a particular, and particularly
turbulent, phase in England’s history:

His early literary career coincided with, and was shaped by, the
unprecedented increase in press activity associated with the
gathering momentum of the English Revolution. The political and
religious tensions of the first half of the century were
accompanied by, and articulated through, a proliferating press
whose annual output rose from 625 titles in 1639 to 848 in 1640,
over 2,000 in 1641 and over 3,666 in 1642, thereafter to continue
at between one and two thousand annually until the Restoration.
(2010: 13)

Activity:
Read John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I.

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THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS AND ALLEGORY

One important way of approaching the nature of The Pilgrim’s Progress
as a text (its form, structure and content), what it aims to achieve, and
how it relates to other works of this period is to address the literary
mode in which it is written.

What, in your initial reading of The Pilgrim’s Progress, strikes you as

particularly unusual or interesting in view of the other texts that you
have studied so far in this module? Are there similarities or differences,
what are these, and how might they contribute to the ways in which
we interpret Bunyan’s text?

We have already observed that The Pilgrim’s Progress and Milton’s

Paradise Lost were written at around the same time; in your own
reading of both texts, however, you might have discovered them to be
radically different either from each other or from any of the other texts
studied in this module so far. What might these differences stem from?

Part of the singularity of The Pilgrim’s Progress, in terms of its literary

context, is determined by its formal qualities: clearly it does not
present its narrative in poetic form, as Milton does, nor does it evolve
its ideas in a more condensed fashion, such as the shorter poems we
have addressed so far do.

The Pilgrim’s Progress is written in prose, but how does this compare
to the kind of prose writing Milton uses in Areopagitica? Whereas the
latter took a real-life, current event from the immediate contemporary
world of politics, Bunyan’s text instead presents a story, what might
even be thought of as a fictional narrative. In one sense, perhaps both
Bunyan and Milton’s prose texts could be said to advance an argument,
as do The Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost: but the nature of those
arguments, and the way in which they are conveyed, are strikingly
different.

Whereas in Paradise Lost Milton outlines his project at the beginning of

Book I of the poem, his ‘great Argument’ whereby he seeks to ‘justify
the ways of God to men’ (Bk I, 22-26), what sort of ‘Argument’ does
The Pilgrim’s Progress advance, and how does it achieve this? Whereas
Paradise Lost invokes the heavenly Muse to inspire his poetic song,
Bunyan’s text adopts an altogether different format, perhaps equally
inspired, but also perhaps with less conscious use of literary artifice
and, even, skill, in the sense of ‘learning’.

The Pilgrim’s Progress is, we could say, a less ‘literary’ piece in the
poetic or highly-crafted sense, without the frameworks of classical
poetry or mythology that support Milton’s presentation of his
theological theme. Instead, Bunyan’s text adopts the format that
perhaps characterises Jesus’s didactic method in the New Testament,
the parable, using a story to exemplify a theological concept and to
teach the listener about its truth. In Bunyan’s case, his experiences as
a preacher would have led him to provide comparable ‘illustrations’ (as
in easily conceivable metaphors, to which his audience could relate) to
convey the sermon’s particular lesson.

So, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan adopts a broadly metaphorical

framework which, by refracting the theological arguments he makes
through a story-telling format, he can bring his readers to identify with
it more closely, and so to follow the lesson it imparts. This rescues
Bunyan from the potential accusation that, as a Puritan Protestant, he
eschews all obfuscations on the path to God’s word, and instead seeks
the plain truth of Scripture; as Roger Pooley argues, by the time that
Bunyan writes Protestant allegory had become a means to discovering
the literal truth of the Bible (2010: 82-4).

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The specific name given to this literary format is allegory. Look up this
term in the Oxford English Dictionary; here, we get several variant
definitions, including:

Description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of

aptly suggestive resemblance. (OED)

and

An instance of such description; a figurative sentence, discourse,

or narrative, in which properties and circumstances attributed to
the apparent subject really refer to the subject they are meant to
suggest; an extended or continued metaphor. (OED)

As M.H. Abrams further explains,

an allegory is a narrative in which the agents and action, and

sometimes the setting as well, are contrived both to make coherent
sense on the ‘literal’ or primary level of signification, and also to signify
a second, correlated order of agents, concepts, and events
(1981: 4)
An allegory is a type of narrative which functions on two levels, both
literally – the narrative means what it seems to mean ‘on the surface’
and figuratively – the literal narrative can be seen to represent
something else.

According to Abrams there are two main types of allegory: the

historical or political allegory, and the allegory of ideas. Abrams
describes the historical or political allegory as that ‘in which the
characters and actions that are signified literally in turn signify, or
‘allegorize’, historical personages and events’ (1981: 4). The allegory
of ideas, on the other hand, is that ‘in which the literal characters
represent abstract concepts and the plot serves to communicate a
doctrine or thesis’ (Abrams 1981: 4).

What is the function of allegory? It can have two possible uses, either
to clarify and simplify complex ideas, or to make abstract ideas, or
experiences which are mysterious or extraordinary, more immediate
for the reader.

How might we apply these definitions of allegory to Bunyan’s book? It

is clear from even a cursory reading of The Pilgrim’s Progress that it is
an allegorical text; on the one hand, when read literally, it tells the
story of the journeys pursued by a man called Christian. On the other
hand, read figuratively, this journey represents something else, namely
Christian’s spiritual journey, which reaches its conclusion in salvation.

Almost any passage from the text illustrates that The Pilgrim’s Progress
is an allegory. This is conveyed in the very presentation of the
narrative not as a single story, but as several stories interweaved, as
we shall go on to discover in greater detail: Christian’s journey is
experienced as a dream which a narrator relays to us, the readers. As
Roger Pooley suggests, this dream-like quality is essential to the dual
reality and surrealism that an allegory can possess: The Pilgrim’s
Progress’ narrative is ‘not strictly a dream, but the “similitude” of a
dream’ (2010: 80).

As Pooley argues, ‘the relationship between dreams and reality, not to

mention the relationship between truth and fiction’ is one that Bunyan
is both ‘defensive’ about and exploits: he does not present his
narrative as having really happened, and ‘the criteria of truth, or of
realism’, is therefore suspicious (2010: 80). This, however, is not the
result of deception on his part, but is essential to the way in which

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allegory functions in the text. It is the simultaneous reality and

fictionality of Bunyan’s characters – their recognisability as something
familiar to us, yet awareness that they are not ‘real’ – that makes their
applicability to our features of our own lives more obvious, and the
mysterious theological truths they represent easier to grasp.

Early in the book, for instance, Christian meets two characters,

Timorous and Mistrust:

Now when he was got up to the top of the hill, there came two
men running against him amain; the name of the one was
Timorous, and the name of the other Mistrust. To whom Christian
said, Sirs, what’s the matter you run the wrong way? Timorous
answered that they were going to the city of Zion, and had got up
that Difficult place; but, said he, the further we go, the more
danger we meet with, wherefore we turned, and are going back
again.

Yes, said Mistrust, for just before us lies a couple of lions in the
way (whether sleeping or waking we know not) and we could not
think, if we came within reach but they would presently pull us in
pieces.
(Bunyan 2008: 48)

How does allegory function in this passage? On the one hand, it

literally offers the simple account of an encounter between three
people on a road in a certain location. However, the names of these
characters alert us to their non-specific, universal function: they are
types, representatives of certain archetypal qualities – comparable
perhaps to those we encountered in Areopagitica – whose role in this
narrative situation is to teach us something about the universal human
condition we all share.

Here, Christian faces temptation: he is incited to be timorous and not

face the journey ahead, and to be doubtful and not trust that God will
take care of the struggling believer. Through these allegorical figures
we perceive Christian’s temptation, but also that the paradigm applies
to our own lives, and so we learn to avoid the pitfalls of fear and
mistrust in our conduct.

SAQ 1
Define allegory and suggest how The Pilgrim’s Progress can be seen as
an allegorical text.

Is allegory used by other writers at this time, and if so how does

Bunyan’s use of it compare to his contemporaries?

To deal with the second question first, we saw in a previous unit that
Milton uses allegory in both ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, which
although they are non-allegorical texts nonetheless personify abstract
entities who then go on to perform some brief, allegorical action in the
poem. ‘L’Allegro’, for instance, begins by personifying Melancholy,
which treats an abstract being as though it were a human so as to
elaborate the poetic theme Milton develops in his piece. Similarly,
although Paradise Lost is largely a non-allegorical work, Milton uses
allegory in Book II to speak of Satan’s encounter with his daughter,
Sin, and the son they have incestuously produced together, Death.
Milton describes Sin, like her son, as ‘a formidable shape’, and relates
of her how:

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one seem’d Woman to the waist, and fair,

But ended foul in many a scaly fold
Voluminous and vast, a Serpent arm’d
With mortal sting: about her middle round
A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark’d
With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung
A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturb’d their noise, into her womb,
And kennel there, yet there still bark’d and howl’d
Within unseen.
(Bk II, ll.650-659)

The narrative here can be read literally, as the story of Satan’s

encounter with this hideous creature, but also figuratively, as an
attempt to represent to the reader the abstract concept of sin.

We shall see in a subsequent unit how another poet writing at this

time, John Dryden, uses allegory in his Absalom and Achitophel to
provide a critique of a contemporary political situation. But how does
Bunyan’s use of allegory compare to that of these other writers?
Although we can say that The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegorical text,
and so generically shares certain qualities with contemporary texts that
also use allegory, Bunyan’s book is markedly different in the form and
purpose of its allegory.

Abrams argues that The Pilgrim’s Progress is both an historical and/or

political allegory and an allegory of ideas, but also much more besides.
Whilst we have identified that, unlike, say, Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim’s
Progress is a prose text, it is the poetic preface to the narrative proper
– what we call a ‘paratext’, or textual material by the author that lies
outside of the text itself – that indicates the nature of Bunyan’s
intentions in writing his book in this way. ‘The Author’s Apology for His
Book’ gives us some idea as to how The Pilgrim’s Progress differs from
‘conventional’ allegorical texts.

Activity:
Read ‘The Author’s Apology for His Book’, the preface to The Pilgrim’s
Progress.

The ‘Apology’ begins with an account of the composition of The

Pilgrim’s Progress, and of various arguments and discussions Bunyan
had about the publication of the book. He then makes a number of
important points. Firstly, he defends allegorical writing as a legitimate
and valid mode for writing his book, asking

May I not write in such a style as this?

In such a Method too, and yet not miss
My end, thy good? Why may it not be done?
(Bunyan 2008: 4)

He goes on to argue that there is a value in allegorical writing, a point

which he illustrates with a natural metaphor:

Dark clouds bring waters, when the bright bring none;

Yea, dark or bright, if they their Silver drops
Cause to descend, the earth, by yielding Crops,
Gives praise to both, and carpeth not at either,
But treasures up the Fruit they yield together;
Yea, so commixes both, that in her Fruit
None can distinguish this from that; they suit

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Her well when hungry: but if she be full,

She spews out both, and makes their blessings null.
(Bunyan 2008: 4-5)

Why does Bunyan feel the need to defend allegorical writing? Perhaps
he recognises that certain experiences (spiritual ones, for example) are
difficult to articulate unequivocally; that is, it is not easy to talk about
them in plain words, and so he must devise a method of
communicating a sense of such experiences that conveys their power
and mystical nature to the reader. He recognises that language is
inadequate to convey a full sense of certain kinds and qualities of
experience; they are, in a sense, ‘ineffable’, but if he wants to share
them with others he must do so by describing them in a way that
others might be able to identify with. Using allegory seems to fulfil just
such a purpose.

The sense that there are some kinds of experience that are almost
incommunicable, and which lie beyond human ability to describe, is
conveyed in Bunyan’s account of the composition of The Pilgrim’s
Progress; he implies that his writing was beyond his control, and that
somehow he was only the medium for conveying the message on
paper of some greater being:

I writing of the Way

And Race of Saints in this our Gospel-Day,
Fell suddenly into Allegory
About their Journey, and the way to Glory,
In more than Twenty things, which I set down;
This done, I twenty more had in my Crown,
And they again began to multiply,
Like sparks that from the coals of fire do fly.
(2008: 3)

Is it significant that Bunyan has to use figurative language, describing

how aspects of the saints’ lives multiply ‘like sparks that from the coals
of fire do fly’, so as to speak of his experience of inspiration? Only by
introducing the simile of sparks leaping from the fire can Bunyan bring
his experience of inspiration alive and make it meaningful for the
reader. How does this compare with the poetry of Milton that we have
encountered so far, where the poet presents himself as the conduit of
divine inspiration through his verse?

Perhaps here we can assert a judgement about the ‘Author’s Apology’

as a piece of ‘poetry’ compared to, for instance, the opening lines of
Paradise Lost, where Milton similarly explains his justification in writing
the poem. Does it seem to you that both pieces are of comparable
quality? Does a couplet such as ‘Fell suddenly into allegory / About
their journey, and the way to glory’, with its clunking metre and
suspicious rhyme, bear comparison with the opening lines of Paradise
Lost?

Perhaps, though, we can also make some assertions about Bunyan’s

‘poetic’ ‘Apology’ that partly relieves him from coming off too badly
from such a comparison: after all, does he really make claims to write
great poetry in his preface, or is his point instead that he is not a
lettered or ‘poetic’ man, but that his inspiration comes from a higher
power who simply uses him as a tool to carry a particular message? As
such, by using the tool of allegory to convey this to us as readers,
Bunyan channels it through his own, apparently mystified way of
understanding: by trying to understand it himself, he sees our own
potential difficulties in understanding the meaning of this story, and so
uses the appealing method of allegory to make it more comprehensible
and relevant to us.

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Bunyan similarly describes the effect he intends his book to have on its
readers through using allegory; he speaks of himself (and God) as a
‘fisherman’ using certain ‘engines’, by which he means books, to catch
‘fish’, that is, to convert the reader. As we will remember from Unit 2,
the image of the fisherman is a powerful one for a Christian readership,
summoning up ideas about St. Peter, Jesus’ first disciple and a founder
of his Church. Similarly, Bunyan presents himself as having an
evangelical role in his reader’s encounter with God’s message, which
he describes using the metaphor of the fisherman:

You see the ways the Fisherman doth take

To catch the Fish; what Engines doth he make?
Behold! How he engageth all his wits;
Also his snares, lines, angels, hooks, and nets:
Yet Fish there be, that neither Hook nor Line,
Nor Snare, nor Net, nor Engine can make thine:
They must be grop’d for, and be tickled too,
Or they will not be catched, what e’er you do.
(2008: 5)

Bunyan once again recognises here the inadequacy of ordinary

language to speak of certain kinds of experience. He hopes that God,
the great Fisherman, will work through this ‘little book’ and succeed in
converting its readers. Because such a process is inherently
mysterious, it can only be conveyed in the abstracted terms of an
allegory.

Towards the end of his prefatory poem, Bunyan supplies further

reasons for how he intends his book should be read and explains that
he intends to reveal its ‘profit’ before turning it over to the reader:

This Book it chalketh out before thine eyes

The man that seeks the everlasting Prize:
It shows you whence he comes, whither he goes,
What he leaves undone: also what he does:
It also shows you how he runs, and runs,
Till he unto the Gate of Glory comes.
It shows too, who sets out for Life amain,
As if the lasting Crown they would attain:
Here also you may see the reason why
They lose their Labour and like fools do die.
This Book will make a Traveller of thee;
If by its Counsel thou wilt ruled be;
It will direct thee to the Holy-Land,
If thou wilt its directions understand:
Yea, it will make the slothful active be
The blind also delightful things to see.
(2008: 8-9)

What do you notice about the metaphors that Bunyan employs here?
He describes the reader as a ‘traveller’, one who will pursue a journey
‘to the Holy Land’ in reading the book. Does he actually prompt us to
undertake a pilgrimage? This may, of course, be one possible effect of
the book on the zealous reader; but Bunyan uses the idea of the
journey here in a metaphorical sense more closely allied to the nature
of the narrative The Pilgrim’s Progress presents. As we shall discover in
more detail in the subsequent section, the book details a journey that
is at once physical and spiritual, which maps out our journey through
the book itself and, by implication, through life. Bunyan therefore
presents The Pilgrim’s Progress as a book that actively seeks to
transform its readers.

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The Pilgrim’s Progress, is not, then, a book to be taken lightly. It

demands a substantial investment on the part of the reader, and also
perhaps involves a certain element of danger: change, as Christian’s
story shows, involves an enormous risk and sometimes a frightening
lack of security. Bunyan demands that the readers of The Pilgrim’s
Progress take the book seriously and invest all their energy in reading
it, as he suggests at the end of his ‘Apology’:

Wouldst read thy self, and read thou knowest not what,
And yet know whether thou art blest or not,
By reading the same Lines? O then come hither,
And lay my Book, thy Head and Heart together.
(2008: 9)

Does this differentiate The Pilgrim’s Progress from contemporary

allegories, and perhaps from other writings of the time in general?
The Pilgrim’s Progress claims that, if read correctly, it will change the
life of the reader and transform him or her into a figure like the hero in
the book. As we shall see, this is not a claim that Dryden makes in
Absalom and Achitophel. However, as we have seen in Milton’s
Areopagitica, and in the Country House poems addressed in Unit 3,
writers can actively seek to effect change in their contemporary world
through their work, through the effect that it might have on its readers
and the possible consequence of this power: members of Parliament or
supporters of censorship, for instance, might be encouraged to repeal
this law upon being persuaded by Milton’s arguments. Similarly,
Marvell’s Upon Appleton House might prompt Lord Fairfax to emerge
from rural retirement and take an active role in shaping the future of
the state once again. How does Bunyan’s text compare or differ to
these attempts to engage in the wider world surrounding a piece of
writing?

In some respects, it does not differ in its desire to be taken seriously

by its readers, and perhaps to have such an impact on them that it
may even encourage them to introduce change into their lives.
Perhaps, though, it operates on a deeper, more spiritual level than
other comparable publications: The Pilgrim’s Progress demands that its
readers in some ways ‘absorb’ the text and its message, by identifying
in a highly personal way with the relevance that its allegories might
hold for our individual lives. In turn, the change it seeks to effect
belongs not to our relationship with the state or with the political
system, but to what is for Bunyan the most important and intense
relationship we can sustain, that with God.

SAQ 2
How does The Pilgrim’s Progress compare to or differ from other
examples of allegorical writing that we have encountered so far?

‘THIS BOOK WILL MAKE A TRAVELLER OF THEE’

Before we begin to analyse the themes, ideas and contexts of The
Pilgrim’s Progress, it is helpful to outline briefly the main points of the
story it presents. You may have noted some of these yourself as you
read Part I, and already developed some ideas of your own about what
is particularly interesting or striking, how this text relates to other
texts you have studied so far, and the broader ideas with which
Bunyan engages.

We may, first of all, note that the story is a refracted account of first-
hand, personal experience: the narrative is presented as a dream, in

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which the speaker of the text does not describe his own speech and
action, but that of another protagonist and group of characters. We
shall think in more detail about how this fits into the formal nature of
The Pilgrim’s Progress in due course. Here, though, it is important to
remember that already we have a story refracted through several
different voices, and to think about how that might affect the ways in
which we receive and interpret that story.

The dreamer’s narrative begins in a most dramatic way with a man

initially called Graceless, then Christian, in great distress: he has
perceived that the city in which he lives, called the City of Destruction,
is soon to be destroyed by God. He asks himself repeatedly: ‘What will
I do to be saved?’ The answer is supplied to him by a man called
Evangelist who says ‘Fly from the wrath to come’, and advises
Christian to escape through a wicket-gate, which he promptly does:

So I saw in my dream, that the man began to run; now he had not run
far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it, began to
cry after him to return; but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran
on crying, ‘Life, life, eternal life’: so he looked not behind him but fled
to the middle of the plain (Bunyan 2008: 14)

Christian must struggle through the Slough (or swamp) of Despond to

reach the wicket-gate eventually, but is compelled by the fear that fills
him and by the vision of hope conveyed in his repeated cry, ‘Life, life,
eternal life’. Having passed through the gate Christian soon afterwards
visits the House of the Interpreter, where he is shown a series of
pictures and other emblems of morality and faith.

Christian is tormented throughout the early part of the book by a

burden on his back, but this is lifted from him when he reaches a hill
on which a cross is standing: Christian is relieved and becomes ‘glad
and lightsome’. He is given new clothes, his forehead is marked, and
he is given a roll of paper which he must hand in at the Gate of the
Celestial City to gain admittance. He loses the roll shortly afterwards
and must retreat to recover it.

When Christian reaches the Palace Beautiful he is given a sword and

armour: with these armaments, he becomes a war-faring saint. Soon
afterwards he encounters Apollyon in the Valley of Humiliation.
Apollyon is described as:

hideous to behold, he was clothed with scales like a fish; (and they are
his pride) he had wings like a dragon, feet like a bear, and out of his
belly came fire and smoke, and his mouth was as the mouth of a lion.
(Bunyan 2008: 61)

Despite Apollyon’s power and the horror he incites by his physical

appearance, Christian defeats him. He passes through the Valley of
Humiliation and of the Shadow of Death. He is joined soon afterwards
by Faithful; together they journey to Vanity Fair, where they are
arrested. Faithful is tried and executed for preaching. Christian,
however, escapes, and is joined by Hopeful, who has been inspired by
the martyrdom of Faithful. They journey together for a time, but
Christian leads them off the way and they end up as prisoners in the
castle of the Giant, Despair. Eventually, however, they escape, from
where they proceed to the Delectable Mountains. Here they are shown
the way to the Celestial City by some shepherds. Before entering the
City they must cross the River of Death. Christian’s journey across the
river is as dramatic as the opening of the book. The Pilgrim’s Progress
Part I concludes with Christian and Hopeful entering the Celestial City.

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How might we tease out the figurative significance of the story told in
The Pilgrim’s Progress? Two words central to its narrative indicate how
we might approach and analyse the text: it is the story of ‘progress’
along a particular ‘way’. The Pilgrim’s Progress tells the story of a
journey, and in this sense it charts ‘progress’: Raymond Williams notes
that this word is rooted in the Latin word progressus, which means ‘a
going forward’ (1983: 243-245). The text charts the ‘progress’ of
Christian from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, and also
encourages us as readers to pursue a figurative journey through the
narrative, in which we trace its potential meaning for us as readers in a
different time and place to that of either Christian or the dreamer.

However, when we chart the ‘progress’ that Christian makes, what

might we observe about the kind of journey he undertakes? If we try
to map his route, as a topographical enterprise that follows a
recognisable route from one place to another, we in fact discover that
he does not travel in a straight line, but in circles. As Christopher Hill
notes, Christian journeys for a long time to reach the city called Vanity
Fair only to find that it is identical to the City of Destruction we thought
he had previously left far behind (1988). The ‘progress’ indicated in the
title of the book is not, then, linear, spatial progress along an
identifiable geographical space; rather, Christian’s journey is
psychological or, more accurately, spiritual.

The names of many of the obstacles Christian encounters on his way –

the Slough of Despond, the Valley of Humiliation – are identifiable as
psychological or spiritual states. Does this prompt us to think of the
journey described in The Pilgrim’s Progress as an inward journey of the
self, through and into the spirit and the mind, rather than one taken
through space? And how does this become more complex when we
remember that the book is not just one, but two narratives, that of
Christian and that of the dreamer? Does this multiple layering of
psychological experience move us one step closer to reading The
Pilgrim’s Progress as a story about our own lives – our own minds and
spiritual journeys – as much as one about a figure called ‘Christian’?

What might our understanding of the word ‘way’ contribute to our

understanding of Christian’s ‘progress’ as a spiritual rather than bodily
journey? In the Gospel of John in the New Testament, Christ describes
himself as ‘the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man cometh onto the
Father but by me’ (John 14:2). Christian journeys through and towards
Christ: he journeys on the spiritual path laid by Christ and leading
towards him, thanks to Christ’s grace. Remember the title of Bunyan’s
first book, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: what does the
meaning of ‘Grace’ contribute to our understanding of the relationship
between God and man as portrayed in The Pilgrim’s Progress, as a
journey towards Christ? In a religious context, the Oxford English
Dictionary tells us, ‘grace’ means ‘The free and unmerited favour of
God as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowing of
blessings’ (OED).

As we found in our discussion of Paradise Lost, it is Christ’s sacrifice on

the Cross that redeems the sinfulness of mankind, and which brings
man the promise of eternal salvation in heaven, if he obediently follows
the path through life that God lays out for him, by making the right
choices to act with goodness and love. As we have already seen in this
unit, this idea re-emerges when Christian is relieved of his burden
when contemplating the cross, which similarly speaks to him – in visual
terms – of the grace of God. In pursuing his journey to the cross,
Christian can find God’s grace through Christ’s sacrifice, and so enacts
in his own life a spiritual journey that follows the path towards grace
laid out by Jesus in John’s Gospel. Christ guides the pilgrim’s soul to
Heaven.

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‘Way’, then, does not refer only to a path or a road and a journey on a
path or road, but also to a way of life. Christ is the ‘Way’ in both
senses: only through his grace and through following his example -
through observing his way of life - can the believer be saved. The
Pilgrim’s Progress tells the story of a journey along a particular way but
also tells the story of the conduct, the way of life, of those who pursue
that journey. In this regard, many of the characters in The Pilgrim’s
Progress are named according to the choices that they make, or the
fashion in which they choose to follow that ‘way’: Timorous, Hopeful,
Mistrust.

The Pilgrim’s Progress charts Christian’s way in two senses, both as the
path he takes in his journey from the City of Destruction to the
Celestial City, and the manner in which he pursues it: his conduct and
his way of life.

How does this relate to us, as readers, both in our progress through
Bunyan’s text and in our own lives, beyond it? The Pilgrim’s Progress
shows the reader a ‘way’ in two senses: a spiritual path – through
despondency, humiliation, despair, across death, to salvation – and
also a way of life, and the kinds of conduct needed to gain this eternal
bliss. The reader is encouraged to measure his or her own ‘way’
against that of Christian in the book and so to proceed along a certain
way, in a certain way, to attain in our own lives the same joyful
destination that Christian reaches in the narrative.

APOLLYON AND THE PROBLEM OF FREE WILL

The Pilgrim’s Progress thus presents itself as a model on which we
might base our own lives; or, at least, points us in the direction of how
we should live a good life in pursuit of God’s grace through Christ.
However, is the theology that Bunyan’s text presents always so
straight forward, or are there moments at which we might find the
ideas he incorporates into the narrative difficult to understand or to
accept? Do the potential tensions belonging to the text’s theology
possibly prevent us from accepting The Pilgrim’s Progress as a way to
establishing a fuller relationship with God?

Think back to Unit 5, where we considered how some aspects of the

theology of Paradise Lost present us with difficulties, which we can only
partly reconcile by remembering the time and place in which Milton’s
poem was produced. Similarly, historical sensitivity is an important
aspect of the way that we read The Pilgrim’s Progress, but merely
saying, erroneously, that ‘everyone accepted these ideas at this time,
so we needn’t examine them more closely ourselves’ is to neglect an
important aspect of our role as literary critics – who both delve into
and, at times, challenge a text and its seeming ‘authority’ – and also to
belittle the readers of Bunyan’s time and since, who may well have
encountered the same obstacles to accepting its message as we might.

One potential difficulty might be found in the episode in which Christian

battles with Apollyon, the hideous creature who confronts our hero in
the Valley of Humiliation. Who is this figure, and what might his
identity add to the allegorical quality and function of the story? Bunyan
describes Apollyon as a ‘foul fiend’ (a phrase that also appears in
Shakespeare’s King Lear), which indicates that this is another name
used to describe the Devil. This, alongside the meaning of his name,
‘the Destroyer’, signals Apollyon’s function in the narrative as a threat
to Christian’s physical and spiritual life. Apollyon features in the Bible
in several places, perhaps most strikingly in the book of Revelation,
where he is described as ‘the angel of the bottomless pit’.

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Our familiarity with fallen angels, who are evil incarnate in Paradise
Lost, lends a terrifying reality to the allegorical figure Bunyan presents
us with here in The Pilgrim’s Progress.

In Bunyan’s narrative, Apollyon demands to know where he is going.

Christian’s response, that he is on his way to the Celestial City, brings
Apollyon to attempt to dissuade him from pursuing his journey in
various ways. For instance, he warns our hero to:

Consider again, when thou art in cool blood, what thou art like to
meet with in the way thou goest. Thou knowest, that for the most
part, his [Christ’s] servants come to an ill end, because they are
transgressors against me and my way; how many of them have
been put to shameful death? And besides, thou countest his
service better than mine; whereas he never came yet from the
place where he is, to deliver any that saved him out of our hands:
but as for me, how many times, as all the world very well knows,
have I delivered, either by power or fraud, those that have
faithfully served me, from him and his; thought taken by them;
and so I will deliver thee. (Bunyan 2008: 62)

Apollyon also reminds Christian of the many times that he has

displayed weakness on his journey:

Thou didst faint at first setting out, when thou wast almost choked
in the Gulf of Despond, thou diddest attempt wrong ways to be rid
of thy Burden, whereas thou shouldest have stayed till thy prince
had taken it off. Thou didst sinfully sleep and lose thy choice
things: thou wast also almost persuaded to go back to the sight of
the lions: and when thou talkest of thy journey, and of what thou
hast heard and seen, thou art inwardly desirous of vain glory in all
that thou sayest or doest. (Bunyan 2008: 63)

Look at the physical power of the words that Apollyon uses to describe
Christian’s frailty – he ‘diddest faint’, he ‘wast almost choked’ – and
the way in which this positions Apollyon in a position of superior
strength to his addressee. He levels accusations against him, that he
tried to rid himself of his ‘Burden’ through ‘wrong ways’ and ‘diddest
sinfully sleep’ – which Christian cannot deny, but which also weaken
the authority of his defiant position. He also incites fear of what is to
come by reminding Christian of the perils he has already faced (the
‘Gulf of Despond’ and the terrifying lions).

In the face of such taunts and fear-laden dissuasion, however,

Christian stands firm, causing Apollyon to fly into ‘a grievous rage’ and
attack Christian. In their ensuing battle Apollyon seems to gain the
advantage until the final moment, when

Apollyon espying his opportunity began to gather up close to Christian,

and wrestling with him, gave him a dreadful fall, and with that
Christian’s sword flew out of his hand. Then said Apollyon, I am sure of
thee now; and with that he had almost pressed him to death; so that
Christian began to despair of life. But as God would have it, while
Apollyon was fetching his last blow, thereby to make a full end of this
good man, Christian nimbly reached out his hand for his sword, and
caught it, saying, Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy, when I fall I
shall arise, and with that gave him a deadly thrust, which made him
give back, as one that had received his mortal wound. Christian
perceiving that, made at him, saying, Nay in all these things we are
more than conquerors, through him that loved us. And with that
Apollyon spread forth his dragon wings, and sped him away, and
Christian saw him no more. (Bunyan 2008: 64)

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Christian’s human impotence is revealed as he drops his sword, but

because he is not alone on his journey, but supported by God, he is
able to reach out for it even when upon the brink of ‘despair of life’: ‘as
God would have it’, and because he is ‘a good man’, Christian is
empowered to defeat his enemy and save himself from death.

As W. R. Owens says of this passage, it exemplifies the intensely close

knowledge Bunyan had of the Bible, for him the most important book
of all, showing that he ‘had absorbed the language of the Bible so
thoroughly that his own prose was infused in the most natural way
with Biblical references, phrases and idioms’ (2010: 45). In the
encounter with Apollyon, Owens suggests, ‘No actual Biblical texts are
cited here, but the whole passage is a tissue of intertextual allusion’
(2010: 45), which empowers Bunyan’s prose with the dual qualities of
familiarity and authority. Christian’s cry, ‘when I fall I shall rise’, is
prophetic of the vision that Revelation promises, when at the Last
Judgement all shall rise from their graves and stand before Christ
triumphant.

Whilst this encounter provides a high-point of dramatic tension in the

narrative, and seems to offer a resoundingly triumphant demonstration
of its message of man’s victory over evil through God’s love and
support, it nonetheless raises a potentially thorny theological issue,
one that we have already encountered in relation to Paradise Lost: the
question of Free Will. Bunyan alludes to this in the final lines of ‘The
Author’s Apology for His Book’ which we have already looked at, where
he asks the reader:

Wouldst read thy self, and read thou knowest not what,
And yet know whether thou art blest or not,
By reading the same Lines? O then come hither,
And lay my Book, thy Head and Heart together.
(2008: 9)

Here, Bunyan is speaking of the doctrine of predestination: he seems

to suggest that by reading The Pilgrim’s Progress the reader can
discover whether he or she is ‘blest or not’, that is, predestined to be
saved. The doctrine of predestination proposes that God, all-powerful,
and therefore powerful over even time itself, has ordained from all and
for all eternity that certain humans (‘the elect’) will be saved, and
certain others damned. Furthermore, as the Oxford English Dictionary
tells us, predestination is:

The action by which God is held to have immutably predetermined

the course of events by an eternal decree or purpose, especially
in relation to the salvation or damnation of human beings […].
(OED)

Just as we found in Paradise Lost, the notion of a divine plan

challenges the idea that we all have choice in the actions we take in
life, and so makes it difficult to see how we can have a divinely-given
‘Free Will’ to act according to our inner consciences without in some
way following this plan.

The doctrine of predestination is central to much seventeenth-century

Protestant theology. The doctrine, however, is problematic for many
thinkers because it seems to propose that humans can do nothing
about their own salvation or damnation: every human’s fate has been
already decided from all eternity, and human will is redundant as far as
salvation or damnation is concerned. It is impossible therefore even for
the repentant man or woman to be saved if he or she is not one of the
elect.

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This sense in which humans will be damned or saved despite

themselves is especially problematic for Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s
Progress. Bunyan’s project in the book seems, on a first reading at
least, to be based around the idea of choosing to go on a journey, and
struggling through the hardships of that journey to achieve salvation.
Salvation must be achieved by struggle, which runs counter to the idea
that it is in any way predestined; if this were the case, then Christian
would not need to undertake his journey at all: he would be saved, no
matter what he did. Bunyan therefore seems to be trapped in
something of a theological bind: he presents the story of a journey that
is chosen and leads to salvation, but at the same time Bunyan is
conscious that to be saved Christian must be one of the elect, which
must surely render his journey pointless.

Bunyan’s difficulty is to conceive of Christian’s pilgrimage as a product

both of his own, and of divine authorship. This problem comes to a
head when Christian is faced with Apollyon and forced to fight him:
Bunyan must devise a strategy whereby Christian can be victorious
over Apollyon and then continue on his journey, yet also one in which
he can only do so through divine agency. Does Bunyan succeed in
achieving this difficult combination?

Apollyon criticises Christian’s ‘vainglory’, that is, pride and unwarranted

belief in himself and in his own power; he accuses Christian of
believing that he can ‘progress’ along his ‘way’ by his own power. It is
Christian’s rejection of this criticism that throws Apollyon into a rage,
as he claims that

these infirmities possessed me in thy country, for there I suck’d them

in, and I have groaned under them, being sorry for them, and have
obtained pardon of my prince. (Bunyan 2008: 63)

Christian indicates that he is aware of his own frailty and weakness,

but that because he expressed repentance for his sins (‘I have groaned
under them, being sorry for them’) he has ‘obtained pardon of my
prince’, meaning Christ: he therefore no longer belongs in Apollyon’s
world, the world of the flesh and of vainglory. Thus, though Apollyon
claims Christian as one of his own, our hero argues that he has moved
beyond that world and already belongs with Christ in the realm
presided over by the Prince of the Celestial City.

When Apollyon subsequently turns to fight Christian, he pits himself

not against this individual man, but against the forces with which
Christian has allied himself, namely the forces of heaven. In this
respect, Christian is only the mediator for the struggle between God
and the forces of the next world, for the battle between good and evil,
heaven and hell. In this respect, is Christian similar to Adam and Eve,
who in their temptation by the serpent in the Garden are only the
means by which Satan exorcises his jealousy and exacts revenge on
God? Remember that Apollyon and Satan alike are fallen angels, who
have forfeited their place in heaven, and so are eternally pitted against
the forces of good.

The way in which Christian himself becomes decentralised in the battle

scene, and used instead as a representative of the forces of good
confronting those of evil, is clearly discernible if we look again at the
battle scene in detail: although Christian seems to win the battle
himself, it is not he who fights but God.

Let’s look at the passage again:

Apollyon espying his opportunity began to gather up close to Christian,

and wrestling with him, gave him a dreadful fall, and with that

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Christian’s sword flew out of his hand. Then said Apollyon, I am sure of
thee now; and with that he had almost pressed him to death; so that
Christian began to despair of life. But as God would have it, while
Apollyon was fetching his last blow, thereby to make a full end of this
good man, Christian nimbly reached out his hand for his sword, and
caught it, saying, Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy, when I fall I
shall arise, and with that gave him a deadly thrust, which made him
give back, as one that had received his mortal wound. Christian
perceiving that, made at him, saying, Nay in all these things we are
more than conquerors, through him that loved us. And with that
Apollyon spread forth his dragon wings, and sped him away, and
Christian saw him no more. (Bunyan 2008: 64)

Following the underlined phrases here, note how those denoting

Christian’s actions, and therefore human agency (such as ‘Christian
nimbly reached’, ‘caught it, saying’, ‘gave him a deadly thrust’) are
qualified by and subordinated to phrases describing divine agency: ‘as
God would have it’, ‘in all these things we are more than conquerors,
through him that loved us’. Although Christian apparently wins the
battle himself, could we argue that he can only do so through God’s
power?

How does this bring us to contemplate the role of human agency in

determining whether we deserve God’s love and forgiveness? Surely, if
the outcome of our actions is dependent on his will, then the choices
we make are redundant; if we are predestined either to be saved or to
be damned, are our attempts to lead a good life futile? Surely we
might as well just follow a life of dissipation and pleasurable sin. Of
course, The Pilgrim’s Progress excludes such a possibility, in the same
kind of way that Milton both incorporates the problems of the theology
he presents in Paradise Lost and prompts us to realise we can only go
so far in answering them. Note, for instance, the heavily-loaded
reference to how Apollyon ‘gave him a dreadful fall’, recalling how
Christian (like his first parents) is subject to the temptation of a
fiendish creature, which here is covered in scales like the serpent that
enters Paradise.

Part of Christian’s journey involves accepting the role that faith must
play in his life (literally, in the allegorical figure of Faith); but
it is how he chooses to use this gift – alongside all the other qualities
and virtues that he must cultivate in life – which ensures that he will
reach the end of his journey, and attain the Celestial City.

The Apollyon episode, indeed, acts as a microcosm for The Pilgrim’s

Progress as a whole. One might initially conceive Christian’s journey to
be a journey towards Christ - Christian strives along the ‘way’ to move
closer to Christ, which his death finally allows him to do. However,
given that Christian is one of the elect (that he is handed the scroll
confirms this), and therefore does not need to journey towards Christ,
we might like to revise our notion of the journey as a journey not
towards Christ but in Christ. In some way, The Pilgrim’s Progress
records the events in the life of the Christian in the world, the Christian
who has sided - who has been sided - with Christ, who lives in Christ,
and who must struggle and battle in Christ with the world around him.

The Apollyon episode is, therefore, not a battle between Christian and
Apollyon that enables our hero to journey onwards, but is one of a
number of battles between Christ, in whom Christian dwells, and the
world of the flesh. To make a subtle distinction, then, The Pilgrim’s
Progress is the record not of Christian’s attempts to be saved - he will
be saved anyway - but the struggles that a member of the elect must
endure in the world. As Keeble suggests, ‘By so insisting on the
circumstances of his texts’ production Bunyan associates their

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experiential authority with a validating tradition of Christian witness’

(2010: 22), which partially validates his enterprise in publishing The
Pilgrim’s Progress. However it would, as Pooley argues, be too
simplistic to think of The Pilgrim’s Progress from a biographical
perspective, as a text that records the torments of the man dedicated
to Christ in the world, who like Bunyan himself is imprisoned and
rejected (2010: 81); instead, its role as a text that both responds to
the moment of its production and speaks to man’s common plight is at
once personal and universal.

SAQ 3
How does the problem of Free Will manifest itself in The Pilgrim’s
Progress and what attempt does Bunyan make to resolve this
problem?

However, although Bunyan’s narrative thus offers a hopeful and

victorious vision to those chosen to receive Christ’s grace, what of
those who, like Christian, are ‘travellers’ in undertaking to read The
Pilgrim’s Progress, but are not predestined to be saved? Surely the
torments and hellish suffering the narrative envisions must incite fear
in those readers who are excluded from this vision of hope. Yet
perhaps this is some means of escape through the mystery that,
essentially, lies at the centre of the spiritual experience that Bunyan
hopes to convey to his readers: we can never know who – if anyone –
has been chosen or not, so the best we can do is to pursue the journey
through life for which Christian’s journey offers an exemplar, in the
hope that we too might reach the Celestial City.

We might, perhaps, like to end our thoughts about The Pilgrim’s

Progress on a similarly indefinite conclusion, by asking how far – if at
all – we can perceive this as a text of its time, one that both reflects
religious sensibilities expressed by one group of society in the late
seventeenth century, and one that to some extent records their trials
in the face of persecution and restrictions on their rights to practice
their religious beliefs. In this respect, we might ask ourselves how far
The Pilgrim’s Progress compares to other texts we have studied, as a
reflection of and response to the contexts of its production.

REVIEW
In this unit we have examined John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress by
addressing how far we might compare it to other texts we have studied
so far. We have explored both the biographical and historical contexts
of the book’s appearance, and discussed the distinctive nature of its
form and structure, and how this relates to its intended function. This,
we have learned from ‘The Author’s Apology for his Book’, is designed
to play an active, transformative role in the reader’s life. This is partly
conveyed through our account of the story of The Pilgrim’s Progress as
that of one man’s ‘progress’ along a certain ‘way’, one which
nonetheless might serve a universalising function: it is not a spatial or
temporal journey, but a spiritual and psychological one that we might
compare to our own journey through life.

In turn, we might apply the lessons that Christian learns to our own
lives in our attempt to improve them, and so hopefully, like him, to
reach the Celestial City. We have, however, also found that some of
the theological issues with which Bunyan’s text deals – notably that of
Free Will – may pose difficulties as to how far we can absorb the
message The Pilgrim’s Progress conveys about our journey towards
Christ, and we have thought about ways in which Bunyan seeks to
resolve these potential obstacles.

Unit 6: John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress: An Allegory of the Christian Life 6-19
_____________________________________________________________________

ADDITIONAL READING
Backscheider, Paula R. 1984. A Being More Intense: A Study of the
Prose Works of Bunyan, Swift, and Defoe (New York: AMS
Press)

Davies, Michael. 2002. Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the

Works of John Bunyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Fish, Stanley. 1972. ‘Progress in The Pilgrim’s Progress’, in Self-

consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century
Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press) (Parts
available online via Google Books)

Sim, Stuart and David Walker. 2000. Bunyan and Authority: The
Rhetoric of Dissent and the Legitimation Crisis in Seventeenth-
Century England, Religions and Discourse (Bern: Peter Lang)

REFERENCES
Abrams, M. H. 1981. A Glossary of Literary Terms, 4th edn (New York:
Holt, Reinhart and Winston)

Bunyan, John. 2008. Roger Pooley (ed.), The Pilgrim’s Progress

(Harmondsworth: Penguin)

Hill, Christopher. 1988. A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People:

John Bunyan and his Church, 1628-1688 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press)

Keeble, N. H. 2010. ‘John Bunyan’s Literary Life’, in Anne Duncan-Page

(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010) pp. 13-25 (Parts available
online via Google Books)

Owens, W. R., and Stuart Sim (eds.). 2007. Reception, Appropriation,

Recollection: Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, Religions and
Discourse (Bern: Peter Lang) (Parts available online via Google
Books)

Owens, W. R. 2010. ‘John Bunyan and the Bible’, in Anne Duncan-Page

(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), pp. 39-50

Pooley, Roger. 2010. ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Line of Allegory’,
in Anne Duncan-Page (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Bunyan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 80-
94

Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and

society, rev. edn (London: Fontana)

Oxford English Dictionary (available online <[Link]

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ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
Q. Define allegory and suggest how The Pilgrim’s Progress can be
seen as an allegorical text.

In its simplest form, a piece of allegorical writing can be read as

having two coherent meanings, a literal meaning and a figurative
meaning. The Pilgrim’s Progress is also an allegorical text in the sense
that it tells literally the story of the journey of one man from one city
to another. However, the story can be read figuratively, in which case
The Pilgrim’s Progress tells the story of a spiritual ‘journey’ from
sinfulness to salvation. The text is allegorical in that, from both literal
and figurative points of view, it tells a coherent story.

SAQ 2
Q. How does The Pilgrim’s Progress compare to or differ from other
examples of allegorical writing that we have encountered so far?

While texts such as ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ by Milton, and

sections of Paradise Lost, might be seen to use allegorical tools, The
Pilgrim’s Progress uses allegory in a different way. Unlike other
examples of allegorical texts, Bunyan’s preface to his book proclaims
that an active engagement with the text will change the reader’s life:
the reader cannot innocently encounter The Pilgrim’s Progress. This
makes Bunyan’s book distinctive, in the far-reaching and
transformative power that he claims the allegory of The Pilgrim’s
Progress can have.

SAQ 3
Q. How does the problem of Free Will manifest itself in The Pilgrim’s
Progress and what attempt does Bunyan make to resolve this
problem?

Bunyan, as a Puritan, is committed to a belief in the doctrine of

predestination: he conceives that God is all-powerful, even over time
itself. This poses a difficulty for him in constructing The Pilgrim’s
Progress, which seems on the surface to be the story of a journey in
search of salvation undertaken by Christian. However, Christian cannot
be saved unless God has already willed that he should be saved, which
potentially makes his journey a pointless enterprise. The way Bunyan
seems to resolve this problem, as we can see through an analysis of
the encounter between Apollyon and Christian, is by construing the
journey described in the book not as a journey towards Christ, but as
a journey in Christ. Christian, therefore, does not move towards
salvation in the text: he has already been saved, as he is one of the
elect. Instead the text describes his attempts to live the Christian life -
the life in Christ - in the world, and the various obstacles to living that
life he is forced to endure. This, in turn, is a model that we as readers
are encouraged to follow in our own lives, as we too seek to reach the
Celestial City.

Unit 6: John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress: An Allegory of the Christian Life 6-21
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UNIT 7

RESTORATION TO REVOLUTION (1):

DEBAUCH AND DISABILITY

AIMS
In this unit, we shall be addressing poetry of the Restoration, using the
work of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and Aphra Behn to identify this
as a ‘period of paradoxes’ characterised by the opposing ideas of excess
and debauchery on the one hand, and dissatisfaction on the other. We
shall see how this reflects upon contrasting feelings about the wealth
and extravagance of a newly-restored royal court, and the uncertainty
of instability of politics, society and economics during this period.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit, you should be able to:

Identify the Restoration, the period following Charles II’s ascension

to the throne in 1660, as a ‘period of paradoxes’.

Describe some of the key historical events of the period 1660-1688,

and how they connect to the literature produced during these years.

Outline how the life and writings of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
exemplify ideas of excess and of disability characterising this period.

Recognise characteristics belonging to the ‘imperfect enjoyment’

poem, and how this connects to themes within Rochester’s poetry,
and across the period as a whole.

Identify that some of the paradoxes belonging to this period include

conflicts about sexuality and gender.

Grasp how Aphra Behn’s version of the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ poem

is both a response to Rochester’s, and reflects these contemporary
concerns.

REQUIRED READING
In this unit, we shall be looking at the following poems in close detail:

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester:

‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ (c. 1680)
‘The Maimed Debauchee’ (c. 1675)
‘Upon Nothing’ (c. 1678)

Aphra Behn:
‘The Disappointment’ (c. 1680)

All poems are available in volume one of Stephen Greenblatt (ed.).

2012. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edn (New York:
W. W. Norton and Co.). ‘The Maimed Debauchee’ is titled ‘The Disabled
Debauchee’ in this edition.

All poems by Rochester are also available in Frank H. Ellis (ed.). 1994.
The Complete Works (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics).

Unit 7: Debauch and Disability 7-1

_____________________________________________________________________

All poems can also be found via Literature Online, although you should
be cautious about the reliability of the versions used. There can even be
differences in the titles of some works; for instance, Rochester’s ‘The
Maimed Debauchee’ is sometimes titled ‘The Disabled Debauchee’.

Rochester’s poems in particular have many variants which have

challenged successive editors; the editions cited above are sound
working texts.

INTRODUCTION
In previous units, we have traced the different ways in which the dual
themes of loss and renewal emerge in writings by diverse authors in the
early part of the period covered by this module, from the devastation
and reconstruction of London after the Great Fire, to the ‘occasional’
nature of Milton’s lament for his dead friend in Lycidas, to the Fall and
expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the new hope for mankind
envisaged in Paradise Lost.

Here, and in the subsequent unit, we shall approach this theme from a
different angle as we analyse poems from the period known as the
‘Restoration’. In this unit we shall focus on a sub-genre popular at this
time, the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ poem, to think about how an age that is
notorious for its excess, debauchery and extravagance also produces
writings that show signs of impotence, of loss and of insufficiency. We
shall also find how the personal and erotic nature of the verse studied in
this unit reflects uncertainty about the current state of the nation at this
time, in the aftermath of Civil War, with the political insecurities of the
reigns of Charles II and James II, leading up to the ‘Glorious Revolution’
of 1688 – themes that become most pertinent to the poems by John
Dryden that we shall consider in the next unit. We shall ask how far
these conflicts justify calling this a ‘period of paradoxes’.

In this unit, we shall focus our enquiries about these themes and
contexts upon the writings of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. We shall
also address one poem by Aphra Behn as a means of understanding
some of the conflicts and paradoxes we discover in this period, in
particular the instability of gender definitions that belong to the highly
sexualised nature of some of this period’s poetry. Finally, we shall see
how Behn’s career as a writer embodies these challenges to our
assumptions about gender relations at this time, but also the unstable
nature of political allegiance, as through her work she responds to the
changing nature of national circumstances in later seventeenth-century
England.

‘A PERIOD OF PARADOXES’?
We saw in Unit 3 how the career of Andrew Marvell in particular, and of
authors from the mid-seventeenth century in general, demonstrate a
degree of ambivalence about the nature of national identity and political
allegiance during particularly troubled times. We saw how, throughout
the period of Civil War and Interregnum, warfare, religious difference
and political factionalism riddled the nation and much of its literature
with uncertainty and doubt. We also saw seeds of hope that Britain
might become an even greater nation than before, once the old and
discredited systems of government had been swept away and new ones
introduced. However, we also observed how the early promise of the
new Parliament, and of Cromwell’s leadership, was nonetheless subject
to doubt and scrutiny, as is revealed by Milton’s Areopagitica and
Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’.

We learnt in our historical overview in Unit 1 how, past these troubled

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years, Charles II’s Restoration to the throne brought a fresh wave of

hope and optimism, but also how the return of monarchy did not
necessarily bring the lasting peace and prosperity that some had hoped.
Charles’s reign is notoriously characterised as one of lavish excess, of
sexual libertinism, and of debauchery; in many respects this is justified
by what is known of Charles’s character – he was devoted to pleasure
and self-indulgence, and the nature of society at the time meant that
the social world revolved around the court and the King: everyone
followed the pattern set by his behaviour.

However, to present such a black-and-white ‘picture of the age’ is to

ignore its actual complexity: not every man was a libertine or profligate,
there was prudence alongside prodigality, piety pitted against
ungodliness. There was a general sense that political allegiance was
uncertain, with many espousing the revolutionary principles upheld
throughout the Civil War, and the new role of Parliament in the
Restoration was often antagonistic to the King’s status as head of the
nation. Religious identity was also insecure – which Charles’ conversion
to Catholicism, and the ascension of his Catholic brother James to the
throne cemented. We have nonetheless seen in Unit 6 how, in the
experiences of the Protestant Dissenters that Bunyan reflects upon, the
authority of the established was equally unsteady.

Similarly, the seemingly harmonious state of the nation reflected in the

image of ease and abundance that Charles’s court generated is at odds
with the reality of social conditions facing many at this time. Poverty
was rife and life was tough for the majority who formed the non-noble
classes, as the Plague of 1665 alone suggests – the disease would not
have spread so rapidly had living conditions been less cramped, or had
sanitation and hygiene been better.

Margaret A. Doody (1998: 61), in fact, describes how some of the

tensions and ambiguities of this period can be characterised through the
issue of gender – a theme that we shall pursue in various directions as
we address the writings of two different authors of the Restoration
period, a male (Rochester) and a female (Behn). Doody writes that:

If the major political events that constitute the Civil War and the
Interregnum involved complex senses of gender, gender roles, and
displacements, it can be no wonder that the culture of the next two
or three generations, of those who came of age or were born after
the settlement of 1660, was imbued with ideas of gender - and of
gender as problematic. (1998: 61).

But were members of the court and the upper classes unaware of such
disparities? Or, instead, was there a sense amongst them too that, in
spite of the seeming prosperity and relaxation they enjoyed under the
restored monarchy, this was not necessarily a new golden age
completely free from the troubles England had experienced, or safe
from new ones?

This, then, is what we might call a ‘period of paradoxes’ – what Doody

refers to as ‘an era that dealt in paradoxes’ (1998: 69): it is
characterised by affluence – vast wealth, even – and by a hedonic rush
of enthusiasm which many felt in their relief that the exiled monarch
had returned to govern, and which many expressed by indulging in
drinking, whoring, gambling and all manner of vice. But this is also a
period where, right across society, there was a sense of dissatisfaction
coupled with fear: the sense that lasting fulfilment could not be found in
pleasure alone, and the anxiety that seeming national stability was only
a veneer that smoothed over genuine disgruntlement and insecurity,
which at any moment could rupture to the surface and throw Britain into
turmoil once again.

Unit 7: Debauch and Disability 7-3

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The paradoxes that characterise this period politically, socially, and in its
religious tensions are mapped out in its literature. Just as we found in
previous units, the publications of authors across the social spectrum
offers us a means of ascertaining how certain people felt about and
responded to the circumstances immediately surrounding them. So, too,
the Restoration produced a wide range of writers and writings, many of
which reflect the disparities and differences that characterise the period.
In their work, many authors show evidence of both indulging in the new
pleasures that the age ushered in, but also reveal a certain degree of
uncertainty about the transient nature of such enjoyments and of the
future of the nation.

We shall begin to explore the idea that this was a period whose
paradoxes are reflected in its literature by considering a selection of
poems by one of the most notorious figures of the Restoration, John
Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, whose status as a member of Charles’ court
allows us to think about how a nobleman both indulged in its licence to
enjoyment, and perhaps came to regret the excessive lengths to which
he could pursue it.

IMPERFECT ENJOYMENT:
JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER (1647-1680)
Who was the Earl of Rochester, and why should his writings interest us
in our study of poetry of the Restoration? His personal reputation
perhaps precedes him, and may affect the judgements that critics and
readers have made upon his writings; as critics ourselves, we should
ask ourselves how dispassionate we should be when we encounter
information about an author’s biography and use it in relation to reading
his or her work. In the case of Rochester, knowing something about the
man and his life – and the period in which he lived – provides an
important background to understanding why he wrote the kind of poems
that he did, even if we should be careful to avoid disparaging the work
on the basis of the personal history.

Activity
Look up the entry for ‘John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’ in the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography.

What can we summarise about Rochester’s biography that will be useful

to our present enquiry into poetry of the Restoration period?

Firstly, Rochester’s personal history in some senses condenses and

intensifies many of the characteristics that we have ascribed to the
Restoration period in this unit so far, and perhaps also alerts us to the
dangers of such stereotypes. We know, from consulting the ODNB, that
Rochester came from a Royalist background: his father, Henry, had
supported Charles in the Civil War and followed the Royal Family in exile
to France. We can therefore surmise that John would probably have
been favourable to supporting the restored monarchy under Charles,
which the biographical information in the ODNB confirms – indeed,
Charles II made Rochester his foster son when John Wilmot’s father
Henry died, and at the age of ten John became second Earl of
Rochester.

Not long after this, we learn, Rochester went to Oxford and soon
obtained his degree, but that his early promise of scholarly aptitude was
thwarted by the influence of the times: the hard-drinking and unruly

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environment at Oxford bred the character traits that Rochester was later
to pursue to excess. A brilliant and sparkling member of Charles’s court,
from an early age he drank hard, had countless liaisons, eloped, and
was notorious for his libertine behaviour.

What do we mean by this word, ‘libertine’, and how might it help us to

understand both Rochester’s history and the nature of the times in
which he lived?

Activity
Look up ‘libertine’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

As you will see from the Dictionary entry, among several variant
meanings the ones that principally inform our purposes here are listed
under definition 2, in particular ‘One who follows his own inclinations or
goes his own way’ and ‘A man who is not restrained by moral law, esp.
in his relations with the female sex; one who leads a dissolute,
licentious life’. The sense ‘One who holds free or loose opinions about
religion’, however, is also pertinent: our reading of Milton and Bunyan in
previous units provides us with some sense of what the virtuous (or
‘Christian’) life should involve, which seem to be completely opposite to
all those qualities that define the libertine.

It is important to bear our understanding of this word in mind as we

pursue our analyses of Rochester’s poems, but also when we think
about the Restoration period in general. As a subsequent unit on the
drama of Congreve will show, the libertine or rake is a stock-character
of Restoration comedy, who only partially exaggerates a recognisable
and sizeable element of society.

Yet we also learn from the biography of Rochester that a life of

dissipation soon took its toll: ravaged by a confection of venereal
diseases and practically blinded by heavy drinking, he retired to the
countryside where, almost unbelievably, Rochester underwent a
religious conversion and repented the riotous experiences of his young
life. He ordered his licentious publications to be destroyed and even
promoted those that encouraged a pious and religious life. Many have
considered the devotion of Rochester’s final months strange, not to say
suspicious, and have suggested that it was caused by horror at the
prospect of his impending death (and, for some, damnation); but
perhaps we should try to be judicious about how we judge Rochester’s
last days in the context of his life and career as a whole.

For indeed, what does such biographical information have to do with

Rochester’s career as a writer?

For one thing, Rochester’s lifestyle and pursuits in many respects

provided subject-matter – not to mention language – that fuelled his
artistic endeavours as a poet and playwright. For instance, the poem
‘Upon his Drinking a Bowl’ testifies to one of his favourite leisure
activities and hints at another, where Rochester writes that:

Cupid and Bacchus my saints are,

May drink and love still reign,
With wine I wash away my cares,
And then to cunt again
(Rochester 1994: 38)

The profane announcement that his ‘saints’ are the pagan gods of love
and wine respectively suggest Rochester’s licentious disregard for

Unit 7: Debauch and Disability 7-5

_____________________________________________________________________

traditional forms of religion – very different indeed to the religious

sentiment Bunyan conveys in The Pilgrim’s Progress, written not long
after this poem. Indeed, Rochester’s language could hardly be any
different: the final line in particular indicates the obscenity that ripples
throughout much of his verse. But should we therefore dismiss it, or
consider Rochester as a poet who simply capitalises on the shock – and
perhaps the thrill – of using indecent words and images in his poems?

As Frank H. Ellis suggests in his entry for Rochester in the Oxford

Dictionary of National Biography, full appreciation of his poetry has been
obscured by the ‘disparagement’ that sees Rochester as simply
grotesque, what Ellis calls ‘the several misconceptions’ founded on ‘the
autobiographical fallacy and the charges of plagiarism, blasphemy, and
obscurity’ (ODNB, online version). After all, as Ellis suggests, we should
avoid the ‘fallacy’ of assuming that every poem is a reflection or
expression of the author’s biography.

There are, indeed, many qualities in Rochester’s verse besides his use of
striking language, or descriptions of various erotic antics. If we look
again at ‘Upon his Drinking a Bowl’, for instance, we can admire the
poem’s artful construction and deft use of metre and rhyme, which
convey with a light-handed touch the author’s adeptness with
expressing this particular sentiment in verse.

The numerous allusions to classical literature and mythology in this

particular poem also indicate the nature of Rochester’s education in the
classics, typical for a man of his time and class perhaps, but
nonetheless appropriated and reapplied to the present context of his
own times in a striking and entertaining way. Indeed, many of the
classical authors towards whom such references point belonged to an
age of indulgence and, in the eyes of some, obscenity themselves.

This, indeed, points us towards thinking about Rochester as a poet of

his time: although his actions and lifestyle might have been on a scale
of depravity unpractised by most – and indeed he was deplored by as
many as he dazzled – they were the product of time that was
distinguished by indulgence, licence to the point of licentiousness, and
profligacy, in both financial and sexual terms. After all, the anonymous
author of ‘One Writing Against his Prick’ felt sufficiently disappointed by
his own body’s perceived inability to keep pace with the demands placed
upon the present-day rake to berate his penis in a comic poem.

As this short, and admittedly minor poem suggests, alongside enjoying

the many pleasures that a newly ‘free’ age opened up for those wealthy
or leisured enough to indulge in them lurks a constant anxiety about not
being able to stand up to the demands of the thoroughly debauched life
– quite literally, in this poem. A sense of a lack of fulfilment often
accompanies even the most boisterous of erotic Restoration verse,
including several pieces by Rochester. As we shall go on to find in
subsequent sections, inadequacy, impotence and dissatisfaction
characterise – albeit humorously – a sub-genre of Restoration verse
known as the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ poem. Rochester produces one
example of this type of poem, which we shall examine in close detail,
alongside other pieces which explore themes related to that of
impotence.

These types of poem point to larger anxieties or ‘disappointments’ about

the age as a whole, when the promise and hope of Restoration – of
monarchy, of peace, wealth, stability, happiness – were found to be in
some sense lacking, unstable, inadequate. As Ros Ballaster writes of
Rochester, his poetry embodies the paradoxes and anxieties expressed
by many of his contemporaries at the very height of seeming to indulge
in the pleasures of the age:

7-6 Literature 3
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This most fragmentary, restless, and intellectual of Restoration

authors subjects his modern-day reader, as he did his
contemporaries, to a series of reversals and logical paradoxes
under the guise of an accessible hedonism. (1998: 221)

As for Rochester’s life and career, it is important to recognise, as Ellis

suggests, that his erotic verse – while in itself possessing many fine
qualities – is one aspect of a life that included many different kinds of
writing, including plays and major satires in verse (like ‘To the
Postboy’). These works, perhaps as much as anything, provide us with
an important means of assessing how far even a writer deeply
immersed in the dissipated pleasures of the age could distance himself
from it, to pass a critical commentary upon his times that is at once
humorous and subversive.

THE ‘IMPERFECT ENJOYMENT’ POEM

The grouping of poems under the category of ‘imperfect enjoyment’
signals that they share distinctive characteristics that link them
together. But what are the origins of this type of poem, and what are
these common characteristics?

Latin poets such as Ovid and Petronius offer early examples of the
tradition of ‘imperfect enjoyment’ poems; French poets such as Rémy
Belleau and Mathurin Regnier subsequently made their own
contributions to this genre in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth
centuries (Ballaster 1998: 208). Several poets of the Restoration period
produced versions of this type of poem – Rochester, of course, for one,
but the playwright and poet George Etherege also wrote an ‘imperfect
enjoyment’ poem, as did William Congreve, and as we shall see Aphra
Behn’s ‘The Disappointment’ belongs to this category. Each offers
variations on the same theme, whilst challenging its parameters and
exploiting the images and language it involves in new ways.

The defining characteristics of this kind of poem are, in a sense, self-

evident from the name ‘imperfect enjoyment’: this type of poem
addresses the disappointment which follows specifically from an
unfulfilled sexual encounter, usually as the result of impotence. As
Jessica Munns summarises, the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ poem ‘describes
an unsuccessful sexual encounter in which the male lover fails to satisfy
his partner’ (2004: 213).

If we separate out the two words ‘imperfect’ and ‘enjoyment’, and ask
what different meanings each term might hold within various historical
contexts, we can perhaps ascertain why certain poets chose to address
the theme of impotence, or of erotic disappointment more generally, in
this type of poem.

ACTIVITY
Look up entries for ‘imperfect’ and ‘enjoyment’ in the Oxford English
Dictionary.

Firstly, if we take the word ‘imperfect’, we see that in its adjectival

sense it holds variant meanings related to the idea of insufficiency or
lack, which can apply both to people and to things. In the context of the
poems that we are addressing in this unit, meanings such as ‘unfinished’
and ‘incomplete’, for instance, or ‘Of persons in respect of imperfect or
defective action or accomplishment’, could be applied to the situation of

Unit 7: Debauch and Disability 7-7

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a sexual encounter. The word ‘enjoyment’, meanwhile, describes the

pleasure or ‘gratification’ that might come from such an encounter.
When ‘enjoyment’ is coupled with ‘imperfect’, then, we find that two
seemingly opposite terms are juxtaposed to convey the sense: we have
on the one hand deficiency or lack, on the other satisfaction or
indulgence. The pairing of these two paradoxical terms conveys the
feeling of intense disappointment that a failed sexual encounter can
bring. By coupling these two words together, and writing a poem that
addresses this theme, the writer aptly conveys with verbal wit the
sterility of his own bodily functions.

How does Rochester’s poetry, and in particular his ‘The Imperfect

Enjoyment’, fit into this class of poem? On the one hand, as we shall
discover, the twinned ideas of excess and depletion repeatedly recur in
his poems; the anticipation of erotic fulfilment is, equally, paired with its
frequent disappointment. However, in his contribution to the ‘imperfect
enjoyment’ genre of poem, he does not focus on impotence but on
premature ejaculation as the cause for erotic disappointment. As Ros
Ballaster (1998: 208) suggests, in his poems ‘emission and loss are
consistently associated with male sexuality and, especially, the penis’.
These are characteristic features of this type of poem, and yet, as she
further argues,

Rochester also departs from the tradition in that the ‘debt to

pleasure’ that the speaker has failed to pay, the achievement of
orgasm in his partner, is the result of premature ejaculation rather
than impotence. His failure is one of self-control and timing rather
than the machinery itself. (1998: 208)

We shall go on to discover in a detailed textual reading how these

patterns of disappointment are mapped out in Rochester’s ‘Imperfect
Enjoyment’ through the poem’s ongoing juxtaposition of the dual ideas
of excess and depletion.

In a wider sense, we shall also address how Rochester’s poem fits into
the broader context of its production. Having established the
parameters of the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ type of poem, we can perhaps
begin to ascertain how it might be used by certain authors as a
paradigm for the dual sense of indulgence and dissatisfaction with which
we have so far characterised the period.

DEBAUCHERY AND DISABILITY:

ROCHESTER’S IMPERFECT ENJOYMENTS
We have already taken note of some poems that might fit the paired, if
opposite ideas of excess and depletion that characterise the Restoration
as a ‘period of paradoxes’ – like the anonymous ‘One Writing Against his
Prick’ – and suggested how a lack of erotic fulfilment is nonetheless
coupled with a humoured approach to the body’s insufficiencies. A far
more fully worked out example of these themes is Rochester’s ‘The
Imperfect Enjoyment’: this holds considerable literary merit in its own
right, and contributes in significant ways to our exploration of
Restoration poetry.

Activity

Read Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’.

What immediately strikes you upon first reading this poem? Perhaps
most readers will be struck – shocked, even – by the types of words

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that Rochester uses: these are very different indeed to the sonorous
phrases found in Milton, and the high-minded theological ideas they
connect to, or indeed to the more straightforward diction of The
Pilgrim’s Progress. Rochester’s lines, perhaps, might seem more suited
to a racy novel, or to an 18-certificate film. We are inevitably taken
aback at such words – if for nothing else than for the fact that they
appear in a poem, which we are told is a piece of literature, no matter
how familiar we might be with language like this in the world beyond
literary texts.

But should we allow this to distract (or, for some readers, even prevent)
us from reading Rochester’s poem as a literary text? What might we
discern beyond seemingly crass language that tells us that ‘The
Imperfect Enjoyment’ is a poem deserving our attention in a literature
module? Or, rather, in what ways do Rochester’s choice of words
contribute towards the ideas he treats in the poem, and the broader
themes they connect to in our understanding of the period as a whole?

Let us address, firstly, what ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ is ‘about’. The

poem’s narrative is easily discernible: it relates how, during a sexual
encounter with his mistress, the speaker of the poem finds that he falls
victim to premature ejaculation, and fails to enjoy fully the pleasure he
has anticipated in his passionate foreplay. And yet Rochester’s poem is
much more than simply an opportunity for licentious dirty-talk. By
tracing how Rochester describes the build-up towards his expected
fulfilment, registers its disappointment, and then records the
downwards spiral of the anticlimax, we can see how he employs
linguistic fecundity to replace his lack of sexual fruition; similarly, he
manipulates metre in a way that he fails to control his own body.

In the first few lines, the speaker of the poem presents a love-scene
that could, potentially, be considered almost commonplace in its
features and description:

Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,

I filled with love, and she all over charms,
Both equally inspired with eager fire,
Melting through kindness, flaming in desire (ll. 1-4)

On the surface, this opening could almost come from the pages of an
anthology of courtly love poetry, or perhaps even from amongst John
Donne’s amorous verse. Looking more closely, however, we can detect
a strain of innuendo even in the first two lines, which indicates to us
that this is to be a rather different kind of love poem. The opening word,
after all, is a striking and unabashed announcement of the physical
appearance of at least one of the figures described in the poem. Note,
too, how Rochester ruptures the metre even with the first word: ‘Naked’
is a troche (stressed-unstressed), which inverts the expected iamb
(unstressed-stressed) which otherwise generally characterises the
poem’s pentameter lines. Indeed, the first line is rippled with rhythmic
irregularities:

- u u - - - u - u -
Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms

Here, the stressed (‘-’) and unstressed (‘u’) syllables do not follow the
same pattern as that adopted throughout the rest of the poem;
immediately, the speaker alerts us that the course of this ‘love’ will not
follow the usual track, and that the anticipated joy of that ‘longing’ will
be disrupted, like the metre. Rochester uses this technique, of mirroring
the speaker’s erotic fortunes through the metrical patterns of the lines,
throughout the poem.

Unit 7: Debauch and Disability 7-9

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Activity
Read through ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ with a pencil in your hand:
note down the stress patterns of each line, following the notation
system outlined above, using ‘-’ to denote a stressed, and ‘u’ to denote
an unstressed syllable.

What do you notice about the metre and rhythm of Rochester’s poem?
Is the regular pattern disrupted at particular moments, with what effect,
and for what potential purpose?

Save this information for your subsequent written analysis of this poem.

After this striking opening, Rochester continually alerts us throughout

the poem that surface-meaning only goes so far in describing the scene
he pictures for us. The speaker describes how he is ‘filled with love’,
which with only a little imagination implies that he is experiencing an
erection, and could even urge us to think of ‘love’ as a by-word for
sperm; it is also a provoking way of reminding us that the pleasure he
anticipates is, quite literally, to ‘fill’ his mistress. Does this, perhaps,
present us with a potential paradox to decipher? He is both ‘filled’ and
the filler, implying that the roles of the couple will be reversed – or,
perhaps, merged as one in their anticipated union.

‘She’, meanwhile, is ‘all over charms’: an innocent enough way of

describing his mistress’ physical attractiveness, perhaps; but the Oxford
English Dictionary tells us that the word ‘charm’ means ‘Any quality,
attribute, trait, feature, etc., which exerts a fascinating or attractive
influence, exciting love or admiration’, and in the plural is particularly
used ‘of female beauty’. Here, the ‘charms’ the mistress possesses
excite the speaker’s ‘love’; the claim that she is ‘all over charms’ also
anticipates how she will be covered all over with the results of his
premature ejaculation, and ‘from her body wipes the clammy joys’ (l.
20).

The combination of unlikely, or antithetical ideas – filled and filling, and

the conjoined idea of fulfilment and emptiness – continues to be worked
out in the subsequent lines. The speaker goes on to describe the various
stages of the foreplay he and his mistress enjoy as they build up to this
expected climax. In this description of the lovers’ mounting desire, their
body parts are fragmented – they are dismembered, as he describes
how ‘arms, legs, lips’ entwine; the ‘tongue’ and ‘mouth’ of each lover is
itemized then recombined. This series of metaphors details the rising
excitement the lovers experience, individually and together.

Terms such as ‘fluttering’ and ‘hovering’ capture a sense of eager

anticipation, the promise of fulfilment, but also of its intangibility: to
flutter or hover, like the ‘soul’, is transient and hard to pin down, like
the moment of exquisite bliss that the speaker looks forward to. His
penis is poised, tentative, ‘over her balmy brinks of bliss’ – a poetic
euphemism for the clitoris. Does Rochester describe it in this way out of
delicacy, or to heighten the erotic charge of this line?

By presenting us with an elaborate and eloquent image of the means by

which he can gain sexual fulfilment, which is intensified by the
alliteration of this line and (as you will have noted) its lilting metre,
Rochester increases the reader’s titillation. The reader, like the speaker
of the poem, hovers on the ‘brinks’ of fulfilment promised in the
following lines, where we hope to read that the speaker achieves the
bliss he anticipates.

7-10 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

However, this poeticised way of describing the female genitals is

juxtaposed with the more brutal, even coarse way that the speaker
describes what happens next:

But whilst her busy hand would guide that part

Which should convey my soul up to her heart,
In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,
Melt into sperm and spend at every pore (ll. 13-16)

Is there a disjuncture between the way in which the clitoris is described,

as ‘the brinks of bliss’, and the more prosaic presentation of ‘her busy
hand’ and his ‘part’? Is there another disjuncture in the subsequent line,
where the rapturous ‘convey my soul up to her heart’ presents an
eloquent way of describing penetration?

The variance of tone in these few lines, perhaps, may bring us to draw
some conclusions about the ways in which the male and female figures
of the poem are represented: are they treated equally, or in different
ways? Do you notice that the speaker uses more eloquent, poetic diction
to describe his own actions, and yet more commonplace and ordinary
terms are connected to the woman? Indeed, her ‘busy hand’ places the
woman in an almost mercantile role, where like a tradeswoman she
actively tries to excite her lover’s bodily ‘part’ – a word which, like its
relative, ‘portion’, has both monetary and sexual connotations. This,
perhaps, sits alongside the description of her ‘charms’, which in the
metaphorical meaning of the term implies material wares as well as
beauty: the mistress is a desirable object whom the speaker hopes to
‘fill’ and enjoy, in all senses of the term. Indeed, as Ros Ballaster
suggests,

The language of economy permeates Rochester’s writing,

nowhere more obviously than in the representation of sexual
exchange as a form of economic trade, usually entailing ‘loss’ for
the male lover. (1998: 206)

It is worth asking yourself, then, as you read through the poem, how
the male and female figures are treated: are they equal, united in their
joint movements and actions, and their potential enjoyment, or is there
an imbalance both in the ways in which they are presented verbally, and
in their experience of this sexual encounter? This balance – or potential
imbalance – is important to bear in mind when we come to read Aphra
Behn’s version of the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ poem.

Nonetheless, that both man and woman face a potential disappointment

in the fulfilment they so eagerly anticipate is signalled in the words
‘dissolving’ and fluttering’, and the terms that Rochester uses in relation
to these: words such as ‘all-dissolving’, ‘liquid raptures’, ‘dissolve’,
‘melt’, ‘spend’. This implies a negative, or even sceptical, approach to
how far a person can fully indulge in pleasure, without being aware of
the pain or disappointment that accompanies it. This sense, conveyed in
Rochester’s combination of terms, is embedded in philosophical ideas
prevalent at the time. As Ballaster suggests, the mercantile rhetoric of
Rochester’s poems is connected to contemporary ideas about sex,
gender and politics: in using these images, she suggests, Rochester
does not necessarily endorse such ideas, but in fact challenges them by
treating them ironically:

In Rochester’s poetic and dramatic works we can identify a

consistent tendency toward critique of the very discourse of
commerce and exchange within which he is writing, a restless
unhappiness with the demarcation of boundaries between the
social, sexual, and political, condemning such discriminatory
activities as part and parcel of a culture that continually balances

Unit 7: Debauch and Disability 7-11

_____________________________________________________________________

its books, and attempts to value and delimit its component parts.
(1998: 207)

Ballaster goes on to argue that this critique is channelled by Rochester

through figures of depletion, or of excess running into waste. She
identifies how:

These gestures of negativity attend the two primary forms of

figuration that dominate his writing and become the subject of
both investigation and critique: first, a figuration of waste or
emission identified with the physical and symbolic properties of
the penis/phallus; and second, a figuration of surfeit and
absorption identified with the physical and symbolic properties of
the vagina/cunt. (1998: 207-8)

In this respect, both the male and female figures of the poem are
subject to the ‘figuration’ of the dual ideas of waste and excess, of
overindulgence and its negative consequences.

In ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, the linked, but opposite phrases – ‘all-

dissolving’, ‘liquid raptures’, ‘dissolve’, ‘melt’, ‘spend’ – signal this
pattern of excess and wastage. They convey an impression of the
simultaneous physicality and intransience of this moment: it is all-too-
fleeting and all-too-possibly ‘dissolves’ into disappointment. Thus, just a
few lines into the poem, both lovers and reader are denied the erotic
satisfaction promised in the opening lines: both the speaker and the
lines of the poem ‘dissolve all o’er’ as the sentences become ruptured
with a series of punctuation points – commas, a colon, a full stop – like
the scattered sperm:

In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,

Melt into sperm and spend at every pore.
A touch from any part of her had done’t,
Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt.
Smiling, she chides in a kind, murmuring noise,
And from her body wipes the clammy joys,
When with a thousand kisses, wandering o’er
My panting bosom, ‘Is there then no more?’ (ll. 15-22)

The words ‘melt’ and ‘spend’ here recall different aspects of the
preceding lines of the poem, but with the same effect. For instance,
‘melting with kindness’ in line 4 had initially captured a sense of the
couple’s tenderness as they work themselves up towards the climax of
their sexual encounter, while ‘spend’ recalls the mercantile discourse
that resonates with the image of the ‘busy’ mistress guiding the ‘part’ to
its destination. Both terms nonetheless hold the same purpose in this
line, signalling the dispersal of sperm and of the moment’s erotic
intensity.

That the speaker ‘spend[s] at every pore’ suggests both a profusion of

bodily fluids and the utter emptiness of the moment: he is physically
emptied (of sperm), but also emptied of hope of the promised orgasm,
as he despairingly realises the incipient disaster (or disappointment) of
the moment. Again the body becomes dismembered – into ‘hand’ and
‘foot’ – but this time these terms refer only to the woman’s body, and
not to the couple as a collective: each limb in fact stands in for her
‘cunt’, implying that her very body has the power to re-inspire him with
the hope (both physically and metaphorically) that would save the
moment, that would reinvigorate the speaker, and so allow both of
them to enjoy a full orgasm.

We need not shy away from the word ‘cunt’ here: in fact, a survey of
the Oxford English Dictionary’s listing of its historical usage shows that
it is, in fact, a very old term indeed.

7-12 Literature 3
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Activity

Look up ‘cunt’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

How does the blunt, unequivocal quality of this word affect how we
interpret this particular crisis point in the poem? Does it jar with the
softer, more eloquent, or tender terms that describe this moment of
passion? For instance, the line ‘Smiling, she chides in a kind, murmuring
noise’ presents the mistress in a relatively gentle way that is, however,
also cloying. The repetitive sound created by the internal rhyme,
‘Smiling’ and ‘murmuring’, makes the woman seem clingy here, as
though her sympathy intensifies the speaker’s sickened sense of
disappointment. Indeed, does he partly lay the blame on her at this
point, suggesting that had she known how to handle the situation (quite
literally) she would have succeeded in reigniting his flagging passion?

That she ‘from her body wipes the clammy joys’ adds to this sense of
distasteful revulsion, the sense that she clings to his body (his ‘bosom’)
just as his sperm clings to hers, and perhaps further detaches the
woman from the man: she wipes away the evidence of his failure, and
so wipes her lover’s presence away too. The detachment that the
speaker feels at this point is captured in the aposiopetic, or partial,
question that he records: ‘Is there then no more?’ This phrase is both a
record of her acknowledgement of his failure, and a partial hope that
there might indeed be ‘more’. This question is also an expression of the
speaker’s own sense of failure, as though he urges his body on to find
‘more’ but is aware of his inability to fulfil this hope, and so is aware
that he bears responsibility for making the ‘enjoyment’ of both lovers
‘imperfect’.

From this mid-point in the poem, the metaphors that Rochester uses to
describe his feelings after the crisis-point of sexual disappointment
adopt a very different tone to those which had occupied the earlier lines
of the poem, where excitement and anticipation were captured in both
the images used and the rhythm. The speaker of the poem seems to be
deprived of speech – unable to articulate his disappointment in words
(compared to the woman) – a disability that mirrors his sexual lack:

I sigh, alas, and kiss, but cannot swive (l. 27)

The word ‘swive’ is an archaic term meaning ‘to copulate’; here, the
speaker tells us, his verbal lack (he can only ‘sigh’, but does not put his
disappointment into words) is like his inability to ‘swive’. Indeed, could
we even push this connection further, and suggest that Rochester aligns
tongue and penis as being equally impotent? In any case, it is a
combination of ‘Eager desires’ and ‘Succeeding shame’ that prevents the
speaker from renewing the chance of ‘success’, a series of emotions that
culminates in ‘rage’, the passion (in the sense of ‘emotion’) that finally
‘confirms me impotent’: the moment is permanently lost forever.

Following this climax-point, we find a series of metaphors that

compound the sense of impotence, of physical debility. What are these?

Activity
Note down metaphors that convey the sense of physical impotence in
lines 31-36.

Unit 7: Debauch and Disability 7-13

_____________________________________________________________________

You might, for instance, note the juxtaposition of opposing images: we

find that ‘heat’, ‘burn’, ‘fire’, ‘flames’ – words which all relate to physical
passion – are placed alongside words such as ‘frozen’, ‘cold’, ‘dead
cinder’, ‘ashes’. What is the effect of these contrasting images? They
suggest, in what we might call a verbal-visual form, the transition from
passionate desire to hopelessness, as the speaker realises with an
increasing sense of despair that he cannot bring his penis to behave as
he wishes, and so cannot ‘swive’ with his mistress.

Using the notes you have just made upon these lines, observe how
Rochester provides a compacted series of images that relate to this and
support the impression of deflation: do these metaphors convey a shift
in tone from the earlier lines of the poem? Do these images mark a
transition from initial elation, to crushing disappointment?

Words and phrases you might have selected to support this impression,
alongside the hot/cold antithesis we have just noted, might include the
series of adjectives in line 35 – ‘Trembling, confused, despairing, limber,
dry’, with the self-deprecating description of the following line, ‘A
wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie’. The poetic voice is at once
‘wishing’ – still longing for the orgasm of which he has been so lately
disappointed – and ‘weak, unmoving’, physically incapable of even the
basic movement; he is, in fact, a ‘lump’, barely a living man at all, but
an inanimate object. How does this compare with the image of the
lively, eager lover conveyed in the opening lines of the poem?

Indeed, we could say that it is precisely the issue of ‘manhood’ that

provides the focal point of the poem, and its main complaint. We’ve
noted how, in some respects, the mistress is subject to a certain degree
of blame for the speaker’s inability to fulfil both of their passionate
desires. However, is your impression of the poem as a whole that the
speaker disparages the woman, or himself? In fact, from line 37, is
there a shift in focus from the relationship between the man and the
woman, to the relationship between the man and his own body?

Who, or what, does the speaker address from line 37 to the end of the
poem?

Again, we can trace the metaphors in these lines to help us to identify

how the speaker deals with the ‘rage’ he feels upon his erotic
disappointment. The target of this combined anger and regret is his own
‘dart of love’, a euphemism for his penis that bitterly conveys the sense
that it fails to live up to its intended function. The ‘dart of love’ also
recalls Cupid’s dart: according to classical mythology, the god of love
would fire his dart into an individual to ensure that he or she should fall
in love with a particular person.

What, indeed, does the use of the word ‘love’ tell us here? Does it seem
to you that Rochester uses it in the same kind of way to other poets or
writers you have encountered in this module so far, or elsewhere? We
might observe, for instance, that ‘love’ has multiple different meanings:
in one sense, it can be purely ‘platonic’ – between friends; it can be
passionate; it can be divine – think of Milton and Bunyan. What do you
think it means here, in the context of Rochester’s poem, and bearing in
mind the other words and images surrounding it? Can we say that it
holds one, or multiple meanings? It might help us at this point in our
enquiry to survey the word briefly in the Oxford English Dictionary.

7-14 Literature 3
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Activity
Note the occurrence of the word ‘love’ in Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect
Enjoyment’.
Look up the word ‘love’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

You can see from the Dictionary entry that the word does, indeed, hold
a broad range of potential applications; which are most useful to us
here? In one sense, the word love conveys the idea that is highly
pertinent to the erotic nature of Rochester’s poem: ‘An intense feeling of
romantic attachment which is based on sexual attraction; sexual passion
combined with liking and concern for the other person’. It can also hold
another, equally relevant meaning that conveys a sense of the practical,
or physical, application of this feeling: ‘Sexual desire or lust, esp. as a
physiological instinct; amorous sexual activity, sexual intercourse’. From
this active sense, a series of prepositional phrases emerge, such as
being ‘in’, ‘into’ or ‘out of love’.

How do these definitions help us to understand the meaning of the word

‘love’ in Rochester’s poem? One of these prepositional meanings, in the
Dictionary entry, is certainly very relevant to the lines of the poem we
have already looked at: being ‘filled with love (for)’, which, as we found,
occurs in line 2 of the poem. As we noted, this holds both a
metaphorical sense and a physical one – the speaker, we observed,
could be both ‘filled’ with feelings of affection and desire for his
mistress, and ‘filled’ in a physical, bodily sense too, with an erection.
Does this dual sense of the physical and the emotional run throughout
the other appearances of the word ‘love’ in the poem that you have
noted, in relation to the various Dictionary definitions you have traced?
What might this tell us about Rochester’s attitude to love in the poem?

By the time that we get to the ‘dart of love’ described in line 37, we
could say that the speaker adopts an altogether more bitter tone both
about love itself, and about his body’s relation to it, that is different to
the tone of eager anticipation found in the use of the word ‘love’ in the
poem’s opening lines. This is partly because, at the beginning of ‘The
Imperfect Enjoyment’, the speaker talks about love in relation to
another human being; now, he uses love to address his own body,
which he has just described as an inanimate ‘lump’, and in particular to
talk about his own penis.

What is striking about the nature of the way that the speaker addresses
his own body, from lines 37-45?

We might, perhaps, notice how the speaker talks to his own penis as if
it were another person, a separate entity to himself, one moreover that
he chides, and holds responsible for his present state of dissatisfaction.
As Claude Rawson observes, ‘Rochester often imagines the penis as an
autonomous being, comically separate from the body’s other functions
and unpredictable’ (2000: 10). This ‘comic’ element is important to bear
in mind as we read through the poem, and try to ascertain its tone.

Initially, the speaker reproves his penis by referring to its former

exploits. In the past, the speaker suggests, his ‘dart of love’ found no
difficulty whatsoever in fulfilling his bodily desires, as its ‘piercing point’
has been ‘oft tried’, an idea that is compounded with the hyperbolic
phrase ‘ten thousand maids have dyed’. The word ‘die’ was commonly
used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe sexual
orgasm; here, we see again how Rochester plays with the multiple
meanings a word can hold to convey the ideas his poem describes: the
image of ten thousand ‘maids’ (or virgins) both expiring with passion,

Unit 7: Debauch and Disability 7-15

_____________________________________________________________________

and experiencing orgasm, is suitably apposite to the absence of orgasm

in the particular encounter described here. This also suggests death in a
variety of other senses too – of the speaker’s hopes, of passion, and so
on.

How does the speaker further reprove his own penis by describing its
former exploits? There is, we might say, a shift in the linguistic register
used – the words become increasingly more coarse, perhaps as the
speaker’s rage subsides into greater bitterness as he contemplates the
difference between his penis’s inability to serve him now, and its
indiscriminate, numerous encounters in the past. For instance, the
speaker describes how:
Woman or boy, nor ought its fury staid,
Where’er it pierced, a cunt it found or made. (ll. 42-3)

It was so insatiable in fulfilling its lust that the penis did not even
discriminate between ‘Woman or boy’, with the brutal and perhaps
shocking idea that ‘a cunt it found or made’ where none existed before.
We might also note here how there is again a shift in the speaker’s
tone: he no longer addresses his penis directly, in the second person,
but refers to it in the third person, as ‘it’; perhaps his disdain for his
own penis is such that he can no longer condescend to talk to it directly
in these lines.

However, the direct, personal attack resumes as he goes on to describe

the various exploits that his ‘treacherous, base deserter of my flame’
had previously undertaken. The accusation of indiscriminate sex
continues – not only boys and women now, but even those women of
the lowest social class, have been exposed to the lust of the speaker’s
penis: ‘oyster, cinder, beggar, common whore’ (l. 50) describes these
low-class women through their professions – as oyster-sellers or
prostitutes – or even absence of a profession (‘beggar’).

The distasteful nature of these multiple sexual encounters is

compounded by the reference to ‘vice, disease, and scandal’, in all of
which the speaker’s penis ‘lead the way’, suggesting that it has been
exposed to all of these negative aspects of sex through its prolific
activity. Indeed, the corrupting nature of sex seems now to have
threatened the health of the penis, which is described with a perverted
natural metaphor as being ‘Shrunk up and sapless like a withered
flower’ (l. 45). Indeed, the phrase ‘shrunk up’ reappears in a different
context a few lines later, where the speaker’s role (or, specifically, his
penis’) as being at the apex of vice is conveyed in the suggestion that
even ‘The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head’ (l. 57) by
comparison with this man’s sexual promiscuity (with again a sexual pun
on ‘head’).

What is the point of all these accusations – partly based on past conduct
– in the context of ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ as a whole? We can,
perhaps, provide one answer by returning to the word ‘Love’, which
appears again in line 60: here, it is used in conjunction with the
adjective ‘great’. What does this suggest, both about the way in which
‘love’ is used in this poem, and about the purpose of the complaint
against the penis?

We might, for one thing, note that once again Rochester uses a pun –
the word ‘great’ can mean multiple things at once. On one level, these
meanings reinforce the sexual innuendo that chimes in with the poem’s
erotic nature: ‘great’ could refer to the swollen penis; it also holds an
archaic sense meaning pregnant, suggesting the possible result of the
sexual encounter so bitterly denied in the poem’s scenario. But, of
course, in its more familiar sense ‘great’ can mean wonderful,
important, special.

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What significance does this last alternative meaning hold at this

particular point in the poem? Compare the use of ‘great Love’ here with
the other appearances of ‘love’ in the poem, and in relation to the lines
that precede it:

Ev’n so thy brutal valor is displayed,

Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade,
But if great Love the onset does command,
Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar’st not stand. (ll. 58-61)

In these lines, there is a transition from the coarse and bitter language
of the invective against the penis – its ‘valor’ is ‘brutal’, while line 59
again suggests the crude nature of its activities (‘stew’ is a colloquial
term for ‘brothel’, home of the ‘whore’) – to the more elevated register
used to describe ‘great Love’.

Here, we find that ‘Love’ is talked about in a noble, grander way, as the
capital letter implies: it can ‘command’, like a monarch, and indeed the
speaker refers to himself in the subsequent line as a ‘prince’, whose
subject is the ‘recreant’ penis that refuses to obey his orders. In this
respect, the penis is portrayed as a wayward vassal, a low-class
miscreant who consorts with whores and oyster-sellers, but who fails to
live up to his potentially nobler calling. It was over-active on countless
occasions before, but now that it is called upon to perform its duty –
this time, in an encounter that really matters, one of ‘great Love’ rather
than simply lust – it ‘dar’st not stand’, and fails to fulfil its role as this
‘prince’s’ servant.

As such, the speaker applies some of the harshest, crudest language to

addressing his penis here, further distancing himself from it – whilst at
the same time recognising that it is an inseparable part of him. He
deems it the

Worst part of me and henceforth hated most,

Through all the town the common fucking post
On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt,
As hogs on gates do rub themselves and grunt (ll. 62-64)

Just as the penis is the speaker’s ‘worst’ bodily part, so it calls up the
worst language he can muster, which creates decidedly repulsive
images: the penis is a ‘common fucking post’; the image of the equally
common whore who ‘relieves her tingling cunt’ upon it is grotesquely
provocative, made more so through the verbally rich assonance
between ‘tingling’ and ‘cunt’. Line 64, meanwhile, conveys an image of
animalistic pleasure – with base, monosyllabic words such as ‘hogs’,
‘gates’, ‘grunt’ – which is compounded by the crudely lilting rhythm of
the metre.

The speaker concludes his diatribe with a malediction, or curse, on his

useless ‘part’:
May’st thou to ravenous chancres be a prey,
Or in consuming weepings waste away.
May strangury and stone thy days attend;
May’st thou ne’er piss who didst refuse to spend
When all my joys did on false thee depend.
And may ten thousand abler pricks agree
To do the wronged Corinna right for thee. (ll. 66-72)

Not only does he wish all manner of horrible venereal diseases upon his
penis, but also that it shall be denied the most natural of bodily
functions – even more natural than sex – as his wish that it might ‘ne’er
piss’ promises a future of frustration and pain for the penis, designed to
equal the speaker’s frustration and pain at his present erotic

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disappointment. As Ros Ballaster says of these closing lines, ‘the

punishment the speaker calls down upon his/its head is a fitting one,
that future emissions should be the result of disease, or should fail
outright’ (1998: 208).

The dual nature of love that we have noticed elsewhere in the poem –
juxtaposed between sexual pleasure and a nobler feeling or emotion – is
nonetheless combined in the final lines of the poem: the coarse
invective against the penis is placed alongside the speaker’s claim that
he makes it on behalf of his mistress, ‘the wronged Corinna’. This final
line conveys an explanation of the paradox of this closing curse: of
course, if the speaker’s penis must suffer disease and the pain of not
being able to ‘piss’, then the speaker must do so too, as the penis is an
indivisible ‘part of me’. He must also face the shame of ‘ten thousand
abler pricks’ – other men and their penises – who will be able to provide
the sexual fulfilment that he has so signally failed to do.

As such, can we perhaps mark a final shift about the way in which the
speaker situates himself in relation to the woman, and to his own body?
In the final lines, the culmination of his diatribe against his own penis,
he suggests that his anger and frustration are partly due to his own
‘disappointment’ and denial of sexual pleasure, but are also due to the
shame of having deprived his mistress, Corinna, of the enjoyment that
she, too, anticipated. Both pride and tenderness are, perhaps, mixed
together here: shame at the inevitable slur upon his reputation, but also
an intense feeling of having disappointed his mistress at the most
intimate expression of their ‘great Love’.

However, perhaps we should not be too ready to take this as an entirely

sincere account of the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ experienced in a sexual
encounter, nor a wholehearted celebration of ‘great Love’. As we have
noted, the puns and innuendo surrounding these, and other words,
prompt us to detect a certain irony in the way in which Rochester treats
his subject.

How might we distinguish the tone of the poem? It might be a witty

reflection upon a contemporary malaise, one made inevitable by the
many and varied sexual experiences the speaker admits to having had,
and which seem common enough for him to be able to talk about them
so freely; indeed, is this actually an indication of bravado? Does the
speaker take a kind of debauched pride in flaunting his various sexual
exploits in such a way, even if they are partly responsible for his
present disappointment?

We should bear these possibilities in mind as we read and think about

this poem, and about the broader themes of sexual debility upon which
it touches, and its presence in other poems by Rochester. For example,
the theme of impotence, to which it is related, has particular resonance
in Rochester’s poem, ‘The Maimed Debauchee’, which we shall come to
shortly. As Claude Rawson says, ‘flauntings of the theme of impotence
were part of the sub-culture of rakish coteries to which Rochester
belonged’ (2000: 10); as such, we should read the sincerity of his
lament for a failed sexual encounter with a certain degree of scepticism
– as well as bearing in mind that this might not be an ‘autobiographical’
poem at all.

No matter how we judge the tone, we might nonetheless be able to

stretch our thoughts about the poem to perceive that it reflects a
possible – even probable – scenario, given the history of the speaker
that it sketches, and apply it to the wider world surrounding the poem.
Is ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ just about one failed sexual encounter,
though? Or can we place Rochester’s poem within a broader context,
which allows us to make some observations upon the period in which it
was produced?

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We have already commented upon how we might describe this as an

age of ‘paradoxes’, one in which sexual licence is coupled with
dissatisfaction, pleasure with pain, excess with disability. Can you trace
these antithetical themes throughout Rochester’s poem, too? In ‘The
Imperfect Enjoyment’, we might say, sexual licence is rampant, both in
the ‘thousands’ of erotic encounters the speakers describes, and in the
present scenario – even if the couple are denied fulfilment, they are
nonetheless placed in an erotic scenario.

There is a sense in the poem that abundant excess in all respects – be it

sex, drink , or otherwise – brings with it contrary consequences that are
distinctly unwelcome: it is, perhaps, partly because of his
overindulgence at other times that the speaker now founds himself
unable to fulfil his desires when it matters most, at the moment of
‘great Love’. We also noted how this juxtaposition of opposites, or
paradoxes, operated throughout the linguistic texture of the poem, with
a series of contrasting images that simultaneously convey a sense of
burning passion and frozen disappointment. Can we, therefore, suggest
that ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ is a poem of paradoxes?

SAQ 1

In what ways can Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ be

described as a ‘poem of paradoxes’?

‘A PERIOD OF PARADOXES’:
TWO POEMS BY ROCHESTER
We have traced in detail some of the distinctive features of Rochester’s
‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, both in its linguistic particularities and its
structure, and in the broader themes it connects to. How might we
extend our observations even further, to situate ‘The Imperfect
Enjoyment’ within the context of Restoration poetry more broadly, and
in terms of our description of this as a ‘period of paradoxes’?

We can support this thesis, or perhaps interrogate its limitations, if we

turn more briefly to two other poems by Rochester, which both enhance
our knowledge of his output as a poet and of the age to which he
belonged - ‘The Maimed Debauchee’ and ‘Upon Nothing’.

Activity
Read ‘The Maimed Debauchee’.

What are your initial impressions upon reading this poem, both in terms
of ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, and of your knowledge of other poems of
this period?

We might, firstly, observe that, like ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, ‘The

Maimed Debauchee’ is predominantly comic in tone – perhaps even
more so, as it does not have the same quality of bitter disappointment,
but is more jaunty and flippant in the way it treats its subject matter.
How is this conveyed?

For one thing, you might comment upon the formal structure of the
poem: how does it compare with that of ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’? It
is written in a form known as the ‘heroic stanza’, one employed by

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contemporary poets such as John Dryden, in relation to whose work we

will discuss it in greater detail in the next unit. In summary, however,
the heroic stanza is a rhymed quatrain with the rhyme-scheme abab;
the metre, as the example from Rochester shows, is usually iambic
pentameter. Heroic verse adopts a pseudo-elevated style to convey an
idea, or to deal with subject-matter, that is inappropriately ‘low’. The
disjunction between form and content – high style and low subject –
creates a comic effect.

How does this work in Rochester’s ‘The Maimed Debauchee’, and to

what effect?

Like ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, this poem presents a speaker who has
enjoyed a life of debauch and excess: not only has he overindulged in
numerous sexual encounters, but he has also drunk excessively and
engaged in all manner of vice. Now, however, he finds that his body
pays the toll for such depravity: he is riddled with illness, both venereal
disease and the physical problems brought about by heavy drinking,
late nights, and general overindulgence. Most importantly he is afflicted
by ‘impotence’, disabled from pursuing his sexual pleasures precisely
because of his excessive enjoyment of them in the past (ll. 13-14). As
with ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, the indiscriminate nature of these
pleasures is signalled by the reference to ‘whores’, and by the claim
that:

Nor shall our love-fits, Cloris, be forgot,

When each the well-looked link-boy strove t’enjoy,
And the best kiss was the deciding lot
Whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy . (ll. 37-40)

The scanty weight placed on such sexual encounters is evident, as only

a ‘kiss’ would be ‘the deciding lot’ as to who did what; and, as with ‘The
Imperfect Enjoyment’, as we can see here the looseness of the
speaker’s attitude to sexual licence is matched by the free use of vulgar
language in these lines.

This supports Claude Rawson’s reading of this poem, and of Rochester’s

treatment of the theme of impotence in general; as we have already
seen, Rawson suggests that the debonair, even boastful way in which
this theme is handled by Rochester reflects the ‘rakish’ environment in
which the poem is produced (2000: 10). Rawson, however, provides an
important reminder that this is not necessarily an account of personal
experience, but a playful imagining of a potential future scenario – even
if it is one that Rochester might all too easily be faced with, given the
details of his personal life. As Rawson writes, ‘“impotence” is presented
in Rochester as an imagined state, on a par with other erotic
possibilities’; in ‘The Maimed Debauchee’, he argues, ‘the speaker is
frankly imagining future incapacities, not describing present ones’
(2000: 8).

It is this potentiality – the admission (or flaunting) of former debauches

providing the ripe conditions for future impotence – that gives the poem
its erotic charge; the provocative details that the speaker gives as an
explanation for the possible scenario of impotence are, after all, in
themselves highly titillating. As Rawson claims,

The impotence is thus conceived not as a cessation of erotic

energy, but as an energy in its own right, a vigour not so much
diminished as gone into reverse. (2000: 8)

This ‘reverse’ – or paradoxical – movement is the direct result of

excess: by too much ‘debauch’, the speaker perverts the natural
balance and proportion of his own body, and potentially pushes its
normal functions into the opposite direction of inability to move at all.

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Indeed, that ‘anything goes’ is the tenor of the times, and that there is
a widespread lack of responsibility in one’s personal conduct, is
suggested in the opening lines of the poem. Here, the speaker uses the
analogy of a ‘brave Admiral in former war’ to describe the hard-going
nature of his former conduct: he likens the exhaustion, the intensity,
the potential injury – but also the elation – of warfare to his life of
licentious and libertine conduct.

Is there a certain inappropriateness, though, in the use of this

metaphor? As we found in, for instance, our study of Country House
poems, the ‘good’ citizen should be engaged in helping to run the
successful state, contributing his own talents to improving the nation;
his active involvement in national affairs enables him to retire upon his
estate and to enjoy his personal pastimes and pleasures. As we saw in
Fairfax’s and Cromwell’s cases, being a fine soldier and serving the
country in times of war is a significant part of this public role.

Here, however, the image of the good citizen is perverted: the

debauchee who speaks suffers from illness and disease, but these are
not inflicted during battle, nor is his exhaustion the result of tireless
public service. Instead, he is weary and sick because of the tireless
pursuit of his own pleasure: he has not earned the right to enjoy those
pleasures by active public service, but on the contrary potentially harms
the nation’s health by contributing to the corruption of its morality.

The Restoration has, by many commentators, been considered as a

period of corrupt morals, one in which vice was rife and, if virtue was
present at all, it was only an assumed virtue. We must, of course, be
careful of stereotyping a period in history, and its literature, in this
unsubtle way; however, is there a sense in which Rochester conveys
such an impression in ‘The Maimed Debauchee’? Ros Ballaster, for
instance, suggests of this poem and ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ alike
that:

Evidently, we must understand both the disabled debauchee and

the speaker of ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ as subject to their
creator's irony: preoccupied with sensual pleasures, they
trivialize political and military glory by invoking the comparison
and reveal themselves to be trivial in the process. (1998: 209)

Furthermore, does Rochester suggest that, while at the time they

seemingly provide pleasure, the libertine’s pursuits actually bring
dissatisfaction? We might look to the title for a clue: here, we find a
paradox in itself: ‘The Maimed Debauchee’ conveys conflicting ideas of
one who is impotent, physically immobile, or powerless, alongside the
image of someone who is wild and engages in all manner of excessive
pleasures. This is equally resonant in the alternative title sometimes
given to the poem, ‘The Disabled Debauchee’.

Does this perhaps support the idea that, as a ‘period of paradoxes’, the
Restoration was a time in which pleasure and pain, indulgence and
deprivation, excess and emptiness, were constantly in the balance?
Moreover, does Rochester’s exploration of these paradoxes suggest that
even apparently the most abandoned rake could be aware of such
conflicts, and of the price that he must inevitably pay for a life of
indulgence? Certainly, if we think back to Rochester’s biography, the
‘religious conversion’ of his final months supports such an idea.

However, we should also be reticent of drawing too many parallels

between life and writing: after all, the ‘Debauchee’ of Rochester’s poem
is not necessarily Rochester himself, just as ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’
might not actually describe a personal experience, but rather one that
can hold universal relevance for every (especially male) reader. And, in

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fact, we should never distance ourselves from Rochester’s ironical

treatment of his subject, and of the ideas it relates to. As Ballaster
argues, discussing these poems together,

The agency of the speakers in both these poems lies in their

utterance, which comes to substitute for the physical act in
which they have failed. Male speech compensates for mechanical
sexual failure. And the potency of speech is considerable. (1998:
209)

As such, far from being impotent, the speaker is empowered by his

verbal wit, which makes him as fruitful in poetry as he apparently claims
not to be in sex.

If anything, ‘The Maimed Debauchee’ characterises what might arguably

be called a period of ‘excess’ – with the related idea of expenditure, of
exhaustion, that it is partnered with – even if Rochester exploits these
dual ideas for comic effect. As Rawson suggests, ‘What one senses […]
is not the experience in itself, but the concern to register a kind of
exhaustiveness of sexual pursuit’, in which excess and emptiness are
conjoined in a comically incongruous way (2000: 6).

We can, perhaps, push these ideas further to address the role of

Rochester’s ‘imperfect enjoyment’ poems within the broader literary and
social context. As we saw earlier, Ros Ballaster draws a direct
connection between the rhetoric of excess (and its antithetical pairing
with depletion) and Rochester’s resistance to contemporary ideologies
about religion, society and politics, one moreover shared by other
writers of the Restoration:

Perhaps the scabrous lampooning, invective, and obscenity in

this period even carried specific overtones of resistance to
latitudinarian attempts to promote civility and appeasement as a
means of furthering the rational religion seen as favourable to
the increase of trade, empire, and science. In aligning his poetry
with ‘wanton expression’ […] Rochester is repudiating this
latitudinarian model of political and state culture. (1998: 209)

The empowerment through rhetorical flourishes that we noted earlier,

as a replacement for sexual fruitfulness, in this reading becomes
connected to ideas about the individual’s participation in the state itself
– his ability to ‘speak out’, as it were:

Speech is then characterized as a form of effective emission for

the male agent, but only when the sexual body fails to perform.
Ineffective speech is also figured as a debased form of emission
which substitutes for sexual prowess. (Ballaster 1998: 209)

As such, we find that by balancing the antagonistic, but nonetheless

complementary notions of excess and depletion, of fruitfulness and
sterility, Rochester succeeds in commenting upon both the private
individual’s physical and mental condition, and upon his relation to the
state.

We can further explore this idea – that the paradoxes that we have so
far traced throughout Rochester’s poems characterise the period more
generally – by turning finally to his famous poem, ‘Upon Nothing’, which
in its title alone aptly captures the sense of dualities that we have
recognised elsewhere.

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Activity
Read ‘Upon Nothing’, and note down those features that support the
idea that this is a ‘period of paradoxes’.

What strikes you about this poem, in the context of the ‘paradoxes’ we
have identified in other poems? As you will note, ‘Upon Nothing’ is a
complex poem and its topic differs from the other poems by Rochester
which we have already encountered. The poem opens by satirising the
idea of God creating ex-nihilo, that is, from nothing, and mocking
humanity’s attempts to understand our existence. The poem then moves
on to ridicule the self-importance and incompetence of theologians,
scholars and statesmen. Paradoxically, ‘Nothing’ proves to be a fruitful
subject-matter as all aspects of human life are satirised.

Your approach to this poem might begin on a thematic level –

identifying those ideas that Rochester juxtaposes which seem to you
opposite, or conflicting, such as the suggestion in line 4 that ‘Ere time
and place were, Time and Place were not’. You may also like to consider
the socio-historic context of the poem; for instance, Rochester presents
the pursuit of knowledge as pointless at a time when the recently
founded Royal Society and Royal Observatory were making advances in
the sciences. You might also approach this on a linguistic level, for
instance noticing how in line 12 ‘men, beasts, birds, fire, water, air, and
land’, seemingly antagonistic terms are placed alongside one another.
You might, perhaps, like to combine the two approaches, using linguistic
analysis to elucidate your discussion of the poem’s themes.

Finally, you should enhance your analysis of this poem by giving some
thought as to its structure: written in rhyming triplets, the poem
contains a thought-nugget in each stanza, with the repetitive nature of
the rhyme suggesting a circularity in the poem’s sound that matches the
circularity of its argument. Also, you might like to comment upon metre
– ostensibly iambic pentameter – but note how this is ruptured in
interesting ways, not least with the inverted foot of the first word of the
first line: this places an important emphasis on the word ‘Nothing’ itself,
thus setting up the theme of the whole poem.

SAQ 2

How might certain of Rochester’s poems support, or conflict with, the

idea that the Restoration was a ‘period of paradoxes’?

‘IMPERFECT ENJOYMENT’:
APHRA BEHN AND THE FEMALE PERSPECTIVE
In the previous sections of this unit, we have considered various
approaches towards addressing how certain of Rochester’s poems might
exemplify the idea that the Restoration was a ‘period of paradoxes’,
focussing in particular detail upon how this theme emerges in ‘The
Imperfect Enjoyment’. We also noted how this is one example of a sub-
genre popular among poets of this period. We gave some thought as to
the way in which Rochester treats gender in his poem, suggesting that
the woman’s role in the sexual encounter is presented in somewhat

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conflicting lights: she is partly blamed by the speaker, but also partly
asked to pardon him for his failure to fulfil their shared erotic desires.

How might the same subject be treated, however, if it were presented

from a female perspective? To find one way of addressing this, we shall
turn to a contribution to the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ genre by a woman,
Aphra Behn, asking in what ways it compares to or differs from
Rochester’s poem.

Activity
Read Aphra Behn, ‘The Disappointment’.

What are your initial impressions upon reading this poem, both in its
relation to Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, and in relation to
observations we have made about the Restoration period in general?

One thing that is initially striking about Behn’s poem is its title: the
words ‘imperfect enjoyment’ do not appear at all, but instead we
immediately find, as it were, the conclusion that Rochester’s poem
reaches. The title to Rochester’s poem at least implies partial pleasure,
even if it is ‘imperfect’; in Behn’s title, we are instantly confronted with
‘Disappointment’.

How far does this suggest that Behn reflects upon Rochester’s famous
contribution to the genre? In fact, Behn loosely models her poem on a
paraphrase of an example of the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ genre by a
French poet, Jean Benech du Cantenac, called ‘Sur une impuissance’
(1661) (Todd 1996: 221; Munns 2004: 213). However, as Jessica
Munns suggests, whereas typically in the male ‘imperfect enjoyment’
poem ‘The sexual “fault” […] is located not just in the malfunctioning
male member, but in the woman: she is too modest or too eager, too
demanding, or too beautiful’ (2004: 213), Behn wittily deploys the
conventional features of the genre to undermine the assumptions about
gender that it makes.

The form of each poem is equally different: whereas Rochester’s poem

is a continual sequence of lines written in iambic pentameter and
rhyming couplets, Behn’s poem is divided into ten-line stanzas. These
stanzas adopt a much more complex rhyme scheme than Rochester’s:
they break down into two quatrains, each of which is cross-rhymed, and
a rhyming couplet; the sequence can be described as abab cdcd ee.

Another striking difference between the poems is the ‘story’ each

describes: whereas Rochester’s poem elaborates a seemingly personal
narrative – whether or not it is autobiographical – Behn adopts the
third-person perspective, describing two individuals detached from the
narrator of the poem, and placing them in a distant, unfamiliar setting.
We are no longer in the intimate environment of the bedroom in the
present day, but in a pastoral environment set in the classical past –
recall the observations we made about pastoral poetry in Unit 2, and
think about how the themes of loss and nostalgia we ascribed to the
genre might connect to the ‘paradoxes’ we identify in poetry of the
Restoration period.

In ‘The Disappointment’, in the first stanza, Behn describes how

One day the Amorous Lysander,

By an impatient Passion sway’d,
Surpriz’d fair Cloris, that lov’d Maid,
Who could defend her self no longer.

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All things did with his Love conspire;

That gilded Planet of the Day,
In his gay Chariot drawn by Fire,
Was now descending to the Sea,
And left no Light to guide the World,
But what from Cloris Brighter Eyes was hurld. (ll. 1-10)

We have already encountered several times, in relation to other poems,

the tendency for poets to display their knowledge of classical texts and
mythology. Likewise, Behn also shows her familiarity with such
reference-points, but also her inventiveness; rather than referring to
any known mythological figures as such, she instead uses the names
‘Lysander’ and ‘Cloris’ in an archetypal sense, as recognisably ‘classical’
in a general rather than specific way. They also evoke the pastoral
setting of this poem. In fact, we have already seen the name ‘Cloris’ in
Rochester’s ‘The Maimed Debauchee’, in the line ‘Nor shall our love-fits
Cloris be forgot’.

What further parallels do you discern between Rochester’s ‘The

Imperfect Enjoyment’ and Behn’s poem – either their similarities, or
their differences?

In terms of narrative sequence, both poems follow a similar arc: they

both describe the heated passion of an encounter between two lovers,
with the hot anticipation of the consummation they share. In Behn’s
poem, however, we find that alongside the description of bodily parts,
which we similarly find in Rochester’s poem, there is a greater degree of
speech, which is significantly given to the woman, Cloris. As she lures
Lysander with her ‘Bright Eyes sweet, and yet severe’ (l. 21), she is
described as provokingly ‘breathing faintly in his Ear’ (l. 24). That ‘She
cry’d’ suggests that she takes an active role in their encounter, crying
out in a moment of particular pleasure; furthermore, she pants several
broken phrases out,

[…] — Cease, Cease — your vain Desire,

Or Ill call out — What would you do?
My Dearer Honour ev’n to You
I cannot, must not give — Retire,
Or take this Life, whose chiefest part
I gave you with the Conquest of my Heart
(ll. 25-30)

Feigned resistance is a classic ploy to lure the lover on, which Cloris
employs to deft effect here by gasping out several partial sentences that
evoke the pretence to modesty (‘My Dearer Honour’, ‘I cannot, must not
give’), which Behn comically juxtaposes with the very different actions
that accompany them. For while Cloris protests with her words, she
does not repel Lysander’s physical passion; he

Kisses her Mouth, her Neck, her Hair;

Each Touch her new Desire Alarms,
His burning trembling Hand he prest
Upon her swelling Snowy Brest,
While she lay panting in his Arms
(ll. 34-38)

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The potential scenario of female impotence, when overpowered by a

passionate lover, is comically rendered here: we do not get a sense of
real sexual threat, as Cloris’ fears are coupled with the sense that she
also desires these advances. Indeed, the ambiguous line ‘Each Touch
her new Desire Alarms’ wittily puns on the words ‘Desire’ and ‘Alarms’,
which simultaneously suggest Cloris’ fears for her modesty, and that her
‘Desire’ is fired all the more by Lysander’s passionate embraces.

However, just as with Rochester’s ‘Imperfect Enjoyment’, we soon find

that the promised fruition of the lovers’ desire is soon to be frustrated.
Here, and throughout your reading of the poem, you might like to
consider whether one lover has more power than the other, or are they
equal? Does the power dynamic remain the same throughout, or does it
shift, and if so, when? Behn works the tension of the encounter up, as it
were, as she describes how Lysander with ‘His daring Hand that Altar
seiz’d’ (l. 45). ‘Altar’ here offers an irreverent euphemism for the clitoris,
which Behn describes with hyperbolic excess: it is an ‘Awful Throne’ and
a ‘Paradice’, which inspires ‘Rage’ and ‘Anger’, but is also paradoxically
‘That Fountain where Delight still flows’, and which offers ‘Universal
World Repose’ (ll. 49-50). Can you detect how in these lines Behn uses
these contrasting, or paradoxical, images to convey the dual sense of
pleasure and frustration that sex provides, and which is characteristic of
the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ type of poem?

This combined sense of anticipation and despair, of longing and of

disappointment, is further conveyed as the story unravels. The young
lovers are described in the very heat of passion, utterly abandoned to
their desire, as ‘Their Bodies, as their Souls, are joyn’d’ (l. 52) and they
lose themselves to ‘Transports Unconfin’d’ (l. 53). The description of
how ‘Cloris half dead and breathless lay’ recalls a word we encountered
in Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, ‘dye’, which holds
connotations of sexual orgasm. Behn pushes this metaphor to its
comical extreme by saying of Cloris how ‘now no signs of Life she
shows, / But what in short-breath’d Sighs returns & goes (ll. 59-60),
such is the extreme ‘transport’ of her passion at this crisis-point.

For, as we soon learn, this is indeed a crisis-point: inflamed by the

physical charms that Cloris lays before him, with her alluring ‘Shape’
and seemingly self-offering posture (she is ‘A Victim to Loves Sacred
Flame’), Lysander stands upon the point of penetration, and so the
moment at which their joys will be consummated. However, he finds at
this crucial juncture that he is, quite literally, disappointed even upon
the cusp of fulfilment:

Ready to taste a thousand Joys,

The too transported hapless Swain
Found the vast Pleasure turn’d to Pain;
Pleasure which too much Love destroys:
The willing Garments by he laid,
And Heaven all open’d to his view,
Mad to possess, himself he threw
On the Defenceless Lovely Maid.
But Oh what envying God[s conspire]
To snatch his Power, yet leave him the Desire! (ll. 71-80)

Again we have an echo of Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, with

the hyperbolic promise of ‘a thousand Joys’ – although, significantly,
here these are anticipated pleasures, while in Rochester’s poem they
are past ones. The repeated word ‘transported’ whips up the drama of
the moment even further, which makes the terrible reversal of
Lysander’s fortunes all the more disastrous, when ‘vast Pleasure’ is
‘turn’d to Pain’. The subsequent line, ‘Pleasure which too much Love
destroys’, further compounds the bitterness of Lysander’s present

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predicament, the repeated word ‘Pleasure’ cruelly reminding him of the

promised joys of which he is now deprived.

Can you detect, in these lines, the dual relationship between ‘Pleasure’
and ‘Pain’? How are these related to the idea of ‘paradox’ we have
traced in this unit so far?

At this point, do you think the speaker presents one lover or both as
culpable for the subsequent failure of the union? What happens in the
subsequent lines, both in narrative and in poetic terms? How do they
compare with the similar scenario that Rochester describes in ‘The
Imperfect Enjoyment’?

Behn, like Rochester, presents the penis as a vital character in this

particular story; however, unlike ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, here it is
not addressed directly, but referred to in the third person, in a series of
metaphors and euphemisms:

Nature’s Support, (without whose Aid

She can no Humane Being give)
It self now wants the Art to live;
Faintness its slack’ned Nerves invade:
In vain th’inraged Youth essay’d
To call its fleeting Vigor back,
No motion ’twill from Motion take;
Excess of Love his Love betray’d:
In vain he Toils, in vain Commands;
The Insensible fell weeping in his Hand.

In this so Amorous Cruel Strife,

Where Love and Fate were too severe,
The poor Lysander in despair
Renounc’d his Reason with his Life:
Now all the brisk and active Fire
That should the Nobler Part inflame,
Serv’d to increase his Rage and Shame,
And left no Spark for New Desire:
Not all her Naked Charms cou’d move
Or calm that Rage that had debauch’d his Love. (ll. 81-100)

Activity
Note down images, words and phrases that seem to resonate with those
found in Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’.

In Behn’s lines, we find the idea of physical debility conveyed in

descriptions of the ‘slackened Nerves’ of the penis; the phrase ‘fleeting
Vigour’, meanwhile, recalls similar references to physical debility found
in Rochester’s poem, such as ‘fluttering’. Similarly, like the speaker of
‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, here Lysander becomes enraged by his
body’s inability to perform as he wishes it to. The line ‘No motion ’twill
from Motion take’ (l. 87), like the repeated word ‘Pleasure’, compounds
the bitter denial of the moment as the speaker envisages Lysander
vigorously, furiously trying to summon his ‘support’ back to life.
However, he is emasculated – literally deprived of his manhood – by his
penis’s refusal to obey his ‘call’: like a woman, ‘The Insensible fell
weeping in his Hand’ (l. 90).

Look again at line 91: the sequence of adjectives, ‘Amorous Cruel

Strife’, places together several disconnected ideas, which jar against
each other. Can you detect here the way in which Behn uses these

Unit 7: Debauch and Disability 7-27

_____________________________________________________________________

paradoxes to reinforce the frustration of this moment for Lysander?

Indeed, such is its terrible disappointment – its bathos, as his hopes are
literally deflated – that he is cast into ‘despair’. As a consequence, in
lines 94-100 we find a series of related words and images that play on
the dual senses of the word ‘passion’, which we similarly encountered in
Rochester’s poem. Here, the idea that ‘passion’ can mean both physical
or erotic desire, and a violent emotion, resurfaces in the description of
how Lysander is deprived of ‘Reason’ in his rage and despair at the
disappointment.

As with Rochester’s poem, we find his desperate attempts to revive his

‘Nobler Part’ described in terms of a burning fire – or passion – that is at
once physical and emotional: it is a ‘brisk and active Fire’ that would be
able to ‘inflame’ his ‘Nobler Part’, but instead that passion becomes
diverted from his body to his soul. Rather than stirring his penis to
action, his passions only serve to ‘inflame’ his emotions, his ‘Rage and
Shame’. As with ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, we find that Lysander is
unable to reignite the ‘Spark’ that would enable him to stand up to the
occasion; but similarly, Cloris shares a degree of blame by being unable
to ‘move’ Lysander – both literally and metaphorically – to find any ‘New
Desire’.

As we found in Rochester’s poems, her physical attractiveness, Cloris’

‘Naked Charms’, are both the original motivation for this passionate
encounter but also shown to be inadequate to rouse them again at this
crisis-point. As well as being unable to ‘move’ Lysander’s passion to
action, however, these ‘Charms’ are also unable to ‘calm that Rage that
had debauch’d his Love’ (l. 100). The word ‘debauched’ here is, of
course, strongly resonant with the poems that we have considered by
Rochester; what is its function in this line?

Activity
Look up ‘debauched’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

As you learn from the Dictionary entry, as a past-participle adjective,

‘debauched’ means ‘Seduced or corrupted from duty or virtue; depraved
or corrupt in morals; given up to sensual pleasures or loose living;
dissolute, licentious’. What does this mean in terms of the word’s
appearance in Behn’s poem? Perhaps we could say that ‘Rage’ renders
Lysander impotent by usurping the passion needed at that particular
moment – the passion of love – with the corrupting passion of anger.
His ‘Love’ – a word with multiple meanings, as we have already learned
– becomes ‘corrupted’ by the passion of ‘Rage’, and as such is unable to
follow its natural course: quite literally, Lysander is unable to be fruitful
in his ‘Love’ by being denied sexual consummation with Cloris because,
unnaturally, the passion of ‘Rage’ interrupts him at this crucial moment.

What follows in the poem partly recalls the comparable scenario in

Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, and makes interesting
departures from it. The speaker describes how:

Cloris returning from the Trance

Which Love and soft Desire had bred,
Her timerous Hand she gently laid
(Or guided by Design or Chance)
Upon that Fabulous Priapas,
That Potent God, as Poets feign;
But never did young Shepherdess,
Gath’ring of Fern upon the Plain,
More nimbly draw her Fingers back,

7-28 Literature 3
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Finding beneath the verdant Leaves a Snake:

Than Cloris her fair Hand withdrew,

Finding that God of her Desires
Disarm’d of all his Awful Fires,
And Cold as Flow’rs bath'd in the Morning-Dew.
Who can the Nymph’s Confusion guess?
The Blood forsook the hinder Place,
And strew’d with Blushes all her Face,
Which both Disdain and Shame exprest:
And from Lysander’s Arms she fled,
Leaving him fainting on the Gloomy Bed (ll. 101-120)

Here, as in Rochester’s poem, the mistress must take responsibility for

trying to revive the feeble penis – mockingly described here as ‘that
Fabulous Priapas’ – and so save the moment from complete failure
(there is a pun here too, ‘fabulous’ suggesting both wonderful and
mythical). Like the mistress in Rochester’s poem, her ‘Hand’ is the
potential instrument of saving the passionate moment; however, here
she does not perform and fail in the necessary task. Rather, Cloris is
blissfully unaware at this point of her lover’s enfeebled condition, and it
is only on reaching her ‘Hand’ towards what she expects to be his
‘Fabulous Priapas’ that she is disabused of her illusions. Instead of the
‘Potent’ penis she expects to find, she discovers that it is limp, aptly
captured by the metaphor of the ‘snake’ in the grass. Furthermore, as
Munns suggests,

The snake in this instance is the penis/phallus/priapus, and

perhaps also the biblical snake that stole into paradise and led to
the fall of man. That snake encouraged lustful love; however, this
snake signals the waning of lust in a wittily heterodox conceit that
turns the fall from grace into a fall from pleasure. (2004: 213)

Cloris is almost bitten by the pang of bitter realisation, as though

Lysander’s limp penis really were a snake; after her ‘transports’ of
passion had led her into a different realm of expected bliss, she is, as it
were, brought hurtling back to earth upon

Finding that God of her Desires

Disarm’d of all his Awful Fires,
And Cold as Flow’rs bath’d in the Morning-Dew (ll. 112-14)

While it might evoke the pastoral setting, as Claude Rawson observes,

the word ‘Flow’rs’ referred to menstrual discharge at this period (2000:
6); what effect does it have that this word, and its variant meanings,
appears in this context? We might, perhaps, see that it continues the
idea of emasculation that we noted earlier, when Lysander first
discovers his penis’ debility: that he is described using an image
habitually connected to women, the ‘Flow’rs bathed in the Morning-Dew’
which evokes a woman’s menstrual flow, further reinforces the
impression that Lysander is unmanned by his impotence. As Rawson
observes, Behn’s use of this image deftly surpasses Rochester’s own use
of the ‘Flowers’ metaphor elsewhere, and exemplifies the unrecognised,
‘versatile existence’ that the image holds in ‘love poetry’ (2000: 9).

Are there other ways in which Behn’s poem is either similar to, or
different from, Rochester’s ‘Imperfect Enjoyment’? In some respects,
they are very like; indeed, Behn’s poem was originally attributed to
Rochester (Ferguson 1998: 237; Rawson 2000: 8). Yet there are
striking differences too, in content, form, tone and, perhaps, purpose.
We might, of course, observe that while Rochester’s poem is about
premature ejaculation, Behn’s focuses on the theme of impotence more
commonly found in the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ poem.

Unit 7: Debauch and Disability 7-29

_____________________________________________________________________

We have already commented upon the difference in structure between

the two; but in relation to this, we might observe how the lengthier and
more elaborate narrative of Behn’s poem expands beyond the relatively
contained scenario that Rochester describes, both in terms of space,
setting and incident. Following Cloris’ discovery and subsequent hasty
flight, the speaker describes how Lysander is tormented by the
continuing physical and mental anguish of his disappointment:

His silent Griefs swell up to Storms,

And not one God his Fury spares;
He curs’d his Birth, his Fate, his Stars;
But more the Shepherdess’s Charms,
Whose soft bewitching Influence
Had Damn’d him to the Hell of Impotence (ll. 135-40)

The comic dimension of the scenario is hinted at by the hyperbolic

excess of Lysander’s ‘Griefs’ – as ‘He curs’d his Birth, his Fate, his Stars’
with tragical exaggeration; similarly, that his ‘Griefs swell up to Storms’
provokingly imitates the action that his penis was unable to perform.
However, significantly, rather than cursing cruel Fate the most,
Lysander blames Cloris, the ‘Shepherdess’ whose ‘Charms’ had so fatally
inflamed him by their ‘soft bewitching Influence’, and so brought him to
his present terrible condition. Had she never allured him in the first
place, these final lines suggest, Lysander would never have been
tempted to seek erotic fulfilment, the pain of whose disappointment he
is now forced to endure in an agony of rage and grief.

Do these final lines project an anti-female message, then?

In this respect, are these lines comparable with the, at times,

ambivalent treatment of the mistress in Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect
Enjoyment’?

As such, does this reflect upon the broader context of ‘The

Disappointment’s’ production, where through her poem Behn comments
upon contemporary attitudes towards women?

To address the first question, it is important to recall, as we did when

considering the tone of Rochester’s poems, that the author might not
always project his or her own opinions through the poem. Indeed, it is
important to recognise that irony might be the dominant register of the
poem, by which the author seems to be saying one thing, but in fact
might also be saying something altogether different at the same time.
We detected several points throughout ‘The Disappointment’ at which
Behn manipulates the alternative meanings a word might hold to convey
alternative interpretations of the scenario she describes. Therefore, the
suggestion that the closing lines of this poem are anti-female is
immediately suspicious, all the more so when we recall that they are in
fact written by a female writer.

Indeed, as Jessica Munns suggests,

The poem’s most remarkable variation on its specific model and

the other ‘imperfect enjoyment’ poems lies in the way it is centred
less on Lysander than on Cloris, less on his pleasure than on hers,
and less on his misery than her ‘disappointment’. […] ‘The
Disappointment’ is an exercise in the erotic pastoral popular with
male writers and presumably readers of the time. However, as
Behn handles the topic, the centre of attention shifts from male to
female, and from penis to vagina. (2004: 214)

This does not mean that the ambivalent irony of the closing lines of

7-30 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

Behn’s poem cannot be aligned with Rochester’s presentation of the

mistress in his ‘Imperfect Enjoyment’; indeed, this alignment is
significant, and has its own purpose. In many respects, Behn admired
Rochester as a writer, but that admiration was also ambivalent: in her
play The Rover, for instance, she mocks Rochester in the figure of one
of the characters. As Margaret Ferguson says of the relationship
between the two writers, and of Behn’s position on the wider literary
scene,

It remains difficult to decipher not only her party politics but

also, on a more local level, her politically charged relations with
literary contemporaries. She is usually described as a great
admirer of the free-thinking Tory the Earl of Rochester, for
instance - but since Behn encoded aspects of John Wilmot, Earl
of Rochester's character and name, especially with the pun on
‘will’ and the French ‘mot’, word, in her portrait of Willmore in
The Rover Part 1 (1677) and Part 2 (1681), we may surmise that
her admiration was leavened with a certain critical irony. (1998:
235)

Ferguson connects this to Behn’s very different approach towards the

relationship between men and women in society, as a matter of both
gender and economic circumstance:

[…] she differs from Rochester and other Tory writers in her
analysis of the cost of masculine libertinism for the women who
fall for men like the rake Willmore in The Rover (1998: 234)

In her ‘Disappointment’ poem Behn responds to Rochester’s well-known

example of the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ genre and those examples written
by other men, but whilst imitating and reusing many of its elements she
also reflects upon them in an ironic, or satirical, way. We have seen, for
instance, that similar words and images ripple throughout both poems,
but are applied to different effect. Indeed, as one commentary
suggests, ‘The Disappointment’ is not actually an ‘imperfect enjoyment’
poem at all, but a ‘mock imperfect enjoyment poem’ (Zeitz and Thoms
1997: 502).

This last point sheds light on the final area of enquiry, how far Behn’s
poem reflects upon contemporary attitudes towards women; certainly,
we might say, ‘The Disappointment’ plays upon stereotypes that a
woman’s seeming virtue and modesty actually conceals burning
passionate desire, that in feigning resistance she can heighten her
lover’s passion, and that her ‘charms’ are responsible for inciting that
passion. The idea that she is partly responsible for his physical failure to
achieve their consummation, her ‘charms’ being unable to save him
from impotence, also resurfaces here, and picks up on the similar
implication in Rochester’s poem; in Behn’s ‘The Disappointment’,
however, this blame is rendered comically ridiculous in its presentation.
Lysander is consistently depicted as the feeble, disabled, incompetent
part of the couple; it is his body’s failure, rather than the limited power
of Cloris’ charms, that brings about the ‘disappointment’ that both
lovers are forced to share. As such, we might say, by apparently
drawing on and using these stereotypes about gender, Behn exposes
them to ridicule and criticism more effectively. Behn shows that, in spite
of the male figure’s disempowerment at this crucial moment, the female
figure is empowered: she is the active, dominant partner as she flees
away from her impotent lover (Zeitz and Thoms 1997: 501).

Finally, how might we place Behn’s poem within our account of the
Restoration as a ‘period of paradoxes’? Perhaps it is this final point,
about exposing stereotypes the better to undermine them, and which
characterises her use of irony throughout the poem, that best
exemplifies how paradox functions in ‘The Disappointment’, and how

Unit 7: Debauch and Disability 7-31

_____________________________________________________________________

this connects to the broader context of the poem’s production. By using

irony, seeming to say one thing whilst actually conveying a quite
opposite idea, Behn deftly deploys the use of paradox that characterises
many poems of this period.

SAQ 3
How does Aphra Behn’s ‘The Disappointment’ compare to Rochester’s
‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, as an example of this genre of poem?

To conclude, we might reflect upon how the ambivalence that Behn

reveals in her literary relationship with Rochester, and the attitudes
towards gender connected to this, are linked to her broader position
within the public sphere. We have talked at length in different units
about men’s role in the public sphere, but what of a woman, and in
particular a ‘woman of letters’? At this point, do you think the speaker
presents one lover or both as culpable for the subsequent failure of the
union? However, Behn’s political position is complex, her response to
contemporary events (such as who was on the throne) varying at
different periods. You should consult the entry for Aphra Behn in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online) to get a full picture of
Behn’s life and career, and her political opinions.

To summarise here, though, it is appropriate to conclude that in her life

and in her works, the variety of Behn’s writings manifest the diversity of
literary activity evident in the late seventeenth century. Equally,
however, her ambivalence upon certain political matters reveals a deep-
seated uncertainty about the present state of the nation, and its political
instability. This anxiety, and the ways in which literature might respond
to it, is a theme we shall examine in greater detail in the subsequent
unit, in which we shall address the work of John Dryden.

REVIEW
We have seen in this unit how the Restoration can be described in
certain respects as a ‘period of paradoxes’ through addressing the
writings of Rochester and Behn. In particular, we have seen how their
contributions to the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ genre of poetry captures the
dual sense of erotic desire and its disappointment, of hope and despair,
of empowerment and impotence, which in many ways offers a means of
reflecting the character of this period. These poems convey the idea
that this is an era of excess and of deprivation, of licentious
overindulgence and of the disease and debility it inevitably brings.
Finally, we have seen how issues of gender are raised by the
implications of the erotic scenarios these poems describe: we have seen
that both Rochester and Behn can draw on stereotypes about gender,
and perhaps upon negative attitudes towards women, without
necessarily endorsing such opinions. Indeed, we have seen how irony is
a key feature of both writers’ poems, which in itself conveys the idea of
paradox, by saying one thing while conveying a completely different
idea. This has prompted us to think about how the ambivalence, or at
least uncertainty, which we find in some of these Restoration poems
reflects upon broader contemporary issues relating to gender and to
politics.

7-32 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

ADDITIONAL READING
Barash, Carol. 1996. English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics,
Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
(Parts available online via Google Books)

Braudy, Leo. 1994. ‘Remembering Masculinity: Premature Ejaculation

Poetry of the Seventeenth Century’, Michigan Quarterly Review,
33: 177-201 (Available online at
<[Link]
86:31?rgn=full+text;view=image>)

Burns, Edward (ed.). 1995. Reading Rochester (Liverpool: Liverpool

University Press)

Donaldson, Ian. 1987. ‘The Argument of “The Disabled Debauchee”’,

Modern Language Review, 82: 30-34

Doody, Margaret A. 1998. ‘Gender, literature, and gendering literature

in the Restoration’, in Steven N. Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), pp. 58-81 (Parts available online
via Google Books)

Everett, Barbara. 1982. ‘The Sense of Nothing’, in Jeremy Treglown

(ed.), Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester (Hamden, CT:
Archon Books), pp. 1-41

Gallagher, Catherine. 1994. Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of

Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Berkeley:
University of California Press) (Parts available online via Google
Books)

Guibbory, Achsah. 1993. ‘Sexual Politics/Political Sex: Seventeenth-

Century Love Poetry’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry
Pebworth (eds), Renaissance Discourses of Desire (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press)

O’Donnell, Mary Anne, Bernard Dhuicq, and Guyonne Leduc (eds). 2000.
Aphra Behn (1640–1689): Identity, Alterity, Ambiguity (Paris:
L’Harmattan)

REFERENCES
Anon. 2008. ‘One Writing Against His Prick’, in The New Oxford Book of
Seventeenth-Century Verse, ed. by Alastair Fowler (Oxford:
Oxford University Press), p.776

Ballaster, Ros. 1998. ‘John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’, in Steven N.

Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature,
1650-1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 204-
224 (Parts available online via Google Books)

Doody, Margaret A. 1998. ‘Gender, literature, and gendering literature

in the Restoration’, in Steven N. Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), pp. 58-81 (Parts available online
via Google Books)

Ellis, Frank H. ‘John Wilmot the second earl of Rochester (1647-1680)’,

in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Unit 7: Debauch and Disability 7-33

_____________________________________________________________________

<[Link]
[Last accessed 8 April 2013]

Ferguson, Margaret. 1998. ‘The Authorial Ciphers of Aphra Behn’, in

Steven N. Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English
Literature, 1650-1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), pp. 225-49 (Parts available online via Google Books)

Munns, Jessica. 2004. ‘Pastoral and lyric: Astrea in Arcadia’, in Derek

Hughes and Janet Todd (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to
Aphra Behn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 204-
220 (Parts available online via Google Books)

Rawson, Claude. 2000. Satire and Sentiment, 1660-1830: Stress-points

in the English Augustan Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press)

Todd, Janet. 1996. The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: Andre
Deutsch) (Parts available online via Google Books)

Wilmot, John. 1994. Frank H. Ellis (ed.), The Complete Works

(Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics)

Zeitz, Lisa M. and Peter Thoms. 1997. ‘Power, Gender, and Identity in
Aphra Behn’s “The Disappointment”’, Studies in English
Literature, 1500-1900, 37. 3: 501-516 (Available on JSTOR and
LION)

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ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
In what ways can Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ be
described as a ‘poem of paradoxes’?

There are several ways in which Rochester’s poem can be described

as a ‘poem of paradoxes’: in its formal structure, in the juxtaposition
of images it uses, and in the ideas that it presents. It adopts a
seemingly coherent, rigid metric structure, using iambic pentameter
in rhyming couplets, which imply regularity and order. However,
Rochester disrupts this pattern at key moments to imply the irregular
nature of the scenario he describes. For instance, even in the first line
he inverts the first foot, making it a trochee, so that from the
beginning of the poem onwards we find a series of paradoxes in the
disjuncture between the appearance of form and its actual disruption.

Paradox also operates in the series of metaphors Rochester uses, as

he juxtaposes several opposing terms – namely those revolving
around heat and cold – to suggest the images they are related to.
This union of verbal antitheses and thematic opposites embodies the
paradoxical nature of the scenario that ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’
describes: the speaker is both impassioned, and fired up, by his love,
but also enraged by it, and disabled from fulfilling his desires by his
premature ejaculation. Thus, the potential fruitfulness of sex is
perverted by the sterile result of this particular encounter. Perhaps
the most striking paradox of the poem is its attitude towards the
penis: both an inseparable part of the speaker’s body, and apparently
a hated ‘part’ of him, he condemns it to a future of disease and
debility which he, too, must inevitably share.

Unit 7: Debauch and Disability 7-35

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SAQ 2

How might certain of Rochester’s poems support, or conflict with, the

idea that the Restoration was a ‘period of paradoxes’?

‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ presents a series of paradoxes that seem

to emanate from generally-described characteristics of this period, as
one of dual notions of excess and of depletion or waste. The fires of
sexual passion are coupled, in this poem, with the frozen wastes of
disappointment. These ideas are further replicated in ‘The Maimed
Debauchee’ where, like the speaker of ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, a
life of excessive pleasure has led to a present state of depletion and
impotence. The idea that the Restoration was a ‘period of paradoxes’
is thus captured in the sense both poems convey that sexual licence
comes with the price of future physical and mental impotence.
Nonetheless, to cap these paradoxes, both poems convey the
bravado that the Restoration libertine might display upon detailing
his previous conduct, even if this might mean future disability.
Finally, the sense that this is a ‘period of paradoxes’ is conveyed in
the epigrammatic poem, ‘Upon Nothing’, which adopts the conceit of
...‘Nothingness’ to satirise the theological, educational and political
values and pursuits of society. The essential paradox of the poem,
that nothingness is both nothing and, perversely, something,
captures a sense of the game-playing and delight in paradox shared
by Restoration wits.

SAQ 3
How does Aphra Behn’s ‘The Disappointment’ compare to Rochester’s
‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, as an example of this genre of poem?

In many respects Rochester’s version of the ‘imperfect enjoyment’

poem is both typical and exemplary: it adopts many of the
conventional themes and features of this genre, but also subverts
them to produce perhaps one of the finest examples of the type. For
one thing, it adopts the theme of premature ejaculation, rather than
impotence; but it also plays with words, metaphors and metre to
create a dazzlingly witty interpretation of the form’s potential as
poetry.

Aphra Behn’s ‘The Disappointment’ is at once similar, and completely

different. She also adopts the theme of erotic dissatisfaction, but
utterly transforms the setting, characters and themes of Rochester’s
version of this genre. Most significantly, Behn adopts a different
attitude towards female agency to Rochester: whereas in ‘The
Imperfect Enjoyment’ the male figure is shown to be lacking, yet the
female is almost peripheral, in Behn’s poem the female figure, Cloris,
is empowered. Meanwhile Lysander, the male, is emasculated by his
impotence and by his response to it. This suggests that Behn adopts
a predominantly male literary form and transforms it to present an
alternative interpretation of the balance of gender relations.

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UNIT 8

RESTORATION TO REVOLUTION (2)

RESTORED WIT: THE POETRY OF JOHN
DRYDEN

AIMS
The aims of this unit are to introduce and outline some of the principal
concerns of the poetry of John Dryden in relation to poetry of the
Restoration period encountered in Unit 7.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Describe how Dryden’s poetry compares or contrasts to the poetry

of other Restoration poets encountered in Unit 7.

Outline Dryden’s theory of poetry, and describe how these literary

values differ from those of Dryden’s predecessors and some
contemporaries.

Define the heroic couplet and explain its use by Dryden and his
contemporaries.

Explain what Dryden and his contemporaries meant by ‘wit’, and

how this manifests itself in satires of this period.

Explain why Dryden wrote public poetry, and how and why he
satirises his enemies in Absalom and Achitophel.

Understand what is meant by ‘mock-heroic’, and how this allows

Dryden to produce a different kind of satire in his poem Mac
Flecknoe.

REQUIRED READING
The two poems by John Dryden we shall focus on in this unit are:

Absalom and Achitophel (1681)

Mac Flecknoe (1676)

These poems can be found in volume one of Stephen Greenblatt (ed.).

2012. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edn (New York:
W. W. Norton and Co.).

These poems can also be found in more compact form in Paul Hammond
and David Hopkins (eds). 2007. Dryden: Selected Poems, Longman
Annotated Poets (London: Longman) and in Paul Hammond (ed.). 1995.
The Poems of John Dryden: Volume I, 1649-1681, Longman Annotated
Poets (London and New York: Longman).

References to the prose writings by Dryden are taken from James

Kinsley and George Parfitt (eds). 1970. John Dryden: Selected Criticism,
Oxford English Authors (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Most references to
Alexander Pope are taken from Alexander Pope. 2008. Pat Rogers (ed.),
Selected Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-1

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Some quotations, and most poetic texts, are available via Literature
Online.

INTRODUCTION
In Unit 7, we encountered two poets of the Restoration period, John
Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and Aphra Behn, and asked in what ways their
contributions to the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ genre of poetry reflected
contemporary attitudes towards this period. We called the Restoration a
‘period of paradoxes’, and saw how this emerges in the dual ideas of
excess and depletion, of indulgence and insufficiency, which
characterises the ‘imperfect enjoyment’ poem. We also saw how these
ideas emerge in very different ways, even in the writings of
contemporary poets, partly because of the issues relating to gender that
this type of poem raises.

In this unit, we shall again find a striking difference between the work of
poets writing in the same period – perhaps a further example of its
paradoxical nature. We shall be principally concerned with the poetry of
John Dryden (1631-1700), whom we briefly met in Unit 1 when we
looked at an extract from his long poem, Annus Mirabilis. Here, we shall
consider two important poems by Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel and
Mac Flecknoe, asking ourselves how and in what ways they compare
with other poems we have already encountered of the Restoration
period, and what they tell us about the variety and purposes of writing
at this time.

We shall base our enquiry by firstly addressing what defines Dryden’s

approach to poetry, how this relates to that of preceding generations
and how far Dryden’s re-evaluation of poetry is shared by his
contemporaries. As we will see, Dryden valued ‘dignity of expression’ in
poetry, and like many of his contemporaries considered that the formal
vehicle for conveying this was the heroic couplet, the form used in the
two poems we shall look at here. Alongside this formality, however,
Dryden considered ‘wit’ to be a defining quality of a successful poem.
We have seen how wit is important to both Rochester and Behn in their
‘imperfect enjoyment’ poems; here, we shall see how Dryden’s poems
exemplify this quality in very different ways, and for different purposes.

We shall partly approach this by addressing Absalom and Achitophel as

an ‘occasional’ poem – a type of writing we have encountered in
previous units. We shall learn that Dryden’s poem is a ‘public’ poem,
which incorporates public figures in allegorical form to satirise their
character and actions – although a very different kind of allegory to
Bunyan’s. An examination of what Dryden meant by ‘character’ will
underpin our study of the poem here, and enable us to see how, by
treating his enemies in a certain, satirical way in Absalom and
Achitophel, he can criticise their actions. We shall compare this with the
public nature of other works we have encountered so far, addressing
how a work of literature can have an active role in the public sphere
through the channel of satire.

We shall conclude this unit by looking at a different kind of satirical

poem by Dryden, Mac Flecknoe, which is an important example of the
mock-heroic form. We shall see how, in this poem, the defining quality
of ‘wit’ adopts the form of the ‘lampoon’, which is used to target another
type of ‘enemy’. We will discuss Dryden’s attitude towards lampoon and
elucidate how it can have serious purposes, as Mac Flecknoe
exemplifies.

We shall look at the way the ‘mock-heroic’ strategy used in Mac

Flecknoe heightens the impact of the criticisms the poem makes; the
humour inherent in this form both increases the reader’s enjoyment,

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and also affirms certain literary and moral values held by Dryden. We
shall, finally, suggest some reasons for why mock-heroic poetry is
important to subsequent literature, in particular by thinking about the
influence of Dryden on Alexander Pope, whose Rape of the Lock we shall
discuss in a subsequent unit.

‘BRICK INTO MARBLE’:

DRYDEN, NEOCLASSICISM, AND THE ‘AUGUSTAN AGE’
In his important retrospective of English Literature of preceding
generations, Lives of the Poets (1779-81), Samuel Johnson wrote of
Dryden:

What was said of Rome, adorned by Augustus, may be applied by

an easy metaphor to English poetry embellished by Dryden [...] he
found it brick, and he left it marble. (2008: 724)

What did Johnson mean by ‘brick’, and how did Dryden turn it into
‘marble’? This metaphor perhaps reminds us of ideas we encountered in
previous units, and Unit 1 in particular, where we thought about how
the Restoration period was one of literal and metaphorical
reconstruction: the rebuilding programmes after the Civil War and Great
Fire; the restructuring of the political system; the return of monarchy;
the remodelling of earlier poetic forms. In this respect, we saw, poets
such as John Dryden reshaped their predecessors’ approach to poetry,
to create new kinds of writing that were best suited to the new,
apparently improved age to which they belonged.

In specifically literary terms, what exactly were these earlier literary

styles and fashions in poetry? And how did Dryden in particular seek to
change them? As well as being a poet, Dryden was also a playwright
and a literary critic; his ideas about previous generations of poets and
poetry are thus accessible through his own writings about them. For
instance, of John Donne’s poetry, he claims that:

[Donne] affects the metaphysics, not only in the satires, but in

the amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and
perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of
philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain
them with the softnesses of love. (Dryden 1970: 211)

What does this reveal about Dryden’s attitude to Donne, and to his
generation more generally? As this comment suggests, and as he
further admits in A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of
Satire (1693), Dryden admired Donne’s poetry and talent; however, he
also sees faults in Donne’s verse, for instance accusing Donne of lacking
‘dignity of expression’. What does this mean, exactly? As Dryden
explains, Donne’s primary fault was that he lacked a sense of
‘suitability’: he ‘affects the metaphysics’ when he should let ‘nature’
reign, and he thus perplexes the minds of ‘the fair sex’ (meaning
women) with philosophical speculation when he should entertain them
with talk of love. It was this absence of a sense of suitability that, for
Dryden, made Donne’s poetry – in Johnson’s words – ‘brick’.

What do Dryden’s comments on Donne tell us about how he views the

‘quality of civilization’ of his own day compared to that of earlier
periods? Dryden implies that Donne’s age lacked refinement and
dignity. Of the age of Shakespeare, Fletcher and Ben Jonson, he says
that ‘the times were ignorant in which they lived’ (Dryden 1970: 121).
By contrast, he suggests, his own age is more refined, which is visible in
a number of areas:

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-3

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the language, wit, and conversation of our own age are improved
and refined above the last. (Dryden 1970: 120)

What is the basis for these assumptions, and how far are they justified?

In Unit 1 we encountered some ideas about how literary change often

sat in tandem with political, social and economic developments; part of
these changes, we saw, involved important movements in the sphere of
scientific knowledge. We saw how Isaac Newton, in particular, was at
the vanguard of rational enquiry and scientific discovery; similarly, the
foundation of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of
Natural Knowledge in 1660 embodied the aspirations and interests
shared by many thinkers and intellectuals at the time; the Royal
Society, as it is called more concisely, obtained its royal charter in 1662.
In many respects, such rapid advances in scientific knowledge heralded
what some call the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ that was to come to full
fruition in the eighteenth century.

Alexander Pope, a poet who belonged to the generation following

Dryden’s and who in many ways was indebted to the earlier poet’s work
– a poet who we will encounter in closer detail in subsequent units –
summarises the nature of these scientific achievements, and their
subsequent impact on the advancement of knowledge in an epitaph
intended for Newton’s tomb at Westminster Abbey:

Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night:

God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light. (Literature Online)

For Pope, the universe is illuminated – enlightened, even – and all its
secrets are revealed, by the discoveries of science. How does this
compare with the ideas about the advancement of knowledge through
science that we encountered in James Thomson’s elegy to Newton in
Unit 1?

For Dryden, confidence in the new knowledge and shining achievements

of his own age was exemplified in various ways. Besides the progress of
science, the reform of literature formed a major part of the project of
rebuilding a new, and greatly improved nation in the wake of the recent
devastations of Civil War, religious factionalism and political
antagonism. The Restoration of the monarch signalled the restoration of
so many other things besides, one of which was the improvement of
earlier literary models, and even works. This took a very practical
direction when Dryden rewrote the works of earlier authors – such as
Chaucer – in the new and improved style of his own time. He also
revised several of Shakespeare’s plays; of the process of reworking
Troilus and Cressida, Dryden claims that:

Because the play was Shakespeare’s, and that there appeared in

some places of it the admirable genius of the author, I undertook
to remove that heap of rubbish under which many excellent
thoughts lay wholly buried. Accordingly, I new modelled the plot;
threw out many unnecessary persons; improved those
characters which were begun and left unfinished [...] and added
that of Andromache. (1970: 160)

The energetic language here – ‘remove’, ‘threw out’ – shows the radical
nature of Dryden’s alterations to Shakespeare’s original – only
reverence for ‘the admirable genius of the author’ prevents him from
completely rewriting it, perhaps. The metaphor of reconstruction is
important here: the less worthy parts of the play are described as a
‘heap of rubbish’, which Dryden as reviser must ‘remove’ or clear out to
find the true quality ‘wholly buried’ beneath. Having cleared the
foundations, he can construct his own, new improved version of the

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play, which is ‘new modelled’ as though it were a fine and splendid

palace.

Does this suggest arrogance on Dryden’s part, and an attitude to earlier

literary works that seems incomprehensible – condemnable, even – to
us today?

From Dryden’s perspective, his alterations to Shakespeare’s play are

wholly in keeping with an attitude shared by his age, that this was a
new pinnacle of civilisation and refinement – an eager national
confidence perhaps made all the more necessary by the recent
experiences of turmoil and uncertainty, and by the possible fear of
future instability. By enthusiastically asserting the achievements and
qualities of the present age, perhaps, a stronger sense of nationhood
that will bring coherence and stability can be established. As such, as
Dryden’s approach to literary criticism and to writing poetry shows, the
sense of loss belonging to the past can now be replaced with a sense of
optimism, of renewal, and of fresh growth.

Of course, as our reading of other texts from this period has revealed,
this confidence is often only ever precarious: in the poetry of Rochester,
for instance, we found that ‘Restoration excess’ is often coupled with a
sense of dissatisfaction, with depletion and with the inevitable sense of
an uncertain future: extravagance always comes with a cost. How is this
echoed in other writings of this period that you have encountered so
far? Think back, for instance, to Paradise Lost, which in some respects
testifies that this was a time which looked back, with longing, at the
previous golden ages and despaired at the future that loomed. Think,
too, of The Pilgrim’s Progress, with the many trials that a Christian man
must face in his journey through life. However, both of these works also
suggest an ultimate, future hope in salvation through following the
Christian path.

How does this compare with the sense of optimism and confidence that
characterises Dryden’s approach to the achievements and potential of
his age? Is there a difference between the outlooks of Milton, Bunyan
and Dryden? Or with Rochester’s? Whilst these writers work at a roughly
contemporaneous period, we might perhaps say that their writings are
markedly different in outlook, form and purpose. This perhaps warns us
that it is dangerous – impossible, even – to characterise an ‘age’ as
embodying one single viewpoint, as promoting a unique, dominant
literary mode, or as provoking similar responses. The latter half of the
seventeenth century, in its historical events, political sphere, religious
activities, and literary works is as varied as the numerous individuals
that inhabited Britain at this time.

What we can say, however, is that certain writers reflect and embody
certain prevalent ideas, attitudes, literary styles, and political stances at
any given time: as such, Rochester is both a Restoration libertine, and
paradoxically reflective upon the costs of that role. Similarly, Dryden
reflects a general feeling, voiced by many, and moreover a hope that
the ‘new’ age in which he lives, in Restoration Britain, can embody the
hopes and aspirations of future peace and prosperity. As such, his
writings often promote the viewpoint that this was an advanced and
advantaged age.

New-found confidence in the nation’s future expansion and productivity

is matched by the development of a new literary style that promotes
qualities that, Dryden suggests, characterise the age – or, at least,
those that he hopes might do so: decorum, refinement, elegance and
poise. Accordingly, his poetry seeks to promote these values through
the form, and possible function, that they adopt.

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-5

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What are these values in literary terms, and how does Dryden promote
them?

If we return to Dryden’s comments on Donne’s lack of ‘suitability’ and

‘dignity of expression’ we can see the seeds of his own approach to
what constitutes accomplished poetry. We have already suggested that
Alexander Pope is in many respects Dryden’s poetic inheritor, and so it
is fitting that we should get some grasp of what ‘suitability’ and ‘dignity
of expression’ might mean in literary terms by looking at his Essay on
Criticism of 1709, a work we shall examine in closer detail in a
subsequent unit. Here, Pope writes that:

Expression is the dress of thought, and still

Appears more decent, as more suitable;
A vile conceit in pompous words expressed,
Is like a clown in regal purple dressed.
(ll.318-321)
(2008: 9)

Pope makes a connection here between ‘expression’ and ‘thought’, and

he argues that ‘expression’ is always ‘more decent’ when it is suitable to
the ‘thought’ being expressed. This belongs to the all-important sense of
‘judgement’ that a man, and a poet, should possess; it involves
following ‘Nature’ to determine one’s thoughts and actions.

However, this is not the wild, unrefined nature of the savage; nor is it
the natural, erotic impulses that might describe the libertine’s pursuit of
his sexual urges. Rather, ‘nature’ in the context of the poet’s sense of
‘judgment’ is closely connected to the scientific ideas we have already
encountered in this unit, and in previous units: recall that the full name
of the Royal Society was the ‘Royal Society of London for the
Improvement of Natural Knowledge’: what does ‘Natural’ mean in this
context? Again, Newton’s role is significant here: he is considered to be
the leading figure in the advancement of ‘Natural Science’. What does
this phrase mean, and what is its significance for our enquiry here into
Dryden’s verse?

Activity
Look up ‘natural science’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

As you see from the Dictionary entry, ‘Natural’ in this context does not
refer to any wild or unrefined quality, but instead in relation to ‘science’
refers to ‘The branch of knowledge that deals with the natural or
physical world; a life science or physical science, such as biology,
chemistry, physics, or geology’. This involves a naturalistic approach to
how we study the universe, where it is seen to obey certain rules or
laws that have a natural origin: think back to Unit 1, where as we saw
Newton ‘discovered’ (or, rather, formulated) the laws of gravity on the
basis of an experience that took place in the natural world. From this
one (although probably apocryphal) event, he deduced a chain of cause
and consequence that led him to the conclusion that there are certain
laws, related to gravity, that operate within the universe, and according
to which all bodies within the universe move and exist.

How does this connect to our understanding of ‘judgement’ in terms of

the poet’s role? If judgement has a foundation in nature, and nature is
taken in its scientific, rationalistic sense, then the poet of sound
judgement is one who operates according to certain rules or systems,
and who obeys the ‘laws’ of the poetic universe.

8-6 Literature 3
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Alongside these rationalistic approaches to judgement runs an important

quality, one that is important both in one’s manners and conversation,
and in one’s poetry: wit. Our use of the term ‘wit’ has different
implications to that understood by Dryden’s generation, just as ‘nature’
had variant meanings for late seventeenth-century thinkers and writers.

How might we grasp a sense of these variant meanings?

Activity
Look up ‘wit’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

In one sense, we have already encountered the word ‘wit’ in several

different contexts in previous units; in Rochester’s verse, for instance,
we found that ‘Restoration wit’ was a key feature of the comical,
satirical or amusing verse written to entertain the courtly reader.
Similarly, to be considered ‘a wit’ in conversation meant saying clever
things, engaging in repartee, and bantering, particularly with the
opposite sex. In Restoration comedies, the wit is often a stock-character
who provokes ridicule at his own expense by believing himself to be
witty when he is not, although other characters may also be witty with
greater success.

In the context of Dryden’s use of wit, the humorous element is, indeed,
important. Nonetheless, as you see from the Dictionary entries, ‘wit’
holds other meanings that are perhaps more unfamiliar to us now, and
which are especially important in the context of Dryden’s approach to
writing poetry and prose. ‘Wit’ can refer to a mental or intellectual
faculty in one sense of the word; but it also means the faculty of
perception – relating here to the senses. It is this meaning that emerges
in Dryden’s preface to Annus Mirabilis, where he claims that

wit in the Poet, or wit writing ... is no other than the faculty of
imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble Spaniel, beats over
and ranges through the field of Memory, till it springs the Quarry it
hunted after; or, without metaphor, which searches over all the
memory for the species or Ideas of those things which it designs
to represent. Wit written, is that which is well defin’d, the happy
result of thought, or product of the imagination
(1993: 41)

So, Dryden suggests, ‘wit’ is one facet of a man’s mental capacities; a

proper use of wit involves judgement, and a sense of what is
appropriate. This means that he can employ ‘metaphor’, or other
fanciful images in his writing, without letting them run into absurdity.
Thus, wit saves writing from being dry or dull – it involves using the
imagination – but is also a faculty that must be used soberly, with a
proper sense of what is appropriate. This is connected to a concept
central to what was believed to be truly desirable in men, manners, and
literature of the late seventeenth century, the concept of decorum.

‘Decorum’ involved having a sense of just proportion, of balance and of

appropriateness, which is perhaps the most significant, defining
attribute of Dryden’s attitude to poetry. How does our understanding of
what these terms mean contribute to our appreciation of Dryden’s
poetic values?

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-7

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ACTIVITY
Look up ‘decorum’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Dictionary entries give us a series of related terms which support

the idea that notions of judgement are inherently connected to those of
appropriateness or just proportion. These include ‘proper, suitable,
seemly, befitting, becoming; fitness, propriety, congruity’; ‘seemliness,
propriety, fitness’. These notions can apply to the manner, speech or
appearance of a person, and in particular applies to one’s position in a
strongly hierarchical society: ‘That which is proper to the character,
position, rank, or dignity of a real person’.

If a person embodies the qualities belonging to ‘decorum’ he or she

produces a pleasing effect in either body or manners, in the sense given
in the Dictionary of ‘Beauty arising from fitness, or from absence of the
incongruous; comeliness; grace; gracefulness’. This is central to one of
the major qualities defining men and manners of the late-seventeenth
and early-eighteenth centuries, that of ‘politeness’, which is a key
concept to bear in mind when thinking about the people and literature
of this period. Yet the ideas relating to decorum also have a particularly
prominent application in the aesthetic sphere, when applied to a
‘dramatic, literary, or artistic composition’.

The Dictionary defines these qualities in the literary context as being

‘That which is proper to a personage, place, time, or subject in question,
or to the nature, unity, or harmony of the composition; fitness,
congruity, keeping’. These features are defining characteristics of a
literary mode, and approach to art and indeed life in general, which we
call ‘neoclassical’. This is a significant aesthetic approach and theory
which underpins Dryden’s approach to literary composition in general,
and poetry in particular, and strongly characterises the styles of writing
and manner of behaviour that many of his contemporaries sought to
achieve in art and in life.

What is ‘neoclassicism’?

We can, of course, have recourse to the Oxford English Dictionary to

find some clue as to the meaning of this term and its cognates.

Activity
Look up ‘neoclassical’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

What does the Dictionary entry tell us? Firstly, it defines ‘neoclassical’ as
meaning ‘Of, relating to, characteristic of, or designating a style of art,
architecture, music, literature […] that is based on or influenced by
classical models, or a style that has become established as “classical” ’.
The Dictionary places this within a historical context, using this term to
apply especially to the evidence of ‘such styles’ in eighteenth-century
literature and late eighteenth-century art. This style is defined as
‘neoclassical’, which in relation to art and architecture of the eighteenth
century was a ‘style characterized by a rejection of baroque and rococo
ornamentation in favour of classical simplicity and regularity of form’. A
‘neoclassicist’, meanwhile, is ‘An adherent or practitioner of neoclassical
style or principles’.

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So, these Dictionary entries reveal to us, the meaning of neoclassical or

neoclassicism is evident in the very word itself: ‘neo’ meaning ‘after’,
and classical referring to the ‘ancient’ authors and writers who, we know
from other units, provided an important foundation for the education of
gentlemen (and some women) of a certain class in this period. As we
have also found, however, besides simply admiring and seeking to
emulate classical authors such as Ovid or Horace (for example), the
classical world offered a model which was highly valued in many other
respects too: the Roman Empire in particular was a striking example of
imperial military power and national expansion, but also of the great
heights that could be reached in art, literature, politics and culture by a
civilised society. No wonder that in this period, when the destruction of
so many of these values throughout the years of civil strife had
threatened Britain’s stability as a nation – let alone an empire – writers
and citizens turned to Rome to provide a model for national
reconstruction.

This reconstruction took shape, as we have seen, not just in the

physical rebuilding of certain monuments and edifices, although this is a
very important manifestation of neoclassicism; the columns and pillars,
as well as the symmetry, of many buildings of the late-seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries testify to this – ‘bricks into marble’, as it were. But,
as we have seen elsewhere, this reconstruction also involved rebuilding
the national image through the arts: through paintings and sculptures,
as well as plays, poems and prose texts.

You might, however, be surprised to see that the Oxford English

Dictionary places these definitions within an eighteenth-century context,
and also to note that the historical examples it gives to show the usage
of these terms at different points in history come mainly from the
nineteenth century. Surely, you may ask, we are addressing John
Dryden, a seventeenth-century poet, in this unit?

We would, however, do well to recognise the limitations, as well as the

advantages, of using such a resource as the Oxford English Dictionary to
provide our sense of ‘literary history’, such as it is: the Dictionary is a
useful touchstone for providing pointers which lead us in the direction of
understanding the multiple meanings a single word can hold, some of its
origins, and some of its subsequent uses. We can, in fact, take a more
expansive approach to the meaning of the word ‘neoclassical’ and its
relatives in relation to the literary material we are studying in this unit,
and in relation to the seventeenth century in general. The so-called
‘origins’ of eighteenth-century neoclassicism, which the Dictionary
seems to emphasise, in fact have their root in the ideas and practices
strongly evident in late seventeenth-century Britain, which flourished for
some of the reasons we have outlined above.

Neoclassicism offered a means of expressing new hopes for a more

refined cultural and social environment, whose buildings embodied the
prosperity and grandeur of this glorious new age, and whose men and
manners exemplified the ideals of a civilisation at its peak. Whether late
seventeenth-century Britain lived up to such an ideal is another matter.

In fact, the Dictionary entries nonetheless emphasise one dimension of

the important origin of the ideals of neoclassicism upheld in this period,
the classical influence, not least because it was the perceived virtues
belonging to classical writings, those of ‘simplicity and regularity of
form’ that we have already identified as belonging to ‘decorum’, which
defined many writings of this period.

As we saw, this idea is exemplified in the notion of ‘unity or harmony’ of

a composition, with each of its parts fitting together in just proportion
and balance. This is embodied in the theory of the three ‘unities’: this

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-9

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originated in the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s ideas about what

constituted the perfect dramatic piece. Aristotle claimed that there
should be unity in three things in a play: it should consist of one action,
which happens in one place, during the course of one day. The notion of
the unities is most fully embodied in the plays of late seventeenth-
century French dramatists, such as Jean Racine, which provide an
important counterpoint for the poetry and plays of contemporaries such
as Dryden.

The idea of the unities and their classical origin, placed alongside what
we have now learnt about decorum and neoclassicism, remind us how
classical models provided a major source of inspiration for the writers of
the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, who translated,
imitated, or emulated their works; but, as we have also seen in several
different contexts, also strove to outdo these admired precedents, to
show that their own talents, and the qualities of the civilised age to
which they belonged, actually surpassed even Rome itself. As such, we
encounter the last important term we should consider when analysing
these periods and their literature: ‘Augustan’.

Activity
Look up the term ‘Augustan’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

We learn from our final recourse to the Dictionary for the time being
that, alongside referring to the reign of the great Emperor Augustus –
often perceived as being at the height of the power and achievement of
Ancient Rome – this term also refers to the period of literature in which
we are interested here. It means, according to the Dictionary, ‘the
period of highest purity and refinement of any national literature […] Of
the correct standard in taste, classical’, and is applied specifically to
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature. John Dryden is
often considered to be at the forefront of this style, alongside his
‘inheritor’ Alexander Pope. Both authors champion the poetic form which
best exemplifies Augustan ideals, with their notions of classical decorum
- the heroic couplet.

However, the ‘Augustan style’ is a term that some literary critics treat
with scepticism, as being (perhaps like the word ‘Enlightenment’) an all-
too-easy way of describing an age in literature that was in fact much
more disparate in the quality, style and purpose of its literary output. To
call this period the ‘Augustan age’ is to diminish or completely ignore
this diversity, and to impose a unity upon it which implies that writers of
this time all agreed to adhere to the code that it seemed to promote.

There was, of course, no such general, tacit agreement, even though

the historical references to Oldmixon and Swift (for example) given in
the Oxford English Dictionary use the term ‘Augustan’ to talk about their
age. As we have seen from previous units, and as we shall see from
those that follow, rather than being an age of conformity to a single
literary standard or ideal, the literature of the late-seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries were in fact as diverse as its people. Similarly, we
too should be wary of simply classifying this period as ‘the Augustan
age’, or of describing all authors of the late-seventeenth and early-
eighteenth centuries as ‘Augustans’, but always bear in mind the
reservations we should have about using any such catch-all term.

Having said this, if any writer of this period can be described as

‘Augustan’ it is, arguably, Dryden, for the ideals of literary achievement
that he espoused – such as we have seen in his comments on Donne
and Shakespeare – and in his practice of those ideals. As we have said,

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the heroic couplet is a major vehicle for the notions of regularity and
symmetry that characterise neoclassicism; alongside several other
notable formal features of Dryden’s poetry, the heroic couplet embodies
the decorum, correctness and unity that Dryden sought on both a
literary and a national plane. But what is the heroic couplet? We shall
examine this question in more detail shortly.

Firstly, though, as we have encountered several different, if interlocking

terms in the unit so far, it is important to pause and make sure that we
have fully grasped what these terms mean, and how they might relate
to the literary material we are addressing in this unit.

Activity
Write down brief explanations of what you understand by the terms
‘nature’, ‘wit’, ‘decorum’, ‘neoclassical’ and ‘Augustan’.

SAQ 1
What might we describe as the defining characteristics of late
seventeenth-century literature, as exemplified in the writings of John
Dryden, and what are the drawbacks of ‘defining’ this period in this
way?

THE HEROIC COUPLET:

‘THE VEHICLE FOR DIGNIFIED EXPRESSION’
As we have seen, the ideals of decorum that seem to belong to notions
such as ‘neoclassical’ or ‘Augustan’ insist on balance, symmetry and
proportion. In many respects, the heroic couplet is the most appropriate
literary vehicle for carrying such qualities. But what is the heroic
couplet?

The heroic couplet is made up of two rhymed lines of iambic pentameter

– that is, a line of verse which consists of five poetic feet, each foot of
which is made up of a weakly stressed syllable followed by a strongly
stressed syllable. If you recall the lines we cited earlier by Pope, we can
see a practical example of the heroic couplet, here with the system of
metrical notation applied that we have used elsewhere in this module (u
= an unstressed syllable, - = a stressed syllable):

u - u - u - u - u -
Expression is the dress of thought, and still
u - u - u - u - u u
Appears more decent, as more suitable […].

As you will see from the second line of this quotation, however, the final
foot corrupts the unstressed-stressed pattern, using instead two
unstressed syllables (a ‘pyrrhic’ foot). This tells us that, in the hands of
a skilled poet, the heroic couplet need not be mundane or repetitive;
instead, he can manipulate its regularity at key moments to underline –
or perhaps subvert – the idea he is communicating.

In this instance, we are surprised that the rhythmic pattern is

interrupted, and perhaps pause over the second line; we are,
furthermore, surprised to see that while talking about being ‘decent’ and
‘suitable’, Pope interrupts the metre in a seemingly unsuitable way.

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-11

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Rather than bringing us to doubt his skill, however, we realise that this
chimes in with his suggestion that there is only an appearance of
decency, a ‘dress’ or disguise, instead of the real thing, and as a result
we marvel all the more at his dexterity.

Dryden similarly uses the heroic couplet with wit, ingenuity and flair. His
use of the form, however, is strongly influenced by that of two relatively
minor poets, Sir John Denham and Edmund Waller. Dryden himself
draws this connection in his ‘Preface to The Rival Ladies’, in which he
defends poetry that is written in rhyme over poetry written in blank
verse. He argues that ‘rhyme has all the advantages of prose’, and goes
on to say that:

[…] the excellence and dignity of it were never fully known till Mr
Waller taught it; he first made writing easily an art. [...] This
sweetness of Mr Waller’s lyric poesy was afterwards followed in
the epic by Sir John Denham, in his Cooper’s Hill, a poem which
[...] for the majesty of the style is, and ever will be, the exact
standard of good writing. (Dryden 1970: 15)

We saw in Unit 3 that Denham’s Cooper’s Hill exerted a lasting influence

on subsequent poets: here, we see one of the major poets of his
generation, Dryden, mentioning that poem’s style of composition as the
pinnacle of ‘good writing’. He, too, will aim to follow the pattern set out
by Denham in such poems as Cooper’s Hill.

How might we compare Dryden and Denham as poets? Can we trace the
influence of Denham’s ‘majestic’ style on Dryden’s verse? Which, do you
think, is the most accomplished poet?

You may like to think over these questions when you read the two
poems we shall be focussing on in this unit; for now, though, we might
note that Samuel Johnson, for one, considers Dryden to be the superior
poet. Johnson praises Waller and Denham, but also notes that their
achievement was slight and only became significant when Dryden
adopted and improved upon the example they had set:

After about half a century of forced thoughts and rugged metre

some advances towards nature and harmony had been already
made by Waller and Denham; they had shown that long
discourses in rhyme grew more pleasing when they were broken
into couplets, and that verse consisted not only in the number but
the arrangement of syllables. (2008: 722)

Do you recognise the validity of such comments, in relation to your

knowledge of Denham’s poem, Cooper’s Hill? And do you notice a
connection between Johnson’s choice of words – and those qualities he
chose to praise – and the features of neoclassical and Augustan writing
we have described so far? You might, for instance, pounce upon such
words as ‘nature’ and ‘harmony’, and notice how Johnson connects
these aesthetic qualities to the composition of verse.

Despite praising Waller and Denham, however, Johnson goes on to say

that:

[…] though they did much, who can deny that they left much to
do? Their works were not many, nor were their minds of very
ample comprehension. More examples of more modes of
composition were necessary for the establishment of regularity,
and the introduction of propriety in word and thought.
(2008: 722)

What does Johnson imply here? His criticism seems to be cruel, and

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highly personal, slighting both Waller and Denham’s mental capacities

(their ‘comprehension’). How are such comments useful to literary
criticism? We find the clue in the second part of this quotation, which
qualifies Johnson’s belittling of these poets’ mental powers; he implies
that, although they had a good initial idea for how to write effective
poetry, they did not produce enough ‘examples’ of it to make a truly
significant contribution to the development of poetry. This is where
Dryden comes in, for Johnson claims that Dryden took these seeds of
promise and allowed them to flourish into numerous and varied
examples of the literary style with which Waller and Denham had only
partially experimented:

The new versification, as it was called, may be considered as

owing its establishment to Dryden, from whose time it is apparent
that English poetry has had no tendency to relapse into its former
savageness. (2008: 723)

Dryden inherited the couplet form from Denham and Waller but he
considerably improved upon their use of it. Johnson implies that English
poetry naturally has a rude and ‘savage’ quality that has only gradually
become refined over successive years, in the hands of successive
generations of poets. It is Dryden who reaches the peak of this
refinement, and who sets the standard for subsequent poets to follow.

We can see the truth of Johnson’s observation if we look at the work of

Alexander Pope, who as we have already hinted was one of Dryden’s
most significant ‘inheritors’; like Dryden, Pope promoted ‘refined’
poetry, in particular through using the heroic couplet. In one of Pope’s
poems, the First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated, we can
see a similar observation about how Dryden improves upon the pattern
set by earlier poets – and Waller in particular – precisely through the
elegant regularity of his lines:

Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join

The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long majestic march, and energy divine.
Tho’ still some traces of our rustic vein
And splay-foot verse, remain’d, and will remain
(ll. 267-71)
(Available via Literature Online)

Dryden succeeded in creating the couplet by making his ‘varying verse’

run into the smooth patterns of a balanced, rhythmical line. He refined
the rude sound of English words, and shaped them into ‘resounding’
lines of verse.

Donald Thomas writes that Dryden found the couplet form could be
used for several different purposes: it could be adapted variously to
elegiac, satiric, or political verse, to narrative poetry or to religious
argument (Dryden 1993: 16). The couplet’s epigrammatic quality can
be effective at certain moments, such as in these lines from Mac
Flecknoe:

All human things are subject to decay,

And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey (ll.1-2; 313)

The idea of the unstoppable, onwards march of one’s ‘Fate’, and of the
monarch’s necessary submission to its ‘summons’, is aptly conveyed by
the unforgiving regularity of these lines.

By contrast, as we saw with the lines from Pope earlier, despite the
formality of the couplet it can acquire a flexibility which allows the poet
to express quite contrary impressions. As Thomas suggests, Dryden’s

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-13

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handling of this form is so deft that, while in lesser hands it might seem
mechanical or obtrusive, in fact the reader barely notices that he uses it
at all (Dryden 1993: 16). In Absalom and Achitophel, for instance,
Dryden writes at one point of his characters that they:

Now wondered why so long they had obeyed

An idol monarch which their hands had made (ll.63-4; 460)

The rhyme between ‘obeyed’ and ‘made’ is almost unnoticeable, or at

least seems highly natural rather than contrived, an impression which is
partly created by the enjambment of these lines. Thus, the formal
framework that the couplet provides is nonetheless flexible, and can be
used to great effect when the poet varies its form and function.

Donald Thomas also argues that the couplet provided a tension in

Dryden’s poetry: the tension of expectancy. The reader expects a rhyme
to materialise regularly in reading a piece written in couplets, and so is
compelled onwards in his or her reading by the lulling rhythm of the
rhyme. We come to rely on finding the expected rhyme in each second
line of a couplet, and we do not have to defer that expectation for very
long until it is fulfilled: each couplet is, after all, by definition only
composed of two lines.

This also has the converse effect, of course, of unsettling us when these
expectations are defeated – if, for instance, the poet uses a half-rhyme,
or where the metre is irregular. At such moments we are made to
pause, and to reflect upon why the poet has chosen to disrupt the
smoothness of his verse at certain points – or, indeed, whether he
meant to at all and has in fact slipped.

Nonetheless, the pattern of expectation and its fulfilment that the

couplet establishes in its reader also lends it an aural quality: it is a
verse form aptly suited to being read aloud, and to being listened to.
We can, for instance, memorise lines that are written in heroic couplets
because of the prompting quality of the rhyme: remembering the end
word of the first line, we are more easily able to remember how the
second line of a couplet runs. As such, the couplet lends itself to being
used in the public poem: it grabs and holds the reader’s attention, and
locks him or her into the compelling forward movement of the verse
(and so the argument that it conveys). Similarly, it has the same effect
if read aloud, by engaging the listener’s attention and allowing him or
her to remember its lines more easily.

These ideas, about how the heroic couplet successfully embodies the
ideals of what we tentatively call the neoclassical or Augustan concept
of poetry, are central to Dryden’s poetic practice, as we will discover in
the two major poems we shall go on to examine. We will also see,
however, how both Absalom and Achitophel and Mac Flecknoe
demonstrate the flexibility and surprising variety of what might, on the
surface, seem to be a very rigid literary form.

SAQ 2
What is the ‘heroic couplet’, and why is it a particularly appropriate
vehicle for conveying Dryden’s concept of what constitutes successful
poetry?

ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL

Dryden’s major poem, Absalom and Achitophel, in many respects
embodies some of the ideas we have come across in this unit so far –

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about decorum and appropriateness, both in one’s personal manners

and in literary style. Yet it also brings together some ideas we have
encountered in previous units – about the ‘public’ or ‘occasional’ nature
of a piece of writing; we have also seen how, by reflecting upon
contemporary political events, society, or the arts, a piece of literature
can comment upon these events, and perhaps help to shape their future
course.

Absalom and Achitophel, too, is in many respects a ‘public’ poem, which

responds to and engages with a controversial, real-life event, and so
successfully demonstrates the heroic couplet’s capacity to serve the
purposes of the public poem.

What is the background to the poem, and what ‘event’ or set of

circumstances prompted Dryden to write it?

THE OCCASION: THE POPISH PLOT

In 1678 a man called Titus Oates went before the Westminster
magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and testified that there was a
Catholic plot afoot to depose Charles II and to place Charles’s Catholic
brother, James, on the throne. Oates testified that this ‘Popish Plot’, as
it was called, was led by the Jesuits, and repeated his testimony before
the Privy Council early in October 1678. Later in the month, Sir Edmund
Berry Godfrey was discovered dead in what seemed like suspicious
circumstances. Oates assured the authorities that Godfrey’s death was
the work of the Papist plotters, who were, he claimed, anxious to silence
all those who knew of their conspiracy.

Oates’s story was a complete fabrication: there was no conspiracy. Why

did he invent such a lie? Oates was a militant Protestant, pledged to
defend Protestant England from any Catholic threat; his claims about
the ‘Popish Plot’ were designed to fuel anti-Catholic sentiment in the
country. Oates’s story was in many respects untenable; for instance, a
sceptic might have asked why such a plot was necessary at all, when
James was Charles’s rightful successor anyway. Nonetheless, Oates’s
allegations had the desired effect of stoking a national panic and
arousing rabid anti-Catholic sentiment. Many Catholics, although
entirely innocent of any crimes, were hunted out, interrogated, tortured,
thrown into prison and executed. The victims were from all classes,
ranks and professions: the Archbishop of Armagh was among those
killed. These persecutions continued for four years.

The unrest following the revelations of the ‘Popish Plot’ fed into, and
also partly arose out of, deeper tensions in England at this time which
emerged from the fraught relationship between King and Parliament.
As we have seen in earlier units, although Charles had been restored to
the throne by Parliament in 1660, the political landscape was by no
means smooth in the following years. Some prominent public figures
stoked these latent tensions, and brought them to a crisis-point. The
frenzy aroused by Oates provided such men with a perfect opportunity
to provoke further antagonism. One of Charles II’s most potent
adversaries, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury, was (like
Oates) a fervent Protestant, and used the accusation of a ‘Popish plot’
as an opportunity to pursue Catholics suspected of involvement.

Shaftesbury’s enthusiasm for this cause was partly motivated by his

opposition to Charles II, whom he had long suspected of having Catholic
sympathies. As leader of the Whig party, Shaftesbury led his party in
the attempt to diffuse the supposed threat of the Papist plotters and to
attack Charles in the process. The Whigs introduced three Bills into
Parliament which sought to exclude James from succeeding to the
throne; these Bills named instead the Duke of Monmouth as Charles’s
rightful successor, Monmouth’s mother claiming that he was Charles’s

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-15

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illegitimate son.

As if this domestic crisis were not serious enough, its tensions deepened
when it was discovered that Charles’s minister, Lord Danby, had been
secretly negotiating financial dealings between the King and Louis XIV of
France. Charges were brought against Danby, and Charles, under threat
(and perhaps deeply embarrassed by this exposure), dissolved
Parliament. However, in the elections that followed a Parliament was
returned to power that was even less favourably disposed towards
Charles and his brother than the previous Parliament. Exposed to
virulent attack, and (as a Catholic) fearing for his safety, James fled to
Holland. Charles, in response, exiled the Duke of Monmouth.

By 1681 the crisis had not abated; Charles suspended Parliament in that
year, and for the remaining four years of his life ruled without it. He
further exacerbated the tense relations he held with public figures by
having Shaftesbury tried for treason in 1681, and Oates flogged and
imprisoned for life. He awarded James one hundred thousand pounds in
damages against Oates, who had called him a traitor. It was James,
despite the best efforts of many in the preceding years, who came to
the throne after Charles’s death.

Throughout the crisis both sides engaged in a fierce propaganda war.

John Dryden, who had been appointed Poet Laureate by Charles in
1668, wrote, as his contribution to that war, Absalom and Achitophel,
which was first published in November 1681. Both by nature of his
public office, but also through personal sympathy, Dryden remained
loyal to Charles throughout the crisis. Absalom and Achitophel testifies
to that loyalty, both supporting the position Charles had adopted and
denouncing his enemies. As such, Absalom and Achitophel is a highly
public poem both in its official nature, and in its direct engagement with
the people and events belonging to its historical moment of publication.

In this section of the unit, we have placed the poem that we shall go on
to discuss in detail within its historic context. It is, therefore, fitting that
we should briefly glance forward to the year 1688. In 1685, just a short
while after the publication of Absalom and Achitophel, Charles II died
and the throne passed to his Catholic brother. As we learned in previous
units, a period of instability ensued that in many respects continued the
uncertainty of the final years of Charles’s reign.

James II ascended to the throne early in February 1685, and initially

Britain enjoyed a period of rejoicing and optimism. However, this was
almost immediately challenged as James had to face two rebellions: one
conducted in the south of the country by his nephew, the Duke of
Monmouth – the ‘Absalom’ of Dryden’s poem – and another in Scotland,
by the Earl of Argyll. Although he successfully crushed these uprisings,
as we discovered in previous units, in the remaining years of his reign
James caused increasing discontent amongst the people through the
political and religious laws he introduced; his growing unpopularity was
also fuelled by his Roman Catholicism.

It was the ‘Declaration of Indulgence’ – an act passed by James in 1685

which ordered tolerance towards Catholics and Dissenters – which finally
tipped the balance of popular opinion against him. More significantly, it
provided the opportunity for James’s nephew, William of Orange
(married to James’s daughter, Mary), to galvanise forces and lead them
in rebellion against the King: an event known variously as the ‘Glorious
Revolution’ or ‘Bloodless Revolution’ of 1688. Dryden remained loyal to
the deposed monarchy, and when he refused to take the oath of
allegiance to the new government in 1688, he fell from favour and was
stripped of his laureateship (Patterson 2006: 221). In the remaining
years until his death in 1700, Dryden lived by his pen, producing further

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significant literary works.

ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL: A PUBLIC POEM

Why might we describe Absalom and Achitophel as an occasional poem,
and also as a public poem?

Firstly, the poem responded to an event in the public consciousness: the

‘Popish Plot’ and the very visible consequences of the panic that ensued
in its wake. The poem also reflects upon a general feeling of tension
born out of the ongoing tensions between the King and Parliament, and
the wider repercussions this had in the public sphere. Absalom and
Achitophel was also, significantly, directed at the public, written by the
national mouthpiece of poetry, the Laureate.

In its dual role as both a reflection upon a current event, and its active
engagement with the public, Absalom and Achitophel can be seen as
another example of literature’s ability to intervene in the public sphere:
we have noticed this capacity in previous units, and similarly here we
shall see how Dryden not only comments upon the contemporary
political situation but seeks to shape its future course, directly through
the commentary he presents in his poem.

How might we detect these various aspects of Absalom and Achitophel’s

intended ‘function’ as a poem – both its attempt to speak to the public,
and its desire to shape public opinion, and so actively alter current
circumstances?

One way of approaching the poem, and its ulterior motives, is to

address what we call the paratextual material surrounding it: that is,
the printed material usually (but not always) written by the author that
precedes the work itself. This ‘paratext’ can take different forms: it
could be a preface, for instance, or an ‘address to the reader’. We shall
see in later units how prefatory matter plays an important role in how
the early novels we shall be studying articulated how their authors
thought they should be read. The French critic Gérard Genette provides
some elucidating comments upon paratextual material, which will inform
our reading both of Dryden’s poem and of subsequent texts. Genette
writes that a paratext is:

[…] what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as

such to its readers and, more generally, to the public. More than a
boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold,
or […] a ‘vestibule’ that offers the world at large the possibility of
either stepping inside or turning back. It is an ‘undefined zone’
between the inside and the outside, a zone without any hard and
fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text)
or the outward side (turned toward the world’s discourse about
the text), an edge. (1997: 1-2)

We can think of a paratext as a ‘threshold’ between us – the outside

world – and the text; it is a border that we must cross to get to the text
proper. However, it is not an obstacle, but potentially a means of
elucidating our ideas about what to expect, about what kind of text
faces us in the pages beyond. As such, the paratext is a vital space for
the author to present some ideas about how he or she conceives of the
work: what he thinks we should expect of it, how we might go about
reading it and what we might learn from it.

What paratextual material does Dryden provide in Absalom and

Achitophel, how might we learn something about its author’s conception
of the work through it and how might it enlighten our reading of the
text?

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-17

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ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL: THE PREFACE ‘TO THE

READER’
A number of important ideas surface in the preface, one of which is the
idea that Absalom and Achitophel is a satire. We have encountered
satire in several different contexts in previous units. In what sense do
we use ‘satire’ here, what forms does it take in this poem, and how does
it affect how we read the poem?

Chris Baldick defines ‘satire’ as ‘a mode of writing that exposes the

failings of individuals, institutions, or societies to ridicule and scorn’
(1990: 198). Baldick argues that a piece of writing need not be wholly
satirical (although it might be), but may just contain satirical elements.
Satire is not restricted to one particular literary form, but can operate in
all genres: poems, plays, prose texts. For instance, we saw how, in
Rochester and Behn’s poetry, they use irony to satirise the society of
their day.

The purpose of satire is to expose a perceived fault in an individual

person’s writings, speech or action, or a failing across a whole society –
its government and institutions, as well as its fads and fashions. By
exposing such failures in this way, the satirist hopes to correct the fault;
a satirical text aims to open the reader or listener’s eyes to the fault it
exposes, and so urge him or her to try to reform it. Thus, satire can act
as a social corrective: despite the often comical nature of many satires,
a satire need not be comical, but in either case its intentions and
potential effects can be very significant.

How can we see satire operating in Absalom and Achitophel, and what
role does the preface play in promoting this feature and purpose?

A preface often serves the purpose of acting as an ‘apologia’: it allows

the author to make his or her ‘excuse’ for the work, or to explain its
form and possible intentions. Dryden uses the preface to Absalom and
Achitophel as a space in which he can declare the literary form that best
defines his poem, which points us towards how we might go about
reading Absalom and Achitophel. Dryden argues that the poem is
satirical, but is also anxious to qualify this claim: he says that, as far as
‘Justice’ would permit, he has held back the satire ‘from carrying too
sharp an Edge’. Dryden highlights the corrective purpose of satire in the
preface, claiming that:

The true end of Satire, is the amendment of Vices by correction.

And he who writes Honestly, is no more an Enemy to the
Offender, than the Physician to the Patient, when he prescribes
harsh Remedies to an inveterate Disease
(1993: 96-97)

Dryden thus distances himself from the accusation of being solely

motivated by animosity to his enemies; instead, he claims, his poem
can have a restorative, healing effect. He is like a doctor or ‘Physician’
who uses his poem to ‘remedy’ the ‘disease’ or failings of his enemies
through the powerful corrective force of satire. As Ronald Paulson has
argued, although Dryden wrote few actual satires throughout his career,
nonetheless ‘running through the whole of Dryden’s oeuvre we can
detect the energies of satire’ (2006: 37).

How can we detect these ‘energies’ in Dryden’s Absalom and

Achitophel? Who are his ‘enemies’, in what ways and for what purpose
does he satirise them in this poem?

Dryden targets a number of Charles II’s opponents indirectly through

the Biblical story of Absalom and Achitophel; as such, the poem
employs an allegory to effect its purpose – a story that conceals an

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ulterior purpose, such as Bunyan uses in The Pilgrim’s Progress to

convey his Christian message. However, as Paulson argues (2006: 43),
Dryden does not actually employ allegory as such, even if certain
aspects of how an allegory functions are evident in Absalom and
Achitophel.

In this poem, Dryden adopts a story found in the Old Testament, in 2

Samuel 13-19, which tells the tale of King David and his rebellious son,
Absalom. This passage also describes how David defeats his son’s
rebellion through warfare, and also the uprising by one of Absalom’s
supporters, Achitophel.
Dryden’s poem uses these biblical characters to stand in for prominent
public figures of his own day. So, who represents whom?

King David represents Charles II.

Absalom represents the Duke of Monmouth.

Achitophel represents the Earl of Shaftesbury.

Corah represents Titus Oates.

Zimri represents the Duke of Buckingham (one time friend of Charles

who changed sides and supported Shaftesbury).

How do these characters operate within the narrative of the poem, and
what is the ulterior purpose of presenting public figures in this
allegorical way?

ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL: THE POEM

Absalom and Achitophel is a fairly long and complex poem: one way of
approaching it is to break it down into eleven different sections, to note
the distinctive features of each section, and to see how each section
interlocks in the poem to create a coherent whole. You should bear in
mind what we have learnt so far in this unit about the historical
background to the poem, and the context of the ‘Popish Plot’, as we
work through the poem.

What does each section consist of?

Section 1: Lines 1-84

Here we are introduced to King David [Charles] and to his noble son,
Absalom [Monmouth]. We are told that David’s reign was marked by
political stability but that the Jewish people [the people of England]
were not content with that stability and showed little gratitude towards
David.

Section 2: Lines 85-133

Here we are introduced to the ‘Jebusites’ [the Catholics], a people who,
we are told, were politically, religiously and financially oppressed in the
country. Rumours began to spread of a Jebusite plot [the Popish Plot]:

Some thought they God’s anointed meant to slay

By guns invented since full many a day;
Our Author swears it not, but who can know
How far the Devil and Jebusites may go? (ll.130-133)

Section 3: Lines 134-229

As the rumours of this Jebusite plot spread, we are told that factions
sprang up against King David. These factions were led by Achitophel
[Shaftesbury], who went so far as to accuse the king himself of being a
Jebusite.

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-19

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Section 4: Lines 230-302

Achitophel endeavoured to persuade Absalom to become the saviour of
his people because, he argued, Absalom is the ‘Country’s Darling and
Desire’: kings should be chosen according to popularity rather than to
traditional laws of succession.

Section 5: Lines 303-372

We discover that Absalom was flattered by what Achitophel had to say,
but he remained loyal to his father.

Section 6: Lines 373-476

However, Achitophel speaks again with Absalom: his speech is recorded
in this section of the poem. Again, he praises Absalom’s virtues, and
describes to him how they could make it possible that Absalom be
named heir to the throne. He also warns him of the dangers of allowing
David’s brother [James] to succeed to the throne.

Section 7: Lines 477-542

We discover that Absalom’s ambition is stirred by this encouragement.
Achitophel exploits this weakness, and unites ‘The Malcontents of all the
Israelites’ in rebellion against King David.

Section 8: Lines 543-681

We are given brief sketches of some of Absalom and Achitophel’s
supporters, and are prompted to think about the real-life figures they
represent allegorically; these include Zimri [Buckingham] and Corah
[Oates]. Absalom is deluded into thinking he can succeed in rebelling
against his father, both because he is driven by his own ambition and
because of the support and encouragement offered by the rebels that
Achitophel has assembled.

Section 9: Lines 682-758

Absalom makes a tour of these supporters; each figure he encounters is
described, and his role in the rebellion suggested.

Section 10: Lines 759-810

The speaker of the poem breaks off his narrative to give us his own
political philosophy. He argues that people have the right to freedom,
but that reasonable men and women do not seek to overthrow
established structures of government. He suggests that destabilising
government in this way does not lead to the improvement of society,
but to destructive anarchy.

Section 11: Lines 811-932

David’s supporters are listed and described, a section that acts as a
counterpoise to Absalom’s tour of his supporters in ll. 682-758.

Section 12: Lines 933-1031

David addresses the rebels in a speech: at the sound of his voice, and
the authority he asserts in what he says, the rebels back down. Now
that it has been successfully crushed, peace and stability are restored to
the kingdom.

Bearing this framework in mind, you should now read the poem for
yourself, and make notes as you go along upon passages, words, or
images that you find particularly interesting or striking. You might, for
instance, like to note down where you think a certain character’s words
or actions reflect upon the real-life figure that they represent, and think
about how this enhances the poem’s role as a satire.

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ACTIVITY
Read Absalom and Achitophel.

What were your impressions upon reading the poem? Did you notice
how Dryden structures his poem so that it follows a distinct narrative
line, such as we have outlined above? And how – and for what purposes
– is character portrayed in Absalom and Achitophel?

When we address the question of how character is portrayed in this

poem, we are also prompted to think about how this relates to Absalom
and Achitophel’s identity as a satire. Why does Dryden tell the story of
Oates, Shaftesbury and Charles in the form of satire? And why is a
Biblical story particularly suited to representing such events?
We can answer both questions together. We might, for instance, argue
that Dryden uses the Biblical story to disguise his attack on Oates,
Shaftesbury and all those involved in the ‘Popish Plot’. By using the
shield of allegory, Dryden can distance himself from the satire; this
allows him to defend himself if he should be attacked for criticising
public figures through the poem: he could just claim that he was merely
re-telling a Biblical story and nothing else. Yet in a more important
sense, by conveying the story of current events through a semi-fictional
allegory, Dryden can display his artistic skill as a poet. In particular, the
‘disguise’ of satire allows him to employ his talent for wit: to attack his
enemies through satire is far more clever and effective than, say,
publishing a reactionary pamphlet.

We could argue that a direct attack on one’s enemies is more liable to

be seen as a personal attack: an indirect attack, as in Dryden’s poem,
does not appear to be motivated by personal concerns or feelings, and
so achieves its aim of criticising these public figures and their actions
more effectively. By distancing the poet from accusations of personal
animosity, the indirect nature of the satirical attack allows his poem to
tackle universal concerns. Look back at the definition of satire that we
formulated earlier in this unit: part of the satirist’s aim is to reform
society, to correct its perceived faults through exposing them to
critique. He achieves this most effectively by dressing up his criticism in
the indirect form of an allegorical story, and can thus claim that his
poem is an important intervention in public affairs, rather than simply
an expression of a private grievance.

Why was the story of King David and his rebellious son particularly well
suited to Dryden’s satirical enterprise?

Drawing a parallel between King David and Charles II was commonplace

in Dryden’s time. This ensured that the nature of Dryden’s poem would
be understood by his contemporaries: they would see the figure of
Charles projected through the character of David in Absalom and
Achitophel, and so would grasp that Dryden’s poem is a satire upon
current people and events. Furthermore, Dryden had used this parallel
himself in an earlier poem, Astraea Redux, written in 1660; his readers,
then, would already be familiar with the idea that Dryden was interested
in the poetic possibilities of comparing Charles to David.

Absalom and Achitophel also had general resonance amongst

contemporary readers in another sense, too: it was also commonplace
to use the name ‘Achitophel’ to represent a malevolent politician,
meaning that the poem’s first readers would have been alerted to the
nature of this character – and, by extension, the criticisms that Dryden
made through this figure of the real-life person he represents, the Duke
of Monmouth. Several other contemporary poems also used this parallel

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-21

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between the Duke of Monmouth and Absalom, again suggesting that

Dryden’s first readers would have been familiar with the idea and
recognise it when they came to read Absalom and Achitophel.

Dryden’s use of existing literary conventions thus served the purpose of

alerting his readers to the nature of his poem, and to the possible
connections with the contemporary world that it might have. Both the
Biblical story, and its parallels with the present day, meant that
Absalom and Achitophel could have cultural resonance, and so its satire
could be more effective, as David Wykes has suggested (1977: 103).

By using a Biblical story in his poem, Dryden also lends Absalom and
Achitophel authority: the undisputed authority of the Bible means that
the poem’s first readers would be encouraged to take Dryden’s poem
seriously, and to think about the importance that its satirical message
might have in their present day. In using the Biblical connection, Dryden
also draws a connection between the present and the past, suggesting
that historical events follow a cycle in which they are continuously
repeated in succeeding eras, in what some might call ‘archetypal
patterns’.

George deF. Lord argues that Dryden displays this tendency to see
versions of the past in the present moment throughout his career; he
claims that Dryden had a ‘lifelong affinity for seeing the present in terms
of the past’ (Lord in Miner 1972: 157). Consequently, Dryden’s view of
history is ‘inescapably retrospective and cyclical’ (Lord in Miner 1972:
156) – it is worked out in cycles that endlessly repeat themselves. Lord
notes that the ‘archetypal pattern’ Dryden used most frequently in his
writings was the ‘cosmogonic myth of restoration, recovery, or renewal
after exile, defeat, or destruction’ (Lord in Miner 1972: 156). As we
have seen in previous units, the paradoxical sense that destruction can
be coupled with renewal surfaces in Dryden’s approach to history, as a
series of repeating patterns.

How does this idea of history – and of the relation between the present
and the past – lend greater authority to Absalom and Achitophel?

From one perspective, if present-day events are seen as mere

repetitions of past events, or at least as following the same pattern of
past periods in history, then the outcome of events in the here and now
seem to be inevitable, and cannot be changed or challenged. Through
using a parallel between the present and the past in this way, Dryden’s
perspective on present events establishes itself as a definitive account.
Furthermore, because they are seen to be inevitable, the procedure and
outcome of those contemporary events seem to be unchallengeable: no-
one can change what will happen.

Thus, Dryden’s perception of Charles II and Shaftesbury in Absalom and

Achitophel is rendered both authoritative and definitive by the parallel
drawn with the Biblical story. By drawing a parallel between Charles and
David, Dryden can suggest that the King’s restoration and authority are
inevitable, and cannot be challenged: just as David quashed rebellion
and asserted his authority, Dryden suggests, so can Charles in the
present crisis.

While the story of David is central to Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden

also uses two other Biblical stories in his poem that both reinforce the
poem’s authority, and further explain the applications that its allegory
might have to contemporary circumstances. References to the story of
Adam, found in the book of Genesis, appear in a number of places in the
poem: in l. 51, for example, the Jews (that is, the people of England)
are referred to as ‘Adam-wits’ who, like Adam, desire liberty. As we saw
in Unit 5 in which we addressed Paradise Lost, the arrogance and

8-22 Literature 3
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ambition of Adam’s desires led to his downfall, and his expulsion from
Paradise; so, in Dryden’s poem, the implication is that, like Adam, the
Jews will fail because their desires are as ambitious as his.

Describing the people of England as Jews also draws a parallel between

Charles and Christ, although this is not an explicit connection (and
perhaps not even intended); rather, it is one that we can infer in our
reading of the poem as an allegory. By making the people of England
Jews, Charles can be seen as the persecuted Christ, who is the saviour
of a hostile and ungrateful people.

However, while aspects of the Bible support Absalom and Achitophel’s

narrative and its allegorical function, Dryden is nonetheless compelled
to adapt this material to suit the different purposes and contexts of his
poem. In particular, he alters certain significant aspects of the Absalom
and Achitophel story, such as by making Achitophel, not Absalom,
responsible for the rebellion. In the Old Testament, Absalom’s rebellion
takes place before Achitophel is introduced into the story; he is an
important character, but has a relatively subordinate role in the course
of the uprising. In Dryden’s account, however, Achitophel is the most
important character, to whom Absalom is subordinate; as Wykes
argues, this makes Absalom become Achitophel’s instrument (1977:
103).

What purpose does this serve in the poem’s role as a satire, and in the
different context of the story that Dryden projects through the poem?
By shifting the blame to Achitophel, Dryden is able to exonerate
Charles’s son to some extent, and so to justify the King’s love for his
own son. Although he did not allow Monmouth to succeed to the throne
– which his illegitimacy would have prevented anyway – Charles II was
clearly fond of his son. In the poem, by showing that Absalom is not
inherently rebellious, but is tempted into rebellion by Achitophel,
Monmouth’s character is partially saved.

Does the fact that Dryden ‘tampers’ with the Biblical story to
accommodate aspects of the relationship between Charles and
Monmouth weaken the poem’s authority? To some extent, this does
indeed suggest that Absalom and Achitophel becomes weaker as a
version of a Biblical story; however, its role as a satire is strengthened,
as by adapting the circumstances of his source to match real-life
circumstances more closely, Dryden can present his critique upon them
more effectively.

How is this satirical dimension and purpose of the poem reinforced

through Absalom and Achitophel’s treatment of character?

‘CHARACTERS’ IN ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL

We could argue that, besides the overarching narrative that is traced in
Absalom and Achitophel, it achieves its satirical purpose most effectively
through the different characters the poem portrays, and their
connection to present-day figures.

Dryden’s depiction of character belongs to a strong literary tradition

prevalent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of ‘drawing’ a
character (Wykes 1977: 175). The ‘character’ as a literary genre dates
back to an ancient Greek text, Characters by Theophrastus, which was
composed of short prose sketches of different kinds of humans and
varieties of human behaviour. The ideal way of behaving was what the
Greek philosopher Aristotle called the ‘middle way’; however, as Wykes
notes, ‘Most characters were denunciations’, that is, they generally
recorded the divergence of a person in his/her behaviour from this
middle way’ (1977: 175). Thus, a ‘character’ portrait exemplified the
difference between a person’s qualities, and how their actions show that
they are or are not true to these qualities.

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-23

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How does this notion of ‘character’ apply to Absalom and Achitophel?

The most significant and most effectively drawn character in Dryden’s

poem is Zimri, who represents George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham.
For many years, Buckingham had been widely known for his unstable
personality and impulsiveness, qualities which Dryden builds brilliantly
into his ‘character’:

Some of their chiefs were princes of the land:

In the first rank of these did Zimri stand;
A man so various that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind’s epitome.
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;
Was every thing by starts, and nothing long;
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:
The all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Blessed madman, who could every hour employ
With something new to wish, or to enjoy!
Railing and praising were his usual themes,
And both, to show his judgement, in extremes:
So over-violent, or over-civil,
That every man with him was god or devil.
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art:
Nothing went unrewarded but desert.
Beggared by fools, whom still he found too late,
He had his jest, and they had his estate.
He laughed himself from court, then sought relief
By forming parties, but could ne’er be chief […].
(ll.543-564)

ACTIVITY
Note down those words and images that reinforce the impression that
Zimri – and by implication Buckingham – is an impulsive character.

How does the structure of Dryden’s verse support these observations?

As we have noted earlier, Absalom and Achitophel is written in heroic
couplets: what features of this verse form are particularly suited to the
impression that Dryden creates of Zimri’s character in these lines? We
might, perhaps, note that Dryden fully exploits the couplet’s
epigrammatic quality in his portrait of Zimri; each couplet is a
condensed, satirical statement about his character, each providing a
self-sufficient criticism of the man. In this respect, these couplets adopt
a metonymic quality – that is, where a part stands in for the whole; by
criticising one feature of Zimri’s character, Dryden attacks the man
himself.

Does Dryden rupture the metrical regularity of the couplet form to

support the impression of compulsiveness that his words convey?
According to Wykes, in lines 547-8:

the strong caesuras which break the lines give us four staccato
sense units, so that the form of the statement imitates the
grasshopper leaps taken by Buckingham’s mind.
(1977: 177)

Are there other points at which form, or structure, coheres with content
in this way in these lines?

8-24 Literature 3
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Alongside criticising Zimri’s personal qualities, this character portrait

also attacks his political motivations; the speaker suggests that Zimri
entered politics from vanity, and as a relief from injured pride. How
might this relate to the poem’s satiric function? In making these claims
about Zimri, Dryden suggests that the Duke of Buckingham has similar
political motivations. This criticism nonetheless expands beyond this
individual man: as Zimri is ‘in the first Rank’ of the leaders of
Achitophel’s rebellion, the implication is that the whole rebellious
movement is driven by shallow and selfish political motivations. Thus
the ‘character’ of Zimri is not just a personal criticism of the man: it also
serves to criticise the political movement to which he is allied. The
‘character’ is not simply an attack on the Duke of Buckingham: it
attacks the whole political movement against Charles II led by
Shaftesbury.

ACTIVITY
Read the following ‘characters’ from Absalom and Achitophel and
compare them with the ‘character’ of Zimri:

Achitophel (ll.150-162)
Shimei (ll.585-629)
Corah (ll.630-681)
Amiel (ll.898-914)

How might we ally our observations on these characters in Dryden’s

poem with our comments upon Absalom and Achitophel as a satire?
Think back to the claims made in the preface, about how a satire can
fulfil a ‘public’ function by reflecting upon current events and people,
and by criticising them it possibly helps to correct perceived faults for
the greater good of society. Can you detect ways in which Absalom and
Achitophel achieves such an aim, either through its use of a Biblical
allegory, or through the distinctive features of the ‘characters’ it
presents, and their connection with real-life individuals? By projecting
his concerns about a very urgent and unstable set of circumstances in
his own day in this allegorical way, Dryden can, perhaps, voice these
concerns more effectively, and even help to shape future events for the
better.

SAQ 3

What features of Absalom and Achitophel identify the poem as a

satire, and how does it achieve its satirical aims?

MAC FLECKNOE: LITERARY SATIRE AND THE MOCK-

HEROIC POEM
Absalom and Achitophel, as we have seen, is a political satire, which
uses a Biblical story to reflect upon and criticise contemporary events
and individuals. Its potential purpose is to effect reform within the
political sphere by exposing the faults of key national figures to critical
scrutiny. However, as we saw in our definition of satire, it can adopt
multiple forms, and be used in multiple ways. Its targets need not
always be political figures, and its predominant tone might be comical
as well as serious.

Mac Flecknoe was probably written between 1663 and 1687, but did not
immediately go into print (Hammond 1995: 306). Instead, it was first

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-25

_____________________________________________________________________

circulated in manuscript form – a common form of circulating literary

material at the time, and one which accounts for the numerous variants
of works by writers such as Rochester, for example. The poem was first
published in an unauthorised version of 1682, which bore the full title
Mac Flecknoe, or a Satyr upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T.S..
According to Hammond, this title was an attempt on the bookseller’s
part ‘to make the poem politically topical in the light of the controversy
between D[ryden] and S[hadwell] in 1682 over The Medal’ (1995: 306).
The full title of this first, unauthorised edition indicates that Mac
Flecknoe might be a political satire; however, we can surmise that the
bookseller added this element to make the poem more sensational, and
so more profitable.

The first authorised version of the poem appeared in 1684 – without the
provoking subtitle – and reappeared in the edition of Dryden’s major
works published by the bookseller Jacob Tonson in 1692. This initial
publication history of Dryden’s poem tells us certain important things,
both about the nature of the poem and about literary relationships, and
the nature of the publishing and bookselling world at the time.

Although the critic Michael Wilding suggests that Mac Flecknoe’s basic
image reveals Dryden’s political habits of thought (Wilding in Miner
1972: 209), unlike Absalom and Achitophel, Mac Flecknoe is, in fact, not
a political satire as such. Instead of adopting figures in the political
world as the targets of his satire, Dryden’s poem provides a much more
personal attack upon a single individual, Thomas Shadwell; this reveals
important insights into Dryden’s critique of his contemporary literary
world.

Shadwell was a poet and a dramatist who greatly admired Ben Jonson,
and tried to emulate his style in his own poems and plays. Dryden,
however, is critical of Jonson’s work in a number of places, which fuelled
the animosity between him and Shadwell. Furthermore, Shadwell allied
himself to Shaftesbury in the disputes about succession to the English
throne prompted by the crisis of the ‘Popish Plot’: this was a further
cause for tension between the two writers. Shadwell replied to Dryden’s
criticisms of Shaftesbury in Absalom and Achitophel and in another
poem by Dryden which criticised this politician, ‘The Medal’ (which
appeared in 1682). Shadwell’s poetic response to the critiques Dryden
offered in his poems was ‘The Medal of John Bayes: a Satire against
Folly and Knavery’, which also appeared in 1682.

In the wake of this ongoing contention between these two writers,

Dryden wrote Mac Flecknoe which, as we have seen, was finally
published in ‘official’ form in 1684. David Wykes suggests the role that
Mac Flecknoe plays in the antagonism between these writers, claiming
that it was ‘the beautiful instrument of Dryden’s final solution to his
Shadwell problem’ (1977: 103). However, it is difficult to establish quite
how far Mac Flecknoe was actually a ‘solution’ to an existing problem:
we know that the poem was probably written before both Absalom and
Achitophel and ‘The Medal’, and so before Shadwell’s riposte to Dryden.
However, the appearance of the poem in print seems to galvanise a
long-standing animosity between the two writers. Furthermore, the
accomplished nature of the poem’s satirical treatment of Shadwell
allows us to suggest that it is, in some senses, the ‘final’ word on the
issue: it presents an almost unanswerable attack.

As we have seen, satire can take different forms and be used for
alternative purposes. While Absalom and Achitophel is a ‘public’ poem
that targets prominent political figures, the satirical target of Mac
Flecknoe is quite different, and thus so is its intended function within
the public sphere: Dryden does not try to comment upon a current
event, and suggest ways that the problems related to it might be

8-26 Literature 3
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resolved. Instead, his attack upon a prominent figure within the literary
world suggests that Dryden comments upon the state of contemporary
literary standards and tastes. As such, Mac Flecknoe is both a deeply
personal poem – a direct attack upon Shadwell himself – and also has a
wider public purpose, by making Shadwell representative of current
literary activity.

In the light of this we can further refine our understanding of what

‘satire’ is in relation to Mac Flecknoe: it is a particular kind of satire,
known as a ‘lampoon’. What do we mean by this term?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘lampoon’ as ‘a virulent or
scurrilous piece of satire against a person’. Chris Baldick, meanwhile,
describes a lampoon as

[…] an insulting written attack upon a real person, in verse or

prose, usually involving caricature and ridicule.
(1990: 119)

A lampoon, according to these definitions, is a crude and somewhat

cruel form of satiric writing; its ‘scurrilous’ and ‘insulting’ nature makes
the lampoon seem petty, and allies it to other, ‘low’ kinds of literary
criticism such as the ‘caricature’.

A caricature can either be in written or in visual form: it takes a

prominent feature of its target, and by exaggerating it exposes it (and
the person it belongs to) to critique and to ridicule. For instance, an
enemy or someone with whom an artist or writer disagrees might have
a large nose: in a caricatured picture, the artist might make it even
larger or grotesque even, and so poke fun at the person to whom it
belongs by exposing it even more obviously to public view. The same
kind of technique can work in a written caricature, where the verbal
description can distort and exaggerate the personal feature it describes.
The feature, of course, need not be a physical one: a person’s character
traits might similarly be exposed to mocking critique.

The lampoon incorporates these techniques belonging to caricature, and

so exposes the target of its attack to harsh criticism and to ridicule. How
might we relate this understanding of ‘lampoon’ to Dryden’s poem? In
some senses, we can ascertain how far we should read Mac Flecknoe as
a lampoon from Dryden’s own critical writings. In his important essay, A
Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, Dryden writes
that:

that [...] sort of satire, which is known in England by the name of

lampoon, is a dangerous sort of weapon, and for the most part
unlawful. We have no moral right on the reputation of other men.
’Tis taking from them, what we cannot restore to them
(1970: 253)

Because a lampoon makes a devastating personal attack upon a person

– which can even permanently deprive them of their reputation – it is a
‘dangerous’ weapon for a writer to use. It is, perhaps, unworthy of the
writer of quality: if we have ‘no moral right’ to attack other people’s
reputations, then we should not use a technique that can deprive
someone of their reputation.

Does this mean that we should not describe Mac Flecknoe as a

lampoon? Or, perhaps, that Dryden goes against the grain of what he
considers to be worthy writing, by producing a poem whose qualities
bring us to describe it as a lampoon?

We can, in fact, find some answers to these questions in the comments

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-27

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that Dryden goes on to make in the Discourse, which qualify lampoon as

a particular kind of satire: although a ‘dangerous weapon’, it can
perhaps be wielded to great effect when in the right hands. As Dryden
writes:

There are only two reasons, for which we may be permitted to

write lampoons. [...] The first is revenge, when we have been
affronted in the same nature, or have in any ways notoriously
abused, and can make ourselves no other reparation. [...] the
second reason, which may justify a poet, when he writes against
a particular person [...] is, when he is become a public nuisance
(1970: 253-4)
We can see here that a writer can be motivated by both personal and
public reasons to attack someone, which the form of the lampoon can
convey most effectively. In this sense, then, lampoon can serve the
more noble, reformative ends of which satire is capable: it can perform
a ‘public’ service by exposing a ‘public nuisance’ to the kind of ridicule
that might bring him to change, or even remove him completely from
the public sphere. As Dryden further explains,

’Tis an action of virtue to make examples of vicious men. They

may and ought to be upbraided with their crimes and follies,
both for their own amendment, if they are not yet incorrigible;
and for the terror of others, to hinder them from falling into
those enormities, which they see are so severely punished, in
the persons of others. The first reason was only an excuse for
revenge; but this second is absolutely of a poet’s office to
perform. (1970: 254)

Thus, we see here, the private malice is resolved into public service, and
when used correctly the techniques belonging to lampoon can act as a
significant force for good in the public sphere.

Dryden’s ‘office’ as a poet means that it is his public duty to use his
skills and his writing to expose a person whose ‘crimes and follies’
threaten the wider public good to the kind of mockery that might bring
about his removal from public life. However, Dryden’s self-respect and
standing as a writer means that he refuses to stoop to the low levels of
crude invective that other lampoons, by lesser writers of the day, might
write. Instead, Dryden’s nobler calling as a poet means that he is
capable of wielding the ‘dangerous weapon’ of lampoon with greater skill
than such lesser writers, and so he can effect a public service more
effectively by using this weapon.

The satirical purpose of Mac Flecknoe thus uses the techniques

belonging to lampoon with caution; as Dryden writes in the Discourse,
the talented writer should avoid the facile name-calling that a lesser
writer of lampoon might use:

How easy it is to call rogue and villain, and that wittily! But how
hard to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave,
without using any of those opprobrious terms! To spare the
grossness of the names, and to do the thing yet more severely,
is to draw a full face, and to make the nose and cheeks stand
out, and yet not to employ any depth of shadowing. This is the
mystery of that noble trade, which yet no master can teach his
apprentice. [...] there is still a vast difference betwixt the
slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that
separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its
place. (1970: 262-263)

It is, in fact, more difficult to write a good lampoon than we might

expect: a writer has to be truly skilled to be able to avoid the pitfalls of

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‘easy’ name-calling, or grotesque description. Dryden’s words here

suggest that he is aware of the very thin line that runs between crude
and effective caricature: think back to the observations we made earlier
about caricature, and look at how Dryden refers to such techniques and
purposes here. The talented writer can avoid the ‘grotesqueness’ of
which caricature and lampoon are capable, and so can fulfil his role in
‘that noble trade’ of using such cutting critiques and ridiculing devices
with careful skill.

To be truly effective as a piece of satire, then, a lampoon must make

cutting strokes at its target, but do so with ‘fineness’ and precision: it is,
in fact, this noble use of a base form of critique that enables the good
writer of a lampoon to differentiate himself from the target of his attack.
So, in Mac Flecknoe, what makes the attack upon Shadwell, and all that
he represents in present-day literature, effective is the deftness of its
barbed and cutting strokes.

As such, Mac Flecknoe not only attacks Shadwell the writer and man –
an end which the lampoon is particularly well suited to achieving – but
also all that he stands in for; as such, the poem acts as an important
manifesto of all that Dryden values and hopes to preserve in the literary
and public world. Dryden’s attack upon Shadwell as a ‘public nuisance’
presents him as having overstepped certain boundaries of acceptable
behaviour, and specifically in this case of literary activity. In order to
correct the faults that Shadwell’s activities as a writer have caused in
contemporary literature, and so preserve its standards for the public
good, Dryden must use his poem to voice his concerns and so hope to
redress them. It is through the corrective power of ridicule belonging to
satire that, in this instance, Dryden’s aim can be achieved most
successfully.

How does Dryden affect his critique upon Shadwell in Mac Flecknoe, and
how does this enable him to reaffirm the literary values that he believes
are threatened by this writer?

Activity
Read Mac Flecknoe.

What are your initial impressions upon reading this poem? Make brief
notes about those words and phrases that, upon your first reading,
strike you as particularly significant in the light of what we have said so
far about satire, lampoon and Dryden’s attitude to literary values.

Why does Dryden choose the particular themes and images that emerge
in Mac Flecknoe as the most effective way of satirising Shadwell, and
the declining literary standards he seems to represent?

MAC FLECKNOE: THE BACKGROUND

‘Mac Flecknoe’ means, literally, ‘son of Flecknoe’. Who was Flecknoe,
and why does Dryden adopt this name in his poem?

Richard Flecknoe, who died in 1678, was an Irish Catholic priest,

infamous for the poor quality of the poetry he wrote. Andrew Marvell
had written a poem about him called ‘Fleckno, an English Priest at
Rome’, where he noted that Flecknoe’s verse was ‘ill made’ (Dryden
1993: 245). Dryden selected Flecknoe as the poetic ‘father’ of Shadwell
because Flecknoe’s name was associated with bad poetry, dullness and
lack of wit.

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-29

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The first six lines of the poem seek to establish a grave and lofty tone.
What do these lines tell us? They describe the mutability, or inevitable
decline, of all things – even powerful monarchs. Flecknoe is compared
to Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome (who was also an author and a
patron of learning) with the power to choose his own successor. The
comparison between Flecknoe and Augustus suggests that Flecknoe
possesses similar qualities and capabilities: he, too, is the master of an
Empire; he, too, is a writer. Flecknoe, like Augustus, has brought about
a time of peace, both in his Empire and in poetry: it was during
Augustus’s reign that poets such as Virgil were writing.

Despite having established such ennobling connections between

Flecknoe and this Roman Emperor, however, Dryden immediately
introduces an incongruity which suggests that, in fact, Flecknoe’s
‘power’ is entirely antithetical to that wielded by Augustus:

In prose and verse was owned without dispute

Through all the realms of nonsense, absolute. (ll.5-6)

The incongruous juxtaposition of the noble, lofty word ‘realm’, and the
lowly word and idea ‘nonsense’ introduces a bathos which suggests that,
in fact, Flecknoe’s reign is of a decidedly inferior quality to Augustus’: by
extension, the verse that he writes does not possess the noble qualities
that belong to poetry produced during Augustus’ reign, but quite the
opposite. Dryden uses this strategy of reversal throughout the poem, to
affect the fierce but also fine strokes of cutting critique that will best
achieve his satirical aims in writing the poem.

We notice here, then, an incongruity between style and subject-matter

that tells us something important about the literary qualities and
‘identity’ of Dryden’s poem. The opening lines of Mac Flecknoe adopt a
‘high’ register to talk about a ‘low’ subject. This incongruity defines Mac
Flecknoe’s identity as a mock-heroic or mock-epic poem: the epic poem
was an established, and widely respected form of literature, as we saw
in our discussion of Paradise Lost in an earlier unit. In the poems of
Homer or Virgil the elevated subject matter is treated in an
appropriately lofty way. Here, however, the elevated style of Dryden’s
opening lines is juxtaposed with the bathetic, or lowly, nature of the
subject he treats. This means that, rather than being an epic poem, Mac
Flecknoe is a mock-epic, sometimes also called mock-heroic.

MAC FLECKNOE AND THE MOCK-HEROIC

What is the ‘mock-heroic’, where does this term come from and how
does this literary form operate in Dryden’s poem?

Baldick defines mock-heroic as a piece of writing:

[…] written in an ironically grand style that is comically

incongruous with the ‘low’ or trivial subject treated.
(1990: 139)

This literary form is said to have originated in the seventeenth century

in Italy, with the poet Tassoni’s Secchia Rapita (or Rape of the Bucket)
of 1622 providing an important early example of the qualities that
Baldick outlines, and which set a pattern for subsequent poets to follow.
The French poet Nicholas Boileau published his own version of the
mock-heroic, Le Lutrin, in 1674.

We shall go on to discuss how mock-heroic poetry develops as a literary

form in our discussion of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock in a
subsequent unit – a poem which owes a significant debt to Dryden’s Mac
Flecknoe, as does perhaps Pope’s greatest achievement, The Dunciad.
For now, though, we might ask what is Dryden’s attitude towards this

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relatively new literary form, and how might it add to our reading of Mac
Flecknoe? Dryden’s comments on Le Lutrin are illuminating in this
respect:

This, I think [...] to be the most beautiful, and the most noble kind
of satire. Here is the majesty of the heroic, finely mixed with the
venom of the other, and raising the delight which otherwise would
be flat and vulgar, by the sublimity of the expression.
(1970: 211)

In the mock-heroic poem, the ‘majesty of the heroic’ is employed to

speak of ‘low’ subject-matter, which is totally inappropriate to and
undeserving of such heroic tones. This disparity between the ‘sublimity
of the expression’ and the inappropriate subject matter raises the
‘delight’ the reader takes in the satire, which could otherwise have been
vulgar and tasteless. Thus, the gravity of the first few lines of Mac
Flecknoe establishes a ‘heroic’ tone which is shattered when it is shown
that the object of all the gravity is none other than Flecknoe, the
Emperor of Nonsense. Our delight increases upon recognising the
incongruity between style and subject-matter, and the satirical purpose
of exposing Flecknoe to ridicule is achieved more effectively.

However, how can we reconcile this comic treatment of a much-admired

literary form, the epic, with what we know of Dryden’s reverent attitude
towards classical writing, and epic poetry in particular? In fact, Dryden
suggests, the mock-heroic actually serves to reaffirm the epic archetype
as ‘the highest reach of serious poetry’ (1973: 105). He writes that:

A Heroic Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest Work

which the Soul of Man is capable to perform. (1993: 21).

So, the appearance of heroic stylistic traits in Mac Flecknoe is a

reminder to the reader that the poem, though comic, has a serious
purpose. The incongruity between a lofty style and a lowly subject
matter reaffirms the poem’s purpose as a corrective satire, which will
use features from other, more ‘lowly’ literary styles (such as the
lampoon) for the greater good of literature.

How, then, does this incongruity between style and substance emerge in
Mac Flecknoe, and how does it help to reaffirm Dryden’s satirical
intentions in writing it?

Firstly, the poem wishes to make serious critical points about literature.
Dryden sees the dullness and senselessness for which Shadwell and
Flecknoe stand as a serious threat to literary standards. Mac Flecknoe is
written as an antidote to that tendency. Its use of the ‘heroic’ style in
conjunction with inappropriate subject matter ridicules that subject
matter - Shadwell and Flecknoe - and highlights for the reader the
deficiencies and dangers of bad poetry, and the need to rid the world of
it.

Ronald Paulson also suggests a political dimension to the critique

Dryden provides in the poem, suggesting that:

Mac Flecknoe is not yet Juvenalian but rather a mock-heroic

satire on the ridiculous pretensions of the poetasters and their
political analogues, the out-of-place Whigs. (2006: 46)

The resonance of such a suggestion, in the context of what we know

about Dryden’s politics, is significant. However, as Paulson goes on to
say,

Mac Flecknoe is also a defence of wit against humour.

(2006: 46)

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Dryden’s criticisms of Shadwell might channel his anti-Whig sympathies,

but they are principally a spirited attack upon the threat that writers
such as Shadwell pose to the preservation of the quality of ‘wit’ that
Dryden prized. This is privileged over the grosser ‘humour’ that
Shadwell is seen to promote: that Dryden ironically attacks his rival by
using a type of writing potentially associated with the grotesque – the
lampoon – adds ironic force to his ‘defence of wit’.

The ‘battle’ that is fought out in Mac Flecknoe is related to what Dryden
considered to be the principal purpose of the heroic poem. When writing
of the heroic in his introduction to a translation of DuFresnoy’s Art of
Painting (1695), Dryden writes that ‘the moral’

[...] is the first business of the poet, as being the groundwork of

his instruction. This being formed, he contrives such a design or
fable, as may be most suitable to the moral; after this he begins
to think of the persons whom he is to employ in carrying on his
design; and gives them the manners which are most proper to
their several characters. The thoughts and words are the last
parts, which give beauty and colouring to the piece.
(1993: 22)

Dryden considers that an epic has a serious moral purpose. He follows

the rules for composing epics formulated by the French critic René
LeBossu: characters, action, ‘thoughts and words’ must all ultimately
refer back to the moral purpose of the epic. This unity relates to what
we now know about the principles of neoclassical criticism and literary
compositions. The epic poem is designed to instruct, and has an
important set of values built into it.

The use of the epic style in Mac Flecknoe relates to and reaffirms those
values by pitting them in a mock-battle against the opposing values
belonging to the empire of dullness. The threats of dullness’s influence
challenge not only the literary, but the moral fabric of society. The
reader is thus reminded by the epic references in Mac Flecknoe, and by
the epic style of the poem, of the importance of correcting faults in
literature and the wider public sphere, and of reaffirming the literary
and moral values that bad writing or bad conduct might threaten.

SAQ 4

Describe the effects of using a heroic style in Mac Flecknoe.

MAC FLECKNOE: THE SATIRICAL PURPOSE OF THE MOCK-

HEROIC
How does this disjunction between the high style and low subject matter
present itself in Mac Flecknoe, and how does this evocation of the epic
in a comic way help Dryden to achieve his satirical purpose in the
poem?

We can divide the poem into several distinct sections, which assist our
analysis:

Section 1: Lines 1-64

In the first section we are introduced to Flecknoe, who tells us that he
intends stepping down from the throne. Flecknoe in turn introduces us
to Shadwell, his son and heir, whom he praises. However, he praises
Shadwell for his skill in dullness – a surprising claim, which immediately
alerts us to the ironic tone in which such praise is made. The description
of Shadwell further reaffirms the ironic way in which his character is

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presented, particularly when it is projected through the voice of such an

unworthy ‘monarch’:

Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,

Mature in dullness from his tender years;
Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through and make a lucid interval,
But Shadwell’s genuine night admits no ray,
His rising fogs prevail upon the day. (ll. 15-24)

The lines are damning and delightful, but that delight is increased by
the fact that these words are framed as praise for Shadwell. It is not
that Shadwell’s writings are riddled with errors, nor that he is
untalented: rather, he is talented, but in Nonsense, and he has a
remarkable ability to be asinine and dull. These words of ‘praise’ are
more damning than a more ‘direct’ criticism would be.

Section 2: Lines 64-93, pp. 320-23

The second part of the poem describes the choice of a site for the new
Emperor’s coronation. Again, this section of the poem begins with great
solemnity:

Close to the walls which fair Augusta bind

(The fair Augusta much to fears inclined),
An ancient fabric raised t’inform the sight
There stood of yore, and Barbican it hight (ll. 64-67)

‘Augusta’ here refers to London, and a ‘barbican’ is a defensive

fortification. The use of archaic words like ‘yore’ and ‘hight’, in
conjunction with talk of Roman London and of defensive fortifications,
heightens the solemnity and ‘heroic’ quality of this passage. However,
that solemnity is once again shattered when it is revealed that the area
of the old barbican is now the home of ‘brothel houses’, the scene of
‘lewd loves and of polluted joys’ (l.71). As Ronald Paulson suggests,

Shadwell and the shabbier parts of London are compared (as by

a simile) to Rome, the emperor, Virgil, and Aeneas – as well as
to John the Baptist. Mac Flecknoe shows the poetaster aspiring
to the laurel, the seditious rebel aspiring to the throne.
(2006: 45)

That this is the site chosen for Shadwell’s coronation indicates the
ludicrous nature of that event, and his unworthiness to claim the title
‘monarch’ in a really noble sense: instead, he is most appropriately
crowned in a place whose history befits his character and qualities as a
writer. Furthermore, in being crowned here Shadwell will fulfil a
prophecy – which again brings in a feature belonging to the heroic
tradition. Once again, however, the content of that prophecy quickly
destroys the heroic qualities the prophecy might have, and thus renders
Shadwell ridiculous:

Here Flecknoe, as a place to Fame well known,

Ambitiously designed his Shadwell’s throne;
For ancient Dekker prophesied long since
That in this pile should reign a mighty prince,
Born for a scourge of wit, and flail of sense,
To whom true dullness should some Psyches owe,
But worlds of Misers from his pen should flow
(ll. 85-91)

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-33

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‘Dekker’ here refers to the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Dekker who

wrote a notable satire on Shadwell’s hero, Ben Jonson, in ‘Satiriomastix:
Or, The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet’ in 1602. How might such a
reference reaffirm what we know about Dryden and Shadwell’s literary
relationship? Is this further confirmed by the mention of ‘Psyches’ and
‘Misers’, which are references to plays by Shadwell? Throughout the
poem, you may note the sheer volume of authors, literary works, genres
and characters which Dryden refers to; this feat attests to his education
and study of his craft, which are key features of the Augustan style.

Section 3: Lines 94-138

The third section of the poem details the preliminaries to Shadwell’s
coronation. ‘Limbs of mangled Poets’ - in other words, pages torn from
the books of poets - are spread along the route of the imperial
procession. Ironically, it is the pages of Shadwell’s own books which, we
are told, form the bulk of those ‘Limbs’ spread before him on his
passage. What do you find particularly interesting in lines 106-111,
which describe Flecknoe on his throne, in terms of what they reveal
about mock-heroic in operation?

The hoary prince in majesty appeared,

High on a throne of his own labours reared.
At his right hand our young Ascanius sate,
Rome’s other hope, and pillar of the state:
His brows thick fogs, instead of glories, grace,
And lambent dullness played around his face.
(ll. 106-11)

On the one hand, these lines echo the opening of Paradise Lost, Book
II:

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far

Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Show’rs on her kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d
To that bad eminence. (ll. 1-6)

Besides evoking Milton’s great epic poem, lines 106-11 of Mac Flecknoe
also echo lines from Virgil’s Roman epic poem, the Aeneid. There
Ascanius, who is the son of Aeneas, is described as ‘second hope of
mighty Rome’ (Aeneid, Bk XII, 168).

Philip Roberts notes that there are several significant aspects of Mac
Flecknoe’s evocation of the Aeneid. The potentially ennobling
comparison between Shadwell and Ascanius, both sons and heirs, is
undermined by the qualities and characteristics ascribed to Shadwell. As
Roberts writes, ‘the grandeur and importance of the epic analogue
offsets and ridicules the gross triviality of Shadwell considered as a
potential king’: while Ascanius is sanctified by a ‘light tongue of flame’,
Shadwell is sanctified by his ‘lambent dulness’ (Dryden 1973: 106).

The implication that dullness’s empire, to be ruled by Shadwell, will be

as vast and extensive as the Roman empire whose origins Virgil
describes in the Aeneid further exposes it to ridicule. Both Shadwell
himself and, according to Roberts, ‘the cultural degradation he
represents’ are thereby exposed to ridicule (Dryden 1973: 106).

Mac Flecknoe’s echoes of epics such as Paradise Lost and the Aeneid
therefore heighten the tone, but also exacerbate the ridicule by
matching an inappropriate subject to the more noble and worthy
subjects of these great poems.

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Section 4: Lines 139-210

This section presents the abdication speech of Flecknoe, where he gives
advice to his ‘son’ and heir. He begins by expressing the hope that his
son’s empire will be extensive:

‘Heaven’s bless my son: from Ireland let him reign

To far Barbados on the western main;
Of his dominion may no end be known,
And greater than his father’s be his throne.’ (ll. 139-42)

However, in the seventeenth century, ‘Barbados’ was known as the

place to which convicts were transported, and ‘Ireland’ was equated
with stupidity. Flecknoe’s hopes for his son’s kingdom are thus founded
on a negative spectrum running from criminality to stupidity. The social
and moral aim of satire is also invoked here as Flecknoe’s wish that
Shadwell’s ‘dominion’ will be extensive depicts dullness as an almost
infectious force that threatens to corrupt the whole world.

It is, perhaps, interesting to note here that Shadwell, in a pathetic

defence of himself against the ridicule Mac Flecknoe casts upon him,
objected that Dryden ‘goes a little too far in calling me the dullest, and
has no more reason for that than for giving me the Irish name of Mack,
when he knows I never saw Ireland till I was three and twenty years
old, and was there but four months’ (Dryden 1973: 116).

Flecknoe’s advice continues:

‘My Son, advance

Still in new impudence, new ignorance.
Success let others teach; learn thou from me
Pangs without birth, and fruitless industry. […]’
(ll. 145-148)

Finally, Flecknoe advises his son to abandon writing for the theatre,
which reflects upon Shadwell’s reputation as an important dramatist at
this time, and as Dryden’s chief rival in the theatre. Instead, Flecknoe
urges his son to turn to writing poetry:

Thy genius calls thee not to purchase fame

In keen iambics, but mild anagram.
Leave writing plays, and choose for thy command
Some peaceful province in acrostic land.
There thou mayest wings display and altars raise,
And torture one poor word ten thousand ways.
(ll. 203-208)

Philip Roberts notes that in Greek poetry the iambic metre was the
‘original vehicle for satire’, while Augustan critics rejected anagrams and
acrostics as forms ‘representative of the shallow kinds of poetry’
(Dryden 1973: 119). How do you think Dryden’s description of the kind
of poetry Shadwell might write adds to his satire upon this rival poet?

Section 5: Lines 211-217, pp. 335-6

The poem concludes with an appropriately ridiculous, and comic,
ending:

He said: but his last words were scarcely heard,

For Bruce and Longvil had a trap prepared,
And down they sent the yet declaiming bard.
Sinking he left his drugget robe behind,
Born upwards by a subterranean wind.
The mantle fell to the young prophet’s part
With double portion of his father’s art. (ll. 211-17)

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-35

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This section evokes a passage from the Bible found in the second book
of Kings, which describes the ascent of Elijah into heaven:

And Elisha said, I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon
me ... and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And Elisha saw it,
and he cried, My father, my father .. He took up also the mantle of
Elijah that fell from him, and went back. (Dryden 1973: 119)

Flecknoe’s disappearance is through a trapdoor in a stage prepared by

Bruce and Longvil, two characters from Shadwell’s play, The Virtuoso.
Just as Elijah’s mantle settles on his son Elisha, so the mantle of
Flecknoe (described as a ‘drugget robe’ - in other words a robe made of
a coarse, woollen cloth - falls onto Shadwell’s shoulders. The
ridiculousness of the manner of Flecknoe’s disappearance shatters once
again the heroic, messianic tone of Shadwell’s succession: up until the
very end of the poem the ridicule at this writer’s expense, and our
delight, are intensified, the better to achieve Dryden’s satiric critique of
Shadwell.

The lulling rhythm of the couplet form rocks us towards this final,
damning conclusion, closing the story off with the concluding rhyme as
though it were eternally conclusive. Perhaps, the verse form suggests
here, Dryden does have the last word on Shadwell and his literary
career.

SAQ 5
Suggest why Dryden wrote Absalom and Achitophel and Mac Flecknoe
in heroic couplets rather than in any other form.

REVIEW
We began this unit by addressing the qualities that Dryden held to be
important in literary composition, and asking how these principles
reflected upon – and perhaps helped to shape – contemporary
literature. We saw how Dryden sought to reform the perceived
coarseness or failings of earlier generations of poets, and by doing so
reaffirmed the styles and ideals he hoped to embody in his own
writings; this, in turn, had an important shaping influence on the literary
compositions of his age. In this context, we addressed major concepts
that elucidate aesthetic approaches at this time, such as the
‘neoclassical’ and ‘Augustan’ ideals in poetry, and thought about how
they might aid our understanding of Dryden’s approach to writing. We
also saw how the heroic couplet offers the most appropriately dignified
way of carrying such ideals.

We then examined two poems by Dryden in the context of satire. In

Absalom and Achitophel, we saw how the pressing recent and current
events of Dryden’s time – and in particular the ‘Popish Plot’ – provided a
compelling motivation for Dryden to write his poem. We saw how he
uses the Biblical allegory of the story of King David and his wayward son
to critique contemporary public figures, and to comment upon their
actions. As such, we saw how the poem might adopt a ‘public’ function
through satire, and potentially effect reform within the public sphere.

We connected this reformative aspect of satire to a very different kind

of satirical poem by Dryden, Mac Flecknoe; as we saw, this poem
targets an individual, Thomas Shadwell, in the form of a lampoon, but
uses this comical and ridiculing attack to reflect Dryden’s concerns
about contemporary literary standards. We saw how Mac Flecknoe is a
mock-heroic poem, which evokes revered classical forms, such as the
epic, and the ideal literary standards they represent but marries it with

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an incongruous subject. This unlikely combination enables Dryden to

achieve the poem’s satirical purpose, in the case of Mac Flecknoe, to
criticise both Shadwell and the current deterioration of literary activity.
Perhaps in the final stroke of irony, this time one that turned against
Dryden, when he was forced to resign office upon refusing to take the
oath of allegiance in 1688, it was his great rival, Thomas Shadwell, who
succeeded him as Poet Laureate.

In the next unit we will conclude our examination of Restoration

literature with an example of dramatic composition, The Way of the
World by Dryden’s close friend, William Congreve. We will be asking
ourselves how some of the ideals and concepts Dryden promoted in his
writing are reflected in this important arena of literary and social
activity.

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-37

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ADDITIONAL READING
PRIMARY MATERIAL
Dryden, John. 1995. Paul Hammond (ed.), The Poems of John Dryden:
Volume I, 1649-1681, Longman Annotated Poets (London and
New York: Longman)

___________ 2007. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (eds), Dryden:

Selected Poems, Longman Annotated Poets (London and New
York: Longman) (Parts available online via Google Books)

SECONDARY MATERIAL
Erskine-Hill, Howard, 2000. ‘MacFlecknoe, Heir of Augustus’, in Paul
Hammond and David Hopkins (eds), John Dryden: Tercentenary
Essays (Oxford: Clarendon), pp. 15–31

Griffin, Dustin. 1994. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington:

University of Kentucky Press) (Parts available online via Google
Books)

Harth, Phillip. 1993. Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda in its
Contexts (Princeton: Princeton University Press)

Paulson, Ronald (ed.). 1971. Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism

(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall)

Quintero, Ruben (ed.). 2007. A Companion to Satire (New Jersey:

Wiley-Blackwell) (Parts available on Google Books)

Rawson, Claude. 2000. Satire and Sentiment, 1660-1830: Stress-points

in the English Augustan Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1994; repr.)

Weinbrot, Howard. 1988. Eighteenth-Century Satire: Essays on Text

and Context from Dryden to Peter Pindar (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press) (Parts available online via Google
Books)

Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and

Society, rev. edn (London: Fontana) (Parts available online via
Google Books)

Zwicker, Steven N. 1984. Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry

(Princeton: Princeton University Press)

REFERENCES
Baldick, Chris. 1990. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
(Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Dryden, John. 1970. J. Kinsley and G. Parfitt (eds), John Dryden:

Selected Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press)

___________ 1973. Philip Roberts (ed.),‘Absalom and Achitophel’ and

other poems (London/Glasgow: Collins)

___________ 1993. D. Thomas, J. M. Dent and Charles E. Tuttle (eds),

Selected Poems (London/Rutland: Vermont)

Genette, Gerard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans.

by Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

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Hammond, Paul (ed.). 1995. The Poems of John Dryden: Volume I,

1649-1681, Longman Annotated Poets (London and New York:
Longman)

Johnson, Samuel. 2008. ‘Dryden’, [extract] in Donald Greene (ed.),

Samuel Johnson: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University
Press), pp. 716-24
(Full text available via Literature Online as Prefaces, Biographical and
Critical, to the Lives of the English Poets, volume the third,
‘Dryden’).

Miner, Earl (ed.). 1972. Writers and their Background: John Dryden
(London: G. Bell and Sons)

Patterson, Annabel. 2006. ‘Dryden and political allegiance’, in Steven N.

Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 221-236

Paulson, Ronald. 2006. ‘Dryden and the energies of satire’, in Steven N.

Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 37-58 (Parts
available online via Google Books)

Pope, Alexander. 2008. Pat Rogers (ed.), Selected Poetry (Oxford:

Oxford University Press)

Wykes, David. 1977. A Preface to Dryden (London: Longman)

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-39

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ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
What might we describe as the defining characteristics of late
seventeenth-century literature, as exemplified in the writings of
John Dryden, and what are the drawbacks of ‘defining’ this period in
this way?

Dryden privileged qualities such as regularity, uniformity and

appropriateness in literary composition: these were seen to replace
the ‘roughness’ of earlier types of poetry, and manifested the
refinement and civilisation that the Restoration period was seen to
embody. These qualities belong to terms used to describe this
period and its aesthetic values, such as ‘decorum’, ‘neoclassical’ and
‘Augustan’. In many respects such terms are useful, in that we can
ascribe a set of characteristics which cohere to the writings of major
authors of this period – amongst whom Dryden is eminent. Qualities
such as elegance and refinement, alongside ‘wit’ – in the sense of
good judgement coupled with an appropriate sense of humour –
generally belong to terms such as ‘neoclassical’ and ‘Augustan’, and
these are qualities that certainly belong to much of Dryden’s
writing.

However, other writers of the Restoration period display a different

aesthetic approach to their work, and show very different qualities
to those Dryden’s work displays: Rochester and Aphra Behn, for
instance, employ comparable methods but often put them to quite
different ends. It is, therefore, wise to exercise caution when using
such terms as ‘neoclassical’ or ‘Augustan’ to ‘define’ an age: the
diversity of writers and writings, and of political and social contexts,
means that the literature of this period eludes any such easy
‘definition’.

SAQ 2
What is the ‘heroic couplet’, and why is it a particularly appropriate
vehicle for conveying Dryden’s concept of what constitutes
successful poetry?

The heroic couplet is a pair of rhyming lines written in iambic

pentameter. It is a particularly effective way of embodying the
ideals of decorum, regularity and smoothness that Dryden is
generally seen to promote in his approach to writing good poetry.
However, the variations and deviations that can operate within this
literary style – when handled by a skilled poet – reveal that despite
its seeming rigidity, the heroic couplet is capable of great formal
flexibility, and so can be used to promote a widely differing array of
ideas and impressions.

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SAQ 3
What features of Absalom and Achitophel identify the poem as a
satire, and how does it achieve its satirical aims?

The historical context surrounding Absalom and Achitophel provided

Dryden with a ripe opportunity for writing his poem as a satire;
moreover, his concerns about contemporary events – and his
support for Charles as monarch – gave him a considerable
motivation for attacking Charles’s enemies through the publication
of his poem. Absalom and Achitophel is identifiable as a satire in
several distinctive ways: the author’s preface to the poem, for
instance, announces the style that it adopts and its intended
purpose. The use of the Biblical story of David and his wayward son
would also have alerted contemporary readers to understand
Dryden’s poem on an allegorical level: thus, the key figures of the
poem would have been easily identifiable as representing important
and prominent public figures. The ‘characters’ that Dryden
portrayed in relation to each figure, be it critical or commendatory,
would have therefore reflected upon the real-life figure that they
represented. Hence, Dryden’s satirical critique of public figures
would have been more effectively conveyed.

SAQ 4
Describe the effects of using a heroic style in Mac Flecknoe.

There are two principal effects produced by Dryden’s use of a heroic

style in Mac Flecknoe. Firstly, his use of such a style makes the
target of his satire - Shadwell - appear ridiculous. This is because
the reader is made aware that he is in no way ‘heroic’, but quite the
opposite. The disparity between Shadwell’s true character, and the
incongruously noble way in which he is described, exposes him to
ridicule.

The second effect of Dryden’s use of a heroic style is that attention

is drawn to the cultural and moral degradation represented by
Shadwell and Flecknoe in the poem. The disparity between the
heroic style and the characters it describes points to the cultural
and literary inadequacy of those characters, and reminds the reader
of the need to remove such corruptive inadequacy from society.
Furthermore, the heroic style also reminds the reader of what is
proper and dignified in the moral life by referring him or her to the
values and morals heroic literature seeks to embody. Shadwell and
Flecknoe are seen, by the disparity between their characters and
the style used to describe them, as morally deficient, and the reader
is reminded of the necessity of correcting such inadequacy for the
greater good of the literary and social worlds.

Unit 8: Restored Wit: The Poetry of John Dryden 8-41

_____________________________________________________________________

SAQ 5
Suggest why Dryden wrote Absalom and Achitophel and Mac
Flecknoe in heroic couplets rather than in any other form.

The smoothness and regularity of the heroic couplet form embodied

many of the qualities that Dryden sought to promote in good
writing: decorum, dignity, refinement and wit. By writing these two
poems in the heroic couplet form, Dryden was able to show the
effectiveness of such ideals in practice.

The heroic couplet gave a ‘shape’ to the verse, providing a formally

rigid mechanism which would enable the poet to sustain the
momentum of the poem, and so to engage the reader in the lulling,
rhythmic qualities of the lines. The pattern of expectation
established in the reader by the heroic couplet both serves to
engross him or her, and to surprise by flouting those expectations
at key moments, when the poet wishes to shift the register or ideas
he expresses.

In Absalom and Achitophel and Mac Flecknoe, the heroic couplet

provides a compelling vehicle for propelling forward the stories each
poem variously relates, but also contributes to the dignified manner
of both poems. This is particularly important in Mac Flecknoe, where
the heroic couplet matches the evocation of classical epic, which
creates the poem’s mock-heroic form. This form is vital to
communicating the satirical enterprise of the poem, whereby by
describing Shadwell as possessing certain negative qualities in an
incongruously high-handed way – by using the heroic couplet in
particular – he is exposed to critiquing ridicule.

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UNIT 9

RESTORATION BEYOND REVOLUTION:

WILLIAM CONGREVE’S THE WAY OF THE
WORLD

AIMS
The aim of this unit is to introduce the theatre of William Congreve
through a reading of his play The Way of the World. This will enable you
to explore a vital area of social and literary activity during the
Restoration period. This unit will also address some of the social and
literary preoccupations that emerged as the seventeenth century drew
to a close and the eighteenth century began.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Identify some of the key aspects of William Congreve’s life and

career within their historical context.

Explain what is meant by Restoration Comedy.

Give reasons why Congreve employs realism in the play.

Outline the ways in which Congreve proceeds to teach his audience

and readers about the ‘way’ of the world.

Understand what Congreve meant by ‘Truewit’ and ‘Witwoud’ or

‘affected wit’, and to indicate examples of each in The Way of the
World.

Explain how The Way of the World can be identified as a social

satire through its realism and its treatment of character.

Show how through this satire Congreve can project the ‘moral
purpose’ of the play.

REQUIRED READING
The required reading for this unit is:

William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700)

This work in its entirety is included in volume one of Stephen Greenblatt

(ed.). 2012. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edn (New
York: W. W. Norton and Co.).

Other good editions of the play may be found in anthologies of

Congreve and of Restoration comedies, for instance, William Congreve.
2006. Eric S. Rump (ed.), The Way of the World and Other Plays
(Harmondsworth: Penguin) and R. G. Lawrence (ed.). 1992. Restoration
Plays, rev. edn (London: Dent).

INTRODUCTION
In the module so far, we have looked at examples of poetry and prose,
and considered from various perspectives how they both reflect upon

Unit 9: Restoration Beyond Revolution: William Congreve’s The Way of the World 9-1
_____________________________________________________________________

and may help to shape contemporary events, and also changing literary
trends and tastes. In the previous two units, we looked at two
contrasting aspects of Restoration poetry, and considered how the
vibrant and, in some respects, turbulent nature of this period produced
very different kinds of poetry, by Rochester, Behn and Dryden.

In this unit, we shall conclude our study of the Restoration period by

addressing a literary genre we have not hitherto addressed in this
module, drama, by examining William Congreve’s comedy The Way of
the World. Our study of this play will enable us to round out our ideas
about the nature and diversity of literary activity during the latter part
of the seventeenth century, and also of the nature of society at this
time: the Restoration theatre flourished with great brilliance and wit,
and was a highly popular form of entertainment.

By situating Congreve’s play within its historical context, we will be able

to draw connections between The Way of the World and other
Restoration literature that we have studied so far. We shall approach
this by, firstly, outlining Congreve’s career, and considering ways in
which this might elucidate our reading of his play. In particular, we shall
approach The Way of the World from the perspective of ‘realism’, a
relatively new and significant mode of drama in the late seventeenth
century. The moral realism of Congreve’s play allows him to effect a
form of satiric critique on his contemporary world. We have already
encountered ideas about satire in the previous unit; in this unit, we shall
apply our knowledge of satire to appreciate how the realism of The Way
of the World allows Congreve to introduce a ‘corrective’ to contemporary
morality, and to suggest ways in which society might improve.

We shall approach this satirical dimension of Congreve’s comedy by

focussing on the play’s treatment of character: some of The Way of the
World’s characters seem to represent the world as it is, and some come
to represent the world as it could and should be. The clash between the
‘Truewits’ and the ‘Witwouds’, or ‘affected wits’, exemplifies how The
Way of the World can be seen as a play concerned with the conflict
between two ways of seeing the world. We will examine the Dedication
to The Way of the World to discover what Congreve meant by these
categories, and we will examine which characters in the play represent
these positions. The Way of the World also presents a conflict between
the world of the old and the world of the young, which certain
characters within the play embody. We shall examine how this clash
connects to the play’s broader concern with the nature of power, its
uses and its distribution in society.

Throughout this unit, as we examine Congreve’s play in detail and think

about its relation to other types of literature of this period, you should
continually ask yourself how one should go about analysing drama as a
literary critic. Do you need to employ a different set of strategies to
those used when analysing a poem or a prose-text? Do you need to use
a different range of technical vocabulary when describing the textual
features and ideas you find interesting or important?

Finally, you should also think about how far the performance context of
a play should affect our analysis of its text: it is helpful, and indeed
important, to remember that The Way of the World was written to be
performed in a theatre, to a particular audience, and to think about how
far this might have determined the way in which Congreve wrote his
play.

THE CAREER OF WILLIAM CONGREVE (1670–1729)

What can we discover about Congreve’s personal history that might
elucidate our reading of The Way of the World?

9-2 Literature 3
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ACTIVITY
Read the entry for ‘William Congreve’ in the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (online).

Note down those aspects that seem particularly interesting or important

to you, either in relation to The Way of the World, or to your knowledge
of the Restoration period as a whole.

What can we summarise about Congreve’s biography that might be

particularly useful to our present enquiries?

Congreve’s early life, as a child and young student in Ireland and in his
training as a lawyer in London, provides the backdrop to his subsequent
career as a dramatist. It was Congreve’s acquaintance with the theatre
world of London that attracted him to pursue writing as a career, firstly
with his published prose-work, Incognito, published in 1692. However, it
was for his plays that he achieved fame and for which he is best
remembered.

Congreve’s first play, The Old Bachelor, first performed in 1693, was a
great success. This was followed by The Double-Dealer (1694), which
occasioned the writing of Dryden’s poem, and Love for Love (1695). The
Mourning Bride, Congreve’s only tragedy, was written in 1697. His most
famous play is The Way of the World, which was written and performed
in 1700 (the year of Dryden’s death). After 1700 he wrote a masque,
The Judgement of Paris (1701), Semele (1710), an operatic piece, a
prose narrative called An Impossible Thing (1720) and a number of
poems. Congreve died in 1729.

Read The Way of the World.

Note down passages that seem to you particularly interesting, or
perhaps puzzling.

Can you draw any connections at this stage with aspects of what you
already know about Restoration literature? For instance, do you
recognise elements of Rochester’s ‘libertine’ character in any of those
depicted in Congreve’s play? Or can you detect the formal qualities
familiar from Dryden’s poetry in The Way of the World?

To answer these and related questions, and to get a fuller grasp of the
themes and details of the play, we shall investigate the nature of the
theatre world in which The Way of the World was first performed.

RESTORATION COMEDY
As we have discovered in previous units, the Restoration of monarchy,
with Charles II’s ascension to throne in 1660, brought about a period of
mixed fortunes. Variously characterised as sparkling and brilliant, as
profligate and licentious, as we have seen in other contexts there was a
strong strain of paradox in the ways that contemporary people both
thought and wrote about the period in which they lived.

However, one matter that was unequivocal was the obvious popularity
of the theatre in this period. This was partly due to a sense of relief, and
of renewed liberty, brought about by Charles’ reopening of the theatres,
which had been closed since 1642 during a period of puritanical rule.
With the reopening of the theatres came a renewed freedom in the
pleasure of going to the theatre; in tandem with this, a new brace of
plays flourished in great abundance.

Unit 9: Restoration Beyond Revolution: William Congreve’s The Way of the World 9-3
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Not all new theatre pieces, of course, were of any great merit; in fact,
many were of very poor quality – and indeed provided grist for the
complaints of writers such as Dryden, who as we have seen held
playwrights such as Shadwell responsible for a decline in literary
standards. Undisputed, however, was the quality of Congreve’s plays,
and his prominence among dramatists of his day. The Way of the World
is perhaps the finest example of his output as a playwright, and of
Restoration comedy as a whole.

What are the origins, features and general qualities of this genre?

Restoration comedy was greatly influenced by the comedy of the French

playwright, Molière (1622-1673). However, it is important to see that
‘Restoration drama’ was not a homogenous mass of theatrical pieces, all
of which were the same, even if they did share similar characteristics. In
fact, there is an important historical divide to bear in mind when we
approach what we call ‘Restoration drama’. As Brian Corman explains,

Most recent critics have insisted upon the need to divide the
playwrights of the period into at least two groups,
chronologically. Since there is a noticeable change in comedy
after the death of Charles II, the mid-1680s is the favoured
place to mark the divide. The plays of the earlier period are often
called Carolean; no equivalent adjective yet exists for the plays
of the reigns of James II, William and Mary, and Anne. The
playwrights of the earlier period were born before the
Restoration; they include Behn, Buckingham, Crowne, Dryden,
Durfey, Etherege, Howard, Otway, Shadwell, and Wycherley.
They flourished in the 1660s and 1670s. The second group, born
after the Restoration, includes Centlivre, Cibber, Congreve,
Farquhar, Manley, Pix, Southerne, Steele, and Vanbrugh; they
flourished after the Glorious Revolution. (Some, of course, are
active on both sides of this artificial divide.)
(2000: 56-7)

It is important to bear these differences, and this variety, in mind as we

approach Congreve’s drama. Nonetheless, we can identify salient
characteristics that, in some senses, are shared by the plays we align
under the general title of ‘Restoration drama’.

What are these shared features?

Much like Molière’s plays, English Restoration comedy conventionally

deals with the relationships between men and women living in a highly
sophisticated society, and employs stereotyped characters to reflect
aspects of that society in a humorous way.

Conventional characters include the stupid husband, and his contrasting

opposite, the clever, if immoral young man-about-town – whom we
might recognise as the ‘rake’ or, more dangerously, the ‘libertine’ that
we encountered in Unit 7. This character-type is generally involved in a
standard plot in which he dupes the foolish husband to gain favour with
his (usually young and beautiful) wife: the rake often makes him a
cuckold. Other stock characters include a would-be wit, one who aspires
to being like the rake, but who is actually rather foolish, and generally
the target of the other characters’ contempt or ridicule.

The comic effect of Restoration drama is generally achieved by a

combination of witty dialogue, often taking the form of licentious
repartee; sparkling and risqué verbal ‘duels’ between characters –
especially between members of the opposite sex; and the ridiculous
violations of the conventions of polite society by the stupid husbands
and the would-be rakes. You should also think about these and related

9-4 Literature 3
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elements in relation to what you learned in Unit 7, about the nature of

gender-relations at this time, and of the sometimes obscure boundaries
separating the power-status of men and women. Often, the supposedly
powerful figure (the rich husband) is exposed to ridicule by the
machinations of his supposedly subjected and obedient wife. The
dialogues between male and female characters, meanwhile, recall in
many respects the interactive ripostes that we noticed in the
comparisons we drew between Rochester and Behn’s poetry.

The Way of the World, from even a cursory reading and understanding
of Restoration drama, seems to fit the Restoration comedy category
quite comfortably. As we will see, however, although The Way of the
World utilises the conventions of Restoration comedy it does so for its
own purposes. The play, ultimately, is not conventional Restoration
fare: it marks the exhaustion of the conventions of this type of comic
drama, and signals the search for new theatrical conventions for the
new world of the eighteenth century.

THE WORLD OF THE WAY OF THE WORLD

Brian Gibbons points to the difference between the ambition and focus
of Congreve’s first and last comedies, as declared by the titles of each
play (2002: xvii). Congreve’s first comedy was called The Old Bachelor.
As the title indicates, the focus of the play is quite narrow: the play, we
can deduce, concerns itself with the universe simply of one person. The
title of Congreve’s last comedy, The Way of the World, on the other
hand, declares that its focus is much more expansive and general: the
title indicates that the play will concern itself with the whole world and
with the way that it works.

This prompts us to think about Congreve’s play within a satirical

context: it is both an entertaining piece of literature in its own right,
intended for the purpose of performance within the theatre context. But
it also has the ability, and possible intent, of reflecting the world of that
theatre audience back upon itself through the characters and scenarios
it presents – albeit in a suitably exaggerated way. As such, it can
expose society’s faults to the very members of the society who watch
the play, and so perhaps through corrective humour encourage redress
of the vices it reveals to public view.

The play will record the way of the world and show it to us. It will tell us
the way the world is. The play can be seen thus as a very ambitious
undertaking for Congreve, and perhaps for its audience a very
intimidating undertaking to attend.

In order to contain the expansiveness of the ‘world’ the title promises

within a reasonable compass for the single play, Congreve compacts
features of the known and recognisable world within the fictionalised
scenario of the characters and places his play portrays. Hence, we are
told, the play is set in London: a familiar setting for the first theatrical
audiences of The Way of the World. However, the enclosed spaces
within that setting are fabricated – they are recognisable as probable,
but are not specifically accurate to any ‘real’ place, but instead are
projections or parts of the characters that Congreve creates to inhabit
them. In turn, these characters are not ‘real’ people in the sense of
actually representing known figures in the contemporary world; rather,
they reflect identifiable character-traits that audience members might
recognise in themselves, or in their friends or relatives. Congreve
enhances this impression of credibility through the time-frame he gives
the play, and through the actions of the characters within it.

To some extent, the extremes to which Congreve pushes his characters

– their speech and action – could even be considered unrealistic:

Unit 9: Restoration Beyond Revolution: William Congreve’s The Way of the World 9-5
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indeed, Restoration drama in general encountered fierce criticism from

more conservative viewers, who found it to be obscene and that it
promoted immorality. Robert Markley, for instance describes how

[…] in 1698 the High Tory churchman, Jeremy Collier, published

a scathing indictment of Restoration comedy for its immorality
and contempt for authority. (2000: 226)

However, as Markley goes on to argue, many other individuals sought to

defend Restoration drama from such accusations, and to propose that it
could have a beneficial role with society, not least the playwrights
themselves. Markley claims that

[…] various defenders of the drama, including playwrights such

as William Congreve, countered these charges by arguing that
comedy satirizes vice and vanity to secure the socioeconomic
stability premised on feminine virtue and masculine property
rights. (2000: 226)

We shall go on to investigate the possible justifications for such a

defence in subsequent sections; for now, it is important to observe that
The Way of the World marries fiction and reality in Congreve’s
representation of a believable, though not an actual world within the
play. This has potential implications for the play’s satiric purpose: it
allows Congreve’s audience to connect to, or identify with, the world the
play represents, but avoids offending any one person in particular,
through the fictional guise of the characters and settings The Way of the
World presents.

What kind of play-world does Congreve create?

THE WAY OF THE WORLD AND ‘REALISM’: ACT I

The world of The Way of the World is a world already in motion when
the curtain opens and the audience is invited in. The first action of the
play is the ending of a card game: we arrive, therefore, not at the
beginning of action but at its end. This is perhaps confusing for us, and
leads to a sense of things happening in the world of the play that are
hidden from us, the readers and the audience, an impression created
elsewhere in the play. In I.2, for instance, in his short dialogue with a
Footman, Mirabell mentions a ‘grand affair’ and a marriage. However,
we are not told the nature of this ‘grand affair’, nor who was involved in
this or the marriage mentioned.

How might this affect our ability to connect to, or identify with, the
world of the play? Surely, if we are to learn from its ‘moral’, we must be
able to understand what is going on?

In one sense, the impression of half-concealed knowledge – that the

characters have a wealth of information that they do not disclose to us,
and that they participate in a life beyond the play’s scenes – actually
enhances the impression that The Way of the World really does reflect a
known and believable world. In the world outside the play, we might
well walk in upon a card-game half-way through, or overhear part of a
conversation, and two people who know each other would most likely
refer to people or facts with which they were both familiar, rather than
needing to explain everything from the outset each time they discussed
a certain matter.

Falsity and deception seem to belong to the world of Congreve’s play,

an impression enhanced by the suggestion that there are certain pieces
of information concealed from us, alongside what we are told of (for
instance) Mirabell’s ‘sham addresses’ to Lady Wishfort, or the secret
marriage Mirabell alludes to when speaking to his Footman. In some

9-6 Literature 3
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respects, this increases our sense of exclusion from the play-world: we

are distanced from it through our lack of knowledge, and perhaps sense
that we are being duped by the characters on stage, just as the
characters dupe one another. On the other hand, many of the
characters in the play are ignorant of certain facts or events too: we,
like them, share in the sense of uncertainty about how events will
unravel, or the role they will play in them.

Nonetheless, we may be justified in finding that the world we are

introduced to in the play is confusing and bewildering. The early part of
The Way of the World presents a tangled web of relationships between
the characters in the play. At one point, in I.5, Fainall speaks to Mirabell
of the ancestry of Sir Wilfull Witwoud, who has only recently arrived:

[…] he is the half-brother to this Witwoud by a former wife, who

was sister to my Lady Wishfort, my wife’s mother. If you marry
Millamant, you must call cousins too. (I.5)

This baffling genealogy of Sir Wilfull Witwoud exemplifies the complex

network of relationships between the play’s characters.

In one sense, this perhaps confuses us; but on the other, it again shows
how Congreve tries to reflect what is true about the real world, where
relationships and connections between various people are indeed
complex and difficult to disentangle. If these links between people seem
to be excessively complicated in the play, it is because whilst it adopts a
realistic approach to representing the world it reflects upon, to achieve
its satirical function the play must exaggerate and distort the features of
that world to expose them to corrective ridicule.

We are, however, given several clues as to how as readers we might

navigate our way through the entangled web of relationships that exist
in The Way of the World – although the theatre audience watching the
play might have a very different experience. We learn from the dramatis
personae who the characters are, and the nature of the relationships
between them:

Fainall is in love with Mrs Marwood, who – though a friend to Fainall –

likes Mirabell.

Mirabell, however, loves Millamant, who is the niece of Lady Wishfort.

Lady Wishfort is Mirabell’s enemy, for at one point in the past he had
falsely declared his love for her, and piqued her pride.

Lady Wishfort’s daughter is Mrs Fainall and wife to Fainall, although she
is in love with Mirabell.

All the characters are attended by a number of friends and servants, the
most important of whom are:

Witwoud (whose half-brother is Sir Wilfull Witwoud) and Petulant,

followers of Millamant.

The servant is an important stock-character in Restoration comedy; in

The Way of the World, these are Mincing (Millamant’s lady-in-waiting),
Foible (Lady Wishfort’s woman), and Waitwell (Mirabell’s servant).

The dramatis personae, then, introduces us to a knot of complex

relationships, which we hope that the play will go on to clarify and,
perhaps, stabilise. The dramatis personae thus raises our expectations,
but also entices us: if we want to find out how each of these
relationships will develop, and how resolution will be achieved among all

Unit 9: Restoration Beyond Revolution: William Congreve’s The Way of the World 9-7
_____________________________________________________________________

these potential conflicts of interest (if at all), we must read the play
itself. This cast-list also gives us clues as to the nature of the play, and
how it will treat those characters: the indicative nature of many of the
characters’ names suggests to us certain personality-traits, which in
turn encourage us to think about the role that each figure will play in
the ensuing drama.

Think back to our discussion of paratexts in the previous unit, in which

we addressed Dryden’s preface to Absalom and Achitophel: there, we
came across the idea that a paratext is like a ‘threshold’ that we must
cross to enter a text. So, too, in Congreve’s play, to enter the world it
presents we must first of all encounter certain pieces of information that
the playwright gives us to consider, and which may determine or shape
our reading of what follows.

In one sense, then, the ‘paratext’ of the dramatis personae acts as a

borderline between the real world that we know and inhabit, and the
semi-real, semi-fictional world of the play. This establishes the ‘realism’
of The Way of the World, as recognisable and credible, but also as
somehow unfamiliar: it is, obviously, artfully constructed by the
playwright, and is yet to be discovered.

SAQ 1

In what respects can The Way of the World be called a ‘realistic’ play?

‘MORAL REALISM’ AND SATIRE IN THE WAY OF THE

WORLD
We have given some thought, in the previous section of this unit, to
some of the ways in which Congreve’s play can be considered ‘realistic’.
However, we might ask why Congreve presents his dramatic material in
this way: why not simply present us with an overtly fictionalised world
that is strange and exotic, like that of The Tempest, for instance, or any
of Shakespeare’s ‘romance’ plays?

At this point, it is helpful for us to revisit some of the ideas we

encountered in the previous unit, where we discussed the forms and
purposes of satire in relation to Dryden’s poetry. We saw how Chris
Baldick defines ‘satire’ as ‘a mode of writing that exposes the failings of
individuals, institutions, or societies to ridicule and scorn’ (1990: 198).
We also saw how a satire can take shape in a variety of literary forms:
in the previous unit, we looked at satirical poems by Dryden in the light
of these ideas. The Oxford English Dictionary’s primary definition of
satire certainly supports this sense, and the specific generic application
of satire to poetry; satire, it claims, is:

A poem, or in modern use sometimes a prose composition, in

which prevailing vices or follies are held up to ridicule.
Sometimes, less correctly, applied to a composition in verse or
prose intended to ridicule a particular person or class of persons,
a lampoon. (OED, online)

This definition is particularly relevant to our discussion of Mac Flecknoe

as a satirical lampoon.

However, as Dryden’s use of satire across the range of his writings

reveals – in genres other than poetry – the term can apply to a wide
array of literary forms. Indeed, Baldick’s definition, given above, seems
to imply a more expansive approach to the term ‘satire’. Alongside

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poetry and prose, satire might equally be used in a theatrical piece –

and perhaps even more so: after all, if the purpose of satire is to expose
‘the failings of individuals, institutions, or societies to ridicule and scorn’
(Baldick 1990: 198), then what better way to do this than by actually
representing that society and its foibles to public view, on the stage?

A few further definitions of ‘satire’ taken from the Oxford English

Dictionary, beyond its primary sense of the term, actually support the
idea that a theatrical play may also be satirical, and the potential for us
to describe The Way of the World as a satirical play. The following
definition,

The species of literature constituted by satires; satirical

composition,

certainly seems more expansive in terms of genre than the initial

definition the OED gives of the term ‘satire’. Furthermore, the qualities
that define a satire can equally be discerned in Congreve’s play, as
much as in Dryden’s poems. According to the Dictionary, satire
involves:

The employment, in speaking or writing, of sarcasm, irony,

ridicule, etc. in exposing, denouncing, deriding, or ridiculing vice,
folly, indecorum, abuses, or evils of any kind.

One historical example of the term’s usage in this sense, which the
Dictionary cites, is George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who in his
poem of around 1675, ‘A Satyr upon the Follies of the Men of the Age’
claims that ‘Nothing helps more than Satyr to amend Ill manners, or is
trulier Virtues Friend’. Buckingham was an enemy of Dryden, both
politically and in literary terms: each lampooned the other in verse.
Nonetheless, Buckingham’s play The Rehearsal (1671) was hugely
popular, and exerted a lasting influence upon subsequent stage drama
of the Restoration period.

The Rehearsal is relevant to our discussion of Congreve’s The Way of

the World as a satirical play because, in his comedy, Buckingham
satirises his great rival, Dryden, whom he calls ‘Bayes’ in mockery of the
laurel crown he metaphorically wears as poet laureate. In The
Rehearsal, Buckingham also caricatures other familiar literary and public
figures, and places them within a comically exaggerated version of the
‘real’ world of contemporary, Restoration London.

How might these ideas, about satire and the capacity of drama to be
satirical, inform our reading of Congreve’s The Way of the World?

We have already discussed how Congreve re-presents the real, known

world of the audience on the stage, exaggerating its features and the
characters who inhabit it for comic effect. We have also noted how the
ridicule of such a reflection of society might help to reinforce the play’s
potential to encourage us to view our own follies and vices from the
seemingly detached position of being an audience-member. As such, a
theatrical piece is not only well suited to containing satirical elements,
but can be a highly effective vehicle for satire.

In fact, having the characters and individuals we might encounter in

everyday life – albeit in a stereotyped or exaggerated form – physically
embodied in the actors on the stage helps to reinforce our sense of
identification with the character-types they represent. As such, the
immediacy of stage drama places us in a better position to view our own
follies and vices – quite literally – and so to laugh at them. This laughter
might lead to reflection, which in turn might even lead us to alter our
habits, to reconsider our speech and actions in relation to other people,

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and so to remove these vices and follies from our own lives.

As we saw earlier in this unit, Robert Markley has shown how

playwrights such as Congreve sought to promote this moral function of
their plays – and to counter accusations of obscenity – by suggesting
that comedy satirizes vice and vanity (2000: 226). This, Markley
suggests, reaffirms society’s genuine values and ensures its stability:
satirical comedy can ‘secure the socioeconomic stability premised on
feminine virtue and masculine property rights’ (2000: 26). As he further
suggests, this exemplifies the idea of paradox that we have explored
elsewhere in relation to this period; for, as Markley notes, Restoration
comedy forms

[…] a body of drama that seems paradoxically both to challenge

its audiences’ pretensions to virtue, honor, and faith and
ultimately to reinforce the institutions of marriage, property, and
patrilineal inheritance. (2000: 226)

We have talked here in fairly general terms about the drama’s capacity
to reflect society’s ‘follies and vices’, but how might we describe the
potential ‘moral outlook’ of Congreve’s play more precisely?

ACTIVITY
Note down the most distinctive personality traits of each of the main
characters in The Way of the World: list these under ‘follies’, ‘vices’ and
‘good’ qualities.

What do you notice about the good and/or bad qualities of each of the
play’s characters? Do certain characters seem wholly good, or wholly
bad? And how are these vices and virtues made clear to us in the play –
through the characters’ speech, their actions, or a combination of both?

Addressing these questions helps us to approach what kind of ‘moral

vision’ Congreve projects through The Way of the World, and the kind of
reform in society that he hopes to promote through the play’s satire
upon the worst features of that society. In some respects, as you will
have noticed, no one character is wholly ‘good’ or ‘bad’: often, there is a
mixture of vice and of virtue in everyone’s speech and actions, although
the balance might be tilted in one direction rather than another. Does
this support Harriet Hawkins’ claim, that the play is both morally and
dramatically confusing (1972: 121)?

We can examine how far this idea might be true or not, and how it
might reaffirm the play’s moral purpose, if we focus on the character of
Mirabell. He is the ‘hero’ of the play, is both admirable and, at some
moments in the play, despicable. He poses important moral problems
for the audience and reader. Many of his actions are deplorable, and
expose his character as that of the libertine who freely indulges in all
manner of vice. He dupes Lady Wishfort, and later Mrs Fainfall, in a
cruel and heartless manner.

Yet his rakish behaviour, the sparkling wit of his verbal repartee and his
handsome appearance (as the other characters reveal) make him a
highly attractive character in a way that might lead us to question our
own moral judgement. Yet the play itself remains ambiguous about how
we should interpret Mirabell’s character, and refuses either to
completely condone or condemn his behaviour. He is clearly the play’s
hero, who finally triumphs over the deceptive villain; the conventional
reconciliation of all characters that ends the play also seems to reaffirm
that, despite his many wicked actions, he is an accepted – and even

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admired – member of society.

Mirabell is a morally ambiguous character; yet in this he is not ideal or

remote, and his attempts to live the ‘moral life’ do not appear as perfect
or inaccessible to the audience. Rather, his desire to reform his conduct
in spite of the much more attractive allure of vice provides the audience
with an ongoing moral struggle with which they can identify. His moral
ambiguity resonates with our own experience of the struggle to live
morally in the world.

As such, Congreve both reaffirms the realism of his play – in real life,
few people could be described as entirely good or bad – but also
provides his audience with a moral vision that is achievable. If The Way
of the World had been pure fantasy, it would be difficult to emulate the
virtuous actions that the play ultimately promotes; instead, in giving us
a more believable representation of our world which mixes the good and
the bad, the morally instructive tale of the play offers a more attainable
goal for us members of society to pursue.

We find, then, that not only does The Way of the World present us with
a glamorised, and perhaps exaggerated version of the world as we know
it (or, at least, as the play’s contemporary audience would do), but of a
vision of how the world could, and perhaps ought to be. In this sense,
its moral vision is idealistic: it imagines a potential future state of
society where we overcome the struggle between vice and virtue, and
achieve the harmonious reconciliation with our fellow men and women,
and with our own circumstances, which the characters find at the end of
the play.

In this respect, Congreve’s play connects to some of the ideas relating

to this period that we have explored in previous units, in particular our
interpretation of the Restoration as a period of ‘paradoxes’. The Way of
the World depicts the competing appeal of vice and virtue, both of which
are attractive in certain respects, even if we ultimately know that moral
goodness is far preferable to moral corruption.

Nonetheless, in his struggle to live a moral life within the world, Mirabell
must struggle to free himself from his own world – that is, the world
determined by his character, and which he has shaped out of his past
actions. Again we see a paradox, between the known and familiar world,
and the unknown territory of the life that Mirabell envisions for himself.
Two worlds are thus pitted against one another: the old world and the
new, the world as it is, and the world as it ought to be.

This disparity is projected through two of the play’s principal characters,

Mirabell – who represents the world as it might be – and Fainfall, who
(like Lady Wishfort) represents the world as it is, with all its follies and
vices, as we shall go on to discover in the subsequent section.

SAQ 2

How does Congreve’s ‘realism’ in The Way of the World help him to
promote the play’s moral purpose?

‘TRUE WIT’ AND ‘AFFECTED WIT’: MIRABELL AND

FAINALL
It is clear from the names of the characters in The Way of the World
who the villain, and who the hero of the piece is. Although we have
identified some ways in which this identity might be problematic,
nonetheless Mirabell is clearly the play’s hero: his name resonates with

Unit 9: Restoration Beyond Revolution: William Congreve’s The Way of the World 9-11
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the word ‘admirable’, and also with the Latin term ‘mirabile’ – a wonder
(which, as you will recall, Dryden also uses in his poem Annus Mirabilis).
Fainall, on the other hand, ‘feigns all’: he is the villain of the play.
However, as we have already suggested, in certain respects The Way of
the World is morally ambiguous; as Harriet Hawkins points out, it is
very difficult to tell Mirabell and Fainall apart, particularly in the early
scenes of the play (1972: 118). They are introduced to us playing cards
together; both seem equally witty in their dialogue; they are seemingly
very similar in character.

However, it is essential to the moral message that Congreve seeks to

convey in The Way of the World that we recognise the actual disparity
between Fainall and Mirabell. Congreve’s Dedication to the play offers us
the most strident attempt to assert this distinction, once again offering
us a paratextual ‘threshold’ that we must cross to gain a fuller
understanding of the play itself and its characters.

ACTIVITY

Read the Dedication to The Way of the World.

THE DEDICATION
What does the Dedication tell us about the kind of moral vision that
Congreve intends to project through The Way of the World?

In the Dedication to the play, Congreve makes an important distinction

between what he calls a ‘Witwoud’ and a ‘Truewit’, in other words,
between someone with the pretence at being ‘witty’ and someone who
is truly ‘witty’. Congreve writes:

Those characters which are meant to be ridiculous in

most of our comedies are of fools so gross, that in my humble
opinion they should rather disturb than divert the well-natured and
reflecting part of the audience; they are rather objects of charity
than contempt; and instead of moving our mirth, they ought very
often to excite our compassion.
This reflection moved me to design some characters
which should appear ridiculous, not so much through a natural
folly (which is incorrigible, and therefore not proper for the stage)
as through an affected wit: a wit, which at the same time that it is
affected, is also false. (Dedication, ll. 20-30)

Here, Congreve indicates the difference between his comedy and that of
other contemporary plays: the ridiculous characters in other Restoration
comedies are laughable through ‘natural folly’. Such characters should
in fact inspire pity rather than laughter, because they are naturally
ridiculous because of faults or negative qualities that they are powerless
to change.

Congreve’s ridiculous characters, on the other hand, deserve the ridicule

they attract because their faults are not unavoidable, but are ones that
they create for themselves. They ‘affect wit’: they are ‘false wits’. By
pretending to possess qualities that they do not actually have, these
characters are objects of contempt and mirth.

We can appreciate the importance of this distinction between

Congreve’s comedies and other comedies of the day - and how radical
his comedy is - when we understand exactly what Congreve considered
‘true wit’ to be. In the context of the play itself, this distinction will also

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enable us to differentiate between the villain and hero of The Way of the
World, Fainall and Mirabell.

Think back to our discussion of ‘wit’ in the previous unit: which qualities
identified there might resonate most strongly with how you think
Congreve conceives of wit in the Dedication to The Way of the World?

For Congreve, ‘true wit’ involves more than simply poetic ability, such as
might partly characterise Dryden’s sense of wit, though poetic ability
can be seen as an expression of ‘true wit’. We can find a fuller
explanation of what true wit is for Congreve in his response to one of
the critical attacks made upon the state of contemporary Restoration
drama, and upon Congreve’s plays in particular. This attack was made
by Jeremy Collier in his pamphlet A Short View of the Immorality and
Profaneness of the English Stage, published in 1698. Congreve
presented his riposte to this attack in his pamphlet, Amendments of Mr
Collier’s False and Imperfect Citations. Here, Congreve writes that:

Wit is at best but the Sign to good understanding; it is hung out

to recommend the Entertainment which may be found within:
And it is very well when the Invitation can be made good. As the
outward form of Godliness is Hypocrisie, which very often
conceals Irreligion and Immorality; so is Wit also very often an
Hypocrisie, a Superficies glaz’d upon false Judgement, a good
Face set on a bad Understanding. (Hawkins 1972: 119)

‘True wit’ for Congreve, then, involves more than just being adept at
using words in a sparkling or clever way: it involves sound judgement
and good understanding. Do you think this resonates with some of the
ideas encountered in the previous unit, in relation to Dryden’s
promotion of decorum and appropriateness? In the previous unit, we
saw how for Dryden (as for Pope after him) ‘wit’ involved a judicious
awareness of what qualified as appropriate humour in different contexts.
Similarly, for Congreve, using wit involves a careful and intelligent
approach to how to use words.

This passage implies that ‘true wit’ and ‘affected wit’ might appear to be
the same, but can be told apart by the evidence of sound judgement –
or its absence – beneath the surface of apparent similarity. The ‘Truewit’
displays good understanding and judgement, while the ‘affected wit’
simply puts ‘a good Face [...] on a bad Understanding.’ The ‘Truewit’ is
a moral person, driven by the right motives, always judicious and
always displaying understanding. As R. A. Foakes describes, the
‘Truewit’ is someone who displays:

a natural elegance of thought and conduct, based on respect for

sound judgement, fidelity to nature, and a due regard for beauty.
(1972: 61)

Which character in The Way of the World most successfully embodies

‘true wit’?

Mirabell, we might say, is the character who most effectively represents

true wit: he consistently displays the ability to judge correctly, to use
his intelligence and to employ his verbal wit in an appropriate manner.

The ‘affected wit’, on the other hand, has all the appearances of ‘natural
elegance of thought and conduct’, but ultimately has false judgement
and inappropriate or false understanding. Fainall is such a person in The
Way of the World: as his name suggests, he ‘feigns all’. He has the
appearance of being a ‘Truewit’ but, as we will see, when his inner
motives are revealed, that appearance is shown to be only that, an
illusion.

Unit 9: Restoration Beyond Revolution: William Congreve’s The Way of the World 9-13
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Look back to the Dedication, and its description of those characters who
rightfully deserve to be exposed to ridicule: which characters in The
Way of the World do you think fit into this category most clearly?

Fainall, to an extent, could be considered to be a ridiculous character;

yet although he deserves our contempt, perhaps he fails to excite our
mirth. Witwoud, however, is a more obviously ridiculous character – his
name speaks for itself. Petulant is similarly exposed as foolish because
he affects wit, and encourages laughter at his expense.

The affectation of wit that characterises these three figures

distinguishes them from ridiculous characters found in contemporary
Restoration comedies: although they similarly excite ridicule, they do so
because of their ‘natural folly’ rather than affected wit.

How does the affectation of wit – and its exposure to ridiculing critique –
contribute towards the moral vision that Congreve projects in The Way
of the World?

Given that, for Congreve, wit is closely connected to understanding,

judgement and morality, the fact that his ridiculous characters affect wit
is highly significant to gauging the play’s moral compass. Those
characters who affect wit, and so excite mirth, are the most immoral –
or even amoral – figures in The Way of the World. By laughing at those
who affect wit, therefore, we also ridicule poor judgement, vice and
immorality itself: our laughter becomes purposefully instructive. While
Congreve suggests that there is no instructive purpose behind laughing
at the ‘natural folly’ of the ridiculous characters in other comedies of the
day, he presents his comedy as projecting a serious moral purpose. This
is achieved through the instructive laughter that an effective satire can
provoke.

How does the difference between Mirabell and Fainall’s ‘wit’ – the one
real, the other affected – emerge in the play itself?

As Act I progresses, it becomes clear that these two characters are not
as they appear to be on the surface, and so their seeming similarity is in
fact illusory. This becomes particularly clear in Fainall and Mirabell’s
discussion of Millamant, Mirabell’s lover:

FAINALL: For a passionate lover, methinks you are a man

somewhat too discerning in the failings of your
mistress.
MIRABELL: And for a discerning man, somewhat too passionate
a lover; for I like her with all her faults, nay, like her
for her faults.
(I.i.139-143)

As Harriet Hawkins notes, here Fainall seems to accuse Mirabell of

departing from the conventional romantic stereotype which
acknowledges no faults in the beloved. Mirabell’s witty reversal of
Fainall’s statement reveals what he considers to be the emptiness of
that stereotype and the existence of a truer, more honest, and more
authentic love (Hawkins 1972: 131).

As their dialogue continues, Fainall’s bitter attitude towards love is

increasingly revealed, compared to Mirabell, for whom true love seems
to be a more genuine emotion:

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MIRABELL: Her [Millamant’s] follies are so natural, or so artful,

that they become her; and those affectations which
in another woman would be odious, serve but to
make her more agreeable. I’ll tell thee Fainall, she
once used me with that insolence, that in revenge I
took her to pieces, sifted her, and separated her
failings; I studied ’em, and got ’em by rote. [...]
They are now grown as familiar to me as my own
frailties; and in all probability in a little time longer I
will like ’em as well.
FAINALL: Marry her, marry her! Be half as well acquainted
with her charms as you are with her defects, and my
life on’t, you are your own man again.
MIRABELL: Say you so?
FAINALL: Ay, ay, I have experience: I have a wife, and so
forth.
(I.i.143-161)

Mirabell here reveals that he loves Millamant completely, despite – even

for – her defects. Furthermore, such an acceptance of her faults
indicates that he accepts his own faults too.

How does Fainall’s response to Mirabell’s approach to love indicate the

nature of his character?

Fainall comes across as practical, even cynical: he tells Mirabell that he

had better marry Millamant if he wants to be free of her. This perhaps
surprising suggestion draws upon a conventional feature of Restoration
drama, in which marriage – with its supposed dullness and familiarity –
is a source of contempt and mockery. The ‘freedom’ that such contempt
involves suggests a lack of fidelity: either party is free to pursue his or
her own desires and pleasures independently of their spouse.

In fact, as we discover, Fainall’s own marriage is an example of this

negative approach to matrimony. He dismisses the institution with the
flippant comment, ‘I have a wife, and so forth’, in reply to Mirabell’s
question – which is made more amusing by the pun on ‘ay’ and ‘I’. It is
clear that for Mirabell, however, marriage is much more important and
love more genuine: he will marry Millamant not to be free of her, but
because he genuinely loves her.

Fainall’s attitude here reveals that he is bitter and, although his ripostes
are witty, he clearly lacks profound or sincere feeling. Mirabell, on the
other hand, is a ‘Truewit’: he is genuine in his feelings. Though on the
surface they appear to share similar characteristics, representing the
rakish character-type, upon closer inspection Mirabell and Fainall are in
fact shown to be characters of a very different quality indeed.

As the play progresses, the differences between these two characters

are made increasingly more plain. In Act II Mirabell meets with Mrs
Fainall, a woman with whom he has had some romantic liaison in the
past, and Fainall meets with Mrs Marwood, his mistress. How might we
contrast the two encounters in terms of what they reveal about either
male character?

Unit 9: Restoration Beyond Revolution: William Congreve’s The Way of the World 9-15
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ACTIVITY
Read through Fainall and Mrs Marwood’s conversation, Act II, sc. i, ll.
90-221.
Read through Mirabell and Mrs Fainall’s conversation, Act II, sc. i, ll.
222-286.

Make notes comparing the conversation between the characters in

either scene. How do the differences between them reveal qualities that
distinguish Mirabell and Fainall’s characters?

Although Mrs Fainall has been wronged by Mirabell in the past - she
accuses him of forcing her to marry Fainall, for instance, as she has
been spurned by Mirabell - their encounter is marked by genuine feeling
and understanding between them.

The encounter between Mrs Marwood and Fainall, on the other hand, is
marked by recrimination, anger and bitterness. Although the scene ends
with a partial reconciliation between the two, the lack of true and
genuine feeling between them is evident; this contrasts markedly with
the true and genuine feelings evident between Mirabell and Mrs Fainall.
This contrast is even more strongly reinforced later in the play, where
Millamant and Mirabell’s genuine affection for one another reveals the
sincere and admirable qualities of their characters. Eventually, of
course, Mirabell triumphs over Fainall: ‘truewit’ finally vanquishes
affected wit.

SAQ 3

How can we distinguish between a ‘Truewit’ and an ‘affected wit’?

Who are the ‘Truewits’ in The Way of the World, and who are the
‘affected wits’?

TWO WAYS WITH THE WORLD: MIRABELL AND FAINALL

Re-read the rest of Congreve’s The Way of the World.

In the last section we indicated some ways in which the characters of

Mirabell and Fainall, who share certain similarities, are nonetheless
distinguished by the different ways in which they embody wit: this
reveals, in the first case, good judgement, and in the second, lack of
judgement.

In many respects we could argue that Fainall and Mirabell are

representatives of two ‘ways’ in the world: Fainall is characterised by
bitterness and cynicism, and his superficial way of life depends upon
surface appearances. Mirabell’s ‘way’, on the other hand, proceeds
according to genuine motives; his character, and his actions, are
distinguished by integrity and sincere feeling, qualities entirely lacking
in Fainall’s character and way of life in the world.

According to which ‘way of the world’ do the rest of the characters in

the play operate?

It seems clear that most of the play’s characters follow Fainall’s ‘way in
the world’; even Mirabell, whose motives are genuine and who does
seem to recognise the existence of a world beneath surface
appearances, seems to follow this way in some respects. This is because

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he is a member of society, and in order to participate within it he must

follow the pattern of behaviour found amongst his peers. His plans have
genuine and good motives: for instance, he wishes to gain Lady
Wishfort’s approval before marrying Millamant. However, to achieve his
purposes he manipulates his own behaviour to deceive those around
him, as well as manipulating other characters. He compels his servant
to disguise himself as the invented character ‘Sir Rowland’ and pretend
to woo Lady Wishfort; Mirabell plans to expose the deception and thus
gain the Lady’s favour, and the ‘reward’ of Millamant’s hand in marriage
– alongside the fortune promised as her dowry.

However, despite such manipulative and deceptive actions, does

Mirabell seem to you to truly belong in the world of surface appearance
and pretended actions?

He frequently expresses his impatience and dissatisfaction with the

world he lives in, and the rules he is forced to abide by if he wants to
remain a part of its society (Roberts 1972: 61). Where does Congreve
reveal this dimension of Mirabell’s attitude towards his contemporary
world and its people?

Mirabell’s opening dialogue with Fainall gives us certain clues about this
true disparity between how he pretends to behave within his world, and
his actual attitude towards it. Here, the two men discuss what seems to
have put Mirabell ‘out of humour’, which he reveals to be an incident
which happened the previous evening, at Millamant’s house: their
intimate conversation had been interrupted by the unwelcome intrusion
of Witwoud, Petulant, Lady Wishfort, Mrs Fainall and Mrs Marwood.
Mirabell goes on to describe what happened next:

MIRABELL: […] Seeing me, they all put on their grave faces,
whispered one another, then complained aloud of the
vapours, and after fell into a profound silence.
FAINALL: They had a mind to be rid of you.
MIRABELL: For which reason I resolved not to stir. At last the good
old lady broke through her painful taciturnity, with an
invective against long visits. I would not have
understood her, but Millamant joining in the argument,
I rose and with a constrained smile told her, I thought
nothing was so easy as to know when a visit began to
be troublesome. She reddened and I withdrew, without
expecting her reply. (I.i.26-36)

Mirabell’s greatest source of irritation at this incident was not the fact
that these people entered and interrupted his rendezvous with
Millamant, but that they would not honestly say that he was not
welcome. Instead, they attempted to insinuate what they thought, but
did not say out loud, that they wanted him to leave by complaining
about long visits, and pretending to feel unwell: the phrase ‘they
complained about the vapours’ refers to a fashionable nervous disorder
allied with depression. Its diagnosis, and its manifestation, however,
were poorly defined: most often, when someone complains of suffering
from ‘the vapours’, they are affecting to have a kind of malady for
appearance’s sake, rather than because of genuine illness.

Mirabell’s response to such irritating affectation and pretence at

politeness, in not saying outright that he should leave, encourages him
to be facetious. He tells Millamant directly that ‘nothing was so easy as
to know when a visit began to be troublesome’, showing that he is
aware of the actual meaning of all these insinuations; she becomes
embarrassed, not because the two lovers have been discovered alone,
but because Mirabell has refused to engage in the false etiquettes of
polite convention.

Unit 9: Restoration Beyond Revolution: William Congreve’s The Way of the World 9-17
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Mirabell expresses a similar frustration with the pettiness and duplicity

of social convention at a later point in the same scene. Fainall reminds
Mirabell that the ‘sham addresses’ of affection his friend had made to
Lady Wishfort are the reason why she is so hostile towards Mirabell.
Mirabell, reflecting upon his pretended affection, describes how easy it
had been to persuade Lady Wishfort that he genuinely admired her:

I did as much as man could, with any reasonable conscience. I

proceeded to the very last act of flattery with her, and was guilty
of a song in her commendation; nay, I got a friend to put her into
a lampoon, and compliment her with the imputation of an affair
with a young fellow, which I carried so far that I told her the
malicious town took notice that she was grown fat of a sudden;
and when she lay in of a dropsy, persuaded her she was reported
to be in labour. The devil’s in’t, if an old woman is to be flattered
further, unless a man should endeavour personally to debauch
her; and that my virtue forbade me. (I.i.63-73)

Mirabell’s speech is riddled with the bitter accusation that he lives in a

false and superficial world. A woman is easily deceived by flattery,
despite her better judgement, because she is subject to the same norms
of society that encourage men to behave in this way towards women.
Indeed, she is as much a creature of convention as her peers, as her
confinement due to ‘a dropsy’ suggests – ‘dropsy’ being another
fashionable illness, like ‘the vapours’. She encourages such flattery, no
doubt goaded on by Mirabell’s youth and good looks, and the lust
implied in her own name ‘wish for it’.

Furthermore, the malicious gossip of a close-knit social world ensures

that invented stories can rapidly be held up as truthful: Mirabell easily
persuades Lady Wishfort that she is believed to be confined ‘in labour’,
rather than ill. However, his resentment at the ease with which a
woman can lose her dignity and compromise her honour in this way –
especially an ‘old’ woman who should know better and so deserve
genuine respect – reveals his own discontent with the conventions of a
society that not only condones, but encourages such behaviour.

Mirabell’s speech reveals his reluctance to play by such deceptive, and

essentially immoral, rules. Fainall’s response to these words implies
that, by contrast, he would have no such qualms. He tells his friend,

You are a gallant man, Mirabell; and though you may have cruelty
enough not to satisfy a lady’s longing, you have too much
generosity not to be tender of her honour. (I.i.83-85)

TWO WAYS WITH THE WORLD: MIRABELL AND LADY

WISHFORT
Although the differences between Mirabell and Fainall’s characters
reveal two contrasting approaches to the world, and to how one should
behave within it, the real tension in the play lies in the relationship
between Lady Wishfort and Mirabell. She, like Fainall, is ruled by
appearances, and lives her life according to the impression she will
create upon those around her. She is, moreover, a dominant figure
within this world: she is its orchestrator, whereas perhaps Fainall only
plays a part in the social sphere she presides over. She is,
consequently, the most antagonistic force to Mirabell’s concept of and
approach to the world – or at least to how it might be.

Lady Wishfort’s chief concerns in life centre around appearances – and

in particular, her personal appearance. Congreve gives a strong sense of
this superficiality when he first introduces Lady Wishfort to his audience,
in a conventional scene-setting: the toilet (as in dressing, washing and

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grooming). This central part of a late-seventeenth and eighteenth-

century woman’s daily life inspired many literary pieces that, comically
or otherwise, use the toilet scene as an opportunity to reflect upon the
stereotypical idea of female vanity. John Donne, for instance, reverses
this process in his wittily erotic poem ‘To his Mistress going to bed’,
where the poetic speaker imagines undressing his lover as he seduces
her through the poem. As we shall see in the subsequent unit, Pope also
uses the toilet scene to expose the vanity of his heroine, Belinda, to
satirical ridicule.

Here, Congreve uses this standard scenario to affect a similar satirical

attack upon Lady Wishfort, and her role as the representative of a vain
and superficial (female) element of society, who dictates its rules by her
own behaviour:

LADY W: Merciful, no news of Foible yet?

PEG: No, madam.
LADY W: I have no more patience. If I have not fretted myself ’till
I am pale again, there’s no veracity in me. Fetch me the
red - the red, do you hear, sweetheart! An arrant ash
colour, as I’m a person! Look you how this wench stirs!
Why dost thou not fetch me a little red? Didst thou not
hear me, Mopus?
PEG: The red ratafia does your ladyship mean, or the cherry
brandy?
LADY W: Ratafia, fool! No, fool! Not the ratafia, fool – grant me
patience! I mean the Spanish paper, idiot! Complexion,
darling. Paint, paint, paint! Dost thou understand that,
changeling? Dangling thy hands like bobbins before
thee! Why dost thou not stir, puppet? Thou wooden
thing upon wires. (III.i.1-15)

Lady Wishfort reveals herself here firstly to be something of a tyrant,

who insults her maidservant, calling her cruel names (such as ‘Mopus’,
meaning a dull or stupid person).

More importantly, however, Lady Wishfort’s exchange with her maid

reveals her concern with appearances: she is particularly anxious to
‘paint’ her face, a classic feature of the toilet seat, for without such a
mask she would be unfit to parade herself in society. Not only does she
need to ‘Paint, paint, paint!’, but the colour must be exactly right, or
she shall be subject to the contempt and ridicule of society.

Lady Wishfort’s concern with appearances operates on another level

here too: whilst she is eager to preserve and project a certain image
amongst her social peers – one of assumed refinement, politeness and
physical attractiveness (even if it is an artificially created beauty) – her
language reveals her to be coarse and unrefined. Her frequent
exclamations, the hurried and abrupt sentences she uses, and above all
the crude words and images she employs, all belie the genuine
brutishness of her nature, concealed beneath a veneer of polite
behaviour.

This obsession with appearances – both in terms of physical

appearances, and how her behaviour will come across and be
interpreted with others – emerges throughout Lady Wishfort’s speech
and actions in the play. When she believes herself to be the object of
‘Sir Rowland’s’ affections (actually Mirabell’s man Waitwell in disguise),
she again reveals her vain obsession with how she appears to others.
As Act IV opens, we find Lady Wishfort anxiously awaiting the promised
arrival of her supposed lover:

Unit 9: Restoration Beyond Revolution: William Congreve’s The Way of the World 9-19
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LADY W: Is Sir Rowland coming, sayest thou, Foible? And are

things in order?
FOIBLE: Yes madam. I have put wax lights in the sconces, and
placed the footmen in a row in the hall in their best
liveries, with the coachman and postilion to fill up the
equipage.
LADY W: Have you pulvilled the coachman and postilion, that they
may not stink of the stable when Sir Rowland comes by?
FOIBLE: Yes madam.
LADY W: And are the dancers and the music ready, that he may
be entertained in all points with correspondence to his
passion?
FOIBLE: All is ready, madam.
LADY W: And – well – and how do I look, Foible?
FOIBLE: Most killing well, madam.
LADY W: Well, and how shall I receive him? In what figure will I
give his heart the first impression? There is a great deal
in the first impression. Shall I sit? No, I won’t sit, I’ll
walk. Ay, I’ll walk from the door upon his entrance, and
then turn full upon him. No, that will be too sudden. I’ll
lie, ay, I’ll lie down. I’ll receive him in my little dressing-
room, there’s a couch – yes, yes, I’ll give the first
impression on a couch. I won’t lie neither, but loll and
lean upon one elbow, with one foot a little dangling off,
jogging in a thoughtful way. Yes; and then as soon as he
appears, start, ay, start and be surprised, and rise to
meet him in a pretty disorder. Yes. Oh, nothing is more
alluring than a levee from a couch in some confusion; it
shows the foot to advantage and furnishes with blushes
and recomposing airs beyond comparison. Hark! There’s
a coach. (IV.i.1-27)

Once again, the fragmented sentence-structure of Lady Wishfort’s

speech reveals her flighty nature, and her fluttering panic about how
she and her household will appear to her suitor.

In this period, a woman was often judged upon the quality of her
domestic arrangements: the food served at her table, the furnishings of
her home, and the number, appearance and manners of her servants all
revealed both the nature of her wealth, status and ability to run a
successful household. This was all the more so for the woman who was
widowed, as in Lady Wishfort’s case; her presentation of her home could
be a major factor in alluring her suitor, in a marriage-market where
financial concerns were often more important than questions of love.
Hence, she parades her servants to show off her wealth – and even
boosts their numbers by adding the coachman and postilion to their
number, who would not normally be included in such a line-up.
However, she makes sure that their true profession shall not be
recognisable, by having them ‘pulvilled’, or sprinkled with powder, to
conceal the ‘stink of the stable’.

Meanwhile, as to her own appearance, Lady Wishfort fusses over its

exact details – her vanity encouraging her to ask Foible ‘how do I look?’
Not only that, but she rehearses how she will receive Sir Rowland to
create the maximum impact upon his affections: after all, she says, ‘the
first impression’ is often the most important. And so, like an actress,
she practises a series of postures and ‘attitudes’, to determine which will
create the greatest effect upon the intended audience in the final
performance. As such, she shows herself to be the dissembling actress
that characterises her role within society: Lady Wishfort embodies the
superficiality, concern with surface-appearance, and concealment of
actual vice that Mirabell reacts against so strongly.

9-20 Literature 3
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TWO WAYS WITH THE WORLD? MIRABELL AND

MILLAMANT
Clearly Mirabell and Lady Wishfort are at odds both in their character-
traits and in the way in which they operate in the world – or at least
would like to. But what of Mirabell’s genuine mistress, Millamant? What
is her role in this world of surface-appearances, and how far is she a
fitting match for Mirabell?

Mirabell’s impatience with the world around him and its inhabitants
drives him to wish for escape from it, and he plans to take Millamant
with him. However, she is a strong-willed and independent woman, and
before consenting to marry Mirabell lays down conditions that he must
fulfil first. This episode, often called the ‘proviso’ scene of the play,
reveals the strength of will of both characters, and of Millamant’s refusal
to conform to certain stereotypes belonging to the role of wife:

MILLA: […] I won’t be called names after I’m married;

positively, I won’t be called names.
MIRABELL: Names!
MILLA: Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love,
sweetheart, and the rest of that nauseous cant in
which men and their wives are so fulsomely familiar. I
shall never bear that. Good Mirabell, don’t let us be
familiar or fond, nor kiss before folks like my Lady
Fadler and Sir Francis, nor go to Hyde Park together
the first Sunday in a new chariot, to provoke eyes and
whispers, and then never to be seen there together
again; as if we were proud of one another the first
week, and ashamed of one another for ever after. Let
us never visit together, nor go to a play together, but
let us be very strange and well-bred; let us be as
strange as if we had been married a great while, and
as well-bred as if we were not married at all.
MIRABELL: Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your
demands are pretty reasonable.
MILLA: Trifles – as liberty to pay and receive visits to and from
whom I please, to write and receive letters, without
interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what
I please, and choose conversation with regard only to
my own taste; to have no obligation upon me to
converse with wits that I don’t like, because they are
your acquaintance, or to be intimate with fools because
they may be your relations. Come to dinner when I
please, dine in my dressing-room when I’m out of
humour, without giving a reason. To have my closet
inviolate, to be sole empress of my tea table, which
you must never presume to approach without first
asking leave; and lastly, wherever I am, you shall
always knock at the door before you come in. These
articles subscribed to, if I continue to endure you a
little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife.
(IV.i.165-198)

The nature of this exchange is highly revealing about both of these

characters, their compatibility and their potential future relationship.
Millamant’s witty discourse exposes many of the faults and foibles of her
own society, as well as the meaningless demands and expectations
placed upon a wife. She implies that the stereotypes created for roles
such as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ encourage people to behave in a certain,
false way, and that society’s demands for how things ought to be
predetermines bad behaviour and discord between spouses.

Unit 9: Restoration Beyond Revolution: William Congreve’s The Way of the World 9-21
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To ensure the perfect harmony between herself and Mirabell that she
envisions, therefore, she insists that they should resolutely refuse to
comply with all these stereotypes. As such, like a good politician she
lays down ‘articles’ that her intended husband should subscribe to,
which she reinforces with the usual witty jibe that she can scarcely
‘endure’ her lover, and with the facetious suggestion that she ‘may by
degrees dwindle into a wife’ if he obeys her demands.

Mirabell’s response to this speech, and to these ‘articles’, is revealing:

he is delighted, finding his future wife to be as witty and engaging as he
could hope. Moreover, though, her demands are precisely aligned with
his own contemptuous attitude to the world around them, and to the
petty demands that social convention places upon individuals and upon
married couples. Like Millamant, he disdains the kind of gossip where
even so simple an act as driving through Hyde Park in a new chariot will
‘provoke eyes and whispers’. Millamant scorns to pretend behaving in a
way that belies her true nature or desires – hence, for instance, her
refusal in advance to chat with ‘wits’ she does not like simply to please
her husband.

That Mirabell wholeheartedly approves of this refusal to obey the empty

conventions of society is conveyed in his wittily bawdy response:

MIRABELL: Your bill of fare is something advanced in this latter

account. Well, have I liberty to offer conditions, that
when you are dwindled into a wife, I may not be
beyond measure enlarged into a husband? (IV.i.199-
202)

Mirabell implies, through his innuendo, that Millamant’s ‘articles’ are all
very well, but that he too has a right to assert certain conditions for
their future married life; fortunately, these fully accord with the spirit of
hers:

MIRABELL: […] Imprimis then, I covenant that your acquaintance

be general; that you admit no sworn confidante or
intimate of your own sex, no she-friend to screen her
affairs under your countenance and tempt you to make
trial of a mutual secrecy; no decoy-duck to wheedle
you a fop, scrambling to the play in a mask, then bring
you home in a pretended fright when you think you
shall be found out, and rail at me for missing the play,
and disappointing the frolic, which you had to pick me
up and prove my constancy!
MILLA: Detestable imprimis! I go to the play in a mask!
MIRABELL: Item, I article that you continue to like your own face
as long as I shall, and while it passes current with me,
that you endeavour not to new-coin it. To which end,
together with all vizards for the day, I prohibit all
masks for the night made of oiled-skins and I know not
what – hog’s bones, hare’s gall, pig-water, and the
marrow of a roasted cat. In short, I forbid all
commerce with the gentlewoman what-d’ye-call-it
Court. Item, I shut my doors against all bawds with
baskets, and pennyworth’s of muslin, china, fans,
atlases, etc. […] (IV. i.205-223)

As with Millamant’s list of conditions, Mirabell’s expose the faults and

foibles common amongst members of society, and women in particular,
and demands that his future wife should renounce all such superficial
pleasures, and should scorn to fit into such conventional patterns and
stereotypes. Attending masked balls, for instance, was a popular
entertainment at this time; but, as the phrase suggests, it could ‘mask’

9-22 Literature 3
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all manner of intrigues and amours. Similarly, Mirabell says, Millamant

should disdain all such mask-wearing or affected virtue.

In the same way, she should refuse to paint her face – or ‘endeavour to
new-coin it’ – when she begins to lose her looks (according to society’s
conventions, at least). He tells her that his love goes beyond this
surface appearance, and that he would esteem her charms less rather
than more if she begins to paint herself artificially, as other women do –
as, in fact, does Lady Wishfort, as we saw. The revolting list of
ingredients used to make cosmetics that Mirabell lists, such as ‘hog’s
bones, hare’s gall, pig-water, and the marrow of a roasted cat’, reveal
the contempt in which he holds such aids to female vanity – and acts as
a possible deterrent to Millamant’s desire to use them. Mirabell also lays
down conditions that ensure Millamant will scorn other habits that the
married woman is stereotypically supposed to assume, like wasting
money on knick-knacks and trifles.

Mirabell’s list of demands is as exacting as Millamant’s, but as her

diplomatic wrangling ensures that she shall not conform to the
stereotype of how a ‘society wife’ should behave, he ensures that he will
not fit the image of the conventional husband. As such, he concludes, ‘I
may prove a tractable and complying husband’ (l. 245), a knowingly
facetious promise which Millamant meets with suitable mock-contempt:

Oh horrid provisos! Filthy strong waters! I toast fellows, odious

men! I hate your odious provisos! (IV.i.246-7)

The ironic humour of this protest is, of course, fully recognised by

Mirabell, who in his reply to this outburst shows that they are, in fact, in
perfect agreement – in character, in temperament and in outlook upon
the world:

Then we’re agreed. Shall I kiss your hand upon the contract?
(IV.i.248-9)

In marrying Millamant, Mirabell will create a new world based not on a

loyalty to appearances but, as Philip Roberts says, ‘based on the
logicalities of life’ (1972: 47). They scorn vain pretence, and instead
seal a ‘contract’ in which they are agreed to obey, not society’s empty
rules, but those of their own obligations to one another, which are
generated by mutual understanding and love.

SAQ 4
In what ways do Lady Wishfort and Mirabell represent alternative
approaches to life in The Way of the World?

THE ‘OLD’ WORLD AND THE NEW

Mirabell and Millamant’s marriage will seal a contract of a new way of
life, one in which the dictates and demands of the ‘old’ world they have
known and now live in are replaced by those of a different social vision
– one founded on honesty and trust. In some respects, this presents
Congreve’s The Way of the World as a play which depicts the death of
one society and the birth of another. The historical context of the play’s
production – upon the cusp of the eighteenth century, during a year in
which stalwarts of late seventeenth-century literature such as Dryden
died – suggests that Congreve’s play ushers in a new era: a new social
vision, and a new literary way of life. How far such promise is realised in
the ensuing years, however, remains yet to be seen.

Unit 9: Restoration Beyond Revolution: William Congreve’s The Way of the World 9-23
_____________________________________________________________________

The disparity between the old and the new is, of course, embodied in
the play’s characters: the younger generations speak and act in very
different ways to their elders (compare Lady Wishfort and Millamant, for
instance), and similarly their goals and aspirations in life differ widely.
The decay of the old, however, is not simply a matter for contemptuous
scorn: the scene of Lady Wishfort’s toilet, while predominantly comic,
nonetheless has a tragic strain in her pitiful attempt to keep up
appearances. Nor, indeed, does Congreve simply dismiss the traditions
and old-fashioned ways belonging to previous generations, either in real
life or in literature: his close friendship with and admiration for Dryden
suggests that he champions literary qualities founded on innovation
within established forms, and variations on existing precedents.

In the same way, The Way of the World – in its very title – suggests a
paradox: it involves both stagnation and the status quo – things are the
way that they are, and so be it. Yet the title also holds a hopeful
promise, of onward movement and progression: the ‘way’ of the world
is a forward one. For all the conventions that might hold it back, and
despite the generational conflicts that resist replacing the old with the
new, younger generations (of people and of writers) will inevitably
propel the world into a new age.

REVIEW
Our study of Congreve’s comedy The Way of the World in this unit
began by outlining some of the key features of Congreve’s personal
history, and identifying some of the major landmarks in his literary
career. Through this, we situated his work within the historical context
of Restoration drama, and noted how its emergence ran parallel to
changes in literature and society that we discussed in previous units,
notably, the restored sense of hope and the new wave of liberation that
Charles II’s ascension to the throne heralded. We described some of the
major precedents and examples of Restoration theatre, and positioned
Congreve’s Way of the World within this context as one of the pre-
eminent examples of this type of drama.

We went on to analyse Congreve’s play from several different

perspectives, beginning with a consideration of The Way of the World in
relation to realism. We saw how Congreve uses realism to enhance the
satirical dimension of his play, and to increase its potential to effect
reform within the social sphere by reflecting society’s vices back upon
the audience-members who watch the play. We described this satirical
impulse in terms of the play’s ‘moral purpose’, and saw how Congreve
sought to achieve this through presenting believable, rather than
ridiculous, characters.

We saw how the distinction between ‘true’ wit and ‘affected’ wit
provided one way in which Congreve differentiates between the
pretence to possess virtues and good judgement, and actually
possessing such qualities. We discussed how these two extremes are
embodied in the characters of Mirabell (a ‘Truewit’) and Fainall (a
pretended wit), and linked this to an analysis of Mirabell’s character. We
described how Mirabell is at odds with the world in which he lives, and
instead offers a vision of an ideal world in which affectation and
pretended feeling (and wit) do not exist. This contrasts with the true
way of the world within the play, where characters such as Lady
Wishfort exemplify affectation and dissembled virtue.

Finally, we saw how Mirabell might succeed in dispensing with the

trifling and petty conventions of his own society, by creating a ‘new’
world in marrying Millamant, a future wife whose vision of how their
married life should be entirely coheres with Mirabell’s approach to
society and to life.

9-24 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

We saw how, in turn, the hopeful future promised by this union in the
younger generation matches The Way of the World’s own role as a play
written upon the cusp of a new age, that of the eighteenth century.
What that future holds, for society and for literature, remains as yet
undiscovered for Congreve: we shall begin to explore it in the next unit,
where we encounter the dazzling social world pictured by Alexander
Pope in his mock-heroic poem, The Rape of the Lock.

ADDITIONAL READING

PRIMARY MATERIAL
Congreve, William. 2002. Brian Gibbons (ed.), The Way of the World,
New Mermaid Series, 3rd rev. edn (London: A&C Black)

Lawrence, R. G. (ed.). 1992. Restoration Plays, rev. edn (London: Dent)

SECONDARY MATERIAL
Canfield, J. Douglas and Deborah C. Payne (eds). 1995. Cultural
Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater
(Athens: University of Georgia Press) (Parts available online via
Google Books)

Evans, James E. 2003. ‘Strains of Comedy in 1700: The Way of the

World and The Beau Defeated’, South Atlantic Review, 68. 1:
15-33 (Available on JSTOR)

Hinnant, Charles H. 1977. ‘Wit, Propriety, and Style in The Way of the
World’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 17. 3: 373-386
(Available on JSTOR)

Hughes, Derek. 1996. English Drama 1660-1700 (Oxford: Clarendon

Press)

Kroll, Richard W. F. 1986. ‘Discourse and Power in The Way of the

World’, ELH, 53. 4: 727-758 (Available on JSTOR)

Loftis, John E. 1996. ‘Congreve’s Way of the World and Popular Criminal
Literature’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 36. 3:
561-578 (Available on JSTOR)

Merchant, W. Moelwyn. 1972. The Critical Idiom: Comedy (London:

Methuen)

Novak, Maximillian E. 1969. ‘The Artist and the Clergyman: Congreve,

Collier and the World of the Play’, College English, 30. 7: 555-
561 (Available on JSTOR)

REFERENCES
Baldick, Chris. 1990. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
(Oxford: Oxford University Press) (Parts available online via
Google Books)

Corman, Brian. 2000. ‘Comedy’, in Deborah Payne Fisk (ed.), The

Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 52-69 (Parts
available online via Google Books)

Foakes, R. A. 1972. ‘Wit and convention in Congreve’s comedies’, in B.

Morris (ed.), Mermaid Critical Commentaries: William Congreve
(London: Ernest Benn; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield)

Unit 9: Restoration Beyond Revolution: William Congreve’s The Way of the World 9-25
_____________________________________________________________________

Gibbons, Brian (ed.). 2002. ‘Introduction’, to William Congreve The Way

of the World, New Mermaid Series (London: A&C Black)

Hawkins, Harriet. 1972. ‘“Offending against decorum”: the reflection of

social experience in The Way of the World’, in Likenesses of
Truth in Elizabethan and Restoration Drama (Oxford: Clarendon
Press)

Markley, Robert. 2000. ‘The canon and its critics’, in Deborah Payne Fisk
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 226-42 (Parts
available online via Google Books)

Roberts, Philip. 1972. ‘Mirabell and Restoration Drama’, in B. Morris

(ed.), Mermaid Critical Commentaries: William Congreve
(London: Ernest Benn; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield)

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ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1

In what respects can The Way of the World be called a ‘realistic’ play?

The Way of the World can be considered to be a ‘realistic’ play in a

number of ways. Firstly, our first encounter with the play finds action
that is already in motion. Events do not ‘begin’ with the beginning: it
is clear from a reading of the opening scene that events have
happened ‘before’ the opening of the play, as it were, and which will
have a bearing on the action. This creates the impression that the
drama takes place in ‘real’ life, an impression of reality which is
mirrored by the complexity of the actions and relationships that the
play goes on to develop.

The Way of the World also depicts falsity and deception – negative
forces which exist both in the play’s world and in the real world; the
audience gets the sense that the characters conceal truths from each
other and from us, which is similar to the relationships that exist
between individuals in ‘real’ life.

Furthermore, the scale of the play makes it believable: the action

takes place within a reasonable time-span, and in spaces and
locations which are easily identifiable for the viewer – such as
domestic settings within London. This creates the impression that the
characters within the play, and their speech and action, while highly
stylised are familiar and ‘realistic’ for the audience-member.

SAQ 2
How does Congreve’s ‘realism’ in The Way of the World help him to
promote the play’s moral purpose?

The realistic effects of Congreve’s play heighten the sense of its

believability. This, essentially, serves his didactic purpose in The Way
of the World: he wishes to hold a mirror up to nature, as it were, and
through exaggerating the vices and virtues present in real-life society
through the speech and action of the characters on the stage, he
hopes to expose our own faults. In recognising our vices and follies –
because we are able to identify with the play’s credible characters
and their adventures – we might be prompted to reconsider our own
actions, and perhaps alter our behaviour in the future. The realism of
The Way of the World enables Congreve’s play to promote a
reformative ‘moral purpose’.

Unit 9: Restoration Beyond Revolution: William Congreve’s The Way of the World 9-27
_____________________________________________________________________

SAQ 3
How can we distinguish between a ‘Truewit’ and an ‘affected wit’?
Who are the ‘Truewits’ in The Way of the World, and who are the
‘affected wits’?

Congreve makes the distinction between the ‘Truewit’ and the

‘affected wit’ in his Dedication to The Way of the World. It is difficult,
he seems to indicate, to tell the ‘Truewit’ from the ‘affected wit’ from
appearances alone, and even from conversation. Both the ‘Truewit’
and the ‘affected wit’ may be equally ‘witty’ in a superficial sense:
each may sparkle in conversation. A ‘Truewit’ can only be
distinguished from an ‘affected wit’ when the nature of the
‘judgement’ that informs that wit is revealed: the wit of the ‘Truewit’
is based on sound judgement and good understanding, while the wit
of the ‘affected wit’ is based on unsound, even malign judgement,
and superficial understanding.

The ‘Truewits’ in The Way of the World are Mirabell, Millamant, and
perhaps Mrs Fainall. On several occasions, these characters show
evidence of true wit, which reveals their sound judgement. The
‘Witwouds’, those who affect wit, include Fainall – as his name
indicates - and the two minor characters Witwoud and Petulant.
Similarly Lady Wishfort, whose superficiality is revealed in a number
of ways in the play, also affects to be witty whilst lacking truly
perceptive judgement; as such, she, too, is an ‘affected wit’.

SAQ 4
In what ways do Lady Wishfort and Mirabell represent alternative
approaches to life in The Way of the World?

The distinction between Lady Wishfort and Mirabell as either an

‘affected’ or a ‘Truewit’ indicates the alternative approach each
character adopts to how to speak and behave in the world, and so
reveals their different visions of ‘life’.

Lady Wishfort is superficial and vain, and is obsessively concerned

with appearances, in all senses of the term: she pays close attention
to matters of dress, how her household will appear in the eyes of
society, and how her behaviour might be perceived by her peers. This
concern with appearances, and how she will be viewed by society,
skews her judgement and lends falsity to her interaction with all other
characters. The scene of her toilet – a conventional feature of the
stereotypical view of women’s vanity – is particularly revealing of her
close concern with personal appearance. Her practice of several
postures in which to receive her supposed lover, Sir Rowland,
suggests that her role in society as a whole is a ‘performance’ rather
than a genuine expression of her character.

Mirabell, by contrast, scorns such surface-appearances: whilst he is a

part of the world, and so to some extent compelled to behave
according to society’s rules, he is nonetheless a misfit too. His
conversations with Fainall, Mrs Fainall, and later Millamant reveal that
he is weary of and impatient with the superficial speech and
behaviour of his peers. A happy resolution to Mirabell’s alternative to
how he wants to live in the world – according to genuine feelings and
thoughts rather than affected ones – is promised in his union with
Millamant. Here, we find, both lovers are of one mind: each wishes to
live life according to their true natures and desires, rather than
according to the conventions or stereotypes imposed by a false,
artificial society.

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UNIT 10

ALEXANDER POPE: THE RAPE OF THE LOCK

AIM
The aim of this unit is to provide literary and social contexts for a
reading of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Explain Pope’s relation to literary history.

Give an account of the social world within which the action of The
Rape of the Lock unfolds.

Identify structures within the poem additional to those of plot and to

the development of action.

REQUIRED READING
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1714 version).

This poem is included in volume one of Stephen Greenblatt (ed.). 2012.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edn (New York: W. W.
Norton and Co.)

A reliable version of The Rape of the Lock can also be found in

Alexander Pope. 2008. Pat Rogers (ed.), Alexander Pope: Selected
Poetry (Oxford: World’s Classics) pp. 32-53.

INTRODUCTION
In the previous three units, we looked at various aspects of Restoration
literature, through the poetry of Rochester, Behn and Dryden, and the
theatre of William Congreve. We saw at the end of the last unit how The
Way of the World, which appeared on the stage in 1700, stood upon the
cusp of the new century, and how in many respects it embodies a
transition from the old to the new.

In this unit, we shall address how some of the prospects and promises,
for society and for literature, that lingered in the last few decades of the
seventeenth century came to be realised in one of the most sparkling
and successful publications of the early years of the eighteenth century:
Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.

We shall, nonetheless, see how many of the seeming contrasting ideas

we have explored so far within the seventeenth-century context – about
loss and renewal, tradition and innovation, the past and the future – are
also highly relevant to our understanding of Pope’s poem within its
historical context. In particular, we shall need to refer back at several
points to our exploration of John Dryden’s poetry in Unit 8. In particular,
our understanding of key terms such as ‘satire’ and ‘mock-heroic’ –
above all in our study of Dryden’s poem Mac Flecknoe – provides an
essential basis for understanding the origins of The Rape of the Lock’s
literary form. This foundation will also help us to appreciate more fully
what was new and innovative about Pope’s poem, and how through it he

Unit 10: Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock 10-1

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both pays homage to earlier literary giants (such as Dryden) and

challenges their status, to establish himself as an independent and
highly successful poet.

Our reading of The Rape of the Lock will thus begin with addressing
generic considerations: what kind of poem is this, and how does it relate
to what we know about mock-heroic poetry? We will use this exploration
as a stepping-stone to the subsequent section of this unit, where we
place the poem within its historical context. Pope’s contemporaries
appreciated The Rape of the Lock for its wit, inventiveness, learning and
sheer poetic beauty. Our own reading of the poem will, therefore, be
enhanced by situating it within the social context of early eighteenth-
century England.

THE RAPE OF THE LOCK: THE BACKGROUND

Before we address both the generic and the social contexts of The Rape
of the Lock, we should observe that, in some respects, this is an
‘occasional’ piece of writing. Think back to previous units, where we
explored this type of writing from different perspectives and in relation
to different authors: we saw how a real-life event could motivate, or
give cause to, a writer to produce a particular piece of work, be it in
poetry, prose or otherwise. We saw, for instance, how Lycidas had its
origin in the death of Milton’s friend, Edward King; in a different context
altogether, we saw how the censorship laws passed by the English
Parliament gave rise to Areopagitica’s genesis.

The Rape of the Lock, too, has its origin in a local, real-life event: but
rather than possessing the tragic, or seriously political, dimensions of
either of the occasions that prompted Milton to write either Lycidas or
Areopagitica, the prompt to write The Rape of the Lock came from a
quite different source, and was destined to adopt a very different shape.

What was the ‘occasion’ that caused Pope to write The Rape of the
Lock?

Sometime in 1711 an unusual event took place in London that sent

ripples of amusement, but also of discontent, among the high-society
coterie whose members it involved. Possibly as a practical joke, perhaps
motivated by malice, Robert, Lord Petre surreptitiously snipped a lock of
hair from the famous society beauty, Arabella Fermor. Both of these
individuals belonged to high-powered Catholic families, who had
formerly been very close – it was even a vague possibility that the two
might marry; however, this close relationship seemed to be threatened
by the sour effect created by this bad joke. Miss Fermor’s pride was
piqued; on the one side her friends rallied round her to condemn the
peer’s act, whilst on the other side Lord Petre’s supporters treated it as
a good joke.

Another nobleman, John Caryll, sought to reconcile the Fermor and

Petre families, as he was a strong friend to both. To achieve this aim,
Caryll sought the assistance of his young poet-friend, Alexander Pope
(1688-1744), who was then emerging as something of a literary
sensation himself. Pope had already published some successful poems,
including his Pastorals printed in the printer Jacob Tonson’s Poetical
Miscellanies 1709, and his Essay on Criticism had appeared in 1711.
Pope, partly because of his friendship with Caryll, and perhaps because
this commission posed a challenge to his creative talents, subsequently
produced The Rape of the Locke.

Pope’s poem uses the emerging mock-heroic form, which we

encountered in our reading of Mac Flecknoe. We shall go on to discuss
how Pope adopts and adapts this literary form in a subsequent section;

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for now, we can recall that the mock-heroic treats a trivial subject in an
inappropriately high-handed way. In presenting Arabella Fermor’s
‘tragedy’ as though it were precisely that, tragic, Pope suggests that the
incident itself is in fact very trifling. In choosing the mock-heroic as the
model for his poem, Pope hoped to turn to jest an affair that had caused
discontent, and so to ‘“laugh them together again” ’ (Tillotson 1954:
83).

The first version of The Rape of the Locke – with this variant spelling –
appeared in two cantos (or long verse ‘chapters’), which initially
circulated in manuscript in 1712, and was later printed in May of that
year. In 1714, Pope produced an expanded, five-canto version which he
titled The Rape of the Lock – the version most widely read today, and
which we shall focus on here in our analyses. The poem was an
immediate success, selling thousands of copies almost at once, and has
remained popular ever since, both for its inherent poetic merits and for
the dazzling picture that it paints of early eighteenth-century society –
and, as we shall see, for the brilliant satire it creates of that period and
its characters.

THE RAPE OF THE LOCK: THE POEM

With this background in mind, you should read the poem through to
familiarise yourself with its story, characters and structural shape. We
shall analyse specific passages in subsequent sections.

ACTIVITY
Read The Rape of the Lock.

What are your initial impressions upon reading Pope’s poem, in view of
the historical background we sketched in the previous section?

On first reading The Rape of the Lock, you might find the poem
somewhat intimidating: its language, style and length potentially
challenge our concentration or ability to follow what exactly is going on
in the surface story, let alone to grasp some of the hidden meanings
behind it.

How might we summarise the main narrative line of the poem?

ACTIVITY
Note down what you think are the main features of the ‘story’ in each
canto of The Rape of the Lock.

We can perhaps summarise that Pope’s poem tells the story of Belinda –
who represents the real-life Arabella Fermor – who is widely famed for
her beauty and success in high society. Above all her other personal
charms, she prizes two locks of hair,

[…] which graceful hung behind

In equal curls, and well conspired to deck
With shining ringlets her smooth ivory neck (II.20-22)

The anti-hero of the poem, the ‘adventurous Baron’ who stands in for
Lord Petre, ‘admired’ these locks (II.29) and wanted to add them to the
collection of trophies he had won from his various conquests over other

Unit 10: Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock 10-3

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women; these objects include random items, such as ‘three garters, half
a pair of gloves’ (II.38). Like Belinda, the Baron is proud, and his pride
is piqued at thinking that she is the one woman who might resist his
advances. So, at a social gathering at Hampton Court, he takes the
opportunity to snip off one of Belinda’s precious ‘curls’ from her neck.

At first Belinda is distressed but quickly becomes enraged: she rallies

her friends and supporters to engage in a combat of (mock) epic
proportions, but instead of real weapons the opponents hurl snuff-
boxes, fans and harsh looks at one another as each side tries to regain
the precious lock. Finally, Belinda lays the Baron low with ‘A charge of
snuff’ (V.82) but does not win back her lock of hair; instead, the lock
mysteriously vanishes and becomes a new constellation in ‘the lunar
sphere’ (V.113). The poem concludes with a comically adulatory vision
of Belinda’s lasting reputation:

This lock, the Muse shall consecrate to fame,

And ’midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name (V.149-50)

The enduring ‘fame’ Belinda will subsequently enjoy, of course, is that

which is provided by Pope’s poem – inspired by ‘the Muse’ – rather than
because her ‘lock’ really has become a new constellation.

In terms of the poem’s metaphor in this conclusion, however, part of

the explanation for this mysterious ascension of Belinda’s lock of hair to
join the stars comes with one of the major additions that Pope made to
his poem in the 1714 version. He introduced an army of celestial beings
– the Sylphs who are forces for good (with Ariel at their head) and the
Gnomes who are evil (led by Umbriel). The Sylphs and Gnomes are
presented as the real agents in the events that unravel in The Rape of
the Lock: it is the evil spirits who, on the one hand, incite the poem’s
characters to anger or to rage. On the other hand, it is the good spirits
(the Sylphs) who help Belinda to show her beauty to its best advantage
in the opening scenes, and who bring about a reconciliation in the
poem’s close.

Beyond the perhaps confusing ‘machinery’ of Pope’s Sylphs and

Gnomes, we might find the language and structure of his poem makes it
difficult to follow the thread of the action. The poem uses numerous
classical allusions (for example, Pope refers to the sun as Sol or
Phoebus); it has a certain amount of periphrasis, or round-about
expression (for example ‘finny prey’ for fish, or ‘glittering forfex’ for
scissors). However the use of classical allusions should be familiar from
the work of authors encountered in previous units, and in Pope’s case
(as in theirs) this provides evidence of his learning, but also of the
reverence with which he thinks about the classical past. This is
important in view of how Pope is, in some senses, an ‘inheritor’ of these
admired precedents, and Dryden in particular.

Nonetheless, the difficulties of allusion and language need not prevent

the poem from being enjoyable and accessible: obscure references can
soon be cleared up by referring to textual notes, and sometimes
pausing, reflecting upon, or re-reading certain demanding passages
reaps fine rewards in helping you fully to appreciate – and enjoy – The
Rape of the Lock’s accomplishment. By bearing in mind the many
literary forms and structures that we have discovered in previous units,
and their varied uses by different poets, we can tackle Pope’s poem with
insight and aplomb.

10-4 Literature 3
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THE RAPE OF THE LOCK AND MOCK-HEROIC

Indeed, to follow on from these observations, by analysing the literary
form of The Rape of the Lock we can better understand why Pope
chooses to treat Arabella Fermor’s grievance in the way he does in the
poem. In particular, we should cast our minds back to Unit 8, where we
gave some detailed attention to the mock-heroic in Dryden’s poem Mac
Flecknoe.

There, we learned, the mock-heroic is a piece ‘written in an ironically

grand style that is comically incongruous with the “low” or trivial subject
treated’ (Baldick 1990: 139). The mock-heroic form is characterised by
rhyming couplets, such as we found in Mac Flecknoe, and uses the
elevated diction and conventions of epic poetry.
In Unit 8 we also noted important mock-heroic literary precedents, such
as the Italian poet Tassoni’s Secchia Rapita (or Rape of the Bucket) of
1622, and the French poet Nicholas Boileau’s Le Lutrin, in 1674.

These preceding models are important to Pope when he undertakes to

write The Rape of the Lock in the mock-heroic style, for like these
earlier writers Pope uses the conventions and the diction of epic poetry
– employing stock features such as the ‘battle scene’, for example, or
presenting the central hero (often a warrior) in resounding and
triumphant terms. Epic poetry, as we discovered in our discussion of
Milton’s Paradise Lost, often uses what are known as ‘epithets’ to
describe certain characters: the same phrase is repeatedly used each
time the character is introduced, so that we become familiar with his or
her defining quality (such as ‘swift-footed Achilles’, in Homer’s Iliad).

As such, The Rape of the Lock is a self-conscious literary work. Pope

constructs his poem so that the reader gives as much attention to how
the story is told as he or she gives to the actual events themselves. At
the end of the poem, Pope will speak of ‘quick, poetic eyes’ (V.124), but
throughout The Rape we are very conscious of how the poet uses
literary conventions to shape his vision. Without some sense, on our
part, of these conventions a good deal of the poem’s point is lost.

What are these epic conventions in Pope’s poem, and how does his
treatment of such conventions indicate the true nature and purpose of
The Rape of the Lock as a mock-heroic poem?

Following the example of classical epic, Pope begins his poem by

summarising its action and asking the muse to inspire him. Like the
Iliad or The Aeneid, Pope’s poem concerns ‘mighty contests’ (I.2), but
whereas those epics cover momentous events occurring in different
lands over an extensive period, the action of Pope’s poem occupies a
single day in the life of polite London society.

ACTIVITY
Re-read The Rape of the Lock, Canto I, ll. 1-12.

What do you notice that is particularly striking in these lines, in terms of

what you already know (from this unit and previous units) about epic
conventions? Underline those words or phrases that seem to you
especially significant in this respect.

The poem, we see, opens with an invocation – a standard feature of

epic poetry. Yet in Pope’s hands it serves a rather different purpose to
its function in, say, Homer’s Iliad or Paradise Lost. How can we discover
these differences, and their alternative purpose in Pope’s poem?

Unit 10: Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock 10-5

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Compare the invocation of The Rape of the Lock to that of Virgil’s

Aeneid (given below in Dryden’s translation, under the Latin title of
Æneis, of 1697): it is clear that Pope very deliberately echoes Virgil’s
poem at several points, yet these echoes help establish how dissimilar
the two poems are:

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate

And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan Shoar:
Long Labours, both by Sea and Land he bore;
And in the doubtful War, before he won
The Latian Realm, and built the destin’d Town:
His banish’d Gods restor’d to Rites Divine,
And setl’d sure Succession in his Line:
From whence the Race of Alban Fathers come,
And the long Glories of Majestick Rome.
O Muse! the Causes and Crimes relate,
What Goddess was provok’d, and whence her hate:
For what Offence the Queen of Heav’n began
To persecute so brave, so just a Man!
Involv’d his anxious Life in endless Cares,
Expos’d to Wants, and hurry’d into Wars!
(Dryden 1997: I, 1-16, p. 1)

Virgil’s subject is man at war. His poem involves a wide geographical

and temporal sweep; the poet will follow Aeneas from Troy (in present-
day Turkey) to Rome, and his poem will be concerned with the founding
of a dynasty. Virgil’s is a story of how a hero can overcome banishment
and divine rage and finally establish ‘sure succession’ in another land.

Pope’s poem replaces Aeneas with a society belle and, whereas Virgil is
concerned with the anger of the ‘Queen of Heaven’, Pope writes of the
‘mighty rage’ which dwells in the soft bosom of an earthly female.

The Rape uses many of the superficial features of epic (invocation of the
muse, sacrificing to the Gods, battles) but the subject of the poem is
not itself heroic. Humour and comedy result from the discrepancy
between style and subject-matter. The opening lines of the poem re-
enforce our sense that lack of proportion is itself a major subject of the
poem. We are going to read of ‘mighty contests’ but the strife arises
from ‘trivial things’.

Pope continues to substitute standard features of epic throughout the

poem: female for male, earthly for divine. He also uses the epic
convention of public games where the hero is able to show his prowess
through such sports as spear-throwing. In epic, the games are an
opportunity for the poet to show that his heroes will be equally talented,
strong and triumphant on the battle-field. The Rape of the Lock also
uses the conventional battle-scene in his poem, but – just as the
characters and settings are greatly different to those of Virgil’s Aeneid,
for instance – in The Rape of the Lock the ‘battle’ adopts a very different
quality, involves very ‘un-heroic’ characters, and serves distinctly
alternative purposes.

We get a sense of how different Pope’s battle scene will be at an early

point in the poem: in Canto I, when Belinda (finally out of bed) prepares
herself for the day ahead, Pope compares her to an epic hero arming for
battle: ‘Now awful beauty puts on all its arms’ (I.139). Her ‘army’ of
Sylphs is also described in military terms, as ‘The light militia of the
lower sky’ (I.42).

10-6 Literature 3
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And what of her intended opponent on the ‘battlefield’, the Baron? We

are given a sense of what kind of warrior he will be through the
preparations that he makes for his own ‘conquests’ in the day ahead.
Conventionally, in epic poetry, the warrior hero makes a sacrifice before
going into battle that, he hopes, will appease the gods and win their
favour – and ultimately gain him victory. In Canto II, the Baron also
makes a ‘heroic’ sacrifice; but its features and purposes are very
different to those of an Achilles or Aeneas.

ACTIVITY
Re-read Canto II, ll. 35-47.

Underline those words and phrases in these lines that seem to invoke
the conventions of ‘epic sacrifice’. Do you notice anything unusual about
how these features are presented?

You might, for instance notice that the ‘altar’ the Baron builds is
dedicated to ‘love’ (II.37); whilst ‘love’ is a deity in the classical world –
embodied (in Greek mythology) in Aphrodite, and in Roman mythology
as Venus – the Baron’s altar is actually devoted to a more generic idea,
‘love’, rather than a specific deity. Accordingly, the trophies and
treasures that he offers to this ‘god’ in sacrifice are petty, shambolic and
undignified; as we noted earlier, they include stray garments (such as
garters and odd gloves), and rather than noble lines of verse, his
sacrifice is ignited with ‘tender billet-doux’ (II.41). That the divine
‘powers’ only ‘granted half his prayer’ indicates the true nature of this
sacrifice; like the vain and vaporous Baron himself, Pope tells us of
these prayers that:

The rest, the winds dispersed in empty air (II.46)

Belinda and the Baron, then, are worthy opponents in the sense that
they are equally matched in vanity and a superficial concern with such
mighty matters as ‘divine power’. We are told of Belinda, for instance,
that:

On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,

Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore (II.7-8)

As these lines indicate, Belinda does not take religion seriously, but is
more concerned with the appearance she will make in public. Indeed, as
we learn when she prepares her toilet in the first canto, her dressing-
table is littered with ‘Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux’
(I.138). That a sacred text is scattered indiscriminately among these
items suggests the low regard in which she holds it.

So, when Belinda and the Baron finally confront one another in the
battle scene that we expect to find in conventional epic poems, we are
prepared for a very different confrontation between warriors than that
which Homer describes of Achilles and Hector, or that Virgil presents
between Aeneas and Turnus.

ACTIVITY
Re-read Canto V, ll. 35-102.

Unit 10: Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock 10-7

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Note down those features of these lines that resonate with what we
might expect to find in a ‘conventional’ battle-scene in an epic poem.
How are these treated differently in The Rape of the Lock?

The pattern of events – from the initial call to arms, to the fight
between key figures on either side of the dispute, to the eventual
victory over the ‘villain’ and his fall – are mirrored in Pope’s lines.
Nonetheless, their treatment is very different to that of The Iliad or The
Aeneid. Indeed, it is indicated that The Rape of the Lock is a very
different kind of ‘epic’ through the direct mention of ‘bold Homer’
(V.45), whose poetry is invoked to expose all the more readily the
discrepancies in how Pope treats his ‘epic’ material.

Not only are the deities of this battle scene – the Sylphs and Gnomes –
inferior versions of the Olympians Homer depicts, but when these gods
are invoked it is in a decidedly diminishing way:

Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air,

Weighs the men’s wits against the lady’s hair (V.71-2)

That ‘wits’ and ‘hair’ are considered to be equally weighty indicates the
truly trivial and vacuous nature of this contest. The weaponry used
confirms this impression, as you will have noted: instead of spears,
swords and shields, we find that a ‘bodkin’ and a ‘charge of snuff’ bring
about the final victory.

Similarly, the Baron’s demise compares unfavourably with, say, Hector’s

at Achilles’ hands; he begs for life so that he might ‘burn in Cupid’s
flames’ (V.102) – a very demeaning way of pleading for his life. Rather
than wishing to die nobly and with honour, the Baron wishes to live,
that he might pursue the amorous intrigues inspired by ‘Cupid’s flames’.

So, we find, The Rape of the Lock uses many of the superficial features
of epic (invocation of the muse, sacrificing to the Gods, battles, long,
formal speeches) but treats these in a comically unsuitable way. This is
partly because the setting and characters of Pope’s poem are vastly
different to those of ancient Greece or Rome, or indeed to Milton’s
Paradise Lost. The subject of The Rape of the Lock poem is not itself
heroic: humour results from the discrepancy between style and subject-
matter, which helps to reinforce the satiric purpose of the poem. By
presenting the ‘trivial things’ that the poem mentions in its opening lines
in a surprisingly high-handed manner, their real triviality is exposed to
comic scrutiny.

So, when we read the words ‘glittering forfex’ or ‘fatal engine’ (V.147,
149), and then discover that the object in question is only a pair of
scissors, we are encouraged to smile, and to reflect with gently derisive
humour upon the serious ‘crime’ that this weapon will soon help the
Baron to perform.

As such, Pope can reaffirm the poem’s actual purpose – to ‘laugh

together’ two disgruntled parties – by using the conventions of epic
poetry in a comic way. Like Tassoni or Boileau, and like Dryden, Pope
employs the characteristic features of epic poetry in a tongue-in-cheek
way, so as to emphasise the essentially trivial nature of the subject-
matter he is presenting in the poem. A clue is, of course, given in the
title; like Tassoni’s Secchia Rapita – which translated into English means
‘the rape of the bucket’ – the ‘rape’ of Pope’s poem is not the horrific
crime that we might initially believe it to be upon hearing the word. In
fact, the use of the term ‘rape’ here should be understood as in
accordance with the Latin term rapere, meaning ‘carrying off’. Thus, the
‘rape’ of Pope’s poem is an exaggerated way of describing the much
more trifling ‘crime’ of the theft of a lock of hair. That this might in fact

10-8 Literature 3
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represent something more than just a prized lock of hair – and might
actually stand in for Belinda’s chastity – is just one sub-text of the poem
that lends its seemingly light-hearted subject-matter a more provokingly
erotic sub-text.

By using the mock-heroic, by treating a ‘low’ subject-matter in an

incongruously high-handed way, Pope thus exposes the trivial nature of
the poem’s subject. As such, he can show that Arabella Fermor’s
response is an unnecessarily exaggerated one, and so hopefully prompt
her to laugh at herself; in doing so, Pope hopes, she may become
reconciled to Lord Petre.

However, in The Rape of the Lock, the real-life Arabella and Lord Petre
become submerged in the comic exaggeration of Belinda and the
Baron’s characters: rather than being direct ‘pictures’ of these real-life
figures, Pope presents us with caricatures. He does this to avoid
offending the poem’s living equivalents, by making his portraits of them
too close to life, but also succeeds in achieving the purpose of his satire
more effectively as a result. As we found in the previous two units, both
Dryden and Congreve show that exaggerating a person’s character-
traits or personal features exposes them to ridicule more successfully,
so that by laughing at our faults and foibles we might be urged to
correct them.

As such, The Rape of the Lock allows us to approach the matter of social
satire from yet another perspective: Pope holds a mirror up to his age –
just as Congreve did in The Way of the World, or Dryden did (for
varying reasons) in Absalom and Achitophel and Mac Flecknoe – and by
reflecting the truly trivial nature of what society holds to be particularly
important, he can expose its members to the corrective force of self-
mockery.

Laura Brown argues that the heroic material of The Rape of the Lock
contrasts the world of the poem with ‘the grandeur of epic, a world of
gods and goddesses, of heroes larger than life, where history is made
and great nations find their identity’ (1985: 20). This unfavourably
contrasts Pope’s own day with that of former times; there is a distinct
element of nostalgia about how Pope conceives of the past – its
achievements and its literature, both of the classical past and of the
recent decades that witnessed the work of Milton or Dryden.

Nonetheless, this presents a somewhat jaded impression of Pope’s view

of his own day: he was very much a man of his own time, and while
there may have been much to condemn or to ridicule in contemporary
society, there was much to admire too. In fact, his own achievements as
a writer – one who forged his own poetic identity and independent
career – depended on how he showed his indebtedness to the past, but
also his ability to innovate on tradition, and to create something new.

As such, the mock-heroic form that had only recently begun to take
shape towards the close of the seventeenth century offered Pope a
fitting vehicle to forge this identity. Think back to Unit 8, where we
reflected upon terms such as ‘Augustan’, and suggested how Pope was
in some senses Dryden’s poetic ‘inheritor’. We shall address Pope’s
approach to authorship more fully in the next unit; but it is important to
note, in relation to The Rape of the Lock, Pope shows that he surpasses
Dryden’s use of the form in Mac Flecknoe to create a poem that is
altogether richer, fuller and more dazzling. As the critic Richard Terry
writes,

Unit 10: Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock 10-9

_____________________________________________________________________

Mock-heroic is perhaps the exemplary genre of the Augustan era:

it is one of the few genres that the Augustans could be said to have
invented themselves, and it could be seen as a paradigmatic
literary form for a culture still reverential to the grandeurs of the
classical past but increasingly vexed about their continuing
relevance to a shabby modern reality. (2005: 3)

Thus, as Terry suggests, classical ‘grandeurs’ are incongruously placed

within the modern-day context, and this surprising juxtaposition serves
to emphasise the comparatively ‘shabby’ nature of the modern world.
Yet while this is a vision of contemporary society – and in particular
contemporary literature – that Pope was to realise most fully in his
great mock-heroic poem The Dunciad (whose final, four-book version
appeared in 1743), in The Rape of the Lock the mock-heroic is used to
create a satire that is more affectionate than cruelly damning; the faults
and foibles the poem exposes are trivial but not corrupting.

According to Pope’s biographer, Maynard Mack, Pope ‘represents the

absurdities of the fashionable world with affection, and with an eye to
the delicate beauties that its best graces unfold’ while never letting us
‘forget that in such a world ethical judgments have reached a sad
disarray’ (1985: 255). As Mack suggests, the mock-heroic’s ‘structure’
provides Pope with the ideal way of addressing the undue emphasis his
contemporaries place upon ‘trifles’.

Even one of the major features of the poem that has attracted particular
attention – Pope’s attitude towards women, as revealed in his treatment
of Belinda – shows that, for all that she is shown to be petty and vain,
the poem holds a distinct fondness towards ‘the fair sex’. Even more
than this, perhaps, Pope’s treatment of women offers a further strain to
his social satire: he shows that, if women are vain and concerned with
trivialities, it is because society constrains them to act according to
certain stereotypes and conventions that it falsely imposes upon them –
much like the social constraints Millamant and Mirabell seek to break
free from at the end of The Way of the World.

SAQ 1
What are the conventions of epic poetry used in Pope’s The Rape of the
Lock, and how does his mock-heroic treatment of them indicate the
true, satirical purpose of his poem?

We might, then, suggest that through his poem Pope offers a satirical
reflection upon the social world to which its real-life characters belong
(and in which he also circulates). But what is the social world that Pope
depicts in The Rape of the Lock, and subjects to the corrective power of
his poem’s satire?

THE SOCIAL WORLD OF THE RAPE OF THE LOCK

We mentioned in the previous section that Pope’s treatment of women –
as represented in the figure of Belinda – offers us some insight into how
Pope perceives and portrays the society to which she, as a woman,
belongs. This attitude towards women has incited much critical debate,
with on the one hand Pope being accused as a misogynist, and on the
other his being ‘rescued’ as an apologist for female virtues, and as a
critic of social stereotypes. Both approaches could potentially be
justified in reading the poem from different perspectives – it is up to
you to decide how you consider the matter, by carefully balancing the
evidence we find in the poem itself.

10-10 Literature 3
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Nonetheless, one celebrated scene in The Rape of the Lock offers us a

potential starting-point for our enquiry into how women, and the social
world to which they belong, are presented in the poem: the scene of
Belinda’s toilet in Canto I.

ACTIVITY
Re-read Canto I, ll. 121-48.

What are your initial impressions upon reading this passage? Do you
think that Belinda comes across as petty or vain? Or do you admire the
way in which she uses her feminine beauty to ensure her status – or
even her power – in her own social world? Note down those words and
phrases that support your conclusions.

We have already noticed such lines as ‘Puffs, powders, patches, bibles,

billet-doux’ (I.138), and how these might reflect in a negative way upon
Belinda’s superficial approach to genuinely serious matters, such as
religion. Similarly, the matters that Belinda is shown to consider
important are perhaps, for us, rather trifling: at an earlier point in this
Canto, for instance, the speaker describes the female heart as ‘the
moving toyshop’ (I.100), which is hardly flattering of women’s intellect.
In the toilet scene itself, this concern with love as a matter of
appearances, rather than profound emotion, emerges in the
considerable concern that Belinda takes over crafting her ‘charms’ the
better to win the affections of those she shall meet in society.

Note how, like the Baron’s ‘sacrifice’ in the subsequent canto, Belinda
stands before her dressing table as before an ‘altar’. She offers various
trophies to the goddess of beauty – ‘glittering spoil’ from exotic
locations, as she from ‘This casket India’s glowing gems unlocks’ (I.132-
3). Her dressing table is littered with implements to assist the toilet,
made from equally rich and costly materials: the ‘tortoise’ and ivory
(‘elephant’) ‘combs’ (I.135-6) that are essential to creating the
devastatingly charming coiffure that will ensure Belinda will make a
stunning impression when she enters society.

It is significant that, in these lines, the objects of Pope’s attention here

are perfectly ordinary; yet the process by which they come to be on
Belinda’s dressing table makes them appear strange and wonderful. The
exotic connotations of such luxury items as ivory and tortoise-shell, like
the jewels of her ‘casket’, evoke a wider network of commercial trade
and industry surrounding the poem. These objects inspire images of
commerce and empire, of Britain’s global power in the wider world,
miniaturised on Belinda’s dressing table. Think back to Unit 1, where we
encountered Dryden’s poem Annus Mirabilis (1666): here, we saw how
the ‘silver Thames’ was a waterway linking London and the wider world
of trade, with its unfamiliar and exotic objects.

Here, too, in the very familiar items of Belinda’s toilet Pope evokes a
sense of strangeness that reminds us of the individual’s role in
promoting the image of Britain’s power and commercial wealth. In
adorning herself with gems from India and perfume from Arabia, she
advertises English commercial power. For one critic, this makes her ‘a
vast nexus of enterprises, a vast commercial expansion which stirred
the imagination of Englishmen to dwell on thoughts of greatness and
magnificence’ (Landa 1982: 197).

Belinda is therefore in some senses reified in these lines: she becomes

an object herself, both through her relation to other objects and

Unit 10: Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock 10-11

_____________________________________________________________________

because, in the beautifying process of her toilet, she makes herself an

attractive ‘item’ on the marriage-market – an idea that we shall return
to at a later point in this unit. In these lines, this impression is enhanced
by the description of how she decks her face with ‘cosmetic powers’
(I.124). However, think back to our discussion of Lady Wishfort’s toilet
in The Way of the World: do Belinda’s preparations seem quite the same
to you? In Congreve’s play, we saw how an ageing woman tried to
enhance her charms through artificial cosmetics – the ‘paints’ and
applications used by many women of her class. We also saw how
Mirabell insists that Millamant shall scorn such artificial aids to beauty in
their marriage ‘contract’.

Here, Belinda shares with Millamant the quality of youthful beauty:

while she adorns herself with jewels, and carefully decks her hair
(which, at this period, would be all the more impressive for being
natural rather than a wig), she is shown to possess natural charms
rather than created, artificial ones. Rather than applying ‘paint’ or
rouge, Belinda

Repairs her smiles, awakens every grace,

And calls forth all the wonders of her face;
Sees by degrees a purer blush arise,
And keener lightnings quicken in her eyes (I.141-44)

Do you detect a note of genuine admiration for Belinda here, which

implies that, unlike other society belles, she in fact possesses natural
‘grace’ and charms that means she need not disguise herself with
cosmetics? As such, her ‘conquest’ over the hearts of many lovers is
perhaps fairly won.

Whilst the toilet scene in Canto I might offer a mocking image of female
vanity, then, it also holds the potential to present a more affectionate
picture of the poem’s heroine. Furthermore, arguably her role as a
member of a society which demands that she should be beautiful to be
considered valuable casts a negative light upon that society, rather than
the woman herself. We perhaps get a stronger sense of this impression
in Pope’s description in Canto IV of how Belinda must ‘torture’ her hair
to create the elegant coiffure that will be so devastating to her potential
lovers – and, as the poem proves, to her own vanity.

ACTIVITY
Re-read Canto IV, ll. 95-120.

Note down those words that strike you as particularly effective in

describing how laborious and, possibly, painful the female toilet could
be.

In Thalestris’ speech, her reference to the standard ‘tools’ of a lady’s

toilet might strike us as highly unappealing, and verge on the
gruesome: the phrase ‘torturing irons’ (IV.100) creates a particularly
powerful image, especially when contrasted with that of the ‘tender
head’ (IV.101). This speech implies that women must endure a painfully
tortuous – and torturous – process in order to ‘beautify’ themselves
before appearing in society. She is placed here as a victim assailed by
the brutal weaponry of ‘bodkin’ and ‘comb’, her ‘locks in paper durance
bound’ (IV.99) as though imprisoned. Belinda’s grief that her lock of
hair should have been ‘raped’ is, perhaps, more understandable when
we realise the lengths she has had to go to so as to create her coiffure.

However, could we argue that this artificial beautification in fact makes

10-12 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

Belinda partly culpable for the ‘tragedy’ that befalls her? Arguably, it is
through making herself so beautiful that Belinda exposes herself to the
desire, and therefore the threat, of male admirers; and yet,
paradoxically, it is society’s demand that she must live up to this role
which bears the ultimate blame for making her prize such superficial
appearances. Indeed, the remainder of Thalestris’ speech (IV.103-120)
supports the impression that she is an unfortunate sacrifice to society’s
demands of how a woman should appear and behave.

The greatest cause of Belinda’s grief is not that her finely-wrought lock
of hair should have been stolen, but that its ‘ravisher’ will use it as a
means to expose her to ridicule in society. She fears that the Baron will
‘display your hair’, to make ‘the fops envy, and the ladies stare!’
(IV.103-4). Whilst this might encourage us to think that Belinda places
an undue weight upon how other people will think of her, now that she
must appear with only one of her two prized locks of her, nonetheless
we can sense a genuine sympathy for her position when we realise that,
in this period, a woman’s ostracism from society could have disastrous
consequences for her future.

A woman was prized for her virtue, as well as her wealth and beauty –
even if (as satirical playwrights such as Congreve suggest) that virtue is
only a pretence, or affected. These necessary qualities made a woman
marriageable, on a ‘market’ where superficial appearances of virtue, if
not their actuality, were essential; for a woman to be known not to be
pure before marriage could imply that any future children she bore to
her husband might be illegitimate heirs. Therefore, it was essential for
women, at a time when women’s rights as such were virtually non-
existent, to preserve her reputation for virtue – as well as making
herself attractive to potential suitors.

Belinda’s world was one in which women were constantly warned that
having a virtuous reputation was as important as being virtuous. Some
years before Pope wrote The Rape of the Lock, the Marquis of Halifax
wrote his Lady’s New Years Gift: or, Advice to a Daughter (1688). In
this text, Halifax warns his daughter about the dangers of her social
position:

At other times, when my Fears prevail, I shrink as if I was struck,

at the Prospect of Danger, to which a young Woman must be
expos’d. But how much the more Lively, so much the more Liable
you are to be hurt; as the finest Plants are the soonest nipped by
the Frost. Whilst you are playing full of Innocence, the spiteful
world will bite, except you are guarded by your Caution. Want of
Care therefore, my dear Child, is never to be excus’d; since as to
this World, it hath the same effect as want of Vertue.
(Halifax 1688: 2-3)

It is the appearance of the ‘want of Vertue’ as much as its actual

absence that could potentially bring lasting social disaster to the
innocent young flower of womanhood. Similarly, in Thalestris’ speech,
we can see genuine cause for concern in her fear that Belinda will now
be:
[…] a degraded toast,
And all your honour in a whisper lost! (IV.109-110)

If Belinda’s ‘honour’ is even suspected of having been compromised,

then she could not only be exposed to the ridicule of polite society but
lose her place within it; her exclusion could spell lasting future disaster
for her potential to find a suitable husband.

Words such as ‘helpless fame’ and ‘infamy’ thus indicate how very easy
it could be for a woman’s reputation to be lost from such slight and

Unit 10: Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock 10-13

_____________________________________________________________________

trivial causes. However, Thalestris’ speech (and other elements of the

poem) suggests that there may be an erotic subtext to Pope’s story of
the ‘rape of the lock’: according to some readers and critics, this ‘lock’
does not actually refer to a real lock of hair, but to Belinda’s chastity.

The implication is, not that the Baron ‘raped’ Belinda, but that she has
allowed herself to become victim to his advances: she has compromised
her reputation by sacrificing her virginity. This reading is supported by
words such as ‘infamy’, which imply a lasting slur on Belinda’s virtuous
reputation; but in fact Belinda herself conveys such a hint, in her
reproach to the Baron,

O hadst thou, cruel! been content to seize

Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these! (IV.175-6)

Even Pope’s earliest readers detected bawdy innuendo here.

The machinery of the Sylphs further reinforces this sense of potential

sexual desire pitted against social constraints. The Sylphs exist to guard
‘the purity of melting maids’ (I.71). However, a woman can only be
guarded successfully if she does not feel any sexual desire; once there
is an ‘earthly lover’ lurking in Belinda’s heart the Sylphs become
powerless and are forced to retire. Indeed, the image of ‘melting maids’
holds a potentially bawdy innuendo which a reader attuned to, say,
Rochester’s exploitation of verbal ambiguity might notice.

The Rape of the Lock’s exploration of sexuality in a civilised world

therefore exposes some of the problems and hypocrisies belonging to
Pope’s contemporary society. The elaborate conventions of Belinda’s
world are supposed to ensure the satisfaction of desire through
courtship and marriage; the failure of this process results in unsatisfied
desire, which is potentially corrupting and harmful to individuals, and to
society as a whole. The idea that repressed desire is potentially
destructive is conveyed in a particularly gruelling image in Canto IV,
where in the Cave of Spleen we find that instead of healthy reproductive
processes,

Men prove with child, as powerful fancy works,

And maids turned bottles, cry aloud for corks. (IV.53-4)

However we choose to interpret the potentially erotic subtexts of The

Rape of the Lock – a reading which we might, of course, reject – the
poem’s basic argument remains the same: the story it relates situates
women as both vain and trifling, and yet victims too. They are placed
within an uncompromising social position where they are compelled to
sustain appearances, in all respects of the word: they must be beautiful
and attractive to their male suitors, but must also uphold a reputation
for virtue. A woman’s chastity is the essential ‘jewel’, as it were, of her
marriage dowry. Belinda’s fear for society’s mockery both provides
evidence of her attention to surface-appearances and superficial
impressions, but is also a necessary condition of her place within that
society. A further depiction of gender relations and restrictive social
norms appears in Clarissa’s speech in Canto V. You might like to
examine ‘grave’ Clarissa’s pronouncements in detail and compare her to
other characters in the poem, such as Belinda and Sir Plume. Does
Clarissa support women’s interests, or does she place further restrictions
on women? What is the reaction to her speech and what does this imply
about contemporary society?

10-14 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

SAQ 2
Should Belinda be blamed for being superficial, and concerned only
with surface appearances, or can we also be sympathetic towards her
as the ‘victim’ of the social constraints placed upon women in her
position at this time?

THE RAPE OF THE LOCK’S ‘METAMORPHOSES’

Writing of The Rape of the Lock in his An Introduction to Pope, Pat
Rogers observes that the poem is much more than a satire of frivolous
socialites; it is also on one level ‘an Ovidian myth, a story of magical
transformations’ (1975: 37). Rogers refers here to Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, a work which was hugely influential for eighteenth-
century writers.

Metamorphosis means change, or transformation; this theme links

together Ovid’s mythological tales of how gods change themselves into
men or creatures to seduce young nymphs, and of how mortals are
transformed into different creatures either by the gods’ wrath, jealousy
or grief. The tale of Narcissus is perhaps the most familiar – the tale of
the handsome youth so enamoured of his own beautiful reflection in the
lake that he wastes away, and is transformed into a narcissus flower.

Like Ovid, Pope writes of how bodies are transformed into different
shapes, but the changes with which The Rape of the Lock is concerned
are not those wrought by gods either punishing or rewarding mortals,
but are those enabled by civilisation. Think back to the scene of
Belinda’s toilet, and how the tortoise and the elephant are transformed
to create the ‘combs’ on her dressing table. Belinda herself is
transformed by ‘cosmetic powers’, not to mention the ‘torturing’
equipment that creates her coiffure. The Sylphs, with their ‘Colours that
change whene’er they wave their wings’ (II.68) are shape-shifting,
celestial beings with the power to effect change in the lives of the
mortals with whom they are concerned. Other, darker, transformations
also take place in the poem, such as the grotesque, monstrous bodies of
the Cave of Spleen. Finally, the lock snipped from Belinda’s head is
transformed into a ‘radiant trail’ in the heavens (V.128).

ACTIVITY
Note down those features of the poem which seem to you to provide
evidence of transformation or ‘metamorphosis’.

These changes, however, also operate on an artistic level, as well as on

the level of subject-matter. We have discussed at an earlier point in this
unit how Pope employs the mock-heroic form that we encountered in
our previous discussion of Dryden. Yet rather than simply replicating the
form and subject-matter of Mac Flecknoe, we have seen how Pope
transforms both the content and the structural qualities of Dryden’s
model to create a new, and very different kind of poem, one more
closely related to the changed social world that Pope reflects upon in
The Rape of the Lock.

Perhaps, at the close of his poem, Pope offers a comment upon the
lasting nature of his achievement. This is both because he has built
upon tradition, the achievements of previous generations of poets, but
has also introduced innovation, to produce a poem that is successful

Unit 10: Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock 10-15

_____________________________________________________________________

because distinctly his own. The lasting quality of The Rape of the Lock is
also contrasted to the transient social world to which Belinda, and her
beauty, belongs: whereas age and death will eventually ravage
Belinda’s physical person, her fame is ensured through Pope’s poem. As
such, he tells us,

This lock, the Muse shall consecrate to fame,

And ’midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name. (V. 149-50)

The metaphorical transformation of Belinda’s lock of hair into a new

constellation is, in fact, realised here in more concrete form: it is
enshrined in the tangible, lasting monument of Pope’s poem, which
whilst consecrating Belinda’s ‘fame’ for posterity also ensures that the
poet himself, and his Rape of the Lock, will gain eternal fame.

SAQ 3
How does the theme of ‘metamorphosis’ operate in The Rape of the
Lock, on both an actual and a metaphorical level?

REVIEW
In this unit, we have approached Pope’s The Rape of the Lock from
different perspectives, which to some extent have allowed us to place it
within our picture of early eighteenth-century literature compared to
that studied in previous units. We have discussed how, paradoxically,
Pope’s poem incorporates both continuity and change: like his important
precursor, Dryden, Pope admires and draws on the models provided by
classical authors, and in particular epic poetry. Yet we have also seen
that, just as Dryden employs the epic to produce a mock-epic poem,
Mac Flecknoe, which exposes its target (Shadwell) to satirical critique,
similarly Pope produces a mock-heroic poem in The Rape of the Lock:
by employing epic conventions, but using such a ‘high’ style to present
‘low’ subject-matter, Pope can better expose the genuine triviality of his
subject-matter. As such, he hopes to alert the real-life figures behind
The Rape of the Lock’s genesis of the actually trifling nature of their
dispute, and so ‘laugh them together again’.

We have also seen, though, that Pope’s satire is targeted towards

society as a whole, in particular through The Rape of the Lock’s
treatment of female vanity and of sexuality. We have discussed how,
while Belinda is shown to be frivolous and vain about her personal
appearance, she is also playing a role allotted to her by a society that
places a high value on such superficial surfaces. As such, we have seen,
The Rape of the Lock neither condemns nor confirms social norms, but
through the satire of its mock-heroic subjects them to comical, critical
scrutiny.

Finally, we have seen how this connects to the theme of

‘transformation’, which operates on several different levels in the poem.
Ultimately, Belinda’s lasting fame – like that of Arabella Fermor – is
secured long after the incident itself that gave rise to The Rape of the
Lock has been forgotten: both are permanently preserved in Pope’s
poem, which also ensures his own lasting fame as a poet who builds on
the models provided by former poets, but also creates his own poetic
identity through his innovative poem.

In the next unit, we shall address questions surrounding ‘authorship’

and poetic identity in closer detail, both in relation to Pope and to
female poets of the early eighteenth century.

10-16 Literature 3
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ADDITIONAL READING

PRIMARY MATERIAL
Dryden, John. 1997. Frederick Keener (ed.), Virgil’s Aeneid: Translated
by John Dryden (Harmondsworth: Penguin)

Halifax, George Savile, Marquis of. 1699. Lady’s New-Year’s Gift: or,
Advice to a daughter as to religion, husband, house, family and
children, behaviour and conversation, friendship, censure, vanity
and affectation, pride, diversions, dancing (London) (Available
online via [Link])

SECONDARY MATERIAL
Brooks, Cleanth. 1943. ‘The Case of Miss Arabella Fermor: A Re-
Examination’, The Sewanee Review, 51. 4: 505-524 (Available
on JSTOR)

Cohen, Ralph. 1969. ‘Transformation in The Rape of the Lock’,

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2. 3: 205-224 (Available on JSTOR)

Crehan, Stewart. 1997. ‘“The Rape of the Lock” and the Economy of
“Trivial Things”’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31. 1: 45-68
(Available on JSTOR)

Hunt, John Dixon (ed.). 1968. The Rape of the Lock: A Casebook
(London: Macmillan)

Jack, Ian. 1942. Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English Poetry
1660-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Knellwolf, Christa. 1998. A Contradiction Still: Representations of

Women in the Poetry of Alexander Pope (Manchester:
Manchester University Press)

Kroll, Richard. 2000. ‘Pope and Drugs: The Pharmacology of “The Rape
of the Lock”’, ELH, 67. 1: 99-141 (Available on JSTOR)

Pollak, Ellen. 1985. The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in
the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago: Chicago University Press)

Rogers, Pat. 2004. ‘Alexander Pope and “Duke upon Duke”: Satiric
Context, Aims, and Means’, The Modern Language Review, 99.
4: 875-888 (Available on JSTOR)

REFERENCES
Baldick, Chris. 1990. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
(Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Brown, Laura. 1985. Alexander Pope (London: Methuen)

Landa, Louis. 1982. ‘Pope’s Belinda, The General Emporie of the World,
and the Wondrous Worm’, in Essays in Eighteenth-Century
Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press)

Mack, Maynard. 1985. Alexander Pope: A Life (Yale: Yale University

Press)

Rogers, Pat. 1975. An Introduction to Pope (London: Methuen) (Parts

available online via Google Books)

Unit 10: Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock 10-17

_____________________________________________________________________

Terry, Richard. 2005. Mock-Heroic from Butler to Cowper: An English

Genre and Discourse (Aldershot: Ashgate) (Parts available via
Google Books)

Tillotson, Geoffrey. 1954. The Rape of the Lock and other poems, 2nd
edn (Oxford: Clarendon)

INTERNET RESOURCES
BBC4’s radio programme ‘In our Time’ includes a discussion of the life
and times of Alexander Pope:
<[Link] [Accessed 25 April
2013]

10-18 Literature 3
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ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
What are the conventions of epic poetry used in Pope’s The Rape of the
Lock, and how does his mock-heroic treatment of them indicate the
true, satirical purpose of his poem?

Like Dryden’s poem Mac Flecknoe, Pope’s The Rape of the Lock draws
on conventions belonging to epic poetry, but transforms these for the
satirical purposes of his poem. Alongside local, linguistic features found
in epic poetry (such as ‘heroic’ epithets), Pope incorporates structures
familiar from, for instance, Homer or Virgil into his poem. The opening
invocation to the muse, or the battle-scene, both of which are central to
poems such as The Iliad or The Aeneid, also appear in The Rape of the
Lock, but with significantly different effects and for divergent purposes.

Essentially, Pope employs epic conventions in an inverted way: he uses

the ‘high’ style of epic poetry to address ‘low’ subject matter. This
enables him to achieve his satiric purpose in The Rape of the Lock more
effectively. In the context of this poem, the trifling nature of the ‘crime’
described – the theft of a lock of hair – is shown to be inconsequential
by being treated in an incongruously elaborate and high-handed way.
As such, Pope can reflect satirically upon the society to which the real-
life referents of The Rape of the Lock belong.

SAQ 2
Should Belinda be blamed for being superficial, and concerned only with
surface appearances, or can we also be sympathetic towards her as the
‘victim’ of the social constraints placed upon women in her position at
this time?

In many respects Belinda is superficial, and intently concerned with the

appearance that she will have in society. The lengthy description of her
toilet, alongside Thalestris’ description of how a woman makes herself
appear beautiful in society, contribute in different ways to the idea that
Belinda is vain and concerned with surface appearance. Her excessive
response to such a trivial incident as the ‘theft’ of a lock of hair further
suggests that she is obsessed with trifles, and most preoccupied with
how others will perceive her as a result of this ‘tragedy’.

However, from a different perspective Pope’s perceived ‘misogyny’ in

presenting female vanity in this way is offset by the sense that Belinda
is a hapless victim of the norms and conventions society places upon
women at this time. She must make herself beautiful to attract potential
male suitors – essential to a woman’s future in the ‘marriage market’ of
early eighteenth-century society. Yet she must also have the
appearance of virtue (if not necessarily chastity itself) to ensure her
place within society, and her marriagability. In these respects, Belinda’s
extreme devastation at the trifling incident of the Baron’s ‘rape’ of her
lock of hair seems partly justified: not only will her appearance in
society be affected, and she may be exposed to ridicule and contempt,
but her prospects are also potentially severely threatened by the
malicious gossip that the ‘rape’ will give rise to. It may be assumed
that, in losing her lock of hair, her chastity has by extension been
compromised. As such, Pope is both mockingly critical of female vanity,
and sympathetic towards woman’s plight, and the cruel social
constraints placed upon women.

Unit 10: Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock 10-19

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SAQ 3
How does the theme of ‘metamorphosis’ operate in The Rape of the
Lock, on both an actual and a metaphorical level?

Transformations take place throughout Pope’s poem: on a literal level,

we see how objects and items are transformed from their original
materials into important, symbolic tools that tell us about the world
inhabited by the poem’s characters. For instance, the transformation
from ivory and tortoise-shell into the combs and trinkets of Belinda’s
dressing table indicates both the nature of her concern with personal
appearance – as a female member of high-class society – and the wider
world in which she participates. We see trade, commerce and the exotic
evocation of distant lands through these seemingly familiar items.

Transformation operates on the level of sentient beings, too: both in the

humans portrayed in the poem (most notably Belinda, who changes
significantly after the ‘rape’), and with the ‘immortals’, the Sylphs and
Gnomes who provide a celestial framework to the poem that invokes
the divine world of the epic poem – even if to different effect in The
Rape of the Lock.

In the final lines of the poem, we see a metamorphosis that brings

together both the literal and the metaphorical: as Belinda’s lock of hair
ascends to the skies to become a new constellation, so, Pope promises,
her fame will be made lasting and permanent through the immortal
lines of his poem. At the same time, the closing couplet implies, Pope
himself becomes immortalised for posterity through the lasting fame of
The Rape of the Lock.

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UNIT 11

CREATIVITY AND GENDER: POPE, FINCH,

BARBER

AIM
The aim of this unit is to explore how poets in the early eighteenth
century understood the role of the poet as author and the writing of
poetry, and to address how far the gender of the poet affected the
perception of this role.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Outline how early eighteenth-century poets perceived the role of

the poet through a reading of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism.

Describe the continuities and the changes between early

eighteenth-century poets and writers of previous generations, in
particular John Dryden.

Discuss social attitudes towards publication in the eighteenth

century.

Recognise which strategies were adopted by female writers so they

could justify publishing their work.

Assess the importance of the role that gender played in creativity,

and the early-eighteenth century conception of poetic identity.

REQUIRED READING
In this unit, we shall be analysing several poems by three early
eighteenth-century poets:

Alexander Pope (1688-1744):

An Essay on Criticism (written 1709, published 1711)

This poem can be found in volume one of Stephen Greenblatt (ed.).

2012. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edn (New York:
W. W. Norton and Co.).

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720):

‘To the Nightingale’ (1713) No. 13, p. 20
‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ (1713) No. 16, pp. 22-23

Mary Barber (1690-1757):

‘Written for my Son, and Spoken by him at his first putting on Breeches’
(1731), No. 84, pp. 39-40

References to Ann Finch and Mary Barber’s poems (and the page
numbers above) are taken from Roger Lonsdale (ed.). 1990.
Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press).

Unit 11: Creativity and Gender: Pope, Finch, Barber 11-1

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INTRODUCTION
In previous units of this module, we have approached the question of
authorship from a wide variety of perspectives: for instance, we saw
how in the latter part of the seventeenth century patronage was a
significant part of what kind of work a writer produced, and its potential
purposes. The ‘Country House’ poems, or those written by Dryden to
support Charles’s monarchy, provide examples of how an author’s work
might support established authority, or (as in the case of Upon Appleton
House) praise a patron. However, we also saw how these writings could
comment in a critical way upon public figures, or even (as in the case of
Milton’s Areopagitica) challenge established authority. We have also
seen that this challenge can be effectively conveyed through satire: by
exposing to ridicule the perceived faults in an individual’s conduct, or in
society as a whole, an author can potentially bring about change in the
public sphere.

In what ways does the role of the author change in the early eighteenth
century, and in what ways does it continue those relationships between
a published work and the wider context in which it is produced that we
have explored in the last half of the seventeenth century?

To address this question, and issues related to it, we shall examine the
work of three different poets active in the early decades of the
eighteenth century: Alexander Pope, Anne Finch, Countess of
Winchilsea, and Mary Barber. We have already encountered Pope, of
course, in the previous unit, where we examined The Rape of the Lock
as a poem that reflects satirically upon the social world in which it is
produced. In this unit, we shall be examining Pope’s early ‘statement’ of
what he perceives the poet’s role to be and the wider purpose that his
work might serve in society: An Essay on Criticism.

In examining this poem by Pope, we shall be drawing on ideas that we

have already encountered in previous units: in particular, you would
benefit greatly by going back to Unit 8, where we analysed several key
terms that elucidate our understanding of Dryden’s poetry, and of late
seventeenth-century attitudes towards the writing of poetry and the
poet’s public role. In particular, terms such as ‘decorum’, ‘neoclassical’
and ‘Augustan’ are highly pertinent to discussing the ways in which
Pope’s ideas about poetry are similar to or different from those of
Dryden and his age. You would also benefit by recalling some of the
ideas that we discussed in the previous unit, in our analysis of The Rape
of the Lock.

In this unit, we shall also approach the issue of authorship in this period
through the work of two female poets: Anne Finch and Mary Barber. We
shall be asking ourselves how, and in what ways, their approaches to
the poet’s role compares to Pope’s. We shall situate this discussion
within an examination of the material contexts of a poet’s activity: that
is, the nature of publication in the early-eighteenth century, how a poet
managed to get his or her work published and sent into the wider public
sphere. We shall be asking of what significance a writer’s gender was in
terms of a poet’s conception of his or her role, and of their ability to
publish their work.

In Unit 1, we saw how Ann Yearsley’s poetry provides evidence of how

an uneducated female poet succeeded in publishing her work for a wider
audience; in this unit, we shall address how the foundations for such
comparative freedom, when women were empowered to publish their
own work, were laid in the careers of early eighteenth-century female
poets.

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Through the course of this unit, we shall address how these poets define
the nature of poetry, and its role in the public sphere, through asking
ourselves a series of questions:

What kind of vocabulary do Pope, Finch and Barber use when they talk
about writing?

What does being a poet require of the individual?

How does the poet earn the respect of the reader?

What difference does it make if the poet is a woman?

ALEXANDER POPE AND AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM

In the previous unit we analysed The Rape of the Lock – a poem which,
we saw, first appeared in 1712, but was published in its extended form
in 1714. In this unit, we shall (as it were) take a step backwards, to
discuss an important work published at a slightly earlier stage in Pope’s
career as a poet, An Essay on Criticism, which he published at the age
of twenty-three in 1711. Our reading of the Essay will illuminate our
understanding of what Pope conceived writing poetry should be, and
gives us a flavour of the breadth and quality of his writing. As such, we
can compare the Essay to The Rape of the Lock in our minds as we read
through the poem, and think back to ideas we encountered in the
previous unit about Pope’s poetic style and his outlook on the world.

Before we examine An Essay on Criticism in detail, it will be useful to

gain a perspective on some details about Pope’s life and his career as a
writer.

ACTIVITY
Read the entry for ‘Alexander Pope’ in the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography.

Note down those elements of Pope’s personal history that seem

particularly interesting or potentially relevant to a reading of his work –
for instance, his Catholicism, his physical appearance, and his identity
as the first in a new breed of professional poets. These details will prove
insightful in your readings of Pope’s Essay on Criticism and its
commentary upon the public world of letters.

What, then, does Pope say in the Essay on Criticism, and how does it
help us to understand his own identity as a poet, and the wider literary
world in which the poem was produced?

An Essay on Criticism expresses, in a succinct and witty fashion, various

views on poetry and writing, both those held by Pope and those
promoted by other authors. Pope’s poem discusses the work of different
poets of preceding generations, and through his humorously critical
analysis of their achievement promotes his own vision of what a poet
should be, and the kind of writing he should produce. This is an
ambitious statement, by a young poet at an early stage in his career,
about his approach to his ‘profession’ – and as such is an important
marker in how the very idea of poetry being a profession, by which one
might earn a living, began to emerge in the early years of the
eighteenth century.

Unit 11: Creativity and Gender: Pope, Finch, Barber 11-3

_____________________________________________________________________

How do these ideas emerge in An Essay on Criticism?

Over the course of the poem, Pope develops two important sets of
ideas:

Firstly, Pope presents how he understands his relation to his poetic

predecessors.

Secondly, Pope presents his own agenda for what a poet should be, and
what kind of writing he should produce. He projects this through
addressing how his work is received: he establishes reading as a moral,
as well as an intellectual act.

We shall address each of these aspects of the Essay on Criticism in turn.

ACTIVITY
Read An Essay on Criticism, ll. 1-200.

CONTINUITIES: POPE AND THE POETIC PAST

In many respects, Pope’s Essay presents us with an array of ideas about
poetry that will be familiar to us from our investigations in previous
units into how different poets at different times adopted alternative
approaches towards the style and purpose of their work. Highly
significant to almost all writers, we found, was the poet’s knowledge of,
and dialogue with, a line of poets which stretched back to those of
ancient Greece and Rome.

Demonstrating understanding of the classical tradition was as important

a prerequisite for poetic authority in the eighteenth century as it had
been in previous decades. As we have already seen, Dryden’s
translation of The Aeneid and numerous other classical texts, as well as
his allusion to mythological figures and ideas, testifies to the keen
interest shared by most writers of his time in ancient authors. So, too,
Pope produced translations of classical texts – his version of Homer’s
epic poems were highly successful, and earned him both financial
independence and respect. Yet equally important was the need for the
poet to innovate, to show his own creative talents through building on
the foundations laid by classical authors and by earlier generations of
poets. Dryden translated several of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Pope,
meanwhile, produced imitations of classical writers, such as Horace.

‘Imitation’ is, indeed, a central term to understanding how an author

succeeded in uniting what might seem to us as paradoxical approaches
to writing poetry: he hoped both to draw on tradition – and so show his
worthiness in joining the ‘pantheon’ of great writers – but also to
introduce innovation, to show that he possessed creative talents that
would ensure his genius as an independent poet.

ACTIVITY
Look up ‘imitation’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

As you can see, there are several alternative interpretations of the idea
and practice of ‘imitation’ in these Dictionary entries; grasping the
diversity of meanings that the term can hold helps us to understand
some very significant aspects of how writers in the late-seventeenth and

11-4 Literature 3
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early-eighteenth centuries thought about the issue of creative

originality.

In a basic sense, the Dictionary tells us, ‘imitation’ means ‘the action or
practice of imitating or copying’. This might seem to hold negative
connotations for us, particularly the idea of ‘copying’, which seems to
imply replication rather than creating anew. Indeed, this impression is
supported by the Dictionary’s subsequent definition of ‘imitation’:

The result or product of imitating; a copy, an artificial likeness; a

thing made to look like something else, which it is not; a
counterfeit.

The idea that an imitation is a ‘fake’ surely casts the term in a

pejorative light, and we might ask ourselves why writers in this period
were so keen to promote their ‘imitations’ of classical authors, such as
Pope’s imitations of Horace. We can find a clue as to the alternative
valence that this term holds in this period in the Dictionary’s definition
of ‘imitation’ under the sub-heading ‘Literature’. Here, we learn that in
literary terms an imitation can mean:

‘A method of translating looser than paraphrase, in which modern

examples and illustrations are used for ancient, or domestick for
foreign’ (J.); a composition of this nature.

The fact that this definition is largely given through Samuel Johnson’s
explanation of the term (indicated in quotation marks) – found in his
landmark Dictionary of the 1750s – indicates to us that the word
‘imitation’ holds a range of historical meanings that might seem less
evident to us today. In the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth
centuries, to produce an imitation of a previous author’s work – and in
particular that of a classical poet – was not only an admirable
demonstration of one’s own poetic talents, but in fact a necessary
staging-post in one’s development as a poet. As Richard Terry suggests,
‘imitation’ in this period shows a desire of ‘intimacy’ with one’s poetic
predecessors (1991: 76). It is through this ‘intimacy’ that a young poet
can hope to forge his own poetic career.

Think back to Unit 8, where we discussed the terms ‘neoclassical’ and

‘Augustan’ in relation to new ideas about how to write poetry. The role
of imitation as a literary practice within this changing approach to how
poetry should be written, and of the poet’s role in society through his
poem, is central to neoclassicism in literature. The imitation is an
extremely sophisticated verse form, because it invites the reader to
keep in mind both the poem he or she is actually reading and whatever
poem is being imitated. It might surprise us that, according to
neoclassical lines of thought, imitation is consistent with originality;
however, if we refer back to the third Dictionary definition we have just
discussed, Pope’s ‘imitations’ of Horace were understood not as copies,
but as conversations or dialogues with the earlier poems.

By displaying an ability to judge the parallels between the work of

classical and preceding generations of poets and his own, Pope
established his poetic authority. The connection between the present-
day poet and the classical past operates on a practical level – one must
have access to classical texts, and be educated in the ability to read
them in the original language. On a more philosophical level, this
connection with the classical past is grounded in a particular conception
of human nature: despite the changes wrought by time, human nature
remains essentially constant, so that the important truths for Homer are
also true for Pope. For neoclassical writers, human beings are
everywhere and at all times more alike than different, and share in the
universal truths about life and the world in equal measure.

Unit 11: Creativity and Gender: Pope, Finch, Barber 11-5

_____________________________________________________________________

How do these ideas emerge in Pope’s Essay on Criticism?

ACTIVITY
Note down words and phrases in ll. 1-200 of An Essay on Criticism
which reveal Pope’s veneration for classical writers.

NATURE AND THE ANCIENTS IN THE ESSAY

We can extend our exploration of the relationship between Pope and the
classical past in An Essay on Criticism if we examine the concept of
‘nature’ in the poem. If we ask ourselves what Pope means by ‘nature’,
we can address both how he connects to ancient authors through this
concept, and also how it enables him to break away from these
precedents to establish himself as an independent writer.

Early in the Essay Pope advises the critic and poet to ‘First follow
Nature’ (l. 68). What does he mean by this? We have already
encountered the alternative meanings that the word ‘nature’ might hold
in Unit 8, where we saw that it not only referred to elements within the
natural world (such as creatures and plants), but also had a more
philosophical dimension too. We saw that ‘natural science’ was an
important emerging discipline at the time that Dryden was active as a
writer, in particular with the establishment of the Royal Society and with
the advances Isaac Newton made in the world of science.

By the time that Pope is writing in the early eighteenth century, these
ideas are even more clearly established, and have equally important
consequences for his poetry as they did for Dryden’s. For Pope, ‘the
natural’ is that which is fit and ordered; he shares the view held by
many contemporary eighteenth-century thinkers and writers, that the
world is a system of interlocking parts. In his important poem, An Essay
on Man (1733-4), Pope elaborates at some length the notion that there
is a ‘great Chain that draws all to agree’ (I.33) and which links together
all elements of the creation. This chain ascends from the smallest
creature, to human beings, to the angels, and finally to God.

In Pope’s conception, and that of many of his contemporaries, the order

of the universe provided evidence of a divine power and plan – an idea
that we encountered in Unit 1, where we examined Thomson’s elegy for
Newton in terms of the balance between religion and science. Similarly,
in this line from Pope’s Essay on Man, we can see how the divine and
the rational are simultaneously evoked: the ‘great Chain’ is one held
together by the laws God has put in place, but the suggestion that it
‘draws all to agree’ suggests the laws of gravity that Newton had
formulated as the result of rational enquiry.

How do these ideas inform our reading of the Essay on Criticism? In

many respects, the connection with the later Essay on Man is apt: both
poems exemplify different aspects of contemporary concepts about
order, balance and proportion – ideas which, as you will recall, we found
to be fundamental to Dryden’s approach to writing. Similarly, both of
Pope’s ‘essays’ adopt a regular and ordered structure that exemplifies
the ideas each poem expresses: the rhyming couplets, and the regular
iambic metre, promote the ideals of decorum belonging to the Augustan
concept of how poetry should be composed.

In the Essay on Criticism, the idea of this ‘chain of being’, with its
associations of connectedness and of order, supports the notion of
appropriateness that the poem presents to us. In the divinely-ordered

11-6 Literature 3
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scheme of the world, each creature has specific attributes, skills and
needs. Similarly, in the Essay on Criticism Pope suggests that each type
of poetic activity has its proper place.

Certain forms and styles of poetry are appropriate to specific purposes;

so, for example, epic poetry is suited to presenting the heroic deeds of
mythological warriors, or to addressing the grand scheme of creation
that Milton’s Paradise Lost deals with. In the same way, a lyric poem
has a much more focussed use and purpose, its song-like qualities being
most suited to describing personal feelings or emotions. An aspiring
poet could acquire understanding of the appropriateness of form to
subject by studying and imitating classical authors, as we have seen.

Yet choosing the most appropriate style to match one’s thoughts or

subject-matter also requires judgement on the aspiring poet’s part – a
skill which, as it happens, comes easily to the poet who looks to the
divinely-ordered natural world for instruction:

First follow Nature, and your judgement frame

By her just standard, which is still the same:
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of art. (ll. 68-73)

For Pope, then, the order and harmony of the natural world are
reflected in the patterns of art; the rules which govern the different
kinds of artistic creation are not arbitrary or whimsical, but are
themselves natural. Significantly, Pope presents the poet’s role within
this existing system of rules and appropriate modes of behaviour as one
of participation rather than creation. He claims that

Those rules of old discovered, not devised,

Are Nature still, but Nature methodized;
Nature, like liberty, is but restrained
By the same laws which first herself ordained. (ll.88-91)

These lines suggest that in using the rules of literary composition the
poet does not impose order; he merely discovers the order inherent in
the natural world – as his poetic predecessors had done before him. Yet
there is a degree of collusion between the poet and nature here, too:
both the poet and nature are subject to these ‘rules’ of the divinely-
ordered universe, but as such there is a natural understanding between
them. In writing about nature – whether the creatures and plants of the
world, or nature in the sense of reasonable knowledge – the poet
imposes the same kind of ‘method’ upon it in his regular, ordered lines
of verse as actually exists in the world.

As such, in these lines Pope suggests that the most appropriate way of
writing about the world in poetry is to imitate the order and regularity
that actually exists in the natural world. What might seem to us as
contrived or artificial – the regular metre and rhyme of the heroic
couplet pattern – is in fact the most appropriate, decorous way for the
neoclassical writer to describe the world around him. The ‘Ancients’ – as
in classical writers – had also discovered these ‘rules’, and had emulated
it in their admirable poetry. The ‘Modern’ writer (of the early eighteenth
century), in emulating this example, also emulates the natural patterns
and order of the world. Hence, the Essay establishes continuity between
the modern poet and his classical forbears through the endless chain of
divine creation, and of history.

Yet does this potentially mean that the ‘modern’ poet is incapable of
creating anything new, and is merely compelled to follow a pre-existing

Unit 11: Creativity and Gender: Pope, Finch, Barber 11-7

_____________________________________________________________________

pattern? At one point, Pope warns,

Moderns, beware! or if you must offend

Against their [the Ancients’] precept, ne’er transgress its end;
Let it be seldom, and compelled by need;
And have, at least, their precedent to plead. (ll. 163-66)

So, in these lines, Pope suggests that there is indeed potential for the
aspiring poet to make his own mark: to write truly good poetry – to
show one’s worth and talent – one must show knowledge of and an
ability to imitate the Ancients. However, if ‘compelled by need’ the
young poet can surpass this example and so propel poetry onwards in
its inevitable progression. After all, Pope suggests here, it is only by
doing this themselves – by ‘transgressing’ the existing rules of
composition – that classical authors created the poetry that modern-day
authors now admire and seek to emulate.

Here, then, Pope tells us that to write truly great poetry involves both
tradition and innovation: an ability to exercise one’s talent through
imitating classical ‘precedent’, but also to follow the compulsion of
individual genius to create something new.

However, this innovation must nonetheless be restrained within certain

boundaries, and must not surpass the boundaries of what is right and
natural in the world. It was only by recognising this need for decorum
that classical writers – and subsequent inheritors such as Dryden – were
able to produce poetry that not only built on tradition but pushed poetry
forward. Yet, Pope goes on to argue in the Essay, the production of
poetry is as much about its reception – by readers and critics – as about
its substance.

How do these ideas emerge in the poem?

ACTIVITY
Read An Essay on Criticism, ll. 201-744.

In the second half of his Essay on Criticism, Pope offers several different
perspectives on what constitutes good writing, which he projects
through various methods. He offers advice for the aspiring poets, but he
also criticises the efforts of existing writers who fail to live up to the
standards set by eminent poetic predecessors. Alongside this, Pope
identifies the central role played by critics in the production and
reception of poetry.

ACTIVITY
Where do each of these perspectives on contemporary poetry emerge in
the lines of An Essay on Criticism that you have just read? Note down
those sections which strike you as particularly significant in promoting
Pope’s approach to writing and to criticism.

You might, for instance, observe that the idea of decorum – of

appropriateness – forms a major part of the advice offered to aspiring
poets. Pope writes that:

Expression is the dress of thought, and still

Appears more decent, as more suitable.

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A vile conceit in pompous words expressed,

Is like a clown in regal purple dressed. (ll.318-321)

Pope makes a connection here between ‘expression’ and ‘thought’, and

he argues that ‘expression’ is always ‘more decent’ when it is suitable to
the ‘thought’ being expressed. How does this connect to the ideas we
have previously encountered in this unit, relating to appropriateness
and to the divinely ordered nature of the universe?

The idea of appropriateness, which Pope directs towards poetic

composition itself, is in fact applied with equal weight towards the role
of the critic. In discussing the varying tastes that critics have, Pope
evokes the idea that decorum, or appropriateness, are as important to
the discernment of good criticism as to the poet who composes lines of
verse. He writes of critics that:

Some to conceit alone their taste confine,

And glittering thoughts struck out at every line;
Pleased with a work where nothing’s just or fit;
One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit. (ll. 289-92)

What impression does Pope convey of this type of critic here? The idea
that such critics only appreciate what is odd or unseemly suggests a
negative appraisal of their judgement, which is confirmed by their
attraction towards ‘glittering’, superficial ‘thoughts’ (rather than
genuinely valuable ones).

Do you notice how Pope supports his point here through the formal
qualities of these lines? The abrupt, all-too-easy rhyme between ‘fit’ and
‘wit’, for instance, suggests a derisory opinion of those poets who
merely versify – who find easy rhyme-schemes – and in turn of those
critics who admire such lines. In the same way, the ungainly phrase
‘wild heap of wit’ – with its impossible metaphor, half-rhyme and
alliteration – contributes to the impression that the critics described
here deserve derision. Pope is more than equal to exposing such critics
to ridicule through his superlative verse – which, through parodying the
type of poetry they admire, effectively satirises them.

By contrast, Pope describes those critics who:

[…] for language all their care express,

And value books, as women men, for dress:
Their praise is still, – the style is excellent:
The sense, they humbly take upon content. (ll. 305-8)

What impression does Pope create of this type of critic? He suggests

that, like the critics previously described, these similarly have little
taste: they value a work solely for its appearance, for the dazzling
impression that it conveys through the ‘dress’ of language. Pope
suggests here that ‘language’ can be used in a negative way: simply by
choosing attractive words, resonant phrases, or witty words a writer can
create the impression of ‘sense’ or thought without actually supplying
any real substance. Some critics, Pope warns, are taken in by this, and
fail to see the difference between empty ‘style’ and genuine ‘sense’.

Pope suggests that the best kind of writing will be valuable both for its
‘expression’ and its ‘thought’; in turn, the most accomplished critic will
be able to discern that when style and substance intersect, and will
appreciate the true talent involved in creating this combination. As Pope
goes on to say:

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

Unit 11: Creativity and Gender: Pope, Finch, Barber 11-9

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’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,

The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar. (ll. 362-9)

Here, several important ideas emerge related to Pope’s concept both of

what constitutes accomplished poetry, and what characterises a truly
talented critic. Pope suggests that it is only by obeying the rules of
poetic composition – by being talented in its ‘art’ – that the poet can
succeed in creating the impression that he writes with effortless ease;
once he has acquired the practised talent of writing verse according to
these existing rules, like the accomplished dancer he will be able to
show off his abilities as though they cost him no effort at all.

The true ‘art’ of poetry lies in mastering its rules: these involve fitting
thought to style in an appropriate manner, dressing these thoughts with
fitting language, and allowing the metre (‘numbers’) and rhyme to
reflect the ‘sense’ (or thought) that is expressed in the verse. In
bringing all these elements together in a harmonious way, the poet can
exercise and display his talent. In turn, the talented critic will be able to
appreciate the poet’s success in creating such verse, and admire it
rather than other, inferior efforts by lesser poets.

ACTIVITY
What other types of poets, readers and critics are portrayed in the
second half of An Essay on Criticism? Are they portrayed in a positive or
negative way?

Make notes on those passages that you find most striking in this
respect, paying particular attention to the types of language used, and
to how Pope supports his arguments through the formal techniques of
his verse.

What might we make of the closing lines of the poem? Does Pope
project a hopeful vision for the future of poetry, or a darkly pessimistic
one?

In the final lines of the Essay on Criticism, Pope seems doubtful that the
standard of poetic composition has been upheld by contemporary poets.
He writes:

The Muse, whose early voice you taught to sing,

Prescribed her heights, and pruned her tender wing,
(Her guide now lost) no more attempts to rise,
But in low numbers short excursions tries:
Content, if hence the unlearned their wants may view,
The learned reflect on what before they knew:
Careless of censure, nor too fond of fame;
Still pleased to praise, yet not afraid to blame;
Averse alike to flatter, or offend;
Not free from faults, nor yet too vain to mend. (ll. 735-46)

The implication that, nowadays, ‘Moderns’ write verse that is ‘in low
numbers’ (referring to poor metrical skill), and that the ‘Muse’ has taken
a downward plummet, creates a vision of paltry and inferior poetry
compared to the achievements of preceding generations.

Yet, these final lines suggest, even if much contemporary composition is

sorely lacking in quality, the present state of literature can be saved by

11-10 Literature 3
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the discerning critic. Being equally ready to ‘censure’ and to ‘praise’, but
according to the merit of each new publication, the true critic is an
impartial judge: he will neither ‘flatter’ nor ‘offend’, and will be equally
ready to take criticism as to give it. As such, the ‘learned’ critic does a
service to the world of literature, and to the wider world, in advising
readers what is truly worth reading – and which qualities make a good
poem deserve such praise – and warning them to avoid poor-quality
work. In turn, by judiciously praising or blaming what he reads, the
good critic can help writers to improve their work, for the greater good
of the future of literature.

SAQ 1
In An Essay on Criticism Pope instructs his reader in how to read and
criticise. What does good reading require, according to Pope?

POETRY AND PUBLICATION: THE CONTEXT

Pope’s Essay on Criticism revolves around the interaction between a
poet, his work and his audience: the entire argument of the poem rests
on how a reader will interpret and comment upon this poem in
particular, and upon literature in general.

But into what kind of publishing world does Pope send his Essay on
Criticism? What are the conditions of the publishing industry at this
time? How does this determine who reads what kinds of books, and how
they comment upon them? And what implications does this have for the
role of the author in the public sphere?

The eighteenth century saw an explosion of print culture. As Richard

Terry argues, this sat in tandem with changes to copyright law and with
developments in print technology (1991: 76). The lapse of the Licensing
Act in 1695 meant that the Stationers’ Company lost control over
copyright, which led to a boom in printed material as the monopoly was
wrested from the hands of just a few booksellers.

This printed material took a variety of shapes and formats, from fictional
books, to poems, to illustrated editions of texts, to newspapers and
journals: when Alexander Pope was born, London had no daily
newspaper; by 1790 it had fourteen. Important magazine publications –
such as periodicals like The Spectator and The Tatler – provided a vital
forum for public debate, social commentary and literary criticism. In an
age of ever-more increasing quantities of printed matter, the role of the
critic – who could discern and comment upon the quality of all this
matter, and advise the reading public accordingly – became ever more
important.

The newly populous breed of critics found much material to uphold their
status and activity-levels, but the status of the author was also
changing. According to Terry, the ‘new ubiquity of print’ brought about
the professionalisation of writing, which became liberated from
patronage; the ‘polite literary audience’ of Dryden’s generation was
replaced by a ‘voracious reading public’ (1991: 77). The public appetite
for printed matter meant that, for the first time, an individual could
make a living from writing; Pope was one of the first writers to achieve
financial independence from publishing his work. This sat in tandem
with further, significant changes in copyright law: the Copyright Act of
1709 re-established protection (for a period of twenty-one years for
copyrights already held, or fifteen years for new copyrights), but did not
return perpetual copyright to the booksellers. Copyright was

Unit 11: Creativity and Gender: Pope, Finch, Barber 11-11

_____________________________________________________________________

automatically returned to the author after fifteen years.

The transition from a manuscript to a print culture, however, had

several effects upon the nature of literary activity; there was an
increasing anxiety about a perceived decline in the quality of literary
standards, which emerges in the attacks levelled against inferior poets
and critics alike in An Essay on Criticism. There was an increasing fear
that poetry might simply be debased by becoming a commodity. Richard
Terry suggests that these new approaches to literary productivity – both
exuberant proliferation and the anxiety about declining standards – are
manifested in an important aesthetic sense in literature at this time:
‘the condition of print governed the format of literature’, he claims
(1991: 77).

Writers such as Pope and Jonathan Swift expressed their grave concerns
about the declining quality of literary standards amid the ever-greater
amounts of printed matter through the printed formats of their writings.
Pope’s The Dunciad and Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, for instance, reproduce
‘in bloated form, the apparatus of print’: ‘Though comic, the vision
remains grimly apocalyptic, one of text engendering text in a frenzy of
verbal accretion’ (Terry 1991: 77). In The Dunciad (which exists in four
different states, the last of which appeared in 1743) Pope satirically
represents a race of Grub-street writers (so called from the street where
many of them lived in London) who produced dullness, nonsense and
monstrosity in the name of poetry.

In many respects, Pope’s poem is a more evolved exploration of the

vision that Dryden presents in Mac Flecknoe, where the horrors of a
world of decayed literary standards – as embodied in Shadwell – offers
a stark warning to contemporary writers. In The Dunciad, it is initially
the critic Theobald, and subsequently the poet laureate and playwright
Colley Cibber, who is the King of Dullness, and representative of all that
is negative about the present-day literary world.

POETRY AND PUBLICATION: THE FEMALE PERSPECTIVE

So far, we have presented this world of writers and their publications,
their readers, and the critics who comment upon them as a male-
dominated world. However, it would be quite wrong to imagine that only
men wrote poetry, prose or drama at this period, or in turn that only
men provided the audience for such literary output. We have already
seen how Aphra Behn provides one female perspective on the world of
literature in the latter part of the seventeenth century. What of the
woman writer or reader in the early eighteenth century?

That poetry was now bought by strangers rather than circulated among
friends in this newly print-dominated literary market to some extent
made it more difficult for women to think of themselves as poets.
Publication, the exposure of one’s thoughts and ideas to anyone who
could pay the required price, conflicted with eighteenth-century views
on female modesty and virtue. We have encountered some of these
ideas, and the negative dimensions of the stereotypes they involved, in
relation to Congreve’s The Way of the World, and in particular with
regard to Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. Would it be conceivable for a
woman such as Belinda to write and publish her own thoughts in public?

Many well-born women were reluctant to publish their writings in a

world where a woman was judged by her physical appearance and her
‘accomplishments’, and their relation to her future fulfilment of the role
of a good wife. As we have seen, even the suspicion of compromised
virtue could forfeit a woman her place in society, and her future security
in marriage; to publish one’s writings was to expose oneself to public
scrutiny in a manner akin to parading naked in public. To be a published

11-12 Literature 3
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woman writer could, potentially, subject a woman’s reputation to

calumny.

In her poem, ‘The Introduction’, the poet Anne Finch explains the social
pressures which women writers faced:

Did I, my lines intend for publick view,

How many censures, wou’d their faults persue,
Some wou’d, because such words they do affect,
Cry they’re insipid, empty, uncorrect.
And many, have attain’d, dull and untaught
The name of Witt, only by finding fault.
True judges, might condemn their want of witt,
And all might say, they’re by a Woman writt.
Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,
Such an intruder on the rights of men,
Such a presumptuous Creature, is esteem’d,
The fault, can by no vertue be redeem’d.
they tell us, we mistake our sex and way;
Good breeding, fassion, dancing, dressing, play
Are the accomplishments we shou’d desire;
To write, or read, or think, or to enquire
Wou’d cloud our beauty, and exaust our time,
And interrupt the Conquests of our prime;
Whilst the dull manage, of a servile house
Is held by some, our outmost art, and use. (ll. 1-20)

Finch makes two points here. She argues that simply the act of writing
is seen as ‘presumptuous’ in a woman, and a ‘mistake’ of her sex. She
then goes on to list the accomplishments which are seen as
appropriately feminine: these include fashion, dancing, dressing. Do you
notice similarities between the requirements of a woman’s role in
society, and the stereotypical images presented on this role in texts we
have encountered previously in this module?

What does this tell us about Anne Finch’s career as a writer, and
potential obstacles to her pursuit of that role?

ACTIVITY
Read the entry for ‘Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea’ in the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography.

As we learn from this biographical sketch, Anne Finch did not, in fact,
meet with opposition to her writing that she envisions in ‘The
Introduction’: she was friendly with many men of letters, including
Pope. Nonetheless, her central points remain valid: male and female
authors earned their readers’ respect on different terms. An author such
as Pope was concerned to show his mastery of the poetic tradition and
to indicate his ability to write in the forms of Homer and Virgil, but only
very exceptional women were in a position to attempt such a display of
learning and ambition. For one thing, the very different educations
received by men and women often left women at a comparable
disadvantage in terms of their knowledge of classical writers, although
this was by no means always the case. More significantly, all women
writers had to contend with the view held even by those who were
supportive of female writing that no literary merit could excuse
deviations from modesty and virtue.

Unit 11: Creativity and Gender: Pope, Finch, Barber 11-13

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We can gain some sense of what society demanded from female authors
in a work published some decades after the period with which we are
principally concerned in this unit, but which nonetheless offers a
retrospective on women’s writing of the first part of the eighteenth
century. The Feminiad, published by the minor poet John Duncombe in
1754, is a celebration of English women writers, whom Duncombe
regards as a source of national pride. However, his praise is mixed with
negative critique: he accuses Delarivier Manley (1663-1723), Susannah
Centlivre (d. 1723) and Aphra Behn (1640-1689) of not maintaining a
proper decency in their writing:

The modest Muse a veil with pity throws

O’er Vice’s friends and Virtue’s female foes
Abash’d she views the bold unblushing mien
Of modern Manley, Centlivre, and Behn;
And grieves to see One nobly born disgrace
Her modest sex, and her illustrious race.
Tho’ harmony thro’ all their number flow’d,
And genuine wit its ev’ry grace bestow’d,
Nor genuine wit nor harmony excuse
The dang’rous sallies of a wanton Muse.
(ll. 139-48; available via Literature Online)

Anne Finch herself encounters conditional praise in Duncombe’s poem:

Who can unmov’d hear Winchelsea reveal

Thy horrors, Spleen! which all, who paint, must feel?
My praises would but wrong her sterling wit,
Since Pope himself applauds what she has writ. (ll. 121-24)

He refers to her poem, ‘The Spleen’, in these lines; but also makes her
achievement subject to the praise that a male poet, Pope, has cast upon
her lines. Her ‘wit’ is recognised as being truly valuable – literally, it is
‘sterling’ – because Pope has validated ‘what she has writ’.

What must a female author do to ensure that she only obeys a ‘modest
Muse’, and so avoids the condemnation of contemporary readers and
critics?

It is important in this respect to remember that this is not simply a

situation of male and female authors pitted against each other: after all,
many female readers might consider the published writings of their
gender-counterparts as improper, immodest or even immoral, just as
male readers might admire it. In either case, though, the female author
is compelled to adopt a range of strategies to ensure that, in publishing
their work, they did not compromise their position within society, and
expose themselves to accusations of an inappropriate lack of modesty
or – even worse – of compromised virtue.

STRATEGIES OF THE FEMALE AUTHOR

A common strategy adopted by female authors to legitimate the
publication of their work was to insist upon limited poetic ambition. As
Jennifer Keith writes,

Many poets have used the convention of announcing the limits of

their ambitions to gain an audience, but Anne Finch’s exploration
of her poetic limits went so far as to question the assumption of
Restoration and early-eighteenth-century poetics that language
could indeed represent.
(1998: 465)

11-14 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

In the closing lines of Finch’s ‘The Introduction’, the speaker of the

poem warns:

Be caution’d then my Muse, and still retir’d

Nor be dispis’d, aiming to be admir’d;
Conscious of wants, still with contracted wing,
To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing;
For groves of Lawrell, thou wert never meant;
Be dark enough thy shades, and be thou there content. (ll. 59-64)

In these lines Finch uses a traditional poetic vocabulary. She speaks of

the ‘muse’ that inspires her poetry as a kind of winged creature and
refers to the ‘lawrell’ conventionally associated with poetic success. This
muse, however, has a ‘contracted’ wing and is ‘retir’d’: it does not insist
on attention.

Of course, there is a paradox here: Finch did eventually publish her

poems, and did not stay in the shade. In publishing her work, however,
she lets the reader know that she has a proper sense of feminine
modesty. Many eighteenth-century female writers, not just poets,
display this kind of doubleness. On the one hand, they draw attention to
themselves by publishing their work, but on the other they downplay
their ambition to be taken seriously as writers. As such, they secure
some form of self-protection against accusations of lack of modesty.

Another strategy adopted by women poets was to present their writing

as an extension, rather than a displacement of, acceptable female roles.
For example, a woman could avoid the charge of presumption by saying
she wrote only to educate her children. This strategy was adopted by
the Irish poet, Mary Barber, when she published a collection of her
poems in 1734 under the title Poems on Several Occasions.

Who was Mary Barber, and how might we understand the nature of her
role as a female poet?

ACTIVITY
Read the entry for ‘Mary Barber’ in the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography.

What do you notice of particular interest in Barber’s personal history,

especially in terms of our enquiry into the identity of the female poet in
the early eighteenth century?

When Barber published an edition of her Poems on Several Occasions in

1736, she gained the support of Jonathan Swift, who wrote a preface to
the poems. In this preface, Swift announces that Barber has a ‘true
poetical Genius’, but is also quick to point out that the writing of poetry
does not interfere with Barber’s more important duties, and that she has
a proper sense of her own limitations:

She seemeth to have a true poetical Genius, better cultivated than

could well be expected, either from her Sex, or the Scene she hath
acted in, as the Wife of a Citizen. Yet I am assured, that no
Woman was ever more useful to her Husband in the Way of his
Business. Poetry hath only been her favourite Amusement; for
which she hath one Qualification, that I wish all good Poets
possess’d a Share of, I mean, that she is ready to take Advice,
and submit to have her Verses corrected, by those who are
generally allow’d to be the best Judges. (Barber 1736: vi-vii;
available via Eighteenth-Century Collections Online).

Unit 11: Creativity and Gender: Pope, Finch, Barber 11-15

_____________________________________________________________________

As Bernard Tucker has shown of the relationship between Swift and

Barber, he championed her as:

[…] “our chief poetess”, telling Pope that she “had a sort of Genius”. He
described her as “a poetical genius” in a letter to the Countess of
Suffolk; two years later she was “the best poetess of both kingdoms”.
(1993: 31)

Alongside the female Irish poets Constantia Greirson and Mary Sican,
Tucker claims, Swift numbered Barber as one of ‘his “triumfeminate” ’
(1993: 31).

In her own Preface to the first, 1734 edition of her collection of poems,
Barber says she is ‘sensible that a Woman steps out of her Province
whenever she presumes to write for the Press’ (1734: xvii; available via
ECCO). She therefore informs her reader that her verses were ‘written
with a very different View from any of those which other Attempters in
Poetry have proposed to themselves: My Aim being chiefly to form the
Minds of my Children’ (1734: xvii).

How might these assertions, alternately by the female author and a

male reader of these poems, affect our reading of Barber’s poems? Do
we view her in a more negative light, as a woman who colludes with the
stereotypes imposed upon her sex? Or do we adopt a more historically-
sensitive approach, in which we see Barber working within the limits
imposed upon her sex and social station in the early eighteenth
century? Does she achieve fulfilment of her ambitions as a poet not just
in spite of, but perhaps because of these constraints?

We shall address these, and related questions, as we go on to examine

poems by Finch and Barber in detail. First, we shall outline the
theoretical terms of our discussion, asking whether we need a different
set of terms and techniques to assess the gender-related issues raised
by the fact that these poems are written by female writers at a time
when the literary market was largely – though not exclusively –
dominated by male authors.

ACTIVITY

Read chapter 6, ‘Feminist criticism’, in Peter Barry, Beginning Theory

(repr. 2009), pp. 116-133.

Bearing in mind the ideas that Barry discusses in relation to feminist

criticism, and the terminology used within this field of literary theory,
we shall go on to think about these ideas in relation to poems by Anne
Finch and Mary Barber.

ALTERNATIVE POETICS: RE-DEFINING KEY TERMS

Proclaiming their limited ambitions, or insisting that their poetry is
merely another way of fulfilling their domestic duties, are two ways
women poets overcome objections to their authorship. However, while
they seemingly conform to existing literary and social norms,
eighteenth-century women also seek to modify understandings of what
the writing of poetry entails. We see such a re-definition in Anne Finch’s
poems ‘To the Nightingale’ and ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’, which, like Pope’s
Essay on Criticism, probe what it means to be a writer and the nature of
a work’s reception by its readers, but does so in strikingly different
ways.

11-16 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

ACTIVITY
Read Anne Finch’s poems ‘To the Nightingale’ and ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’.

Make notes on what you think are the most significant elements of
these two poems in relation to the poet’s identity and role.

Which images are used to envisage this role? From what you have
encountered in this module so far, do the kinds of language Finch uses
here strike you as similar to, or different from other poets’ articulations
of how they perceive their poetic identity ? Do the poems have a
particular tone or atmosphere? Do certain words, figures or images
suggest that the poetic voice is female?

Make notes on your observations: you should attempt to compare and

contrast the features you identify as particularly interesting in both
poems, rather than listing them in isolation.

Like Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, Finch’s ‘To the Nightingale’ is

concerned with finding a poetic model, but unlike Pope, who sees a
relationship with literary predecessors as being crucial to his poetic task,
Finch offers the living form of the nightingale as a model for the poet.
As we have seen, Pope’s advice to ‘follow nature’ leads eventually to the
study of Homer. In contrast, Finch’s poetic model is not man-made but
a part of the natural, organic world. Moreover, she associates the
singing of the bird with freedom, wildness and lack of constraint. Does
this remind you of Ann Yearsley’s account of poetic genius later in the
century, which we encountered in Unit 1?

In Finch’s poem, poetry is not a matter of learning and judgement but

of feeling and emotion. She addresses the nightingale by drawing a
parallel between this creature and previous generations of poets:

Poets wild as thou were born,

Pleasing best when unconfined,
When to please is least designed,
Soothing but their cares to rest. (ll. 7-10)

The ‘wild’ poet, like the creatures of the natural world, produces a song
that is equally beautiful, and perhaps the more so for being
‘unconfined’. As Jennifer Keith argues,

In Finch’s landscape and nature poetry, her poetic self takes on

the role of what is normally objectified in the poetic tradition: the
bird. In many of her poems it is through her identification with the
bird that Finch repeatedly defends her authority to write by
emphasizing the narrow range of her ability and poetic territory
while calling on the bird's classical lyric associations as a trope of
inspiration. (1998: 472)

Similarly, in ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’, you may have noted how the image
of the nightingale (‘Philomel’) is used to evoke the (female) poet’s
‘song’. As in ‘To the Nightingale’, again, we find that metaphors and
descriptive features belonging to the natural world offer the closest
parallels to the unrefined or ‘unconstrained’ activity of the female poet.

In ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’, we find the banks of the river sprawling with

unkempt vegetation – ‘the woodbind and the bramble-rose’ (l. 13), and
the ‘scattered glow-worms’ (l. 17) that create a haphazard, but
nonetheless magical effect upon the evening scene with their ‘trivial

Unit 11: Creativity and Gender: Pope, Finch, Barber 11-17

_____________________________________________________________________

beauties’ (l. 18). Images such as the ‘sunburnt hills’ with ‘their swarthy
looks’ (l. 27), the ‘swelling haycocks’ (l. 28), the rambling flock of sheep
‘at large’ (l. 33) and the ‘straggling brood’ of partridge (l. 36)
collectively evoke the impression of looseness, of lack of constraint.
This, the poem suggests, is like the unruly talent of the poetic voice in
this poem, a specifically feminine one (‘lonely Philomel’).

We have observed how the unruly images Finch uses in these poems
imitate the perceived wildness of the female poetic voice. However,
does this mean that Finch holds poetic rules in scant regard, in contrast
to Pope? In fact, both ‘To the Nightingale’ and ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’
juxtapose their images of wild and unruly ‘nature’ – and the kind of
poetic activity with which they are in sympathy – with the carefully
regulated formal qualities of both poems.

‘To the Nightingale’, as you will have noted, obeys a concise metrical
and rhythmic pattern: its rhyming couplets adopt a varied metrical
pattern – shifting from iambic pentameter to tetrameter with, in line 13,
a line composed of twelve syllables (an ‘alexandrine’). The rhyme of this
line does not cohere with those of the surrounding lines, as though to
exemplify that the idea conveyed here is different to what has preceded
this line, and what will follow:

Like thine, when best he sings, is placed against a thorn (l. 13).

Like the ‘thorn’ visually depicted, the metre here interrupts the
harmonious impression of natural beauty, and of the poet’s easy
composition of verse. Finch’s manipulation of the formal qualities of her
verse matches that of male counterparts such as Dryden or Pope.

Do you notice a similar treatment of form in ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’? The

regularity of the rhyming couplets, perhaps, lends this poem a more
coherent formal quality than ‘To the Nightingale’ possesses.
Nonetheless, half-rhymes, such as ‘wind’ and ‘confined’, indicate an
alignment of sense with structure: the unruly ‘wind’ described cannot be
‘confined’, either in reality or in the strictures of poetic rules.

What do these observations tell us about Anne Finch’s approach to the

composition of poetry, in comparison to or in contrast with the attitude
outlined in statements by male poets, such as Pope’s Essay on
Criticism?

Perhaps, if we think back to our analysis of Ann Yearsley’s poem, we

can detect both a desire to be taken seriously as a poet, who can
compose equally challenging verse both through formal innovation and
through the ideas and images it explores; but also the desire to project
a distinctly feminine voice, one which celebrates the uniquely distinctive
attributes of the female poet and uses them to her advantage.

SAQ 2

Contrast the use of ‘nature’ in Pope’s An Essay on Criticism and

Finch’s ‘To the Nightingale’.

11-18 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

ALTERNATIVE POETICS: FINDING NEW SUBJECT MATTER

FOR POETRY
We have seen ways in which women might shape their identity as poets,
and perhaps assert their authority within the literary world, through the
types of language they use and their manipulation of established formal
structures.

Women could also insinuate themselves into the literary world through
an adroit choice of subject matter. Few women had the education men
had received, which established their familiarity with classical authors
such as Homer and Virgil, and shaped their training as a poet through
imitating their works. However, female poets could use familiar and
domestic events as sources of poetry. In so doing, they stayed within
the bounds of experience thought proper within their society; but at the
same time, female poets could assert resistance to the stereotypes of
conformity and lack of imagination that such roles seem to involve. In
fact, the seemingly mundane experiences of the everyday could provide
subject-matter for poetry that was equally, even more, exciting than the
subject-matter of classical models.

Mary Barber’s ‘Written for my Son, and Spoken by him at his first
putting on Breeches’ offers a striking example of the originality and
imagination in poetic composition that could be inspired by the domestic
environment.

ACTIVITY
Read Mary Barber’s ‘Written for my Son, and Spoken by him at his first
putting on Breeches’.

What are your initial impressions upon reading this poem? Are you
struck by the kinds of language Barber uses, by the formal qualities of
the poem, or by its subject-matter?

All of these aspects of the poem are, perhaps, of equal interest in our
examination of how, in this poem, Barber projects her own identity as a
poet. Note those words that evoke a sense of place – a particular, and
specifically domestic, environment: the everyday objects that the
speaker of the poem notes as he lists the articles of clothing (‘breeches’,
‘shoes’, ‘cravat’) evoke a world that is known and familiar to the reader.
In many respects, the rudimentary quality of the objects listed, and the
words used to describe them, effectively remind us that the speaker is a
child, the ‘son’ mentioned in the title of the poem. Thus, Barber adopts
the novel perspective of speaking through the voice of a child, to
examine his thoughts and perceptions upon the familiar surroundings of
his everyday life. From your reading of the poem so far, what is the
effect of having a child as the speaker, specifically a little boy? Do you
think that, contrary to expectation, Barber places herself in a position of
authority in her choice of setting and subject-matter?

However, while the speaker of the poem is, on one level, this child, on
another the poetic voice is simultaneously that of the poet herself: she
does not record her son’s observations as such, but instead adopts his
assumed perspective. She, as it were, stands in her son’s shoes to try
and see the world as he might perceive it to be. As such, Barber adopts
a uniquely intimate psychological relationship with the ‘other’ person of
her poem, and challenges the parameters of what is appropriate to the
role of the poet: she speaks in several voices simultaneously to address
subject-matter that might be deemed trivial, or unsuitable to be dealt
with in the ‘high’ artistic form of the poem.

Unit 11: Creativity and Gender: Pope, Finch, Barber 11-19

_____________________________________________________________________

The conversational and familiar tone of the poem, therefore, adopts a

multiple perspective that both considers the local, known environment
of the home, but which also looks outwards, to the wider world in which
the poet and her writing is situated. Barber uses the description of
everyday details to allow larger reflections on the nature of society. The
occasion of the poem, the boy’s putting on of breeches for the first time
(during this period both boys and girls wore dresses while very young)
is personal but it is also deeply symbolic: it is the little boy’s first
exposure to ‘tyrant Custom’ (l. 3), what his society expects of him as a
man. The expectations and conventions of this society similarly place
constraints upon the activities, and specifically the literary activities, of
this boy’s mother.

These stereotypes are perhaps challenged further in the way in which

Barber treats the expectations placed upon individuals regarding
personal appearance: as we saw in The Rape of the Lock, female
appearance is determined by fashion and custom. Barber’s poem, which
takes the male body as subject, presents an interesting gender reversal
on a common theme. The boy’s clothes ‘cramp’ and ‘bind’ him so that
his blood cannot circulate and he is too uncomfortable to eat. In a very
unpretentious way the poem playfully exposes the way in which
masculinity, like femininity, is socially constructed.

The argument of the poem opposes reason and custom. In the natural
world animals are covered ‘for use, for ornament and ease’ (l. 42): only
man, the so-called reasonable creature, acts in defiance of Reason and
subjects himself to dressing in an uncomfortable and ‘unnatural’ way.

SAQ 3

What kinds of imagery does Barber use in the final paragraph of

‘Written for my Son, and Spoken by him at his first putting on
Breeches’, and how does it support her ideas about the female poet’s
role?

On the surface, Barber’s poem might seem to be harmless and trivial,

just as Finch’s poems’ may seem to deal with elements of the natural
world in a relatively superficial, or merely prettified, way. In many
respects, the subject-matter both poets treat is fairly inconsequential.
However, just as a lock of hair comes to hold wider symbolic significant
in Pope’s Rape of the Lock, so in Barber’s poem ‘Written for My Son’ the
domestic and the familiar are loaded with ideas which resonate in
important ways with the operations of society as a whole, and of the
individual’s role within it.

Just as her son must be subject to ‘tyrant Custom’ for the remainder of
his life – in dress, manners, activities – so must the female poet be
constrained by the gender-determined role society imposes upon her.
However, as both Finch and Barber’s poems suggest, she may
revolutionise the way that we think about the position in the world
allotted to women, and so propose new ways to conceive of the female
authorial identity. How far this compares or contrasts with the role that
Pope conceives for the (male) reader and critic in An Essay on Criticism
remains for your to judge in your reading of these poems.

11-20 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

ACTIVITY
Peter Barry writes of feminist criticism that a ‘fundamental issue, on
which opinion is […] polarised, is the question of whether or not there
exists a form of language which is inherently feminine’ (2009: 121).

In your reading of these poems by Anne Finch and Mary Barber, do you
see any justification for claiming that an ‘inherently feminine’ type of
language exists? How far might such a claim be challenged? Make
detailed notes on your thoughts, bringing in relevant aspects of the
chapter in Barry.

REVIEW
This unit has used work by three different poets to explore early
eighteenth-century attitudes towards the writing and reception of
poetry. We saw how, in An Essay on Criticism, Pope voices conventional
attitudes towards writing poetry: he promotes the idea that a
knowledge of the ‘Ancients’ – as in classical writers – is essential to the
formation of the ‘Modern’ author’s poetic talents. Veneration of recent,
but equally accomplished writers, such as Dryden, is also essential to
the aspiring poet’s formation. ‘Imitation’ – which involves both building
on preceding models and innovation – is central to this pattern of
literary inheritance. We also saw, however, that the ideas of decorum,
of appropriateness and of suitability – and the sound judgement which
provides their essential foundation – are as important to the reader and
critic as to the poet.

We have also seen in this unit that these ideas about the poet’s identity
and role are gendered; many female poets of the early eighteenth
century feel compelled to justify their poetic activity, whereas male
poets do not feel such an obligation. Although a classical education was
deemed essential to the formation of a poet’s identity, as we have seen
many female writers were denied access to the Ancients in this way.
However, as we have seen in the writings of Anne Finch and Mary
Barber, female poets employ a range of strategies to overcome the
constraints placed upon women, and the demand for them to behave in
an appropriate and modest manner, so as to publish their work. These
strategies included a denial of serious poetic ambition and attempts to
find everyday subjects for poetry; but we have also seen how, by
employing the rhetoric belonging to their supposed sphere in society in
new and innovative ways – and by manipulating the existing
conventions of a poem’s formal qualities – female poets were able to
form a challenging and independent poetic identity within their social
sphere.

ADDITIONAL READING
Doody, Margaret. 1985. The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry
Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) (Parts
available online via Google Books)

Duncombe, John. 1754. The Feminiad (London) (Available on Literature

Online)

Hinnant, Charles H. 1991. ‘Song and Speech in Anne Finch’s “To the
Nightingale”’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 31. 3:
499-513 (Available on JSTOR)

Hinnant, Charles H. 1994. The Poetry of Anne Finch: An Essay in

Unit 11: Creativity and Gender: Pope, Finch, Barber 11-21

_____________________________________________________________________

Interpretation. (London: Associated University Presses) (Parts

available via Google Books)

Mallinson, Jean. 1990. ‘Anne Finch: A Woman Poet and the Tradition’, in
Gender at Work: Four Women Writers of the Eighteenth Century
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press)

Mermin, Dorothy. 1990. ‘Women becoming poets: Katherine Philips,

Aphra Behn, Anne Finch’, ELH, 57. 2: 335-355 (Available on
JSTOR)

Miller, Christopher R. 2005. ‘Staying out Late: Anne Finch’s Poetics of

Evening’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 45. 3: 603-
623 (Available on JSTOR)

Morrissey, Lee. 2004. ‘Re-Reading Reading in Eighteenth-Century

Literary Criticism’, College Literature, 31. 3: 157-178 (Available
on JSTOR)

Park, Douglas B. 1975. ‘“At Once the Source, and End”: Nature’s
Defining Pattern in An Essay on Criticism’, PMLA, 90. 5: 861-873
(Available on JSTOR)

Rogers, Pat. 1975. An Introduction to Pope (London: Methuen) (Parts

available via Google Books)

Rothstein, Eric. 1981. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 1660-

1780 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul) (Parts available via
Google Books)

REFERENCES
Barber, Mary. 1734. Poems on several occasions (Imprint: London
[Link]) (Available on ECCO)

Barber, Mary. 1736. Poems on several occasions (Imprint: London

[Link]) (Available on ECCO)

Barry, Peter. 2009. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and

Cultural Theory, 3rd edn (Manchester: Manchester University
Press)

Keith, Jennifer. 1998. ‘The Poetics of Anne Finch’, Studies in English

Literature, 1500-1900, 38. 3: 465-480 (Available on JSTOR)

Terry, Richard. 1991. ‘The Circumstances of Eighteenth-Century

Parody’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 15. 3: 76-92

Tucker, Bernard. 1993. ‘“Our Chief Poetess”: Mary Barber and Swift's
Circle’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 19. 2: 31-44
(Available on JSTOR)

11-22 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
In An Essay on Criticism Pope instructs his reader in how to read and
criticise. What does good reading require, according to Pope?

For Pope, the aspiring poet should model his writing on the precedent
set by greatly admired classical writers. Similarly, the ideal reader
forms his judgement through reading the Ancients. This will enable the
critic to discern the true qualities of the poetry he reads. Pope also
suggests that readers should acquaint themselves with a writer’s
background – the details of his biography and history – so as to form a
notion of a writer’s ‘proper character’ (l.119). However, such
knowledge is only an initial step towards fully appreciating, and
commenting upon, a text: reading also has a moral dimension, and
demands that the reader must possess certain moral attributes so as to
read a text effectively.

A good reader, seeking to read ‘with the same spirit that its author
writ’ (l.234), will possess discernment: he will not pay undue attention
to slight flaws in a given work, but will attempt to gain an
understanding of its overall intentions and purposes. The ideal reader
is ‘learned’ but also has ‘a soul exempt from pride’ (l.641). For Pope,
both the composition and the appreciation of poetry require knowledge
of the writings of the past, and the moral characteristics of sound
judgement and judicious discernment.

Unit 11: Creativity and Gender: Pope, Finch, Barber 11-23

_____________________________________________________________________

SAQ 2
Contrast the use of ‘nature’ in Pope’s An Essay on Criticism and
Finch’s ‘To the Nightingale’.

Pope and Finch use fundamentally different senses of ‘nature’ in their

poetry. Pope’s concept of nature is founded upon a basis of rational
enquiry, where the natural is closely connected to natural science; in
this respect, what is natural equates to what is true. This participates
in Pope’s view of the universe – one shared by his contemporaries –
that the world consisted of a divinely-ordered chain of being. This
operates both within the organic natural world, and within the
‘natural’ world of rational thought and, by extension, poetry. Truly
great art will reflect the order and harmonious functioning of the
divinely-created world.

By contrast, in Finch’s ‘To the Nightingale’, ‘nature’ primarily refers to

features of the natural world: to landscape, its features and the
creatures which inhabit it. Unlike Pope, who sees nature, art and
society as being continuous and interconnected, for Finch the natural
world in this poem embodies ideas of freedom and liberty. This
contrasts strongly with the idea of social constraint, which is
particularly pertinent to Finch’s identity as a female poet. In ‘To the
Nightingale’, Finch equates the rustic poet with the natural world: the
poet is, in some senses, ‘a natural’. As such, she presents a vision of
how she, as a poet ‘unschooled’ in the rules that bind contemporary
(male) poets, can obtain the kind of freedom through writing her
poetry that is denied to her as a women within a constrictive society.

Nonetheless, we can also see how Finch’s ‘To the Nightingale’ relies
heavily on the careful knowledge and use of technical features and
conventions of poetry – metre and rhyme – which ally her poem to
other contemporary examples of poetry by male writers (such as
Pope). The formal qualities of Finch’s poem suggest that she, too, can
master such skills, even if she has not been tutored in their
acquirement through an education that relies on close familiarity with
classical authors. In fact, her manipulation of the formal features of her
poem demonstrates her true accomplishment as a poet.

11-24 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

SAQ 3
What kinds of imagery does Barber use in the final paragraph of
‘Written for my Son, and Spoken by him at his first putting on
Breeches’, and how does it support her ideas about the female poet’s
role?

The imagery used by Barber at the end of her poem projects ideas of
government, and in particular monarchy. Reason has been given to
man so as to defend the vulnerable human body, but Barber argues
that Reason’s throne has been usurped by ‘Custom’. Moreover,
‘Custom’ is not a wise ruler but a ‘tyrant’ and a ‘despot’ who binds
individuals in ‘eternal Chains’. In many respects, the binding
constraints of social convention – which demand that men and women
should dress in certain ways – also impose themselves upon the
creative activities of the aspiring female poet.

In challenging ‘tyrant’ custom in this way in the final lines of ‘Written

for my Son’, Barber implies that she, too, will challenge the
conventions which demand a woman should obey the stereotypical
female role of modesty and propriety. Although her poem operates
within these boundaries, she nonetheless challenges the assumptions
towards women by drawing on the familiar, domestic environment
deemed the most suitable sphere for a woman, by using these
elements of daily life to project her own critique upon social constraint
in poetic form.

Unit 11: Creativity and Gender: Pope, Finch, Barber 11-25

_____________________________________________________________________

UNIT 12

TRAVEL WRITING AND THE LETTER IN THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY:
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU

AIM
The aim of this unit is to give an account of the importance of the letter
within eighteenth-century culture, and within the wider context of
travel and travel writing in this period, through a discussion of the
Turkish Embassy Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Describe the various types and purposes of letters within

eighteenth-century life and culture.

Identify key elements of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s life and

writings, and how her Turkish Embassy Letters fit within the picture
of eighteenth-century letter-writing.

Discuss how the letter provided an important genre within

eighteenth-century literature.

Describe the variety of travel undertaken during the eighteenth

century, and the different types of literature that emerged to reflect
this.

Explain how the letter supplied a vital element of eighteenth-

century travel literature, and the role of Montagu’s Turkish Embassy
Letters within this.

Explain what is meant by eighteenth-century orientalism, and

assess how far Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters either promote
or challenge contemporary attitudes towards Eastern ‘otherness’.

REQUIRED READING
In this unit, we shall be studying:

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters

References in this unit are to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 1816.

Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, written
during her Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (London) This is available
online via Google Books:
<[Link]
&dq=Lady+Mary+Wortley+Montagu.+1816.+Letters+of+the+Right+H
onourable+Lady+Mary+Wortley+Montagu,+written+during+her+Trave
ls+in+Europe,+Asia,+and+Africa+(London)&hl=en&sa=X&ei=5QR5UZ
6vF66f7Aa5nICYCw&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false>
[Accessed 25 April 2013]

Three other reliable editions of this text are:

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 1994. Malcolm Jack (ed.), The Turkish

Unit 12: Travel Writing and the Letter in the Eighteenth Century: 12-1
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
_____________________________________________________________________

Embassy Letters, with an introduction by Anita Desai (London: Virago);

Robert Halsband (ed.). 1986; The Selected Letters of Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, (Harmondsworth: Penguin);
Isobel Grundy (ed.). 1997. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Selected
Letters, ed. by (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

INTRODUCTION
In this unit, we shall be addressing several major aspects of
eighteenth-century cultural activity as travel formed a significant area
of eighteenth-century life. Travel was pursued for a wide variety of
reasons, by many different kinds of people across the social spectrum:
it opened up new and unprecedented experiences for leisure tourists;
enabled vital trade links to be established between different nations;
offered the potential for discovering new and strange lands through
exploration; and enabled a greater commerce of cultural capital
between different nations. Whilst travel, and its various forms,
dominated many realms of eighteenth-century life and its literature
right across the period, perhaps its most significant aspect was the so-
called ‘Grand Tour’.

The writer we shall be studying in this unit, Lady Mary Wortley

Montagu, experienced travel in several of these different capacities. In
writing about her experiences abroad, however, Montagu also
exemplifies another vital aspect of eighteenth-century culture that we
shall be examining in this unit: letter-writing.

THE LETTER IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE

The letter provided a vital link of communication at a time when
contact between individuals who were geographically far removed from
one another could only take place through the written messages
delivered by hand, sometimes over many thousands of miles.

However, the letter takes on much more than a practical function

within eighteenth-century cultural life: it becomes a means of
sustaining a conversation between individuals that can be gossipy,
didactic, theological, amorous or political. It enables the letter writer to
provide a social commentary upon his or her immediate environment,
and the recipient to create a mental picture of a place he or she is very
distant from; in turn, the recipient might be encouraged to think about
his or her own situation in a new way through reading another person’s
letter.

The letter also comes to be not just a reflection upon real-life

experiences and events, but also a vehicle for fiction: either a letter-
writer could elaborate upon his or her experiences, to create a fanciful
account of them, or they could entirely fabricate the substance of the
letter from their imagination.

This alerts us to the vital role that letter-writing played in the

development of new fictional forms during the eighteenth century: the
emergence of new types of prose narrative, and in particular the prose
fictions that we now call ‘the novel’, often drew on the models, ideas
and potential for literary expression found in the letter form. As we
shall find in subsequent units, Samuel Richardson’s fiction extensively
uses the techniques and the formats of letter-writing, in what is known
as ‘epistolary fiction’.

In this unit, we shall address how Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish

Embassy Letters exemplify both the practical aspects and purposes of
travel, but also the opportunities for imaginative expansion that it
opened up. Similarly, the Letters offer a fine example of this popular

12-2 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

and diverse area of literary activity: Montagu both interacts with and
comments upon the worlds that she encounters in her travels and
writes about in her epistles.

Apart from what they reveal about the literary genres popular during
this period, namely travel writing and prose fiction, Wortley Montagu’s
letters also reveal how the English viewed the Orient during this period.
Her letters offer a view of the East as a place of great beauty, luxury
and sensual delight; but she also uses her experiences to contrast
Eastern oppression and English liberty. This contrast recurs in all kinds
of eighteenth-century writing, and is a notable element in the
construction of English national identity. As such the Turkish Embassy
Letters are a sociological, literary, historical and – perhaps most
importantly – highly enjoyable text.

ACTIVITY
Read Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters.

You should read through this text fairly rapidly to gain an overall sense
of its elements, tone and variety; we shall concentrate on selected
passages in greater detail throughout this unit.

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU: LIFE AND WRITINGS

Who was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and how might an
understanding of her life and literary activities inform our reading of
the Turkish Embassy Letters?

ACTIVITY
Look up the entry for ‘Mary Wortley Montagu’ in the Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography.

As the ODNB reveals, Mary Wortley Montagu was a prominent figure in

her day, both in social and literary circles: she was a poet, a dramatist,
and a friend of Pope, famous not only for her writings but for her
conversational spirit and ready wit. The Turkish Embassy Letters come
from a journey she made with her husband in 1716 when he was
appointed ambassador to Turkey. What we read today are not the
letters Montagu originally wrote, but versions of those letters which she
reworked, kept in albums, and showed to friends, and which she
combined with extracts from her journals from this time. As such, the
Letters offer an example of the potential for travel-writing to merge
fact and fiction so as to produce an entertaining account of the
traveller’s experiences for the reader.

Shortly before her death, Montagu returned to England from her self-
imposed exile in Europe. At Rotterdam, on her journey home, she gave
her autograph copy of the letters to a protestant clergyman, Mr.
Sowden, with whom she was lodging, and whom Halsband describes as
‘an enlightened and humane member of the learned society of the city’
(1957: 278). Halsband claims that:

The disposal [of the letters], evidently agreed on verbally, was

that the letters should be published posthumously. She [Montagu]
must have known that her daughter and son-in-law would not
permit her to appear publicly as an author, even after her death

Unit 12: Travel Writing and the Letter in the Eighteenth Century: 12-3
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
_____________________________________________________________________

(1957: 279)

On Lady Mary’s death in 1762 Sowdon wrote to her daughter, Lady

Bute, stating his intention to publish the letters. Negotiations ensued,
and the family paid five hundred pounds to have the letters returned
and publication suppressed. Nonetheless, an ‘unauthorised’ edition of
the letters appeared in May 1763, even though they had been safely
locked away in Lady Bute’s possession. Montagu’s biographer, Robert
Halsband, provides an explanation for this seeming mystery:

The honest, naïve Rev. Mr. Sowden explained to [Wortley

Montagu’s daughter] that while the volumes were still in his
possession two English gentlemen called to look at them, and
contrived to have him called away. When he returned they had
disappeared with the volumes, which they brought back the next
day with many apologies. Presumably the letters had been copied
out during the night.
(1957: 288)

The history of the Embassy Letters, their existence for many years as a
manuscript which Wortley Montagu circulated privately and only
considered publishing at the end of her life, sheds light upon two major
aspects of literary activity and publication in the eighteenth century:
many texts still circulated in manuscript, which (as we have seen
elsewhere) was the case in the seventeenth century. Yet, as we have
also seen in previous units, a woman’s status as an author, able to
publish her own writings, was by no means secure. Although Montagu’s
Letters contained no scandal or salacious material, it was nonetheless
deemed by her family inappropriate that they should appear in print,
lest they cast a negative light upon her posthumous reputation.

Nonetheless, that they did appear in print testifies to the eagerness of

some contemporary readers and publishers to see Montagu’s writings
in print – given her existing reputation as a literary woman and a wit –
and for the desire for publications that helped to fuel the voracious
appetite for travel writing prevalent at the time. As such, Montagu’s
Letters provide a testimony both of the excitements and adventures of
her private life and her talent as a writer, but also of the conditions of
the publishing market and the nature of the reading public in later
eighteenth-century Britain.

As Halsband writes of Montagu’s Letters, in their incorporation of her

journal of her experiences at the time and of actual correspondence,
that they are:

[…] the fullest record we have of her thoughts, activities, and

observations. Their dates, even if sometimes inaccurate, are
usually close to the actual ones; and the names she put at the
heads of the letters are a few of the many friends to whom she
sent actual letters. Although their form is partially fiction, the
Embassy Letters tell the substance of her life abroad
(1957: 59)

SAQ 1
Does the fictionalised quality of Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters
diminish their value as a record of her travels abroad?

THE LETTER AS A LITERARY GENRE

How might we view the letter as a literary genre?

12-4 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

A letter has many forms and potential purposes: it can have a

practical, official function; it can be an imitate note, or perhaps a love-
letter; it can be an anguished expression of pain or grief; it can be a
document recording and conveying experience, or an enquiry for
information from a recipient. A letter might be addressed to one or
several people: it might be intended for private reading alone, and the
author may never expect his or her letter to enter print. On the other
hand, some authors – even when writing personal correspondence –
may do so with a view to potential publication, whether in their lifetime
or posthumously.

Indeed, we might ask the same question of a letter as of a journal:

how far can we ever be sure that it is not, in some sense, artificial? Of
course, this must clearly be the case for a novel written in letter-form
(an ‘epistolary’ novel). But in the case of a supposedly personal
correspondence, might a letter be crafted to create a certain
impression, either of the author or of the recipient? In the case of a
famous author, does he or she write a letter in a certain way for the
future effect it might have on their reputation, if it is ever published?

As we have observed, both the letter and the journal coalesce in Mary
Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters; but in many respects in
crafting her experiences in a supposedly ‘artificial’ way, with the
possible expectation of publication, Montagu was following conventions
and expectations shared by many contemporary writers. Increasingly,
eighteenth-century writers were influenced by the knowledge that their
letters might be published; some, indeed, ensured that this would be
the case.

Pope, for example, was eager to publish his correspondence, which he

understood as a record of his own literary career and times. Writing to
Jonathan Swift, Pope considered the complexity of writing which was
private but might become public:

Now as I love you better than most I have ever met with in the
world, and esteem you too the more the longer I have compar’d
you with the rest of the world; so inevitably I write to you more
negligently, that is more openly, and what all but such as love
another will call writing worse. I smile to think how Curl [a
publisher] would be bit*, were our Epistles to fall into his hands,
and how gloriously they would fall short of ev’ry ingenious reader’s
expectations?
(Pope to Swift, 28 November 1729; Swift, 2003: III.271)

* bit = taken in; duped.

Swift’s notions of letter writing differed from those Pope proposes in

this extract, as the following comments made in a letter from Swift to
Pope indicate:

I find you have been a writer of Letters almost from your infancy,
and by your own confession had Schemes even then of Epistolary
fame. Montaigne says that if he could have excelled in any kind of
writing, it would have been in Letters; […] it is plain that all Pliny’s
Letters were written with a view of publishing, and I accuse
Voltaire himself of the same crime, although he be an Author I am
fond of. They cease to be Letters when they become a jeu
d’esprit*.
(Swift to Pope, February 26 1729; Swift, 2003: III.283-4)

* jeu d’esprit = witty game.

The emphases in these two passages are quite different: Pope is

Unit 12: Travel Writing and the Letter in the Eighteenth Century: 12-5
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
_____________________________________________________________________

concerned with how his letters might be read when they become
public; Swift, by contrast, rebukes the consciously literary quality of
those letters composed with a possible view to future publication. He
mentions important writers – ancient (Pliny), more recent (Montaigne)
and contemporary (Voltaire) – accusing Pliny and Voltaire of the ‘crime’
of writing letters designed to impress the reader with their wit and
spirit. This reader, Swift implies, is not the individual addressee of the
letter, but a potentially unknown audience who reads it in printed
format.

Mary Wortley Montagu was one of Alexander Pope’s most lively

correspondents in the early years of their friendship; they exchanged
many letters before, famously, seriously falling out for generally
uncertain reasons. Indeed, Pope supplies one of the addressees in the
Turkish Embassy Letters. After the definitive break in their friendship,
their feuding relationship was worked out through poetry: each
commented in negative ways upon the character, appearance, life and
writing of the other through bitterly satirical verse. On the one hand,
this alerts us to the fact that the ‘verse epistle’ is a recognised literary
form, stretching back to classical authors (such as Horace): the
epistolary satire could often reflect in an amusingly provocative way
upon perceived faults and foibles of society.

In Pope and Montagu’s case, the ‘correspondence’ through verse of the

latter part of their lives does not adopt such a formal quality; instead,
their reference to one another is more veiled and allusive. Nonetheless,
their early correspondence through letters, and their later antagonist
ripostes through verse, highlights the way in which ‘letter writing’ could
operate as an amorphous, hybrid idea at this time, taking the shape of
actual letters, verses sent to someone else, or perhaps a
correspondence sustained through a journal. This provides us with an
important sense of the variety of the letter form in this period, and of
its potential different uses, which is a vital background to our approach
to the Turkish Embassy Letters in this unit.

As we have seen, Montagu composed her epistolary account of her

experiences on the continent with the intention that they should be
read by others – not just individual recipients of her letters, or herself
(in the case of the journal). She even anticipated that this account
should read an even wider, possibly anonymous audience, by going
into print.

Does this make us read the Turkish Embassy Letters in a different way
than if they had actually been selected from her private
correspondence?

Or can we admire the Embassy Letters as an artistic creation, which

draws on personal experience but heightens certain of its elements,
removes less interesting parts, and crafts the author’s words into a
new work?

Is the finished product even more admirable and enjoyable than if we

had merely had an unedited series of Montagu’s letters? Does this align
Montagu’s text with contemporary fictional prose narratives, not in a
negative way, but in a manner that highlights her artistry?

You should think about these, and related questions, as we read

through the Turkish Embassy Letters and analyse some of their details.
Throughout the following sections, you should attempt to draw mental
parallels between Montagu’s text and other texts you have encountered
from this period so far, asking yourself how, in what ways, and for
what possible reasons they are similar or different.

12-6 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

SAQ 2
How might an understanding of eighteenth-century attitudes towards
the publication of private letters inform our reading of Montagu’s
Turkish Embassy Letters?

TRAVEL LITERATURE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY:

MONTAGU’S CONTRIBUTION
As we outlined in the introduction to this unit, travel was an
increasingly popular and diverse pursuit for citizens across the social
spectrum during the eighteenth century. In turn, travel writing enjoyed
an unprecedented boom in popularity, with ever-increasing numbers of
journey narratives appearing in the booksellers’ windows; just as types
of travel were very diverse, pursued by different kinds of individual for
different purposes, so types of travel writing were heterogeneous.

DIFFERENT ‘TYPES’ OF TRAVELLER AND OF TRAVEL WRITING

One ‘type’ of traveller was the ‘Grand Tourist’, who was typically
represented by an elite, young male. It formed part of the ‘education’
of rich young noblemen to visit the sights of continental countries that
they had read about in their study of classical authors. The ‘Tour’
typically took this young man – accompanied by a tutor (or ‘bear-
leader’) across France and down through Italy. However, the Grand
Tour could be greatly varied in terms of itinerary and route: it could
include the ‘Low Countries’ (the Netherlands and Belgium); Greece; the
‘orient’ (Turkey and the Levant); Spain; or even China.

Similarly, the type of ‘education’ the young Grand Tourist received was
not simply restricted to visiting worthy monuments and buildings, or
admiring the impressive landscapes of the Alps or the Roman
‘campagna’ (‘countryside’): often, the Tour involved an ‘education’ in
other kinds of experiences, too. The young Grand Tourist often used
this first taste of freedom as an opportunity to indulge in heavy
drinking; to gamble; to visit brothels and gain a wide variety of sexual
experiences.

Often, the Grand Tourist (like a modern-day tourist, only with a more
ample budget, perhaps) would often return to England after the
lengthy duration of their visit abroad (sometimes up to two or three
years) loaded with souvenirs: art-works, sculptures, curiosities,
sometimes even people (in the form of foreign servants). Many of the
grand houses and stately homes of the British Isles are furnished with
the spoils of the Grand Tourist’s travels. His legacy, however,
sometimes also took literary form: many Tourists published accounts of
the journals or letters written during their time abroad upon their
return, or subsequently wrote up their experiences for the pleasure and
edification of readers in England.

However, at a time when travel was difficult, expensive and dangerous,

and very few individuals travelled more than a few miles from where
they were born, travel writing could supply those whom finance and
social position confined to their immediate domestic environment with
a sense of what lay in the wider world. Travel literature could provide
escapism through the tales of distant, exotic places it invariably
involved relating, and provide insular communities and narrow-minded
individuals with a more broad-minded view of the peoples and places
that lay beyond the immediate purlieus of their experience.

Unit 12: Travel Writing and the Letter in the Eighteenth Century: 12-7
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
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VISUALISING FOREIGN SIGHTS IN TRAVEL WRITING

Travel writing thus offered readers in England an opportunity to learn
about distant lands; landscapes and famous monuments might have
been familiar from reading classical texts or later descriptive accounts.
For instance, the ‘campagna’ of Italy – the countryside surrounding
Rome – would be known to eighteenth-century readers of Horace or
Virgil. In some senses, those readers were able to get a visual image of
what such landscapes looked like through the paintings of famous
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century artists such as Claude Lorraine or
Nicholas Poussin. Their canvases captured in visual form the kind of
idealised landscape described in Virgil’s Georgics, for instance.

Describing the features of the landscape, or the monuments and

buildings viewed, thus formed an important part of the travel-writer’s
role: he or she must use the written account to picture, as it were, the
scenes and sights that those unable to travel abroad could only see
through such written accounts. In the Turkish Embassy Letters
Montagu adopts a similarly instructive role: she describes in detail
those visual elements of the new environments that surround her.

ACTIVITY
Read Letter XLVI, Mary Wortley Montagu to Lady Bristol,
Constantinople, 10 April 1718, pp. 217-227.

Note down which sights Montagu considers worthy of attention, and

how through her words she creates a vivid picture of her surroundings
that enables Lady Bristol to visualise them.

Whilst the Grand Tour is an enduring element of travel activity

throughout the eighteenth century, and while many published travel
accounts continue to contribute to literature about the Tour (as in
some respects Montagu’s Letters do), as the eighteenth century wore
on both the nature of travel and of travel writing changed: with
increasing social mobility came the possibility for more individuals from
lower social and economic classes to travel. This included travel
abroad, but the popularity of domestic travel within the British Isles
saw a steady rise from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. As we
shall see in a later unit, travellers who both journeyed at home and
abroad often used their foreign experiences to reflect more favourably
upon their own nation, at the expense of the foreign.

Tobias Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (1766) provide a

‘splenetic’ account of travel to the continent, which pass acerbic
comments upon the peoples and places visited. By contrast, Smollett’s
fictional travel narrative, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)
ridicules the ‘splenetic’ world-view of its titular character, and offers a
warm appraisal of the benefits of travel through the British Isles.

As we have found, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy

Letters originate in an earlier phase of the history of foreign travel and
travel literature than Smollett’s texts, as Montagu conducted the
journeys that gave rise to the experiences she would later compile in
her Letters in the early eighteenth century. There is also a marked
contrast with the approach that Montagu adopts towards the ‘foreign’
through her travels: encountering strange peoples and lands could be a
cause for fear and negative critique of ‘the other’, and used as an
opportunity to promote a nationalistic viewpoint.

Montagu’s Letters, in fact, are principally concerned with providing an

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account of the people and societies she encounters, their customs and
manners, than of the buildings, monuments or landscapes she sees. As
such, her Letters provide an anthropological survey with a potentially
socially informative purpose.

TRAVEL WRITING AS SOCIAL COMMENTARY

In Montagu’s Letters, her comments on the strange and wonderful
sights and people she encounters often provoke quizzical critique,
which sometimes brings her to reflect with fondness or greater
appreciation upon more familiar British customs and people. However,
she also finds much to admire in her foreign travels: she both
appreciates ‘the other’ in itself, and at times sees it as an opportunity
to reflect in a provocative way upon the faults and follies of her own
home nation.

However, in the initial stages of the travels documented in the Turkish

Embassy Letters, part of the social critique that Montagu provides is
levelled at European courts, customs and society. What kinds of
observations does Montagu make, and how do they fit into the general
style and purpose of travel writing at this time?

ACTIVITY
Read Letter X, Mary Wortley Montagu to Lady Mar, Vienna, 14
September 1716, pp. 31-37.

Note down what elements of Viennese society attract Montagu’s

comments:

Is Montagu’s attention captured by the physical features of the people

she encounters, their dress, or their habits?

What do you notice about the social hierarchies Montagu describes?

How does she use her observations to reflect upon the people and
social customs familiar in English society?

You should make detailed notes about your conclusions, which might
include thinking about Montagu’s description of these foreign customs
as ‘monstrous and contrary to all common sense and reason’ (1816:
31). How do the various descriptive details Montagu provides support
this comment? You might, for instance, notice how articles of dress
create a ridiculous picture of those described: the fantastical
headdresses made of ‘gauze’ which rise to astonishing heights; the
numerous gems (‘diamonds, pearls, red, green and yellow stones’) that
adorn the women’s hair; and the ‘whalebone petticoats’. That Montagu
says of these that they ‘out-do ours by several yards’ circumference’
indicates how she uses observations upon her present environment and
its people to reflect upon her own society in England.

How do you judge the tone of this letter? Is it hostile, as such mocking
descriptions might suggest, or generally favourable towards Viennese
customs and society? Perhaps, alongside those unusual aspects of her
surroundings that strike Montagu as strange enough to mock, she also
expresses considerable admiration and ‘wonder’ at what she sees; if an
aspect of this social world is so ‘wonderful’ that it attracts comment,
this does not necessarily mean that she holds it in derision. Rather, it is
perhaps as interesting or worthy of comment as a monument or
landscape – which we might consider to be the traveller’s usual
subjects in his or her journey narrative. Indeed, Montagu says of her

Unit 12: Travel Writing and the Letter in the Eighteenth Century: 12-9
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
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meeting with the Empress that ‘I was perfectly charmed’ (1816: 32),
although this is coupled with a critical comment about her irregular
‘features’.

What do these observations in Letter X tell us about the nature of the

Turkish Embassy Letters as a whole as an example of travel literature?
Do you find the nature of Montagu’s comments – what she finds worthy
of attention, and the way in which she frames them – peculiar, or
unexpected within the context of a piece of travel writing?
There are, perhaps, several different aspects to this: in Letter X, as
throughout the Turkish Embassy Letters, Montagu describes the
various peoples, customs and societies she encounters. She uses this
as an opportunity to describe for her readers in England a world to
which they cannot have access: remember that this is a time when
photographs did not exist, and when visual images took the form of
paintings, prints and drawings – which could only give a partial,
subjective view of a particular person or place. Montagu, through her
vivid prose, evokes verbal ‘pictures’ that enable her reader to perceive
(as it were) what she herself observes.

This draws our attention to another aspect of Letter X, and its role as a
representative example of the Turkish Embassy Letters as a whole:
Montagu is in the dual role of both observer and participant. She
describes what she sees from a fairly detached perspective, and yet is
also involved in the various activities she describes, and interacts with
the people she meets and writes about.

This dual perspective alerts us to another significant dimension of the

Letters and their participation in the travel-writing genre. As we have
noted, Montagu often uses her observations on the strange and striking
as a source for humour: to some extent, she mocks those people and
customs she encounters. And yet – unlike, say, the ‘splenetic’ traveller
represented by Smollett – she frequently shows admiration, and even
affection, for the people, manners and places she describes. As such,
Montagu uses her travel account as a commentary upon ‘otherness’ –
that which is strange or unknown – but shows that this is not
something to be feared.

SAQ 3
Describe some of the key features of eighteenth-century travel
literature and its relation to different types of travel in this period.
Where do Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters fit into this account?

THE TURKISH EMBASSY LETTERS IN THEIR EIGHTEENTH-

CENTURY CONTEXT
In this respect, Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters both contribute to,
and contrast with, other examples of travel literature in the eighteenth
century. We have already observed how increasingly large numbers of
journey narratives were published during this period, but that not all
were of comparable quality. In fact, many such publications were of
dubious merit: they neither succeeded in conveying factual information
to the reader, nor in offering accurate accounts of the people and
customs observed, either from the author’s lack of literary skill or from
his or her prejudice towards the foreign nations visited.

In the Letters, we can detect a distinct urge on Montagu’s behalf to

position herself in relation to these competing travellers and travel
accounts: she is frequently at pains to distinguish herself from the
plethora of poor-quality travel accounts. She writes to Lady Bristol, for

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instance, that ‘I know you can have none but what is partial and
mistaken from the writings of travellers’ (Montagu 1816: 218). ‘Partial’
has two senses here – as both fragmented and prejudiced; she seeks
to rectify both aspects of existing travel accounts by filling out what is
‘partial’ in them and correcting their ‘mistakes’.

She reflects upon the fantastical, or purely invented nature of many

contemporary journey narratives when she writes to one correspondent
that ‘’tis my regard to truth, and not laziness, that I do not entertain
you with as many prodigies as other travellers use to divert their
readers with’ (Montagu 1816: 71). Later, Montagu complains to her
sister that this correspondent ‘[…] is very angry that I won’t lie like
other travellers. I verily believe she expects I should tell her of the
anthropophagi, and men whose heads grow below their shoulders’
(1816: 76). Here, Montagu alludes in a scathingly sarcastic way to the
regular appearance in travellers’ tales of references to cannibalism.

Unlike existing travel accounts, Montagu suggests, she offers a truthful

and descriptive record of what she sees around her, albeit one
projected through her own subjective interpretation. As such, her
accurate writings will eventually be more instructive to her readers
than such fantastical tales. She aims to show that her own letters have
intrinsic merit and, possibly, a broader social value through offering a
reformative satirical critique of British society and customs.

QUESTIONS OF ‘DIFFERENCE’ IN THE TURKISH EMBASSY

LETTERS
If Montagu knows well, and protects her own letters from, the
suspicions with which travel accounts were sometimes viewed, she also
knows that travellers were valued for the insights they could give into
cultural difference. Eighteenth-century writers in general were much
interested in the relationship between nature and custom.

As we have seen in our study of An Essay on Criticism, one important

strand in eighteenth-century thought insisted that human nature did
not differ significantly through history or across different lands. But, if
this was the case, how did one account for the obvious differences in
customs between different peoples?

Montagu often reflects on this problem in the Turkish Embassy Letters,

and offers varying solutions to it at different times. As we have seen,
she adopts a dual perspective of simultaneous critique and admiring
observation on the strange customs and manners she encounters; this
reveals the conflicting nature of the philosophical concept of the
unchanging character of man prevalent at this time and of the evidence
of difference actually encountered through foreign travel.

Early in her travels, while in Vienna, she seems quite happy to accept
cultural difference, and to propose a kind of moral relativism:

Thus you see, my dear, gallantry and good breeding are as

different in different climates as morality and religion. Who have
the rightest notions of both we shall never know till the day of
judgement […]. (Letter X, Montagu to Lady Rich,
Vienna, 20 September 1716, 41)

This offers Montagu one strategy whereby she can probe and challenge
contemporary British notions of ‘otherness’ – the strange, unknown
customs of other peoples in different lands, which as we have seen
could inspire fear and anxiety. Montagu’s ‘moral relativism’, in fact,
does not seek to displace existing ideas about right and wrong, but
rather is a way of reconciling ideas about man’s ‘character’ with the

Unit 12: Travel Writing and the Letter in the Eighteenth Century: 12-11
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
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difference she encounters around her – which actually provides

evidence that ‘the other’ is not as terrifying or as strange as some
might presume.

What is this ‘otherness’, and how does an understanding of the

eighteenth-century concept of the Orient as a site of ‘otherness’
illuminate Montagu’s approach towards cultural difference in the
Turkish Embassy Letters?

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORIENTALISM
In eighteenth-century England, the East, particularly the Ottoman
Empire, represented luxury and oppression. English writers were
fascinated by the East, but they often defined themselves against it:
Eastern despotism allowed promotion of English liberty. In particular
the position of women, in a rational, Christian, England was often
compared favourably with the position of Muslim women who (it was
regularly asserted by the English) were imprisoned in harems and held
to have no souls.

Nonetheless, the East (or what the East was imagined to be) seduced
many writers. In 1708, Antoine Galland translated into French the
Arabian Night’s Entertainments, which soon made their way into an
English version. The Tales (which included now well-known stories such
as ‘Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp’) were an immediate, incredible
success.

They helped confirm European beliefs that the East (an area which could
stretch anywhere from North Africa to Japan) was a place of sensuality,
luxury, enchantment and arbitrary power. The Arabian Nights was
imitated in works like Tales of the Genii (1764), Mogul Tales and
Chinese Tales. The vogue for things oriental spread beyond literature
into clothing, furniture and landscape design. Indeed, we have already
encountered the vogue for exotic, foreign goods in earlier units; for
instance, ‘Altars of Japan’ (III. 91) – oriental lacquered tables – are
mentioned in The Rape of the Lock when Belinda and her companions
attend Hampton court.

As her letters show, Lady Mary was well aware of the popularity of
fantastic Eastern stories in England. She writes to her sister from
Constantinople,

Now do I fancy that you imagine I have entertained you all this
while with a relation that has, at least, received many
embellishments from my hand. This is but too like, says you, the
Arabian tales: these embroidered napkins, and a jewel as large as
a turkey’s egg! You forget, dear sister, those very tales were writ
by an author of this country and, excepting the enchantments, are
a real representation of the manners here. (Montagu to
Lady Mar, Pera, Constantinople, 10 March 1718, 209)

The pre-existence of a text such as the Arabian Nights meant that

readers of any account of the East – even a primarily factual one that
came in the form of a traveller’s account – would expect to find certain
ideas, images and interpretations in a fresh description of orientalism.

‘OTHERNESS’ AND ‘ORIENTALISM’ IN THE TURKISH

EMBASSY LETTERS
It is, perhaps, when Montagu reaches the more exotic surroundings
and societies of the Turkish lands that her travel account offers the
greatest opportunity to challenge contemporary British notions of
‘otherness’.
One aspect of ‘oriental’ life that attracted much intrigue, condemnation

12-12 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

and comment at the time was the practice of the harem, in which the
Sultan kept his numerous wives. As a woman, Montagu was admitted
to the baths and harems, the ‘forbidden ground’ which so intrigued and
titillated the Western imagination. Montagu, on one occasion, visits the
harem at Adrianople: her account of her experiences is revealing, both
about contemporary prejudices and preconceptions in England, and
about how she attempts to reshape them through her writing.

ACTIVITY
Read Letter XXXVII, Mary Wortley Montagu to Lady Mar, Adrianople, 18
April 1717, pp. 156-165.

Make notes on how Montagu describes her experiences in this letter:

what does it reveal about contemporary British prejudices about
oriental practices, and how does Montagu project her own, reforming
view?

As Montagu’s account of ‘otherness’, in this letter and throughout the

Turkish Embassy Letters reveals, she frequently presents the wonderful
and the strange as a subject for curious critique. Whilst many aspects
of people’s lives and customs attract her reproof, she is often warmly
admiring of the difference she observes around her. In fact, it can
inspire wonder, esteem and even a desire for emulation. As such, the
travel account can prompt audiences in England to reflect in a more
critically astute way upon their own habits and customs, and so
perhaps seek to change or alter them; this gives travel writing a
satirical dimension we have encountered in other literary contexts, in
previous units.

However, is Montagu consistent in her appraisal of the East, or do her

Letters project a dual tendency both to admire and to criticise the
‘otherness’ she encounters in her travels?

Two major themes assert themselves in Montagu’s representation of

the East: that it is a place of beauty, female indolence, and sensuality;
but that it is also a place of despotism, arbitrary power and subjection.

Her first letter from Adrianople describes the climate as one of

‘perpetual spring’; however, Montagu immediately goes on to assert
that, ‘happy as it seems’, it cannot be preferred to England. With all its
‘snows and frosts’ England enjoys freedom, because:

[…] we are blessed with an easy government under a king who

makes his own happiness consist in the liberty of his people and
chooses rather to be looked upon as their father than their
master. (Letter XXVIII, Mary Wortley Montagu to the
Princess of Wales, Adrianople, 1 April 1717, 101)

Of course, Montagu’s comments here are skewed by the identity of the

recipient: in writing to the Princess of Wales, she must inevitably flatter
and praise the King as the ‘father’ of a free nation. Nonetheless,
throughout the letters Montagu’s appreciation of the East is often
punctured by a reminder of its undesirable political structures. England
does not offer the same sensual delights as the East, but it is valued as
a place of liberty.

Describing her visit to the hot baths at Sophia, Montagu is enchanted

by the beauty and dignity of the naked women; her admiration,
however, is projected through the viewpoint of a woman of her class

Unit 12: Travel Writing and the Letter in the Eighteenth Century: 12-13
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
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and cultural background:

There were many amongst them as exactly proportioned as ever

any goddess was drawn by the pencil of Guido or Titian, and most
of their skins shiningly white, only adorned by their beautiful hair
divided into many tresses, hanging on their shoulders, braided
either with pearl or ribbon, perfectly representing the figures of
the Graces. (Letter XXIX, Mary Wortley Montagu to Lady
Rich, Adrianople, 1 April 1717, 105)

Montagu’s description draws on Western images of ideal female

beauty: she demonstrates her classical and cultural knowledge, by
referring to Old Master artists (Guido and Titian) and to the
allegorical three Graces. As such, she transposes ideals of the
feminine, and of beauty, belonging to a Western mindset upon the
‘exotic’ and less familiar aspects of Eastern life that she observes. To
some extent, this provides evidence of Lady Mary’s attempt to
reconcile what is unfamiliar to her own mind, by explaining it to
herself through analogies with which she is more immediately familiar
– with western art and literature.

On the other hand, some might argue, this demonstrates an attempt

by the Western traveller to homogenise difference – to conquer ‘the
other’ by imposing a different set of cultural values upon it. Similarly,
Montagu’s repeated critique of Eastern politics and social structures –
which serve to reinforce her notions of the comparative qualities of
British freedom – suggest a lack of sensitivity to the modes and
manners of different peoples.

In Letter XXII, for instance, Montagu’s description of the women she

observes is constructed around images of freedom and confinement.
The Eastern women, naked and dignified, appear to be completely
free; Montagu, trussed up in her European stays, appears to be
confined. At a deeper level, however, the contrast is reversed, because
the power Montagu’s husband (who would expect her to remain
covered) exerts over her is considerably less than that to which
Eastern women are subjected. The pattern of this letter is one we see
often in the Embassy Letters, where Montagu will offer a vivid
appreciation of Eastern wonders and then finally, if sometimes very
subtly, re-affirm the superiority of English or European ways.

The shift in Montagu’s attitudes towards the East, from enchantment to

criticism, is evident in comparing her very different representations of
two similar scenes.

ACTIVITY
Read Letter XXXVII, Mary Wortley Montagu to Lady Mar, Adrianople, 18
April 1718, pp. 156-165

Early in her stay when she visits the apartments of Fatima, the wife of
an important political figure, Montagu’s appreciation is complete and
enthusiastic (Letter XXXVII). On entering Fatima’s apartments, she is
‘sorry that decency did not permit [her]’ to consider more closely the
beautiful young girls she sees in the gallery. Seeing Fatima herself,
Montagu is ‘so struck with admiration’ (1816: 161) that she cannot
speak for some time. Again, she draws a comparison between the
living beauty of this woman and a cultural object more familiar from
her home surroundings; Montagu says that she took more pleasure in
looking on Fatima than looking upon ‘the finest piece of sculpture could
have given me’ (1816: 163). Montagu is also deeply impressed by

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Fatima’s manners and demeanour; she asserts that, although

‘educated in a country we call barbarous’, she would grace ‘the most
polite throne of Europe’ (1816: 162).

Throughout the scene, Montagu’s language is sensual and erotic, as

she notes when she says of the singing and dancing girls that ‘I am
very positive the coldest and most rigid prude upon earth could not
have looked upon them without thinking of something not to be spoken
of’ (1816: 163).

At a later point, however, a comparable experience is described in a

very different way, and draws a contrasting range of responses about
the cultural values Montagu observes.

ACTIVITY
Read Letter XLIV, Mary Wortley Montagu to Lady Mar, Pera,
Constantinople, 10 March 1718, pp. 200-212.

What are your initial impressions upon reading this letter, in view of
those gathered from Letter XXXVII? Note down some of the ways in
which Montagu’s attitude to the ‘otherness’ she comments upon is
either similar or different in each letter.

In Letter XLIV, Montagu introduces her visit to the Sultana by giving us

some details of Eastern barbarity: the Sultana’s husband was deposed
and then murdered, and she was forced to marry again. This plays into
contemporary ideas about oriental despotism and cruelty. Whereas
Fatima’s magnificence excited only admiration in Montagu, the richness
of the Sultana’s apartments seems to her excessive. She finds the long
dinner tedious, and it is with the ‘utmost regret’ that she makes use of
the costly napkins provided. Montagu suspects that the Sultana is
ostentatiously displaying her wealth.

Montagu ends her account by briefly contrasting Fatima and the

Sultana. The latter has the awkwardness of one who has ‘lived
excluded from the world’, whereas Fatima has all the ‘politeness and
good breeding of a court’ (Montagu 1816: 211). It is at this point that
we learn that Fatima owes her demeanour to her European mother;
how might this information influence Montagu’s opinion of Fatima’s
superiority in her evaluation of the two women?

However, is her approach to ‘the other’ so clear-cut? As we have

observed in this unit, Montagu’s description of and approach towards
the various types of ‘otherness’ she encounters in her travels produce a
complex set of responses. Montagu’s responses are embedded in the
shock, wonder, admiration and revulsion she variously feels upon
encountering the strange and the new; but they are also grounded
within her sense of appreciation of her home nation. She is at once
proud of Britain – its political freedom and its cultural heritage – and
critical of its petty customs and manners, and of its social constraints.
As Mary Jo Kietzman argues,

Resisting the eighteenth-century tendency to Other women of

empire in order to consolidate English women in a domestic
sphere, Montagu’s letters may be read as an ethnography of
Turkish women's culture that does not represent culture as an
order, an Other, or a fixed world of any sort but, instead, conveys
the fluidity of a culture whose women seem remarkably able to
accommodate a multiplicity of alterities into their social fabric.
(1998: 537)

Unit 12: Travel Writing and the Letter in the Eighteenth Century: 12-15
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
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Montagu uses her evaluation of the East as a means to reflect upon

both the foreign and familiar, in ways that involve simultaneously
negative and positive responses.

SAQ 4
How far do Montagu’s attitudes towards Eastern ‘otherness’ reflect
those of her eighteenth-century contemporaries, and does this make
the Turkish Embassy Letters project a negative attitude towards the
East?

REVIEW
In this unit, we have discussed the importance of letter writing within
eighteenth-century culture; as we have seen, the letter could take
various forms, and perform a range of functions, within eighteenth-
century life and its literature. The letter could be a factual document,
or as a means of sustaining contact between individuals at a time when
visiting friends or family was more difficult than it might be today. The
role of the letter within eighteenth-century culture nonetheless serves
another, significant, role: letter-writing offered a means of blending
fiction and reality. As such, it came to be used in the latter part of the
century as a vehicle for fictional prose narratives, such as in the novel.

Yet the blend of the actual and the imaginary that can take place within
the letter is also aptly suited to the parallel increase in the types and
number of journeys undertaken throughout the century. In this unit,
we described how travel and travel literature saw a considerable boom
as the eighteenth century moved on: both the types of travel, and the
types of writing about it, increased in response to changing social and
economic circumstances. The letter provided a particularly pertinent
vehicle for travellers to describe their experiences for those at home,
whether their accounts were entirely accurate or fanciful.

We saw how Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters offer a particularly

fine example of this, as she both draws on her actual travels abroad
and elaborates her account of her experiences to produce a text that is
simultaneously instructive and entertaining. This dimension of the
Letters, we found, is particularly revealing in terms of eighteenth-
century approaches towards the unfamiliar people and cultures
travellers encountered abroad. We saw how Montagu’s attitude towards
the Turkish lands that she visited was especially influenced by
contemporary notions about orientalism, which tinges her letters with
critical comments upon Eastern ‘otherness’.

However, we also found that the tone of her letters, and her
judgements on ‘the other’, are also ambiguous: she finds much to
admire as well as to criticise, and frequently uses her comments upon
the East to reflect in a negative way upon customs and practices
belonging to eighteenth-century English society. As such, Montagu’s
Embassy Letters perform a critical function that looks in two directions:
she exposes the faults and follies of both her host and her home
nation.

In the next unit, we shall consider a very different example of

eighteenth-century prose writing, which nonetheless blends actual
experience and its elaboration, Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague
Year.

12-16 Literature 3
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ADDITIONAL READING

PRIMARY MATERIAL
Swift, Jonathan. 2003. David Woolley (ed.), The Correspondence of
Jonathan Swift, D.D., 3 vols (Frankfurt: Peter Lang)

SECONDARY MATERIAL
Aravamudan, Srinivas. 1995. ‘Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the
Hammam: Masquerade, Womanliness, and Levantinization’,
ELH, 62. 1: 69-104 (Available on JSTOR)

Day, Robert Adams. 1966. Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction Before

Richardson (Ann Arbor: Michigan)

Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock. 1981. ‘An Early Ethnographer of Middle

Eastern Women: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)’,
Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 40. 4: 329-338 (Available on
JSTOR)

Halsband, Robert. 1965. ‘Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as Letter-Writer’

PMLA, 80. 3: 155-163 (Available on JSTOR)

Looser, Devoney. 2005. ‘Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Historian of

Her Own Time’ in British Women Writers and the Writing of
History, 1670-1820 (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press)
(Parts available via Google Books)

Lowenthal, Cynthia J. 2010. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the

Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter (Georgia: University of
Georgia Press) (Parts available via Google Books)

Lowenthal, Cynthia. 1990. ‘The Veil of Romance: Lady Mary Wortley

Montagu’s Embassy Letters’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 14: 66-
82

Mack, Robert (ed.). 1992. Oriental Tales (Oxford: Oxford University

Press)

Perry, Ruth. 1980. Women, Letters and the Novel (New York: AMS
Press)

REFERENCES

Halsband, Robert. 1957. The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956; repr.)

Kietzman, Mary Jo. 1998. ‘Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters and

Cultural Dislocation’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900,
38. 3: 537-551 (Available via JSTOR)

Swift, Jonathan. 2003. David Woolley (ed.), The Correspondence of

Jonathan Swift, D.D., 3 vols (Frankfurt: Peter Lang)

Unit 12: Travel Writing and the Letter in the Eighteenth Century: 12-17
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
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ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
Does the fictionalised quality of Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters
diminish their value as a record of her travels abroad?

The blend of fact and fiction in Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters in

some respects diminishes their value as a true and accurate account
of foreign manners and customs, and even of the sights she observes
on her travels. The fact that she ‘wrote up’ her account of her
experiences at a later date – and so was distanced by time and place
from the original site of her experiences, and her first-hand feelings
and thoughts at the time – might make her presentation of her
travels seem less ‘authentic’.

However, the fact that she did in fact record her experiences as and
when they happened, in letters and journal-entries, means that she
did have a record of her original impressions to work with. Even if she
did refine and alter the texture of these documents, there is still a
strain of truthfulness running throughout them. Indeed, we might
argue, the elaboration or refinement of certain passages might even
be an improvement upon the original, perhaps hastily-written text: as
such, the semi-fictionalised Turkish Embassy Letters might even have
a greater instructional value, by being both informative and
entertaining.

SAQ 2
How might an understanding of eighteenth-century attitudes towards
the publication of private letters inform our reading of Montagu’s
Turkish Embassy Letters?

The development of print during the eighteenth century meant that

the letters of literary and political figures had commercial potential.
The circumstances in which Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters were
published in 1763, in which the manuscript was literally stolen and
copied overnight, demonstrate how valuable a commodity letters
could be.

As might be expected, different individuals responded in various ways

to the publication of what either were, or purported to be, private
documents. Alexander Pope was eager to publish his own letters, and
was anxious that people understand that his letters were written
‘more negligently’, with greater informality, than his other works.
Jonathan Swift, in contrast, was not keen on the publication of
private letters. In fact, he spoke of writing letters with an eye to
publication as a ‘crime’. He suggested that letter-writers who aimed
at eventual publication tried too hard to impress; the result was a
witty game, a ‘jeu d’esprit’ which betrayed the intimacy of the
genuine letter.

In terms of Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, these contrasting

attitudes towards the publication of letters on the one hand ensure a
readership for the published edition of these letters, and on the other
a potentially hostile reception by those who considered letter-writing
to be a purely private activity, which should not be shared in public,
in print.

12-18 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

SAQ 3
Describe some of the key features of eighteenth-century travel
literature and its relation to different types of travel in this period.
Where do Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters fit into this account?

During the eighteenth century there were a wide variety of types of

travel, which changed over the course of the century, often in
response to altering social, political and historical circumstances. The
idea of the ‘Grand Tour’ nonetheless persisted in various forms
throughout the century, involving a wealthy young nobleman’s
‘educational’ travel to (principally) the continent, to learn about the
culture and to see the landscapes and monuments that he had
learned about through reading classical authors. However, this
‘education’ could also have less noble dimensions, involving licence to
drink, gamble and whore. Yet many other types of travel took place
over the century, from travel for trade, to exploration, to more
humble types of tourism; the places travelled to also varied, from far-
flung places such as China to the more familiar surroundings of the
British Isles.

Just as there were many different types of travel during the century,
so many different types of travel literature reflected the variety of
experiences found through such journeys. Travel literature ranged
from factual accounts, to elaborated accounts of actual experience, to
completely fanciful or imaginary journey narratives. The letter
provided a key vehicle for travel writing, as it enabled family and
friends in the home country to learn about strange and exciting
foreign lands; its ability to blend fact and fiction also ensured that the
letter could provide a very entertaining means of learning about such
distant lands.

Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters fit into this account in several

different ways: their identity as a series of letters, which are
simultaneously an account of actual experience and a ‘fictionalised’
version of her experiences, coheres with the identity of many other
types of travel literature in this period. The variety of experiences
Montagu records in the Letters also reflects the wide range of
emotions, thoughts and feelings contemporary travellers record in
travel literature. The Letters also reflect contemporary conventions in
travel writing by picturing the unfamiliar sights, societies, peoples,
manners and customs found abroad to those back at home in a lively
and vivid way. As such, Montagu’s commentary on the ‘other’
encountered abroad offers a vehicle for satirical critique, both on the
host and on the home nation, which matches the satirical dimension
of many contemporary examples of travel literature.

Unit 12: Travel Writing and the Letter in the Eighteenth Century: 12-19
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
_____________________________________________________________________

SAQ 4
How far do Montagu’s attitudes towards Eastern ‘otherness’ reflect
those of her eighteenth-century contemporaries, and does this make
the Turkish Embassy Letters project a negative attitude towards the
East?

Eighteenth-century attitudes towards the East were to some extent

shaped by the fantasised versions of its otherness found in such
imaginative texts as the Arabian Nights: images of luxury, of excess,
of sensuality and fabulous wealth, all coloured the allure of the East.
Yet the East was also synonymous with despotism, with barbarity,
and with an oppressive treatment of women; similarly, Eastern
‘excess’ could be viewed in an entirely negative way, as synonymous
with indulgence and moral perversion.

Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters reflect some of these attitudes

towards the East: she comments in a negative way upon the political
oppression that she believes characterises the Turkish lands she
visits, and upon the treatment of women. She compares these
aspects of the East unfavourably with the free, more ‘civilised’
political and social systems which exist in England. Yet her approach
to the East is also strongly characterised by admiration, wonder and
awe. Her preference for many aspects of Turkish manners and
customs over English ones suggests a more ambivalent approach
towards the Orient than might have been shared by her
contemporaries. As such, she uses her Letters to project a positive
account of foreign difference, but one that is simultaneously aware of
its drawbacks: from her detached perspective as a visitor, she can
observe both the qualities and the faults of the East, and as such
draw lessons from her experiences that reflect variously in negative
or in positive ways upon English life, manners and customs.

12-20 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

UNIT 13
DANIEL DEFOE: A JOURNAL OF THE
PLAGUE YEAR (1722)

AIM
The aim of this unit is to expand our discussion of eighteenth-century
prose writing, and to introduce one aspect of the literature about London
produced during this period.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Explain why we call A Journal of the Plague Year a modern narrative.

Discuss Defoe’s use of verisimilitude in his text.

Give an account of how Defoe represents the problem of

interpretation.

REQUIRED READING
Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)

All references in this unit are taken from Daniel Defoe. 2010. Louis
Landa (ed.), A Journal of the Plague Year (Oxford: Oxford University
Press).

INTRODUCTION
In the previous unit, we encountered one example of eighteenth-century
prose-writing: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters
represent two examples of this genre of literature, both the letter and
the journal. We also saw how both types of written record were
particularly appropriate to documenting the varied kinds of experience
that the eighteenth-century traveller discovered abroad. We also saw,
however, that during the eighteenth century travel did not necessarily
take place in foreign countries, but that domestic tourism saw a distinct
rise as the century wore on. We shall discuss this dimension of
eighteenth-century travel more fully in a unit dedicated to Tobias
Smollett.

In this unit, however, we shall give some attention to one aspect of the
distinction between domestic and foreign that emerges in Smollett’s
writings – the importance of London – in our discussion of Daniel
Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. Whilst reminding us that London
provided a central hub for eighteenth-century life, and was a major
source of inspiration for literature of different kinds in this period,
Defoe’s Journal also reminds us of the ability for a text to blend fact and
fiction, an idea which we encountered in relation to Montagu’s Turkish
Embassy Letters.

In this unit, we shall address how far the actual record of lived
experience – which we might expect to find in a journal – merges with
the elaborated, or fictionalised, account of that experience.

Unit 13: Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 13-1
_____________________________________________________________________

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR: THE BACKGROUND

In 1722, when Daniel Defoe published his A Journal of the Plague Year,
the great plague was part of recent history. Defoe’s readers were as
close to the events of 1665 as we are to the outbreak of the Second
World War. Some of his readers would have personally experienced the
catastrophe the Journal describes; others would have heard stories of
that time from older relatives. Like the Fire of London, which followed
the year after, the Great Plague remained in the popular mind as a
warning and a challenge. Both events reminded Londoners that
ordinary, daily life was vulnerable to complete reversal and disruption:
the achievements of civilisation could easily be undone by disaster.

What was the Great Plague, who did it affect, and how did it change
London life and its literature? In turn, what role did this major event
play in national life?

In The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Griffiths et al. write of the

‘bubonic plague’ that it ‘apparently became increasingly urban-focused’.
They explain how:

Major epidemics thus reflected the introduction of new strains of

plague bacillus, and urban populations failed to develop the levels
of immunity associated with infections such as smallpox. Hence
epidemics when they occurred could display the destructiveness
characteristic of outbreaks among ‘virgin soil’ populations. England
suffered recurrent urban epidemics until the 1660s, and in London,
for instance, it is estimated that between a sixth and a quarter of
the population were carried off by each of the plagues of 1563,
1603, 1625 and 1665. (Griffiths et al. 2000: 204)

Who was affected by the Plague? Of what sex or social class? Griffiths et
al. describe how:

Plague mortality varied by age and sex in ways which evidently

reflected specifically local factors, and no consistent pattern has
yet emerged. The disease was no respecter of wealth or nutritional
status once individuals were infected, but there was a progressive
change in the spatial, and by implication socio-economic, impact of
epidemics within the larger urban centres. […] The disappearance
of bubonic plague may owe something to changes in these latter
respects, as it may also to the cumulative effects of human agency
through measures such as quarantines and cordons sanitaires.
None of the wide range of explanations hitherto advanced has
proved entirely convincing, however, and the phenomenon
remains puzzling. (Griffiths et al. 2000: 204-5)

In Unit 1, we discovered that the Plague and the Great Fire produced
paradoxical situations: both events were immensely destructive in actual
terms and with regard to national morale, yet both also provided
opportunities for renewal and for reconstruction. As Griffiths et al.
suggest, ‘Major mortality crises, particularly plague epidemics, were
impressive in their scale and destructive violence, but so were the
powers of recovery displayed by many urban centres’ (2000: 206-7).
However, when Defoe published his Journal in 1722 the new future for
London and Britain envisaged in such poems as Annus Mirabilis had only
partly come to be realised: national stability, health and security were
by no means firmly established.

For one thing, the dangers of the plague were not necessarily safely in
the past. Across the English Channel there had been several recent
outbreaks: in 1720 between forty and sixty thousand people had died

13-2 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

from bubonic plague in the town of Marseilles alone.

Events like the ‘Great Visitation’ (as Defoe calls the plague on his title
page) provoke those who experience them into speculation and
explanation. The will to survive is accompanied by a desperate need to
discover in the chaos and suffering some kind of reason or meaning. A
Journal of the Plague Year does not simply describe events: it tries to
find significant interpretations for them.

With this background in mind, you should now read the Journal and try
to identify how Defoe presents both the facts about this terrible event in
Britain’s history, and the emotions it aroused.

ACTIVITY
Read The Journal of the Plague Year.

THE JOURNAL AND LONDON LITERATURE

Defoe’s Journal is specifically London-centred: it tells us about actual
historical events of the recent past that are firmly based within the
topographical surroundings of a specific place. But Defoe, writing in
1720, looks back on a London that wore a very different face in 1665 in
its streets, layout, principal monuments and public spaces.

What kind of place was London in 1665?

What are the major features of London’s topography and society in this
period, and how do they change in response to historical events?

How are these changes reflected in literature produced during the period
in which we are interested in this module, from 1640 onwards?

How does this background enhance our understanding of Daniel Defoe’s

Journal of the Plague Year?

You will have encountered answers to some of these questions in

different contexts, in different units. For instance, your study of
Congreve will have shown you one dimension of London life at the turn
of the eighteenth century. You found in Unit 9 how the social coteries
represented in The Way of the World were rooted in specific places
around the capital city; Millamant, for instance, describes the
fashionable pastime of taking the air in Hyde Park.

How does the London that Defoe depicts in the Journal of the Plague
Year compare to this?

Jeremy Boulton highlights several important aspects of London’s

development over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: he describes
how the city’s economic growth was fuelled by trade and commerce,
how its topography changed (the layout of its streets and its buildings),
and the alterations in the city’s social make-up (2000: passim). Boulton
also highlights how political or national events motivated many of these
developments: clearly, the most significant of these in relation to this
unit is the occasion of the Plague of 1665.

London’s population grew rapidly; this increased number of inhabitants

exacerbated the gap between rich and poor already present in the city.
The wealthiest enjoyed the luxuries made more readily available by
London’s increased trade links with exotic and far-off lands (which
continued into the eighteenth century, as Belinda’s toilet testifies).

Unit 13: Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 13-3
_____________________________________________________________________

However, for the most impoverished, the streets became more crowded,
dwellings were often cramped with many families sharing small spaces,
and sanitation so to speak was dire. As such, the conditions were ripe
for pestilence and disease to spread amongst an ill-nourished and
unhygienic populace. Boulton highlights how this major event altered
London’s society and, eventually, initiated changes in the layout of the
city’s buildings, its laws and its way of life.

We have seen how many of these developments are mapped out in the
very different kinds of literature that we have encountered in previous
units: in Unit 3, for instance, we examined the differences between the
pleasures of country retirement and the civic duties performed in an
urban context. We also saw, in our discussion of Congreve’s Way of the
World, how ‘high’, fashionable society was concentrated in the city of
London, just as the political events satirised in Dryden’s Absalom and
Achitophel were centred in the capital.

The importance of London as a centre of commercial, literary and social

activity propelled the economic and cultural life of the nation in many
respects; in turn, as with the seventeenth century, much literature of
the eighteenth century reflects the importance of London in relation to
all aspects of national life. This centrality emerges in very different types
of text: in prose fictions, in political pamphlets, in poems and in plays.

However, London was not always a site of admiration and attraction:

many writers of this period considered the capital to be the hub of vice,
a place where morals were corrupted. It was often contrasted
unfavourably with the country, whose benefits were considered to be
wholesome and pure. We have seen this distinction between country
and city in previous units, and will explore it in closer detail in
subsequent units exploring Smollett, and the poetry of Crabbe and
Goldsmith.

Here, though, it is important to note how some of the social, literary and
political changes witnessed in the nation’s capital – and which emerged
in response to historical events – shaped the way in which many British
citizens thought about themselves and their nation. This was, in turn,
registered in the different kinds of literature produced throughout this
period.

How might these details about the city of London inform our reading of
Defoe’s Journal?

Defoe was a London-based writer, whose fiction often draws on his

detailed knowledge of local geography. His prose fiction Moll Flanders,
for instance, reveals intimate familiarity with the streets, shops, and
private and public places of the capital. However, in writing the Journal
Defoe presents an apparently ‘realistic’ account of the city at a period of
history removed from the present time of writing. As we have seen in
our reading of Jeremy Boulton’s discussion of London’s history up to
1700, the city was a different place to that of 1722, and that difference
was determined in significant ways by major events such as the plague,
upon which Defoe focuses in the Journal.

So how do we read the Journal? How far is it a historical document that

accurately reflects a major national event, and its effect upon the
nation’s capital? How far must we take into account the fact that its
author writes about this period in history from a retrospective vantage-
point? Do we read the Journal as principally factual, or as a fictionalised
account of recent history?

In many respects, determining how we read Defoe’s Journal revolves

around the question of genre.

13-4 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

FACT AND FICTION: THE QUESTION OF GENRE

At an earlier point in this unit we described how the Journal of the
Plague Year does not simply record events, but attempts to provide a
subjective interpretation of them. However, once we start talking about
observation and interpretation we are forced to ask what kind of text
Defoe’s Journal is: to what genre of literature does it belong?

The title page of the Journal makes very particular claims. We are told
that the text we are about to read consists of:

Observations or Memorials, of the most Remarkable Occurrences,

as well Publick as Private, which happened in London during the
last Great Visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen who continued
all the while in London.

We learn that we shall be presented with an eye-witness account of a

great calamity: many features of the text itself encourage this
impression, as we shall go on to discover. Despite appearances,
however, the Journal is not a personal account; alongside the factual
‘Observations’ made in the text, Defoe intertwines a considerable degree
of invention. The Journal is derived from actual events but it is narrated
by a fictional character. The citizen who purportedly survived the plague
never existed, but is entirely a creation of Daniel Defoe’s. The Journal,
then, is not a journal at all but a fictional narrative which masquerades
as a different kind of writing.

In the previous unit, we saw how Mary Wortley Montagu elaborates

upon her own journal entries and her letters to produce an account of
her travels that is semi-truthful, semi-fictional, in the Turkish Embassy
Letters. The Journal of the Plague Year adopts a similar liminal position
between accuracy and invention, but unlike the Letters is not based on
an account of personal experience from the time at which the events
described take place. Defoe gleaned his facts from reading about the
plague and this period in London’s history, and through the accounts
provided by older relatives and those who had experienced it first-hand.
Yet he elaborates upon and embellishes his material to produce a text
that is a hybrid of the actual and the fictional, the imaginative and the
real.

How does Defoe create the impression that this is a genuine, factual
account of events as they take place?

There are, in fact, numerous devices that succeed in convincing the

reader that this is a truthful account, written on the basis of hard
evidence, and enhanced with the subjective interpretations of an
individual who speaks from personal experience. In the opening pages
of the Journal, H.F. lists various statistics that reveal the terrible
increase in mortality rates: the number of burials in the various parishes
of London testifies to the increasingly tight hold that the plague is
gaining upon the local population.

In his Journal, H.F. is careful to distinguish rumour from fact, and uses
such devices as listing statistics to promote truth over hearsay. Gossip
and rumour were rampant in the late seventeenth century, even though
this was a period when newsprint was not as ubiquitous as it was to
become by the time Defoe wrote the Journal in 1722. At the very
beginning of his account H.F. informs the reader that ‘we had no such
thing as printed News Papers in those Days, to spread Rumours and
Reports of Things, and to improve them by the Invention of Men, as I
have lived to see practised since’ (Defoe 2010: 1). So as to stamp his
account with the validity of truth, he meticulously informs the reader
whether he knows a certain thing to be true (because he has seen it

Unit 13: Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 13-5
_____________________________________________________________________

with his own eyes) or whether he is merely passing on a story or a

rumour.

The manner in which H.F. acquires his information is always noted, and
the limits of his own personal knowledge clearly given. Having told one
story, H.F. says that it is ‘true in the General, for no Man could at such a
Time learn all the Particulars’ (Defoe 2010: 52). Later, before relating an
affecting tale of ‘immovable affection’, H.F. cautions his reader that the
story came to his knowledge by hearsay, and that he will not ‘vouch the
Truth of the Particulars’ (Defoe 2010: 115).

Why is H.F. so preoccupied with sifting through what he knows, so eager

to alert the reader to the difference between evidence, story, rumour
and hearsay?

We can grasp the reasons behind H.F.’s concerns more fully if we briefly
address the contexts of the publishing world at the time Defoe wrote the
Journal, as opposed to the world recorded within its narrative. As H.F.
claims, ‘printed newspapers’ did not exist as such in the late
seventeenth century; however, by the time that Defoe was writing print
was ubiquitous, in a wide variety of formats and for many different
purposes. On the one hand, newspapers and printed texts of all kinds
could potentially increase man’s knowledge: it could spread news,
information, instruction, and so improve the intellectual capacities of
individuals in all walks of life. Not only the literate could benefit; social
practices at this time meant that printed material was often read out
aloud in public or small gatherings, thus benefitting those who were
illiterate or semi-literate.

However, the increasing quantity of printed matter did not necessarily

have purely beneficial results, nor was it always held to be a positive
contribution to society as a whole. Our previous explorations of the
publishing world surrounding Pope, Finch and Barber provided insight
into one dimension of the nature of printing practices in the early
eighteenth century, and the potentially negative effects that printing
one’s writings could have upon an author’s reputation. We saw, too, how
in relation to Dryden and to Pope that these writers expressed concern
that the increasing abundance of printed material matched a decline in
literary standards.

While print circulates truth and information, it can also spread lies,
distortion and pure fantasy. How one tells truth from falsity in print was
an intellectual preoccupation in Defoe’s period, and permeates the
delicate balance between factual credibility and entertaining
fictionalisation that underpins the Journal.

One of Defoe’s aims is to make his fictional account of the plague pass
as fact, to present his inventions as the truth. If the reader is convinced
that Defoe’s narrator is honest then his description of the events
described in the Journal are likely to be more acceptable. By carefully
discriminating between rumour, story and fact, H.F. wins the reader’s
trust. As we saw in the previous unit, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu used
a similar tactic when, in order to persuade her reader of the truth of her
letters, she distanced herself from the lies of other travellers. Defoe’s
hope is that once we see H.F.’s refusal to present invention as truth, we
will accept the greatest invention of all: that of H.F. himself.

H.F.’s discriminations between different kinds of information (some

completely true, others true in general, yet others merely hearsay) also
increase the Journal’s believability because they mirror the various
routes by which we, in the world outside the book, also follow to arrive
at truth. The learning experience that H.F. undergoes as he pursues the
chronological sequence of days throughout the year, each of which is

13-6 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

marked by a fresh experience, fact or piece of information that shapes

his account of this period, increases the impression of verisimilitude that
Defoe wishes to convey in his text. As such, our involvement as readers
with the narrator and his experiences is heightened, and we become
more engaged in his world.

Why might Defoe be motivated to write such a text in this way? Why, if
he wishes to write a fictional narrative, does he not simply create an
entirely made-up story, rather than one partially based on fact? Defoe
wishes to create the impression that his Journal is as an eye-witness’s
memoir because such writing can claim to be true in a way fiction
cannot, which has several important implications for Defoe’s potential
purpose in publishing this work. The ‘truthfulness’ of Defoe’s text gives
it increased narrative authority, or influence over the reader. As such, it
has a greater ability to convey moralising lessons, or advice, than a dry,
overtly didactic piece of writing might do.

We have already encountered in previous units the idea that art can be
both instructive and entertaining – and so may help to effect change for
the better in the public sphere. Whereas poetry or drama were the
dominant literary modes in previous periods, throughout the eighteenth
century prose writing came to assume an increasing significance in
cultural and public life; in particular, prose fiction went from strength to
strength. The idea increasingly took hold that prose fiction was able to
convey a moral lesson, or wholesome idea, and so was capable of
instructing the reader at the same time as entertaining him or her with
its diverting narrative.

This idea gained particular momentum towards the middle of the

eighteenth century, when the so-called ‘rise of the novel’ saw prose
fiction assume an unprecedented significance in its role in public life. We
shall examine this more closely in subsequent units, in relation to the
writings of Richardson and Fielding; here, however, it is important to
recognise that Defoe – who was an important early formulator of the
types and purposes of prose fiction in the eighteenth century – aims in
his writings both to entertain and to instruct.

As such, the Journal’s dual nature as both a factual account and an

invented, ‘fictional’ one, helps its readers to find its narrative more
convincing; as such, they can accept the points it makes and the ideas it
tries to communicate as being more reasonable, more true to life. And,
as such, the Journal succeeds in achieving its instructive purpose more
effectively, precisely through engaging the reader.

ACTIVITY
Make notes on those elements of the text that Defoe uses to try to
convince us that this is a genuine, first-hand account of the events
described.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE TEXT

A Journal of the Plague Year is loosely structured by the course of the
plague itself. The narrative is framed by a definite beginning and end-
point: the first sentence of the Journal tells us when H.F. first heard that
‘the plague was returned again in Holland’, and the final pages of his
account deal with London’s ‘deliverance’.

However, as we read through the Journal, we might be tempted to think

that it actually lacks a clear and defined structure: H.F. is not an

Unit 13: Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 13-7
_____________________________________________________________________

omniscient, or all-knowing narrator; he is an individual experiencing a

catastrophe. As such, his response to events is immediate and
spontaneous – he writes about them as they occur, as one would do in a
‘real’ journal. This record thus acquires a fragmentary, and at times
incoherent quality: H.F. digresses, repeats himself, and takes up topics
only to drop them.

Apparent narrative formlessness is strikingly exemplified in the story of

the three men promised to us on page 57, left aside and then taken up
again on page 120 (‘I come back to my three Men’). The disparate
stands of this sub-story are insufficiently developed, and its place within
the larger narrative is not entirely clear. This pattern, of incompleteness
and inconsistency, recurs repeatedly throughout the Journal.

ACTIVITY
Note down other occasions on which H.F.’s narrative seems disrupted
and inconsistent.

What forms does this fragmentation take, and what effect does it have
on the overall impression created by the Journal?

The Journal, we might say, does not have a coherently developed plot;
its seeming lack of structure might even threaten the entire narrative
with a sense of disorder and incomprehensibility. However, the
cumulative effect of these fragmented narrative elements is that, in fact,
the Journal is extraordinarily effective. It creates the impression of
immediacy, that this is an account written in response to events as they
unfold. This succeeds in engrossing us in the narrative by sustaining its
suspense: we have no clear sense of what is going to happen next, or
what its significance may be. We experience the same confusion and
uncertainty that H.F. is undergoing, and, like him, we try to impose
order and form.

SAQ 1
How does the effect of immediacy, created by the fragmented structure
of the Journal’s narrative, succeed in convincing the reader that this is
a first-hand account of genuine experience, recorded at the time at
which these events take place?

H.F. AND THE MODERN

What might we make of H.F. as the narrator of this text? Do we
sympathise with him, and become engaged in his experiences as a
result? Is he an archetypal character – such as one might find in
allegorical texts like The Pilgrim’s Progress – or is he an ‘individual’, with
distinctive and unique character traits?

We could argue that Defoe’s H.F. is a modern individual: but what might
we mean by the word ‘modern’? Some historians argue that the
‘modern’ period begins when money replaces land as the primary
economic unit. In England this shift occurred in the seventeenth century
(the Bank of England and the Stock Exchange were founded in the
1690s). Money is a very important subject in Defoe’s writing, and is
central to how he presents characters such as Moll Flanders. Robinson
Crusoe, marooned on a desert island, reveals himself to be equally
concerned with economic matters, even though he can have no practical

13-8 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

use for money in his situation. According to Ian Watt, Crusoe actually
exemplifies the first instance in prose fiction of ‘homo economicus’, or
the first capitalist man, such is his obsession with money (1957: 69).

Deidre Shauna Lynch draws an interesting link between the etymological

roots of words relating to counting money, and to telling stories. As she
writes,
As they tell their stories, the protagonists of Defoe’s fictions
may alert modern readers to the older meanings of the verb “to
tell,” reminding us that, in the eighteenth century, stories and
money alike were things that (along with ships’ cargoes and
tradespeople’s stock) required telling. The Oxford English
Dictionary in fact cites Defoe three times in its entry
enumerating the twenty-six meanings of tell. (2009: 84)

As Lynch observes, the ‘citations’ and ‘usage’ listed in the OED in

relation to such words:

[…] can make visible the deep affinities, ones especially fruitful
for Defoe’s novels, that link the human activities of narrating
and counting – just those affinities that still make ‘account’ both
another designation for a narration and a word for the
computations, the reports on moneys paid and received, that
comprise, for instance, a bank statement. (2009: 84)

How does this economic discourse inform our reading of the Journal of
the Plague Year?

In the Journal, we learn that H.F. is a saddler, whose business dealings

are primarily with merchants trading to the English colonies in America
(Defoe 2010: 8). Money is not as central a preoccupation for H.F. as it is
for some of Defoe’s characters, but he still makes us very much aware
that modern life, in a capitalist economy, requires that money should
constantly change hands. Of course, at times of contagion, the contact
between people that money necessitates becomes fraught. One of the
most memorable episodes in the Journal is that where H.F. comes
across a purse lying in a square which no-one will touch.

In this passage, we gather several different facets of H.F.’s identity as a

‘modern’, economic individual. At first, it seems, he is disinterested
about money:

When I came to the Post-House, as I went to put in my Letter, I

saw a Man stand in one Corner of the Yard, and talking to
another at a Window, and a third had open’d a Door belonging
to the Office; In the middle of the Yard lay a small Leather
Purse, with two Keys hanging at it, and Money in it, but no Body
would meddle with it: I ask’d how long it had lain there; the
Man that Window said, it had lain almost an Hour; but that they
had not meddled with it, because they did not know, but the
Person who dropt it, might come back to look for it. I had no
such need of Money, nor was the Sum so big that I had any
Inclination to meddle with it, or to get the Money at the hazard
it might be attended with it; so I seem’d to go away, when the
Man who had open’d the door said he would take it up; but so,
that if the right Owner came for it, he should be sure to have it.
(Defoe 2010: 104-105)

Here, it seems, H.F. is reluctant to pick up a purse that does not belong
to him, and whose rightful owner might subsequently reclaim it.

Unit 13: Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 13-9
_____________________________________________________________________

Do you notice any particularly interesting features about the way in

which H.F. describes his actions, and his interaction with other people, in
this scene?

We might, for instance, observe that Defoe conveys the idea of

circulation, both through the actions described and through the stylistic
features of this passage. H.F. posts a letter, which immediately suggests
to us the idea of the circulation of news, of conveying information to a
distant recipient, who might be cut off by distance or by circumstance.
The interaction between H.F. and this distant recipient prompts us to
think, perhaps, of the fear and isolation characterising a time of plague,
when even whole communities might be cut off from the outside world
through quarantine.

However, as H.F.’s exchange with the two other characters makes clear,
human interaction takes place in other forms in this passage, in which
the circulation of news operates within the more mundane confines of
the conversation about the object lying on the floor. It is, of course, this
purse which conveys the idea of circulation most effectively, principally
that of the exchange of money within a capitalist economy that it
symbolises.

That H.F. claims to be disinterested in this item on one level suggests

that he is not a financially motivated individual; but on another, his
exchange with the other two characters in the scene, and the very way
in which it is written, show that he is inextricably part of this society. He
is necessarily bound to interact with those around him – through the
verbal ‘exchange’, just as much as through the financial one. The syntax
of the passage supports this, as the hypotactic clauses – each clause
being linked to the next in a chain of dependence – mimics the close ties
that bind individuals within society; and, in this passage, this is a
peculiarly economic bond.

However, whilst money and words might circulate freely within society,
both can potentially be harmful at a time of national crisis such as the
plague. We observed earlier how harmful gossip and hearsay can spread
pernicious rumours about the scale of the disaster – damaging to public
morale and, perhaps, to future remedy; similarly, this episode of the
purse shows that it is through one of the most binding forms of human
interaction in an economic society, the exchange of money, that
contagion might be spread. It is this fact, rather than his lack of interest
in finance or his sense of property rights, which perhaps motivates H.F.
to walk away from the purse at first.

As the remainder of this episode goes on to reveal, the purse symbolises

the circulation of disease through its role as a carrier of money. H.F.
describes the elaborate measures taken to cleanse the coins contained
within the purse to make them safe for handling – with the intention, we
are told, of restoring them to their rightful owner at some future point:

So he went in, and fetched a pail of Water, and set it down hard
by the Purse; then went again, and fetch’d some Gun-powder,
and cast a good deal of Powder upon the Purse, and then made a
Train from that which he had thrown loose upon the Purse; the
train reached about two Yards; after this he goes in a third Time,
and fetches out a pair of Tongs red hot, and which he had
prepar’d, I suppose on purpose; and first setting Fire to the Train
of Powder, that sing’d the Purse and also smoak’d the Air
sufficiently: But he was not content with that, but he then takes
up the Purse with the Tongs, holding it so long till the Tongs
burnt thro’ the Purse, and then he shook the Money out into the
Pail of Water, so he carried it in. The Money, as I remember, was
about thirteen Shillings, and some smooth Groats, and Brass
Farthings. (Defoe 2010: 105)

13-10 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

Although H.F. claims at first not to care for the purse’s money, he has a
very distinct recollection of the precise amount; as such, he reveals
himself to be an example of an individual operating under the conditions
of a capitalist, economic society. Yet the solidity of this structure is most
potently threatened at a time of crisis, such as the plague, when the
most vital element of its correct functioning (money) becomes the
harbinger of disease, and involves such an elaborate ritual to make it
safe to handle.

In what other respects might we describe H.F as a ‘modern’ individual?

H.F.’s religion is also modern in kind. Dissenters, Protestants who did

not recognise the established Church of England, were excluded by law
from the universities and professions, and so they often became
merchants and entrepreneurs. Not only were they disproportionately
represented among those who made a living from new sources of wealth
in the colonies, they were also convinced that commercial enterprises
were a vocation as worthy as any other. While more traditional believers
might look askance at trade and money-making, dissenters believed
that these activities, too, could reflect the will of God.

In the early pages of his Journal, H.F. vacillates between leaving London
and remaining in the plague-stricken city. He decides to stay, not only
because to leave ‘had been to hazard the loss not only of [his] Trade,
but of [his] Goods, and indeed of all [he] had in the World’ (Defoe 2010:
8-9), but because by staying he takes his lot ‘in that Station in which
God had placed [him]’ (Defoe 2010: 11).

By both religion and occupation H.F. belongs to the forces which were
changing England into a modern country. As such, he coheres with Ian
Watt’s assessment of Robinson Crusoe, who whilst being an ‘economic
man’ is also an example of the ‘Protestant work ethic’ in action: this
involves the concept of the ‘dignity of labour’, in which it is seemly for
the Christian to be usefully employed (1957: 82). However, as Watt
shows, this idea of labour is also an inherently economic one, whereby
man’s function in society is determined by his useful contribution
(through work) to its successful financial transactions. H.F., too,
represents the individual’s role to be both an economic and a religious
one, each aspect of which he must fulfil to be a useful member of
society.

As readers of his journal, however, we are more likely to be struck by a

third mark of H.F.’s modernity: his insistence on observation, on the
importance of what the eye sees. H.F.’s ideas about himself, his world,
and the crisis through which he is living, are determined by what he
sees. The insistence that the mind knows what the eye has seen, that
understanding begins with sight, is one H.F. shares with John Locke,
whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) exerted a vast
and significant influence upon literature and thought in the eighteenth
century.

SAQ 2
In what respects is the role of the ‘modern’ individual within a smoothly
functioning society threatened in a time of crisis such as the plague?

Unit 13: Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 13-11
_____________________________________________________________________

THE SEEING ‘EYE/I’

H.F. tells us that his opinions are based on ‘what I saw with my eyes
and heard from other People that were Eye-Witnesses’ (Defoe 2010:
99). As we observed earlier, we are more likely to credit H.F. as a
witness because his account is characterised by concrete and
circumstantial detail. He does not simply tell us that certain incidents
occurred: he places events in a particular time and place. For example,
he might introduce an episode ‘As I went along Houndsditch one
Morning, about Eight a-Clock’ (Defoe 2010: 48), or ‘[m]uch about the
same time I walked out into the fields towards Bow’ (Defoe 2010: 105).

H.F.’s desire to acquire knowledge through observation is his most

obvious characteristic. He knows that each time he ventures out into the
city he risks being taken by the plague, but even the very real fear of
death cannot keep him inside. The tension between H.F.’s curiosity and
his fear is a major theme in the Journal: in the struggle between them,
his curiosity always wins. Although, at times, he tells the reader that he
would ‘retire Home sometimes and resolve to go out no more’ (Defoe
2010: 76), and that at one stage he ‘kept within Doors, for about a
Fortnight, and never stirr’d out’ (Defoe 2010: 103), his resolutions never
hold: he cannot ‘prevail upon [his] unsatisfy’d Curiosity’ (Defoe 2010:
80).

The more potent the threat of danger, it seems, the greater H.F.’s
compulsion to witness its cause first-hand. When a ‘terrible pit’ is dug in
his parish to bury the dead, H.F. cannot ‘resist [his] curiosity to go and
see it’. Having seen the pit once, he is driven to go and see it again:

It was about the 10th of September, that my Curiosity led, or

rather drove, me to go and see this Pit again, when there had
been near 400 People buried in it; and I was not content to see it
in the Day-time, as I had done before; for then there would have
been nothing to have been seen but the loose Earth; for all the
Bodies that were thrown in, were immediately covered with Earth
by those they call’d the Buryers, which at other Times were call’d
Bearers; but I resolved to go in the Night and see some of them
thrown in. (Defoe 2010: 60)

What do you notice about the syntax of this passage? Make notes
comparing the length of sentence in this passage and the passage
analysed above (Defoe 2010: 105): how does structure support sense in
either passage?

If H.F. is to understand the plague he has to see even its most horrifying
manifestations with his own eyes. H.F.’s definition of himself as an eye-
witness, the high value he places on observation, marks him as a
modern narrator.

SAQ 3
Read the section of the Journal where H.F. describes his fascination
with, and visits to, the burial pit at Aldgate (pp. 58-62). How does the
narrator persuade us that these visits actually took place?

13-12 Literature 3
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‘EYE/I’: SUBJECTIVE INTERPRETATION AND

SCIENTIFIC TRUTH
Whilst on the one hand H.F.’s observations rely upon his ability to
observe the sights of London during a time of plague, and using the
evidence of his own eyes to make a record of them, on the other hand
his account is dependent upon how he interprets the events he
witnesses. As such, what H.F. observes with the ‘eye’ – what he
perceives using this organ – is subject to the interoperations of the ‘I’;
the external faculty of perception, as in sight, is intimately bound with
the faculty of perception, as in the thought-processes involved in
interpreting what we see.

H.F.’s journal of the plague does not simply record the devastation: it
also attempts to understand it, to make it mean something. As an
interpreter of the plague, H.F. is torn between the supernatural and the
natural, between the mysterious and the scientific. A religious man, H.F.
uses biblical events to pattern his experience, and (in common with
many of his contemporaries) is tempted to understand the plague as a
punishment sent by God. He claims at one point,

Doubtless the Visitation it self is a Stroke from Heaven upon a

City, or Country, or Nation where it falls; a Messenger of its
Vengeance, and a loud Call to that Nation or Country or City, to
Humiliation and Repentance. (Defoe 2010: 193)

As our exploration of the historical contexts of the Civil War and

Restoration in previous units will tell us, Defoe’s first readers would have
understood the cause for English repentance: Dissenters, and others
who had hoped to establish a God-fearing New Jerusalem in England,
had recently seen those hopes defeated by the Restoration of the
monarchy (1660). Not only did England once more have a King, but the
court of Charles II was notoriously dissolute. At a certain level, H.F.
wants to believe that God sent the plague to punish Londoners and call
them to repentance. How does this contribute towards our
understanding in previous units of the simultaneous destruction and
renewal potentially brought about by such terrible disasters?

Having interpreted the plague as a sign of God’s retribution, however,

H.F. is not fully satisfied. Part of H.F. subscribes to the rationalist belief
that even the hand of God works in natural ways. That is why he holds
that the plague is ‘a distemper arising from natural causes […] really
propagated by natural means’. As we have learnt elsewhere, H.F. is, of
course, writing at a time of scientific innovation and confidence: the
foundation of the Royal Society in 1660, the scientific advances
propelled forward by Newton, and an increasing interest in rational
enquiry all helped to erode existing superstitions and non-rational ways
of explaining the universe.

However, that both dimensions of human ways of understanding the

world – the scientific and the superstitious – remained potent during this
period emerges in one particularly memorable story of the Journal. The
horrors of the plague were compounded by the impossibility of
identifying its victims immediately; so, H.F. tells us, some people held
that the presence of the plague might be distinguished if a victim
breathed upon glass:

[…] where the Breath condensing, there might living Creatures be

seen by a Microscope, of strange monstrous and frightful Shapes,
such as Dragons, Snakes, Serpents, and Devils, horrible to
behold: But this I very much question the Truth of, and we had
no Microscopes at that Time, as I remember, to make the
Experiment with. (Defoe 2010: 203)

Unit 13: Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 13-13
_____________________________________________________________________

H.F. is torn between the desire for rational ‘experiment’ and the non-
rational impulse that lies behind it: here, he conveys both his scientific
impulses and his residual superstition. This passage reveals the
conflicting impulses that tear an individual living through a transitional
period of history: H. F. is not prepared to forego entirely the possibility
of monsters, dragons, and devils, but he wants to discover their shapes
through use of what was then a recent scientific discovery, the
microscope.

The plague was so little understood that it appeared inscrutable and

mysterious. When people died suddenly in the streets, some thought
they ‘had been touched by a stroke from heaven as men are killed by a
flash of lightning’. This is a view H.F. wants to disprove, remarking that
such victims ‘either had Tokens upon them or other evident proofs of
the Distemper’ (Defoe 2010: 168). The differences in these two
interpretations are important.

Strokes from heaven cannot be prepared for or avoided. In contrast, a

natural process - which has real and visible effects upon the body - must
have a cause. When H.F. affirms that all those who died had the ‘tokens’
upon them, he is insisting that the disease works through natural
means. Implicit in this insistence is the hope that medical progress will
someday enable physicians to read those tokens before, not after,
death. H.F. believes that even the darkest of nature’s workings can
eventually be brought to light, and that human society will not always
be powerless before catastrophes like the plague. H.F.’s optimism in this
respect is another indication of his modernity: he embodies the striving
for truth based on empirical knowledge that was to take increasing hold
on the types of intellectual enquiry characterising the so-called
‘Enlightenment’ thought of the eighteenth century.

Yet the ‘modernity’ of H.F.’s character is also significant in terms of

other developments witnessed during this period, within the realm of
literature. H.F.’s subjective interpretation of the empirical evidence he
gathers – that is, the observations he makes with his own eyes of
events that he personally witnesses – reveal the importance of his role
as a ‘modern’ individual in terms of the development of prose fiction. He
is not simply a stock-character, a cipher for the author’s words, but is
instead a responsive individual whose reflections upon his own
experiences shape his future character and actions. As such, Defoe gives
H.F. a psychological complexity that was to emerge more fully in the
‘individual’ heroes and heroines who fill prose fiction later in the century.

SAQ 4
Defoe narrates A Journal of the Plague Year through the persona, or
fictional character, of H.F. How would you describe his character?

REVIEW
This unit has explored the narrative features of Defoe’s A Journal of the
Plague Year. We have examined the historical background of the actual
events that supply the context for Defoe’s narrative, the Great Plague of
1665. We have seen how this disaster was particular to London, but how
this also had a significant impact upon the nation as a whole: the capital
city was the hub of economic, social and cultural activity, and its
devastation by plague inevitably affected the smooth functioning and
the stability of Britain’s commercial and cultural life, besides actually
destroying many lives. We have seen how, in many respects, Defoe’s
Journal is a contribution to the literature about London that emerged
with increasing diversity and abundance throughout the eighteenth
century.

13-14 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

In this unit, we have also addressed the generic questions that revolve
around the semi-factual, semi-fictional nature of Defoe’s text. We have
seen how the Journal weaves truth and invention into a diverting
narrative that is, at the same time, instructive. As such, we have seen
how the Journal succeeds in achieving art’s potential purpose of
providing both entertainment and instruction. This, we learnt, has
significant implications for the development of prose fiction, in particular
with the ‘rise of the novel’ witnessed towards the middle of the
eighteenth century.

We have examined various aspects of Defoe’s Journal in relation to its

balance between veracity and invention. We have seen how this
operates on a structural level: the fragmentation of H.F.’s narrative
succeeds in creating the impression that this is an account recorded in
the process of events unravelling. We have also examined how the
character of H.F. itself is a significant element of the Journal’s ability to
offer a convincing record of personal experience, and of this text’s role
within the development of prose fiction.

H.F. is a ‘modern’ individual both in his embodiment of an ‘economic’

impulse, which we have described as characterising a modern capitalist
society; but H.F.’s religious beliefs are also distinctly ‘modern’ in one
sense too. H.F. balances the superstitious dimension of his religious
beliefs with the impulse towards scientific, rational enquiry
characterising late seventeenth-century thought. As such, he embodies
the progressive, ‘modern’ individual who reacts in response to his own
experiences, and in interpreting them determines his own future actions.
It is this individualism that secures H.F.’s role as an important element
in the development of the ‘psychological’, subjective individual of
eighteenth-century prose fiction.

In the next unit, we shall examine another dimension of eighteenth-

century prose writing, yet one which is concerned primarily with fact
rather than fiction. However, as we shall see in our reading of Jonathan
Swift’s Irish Pamphlets, contemporary developments in prose writings
have a significant impact on the printed text’s ability to effect change
within the social sphere.

ADDITIONAL READING
Bender, John. 1987. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the
Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago:
Chicago University Press)

Flynn, Carol H. 1990. The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press) (Parts available online via Google
Books)

Novak, Maximillian E. 1977. ‘Defoe and the Disordered City’, PMLA, 92:
241-252

Richetti, John. 1987. Daniel Defoe (Boston: G.K. Hall)

Richetti, John. 2009. ‘Defoe as an innovator of fictional for’, in John

Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-
Century Novel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp.
41-71

Rogers, Pat (ed.). 1995. Daniel Defoe: The Critical Heritage (London:
Routledge) (Parts available online via Google Books)

Unit 13: Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 13-15
_____________________________________________________________________

REFERENCES
Boulton, Jeremy. 2000. ‘London 1540-1700’, in Peter Clarke (ed.), The
Cambridge Urban History of Britain: Volume 2, 1540–1840
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 315-46

Defoe, Daniel. 2010. Cynthia Wall (ed.), A Journal of the Plague Year
(Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Griffiths, P., J. Landers, M. Pelling and R. Tyson (eds). 2000. ‘Population

and disease, estrangement and belonging 1540–1700’, in Peter
Clarke (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: Volume 2,
1540–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 195-
234 (Parts available via Google Books)

Lynch, Deirdre Susan. 2009. ‘Money and character in Defoe’s fiction’, in

John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the
Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), pp. 84-101

Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson
and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus)

13-16 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
How does the effect of immediacy, created by the fragmented structure
of the Journal’s narrative, succeed in convincing the reader that this is a
first-hand account of genuine experience, recorded at the time at which
these events take place?

By creating a fragmented narrative account, in which the narrator

digresses, leaves plot-lines undeveloped, and does not always conclude
certain story-lines, Defoe succeeds in creating the impression that this
is a first-hand account of experience, recorded as events unravel. This
sense of immediacy enables the reader to believe that H.F., the
narrator, writes down his experiences as they happen; if he fails to
provide ‘closure’, this might simply be because the pace of events
means that not all stories can be neatly concluded, or that the focus of
his attentions shifts elsewhere in response to fresh circumstances.
Narrative fragmentation mirrors the sense of uncertainty felt at such a
time of crisis, and as such contributes to the impression that H.F. writes
at a time of peculiar stress and insecurity.

SAQ 2
In what respects is the role of the ‘modern’ individual within a smoothly
functioning society threatened in a time of crisis such as the plague?

The ‘modern’ individual can, in some respects, be identified as one who

participates in a newly-emerging capitalist economy. As such, he is
necessarily interdependent with the actions and transactions of other
individuals within society. This operates on several levels: members of
society exchange words, actions, and forms of communication such as
letters, all of which sustain the networks of social interaction
characterising modernity. However, these exchanges are often
principally financial, which in the period of the Journal’s composition
largely involved the exchange of money.

At a time of crisis, such as the plague, the exchange of money could

literally enable the spread of disease; as such, the circulation of the
individual, and the money he circulates, might increase the spread of
the corruption which threatens to undermine social health and stability.
The individual, ‘modern’ man’s role within society is thus threatened at
a time of crisis by his inability to participate fully in the interactions
necessary to sustaining society’s smooth functioning: that is, through
interacting with others in exchanging money, words or gestures.

Unit 13: Daniel Defoe: A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 13-17
_____________________________________________________________________

SAQ 3
Read the section of the Journal where H.F. describes his fascination
with, and visits to, the burial pit at Aldgate (pp. 58-62). How does the
narrator persuade us that these visits actually took place?

In H.F., Defoe created a narrator whose use of detail compels belief. For
example, the burial pit H.F. visits is very specifically placed, firmly
located ‘in the Church-Yard of [the] Parish of Aldgate’ (Defoe 2010: 58-
59). Our ability to visualise the scene is aided by H.F.’s provision of the
dimensions of the pit. Our belief that we have been given an eye-
witness view (rather than information acquired from a written record) is
encouraged by H.F.’s qualification ‘as near as I may judge’. As the
passage continues, we are offered figures and statistics. H.F. not only
tells us when the digging of the pit was begun, and how quickly the pit
was filled, he also tells us the precise date when he was driven to go
and visit it.

The effect of this accumulated detail is to persuade us that we are

reading an actual memoir. The use of detail is not, however, Defoe’s
only strategy of persuasion. H.F.’s admission that ‘it is impossible to say
anything that is able to give a true idea of it to those who did not see it,
other than this, that it was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such
as no tongue can express’ (Defoe 2010: 60) is suggestive rather than
descriptive. By telling the reader that no language can convey the
horrors of the pit, H.F. intimates its powerful effect upon him.
Paradoxically, his insistence that he has no words to describe the
horrors of what he has seen encourages us to believe that we are
reading an account of an actual event.

SAQ 4
Defoe narrates A Journal of the Plague Year through the persona, or
fictional character, of H.F. How would you describe his character?

Over the course of the Journal we learn a considerable amount about

H.F. as an individual. We know that he is a merchant, whose livelihood
depends upon English colonial interests. He is a religious man, but not a
bigot, who believes that ‘on the other Side the Grave we shall be all
brethren again’ (Defoe 2010: 176).

H.F.’s most striking characteristic is his desire to witness what is going

on around him; ‘curiosity’ is the personal quality he mentions most
often in his account. So great is H.F.’s desire to see and to know that it
conquers even his fear of contamination and death, driving him to go
and visit the pits which serve as communal graves for the plague
victims. H.F.’s curiosity is accompanied by a desire to discern some
meaning, or pattern, in the workings of the plague. H.F. can offer no
simple explanation for the horror that London is undergoing. He is
prepared to admit that the plague is a divine punishment, but he insists
that it must be spread through ‘natural means’ that men can discover
and prevent.

In creating H.F., a dissenting merchant with a belief in scientific

progress, Defoe created a character we can identify as being specifically
‘modern’. The psychological complexity of the character identifies the
importance of his role within the development of prose fiction, and the
increasing emphasis placed in prose narratives upon the individual
character’s evolution over the course of the story.

13-18 Literature 3
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UNIT 14

JONATHAN SWIFT AND IRELAND

AIMS
The aims of this unit are to outline Swift’s attitudes towards Ireland and
to introduce an important element of early eighteenth-century prose
writing: the occasional pamphlet.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Discuss the various ways in which Swift may be considered an Irish

writer.

Place two of Swift’s Irish pamphlets, A Short View of the Present

State of Ireland (1727) and A Modest Proposal (1729), within their
historical context.

Describe how the political pamphlet might be identified as a literary

form through its deployment of rhetorical devices.

Offer an account of Swift’s use of irony.

Discuss Swift’s strategies of persuasion.

REQUIRED READING
You are required to read two of Jonathan Swift’s pamphlets:

A Short View of the Present State of Ireland (1727)

A Modest Proposal (1729)

A Modest Proposal is included in volume one of Stephen Greenblatt

(ed.). 2012. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th edn (New
York: W. W. Norton and Co.). A Short View of the Present State of
Ireland is available online as part of The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift,
ed. by Temple Scott, VII, via Project Gutenberg
(<[Link]
[Link]#Page_79>) [Accessed 11 February 2013]

INTRODUCTION
In previous units, we have discussed various approaches towards how
literature might play an important role in the public sphere. In
particular, we have addressed different dimensions of how political
events might incite a writer to produce a particular piece of work, and
how its publication might in turn shape the future course of events
within the public world. We saw how Milton’s Areopagitica responded
critically to the passing of censorship laws by Parliament; how ‘Country
House’ poems respond to current political turmoil, and encourage estate
owners to engage in reconstructing the state; and we also saw how the
so-called ‘Popish Plot’ inspired Dryden to write his satirical political
allegory, Absalom and Achitophel.

In this unit, we will consider from yet another perspective the role that
literature can play in public life, and in particular how it can respond to
and interact with events on the political stage. We shall be discussing a

Unit 14: Jonathan Swift and Ireland: The Political Pamphlet 14-1
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specific type of prose writing that contrasts to other texts previously

encountered in this module, the political prose pamphlet. Whilst we
might draw points of comparison with Milton’s political prose, the two
pamphlets we shall be examining in this unit, Jonathan Swift’s A Modest
Proposal and A Short View of the Present State of Ireland, contrast
markedly in content, tone and purpose. Nonetheless, these pamphlets
demonstrate the extent to which Swift, like many of the writers
previously studied in this module, was deeply concerned with the
political events of his day, and how he too sought to comment upon
them in a public way through publishing his thoughts in pamphlet form.

A Modest Proposal is famous, even notorious; A Short View is less well

known. Both pamphlets, however, are concerned with the same
subject: Irish poverty in the 1720s. This unit begins by discussing
Swift’s decision to write on Irish affairs, before analysing the pamphlets
themselves in some detail. In assessing how effective the pamphlets
are as pieces of political writing, we will pay particular attention to two
characteristic elements of Swift’s work: his use of irony and
impersonation.

Before we begin our analysis, you should read these two pamphlets
through: make notes on your initial impressions, and mark any
passages that strike you as particularly interesting or unusual.

Activity
Read Swift’s A Modest Proposal and A Short View.

SWIFT AND IRELAND

Who was Swift, what was his relation to Ireland, and how might this
have a bearing upon our reading of A Modest Proposal and A Short
View?

Activity
Look up the entry for ‘Jonathan Swift’ in the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (online version).

What are the principal points of interest in this biographical entry, in

view of the questions posed at the beginning of this section of the unit?

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667 of English parents; but in his
later writings he would sometimes refer to the ‘accident’ of his birth, a
remark that indicates that he felt himself to be Irish in no important
sense. Educated in Kilkenny, and later at Trinity College, Dublin, Swift
left Ireland in 1689 to seek his livelihood in England. Until he was well
into his forties, Swift still hoped to establish a political career for himself
in England; for a time, between 1710 and 1714, his influence with the
government of the day was so strong that these hopes did not appear
unrealistic. However, the political landscape was completely altered by
the death of Queen Anne in 1714: the Tory government whom Swift had
supported and served was set to be replaced by a Whig command,
headed by Robert Walpole, under the new monarch, George I. His
ambitions defeated, Swift returned to Dublin and the Deanship of St.
Patrick’s Cathedral. He would remain in Dublin, with only two brief visits
to London, until his death in 1745.

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During his years in London, Swift had enjoyed close friendships and
literary collaboration with the leading writers of the day, including
Alexander Pope. Dublin had nothing equivalent to offer, and Swift
regarded himself as undergoing a kind of banishment from the culture
and society he most valued. Writing to metropolitan friends, he
complained that Ireland gave him nothing to talk about and that he
could neither ‘think nor write in this Country’. Whereas his friends lived
in the ‘midst of the World’, Swift, exiled on a barbarous island, lived
‘wholly out of it’. Yet, in the years ahead, Swift would not only write on
Irish subjects, he also came, ‘grudgingly, and perhaps not always fully
consciously, to take seriously the Irish nation, and his identity as an
Irishman’ (Ross 1993: 85).

Swift’s relationship with his native country brings us to ask some

important questions about what we mean when we refer to a writer as
Irish. Do we refer simply to a biographical fact? Does ‘Irish’ describe a
writer’s subject matter? Does this signal the writer’s identification with
the country? Eventually, Swift became an ‘Irish’ writer on all these
grounds.

SAQ 1
Describe Swift’s identity as ‘an Irish writer’: is this a description we
should use with caution?

SWIFT’S WRITING IN THE 1720S

Swift’s activities in the 1720s suggest that he held a double sense of his
identity as a writer: he still regarded London as the centre of cultural
and political life, which as we have seen in previous units was an opinion
partly justified by the commercial and social importance of the capital
city. When Swift finished Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, a work which he
himself valued highly, Swift travelled to London to oversee the book’s
publication. Gulliver’s Travels was written very much with the English
reading public in mind, and the response of English readers would
determine the work’s success in Swift’s mind.

We have already seen, in our discussion of Mary Wortley Montagu, that

travel and travel writing adopted varied forms and purposes during the
eighteenth century. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s satire upon
contemporary British politics – and Robert Walpole in particular – was
projected through the fantastical journey of its titular hero. In visiting
the strange lands inhabited by giants in Brobdingnag, or tiny people in
Lilliput, Gulliver witnesses a wide array of new social practices and
political systems. In comparing them with the more familiar world of
England, Gulliver (and, through him, Swift), can project a satirical
commentary upon both the positive and negative elements of English
life, politics and manners. The only perfect society Gulliver encounters is
the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of horses ennobled by their civilised
manners and intellect, particularly in contrast to the beastly Yahoos,
whom the reader comes to recognise with horror as representing a
degraded form of human being.

Yet, even as he asserted his place in English culture with the satirical
drive and popular success of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift became
increasingly committed to writing about Ireland and Irish concerns. In
fact, the writing of Gulliver’s Travels was interrupted by Swift’s most
dramatic participation in Irish politics: The Drapier’s Letters, a series of
pamphlets written from 1724-5. William Wood, an Englishman, had been
granted a patent to coin copper money for Ireland, and the fear was

Unit 14: Jonathan Swift and Ireland: The Political Pamphlet 14-3
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that debased coinage would impoverish the country. Swift wrote The
Drapier’s Letters to ignite public opposition to Wood’s patent.

The Drapier’s Letters brilliantly employs one of Swift’s favoured literary

devices: impersonation. In this pamphlet, Swift wants to persuade the
‘Tradesmen, Shop-keepers, Farmers, and Country-People in General’ to
boycott Wood’s coinage. Rather than write as the Dean of St. Patrick’s
(a position which removes him in class-terms from his audience) Swift
purports to be a linen-draper, an individual concerned with the practical
details of buying and selling and making a living. The voice of the linen-
draper gives Swift the authority he needs for his particular purpose.

The Drapier’s Letters succeeded in rousing opposition to Wood’s patent,

which was revoked by the government. The letters also established
Swift’s position as a popular figure, a ‘Patriot Dean’. The government
offered three hundred pounds for the discovery of the Drapier, but
although Swift’s authorship had become widely known, no-one turned
him in. Swift’s pamphlets of the late 1720s, then, are written by a man
who had decisively affected Irish politics and had gained a good deal of
popular affection.

POLITICAL PAMPHLETS
We have just learned that The Drapier’s Letters took shape in a series of
pamphlets; but what is the pamphlet as a literary form? How can it
enable a writer to achieve the aim of conveying a particular opinion or
point of view, such as Swift seems to have done in The Drapier’s
Letters? And how might the characteristic device of impersonation
inform our understanding of A Modest Proposal and A Short View as
political pamphlets?

We have already encountered the classical idea that the purpose of art
is both to entertain and to instruct; we have seen how this manifests
itself in different ways, from Dryden’s poetry, to Congreve’s drama, to
Defoe’s prose narrative. This combined purpose of literature is
secondary to the writer’s desire to persuade. A political pamphleteer,
however, seeks to convince his or her reader of something, often with
the ultimate aim of bringing about political or social change. Swift –
whose career as a writer was varied and diverse, ranging from satirical
texts such as A Tale of a Tub to famous fictional narratives such as
Gulliver’s Travels – also wrote political pamphlets that attempted to
convince his readers of a particular point of view. As we shall discover in
this unit, Swift wishes to expose the deplorable economic conditions of
Ireland, and so suggest to his reader that certain legal and social
reforms could alleviate poverty and suffering.

Political pamphlets, by their very nature, are immediate and specific,

and like all such writings they risk being simply of passing interest,
ephemeral. Think back to the unit on Dryden, and how we were required
to explore the historical circumstances of the Popish Plot so as to
understand the context for Absalom and Achitophel’s publication. Are
both satire and the political pamphlet potentially redundant once the
conditions which inspired the writing have changed? Perhaps the text
itself may no longer greatly interest a reader as its relevance fades and
its immediacy subsides.

However, as you will have discovered upon reading these two political
pamphlets by Swift, his sophisticated, sometimes shocking, use of
literary devices ensured that his pamphlets escaped this danger. Long
after the particular conditions against which Swift wrote have
disappeared, his pamphlets are read as examples of the rhetoric of
persuasion. Swift occasionally uses straightforward argumentation to
make his case, but his techniques of persuasion also include irony (the
deliberate creation of a gap between sense and meaning) and
impersonation (using a voice other than his own).

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These devices are specifically literary devices, but are also embedded
within the understanding and practice of rhetoric that formed part of the
classically-educated male’s knowledge. Rhetoric is an ancient art – its
roots lie in the classical writings of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, and
the Roman orator Cicero. The primary definition given in the Oxford
English Dictionary of the term ‘rhetoric’ is

The art of using language effectively so as to persuade or

influence others, esp[ecially] the exploitation of figures of speech
and other compositional techniques to this end; the study of
principles and rules to be followed by a speaker or writer striving
for eloquence, esp[ecially] as formulated by ancient Greek and
Roman writers. (OED online)

As this Dictionary entry alone tells us, ‘persuasion’ is a central feature of

rhetoric: it involves using language in a certain way to achieve the
purpose of convincing the audience (or reader) of the ‘speaker or
writer’s’ point of view.

What are the ‘principles and rules’ to be followed by the aspiring

rhetorician? A further definition provides elucidation, this time from The
Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature:

Rhetoric: the theoretical art of speaking so as to persuade; it is

oratory reduced to a system which can be taught. In the Greek
world rhetoric was reputedly first developed in Sicily in the mid-
fifth century BC and further refined by the sophists, most of whom
regarded a knowledge and command of it essential for men
embarking on a political career. During the first century BC (as a
consequence of the spread of Greek culture) the study of rhetoric
became an important part of Roman education and exercised an
increasing influence on Roman literature during the empire.

Following this background information, the entry tells us that:

The elements of rhetoric were treated under five headings:

invention, arrangement, diction, memory, delivery. ‘Invention’ was
the discovery (inventio) of the relevant material; ‘arrangement’
entailed putting the materials together in a structured way;
‘diction’ concerned finding the appropriate style of speech for the
occasion, grand, middle, or plain (sometimes known as low).
‘Memory’ gave guidance on how to memorize speeches; ‘delivery’
gave guidance on the techniques of public speaking.

How might this enhance our study of Swift’s political pamphlets in this
unit? After all, we might argue, these are specifically prose texts,
whereas according to this definition ‘rhetoric’ seems principally
concerned with oral ‘persuasion’, such as in the speech.

In fact, as the Oxford English Dictionary definition indicates, ‘rhetoric’

originated in classical oratory – speeches delivered out loud to an
audience – but have come to assume wider application in all realms of
public discourse. So, a piece of writing might employ rhetorical devices –
such as ‘invention’ or ‘arrangement’ – and use these to convince the
reader of a particular point of view; ‘diction’ is, of course, a central
feature of any kind of writing, as we found in our study of
appropriateness in relation to Dryden and Pope.

The use of such tactics to persuade, of course, is especially important to

the author of the prose pamphlet, who by employing certain rhetorical
devices can succeed in convincing the reader of his or her point of view.
We saw how this tactic operates in The Drapier’s Letters, where Swift
employs irony in his impersonation of a particular viewpoint. As we shall
see, Swift engages with the literary applications of the tools of rhetoric

Unit 14: Jonathan Swift and Ireland: The Political Pamphlet 14-5
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in A Modest Proposal and A Short View, but combines them with the
techniques of irony to produce a type of argumentation that
paradoxically attempts to persuade by encouraging dissent. That is, by
using irony Swift proposes an opinion that is, in fact, opposite to his true
opinion; he uses our reaction against the point of view apparently
supported to convince us that the submerged view is in fact the better
of the two.

SAQ 2
How might rhetorical devices enable the political pamphleteer to
persuade his audience of a particular point of view more effectively?

IRONY AND IMPERSONATION: A SHORT VIEW AND A

MODEST PROPOSAL
Both of the pamphlets with which we are concerned respond,
essentially, to the same set of circumstances. During the 1720s the Irish
economy, already handicapped by a series of Navigation Acts which
prevented Ireland from competing with English trade, was further
weakened by famine. In each pamphlet, Swift wants to indicate the
causes of Irish misery and suggest possible steps towards its cure. The
spectacle of Irish poverty rouses Swift’s ‘savage indignation’ (the phrase
he chose for his own epitaph), yet he often chose to express that
indignation indirectly: by assuming voices other than his own. It is this
combination of passion and evasiveness that makes Swift such a
challenging writer.

Swift published both pamphlets anonymously. Even though he now

enjoyed a significant reputation, both as the author of Gulliver’s Travels
and The Drapier’s Letters, he still chose not to speak directly to his
reader. When we confront a text by an unknown author, or an author
unknown to us, our ignorance of what to expect makes the work more
difficult to place; unlike the first readers of Swift’s pamphlets, we know
the author, but Swift’s writings still pose particular interpretative
difficulties. As Robert Phiddian writes of Swift’s use of multiple voices,
his various ‘selves’ ‘masquerade as the origins of authority’: in Swiftian
parody, no single voice can be discerned as ‘speaking’ amongst a
‘number of authorising voices’ and we, as readers, are often left
uncertain as to where the true centre of authority lies (1995: 104).

Swift’s anonymity, his love of impersonation, means that the reader can
make few assumptions as to the status of what he or she is reading. We
are often uncertain as to how seriously we are to take the ideas being
put forward: Swift constantly puzzles the reader as to the distance
between the ideas being expressed and those he holds himself. As such,
he can achieve the satiric aim of his pamphlets more effectively, an aim
that has at its core a desire to effect true, good and lasting reform
within the public sphere. As Michael J. Suarez writes,

The key concept for understanding Swift’s satire is not a rhetorical

precept about persona, but a deeply held principle about what it
means, in Swift’s view, to be a person. For Swift, language,
religion, and politics are not strictly divisible, but are all
inextricably linked as integral parts of human endeavour. The
serious business of Swiftian satire is that it invites (or provokes)
the reader to be critical: that is, to judge.
(2003: 112)
It is this capacity of judgement – between the ironical tone of the Swift’s
writing and its true intent – that we are called upon to exert in our
reading of his pamphlets.

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A SHORT VIEW OF THE STATE OF IRELAND

In A Short View, Swift refutes the fallacy that Ireland is a prosperous
country. The pamphlet works by listing fourteen factors which lead to
national wealth and then showing how none of these factors obtain in
Ireland. The pamphlet concludes that:

If Ireland be a rich and flourishing Kingdom; its Wealth and

Prosperity must be owing to certain Causes, that are yet concealed
from the whole Race of Mankind.

How does Swift succeed in persuading his reader of the truth of this
conclusion throughout the pamphlet? What evidence do you observe of
his use of rhetorical devices to convince us?

Swift’s procedure in this pamphlet is logical and rational. If the reader

agrees that the causes of national wealth are as the pamphlet claims,
then the reader must later accept the writer’s demonstration of Irish
poverty. This is a distinctive form of logical argumentation, a ‘syllogism’,
which proposes two premises and a conclusion; it follows the formula of
‘a+b = c’, or, to put it into words, if you accept ‘a’ and ‘b’ – two
propositions in an argument – then ‘c’ (the conclusion) must be true. As
with the forms of rhetoric we outlined earlier, this type of argument
originates with the classical Greek author Aristotle.

The strength of Swift’s pamphlet, however, does not consist in argument

alone. A Short View also prepares us to read A Modest Proposal because
it forces us to ask why a writer might choose to say something with
which he does not agree, or which he knows to be untrue: it explicitly
raises the question of irony.

What is ‘irony’, and how might our understanding of this term elucidate
our reading of both of these pamphlets by Swift?

Activity
Look up the definition of ‘irony’ in the Oxford English Dictionary (online
version).

You might like to explore in greater depth the historical applications of

this term as traced in the Dictionary entry. Perhaps, however, the
meaning of the word ‘irony’ most suited to our present enquiry is the
primary definition:

A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite

of that expressed by the words used; usually taking the form of
sarcasm or ridicule in which laudatory expressions are used to
imply condemnation or contempt. (OED online)

So, we see from this definition that irony is a ‘figure of speech’, which
allies it to the realm of rhetorical tools that we identified previously in
this unit. It involves saying one thing but meaning another, so as to
expose the opinion one pretends to hold to derision or ridicule. A more
elaborate definition of this term in The Oxford Dictionary of Literary
Terms highlights how an understanding of this term might inform our
reading of Swift’s role as an ironist in his political pamphlets:

Irony: A subtly humorous perception of inconsistency, in which

an apparently straightforward statement or event is undermined
by its context so as to give it a very different significance. […] At

Unit 14: Jonathan Swift and Ireland: The Political Pamphlet 14-7
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its simplest, in verbal irony, it involves a discrepancy between

what is said and what is really meant, as in its crude form,
sarcasm […]. The more sustained structural irony in literature
involves the use of a naïve or deluded hero or unreliable narrator,
whose view of the world differs widely from the true
circumstances recognized by the author and readers; literary
irony thus flatters its readers’ intelligence at the expense of a
character (or fictional narrator).

This Dictionary goes on to apply this understanding of ‘irony’ to fictional

narratives, but its point is also applicable to Swift’s use of the technique:

A similar sense of detached superiority is achieved by dramatic

irony, in which the audience knows more about a character’s
situation than the character does, foreseeing an outcome contrary
to the character’s expectations, and thus ascribing a sharply
different sense to some of the character’s own statements; in
tragedies , this is called tragic irony.

How might these definitions of irony inform our reading of Swift’s A

Short View? At one point in the pamphlet, Swift imagines
Commissioners coming over from England and observing:

the Faces of the Natives; the Improvement of the Land; the

thriving numerous Plantations; the noble Woods; the Abundance
and Vicinity of Country-Seats; the commodious Farmers Houses
and Barns; the Towns and Villages, where every Body is busy, and
thriving with all Kind of Manufactures; the Shops full of Goods,
wrought to Perfection.

The description goes on, accumulating detail after detail, and ends by
invoking the ‘glorious Reports’ the same commissioners will make on
their return to England. At this point, however, Swift breaks off:

But my heart is too heavy to continue this Irony longer; for it is

manifest, that whatever Stranger took such a Journey, would be
apt to think himself travelling in Lapland, or Ysland, rather than in
a Country so favoured by Nature as ours, both in Fruitfulness of
Soil, and Temperature of Climate.

This moment in the pamphlet is remarkable for two reasons: its desolate
image of Ireland is more effective because it has been preceded by an
imagined (and ironically intended) picture of national prosperity. By
offering a picture of what Ireland is not, Swift enforces upon the reader
a fuller impression of the actual condition of Ireland at the present time.
On a different level, Swift’s reference to his heavy heart reminds us that
irony is not incompatible with deep and painful feeling, an idea that
holds particular resonance with A Modest Proposal.

ACTIVITY
Re-read A Short View, noting the occasions where Swift sees Ireland
through the eyes of a stranger.

How does this contribute towards your understanding of how Swift uses
irony in this pamphlet, and to what purpose?

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SAQ 3
To what extent does the author of A Short View identify with the
inhabitants of Ireland? How does the tone of the pamphlet contribute to
create this impression?

A MODEST PROPOSAL: INTRODUCTION

A Modest Proposal is Swift’s most notorious piece of writing: many who
know little else about Swift know that he wrote a pamphlet in which he
proposed eating children as a solution to Irish poverty. How might we go
about challenging such a simplified view? How might we produce a more
nuanced understanding of this pamphlet, how it is written, and Swift’s
purposes in publishing it?

In order to understand A Modest Proposal two distinctions must be

made. Firstly, we need to differentiate between Jonathan Swift, the
biographical author, and the ‘modest proposer’ himself, a fictional
persona adopted by Swift. As we saw, in The Drapier’s Letters Swift
assumes the voice of a shopkeeper in Francis Street, Dublin; in A
Modest Proposal he imitates the voice of a projector, an individual given
to imagining (projecting) schemes for social and scientific improvement.
Such projectors were often the butt of Swift’s satire because they
represented a phenomenon which fascinated him: reason gone mad.
Indeed, this figure recurs repeatedly in Swift’s writings, in which he
satirises characters whose exclusive, excessive reliance on the power of
reason makes them deranged; the most famous of such a character is
Lemuel Gulliver.

A Modest Proposal is an extremely rational, logical, piece of writing,

which in many respects deploys the rhetorical devices and
argumentative strategies we have already discussed. The proposer
identifies a real problem, thinks it through, and suggests a solution. But
his reason, untouched by moral or ethical considerations, is a kind of
madness. Swift uses the proposer’s moral madness to direct his prose
towards his ultimate satiric object: the Irish economy.

Another distinction crucial to understanding A Modest Proposal is that

between sense and meaning. The proposal that poverty would be solved
by eating children is not illogical: we understand the terms involved, and
we can follow the advantages as outlined by the proposer. But the sense
of A Modest Proposal is different to its meaning.

Activity
Swift’s proposer tries several times to impress upon the reader how
reasonable he is. Read through the pamphlet, locating and noting these
occasions. What types of rhetorical devices and language – diction – are
used to achieve this effect?

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A MODEST PROPOSAL: STRUCTURE

The first quarter of the pamphlet lures the reader in, persuades us to
trust the writer, and prepares us to accept the proposal he is to offer.
The intentions of the writer, as announced in the title, seem benign
enough: he wants to incorporate the children of the poor into the
community, and give them a useful social function. The proposal he has
to make is ‘modest’, as in reasonable, or level-headed. We are
encouraged to expect a sensible suggestion from the writer, nothing
outlandish or extreme. How is this initial impression sustained in the
structure of the pamphlet?

A Modest Proposal begins in a fairly straightforward way, by presenting

the reader with a graphic word-picture of Irish poverty and making the
uncontroversial statement that any individual who could solve this acute
problem should have ‘his Statue set up for a Preserver of the Nation’.
This reasonable, public-spirited author wins his readers’ trust on
additional grounds: he has done his background research on this issue,
having ‘maturely weighed the several Schemes of other Projectors’. He
is also a man of feeling, moved to ‘Tears and Pity’ by the ‘poor innocent
Babes’ killed by mothers unable to provide for them. As readers, we are
encouraged to sympathise with this approach, which seems entirely
natural (as in rational) and also to express refined human qualities, such
as compassion.

However, even at an early stage there are warning signs that the
proposer is not to be trusted. His use of statistics gives his writing an air
of authority, which in some respects is like the narrator’s adherence to
‘fact’ in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, in an attempt to convince us
of the veracity of his narrative. In this pamphlet, however, the proposer
seems factual to the point of being cold-blooded, especially when he
calmly writes off ‘Fifty thousand, for those Women who miscarry, or
whose Children die by Accident’. Shortly after, the proposer informs us
that children cannot be expected to earn a living by stealing until they
are six. At this point, we should certainly have some suspicions about
the ‘modest’ proposal we are about to hear: the tone of the writing, as
well as the comments made, alert us that this speaker’s judgement is
not necessarily to be trusted at face-value.

However, the proposal itself, when it is finally made, far exceeds

anything the reader might expect; the shock is made all the more acute
by the initial sense of security promised in the opening lines of the
pamphlet, and is compounded by the proposer’s hope that no objections
will be raised.

In the remaining three-quarters of the pamphlet the proposal is not only

refined, it is explained: having caught the reader in his painful rhetorical
trap, Swift begins to let us know why we are there.

Activity
How might we compare the speakers of A Short View and A Modest
Proposal? Make a short list of their shared character-traits.

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THE MEANING OF A MODEST PROPOSAL

If A Modest Proposal does not mean what it says, then what does it
mean? What prevents the pamphlet from simply being offensive and
abhorrent?

The first part of Swift’s strategy in the pamphlet is to raise the reader’s
disgust and horror by suggesting murder and cannibalism. The second
part is to present the ways in which the Irish economy is already killing
people. As such, Swift presents an elaborated argument through irony,
in which he compounds the sense of horror and abhorrence we should
feel at the true state of Ireland by contrasting it with the fantastically
ludicrous (if repulsive) ‘solution’ the proposer offers in the pamphlet.

If the reader can recognise that rack-renting and poverty kill, then all
the disgust and horror he or she feels at the modest proposal should be
transferred to the very real conditions of Ireland. We could say that the
argument of A Modest Proposal is that economics can be just as immoral
as cannibalism. There is a logical connection between the modest
proposal and Irish life in 1729, which the latter sections of the pamphlet
make clear to the reader.

This process begins when we are told that children will be somewhat
dear food and ‘therefore very proper for Landlords; who, as they have
already devoured most of the Parents, seem to have the best Title to the
Children’. It continues when we are informed that while there are a ‘vast
number of poor People, who are Aged, Diseased, or Maimed […] it is
very well known, that they are every Day Dying, and rotting, by Cold
and Famine, and Filth, and Vermin, as fast as can be reasonably
expected’.

Swift’s strategy becomes clear in such remarks: he has sprung upon the
reader the horrendous suggestion that eating babies will solve Ireland’s
problems. But no sooner has the reader recoiled from such an
unacceptable notion than he or she is forced to recognise that allowing
adults to die of disease and famine is similarly unacceptable. Any reader
who does not want to see the similarity is forced to confront it when the
proposer suggests that those who ‘dislike [his] Overture’ ask Irish
parents:

Whether they would not, at this Day, think it a great Happiness to

have been sold for Food at a Year old, in the Manner I prescribe;
and thereby have avoided such a perpetual Scene of Misfortunes,
as they have since gone through; the Oppression of Landlords;
the Impossibility of paying Rent, without Money or Trade; the
Want of common Sustenance, with neither House nor Cloathes, to
cover them from the Inclemencies of Weather; and the most
inevitable Prospect of intailing the like, or greater Miseries upon
their Breed for ever.

The extremity of A Modest Proposal is justified because through it Swift

forces the reader to recognise that the economic organisation of Ireland
profoundly resembles cold-blooded slaughter.

The closing paragraphs of the pamphlet offer additional justifications of

Swift’s irony. In the section beginning ‘let no Man talk to me of other
Expedients’ Swift puts into the proposer’s mouth ideas he had previously
made himself in full seriousness. This moment takes the ironies in the
pamphlet a step further: Swift does not intend that the ‘modest
proposal’ be acted upon; in addition, he now appears to reject ideas
which he had previously espoused. It is because Swift’s reasonable
proposals have been ignored, such as his encouragement of Irish
industry, that he has assumed the madness of the modest proposer.

Unit 14: Jonathan Swift and Ireland: The Political Pamphlet 14-11
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SAQ 4
What strategies does Swift’s modest proposer use to win over his
reader?

REVIEW
This unit looked at a different facet of the notion that political writing, no
less than poetry or fiction, can be a kind of literature; as such, we
compared the political pamphlets of Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
and A Short View, to ‘politicised’ literature encountered in previous
units, such as that by Milton or Dryden. We examined how Swift’s career
as a writer is closely connected to his relationship with Ireland,
culminating in his pamphlet-writing upon topics relating to the welfare
and current state of the country. We discussed aspects of the political
pamphlet as a literary genre in relation to ideas about rhetoric, and their
classical roots; we saw how rhetorical devices might be employed to
great effect by the writer who wishes to persuade his reader of a
particular point of view, and so is most pertinent to the author of a
political pamphlet. We saw how the use of irony or impersonation are
features of the rhetorical tool-set, and how these tactics are used to
particularly devastating effect in Swift’s writing.

In the final sections of this unit we looked in detail at the pamphlets

themselves; here, we examined how the ideas of irony and
impersonation we had previously outlined emerged in the details and
tone of Swift’s texts. We found how, by adopting one viewpoint
ironically, Swift succeeds in promoting the opposite stance, and as such
convinces his reader of a very real and pressing need to adopt his actual
(rather than his ‘modest’) proposals. As such, both pamphlets adopt a
satirical function, of aiming to achieve reform within the public sphere
through the literary text.

ADDITIONAL READING
Barnett, Louise. 2007. Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women
(Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Boyle, Frank. 2000. Swift as Nemesis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press)

Fabricant, Carole. 1982. Swift's Landscape (Baltimore: John Hopkins

University Press)

Ferguson, Oliver. 1962. Jonathan Swift and Ireland (Urbana: University

of Illinois Press)

McMinn, Joseph. 1991. Jonathan Swift: A Literary Life (London:

Macmillan)

Phiddian, Robert. 1996. ‘Have You Eaten Yet? The Reader in A Modest
Proposal’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 36. 3: 603-
621 (Available on JSTOR)

Quintero, Ruben (ed.). 2007. A Companion to Satire (New Jersey:

Wiley-Blackwell) (Parts available on Google Books)

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REFERENCES

The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (online edition)

(Available via Oxford Reference Online)

The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (online edition) (Available via

Oxford Reference Online)

Phiddian, Robert. 1995. Swift’s Parody (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press) (Parts available via Google Books)

Ross, Ian Campbell, Richard H. Rodino and Hermann J. Real (eds).

1993. ‘The Scriblerians and Swift in Ireland’, in Papers from the
Second Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Munich: Wilhelm
Fink)

Suarez, Michael J. (2003). ‘Swift’s satire and parody’, in Christopher Fox

(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), pp. 112-127 (Parts available via
Google Books)

Unit 14: Jonathan Swift and Ireland: The Political Pamphlet 14-13
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ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
Describe Swift’s identity as ‘an Irish writer’: is this a description we
should use with caution?

Swift was both born and educated in Ireland, and following his return,
after the political situation in England made it unfavourable for him to
remain in London, he was based in Dublin, as Dean of St. Patrick’s. As
such, he is ‘Irish’ both through birth and residence. However, he often
expressed displeasure at being ‘exiled’, as it were, to Ireland, and in
many respects regarded London as the centre of political and literary
life. Nonetheless, Swift’s deep affinity with Irish affairs and the
conditions of its people are expressed in numerous pamphlets – both
serious and ironical – in which he offers opinions on how the state of the
nation might be altered for the better. As such, he is ‘an Irish writer’
through the deep concerns he expresses about Ireland in his writings.
However, we should use the term with caution for the inevitable
biographical assumptions it carries with it, and for the implication that
Swift’s relationship with Ireland was straightforward and clear-cut.

SAQ 2
How might rhetorical devices enable the political pamphleteer to
persuade his audience of a particular point of view more effectively?

The art of rhetoric, originally used in the classical world for speech-
making, offers an array of devices that the political pamphleteer might
employ to increase the effectiveness of his argument. Techniques such
as using examples, or adjusting the diction to match the purpose of the
piece appropriately, might successfully be employed by the writer who
wishes to produce a compelling and persuasive argument. In particular,
the device of irony – of saying one thing and meaning another – can
provide a powerful tool for convincing a reader of the truth of one point
of view; this is a technique Swift uses with particular skill in A Short
View and A Modest Proposal.

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SAQ 3
To what extent does the author of A Short View identify with the
inhabitants of Ireland? How does the tone of the pamphlet contribute to
create this impression?

Early in A Short View the writer announces that he has no ‘personal

Interest’ in Ireland as he does not own ‘one Spot of Ground in the
whole Island.’ While the writer has no financial stake in the country,
however, he is far from unconcerned about its fate. In fact, he clearly
says that conditions in Ireland have roused his indignation. In the
course of the pamphlet the writer identifies strongly with the
inhabitants of Ireland, speaking of ‘our Misfortune’ and complaining that
the Irish are ‘forced to obey some Laws we never consented to’.

The pamphlet contrasts Ireland as it is seen by visitors and as it is

known to be by those who live there. The writer distinguishes himself
from English visitors, who are misled by the hospitality they meet into
thinking that the Irish ‘wallow in Riches and Luxury’. The author writes
as a ‘Native and Inhabitant of this Kingdom’ who knows the true state
of its affairs.

This impression is supported by the diverse tonal registers Swift adopts

in this pamphlet. There are significant variations in tone throughout A
Short View. Although the writer begins by mentioning how indignant he
is about the state of Ireland, the tone in the first section of the
pamphlet is carefully controlled. The writer seeks to impress upon the
reader his own objectivity, his impartial grasp of the facts. Indeed, he
states clearly that it is not his intention to complain, ‘but barely to
relate the Facts’. As the pamphlet progresses, however, the tone of the
writer becomes more involved.

Having shown how Ireland meets few of the criteria of wealth, the
writer becomes ironic, almost sarcastic, as he imagines visitors making
a tour of an Ireland in which the people are well-fed and dressed, the
buildings are sound and comfortable, and the towns busy and
prosperous. At this point, the tone of the pamphlet suddenly becomes
pessimistic and downcast, as the writer speaks of the ‘heavy heart’
which prevents him carrying the irony any further. In the closing
paragraphs of the pamphlet the tone is angry, as the writer concludes
that those arguing for Ireland’s wealth are either stupid or completely
lacking in integrity.

Unit 14: Jonathan Swift and Ireland: The Political Pamphlet 14-15
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SAQ 4
What strategies does Swift’s modest proposer use to win over his
reader?

Swift’s proposer uses several different strategies to win over his

reader. He lets us know that he has thought about the Irish poor ‘for
many Years’. He seems to have a detailed knowledge of Irish
demographics, about which he provides the reader with a range of
statistics. The most important of the proposer’s strategies, however, is
that he appears completely reasonable. This is why he painstakingly
lists the advantages of his plan - the poorer tenants will have
something they can call their own, women will not be mistreated
during pregnancy. The proposer is adept at the form of argument, yet
he several times insists that he is not ‘violently bent upon [his] own
opinion’. He is a moderate man, prepared to hear what others have to
say. Finally, he reasserts that his proposal is entirely disinterested. He
himself can hope for no gain were it put into practice. Through the
figure of the modest proposer, Swift shows how reason alone is not
enough to guide human affairs; a moral sense is also required.

14-16 Literature 3
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UNIT 15

‘THE RISE OF THE NOVEL’ (1): SAMUEL

RICHARDSON’S PAMELA (1740)

AIMS
The aim of this unit is to introduce you to a new fictional genre that
emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century, the novel, through an
analysis of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.

OBJECTIVES:
By the end of this unit, you should be able to:

Outline the principal aspects of Ian Watt’s important study, The Rise
of the Novel.

Offer a critique of some of the drawbacks of Watt’s approach.

Describe the main elements of plot and characterisation in

Richardson’s Pamela.

Show how Pamela meets Watt’s criteria of ‘formal realism’ in terms

of language, the writing-to-the-moment technique and character.

Identify why ‘realism’ is central to Richardson’s didactic purpose in

Pamela, in relation to Samuel Johnson’s discussion of the ‘new
realistic novel’.

Describe why paratextual material might be important in

understanding what a book contains, and how it might indicate the
author’s ‘moral purpose’ in relation to Pamela.

Question how far Pamela succeeds in fulfilling its ‘moral purpose’ in

terms of its narrative technique and presentation of character.

Outline why Pamela might be considered ‘revolutionary’ for its

content as well as its form.

REQUIRED READING
The required reading for this unit is:

Samuel Richardson. 2008. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (eds),

Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (Oxford: Oxford University Press). All
references in this unit are to this edition. Pamela is also available online
via Project Gutenberg, although you should be aware that there may be
textual variants with the version used here.

Samuel Johnson, Rambler, No. 4, ‘The New Realistic Novel’ (1750), in

volume one of Stephen Greenblatt (ed.). 2006. The Norton Anthology of
English Literature, 8th edn (New York: W. W. Norton and Co.).

INTRODUCTION
In previous units, we have considered various examples of prose writing
– both fictional and non-fictional – and suggested how these texts can
adopt different forms and purposes. We saw how Milton’s Areopagitica

Unit 15: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (1): Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) 15-1
______________________________________________________

and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress offer examples of late seventeenth-

century prose writing, and how in strongly contrasting ways both
authors seek to convey a serious political or moral message through
their texts. We have also seen how Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s
Turkish Embassy Letters blend fact and fiction in a travel narrative
which assumes epistolary form, and how Defoe’s Journal of the Plague
Year acts as a semi-fictional, semi-factual account of the events it
describes. Here, too, the journal format offers Defoe a means of
conveying a narrative that is at once objective, in the details it records,
and subjective, in the narrator’s interpretation of them.

All of these aspects of earlier prose writing are relevant to the text
which is the subject of this unit, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740).
Richardson’s book is held by many to be innovative, and even
revolutionary: it is, for some, the ‘first’ novel – a genre which is seen to
emerge in the middle of the eighteenth century, with this very text at
the forefront of helping to define the conventions and structure of this
new form. However, as we shall see in this unit, it is also important to
challenge the ‘newness’ of the novel form: in many ways, Richardson’s
book incorporates many existing aspects of prose writing, and in
particular prose fiction. The blend of fact and fiction we have discovered
in earlier prose texts also emerges in Pamela; similarly, Richardson
seeks to project a ‘moral’ purpose through his text as serious and
sincere as Milton or Bunyan’s, in their very different ways.

We shall approach these contrasting aspects of how to read Pamela, and

of its significance in the development of prose fiction from the mid-
eighteenth century onwards, firstly through addressing a critical text
that has had a significant impact on all subsequent discussion about the
novel genre: Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. We shall explore some of
the most important aspects of Watt’s study, alongside challenging some
of the assumptions it involves. We shall then go on to examine how,
and in what ways, Watt’s ideas emerge in Pamela itself.

We shall explain the principal features of plot and character in

Richardson’s novel, and think about how these relate to the criteria that
Watt identifies as belonging to ‘formal realism’. We will discuss Pamela’s
use of language, and describe how the narrative technique of ‘writing-
to-the-moment’ that Richardson uses reinforces the impression of
realism. We will also describe how Pamela’s treatment of character is in
many respects unprecedented, and central to the development of
subsequent prose fiction.

We will relate the new ‘realistic’ focus of Richardson’s text to the ‘moral
purpose’ he pursues in Pamela, partly through a reading of Samuel
Johnson’s Rambler essay. We shall see how the ‘paratextual’ material
with which Richardson prefaces Pamela provides an important way of
judging the nature of his didactic purpose in publishing the book.
However, we shall also address how far Richardson succeeds in his aims
of both ‘entertaining’ and ‘instructing’ the reader of Pamela.

We shall also explore why Richardson’s novel might be considered

ground-breaking, and even revolutionary, for the content of its ‘story’ as
well as for its formal innovations. As we shall see, the issues of gender
and class that Pamela challenges provoked considerable comment
amongst the book’s earliest readers. This will lead us into the
subsequent unit, which addresses the question of the ‘rise of the novel’
in this period by considering some of the fictional responses to
Richardson’s book in the so-called ‘Pamela controversy’ that arose after
its publication.

15-2 Literature 3
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ACTIVITY
Before we begin to explore these, and related questions, you should
read through Pamela and take notes upon those aspects which
immediately strike you as particularly interesting or important in the
light of the introduction to this unit.

IAN WATT’S THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

In 1957, Ian Watt published a book that would prove to be hugely
influential in subsequent decades of literary criticism, and of our
understanding of literature in general: The Rise of the Novel. In his
study, Watt posed himself with the challenging question of when, how
and why ‘the novel’ came into being: what was it about the eighteenth
century that was particularly favourable to the emergence of a new and,
in some senses, revolutionary literary form?

In going about answering this question, Watt brought together

approaches from two major disciplines – literary criticism and historical
or sociological studies – which contributed in an innovative way to a
subject only partly covered by earlier authors such as Q. D. Leavis, in
her Fiction and the Reading Public.

Watt’s Rise of the Novel is divided into separate sections: firstly, he tries
to identify what it is that makes a novel a novel, and comes to the
conclusion that ‘formal realism’ is the defining characteristic of the new
type of prose fiction that emerged in the eighteenth century. This
‘realism’ makes narrative convincing through details of setting and
place, and the temporal sequence and elements of its plot.
Characterisation is another major part of ‘realism’ in the novel: life-like
characters convince us, as readers, that this might almost be a true
story.

Watt identifies several reasons for how ‘realism’ came to take hold of
fictional narratives at this particular moment in history, namely a
growing interest in the nature of the individual, of personal identity, and
of private experience; these ideas, Watt suggests, originated in the late-
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with major thinkers such as John
Locke.

Watt claims that the writings of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and
Henry Fielding best exemplify the different ways in which the new-found
focus on ‘realism’ manifests itself in fictional narratives, as the rest of
his book goes on to examine in separate chapters devoted to each
author. Although Defoe emerges relatively well from the study, for Watt
Richardson is the favoured champion of the novel form, with Fielding
coming in for a fair amount of condescending comment by comparison.

Before looking at these writers, though, Watt addresses who was

reading these new narrative fictions: from what social class, of what
sex, and in what numbers? In spite of widespread illiteracy – or rather,
semi-literacy – Watt claims that books were popular across a broad
spectrum of society, even if they were costly to buy and wages were
low. The majority of the poorer classes, perhaps, had neither time nor
money to indulge in the luxury of reading, but Watt claims that both
‘apprentices and household servants’ were the significant exception;
female domestics in particular provided a significant market for the
increasingly large numbers of novels that were published as the
eighteenth century wore on.

Unit 15: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (1): Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) 15-3
______________________________________________________

CRITIQUES OF WATT
Although Watt’s Rise of the Novel has exerted a considerable and
widespread influence on subsequent accounts of this genre, it has
encountered an inevitable flurry of criticism since its first appearance.
Critics such as Michael McKeon, John Richetti, J. Paul Hunter and Ros
Ballaster, have partly challenged and partly built on Watt’s study in
various ways to produce more nuanced versions of the narrative of the
‘rise of the novel’.

We can, however, at least begin to pose some challenges of our own

now. For instance, is the idea of the ‘rise of the novel’ a useful or indeed
accurate one at all? Does the notion of a ‘rise’ suggest somehow an
upward curve of constant improvement, with the related idea that
somehow everything that had happened in narrative fiction before was
somehow inferior? Are we justified in locating the beginning of this so-
called ‘rise’ in the early eighteenth century? Indeed, is it justifiable to
try and locate any such ‘beginning’ at all?

Should we even be suspicious of the word ‘novel’ itself? Do we, in fact,

bring to our understanding of this term our own assumptions about
what a ‘novel’ is and does, which are inevitably partly the result of our
cultural heritage? We might, for instance, be so familiar with the
nineteenth-century novels of Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray or the Brontës
that we already think we know what ‘a novel’ is. Does this knowledge
make us prejudiced against earlier examples of novels, which we might
somehow think are crude and undeveloped by comparison?

In fact, we could argue, the word ‘novel’ is not the best term to describe
many of the texts classified under this title, and particularly within the
historical context covered by this module. As John Richetti warns us:

As a classification for the many prose narratives produced in

Britain over the course of the eighteenth century, “novel” is a
convenient label rather than a historically accurate term, which
tells us much more about our own late twentieth-century [and
twenty-first!] assumptions concerning narrative than about the
eighteenth-century sense of what prose fiction was for its
contemporary readers and writers. (1996: 1)

Do we need to find a completely different way of talking about the

eighteenth-century texts that we describe as ‘novels’?

We should ask ourselves these questions not only when we produce our
own responses to Watt’s Rise of the Novel, but throughout our study of
prose fictions that we loosely class under the title ‘novels’: we should,
for instance, challenge the assumption that the prose fictions studied in
this module chart an upward ‘rise’ from the rudimentary, early attempts
at a novel by Richardson onwards. J. Paul Hunter, for one, criticises
Watt’s study for adopting just such a teleological approach.

We should, perhaps, try (temporarily at least) to shed our

preconceptions about what a novel ‘is’ and what we expect to find in its
pages; we should also try to shed any notions about a progressive ‘rise’
or ‘development’ in the novel genre. It is, perhaps, more fruitful to think
about the texts discussed under this term as a series of interlocking
genres, forms and modes, all of which coalesce in various ways in
different texts. We should, perhaps, think about these texts as ‘prose
narratives’ first, ‘novels’ after: only then can we begin to allow
ourselves to address what characteristics and features we recognise as
shared by these very different texts, and which allow us to think of
them under the general banner of ‘novel’.

15-4 Literature 3
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BEFORE THE ‘NOVEL’

In this respect, it is important to address what kinds of prose narratives
appeared before Richardson’s ‘novel’, and subsequent examples of this
type of fiction. Although Watt gives some thought to such texts,
scholarship since The Rise of the Novel, however, has placed increasing
emphasis on the different types of prose narratives that existed in the
centuries leading up to the authors Watt focuses on. Critics increasingly
address how the different generic qualities of these narrative forms
intersected, and in ways that have important repercussions for creating
the ‘new’ form of the eighteenth-century novel.

What are these different narrative forms?

As we have found in previous units, religious texts such as Bunyan’s The

Pilgrim’s Progress provided a significant source of reading matter, since
its first appearance in 1678, alongside printed sermons and (of course)
the Bible. However, not all prose narratives were religiously inspired, by
any means: feminist critics such as Ros Ballaster and Janet Todd,
alongside historians of the book, have described the growth of interest
in ‘amatory fiction’ from the late-seventeenth century onwards; authors
such as Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood provided
important early precursors for the kind of amatory tale that Richardson
both subverts and varies in Pamela and his later text, Clarissa.

There was a considerable market for this kind of prose narrative, which
continued in the tradition of earlier romance fiction; it included stock
features such as intrigue, fantastic scenarios, incredible coincidences,
sexual passion. One early commentator claims of Romances that:

I call them Fictions, to discriminate them from True Histories; and

I add, of Love Adventures, because Love ought to be the principal
Subject of Romance.
(Williams 1970: 46)

The term ‘romance’ is an important one to bear in mind: whilst

immensely popular, this genre attracted much criticism and
disparagement. Many of the eighteenth-century ‘novelists’ we shall be
addressing in this module, including Richardson, were keen to
differentiate their books from this fantastical and sensational type of
fiction. Like the religious allegory, the romance blends fiction and
reality, often using stock characters rather than ‘individual types’. For
Ian Watt, one of the key innovations introduced by the novel is its use
of believable, ‘individual’ characters, whose actions are the result of
their own particular identities, rather than of their conformity to a
stereotype.

SAQ 1
What are the principal features of Ian Watt’s study The Rise of the
Novel, and what potential objections might be raised to the approach
that he adopts?

PAMELA AND ‘FORMAL REALISM’

How far is Ian Watt justified in considering Pamela to be the first ‘true’
novel? How far does Richardson’s book fulfil Watt’s criteria of ‘formal
realism’?

Unit 15: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (1): Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) 15-5
______________________________________________________

In The Rise of the Novel, Watt claims that:

The importance of Richardson’s position in the tradition of the

novel is largely due to his success in dealing with several of the
major formal problems which Defoe had left unsolved. The most
important of them was probably that of plot, and here
Richardson’s solution was remarkably simple: he avoided an
episodic plot by basing his novels on a single action, a courtship.
(1972: 51)

Watt argues that Daniel Defoe’s prose fiction of 1719, Robinson Crusoe,
in some respects deserves the title of the ‘first novel’, but that it
actually falls short of fulfilling the criteria Watt identifies as belonging to
the novel: Robinson Crusoe lacks a distinctive plot, the narrative being
composed of several episodes that are not necessarily connected in a
linear fashion. Richardson resolves what Watt considers to be this
‘problem’ by the nature of the subject-matter he chooses: Pamela’s
story revolves around one central ‘story’, that which Watt quaintly terms
‘a courtship’; this gives shape and structure to how that story is worked
out throughout the novel.

By developing events and scenarios connected to this main idea

Richardson can give Pamela a linear structure, allowing events to follow
in chronological order and to be interconnected in a causal sequence:
each of Pamela or Mr B’s actions has an impact on subsequent events.

Activity
Outline in note-form the principal plot elements of Pamela: what
happens when, where, and involving which characters.

As you will have found, each event in Pamela happens in causal

sequence: each episode has an almost direct impact on what follows.
According to Watt, this enhances the impression that Pamela’s story
takes place within a recognisable time-frame, across a credible expanse
of space.

There are several major aspects to Pamela’s claim to formal realism,

alongside the structuring principle of a single, central plot that Watt
identifies: its use of language, its overall structure as a series of letters,
its presentation of character, and the kinds of scenarios it presents.
Watt describes how Pamela achieves ‘realism’ by presenting minute,
domestic details, and relating these to a distinctively individual central
character, whose actions, thoughts and emotions we follow through her
own personal account of her experiences, as they happen. We shall
address each of these aspects of Pamela’s ‘formal realism’ in turn.

PAMELA’S REALISM: LANGUAGE

Pamela’s use of language is also a significant means by which
Richardson succeeds in convincing the reader that this is a credible
story: the linguistic register adopted by Pamela herself and by the other
characters is true to life. The words Pamela uses are familiar, colloquial,
and even crude, such as a low-class servant girl might use (Richardson
2008: xvii): for instance, phrases such as ‘I did nothing but curchee and
cry’, her description of herself as ‘a Clog upon my dear Parents’
(Richardson 2008: 11-13), or crude grammatical constructions such as
when she describes how Mr Longman is ‘reckon’d worth a Power of
Money’ (Richardson 2008: 43).

Other characters are presented in a seemingly realistic way by the kinds

15-6 Literature 3
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of language that they use, and by Pamela’s description of their actions.

Mr B, for instance, is violent and impulsive in the novel’s earlier parts:
he calls Pamela insulting names such as ‘Sawcebox’ and ‘Boldface’,
stamps his foot at regular intervals, storms from rooms and slams
doors. That Mrs Jervis, meanwhile, is a simple woman in her master’s
service is amply shown by her speech and actions; at one point, for
instance, she tells the heroine, ‘Pamela, don’t be pert to his Honour! You
should know your Distance’ (Richardson 2008: 35).

Each character within Pamela speaks and acts in a manner that is

appropriate to their sex and social status: as such, Richardson succeeds
in conveying the impression that this is a series of letters written by a
young servant girl to her parents in the country. Her observations are
layered with her own unique diction – determined by her class and
education, and the religious principles with which she has been
inculcated, and as such we gain a sense that Pamela is ‘real’ as a
character. The conveyance of her experience in a series of letters is
essential to reinforcing this impression.

PAMELA’S REALISM: ‘WRITING-TO-THE-MOMENT’

In tandem with the ‘realistically’ appropriate types of language used by
Richardson’s characters, he also tries to reinforce the impression of
authenticity through the narrative structure and drive of his novel. The
epistolary form gives him the ability to present Pamela’s account as one
that is recorded in direct response to her experiences, written as she
goes along. As one early reader observed in a discussion of Pamela and
Richardson’s later, more accomplished epistolary novel, Clarissa, the
story is:

related in a series of letters, by the parties themselves, at the

very time in which the events happened, and this method has
given the author great advantages, which he could not have
drawn from any other species of writing. (Williams 1970: 132)

The immediacy of the writing-to-the-moment technique increases the

impression of emotional intensity, pitted against the backdrop of local
domestic details; as this critic goes on to claim,

The minute particulars of events, the sentiments and conversation

of the parties, are, upon this plan, exhibited with all the warmth
and spirit that the passion, supposed to be predominant at the
very time, could produce, and with all the distinguishing
characteristicks, which memory can supply, in a history of recent
transactions. (Williams 1970: 132)

In fact, this impression in Pamela is partly the result of its origins in an

earlier work by Richardson called Letters Written to and for Particular
Friends, on the Most Important Occasions, which was finally printed in
1741 (Richardson 2008: xiii). This text, usually known as Familiar
Letters, presents a comparable scenario to Pamela’s story, but was
actually intended as a guide-book for letter-writing, by providing a
series of templates for model letters. As such, the conduct-book quality
of Pamela is embedded in the structure and form that Richardson gives
to his book.

In Pamela numerous narrative devices help to reinforce the impression

of immediacy possible through presenting the narrative in a series of
letters, from Pamela actually describing the act of writing, to that
writing’s subjection to circumstance – she frequently has to break off
writing when she hears footsteps or fears she is being watched. Material
obstacles to not being able to write also heighten the impression that
she writes as she goes along: she is deprived of paper and ink, for
instance, and frets about whether her letters will be delivered. All of

Unit 15: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (1): Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) 15-7
______________________________________________________

these aspects of Pamela add up to create the impression that this really
is a series of letters written under the circumstances described.

The technique of writing-to-the-moment allows readers to feel that they

accompany Pamela through the various events that happen to her,
registering her pain, shock, fear, or elation in proportion to how she
conveys them through the experiences she records.

This idea comes across in the second prefatory letter that precedes the
narrative; its author claims that the way in which Pamela is written – in
her own words, as a series of letters – increases the impression that this
is, indeed, a true story, and so increases his engagement with the
heroine. Because Pamela ‘carries Conviction in every Part of it; and the
Incidents are so natural and interesting’ he feels a peculiar sympathy for
Pamela, treating her as though she did really exist; he claims that:

I have gone hand-in-hand, and sympathiz’d with the pretty

Heroine in all her Sufferings, and been extremely anxious for her
Safety. (Richardson 2008: 7)

This empathy with Pamela and her plight is enabled by her credibility as
a character: she is believable both in her words and her actions, and in
the way that she responds to the crises that happen to her. It is this
realism as a character that enables Pamela to convey the ‘moral
purpose’ of Richardson’s narrative most effectively, as we shall discover.

PAMELA’S REALISM: CHARACTER

Pamela’s credibility as a heroine is achieved through the types of
language she uses and through the way in which she presents her
narrative as the story unravels. This is central to Watt’s claim that
Pamela is the first true novel in the sense that it presents an
individualised central character who develops throughout the book in
response to her circumstances; as Margaret Anne Doody suggests,

We can be persuaded that we see her growing. Richardson is a

pioneer in modern fiction in finding ways of giving an impression
that a character is developing and changing from within.
(1996: 103)

Watt describes how this sense of Pamela’s development as a character

justifies the book’s claims to formal realism, and furthermore to the role
that Richardson’s book plays in the emergence of the novel as a genre:
alongside the domestic detail that gives Pamela its ‘realism’, Richardson
develops the psychological complexity of his heroine in a believable
way, and encourages us to care about what happens to her.

This psychological complexity, for Watt, evolves in response to an

increased interest in the individual mind, which as we saw earlier in this
unit was influenced by the writings of seventeenth-century thinkers
such as Descartes and Locke. Watt suggests that Pamela is the first
‘novel’ fully to explore an individual’s psychology, and to present her
evolution as a character as an empirical one: her experiences directly
shape her knowledge of and about the world. Gradually, her responses
to these experiences become more mature and developed: we get a
sense that she ‘grows’ as a character within the particular circumstances
of her own environment.

This dimension of Pamela in many respects justifies Watt and

subsequent critics’ claims that this is the first true ‘novel’, in its realistic
treatment of character and in its interest in human psychology; this has
a significant impact on all subsequent narrative fictions. However, in
Richardson’s text Pamela’s credibility as a character plays a significant
part in the book’s ability to offer instruction to its readers, as well as

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entertainment. As such, Pamela provides an important early manifesto

for a novel’s ability to serve a didactic, moralising purpose, an idea
which subsequent authors and critics were to develop in diverse ways in
the decades following Pamela’s publication.

One commentary on the book’s ability to be beneficial to its readers is

particularly important to read alongside Pamela, so as to gauge the
serious intentions that Richardson has in writing and publishing his
fictional narrative and the importance of using credible characters to do
so: Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essay No 4.

Activity
Read Samuel Johnson, Rambler No. 4.

Johnson’s account of the ‘new realist novel’ (a title given to the essay by
later editors) depends on exactly the criteria outlined in the second
prefatory letter to Pamela we examined earlier in this unit, and which
Richardson’s book is seen to uphold: the believable qualities of its
heroine, who is ‘drawn from nature’, make it easier to convey the
fictional story’s moral lesson.

Some key phrases in Johnson’s essay reinforce this dual dimension of

the ‘new realist fiction’, which should:

[…] exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that
daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and
qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind.
[…] They are engaged in portraits of which every one knows the
original, and can detect any deviation from exactness of
resemblance. (2006: 2743)

How do these observations sit alongside your reading of Pamela, and of

the various characters it presents? Pamela, as we have seen, is given an
individuality in her manner of speech and action that, according to
Johnson’s view, succeeds in making her lifelike: in many respects she
‘resembles’ characters whose ‘original’ we might recognise in our daily
lives. As such, she offers readers an admirable model to follow, in the
virtuous conduct she displays throughout the narrative, but also a
model that is achievable for the reader to emulate: because she is
‘ordinary’, rather than fantastical, Pamela is easier to identify with, and
so to imitate.

Johnson’s essay upholds the claim made in the prefatory letters to

Pamela’s early editions: its realism reinforces its moralising benefit for
readers, and especially the young and impressionable:

These books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and
the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and
introductions into life. […] [They can] convey the knowledge of
vice and virtue with more efficacy than axioms and definitions.
(2006: 2744)

The youthful reader envisaged here, who ‘idly’ spends his or her time
reading novels, can at least benefit from such leisure pursuits if the
books themselves are instructive. Johnson suggests that, better than
‘lectures of conduct’, morally wholesome, realistically believable books
offer young readers a model that they can identify with and follow in
their own conduct.

Unit 15: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (1): Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) 15-9
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SAQ 2
Which features of Pamela fulfil Watt’s criteria of ‘formal realism’?

Pamela’s ‘realism’ is central to conveying Richardson’s didactic

purpose: he writes and publishes Pamela as an instructive guide for
its readers, who will benefit from the moral lessons it conveys. But
what are these lessons, and what is Pamela’s ‘moral purpose’?

PAMELA’S ‘MORAL PURPOSE’

The driving principle of Pamela’s narrative is Mr B’s attempted seduction
of the heroine, her repeated resistance to his advances, and her final
triumph in reforming the rake and marrying him. As such, the ‘moral’
that Pamela conveys is seemingly fairly easy to decipher: it is a tale of
virtue winning over vice, of pious perseverance in the face of
persecution, and of the application of religious principles to ensure
better conduct in life, and especially in adversity. Pamela consistently
eschews material gain or riches, prizing the ‘jewel’ of her chastity over
any more tangible wealth: she is, of course, ‘rewarded’ for her ‘virtue’,
as the subtitle reminds us.

Yet how can we ascertain the claims that Richardson makes about
Pamela beyond its story-line, both about what type of prose narrative it
is, and about its broader social function as a ‘moral tale’ or ‘lesson’?

One means of discovering what types of claims Richardson makes about

Pamela’s generic identity and its intended ‘value’ for the reader is to
examine the book’s paratexts.

PAMELA: PARATEXTS AND PURPOSES

What is a ‘paratext’? Why might paratextual material be important, or
even interesting to us when thinking about the novel form?

Activity
Look up ‘paratext’ in the Oxford English Dictionary (online).

In many respects, a book’s paratexts give us some vital clues about

what kind of book we have, how the author thinks we might go about
reading it, and how we might benefit from reading it. Gérard Genette
claims that paratextual material is:

[…] what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as

such to its readers and, more generally, to the public. More than a
boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold,
or […] a ‘vestibule’ that offers the world at large the possibility of
either stepping inside or turning back. It is an ‘undefined zone’
between the inside and the outside, a zone without any hard and
fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text)
or the outward side (turned toward the world’s discourse about
the text), an edge, or, as Philippe Lejeune put it, ‘a fringe of the
printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the
text’. (1997: 1-2)

In the context of eighteenth-century books, the title-page was of

considerable significance: it was only after the beginnings of print that
title-pages were first used, and they served a practical purpose as the
sign, or advert, hung up in the bookseller’s shop that enabled

15-10 Literature 3
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consumers to identify what they might like to buy and read. The nature
of this information was thus highly important: it could tell a reader a lot
about what they were to expect in the ensuing pages of a book.

What are Pamela’s paratexts? In fact, there are several ‘vestibules’ that
we must pass through in order to access the narrative itself: the title-
page, the Editor’s Preface, and two letters written to the Editor by
‘friends’ who commend the book to the public. The second edition of
Richardson’s book, in 1741, was published with an ‘Introduction’ in the
form of a letter from Richardson’s friend Aaron Hill (although he
remained anonymous), which further commended the ‘author’ of this
purportedly excellent book. This is printed as ‘Appendix 1’ in the Oxford
World’s Classics edition of Pamela.

There are several important points in Genette’s statement that guide us

in our understanding of how and why Richardson uses his paratextual
material in Pamela in the way that he does: the title-page, preface, and
commendatory letters are ‘thresholds’ that the reader must cross before
reaching the narrative proper, through which he or she learns
something about the text beyond, and which marks his or her transition
from the world outside of the book to the world within.

Look at the title-page of Pamela: it follows eighteenth-century

convention by being remarkably long, and provides us with a
considerable amount of information about the structure, central
character, and story of the book. The title-page also tells us something
about the book’s potential usefulness for the reader: it is

Now first Published In order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue,

and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes.

As we know, the title-page is a marketing-tool for potential buyers:

Richardson uses his to enhance Pamela’s appeal to customers, but also
to tell us about the serious purpose behind the book. The title-page
suggests that this serious purpose will be achieved by the type of
narrative it presents, one based on authenticity: this is ‘A Narrative
which has its Foundation in TRUTH and NATURE’. But the title-page also
suggests that this is going to be an enjoyable book to read:

at the same time it agreeably entertains, by a Variety of curious

and affecting INCIDENTS.

The title-page also makes claims about what kind of book Pamela is not,
by differentiating it from other books on the market: it is

intirely divested of all those Images, which, in too many Pieces

calculated for Amusement only, tend to inflame the Minds they
should instruct.

Here, then, in the title-page alone, are some striking claims about what
kind of book this is, and is not, and about its intentions. We find the
familiar argument that one can ‘instruct’ most effectively by
‘entertaining’ at the same time, an idea we have encountered in
numerous different guises in previous units. The claims made here also
harmonise with those of Johnson’s later essay about ‘realist’ fiction: it is
Pamela’s ‘foundation in TRUTH and NATURE’ that ensures it will provide
the reader with credible models that he or (more likely) she can emulate
in his or her own daily life.

The next piece of paratextual material, the ‘Preface by the Editor’,

reiterates some of the title-page’s claims in a series of hypothetical
‘If….’ statements. The implication of these rhetorical suggestions is that
Pamela will ‘divert and entertain’, and that it will ‘instruct’ the reader,
and so ‘improve the minds of the youth of both sexes’.

Unit 15: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (1): Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) 15-11
______________________________________________________

The editor claims that this instructive purpose is reinforced and made
possible by the realistic nature of the characters and events described:
this book will ‘draw Characters justly’ and give ‘practical Examples’
drawn from real life (Richardson 2008: 3). Pamela will provide a model
and exemplar for women of all conditions: ‘the modest Virgin, the
chaste Bride, and the obliging wife’ (Richardson 2008: 3). But it will not
only appeal to these potential readers: Pamela is a book that ‘shall
engage the Passions of every sensible Reader, and strongly interest
them in the edifying story’ (Richardson 2008: 3).

Besides these claims about Pamela’s educative value, the author of the
preface also tries to convince us that the book is actually written by
someone other than himself: he is simply the ‘editor’. However he is not
only an editor but a reader too, and so speaks from experience of how
his own ‘Passions’ were ‘moved’ on reading this ‘little Work’ ( Richardson
2008: 4). In fact, because he is not the author of Pamela himself but
only its Editor, he claims that he can honestly vouch that it possesses all
the qualities he has outlined:

[…] because an Editor may reasonably be supposed to judge with

an Impartiality which is rarely to be met with in an Author
towards his own Works (Richardson 2008: 4)

Of course, we know that this ‘Editor’ is in fact Richardson himself: what

effect does this knowledge have on how we receive the claims that he
makes about this book’s qualities and purpose? Does this ‘Impartiality’
seem suspicious as a result of knowing that Richardson is the
supposedly disinterested judge of his own book?

From one perspective, we could argue that this is part of an elaborate

selling-tactic, one meant to stoke our desire to buy and read this book.
Yet Richardson’s emphatic claims about Pamela in his role as the ‘Editor’
go further than this: he really does want to convince us that this is a
‘true story’, because if we can believe that it is ‘drawn from nature’, and
presents real people and real scenarios, we are more likely to profit
from its instructive story. The pretence to authenticity is central to how
Richardson envisages the moral purpose of his book.

This is reinforced in two further pieces of paratextual material, ‘Letters

to the Editor’, which confirm the claims made in the preface; these
letters offer further ‘impartial’ confirmations of the book’s combined
qualities of being enjoyable to read and instructive. As such, they ‘sell’
or ‘puff’ the narrative that follows.

Both letters were written by Richardson’s friends, the first by Jean

Baptiste de Freval, the second by William Webster. However, according
to Thomas Keymer, it cannot be completely ruled out that these two
warmly-worded letters were not written by Richardson himself
(Richardson 2008: 526). Nonetheless, these letters confirm and
strengthen the claims made in Pamela’s preface about its literary
qualities and its educational purpose; in fact, the two go hand-in-hand,
as the letter by ‘J.B.D.F.’ makes clear: Pamela has ‘numerous beauties’,
and is written in an appropriately sober style, which helps to reinforce
the useful lessons it imparts to its readers:

For, as it borrows none of its Excellencies from the romantic

Flights of unnatural Fancy, its being founded in Truth and Nature,
and built upon Experience, will be a lasting Recommendation to
the Discerning and Judicious; while the agreeable Variety of
Occurrences and Characters, in which it abounds, will not fail to
engage the Attention of the gay and more sprightly Readers.
(Richardson 2008: 5-6)

15-12 Literature 3
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The terminology used in this letter is important to note in relation to the

‘moral purpose’ Richardson intends Pamela to have: by distinguishing
this book from the romance genre of fiction, it has a more ‘authentic’
quality that offers a better model for readers to follow because it is
nearer to real life. The ‘gay and more sprightly Readers’ can benefit
from Pamela’s lessons because it also has plenty to entertain.

However, we saw earlier that Watt describes Pamela as ‘solving’ the

problem of plot that apparently existed in Defoe’s fiction by focussing on
the ‘single’ plot of a courtship. The romance, we know, involves love,
intrigue, and sexual passion. What distinguishes Pamela from the
romance in its treatment of love and sex, and so helps Richardson to
convey the moral purpose of his book?

It is an important feature both of how Richardson presents Pamela to

his reading public, and of how we place its role in our history of the ‘rise
of the novel’, to recognise that Pamela makes distinct claims to not
being a romance – nor, indeed, to being a novel at all. By denying that
Pamela is like fanciful or entirely incredible fictions such as the romance,
and reinforcing its claims to ‘authenticity’ and to realism, Richardson
can convey the ‘moral purpose’ of his fictional enterprise more
effectively.

We have already addressed some aspects of how Richardson succeeds

in differentiating Pamela from the romance, and so reinforces the
instructive potential of the book: its realism is markedly different to the
flights of fancy that characterise romance, and it presents individualised
rather than archetypal characters, which the romance conventionally
uses. The linguistic quality of Pamela’s realism is in fact reinforced in the
second letter with which Richardson prefaces his narrative.

Written by the author’s ‘affectionate friend’, this letter’s author

describes how he is more able to believe that Pamela tells a true story
because of the types of language it uses. He claims that Pamela’s
language is not elaborate or fanciful, but is instead appropriately
decorous and ‘plain’. He tells the ‘Editor’ of Pamela that:

I could wish to see it out in its own native Simplicity, which will
affect and please the Reader beyond all the Strokes of Oratory in
the World; for those will but spoil it: […] it may disguise the
Facts, marr the Reflections, and unnaturalize the Incidents, so as
to be lost in a Multiplicity of fine idle Words and Phrases, and
reduce our Sterling Substance into an empty Shadow, or rather
frenchify our English Solidity into Froth and Whip-Syllabub. No;
let us have Pamela as Pamela wrote it; in her own Words, without
Amputation, or Addition. (Richardson 2008: 9)

The ‘native Simplicity’ of Pamela’s prose-style leads us to believe all the

more that this really is a series of letters written by a young servant girl
to her parents. Pamela’s language is one of ‘Sterling Substance’, a
mercantile metaphor that might perhaps make us think of the book’s
subtitle, ‘Virtue Rewarded’. But this phrase also reminds us of the
particularly English quality of the book’s prose: honest and plain-
spoken, Pamela’s pure moral vision refutes all attempts by other
authors to ‘frenchify our English Solidity into Froth and Whip-syllabub’.
Such a ‘frothy’, pretentious prose-style would not be as effective at
communicating the wholesome moral of Pamela’s story.

The nationalistic claims here are also important in another sense, one
which clarifies the generic ‘identity’ of Pamela by distinguishing it from
other literary forms. This is not a ‘romance’, with all the fanciful and
incredible qualities that that type of fiction presents – one which is,
furthermore, typically seen as a French genre. Pamela is distinguished

Unit 15: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (1): Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) 15-13
______________________________________________________

from such syllabub-like prose, with its fanciful subject-matter and frothy
way of describing it, and the inevitably frothy morals that romances
convey.

Pamela’s excellence, and its ability to be morally instructive, is precisely

due to the fact that it is unlike these amatory fictions: it does not
present ‘romantic Flights of unnatural Fancy’, but is instead ‘founded in
Truth and Nature, and built upon Experience’, conveyed in plain English
prose. As the second prefatory letter suggests, it is Pamela’s story ‘as
Pamela wrote it’: as a result, it is both more convincingly authentic, and
more able to convey a wholesome moral lesson.

Activity

Read the ‘Introduction’ to the second edition of Pamela (Appendix 1, pp.

507-19); note down words and phrases which support the claims about
Pamela’s beneficial qualities made in the paratextual material of the first
edition.

DOES PAMELA ACHIEVE ITS ‘MORAL PURPOSE’?

The paratexts Richardson supplies to Pamela are designed to reinforce
the ‘instructive’ dimension by describing those qualities that help to
convey this moral lesson most effectively: namely, the ‘truthfulness’ or
‘authenticity’ of its characters and events, and the ‘entertainment’ or
enjoyment that the reader will gain from the book. As such, by
entertaining, Pamela is most able to succeed in its aim of teaching the
reader.

However, does Richardson’s novel succeed in convincing us that this is

an ‘authentic’ story, written in a series of letters by a servant girl in the
country? And, as such, does Pamela succeed in fulfilling its didactic
purpose?

We could argue that from several different angles Richardson’s book

fails to convince us that this is a ‘realistic’ narrative, and so perhaps that
it does not succeed in fully persuading us of its ‘moral’.

DRAWBACKS OF THE ‘WRITING-TO-THE-MOMENT’ TECHNIQUE

Does the writing-to-the-moment technique actually convince us that this
is indeed an authentic ‘history’, whose trueness to life makes its moral
lessons more convincing?

There are, of course, many ‘holes’ in Richardson’s text in terms of its

status as a ‘believably real’ narrative in its use of this technique. It often
breaks down and reveals inconsistencies – impossibilities, even – in the
narrative. Can Pamela really write so much, so fast? How does she have
such a constant supply of ink and paper? How can she find the time to
write so much, in her role as a domestic servant with presumably heavy
duties?

As the early reader, whose comments on Richardson’s epistolary fiction

we encountered earlier, observes,

There is, however, one difficulty attending the epistolary method,

for it is necessary that all the characters should have an
uncommon taste for this kind of correspondence, and that they
should suffer no event, nor even a remarkable conversation to
pass without immediately committing it to writing […]
(Williams 1970: 133)

15-14 Literature 3
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Even when Pamela does have leisure to write in her Lincolnshire

captivity, there are still numerous practical difficulties that Richardson
must resolve if we are to believe that this is how events really
happened, and how Pamela recorded her responses to them. He is
forced to contrive several different ‘solutions’ to these potential practical
problems which do not necessarily always seem convincing. Leaving her
private papers concealed in the garden at Lincolnshire, for instance,
poses all sorts of potential hazards; Richardson perhaps recognises this,
and so is compelled to invent a strategy whereby Pamela can rescue her
precious writings. As she tells us at one point,

I have removed my Papers from under the Rose-bush; for I saw

the Gardener begin to dig near that Spot; and I was afraid he
would find them (Richardson 2008: 223)

The artificial nature of the coincidences and expedients that Richardson

is frequently forced to use, so as to maintain the impression of
‘authenticity’, might in fact make Pamela seem less true to life.

The narrative contrivances that make Pamela less credible sit alongside
perhaps the central obstacle to benefitting from the example of Pamela
story: can we really believe in Pamela as a character?

IS PAMELA A CREDIBLE CHARACTER?

As we saw with Johnson’s Rambler essay, if we are to read Richardson’s
novel as a didactic text, that both instructs and entertains at the same
time, we must believe in its characters as representing figures who are
true to life. We have considered how this might be the case in Pamela,
such as the ‘authentic’ and appropriate use of language belonging to
different characters within the narrative. And yet, we could argue,
Pamela’s characters fail to fulfil the criteria of ‘moral realism’ by being
too outlandish, extreme or caricatured to be credible.

Look again at Johnson’s assertion that the new ‘realistic’ fiction should
present believable characters: he argues that it should:

[…] exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that
daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and
qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind.
[…] They are engaged in portraits of which every one knows the
original, and can detect any deviation from exactness of
resemblance. (2006: 2743)

However, how do these observations sit alongside your reading of

Pamela, and of the various characters it presents? Are these characters
convincing in representing the type of person (or ‘original’) that we
might encounter in our daily lives, or do they veer towards caricature?
Perhaps there are elements of both types in Richardson’s text: while we
might consider Pamela’s own words and actions to be largely
proportionate to the type of person she is meant to be, do Mrs Jervis or
Mrs Jewkes tend towards the ridiculous? Perhaps Mr B could also be
considered to be pantomimic in certain respects; he potentially
straddles the border of Johnson’s suggestion that:

There have been men indeed splendidly wicked, whose

endowments through a brightness on their crimes […]. Vice, for
vice is necessary to be shown, should always disgust […]
(2006: 2746)

Does the ‘vice’ of Mr B’s character potentially make him more appealing
to the reader, who is titillated by the sensational nature of his
wickedness? Think back to our study of Paradise Lost: here we saw that

Unit 15: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (1): Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) 15-15
______________________________________________________

a character designed to ‘disgust’ by the inherent evil of his actions

might potentially be seen as glamorous for the reader.

At best, such vicious characters are ambiguous; and, as with Milton, it is

important to recognise that Richardson intends his reader to consider Mr
B and his actions to be repulsive. The ‘moral lesson’ of Pamela depends
on us interpreting his character in this way; although his moral
reformation at the end of Pamela might seem incredible to some
readers, it is perhaps a testament to the ability for even the most
vicious character to change.

However, does this potential problem with the credibility of Richardson’s

characters extend further, to the heroine herself? So far, we have
argued, her believability is central to the ‘realism’ of Richardson’s novel,
and is sustained through her authentic use of language, and the veracity
of her first-person narration of the events that befall her as they
happen, in a series of letters. Yet, as we have seen, there are potential
drawbacks to this writing-to-the-moment technique which make
Pamela’s narrative seem incredible, rather than credibly truthful.

Furthermore, how far is Pamela herself a credible character? On the one

hand, is her tenacity about her virtue simply too ferocious to be
believed? And, on the other, is her change of heart towards the end of
the novel, when she finally accepts Mr B as her husband and declares
her love for him, difficult to take for the reader who has accompanied
her ‘hand-in-hand’ throughout her trials?

To some extent, Pamela’s resistance is quite exceptional: she becomes

almost superhuman at times, repelling her master with violent and
almost hysterical power. When Mr B physically molests her, by forcibly
kissing her and then thrusting his ‘Hand in my Bosom’, Pamela claims
that:

[…] the Indignation gave me double Strength, and I got loose

from him, by a sudden Spring, and ran out of the Room.
(Richardson 2008: 32)

The more famous, and elaborated occasions of Mr B’s attempts on

Pamela’s bodily virtue – such as when he hides in Mrs Jervis’ bedroom,
or when she is incarcerated in the Lincolnshire house – bring her to
show similar bold, and surprising, resolve in her words and actions.

Is this entirely consistent with Pamela’s identity as a young and

inexperienced girl? Or, indeed, of a servant girl, who in the
contemporary context would ordinarily be expected to comply with her
master’s wishes?

Is Pamela a paragon of virtue, whose exemplary conduct provides a

model that is simply too exceptional for the ‘young, idle’ reader to
follow? If we cannot entirely believe in Pamela, or identify with her,
perhaps we are less inclined to emulate her virtuous conduct. As such,
Richardson’s ‘moral purpose’ in the novel could potentially fail.

SAQ 3
In what ways does Pamela potentially fail to fulfil the criteria of
‘formal realism’, and how might this affect Richardson’s aim to
‘instruct’ his reader through the novel?

15-16 Literature 3
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As we shall see in the subsequent unit, these potential difficulties of

Pamela’s character fuelled a significant dimension of the backlash
against Richardson’s book. Many readers found her too good to be true,
and so were inclined to read vicious motives behind her seemingly pious
conduct, and to suggest that Pamela is in fact a hypocrite who plays a
virtuous part. For other readers, while not adopting such a malicious
approach to Richardson’s text, while they nonetheless found much to
admire in Pamela, they did not deny that certain aspects of the book fell
short of its claims to authenticity. These are, perhaps, difficulties which
Richardson resolves in his second, more accomplished epistolary novel,
Clarissa (1747-8).

PAMELA AS A ‘REVOLUTIONARY’ TEXT

Pamela nonetheless plays a vital role in the development of prose
fiction, and in particular in the ‘rise of the novel’ narrative that Ian Watt
describes.

In some respects, this is the result of the innovations in narrative form

that Richardson’s book introduces: its composition as a series of letters
set an important precedent for subsequent fictions, similarly composed
in epistolary form, and which also aimed to achieve the immediacy of
the writing-to-the-moment technique. Similarly, the aspects of ‘formal
realism’ that we have indentified in Pamela – even if they are in some
ways flawed – also have important repercussions for subsequent prose
fiction. The focus on domestic detail, and the minute particulars of
everyday life, and the attention to characters as individuals (rather than
the archetypes of romance), are important features of subsequent
‘realist’ novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Yet Pamela is also revolutionary in more immediate ways, within the

direct contemporary context of its production. It plays an important part
both in challenging how mid eighteenth-century readers thought about
social hierarchies and about gender relations, and about how these
might be represented in fiction.

We previously identified Pamela’s stoic resistance to Mr B’s advances as,

in some senses, too extreme to be credible. However, for contemporary
readers this resistance had important implications for the way in which
they perceived class and sex, and its presentation in the prose
narrative. In her strident resistance, Pamela confounds the stereotype
of the servant girl who is fatally compliant to her master’s wishes.

In fact, Ian Watt claims, Pamela was responsible for bringing about two
‘revolutions’ in contemporary thinking, which have important
repercussions for the ‘rise of the novel’ narrative he traces. Watt argues
that ‘Richardson played an important part in establishing this new code’
(1972: 155), a ‘code’ in which ‘courtly love’ and ‘marriage’ are
reconciled for the first time. The conclusion of Pamela, with its ‘happy
ending’ in marriage, is in itself more revolutionary than might appear. In
contrast to the conventional happy endings of romance tales, Pamela’s
conclusion is more challenging to contemporary values and ideas about
class and sex. By triumphing over her ‘master’s’ wicked desires,
bringing him to reform himself, and finally to marry her, Pamela
challenges assumptions both about social status and about gender.

As Ian Watt claims,

The rise of the novel […] would seem to be connected to the

much greater freedom of women in modern society, a freedom
which, especially as regards marriage, was achieved earlier and
more completely in England than elsewhere. (1972: 155)

Unit 15: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (1): Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) 15-17
______________________________________________________

Pamela is a servant girl, and her marriage to her wealthy employer

marks a significant shift in the social aspirations of the lower-classes; as
Margaret Anne Doody says,

Mr. B. has, in terms of contemporary society, every reason to

regard himself as superior to Pamela. He is twenty-five years old,
and thus of age, while she is still a minor. He is male, she is
female. He is upper class, a member of the gentry, while she
belongs to the working class. Mr. B. is not a nobleman, but he
belongs to the ranks of true gentry. (1996: 101)

That Pamela is a woman is equally significant, for she challenges

assumptions that a woman of her class will not be so tenacious about
her virtue. Watt claims that this revolutionises what he calls ‘the
feminine role’ in fiction and ushers in a ‘new sexual ideology’ which
continues to evolve in all subsequent prose fiction. Watt says that
Richardson’s book:

[…] marks a very notable epiphany in the history of our culture:

the emergence of a new, fully developed, and immensely
influential stereotype of the feminine role. (1972: 182)

Watt argues that Richardson is responsible for initiating a concept of

how men and women interact in the fictional narrative by introducing a
concept of sex which:

[…] embodies a more complete and comprehensive separation

between the male and female roles than had previously existed.
(1972: 183)

Watt claims that this operates on every level of Pamela, down to the
details of the words on the page, and the ‘linguistic sensitivity’ with
which Richardson presents his heroine: she is cautious about certain
words and phrases which might seem indelicate, or which present her
as a sexual being, which is essential to how she conceives of her
physical virtue: as Watt notes, she ‘blushes’ at Mr B’s suggestion that
‘pretty maids should wear shoes and stockings’ (Watt 1972: 184).

Watt claims that the ‘decarnalization of the heroine’ in Pamela is

responsible for all subsequent representations of the ‘feminine role’ in
prose fiction. In terms of how Richardson conceived of his novel, and of
the impact he hoped it would have on its readers, this ‘decarnalization’
is essential to promoting the physical and spiritual virtue of his heroine,
but also the broader ‘lesson’ that he wishes to teach us in reading
Pamela’s story.

However, as with the potential drawbacks of Pamela’s credibility as a

heroine, this ‘revolutionary’ quality of Richardson’s text, with its
challenge to accepted notions of class and gender – and of fiction-
writing – provided the source for violent reaction against this novel, as
we shall discover in the subsequent unit.

REVIEW
In this unit, we have addressed how the ‘novel’ came into being in the
mid-eighteenth century by focussing on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.
Taking Ian Watt’s important study, The Rise of the Novel, as our
starting point, we addressed various aspects of what (according to
Watt) constitutes a ‘novel’, and why the mid-eighteenth century
provided the most ripe conditions for the emergence of this new form of
narrative fiction. We saw how Watt argues that ‘formal realism’ is the
principal quality of the emerging novel form, which involves an
increased attention to minute, domestic details; a believable plot and

15-18 Literature 3
______________________________________________________

time-scale; and an intensified attention to character. In particular, we

saw how in the new novel form ‘character’ developed as an individual
rather than archetypal entity, partly in response to a growing interest in
personal identity stoked by the philosophy of late seventeenth-century
thinkers such as Descartes and Locke.

We then proceeded to examine Richardson’s Pamela within the context

of the ‘rise of the novel’ account that Watt provides: we saw how it
fulfils several aspects of Watt’s criteria for ‘formal realism’, such as a
single, central plot. Pamela also uses language that is appropriate to the
characters and situations related to it; the narrative technique of
writing-to-the-moment also increases the impression of veracity, by
presenting Pamela’s experiences to the reader as they happen. We saw
how Pamela’s characters also uphold principles of realism, and in
particular the heroine herself: she changes over time, developing
empirically (in direct response to her experiences).

We saw how the heightened realism of Richardson’s novel enables him

to convey a ‘moral purpose’ through Pamela more effectively. We
related this to Samuel Johnson’s essay in The Rambler, where he
describes how by presenting ‘natural’ characters that a reader can
identify with, ‘realist’ fiction is more able to provide models whose
virtuous conduct the reader can emulate. We also examined the
paratextual material that Richardson supplies with Pamela, which offers
a vital means of ascertaining the nature of the claims he makes about
his book – its content and purpose – and its generic identity. We saw,
for instance, how Pamela’s appreciative early readers support
Richardson’s insistence that his book is not a romance, and so is able to
present a more credibly ‘instructive’ story.

However, we also saw how there are several drawbacks to Pamela’s

claims to fulfil the criteria of formal realism, and to achieve its moral
purpose. There are flaws in the writing-to-the-moment technique and in
the epistolary method in general. Similarly, the novel’s characters are
not always consistent with what we might consider to be ‘credible’.
Pamela in particular could arguably be held as too virtuous, too
exemplary, to be authentic.

Nonetheless, we concluded our discussion of Pamela by considering how

in many respects it is ‘revolutionary’: it challenges contemporary
assumptions about social hierarchy and gender relations by enabling the
virtuous maidservant to triumph over her wicked master. Pamela also
sets in motion several new ways of thinking about how such
relationships might be presented in narrative form, which has significant
repercussions for the development of subsequent prose fiction.

ADDITIONAL READING
Beasley, Jerry C. 1976. ‘Romance and the “New” Novels of Richardson,
Fielding and Smollett’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900,
16. 3: 437-50 (Available on JSTOR)

Castle, Terry. 1982. ‘P/B: Pamela as Sexual Fiction’, Studies in English

Literature, 1500-1900, 22. 3 (1982): 469-89 (Available on
JSTOR)

Conboy, Sheila. 1987. ‘Fabric and Fabrication in Richardson’s Pamela’,

ELH, 54:, 81-96 (Available on JSTOR)

Golden, Morris. 1986. ‘Public Context and Imagining Self in Pamela and
Shamela’, ELH, 53.2: 311-329 (Available on JSTOR)

Unit 15: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (1): Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) 15-19
______________________________________________________

Harris, Jocelyn. 1987. Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press) (Parts available online via Google Books)

McKeon, Michael. 1987. The Origins of the English Novel, 1660-1740

(Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press) (Parts
available online via Google Books)

Rivero, Albert J (ed.). 1996. New Essays on Samuel Richardson

(Basingstoke: Macmillan)

Roussel, Roy. 1974. ‘Reflections on the Letter: The Reconciliation of

Distance and Presence in Pamela’, ELH, 41.3: 375-399
(Available on JSTOR)

Watt, Ian. 2000. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson
and Fielding (London: Pimlico)

Whyman, Susan E. 2007. ‘Letter Writing and the Rise of the Novel: The
Epistolary Literacy of Jane Johnson and Samuel Richardson’,
Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 70.4: 577-606 (Available on
LION)

Zimmerman, Everett. 1996. The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the

Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press) (Parts available online via Google Books)

REFERENCES
Ballaster, Ros. 1992. Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from
1684-1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Doody, Margaret Anne. 1996 ‘Samuel Richardson: Fiction and

knowledge’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press) pp. 90-119.

Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans.

by Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
(Parts available online via Google Books).

Greenblatt, Stephen (ed.). The Norton Anthology of English Literature,

8th edn (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2006) I. 2743-
2745.

Hunter, J. Paul. 1990. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of

Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York and London: W.
W. Norton)

McKeon, Michael. 1987. The Origins of the English Novel, 1660-1740

(Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press) (Parts
available online via Google Books)

Richardson, Samuel. 2008. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (eds),

Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Richetti, John (ed.). 1996. The Cambridge Companion to the

Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press) (Parts available online via Google Books)

Watt, Ian. 1972. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson
and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957; repr.
Harmondsworth: Pelican) (Parts available online via Google
Books)

15-20 Literature 3
______________________________________________________

Williams, Ioan (ed.). 1970. Novel and Romance, 1700-1800: A

Documentary Record (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul)
(Parts available online via Google Books)

Unit 15: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (1): Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) 15-21
______________________________________________________

ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1

What are the principal features of Ian Watt’s study The Rise of the
Novel, and what potential objections might be raised to the approach
that he adopts?

Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel combines literary criticism and a socio-
historical approach to explain why a new form of prose fiction
emerged in the mid-eighteenth century: the novel. Watt describes
the enduring influence of thinkers such as Descartes and Locke,
whose ideas about individual identity gave rise to a growing interest
in representing such individuality in the characters of fictional
narratives. Watt explains how a new concept of ‘formal realism’
became discernible in mid-century texts such as those by Samuel
Richardson and Henry Fielding: this realism involves a close attention
to the domestic details of everyday life, an increasing emphasis on
individual experience in the development of character, and a credible
time-frame and geography.

Potential objections could be raised to the premise of Watt’s study:

the idea of a ‘rise’ of the novel implies an upward curve of
improvement, arguably to the disparagement of earlier prose texts.
The idea of trying to locate a ‘beginning’ at all could equally be
considered flawed. Critics such as J. Paul Hunter also argue that the
teleological approach Watt adopts is problematic: the novels of the
future are not necessarily ‘improvements’ on those of the past.

SAQ 2
Which features of Pamela fulfil Watt’s criteria of ‘formal realism’?

Pamela possesses many features which could arguably be said to fulfil

Watt’s criteria of ‘formal realism’. The minute domestic detail it
presents, belonging to the familiar setting of a home and its ‘family’
of servants and master, are recognisable as belonging to real life for
contemporary readers. Similarly, the individual items and daily
activities that the text details create the impression of a familiar and
credible living environment. The time-scale and geographical setting
of the novel also reinforce the impression that this is an authentic
‘history’ of its heroine’s experiences. The language that Richardson’s
text uses, and in particular the appropriateness of speech to
character, heighten the credibility of those characters. This veracity is
focussed upon Pamela herself: both the method of her account –
written as a series of letters which record her experiences in the
process of their taking place – and her development as a character in
response to her experiences, strengthen the impression that this is a
faithful and ‘true’ record written by a real-life heroine.

15-22 Literature 3
______________________________________________________

SAQ 3

In what ways does Pamela potentially fail to fulfil the criteria of

‘formal realism’, and how might this affect Richardson’s aim to
‘instruct’ his reader through the novel?

In some respects, Pamela could arguably be said to fall short of the

‘realism’ that it hopes to convey through its narrative and through the
characters it presents. The epistolary technique, for instance,
compels Richardson to contrive expedients that resolve certain
narrative difficulties which diminish the impression of authenticity.
Furthermore, Pamela herself – around whom the ‘realism’ of the book
largely centres – is in many ways too perfect to be credible. She
offers a paragon of virtue who is difficult to identify with, or to
emulate in her actions. As such, Richardson’s aim of providing a
morally instructive lesson through his text potentially founders: as
Samuel Johnson suggests, for a reader of fiction to follow the virtuous
conduct of a novel’s character that character must be credible, but
the occasional incredibility of Pamela’s character means that the
reader might find it difficult to believe in her, and to emulate her
qualities. As such, Richardson’s ‘moral purpose’ could fall short of
accomplishment, by presenting a heroine who is simply too
exemplary to be authentic.

Unit 15: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (1): Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) 15-23
_____________________________________________________________________

UNIT 16

‘THE RISE OF THE NOVEL’ (2): HENRY

FIELDING AND THE ‘PAMELA
CONTROVERSY’

AIMS
The aim of this unit is to introduce a different dimension of the ‘rise of
the novel’ narrative outlined in the previous unit by exploring
contemporary responses to Richardson’s novel in what is called the
‘Pamela controversy’, and in particular Henry Fielding’s Shamela. This
unit will also address Henry Fielding’s claim to pursue a ‘moral purpose’
in his alternative approach to writing fiction.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit, you should be able to:

Explain what is meant by the ‘Pamela controversy’, and why we

might be cautious about using this phrase.

Outline the principal reasons why contemporary readers adopted a

‘Pamelist’ or ‘Antipamelist’ stance towards Richardson’s novel.

Explain why this might be important in terms of the ‘rise of the novel’
in this period.

Describe the role played by Henry Fielding’s Shamela in the ‘Pamela

controversy’.

Explain why Fielding might have been motivated to present his

response to Richardson’s novel in the form of Shamela.

Outline Fielding’s alternative approach towards projecting a ‘moral

purpose’ through his fiction through a reading of the ‘Preface’ to
Joseph Andrews.

REQUIRED READING
The required reading for this unit is:

Henry Fielding, Shamela (1741)

Henry Fielding, ‘Preface’ to Joseph Andrews (1742)

Both texts are included in Henry Fielding. 2008. Thomas Keymer (ed.),
Joseph Andrews and Shamela (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
References in this unit are to this edition.

These texts are also available in Henry Fielding. 2003. Judith Hawley
(ed.), Joseph Andrews and Shamela (Harmondsworth: Penguin)
Shamela is also available online via Project Gutenberg, although you
should be aware that there may be textual variants with the version
used here.

Unit 16: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (2): Henry Fielding 16-1
and the ‘Pamela Controversy’
_____________________________________________________________________

INTRODUCTION
In the previous unit, we addressed the new type of prose fiction that
emerged in the early part of the eighteenth century, the novel; we
analysed several key aspects of Ian Watt’s important study, The Rise of
the Novel, in relation to Samuel Richardson’s novel of 1740, Pamela. We
saw how in many respects Richardson’s text upholds the principles of
‘formal realism’ that Watt identifies; Pamela, we saw, also demonstrates
the close attention to domestic detail, development of character and
interest in individual psychology that Watt claims belongs to the new
‘novel’ genre.

However, we also identified how Richardson’s novel might in some

respects fall short of fulfilling the criteria that Watt outlines.
Furthermore, there are potential shortcomings in how far the reader is
able to believe that Pamela, the book’s narrator and heroine, is credible.
These drawbacks, we saw, might have consequences for how successful
Pamela is in conveying the moral lesson that Richardson hopes to
impress upon his reader: if Pamela is simply too good to be true, she is
difficult for the reader to emulate in his or her actions.

In this unit, we shall explore some of these potential problems with

Pamela’s character, and with Pamela as a novel, in the context of the
so-called ‘Pamela controversy’. This contemporary reaction against
Richardson’s text registers the very disparate responses that some
readers expressed towards it, but also how these responses could be
expressed in stimulating, innovative and exciting ways. In this unit, we
shall examine Henry Fielding’s Shamela as one of the most brilliant
contemporary ripostes to Richardson’s novel.

However, we shall go beyond simply assuming that Fielding debunks

Richardson’s text, or wishes to deride his serious moral intentions:
indeed, as we shall see through a reading of the preface to Fielding’s
later work, Joseph Andrews, he has an equally strong desire to convey a
moral message through his fictional narrative. Nonetheless, as the
preface reveals, Fielding chooses to go about conveying this message in
a completely different way to Richardson.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH PAMELA?

As we saw in our reading of Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essay in the
previous unit, Johnson suggests that the chief means of conveying a
narrative’s moral purpose is its ability to convince us of its trueness to
life. As we saw, Pamela’s credibility as a heroine who is drawn from ‘real
life’ is central to Richardson’s presentation of her as a model whose
virtuous actions and strong principles his readers can copy in their own
lives.

However, as we suggested in the final sections of the previous unit, just

how far Pamela is a ‘credible’ heroine is open to some speculation: she
is surely just far too good, too perfect, too much a paragon, to be
wholly believable: can we really take Pamela at face-value?

Indeed, this is a potential problem that Richardson himself articulates in

Pamela, albeit in an understated way. Mr B is one of Pamela’s most
virulent critics; his frustration at her resistance often brings him to
accuse Pamela of being two-faced, an actress who only plays a virtuous
part rather than actually holding to such principles.

A key scene in Pamela that demonstrates Mr B’s potential justification

for this accusation of hypocrisy is that in which Pamela ‘tricks herself up’
in her country garb, in the hope of returning to her parents’ home. By
dressing herself in this way, she apparently makes herself especially
attractive without realising it; Mr B is, of course, greatly attracted to

16-2 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

Pamela in this becoming outfit. However, he plays along with her new
disguise by pretending that he does not recognise her, teasing her so as
to kiss her. When he reveals that he knows it is actually her, he accuses
her,
Who was it you put your Tricks upon? I was resolved never to
honour your Unworthiness, said he, with so much Notice again;
and so you must disguise yourself, to attract me, and yet pretend,
like an Hypocrite as you are –. (Richardson 2008: 57)

Pamela defends herself, claiming that ‘I have put on no Disguise’; but

the potential ‘problem’ with Pamela as a credible character is implicit in
Richardson’s own text: she is simply too good to be true.

This is one of the central features of some contemporary (and

subsequent) readers’ negative responses to Pamela: this paragon of
virtue is simply too perfect, which quite apart from making her
unrealistic as a character, also makes her proposed function as an
exemplar to the young, impressionable readers Johnson describes
difficult to fulfil: few of us can claim to be able to model ourselves on
Pamela’s exceptional pattern.

But Mr B’s accusation of hypocrisy also has quite other resonances in

contemporary responses in a sensation known as the ‘Pamela
controversy’. The possibility that Pamela is not in fact all she seems, but
that she is acting a part to deceive Mr B and her readers, is taken on
board by those belonging to the ‘Antipamelist’ camp of responses to
Richardson’s novel, with Fielding’s Shamela being perhaps the liveliest
example.

‘THE PAMELA CONTROVERSY’

Pamela was, undeniably, hugely popular and influential: it sold
thousands of copies, went into numerous editions, and was widely
talked about in conversation, newspapers, journals and magazines. A
considerable number of creative responses emerged in Pamela’s wake,
which took shape in textual accounts, fictional versions, plays and
poems. Richardson himself published a ‘continuation’ of Pamela’s story,
Pamela in her Exalted Condition, partly to counteract a spate of
unauthorised sequels by rival authors. As Thomas Keymer says, the
Pamela craze took shape in many other, more surprising forms too,
with:

[…] Pamela turning up in such ephemeral forms as illustrated fans

and waxwork shows. (Richardson 2008: xxv)

There were also illustrations of Pamela’s key scenes, by artists such as

Francis Hayman and Joseph Highmore.

Apart from much undeniable praise for and pleasure in Richardson’s

book, however, the immense scale of response to Pamela was not
always favourable: the debate over its merits, or its drawbacks, centred
on precisely the questions outlined in this unit so far: how far can we
believe in Pamela? Is she really so virtuous, or is she an impostor? The
factionalism that such disparate responses provoked separated out into
two camps, the ‘Pamelist’ and ‘Antipamelist’ sides of what has been
called ‘The Pamela controversy’.

However, as Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor wisely suggest, responses

to Pamela were not necessarily so clear-cut: many readers manifested
opinions about Pamela that expressed both ‘Pamelist’ and ‘Antipamelist’
tendencies (2005: 10-11). In fact, Keymer and Sabor argue, to talk
about the debate about Pamela as a ‘controversy’ at all is misguided:
instead, they suggest, ‘vogue’ might be a more appropriate term to
describe the fashionability of talking or writing about Pamela, and also

Unit 16: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (2): Henry Fielding 16-3
and the ‘Pamela Controversy’
_____________________________________________________________________

the potential profitability of leaping on the bandwagon of the popularity

of Richardson’s book by publishing a hack-version or imaginative
alternative to it. They write that:

Pamela inspired a swarm of uninvited appropriations, a Grubstreet

grabfest in which a hungry succession of entrepreneurial
opportunists and freeloading hacks […] moved in for a slice of the
action. (Keymer and Sabor 2005: 2)

Nonetheless, although the factionalism implied in such a term as the

‘Pamela controversy’ should be considered with caution, this phrase is
generally recognised as describing the unprecedented level of response
to Richardson’s book, and of the almost unprecedented way in which
these responses took creative form. In the midst of these responses one
text in particular took the lead in crystallising many of the problems
some readers found with Pamela, and set a precedent for all subsequent
creative contributions to the ‘controversy’: Henry Fielding’s Shamela,
which appeared in 1741, hot on the heels of Pamela itself.

SAQ 1
How does the ‘Pamela controversy’ expose certain potential drawbacks
in the character of Richardson’s heroine?

‘THE PAMELA CONTROVERSY’: SHAMELA

Shamela embodies what might be called a mocking critique of
Richardson’s text: its very title indicates the pejorative view it holds of
the heroine’s much-lauded virtue. The authorship was disputed for some
time, but it is now fairly widely recognised that Fielding was the author
of Shamela. This text gives some indication about the nature of
Richardson and Fielding’s differences as authors, which our reading of
the preface to Joseph Andrews later in this unit will confirm. Both
authors project a moral purpose through their fiction, but go about it in
strongly contrasting ways. This difference in vision of how to perform a
didactic function in fiction is partly what motivates Fielding to respond to
Pamela in the way that he does in Shamela.

What is it about Pamela that Fielding objects to, and how does he
convey this in Shamela?

Activity
Read Henry Fielding’s Shamela.

Firstly, Fielding’s critique goes right back to the paratextual material

that, as we saw in the previous unit, is central to how Richardson states
his didactic purpose in Pamela, and its ability both to entertain and to
instruct. Fielding is provoked by the claims to ‘authenticity’ that
Richardson makes in the book’s preface, under the guise of being its
‘Editor’. He is, moreover, particularly resistant to the arrogant way
Richardson goes about making these claims about his novel’s qualities,
and benefit for the reader, and above all by the puffing letters that
Richardson provides as prefaces to the narrative.

Fielding’s objections to Richardson’s posturing as the ‘Editor’ of Pamela,

and the apparently pompous claims he makes about his novel’s merits,
surface with particular prominence even in the opening pages of

16-4 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

Shamela. Just as Richardson had used his paratextual material to

trumpet the qualities and purposes of Pamela, so in Shamela Fielding
uses his paratexts to state his intentions for this particular publication.
Here, Fielding states his approach to writing fiction in direct opposition
to Richardson’s approach, as stated in Pamela, through parodying the
earlier novel’s paratexts.

The title-page of Shamela in itself arrests our attention; as with

Pamela’s title-page, it gives us a wealth of information about the
content and purpose of this publication: it is:

An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. In which, the

many notorious falsehoods and misrepresentations of a Book
called Pamela, Are exposed and refuted; and all the matchless
arts of that young Politician, set in a true and just Light.

Richardson’s heroine immediately comes under attack: she is a ‘young

Politician’, which implies that she is scheming and Machiavellian. Her
transformed name, from Pamela to Shamela, indicates the ‘true’
character that this book promises to ‘expose’.

The tantalising nature of the exposé that Fielding promises his readers
is suggested in the subsequent information given on the title-page: an
amorous intrigue is hinted at in the promised disclosure of ‘all that
passed between her and Parson Arthur Williams’. There is a jibe at
Richardson’s pretence to authenticity, with the claim that ‘The whole’
book is ‘exact Copies of authentick Papers delivered to the Editor’. The
suggestion made by one of Richardson’s friends in the first puffing letter
to preface Pamela, that every home should have a copy of the book for
the pleasure and instruction it provides, is also mocked on Fielding’s
title-page with its advice that Shamela is ‘Necessary to be had in all
Families’.

The title-page is followed by a Dedication, and, as with Richardson’s

book, prefatory ‘Letters to the Editor’; these are revelatory about
Shamela’s nature and purpose, and deliberately provocative in relation
to Richardson’s stated intentions. The Dedication – a standard feature of
eighteenth-century books, both fictional and otherwise – is addressed
‘To Miss Fanny, &c.’ (Fielding 2008: 307), which immediately alerts us
as to the comically erotic nature of this ‘version’ of Pamela’s history:
although it was a common name at the time, ‘Fanny’ was already a
sexually loaded term; ‘&c.’ is also a textual euphemism for the female
pudenda. The Dedication parodies Richardson’s set of moral precepts in
his preface, in the series of ‘If…’ statements, as the spurious editor
gives Miss Fanny several enumerated reasons why this book should be
so instructive and useful to her.

The Letters to the Editor similarly parody the prefatory matter

Richardson provides in Pamela, mimicking the admiring tone adopted by
Richardson’s friends; as such, Fielding exposes their serious intent in
recommending Pamela to the public to ridicule. In Fielding’s text, there
is (perhaps surprisingly) a letter written by the Editor himself, to
himself. This suggests the low opinion Fielding has of Richardson’s self-
congratulatory ‘editorial’ role. This is reinforced by the letter written by
‘John Puff’, whose name indicates the esteem in which Fielding holds the
commendatory letters prefacing Richardson’s novel.

These two, short pieces, however, are followed by two longer letters:
Parsons Tickletext and Oliver compare opinions on Richardson’s novel,
and so set the context for the text of Shamela which follows.

Parson Tickletext is enraptured with Pamela, praises the book’s virtues,

and even includes extracts from the dedicatory material with which
Richardson prefaced the second edition of Pamela to enhance his praise.

Unit 16: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (2): Henry Fielding 16-5
and the ‘Pamela Controversy’
_____________________________________________________________________

That this Parson is called ‘Tickletext’, however, indicates the quality and
depth of his judgements: besides having bawdy implications, the name
Tickletext also suggests that he might twist his interpretation of
whatever he reads to suit his own inclinations or purposes.
Parson Oliver, however, is much more discerning – and critical of
Pamela. He reflects upon the Pamela craze itself, which he describes as
‘an epidemical Phrenzy now raging in Town’ (Fielding 2008: 312). He
also claims to have had prior knowledge of her story: he was actually ‘in
the neighbourhood’ at the time of the events that Pamela relates, and
so had the perfect opportunity to notice ‘all her little Arts’ (Fielding
2008: 313), and to see that her proclaimed virtue was just a pretence.
Oliver promises Tickletext that he will reveal the ‘true’ nature of Pamela
and her history by sending him ‘some Papers relating to this Matter’
(Fielding 2008: 313) – the text of Shamela itself. Parson Oliver’s claim
about these letters – ‘I assure you are authentick’ (Fielding 2008: 314)
– is a further dig at Richardson’s pretence to authenticity.

What follows is a brilliant exposé of Pamela: Fielding pounces upon

certain aspects of Richardson’s narrative, its loopholes and
inconsistencies, and inflates them to extravagant proportions to provoke
ridicule at Richardson’s expense. This operates on several different
levels: linguistically, for instance, Fielding twists Richardson’s use of
words and the concepts they apply to – Pamela’s celebrated ‘virtue’ is
distorted into ‘vartue’. Fielding condenses the coarse insults used by Mr
B, which Richardson disperses across his narrative, to highlight their
presence: Shamela describes at one point how her master – now
revealingly named Mr Booby – calls her ‘Hussy, Slut, Saucebox,
Boldface’ (2008: 317), all in one breath.

Certain whole episodes in Pamela are also parodied in Shamela: by

selecting one or two characteristic features of Richardson’s narrative,
distorting them, and making them grotesque, Fielding exposes the
original episode in Pamela to comic critique. For example, the scene in
Richardson’s book in which Pamela prepares her three separate
‘Parcels’, in preparation for her supposed return to the country, comes
in for savage treatment in Shamela. In Richardson’s novel, the heroine
packs into the bundle that she intends to take home with her objects
that are supposed to demonstrate her modesty, her simple and humble
piety, her scorn for material riches in preference for the true ‘jewel’ of
her chastity. Among these, Pamela itemises:

[…] a quilted Callimancoe Coat, and a Pair of Stockens I bought of

the Pedlar, and my Straw-hat with blue Strings; and a Remnant
of Scots Cloth, which will make two Shirts and two Shifts, the
same I have on, for my poor Father and Mother. And here are
four other Shifts […] and here are two Pair of Shoes, I have taken
the Lace off, which I will burn, and may-be will fetch me some
little Matter at a Pinch, with an old Shoe-buckle or two.
(Richardson 2008: 78)

What might, for some readers, be a fine example of Pamela’s eschewal

of material wealth, and of her sound domestic economy, becomes for
others proof of her possessiveness, her materialism, in the way that she
obsessively lists these individual items and discusses their value. In
Fielding’s text, this episode is savagely brutalised, both the nature of
the objects Shamela includes in her ‘bundles’, and the way in which she
describes them, exposing how Richardson’s heroine is a fake who
parades behind a façade of purity. Shamela lists:

[…] two Day-Caps, two Night-Caps, five Shifts, one Sham, a

Hoop, a Quilted-Petticoat, two Flannel-Petticoats, two pair of
Stockings, one odd one, a pair of lac’d Shoes, a short flowered
Apron, a lac’d Neck-Handkerchief, one Clog, and almost another,
and some few Books […]. (2008: 332)

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Shamela’s shopping list condenses Pamela’s more descriptive account of

her bundles, and so exaggerates its sense of excessive itemisation;
moreover, the items that Shamela includes – odd stockings, ‘almost
another’ Clog – suggest her shambolic and sluttish nature. As her
description goes on, she lists several books, whose titles nonetheless
add to the impression of her loose moral character: they include nods
towards devotional texts – the Whole duty of Man, for instance.
However, Shamela’s description of them corrupts their intended pious
purpose: her copy, Shamela claims, has ‘only the Duty to one’s
Neighbour, torn out’; she also owns decidedly suspicious volumes, such
as the racy Venus in the Cloister.

Alongside the content of Richardson’s book, Fielding exposes his

narrative technique to critical scrutiny. Pamela’s characteristic way of
recording everything as it happens to her is exposed to ridicule by being
made explicit: as Shamela says at one point, ‘You see I write in the
present Tense’ (Fielding 2008: 318). Fielding ridicules what we might
think is an integral part of the way that Richardson tries to make us
believe that Pamela is a genuine and authentic account of events
recorded as they took place.

However, we might also look at this from a different perspective:

Fielding is not necessarily saying that Pamela is bad in itself from a
moral point of view. He does not sincerely argue that Pamela herself is
morally corrupt, or a hypocrite. Instead, he exposes what could be seen
as a potential flaw – or range of flaws – in Richardson’s narrative, and
exposes them to the reader’s view for comic effect. There are
undeniably gaps in Pamela, in terms of its presentation of character or
its narrative technique, and so Fielding fills them in with his own
creative material to create an entertaining, intentionally facetious
burlesque ‘novel’ of his own.

Nor does Fielding use Shamela to suggest that he does not enjoy
reading Pamela, or esteem Richardson as a writer; in fact, he praises
Richardson’s later, much more carefully constructed (and much longer)
novel, Clarissa. Rather, we might perhaps think of Shamela as a form of
textual critique: there are undeniably holes in Pamela’s narrative, and
difficulties with its technique; Fielding can comment upon them more
effectively by exposing them to comic scrutiny.

Furthermore, rather than Pamela itself, Fielding reacts against the

pretensions that Richardson claims for himself as an author, both
through the pretence to authenticity that he makes through styling
himself only as ‘The Editor’, and through the provoking quantity and
nature of the puffs with which Richardson’s friends promote his book,
and which he prints alongside it. Such pomposity surely deserves to be
brought down a peg or two. Shamela set the tone, and offered a model,
for a subsequent gaggle of authors to produce their own creative
versions of Pamela in equally scurrilous ways, although perhaps none
quite as successfully as Fielding.

IS SHAMELA SUBVERSIVE OR CONSERVATIVE?

There is, however, a sense in which Fielding is actually being
conservative rather than subversive. We might think that, because it is
an intentionally facetious and parodying version of Pamela, Shamela is
the more anarchic of the two texts, challenging established and
venerable literary texts. However, it is important to recognise that, in
the context of its contemporary production, Pamela raised dispute for its
perceived challenge to established notions of gender and class relations,
as we found in the previous unit. As such, it might be claimed that
Fielding (a noted conservative in many respects) seeks to correct the
distortion of existing hierarchies threatened by Richardson’s novel. As

Unit 16: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (2): Henry Fielding 16-7
and the ‘Pamela Controversy’
_____________________________________________________________________

we have found in earlier units, the ‘sovereign corrective’ of satire

provides a much more effective tool for re-establishing norms, and
confirming hierarchies, than perhaps any other method of critique.

Keymer and Sabor describe how, in the wake of the ‘Pamela

controversy’, writing about Richardson’s novel offered an opportunity of
assuming a position ‘on social and sexual politics’ (2005: 5). From this
perspective, the ‘controversy’ literature confronts Richardson’s
transgressions of gender and social boundaries with a ‘conservative
backlash’; various responses ‘make plain the extent to which
Richardson’s narrative of social disruption and moral disproportion had
struck the rawest of collective nerves’, well beyond the particular
positions adopted by individual authors (Keymer and Sabor 2005: 5, 7).

SAQ 2

In what ways, and for what reasons, does Fielding subject Richardson’s
Pamela to satirical parody in Shamela?

As Keymer and Sabor suggest, Shamela is often read ‘as a rearguard

assertion of patrician values’; however, as they also suggest, Fielding’s
text has more subtlety than this (2005: 5-6). In many respects,
Shamela foregrounds the very different approaches that either author
takes towards the moral purpose of art, and how that might be achieved
through a fictional narrative, and so the role that Fielding and
Richardson play in the history of the ‘rise of the novel’.

It might, in this respect, be useful to compare and contrast accounts of

Richardson and Fielding’s personal biographies.

Activity
Look up the entries for Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online).

As you can see from these biographical accounts, both authors were in
fact keenly interested in matters of public morality, and of literature’s
role within society. Perhaps, we can argue, both authors hold a sincere
belief in the ‘moral purpose’ of their art: but both authors go about
conveying this in entirely different ways.

What is Fielding’s ‘moral purpose’? How does he convey it through his

fiction?

FIELDING’S ‘MORAL PURPOSE’ AND THE COMIC NOVEL

While Shamela is a provoking, entertaining response to Pamela in the
immediate wake of the ‘vogue’ that raged after Richardson published his
novel, it is in many respects a slight and relatively under-evolved
example of Fielding’s skill as an author. Rather, Shamela is a statement
of literary criticism at a particular moment in time, in response to the
conditions of the contemporary publishing and reading worlds. It tells us
a certain amount about Fielding’s fictional style, and about how he
formulates this by parodying another author’s work. However, a later,
much more developed example of Fielding’s fiction, Joseph Andrews,
gives us a clearer sense of his skill as a writer, but also of the serious
intentions that motivate him to produce his novels.

16-8 Literature 3
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How can we discover Fielding’s artistic principles in writing his novels,

and how this supports the moral purpose of his fiction?

We saw how Richardson’s paratextual material to Pamela is central to

how he presents his readers with a statement about the qualities of his
novel, and about the serious moral benefit it can bring to its readers.
Similarly, we can examine Fielding’s use of paratextual material to
gauge ideas about the ‘moral purpose’ of fiction, but also his strongly
contrasting views to the types of fiction most appropriate to conveying
that vision. We saw how this emerges to some degree in Shamela, but
also the largely facetious reasons why Fielding uses his paratextual
material in this way. The preface to Joseph Andrews, by contrast, offers
us a much fuller, more complex, and more provoking sense of how
Fielding envisages his role as an author, and how he proposes to
present this in the type of fiction he writes.

Activity
Read the preface to Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, pp. 3-9.

What strikes you as particularly interesting or unusual about Fielding’s

statement about his approach to fiction in this preface?

How does it compare with the prefatory matter that Richardson supplies
in Pamela?

Do you get a clear sense of what ‘type’ of fiction Fielding proposes to

write at all, or is his taxonomy confusing?

In many respects, bafflement is a natural reaction upon first reading the

preface to Joseph Andrews: Fielding gives an account of different genres
of writing so as to situate the type of fiction that he proposes to write.
However, that generic classification is complicated, perhaps obscure,
and brings in references to texts that apparently no longer exist. How,
for instance, are we to compare Fielding’s novel with the ‘lost’ Margites
(2008: 3)? If we cannot compare the two, for obvious practical reasons,
then how are we to gauge what type of novel Joseph Andrews is?
Furthermore, the convoluted descriptions of the ‘comic Epic- Poem in
Prose’ (Fielding 2008: 3) surely gives no clear statement about what
type of book we are about to read. What exactly is such a type of
writing? What are its generic qualities?

Activity
List the different types of ‘genre’ that Fielding mentions in the preface to
Joseph Andrews.

Fielding, of course, provokes us to ask such questions about genre in

response to the preface to Joseph Andrews without providing any clear
idea about how we might respond. In fact, the confusing array of
generic distinctions presents us with a taxonomy for fiction-writing that
is purposely ill-defined. Fielding suggests in the preface that rules for
fiction-writing in prose are as yet vague; there are no ‘conventions’ for
novel-writing so to speak as yet, and so the author of fiction is free to
define them for himself.

Unit 16: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (2): Henry Fielding 16-9
and the ‘Pamela Controversy’
_____________________________________________________________________

That is precisely what Fielding goes about doing in this preface; but it is
important to note that he does so by defining his ‘comic novel’ in
relation to other kinds of writings. In effect, he says what kind of book
Joseph Andrews is, by saying what it is not. As such, he claims, he
presents us with a ‘new species of writing’ in Joseph Andrews – an idea
that Fielding develops more fully in his later novel, Tom Jones. The idea
of character is central to how Fielding formulates his approach to
fictional writing in the preface to Joseph Andrews.

What do you notice about his comments upon character in the preface?

For one thing, Fielding affirms what his ideas are about how ‘character’
should be represented in the fictional narrative by, once again, defining
it in terms of how character should not be portrayed. He states that the
writer of comic fiction should be concerned with presenting ‘character’,
and not ‘caricature’. Fielding argues that ‘character’ is drawn from
nature, whereas ‘caricature’ is a gross distortion of what is natural
(2008: 5).

Fielding presents this idea through drawing a comparison with the visual
arts. The ‘history painter’, he argues, is like the true comic novelist, who
represents ‘nature’ by drawing characters identifiable as being ‘natural’.
The caricaturist, however, is like the author of burlesque fiction, who
presents grotesque, monstrous distortions of the types of people – their
character-traits or physical appearance – that we might meet in
everyday life. As Fielding argues, the ‘Comic History-Painter’ produces:

[…] the exactest Copy of Nature; insomuch, that a judicious Eye

instantly rejects any thing outré. […] Whereas in the Caricatura
we allow all Licence. (2008: 5)

One type of artist faithfully records and represents ‘Nature’, whilst the
other fancifully distorts it to ‘Monsters, not Men’ (Fielding 2008: 5).

Fielding here refers to the important contemporary artist William

Hogarth in this respect, whose famous print ‘Characters/Caricaturas’
presents in a visual way precisely the argument that Fielding makes in
the preface, about the importance of representing in an art work men
drawn from nature, not monsters created out of the imagination.

We have encountered the idea of caricature before, in previous units,

where we linked it to the idea of satire: we found that caricaturing a
particular person or type of person involves selecting their most
distinctive faults (whether of personality, conduct or physical
appearance). This fault is then distorted, exaggerated to extreme
proportions, and so exposed to public view more effectively. As we
found, the purpose of caricature is satirical: by exposing such vices and
follies, faults and foibles, the artist or author can bring us to reflect
upon them, and so perhaps alter our conduct in real life.

Of course, the danger with caricature is that it verges towards the

merely vindictive – a potential feature of the lampoon, as we saw in our
discussion of Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe. It is this dimension of caricature
that Fielding resists, in his statement that the truly good comic writer
should be concerned with portraying ‘Men’, not ‘Monsters’. In fact,
Fielding argues in the preface to Joseph Andrews, it is by drawing
characters from ‘nature’, rather than grotesquely distorting them, that
the comic writer can achieve a more effective satire upon such
individuals and the society to which they belong.

The more ‘lifelike’, or true to nature, that a character in a fictional novel

is, the more able we are to identify with him or her. Consequently, if
their actions are portrayed as being ‘ridiculous’ – if their faults and

16-10 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

follies are exposed to comic scrutiny – then we are more likely to benefit
from the lesson. We are perhaps more able to perceive our own faults
as like those portrayed in the novel, and so reform our own conduct in
the future. As such, Fielding argues in the preface to Joseph Andrews,
satire can be more effective through presenting ‘nature’ (character) not
the unnatural (caricature): this should be the aim of the comic novelist.
What does Fielding target in particular as being the true target of the
comic novelist’s satire?

The answer lies in his use of the word ‘Ridiculous’. While this might
make us think of the point-scoring, or vindictive aspect of lampoon, for
Fielding ‘Ridicule’ has a more complex and potentially useful sense.
Ridicule belongs to satire’s ability to act as a ‘sovereign corrective’: by
provoking laughter at a particular character’s expense, he or she – and
even we as readers – are inclined to correct vice or folly, to avoid
brining similar ridicule upon ourselves. For Fielding, the true target of
such ridicule is ‘Affectation’. As he states,

The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is

Affectation. (Fielding 2008: 6)

What does he mean by the term ‘Affectation’?

Activity
Look up ‘affectation’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

What does your understanding of this term, and of its various different
uses through time, tell you about Fielding’s use of the word in the
preface to Joseph Andrews?

For Fielding, pretending to be something one is not – whether this

involves pretending to be more virtuous, beautiful, witty or wise – is one
of the prime follies of his age. He suggests in the preface to Joseph
Andrews that in his contemporary society many people are inclined to
‘affect’ to be more amusing, more intelligent, or more pure than they
actually are:

Now Affectation proceeds from one of these two Causes; Vanity,

or Hypocrisy: for as Vanity puts us on affecting false Characters,
in order to purchase Applause; so Hypocrisy sets us on an
Endeavour to avoid Censure by concealing our Vices under an
Appearance of their opposite Virtues. (Fielding 2008: 6)

This makes such affected people rightly subject to the accusation of

hypocrisy; it is the duty of the moral writer of fiction to expose that
hypocrisy to public view, to expose it to correcting ridicule, and so
potentially to bring about change in some aspect of how society
behaves.

How does Fielding’s vision of the function of his fictional writing – the
benefit it can bring to society as a whole – and the way that he
proposes a writer of fiction should achieve this goal, compare with
Richardson’s moral purpose in Pamela?

From one perspective, we could argue that Pamela presents characters

who are one-dimensional, and who embody the ‘caricature’ that Fielding
derides: Mrs Jewkes, for instance, could be seen to be a ‘stock’
character who represents the low-class housekeeper with a simple
outlook on life, and a variable moral compass. Yet, on the other hand,
characters in Fielding’s fiction – such as Parson Adams in Joseph

Unit 16: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (2): Henry Fielding 16-11
and the ‘Pamela Controversy’
_____________________________________________________________________

Andrews, or the tutors named Thwackum and Square in his later novel,
Tom Jones – are also ‘caricatures’ rather than ‘characters’ drawn from
nature. No matter how strongly Fielding protests against caricature, and
argues that he is firmly on the side of drawing characters, there is a
very fine line separating the two approaches to fictional personages:
sometimes, an author must straddle the boundary so as to
communicate the particular moral point that he or she wishes to make
in his or her fiction.

Perhaps, we could argue, both Richardson and Fielding present

characters that embody aspects both of ‘nature’ and of the ‘monstrous’.
What separates these two writers is the serious, almost pompous way
that Richardson goes about conveying his didactic purpose in Pamela.
Fielding’s tone, and approach, is distinctly lighter: for Fielding, using
comedy as a corrective force is much more effective than to preach to
his readers outright, as he suggests Richardson does in Pamela. As
such, he reinforces the importance of ‘entertainment’ in the writer’s
desire to provide ‘instruction’. Which kind of novel the reader finds
either most ‘instructive’ or most ‘entertaining’, perhaps, remains a
question of personal taste.

SAQ 3
What does the Preface to Joseph Andrews tell us about the ‘moral
purpose’ of Fielding’s fiction, and of the type of fiction best able to convey
this purpose?

REVIEW
In this unit, we have seen how the immense success and popularity of
Samuel Richardson’s Pamela gave rise to a strong reaction amongst
contemporary readers: either greatly admiring, or greatly critical, these
readers adopted ‘Pamelist’ and ‘Antipamelist’ stances towards
Richardson’s novel. However, as we also saw, responses to Pamela were
not necessarily so clear-cut: positive and negative points could be
blended in the single reader’s opinion of this novel.

Nonetheless, in this unit we examined how Henry Fielding’s Shamela

offers one of the most vibrant and entertaining contemporary ripostes to
Pamela. This short ‘burlesque novel’ set a trend for responding to
Richardson’s novel in this provoking, creative way, and offered a model
for future writers to imitate when they produced their own ‘Antipamelist’
responses to Pamela. Fielding’s text parodies, and so exposes to satiric
critique certain key aspects of Richardson’s novel. In particular,
Shamela centralises the problems many readers registered with Pamela
herself as a character: she is simply too perfect, and so must be a fake
who hides behind a mask of virtue, here exposed as ‘vartue’.

We also saw, however, that Shamela registers a general unease with

Pamela in other, more serious ways: Richardson’s challenge to
established social hierarchies and gender relations caused much
discontent among contemporary readers. From this perspective, Fielding
is a ‘conservative’ who seeks to expose such challenges in Richardson’s
novel to ridicule, and so undermine them.

In many respects, though, as we saw in this unit Shamela is more about

a different artistic vision than a direct attack on Richardson as a writer.
Through a reading of the preface to Joseph Andrews, we saw how
Fielding presents the role of the fiction writer as a moral one: it is his
duty to detect faults and foibles among members of society, and by
exposing them to ridicule attempt to bring about their correction. As

16-12 Literature 3
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such, presenting ‘characters’ drawn from nature, rather than monstrous

‘caricatures’, should be the proper ‘province’ of the comic novelist. In
some senses, as we saw, Richardson also has a moral ‘vision’ for his
fiction; the difference between the two writers is that for Fielding, in
contrast to Richardson, this is conveyed through exposing society’s
faults to comic scrutiny.

In the next unit, we shall be examining the question of the ‘rise of the
novel’ – and, indeed, how appropriate such an idea is – in relation to a
very different kind of prose fiction which appeared two decades after
Fielding and Richardson’s texts: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

ADDITIONAL READING

Antal, Frederick. 1952. ‘The Moral Purpose of Hogarth’s Art’, Journal of

the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 15: 169-97 (Available on
JSTOR)

Battestin, Martin C. with Ruthe R. Battestin. 1993. Henry Fielding: A Life

(London: Routledge, 1989; repr.) (Parts available via Google
Books)

Beasley, Jerry C. 1976. ‘Romance and the “New” Novels of Richardson,

Fielding and Smollett’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900,
16. 3: 437-50 (Available on JSTOR)

Bell, Ian A. 1994. Henry Fielding: Authorship and Authority (London and
New York: Longman)

Campbell, Jill. 1995. Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding’s

Plays and Novels (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press)

Castle, Terry. 1982. ‘P/B: Pamela as Sexual Fiction’, Studies in English

Literature, 1500-1900, 22. 3: 469-89 (Available on JSTOR)

Clymer, Lorna and Robert Mayer (eds). 2007. Historical Boundaries,

Narrative Forms: Essays on British literature in the Long
Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman (Newark,
DE: University of Delaware Press) (Parts available via Google
Books)

Conboy, Sheila. 1987. ‘Fabric and Fabrication in Richardson’s Pamela’,

ELH, 54: 81-96 (Available on JSTOR)

Doody, Margaret Anne. 1974. A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels

of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press)

Dussinger, John A. 1970. ‘What Pamela Knew: An Interpretation’, The

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 69: 377-393

Golden, Morris. 1986. ‘Public Context and Imagining Self in Pamela and
Shamela’, ELH, 53.2: 311-329 (Available on JSTOR)

Hunter, J. Paul. 1990. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of

Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York and London: W.
W. Norton)

Keymer, Thomas and Peter Sabor (eds). 2001. The Pamela Controversy:
Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela,
1740-1750, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto)

Unit 16: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (2): Henry Fielding 16-13
and the ‘Pamela Controversy’
_____________________________________________________________________

Keymer, Thomas and Peter Sabor. 2005. Pamela in the Marketplace:

Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century
Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
(Parts available via Google Books)

Kreissman, Bernard. 1960. Pamela-Shamela: A Study of the Criticisms,

Burlesques, Parodies, and Adaptations of Richardson’s Pamela
(Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press)

Smallwood, Angela. 1989. Fielding and the Woman Question: The

Novels of Henry Fielding and Feminist Debate, 1700-1750
(Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf)

Turner, James Grantham. 1994. ‘Novel Panic: Picture and Performance

in the Reception of Richardson’s Pamela’, Representations, 48:
70-96 (Available on JSTOR)

REFERENCES

Fielding, Henry. 2008. Thomas Keymer (ed.), Joseph Andrews and

Shamela (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Keymer, Thomas and Peter Sabor. 2005. Pamela in the Marketplace:

Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century
Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Richardson, Samuel. 2008. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (eds),

Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

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ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
Q. How does the ‘Pamela controversy’ expose certain potential
drawbacks in the character of Richardson’s heroine?

In many respects, Richardson’s heroine is simply too good to be true.

From one perspective, this limits her potential usefulness as a moral
exemplar who readers can admire and emulate. However, there is a
possibility of perceiving inconsistencies in Pamela’s character, and in
Richardson’s novel as a whole, which open up gaps of interpretation.
These gaps could potentially be filled by subversive writers who seek to
expose the so-called subtexts of Pamela by writing their own scurrilous
or bawdy exposés of the heroine’s ‘true’ character. While some ‘Pamelist’
texts within the ‘Pamela controversy’ celebrate the heroine’s virtuous
qualities, other ‘Antipamelist’ texts foreground many of the potential
problems with Pamela as a character. For instance, her almost incredible
virtue is exposed as a façade which conceals her genuine corruption of
character. Other, less facetious responses show a more serious side of
the problems some readers might find with Pamela as a character: she
subverts many existing stereotypes about class and gender by marrying
her master. By entering the ‘debate’ about Richardson’s text in the
‘controversy’, certain readers could voice their concerns with the book as
a whole, which are centred on Pamela as a character.

SAQ 2
Q. In what ways, and for what reasons, does Fielding subject
Richardson’s Pamela to satirical parody in Shamela?

Fielding’s motivations for writing Shamela stem from several different

reasons, each of which is manifested in the different ways in which his
parody of Pamela emerges in this text. Firstly, Fielding finds fault with
the arrogant way that Richardson uses his prefatory matter in Pamela.
The ‘puffing’ letters by Richardson’s friends, alongside the self-
congratulatory preface by the ‘Editor’, make striking claims about the
qualities of Pamela and the benefit it will bring to its readers.
Considering such statements of authorial status to be pretentious,
perhaps, Fielding parodies these prefatory statements in the various
paratexts that precede the narrative of Shamela. The nature of these
materials suggests the mocking regard in which Fielding holds the
prefatory matter of Pamela. For instance, one author is named ‘John
Puff’ – a clear indication of the ‘puffing’ nature of Pamela’s prefatory
letters. The two letters between Parsons Tickletext and Oliver further
parody those prefacing Pamela, and indicate the type of narrative that
Fielding proposes to give: a facetious reading of Richardson’s novel,
which exposes a perceived subtext of eroticism and hypocrisy. This is
further revealed in the text itself, where several key passages of Pamela
are transposed and reworked in a comic way to expose the eroticism,
materialism, or self-interest that Richardson’s heroine is supposed to
conceal behind a façade of virtue.

Fielding’s purposes in parodying Richardson’s novel in this way are partly

related to his criticisms of Pamela itself, but also extend beyond this.
Fielding considered the self-righteous moralising of Pamela to be too
strident, and suggests that an author can convey a ‘moral purpose’
through his or her work in an alternative, and perhaps more effective
way: chiefly, he or she can expose vice and propose its correction
through comic satire.

Unit 16: ‘The Rise of the Novel’ (2): Henry Fielding 16-15
and the ‘Pamela Controversy’
_____________________________________________________________________

SAQ 3

Q. What does the Preface to Joseph Andrews tell us about the ‘moral
purpose’ of Fielding’s fiction, and of the type of fiction best able to
convey this purpose?

The preface to Joseph Andrews, in many respects, takes the alternative

project for fiction-writing proposed in Shamela several stages further. In
the Preface, Fielding proposes several different generic forms, each of
which allow him to distinguish the kind of writing that he proposes – a
‘new species’, which is ‘comic-epic’. This, Fielding suggests in the
Preface, can have an equally beneficial role in society as a more
seriously didactic text, such as Pamela. By exposing society’s vices to
public ridicule, an author can encourage his readers to perceive its
faults, and so perhaps regulate their conduct in the future. In this
respect, it is important to present the reader with characters and
scenarios that are lifelike, or that he or she can identify with. As such,
Fielding encourages the comic writer to portray character rather than
caricature – to draw from ‘nature’ rather than distort it monstrously. As
such, it is easier for the reader to perceive the target of Fielding’s satire,
and so for his fiction to exert its beneficial effect.

16-16 Literature 3
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UNIT 17

‘THE RISE OF THE NOVEL’? LAURENCE

STERNE’S TRISTRAM SHANDY

AIMS
The aim of this unit is to introduce you to a very different kind of prose
fiction to the novels of Richardson and Fielding addressed in the two
previous units: Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman. This unit will address in what ways Sterne’s text can be
called a ‘novel’, how far it subverts what we might expect of this genre,
and its role in the development of eighteenth-century and future prose
fiction.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit, you should be able to:

Outline several different critical approaches towards Laurence

Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

Describe in what ways Tristram Shandy does or does not fit the
criteria for the ‘novel’ identified in Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel.

Explain in what ways Tristram Shandy parodies the ‘conventions’

of the emergent novel form, compared to other eighteenth-century
texts.

Describe the ‘content’ of Tristram Shandy in relation to each

‘instalment’ of the narrative.

Explain how form and content interact in Tristram Shandy.

Explain why Tristram Shandy is ‘about’ more than simply playing

with the formal features of a fictional narrative, or with the
organisation of its content.

REQUIRED READING
The required reading for this unit is:

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

(1759-67)

References in this unit are taken from Laurence Sterne. 2009. Ian
Campbell Ross (ed.), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Another reliable edition of this text is Laurence Sterne. 2003. Melvyn

New and Joan New(eds),The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics)..This novel is also
available online via Project Gutenberg, although you should be aware
that there may be textual variants with the version used here.

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INTRODUCTION
In Units 15 and 16, we addressed the ways in which prose fiction
developed in the middle of the eighteenth century, using the idea of
what is sometimes called the ‘rise of the novel’. We used Ian Watt’s
important critical study, which adopts this phrase as its title, as a means
of addressing what it was about this period in history that proved to be
particularly conducive to the emergence of a new type of prose fiction.
We also saw how Watt’s Rise of the Novel outlines several criteria for
what constitutes the emerging ‘novel’ genre, in particular the idea of
‘formal realism’, the increasing focus on domestic detail and individual
character, and a clear, central ‘plot’. However, we also outlined some
potential objections to Watt’s approach.

In this unit, we shall take these objections several stages further as we

address a book that appeared almost two decades after Richardson and
Fielding’s texts: Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67). We shall ask how and in what ways
Sterne’s book fulfils the criteria of the novel form outlined in Watt’s
study. However, we shall also examine how, and in what ways, Sterne
subverts the ‘conventions’ that seemed to have been established in the
earlier prose fictions of writers such as Fielding and Richardson. Yet part
of this investigation will necessarily involve challenging the very idea of
such ‘conventions’: we shall be asking how far we are justified in
claiming that there are established ways of how to write prose fiction,
when the ‘novel’ form was as yet undefined, and still in the process of
taking shape.

In this unit, we shall be looking at the ways in which Sterne’s Tristram

Shandy takes prose fiction in new and surprising directions. We shall
address this text, which on a first reading might appear challenging –
and even incomprehensible – from several different angles. We will
examine what is particularly unusual or interesting about its formal
features: its visual appearance, its structure, and the organisation of its
content. We shall see how the form of Tristram Shandy is, in fact,
central to the ‘content’ that Sterne includes in his book. We shall
examine what exactly this content is in terms of story and plot, but also
in terms of the ideas, images and textual references that Sterne weaves
into his book.

Finally, we shall address how and in what ways Tristram Shandy

contributes to the development of prose fiction: we shall see how the
contemporary circumstances of its appearance – including its publication
history and reception – are vital to the evolution of Sterne’s text itself.
We shall also see how Tristram Shandy exerts a lasting impact on the
ways in which subsequent readers approach prose fiction, and how
subsequent generations of authors go about writing it.

Activity
Skim through your copy of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

We shall read Sterne’s book in closer detail throughout the course of

this unit. For now, you should work your way rapidly through the pages
of Tristram Shandy to familiarise yourself with its layout, overall
structure and visual appearance on the page.

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TRISTRAM SHANDY AND THE ‘RISE OF THE NOVEL’: SOME

CRITICAL APPROACHES
Before we begin to examine Sterne’s text in detail, it is helpful to gain
an idea of the very different critical responses that Tristram Shandy has
provoked since its first appearance. You can use this apparatus of
critical approaches to align your own opinions about Tristram Shandy in
relation to existing trends in criticism, assess the advantages and
shortcomings of each position, and so establish your own stance in
relation to this text.

In previous units, we addressed the idea that the novel form somehow
‘rose’ out of other, earlier types of narrative fiction, such as the
romance, travel writing, or the conduct book. We based our enquiries
upon Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel, and used the fictions of Samuel
Richardson and Henry Fielding to explore the ideas Watt proposes about
the new ‘novel’ genre which emerged in the middle decades of the
eighteenth century.

To some extent, readers of this period were coming to expect certain

things of the prose narratives that we now classify under the title
‘novel’: that they should have a certain appearance; that they should
tell a story organised in a clear and discernible way; and, perhaps, that
they might teach the reader something at the same time as entertaining
him or her.

In early 1760, however, readers were shocked, provoked, baffled or

delighted to come across what seemed to be a new type of prose
fiction: Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman. The first two volumes of Sterne’s book were printed at York
in 1759, and appeared in London in January 1760.

For many contemporary and subsequent readers, Sterne’s ‘novel’

seemed to challenge, and completely overturn, all the established rules
of how a prose fiction should be written: not only the kind of story it
tells, but the way in which that story is arranged, and the visual
appearance of the text itself seem utterly to contradict everything that
authors such as Richardson and Fielding had established in their earlier
novels.

However, as we have seen in the previous two units, the narrative of

the ‘rise of the novel’ is a convenient rather than completely historically
accurate one: for one thing, as we saw in Unit 15, the word ‘novel’ is an
anomaly in this period, and not generally the term used by eighteenth-
century readers to describe the kinds of texts that we now class as
‘novels’. So, we might ask ourselves, how far is Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy ‘subversive’ or ‘innovative’? How far does it unsettle existing
conventions, or establish new ones? How does it compare with other
contemporary publications?

We can address these, and related questions, by approaching Sterne’s

book from several different angles, and by roughly dividing our enquiry
into questions of ‘form’ and questions of ‘content’.

IAN WATT’S RISE OF THE NOVEL ON STERNE

To begin, however, we could convincingly argue that Tristram Shandy is
very unlike other prose fictions of the period that we have encountered
so far. This book seems to contravene all the ‘rules’ of novel-writing – or
at least our expectations of what a novel should contain and in what
order. Tristram Shandy seems to turn on its head that a novel should be
structured in a particular way, or that the subject matter it contains
should be of a certain kind.

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Indeed, are we justified in calling Tristram Shandy a novel at all?

While Ian Watt does not devote much space to Sterne in The Rise of the
Novel – he is not one of the ‘big three’ authors he focuses on (Defoe,
Richardson and Fielding) – Watt does in fact give Sterne some space in
his book, although he rather condescendingly relegates this discussion
to the tenth chapter of The Rise of the Novel, which is unpromisingly
subtitled ‘a Note’. What does this ‘note’ about Sterne tell us about his
place in the ‘rise of the novel’ story traced through Watt’s book?
Watt describes the ‘major formal problems’ that Sterne’s predecessors
had been unable to ‘solve’, namely the contrasting approaches to
character that Richardson and Fielding adopt: on the one hand
‘internal’, on the other, ‘external’. Watt claims that:

[…] Sterne found a way of reconciling Richardson’s realism of

presentation with Fielding’s realism of assessment’. (1972: 331)

Compared with these earlier novelists, Watt claims, Sterne’s:

[…] remarkable literary originality gives his work a wholly

personal, not to say eccentric, quality. (1972: 330)

Because Sterne was able to reconcile the two approaches to character

adopted by Richardson and by Fielding, Tristram Shandy is an important
intervention in the ‘history’ of the novel Watt describes in his book.
Sterne’s achievement, Watt claims, is due to the fact that:

Sterne’s narrative mode gives very careful attention to all the

aspects of formal realism: to the particularization of time, place,
and person. (1972: 331)

Sterne succeeds in evoking a very lifelike impression of the people he

describes and the situations in which he places them: he gives them a
‘natural and lifelike sequence of action’ (Watt 1972: 331). Many scenes
in Tristram Shandy, Watt claims, attain a ‘living authenticity’, and he
even describes Sterne as having a ‘mastery of realistic presentation’
(1972: 331).

So what prevents Sterne from taking centre-stage in The Rise of the

Novel, and Watt from giving Tristram Shandy more full-blown attention
than that which we find in the ‘note’ at the back of his book? Watt
claims that Sterne is not ‘the supreme figure among eighteenth-century
novelists’ that he might have been because:

[…] of course, Tristram Shandy is not so much a novel as a

parody of a novel, and, with a precocious technical maturity,
Sterne turns his irony against many of the narrative methods
which the new genre had so lately developed. (Watt 1972: 331)

We shall address how far these claims are justified in relation to

Sterne’s book more fully in subsequent sections of this unit: we will ask
whether Tristram Shandy can be described as a ‘parody of a novel’, or
indeed whether the word ‘novel’ is the most appropriate term to use in
relation to Tristram Shandy at all. We will challenge the principles of
Watt’s critique of Sterne by thinking about Tristram Shandy broadly in
terms of form and of content. For now, though, we will tacitly accept
Watt’s assessment of Tristram Shandy, that its generic identity is partly
defined by what it is not – that is, a novel as such – partly because this
view has had considerable impact on critical accounts of Tristram
Shandy, both before and since Watt.

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IS TRISTRAM SHANDY AN ‘ANTI-NOVEL’?

In fact, while Christopher Ricks calls Tristram Shandy ‘the greatest
shaggy-dog story in the language’ (Sterne 2003: xi), other critics have
been tempted to describe Sterne’s book as an ‘anti-novel’, one which
purposely subverts the seeming ‘conventions’ that other contemporary
writers – such as Richardson or Fielding – adopt in their prose fictions,
as well as those used by subsequent writers.

Nineteenth-century Victorian novelists in particular (such as the

Brontës, Dickens, or Thackeray) seem a world away from Tristram
Shandy, both in their subject matter and in the way they present their
material: they seem to achieve the ‘realism’ that Watt praises so highly
in Richardson’s fiction much more clearly than Sterne. In one sense,
some critics claim, Sterne is actually ‘proto-modern’, anticipating the
narrative techniques and treatment of subject in a way that only later
writers, such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce or Marcel Proust, were to
do more fully.

Several critical lines of thinking try to address what it is about Sterne’s

book that makes it seem so different to other kinds of novel. Some
critics adopt a ‘formal’ line of enquiry, tackling the disruptive or unusual
ways in which Tristram Shandy is structured in comparison to, say,
Pamela. Other critics, however, resist this ahistorical approach, and
argue that we cannot fully understand what is so unusual – or what is
perhaps not quite so strange – about Tristram Shandy without
addressing the contemporary, historical circumstances of its production.
Each area of criticism perhaps sheds different kinds of light upon how
we can read Tristram Shandy, and how we can place it in our account of
the development of prose fiction in the eighteenth century.

RUSSIAN FORMALISM
The idea that Sterne is ‘proto-modern’ has nonetheless led one school of
literary theory – that of the Russian Formalists – to claim Sterne and his
book as their champion, because (they claim) Tristram Shandy supports
the idea that what is really valuable in a novel is not what it is about as
such, but how it is written. Viktor Shklovsky, one of the leading figures
of the Russian Formalist School, in fact claims that:

‘Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel in world literature’.

This is a striking, and perhaps confusing claim: surely the idea that
Tristram Shandy is an ‘anti-novel’ suggests that Sterne’s book is in fact
untypical? We have, for instance, just contrasted it with other kinds of
books that we consider to be novels, such as by Richardson, say, or
Dickens. In fact, Shklovsky’s claim has been rather misinterpreted by
critics ever since he first made it: his point is not that Tristram Shandy
is like other books, or that it represents the most perfect example of
how a book should be written. Rather, he makes two quite opposite
claims about Tristram Shandy in the essay in which he makes this
statement: he says that Sterne’s book is both revolutionary and that it
is ‘typical’.

Part of the confusion over this statement comes from the translation of
the word ‘typical’. Margaret Rose suggests that the word ‘essential’
might have made more sense, because what Shklovsky admired in
Tristram Shandy was the way in which it seems to condense the
‘essence’ of what a novel should be, in terms of its structure, and its
approach towards plot (1993: 108).

Shklovsky’s comments on Tristram Shandy, and the potential confusion

that they might give rise to for subsequent critics, in fact underline

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-5
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some of the difficulties that lie behind claiming that Tristram Shandy is
‘proto-modern’.

Is a different kind of approach needed?

STERNE AND THE ‘TRADITION OF LEARNED WIT’

Another group of critics adopt an entirely different approach to that of
the Russian Formalist School, and to those critics who try to claim that
Sterne’s book is a prototype of experimental fiction such as emerged in
the early-twentieth century with Woolf and Joyce (Keymer 2002: 4).

These critics, by contrast, claim that Tristram Shandy is actually stuck in

the past: they argue that it draws on earlier types and styles of
literature, such as Menippean satire and the ‘tradition of learned wit’
(Keymer 2002: 4-5). They also claim that Sterne in fact ‘borrows’ from
the work of earlier writers, such as Swift, Cervantes, Rabelais,
Montaigne or Robert Burton.

These critics suggest that Jonathan Swift’s satirical parodies, of the

early eighteenth century, offer a forerunner of the type of satire that
Sterne produces in Tristram Shandy. We saw in Unit 14 how Swift uses
irony for satirical purposes in his Irish pamphlets. Similarly, some critics
argue, Sterne inherits this technique of parodical satire from Swift, and
applies it to the new set of targets he addresses in Tristram Shandy,
such as ‘modern’ medicine or the system-making ‘philosophy’ of
characters such as Walter Shandy. These critics argue that Sterne is
particularly influenced by Swift’s Tale of a Tub, which is a complex satire
on corrupt ‘modern’ learning (as opposed to truly venerable ‘ancient’
learning). Swift conveys this satire through parodying, or mimicking,
the position of the ‘modern’ writer, the better to undermine the
moderns’ claim to literary value.

There is a considerable amount of truth to this approach: Sterne’s text

is undeniably embedded in an immense wealth of knowledge and
reading. Indisputably, Sterne does incorporate a wide array of textual,
or ‘learned’ sources that align him with other authors who write within
the ‘tradition of learned wit’, or within that of ‘Menippean satire’ – a
type of prose satire which targets ideas, rather than particular
individuals. Furthermore, he does seem to deride those who pretend to
have great learning or knowledge (perhaps the narrator himself is the
clearest example of this), and mocks pedantry, and those who (like the
moderns Swift derides) create their own systems of meaning out of
obscure sources or ideas (embodied in Walter Shandy).

However, despite the considerable similarities between Swift and

Sterne, there are also marked differences between the two authors.
Although some critics now discredit the stereotype that Swift is bitter
and acerbic, whilst Sterne is congenial or warm towards the faults and
foibles of human nature, there is an extent to which Sterne’s satire
adopts a different tone and target to Swift’s. He writes in a different
historical moment, where the concerns about the ‘moderns’ and the
perceived decline in literary standards, shared by Swift and
contemporaries such as Pope, are less applicable. Instead, it is not
misguided to suggest that Sterne is more forgiving of the follies and
vices of the characters who make up the Shandy world.

TRISTRAM SHANDY IS A BOOK IN AND OF ITS TIME

The contrast drawn here between Swift and Sterne alerts us to another
type of critical approach to Tristram Shandy, one which argues that
while it draws on preceding literary traditions, and perhaps anticipates
future ones, it is nonetheless very much a book in and of its time
(Keymer 2002: 5-6).

17-6 Literature 3
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Critics such as Thomas Keymer claim that it is essential to read Tristram

Shandy within the historical context of its production. Keymer argues
that Sterne draws on a range of near-contemporary literary models
(such as novels of the two preceding decades), but also incorporates
much older ones into Tristram Shandy (such as from Cervantes or
Rabelais). And yet, Keymer claims, Sterne responds to the immediate
moment of his book’s production: he is alert to the needs and demands
of the contemporary publishing market, and so responds to it by
shaping Tristram Shandy – both its content (or ‘story’ and ‘subject-
matter’) and its form (its visual appearance) to appeal to that market of
contemporary buyers and readers.

Among this array of critical opinions about Sterne, which line should we
adopt in reading Tristram Shandy? Do we consider it to be proto-
modern, or antiquated, or in and of its time? Or do we take yet another
approach, and say that Tristram Shandy is in fact sui generis – a unique
law unto itself, quite unlike any other kind of book?

In fact, there is some truth in each of these positions: Tristram Shandy

is quite distinctive, and it is certainly deliberately provocative in its
attempts to show how unlike other books it is. On the other hand,
Sterne does draw extensively on other kinds of books (‘Cervantick
humour’, or the grotesque language that Rabelais uses), which suggests
that Tristram Shandy is embedded in earlier literary forms and works.
And, once again, it does offer a model that subsequent writers such as
Joyce and Woolf imitate, in its focus on what passes in a single man’s
mind.

Where, then, should we position ourselves? It is, perhaps, wise to follow

Thomas Keymer’s conclusion, that when approaching Tristram Shandy
we cannot definitively say it is either one thing or the other: it is neither
stuck in the past nor proto-modern, nor completely in a class of its own.
Rather, we should embed our analysis of Sterne’s text in an approach
that is both sensitive to the historical contexts in which Tristram Shandy
was produced, and be aware of how it is both like and unlike other
books published around this time.

SAQ 1
What are the potential advantages and drawbacks of the different
critical approaches that we might adopt towards reading Tristram
Shandy?

TRISTRAM SHANDY: FORM

How might we go about approaching Tristram Shandy, though, in terms
of reading and understanding this book, and placing it within our history
of the development of prose fiction in this period? How do we make
sense of it, for a start? How does it compare to other kinds of books
that were published around this time? And where does it fit within the
story of the so-called ‘rise of the novel’?

We can, perhaps, find a helpful way of approaching Tristram Shandy by

reconsidering some of the ideas adopted by the Russian Formalist group
of critics. As the name of this ‘School’ suggests, these theorists are
principally interested in the formal qualities of a literary work. They
privilege form over content: Sterne’s book, they argue, is exemplary
because it is primarily concerned with the manner of writing rather than
the story it tells. Tristram Shandy is really ‘about’ its own structure
rather than any ‘story’ as such: it is fascinated with the ways in which a
book is written rather than its actual substance.

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As we shall see, this is an idea that should be handled with some

caution, but for now let us give some thought as to what makes such a
claim justifiable: what is particularly striking about Tristram Shandy’s
structure, and how does Sterne use the form of his book to follow, or to
challenge, the seeming conventions of how a book should be written at
this time? And, as such, how can we situate Tristram Shandy in relation
to the other prose fictions from this period that we have already
encountered?

Even upon first opening Tristram Shandy you will have noticed that it is
not going to provide the same kind of reading experience as, say,
Pamela, or novels by Fielding such as Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones.
For one thing, Sterne’s book differs considerably from these novels in
terms of how he organises his fictional content.

We will take each of these apparently innovative ways of presenting the

‘story’ of Tristram Shandy to the reader in turn.

PARATEXTS
Sterne’s innovations with the formal qualities of his book in fact begin
before the narrative proper gets under way. In Unit 15, we saw how a
book’s paratexts can provide the reader with an important ‘threshold’ to
cross before reaching the story itself: devices such as the title-page,
preface, dedication or prefatory letters each supply us with an idea of
the nature of the book we are confronted with, what to expect, and
perhaps what the author intends us to gain from reading it. As we saw
when discussing Pamela, Gérard Genette claims that a paratext is:

[…] what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as

such to its readers and, more generally, to the public. More than a
boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold,
or […] a ‘vestibule’ that offers the world at large the possibility of
either stepping inside or turning back. (1997: 1-2)

This idea, we found, was useful enough when thinking about the form
and content of texts such as Pamela, where paratextual material
provides a means of grasping how Richardson intends us to approach
his novel. But how far is this idea appropriate when we turn to look at
Tristram Shandy? What might we make of Sterne’s paratexts?

A reader might, for instance, expect to use the title-page as a gauge of

what kind of book Tristram Shandy is. However, there is no title-page as
such in Sterne’s book; instead, we find on opening it that there are
several title-pages. This is partly because of the publication history of
Tristram Shandy, which is quite different to that of the other books we
have looked at so far. Its volumes did not appear all at once, but were
published in a series of instalments: the first two volumes were printed
in York in 1759, and sold in London in 1760; after that, two volumes
appeared at a time at irregular intervals, with the final, isolated volume
9 appearing in 1767.

However, we should observe that publication in instalments was not

actually unprecedented at this time: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, for
instance, was published in three separate stages; looking forwards,
nineteenth-century novelists such as George Eliot, Dickens and Trollope
were among many authors whose novels first appeared in serial format.
However, the publication of Tristram Shandy in instalments was not a
regulated affair, but was episodic; this has important implications for
questions such as whether Sterne had an overall plan in writing his
book, or whether it is actually ‘completed’. Indeed, this historical
background provides an important context for understanding how
Tristram Shandy was written and received by its readers, and is a topic

17-8 Literature 3
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that we shall return to later in this unit.

What of the other paratextual elements of a book’s composition? How

do they appear in Tristram Shandy, and how do they either fulfil or
defeat a reader’s expectation of their supposed function in a novel?

We might expect to find an author’s preface exactly where that word

tells us it should be – that is, as a pre-face, a prelude, to the narrative
itself. Certainly in Genette’s terms to be a preface it has to be the
‘vestibule’ that we step through, between ‘our’ outside world and the
world inside the novel: the preface, like other paratexts, is by definition
outside of the text, it is:

[…] an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside, a

zone without any hard and fast boundary on either the inward
side (turned toward the text) or the outward side (turned toward
the world’s discourse about the text) […]. (Genette 1997: 1-2)

As such, it can perform its function of facing the text – being ‘turned
toward’ it – or facing away from the text, towards the ‘outward side’,
and the ‘world’s discourse about the text’.

In Tristram Shandy, we find that this paratext is actually incorporated

within the text itself: ‘The Author’s Preface’ does not actually appear
until Volume III – the second instalment of Sterne’s narrative, which
along with Volume IV appeared in 1761. Even then it does not pre-face
the text, but appears half way through the volume, between chapters
20 and 21. The narrator revels in his awareness of the effect that
positioning the preface in this unusual place might have on his readers;
he opens it with a negative declaration,

NO, I’ll not say a word about it, − here it is; −−− in publishing it,
−− I have appealed to the world, −−− and to the world I leave it;
−− it must speak for itself. (Sterne 2009: 153)

This is very different indeed to the measured, sober tones of

Richardson’s preface: this author does not even want to ‘say a word’ in
his preface at all, apparently. Instead, he seems to take a rather laissé
faire attitude to the provoking fact that his preface did not appear until
this rather late stage in his narrative’s ‘progress’.

In fact, Sterne takes this game with the ‘faces’ of a book even further:
the marble pages, which you may have been surprised to come across
part-way through Volume III, actually imitate the marbled paper that
would normally have covered the end-boards of a printed book at this
time. Sterne, as it were, turns his ‘novel’ inside out by placing what we
would expect to find ‘facing’ the inside of the book and outside world –
to use Genette’s terms – within the narrative itself.

Similarly, there is no ‘dedication’ as such in terms of a text’s usual

prefatory matter; in fact, there are several: one to William Pitt the
elder, at the beginning of Volume I, another to Viscount Spencer, at the
beginning of Volume V (which was published in 1762), and another,
again to Pitt, at the beginning of Volume IX, published in 1767.

CHAPTERS
Sterne’s manipulation of the ‘conventional’ way in which a book’s
‘ingredients’ should be organised goes beyond the paratexts of Tristram
Shandy. He transforms what we might consider to be another ‘standard’
feature of the novel, which we expect to find in this type of text: the
chapter division. In other novels – both in contemporary texts, and in
subsequent examples such as Victorian or twentieth-century novels –

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-9
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we might be used to seeing that an author organises the ‘plot’ or story

they tell into clearly-defined sections, or chapters.

In terms of mid eighteenth-century texts, the chapter division was

gradually coming to be recognised as an important way of shaping the
reading experience: it provided a means of dividing the story up into
clear segments, each of which represents a different stage of the story,
and each of which links to the next in a distinctive sequence. In some
texts, the chapter can create the ‘cliffhanger effect’ of leaving a
situation unexplained or unfinished, which lures the reader to expect its
resolution in the subsequent chapter.

Of course, the publication of Tristram Shandy in instalments gives a

quite different take on the idea that the chapter division can provide a
cliff-hanger: the wait for Sterne’s first readers to know what happens
next is longer than the time it takes just to turn the page to read the
next chapter, as they had to wait a couple of years until the next set of
volumes was published.

Among near-contemporary authors Henry Fielding, for one, is keenly

aware of the artistic potential of the chapter division, and uses this
device to great effect in his novels. As we found in Shamela, and as
Joseph Andrews further demonstrates, dividing the story up in this way
gives the novel cohesion, but also makes it more engaging, enticing the
reader on to learn more about the story and its characters in
subsequent instalments.

In what some people like to call his ‘comic masterpiece’, Tom Jones,
which was published in 1749, Fielding directly addresses the issue of
chapter divisions, what they contribute towards the author’s ability to
construct his work, and the reader’s experience of it. He uses this device
of breaking his narrative down into a number of books, eighteen in
total. These books are then broken down into a sequence of chapters,
each of which clearly outlines the period of time dealt with: for instance,
there are chapter headings such as ‘about three weeks’, or ‘three days’.
The chapter headings in Tom Jones are descriptive titles, suggesting
what kind of subject matter each contains, each of which is typically
amusing, such as:

Containing five pages of paper (Fielding 2005: 137)

and:

A most dreadful Chapter indeed; and which few Readers ought to

venture upon in an Evening, especially when alone. (Fielding
2005: 342)

In the first chapter of each new book, Fielding directly addresses his
readers with a compacted essay, in which he deals, with comic gravity,
with such topics as the role of the literary critic, love or the stage. In
these introductory chapters, he also presents his theory of what a novel
should be: significantly, he does this by clarifying that Tom Jones is in
fact a ‘history’, and so unlike the fantastical romances with which people
might associate the term ‘novel’, which as we saw is a preoccupation
with genre that emerges in the preface to Joseph Andrews.

The idea that the chapter division provides an important formal element
of the kind of prose fiction that Fielding writes also emerges in these
introductory chapters. Fielding says of his ‘introductory chapters’ that:

I have considered them as a kind of mark or stamp, which may

hereafter enable a very indifferent reader to distinguish, what is
true and genuine in this historic kind of writing, from what is false
and counterfeit. (Fielding 2005: 428)

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For Fielding, chapters are both a formal way of organising the book, but
also a means to present some of its themes and ideas, in the
introductory chapter ‘essays’. At the very beginning of Tom Jones,
Fielding famously presents:

The Introduction to the Work, or Bill of Fare to the Feast. (Fielding

2005: 7)

He describes each stage of the story as the course of a meal, which

might or might not be to the taste of the reader. So as to avoid
disappointing or surprising readers with what they might not want to
read, Fielding claims, he provides a ‘bill of fare’ – meaning the contents
list – in which he tells us what each chapter contains; the reader can
pick and choose what to read, what to ignore, just as he or she would
do with a meal.

The division of Tom Jones’ narrative into chapters makes such a pick-
and-mix approach to reading the book possible. Of course, Fielding does
not really expect his readers to select which chapters they might read,
which skip over; in fact, he rather hopes that they will read the whole
book straight through. Instead, his comical reflections upon the very
nature of a novel’s construction provide a commentary upon how we
might go about reading such a book, and (more importantly) about the
approach that some contemporary readers might adopt in reading
fictional narratives.

Fielding’s comments upon chapters as an organising principle of a novel,

and how this relates to the kind of reading practices that Fielding
criticises in the very act of seeming to approve of them, are highly
pertinent to how Sterne approaches the formal qualities of his book, and
their effect upon the reading experience. Fielding’s suggestion that we
should, in fact, read a book in its entirety so as to benefit fully from its
combined ability to instruct and to entertain places a demand upon the
reader to engage with the text that confronts him or her as an exercise
in self-discipline: we should try to take in and think about all aspects of
a book, even those that seem on the surface to be less interesting or
more challenging. As such, we can only glean the really instructive,
useful point of reading a fictional narrative through reading it in its
entirety.

This is an idea that Sterne incorporates into Tristram Shandy, and which
is conveyed in particularly innovative ways through the formal
organisation of his book: as we shall see in a subsequent section of this
unit, this has a serious point as regards how Sterne intends us to read
his book. However, on your initial perusal of Tristram Shandy you will
have noticed that, as far as chapter divisions are concerned, Sterne
adopts a very different approach to that of writers such as Fielding, or
later novelists: this organising principle is turned on its head in Tristram
Shandy.

Whereas in texts such as Tom Jones the chapter has a formal role that
the author exploits both for aesthetic effect, and to sustain the progress
of his or her story, you will have noticed that in Tristram Shandy
chapter divisions do not follow an orderly pattern at all: they are unruly
and, it might appear to some, disorganised.

There are immense variations of length between chapters: some last for
several pages, others are only a sentence long; some chapters seem to
follow on from previous ones, whilst others seem entirely disconnected
from the main ‘narrative’, whatever that might be, and instead serve as
stand-alone meditations on a wide variety of subjects. Gothic script is
used to head one chapter (Sterne 2009: 525); others are misnumbered,
and break the sequential and orderly flow; the narrator tells us that he

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-11
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has decided to cut out two whole chapters; and there are those that are
left entirely blank (Sterne 2009: 512).

We might well ask whether Sterne has completely lost control of his
narrative – or, perhaps, whether he is not as skilled as authors such as
Fielding, who are able to maintain an orderly structure in their novels.
Certainly, simply by browsing through your copy of Tristram Shandy,
you will have noticed that the text is composed of a seemingly anarchic
riot of words and symbols, of which the unusual approach to chapters is
just one element.

VISUAL DEVICES
In Tristram Shandy, the use of chapters and their presentation– such as
the chapter which uses Gothic script as its heading – in fact indicates
one striking and unusual feature of how Sterne’s book is structured, and
how it mixes up the seemingly conventional ingredients that should
make up a novel: its repeated use of visual devices and images.

Sterne inserts black pages and (as we have seen) marble pages (2009:
181-2), as well as a blank page, which seems to erase words
completely as the narrator invites his reader to ‘draw’ his own picture of
the Widow Wadman, from the image he has imprinted on his mind’s
eye. There are diagrams depicting wavy and irregular lines (Sterne
2009: 379), and a squiggly line that disrupts the text proper (Sterne
2009: 490).

Sterne’s use of visual devices also operates on the level of his text’s
distinctive typography. There are whole sections in italicised script –
often incorporating foreign languages such as Latin and French, and on
occasion lengthy footnotes in a smaller font-size. There are lists and
tables. Sterne’s punctuation is also striking: one eighteenth-century
critic called him ‘the dashite Sterne’ because he seemed to use this
punctuation symbol so frequently. In fact, Sterne does not use just one
type of dash: as the critic Anne Bandry has shown, there are four
different types of dash in Tristram Shandy, each of varying length.

There are other kinds of symbols, too: again, a very familiar sign is the
asterisk, which is liberally peppered throughout Sterne’s book. There
are also crosses, pointing fingers, exclamations a-plenty, crossed-out
words and – conversely – blank spaces where Sterne does not provide
any words or symbols at all.

You might consider all these ‘anarchic’ aspects of Tristram Shandy to be

only so much authorial fireworks: is Sterne poking fun at his reader by
using all these strange and surprising visual features? Or do his games
with the formal ‘ingredients’ that usually go to make up a novel reflect
in a mocking way upon the practice of other, famous writers of the time,
such as Richardson or Fielding? Do these apparently innovative
elements of Tristram Shandy, and the conventions they seem to
overturn, actually mean anything, or are they just superficial
diversions?

When we ask ourselves what we might make of all this, we might

perhaps ask what eighteenth-century readers might have made of
Tristram Shandy. After all, the reaction of Tristram Shandy’s earliest
readers might tell us how far Sterne was parodying, copying, or
subverting the sorts of ‘conventions’ of a novel that they had come to
expect through reading Richardson or Fielding. Sterne’s contemporary
readers took different approaches to whether to admire or be derisive
about Tristram Shandy’s more quirky features, and as such show us
how unusual or how similar they found it to be compared to other,
contemporaneous texts. Its early readers variously found it to be
frustrating, entertaining, innovative or derivative.

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However, as we have seen, this reaction partly depends upon the way in
which his first readers would have first received Sterne’s book, and how
as a result they might have compared it to other contemporary
publications. Tristram Shandy’s early readers did not get the whole
story all at once, but were immediately challenged to consider Sterne’s
text as an ongoing enterprise; perhaps by necessity, they were
compelled to conceive of Tristram Shandy as a book whose form was
fairly fluid and ill-defined. As such, questions of form – which we have
been addressing in this section of the unit – are inherently connected to
those relating to content.

SAQ 2
In what ways does Sterne disrupt the formal features of the
‘conventional’ fictional narrative, and how far should we be cautious
about claiming that any such ‘conventions’ exist at all at this time?

TRISTRAM SHANDY: CONTENT

Part of the bafflement that Tristram Shandy’s first readers often
recorded upon first reading this text is a result of the seemingly
disrupted narrative with which Sterne presents his readers. If we return
to the terminology adopted by the Russian Formalists, how does
Tristram Shandy’s ‘content’ relate to its ‘form’ – a form or structure
that, as we have seen, is seemingly irregular and perhaps even
incoherent? Does the ‘content’ of Tristram Shandy – its subject-matter
or the story it tells – match its form in this way?

Sterne’s title, after all, promises us that here we will have the ‘Life and
Opinions’ of its hero, and as such we are perhaps justified in thinking
that we will have a relatively straightforward narrative of the hero’s
passage from birth, to childhood, to adulthood, and that his ‘opinions’
will develop and mature as his story evolves. However, even a cursory
glance at Tristram Shandy reveals that this is anything but a linear,
chronological ‘autobiography’.

In fact, the title itself gives us a clue about the very different kind of ‘life
story’ that Sterne offers his readers: rather than using the ‘Life and
Adventures’ formula familiar from texts such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe (1719), here, we are told, we are to expect ‘life’ and ‘opinions’.
It is as if the history of this particular individual will be told through
explaining his thoughts and reflections on the world around him, rather
than detailing any facts about his life as such, or the events that happen
to him.

After all, according to Ian Watt, what constitutes a ‘novel’ is ‘[…] the
interpenetration of plot, character, and emergent moral theme’ (1972:
16). For Watt, Richardson ‘resolves’ the problem of ‘plot’ posed in
novels such as Robinson Crusoe by focussing on a single, unified plot,
that of a ‘courtship’ (1972: 152). How might this idea relate to Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy?

With this background in mind, you are now prepared to read Tristram
Shandy yourself. In this unit, we shall read Sterne’s text as his first
readers would have received it: in instalments of two volumes at a time,
with ‘Volume IX’ standing as an isolated volume. This will help you to
gauge how Sterne’s initial readers might have reacted to Tristram
Shandy through the evolving process of its composition and publication.
It will help you to see the different qualities, themes and features of
each separate instalment, and so perhaps to judge how Tristram

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-13
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Shandy compares with other ‘novels’ of this period that you have
already encountered.

As we read through each ‘instalment’, you should note down what the
‘story’ seems to be, what is interesting about the formal innovations or
narrative techniques Sterne uses, and what it might tell you about
Tristram Shandy’s role in the ‘rise of the novel’ narrative that emerges
from Ian Watt’s book and from subsequent critical accounts.

Activity
Read Tristram Shandy, volumes I and II, pp. 1-122.

What ‘happens’ in these two volumes? Make a list of the main elements
of the ‘story’: note down what takes place and where, and which
characters are involved.

Note down what is most unusual about these opening volumes of

Sterne’s book: how do they compare with other novels of this period
you might have read, such as Pamela, in how Tristram goes about
telling his life story?

Which narrative devices are used to convey this ‘story’? For instance,
how are the chapters organised? What ‘visual devices’ strike you as
particularly unusual? Do we get a straightforward, linear chronology or
sequence of events?

In volumes I and II, Sterne opens his book with perhaps one of the
most striking aspects of all: whereas we might have expected to be told
about the hero’s birth, before proceeding to a description of his
childhood, Tristram describes his existence even before he is born into
the world: he begins chapter one with an account of his conception. He
states that ‘I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of
them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what
they were about when they begot me’ (Sterne 2009: 5).

Immediately, it seems, Sterne seems to challenge the ‘conventional’

way one might go about telling his narrator’s life story – one made all
the more striking because this is a first-person narrative, told by the
eponymous character himself. How, we might ask, can he know any of
the details of his conception? In fact, as he tells us a few pages later,
‘To my uncle Mr. Toby Shandy do I stand indebted for the preceding
anecdote’ (Sterne 2009: 7). We have here a clue as to how Tristram
proposes to go about writing his ‘life story’: it is one that will necessarily
rely on the ‘anecdotes’, stories, and even ‘opinions’ of other people,
alongside his own.

Who are these ‘other people’ in volumes I and II?

As you will have noted in your reading of these two volumes, we have
several important clues as to who exactly this character, Tristram
Shandy, is, what his ‘story’ might be, and who the other characters that
play a role in the narrative are. For instance, we meet uncle Toby,
corporal Trim, Walter Shandy (Tristram’s father), his mother, Parson
Yorick, and Dr Slop. These are, more or less, the key characters that we
meet in Tristram Shandy.

Which ‘events’ take place?

Besides the conception of the hero, we find the story of Parson Yorick –
which even anticipates his death. We learn that Toby suffers from a

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wound in the groin, gained at the Battle of Namur, and that (with his
faithful servant, Trim), he is particularly fond of anything to do with
military fortifications. We are told that uncle Toby’s life was ‘put in
jeopardy by words’ (Sterne 2009: 71), a comically tragic claim based on
the fact that Toby could not find the right words to talk to other people
about his groin wound. This again refers to Locke’s ideas about the use
of words, and how our communication with other people is limited by
the different conceptions that each person has about what a word might
mean.

In Volume I, we also find Walter Shandy and Toby seated in the parlour,
awaiting Tristram’s birth, where Walter discourses at length about his
own pet subjects – namely, obscure classical reading, and ideas about
childbirth.

In Volume II, we have the arrival of the ‘uncourtly’ figure of Dr Slop

(the man-midwife), following an unfortunate accident in the ‘dirty lane’,
when the footman Obadiah collides with him on his horse. While the
men await Tristram’s birth, Mrs Shandy being tended by the female
mid-wife, Trim reads a sermon aloud that, we learn, was written by
Parson Yorick. Volume II ends with a tantalising promise which, like the
‘cliffhanger’ chapter, leaves us expecting the next instalment:

The reader will be content to wait for a full explanation of these

matters till the next year, − when a series of things will be laid open
which he little expects. (Sterne 2009: 122)

What did you find to be particularly unusual about volumes I and II,
besides the unexpected opening of the ‘story’?

You will no doubt have been particularly struck by the visual appearance
of these volumes: the black pages, marking Yorick’s death (with the
reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet) are most prominent, perhaps, and
lead us to question how, and why, Sterne uses such strange visual
features in his text. There are, of course, other unusual visual features,
such as the distinctive typography of the text, and its use of symbols
and images (such as the pointing finger of page 91).

Other unusual aspects you may have noticed are Tristram’s tendency to
digress from what seems to be the main story-line; his inclusion of
outré ideas or seemingly obscure references; and the deferral of
‘events’ we expect to find reaching a conclusion – most notably, his
birth, which still has not taken place by the end of the second volume.
All of these features of how Tristram goes about telling his story are, in
fact, characteristic of Tristram Shandy as a whole: you will become
more familiar with both Sterne’s written style, the delivery of the book’s
‘story’ (and perhaps its refusal to deliver the story at all), and its visual
appearance as you work through subsequent volumes.

For now, we might ask, do volumes I and II have any substance or

lasting effect, beyond the initial impression of being quirky or unusual?

One clue that Sterne’s book has more weighty seriousness, than might
perhaps at first appear from an initial reading, lies in the opening pages,
with their comical description of the ‘homunculus’. Here, Sterne refers
to ongoing disputes in scientific thought about human reproduction. The
Dutch scientist Leeuwenhoek had made improvements to the design of
the microscope, which enabled observers to view human sperm from
much closer quarters. The word ‘homunculus’ means ‘little human’, and
refers to the idea that spermatozoa are like miniaturised human beings,
an idea which was upheld by the ‘animalculists’. As such, the female egg
was only a nest or temporary home for the human embryo. The
‘ovulists’, by contrast, held that the female egg played a more important
role in procreation (Sterne 2009: 541).

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-15
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What does this tell us about the kinds of information that Sterne
provides in his narrative, and of how he relates it to the ‘story’ of his
fictional creation, Tristram Shandy?

This compacted example, found even in the opening pages of Tristram

Shandy, perhaps indicates Sterne’s interest in drawing on other types of
discourse than simply that of the fictional narrative: he uses scientific
discourse, and a contemporary debate, in this instance, but throughout
Tristram Shandy brings in a wide range of references, reading and ideas
that play alongside the purely imaginative characters and scenarios that
he presents to his readers. That Mrs Shandy connects the winding of the
clock on the stairs every Sunday night with having sex, for instance, is a
comical enactment of the philosopher John Locke’s theory of the
association of ideas.

In volumes I and II, references to Locke, to Horace, to Homer, to the

physicians of the Sorbonne, to the Bible and to a range of other sources
suggest that here is a book deeply embedded in a wealth of ideas and
other texts, even if that knowledge is presented in a seemingly unusual
or quirky way. Part of the challenge of reading Tristram Shandy is to
unravel that which at one point Tristram describes as the ‘riddles and
mysteries’ (Sterne 2009: 517) of life, which this book in some senses
claims to embody.

Activity
Read Tristram Shandy, volumes III and IV, p. 125-269.

Note down what takes place in these volumes, in view of the points of
interest raised in our discussion of volumes I and II:

What are the ‘events’ of these volumes?

Which characters do they involve?

How does Sterne organise his material in these volumes?

What are the most striking visual features of the text?

What ideas, or types of reading, are brought into the narrative?

We might summarise that in these two volumes we have, in some

senses, a continuation of volumes I and II in respect to all the features
listed above: the ‘story’ is still one of waiting – both the characters in
the parlour, and we as readers, still expect Tristram Shandy himself to
be born. So, again, Sterne’s narrative technique here is one of deferral.
We find an account of the new-fangled invention of the forceps, which
Slop proposes to use on the soon-to-be-born Tristram, and Walter
Shandy’s reaction of combined horror and fascination, alongside the
gruesome experiment on Toby’s knuckles using the forceps (Sterne
2009: 148). At least, we find perhaps to our relief, Tristram is finally
born in this volume, even if his birth is beset by a series of disasters:
we find that his nose has been crushed in his extraction, and calls for a
‘bridge’ so as to support it. As Trim tells Walter Shandy,

−− In bringing him into the world with his vile instruments, he

[Dr Slop] has crushed his nose, Susannah says, as flat as a
pancake to his face, and he is making a false bridge with a piece
of cotton and a thin piece of whalebone out of Susannah’s stays,
to raise it up. (Sterne 2009: 170)

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This, we learn, is devastating news for Walter Shandy, beyond the

father’s natural concern for his new-born son’s welfare: we find that he
is particularly attached to the importance of a nose to a man’s status
and success in life. This idea clearly has strong overtones of sexual
innuendo, one part of the bawdy humour that characterises Sterne’s
book. In narrative terms, this episode brings Tristram to digress with a
story about the draw-bridge on uncle Toby’s bowling green, where he
has erected model fortifications, and which again provides an
opportunity for bawdy innuendo. It also brings Walter to prostrate
himself in grief upon the bed in the opening chapters of Volume IV.

In volumes III and IV, as with the previous two volumes, we have a
surprising array of extra-textual sources incorporated into the narrative,
presented in unusual ways: for instance, ‘Ernulphus’ Curse’ is itself a
curious ‘text’ to bring into a ‘novel’, and is moreover printed in both
Latin and English.

Similarly, in Volume III, we find the famous ‘marbled page’, which as

we noted earlier turns the idea of the paratext on its head: the outsides
of the conventional book are brought inside the pages of Tristram
Shandy. This would have been particularly striking for contemporary
readers, as each marbling would have been unique – an effect lost upon
modern-day paperback readers. The appearance of ‘The Author’s
Preface’ in Volume III (Sterne 2009: 153) – rather than at the
beginning of the whole book – would have been equally shocking for
Sterne’s first readers, as it is perhaps for us now.

Volume IV, you will have observed, begins with an equally disruptive
‘interruption’, ‘Slawkenbergius’ Tale’, which gives us a story that
appears to be completely unconnected to Tristram’s life and to the
events at Shandy Hall. In fact, some critics argue, this story offers
Sterne an opportunity to comment upon the difference between Catholic
and Protestant ideas about the communion: the doctrine of the ‘real
presence’ of Christ’s body in the communion host is embodied in Diego’s
nose, which stirs such a controversy among the people of Strasburg,
who debate whether it actually ‘exists’ or not (Walsh 1994).

These visually and thematically disruptive elements of Sterne’s text –

which both interrupt and defer the delivery of the story (as in Tristram’s
birth), and flout our expectations of how that story should be told in a
fictional narrative – characterise volumes III and IV as strongly as the
first instalment of Sterne’s book.

Once again, this instalment ends with the promise of a future

instalment: Sterne facetiously reminds us of the ‘moral purpose’ of
other novelists’ intentions for their books with a reference to Cervantes
great comic narrative, Don Quixote – whose ‘Cervantick humour’,
Tristram claims, offers a model for his own. He reminds us of his own
bodily illness (he complains of a ‘vile cough’), but nonetheless cheerfully
promises to ‘lay open a story to the world you little dream of’ in Volume
V (Sterne 2009: 270).

Activity
Read Tristram Shandy, volumes V and VI, pp. 275-381.

What takes place in these volumes?

Note down what seem to you the most interesting or important aspects
of these two volumes, in relation to the narrative and the way it is
communicated to the reader.

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-17
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What are the most unusual aspects of these two volumes, in terms of
narrative ‘progress’ or visual appearance?

Tristram is once again in digressive mode as these volumes open, as he

gives his reader a fragmentary story ‘Upon Whiskers’, set in the court of
the Queen of Navarre some years past. Back in Shandy Hall, we find
that Tristram’s older brother, Bobby, has died, making Tristram the
‘heir’ to the Shandy estate. Corporal Trim’s account of the news to his
fellow servants, assembled in the kitchen, offers Sterne an opportunity
to describe how body language can provide as effective a means of
communication as words – and is even perhaps a better one.

Activity
How does this emerge in chapters 7-11 of Volume V? Make notes on the
‘language’ of gesture, and how they complement or supplement the
spoken language of this passage.

In this passage, you might observe, the idea found in Volume I that
uncle Toby’s life was ‘put in jeopardy by words’ (Sterne 2009: 71) is
contrasted with the very effective way in which Trim communicates with
his fellows using gesture. The reference to Locke in these ideas about
words also resurfaces in this passage, where the ‘green satin night-
gown’ that Susannah pictures is another example of Locke’s notion of
the association of ideas.

In Volume V, we also find stories about Tristram’s childhood – that he is

nearly castrated by the sash window, for instance (Sterne 2009: 301),
which relates to an account of Toby and Trim’s mock-fortifications on
the bowling green. We find Walter Shandy once again in best
explanatory mood, discoursing about his favourite subjects, and
showing off his classical learning; indeed, Walter closes Volume V with
an account of the ‘verbs auxiliary’, which he delivers to Yorick and Toby
(Sterne 2009: 323).

Volume VI provides another surprise for the reader, as we apparently

leap back in time to when Tristram was just born: Slop and Susannah
prepare a ‘cataplasm’ – a warming medicinal compress – to apply to
Tristram’s injured nose. This leads to a farcical scene in which the two
characters struggle with the candle, and Slop’s wig is set on fire (Sterne
2009: 331).

Yet Volume VI also registers a shift in tone, which you may have noticed
in the ‘Story of Le Fever’ that Tristram interpolates into his narrative
(Volume VI, chapters 6-11). Whilst on the one hand being another
digressive distraction from the apparently main ‘story’ of Tristram
Shandy, this episode also provides Sterne with an opportunity to display
the compassionate quality of uncle Toby and Trim’s characters to great
effect.

This episode was hugely popular among Sterne’s readers, and shows
evidence of his ability to adapt his fictional material to suit the changing
tastes of his audience: as we shall discover in greater detail in
subsequent units, ‘sentimentalism’ was a phenomenon that emerged in
literature and culture during the latter decades of the eighteenth
century. Sterne was held by many to be one of the greatest
practitioners of the ‘sentimental’ style, with this episode in particular
offering a key example of his skill.

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Activity
Note down those words and phrases in Volume VI, chapters 6-11 (‘The
Story of Le Fever’) that seem to you to be particularly touching or
pathetic.

The prophetic announcement of Toby’s funeral in Volume VI (Sterne

2009: 362) further enhances this pathetic quality.

Of course, there is still plenty to entertain and to amuse on the level of

facetious or bawdy humour in Volume VI. We find, for instance, that Le
Fever’s story is abruptly ended by the impatient narrator, who is
anxious to ‘return to my own story’ (Sterne 2009: 343). Indeed, this
reminds us of how Tristram is a constant presence throughout the book,
who repeatedly alerts us to the fact that this is a book about his life and
opinions; for one thing, he constantly reminds us that he is in the
process of writing. The repeated promises for what is yet to come are
part of this impression of ongoing composition, alongside the recurring
reminders about the specific time and place in which Tristram claims to
be writing.

The continuing use of varied typography in Volume VI is a further

reminder of the very physical nature of Tristram’s (and perhaps
Sterne’s) approach to writing: we find in Volume VI that the by-now
familiar dashes and asterisks strongly characterise Tristram Shandy’s
text. Indeed, Volume VI itself closes with a striking, and provoking,
image which is supposed to demonstrate the approach towards writing
his narrative that Tristram adopts.

He tells us, perhaps to our surprise, that ‘I am now beginning to get

fairly into my work’, and promises that from now on he will be able to
progress in ‘a tolerable straight line’ (Sterne 2009: 379). He then draws
out the narrative ‘line’ pursued in the first four volumes:

The fifth volume adopted a different course:

The various deviations and digressions of his narrative are represented by

the curves and loops of this line. He promises that, in the next volume, he
will follow the good example he has no set himself in Volume VI, which was

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-19
_____________________________________________________________________

almost completely without deviation, and so produce a purely ‘straight’ line

of narrative.

Do volumes VII and VIII live up to this promise?

Activity

Read Tristram Shandy, volumes VII and VIII, pp. 385-479.

Make notes on the form and content of these two volumes: what
subject matter do they involve, and how is it arranged?

Of course, in many respects, Tristram instantly breaks his promise in

Volume VII: we find that, instead of a continuation of the stories we
might have expected – such as the long-deferred ‘amours’ of uncle Toby
and Widow Wadman – Tristram gives us an account of his voyage
abroad to escape ‘Death’, who comes knocking on his door. This
reminds us of Tristram’s ongoing illness – and of Sterne’s own suffering
from the disease of tuberculosis that finally killed him – as he
metaphorically escapes Death by pursuing foreign travels to places
supposed to restore a person’s health.

We encountered the idea of the ‘grand tour’ in a previous unit, where

we discussed Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters in
relation to existing travel writing. Here, Sterne offers us a parody of this
type of literature, as he presents Tristram’s ‘grand tour’ through France.
However, typically, this is not simply a straightforward parody, as
Tristram complicates his narrative of his journey in adulthood, to escape
‘Death’, by relating at the same time his boyhood travels to the
continent in company with Walter and Toby. This leads to some
complicated authorial manoeuvring, as at one point Tristram finds
himself in three places at once:

− Now this is the most puzzled skein of all – for in this last
chapter, as far at least as it has help’d me through Auxerre, I
have been getting forwards in two different journies together, and
with the same dash of the pen – […] I have brought myself into
such a situation, as no traveller ever stood before me; for I am
this moment walking across the market-place of Auxerre with my
father and my uncle Toby, in our way back to dinner – and I am
this moment also entering Lyons with my post-chaise broke into a
thousand pieces – and I am moreover this moment in a
handsome pavilion built by Pringello, upon the banks of the
Garonne, which Mons. Sligniac has lent me, and where I now sit
rhapsodizing all these affairs.
−−− Let me collect myself, and pursue my journey.
(Sterne 2009: 413)

In this passage, we can see Sterne playing with the conventional

dimensions of space and time within a narrative.

Think back to our previous discussions of Ian Watt: how does Sterne’s
treatment of the ‘unity’ of space and time within the narrative plot
compare to the ideas encountered in The Rise of the Novel, or to other
novels of this period?

In Volume VIII, we finally receive the promised love-story of uncle

Toby’s courtship of Widow Wadman. However, this ‘courtship’ is clearly
very different to the kind that we find in, for instance, Pamela – which
for Ian Watt was the unifying narrative principle of Richardson’s book.

17-20 Literature 3
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Toby’s amours are principally related to us in terms of what does not

happen, as much as what does actually take place: rather like Tristram
in his narrative so far, Toby delays actually addressing the widow
directly about his feelings, but instead debates the matter in various
equivocal ways with Corporal Trim and Walter Shandy.

For instance, we find the interpolated tale of the ‘King of Bohemia and
his seven castles’ (Sterne 2009: 451). However, this story is constantly
interrupted by Toby, and is furthermore inter-layered with Trim’s
account of his own amorous encounter, with the fair Beguine – a story
which he never actually finishes in his own words, as Toby
(erroneously) finishes it for him.

The volume in fact finishes on a similar note of incompletion, as we are

still waiting for Toby to make it to Widow Wadman’s for his promised
declaration of love. Sterne’s first readers would have to wait until 1767
for the conclusion of the story.

Activity
Read Tristram Shandy, Volume IX, pp. 483-539.

Note down in what ways the ‘narrative’ seems to have progressed in

Volume IX, or what ways it has not. What else do you find to be
particularly unusual or interesting in this volume?

In many respects, Volume IX could not be considered to provide a

‘conclusion’ at all. While Toby finally makes it into Widow Wadman’s
parlour, their encounter is perhaps as inconclusive as any story in
Tristram Shandy: it is characterised by yet another fundamental lack of
understanding – over the meaning of the words ‘very place’ (Sterne
2009: 514) – which reminds us of Sterne’s ongoing engagement with
Locke’s ideas about the limitations of words as a means of
communication.

In fact, the power of gestures, as opposed to words, is conveyed in yet

another striking visual image in Volume IX: standing on the widow’s
doorstep, Trim conveys an argument for ‘celibacy’ with a flourish of his
stick that is much more effective than any of Walter’s ‘subtle syllogisms’
(Sterne 2009: 490), and which Sterne conveys with a flourishing line
that ripples across the surface of the page.

The inconclusive nature of Toby’s amours suggest the way in which

Volume IX itself does not fully bring us to the ‘conclusion’ of any single
character’s story in Tristram Shandy, least of all the narrator’s own
story. In fact, Yorick’s provokingly enigmatic joke, which concludes
Volume IX, perhaps provides the most fitting statement for what the
reader might make of Tristram Shandy, in terms of trying to find
definitive end-points or conclusions to its stories or opinions. When Mrs
Shandy asks ‘what is all this story about?’, Yorick replies, ‘A COCK and a
BULL […] And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard’ (Sterne 2009:
539).

IS TRISTRAM SHANDY ‘COMPLETE’?

This ‘conclusion’ to Sterne’s book has led many to wonder whether it
was, in fact, complete (Booth 1951). From one perspective, those
contemporary readers who had become used to receiving one or two
volumes of Tristram Shandy every couple of years might well have

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-21
_____________________________________________________________________

expected that more was yet to come. However, Sterne’s own death in
1768 inevitably put a final end to any such possibility.

However, perhaps it is to miss the point to ask if he might have written

more had he lived. For surely our experience of reading Tristram
Shandy has taught us that it leaves many ‘lives’ unaccounted for, many
‘opinions’ unexplored, and that potentially there could always be more
to come. Rather, the process of writing (like that of living) is an ongoing
one for Sterne as for his narrator, and that while either has enough ‘life’
left, they will have enough matter to write about. Potentially, this story
– and the numerous stories it intertwines – are ongoing, and continue
not only in the pages of Sterne’s book but in his readers’ continuing
interpretations of their content.

SAQ 3

What does the delivery of Tristram Shandy’s story in instalments tell

us about the relationship between the content of that narrative, and
how it is arranged?

‘WHAT IS ALL THIS STORY ABOUT’?

Where does this leave us in our own reading of Tristram Shandy, and
how we place Sterne’s book in our account of the development of prose
fiction during the eighteenth century?

Is Tristram Shandy particularly innovative, and why might Sterne

present his fictional narrative to the public in the way that he does?

Is Tristram Shandy merely a provokingly ‘original’, eccentric text?

On the one hand, in formal terms Sterne’s book is utterly different to

other, earlier ‘novels’: Tristram Shandy does not adopt a fluid, seamless
narrative like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; nor is it written in a series of
letters, like Richardson’s Pamela; and it does not follow the forward-
driven ‘journey’ of its hero as its structuring principal, as in Fielding’s
Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones.

On the other hand, while its form and structure seem very distinct from
these other apparently prominent examples of the novel genre, is
Tristram Shandy unique in the way it plays with the formal qualities of
the book itself? Thomas Keymer, for one, has conducted some
illuminating research on novels of the 1740s and 1750s, the decades
immediately preceding Tristram Shandy’s appearance
(Keymer 2002: 6-7).

Many authors of this period use similarly innovative and striking visual
features: Keymer uses the example of John Kidgell’s The Card, which
actually incorporates images of the cards described in the title, and
which play an important role in the plot (2002: 69). As such, some
contemporary readers could have recognised that Tristram Shandy was
not unique in its games with form and the material appearance of the
book. This perhaps differs to our response to this question, because we
might only be familiar with texts such as The Card because scholars like
Thomas Keymer tell us about them.

We might, then, ask whether Tristram Shandy is innovative and

distinctive, or whether it just copies other literary models. And, if Sterne
is merely imitating fads, or experiments undertaken by other writers
who play with the nascent novel form – if he is parodying them, as Watt

17-22 Literature 3
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suggests – why should we think about Tristram Shandy as being

anything more than yet another frivolous, and superficial, riff on a
novel’s formal features – such as by playing about with page
numbering, or chapter divisions?

Part of our response to such questions might be that, while Sterne

might have been introducing ‘innovations’ that other writers, like
Kidgell, had earlier toyed with, there must be something distinctive
about his book that means that we are studying Tristram Shandy, and
not (say) The Card – and why Sterne’s book has remained in print since
its first appearance. This perhaps leads us to think about how what we
might so far have considered as a distinct enquiry, about form
separated from content, is in fact more fruitfully pursued as a joint
enterprise. Whereas the Russian Formalists see Tristram Shandy’s
triumph as being the result of privileging the manner of telling, rather
than what is being told, perhaps what is most important about Sterne’s
book is that it actually uses its unusual formal features to say
something about what is written: it uses form to comment on content,
not so as to replace it.

As such, we cannot really divorce our comments on Tristram Shandy’s

form from the substance of the book in the artificial way we might have
seemed to do so far in this unit; instead, we need to think about why
Sterne plays with his book’s form in the way that he does. This will lead
us to talking about why Tristram Shandy is not just an entertaining
game with the mechanics of how a novel might not be written. Sterne’s
book is not simply a parody of other writers’ ‘novels’, but it is also
something more profound: an exploration of ideas – other people’s
ideas, and other books.

We have encountered some of these in our reading of Tristram Shandy’s

individual volumes so far in this unit, but it is important to bring these
ideas together now, and to consider how they connect together in the
book as a whole. As such, as we shall see, Tristram Shandy offers its
readers an exploration of the relationship between the individual mind
and the ideas it probes and the experiences that happen to him in his
life. Sterne provides an approach to thinking about how ‘life’ and
‘opinions’ necessarily intertwine, and about how the subjective
individual might interpret and represent his experiences within a
fictional narrative. By extension, Sterne prompts us as readers to
consider how we got about interpreting all the different kinds of
information that we receive, and use it to shape our view of the world.

We shall focus on a few key examples of the unusual ‘formal’ features of

Sterne’s text that we have mentioned so far in this unit. We will ask
what the broader purpose of function might be of each of these aspects
of Tristram Shandy. We will, in turn, ask what each feature indicates
about Sterne’s approach towards writing prose fiction: both in terms of
what it might contain – its ‘content’ – and how the way in which that
content is arranged and presented can actually hold meaning in itself.
As such, we might think, Sterne promotes a ‘purpose’ in Tristram
Shandy as laudable as Richardson’s moral didacticism, for instance: this
time, however, he proposes a new way of reading and of writing fiction.

WHY IS STERNE’S USE OF PARATEXTUAL MATERIAL SO

UNORTHODOX?
Earlier in this unit, we discussed how Sterne treats some of the
paratextual devices that other authors use for specific purposes in their
books in an unusual way; why might the preface appear part way
through Volume III, for instance? Is this just a random positioning,
inserted here because the narrator did not manage to write a preface
before he published volumes I and II of his book?

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-23
_____________________________________________________________________

If we look at the content of the preface itself, we can perhaps get some
clue as to why Sterne places it here, in Volume III, rather than
anywhere else.

Tristram tells us that:

−−− when I sat down, my intent was to write a good book; and
as far as the tenuity of my understanding would hold out, − a
wise, aye, and a discreet, −− taking care only, as I went along, to
put into it all the wit and the judgment (be it more or less) which
the great author and bestower of them had thought fit originally
to give me, −− so that, as your worships see, −− ’tis just as God
pleases. (Sterne 2009: 153)

So, it seems, having hoped to show ‘wit and judgment’ in the narrative
so far – in action, as it were – Tristram finds he has not quite lived up to
the expectations he had of himself in this respect. As a result, he has to
pause here, part-way through Volume III, to talk about wit and
judgement in a fairly abstract, philosophical sense. This allows him to
bring in the vast wealth of reading and knowledge he seems to have on
the subject – he mentions various important thinkers, such as Locke, for
example – which demonstrates his learning, and so perhaps that he is
qualified to talk authoritatively about this subject in this way.

However, having undertaken this task in the preface, Tristram soon ties
himself in knots; he imagines how impressive it would be if the rest of
his narrative managed to unite both wit and judgement, but becomes so
overwhelmed with the idea that words seem to fail him:

Bless us! – what noble work we should make! – how should I

tickle it off! – and what spirits should I find myself in, to be
writing away for such readers! – and you, − just heaven! – with
what raptures would you sit and read, −− but oh! – ’tis too much,
−−− I am sick, −−− I faint away deliciously at the thoughts of it!
−−− ’tis more than nature can bear! – lay hold of me, − I am
giddy, − I am stone blind, −−− I’m dying, −−− I am gone. –
Help! Help! Help! (Sterne 2009: 154)

This is a dramatic crisis-point indeed – and, again, very different from

the measured and balanced language and style that Richardson or
Fielding use in their prefaces.

Can we therefore say that Sterne’s ‘Author’s Preface’ is written in the

way that it is, and placed in this part of the book, so as to parody these
earlier authors’ techniques – and more generally the tendency for
authors in this period to use their preface as both apologia and
advertisement for the book?

Yes, we can – but that is only part of the story. Sterne is, of course,
parodying the ‘convention’ of the preface – both where it should be, and
what it should contain; however, he also uses his ‘Author’s Preface’ to
do several other things too, which wrest this passage from just being an
amusing joke at other writers’ expense, or merely a parody of existing
conventions.

For one thing, as the passage cited above tells us, the preface
incorporates many of those quirky visual features that, as we noted
previously in this unit, Sterne is particularly fond of using – in this case,
notably the dash. But are these dashes just randomly placed, the
seemingly haphazard spatterings of the pen of an author who cannot
quite control his written style?

In one sense, the dashes fragment the text in this passage: they signify
the apparent breakdown of the narrator’s ability to speak or write

17-24 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

coherently – or even to think – and so heighten the dramatic effect of

this moment. Of course, in another sense this becomes somewhat
ridiculous: there are so many dashes in Tristram’s rapturous vision of
how splendid it might be if wit and judgement were found in his
narrative (a topic which, perhaps, might not inspire everyone to be
quite so overwhelmed) that we are perhaps prompted to view this
overwrought narrator with a certain amount of sceptical irony.

This point should, perhaps, remind us of one important aspect of

Tristram Shandy that we should bear in mind as we read and analyse it:
should we see Sterne and Tristram as one and the same? In the context
of this passage, we could argue that Sterne creates a comically
hyperbolic moment through his use of punctuation, which tells us
something about the character of the narrator, and perhaps raises a wry
smile at his expense. Furthermore, as this passage reveals, while
throughout his narrative Tristram is keen to parade his learning, and the
vast amounts of reading he claims to have done, can we always
completely trust his erudition? There are, indeed, several occasions
when the editor’s notes to your edition of the text might point to some
of Tristram’s inaccuracies. How far these mistakes are Tristram’s, how
far Sterne’s, is not always easy (or desirable) to determine; but they
nonetheless alert us to the need to separate the author from his
creation when reading a text that, at times, seems to present them as
one and the same.

WHY DOES STERNE USE SUCH DISTINCTIVE PUNCTUATION

AND TYPOGRAPHY?
Indeed, the use of the dash in the passage from the ‘Author’s Preface’
cited here gives some indications about how we might judge Tristram as
a character, and the ways in which he communicates his narrative. We
mentioned earlier that there are in fact four different types of dash-
length in Tristram Shandy, and the critic Anne Bandry has shown how
the different lengths of these dashes are used for different effects in
Sterne’s book (Bandry 1988). Bandry discusses what she calls ‘le plaisir
du tiret’ (the pleasure of the dash), which Sterne uses to entice his
readers onwards in the narrative.
The dash is suggestive, and has the ability to point us in the direction of
what might come: we eagerly anticipate the next part of the sentence.
As such, the dash is, paradoxically, two things at once: it represents
‘nothing’; it is a gap in the text, which creates an aposiopesis – a break
in the flow of words. But at the same time as seeming to say nothing,
the dash actually creates a meaning of its own by connecting the words
surrounding it in the sentence together. Not only that, but the dash
holds meaning by indicating what might have been said.

A compact example of this can be found in Volume VII, where Tristram

tells us of the legend of the two lovers, Amanda and Amandus, who
were:

separated from each other by cruel parents, and by still more

cruel destiny –

Amandus − He
Amanda − She − (Sterne 2009: 417)

What do these dashes tell us? Of course, in one sense they do not tell
us anything at all, but instead lead us on to imagine what might have
been printed.

This is a recurrent feature of Tristram Shandy – the hint at what might

have been – and plays a major role in the provoking, and titillating
nature of Sterne’s narrative. Furthermore, it reminds us how form (the

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-25
_____________________________________________________________________

visual devices of the book and where they appear) not only supports
content, but can be used to create meaning, even if that meaning is
only implicit in Sterne’s text (if at all), and really only lies within the
realm of our own minds.

This connects the dash to another feature of Sterne’s typography, which

we encountered at an earlier point in this unit, and which might seem to
be liberally scattered at random throughout his narrative: the asterisk.
This particular symbol has provoked considerable interest among
readers and critics alike; Sterne’s earliest readers, for instance,
immediately noticed that the asterisk is often used as a thin veil for
covering bawdy meaning.

For instance, one famous and frequently quoted example is the moment
at which the Shandy brothers await the birth of Tristram in the parlour.
They discuss Mrs Shandy’s reluctance to be delivered by a male
midwife, and Toby speculates that this might be because

My sister, I daresay, does not care to let a man come so near her
**** (Sterne 2009: 81)

Which word precisely is covered by those asterisks has provoked rabid

speculation; it has also provoked much condemnation from more
puritanically-minded readers, who criticise Sterne for using such
prurient tactics to make his narrative more sensational. This, they
suggest, is designed to make his narrative more appealing to his
readers: anyone can get a laugh from a dirty joke, they claim. But, of
course, to print a dirty joke in the flesh (as it were) not only risks the
perils of censorship, but actually risks being less funny: it is much more
effective to hint at the joke, to provoke the reader’s imagination and let
him or her imagine the dirty word that might have been intended.

This tactic certainly works to comic effect several times in Tristram

Shandy; for instance, earlier we encountered the episode in which the
infant Tristram needs the toilet, but the matter being pressing, the maid
devises a solution that nearly has disastrous consequences:

Cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash

with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the window
seat with the other, − cannot you manage, my dear, for a single
time to **** *** ** *** ******? (Sterne 2009: 301)

It does not take a great leap of the imagination to guess which words
might fit the ‘censored’ asterisks here, and to discover that by ‘pissing
out of the window’ the infant Tristram is nearly castrated.

However, on other occasions, an asterisk does not always equal a letter;

indeed, as the critic Peter de Voogd has argued (1988: 387), there are
many instances when no sense whatsoever can be made of a series of
asterisks. For instance, when Tristram reminds his ‘Jenny’ of the bitter
experience of what we are led to believe is an admission of impotence,
he records how she tells him:

−−−’Tis enough, Tristram, and I am satisfied, said’st thou,

whispering these words in my ear, **** ** **** ***
******;−**** ** **** −− any other man would have sunk
down to the center – (Sterne 2009: 415)

No stretch of the imagination can fill these words with anything vaguely
plausible, and as New suggests, ‘it is unlikely that Sterne has definite
words in mind’ (Sterne 2003: 711).

The point here, however, is that these seemingly random visual features
of the book, features which seem to turn on their head the conventions

17-26 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

of organised prose and ‘appropriate’ meaning that Richardson or

Fielding seem to establish, are in fact carefully controlled. Often, the
difficulty of deciphering meaning is more important to the comedy of the
moment as replacing asterisks with dirty words could be; for it is by
using such devices that Sterne deliberately points towards the reader’s
expectation of finding such dirty words.

How far Sterne can be held responsible for creating the possibility of
bawdy interpretations, which we cannot help but ‘find’ for ourselves
through the hints he gives us, and how far the dirty-minded reader is
actually to blame for finding Tristram Shandy’s text to be ‘dirty’, is
almost impossible to establish clearly. However, this question belongs to
a broader issue about how we go about reading Sterne’s book at all: at
what point do form and content intersect only through our ability to
decipher the clues to meaning that Sterne gives us?

THE ‘READER’S ROLE’ IN TRISTRAM SHANDY

Tristram repeatedly tells us that we should be engaged in ‘constructing’
the narrative for ourselves. At one point he famously claims that ‘writing
[…] is but a different name for conversation’ (Sterne 2009: 87). In this
imaginary conversation between reader and author, ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’
are pictured as journeying alongside the narrator and contributing their
own thoughts and opinions to push its progress onwards.

However, we are prompted to ask how far this kind of ‘conversation’

between reader and author is actually possible, and indeed how far we
are intended by Sterne to take such a proposal seriously at all. The idea
that ‘writing’ is like ‘conversation’ is only meant half-seriously: we
cannot, of course, really ‘engage’ in a conversation with an author who
communicates to us on paper. Our comments and opinions will only go
so far in shaping a narrative that is already in print, in a book we hold
between our hands.

In one sense, Sterne’s first readers had a better chance at being

actively engaged in the narrative’s construction than the modern-day
reader can ever have: we discovered in a previous section in this unit
that Tristram Shandy was published in instalments; in the intervening
periods, between the appearance of each new pair of volumes, many
readers and critics contributed their own opinions on the story so far.
Sterne may have considered and thought about some of these, which as
a result may have helped to shape the writing of future volumes.
Clearly, this is a kind of readerly engagement we can never enjoy.

However, rather than being an actual call to ‘converse’ with his readers,
Tristram’s point about writing and conversation is actually more
metaphorical. Earlier, we saw how the dashes and asterisks are both
ways of concealing meaning (particularly bawdy words) but also of
conveying it: they are signifiers, prompts which encourage us to
imagine what might have been in their place. This is an important part
of Sterne’s narrative technique as a whole: he does not necessarily tell
the reader facts or details as such, but rather gives us hints and clues
which we must piece together for ourselves to ‘create’ a narrative of our
own, as it were, which runs in tandem with Tristram’s. As such, the
‘plot’ of Tristram Shandy is subordinate to the way in which we fabricate
experience out of the different kinds of information given to us.

The presentation of character in Tristram’s narrative offers an apt

example. In previous units, we discussed how an approach to ‘character’
was an important part of the ‘development’ of the novel form in texts
such as Pamela or Joseph Andrews. In Fielding’s Tom Jones, for
instance, the physical description of the hero or heroine’s tangible
features is one means of making them seem more ‘realistic’ to the
reader.

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-27
_____________________________________________________________________

However, Tristram’s description of his characters is much more

ambiguous. His depiction of uncle Toby (for instance) is quite unlike the
‘realistic’ description of a character’s facial features, physical
deportment or dress, which a reader might expect to find in a novel.
Tristram claims that he will ‘draw’ Toby’s character in ‘three strokes’:
quite apart from being a witty side-reference to William Hogarth, this
‘picture’ of Toby does not actually involve describing anything about him
as regards his physical appearance at all. Instead, as Tristram begins to
draw his ‘portrait’ of his uncle, he tells us that:

I was just going [. . .] to have given you the great out-lines of my

uncle Toby’s most whimsical character. (Sterne 2009: 58)

before suddenly breaking off with one of his characteristic digressions.

He resumes the picture two chapters later, half-heartedly asserting
that:

If I was not morally sure that the reader must be out of all patience for
my uncle Toby’s character — (Sterne 2009: 61)

Finally, when we are given this promised ‘picture’, it does not consist of
physical details at all: instead, Tristram ‘draws’ Toby’s character by
describing his most defining feature – his hobby-horse, or ruling
passion; once we understand what makes Toby tick, Tristram suggests,
then we get a full ‘picture’ of his character, which will be much more
effective than any verbal description.

As such, Sterne’s reader is challenged to assemble the fragmented

elements of Tristram Shandy’s narrative for him or herself, and so to
make sense of the book as a whole according to his or her own way of
interpreting information. It is through a combination of the subjective
interpretation of facts and experiences conveyed through Tristram’s
narrative voice, and the subjective re-interpretation of them by the
book’s readers, that Sterne’s narrative is driven forwards.

FRAGMENTATION AND STERNE’S NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE

The early twentieth-century critic and novelist, Virginia Woolf,
comments in interesting ways upon Sterne’s narrative technique, and
the way in which such fragmentary ‘pictures’, or experiences described,
help to engage the reader in the narrative. Woolf recognises that, in the
passage described above, Tristram’s picture of Toby is a sketch rather
than a complete portrait, and suggests that Sterne uses this technique
to engross us in the text itself (1966: 92-3).

Woolf connects this technique of creating mental pictures in the reader’s

mind by using suggestive details to the broader structural nature of
Tristram Shandy. Woolf recognises how, paradoxically, fragmentation
leads to completeness; at the same time, the digression that Tristram
indulges in during these pages actually drives the forward progression
of his story. Tristram claims of his picture of Toby’s portrait, despite all
the deviations from actually delivering the promised description, that:

[…] the drawing of my Uncle Toby’s character went on all the time
– not the great contours of it – that was impossible – but some
familiar strokes and faint designations of it (Sterne 2009: 58)

The reader comes to recognise the ‘familiar strokes’ of Tristram’s

narrative style as the text moves onwards, and as such can gain some
sense of cohesion out of its disparate elements.

17-28 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

WHY DOES STERNE SUBVERT A LINEAR PLOT?

Rather than following the single, central, cohesive plot line that we
found in Pamela, for instance, Tristram’s narrative twists and turns,
winds back on itself and pursues numerous side avenues. Nonetheless,
it continues to ‘develop’ in some sense of the word, as suggested by
Woolf’s comments on how Sterne’s narrative technique brings us to
create pictures of Tristram Shandy’s characters for ourselves. Tristram
himself describes his narrative technique as both ‘progressive’ and
‘digressive’: even when it seems to be going back on itself, the many
‘wheels within wheels’ of its various parts ensure that ‘the whole
machine is kept a-going’ (Sterne 2009: 59). As he tells the reader,

By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by

itself; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled,
which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word,
my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,---and at the
same time.

[…] from the beginning of this, you see, I have constructed the
main work and the adventitious parts of it with such intersections,
and have so complicated and involved the digressive and
progressive movements, one wheel within another, that the whole
machine, in general, has been kept a-going;---and, what's more,
it shall be kept a-going these forty years, if it pleases the fountain
of health to bless me so long with life and good spirits. (Sterne
2009: 58-59)

Activity
How does this statement connect with your reading of Tristram
Shandy’s narrative method? Make notes on specific passages that
exemplify Tristram’s ‘digressive-progressive’ narrative technique.

Tristram suggests here that the wayward twists and turns of his story
are as important to Tristram Shandy’s narrative ‘progression’ as
following a ‘plot’ straight through from beginning to end. As he tells us,

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; ---they are the life,

the soul of reading;---take them out of this book for instance,---
you might as well take the book along with them;---one cold
eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the
writer;---he steps forth like a bridegroom,---bids All hail; brings in
variety, and forbids the appetite to fail. (Sterne 2009: 59)

Tristram deviates, digresses, and constantly defers the story that the
reader had expected to find in his book’s pages (of his birth, childhood,
or upbringing, for example); instead, he gives us a patchwork of lives
and opinions, which seem constantly to delay the delivery of the story
itself. By doing this, Tristram not only engages his reader more closely
in the narrative as it unravels, but also hopes to give a truer
representation of life as it is lived, experienced and recorded. As such,
he suggests, Tristram Shandy is a true picture of how a man’s ‘life’ and
his ‘opinions’ are necessarily entwined, and how both are ongoing
processes. It is, of course, particularly significant to Tristram who
communicates this idea about how we experience life through the
process of writing about his life.

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-29
_____________________________________________________________________

TRISTRAM SHANDY: LIFE AND WRITING

We have discussed various ways in which the more striking or unusual
aspects of Tristram Shandy might have significance or meaning, and so
how they are not simply superficial or quirky devices used to grab the
reader’s attention.

However, we might ask, what kind of book is Tristram Shandy? How

might we go about reading it, and what might we gain from the
experience? Tristram Shandy’s refusal to give an orderly progression of
events and their consequences, of cause and effect, creates an
impression of disparateness and incoherence. A reader might
legitimately ask whether he or she is deprived of the pleasure of reading
a novel, in the sense that we might expect, of following a story from
beginning to end.

As we found earlier in this unit, Sterne deliberately chooses to overturn

the seemingly well-established ‘life and adventures’ formula, and as
such consciously announces what kind of book Tristram Shandy is not:
it is not a linear series of exciting actions or episodes that appeal to the
tastes of the reader accustomed to reading sensationalist tales. At one
point, Tristram orders his imagined reader, ‘Madam’, to go back and re-
read a chapter, claiming she did not pay sufficient attention to it the
first time round. While she is presumably doing this, he tells the rest of
us that:

I have imposed this penance upon the lady, neither out of

wantonness or cruelty, but from the best of motives […] ’Tis to
rebuke a vicious taste which has crept into thousands besides
herself, — of reading straight forwards, more in quest of
adventures, than of the deep erudition and knowledge which a
book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly
impart with them. (Sterne 2009: 48)

Unlike books such as Robinson Crusoe, for instance, the reader should
not look to Tristram Shandy for a strange and surprising series of
‘adventures’; this is not the kind of book that allows a reader to follow it
for its plot alone, rather than for any of the other interesting things it
might have to say.
So what kind of book does Tristram claim his to be? Is it more closely
aligned with another popular formula for the titles of prose narratives at
this time, that of the ‘history’? Richardson, for instance, calls Clarissa a
‘history of a young lady’; Fielding similarly calls Tom Jones the ‘history’
of a ‘foundling’. Is Tristram Shandy akin to these texts?

In one sense, Tristram Shandy is most definitely not a history, in terms

of the relay of facts and scenarios in consequential order; and yet, in
another, Tristram specifically claims that his narrative is indeed a
history. However, this is not ‘history’ in the conventional sense:
Tristram Shandy is, the narrator tells us,

[…] a history-book, Sir […] of what passes in a man’s own mind

[…] (Sterne 2009: 70)

Rather than other fictional narratives such as Clarissa or Tom Jones,

Tristram actually compares his own book to Locke’s Essay concerning
Human Understanding, a text which we have previously encountered in
this unit as the source of theories about language, or about the
association of ideas. In some respects, this aligns Tristram Shandy with
earlier novels we have encountered in previous units, which claim to
instruct at the same time as entertaining the reader. Here, however,
that ‘instruction’ or valuable learning is conveyed through what ‘passes’
in the narrator’s own mind: Tristram’s interpretation of his experiences,
rather than the facts of the experiences themselves. As such, we could

17-30 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

argue, Tristram Shandy probes the psychological possibilities that Ian

Watt says characterise the new ‘novel’ form in equally, if not more,
challenging ways than any of the earlier prose fictions we have looked
at so far.

Tristram Shandy gains weight in going about this enterprise by

presenting the reader with a wide array of ‘learning’: part of Tristram’s
purpose, of relating everything that passes in his mind, involves
conveying how we gather a wealth of information from different
sources, both in our interaction with other people and their opinions, but
also with the numerous books we read. Throughout his narrative,
Tristram parades his learning: he talks about Locke, Shakespeare,
Rabelais, Cervantes, Montaigne, philosophers and classical authors.
However, as we hinted earlier in this unit, in many respects this learning
is precisely that, a parade: often, Tristram’s comments about what he
has read show that he has completely misunderstood it, misquoted it, or
perhaps not even read what he claims to at all. At best, he is an
unreliable guide in ‘erudition’ as much as anything else.

Yet Sterne, as opposed to Tristram, is a quite different matter: what is

partly so striking about Tristram Shandy is the way in which he weaves
multiple references to books, writers, anecdotes, proverbs and facts into
his fictional narrative. Indeed, ever since John Ferriar sought to expose
Sterne as a plagiarist in 1798, readers and critics have identified the
wide array of sources and texts that Sterne incorporates into Tristram
Shandy.

By presenting such an array of knowledge from different sources, but

also showing how that information can be misunderstood or
misrepresented, Sterne presents his book as an altogether more fully
rounded representation of human experience. As such, Tristram’s
‘learning’ teaches us about how the individual mind – including the
reader’s – is shaped by his or her subjective interpretation of
experience, including other writers’ ideas and texts.

As such, Tristram Shandy is about real life: not in the sense of events
that might befall us, but rather in the sense of how we respond to
whatever goes on in the outside world, how we interpret that
information, and how our own mental life is as active as any exotic
adventure’s. The idiosyncratic way in which he presents his ‘life story’ to
the reader reflects the haphazard way in which things happen to an
individual in life, and the highly subjective, personal ways in which he or
she responds to and perhaps writes about them. As such, Tristram
Shandy suggests how even the most trivial and mundane things go to
make up our ‘characters’, the people we are. As such, ‘life’ and
‘opinions’ are inextricably intertwined in Tristram’s narrative.

SAQ 4
Is Tristram Shandy just a quirky take on how to write a fictional
narrative, or does it offer the reader something more besides?

WHAT KIND OF ‘NOVEL’ IS TRISTRAM SHANDY?

So what kind of a ‘novel’ is Tristram Shandy? Or is it in fact not a novel
at all, but a parody of a novel, or even an anti-novel?

In a sense, both contrary opinions are true: it is partially a novel – in

that it incorporates many novelistic features – but it is also a parody of
one, in that it often transforms such features to comic effect. It is partly

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-31
_____________________________________________________________________

unique in being unlike, say, Richardson or Fielding’s books; however, as

we have seen it is not unprecedented, as we could point to the
existence of other contemporary experiments with the forms of
narrative prose.

If anything, Tristram Shandy is no one thing: it does not fit into any
single category. It is a story, or perhaps several stories; it is a
philosophical treatise; it is a comic novel; it is a visually innovative text;
it is a travel narrative; it is a love story; it is a study of several eccentric
characters; it is a sentimental tale. For many readers and commentators
alike, Tristram Shandy is a book about writing a book, which by
exposing the mechanics of a book’s construction can comment upon
them in an insightful way. However, other commentators argue that
there is more depth to Tristram Shandy than simply being a game with
the formal devices used to write and present a story. Many readers find
that there is depth, and truth, in many of the ideas that Sterne presents
in Tristram Shandy, not least the theological or philosophical concepts
which remind us that Sterne himself was an Anglican priest in real life,
deeply concerned with the Christian individual’s struggles and joys.

Sterne’s book perhaps incorporates aspects of all these elements; but,

more importantly, its ‘identity’ is not fixed or stable. Partly as a result of
the publishing process we described earlier in this unit, its focus and
tone shift throughout the volumes published over the course of several
years; there is a movement from the ‘satirical’ vein of the opening
volumes to the ‘sentimental’ quality of later instalments. Yet even this
analysis is too reductive, as different strains and modes are intertwined
throughout this provoking, frustrating, fascinating book.

Perhaps, to conclude, when trying to determine what kind of book

Tristram Shandy is, we should follow his advice to his friend Eugenius,
that ‘to define, is to distrust’ (Sterne 2009: 173). Or, perhaps, we
should take heed of the facetious but witty summary of Tristram Shandy
with which Yorick closes Volume IX:

A cock and a bull, […] and one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.

ADDITIONAL READING
PRIMARY TEXTS
Fielding, Henry. 2005. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (eds), Tom
Jones: The History of a Foundling (Harmondsworth: Penguin)

SECONDARY TEXTS
Booth, Wayne. 1951. ‘Did Sterne complete Tristram Shandy?’, Modern
Philology, 48: 172-83 (Available on JSTOR)

Briggs, Peter M. 1985. ‘Locke’s “Essay” and the Tentativeness of

“Tristram Shandy”’, Studies in Philology, 82.4: 493-520
(Available on JSTOR)

Byrd, Max. 1984. ‘Sterne and Swift: Augustan Continuities’, in James

Engell (ed.), Johnson and his Age, Harvard English Studies 12
(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press), 509-30
(Parts available via Google Books)

Cash, Arthur H. 1975. Laurence Sterne: The Early & Middle Years
(London: Methuen) (Parts available via Google Books)

 . 1986. Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (London and New
York: Methuen) (Parts available online via Google Books)

17-32 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

Flynn, Carol Houlihan. 2002. ‘Running Out of Matter: The Body

Exercised in Eighteenth-Century Fiction’, in Marcus Walsh (ed.),
Laurence Sterne (London: Longman), 112-18

Hunter, J. Paul. 1994. ‘From Typology to Type: Agents of Change in

Eighteenth-Century English Texts’, in Margaret J. M. Ezell and
Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (eds), Cultural Artifacts and the
Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body
(Michigan: Michigan University Press), 41-69 (Parts available via
Google Books)

Jefferson, Douglas. 1951. ‘Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned

Wit’, Essays in Criticism, 1: 225-48

Keymer, Thomas (ed.) 2009. The Cambridge Companion to Laurence

Sterne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Moss, Roger B. 1981-2. ‘Sterne’s Punctuation’, Eighteenth-Century

Studies, 15.2: 179-200 (Available on JSTOR)

New, Melvyn. 1969. Laurence Sterne as Satirist: A Reading of Tristram

Shandy (Gainesville: University of Florida Press)

Parnell, J. T. 1994. ‘Swift, Sterne, and the Skeptical Tradition’, Studies

in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 23: 221-42

Skinner, John. 2001. ‘Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Tobias

Smollett’s Humphry Clinker’, in An Introduction to Eighteenth-
century Fiction: Raising the Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan)

Tuveson, Ernest. 1962. ‘Locke and Sterne’, in J. A. Mazzeo (ed.),

Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas
1600-1800 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul)

Watt, Ian. 1972. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson
and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957; repr.
Harmondsworth: Pelican) (Parts available via Google Books)

REFERENCES
Bandry, Anne. 1988. ‘Tristram Shandy ou le Plaisir du Tiret’, Études
Anglaises, 2: 143-54.

Fielding, Henry. 2005. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (eds), Tom
Jones: The History of a Foundling (Harmondsworth: Penguin)

Genette, Gérard.1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. by

Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Keymer, Thomas. 2002. Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Rose, Margaret. 1993. Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) (Parts available online
via Google Books)

Sterne, Laurence. 2003. Melvyn New and Joan New (eds),The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Classics)

Sterne, Laurence. 2009. Ian Campbell Ross (ed.), The Life and Opinions

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-33
_____________________________________________________________________

of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Oxford: Oxford University

Press)

De Voogd, Peter Jan. 1988. ‘Tristram Shandy as aesthetic object’, Word

& Image, 4.1: 388-92

Walsh, Marcus. 1994. ‘Goodness Nose: Sterne’s Slawkenbergius, the

Real Presence, and the Shapeable Text’, Journal for Eighteenth-
Century Studies, 17.1: 55–63 (Available via the Wiley Online
Library database)

Watt, Ian. 1972. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson
and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957; repr.
Harmondsworth: Pelican) (Parts available online via Google
Books)

Woolf, Virginia. 1966. ‘Phases of Fiction’, in Collected Essays by Virginia

Woolf, vol. II (London: Hogarth Press), pp. 56-102 (Parts
available via Google Books)

17-34 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1

What are the potential advantages and drawbacks of the different

critical approaches that we might adopt towards reading Tristram
Shandy?

The different critical approaches one might adopt towards reading

and understanding Tristram Shandy offer an array of insights, but
also potential drawbacks. For instance, the ‘Russian Formalist’
approach alerts us to the intelligent ways in which Sterne uses the
structural devices of his book to convey different ideas about the
process of writing fiction itself. However, this risks overlooking the
genuinely profound ideas that Sterne conveys in the ‘content’ of his
book: Tristram Shandy’s ‘story’ or content is perhaps less superficial
than the Russian Formalist approach might allow.

Similarly, the critical approach which argues that Tristram Shandy is

stuck in the past, and represents another example of the ‘tradition of
learned wit’, offers an important reminder of the wealth of learning
that Sterne’s book conveys, but also its healthy scepticism about
parading such knowledge. Sterne does indeed borrow ideas and
materials from earlier authors writing in this tradition, such as Burton
or Swift, but he also incorporates them into a very different kind of
text. His ‘satirical’ targets are different to those of earlier generations,
and perhaps his satire is more congenial than assertive. This
approach should thus be adopted with caution.

In the same way, the opposite approach, which sees Sterne as ‘proto-
modern’, has both advantages and disadvantages: Tristram Shandy
did indeed inspire future generations of writers, such as Woolf or
Joyce, but it is misguided to suggest that it is completely divorced
from the contexts of its production. In fact, it is more fruitful to adopt
aspects of all these different approaches, and to read and analyse
Tristram Shandy as a book both in and of its time, and as a major
source of inspiration for subsequent authors similarly interested in
using awareness of how a book is constructed to comment upon
broader themes, related to writing and to life.

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-35
_____________________________________________________________________

SAQ 2

In what ways does Sterne disrupt the formal features of the

‘conventional’ fictional narrative, and how far should we be cautious
about claiming that any such ‘conventions’ exist at all at this time?

Novelists of the preceding generation, such as Richardson or Fielding,

to some extent offer counter-examples to Tristram Shandy in terms
of the way in which a fictional narrative might be written. For
instance, the use of chapter divisions in texts such as Tom Jones
offers a striking contrast to the way in which Sterne handles chapters
in Tristram Shandy. Similarly, Sterne uses ‘conventions’ of the novel
form, such as the preface or dedication, in markedly different ways to
Richardson or Fielding: his ‘paratexts’ appear within the book itself,
not least in striking visual devices such as the marbled leaves which
appear part-way through Volume III.

Ian Watt argues that Sterne differs from these two writers by treating
character in a more realistic way than they were able to achieve: the
conveyance of Tristram’s narrative through the first-person voice,
written as it were in the process of production, and its presentation of
an array of distinctive and individualised characters, all help to
achieve this impression. Watt also argues that Tristram Shandy is a
‘parody’ of the novel, as presented in Richardson and Fielding’s
fiction.

However, to suggest that the ‘novel’ had established ‘conventions’ as

such at this time is misguided: as critics such as John Richetti argue,
the word ‘novel’ itself was as yet ill-defined, and so to argue whether
or not Tristram Shandy is a novel, a parody of a novel, or an anti-
novel is to impose a false sense of generic identity upon Sterne’s
book. Rather, we could argue, Sterne does indeed disrupt the
apparently usual features of a book, and how its content should be
arranged, but does not necessarily do so to parody existing examples
of prose fiction. Instead, he uses these ‘games’ with form to comment
upon the process of writing itself.

Furthermore, in many respects it could be argued that Sterne’s

‘innovations’ are less unprecedented than might at first appear: as
critics such as Thomas Keymer have shown, earlier examples of the
quirky use of form, typography, or narrative mode provide a
backdrop to Tristram Shandy’s appearance on the book-buying
market.

17-36 Literature 3
_____________________________________________________________________

SAQ 3
What does the delivery of Tristram Shandy’s story in instalments tell
us about the relationship between the content of that narrative, and
how it is arranged?

The delivery of Sterne’s narrative in several instalments, spread

across a number of years, provides us with some sense of how
contemporary readers might have read and received Tristram
Shandy. Reading the text ourselves in this way helps us to gain a
fuller sense of how the book itself develops over a period of time, and
of the contrasts between its different volumes.

For instance, the use of innovative formal techniques – such as the

striking use of typography, and visual devices such as the black and
marbled pages – appear at an early stage of Tristram’s narrative.
They would have struck contemporary readers as being particularly
unusual. Such strange features appear throughout Tristram Shandy,
but by the final volumes of the book readers might perhaps have
become more familiar with them. As such, their appeal to novelty
might have worn off, and so the reader of later instalments may be
encouraged to seek other meanings or interpretations behind them.

We can also chart the shift in tone, from a more overtly satirical one
to a more sentimental quality, as the volumes progress. This reminds
us of the changing tastes among Sterne’s readers, and the way in
which he responds to this by altering the nature of his narrative
content, and the way in which he arranges it.

SAQ 4
Is Tristram Shandy just a quirky take on how to write a fictional
narrative, or does it offer the reader something more besides?

Tristram Shandy is undeniably provoking in the ways in which it

presents its fictional narrative to the reader: the visual devices,
narrative technique, and frequent challenges to the reader to engage
actively in the reading process – so as to construct the story for him
or herself, as it were – all offer ‘novel’ ways to write and read fiction.
The contrast with other fictional narratives, such as Pamela or Tom
Jones, is striking. However, more than just provoking surprise or
flouting readerly expectation lies behind why Sterne presents his
book to the reading public in this way. In Tristram Shandy, he probes
a range of philosophical, religious, literary and social issues; these
are exposed to closer scrutiny by being presented in a seemingly
quirky way. Furthermore, Tristram Shandy offers a ‘history’ of
everything that passes in the ‘mind’ of its narrator: as such, Sterne
challenges the reader to think about the way in which he or she
interprets the experiences gained from the world around them.
Tristram’s subjective interpretation of his experiences, and his
communication of those experiences to the reader in his highly
personal, idiosyncratic narrative, convey an impression of real life,
recorded in the process of being lived. As such, Tristram Shandy
offers the reader a perceptive insight upon how the human individual
lives within, and responds to, the world around him.

Unit 17: ‘The Rise of the Novel’? Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 17-37
_____________________________________________________________________

UNIT 18

SENTIMENTAL FICTION: HENRY

MACKENZIE’S MAN OF FEELING

AIMS
The aim of this unit is to introduce you to ‘sentimental fiction’, which
enjoyed immense popularity in the latter part of the eighteenth century,
through a reading of Henry Mackenzie’s novel The Man of Feeling.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit, you should be able to:

Identify what is meant by ‘sentiment’ and ‘sensibility’.

Describe how these qualities are manifested in the literature and

culture of the final decades of the eighteenth century.

Explain how the sentimental ‘phenomenon’ emerged and the extent

of its influence across Europe.

Provide a detailed reading of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling as a

novel of sentiment and of sensibility.

Suggest ways in which sentimental fiction encountered derision,

parody and satire from its first emergence.

REQUIRED READING
The required reading for this unit is:

Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771)

References in this unit are taken from Henry Mackenzie. 2009. Brian
Vickers (ed.), The Man of Feeling, (Oxford: Oxford University Press),
with notes and introduction by Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave.
This novel is also available online via Project Gutenberg.

INTRODUCTION
Over the past three units, we have addressed some of the different
ways in which prose fiction changed from the middle of the eighteenth
century onwards. We have seen how Samuel Richardson and Henry
Fielding offered alternative approaches to the new genre of the ‘novel’,
which came into being around this time. We have also seen how
Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
overturns some of the so-called ‘conventions’ of how a novel should be
written, and what kind of ‘story’ it should contain.

Tristram Shandy, however, was not the only work of prose fiction for
which Sterne was famous. His second work, A Sentimental Journey
through France and Italy, was published in the year of his death, 1768.
This book was as controversial as Tristram Shandy in some respects,
and helped to initiate a new trend in fiction-writing whose influence
would be vast and widespread. A Sentimental Journey was held by
many to embody a new-found mode of literary expression,

Unit 18: Sentimental Fiction: Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling 18-1

_____________________________________________________________________

‘sentimentalism’, and offered a model for future writers to base their

own sentimental fiction upon. However, arguably Richardson’s fiction
could equally be said to possess sentimental qualities, and (as we found
towards the end of the previous unit), in some respects Tristram Shandy
shows evidence of Sterne’s awareness of a change in reading tastes
towards the sentimental.

What exactly is meant by the term ‘sentiment’, and how it relates to a

closely connected term, ‘sensibility’, lies at the root of identifying which
author’s work is the first true example of this kind of fiction. To some
extent, the enquiry is misleading: perhaps there is no single ‘origin’ of
sentimental fiction, just as the term itself can hold multiple meanings.

We will address these, and related questions, in this unit. We will ask
what is meant by terms such as ‘sentiment’ and ‘sensibility’, and how
they might be manifested in the writings of some of the authors we
have already looked at in previous units. We will explore how the
fashion for sentimentalism took hold not only of literature, but of many
aspects of culture in the latter part of the eighteenth century, not just in
Britain but beyond. We will focus our enquiry into the meaning(s) of
sentiment, and its literary manifestation, through a close reading of a
text held by many to exemplify the ideas and ideals of sentimentalism:
Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771).

However, in the final section of this unit we shall question how far all
late eighteenth-century readers embraced the popularity of sentimental
literature. We will see how it actually soon encountered derision, which
often took the form of parody and satire. In fact, as we shall see, an
ironical treatment of sentiment is embedded in one of the very first
‘sentimental’ texts to appear, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. We shall
conclude this unit by asking how, why, and in what ways sentimental
fiction encountered satirical parody, and the implications this has for
future developments in prose fiction.

SENTIMENT AND SENSIBILITY: DEFINITIONS, ORIGINS

SENTIMENT
What do we mean by the word ‘sentiment’?

What is meant by ‘sensibility’, and how does it relate to ‘sentiment’ as a

word?

Where do these terms come from, and how are their meanings
manifested in literature of the latter part of the eighteenth century?

As literary critics from R. F. Brissenden to John Mullan warn us, the

definitions and origins of such words are by no means clear-cut or easy
to pin down. Brissenden suggests that these terms belong to a ‘family of
words’ which could connote a range of meanings and operate in a
variety of contexts and discourses (1974: 19-20). Mullan, meanwhile,
argues that the ‘problem’ of sentimentalism is not a matter faced by
modern-day critics alone: both its meaning, and the ideas connected to
it, were very pertinent to eighteenth-century readers too (1997: 14-16).

Nonetheless, resources such as the Oxford English Dictionary offer us

one means of finding out what the variant meanings of such terms
might be, where their first recorded usage appears, and how these
meanings might change over time and in different contexts. We shall
take each term in turn, comparing and contrasting the different
interpretations of ‘sentiment’ and of ‘sensibility’, and considering how
the relationship between them might be manifested in the literary texts
of this period that we have studied so far.

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Activity
Look up ‘sentiment’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s account of the word ‘sentiment’ reveals

that this term has very old origins and usages; however, it also
suggests that this term and its meanings acquired a new vitality during
the latter part of the eighteenth century, which had significant
implications for the development of literature in this period.

The word ‘sentiment’ has fourteenth-century origins in the poet

Chaucer’s writings, where it means a ‘personal experience, one’s own
feeling’. In its obsolete form, sentiment can mean a ‘sensation’ or
‘physical feeling’, while it later comes to mean ‘knowledge due to vague
sensation’. We also learn from the Dictionary entry that the word
‘sentiment’ gains a fresh range of meanings, besides these earlier
senses, in subsequent usages: it comes to acquire a more obviously
mental dimension, to mean an ‘intellectual or emotional perception’.

It is, we find, during the seventeenth century that the word ‘sentiment’
comes to apply to a psychological state, and specifically refers to ‘an
amatory feeling or inclination’. However, it is in the eighteenth-century
context that this dimension of the term comes to acquire its fullest
appreciation, and that it exerts an increasing impact on literary works.

The word ‘sentiment’, the OED tells us, increasingly comes to signify

An emotional thought expressed in literature or art; the feeling or

meaning intended to be conveyed by a passage, as distinguished
from the mode of expression.

The Dictionary cites its earliest example of this sense from 1709.
However, it is also in this period that ‘sentiment’ comes to acquire a
more generalised usage, to describe

Refined and tender emotion; exercise or manifestation of

‘sensibility’; emotional reflection or meditation; appeal to the
tender emotions in literature or art. Now chiefly in derisive use,
conveying an imputation of either insincerity or mawkishness.

This series of alternative meanings in the OED are significant to our

enquiries here: sentiment seems to be, on the one hand, something
positive: it is ‘refined and tender’, and can express both emotion and
the intellectual quality of ‘meditation’. However, in the present day, we
are told, ‘sentiment’ is used derisively, and is connected to suspicions of
‘insincerity or mawkishness’. The word ‘sensibility’ also appears in this
definition: how does that fit into the picture of ‘sentiment’ that we are
sketching here?

Some answers to these queries will become apparent as we come to

look at the texts themselves, which seem to embody such alternative
interpretations of what ‘sentiment’ is, and how it might be received by
readers of ‘literature’: for one thing, the OED cites Sterne’s Sentimental
Journey as its first example of the use of the word ‘sentiment’ in the
sense outlined here.

As we shall see, ‘sentiment’ comes increasingly to refer not only to an

individual’s state of mind, in a fairly abstract sense, but also to how the
emotional or intellectual quality of ‘sentiment’ affects his or her actions.
Indeed, it is only a short step from using ‘sentiment’ to refer to a person

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to the appearance of a new word to describe more accurately someone

who embodies such qualities: the word ‘sentimental’. As the OED again
tells us, the word ‘sentimental’ can be used adjectivally,

Of persons, their dispositions and actions: characterized by

sentiment. […] originally in favourable sense: characterized by or
exhibiting refined and elevated feeling. in later use: addicted to
indulgence in superficial emotion; apt to be swayed by sentiment.

Again, there is both a ‘favourable’ interpretation of sentiment in its

variant meaning of ‘sentimental’, and a more negative view that it is
‘superficial’ or self-indulgent; we should bear these variant responses to
sentiment in mind as we pursue our enquiries.

The first recorded appearance of the word, in a letter written by Lady

Bradshaigh to Richardson in 1749, gives us a hint that even at this
apparently ‘early’ stage in the term’s history, ‘sentimental’ could be
used in a pejorative sense; she asks the famous author,

What, in your opinion, is the meaning of the word sentimental, so

much in vogue among the polite [...] Every thing clever and
agreeable is comprehended in that word [...] I am frequently
astonished to hear such a one is a sentimental man; we were a
sentimental party; I have been taking a sentimental walk
(Oxford English Dictionary citation)

Lady Bradshaigh employs rather imperious sarcasm here: she implies

that the word is ‘so much in vogue among the polite’, who use it
indiscriminately to describe all manner of activities, that it might seem
worthless to call anyone or anything ‘sentimental’ at all. She hints at
how simply by becoming fashionable a word can lose its potential value,
and in a way can become meaningless. This is certainly an impression
that Horace Walpole, a writer we shall discuss in a subsequent unit,
conveys in 1752, when he writes to a friend that:

I am still sentimental enough to flatter myself, that a man who

could beg sixteen guineas, will not give them (Oxford English
Dictionary citation)

So, already by 1752, there has been a shift in meaning from the
admirable sense of sentiment, which refers to refined feelings and
emotions, to its pejorative to describe the suspicious financial
motivations of the beggar.

However, to imply that the word becomes mocked, or even redundant,

before it has even fully come into existence is to give a jaded picture of
what the words ‘sentiment’ and ‘sentimental’ meant at this time, and
how the qualities belonging to each term were manifested in literature:
instead, these variant, and potentially conflicting, meanings as sitting in
tandem. While commentators such as Lady Bradshaigh and Horace
Walpole might use the term with derision, there were still many writers
and readers in the latter part of the eighteenth century who took
sentimentalism seriously.

The ‘sentimental’ comes to signify, for some, both a development in

attitudes towards individual psychology, and a new aesthetic about how
the individual person’s thoughts and emotions might be expressed in
literature. We find, for instance, that the word ‘sentimental’ comes to
apply to an action that arises from feeling, rather than reason: there is
a growing emphasis upon the uncontrollable responses a person might
have to a particular situation, or to another person, when he or she is
driven by their emotional impulses rather than their ‘rational’ or
intellectual faculties.

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Predominant among such uncontrollable impulses, of course, is the

emotion of love: perhaps more than any other feeling, love and its
relatives (such as compassion, or tender-heartedness) come to
characterise literary manifestations of the term ‘sentimental’ during the
eighteenth century.

It is this dimension of the word and its cognates that leads to the
emergence of a fresh term, used to describe the general state of mind
of one who possesses sentimental qualities, and of the kind of literature
that tries to show such qualities: that term is ‘sentimentalism’.
According to the OED, this term describes:

The sentimental habit of mind; the disposition to attribute undue

importance to sentimental considerations, or to be governed by
sentiment in opposition to reason; the tendency to excessive
indulgence in or insincere display of sentiment.

The earliest recorded use of this in the OED is in 1817, in Byron’s poem
Beppo. Here, we can see, the ‘mind’ – which we would usually consider
to be the seat of rational thought – becomes a servant to the operations
of the feelings. By the time that this sense of the word emerges, the
hyperbole and self-indulgence present in earlier senses of the term has
become one of the predominant, defining qualities of ‘sentimentalism’.

SENSIBILITY
As the OED definitions here indicate, we cannot fully get a sense of what
‘sentiment’ means, and how it emerges in literature of the latter part of
the eighteenth century, without gaining some sense of what ‘sensibility’
means around this time.

Activity
Look up ‘sensibility’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

What is meant by the term ‘sensibility’?

How does it compare or contrast with the word ‘sentiment’ and its
cognates?

What are the differences, and what are the similarities between these
two terms?

How does this term’s usage alter over time?

How might they emerge to different effect in a literary text?

As the OED entries suggest, we can make a connection between the

word ‘sensible’ and ‘sensibility’: in one sense, ‘sensible’ has a quite
obvious meaning for us, as not silly. However, it is an alternative
dimension of the term that is particularly relevant to our analysis of
sentimental literature. ‘Sensible’, we find in the OED, has medieval
origins, and refers to what can be perceived by the senses; also, in an
adjectival sense, it describes the person who feels these sensations. The
OED marks a shift in the term’s use from its description of the ‘Power of
sensation or perception’ (a meaning that remains in usage right up until
the nineteenth century) and a more philosophical dimension of the
term, to mean the:

Power or faculty of feeling, capacity of sensation and emotion as

distinguished from cognition and will.

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The OED cites early nineteenth-century translations of the eighteenth-

century German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s influential Critique of Pure
Reason, which uses the word ‘sensibility’ in this sense. We can, perhaps,
infer that this dimension of the term was becoming recognisable in the
latter part of the eighteenth century. In fact, Kant’s Critique first
appeared in 1781, just a few years after the German author Johan
Wolfgang von Goethe’s hugely influential novel of sensibility, The
Sorrows of Young Werther, was published in 1774.

So, in this ‘philosophical’ sense, we see that ‘sensibility’ does not simply
involve bodily sensation, but refers to how an individual responds to
that sensation in an intellectual sense; in other words, he or she
interprets external stimuli as an ‘emotion’, making a physical ‘sensation’
into a mental one. Furthermore, this ‘sensation and emotion’ seem to be
divorced from ‘cognition and will’: one’s emotional response belongs to
a powerful ‘faculty of feeling’ over whose operations we have no rational
control.

This meaning of the word ‘sensibility’ suggests that our emotions

operate on a different plane to our reason, and that we cannot control
how we respond to things that move us; significantly for our enquiries in
this unit, this sense emerges in the eighteenth century. According to the
OED, this involves:

Emotional consciousness; glad or sorrowful, grateful or resentful

recognition of a person’s conduct, or of a fact or a condition of
things.

This sense is cited as first appearing in 1751, and becomes particularly

popular in the subsequent decades. The sense of heightened emotional
responsiveness indicated here is also connected to a meaning that the
word ‘sensibility’ comes to hold in the eighteenth century, which is
particularly relevant for us, that of:

Quickness and acuteness of apprehension or feeling; the quality

of being easily and strongly affected by emotional influences;
sensitiveness. Also […] sensitiveness to, keen sense of something.

Addison, for instance, uses this sense in the Spectator in 1711, as does
Hume in 1741, and Godwin in 1794, in Caleb Williams. So, it seems,
‘sensibility’ refers to a capacity for feeling that is so quick and ready
that a person is easily susceptible to ‘emotional influences’, to the point
of ‘sensitiveness’. As a result, perhaps, he or she is incapable of
controlling their responses to whatever it was that ‘strongly affected’
them that they can no longer respond to it in a rational way: they lose,
as it were, the power of ‘Will’ and reason.

SENTIMENT OR SENSIBILITY?
How does this compare with your understanding of the word
‘sentiment’?

In many respects, the two terms are similar in privileging emotion, or

feeling, over rational faculties of thought. However, there are
distinctions between the two words, which have certain implications for
how we relate them to literature produced in the last few decades of the
eighteenth century.

According to Janet Todd (1986: 7) ‘sentiment’ implies ‘a moral

reflection, a rational opinion’, and an ‘elevated’ thought that is
‘influenced by emotion’. By contrast, ‘sensibility’ denotes the ‘faculty of
feeling, the capacity for extremely refined emotion and a quickness to
display compassion for suffering’. Todd argues that sensibility involves

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‘an innate sensitiveness or susceptibility revealing itself in a variety of

spontaneous activities such as crying, swooning and kneeling’ (1986:
7).

How does this help us in our understanding of these terms, and of the
points of comparison and of contrast between them?

To some extent, as the OED definitions and Todd’s formula suggests,

these terms are closely linked: it is difficult to identify exactly what each
term ‘means’ when their meaning is inherently connected. However, the
impression that ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’ are in some senses separate,
which emerges from Todd’s account, underpins how we might separate
out these two terms: ‘emotion’ is a more ‘elevated’ dimension of human
responsiveness, whereas the ‘feeling’ associated with sensibility is
weaker, less subtle, and less controllable. Whereas the sentimentalist
might connect his emotional response to an external stimulus to a
‘rational’ train of thought, the ‘man of feeling’, affected by sensibility,
can only express that response in inarticulate bodily reactions, such as
‘sighing’ or ‘weeping’.

To some extent, ‘sensibility’ is a somewhat narrower term than

‘sentiment’, with perhaps less varied meanings, and it is less frequently
used; or, rather, when it is used it is in a more specific sense than
‘sentiment’. In many respects, ‘sensibility’ acquires a more specific, and
rarefied, meaning towards the end of the eighteenth century. Again, if
we look at the OED, we find that in this period, ‘sensibility’ comes to
denote a:

Capacity for refined emotion; delicate sensitiveness of taste; also,

readiness to feel compassion for suffering, and to be moved by
the pathetic in literature or art.

Cowper, for instance, uses ‘sensibility’ in this sense in 1762; and,

indeed, the term appears in 1768, in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey,
where the enraptured narrator exclaims:

Dear sensibility! source unexhausted of all that’s precious in our

joys, or costly in our sorrows!

In many respects, the fine line separating these two terms – and the
close connections between them – can be most clearly discerned
through examining examples of literature which seem to display on the
one hand ‘sentimental’ qualities, and on the other those of ‘sensibility’.
Perhaps, as we shall discover, some texts combine the two.

THE ‘ORIGINS’ OF SENTIMENTAL LITERATURE

As our survey of these dictionary definitions has revealed, the mid-
eighteenth century was a seminal moment in the evolution of ideas
about sentiment and sensibility. This period witnessed a large surge in a
body of literature which exemplified the different aspects of both
sentiment and sensibility, represented by characters who seemed to
embody such qualities.

Which texts provide the source or origin of ideas about sentiment, and
their development in literary form?

As we mentioned in the opening section of this unit, Richardson’s fiction

was held by many to exemplify sentimental qualities. In The Rise of the
Novel, Ian Watt describes how the growing interest in the individual
mind that, he argues, took place in the eighteenth century is a key
element of the ‘development’ of the novel form. In many respects this
fits into Watt’s focus on Richardson’s importance in the story of the
novel that he outlines: Richardson develops the psychological dimension

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of his main characters in a way that was perhaps unprecedented in

earlier narrative fiction. Richardson’s books were, moreover, held by
many to be prominent examples of ‘the sentimental’.

Pamela’s reflections on religion, or her expression of certain emotions in

response to the circumstances that befall her, provide one aspect of this
reading of Richardson’s role in the development of sentimental
literature. However, it is with his later novels, Clarissa and Sir Charles
Grandison, that Richardson responds most fully to the emerging taste
for sentimental literature, and the opportunity that exemplifying such
qualities gives the author to convey philosophical, religious or moral
ideas. In each text, the heroine and hero respectively display rarefied
feeling, and often demonstrate physical debility at moments of
heightened emotion, but also display a capacity to rationalise their
emotions, and to reflect upon them in a reasoned way. As Ian Watt
writes, in texts such as these,

One fairly common view has been that Richardson’s novels

gratified the sentimental tendencies of his age. (1972: 197)

However, as Watt goes on to qualify with significant implications for the

role of sentimentalism in the ‘rise of the novel’ that he describes, it is
misleading to describe Richardson’s books as ‘sentimental novels’. Watt
describes the new valorisation of ‘sentiment’ in eighteenth-century
literature as involving ‘the depiction of benevolence’ through
‘philanthropic action or generous tears’, but also goes on to say that
while:

There are undoubtedly features in Richardson’s work which are

‘sentimental’ in this as well as in the current sense, but the term
is nevertheless somewhat misleading when applied either to his
own outlook or to the characteristic literary quality of his novels.
For, as we have seen, Richardson’s moral theory was opposed to
the cult of love and emotional release in general, while in his
practice as a novelist he presented a much wider range of feelings
than those to which the sentimentalists proper usually restricted
themselves. (1972: 197)

So if Richardson is not a ‘sentimentalist proper’, which authors of this

period are? Laurence Sterne is often described as a writer who displays,
and perhaps exploits, sentimentalism in his fiction. We encountered
Tristram Shandy in the previous unit, and noted how its tone shifts
across its nine volumes from a more satirical to a more pathetic
register; we saw how this is partly due to its publication in instalments,
which allowed Sterne to respond to the changing tastes of his reading
public. These tastes were increasingly becoming attuned to enjoying
scenarios, characters and stories which displayed sentimental qualities.

In some respects, we could argue, Tristram Shandy parodies the

psychological dimension that Richardson seems to develop to great
success in his fiction; after all, Tristram gives us the ‘history of what
passes in one man’s mind’ in a consciously comical way, that reflects
upon Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. However, there
are decidedly distinct elements of sentimentalism in Tristram Shandy. In
the later volumes of Sterne’s book there is a distinct shift in tone; the
reader is finally given the story of uncle Toby’s amours, a sentimental
love-theme that the reader has been promised since the first volume of
this book.

Furthermore, the narrator of Tristram Shandy seems to position himself

as a ‘sentimental’ narrator, for instance by lamenting the death of Yorick
with a feeling encomium, ‘Alas! Poor Yorick!’. However, the tear-jerking
quality of this moment is nonetheless also coupled with our awareness

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that this is also a literary joke, an impression which is heightened by

Sterne’s use of the black page which follows this scene.

In later volumes, however, Tristram shows perhaps increasingly greater

signs of being a ‘sentimentalist’: he sighs and weeps over uncle Toby’s
grave, for instance. Episodes such as the ‘Story of Le Fever’, or
‘rhapsodies’ upon uncle Toby’s benevolence or Parson Yorick’s personal
qualities, all demonstrate the narrator’s sentimentalism, and provoke an
emotional response in the reader. However, as we found in the previous
unit, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is predominantly comic, and his use of
sentiment is perhaps ironic rather than necessarily sincere; we could
argue, he exploits this emerging taste among his readers for
commercial reasons.

Yet Sterne is nonetheless a prominent figure in the emergence of this

taste for sentimental fiction, and in many respects his work is one of the
principal reasons why this type of literature became so popular. A
Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, published shortly before
the author’s death in 1768, cements some of the newly emerging ideas
about what ‘the sentimental’ was, and how it might be used in
literature.

A Sentimental Journey offers contemporary and subsequent authors an

exemplar for how ‘sentimental fiction’ might be written, or at least for
how the qualities of sentimentalism might be embodied in the
narrative’s chief protagonist. Indeed, that Sterne wishes his novel to be
read in this way is clearly paraded in its title. However, as we shall
discover in this unit, ‘sentiment’ in Sterne’s text is not necessarily
presented in a clear-cut way: indeed, he renders the term and its
manifestation in his protagonist’s actions ambivalent in certain
provoking ways.

However, in some surface respects at least, A Sentimental Journey

offers us an exemplary sentimental text, which has significant
implications for the way in which Henry Mackenzie treats this concept in
his Man of Feeling.

How does sentiment emerge in Sterne’s text, and what might we learn
from A Sentimental Journey that might inform our reading of The Man of
Feeling?

Sterne’s narrative is not organised as a coherent sequence of orderly

chapters, following a distinctively marked-out chronology in which
characters interact in a chain of events. Instead, the narrative is
episodic: it is composed of several short vignettes which are not
necessarily connected to one another. Characters appear in certain
scenes, but are then never referred to again. Similarly, the text itself is
fragmented by Sterne’s trademark dashes, by aposiopeses, and by
occasional visual features, such as a picture of the narrator’s coat of
arms. This fragmentation of the narrative provides an important model
for subsequent authors of sentimental fiction: it seems to embody the
disjointed feelings a sentimental character might experience, or the
incoherence he or she experiences following a particularly moving
moment.

Furthermore, the narrator of Sterne’s second novel is one of the more

overtly ‘sentimental’ characters familiar from Tristram Shandy, Parson
Yorick, who displayed a capacity to be compassionate and ‘emotional’ in
response to some stimuli, but also an ability to exert his reason, even to
be witty or ironic. Indeed, this complexity emerges in Yorick’s
presentation in A Sentimental Journey. In many ways, he embodies the
qualities of sentimentalism: he encounters beggars, the needy, or
individuals similarly capable of elevated emotions. He is often moved by

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the suffering of others, and encouraged to exert his reason to respond

accordingly: for instance, he rationalises the grief at seeing lame
beggars in Paris, and attempts to relieve their suffering by giving them
alms.

Yorick frequently expresses profound thoughts, motivated by external

objects of compassion, which as we have seen identifies him as a
sentimentalist who uses reason to make sense of his emotional
experiences. Many of these are of a religious nature, such as when
Yorick is moved by a fairly trivial experience to reflect upon the ‘Great
Sensorium of the World’ (Sterne 2008: 98), the divine seat of all
sentimental feeling.

And, of course, Yorick is most susceptible to what we have identified as

one of the defining aspects of the sentimentalist: love, in the sense of
the tender passion. His encounters with a shop-keeper and with a fille
de chambre at Paris, for instance, or his lamentations for the sorry
decline of poor, mad Maria (who also appears in Tristram Shandy), all
show evidence of his delicate feelings towards women.

However, Yorick also frequently displays qualities identifiable as those of

‘sensibility’: he is sometimes so overwhelmed by his emotions that he
becomes completely unable to express them in words, or to act upon
them. For instance, at one point in A Sentimental Journey, Yorick comes
across a caged starling in his hotel at Paris. He is deeply moved by the
sight of an imprisoned animal, compassion towards animals being a key
feature of sentimentalism. The sight of the caged starling, which he
imagines as plaintively crying ‘I can’t get out!’ (Sterne 2008: 60),
transports Yorick onto a different mental plane: the sight of this
animal’s incarceration leads him to think about captivity in general.

Yorick tries to picture in his imagination the poor captive trapped in a

prison cell who yearns for freedom. However, Sterne’s narrator becomes
so overwhelmed with this terrible vision, and the tender emotions of
compassion that it arouses, that he becomes incapable of conceiving a
full picture of it and can no longer describe it in words; he tells his
reader that:
[…] finding, however affecting the picture was, that I could not
bring it near me, […] − I could not sustain the picture of
confinement which my fancy had drawn− I startled up from my
chair […] . (Sterne 2008: 61)

The ‘picture’ Yorick draws for himself is simply too ‘affecting’ for him to
respond to in a rational way, and he falls into a state of aphasia: he is
unable to articulate his feelings. We might even say that at this point,
this ‘sentimental traveller’ displays qualities that might be defined as
those belonging to ‘sensibility’. As such, in this passage, sentiment and
sensibility merge.

This passage also indicates the sense of excess that we discerned in our
definitions of sentiment and of sensibility: the emotions or feelings
aroused by particular situations, or other living beings, become so
overwhelming that the narrator of sentimental fiction hyperbolises his
description of them, so much so that (in some cases) he is no longer
able to speak at all. As we shall see, this aspect of sentimental excess is
particularly prominent in Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, where the ‘affect’
of certain scenes or emotions not only make the hero incapable of
speaking, but also disable him on a bodily, physical level too.

As such, our understanding of the ‘origins’ of sentimental fiction alerts

us to how the expression of sentiment or of sensibility in literary texts
can be variable: the differing aspects of what these terms mean is

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reflected by the way in which different authors apply them to fictional

characters and situations.

As we have seen the term ‘sentiment’ and its subsequent mutations into
a new range of terms to describe the qualities it possesses, and the
people and books it might apply to, shows a marked evolution from an
initially abstract sense of the word to one that becomes increasingly
connected to an individual person’s state of mind – and specifically, his
or her emotions – and how this affects his or her actions. We have
found that this involves a growing emphasis on ‘passion’ or ‘emotion’
rather than ‘reason’ – especially when that involves love; in this respect,
it is closely tied to the word ‘feeling’, which clearly has an important
significance for the text upon which we shall be focussing in this unit:
Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling.

SAQ 1
What might we describe as the ‘origins’ of sentimental fiction?

HENRY MACKENZIE’S MAN OF FEELING

How does our understanding of sentiment and sensibility as terms and
concepts, and our awareness of the history of sentimental fiction,
enlighten our reading of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling?

Activity
Read Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling.

THE EPISODIC NARRATIVE

In many respects, this book represents what some critics have held to
be the epitome of sentimental fiction; or, rather, it shows the fashion for
sensibility at its height. In some respects, Mackenzie’s novel pushes the
character of the sentimentalist to such an extreme that subsequent
sentimental fiction is unable to take his qualities any further without
verging on the ridiculous.

In some senses, Mackenzie seems to take up where Sterne left off, as

The Man of Feeling was published in 1771, fairly soon after A
Sentimental Journey’s appearance in 1768. Mackenzie adopts many
features of the ‘sentimental traveller’ at the centre of Sterne’s text when
shaping his own central character; however, in many ways Harley
demonstrates an even greater emotional susceptibility, and sensibility,
than the tender-hearted Yorick.

From a structural point of view, Mackenzie also follows the episodic

format of A Sentimental Journey: in this way, like Sterne he challenges
certain contemporary readers’ expectations about how a fictional
narrative should be written. One critic describes how The Man of Feeling
tries to stand out in a market filled by similar types of books by being
innovative with the narrative form. The composition of Mackenzie’s
book, according to Kenneth C. Slagle, is ‘unusual in several particulars’;
he goes on to suggest that:
With publishers striving to outdo each other in bizarre attractions,
numerous experiments had been made in presenting stories to the
public. Booksellers had novels on their shelves purporting to have
come from manuscripts found in old desks, chests, bureaus,
hackney coaches, abandoned clothes. (Mackenzie 1958: vii)

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In The Man of Feeling, Mackenzie developed a new narrative device to

combat the accusation of merely imitating other contemporary
publications, and to establish the novelty of his own text; he

[…] introduced the sporting curate with a manuscript book which

had furnished frequent wadding for his fowling piece. The natural
resulting mutilation served to explain a lack of connected plot
and gave the author excuse for omissions and even incoherence.
(Mackenzie 1958: vii)

Before the narrative proper begins, which we expect to find upon

opening The Man of Feeling, the reader is confronted with at least two
different stories in the book’s ‘Introduction’. The unnamed narrator of
this account describes to an unnamed second person – perhaps in the
form of a letter – how when he went out shooting one day he and his
companion, a curate, caught sight of a mysterious young woman. As the
friends speculate about who she is, the curate relates some details he
knows of her personal history; it emerges that this young woman’s story
is closely related to that of another, equally mysterious figure, ‘one
HARLEY’.

The curate tantalisingly promises this initial narrator that the fragments
of information he has given about Harley belong to a fuller history, the
‘greatest part’ of which is still in the curate’s ‘possession’. The curate
himself obtained this written record from yet another character, known
as ‘The Ghost’; however, he is relatively uninterested in this story
himself, and explains how he soon tired of reading the manuscript. As
he tells the narrator of the Introduction,

[…] I could never find the author in one strain for two chapters
together. (Mackenzie 2009: 5)

Clearly, the curate is not a reader who can easily become engrossed in
the fragmented, episodic story, of which publications such as Tristram
Shandy or A Sentimental Journey might provide contemporary
examples. Instead, the curate prefers reading more sober, theological
tracts, whose point and purpose are clear, and whose argument (or
narrative) follows a linear pattern. In fact, the curate reveals that he
holds these documents in such poor esteem that he only uses them as
‘wadding’ for his gun.

The unnamed narrator of the ‘Introduction’, however, is clearly a

different type of reader: he is more intrigued than the curate by the
promisingly intriguing hints he has had of this Harley’s history, and
suggests that he savours the challenge of making sense of a story which
is conveyed in shreds and patches. He exchanges the curate’s
manuscript for the ‘wadding’ of his own gun, a German philosophical
work which appeals to the curate’s reading tastes, and eagerly reads
about Harley’s history.

However, there lies yet another story within this narrator’s attempt to
make a coherent account out of the scraps of narrative he finds in this
manuscript. He describes how:

[…] I found it a bundle of little episodes, put together without art,

and of no importance on the whole, with something of nature, and
little else in them. I was a good deal affected with some very
trifling passages in it; and had the name of Marmontel, or a
Richardson, been on the title-page – ’tis odds that I should have
wept […] . (Mackenzie 2009: 4-5)

Here, the narrator of this ‘Introduction’ denies making any great literary
claims about this book: it is apparently written ‘without art’, it is ‘of no
importance on the whole’, and consists of ‘trifling passages’. And yet the

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narrator suggests potential points of comparison with more ‘literary’

texts that signal to the nature of the narrative that lies ahead:
Richardson’s name in particular prompts us to think about the
‘sentimental’ qualities of his text. Mackenzie sets up a comparison
between The Man of Feeling and such famous literary precursors both to
identify the type of book that it is, and about its qualities.

However, in stating that this text is entirely ‘natural’, Mackenzie

differentiates The Man of Feeling from other literary works which might
equally be identified as sentimental fictions. The narrator’s suggestion
that he might have wept, had he known it was by Richardson, but did
not because the manuscript was anonymous, is perhaps ironic: through
saying this, Mackenzie hints that we only ‘weep’ at sentimental
narratives when we are conditioned by our preconceptions to do so.
These assumptions are founded upon knowing the identity of the author
as one who typically writes ‘sentimental fiction’.

In fact, we are told, while this narrative might be artless, as a result it is

more true to ‘nature’; it is precisely the naïve and rudimentary literary
style of this history that increases the impression that this is a true
story. As such, it is easier for us to believe in it, to identify with its
characters, and to engage with their experiences in a sympathetic way.
It is this kind of emotional engagement with the supposedly realistic
narrative that identifies The Man of Feeling as a striking example of
sentimental fiction. The implication is that the more ‘natural’, rather
than contrived, sentiment of Mackenzie’s narrative will actually be more
convincing, and more affective, because it is not written in an obviously
‘literary’ way.

The difference between the ‘natural’ roughness of the literary style of

this text, compared with the artificial smoothness of more famous
precursors (such as Richardson’s novels), emerges in the way that
Mackenzie organises the structural elements of The Man of Feeling.
Mackenzie appears to make more modest claims about The Man of
Feeling compared to such texts as, for instance, Pamela: he does not
provide the book with a preface which makes great boasts about its
literary merits and moral purpose. Instead, the most important
paratextual device of The Man of Feeling is the Introduction, which in a
sense is not a paratext at all. It is both outside the narrative itself, and
within it: it is a part of the ‘story’ of The Man of Feeling, yet also offers a
framing device for the main narrative of Mackenzie’s book.

In many ways, this pseudo-preface introduces narrative complexity from

the outset, giving us a compacted version of the several different
stories, lives and opinions that make up the substance of other
contemporary novels. Rather like Sterne, Mackenzie gives us snap-shots
of people’s lives that we will never learn anything more about, such as
the curate. The Introduction also entices us as readers into the narrative
itself, by promising us greater elucidation of the mysterious hints that
we are given about certain other characters, and in particular Harley
himself.

We are, perhaps, encouraged to connect this figure with the ‘man of

feeling’ named on the title-page, and so to hope that the narrative will
show how, and in what ways, Harley lives up to this identity.
Furthermore, we are sympathetically engaged with this character even
before any real facts or information about him have been given to us:
we know, for instance, that his story is a tragically sad one, possibly a
story of unrequited love involving the enigmatic young woman viewed in
the Introduction, and so we are drawn into the narrative so as to find
out more.

We are forewarned that this narrative will be difficult to follow: its

fragmentary quality will demand our attention as readers, and perhaps

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leave some of our expectations unfulfilled. But as such, we are

encouraged to engage with this challenge to gain the benefits and
enjoyment of reading this story, or perhaps its deeper emotional
significance, which the narrator of the Introduction promises us we can
find in it: he speaks from personal experience of having read this story
himself. Indeed, the fragmented nature of the narrative is essential to
conveying that impression of veracity, and to increasing our emotional
response to Harley’s history.

Whereas Yorick’s narrative had been episodic and fragmented – perhaps

evoking the disjointed feelings of someone who is moved by his
emotions – Mackenzie’s novel takes this one step further, using the
material circumstances affecting the apparently ‘original’ manuscript to
introduce ruptures and elisions in the narrative. These breaks and
‘missing’ passages of text partly try to convey the impression that this
story really was discovered in manuscript form – and so add to the
‘novelty’ of the book for readers; they also enable the author to convey
an impression of the disjointed nature of his protagonist’s experiences
through the very format of the text itself.

Our familiarity with Sterne’s manipulation with the visual appearance

and organisational principles of the novel might lead us to view his use
of this episodic format with some scepticism. However, in The Man of
Feeling this facetious quality is much more difficult to identify; in fact,
there is a distinct sense that the ‘sentimental narrative’ that he conveys
is sincere. The term ‘man of feeling’ in Sterne’s hands would perhaps
inevitably have opened up the possibility of introducing bawdy
innuendo; in Mackenzie’s text, by contrast, we are given a central
protagonist who we can truly believe embodies all the qualities that we
might hope to find in the sentimentalist.

HARLEY AS SENTIMENTAL HERO

The identity of Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling as sentimental fiction rests
principally upon the depiction of its central character, in whom the
qualities identifiable as belonging to the sentimentalist are most clearly
shown. Furthermore, Harley’s character displays many aspects of the
related identity we have already sketched in this unit, that of sensibility.

Activity
Make notes on which passages of The Man of Feeling present Harley’s
character as exemplifying either sentiment, or sensibility, or both.

As we have suggested in our analysis of the Introduction, the reader is

given hints about Harley’s character even before the narrative proper
begins: the curate calls him ‘a whimsical sort of a man’, a description,
however, that he only gets from hearsay and general opinion.
Nonetheless, this suggestion of ‘whimsicality’ is significant in several
respects. For one thing, this is a word that Sterne’s Yorick uses on
several occasions to describe his own character as a sentimental
traveller.

What does ‘whimsicality’ mean, and how might it emerge in sentimental

fiction?

Whimsicality can include impulsiveness, a quick responsiveness to

emotional stimuli, an inclination to dwell on trifles, and a tendency to
pursue flights of fancy. Yorick displays many such tendencies in A
Sentimental Journey; they similarly emerge in Harley’s character in The

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Man of Feeling. However, the whimsicality of Mackenzie’s hero is very

different to Yorick’s: it lacks the self-conscious humour that Sterne
works into his narrative. Whereas Sterne perhaps manipulates this
sentimental quality for comic effect, Mackenzie uses it to further the
impression that the emotional responses of this man of feeling are truly
sincere.

SENTIMENTALISM AND TRAVEL

Nonetheless, Harley and Yorick share another significant connection, in
that both develop their sentimental characters through the process of a
journey: like Yorick’s travels, it is through meeting other people,
hearing their sad stories and responding to them in a suitably emotional
way that Harley shows his qualities as a ‘man of feeling’. This alerts us
to a link between sentimental fiction and travel literature that we will
comment upon in subsequent units. These two genres were highly
popular in the latter part of the eighteenth-century, but as A
Sentimental Journey and The Man of Feeling reveal, an author can blur
the boundary between them to enhance the particularly sentimental
quality of his narrative.

In The Man of Feeling, ‘travel’ is provided as the antidote to the ‘rust’ –

meaning here the habits of mind and character – that a man accrues by
staying in the same place for too long. Travel opens the mind, as
Harley’s narrative reveals; but more importantly travel opens the heart,
by providing the hero with fresh opportunities to show that he has the
sympathetic tendencies belonging to the true sentimentalist. Each new
encounter brings Harley into contact with an unprecedented number of
suffering individuals which allows him to express and develop even
further the inherent character traits described at the beginning of the
Man of Feeling.

Harley, we are told, is possessed of:

[…] a consciousness, which the most delicate feelings produce,

and the most extensive knowledge cannot always remove.
(Mackenzie 2009: 8)

Even in this initial description, before we become fully acquainted with

Harley, we find that he possesses qualities that we have previously
described as belonging to the sentimental character: he has a ‘delicacy’
of feeling, and an intensely alert ‘consciousness’ to the impressions
conveyed by the people and objects of the outside world. Furthermore,
we find in this sentence, this emotional capacity is pitted against
reason: the ‘knowledge’ of learning, and (it is implied) rational thought,
will always be subservient to the qualities that a true man of feeling
possesses. As such, Harley’s character embodies the qualities of
‘sensibility’ that, as we discovered earlier, privilege feeling over intellect.

SENTIMENTALISM AND RHETORICAL EXCESS

These qualities are repeatedly displayed throughout the narrative;
Harley’s identity as a sentimental ‘man of feeling’ is repeatedly
confirmed through his words and actions. The heightened emotion of his
response to even the most banal or trivial stimulus often verges on the
excessive. Mackenzie is, perhaps, aware that such sentimental excess
might at times border on the ridiculous. For instance, when he first
meets the lovely Miss Walton, Harley is so enraptured at hearing her
sing that the narrator says that:

The effect it had upon Harley, himself used to paint ridiculously

enough; and ascribed it to powers, which few believed, and
nobody cared for. (Mackenzie 2009: 13)

In Sterne, this kind of sentence might prompt a smile; in The Man of

Feeling, however, Mackenzie tries to counter the slight fear that his

Unit 18: Sentimental Fiction: Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling 18-15

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hero’s character might be considered ridiculous by making such a

suggestion himself outright: it is as though he can refute potential
criticism by talking about it before any critic has even had the chance to
read his text. Moreover, this is an accusation that he hopes to repudiate
with the subsequent numerous demonstrations of how genuine, and
genuinely moving, this kind of heightened emotional response in Harley
can be.

Which passages in The Man of Feeling demonstrate the sincerely

sentimental qualities of Harley’s character?

On one level, Harley’s intensified feeling is expressed in the words he

uses: he frequently breaks out into the sentimentalist’s characteristic
rhapsodies on subjects such as benevolence, love, natural beauty and
the divine power discerned through such virtues.

SENTIMENTALISM AND BENEVOLENT ACTION

However, Harley is not a man of feeling in words alone: his actions, or
physical responses to the things that move him, also demonstrate the
qualities of sentimentalism we have outlined. Upon encountering a
beggar at an early point in his journey, Harley is so sorry for the poor
man’s situation that he loses his appetite (Mackenzie 2009: 16).

Harley’s actions in this episode, however, are not just centred on his
own body. Indeed, he is so moved by this scene of pity that he feels
inclined to exercise a key aspect of the sentimentalist’s character: the
capacity for benevolence.

Philanthropic action is a central part of how the sentimentalist can

connect his own emotional responses to certain external stimuli with the
objects that inspire such responses: it is a way of linking the individual
man of feeling with the outside world in a constructive way, showing
that heightened emotion can urge the individual towards taking active
interest in objects of pity or compassion.

In A Sentimental Journey, Yorick is often moved by scenes of poverty,

such as the groups of beggars who line Paris’s streets; but he is not
purely moved to think about them in a pitiful way. Instead, he puts his
feelings into action by giving alms.

In the episode involving the beggar in The Man of Feeling, Harley shows
a similar capacity for acting generously upon the shift in his emotional
state. However, as Mackenzie’s description of this scene suggests,
sentimental benevolence is not necessarily a straightforward
transaction:

Harley had drawn a shilling from his pocket; but Virtue bade him
consider on whom he was going to bestow it. Virtue held back his
arm; but a milder form, a younger sister of Virtue’s, not so severe
as Virtue, nor so serious as Pity, smiled upon him; his fingers lost
their compression, nor did Virtue offer to catch the money as it
fell. It had no sooner reached the ground than the watchful cur (a
trick he had been taught) snapped it up, and, contrary to the
most approved method of stewardship, delivered it immediately
into the hands of his master. (2009: 18)

This rather lengthy description of the simple act of giving alms in fact
tells us several important things about sentimental benevolence, both
its virtues and potential objections to it. For one thing, we see that the
benevolent act is not automatic: Harley actually hesitates in giving the
coin, and must first of all deliberate upon whether the object of his
benevolence is, quite literally, worth it.
In one sense, we might ask, does this show that Harley is subject to

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reason, rather than the impulsive emotionalism that should characterise

him as a sentimentalist? However, the emotional impulse finally
triumphs: it is an unnamed quality that lies between ‘Virtue’ and ‘Pity’
which finally compels him to drop the coin. As such, he proves himself
to be a true sentimental traveller.

Yet as this passage suggests, sentimental benevolence is not necessarily

always a straightforward act of kindness, or of sympathetic pity; in fact,
as contemporary eighteenth-century readers and writers were aware,
sentimental benevolence can potentially be loaded with accusations of
selfish altruism. This is a problem that subsequent critics, such as R. F.
Brissenden, have also suggested (1974: 32, 49). The objection to
sentimental benevolence is that, in giving money to a miserable beggar
or similarly suffering individual, the sentimentalist gratifies his or her
own saddened, emotional feelings about this other person rather than
really caring about relieving that person’s suffering.

Some critics go even further; Robert Markley, for instance, links this
attack upon sentimental philanthropy to a Marxist argument about the
capitalist economy. As he writes,

Money becomes the sentimentalist’s medium of exchange, a

palpable, materialist manifestation of good nature as a commodity
(Markley 1987: 210)

Markley suggests that the act of sentimental generosity is actually a

way by which the bourgeois elite can (albeit subconsciously) relieve
feelings of guilt about their own privilege, compared to the deprivation
of others. Sterne’s Yorick comes under particular attack in Markley’s
account.

However, the potentially troublesome nature of benevolence is also

detected, and partially exposed, by some eighteenth-century writers. In
The Man of Feeling, for instance, ‘The Misanthropist’ whom Harley
encounters in his travels reflects upon the nature of ‘Vanity’, suggesting
that the powerful and wealthy only ‘boast of generosity and feeling’
rather than genuinely holding such qualities. He claims of such people
that:

[…] the sensations of an honest heart, of a mind universally

benevolent, make up the quiet bliss which they enjoy; but they
will not, by this, be exempt from the charge of selfishness. […]
With vanity your best virtues are grossly tainted: your
benevolence, which ye deduce immediately from the natural
impulse of the heart, squints to it for its rewards. There are some,
indeed, who tell us of the satisfaction which flows from a secret
consciousness of good actions: this secret satisfaction is truly
excellent – when we have some friend to whom we may discover
its excellence. (Mackenzie 2009: 32)

Not only do generous acts actually have selfish motives, this passage
suggests, but we perform them because we want other people to see
how generous we are. However, whilst this ‘Misanthropist’ voices such
potential accusations against acts of benevolence, Harley’s rejection of
the seeming truth of what he says suggests that The Man of Feeling is
an extended refutation of such a pessimistic view of human nature.
Harley responds to this meeting by saying that:

[…] it is curious to observe how the nature of truth may be

changed to the garb it wears. (Mackenzie 2009: 33)

Harley’s ensuing journey is designed to be an active demonstration of

how genuine feeling can motivate sincerely good actions, exempt from

Unit 18: Sentimental Fiction: Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling 18-17

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the charges of vanity or self-gratification. Mackenzie achieves this

through presenting his hero in a series of new and challenging
scenarios, each of which provide the opportunity to demonstrate
different aspects of Harley’s sentimental character.

This depends upon the way in which Harley interacts with other human
individuals: he demonstrates ‘romantic enthusiasm’ (Mackenzie 2009:
61, 65) upon encountering new people and objects of compassion, each
of which gives him an opportunity of displaying his capacity for
sentimental feeling.

SENTIMENTALISM AND CONNECTEDNESS WITH OTHER

INDIVIDUALS
In order to demonstrate this sentimental capacity, Harley establishes
what might be called ‘connectedness’ with others as a way of linking his
own individual human feelings with the objects that inspire them. His
sympathetic responses to such examples of misery and human suffering
become increasingly numerous, and increasingly more intense, as the
narrative progresses.

The episode involving the visit to Bedlam, the mental asylum, provides
a particularly ripe opportunity for Harley to show that he is a man of
feeling. Modern-day readers might find such an episode shockingly
distasteful: surely visiting an asylum is a very objectionable leisure
activity. However, the practice of viewing inmates in such asylums was
common among the wealthier classes of eighteenth-century society,
who often considered the inmates to be objects of curiosity rather than
suffering human individuals. Yet there were many people at this time
who objected to such practices as inhumane.

In The Man of Feeling, the Bedlam episode shows that Harley sides with
those who find such activities uncomfortable. His response to the human
misery witnessed in the asylum demonstrates that he is a true
sentimentalist; his grief-ridden and emotional response to his visit to
Bedlam suggests that contemporary sensibilities found this to be a
profoundly disturbing practice.

Mackenzie paints a horrific picture of the ‘misery’ endured in the

asylum: ‘The clanking of chains, the wildness of their cries’ (Mackenzie
2009: 23) creates a truly unpleasant scene, and a ripe occasion for
Harley to display his most delicate feelings. He is nonetheless ‘curious’
about the individuals he comes across in his visit (Mackenzie 2009: 17);
indeed, so much so that we might be tempted to think that he is a
disinterested observer, not truly moved by the horror of Bedlam and its
impact upon individual human beings. However, when Harley actually
engages with the inmates themselves, as individuals with their own
particular stories, he shows his true capacity for feeling: he is
profoundly moved by each story he hears.

Harley is most profoundly moved by the story of the noble young

woman who had been jilted by her lover; this provides yet another
interpolated story in Harley’s own narrative, yet one which allows us to
see his development as a character through the reactions he shows
upon hearing this story. He gives this story ‘the tribute of some tears’,
talks with the young woman, and finally ‘burst into tears’ again before
leaving the asylum (Mackenzie 2009: 26-7).

This episode shows his susceptibility to ‘affect’, a term intimately

connected with the emotional responsiveness of the sentimental
individual. As the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, ‘affect’ is concerned
with the senses that relate to the mind; it can mean:

The manner in which one is inclined or disposed; (also) the

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capacity for willing or desiring; a mental state, mood, or emotion,

esp. one regarded as an attribute of a more general state; a
feeling, desire, intention.

Affect shares qualities that are identifiable as belonging to sensibility; it

is

An inner disposition or feeling (rather than an external

manifestation or action); intent, intention, earnest, reality.

And, as the Bedlam episode in The Man of Feeling reveals, affect is

closely involved with how human beings relate to one another: it shows:

Feeling towards or in favour of a person or thing; kindly feeling,

affection; (also) an instance of this. An emotional, unreflective
response.

As this Dictionary entry here suggests, ‘affect’ involves a sensitive

reaction to the emotional state of another human being, which awakens
the qualities of sensibility, of unthinking responsiveness, that we have
already seen applies to Harley’s character. And, as Harley shows in the
visit to Bedlam, affect can have an impact upon the way in which the
sentimental individual thinks, speaks and acts. As the Dictionary further
explains, affect is:

A feeling or subjective experience accompanying a thought or

action or occurring in response to a stimulus; an emotion, a
mood. In later use also […] the outward display of emotion or
mood, as manifested by facial expression, posture, gestures, tone
of voice […].

Indeed, the physical dimensions of sentimentalism – the emotions’

effect upon the human body – are repeatedly connected to the feelings
that Harley owns. The narrative demonstrates throughout how Harley is
a ‘man of feeling’ in all senses of the term: both in a metaphorical and
in a physical sense.

THE ‘TRIBUTE OF TEARS’: SENTIMENTALISM AND THE BODY

Indeed, Harley’s readiness to shed tears at every moving story or sight
strongly characterises his identity as a sentimental traveller, moved by
the powerful scenes of human suffering he encounters. Furthermore,
this over-sensitive responsiveness to sad stories or evidence of human
suffering, manifested in this physical reaction, demonstrates how Harley
expresses qualities belonging to sensibility. His tears often flow to
excess, and demonstrate the hyperbolised emotionalism which, as we
found earlier, can potentially border on the ridiculous.

However, it is towards the end of his journey, and of the book’s

narrative, that these various aspects of Harley’s sentimentality come to
full fruition. Harley learns that the woman he’s loved all along, Miss
Walton, is to be married. Mackenzie describes how:

At that instant a shepherd blew his horn: the romantic melancholy

of the sound quite overcame him! – it was the very note that
wanted to be touched – he sighed! he dropped a tear! – (2009:
84)

The physical and emotional nature of Harley’s response here, in which

the terrible news he receives has a profound effect upon his mental
state, in which his body is forced to share, brings together the hints
throughout the narrative so far that the hero is a man of feeling in both
senses of the word. Harley ‘feels’ the impact of his experiences on an
emotional level, but he also feels them on a sentient, physical level too.

Unit 18: Sentimental Fiction: Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling 18-19

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As Tim Parnell argues,

Sentiment has a physical basis. It begins in the body, in the

senses. We recognize it by bodily signs: in fainting or swooning,
crying, an inability to speak (Mackenzie 2009: xii)

As we have seen, this is manifested in his tears, sighs, and occasional

illness. It is, of course, this union of body and mind in the man of feeling
that sets up the hero’s subsequent decline in this narrative.
We learn in the ensuing pages of Harley’s increasing physical debility:
he becomes weakened and ill by the grief he suffers at contemplating
the loss of Miss Walton. Initially, he is ‘graver than usual’ (Mackenzie
2009: 84), then recovers enough to write a pastoral poem ‘upon the
handle of a tea-kettle’ about unrequited love (Mackenzie 2009: 84). The
narrative then breaks off into a series of fragments, through which we
gather the conclusion to Harley’s story.

This enhanced episodic quality of the narrative reaffirms that Mackenzie

uses innovative writing techniques to establish the unique identity of his
sentimental narrative. Following the tale of Count Respino and Sedley,
the narrator interrupts with a supposed editorial explanation for the
gaps in the ensuing narrative: he tells us that the curate’s
‘depredations’ on the manuscript are most apparent at this crucial
juncture of the story (Mackenzie 2009: 93). Instead, the external
narrative voice relates what happened to Harley both by assembling the
fragments of ‘the mutilated passages’ still left, and by making ‘some
inquiries’ from witnesses and friends at the time (Mackenzie 2009: 93).

We are told that, although Miss Walton did not in fact marry her suitor,
Harley failed to propose to her himself; he subsequently entered into a
further mental and physical decline. This is caused by his ‘desperate’
financial circumstances, which make it impossible for him to be an
appropriate suitor; as a result, he pines away in his ‘hopeless love for
Miss Walton’ (Mackenzie 2009: 93).

The narrative resumes, after this editorial intervention, where we find

Harley resigned, it would seem, to his debilitating illness. However, the
scene becomes increasingly powerful in its emotional intensity, as
Harley imagines his imminent death: he sheds ‘a tear’ upon his friend’s
hand, and becomes almost enraptured by the ‘recollection’ of the
‘scenes of pleasure’ he has enjoyed in the past (Mackenzie 2009: 95).
However, when Miss Walton enters the room Harley becomes
overpowered by his emotions, both at contemplating her ‘goodness’,
and at their shared sense that their passion is doomed. She matches
Harley in her emotional response, as:

Her tears were now flowing without control. (Mackenzie 2009:

96)

However, at the very peak of announcing his love for Miss Walton,
Harley unexpectedly expires:

He seized her hand – a languid colour reddened his cheek – a

smile brightened faintly in his eye. As he gazed on her, it grew
dim, it fixed, it closed – He sighed and fell back on his seat.
(Mackenzie 2009: 96)

In his death, the physical and emotional aspects of Harley’s status as a

man of feeling are ultimately combined: the powerful feelings aroused
by his unrequited love are so overwhelming that his body is
overpowered, and ‘Harley was gone for ever’.

The narrator subsequently rounds off the story with an account of his
own sentimentally emotive response upon seeing Harley’s body, and the

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sorry reflections this inspires. He even suggests that this emotional

attachment to Harley continues even beyond death, claiming that he
visits his grave even now. Perhaps, the narrator suggests, the reader
should also be inspired to be so profoundly, and lastingly, moved by
Harley’s story.

SAQ 2
Which aspects of Harley’s character identify him as a ‘sentimentalist’?

SENTIMENTAL EXCESS AND SATIRE

The conclusion of The Man of Feeling seems to suggest that not only
does Harley embody many of the qualities we have described as
belonging to the sentimental traveller, but also pushes them to an
extreme. Harley seems genuinely to possess those thoughts and
feelings ascribed to him, so much so that he actually dies from an
excess of too much feeling. We might, of course, think this a little silly,
to say the least: surely it is a cliché to die, literally, of a broken heart.
And yet if we consider Harley’s character in the context of sentimental
fiction, his thoughts, feelings, actions and responses are in fact entirely
fitting and natural, a suggestion which is made in the ‘Introduction’ to
the narrative.

However, as we found earlier, even Mackenzie is aware of the potential

ridiculousness of such sentimental excess. In fact, the extreme
emotions and actions of the characters of sentimental fiction have
provoked derision and satire since their first appearance. We could even
argue that one of the earliest sentimental narratives, Sterne’s
Sentimental Journey, already provokes a mocking critique of the
principles and ideas it is supposed to exemplify. Those moments at
which Yorick displays emotional excess, or descends into hyperbole (or,
by contrast, hyperbolic aphasia) are conveyed to the reader with a
certain sense of self-awareness: we get the impression that Sterne does
not always treat sentiment entirely seriously, or at least that he is
aware of its potential drawbacks, and exploits this for comic effect.

Readers and critics have commented upon the potential for parody that
sentimental fiction opens up, and have highlighted how Sterne’s
Sentimental Journey in particular exposes this potential in an ironic way.
As Brissenden writes, this emerges in the frequently erotic subtext that
Sterne weaves into his narrative: the ‘capacity for benevolence,
compassion and sympathy’ is ‘intimately if sometimes ironically’ related
to that for ‘sexual responsiveness’, and in A Sentimental Journey
‘heightened erotic and moral awareness’ are blended (1974: 222).

There are many scenes in which Sterne seems to satirise the

sentimentalism he supposedly promotes in his narrative through
projecting this erotic subtext. For instance, the scene in which Yorick
tenderly talks with the grisset (a young, working-class French woman)
in the glove shop can, on one level, be seen as entirely innocent: he
takes her pulse in the course of their tender exchange, but the way in
which Sterne describes a moment which potentially could demonstrate
the refined and tender feelings belonging to the sentimentalist, actually
hints at an erotic reading that many contemporaries were also quick to
detect:

The beautiful Grisset look’d sometimes at the gloves, then side-

ways to the window, then at the gloves — and then at me. I was
not disposed to break silence — I follow’d her example: so I
look’d at the gloves, then to the window, then at the gloves, and

Unit 18: Sentimental Fiction: Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling 18-21

_____________________________________________________________________

then at her – and so on alternately. I found I lost considerably in

every attack — she had a quick black eye, and shot through two
such long and silken eye-lashes with such penetration, that she
look’d into my very heart and reins — It may seem strange, but I
could actually feel she did — . (Sterne 2008: 46)

This charged exchange of looks and glances, of course, is highly erotic

for the reader attuned to the possibility that Sterne is in fact treating
sentiment in an ironic way.

A Sentimental Journey provides evidence that Sterne perceives the

comic excesses towards which sentimental tendencies can lead, and so
exposes them to gentle ridicule through parodying them. This indicates
the extent to which sentiment could be undermined by satire, where
contemporary readers could attack its most obviously extreme aspects
by parodying them, and so perhaps suggest a negative appraisal of its
qualities and its effects upon readers. As such, Sterne’s narrative
connects to a wider response to sentimentalism among contemporary
readers, who similarly found its rhetorical excesses and heightened
emotions to be so extreme as to be ridiculous.

As John Mullan suggests, the attack upon sentiment is allied to the

suspicion that the sentimentalist’s feelings are not always entirely
sincere: sentiment ‘can stand for both judgment and affectation’ (1997:
8). This was an accusation frequently levelled at Sterne’s narrator.
Mullan argues that this is centred upon the way in which the sentimental
body operates: the physical signs that, as we have seen earlier in
Parnell’s observation, identify a particular individual as a sentimentalist
could also be interpreted as the self-conscious gestures of someone
playing the role of the sentimentalist. As Mullan goes on to argue,

In novels, the articulacy of sentiment is produced via a special

kind of inward attention: a concern with feeling as articulated by
the body – by its postures and gestures, its involuntary
palpitations and collapses (1997: 16)

Janet Todd writes that ‘sentimentality’ is a pejorative term that emerged

in the 1770s, which criticises ‘debased and affected feeling’ (1986: 8). A
sense rapidly emerged that sentimental feeling, and the fiction which
sought to express it, had quickly become cheapened by being too easy
to imitate. Each imitation involved exaggerating qualities and stylistic
features that, even in the earliest examples of the genre, already
verged on the excessive.

Indeed, Henry Mackenzie himself is keenly aware of the abuses to which

sentimental writing is subjected by being too easily appropriated by
writers who leap on the bandwagon of its popularity. He claims, in an
article printed in The Lounger in 1785, that the novel as a genre has
suffered a considerable ‘degradation’ at the hands of a rash of unworthy
writers. He describes these authors as those ‘whose necessities or
vanity prompted them to write’, and so ‘betook themselves to a field,
which, as they imagined, it required no extent of information or depth of
learning to cultivate, but in which a heated imagination, or an excursive
fancy, were alone sufficient to succeed’ (Mackenzie 2009: 100).

The greatest victim of this ‘debasement of the Novel’ is, Mackenzie

argues, sentimental fiction (2009: 100). Not only has it witnessed a
decline in literary standards, but it also potentially threatens to exert a
pernicious effect upon society as a whole. As Todd argues, the attack on
sensibility which resulted from this negative appraisal of sentiment was
partly based on the negative effect it was held to exert upon young
female readers (1986: 133). As we have seen in our discussion of
Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essay No. 4, fiction could have a very

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positive effect upon instructing the young and impressionable reader;

however, if the sentiments conveyed in the text are so extreme as to
appear ridiculous, this effect could quickly become pernicious.

Mackenzie articulates this argument in his Lounger essay, although he

attempts to moderate the attack upon the ‘dangerous tendency of all
novels’ perceived by some critics (2009: 101). He argues that novels
are capable of ‘promoting a certain refinement of mind’, but nonetheless
suggests that they can be dangerous in ‘forming a mistaken and
pernicious system of morality’. He suggests that this seems ‘to arise
from that contrast between one virtue or excellence and another, that
war of duties which is to be found in many of them, particularly in that
species called the Sentimental’ (Mackenzie 2009: 101). In the hands of
an unskilled, or perhaps a malicious writer, the ideas and characters
portrayed in sentimental fiction can have a deeply negative effect upon
the reader, and upon society as a whole.

Indeed, the potentially harmful consequences of the fictional narrative

which seems to indulge in emotional excess can be seen by the wider
influence that sentimental literature exerted upon culture and society in
the latter part of the eighteenth century. Texts such as A Sentimental
Journey and The Man of Feeling, or Oliver Goldsmith’s popular novel The
Vicar of Wakefield, reflected upon and helped to fuel a world-wide trend
in the appeal of sentimentalism.

The combination of sentiment and satire, however, is often difficult to

disentangle: even whilst seeming to promote such ideas and qualities
most whole-heartedly, a sense of scepticism perhaps inevitably emerges
in the reader in response to the demonstrations of excess which lies at
the heart of sentimentalism. Indeed, as Jane Austen’s Sense and
Sensibility was later to demonstrate, the appeal to the writer to expose
sentimentalism to comical, satiric treatment endured for some years
beyond the period in which A Sentimental Journey and The Man of
Feeling appeared.

Nonetheless, sentimental fiction became a ‘phenomenon’ whose peak

was perhaps reached in the German author Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows
of Young Werther, published in 1776, shortly after The Man of Feeling;
this text both drew from and helped to fuel the sentimental craze, but
its popularity also indicates why some contemporary readers reacted
towards sentimentalism in a negative way.

Goethe’s story of a young man so affected by his emotions, and so

overwhelmed with his unrequited love for a young woman, that he
finally commits suicide offered late eighteenth-century readers a
profoundly moving tale of sentimental excess. Indeed, Goethe’s hero
displays the defining qualities of sensibility in his heightened emotion,
and in his inability to deal with feelings in a rational way. Goethe’s text
inspired a generation of young men across the continent to imitate
Young Werther, at least in their behaviour and dress, if not necessarily
in his final tragic end. In many respects, Goethe’s novel takes one stage
further the qualities of sentimentalism, and its connection with
sensibility, developed in Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling.

While The Sorrows of Werther could potentially exert a negative

influence upon impressionable young readers, it is nonetheless a
striking example of the literary qualities that can be developed in
sentimental fiction. It also demonstrates how rapidly, and how far, the
taste for this type of writing spread. Furthermore, Goethe’s Young
Werther was to develop his identity as a sentimentalist through the
process of a journey, a connection between sentimental fiction and
travel writing that we have already commented upon previously in this
unit. How far the journey narrative can convey sentiment, as in

Unit 18: Sentimental Fiction: Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling 18-23

_____________________________________________________________________

Mackenzie and Goethe’s texts, and how far it can be used to satirise it
(as, perhaps, in A Sentimental Journey), forms one aspect of the ‘travel
fiction’ that we shall discuss in the following unit: Tobias Smollett’s
Expedition of Humphry Clinker.

SAQ 3
Why might sentimental fiction be subjected to satiric treatment?

REVIEW
In this unit, we have surveyed a vastly popular and influential genre of
literature that appeared in the latter part of the eighteenth century:
sentimental fiction. We have seen how the term ‘sentiment’, and its
relative ‘sensibility’, are subject to considerable mutability: their
meanings and applications change over time, and depending upon
particular literary contexts.

We have also traced the ‘origins’ of sentimental fiction, focussing upon

Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey as a key text: we saw how
many of the ‘definitions’ of sentiment identified earlier in the unit were
manifested in Sterne’s text. However, we also found that Sterne
subjects some of these qualities to ironic treatment.

We subsequently analysed Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling as a highly

influential and successful example of sentimental literature. We
discussed various aspects of the text which identify it as ‘sentimental’,
in particular focussing upon the central hero’s character. We saw how
Harley’s words, actions, and ideas connect to our definitions of
sentiment, but how they also display aspects of sensibility. In particular,
Harley demonstrates the fallibility of the sentimental body, the site for
demonstrating sensibility, most evidently in his final expiry from too
much heightened emotion.

We saw how this aspect of sentimentalism, emotional excess, subjected

this type of literature to critique by subsequent writers: some exposed it
to ironic treatment for comic effect, such as Sterne in A Sentimental
Journey. Other contemporary commentators were more troubled by the
potential problems posed by sentimental excess: it indicated affectation
for some readers, and so cheapened the heightened emotions it was
supposed to depict. This could even have a harmful effect upon the
susceptible, impressionable young readers of sentimental fiction: it
threatened to introduce a pernicious system of morality which could
even affect society as a whole in a negative way.

Nonetheless, as we found in the concluding sections of this unit,

sentimental fiction remained popular and influential, not only in Britain
but across the continent. Texts such as Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther
exemplify rarefied sensibility matched with literary quality. This text, as
Sterne and Mackenzie’s before it, also demonstrates how sentimental
fiction can often sit in tandem with another literary genre, that of travel
writing. A contrasting treatment of the journey narrative in the work of
Tobias Smollett, and its potential connection with sentiment, is the
subject of the subsequent unit.

18-24 Literature 3
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ADDITIONAL READING
PRIMARY TEXTS
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 2012. The Sorrows of Young Werther
(Oxford: Oxford University Press)

SECONDARY TEXTS
Benedict, Barbara. 1990. ‘Literary Miscellanies: The Cultural Mediation
of Fragmented Feeling’, ELH, 57.2: 407-430 (Available on
JSTOR)

Harkin, Maureen. 1994. ‘Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling: Embalming

Sensibility’, ELH, 61.2: 317-340 (Available on JSTOR)

McGuirk, Carol. 1980. ‘Sentimental Encounter in Sterne, Mackenzie, and

Burns’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 20.3: 505-515
(Available on JSTOR)

Todd, Janet. 1986. Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York:

Methuen) (Parts available online via Google Books)

REFERENCES
Brissenden, R. F. 1974. Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of
Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan)

Mackenzie, Henry. 1958. Kenneth C. Slagle (ed.), The Man of Feeling,

(New York and London: W. W. Norton)

Mackenzie, Henry. 2009. Brian Vickers (ed.), The Man of Feeling

(Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Markley, Robert. 1987. ‘Sentiment as Performance: Shaftesbury,

Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue’, in Felicity Nussbaum and
Laura Brown (eds), The New Eighteenth Century: Theory,
Politics, English Literature (New York and London: Methuen), pp.
210-30 (Parts available online via Google Books)

Mullan, John. 1997. Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling

in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988;
repr.)

Sterne, Laurence. 2008. Tim Parnell and Ian Jack (eds), A Sentimental
Journey and other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Todd, Janet. 1986. Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York:

Methuen) (Parts available online via Google Books)

Unit 18: Sentimental Fiction: Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling 18-25

_____________________________________________________________________

ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
What might we describe as the ‘origins’ of sentimental fiction?

Sentimental fiction emerges approximately during the latter decades of

the eighteenth century. However, its origins can perhaps be said to
extend even further, as the etymology of the term sentiment, and its
cognates, indicates an evolving set of meanings surrounding this word
and how it might emerge in literature. Nonetheless, it could be argued
that the eighteenth century witnessed the first full emergence of
sentimental fiction as a genre. Novelists such as Richardson could be
identified as showing sentimental qualities in their work; in particular,
texts such as Clarissa or Sir Charles Grandison display the rarefied
feelings, heightened emotion, and intellectual elevation of
sentimentalism. Yet sentimental fiction, perhaps, finds its fullest early
expression in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France
and Italy. In this text, Sterne presents a narrator whose words, actions
and emotions identify him as a sentimentalist. Indeed, he himself
announces that he possesses this identity. Yorick’s benevolence
towards the needy, his compassion towards animals, his sensitive
engagement with other human beings, and his tendency towards
emotional excess are all aspects of his character which identify him,
and his narrative, as sentimental. These are all qualities absorbed into,
and expanded upon, in Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling.

SAQ 2
Which aspects of Harley’s character identify him as a ‘sentimentalist’?

Harley’s character in many respects develops those found in Sterne’s

Parson Yorick, which similarly identified him as a sentimental traveller.
Harley, like Yorick, is moved by pity to perform acts of benevolence
and charity towards those in need, such as the beggar and his dog.
Harley’s body is frequently used to express the sentimental aspects of
his character: he weeps, faints, sighs and cries. In many ways,
however, Harley’s tendency towards sentimental excess – such as
manifested in such physical reactions to emotional stimuli – also
identifies him as a man of sensibility. As such, he divorces his emotions
from rational thought, and instead acts in a more instinctive,
susceptible way. This is most strongly evident in the close of the
narrative, in which Harley expires from the overwhelming power of his
own emotions, caused by the tragic circumstances of his final days.

18-26 Literature 3
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SAQ 3
Why might sentimental fiction be subjected to satiric treatment?

The sentimental excess that characterises The Man of Feeling

demonstrates a principal quality of sentimental fiction which, arguably,
could expose it most readily to satiric treatment. The rhetorical and
physical excess that characters such as Harley display could potentially
be seen as affected, or insincere. As such, such words, actions and
scenarios could easily be parodied by a subsequent author. This parody
could be used for satiric purposes: either to expose the literary
shortcomings of sentimental fiction, or to suggest that such
exaggerated feelings and the ideas they relate to could exert a
pernicious effect upon society. Satire of sentiment could, then, either
be mocking for comic purposes, or seek to expose genuine faults and
perceived dangers for the greater good of society and its readers.

Unit 18: Sentimental Fiction: Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling 18-27

_____________________________________________________________________

UNIT 19

JOURNEY NARRATIVES: TOBIAS

SMOLLETT’S EXPEDITION OF HUMPHRY
CLINKER

AIM
The aim of this unit is to explore a significant area of prose fiction in the
latter part of the eighteenth century, the fictional travel narrative,
through an analysis of Tobias Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Explain why the journey narrative was a popular mode of conveying

a fictional story in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

Suggest how this genre connects to other texts and genres you have
encountered in this module so far.

Describe how Smollett defines the novel’s characters as users of

language.

Explain how Smollett’s fictional techniques contribute to his

representation of subjectivity.

Explain how an opposition between country and city emerged in

eighteenth-century literature.

REQUIRED READING
The required reading for this unit is:

Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)

The edition referred to in this unit is Tobias Smollett. 2009. Lewis M.

Knapp and Paul-Gabriel Boucé (eds), The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
(Oxford: Oxford University Press).

INTRODUCTION
In the previous unit, we examined various aspects of sentimental
fiction, and saw how this literary genre enjoyed immense popularity in
the latter decades of the eighteenth century. In our reading of Henry
Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, and in our discussion of other sentimental
narratives (such as Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, or Goethe’s
Sorrows of Young Werther), we saw how sentiment and sensibility are
intimately connected in how the central character speaks and acts. We
also found, towards the end of Unit 18, that the sentimental narrative is
aptly conveyed through the journey: it is by travelling, meeting new
people with whom he can interact, that the sentimentalist develops his
character most fully.

In this unit, we shall be addressing the idea of the journey narrative

from a different perspective. In Unit 12, we encountered the idea that,

Unit 19: Journey Narratives: Tobias Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker 19-1
_____________________________________________________________________

just as travel itself was becoming more popular and more diverse in the
eighteenth century, so travel writing enjoyed an increase in the
numbers and varieties of texts produced in this period. Our reading of
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters revealed that
fact and fiction are often necessarily connected in travel writing, in
Montagu’s case because she embellishes her actual experiences to
create a polished literary text. In this unit, we shall discover how Tobias
Smollett also engages with the genre of travel writing, and exploits the
journey narrative format in different ways.

We shall briefly examine how Smollett is a travel writer who records his
actual experiences abroad in some texts, but the focus of the unit will
be upon the fictionalised version of the journey narrative that Smollett
presents in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. This text was published
in the same year as Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling; but as we shall
discover, whilst both novels appropriate the travel format for fictional
purposes, they offer very different approaches to the nature of travel, to
the experiences it offers, and to the characters who undertake it.

This unit will begin with a concise discussion of Smollett as a travel

writer. We shall then concentrate on The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
itself as representative of general trends in later eighteenth-century
fiction. This enquiry will be divided into two parts: the first considers the
structure of Smollett’s novel, showing how his narrative techniques
facilitate the representation of subjectivity. The second part of the unit
takes a thematic approach, examining Smollett’s use of an important
opposition in eighteenth-century culture, that between country and city.
This will lead us on to discover how this opposition emerges in another
genre of eighteenth-century literature, poetry, the subject of the
subsequent unit.

TOBIAS SMOLLETT AS TRAVEL WRITER

Scottish-born Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) enjoyed a varied career as
an author, which partly reflected the varied experiences of his life.
Smollett wrote some satirical verse; he was an editor, a translator, and
a critic who made significant contributions to the influential journal
Critical Review; he also produced a four-volume History of England.
Smollett is perhaps best known for his ‘picaresque’ novels, a type of
literature which involves a comical portrayal of the adventures of its
hero. The picaresque can involve graphic, even gruesome detail, as its
protagonist (often from a lower social class) pits himself against a
hostile society. This quality gives this type of fiction a satirical
dimension, which Smollett exploits in novels such as Roderick Random
(1748) and Peregrine Pickle (1751).

In his diverse interests as an author, and in his active life, Smollett was
also a traveller: this provided subject matter for much of his fiction. Yet
he also wrote a ‘genuine’ account of his own version of the ‘Grand Tour’,
a popular eighteenth-century experience which we encountered in Unit
12. Smollett’s tour to the continent involved a trip through France and
Italy, which he records in a series of letters published as Travels
through France and Italy in 1766. However, while Smollett did actually
undertake this journey, this text is a ‘worked up’ version similar to
Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters: upon returning from his travels
abroad, the author polishes, refines, reorganises and rewrites his
account of his experiences.

Alongside the literary qualities of the Travels, this text is remarkable for
the character that Smollett projects through his text. In the previous
unit, we encountered the idea that the ‘sentimental traveller’ can
develop and express the refined, emotional qualities of his character
through the process of experiencing new relationships and situations.

19-2 Literature 3
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However, Smollett’s identity as a traveller is quite opposite to the

sentimental: he is a ‘splenetic’ traveller, who typically objects to almost
all aspects of the foreign lands he journeys through. Smollett criticises
the French national character; the state of the roads; the poor levels of
hygiene; the cloying manners, and the exorbitant prices he finds on the
continent.

This frequently provides him with a means of praising the habits,

customs and people of his own homeland. As such, Smollett’s Travels
reflect upon a significant aspect of eighteenth-century travel writing,
which we considered in Unit 12, that the encounter with the ‘other’
found in foreign lands provides a way of reaffirming one’s national
identity.

Travels through France and Italy, then, offers a quite different approach
to the possibilities of travel than texts such as A Sentimental Journey,
where new experiences abroad offer fresh opportunities to learn about
human nature. Indeed, Smollett seems to resent every human contact
he has whilst abroad. In fact, the acerbic nature of the Travels provoked
Sterne to reflect satirically upon the character of the ‘splenetic traveller’
that Smollett projects: in A Sentimental Journey, he is facetiously
referred to as the ‘Smelfungus’ character who, according to Yorick,
complains about the disappointment he feels upon viewing such famous
foreign landmarks as the Pantheon in Rome (Sterne 2008: 24).

Smollett’s Travels nonetheless offer a lively and engaging account of the

experience of foreign travel in the eighteenth century, and the potential
to represent such experiences in a literary text. They display his
versatility as a writer, and his ability to exploit the liminal blend of fact
and fiction that travel writing offers the author. This combination is a
central characteristic of the text that we shall be focussing on in this
unit, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Like the Travels, Humphry
Clinker is written as a series of letters, this time penned by a range of
different correspondents whom Smollett creates to people the fictional
world of the text.

The location is also different in this novel: whereas the Travels record a
journey on the continent, Humphry Clinker offers a fictionalised
perspective upon domestic travel, which became increasingly popular in
the latter half of the eighteenth century. Whether for reasons of
economy, or because of a reawakened sense of national pride in the
beautiful landscapes and diverse societies of Britain, many travellers
increasingly visited the home island instead of journeying abroad to
seek new experiences.

As we shall discover, the ‘splenetic’ character that Smollett projects in

Travels through France and Italy also emerges in this more overtly
fictional text: one of its principal protagonists, Matthew Bramble,
provides a highly subjective interpretation of the experiences he
encounters through the process of travel which is strongly characterised
by his pessimistic view-point. This contrasts with the character of the
eponymous hero, who in many respects provides a counterpart to
Bramble’s character, as we shall go on to discover in our reading of
Humphry Clinker.

Activity
Read Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker.

Unit 19: Journey Narratives: Tobias Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker 19-3
_____________________________________________________________________

THE GENRES OF HUMPHREY CLINKER

As we have already discovered in this unit, Smollett’s activities as a
writer are varied, covering different genres and undertaken for different
purposes. This multiplicity also emerges in The Expedition of Humphry
Clinker: it is an epistolary novel, a book of travels, and a quest-
narrative.

Activity

Make notes on how Humphry Clinker’s narrative is conveyed: who tells

the story, and how?

How do the various viewpoints of the novel’s characters create the

picture of the world they inhabit?

As you will have observed in this exercise, the narrative is conducted

through a series of letters written by five members of the Bramble
entourage, as each shares his or her experience of a tour of Britain. The
dominant letter writer of the novel is Matthew Bramble, a Welsh squire,
afflicted with ill-health and the demands of his extended family. When
he is not preoccupied with his own physical state, Bramble energetically
observes, and passionately indicts, the Britain of the 1760s. The novel’s
other letter writers include Bramble’s sister Tabitha, an inveterate
husband-hunter; his ‘sentimental’ niece Lydia, unsuitably love-struck by
a strolling player; and his nephew Jery, an Oxford student who is
anxious to prove himself a man of the world. The final letter writer is
Win Jenkins, Tabitha’s maid.

HUMPHRY CLINKER AS TRAVEL NARRATIVE

A significant aspect of how the narrative of Humphry Clinker is
structured is its identity as a travel narrative. As we have discovered in
previous units, travel can provide an important educational experience
for the individual: by undertaking a journey, and encountering new
people and societies, the traveller can learn more about the world,
about himself, and about human nature.

This dimension of the travel experience solidifies the structure of

Smollett’s novel as a fictionalised journey narrative. If anything, though,
the purpose of travel as an educational activity confirms the disparity
between Humphry Clinker’s male and female characters, and further
upholds the novel’s embodiment of gendered stereotypes.

If the task of the Bramble women is to get married, that of the Bramble
men is to achieve a greater, and more accurate, understanding of their
society. In the opening sections of the novel, Jery Melford is a cocksure
and arrogant young man; however, by its end the experiences gained
through travel have enabled him to learn more about the world and
about himself, and so to mature as a character. As he writes,

Without all doubt, the greatest advantage acquired in travelling

and perusing mankind in the original, is that of dispelling those
shameful clouds that darken the faculties of the mind, preventing
it from judging with candour and precision.
(Smollett 2009: 332)

Matthew Bramble’s journey also proves to be an enlightening

experience. He survives the luxury and dissipation of English cities to
discover that there are, after all, pockets of the landscape where social
life is orderly and beneficial; one such place is Scotland. This aspect of
Bramble’s education as a character runs parallel with the beneficial

19-4 Literature 3
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experience that the reader can gain by undertaking the ‘journey’ of

reading Humphry Clinker itself.

During the late-eighteenth century, Scotland was regularly denigrated in

English culture. Smollett, a Scot himself, uses his novel to educate his
English readers into shedding their nationalist prejudices. Not only does
Bramble praise the natural wonders of Scotland, and the sublimity of
the Highlands, he also finds Scottish culture, its universities, societies,
and general social discourse, to be a model of civic order. He ends the
novel believing that social order is still possible, which confirms his own
development as a character but also prompts the reader to pursue a
similar ideal.

The way in which Bramble achieves this enlightenment is, of course,

through experiencing a comically ludicrous series of adventures and
encounters with other people. His reflections upon these help to shape
his vision of the world – an ultimately positive one – and confirm the
journey narrative’s potential to convey a learning experience. Yet it is
the comic drive of these experiences and how they are related which
gives Smollett’s novel greater effectiveness: to recall the conventional
idea of the purpose of literature that we have encountered in several
different ways throughout this module, a piece of writing should aim
both to instruct and to entertain.

HUMPHRY CLINKER AS COMIC NOVEL

The ‘educational’ experience that we might gain through reading
Humphry Clinker is, then, most effectively obtained through our
enjoyment in reading it. Perhaps the dominant quality of Smollett’s
novel, which in many ways determines its structure, is its comedy: the
various view-points of each of the characters offer us different
perspectives on the world they inhabit. Frequently, it is the clash
between their interpretations of and reflections upon this world that
create a comic effect which the reader who compares the varying
accounts projected in these letters can appreciate.

Perhaps the comedy is made most fulfilling by the way in which

Humphry Clinker eventually satisfies the desires of all its major
characters, no matter what their view of the world. Lydia’s strolling
player is transformed into a gentleman, whom she can appropriately
marry. Tabitha finds a husband in the exotic Lismahago, an old soldier
whose previous marriage was to the Indian Squinkinacoosta. Win
Jenkins too is happy in love, and marries the novel’s titular hero,
Humphry Clinker.

In many respects, the successful conclusions of these different

characters’ stories mirror the happy ending that conventionally belongs
to comedy. In all its genres, comedy traditionally ends with all loose
ends being tied, feuding characters being reconciled, misunderstandings
being explained, and a festive celebration usually symbolised in
marriage. However, this festive quality also possesses a subversive
element: it is connected to the carnival, which traditionally involves
overturning conventions, challenging authority, and unruly behaviour
verging on the anarchic.

This aspect of comedy as carnival could, from one perspective, be

viewed as negative: established order is overturned, and misrule
threatens to damage the bonds that ensure social cohesion. However,
from another angle, carnival can be liberating, enabling individuals and
communities to challenge stifling hierarchies and conventions, and to
establish a new and revitalising social order characterised by festivity
and celebration. One of the most influential critical accounts of carnival
can be found in the Russian author Mikhail Bakhtin’s book, Rabelais and
his World.

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This sense of carnivalesque disorder emerges in Humphry Clinker, albeit

in a much milder form than the French author Rabelais’ Gargantua and
Pantagruel, the subjects of Bakhtin’s book. In Smollett’s novel, as you
will have observed, the varying views of the world voiced by the
different characters who convey the narrative threaten to unsettle
established, ‘authoritative’ ideas about society and the people who
inhabit it. In particular, Humphry Clinker disturbs many established
ideas about the female character, and about the relationship between
men and women.

In some respects, Smollett confirms existing stereotypes by considering

female sexual desire to be an unruly force within society which needed
to be contained. And yet, perversely, by confirming this established idea
Smollett’s female characters succeed in unsettling the smooth ordering
of a society in which a woman’s place is clearly defined, and her
behaviour circumscribed by certain norms of social behaviour. In
Humphry Clinker, Smollett’s women are anything but tame: their sexual
desire is highly disruptive throughout the novel, both in narrative terms
and in the gender-defined roles of its different characters, and the
relationships that exist between them.

Matthew Bramble, for one, is bitterly aware of the disorder that the
unruly desires of the women who people his world bring about; at one
point, he asks

What the devil had I to do, to come a plague hunting with a

leash of females in my train? (Smollett 2009: 141)

The chaotic passions of the Bramble women – pictured here as being

like an uncontainable disease – contribute towards the comic drive of
the novel. Their carnivalesque behaviour, by challenging assumptions
about how women should behave in society and threatening to unsettle
its conventions and hierarchies, provides the comedy of unpredictability
and fuels the reader’s pleasure in the topsy-turvy.

However, Humphry Clinker’s quality as a comic novel is perhaps most

strongly established by the way in which its conclusion conforms to
traditional patterns of comedy: the disruptive desires of the Bramble
women are resolved in the novel’s closing sections, as their marriages
symbolise a restoration of social order. Even the novel’s characters
seem to recognise that this is a conventional way of re-establishing
harmony; as Jery Melford writes towards the conclusion of the narrative,

[…] the fatal knots are now tied. The comedy is near a close; and
the curtain is ready to drop. (Smollett 2009: 346)

The idea that ‘knots’ are ‘tied’ is a commonplace, which reminds us of

the largely traditional values and narrative patterns that Humphry
Clinker upholds in its structure: for all the inventiveness of Smollett’s
story, and the potential challenges to social order that its characters
sometimes pose, its overriding purpose is to provide a normative comic
narrative of human nature and of social interaction.

However, we could argue that the sense of order conveyed at the

novel’s close is superficial rather than real. After all, Bramble does not
merely discover a pattern of order on his travels, he also discovers his
own intimate relation to disorder, in the person of Humphry Clinker.
Bramble, so concerned to fulfil his duties as a gentleman, and so much
in favour of social distinction, finds that he is actually the father of an
impoverished social outcast.

Clinker’s good heart and affection are undeniable, but he causes upset
and chaos from the moment the Bramble entourage first meet him.

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Moreover, there are signs that he will continue to be a disruptive force

in this society even after the company arrive back in Brambleton-hall, a
haven which lies beyond the boundaries of the book’s narrative. The
most potent indication of future anarchy is Clinker’s choice of bride.
Win, like her husband, is a generous, feeling person; however, her
character is an unruly and disruptive one.

At the end of the novel, Bramble seems almost reconciled to the

mayhem Win and Clinker will generate, as he imagines ‘a whole litter of
[their] progeny at Brambleton-hall’ (Smollett 2009: 345). The
disruptiveness that Win’s character embodies is perhaps conveyed in
her most significant attribute: her unconventional, almost lawless,
approach to language, the human invention on which social life
depends.

It is this approach to language – to the way in which use of language

defines character – which underpins Humphry Clinker’s generic identity
as a novel.

HUMPHRY CLINKER AS A ‘NOVEL’

Throughout this unit so far, we have considered the various generic
qualities that Humphry Clinker possesses, and suggested ways in which
it upholds a range of generic structures and conventions. So far, we
have freely used the term ‘novel’ to describe Smollett’s text; however,
as we found in Units 15-17, the ‘definition’ of what this term means in
relation to late eighteenth-century narrative fiction is far from
unequivocal. We have found that the so-called conventions of the novel
form were fluid and ill-defined in this period, and that in fact narrative
fiction incorporated a hybrid of different genres, forms and styles. As we
have seen in this unit so far, this generic indeterminacy is central to
Humphry Clinker.

However, Smollett’s text also incorporates certain qualities that,

according to one approach to what constitutes the substance of a
narrative, identifies Humphry Clinker as a novel: the very words of the
text themselves. In his essay ‘Discourse in the Novel’, Mikhail Bakhtin
states that ‘the decisive and distinctive importance’ of the novel is that
‘the human being in the novel is first, foremost and always a speaking
human being’ (1998: 332). For Bakhtin, the novel is pre-eminent among
literary genres because it draws attention to individuals as users of
language. The novel encourages reflection upon, and refines our
understanding of, how language defines the individual and joins him or
her to society.

SAQ 1
Which different genres does Smollett incorporate in Humphry Clinker,
and to what effect?

HUMPHRY CLINKER: A NOVEL OF DISCOURSE

One approach to language, and its potential relevance to literature,
might suggest that no relation to language is entirely natural. We speak
as we do because of multiple, and complicated, social and personal
factors. When we speak, not only do we intentionally transmit
information, we also convey aspects of our personal history and social
position. The words we use and the references we make all tell our
auditors a great deal.

This attitude towards language strongly characterises texts such as

Tristram Shandy, as we found in Unit 17; indeed, Bakhtin holds up

Unit 19: Journey Narratives: Tobias Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker 19-7
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Sterne’s book as one of the most successful examples of the ‘polyphonic

novel’. This means a text in which multiple linguistic discourses operate:
in other words, the author succeeds in incorporating into the text a
whole range of different types of language, conveyed through different
characters and narrative voices. As such, it becomes a truer
representation of how human beings use language as individuals within
society.

This sense of multiple voices, or linguistic registers, also operates in

Humphry Clinker. For instance, when Jery Melford speaks of Dr. Lewis
as the ‘fidus Achates’ of his uncle (Smollett 2009: 61) he draws on the
discourse belonging to his own sphere of experience. As a student at
Oxford, and as the beneficiary of a classical education, Jery possesses
familiarity with the Latin language and with important classical texts
such as Virgil’s Aeneid. As this moment shows, he also displays the
collegians’ typical boastfulness in showing off his knowledge by mixing
Latin phrases alongside English ones.

By contrast, a very different range of learning, and educational

experience, is conveyed through the types of words that Jery’s sister
Lydia uses. Unlike her brother, she has not attended school or
university, but instead must gain her knowledge of literature from a
very different range of books. At one point, she describes how the
London pleasure garden at Ranelagh ‘looks like the inchanted palace of
a genie’ (Smollett 2009: 92). Lydia displays her familiarity with Oriental
tales, such as the Arabian Nights which we encountered in Unit 12. This
use of language also suggests some aspects of Lydia’s character: she is,
perhaps, fanciful and easily influenced by the types of books she reads.
She is the impressionable young female reader who writers such as
Samuel Johnson warn should avoid reading certain kinds of books which
might inflame the imagination.

Our language defines us, but none of us can completely control the
language we use: each word potentially has several different meanings,
and our interpretation of which meaning is meant by the speaker
depends upon our own ideas. This can lead to misunderstandings, when
one person’s conception of a word’s meaning is different to another’s.
This idea is central to John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, a text which (as we found in Unit 17) strongly influences
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; indeed, Sterne’s characters frequently fall
victim to the numerous failures of communication that result from
different conceptions of what words mean.

In Humphry Clinker, Smollett uses two characters, Tabitha Bramble and

Win Jenkins, as extreme examples of this aspect of language use. Both
of these women have a hazy relationship to language: their letters are
full of misspellings, incorrect word-choice and coinages of their own.
One might expect that such prevalent and insistent error would make
their letters incomprehensible, but, in fact, this is far from being the
case. As readers, we are so habituated to the task of interpreting
language that we can see beyond the error: we can grasp both the
meaning the writer intended, and the meaning she has unintentionally
created.

Smollett gives Win Jenkins the final word in his novel, when she writes
to her friend that ‘We were yesterday three kiple chined, by the grease
of God, in the holy bands of mattermoney’ (Smollett 2009: 352). Win
mistakes ‘grease’ for ‘grace’ and ‘mattermoney’ for ‘matrimony’, yet the
reader is left in no doubt as to what she means to say: we see both the
word she actually uses and the word she intends.

Win’s error sounds a pragmatic, worldly note at the end of the novel,
reminding the reader that marriage is physical as well as spiritual, a

19-8 Literature 3
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matter of money as well as love. This is confirmed at a later point in the

same letter, where the conventional happy ending of the novel is
potentially undermined by the darker note that Win unwittingly
introduces through her malapropisms. She wishes to say that the
group’s society is to separate, but writes instead that its ‘satiety is to
suppurate’ (Smollett 2009: 352); here, her error conveys to the reader
the suspicion that the felicity of the novel’s end cannot be maintained,
and that such a fullness (or ‘satiety’) is bound to burst. Win exemplifies,
in extreme form, the inability of any speaker to control fully the
meaning of what they say.

Activity
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker begins with a letter from each of the
novel’s five correspondents. Read these five letters, and note what ideas
you form about each of the characters from the words they use.

As Bakhtin suggests, the multiplicity of language is to be celebrated

rather than feared – or, worse, regulated. Discourse in the novel is,
Bakhtin claims, always ‘contested, contestable, contesting’ (1998: 332).
It is this ongoing process of breaking down old meanings and
establishing new ones that gives the ‘polyphonic’, multiple-discoursed
novel its vitality.

SAQ 2
Using the first five letters of The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, how
would you describe the character of Matthew Bramble?

SUBJECTIVITY IN HUMPHRY CLINKER

It is sometimes said that literature takes an ‘inward turn’ in the latter
half of the eighteenth century, meaning that writers take an increasing
interest in subjectivity, and how reality appears to the individual. We
have encountered this emerging focus upon the individual’s perspective
in previous units. For instance, we saw how in A Journal of the Plague
Year the first-person narrative gives us a distinctive perspective upon
the world observed by one individual; we learn, through the way he
talks about this world, that Defoe is primarily interested in questions of
truth and accuracy.

However, as we noted in our discussion of Pamela, there is a shift in

emphasis in the way that the individual is portrayed by the middle
decades of the century. Authors take an increasing interest in conveying
an impression of their characters’ thoughts and emotions, and upon how
these are shaped by their experiences. Characters such as Pamela
develop as the narrative evolves, as she encounters new situations and
people and learns how to respond to them in different ways.

As we saw in our discussion of Tristram Shandy, Sterne takes this one

stage further, as his novel promises to deliver a ‘history’ of ‘all that
passes in a man’s mind’: here, it seems, subjectivity itself is the subject
of the book.

We also found how, in sentimental fiction, subjectivity focuses upon the

individual’s emotional response to external stimuli, and how he or she
attempts to rationalise their feelings – or, in the case of sensibility, fails
to do so.

Unit 19: Journey Narratives: Tobias Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker 19-9
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How does Humphry Clinker compare with these near-contemporary

examples of narrative fiction?

The very structure of Smollett’s novel suggests that there is no single

truth, but many partial versions of events: compared to narratives such
as Defoe’s, Smollett refracts the idea of single, authoritative ‘truth’, and
instead presents the world from multiple narrative perspectives. As
such, he is perhaps closer to Sterne than to Richardson in attempting to
represent the world as it really is: a combination of multiple, competing
points of view, or (in Sternean terms) lives and opinions.

For example, Lydia Melford and her uncle display strikingly different
attitudes towards the pleasure grounds of London. Lydia is a young
woman, looking for enchantment, wonder and love; in many respects,
she offers a comically nuanced version of the whimsical, sentimental
heroine. Her expectations, and the sentimental quality of her character,
have been formed by the novels she reads: according to her uncle, ‘She
has got a languishing eye, and reads romances’ (Smollett 2009: 12).

We noted earlier that Lydia compares her experience of Ranelagh to the

picture she has created in her mind of exotic foreign lands, formed
through her reading of oriental tales. Her description of the pleasure
garden is richly evocative of her reading, and of her lively imagination:

All that you read of wealth and grandeur, in the Arabian Night’s
Entertainment, and the Persian Tales, concerning Bagdad,
Diarbekir, Damascus, Ispahan, and Samarkand, is here realised.
Ranelagh looks like the inchanted palace of a genie, adorned
with the most exquisite performances of painting, carving, and
gilding, enlightened with a thousand golden lamps, that emulate
the noon-day sun. (Smollett 2009: 92)

In contrast, for the unhealthy Bramble, Ranelagh is simply a place of

physical discomfort, the noise and glare of which irritate his nerves:

What are the amusements at Ranelagh? One half of the company

are following one another’s tails, in an eternal circle; like so many
blind asses in an olive-mill, where they can neither discourse,
distinguish, nor be distinguished; while the other half are drinking
hot water, under the denomination of tea, till nine or ten o’clock at
night, to keep them awake for the rest of the evening. As for the
orchestra, the vocal musick especially, it is well for the performers
that they cannot be heard distinctly. (Smollett 2009: 89)

Confronted by the same scene, Lydia and her uncle not only note
different things, they use markedly different language to describe what
they observe, drawn from their own reading and mental pictures of the
world around them. Describing the multiple-perspective effect that this
technique of contrasting viewpoints of the same thing creates in
Humphry Clinker, Wolfgang Iser explains how:

[…] the succession of letters brings about a telescoping of

situations in which - paradoxically enough - the characters reveal
themselves and their surroundings through the very fact that
they see everything from their own limited point of view.
Consequently, the task of co-ordination is handed over to the
reader, for he alone has all the information at his disposal. The
one-sidedness of these viewpoints gives a sharp outline to the
world that is described, whereas their blending results in its
modification. (1974: 75)

The letters written by the five members of the Bramble entourage as

they tour through England and Scotland, amend, correct, and modify

19-10 Literature 3
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each other, and these partial and subjective accounts generate a more
cohesive whole. The novel takes the form of a circle in which the reader
sees events though the eyes, and sensibilities, of very different
characters. Reading these differing accounts makes us conscious that no
one character can tell the whole story of any given incident; no single
narrative is comprehensive or definitive. The structure of Smollett’s
novel not only allows the reader to see that any narrative has its
limitations, but that it also helps us perceive that no narration can be
separated from the language in which it is told.

SAQ 3
In his letter of May 24 from London (pp. 79-86), Jery Melford
describes how Matthew and Tabitha Bramble respond to the first
appearance of Humphry Clinker. What do their respective responses
say about their own characters?

GEOGRAPHY IN HUMPHRY CLINKER

Part of the way in which Smollett is able to represent these multiple
viewpoints in his novel depends upon the generic quality of Humphry
Clinker as an epistolary text, written in a series of letters by a range of
authors. However, the shifting perspectives of the narrative also result
from the mobility of the letter-writers themselves: no one is
permanently fixed in one place, but travels about to different locations.
Each new situation brings a fresh array of experiences and encounters
with new people. As such, Humphry Clinker’s identity as a travel
narrative, as well as an epistolary novel, supports its ability to portray
multiple subjectivities.

Yet the journey narrative aspect of Smollett’s text goes beyond the
representation of character. In many respects, Humphry Clinker offers
another contribution to the already popular travel-writing genre. In fact,
Smollett draws attention to the vogue for travel writing in the mock-
publisher’s letter with which the novel begins: he describes how ‘there
have been so many letters upon travels lately published’, and even
facetiously mentions his own name among his list of authors (2009: 2).
He also cuttingly refers to ‘Shandy’s Sentimental Travels’ – a text which,
as we have seen, satirically includes Smollett under the guise of
Smelfungus – and hints that frivolous texts such as Sterne’s have
saturated the market: ‘the public seems to be cloyed with that kind of
entertainment’ (Smollett 2009: 3).

Nonetheless, Smollett pushes his contribution onto the field of travel

writing with little apology. Indeed, in many respects the novel involves
standard features of travel literature: the letters of Humphry Clinker are
always written from a very precise location, and they provide the
descriptions of buildings, institutions, landscapes and fashions which a
contemporary reader would have expected and enjoyed.

The satisfaction of curiosity is not, however, the sole purpose of these

descriptions: they also aim to show how external ‘reality’ is constructed
by the individual. Furthermore, if his text claims to be more original
than other contributions to the genre, Smollett suggests, it is because
he does not even need to travel abroad to find suitable subject-matter:
indeed, Britain itself is rich in landscapes, monuments and societies
which all deserve observation and comment.

Smollett strives to bring the far-flung parts of Britain into relation with
one another, and to create a coherent, satisfying account of the nation
from fragmentary impressions. In the achievement of this aim, Smollett

Unit 19: Journey Narratives: Tobias Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker 19-11
_____________________________________________________________________

deploys an opposition between country and city which depends upon an

ongoing discourse about, and range of literary representations of, the
capital city itself.

LONDON IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

Towards the beginning of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year the
narrator is anxious to impress upon the reader the huge number of
people then in London:

It must not be forgot here that the City and Suburbs were
prodigiously full of People at the time of this Visitation, I mean at
the time that it began; for though I have lived to see a further
increase, and mighty Throngs of People settling in London more
than ever, yet we had always a Notion that the Numbers of
People which, the Wars being over, the Armies disbanded, and
the Royal Family and the Monarchy being Restored, had Flocked
to London to Settle in Business, or to depend upon and attend
the Court for Rewards of Services, Preferments, and the like,
was such that the Town was Computed to have in it above a
hundred thousand People more that ever it held before.
(Defoe 2003: 19)

In 1700, London had over half a million inhabitants and by 1820 that
number would almost double. Impressive as these figures are, it is not
the simple growth in population which most concerns us (the most
significant increase takes place after 1780). Only when London is
considered in relation to the rest of the country does its true importance
emerge. In 1700, one in eight Englishmen (or half the country’s town
dwellers) lived in London. No other city even approached the scale of
the capital: the nearest contender, Norwich, did not have quite 30,000
inhabitants (Porter 1982: 54).

Another, even more crucial, fact was that deaths in London greatly
exceeded births: the city only grew because its population was
constantly renewed by fresh immigrants from the country. This last fact
was not lost on contemporary observers. In her historical account of
London in the eighteenth century, M. Dorothy George presents two
contrasting mid-century attitudes towards the capital city; on the one
hand, one observer claimed that ‘London has grown, and continues to
grow, out of compass, at the expense of, and to the sensible diminution
of the other towns and boroughs’; another contemporary, however,
notes that ‘London will not feel any want of recruits till there are no
other people in the country’ (1985: 36). The constant flow of food and
labour from the countryside made London’s ascendancy possible.

Inevitably, London’s relationship to the rest of the country was subject

to very different interpretations. In A Journal of the Plague Year Daniel
Defoe, a man imaginatively and intellectually committed to the
progressive forces of trade and commerce, introduces a character who
explains the benefits that the country derives from the city:

[He] argued very calmly with them a great while, and told them
that London was the place by which they - that is, the Townsmen
of Epping and all the Country round them - subsisted; to whom
they sold the Produce of their Lands, and out of whom they made
their Rent of their Farms. (Defoe 2003: 137)

In marked contrast, Smollett is emotionally drawn by the traditions and

values of the land; at one point, Matthew Bramble complains that:

[…] the capital is become an overgrown monster; which, like a

dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities
without nourishment and support. (Smollett 2009: 87)

19-12 Literature 3
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The debate over the phenomenon of London was not simply an

economic one. For many eighteenth-century writers the contrast
between city and country, trade and agriculture, allowed for a moral
contrast as well. The country, because it produced nourishment through
active labour, could be represented as a site of health and self-
sufficiency; the city, by contrast, was seen as a pit of passive
consumption, a place of idleness and luxury. The individual visiting the
city from the wholesome country was threatened with moral corruption.

‘Luxury’ had a much more pejorative meaning in the eighteenth century

than it does today: it was used to describe not just objects but the
whole process of consumer desire. For many anxious contemporary
commentators, a luxurious society was one in which individuals were
caught up in the acquisition and enjoyment of material goods. Among
such a commodity-driven culture, books themselves were, of course, of
particular significance: they had the ability to entertain and to instruct
the reading public, as we have seen, but also potentially threatened to
mislead, or even corrupt the morals of, the impressionable reader.

Numerous eighteenth-century texts expose the ongoing contention

between the relative virtues and vices of country and city. Even the
visual arts exemplify this theme: the painter William Hogarth’s
‘narrative’ series of pictures, The Harlot’s Progress and The Rake’s
Progress, show the moral decline of their central characters after they
have entered the dissipated lifestyle with which London tempts the
susceptible and naïve youth who travels to it from the country.

Similarly, in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), the hero undergoes a

moral journey which takes him from the countryside where he is raised
to the glamorous allure – and moral depravity – of London. Tom
succumbs to temptations of various kinds in the capital, but because he
is truly virtuous at heart he is finally rewarded with marriage to his
beloved Sophia: in their married life, they enjoy wholesome rural felicity
on their country estate.

In this context, Matthew Bramble’s contrast between his ‘town

grievances’ and ‘country comforts’ offers a remarkably vigorous
expression of an important strand in eighteenth-century thought and
literature (Smollett 2009: 118-123). Unsurprisingly, given his
preoccupation with his body, Bramble initially describes the different
kinds of physical experience that country and town afford. In the
country, he enjoys ‘clear, elastic, salutary air’; in London, he breathes
‘the steams of endless putrefaction’. In the country he is nourished by
the produce of his own lands, whereas in London his food is adulterated.
In the country, he passes his hours ‘without weariness or regret’ in
reading, chatting or superintending his farm; in London he goes to bed
‘jaded and restless from the dissipations of the day’.

As Bramble’s letter progresses, he increasingly emphasises the moral

contrast between London and his country home, and finally comes to
speak of the two in terms of vice and virtue:

From this wild uproar of knavery, folly, and impertinence, I shall

fly with double relish to the serenity of retirement, the cordial
effusions of unreserved friendship, the hospitality and protection
of the rural gods. (Smollett 2009: 123)

Humphry Clinker is a travel narrative whose concerns extend beyond

simple description. Ascribing symbolic and moral significance to the
spaces through which its characters move, the novel gives important
expression to the opposition between country and city that dominates
many strands of eighteenth-century English culture, and which we shall
consider from a different perspective in the subsequent unit.

Unit 19: Journey Narratives: Tobias Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker 19-13
_____________________________________________________________________

REVIEW
In this unit, we have considered different aspects of Smollett’s activities
as an author. We have seen how throughout his career he produces
very different types of writing, from the factual to the satirical. We
focussed on his identity as a travel writer, firstly by discussing his
‘factual’ account of his continental travels through France and Italy.
However, as we saw, the fact that Smollett embellished his own letters
for literary purposes reminds us of the blend between fact and fiction
characterising much travel writing at this time.

This combination of the fictional with the real also emerges in Smollett’s
more overtly fictionalised travel narrative, The Expedition of Humphry
Clinker, upon which we focussed in this unit. We found how this text
incorporates various different generic strands, which in some respects
aligns it with other eighteenth-century texts we have already
encountered, and in other separates it from them. We saw, for instance,
that Smollett’s use of the journey narrative is very different to its
appropriation by sentimental writers. Nonetheless, we saw how
Humphry Clinker is similar to novels such as Tristram Shandy in its
concern with language.

This, we found, is a central feature of the way in which Smollett treats

character in the novel, and in particular the way in which he can
represent multiple subjectivities through the types of words each
individual uses. As we discovered, this is also connected to the multiple
perspectives each character is able to gain upon the world through the
activity of travel. In particular, Smollett foregrounds an ongoing
contemporary debate, which weighs the relative values of the country
and the city, through the different attitudes that his characters adopt
towards each location.

ADDITIONAL READING

PRIMARY TEXTS
Smollett, Tobias. 2010. Travels through France and Italy (London:
Tauris Parke Paperbacks)

SECONDARY TEXTS
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and his World, trans. by Helene
Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) (Parts available
via Google Books)

Boucé, P.G. 1976. The Novels of Smollett, trans. by Antonia White

(London: Longman)

Brewer, John. 1997. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture

in the Eighteenth Century (New York and London: Harper Collins)

Duncan, Jeffrey L. 1968: ‘The Rural Ideal in Eighteenth-Century Fiction’,

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 8. 3: 517-535 (Available
on JSTOR)

Keymer, Tom. 1995. ‘Smollett’s Scotlands: Culture, Politics and

Nationhood in “Humphry Clinker” and Defoe’s “Tour”’, History
Workshop Journal, 40: 118-132 (Available on JSTOR)

Sekora, John. 1977. Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to

Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press)

Weed, David M. 1997. ‘Sentimental Misogyny and Medicine in Humphry

Clinker’ Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 37.3: 615-636
(Available on JSTOR)

19-14 Literature 3
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Williams, Raymond. 1985. The Country and the City (London: Hogarth
Press) (Parts available online via Google Books)

REFERENCES
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and his World, trans. by Helene
Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) (Parts available
via Google Books)

 . 1998. Michael Holquis (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination:

Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin trans. by Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982: repr.)
(Parts available via Google Books)

Defoe, Daniel. 2003. Cynthia Wall (ed.), A Journal of the Plague Year
(Harmondsworth: Penguin)

George, Dorothy M. 1985. London Life in the Eighteenth Century

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1925: repr.)

Iser, Wolfgang. 1974. The Implied Reader (Baltimore and London:

Johns Hopkins University Press)

Porter, Roy. 1982. English Society in the Eighteenth Century

(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books)

Smollett, Tobias. 2009. Lewis M. Knapp and Paul-Gabriel Boucé (eds),

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Oxford: Oxford University
Press)

Sterne, Laurence. 2008. Tim Parnell and Ian Jack (eds), A Sentimental
Journey and other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Unit 19: Journey Narratives: Tobias Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker 19-15
_____________________________________________________________________

ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
Q. Which different genres does Smollett incorporate in Humphry
Clinker, and to what effect?

Humphry Clinker could arguably be said to draw on a range of

different literary genres. It is, principally, comic, and as such
straddles the various genres that might convey comic ideas or
techniques. For instance, the carnivalesque emerges in the threat to
overturn established hierarchies that the book’s women pose. On the
other hand, the marriages which conclude the novel seem to re-
establish order, and cohere with conventions of the comic genre.

Smollett’s text is also a travel narrative, which conveys the

characters’ different view-points through enabling them to encounter
fresh experiences in their journeys, which also allows them to
develop as individuals. It is, however, different to sentimental fiction
– which also frequently adopts the journey narrative format –
because the drive of Smollett’s text is principally comic.

Humphry Clinker also demonstrates elements of the epistolary

narrative, similar to Pamela, but in contrast to Richardson’s text
Smollett uses multiple letter-writers, who convey different narrative
perspectives upon the world and the events that take place. In this
respect, Humphry Clinker is embedded in the types of language it
uses, and demonstrates the multiple voices which, according to
Bakhtin, belong to the polyphonic novel. As such, and with its
intensified focus upon subjectivity, Smollett’s text can also be
described as a novel.

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SAQ 2
Q. Using the first five letters of The Expedition of Humphry Clinker,
how would you describe the character of Matthew Bramble?

The first five letters of Humphry Clinker allow us to build up a

composite picture of Matthew Bramble. Bramble’s opening complaint,
‘The pills are good for nothing’, establishes his ill-health and his
irritability. Bramble’s grumble that his nephew and niece are ‘a
perpetual source of vexation’ increases our sense that we are dealing
with a misanthrope, a character who has no time for his fellow human
beings. Yet this sense is undermined by the careful instructions
Bramble gives for the running of the estate in his absence. His orders
that the poor are to have corn at under the market price, and that a
widow is to be given support, demonstrate his practical charity, and
indicate Bramble’s ability to consider others besides himself.

Smollett uses the subsequent letters to re-enforce our awareness of

Bramble’s complex character. Jery’s first impressions of Bramble (like
our own) are not favourable: he sees his uncle as a bad-tempered
individual, ‘always on the fret’ (8). Jery is, however, willing to think
that Bramble’s character has been affected by his illness, and that
further acquaintance may present him in a better light. This
possibility is, in turn, strengthened by the letters of Win and Liddy.
Win tells us in passing how the ‘squire gave away an ould coat to a
poor man’ (7). Liddy, whom Bramble had spoken of merely as a
source of trouble, reveals in her letter that her uncle, initially angry at
her involvement with Wilson, the strolling-player, has been moved by
her own distress, and is ‘now all tenderness and compassion’ (10). No
single letter gives a complete picture of Bramble’s character, but the
information and perceptions each allows the reader to begin to form a
sense of Bramble.

Unit 19: Journey Narratives: Tobias Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker 19-17
_____________________________________________________________________

SAQ 3
Q. In his letter of May 24 from London (pp. 79-86), Jery Melford
describes how Matthew and Tabitha Bramble respond to the first
appearance of Humphry Clinker. What do their respective
responses say about their own characters?

The first reactions of Matt and Tabitha Bramble to Humphry Clinker

are in keeping with character traits exhibited by each elsewhere in
the book. Tabitha, in responding to Clinker, sees only his clothes (or
absence of them) and bases her view of his character on his external
appearance. She rails against Clinker as ‘a beggarly rascal’, and ‘an
impudent varlet’ (81). To Tabitha’s mind, Clinker’s torn clothes
denote moral failing. Tabitha is not interested in how Clinker got into
such a state. She is, however, incensed that Clinker has forced his
poverty upon her notice: his crime is riding ‘before persons of fashion
without a shirt’. As is the case elsewhere in the novel, Tabitha is only
interested in her own feelings. Her reaction to Clinker demonstrates
her complete self-involvement.

Unlike his sister, Matthew Bramble wants to know what has caused
Clinker’s poor appearance. He listens to what Clinker has to say about
his own past. Significantly, he then asks if Clinker is ‘known to any
person in Marlborough’ (82). Bramble’s sense of social responsibility
requires that recipients of his charity be deserving, and it is only after
the landlord has verified Clinker’s story that Bramble acts.

In contrast to Tabitha, who interprets events solely in the light of her

own self-interest, Bramble uses his personal experience to evaluate
the social world in which he moves. Humphry Clinker’s plight reflects
the ’morals of the age’ (82). Bramble’s ironic invocation of the
Sermon on the Mount – ‘Heark ye, Clinker, you are a most notorious
offender - You stand convicted of sickness, hunger, wretchedness,
and want’ - exposes the hypocrisy of a society which, supposedly
Christian, still ignores the moral standards of that faith. Bramble, who
functions as a judge here, reminds the reader of a final scene of
judgement in which temporal concerns will be overthrown. Bramble’s
response to Clinker demonstrates the gravity of his character, and his
ability to serve as a moral centre of the novel.

19-18 Literature 3
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UNIT 20

THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY: GOLDSMITH

AND CRABBE

AIM
The aim of this unit is to discuss representations of the country and the
city in late eighteenth-century poetry.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit you should be able to:

Connect eighteenth-century representations of the country to the

classical tradition.

Compare poetic attitudes towards the country and the city with the
expression of this idea in other texts you have encountered from this
period.

Explain what is meant by the term ‘anti-pastoral’ in later eighteenth-

century poetry.

Describe how Oliver Goldsmith and George Crabbe relate poetry to

social conditions.

REQUIRED READING
The required reading for this unit is:

Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770)

George Crabbe, The Village (1783), Book I

Both poems can be found in Roger Lonsdale (ed.). 2009. The New
Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse Oxford World’s Classics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press).

INTRODUCTION
In the last unit, we discussed how Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker is
in many respects a hybrid text: it incorporates several different genres
and styles, including aspects of the novel (such as epistolarity) and
other literary forms such as travel writing. We also found how Humphry
Clinker contrasts with other literary modes we have studied, such as the
sentimental novel, whilst reflecting upon some of its elements in a
mildly satirical way (such as in the character of Lydia Bramble). In the
final section of Unit 19 we addressed how in his novel Smollett conveys
an ongoing debate about the relative merits of the country and the city:
we found that in many respects Humphry Clinker projects a negative
attitude towards the perceived vice, dissipation and immorality of the
city, which is pitted against the relative virtue and wholesome pleasures
of the country.

In this unit, we shall be considering this opposition from a different

perspective by analsying examples of a literary genre that we have not
studied for several units. You may have gained the impression that the
latter part of the eighteenth century was heavily prose-centred, and

Unit 20: The Country and the City: Goldsmith and Crabbe 20-1
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that other types of literary or cultural activity were not so lively at this
time. However, this is far from the case: while the significant
developments in different types of prose fiction in the late eighteenth
century generated some of the most exciting and influential literary
works of this period (such as Pamela or Tristram Shandy), writers were
still very active in other genres too.

Although we shall not be considering any examples as such in this

module, the late eighteenth-century theatre was a dynamic world:
theatrical performances of all kinds remained hugely popular, from the
more high-brow revivals of Shakespeare’s plays to the ‘low’ forms of
theatre such as the pantomime. Many critics consider this period of
theatre history to have witnessed a decline in standard of the stage
entertainment available to audiences, and in particular of the production
of new pieces; but as far as audience numbers can offer a gauge of
popular interest, many contemporary theatre-goers continued to see
this as an attractive way of spending their leisure time and money.
Furthermore, the drama of playwrights such as Richard Brinsley
Sheridan, or Oliver Goldsmith, offer a counter-argument to this view.

Beside theatre, many other types of literary and cultural activity

flourished in this period besides the prose narrative. Poetry continued to
be a highly popular – and highly valued – form of literary expression,
which witnessed changes in form and outlook as significant as those
manifested in prose fiction. In previous units, we have charted some of
the changes in form and the poem’s potential purpose across a range of
writers. Similarly, in the late eighteenth century many poets continued
to be preoccupied both with the formal qualities of their verse and of its
wider role within society.

In this unit, we shall narrow our awareness of these broader concerns

by focussing our attention upon the theme with which we closed the
previous unit: we will consider the idea that this period witnessed an
intensification in the debate between the comparative virtues of country
and city through a close reading of two major poems from this period,
Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770) and George Crabbe’s
The Village (1783).

We shall see how these authors not only reflect upon this ongoing
opposition between country and city, but used it to offer a wider
comment upon their contemporary society. As such, Goldsmith and
Crabbe’s poems remind us of the broader questions of an author’s moral
responsibility, and his ability to convey edifying lessons or important
comments through his art-work, which we have encountered in several
different guises in previous units.

At the most general level, this unit is concerned with the tension
between convention and observation in eighteenth-century poetry; or,
to put it another way, with the relationship between the language of
poetry and the social conditions of late eighteenth-century England. This
tension emerges most clearly in late eighteenth-century poetry dealing
with country life, whose roots lie in ideas found in the classical tradition
of pastoral poetry.

We have already discussed the influence of pastoral upon Milton’s

poetry, and upon the ‘Country House’ poem genre, in previous units. In
this unit, we shall approach Goldsmith and Crabbe’s poems through
addressing what the pastoral tradition involves and its impact upon
eighteenth-century poets. We shall see how, while they inherited this
genre and its conventions, many poets of this period increasingly came
to feel that pastoral poetry needed to be reconsidered so that it could
more accurately reflect the nature of contemporary country life: critics
attach the name ‘anti-pastoralism’ to this reconsideration. We will

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examine the pastoral and anti-pastoral strands in later eighteenth-

century poetry as they emerge in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted
Village and George Crabbe’s The Village.

THE COUNTRY AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION

We have already encountered the idea that the classical tradition as
represented by greatly admired writers such as Homer, Horace and
Virgil influenced generations of English writers across the period covered
by this module. We have seen how classicism adopted various different
strands, from the influence of ideas about decorum, and the ability for
Restoration London to rival Rome, as found in the neoclassicism of John
Dryden’s criticism and poetry, to the continuation and development of
these ideas in the ‘Augustan’ poetry of Alexander Pope. In Unit 11, for
instance, we saw how Pope’s Essay on Criticism presented the ‘modern’
poet’s role as one that is necessarily dependent on familiarity with the
‘Ancients’. We also saw, in Unit 10, how Pope’s Rape of the Lock
reworks the traditions of classical epic to produce a mock-heroic poem.

The influence of classical traditions upon authors of very different

stamps across this period is nonetheless much more widespread than
this. In our discussion of Milton’s poetry in Unit 2, for instance, we
found how the pastoral tradition – mediated through a reading of
Elizabethan poetry – provided an important model for Milton to reshape
for his own poetic needs. Similarly, we found how the pastoral ideal of
Horace’s poetry establishes a way of conceiving the relationship
between country and city, and the individual’s relation to both, that
strongly influences poets who write within the ‘Country House’ genre.

Indeed, eighteenth-century poets such as Pope continue to express an

interest in pastoral – and its origins in classical traditions – as an
important model for their own poetry. Pope in fact wrote his own
version of the ‘estate poem’, The Palace of Alcinous, a passage within
his translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Elsewhere, Pope provides a
discussion of analysis that reminds of us his dual role as both poet and
critic; introducing his own pastoral poems, published in 1709, Pope
explains what the attraction of pastoral is:

The original of Poetry is ascribed to that age which succeeded the

creation of the world: And as the keeping of flocks seems to have
been the first employment of mankind, the most ancient sort of
poetry was probably pastoral. ’Tis natural to imagine, that the
leisure of those ancient shepherds admitting and inviting some
diversion, none was so proper to that solitary and sedentary life as
singing; and that in their songs they took occasion to celebrate
their own felicity. From hence a Poem was invented, and
afterwards improv’d to a perfect image of that happy time; which
by giving us an esteem for the virtues of a former age, might
recommend them to the present . . . it may be useful to take this
Idea along with us, that pastoral is an image of what they call the
Golden age. (1963: 119)

Pastoral poetry, as Pope describes it, represents ‘the virtues of a former

age’. From the pastorals of the Greek Theocritus, to those of Virgil, to
those of Pope himself, pastoral poetry adhered to invariable
conventions. Pastoral poems are concerned with shepherds, love and
songs of love. The country as it exists in eighteenth-century pastoral is
not that of eighteenth-century England, but that of ‘the Golden age’.

Classical poets did, of course, understand that the country had a reality
of its own as a place of work, which offers a counter-argument to the
pastoral idyll, as we discovered in Unit 3. For example, Virgil followed
his pastorals with a quartet of poems called The Georgics (the title

Unit 20: The Country and the City: Goldsmith and Crabbe 20-3
_____________________________________________________________________

means ‘the facts of farming’). In these poems Virgil offers information

and advice: he teaches the reader to distinguish between different kinds
of soil, and advises on matters of pruning and harvesting. Unlike
pastorals, Virgil’s Georgics are down-to-earth poems about working the
land, but they share with pastoral an idealisation of the country as a
place of tranquillity and moral virtue. The first book of his poems opens
with just such a vision of rural harmony obtained through labour:

What tickles the corn to laugh out loud, and by what star
To steer the plough, and how to train the vine to elms,
good management of flocks and herds, the expertise bees need to
thrive – my lord, Maecenas, such are the makings of the song
I take upon myself to sing. (Virgil 2009: 5)

It is the hard work involved in steering ‘the plough’ and training ‘the
vine’ that ensures the land will be most fruitful: ‘good management’ –
the careful discretion of the ‘lord’ of the estate – makes the whole of
nature exist in bountiful harmony. Virgil suggests that the farmer’s life
is not luxurious, but is free from ostentation. The work and frugality
which farming-life requires not only lead to health and virtue but also to
a sound social order in which fathers and gods are venerated.

As we found in Unit 3, these ideas also emerge in Horace’s Satires and

Epistles, which similarly present the idea that the country life is one of
toil and labour, but that it is also wholesome and virtuous. Horace
praises ‘the virtues of plain living’ (Satire II.2.1); he promotes
moderation and abstinence from the ‘gluttony’ and dissipation with
which city life can tempt a man.

Virgil’s Georgics and Horace’s vision of the ‘good life’ exerted an

enormous appeal for English readers of the period that we are studying.
Their view of the farmer as a self-sufficient, independent individual at
the centre of a well-regulated social order is entirely consistent with
certain ideological strands in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century life,
as we have found in many different contexts, as the arguments that
Virgil (for example) makes in his Georgics are re-stated countless times
in poetry and prose. For instance, as we found in Humphry Clinker,
Matthew Bramble expresses an appreciation of the country very close to
that of Virgil’s Georgics.

As we shall go on to discuss in this unit, Virgil’s ideal of country life, and

its expression in this particular literary form, exerted a particularly
strong influence upon two poems that were contemporaneous with
Smollett’s novel: Goldsmith’s Deserted Village and Crabbe’s The Village.

THE PASTORAL AND LITERARY CONVENTION

How might we understand the role of pastoral poetry, and the
emergence of anti-pastoral, in eighteenth-century poetry?

The most influential modern account of eighteenth-century pastoral is

provided by the Welsh critic Raymond Williams in The Country and the
City (1973). The focal point in this study is the tension between the
country, as a site of lived experience, and the country as it is produced
through literary conventions. Williams explains his approach to this
problem through a discussion of the ‘Country House’ poem with which
we are already familiar from Unit 3. Williams argues that poems of this
genre:

[…] were customarily presented as records of the country

houses, and so of the organic rural society England had once
been, and so of the pattern of real civilisation, later destroyed by
capitalism. (1973: 304)

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Williams argues from a Marxist standpoint, which opposes the

hierarchical assumptions inherent in such a view. However, as he
suggests here, it is the convention surrounding the criticism of such
poetry, rather than the society that poetry reflects, which he seeks to
reassess:

I decided this had to be challenged on two grounds. First, it was

necessary to show […] that country houses like Saxham and
Penshurst were not at all like the poems Jonson or Carew wrote
about them; but secondly, it was also necessary to understand
that their particular way of seeing them, or not seeing them, lay
deep in the very forms and conventions of the poetry itself.
(Williams 1973: 304)

Williams is speaking of the way literary conventions can operate so as to

block out, or render invisible, certain kinds of experience and truth.

This comment suggests that it is possible for a poet to idealise the

subject he is writing about: whether to flatter a patron, or to project a
particular polemical message, he may make the subject of his
description even more glamorous, attractive or virtuous than it actually
is. As such, the genuine misery and suffering involved in truly laborious
work upon the land becomes neglected in the perfection of the rural
idyll that the poet creates.

From Williams’s perspective, this supports a ‘capitalist’ approach to the

economy in which the well-run country estate forms a vital component:
the success of a bountiful estate accrues wealth for its owner. However,
whilst the owner may exemplify his own personal virtues of moderation
and restraint through this visible success, and although he might be
benevolent towards the ‘family’ who help to run his estate, those who
perform the most laborious tasks are essentially excluded from the
greater benefits of such prosperity.

Furthermore, the truly onerous nature of their toil becomes

overshadowed by the glamorous picture created by poets writing within
the pastoral tradition who praise the well-run estate. Pastoral poems
disguise the meanness and misery of country life in order to paint a
‘Golden age’ represented by the country estate and its owner: as such,
poetic idealisation conceals the hard truth about the rural economy.

There is another facet of the pastoral approach towards representing

the countryside in this idealised way which connects with other
developments in literature during this period that we have discussed in
other contexts. The Marxist rhetoric of Williams’s comments here might
remind you of the anti-capitalist attack that critics such as Robert
Markley make upon sentimental benevolence, as we discussed in Unit
18.

Indeed, there is a strong connection between the ideal emotions and

sensibilities that characterises sentimentalism and the idealisation of the
rural poor present in pastoral poetry: just as the way in which a
sentimentalist can look upon suffering beggars with compassion and
offer them alms could be interpreted as selfish altruism, so the pastoral
poet’s depiction of hard-working labourers could be a way of hiding the
truth about their genuine misery.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ANTI-PASTORAL
Of course, to some extent those who wrote pastoral were well aware of
the divergences between the ‘real’ country and the one they
represented in writing.

An important, and varied, group of eighteenth-century poets set out to

Unit 20: The Country and the City: Goldsmith and Crabbe 20-5
_____________________________________________________________________

challenge pastoral by telling the whole truth, as they saw it, in their
poems. Such writers forced readers to pay attention to the
conventionality of pastoral, and to confront those aspects of country life
which pastoral conventions could not accommodate.

Some of these poets attracted considerable attention because they

flouted the expectations of eighteenth-century readers on two fronts:
not only was their subject matter the world of work, but they
themselves were workers, the very people pastoral poetry made
invisible. Among such poets were Stephen Duck, ‘The thresher poet’,
and Mary Collier, ‘The Washer-woman poet’ – not to mention Ann
Yearsley, or ‘Lactilla’, the milkmaid-turned-poetess we encountered in
Unit 1.

Duck’s story is particularly poignant: a rural labourer born in 1705, he

managed to teach himself how to read and eventually wrote verses. At
first he seemed to be tremendously successful, gaining royal patronage
and a job as a librarian; however, eventually he became deranged and
committed suicide. In his most famous poem, ‘The Thresher’s Labour’
(published in 1730), Duck overturns expectations about the appropriate
subject matter of pastoral poetry: rather than creating an idealised
picture of the country and the fruitful labours that it nurtures, he
uncovers the misery of rural life.

Duck refuses to adhere to existing pastoral or social conventions about

the life of the rural poor; he exposes the difference between the
idealised shepherd (like the figure we encountered in Milton’s Lycidas)
and the living agricultural labourer to create an original, and
ideologically challenging, new type of poetry. As he asks his reader,

Can we, like shepherds, tell a merry tale

The voice is lost, drowned by the noisy flail.
But we may think. - Alas! what pleasing thing
Here to the mind can the dull fancy bring?
The eye beholds no pleasant object here:
No cheerful sound diverts the list’ning ear.
The shepherd well may turn his voice to sing,
Inspired by all the beauties of the spring:
No fountains murmur here, no lambkins play,
No linnets warble, and no fields look gay;
’Tis all a dull and melancholy scene,
Fit only to provoke the Muse’s spleen (Lonsdale 2009: 225)

Duck contrasts the noise of harvesting, the dullness of the landscape,

and the tedium of repetitive labour with the gay fields, warbling linnets,
and murmuring fountains of pastoral convention. As such, he challenges
the contemporary reader’s expectations about what the fitting focus,
and manner of description, should be in a poem ostensibly based upon a
rural theme. Duck’s poem exposes what the art-historian and literary
critic John Barrell calls ‘the darker side of the landscape’: the harsh and
gritty reality of the suffering rural poor.

Duck is, perhaps, a minor and extreme example of the tension between
poetic convention and real life of which Raymond Williams speaks, and
of the idealisation of rural life that Barrell criticises. Nonetheless, we find
the same tensions in major poems of the century such as Goldsmith’s
The Deserted Village and Crabbe’s The Village. Each of these poems
asks in different ways how the poetic representation of the country as a
place of tranquillity, innocence and simplicity can be reconciled with the
actual space where people work the land.

20-6 Literature 3
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GOLDSMITH’S THE DESERTED VILLAGE

Activity
Read Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village.

Make notes on your initial impressions upon reading this poem, in the
light of the preceding discussion about form and about the depiction of
rural life.

Does Goldsmith present an idealised, ‘pastoral’ vision of the country, or

a darker, ‘anti-pastoral’ picture of its reality?

In his Dedication of The Deserted Village to the artist, Sir Joshua

Reynolds, Goldsmith raises the question of truth-telling in poetry: he
admits that not everyone agrees with his views on rural depopulation,
the subject of the poem, but he asserts his own sincere belief in what he
has written:

I have taken all possible pains, in my country excursions, for

these four or five years past, to be certain of what I allege; and
that all my views and enquiries have led me to believe those
miseries real, which I here attempt to display. (Jain and
Richardson 1994: 443)

This poem, Goldsmith argues, is written out of real knowledge and

observation. Rather than make a contribution to the tradition of
depicting warbling linnets and murmuring fountains – the subjects of
‘sentimentalised’ views of the country upon which Goldsmith
sarcastically reflects – this poet considers that an important function of
poetry should be to display the real misery of those who toil on the
land.

We have encountered this idea in different respects in the work of a

range of writers in this module, and seen how social critique through the
work of art might help to introduce positive change within the social
realm. In Goldsmith’s poem, the belief that poetry should articulate
truths which society would rather ignore is a dominant underlying theme
which runs throughout, right up to its closing lines, where Goldsmith
asks Poetry to ‘Aid slighted truth, with thy persuasive strain’ (l. 423).

THE DESERTED VILLAGE AS SOCIAL CRITICISM

The subject of Goldsmith’s poem is rural depopulation: the inhabitants
of ‘Sweet Auburn’, the village of the title, have abandoned their homes
because the lands are being enclosed. Enclosure was an agricultural
practice that dominated the ‘revolution’ in how Britain’s rural economy
functioned in the eighteenth century. Although enclosure had been
practised before for several centuries, an even more rigorous approach
to this way of organising the distribution of land took hold in this period,
in tandem with the rapid development of Britain’s industrialised
economy. Previously extensive swathes of open or ‘common’ land
became increasingly enclosed into smaller parcels of easily manageable
agricultural fields.

In English Society in the Eighteenth Century, Roy Porter notes that

‘much ink and passion have been spilt by historians debating the
injustice and social consequences of enclosure’ (1982: 227). Enclosure
fundamentally altered the landscape, improved the health of livestock
and increased rural profits; but it also caused tremendous suffering to
those at the very bottom of rural society now deprived of common
lands. Enclosures destroyed communities.

Unit 20: The Country and the City: Goldsmith and Crabbe 20-7
_____________________________________________________________________

Several critics have suggested that in writing The Deserted Village

Goldsmith was making a specific argument about the practice of
enclosure, and its impact upon rural communities. In particular,
Goldsmith draws upon his own memories of enclosures in County
Longford in Ireland during the 1730s. The ambivalent benefit and harm
of this practice is figured through the narrative sequences charted in
Goldsmith’s poem.

One of the patterns in The Deserted Village is the way in which it takes
the reader from a scene of community to one of isolation. For example,
the verse paragraph from lines 113 to 135 begins with the poet
remembering the ‘village murmur’ at evening, a happy blend of animal
clamour and human noise.

Activity
Re-read The Deserted Village, ll. 113-135.

Make notes on the transition between population and isolation charted

in these lines.

The poet contrasts two time-frames here: one of memory, and the other
of the present moment. In the former, nobody is isolated, everything is
integrated: the swain responds to the milkmaid, the herd low to meet
the young, and all sounds make ‘sweet confusion’. The poet’s memory is
of an organic society in which all the parts meld together harmoniously.
Now, however, only a ‘widowed, solitary’ thing remains: ‘The sad
historian of the pensive plain’.

Goldsmith expresses views on rural virtue close to those of Virgil or

Smollett. Like them, he associates the life of the farmer with innocence,
health and independence:

For him light labour spread her wholesome store,

Just gave what life required, but gave no more:
His best companions, innocence and health;
And his best riches, ignorance of wealth. (ll.59-62)

For Goldsmith, however, it is no longer possible to live this idyll. Not

only has it been destroyed, but it has been ruined by specific aspects of
eighteenth-century life, trade and luxury: he describes of the onwards
progress of trade that the ‘unfeeling train/ Usurp the land and
dispossess the swain’ (l. 63). In the splendours of commercial England,
its striking vistas and palaces, Goldsmith sees only a land that is by
‘luxury betrayed’ (l. 295).

What future does this offer for rural England, and for Britain as a whole?

Activity
Re-read The Deserted Village, ll. 310-430.

Make notes on the tone of these closing sections: is Goldsmith’s vision a

pessimistic or optimistic one?

Which words and images convey this impression?

In the last quarter of the poem (ll. 310-430), we may summarise,

20-8 Literature 3
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Goldsmith imagines a bitter fate for the village’s inhabitants: they will
be forced off the land inhabited by their ancestors and dispersed across
the country. Some go to the city where they see a profusion of luxury,
dissipation and excess in which they ‘must not share’. On the one hand,
they do not have the financial stability to participate in such pleasures;
on the other, Goldsmith suggests, the wholesome virtue that they
possess as embodiments of the healthy countryside brings him to warn
against the corrupting influences of the city.

Other villagers are forced to ‘distant climes’ (l. 341), where the dangers
they face are more exotic: scorpions, snakes, tigers and ’savage men’.
As such, the close-knit community of rural bliss – based on hard work,
poverty and suffering, but also made cohesive through a shared sense
of values and virtues – will be dispersed and dismantled. The wider
effects upon society as a whole, Goldsmith suggests, will be equally
fragmentary and eventually destructive.

SAQ 1
The Deserted Village draws attention to the contrast between city and
country. How does Goldsmith describe the city in this poem?

SOCIAL CRITICISM AND THE MIND OF THE POET

In his dedication to Reynolds, as we have seen, Goldsmith insisted that
his poem was based on accurate observation. However, the facts of
enclosure, eviction and emigration are only part of the broader range of
ideas that Goldsmith wishes to convey. These are centred upon his own
position in relation to the social phenomena he records: the importance
of his own memory as a palimpsest on which the patterns of local, social
history are recorded reminds us of his identity as the creator of this
particular poem. ‘Sweet Auburn’ is important not only for what it is, or
was, but also for the feelings it excites in the speaker, emotions which
are directly linked to his vocation as poet.

The poet confesses that ‘Sweet Auburn’ had, in all his wanderings and
disappointments, been his ideal community, the place in which he
hoped, eventually, to fulfil his poetic self. In his pride, he had hoped:

Amidst the swains to show my book-learned skill,

Around my fire an evening group to draw,
And tell of all I felt, and all I saw (ll. 90-92)

Even in the midst of a rural community whose inhabitants may have

poor levels of literacy – if any at all – the ‘skill’ of poetry can
nonetheless still be appreciated. In fact, it can provide a form of social
glue, which ensures the cohesion of this small community through the
shared telling of stories, through the common fund of learning. The poet
has now been deprived of that community; instead, he must confide his
loss to the anonymous members of the book-buying public.

The destruction of Auburn is also the destruction of a certain kind of

poetry. As Raymond Williams astutely remarks, Goldsmith’s creation of
a desert landscape is ‘an imaginative rather than a social process; it is
what the new order does to the poet, not to the land’ (1973: 79). The
Deserted Village is at once a pastoral poem and a poem about why
pastoral poetry is no longer possible. As such, when Goldsmith imagines
the ‘rural virtues’ leaving the land he also sees ‘sweet Poetry’, the
‘loveliest maid’, in flight. Poetry, like the villagers, has been forced into
exile.

Unit 20: The Country and the City: Goldsmith and Crabbe 20-9
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SAQ 2
At the end of The Deserted Village Goldsmith addresses ‘sweet
Poetry’. How does he characterise poetry in this address?

GEORGE CRABBE’S THE VILLAGE AND ANTI-PASTORAL

Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village uses the conventions of pastoral
poetry as an instrument of social criticism; through the narrator’s
memories Goldsmith asserts the reality of vanished rural virtues. Even
in his childhood, pastoral poetry was ‘true’ for this poet, and it still
remains ‘true’ in his imagination. Only the injurious effects of trade and
luxury, truths of a different order, have invalidated the pastoral ideal.

Unlike Goldsmith, George Crabbe sees pastoral conventions as being

intrinsically false. In his poem, The Village, Crabbe presents an
altogether different vision of the ways in which the rural community
might be represented in poetry. In the final section of this unit, we will
conduct a brief reading of Crabbe’s poem as an opposing counterpart to
the vision Goldsmith presents in terms of both ideas and poetic form.

Activity
Read George Crabbe, The Village, Book I, pp. 669-676.

In The Village, Crabbe argues that adherence to the pastoral tradition

leads poets astray:

From truth and nature shall we widely stray?

Where Virgil, not where fancy leads the way? (ll. 19-20)

Crabbe argues that poets have been misled by their reading of other
poets, and have abandoned both truth and nature. Unlike Goldsmith,
but like ‘honest Duck’ (l.27), Crabbe sees rural life as impoverished,
harsh and cruel. Rather than following the path of ‘fancy’, which might
create a false and idealistic vision of the realities of rural life, Crabbe
urges the poet and reader to follow the more tangibly realistic route of
‘truth and nature’.

Goldsmith presents his ‘sad historian of the pensive plain’ as a victim of

recent social changes; Crabbe tells the story of a ‘hoary swain’
condemned to a life of long labour. Goldsmith sees isolation and
loneliness as a product of rural depopulation; Crabbe denies that village
life ever offered the community which Goldsmith mourns. To reinforce
his point, Crabbe replaces Goldsmith’s pastor, ‘passing rich with forty
pounds a year’, with a sporting vicar more interested in hunting than in
providing comfort for a dying man. For Crabbe, poetic conventions are a
falsifying medium. His own ambition is to describe rural life ‘As truth will
paint it, and as bards will not’ (l.54).

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Activity
Make notes on your impression of the contrasts between Crabbe and
Goldsmith’s poems.

How does Crabbe’s vision of the rural community compare to

Goldsmith’s?

What are the differences or similarities between the poetic forms each
poet adopts to convey this vision?

REVIEW
This unit has considered various attitudes towards the representation of
country life in eighteenth-century poetry. We began by describing how
the classical tradition influenced eighteenth-century conceptions of the
country, and compared these ideas to those encountered in previous
units on Milton and ‘Country House’ poetry. We compared the pastoral
tradition with the ‘anti-pastoral’ strain of poetry found in the work of
minor authors such as Stephen Duck. We saw how such writers develop
a mode of poetry that draws attention to the conventionality of pastoral,
and which tries to show how incompatible pastoral conventions and
country life are.

We developed these contrasting approaches to pastoral through a

reading of Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village. We saw how
Goldsmith asserts that the conventions of pastoral provided a kind of
truth even within his own lifetime, but that social change in the form of
enclosures, trade and commerce, has destroyed the country. It is only
in the memory of the poet that pastoral retains its truth. We compared
these ideas to the first part of George Crabbe’s poem The Village, and
saw how in direct contrast to Goldsmith, Crabbe insists that country life
is harsh and impoverished, which poetry idealises and so manages to
conceal.

The representation of the country found in these poems belongs to a

wider interest in nature belonging to writers in all genres in the latter
half of the eighteenth century. Whilst nature has been a source of
inspiration and comment across all literary periods, its representation
develops in interesting new and diverse ways in this period. As we shall
discover in the subsequent unit, an aesthetic discourse mapped onto the
landscape with an evolving interest in the psychological presentation of
character converge in yet another new type of prose fiction that
emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century: the Gothic novel.

ADDITIONAL READING

PRIMARY TEXTS
Lonsdale, Roger. 2009. The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century
Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

SECONDARY TEXTS
Griffin, Michael. 2001. ‘Delicate Allegories, Deceitful Mazes: Goldsmith’s
Landscapes’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr,
16: 104-117 (Available on JSTOR)

Jefferson, D. W. 1976. ‘“Satirical Landscape”: Churchill and Crabbe’, The

Yearbook of English Studies, 6: 92-100 (Available on JSTOR)

Lutz, Alfred. 1998. ‘The Politics of Reception: The Case of Goldsmith’s

Unit 20: The Country and the City: Goldsmith and Crabbe 20-11
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“The Deserted Village”’, Studies in Philology, 95.2: 174-196

(Available on JSTOR)

Williams, Anne. 1984. ‘Pastoral into Lyric: The Deserted Village’, in

Prophetic Strain (Chicago: Chicago University Press)

Williams, Raymond. 1973. ‘Nature’s Threads’, in The Country and the

City (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 68-79

REFERENCES
Barrell, John. 1983. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in
English Painting 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press)

Jain, Nalini, and John Richardson (eds). 1994. Eighteenth-Century

English Poetry: The Annotated Anthology (Hemel Hempstead:
Harvester Wheatsheaf)

Lonsdale, Roger (ed.). 2009. The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-

Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press) (Parts available
online via Google Books)

Pope, Alexander. 1963. John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope:
A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text (New Haven:
Yale University Press)

Porter, Roy. 1982. English Society in the Eighteenth-Century

(Harmondsworth: Penguin)

Rudd, Niall (ed.). 2005. The Satires of Horace and Persius

(Harmondsworth: Penguin)

Virgil. 2009. Georgics, trans. by Peter Fallon (Oxford: Oxford University

Press)

Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), pp. 68-79 (Parts available online via Google
Books)

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ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1
The Deserted Village draws attention to the contrast between city and
country. How does Goldsmith describe the city in this poem?

In Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, the city represents luxury and

vice. It is a place of loneliness and isolation where no real community
is possible. When, for example, Goldsmith gives us a character sketch
of the village’s vicar, an exemplary individual dedicated to the
spiritual and material needs of his flock, he emphasises that such
virtue exists ‘remote from towns’ (l. 143). The vicar is independent
and careless of social advancement: ‘Unpracticed he to fawn, or seek
for power’ (l. 145). In Goldsmith’s memory, country life is inclusive,
and all his images of it involve conversation, convivial drinking and
equality of pleasure.

The city, in contrast, is marked by social inequality and exclusion;

there is ‘profusion’ (l. 309), but only for some. Individuals prey upon
each other and one man’s pleasure requires another’s pain; the ‘joys’
of the rake are ‘Extorted from his fellow-creature’s woe’ (l. 313).
Goldsmith acknowledges the spectacle the city provides, but he
includes between the ‘glittering courtier,’ and the domes of pleasure,
the sober image of the gloomy ‘black gibbet’. The image of the gibbet
reminds the reader that offenses against property were capital
offenses in the later eighteenth century, and suggests the repression
which sustains the ‘tumultuous grandeur’ (l. 321) of city life.

While the poem represents country life through the stories of the
vicar and the school-master, it represents city life through the story
of the seduced and abandoned young girl: ‘Now lost to all; her
friends, her virtue fled, / Near her betrayer’s door she lays her head’
(ll. 331-2). At this point in the poem, Goldsmith’s representation of
the relationship between city and country is clearly gendered. The
poem identifies the country (associated throughout with sweetness)
with the young woman (‘Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the
thorn’). Ambitious and desiring to see the town, the young woman
has left her rural simplicity and has been undone by the city and the
luxurious men it contains. As a ‘poor, houseless, shivering female’
she symbolises the way in which the entire country has been ’by
luxury betrayed’ (l. 294).

SAQ 2
At the end of The Deserted Village, Goldsmith addresses ‘sweet
Poetry’. How does he characterise poetry in this address?

At the end of The Deserted Village, Goldsmith personifies poetry and

associates it with the ‘rural virtues’ forced to leave the land. He
cannot imagine how poetry can be written in ‘these degenerate times
of shame’ (l.409). In a world dedicated to material gain and
commerce, poetry is ‘neglected and decried’: it becomes a ‘solitary
pride’ (l.411-412). Only isolated individuals cherish poetry, which can
no longer represent the social and public world. The ending of the
poem provides a double message: Goldsmith sees poetry as going
into exile, forced to exist in extreme and exotic locations, ‘where
equinoctial fervours glow, / Or winter wraps the polar world in snow’
(l.419-420). At the same time, he still holds out the possibility that
the voice of poetry may eventually be heard. The task Goldsmith
imagines for poetry is a social one. It is through poetry, the ‘nurse of
every virtue’, that the ‘rage of gain’ can be rejected (l.416, 424).

Unit 20: The Country and the City: Goldsmith and Crabbe 20-13
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UNIT 21

GOTHIC FICTION: HORACE WALPOLE’S

CASTLE OF OTRANTO AND BEYOND

AIM
The aim of this unit is to introduce you to Gothic fiction by exploring its
‘origins’ in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, and to see how the ideas
and themes the Gothic incorporates emerges in subsequent examples of
the genre.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit, you should be able to:

Describe what characterises Gothic fiction.

Provide an account of how these features first emerged in fictional

form through a close reading of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto.

Explain why the natural world provides an important means for

conveying Gothic images and ideas through a discussion of Edmund
Burke’s Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful.

Explain how these trends and ideas developed in subsequent

examples of Gothic fiction, and in particular in Ann Radcliffe’s novels.

REQUIRED READING
The required reading for this unit is:

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)

The edition referred to in this unit is Horace Walpole. 2008. W. S. Lewis

(ed.),The Castle of Otranto, with an introduction and revised notes by E.
J. Clery, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

INTRODUCTION

Over the course of the past few modules, we have traced how literature
of the latter part of the eighteenth century grew in very different
directions, and in very diverse ways. We have charted the development
of prose fiction from around 1740 onwards, which we have considered in
relation to the emergence of the genre of the novel. As we have
discovered, however, the ‘novel’ cannot clearly be defined during this
period: it is often a hybrid form incorporating many different styles, and
written for a range of varying purposes. We found, for instance, that
Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding take very different approaches
towards the purposes of fiction, and the way in which that purpose
might be achieved. We have also discovered that Laurence Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy offers an altogether contrasting approach to how a
‘novel’ might be written, to the visual appearance of its text, and to how
we might go about reading the book.

We have also discussed how prose fiction in the latter part of the
eighteenth century took yet another turn with the emergence of

Unit 21: Gothic Fiction: Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Beyond 21-1
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sentimental fiction; we connected the journey narrative that often

conveys the ideas and expressions of sentiment in such texts with the
very different kind of travel writing that Smollett incorporates into his
Humphry Clinker, itself a hybrid ‘novel’. In the last unit, we saw how the
opposition between country and city which emerges in Smollett’s text
finds a parallel expression in the poetry of Crabbe and Goldsmith
produced around this time.

All these aspects of your knowledge of late eighteenth-century literature

– the various genres it covers, and the very different approaches
adopted by a range of authors – will underpin your understanding of the
topic covered in this unit. We shall discuss Gothic fiction as yet another
dimension of the literature produced during the second half of the
eighteenth century, and more specifically of prose literature. We shall
discover what constitutes the ‘Gothic’: the components – or, to use a
more apt term (as we shall see) – the ‘ingredients’ of the Gothic novel.
We shall focus this discussion upon what is generally considered to be
the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto.

Walpole’s text was published in 1764: chronologically, it belongs

between the novels of Richardson and Fielding in the 1740s and those of
sentimental authors, such as Mackenzie, writing in the 1770s – the
decade in which, as we found, Smollett also published Humphry Clinker.
The Castle of Otranto is contemporaneous with Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy in the ongoing process of its publication: in fact, by 1764,
Sterne’s readers had already received volumes I-VI of the text, but
were still awaiting the publication of volumes VII and VIII (in 1765) and
volume IX (1767).

We seem in this unit, then, to be going back on ourselves by focussing

on a text which chronologically preceded others that we have already
studied in the past couple of units. However, as we shall see, Walpole’s
novel embodies many of the themes and modes of expression that, as a
cumulative process, we have discovered preoccupy writers of this
period. Not only does The Castle of Otranto reflect upon the hybridity of
the novel form at this time, but while it incorporates several different
existing styles of writing, it also reminds us of the ‘novelty’ of the novel:
Walpole seems to be inventing a new type of fiction at a time when
what constituted a novel – both its structure and its content – was fluid
and undefined.

Furthermore, The Castle of Otranto initiates a new trend in fiction-

writing that was to prove hugely popular in the latter decades of the
eighteenth century, as numerous other writers attempt to produce
Gothic novels of their own. In many ways, Walpole’s text began a
fashion that rivalled literary ‘phenomena’ such as that of sentimental
fiction.

Our discussion of Gothic fiction in this unit will also draw upon our
knowledge of the literature of nature, which we touched upon in our
study of Smollett, and focussed upon more closely in the previous unit.
As we shall discover, Gothic fiction draws on contemporary aesthetic
discourses, and in particular Edmund Burke’s highly influential treatise A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). As we shall
see, Burke’s ideas about sublimity and beauty provide an important
template for subsequent writers to present their descriptions of the
natural world, and most significantly for authors of Gothic fiction. We
shall consider how these ideas connect to and help to support the
‘ingredients’ of the Gothic novel, and also how they evolve in
subsequent examples of the genre.

Finally, in this unit we will address how the Gothic develops in examples
drawn from the subsequent decades of the eighteenth century following

21-2 Literature 3
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the publication of The Castle of Otranto. As such, we shall see both the
origins and the evolution of this genre of fiction, which you will take one
stage further in your study of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the next
module.

WHAT IS GOTHIC FICTION?

We may all be familiar with the word ‘Gothic’, and have some sense of
what it means; however, how might this term describe a literary genre?
How do we move from a general sense or impression of what ‘gothic’
means to an accurate analysis of texts?

One means of grasping what the word ‘gothic’ means in a generalised

way, and of its more specific applications to literature, is to have
recourse to the trusty repository of knowledge found in the Oxford
English Dictionary.

Activity
Look up ‘gothic’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

As you will have discovered, this term has widespread applications,

ranging from its use to describe a historical tribe of people (the Goths)
to our more modern sense of a group who listen to a particular type of
music and dress in a certain way. ‘Gothic’ can also be used as an
architectural term, to describe the kinds of buildings erected during the
medieval period: the pointed arch of cathedral windows of this time, for
instance, frequently denotes the Gothic style.

As the Dictionary entry tells us, the ‘gothic revival’ refers to a

movement in subsequent centuries to recreate the perceived purity of
this style of architecture and the period to which it belonged. For
instance, in Stones of Venice the art historian John Ruskin offered an
important intervention in Victorian aesthetics by praising the Gothic
style of medieval architecture. As the Dictionary also tells us, though,
the term ‘gothic’ can be used to describe a certain type of ‘black letter’
print, but it can also denote something that is:

Barbarous, rude, uncouth, unpolished, in bad taste. Of temper:

Savage.

There is, then, a contrasting range of interpretations of this term and

potentially very different applications for its use. How might this word
describe a literary text, and so inform our reading of the fiction studied
in this unit?

As the Oxford English Dictionary goes on to tell us in a supplementary

entry for the term ‘gothic’, a specifically literary application of this term
emerged in our period of interest in this module. The Dictionary explains
that we can understand ‘Gothic’ as meaning:

Of or designating a genre of fiction characterized by suspenseful,

sensational plots involving supernatural or macabre elements and
often (esp. in early use) having a medieval theme or setting.

It provides historical examples of this usage of the term that clearly

have significance for our topic of study in this unit: Walpole’s Castle of
Otranto, for one thing, is cited as a key text in generating this sense of
the term’s usage, as we shall go on to discuss in closer detail during this
unit.

Unit 21: Gothic Fiction: Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Beyond 21-3
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For now, though, we shall pursue our attempt to find a clearer idea of
what the ‘gothic’ means in relation to literature, and in particular which
‘ingredients’ we would normally expect to find in a text described as a
‘Gothic novel’.

Other reference resources, such as The Concise Oxford Companion to

English Literature, give a more detailed picture of what the genre of
‘Gothic fiction’ involves. Its entry for this term states that:

Frightening or horrifying stories of various kinds have been told in

all ages, but the literary tradition confusingly designated as
‘Gothic’ is a distinct modern development in which the
characteristic theme is the stranglehold of the past upon the
present, or the encroachment of the ‘dark’ ages of oppression
upon the ‘enlightened’ modern era. This theme is embodied
typically in enclosed and haunted settings such as castles, crypts,
convents, or gloomy mansions, in images of ruin and decay, and
in episodes of imprisonment, cruelty, and persecution (The
Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, online version).

Indeed, this sense of ‘confusion’ over the precise definition of this term,
and of its manifestation in literature, is supported by Jeremy Hogle’s
discussion of Gothic fiction. Hogle writes that there is a considerable
‘difficulty’ in clearly defining this term and its fictional manifestations
(2002: 1). One reason for this ‘difficulty’, he explains, stems from:

[…] how pliable and malleable this type of fiction-making has

proven to be, stemming as it does from an uneasy conflation of
genres, styles, and conflicted cultural concerns from its outset.
(Hogle 2002: 1-2)

However, Hogle goes on to provide an informative analysis of what

‘Gothic fiction’ might involve – its various elements, its tone and its
chief characteristics – which elaborates upon the more compact
explanations found in the reference works cited here. Hogle writes of
this type of fiction that,

[…] given how relatively constant some of its features are, we can
specify some general parameters by which fictions can be
identified as primarily or substantially Gothic. (2002: 2)

Hogle identifies the type of location as being a common feature shared

by examples of this genre:

[…] a Gothic tale usually takes place (at least some of the time) in
an antiquated or seemingly antiquated space – be it a castle, a
foreign palace, an abbey, a vast prison, a subterranean crypt, a
graveyard, a primeval frontier or island, a large old house or
theatre, an aging city or urban underworld, a decaying
storehouse, factory, laboratory, public building, or some new
recreation of an older venue, such as an office with old filing
cabinets, an overworked spaceship, or a computer memory.
(2002: 2)

As this list reveals, the locations of Gothic fiction can be very varied,
and often suggest historical specificity: the ‘laboratory’ or ‘office’, and of
course the ‘spaceship’ and ‘computer memory’ that Hogle describes
embed the ‘Gothic tale’ within a particular period, where such spaces
alone can be found. Other places, such as the ‘prison’ or the ‘crypt’ have
a more timeless quality, and suggest an archetypal store of shared
‘locations’ available to all writers within this genre.

As Hogle goes on to explain, what happens within these locations is also

21-4 Literature 3
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central to detecting a universal set of themes or ideas belonging to most

examples of Gothic fiction:

Within this space, or a combination of such spaces, are hidden

some secrets from the past (sometimes the recent past) that
haunt the characters, psychologically, physically, or otherwise at
the main time of the story. (2002: 2)

As Hogle suggests here, Gothic fiction typically involves a supernatural

dimension, characterised by what he describes as ‘hauntings’:

These hauntings can take many forms, but they frequently

assume the features of ghosts, specters, or monsters (mixing
features from different realms of being, often life and death) that
rise from within the antiquated space, or sometimes invade it
from alien realms, to manifest unresolved crimes or conflicts that
can no longer be successfully buried from view. It is at this level
that Gothic fictions generally play with and oscillate between the
earthly laws of conventional reality and the possibilities of the
supernatural. (2002: 2)

As this suggests, Gothic fiction involves blending fact and fiction – an

idea that we have encountered in various contexts in previous units –
but which, perhaps more than other texts we have studied, requires a
delicate balance between what is credible and what is impossible so to
gain its fullest effect. It is the suggestion that the boundaries separating
the various opposing forces represented in the Gothic tale are only
liminal and may easily be crossed – the boundary between the real and
the imaginary, between the horrific and the pleasurable, between the
supernatural and the ordinary – which gives this type of fiction its power
to move the reader.

As Hogle writes, it is ‘the possibility that the boundaries between these

may have been crossed, at least psychologically but also physically or
both’ (2002: 3) which creates the sometimes terrifyingly powerful effect
of Gothic fiction. He suggests that this potential transgression creates
an ‘oscillation’ between different realms of possibility encompassed by
these borders. This produces either ‘the “terror Gothic” on the one hand
or the “horror Gothic” on the other’ (Hogle 2002: 3):

The first of these holds characters and readers mostly in anxious

suspense about threats to life, safety, and sanity kept largely out
of sight or in shadows or suggestions from a hidden past, while
the latter confronts the principal characters with the gross
violence of physical or psychological dissolution, explicitly
shattering the assumed norms (including the repressions) of
everyday life with wildly shocking, and even revolting,
consequences. (Hogle 2002: 3)

We shall go on to discover how these various aspects of what

constitutes the Gothic – either in isolation or in combination – emerge in
various ways in different examples of the genre. As we shall see,
however, despite the diffuseness of the term and its potential meanings,
and its possible application to fictional works, the ‘ingredients’ of the
Gothic tale can rapidly converge into cliché: this tendency to become
formulaic potentially challenges the author of Gothic fiction to devise
new ways to straddle the ‘boundaries’ separating the supernatural and
the natural so as to create the truly terrifying effect upon the reader of
which good Gothic fiction is capable.

Unit 21: Gothic Fiction: Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Beyond 21-5
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SAQ 1

What is ‘the Gothic’, and how might it be applied to literary texts?

THE ‘ORIGINS’ OF GOTHIC FICTION: HORACE WALPOLE’S

CASTLE OF OTRANTO
In many respects, Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto can avoid the
danger of formulaic cliché because of its place in history: it is, as you
will have discovered in your excavations of the term ‘gothic’, generally
considered to be the first example of a Gothic novel. However, the idea
of the formula – the set of criteria that a text must include so as to be
described as Gothic fiction – is very pertinent indeed to Walpole’s novel.
In many ways, Walpole plays on the idea of such conventional elements
even before they have become fully established, or been adopted by
subsequent writers. As such, we might say, The Castle of Otranto is
both a trend-setter and a subverter of the very genre to which it seems
to give rise.

How does this emerge in The Castle of Otranto, and in what ways does
it fulfil the criteria for Gothic fiction outlined in this unit so far?

Activity
Read The Castle of Otranto.

Note down which passages seem to you to embody the ‘criteria’ for
Gothic fiction identified earlier in this unit.

ESTABLISHING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE GOTHIC:

WALPOLE’S FIRST PREFACE
We are given clues about the kind of book that faces us even before we
begin to read the narrative proper; we found that with (for example)
Richardson or Fielding’s novels paratextual material provides us with a
‘threshold’ that we cross before reaching the story itself, and which
indicates the author’s purposes in writing his book and the style that it
adopts. Similarly, in the prefatory matter to The Castle of Otranto
Walpole gives his reader a clear sense of what kind of book this is,
which in many respects coheres with our expectations of the Gothic
genre from our investigations so far in this unit.

Activity
Re-read the preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, pp. 5-8.

In the preface to the first edition of his novel, Walpole gives an

impression of the story’s antiquity, elaborating the pretence that this is
based on an ‘authentic’ manuscript, discovered amongst some
antiquated documents:

The following work was found in the library of an ancient catholic

family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the
black letter, in the year 1529. (2008: 5)

In some respects, this resembles Richardson’s preface to Pamela, in

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which he claims that the text is based on a genuine, ‘authentic’ series of

letters. However, Walpole’s claims to authenticity are at the same time
very different to Richardson’s: already here we are given the impression
that ‘location’ is important, as we found in Hogle’s suggestions.

Not only is the ‘library’ an immediately evocative place in which to find

such a mysterious document, but we are also given two geographical
locations: ‘the north of England’ and ‘Naples’. The fairly wild and rugged
landscapes of northern England, which at this period would have been
inaccessible in some places due to poor-quality roads, immediately
evoke a sense of mystery. This is compounded by the reference to
Naples, which whilst being a real place also belongs in a country that,
for contemporary readers, is also filled with intrigue: as we found in our
discussion of Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy, southern
Europe in particular was thought to be a strange land, and was held
with a certain degree of suspicion.

The mystique and exoticism of a far-flung place such as Naples – even

more inaccessible for many travellers than the north of England – adds
to the tantalising promise of untold secrets given in the mention of this
manuscript document. The reference to the ‘catholic family’ compounds
this impression, as Catholics were frequently treated with as equal a
degree of suspicion as foreigners at this time. The seemingly mysterious
rituals and practices of the ‘Romish’ religion (as many called
Catholicism) provoked much criticism and ridicule, but also inspired a
sense of uncomfortable unfamiliarity: the nature and purpose of such
practices remained obscure for many eighteenth-century non-Catholics,
and so inspired a combination of fear, suspicion and intrigue
surrounding this religion.

The air of mystery is further compounded by the nature of the

document itself: not only was it ‘discovered’ neglected, languishing in a
remote library, but it is written in impenetrable ‘black letter’, which
suggests its antiquity and its antiquarianism, which is confirmed by its
date (‘1529’).

So, even in the first two sentences of the preface, Walpole establishes
some of the ‘parameters’ of the Gothic tale identified by Hogle. Walpole
further elaborates upon these characteristic features of his text, which
we are led to expect and will soon encounter in the story itself: he
identifies an antiquated historical background to the story, compounding
the impression of mystery. We are, furthermore, promised that this
work has an ‘air of the miraculous’ (Walpole 2008: 6). While Walpole
seems to apologise for this quality of the work, in fact he uses it as a
device to lure the reader in: we want to find out more about what is so
intriguing, and potentially ‘miraculous’, in this story.

Already, Walpole straddles the ‘boundaries’ between the credible and

the supernatural that we identified earlier, by suggesting that ‘the
possibility of the facts’ and the characters’ appropriate conformity to
‘their situation’ makes this narrative seem almost as though it might be
true. This sense of probability blurs the boundary between the
believable and the incredible, and so intensifies our terror upon reading
the horrifying events that unravel in the story itself.

And yet, Walpole suggests, the style of the whole piece is entirely
appropriate to its content, and will not offend the reader:

There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or

unnecessary descriptions. Every thing tends directly to the
catastrophe. (2008: 6)

In fact, by being written in a seemingly simple style, the story will be

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even more powerful and effective: the ‘catastrophe’ which is

tantalisingly promised here will be all the more impressive for the
probable sequence of events that lead up to it, and for the appropriate
manner of expression in which they are conveyed.

PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE GOTHIC: THE NARRATIVE

How does the narrative itself live up to the promises made in this
preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto?

Walpole’s novel is relatively short, and yet its action is compact: this
intensifies the series of impressions he creates, and the sense of
unavoidable fate that surrounds the destiny of each character. Several
passages arguably exemplify these qualities, and embody the ‘criteria’
of Gothic fiction identified by Hogle and in reference-work definitions of
the genre.

Activity
Re-read pp. 24-26 of The Castle of Otranto.

What takes place in this passage?

Note down those words and phrases that exemplify the ‘criteria’ of
Gothic fiction identified previously in this unit.

In this passage, we are given an impression of the heightened emotion

experienced by the characters, which increases the tension of the
scene: Isabella in particular is portrayed as ‘trembling’ and as
experiencing ‘astonishment’ (Walpole 2008: 24). Her speech matches
these emotions; initially, emotion renders her speechless: ‘Words
cannot paint the astonishment of Isabella’ (Walpole 2008: 24). She
soon regains this capacity, and yet while she uses words she seems to
be almost equally inarticulate: she bursts into exclamations of surprise
as a result of her fear, grief, and shock:

Heavens! cried Isabella, waking from her delusion, what do I

hear! You, my lord! You! My father in law! the father of Conrad!
the husband of the virtuous and tender Hippolita! – (Walpole
2008: 25)

The fragmented pattern of Isabella’s speech here indicates her

‘astonishment’ and encourages the reader to become absorbed in the
fear and sense of the unknown that she is experiencing. This is matched
by her bodily state: she becomes frozen with terror, and almost corpse-
like in her lack of animation, as ‘Manfred seized the cold hand of
Isabella, who was half-dead with fright and horror’ (Walpole 2008: 25).

The sense of the unknown that compounds Isabella’s ‘horror’ at this

moment of terrible revelation is, of course, most tellingly represented by
the ‘spectre’ that appears upon the scene (Walpole 2008: 26). The
image of the picture which comes to life is a profoundly disturbing and
inexplicable moment in Walpole’s text: the charge of representing the
‘miraculous’, against which he had defended himself in the preface, is
subverted here into something altogether more chilling. Rather than
being a positive and faith-affirming moment, this evidence of
supernatural powers beyond human understanding instils fear and
uncertainty.

The purpose of the spectre is as yet obscure to the reader: why does he
entice Manfred to follow him? Where do they go? The sense of mystery

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is compounded by the fact that the ‘vision’ is speechless: he only

‘sighed’, but does not articulate his intended purpose in entering the
scene at this moment, nor how it will impinge upon the fate of the
characters. This sense of an overriding and unavoidable fate pervades
this scene: each character, even those seemingly most in control, such
as Manfred, is subject to external forces over which they have little (if
any) sway. Their only power comes from the internal resources of
resilience and reason in the face of inexplicable and terrifying
circumstances.

PSYCHOLOGICAL INTENSITY: THE CHARACTER IN GOTHIC

FICTION
The reader’s engagement with the characters and their story is
heightened by the impression that we, too, share a sense of uncertainty
and fear about how the story will evolve. This sympathetic engagement
is principally centred on the character of Isabella who, in this passage
and elsewhere, offers a template for the emotions and reactions that we
might humanly feel and perform in similar circumstances. As the story
moves on, Isabella’s fear and sense of helplessness only increase, and
accordingly we as readers feel increasingly drawn into our involvement
with her character.

Activity
Re-read The Castle of Otranto, pp. 28-30.

What does this passage tell us about Isabella’s character?

In what ways does it exemplify qualities belonging to Gothic fiction?

In some respects, these two questions can be answered most effectively

in tandem: Isabella’s reactions to an increasingly fear-provoking series
of events manifest many of the elements of Gothic fiction that we have
already identified in this unit. Isabella is progressively more troubled by
doubt as to what will happen next, merging the sense of unrevealed
truth belonging to the Gothic with our uncertainty as readers about
where the story will lead. Walpole describes how:

Isabella, whom every incident was sufficient to dismay, hesitated

whether she should proceed. (2008: 28)

This reaction perhaps matches our own as readers, as we feel powerless

to know how the story will ‘proceed’, and fear that each ‘incident’ that
befalls Isabella only intensifies the horror of her situation. This is
compounded by the frequent affirmation of her personal qualities: her
‘gentleness’, ‘conscious innocence’, purity, modesty, and goodness all
make the nature of her plight all the more terrible. This increases our
sympathy with her character, and means that we feel her shock,
dismay, and fear with each new awful experience.

For instance, when Isabella is for ‘a considerable time’ left in ‘an agony
of despair’ (Walpole 2008: 29) the reader feels equally suspended
emotionally, uncertain about what possible event might take place to
resolve such an ‘agony’. Each glimpse of hope – such as the
‘momentary joy’ Isabella feels upon seeing ‘an imperfect ray of clouded
moonshine’ through the ‘roof of the vault’ (Walpole 2008: 29) – only
serves to intensify her misery by being too fleeting. Each elevation of
feeling only makes the descent back into fear and trepidation more
painful. As such, Walpole achieves the psychological realism that,
according to Hogle’s account, belongs to Gothic fiction: Walpole

Unit 21: Gothic Fiction: Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Beyond 21-9
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succeeds in capturing in Isabella’s character the terror at mysterious

circumstances, and the fear of not knowing how events will unravel,
that are natural human responses to terrifying situations.

And, of course, in this passage the Gothic fiction’s characteristically

supernatural elements intensify the terror of Isabella’s experiences: she
initially believes that the ‘human form’ she encounters is ‘the ghost of
her betrothed Conrad’ (Walpole 2008: 29). Her mistake, a reasonable
one to make in such pressurised circumstances, acts as a reminder of
the liminal boundaries that separate the supernatural from the natural,
the known from the unknown, and which Walpole as a Gothic writer
exploits to particularly powerful effect in this scene.

Indeed, throughout The Castle of Otranto Walpole demonstrates his

mastery of evoking fear in his reader through toying with the dual sense
of familiarity and strangeness that characterises his text. We are
repeatedly given tantalising clues as to what will happen next, but
constantly left in suspense as to their resolution; we are given glimpses
of the characters’ emotional states, but left in doubt over what effect
future events might have upon them. We are constantly pushed to the
limits of what seems to be acceptable or possible: each new event
seems even more terrible than the last, and we are left wondering
whether things could feasibly get any worse. Frequently, they do.

GENERIC IDENTITY: DOES THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO CREATE

GOTHIC CLICHÉ?
Indeed, we might be led to wonder whether Walpole’s novel in fact
pushes these boundaries too far, and verges upon the ridiculous in its
exploitation of the ‘Gothic’ qualities it seems to formulate. As your own
notes upon the most characteristically ‘Gothic’ passages of The Castle of
Otranto will have revealed to you, Walpole’s novel is in fact a highly
formulaic text: it proposes the criteria for a Gothic tale and puts them
into practice – time and again.

Even though it is apparently the first example of the genre, does The
Castle of Otranto in some senses become a cliché of Gothic fiction?

In fact, Walpole himself initiates the idea that Gothic fiction somehow
follows a formula, or incorporates a set of criteria, in his preface to the
second edition of The Castle of Otranto.

Activity
Re-read the preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, pp.
9-14.

In this preface, Walpole gives us a clear sense of his awareness of his

book as a literary text: in many ways, it is a highly artificial construction
which exemplifies certain qualities and consciously creates particular
effects. Walpole describes the public reception of ‘this little piece’ (2008:
9), immediately reminding us of The Castle of Otranto’s identity as a
material text: it is written by an author, produced by printers, and
purchased, handled and read by consumers. Indeed, its immense
popularity has ensured that it will enter a second edition, but has also
brought ‘the author to explain the grounds on which he composed it’
(Walpole 2008: 9).

Here, Walpole admits to having pretended that this work was

‘discovered’ and conveyed to the public ‘under the borrowed personage
of a translator’: the success of the book alone has meant that such a

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subterfuge has necessarily become exposed, but it also gives Walpole

an opportunity to claim the merit for having written it himself. Indeed,
his false modesty (he claims to have remained anonymous through
‘diffidence in his own abilities’) seems rather suspect, while his claims
for ‘the novelty of the attempt’ reminds us of The Castle of Otranto’s
claim to be the first of its kind in this genre.

Walpole in fact goes on to provide a critical analysis of the generic

identity of his book. He claims that ‘It was an attempt to blend the two
kinds of romance, the ancient and modern’ (Walpole 2008: 9). This
involves striking a balance in representing ‘nature’: in the ‘ancient’ type
of romance, ‘all was imagination and improbability’ – there was not
enough ‘nature’ – whereas in the ‘modern’ kind there was too much,
and ‘Nature has cramped imagination’ (Walpole 2008: 9). Walpole
argues that he attempted ‘to reconcile the two kinds’ in his text by
leaving enough room for ‘the powers of fancy’ to roam ‘through the
boundless realms of invention’, but also by operating ‘according to the
rules of probability’ (2008: 9).

By making his protagonists act in a manner appropriate to their

characters, no matter how strange or unusual the scenarios in which
they are placed, Walpole suggests that he is more able to show the
consistency of ‘human character’ (2008: 10). This distinguishes his
novel from previous types of ‘romance’, where the blend between fact
and fiction, the probable with the incredible, had not been sufficiently
well balanced. As Walpole claims, in promoting his success in achieving
this himself, ‘My rule was nature’ (2008: 10). As such, each character
speaks and acts appropriately according to his or her station in life.
Indeed, as he goes on to suggest, his ability to combine the probable
with the supernatural in a credible way in his characterisation ensures
his readers are thoroughly engaged in the story:

The very impatience which a reader feels, while delayed by the

coarse pleasantries of the vulgar actors from arriving at the
knowledge of the important catastrophe he expects, perhaps
heightens, certainly proves that he has been artfully interested in,
the depending event. (Walpole 2008: 10)

It is our curiosity to know more, and Walpole’s skilful ability to delay

fulfilling such expectations, which both heightens our sense of the
‘naturalness’ of the story and engrosses us in reading the narrative.

In many respects, though, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto is a deliberately

provocative intervention in the development of prose fiction as much as
a sincere exemplification of its author’s ‘theory’ of a new species of
writing. We find some clues to this self-conscious, almost tongue-in-
cheek positioning on Walpole’s part in the preface to the second edition.
Indeed, it was only in the second edition of the novel that Walpole
appended the subtitle which apparently established its ‘new’ generic
identity: it was only now, in 1765, that he titled his book The Castle of
Otranto: A Gothic Story (Clery 2002: 21). Indeed, as Clery suggests,
this modified title was as much a way of making a defiant statement
against hostile responses to the first edition as an announcement of
authorial purpose:

The addition was a flippant paradox chiefly intended, one infers,

to annoy stuffy critics who objected to the experiment. After all,
how could a Gothic story have a modern author? (2002: 21)

The suggestion that Walpole was being ‘flippant’ offers an important

reminder of his approach towards the ‘new’ kind of fiction-writing that
he had apparently initiated. Whilst to some extent Walpole does want
his novel to be taken seriously, it is nonetheless a very self-conscious

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literary exercise produced in part in response to existing examples of

prose fiction (such as Richardson’s), and in part as a commercial
venture. As Clery writes, Walpole was responding directly to an
assumption that ‘romance’ could not represent ‘an appeal to the
imagination that went beyond rational causes’:

The Castle of Otranto was presented to the public, especially in

the preface to the second edition, as an outright challenge to this
orthodoxy. (2002: 23)

As a result, Walpole defiantly establishes his book in opposition to the

novels of authors such as Richardson or Fielding, for whom (as we have
seen) ‘instruction’ and ‘entertainment’ are combined in their fiction:

Walpole’s business is not instruction, but the pleasures of the

imagination. (Clery 2002: 23)

In his ability to blend the incredible with the natural, Clery suggests,
Walpole establishes The Castle of Otranto’s importance as a model for
all subsequent attempts to produce a fictional narrative in the ‘Gothic’
style by giving free reign to the imagination but attempting to contain
this within the bounds of probability:

[…] this novel provides the template for all future fictions of
supernatural terror, including film. The credible emotions of the
characters connect us to incredible phenomena and events and
allow terror to circulate via processes of identification and
projection. (2002: 25)

As such, in some respects we could argue that Walpole in fact creates a

cliché of Gothic fiction in The Castle of Otranto even before the ‘Gothic’
has emerged as a genre as such: the self-conscious manipulation of
literary form to create a new type that is both related, and yet in
opposition to existing kinds of prose fiction means that Walpole
purposely established the ‘parameters’ of what his new approach to
fiction-writing involves in a highly artificial way. Nonetheless, this by no
means diminishes Walpole’s achievement in The Castle of Otranto: it is
a highly enjoyable text, and engaging to read as well as skilfully written.
In fact, our awareness that Walpole manipulates the generic identity of
his text heightens this impression.

Some readers might be tempted to treat certain aspects of the ‘terror’

experienced by the characters, or the strangeness of the story’s
supernatural elements, to ridicule: certainly, the characteristic
‘ingredients’ of Gothic fiction which The Castle of Otranto seems to
embody could easily be imitated, and so become the target of satire and
parody. Indeed, many subsequent writers have put this tendency into
practice, and shown how the distinctive elements of a Gothic novel
become so recognisable that they quickly become clichés, which attract
parody or subversive satire.

However, the appeal of Walpole’s version of ‘romance’ has exerted a

considerable influence upon the development of prose narratives since
the latter decades of the eighteenth century, well beyond the
boundaries of parody or satire. As we shall go on to discuss in the final
sections of this unit, subsequent authors identify the descriptive power
and psychological intensity of Walpole’s text, and expand upon them in
the context of the new narrative scenarios that they develop in their
own contributions to the genre of Gothic fiction.

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SAQ 2
In what ways can Walpole’s Castle of Otranto be described as a
‘Gothic novel’, and what are the drawbacks of classifying this text in
this way?

GOTHIC SUBLIMITY
So far in this unit, we have considered what can be identified as the
characteristics of the Gothic genre of fiction: these include features such
as supernatural elements, heightened tension to create a sense of fear,
and the psychological intensity experienced by the characters in
pressurised circumstances. However, a significant aspect of what
enables texts to be compared under the name ‘Gothic’ is their use of
language.

Activity
Did you notice anything particularly striking about the kinds of words
that Walpole uses in The Castle of Otranto? Do certain phrases recur
frequently? Make a list of those terms which seem to you ‘characteristic’
of Walpole’s descriptive style.

You may have noted that words such as ‘astonishment’, ‘terror’ or

‘horror’ reappear on many occasions throughout Walpole’s novel, and
that these help to intensify the sense of claustrophobia and heightened
emotion that the characters experience. Such terms, however, also
appear in the context of Walpole’s description of place: frequently, they
are used to describe the landscape, the Castle itself, and surrounding
terrain. In fact, in The Castle of Otranto Walpole draws on an aesthetic
discourse that belongs to a very different genre of text to that of the
romance, the novel, or prose fiction in general: an essay that addresses
certain aspects of aesthetics – matters related to art, taste and beauty.

THE LANGUAGE OF SUBLIMITY: EDMUND BURKE’S

PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY
Words such as ‘terror’ or ‘astonishment’ would have been very familiar
to Walpole’s readers as belonging to an influential aesthetic treatise
written in prose which was first published in 1757: Edmund Burke’s
Philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful.

Burke was an important figure in the eighteenth century: he was a

politician, an orator, an author, a statesman and a philosopher. He
published several important works, one of which (Reflections upon the
Revolution in France of 1790) was an important intervention in the
nation’s political life at a time of particular crisis. In this text, Burke
attacked the French Revolution and the radical politics to which it might
give rise in Britain; the Reflections also sparked a debate with the
radical political writer Thomas Paine, whose Rights of Man (1791) was
one of the most influential, incendiary and widely-read texts of the final
decade of the eighteenth century.

Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry is an earlier and less politically determined

work. In this essay, Burke investigates the origins of ‘our ideas of the
sublime and beautiful’: he is concerned with questions of taste, of what
we find to be pleasing, or inspiring, or impressive. Principally an
aesthetic treatise, Burke’s Enquiry draws examples from the visible

Unit 21: Gothic Fiction: Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Beyond 21-13
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world to comment upon how we respond to external stimuli: certain

objects, landscapes or scenery have particular properties which inspire a
widely different range of emotions in us.

Burke divides his Enquiry into two separate areas: the sublime and the
beautiful. The sublime is an ancient term and concept, stretching back
to the writings of the Greek philosopher Longinus. It denotes all that is
most lofty, elevated and grand: in a philosophical sense, according to
The Oxford English Dictionary, the sublime relates to ‘ideas’, ‘truths’ and
‘subjects’ ‘Belonging to the highest regions of thought, reality, or human
activity’. This has a literary application, as it can be used to describe
‘language, style, or a writer’. A sublime style involves ‘Expressing lofty
ideas in a grand and elevated manner’ (OED online). These ideas have
had a very significant impact on aesthetic discourse and on literary
practice since their first expression in Ancient Greece.

In the Enquiry Burke seeks to re-investigate these concepts from

another perspective, and to address which objects in the external world
best represent the quality of sublimity. He begins by providing his own
definition of the word ‘sublime’. According to Burke, the sublime is a
powerful force within ‘nature’, and can inspire the strongest emotions
within us: the greatest of these is ‘Astonishment’ (2004: 101). Burke
describes how ‘astonishment’ is ‘that state of the soul, in which all its
motions are suspended, with some degree of horror’ (2004: 101).
Burke’s terminology here is significant: words such as ‘astonishment’
and ‘horror’ repeatedly reappear in the Enquiry, and underline the
profoundly powerful effect that, according to Burke, the sublime can
have upon the individual’s emotions.

Indeed, Burke further expands upon this range of terms by suggesting

that the sublime also arouses ‘terror’. As he explains,

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting

and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain or
death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain.
Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime
too, whether this cause of terror, be endued with greatness of
dimensions or not; for it is impossible to look on any thing as
trifling, or contemptible, that may be dangerous. (2004: 101)

As this passage suggests, Burke identifies tangible or visible aspects of

the world that are capable of inspiring ‘terror’, and so which have a
sublime power: in this case, ‘greatness’. He even goes further, to
suggest that the force of the emotion such a stimulus exerts can have a
potent effect upon the body: feeling fear can, quite literally, make one
‘feel’ ‘actual pain’. Burke goes on to identify a range of different
phenomena of the external world that can have sublime properties:
these include ‘obscurity’, ‘vastness’, and ‘infinity’.

Burke connects these to physical or tangible elements of the world: for

instance, he uses ‘obscurity’ in the sense meaning ‘absence of light’,
and suggests that this impenetrable darkness can greatly increase the
feeling of fear:

To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be

necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we
can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension
vanishes. (2004: 102)

Similarly, Burke explains what he means by the term ‘vastness’ by

connecting it to physical elements of the landscape:

Greatness of dimension, is a powerful cause of the sublime. […]

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Extension is either in length, height, or depth. Of these the length

strikes least; an hundred yards of ground will never work such an
effect as a tower an hundred yards high, or a rock or mountain of
that altitude. I am apt to imagine likewise, that height is less
grand than depth; and that we are more struck at looking down
from a precipice, than at looking up at an object of equal height.
(2004: 114)

This insistence on how sublimity operates within space or upon physical

properties allows Burke to establish a contrast with the second major
area of his enquiry, into ‘the beautiful’. For Burke, the beautiful is in
many respects the opposite of the sublime: it inspires pleasure rather
than terror; beauty belongs to ‘that quality or those qualities in bodies
by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it’ (2004: 128).

Beauty possesses properties such as ‘smoothness’ and ‘gradual

variation’, which contrast with the ‘ruggedness’ or sudden contrasts
characterising the sublime (Burke 2004: 148). Beauty belongs to both
the physical form of the human being and to the physical qualities of
landscape: gently rolling hills, pastures, and smooth terrain, for
instance, could all be described as ‘beautiful’ and could inspire the
tender and gentle ‘passions’ that Burke describes.

Burke draws a comparison between the beautiful and the sublime in

which he summarises the contrasts between these two very different
sources of the passions:

[…] sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones

comparatively small; beauty should be smooth, and polished; the
great, rugged and negligent […] beauty should not be obscure;
the great ought to be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light
and delicate; the great ought to be solid, even massive. They are
indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on
pain, the other on pleasure. (2004: 157)

Burke suggests that we do not necessarily always find the sublime and
the beautiful in isolation: in fact, they can often be found in
combination, but as such their differences are complementary, and help
to make their own peculiar features even more obvious. As Burke
summarises, ‘Black and white may soften, may blend, but they are not
therefore the same’ (2004: 158).

Nonetheless, in his Enquiry, Burke holds the sublime in higher esteem

than the beautiful: while there is much to admire in beauty, and the
‘passions’ it inspires are pleasing, the sublime stirs much nobler
passions. Indeed, ‘terror’ itself is not to be understood necessarily as a
negative response: ‘terror’ and ‘astonishment’ are elevated emotions in
Burke’s conception, which can lead the individual into a higher state of
being. Indeed, as Burke suggests in his treatise, ‘pain can be a cause of
delight’ (2004: 164) because it exercises the intellect and the emotions,
and so is much more admirable than the languid and passive feelings
aroused by beauty.

By embedding his description of these terms in physical features of the

known and visible world, and using this to exemplify what he means by
the term ‘sublime’, Burke initiated a significant new way of viewing and
describing the external world. It will have become clear from this
discussion of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and
Beautiful that there are many important points of contact between this
aesthetic treatise and examples of Gothic fiction such as The Castle of
Otranto. Both the concepts that Burke presents, and the language used
to describe them, emerge repeatedly throughout Walpole’s novel.
We have already discussed how Isabella’s psychological torment is

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_____________________________________________________________________

portrayed through her own use of language, and through the words
used to describe her: the word ‘astonishment’, for instance, appears in
the passage analysed earlier in this unit, and recurs on many occasions
throughout Walpole’s text. The discourse of the sublime does not only
relate to the novel’s characters, though: the landscape in which these
events take place, and in particular the description of the Castle of
Otranto itself, consistently draw on the kind of rhetoric that Burke
employs in the Enquiry: this is a place of dark and winding corridors, of
vaults and crypts, of craggy precipices, and awe-inspiring heights.

Activity
Note down words, phrases, and passages that draw on Burke’s idea of
the ‘sublime’ in his Philosophical Enquiry.

Does the ‘beautiful’ have a place in Walpole’s text?

THE SUBLIME AND THE BEAUTIFUL IN SUBSEQUENT GOTHIC

FICTION
Walpole’s text is not the only fictional work to incorporate Burke’s
language and ideas about sublimity, and its relation to beauty. In fact,
just as The Castle of Otranto provides a model for all subsequent
attempts to write Gothic fiction, so Burke’s treatise provides those who
wish to write such novels with a source-book of ideas and ways to
describe them that are most appropriately suited to the kinds of
concepts that Gothic fiction aims to present, and the kinds of emotions
that it seeks to evoke in the reader. Indeed, our perspective upon how
the genre of the Gothic novel develops in the latter part of the
eighteenth century and beyond is most fruitfully informed by
considering the impact of Walpole’s text and of Burke’s treatise upon
subsequent writers in tandem.

Gothic fiction, after all, became a wildly popular realm of fiction in the
latter decades of the eighteenth century: as we suggested in the
opening sections of this unit, its fashionability and the commercial
success it generated rivalled that of sentimental fiction. Numerous
novelists followed the example set by Walpole to produce their own
versions of the Gothic novel.

One of the most notable among these was Matthew Lewis, whose book
The Monk (1796) was an immense success. This novel pushes to an
extreme the ideas, scenarios and language found in Walpole’s narrative:
it involves grotesque description which verges on the repulsive, and
which coheres with Hogle’s account of the genre. Lewis’s novel involves
settings such as crypts and graveyards, but also transgresses religious
ideals and social taboos – notably that of incest – to produce a narrative
which, according to Hogle’s summation, has ‘wildly shocking, and even
revolting, consequences’ (2002: 3).

However, whilst Lewis’ text to some extent exploits the more macabre
and grotesque capacities of the Gothic genre, the novels of one of this
form’s most successful practitioners attempts to demonstrate the more
intellectual dimensions that can be probed by drawing on both Walpole
and Burke’s models. Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels, in many respects,
attempt to develop the ‘ingredients’ of Gothic fiction found in The Castle
of Otranto alongside the concepts conveyed in Burke’s Enquiry.

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THE SUBLIME AND THE BEAUTIFUL IN ANN RADCLIFFE’S

GOTHIC FICTION
Ann Radcliffe attempted to elevate the genre of Gothic fiction from the
realms of prurience and shock-tactics to which it could potentially
descend when handled by writers who simply wanted to shock their
readers.

In novels such as A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Mysteries of Udolpho

(1794), and The Italian (1797), Radcliffe’s heroines offer exemplary
models of conduct in which, despite the horrifying pressures of the
situations they are compelled to endure, they exercise reason and cling
to moral and religious precept as a way of surviving. Their conduct, and
tenacious virtue, is often rewarded with a happy ending. As such,
Radcliffe’s version of the Gothic establishes the genre’s potential to
pursue a moralising purpose.

However, Radcliffe’s novels also exemplify the ideas and language made
popular by Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry. Even decades after its
publication, the concepts this text conveys, and the expressions used to
describe them, continue to influence the way in which writers perceive
and portray their fictional worlds. The landscapes and settings of
Radcliffe’s version of the Gothic are redolent with the language of
sublimity. They are frequently located in the ‘exotic’ environment of
continental Europe: the fiery and passionate national character ascribed
to Italy, in particular, provides an apt setting for conveying the extreme
emotions explored in Radcliffe’s novels.

In The Mysteries of Udolpho, for instance, the heroine travels through

the Alps to reach the terrible castle in which she will unknowingly
become incarcerated, which lies in the Apennine mountains. Emily
passes through ‘immense pine-forests’ which ‘excluded all view but of
the cliffs above’ (Radcliffe 2008: 224), so dense is their foliage. The
trees both obscure the view beyond, and give occasional glimpses of the
awe-inspiring mountains that further increase Emily’s trepidation by
only partially revealing sight of them:

The gloom of these shades, their solitary silence […] the

tremendous precipices of the mountains, that came partially to
the eye, each assisted to raise the solemnity of Emily’s feelings
into awe; she saw only images of gloomy grandeur, or of dreadful
sublimity, around her; other images, equally gloomy and equally
terrible, gleamed on her imagination. (Radcliffe 2008: 224)

This passage, like numerous similar passages, draws heavily on Burkean

rhetoric, and upon his ideas about how the sublime features of the
landscape can inspire particular emotions, or ‘passions’, in the
individual. After the terrifying scenery witnessed in the Alps, for
instance, the travellers come across landscape described in terms of the
beautiful, which instils a feeling of calm: the landscape offers ‘pastoral
scenes [that] exhibited their “green delights” in the narrow vales,
smiling amid surrounding horror’ (Radcliffe 2008: 226).

A more moderated version of the sublime awaits Emily when she finally
reaches the Apennines:

Wild and romantic as were these scenes, their character had far
less of the sublime, than had those of the Alps, which guard the
entrance of Italy. Emily was often elevated, but seldom felt those
emotions of indescribable awe which she had so continually
experienced, in her passage over the Alps. (Radcliffe 2008: 226)

As this passage suggests, in her use of Burke’s rhetoric and ideas

Radcliffe attempts to employ the discourse of sublimity to lend a greater

Unit 21: Gothic Fiction: Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Beyond 21-17
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psychological depth to her characters. She expands upon this quality

found in Walpole’s characterisation – where, as we saw, the
‘astonishment’ or ‘terror’ experienced by the narrative’s protagonists
evokes Burkean language. In Radcliffe, the modulation between terror,
fear, suspense, and awe as provoked by the physical environments in
which she places her heroines allows them to develop in psychologically
complex ways. Emily’s transition from trepidation to elevation suggests
the high emotional register to which the sublime experience can push a
character.

As this passage, and Radcliffe’s use of the Philosophical Enquiry in

general suggests, descriptions of the natural landscape provide a
particularly appropriate space on which to map out Burkean aesthetics.
Furthermore, this reveals to us another dimension of the attitude
towards the natural world adopted by many thinkers and writers in the
latter half of the eighteenth century. This approach connects an
appreciation of nature with an attempt to channel that appreciation
through philosophical discourse, and to rationalise the instinctive
responses that we may have towards such external stimuli as can be
found in nature.

This both complements and contrasts with the approach to the

countryside that we encountered in the poetry of Crabbe and Goldsmith
in the previous unit, and offers a counterpoint to the attitude towards
nature adopted by the so-called ‘Romantic’ poets that you will study
elsewhere. Nonetheless, in the context of Gothic fiction, the connection
between the fictional character’s emotional response to the natural
world, and his or her ability to turn it into an intellectual response,
indicates the connection between the individual’s psychological state
and his or her surroundings that was to prove very significant in the
emergence of Romanticism.

Throughout Radcliffe’s novels, this enables her to probe how extreme

experiences can exert an emotional impact upon the individual which
allows her to examine her own mental resilience and her capacity for
responsiveness, and to develop as a character. The psychological aspect
of Radcliffe’s Gothic fiction, with its origins in both Walpole and Burke,
offers an important staging-post in the development of the genre’s
capacity to explore such a dimension, and which was to reach an
apotheosis in novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

SAQ 3

In what ways does Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry provide an important

influence on Gothic fiction?

REVIEW
In this unit, we have encountered yet another strand of eighteenth-
century prose fiction that both contrasts with and complements other
texts studied in previous units. We analysed a range of interpretations
relating to the word ‘gothic’, and identified several key characteristics
that belong to fictional works written within this tradition. We noted how
a tendency to shock the reader, supernatural elements, even the
grotesque, belong to ‘Gothic tales’.

We saw how many of these ideas and tendencies emerge in what is

generally considered to be the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s
Castle of Otranto. We analysed several key passages of this text that
exemplify the ideas of the Gothic previously outlined. We also saw how

21-18 Literature 3
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Walpole develops characterisation in his novel to introduce a level of

psychological complexity that is particularly pertinent to the experiences
encountered by the individual in a Gothic novel, and the impact upon
their emotions and their mind.

We subsequently saw how some of the terms used by Walpole to

describe such an emotional or intellectual state of being are drawn from
Edmund Burke’s aesthetic treatise, An Enquiry into the Origin of the
Sublime and Beautiful. We found how the contrasting notions of
sublimity and beauty complement one another in Burke’s treatise, and
how both ideas are pertinent to Gothic fiction. Nonetheless, we found
that the sublime is the most important means of channelling the kinds
of experience presented in the Gothic: this involves such emotions as
‘terror’ and ‘astonishment’. We found that Burke relates these ideas to
aspects of the physical or natural world, and considered how this also
finds expression in Gothic fiction.

We concluded this unit by discussing the development of Gothic fiction

since Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, and in particular the continuing
influence of Burke’s ideas and terminology on examples of the genre.
We focussed upon Ann Radcliffe’s novels as exemplary in this respect,
where the intensified focus upon the sublimity and beauty of the
landscape, embedded in Burkean aesthetics, matched the heightened
depiction of the characters’ psychological state. We saw how this exerts
an influence upon the development of subsequent examples of Gothic
fiction, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

ADDITIONAL READING
Botting, Fred. 1996. The .Gothic (London: Routledge) (Available online
via Google Books)

Clery, E. J. 1995. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800

(Cambridge: Cambridge) (Available online via Google Books)

Durant, David. 1982. ‘Ann Radcliffe and the Conservative Gothic’,

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 22.3: 519-530
(Available on JSTOR)

Hume, Robert D. 1969. ‘Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the

Gothic Novel’, PMLA, 84. 2: 282-290 (Available on JSTOR)

Lewis, Jayne. 2006. ‘“No Colour of Language”: Radcliffe’s Aesthetic

Unbound’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39.3: 377-390

Morris, David B. 1985. ‘Gothic Sublimity’, New Literary History, 16.2:,

The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations, 299-319
(Available on JSTOR)

Novak, Maximillian E. 1979. ‘Gothic Fiction and the Grotesque’, NOVEL:

A Forum on Fiction, 13.1: 50-67 (Available on JSTOR)

Schmitt, Cannon. 1994. ‘Techniques of Terror, Technologies of

Nationality: Ann Radcliffe’s “The Italian”,’ ELH, 61. 4: 853-876
(Available on JSTOR)

REFERENCES
Burke, Edmund. 2004. David Womersley (ed.), A Philosophical Enquiry
into the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(Harmondsworth: Penguin)

Unit 21: Gothic Fiction: Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Beyond 21-19
_____________________________________________________________________

The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (online version)

(Available via Oxford Reference Online)

Clery, E. J. 2002. ‘The genesis of “Gothic” fiction’, in Jerrold E. Hogle

(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), pp. 21-39 (Parts available via
Google Books)

Hogle, Jerrold E. 2002. ‘Introduction: The Gothic in western culture’, in

Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic
Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1-20
(Parts available via Google Books)

Radcliffe, Ann. 2008. Terry Castle and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The
Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Walpole, Horace. 2008. W. S. Lewis (ed.), The Castle of Otranto

(Oxford: Oxford University Press)

21-20 Literature 3
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ANSWERS TO SAQS

SAQ 1

What is ‘the Gothic’, and how might it be applied to literary texts?

Although the meaning of the word ‘Gothic’ can encompass a range of

interpretations, ranging from music to architecture, this term
nonetheless has specific application to literary texts. Nonetheless,
what might constitute an example of Gothic fiction is broad: features
such as setting and place – typically in hidden or obscure places, such
as graveyards – are important to the development of the narrative
that takes place in relation to such a backdrop. Such events usually
involve a sense of the unknown, a provoking impression of terror,
and supernatural elements (such as ghosts) which serve to heighten
the reader’s emotional and psychological engagement in the text. In
a literary example of the Gothic, this typically centres on the
characters, whose emotional responses to unprecedented
circumstances reflect the strangeness and power of their peculiar
circumstances.

SAQ 2
In what ways can Walpole’s Castle of Otranto be described as a
‘Gothic novel’, and what are the drawbacks of classifying this text in
this way?

Walpole’s Castle of Otranto encompasses many of the criteria that

critics, such as Hogle, identify as belonging to the Gothic genre. From
the outset, Walpole’s narrative involves mysterious circumstances,
supernatural events, and a sense of impending dread and uncertainty
over the fates of the characters. Isabella in particular embodies the
psychological torment of the heroine subjected to strange and
inexplicable circumstances.

Walpole’s novel could also be said to introduce elements of the Gothic

before the narrative even begins: in the preface to The Castle of
Otranto, he suggests that the story has a mysterious origin, in
obscure places, and that its transmission in manuscript form indicates
an antiquated history. This sense of intrigue, and of secrets yet to be
revealed, lures the reader into the narrative in a desire to find out
more. This suspense is sustained throughout the narrative, with the
numerous indications of revelation that are constantly denied. As
such, Walpole introduces the element of suspense that strongly
characterises examples of the Gothic genre.

However, we should be wary of making such a classification,

particularly as The Castle of Otranto is a seminal work often
considered to be the first ‘Gothic novel’. Furthermore, categorising
the novel in this way runs the risk of imposing certain limitations
upon the text; for instance, this label could cause us to view the
events and characters of Walpole’s Otranto as clichés and hackneyed
stereotypes, even before the genre has fully come into being.

Unit 21: Gothic Fiction: Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Beyond 21-21
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SAQ 3

In what ways does Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry provide an important

influence on Gothic fiction?

Both the terminology and the ideas of Burke’s treatise provide an

important model for novelists such as Walpole and Radcliffe when
composing their versions of Gothic fiction. Terms such as ‘terror’ and
‘astonishment’, which Burke uses to describe the sublime, run
throughout the narratives of both these novelists, and underpin the
emotional intensity of the characters’ experiences. Furthermore, they
indicate the psychological impact of the awe-inspiring circumstances
they encounter.

Burke’s treatise nonetheless offers another, related means by which

Gothic novelists can incorporate his ideas into their fictions. He
connects his ideas about the sublime and the beautiful to visible,
tangible objects in the world: this offers Gothic novelists a template
for describing the natural scenery and landscapes that form the
backdrop to their stories. By making such scenery ‘terrifying’ or awe-
inspiring, they can evoke more effectively the emotional impact that
it has upon the characters, and its connection to the psychological
intensity of their experiences. As such, the natural world outside the
individual and the mental world within are inherently connected
through the discourse of the sublime and the beautiful.

21-22 Literature 3
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UNIT 22

REVIEW

This module has covered a vast and disparate spectrum of literature,

spread across a broad chronological scope. We have considered a very
different range of authors, writing in diverse genres, and for numerous
purposes.

What conclusions might we draw about the period spanning from c.

1640 to c. 1800, and of the literary and cultural developments
witnessed across these years?

It might help us to divide this review of Module 3 into several distinct

categories.

AUTHORS
Which authors have we studied, and what kinds of texts did they
produce?

In the early part of the period, we paid close attention to the writings of
what might be considered ‘canonical’ authors such as John Milton and
John Dryden. Other familiar names from subsequent decades include
authors such as Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding.

However, we have encountered many less familiar names from across

this period too: from the authors recognisable to students of literature,
although not necessarily the general reader (such as John Denham, or
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, or George Crabbe), to names that even in
academic circles might be obscure (the poets John Duck and Ann
Yearsley, for instance).

By situating our study of well-known writers in relation to less familiar

names we have gained a much richer perspective on the varieties of
authorial activity throughout this period. In particular, we have seen
how social class and gender need not prohibit writing, although they
may shape the kind of work an author produces.

In fact, by reconsidering our picture of the (very) ‘long’ eighteenth

century as one peopled by men and women as diverse as Aphra Behn
and Samuel Richardson, from social classes as different as Rochester’s
and Sterne’s, we have seen how creative activity at this time was the
preserve of no individual class, sex or profession. Indeed, as we have
found, the idea that writing is a ‘profession’ evolves in significant ways
in this period, in relation to how both men and women perceive their
role as authors, and to the type of work they produce.

GENRES
Just as the range of authors we have covered has been vast, so we
have encountered very different types of texts in this module. We have
seen how this variety often emerges in response to historical and
personal circumstances surrounding the author at the time of writing.
For instance, the courtly world of Restoration England provided an
important backdrop for the poetry of the Earl of Rochester on the one
hand, or for the satirical verse of John Dryden on the other. Similarly,
the Parliamentary situation of late seventeenth-century England gave

Unit 22: Review 22-1

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rise to Milton’s polemical prose tract, Areopagitica, just as the religious

climate at this time nurtured the appearance of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

We have studied different genres besides poetry and prose too, through
our analysis of William Congreve’s Way of the World, and seen how that
highly popular arena of entertainment – the stage – can provide an
important means of channelling social critique. We have also, at times,
reflected upon the world of the visual arts as a vital means of interaction
with the world of texts.

Yet, as we have found, the generic identities of these texts themselves

did not remain static: the country-house or erotic poetry of late
seventeenth-century England, for instance, is very different to the
barbed satire of Pope’s Rape of the Lock, the gender-challenging verse
of Barber, and the sentimentalised verse of Goldsmith.

Prose, too, witnessed considerable and significant changes over this

period. While the late seventeenth century offered us prose tracts and
religious allegories, we found a stimulating variety of prose writing
awaiting us in the eighteenth century. This ranged from the travel-
writing epistolarity of Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, to the
political pamphlets of Jonathan Swift, to the pseudo-journal of Daniel
Defoe.

We saw how the liminal blend of fact and fiction was central to the new
form of prose writing that emerged around the middle years of the
eighteenth century: the ‘novel’. While we contended the generic
specificities of this term, we nonetheless saw how prose fiction
flourished in a variety of forms in the latter part of the century, from the
didactic fictions of Richardson and Fielding, to the challenge to all
seeming rules and conventions of Tristram Shandy, to the fashionable
surge in sentimentalism, to the awe-inspiring suspense of the Gothic
novel.

Each new type of literary text, and each variation on existing forms,
offered readers a fresh stimulation in the reading experience, and a
fresh challenge in the way they thought about the boundaries and
purposes of the literary text.

CONTEXTS
A consistent feature of our analyses of these authors’ texts has centred
upon the way in which social, historical, economic or political
circumstances can help to shape both the type of text that is produced,
and its potential role within the wider public sphere.

We have seen how the tempestuous events of the early part of the
period covered by this module generated a range of highly politicised,
reactionary texts that both reflected upon and, perhaps, helped to
shape the future course of events in the nation’s history. Crises such as
the passing of the Censorship Laws, the Civil War, and the Popish Plot
provide authors as different as Milton, Marvell and Dryden with
inspiration to write, and perhaps to use their publications as a way of
influencing those in power.

However, as we have seen throughout this module, these contexts are

not only political, or determined by moments of crisis. Indeed, social
and cultural change frequently provide the backdrop to the emergence
of new literary forms, such as Pope’s mock-heroic poem, The Rape of
the Lock, or the novel forms developed by such writers as Richardson,
Sterne and Smollett. In their own way, these less overtly politicised
texts exert an equally powerful influence upon public life, either by
shaping the future course of literary activity or by reaffirming the

22-2 Literature 3
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potential ‘purpose’ of literature – to teach its reader or audience whilst

also entertaining them – in new and challenging ways.

PURPOSES
We have discussed the idea of ‘purpose’ in a range of different contexts
throughout this unit, which has helped to elucidate our ideas about why
particular authors wrote the particular texts that they did at certain
times.

In the early part of our period, for instance, we paid close attention to
the different forms and functions of satire, in texts as diverse as
Dryden’s, Rochester’s and Congreve’s. We saw how, just as the forms of
each of these writers’ texts varied considerably, so the reasons for
producing such texts altered depending upon the historical
circumstances surrounding the author at that time. At a time of civil
unrest or uncertainty, for instance, a ’Country House’ poem might
remind the civically-minded individual of his duty towards the state, and
towards helping it to function as smoothly as his estate.

We have consistently found that a text is often the product of context,

or at least a reflection upon it, and that in many ways it can help to
shape the way that its readers perceive the world around them.

Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock offers a satirical commentary upon

the social demands placed upon women that, perhaps, remains
ambivalent in the ultimate target of its critique; meanwhile Mary
Wortley Montagu presents a challenging and insightful account of her
experiences whilst travelling abroad, which both comment upon the
‘other’ and reflect in critically informative ways upon British customs
and habits.

Similarly, the prose fictions of Richardson and Fielding emerge in

response to a newly validated function that a book can have in shaping
the moral conduct of its reader, just as Sterne rebukes his readers’
‘vicious taste’ in reading a book only for its story, rather than for any
useful erudition it might convey. In the same way, Smollett uses his
hybrid novel, Humphry Clinker, to absorb strands of existing generic
forms and to reflect upon contemporary debates about the relative
value of country and city life, an argument that also emerges in
Goldsmith and Crabbe’s poetry. The Gothic fiction of Walpole and
Radcliffe similarly assimilates aesthetic discourses belonging to the
world beyond fiction to propose new ways of representing an individual’s
experience.

Finally, the ‘purpose’ of all these very different texts perhaps rests on
an essential principle that we have discovered in various guises
throughout this module: their purpose is both to ‘instruct’ and to
‘entertain’, necessarily in unequal measure, but always in challenging
and, hopefully, stimulating and engaging ways.

Unit 22: Review 22-3