1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 25) 9781684481750

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1650–1850

EDITORIAL BOARD Theodore E. D. Braun University of Delaware Samara Anne Cahill Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Kathryn Duncan Saint Leo University James T. Engell Harvard University Scott Gordon Lehigh University Paul Kerry Christ Church, Oxford Colby H. Kullman University of Mississippi Mark A. Pedreira University of Puerto Rico Cedric D. Reverand II University of Wyoming Howard D. Weinbrot University of Wisconsin

1650–1850 IDEAS, AESTHETICS, AND INQUIRIES IN THE EARLY MODERN ERA

KEVIN L. COPE, Editor SAMARA ANNE CAHILL, Book Review Editor

LEWISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

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VOLUME

ISBN 978-1-68448-172-9 ISSN 1065-3112 This collection copyright © 2020 by Bucknell University Press Individual chapters copyright © 2020 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-­Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­bucknell​.­edu​/­UniversityPress Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMER­I­CA

CONTENTS ESSAYS Edited by Kevin L. Cope Harris beyond Hermes JACK LYNCH

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The Courier de l’Eu­rope, the Gordon Riots and ­Trials, and the Changing Face of Anglo-­French Relations HOWARD D. WEINBROT

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Lapdogs/Lenses: Microscopy, Narrative, and The History of Pompey the ­Little MOLLY MAROTTA

45

Deus sive Natura: The Monistic Link of Spinoza with China YU LIU

64

Murphy and Johnson: Prolegomenon to a New Edition ANTHONY W. LEE

86

SPECIAL FEATURE The Achievements of John Dennis Edited by Claude Willan Introduction to Special Feature CLAUDE WILLAN

107

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“A Separate Ministry”: Dennis, Drury Lane, and Opposition Politics DANIEL GUSTAFSON

129

“Naked Majesty”: The Occasional Sublime and Miltonic Whig History of John Dennis, Poet JAMES HORO­WITZ

154

Anatomy of a Pan: John Dennis’s Annotated Copy of Blackmore’s Prince Arthur PHILIP S. PALMER

181

My ­Enemy’s ­Enemy: Dennis, Pope, and Edmund Curll PAT ROGERS

201

Ovid Made En­glish: Dennis’s Translation of The Passion of Byblis SARAH B. STEIN

217

BOOK REVIEWS Edited by Samara Anne Cahill Catherine Ingrassia, ed., The Cambridge Companion to ­Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 Reviewed by SUZANNE L. BARNETT 239 Stephen Gaukroger, The Natu­ral and the ­Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1739–1841 Reviewed by R.J.W. MILLS 244 Malcolm Jack, To the Fairest Cape: Eu­ro­pean Encounters in the Cape of Good Hope Reviewed by NIGEL PENN 248 Nan Goodman, The Puritan Cosmopolis: The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER TRIGG 252 Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment Reviewed by MARK G. SPENCER 255 Stewart Pollens, Stradivari Reviewed by ROY BOGAS 258 Paul Prescott, Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Per­for­mance from the Eigh­teenth ­Century to the Pre­sent Reviewed by GEFEN BAR-­ON SANTOR 260 vi

Contents

Jonathan I. Israel, Demo­cratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and ­Human Rights, 1750–1790 Reviewed by MARK G. SPENCER 263 Andrew Janiak and Eric Schliesser, eds., Interpreting Newton: Critical Essays Reviewed by GEFEN BAR-­ON SANTOR 266 Geordan Hammond, John Wesley in Amer­i­ca: Restoring Primitive Chris­tian­ity Reviewed by ISABEL RIVERS 270 Geordan Hammond and David Ceri Jones, eds., George Whitefield: Life, Context, and Legacy Reviewed by RICHARD P. HEITZENRATER 273 Felix Waldmann, ed., Further Letters of David Hume Reviewed by MARK G. SPENCER 276 Henry Hitchings, The World in Thirty-­Eight Chapters, or, Dr Johnson’s Guide to Life Reviewed by MALCOLM JACK 278 Ian Woodfield, Performing Operas for Mozart: Impresarios, Singers and Troupes Reviewed by KATE QUARTANO BROWN 281 Stephen Rumph, Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics Reviewed by JANE R. STEVENS 287 Susan Carlile, Charlotte Lennox: An In­de­pen­dent Mind Reviewed by ROBIN RUNIA 292 Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens, introduction by Dominique Poulot, translation by Chris Miller and David Gilks Reviewed by PAULA PINTO 295 Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Brontës, Anniversary Edition Reviewed by TAMARA S. WAGNER 301

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About the Contributors

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1650–1850

HARRIS BEYOND HERMES JACK LYNCH

Some eighteenth-­century writers are so firmly associated with one work that

they are known to posterity not by a given name but by a book title: John “De­mos­ the­nes” Taylor, for instance, or John “Estimate” Brown. A few are reasonably familiar, such as Matthew “Monk” Lewis and William Henry “Shakespeare” Ireland. ­Others are nearly forgotten, like William “Pliny” Melmoth, Richard “Leonidas” Glover, and James “Abyssinian” Bruce. A few writers have managed to escape their early nicknames—­S amuel “Dictionary” Johnson, for instance, and James “Corsica” Boswell—by ­going on to write more impor­tant ­things. But most are doomed to be remembered by posterity for a single work. Among the writers who have suffered most from a nickname is James Harris, who took his moniker from Hermes; or, A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Lan­ guage and Universal Grammar, first published in 1751 and reprinted five times in the eigh­teenth ­century.1 More than two centuries ­after his death, “Hermes” Harris is known, if he is known at all, for this work alone. Any number of ­f actors have cooperated in leaving Harris in obscurity. Many readers know his name only ­because he had the misfortune to be ridiculed by Samuel Johnson. Harris and Johnson ­were hardly enemies, but Boswell and Hester Thrale recorded a number of Johnson’s nastier jabs—­“Harris . . . ​is a prig, and a bad prig. I looked into his book, and thought he did not understand his own system”; “of James Harris Dedication to his Hermes he said that tho’ but 14 Lines long, t­here ­were 6 Grammatical faults in it”—­and Clive Probyn, in the most thorough and sympathetic account of Harris to date, gives a ­great deal of attention to this supposed “deep hostility of Samuel Johnson.” 2

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1650–1850 But t­ hese slights have been better remembered than the indications of goodwill between the two men, as when Joseph Cradock argued that Hermes is “too abstruse; it is heavy.” “It is,” replied Johnson, “but a work of that kind must be heavy.”3 And Harris continued to treat Johnson kindly: Johnson was once “solaced with an elegant entertainment, a very accomplished f­ amily, and much good com­pany; among whom was Mr. Harris of Salisbury, who paid him many compliments on his ‘Journey to the Western Islands’ ” (Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 2:365). The biggest prob­lem with Harris’s reception, though, is that he is assumed to stand outside the mainstream of eighteenth-­century thought—­that his fascination for Aristotelian philosophy at a time when Aristotle’s reputation was at a low ebb means he was not r­ eally engaged in the most impor­tant questions of his age. His personal connections with writers like Shaftesbury, Henry and Sarah Fielding, Floyer Sydenham, John Upton, Lord Monboddo, and Charles Burney, along with his involvement in the musical world of late-­century ­England, ­will prob­ably guarantee him a place in the footnotes to studies of other, supposedly more impor­ tant, figures. But his hostility ­toward Lockean empiricism excludes him from many histories of philosophy; his classical learning makes him seem backward-­looking at a time when interest in vernacular lit­er­a­ture was flourishing; his fascination with the ancients made him antipathetic ­toward modern advances in science. All of ­these charges are unjust to some degree; as Probyn puts it, He is unpop­u­lar with phi­los­o­phers for his attacks on Locke (though Locke is almost never mentioned by name); with critics b ­ ecause of his apparently low opinion of con­temporary lit­er­a­ture (though his admiration for Henry Fielding’s work was boundless, and he read Richardson and Pope with warm admiration); with scientists for his dismay at the con­temporary fashion for empirical and materialist philosophies (though he was enthralled by Hunter’s lectures on comparative anatomy); and with the general reader b ­ ecause of his daunting classical scholarship, even though his books are specifically written to display Eu­rope’s classical inheritance in the most accessible manner to En­glish readers. (The Sociable Humanist, 2–3) Even Hermes is sometimes taken to be a kind of philosophical outlier, not engaged with the most impor­tant questions in eighteenth-­century linguistic theory. In a standard work on the subject, Hans Aarsleff admits that “Harris’ Hermes belongs in the tradition of universal grammar,” but he finds it “a poor representative of its kind.” 4

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What­ever the cause, Harris is remembered only as the author of Hermes and assumed to be of l­ittle importance for most readers. As David Womersley puts it in a review of Probyn’s The Sociable Humanist, “on closing the book, one’s stubborn feeling is that Harris ­will never become a major presence in eighteenth-­ century studies. . . . ​Few of Harris’s contemporaries seem to have shared his ideas.”5 And yet his oeuvre contains a number of works that do not deserve to be consigned to oblivion, and he engages with many impor­tant ideas that w ­ ere circulating throughout Britain and Eu­rope during his lifetime. His first publication came when he was 35, a Shaftesburian dialogue on the relative merits of the ­sister arts, and the title suggests the range of subjects on which he felt prepared to discourse: Three Treatises: The First Concerning Art; The Second Concerning M ­ usic, Paint­ ing, and Poetry; The Third Concerning Happiness (London, 1744). ­Later editions appeared in 1783 and 1792. ­After Hermes came a pair of pastoral poems in the early 1760s, then a large work of Aristotelian philosophy called Philosophical Arrange­ ments in 1775, and fi­nally Philological Inquiries, published posthumously in 1781.6 All have been forgotten, eclipsed by Hermes. As part of this act of forgetting, the world has also forgotten the kinds of inquiry that Harris attempted that are not clearly on display in Hermes. When ­Harris appears in a positive light t­oday, it is usually for anticipating many of the insights of twentieth-­century linguistics. Ian Michael, for instance, calls Hermes “by far the most penetrating of all the works written in the name of Universal Grammar.”7 Hermes attempts to describe language generally, rather than any par­tic­u­ lar language; his mode of linguistic description is capable of taking on Greek and Latin as well as En­glish and French. But this account of Harris’s concerns is incomplete, and it neglects some of his interests and talents. Although Hermes is not concerned with the historical development of languages, his extensive classical knowledge meant that he often framed his questions in historical terms, even as he sought to describe patterns that transcended historical contingencies. One of his recurring concerns is the tension between the universal claims he wants to make about lit­er­a­ture and the historicist inclinations forced on him by his awareness of the differences between the ancients and the moderns. ­After all, he often advises his readers to look back on their own history: “The Fate indeed of antient Authors,” he advises, “is not unworthy of our notice”; and he warns against the “evil” of “admiring only the authors of our own age” (Hermes, viii, xiii). Harris was writing during a time when British thinkers ­were trying to sort out the nation’s cultural and intellectual history, a pro­cess Lawrence Lipking has called

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1650–1850 “the ordering of the arts”—­making the first attempts “to describe the w ­ hole prac8 tice of a single art; to set the history and criticism of an art in order.” Eighteenth-­ century Britain is usually given short shrift in accounts of the development of historicist criticism, which is supposed to make its first showing in the nineteenth ­century. Critics of that time are supposed to be concerned with neoclassical ideals and unities and timeless verities, not the specific historical conditions ­under which authors lived. But many of the best eighteenth-­century British critics ­were fundamentally historicist at heart, and sought to understand the relationships between history and art. Impor­tant works in this tradition include John Upton’s Critical Observations on Shakespeare (1747), Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare (1765), Elizabeth Montagu’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (1769), Thomas Warton’s The History of En­glish Poetry (1774–1781), Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779–1781), and, in ­music, Charles Burney’s General History of ­Music (1776– 1789)—­all written, as it happens, by friends of Harris.9 The work in which Harris’s own historical consciousness is most evident is Philological Inquiries, which appeared posthumously in 1781.10 The work comprises three sections, and Harris’s own description gives an idea of the tenor of each part. The first, largely a reworking of his early anonymous publication Upon the Rise and Pro­gress of Criticism (1752), is “an Investigation of the Rise and dif­ fer­ent Species of CRITICISM and CRITICS ”; the second is “AN ILLUSTRATION OF CRITICAL D OCTRINES AND PRINCIPLES , as they appear in DISTINGUISHED AUTHORS , as well Antient as Modern”; and the last “­will be rather HISTORICAL than Critical, being AN ESSAY ON THE TASTE AND LITERATURE OF THE M IDDLE AGE ” (Philological Inquiries, 3–4). This third part is a history of lit­er­a­ture in Eu­rope, the Byzantine Empire, and Arabia from the fall of the Roman Empire to the end of the “Dark Ages.” Of course, a subject this large cannot be covered comprehensively in the three hundred or so pages Harris gives to it; his method is to offer a few names and events, and to try to discover in the historical flux a pattern, a logic governing the pro­cesses of change. Philological Inquiries is not entirely original, but neither ­were ­there many similar works in 1781. Prob­ably the nearest analogue of his historical survey of the ­Middle Ages was Warton’s The History of En­glish Poetry.11 Warton explains the purpose of his History early in the first volume: We look back on the savage condition of our ancestors with the triumph of superiority; we are pleased to mark the steps by which we have been raised from rudeness to elegance: and our reflections on this subject are accompanied with a conscious pride, arising in ­great mea­sure from a tacit comparison

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of the infinite disproportion between the feeble efforts of remote ages, and our pre­sent improvements in knowledge. (The History of En­glish Poetry, 1:i) Harris’s purpose, however, was dif­fer­ent. First, we see in him ­little of the triumphalism that marks Warton’s account. Harris has often been accused of neglecting or disparaging all modern lit­er­a­ture, and many of his works do ­little to lessen the impression. In Hermes, for instance, he explains “the multiplicity of antient quotations, with which he has filled his Book” by announcing his intention “to revive the decaying taste of antient Lit­er­a­ture; to lessen the bigotted contempt of ­every ­thing not modern” (Hermes, xv–­x vi). He has in fact been criticized for his own bigoted contempt of every­thing that is not ancient: as The New Annual Register put it shortly a­ fter his death, Harris “was deeply conversant in the Grecian learning, and especially the Grecian philosophy. Perhaps he was devoted to it to a degree of bigotry, since he would scarcely permit himself to extend a thought beyond the ideas of the ancients.”12 It is true that he had l­ittle patience for Lockean philosophy; though he almost never identifies Locke by name, ­there is no mistaking his distaste for the materialism and empiricism that marked modern philosophy. But he was not entirely contemptuous of modern lit­er­a­ture, and Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope ­were ­great favorites—he regularly uses quotations from their works to illustrate grammatical patterns. The more impor­tant difference between Warton’s history and Harris’s, though, is that Warton announces his intention of writing a straightforward chronicle history, whereas Harris hopes to combine his philosophical interests with the historical investigations that constitute the last section of the Philological Inqui­ ries. The work is an attempt at “philosophical history” and is marked by tensions between what Harris calls “philosophical criticism” and “historical criticism.” Beginning in Upon the Rise and Pro­gress of Criticism, Harris worked to distinguish the species of literary criticism—­something not attempted by many ­earlier En­glish critics. When he revised this early work in Philological Inquiries he kept intact its taxonomy of three critical modes. The “first Critics,” he writes, “not only attended to the POWERS , and dif­fer­ent Species of WORDS; the Force of numerous Composition ­whether in prose or verse; the Aptitude of its vari­ous kinds to dif­fer­ ent subjects; but they farther considered that, which is the basis of all, that is to say in other words, the MEANING or the SENSE.” His beloved Aristotle was among the most distinguished prac­ti­tion­ers of this mode. Since it “led them at once into the most curious of subjects; the nature of Man in general,” Harris identifies it as ­“PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM ” (Philological Inquiries, 7, 9). This philosophical criticism is for Harris the highest variety, but not the only one. The “second species”—­second

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1650–1850 both chronologically and in order of value—is “a species which, in distinction to the former, we call CRITICISM HISTORICAL” (16). Among the ancients t­ here ­were many distinguished philosophical critics, but Harris saw few among his contemporaries. “However small among Moderns may be the number of t­ hese Philosophical Critics,” he explains, “the Writers of HISTORICAL or EXPLANATORY CRITICISM have been in a manner innumerable” (19). The third species is “CRITICISM CORRECTIVE,” which began with an attempt “to collate all the vari­ous Copies of authority, and then, from amidst the variety of Readings thus collected, to establish by good reasons ­either the true, or the most probable” (30–31). Harris admits such criticism has its place, but he has ­little sympathy with the state of the art in the eigh­teenth ­century, when corrective criticism tended to attract plodding pedants. Thus he laments that “The best of t­ hings may pass into abuse” (34), especially the fondness for conjectural emendation that left some texts in tatters. “Authors have been taken in hand,” he complains, “only to display the skill and abilities of the Artist; so that the end of many an Edition seems often to have been no more, than to exhibit the g­ reat sagacity and erudition of an Editor” (35). Even “the celebrated Bentley” deserves blame for his zeal for conjecture: “It would have become that able writer . . . ​had he been more temperate in his Criticism upon the Paradise lost” (37). When it touches on literary m ­ atters, Hermes is an example of philosophical criticism: it is concerned with both “the POWERS , and dif­fer­ent Species of WORDS ” and “the nature of Man in general.” Philological Inquiries, however, tries to go a step further, by combining this philosophical mode with the historical criticism that has flourished among the moderns. Harris recognized from the beginning of his proj­ect that he was stepping outside his usual areas of expertise: “I claim a Privi­ lege of Age,” he writes, “to pass from PHILOSOPHY to PHILOLOGY ” (1). And yet he is not entirely abandoning his usual philosophical interests for history; in fact he is trying to reconcile the two. The central prob­lem of bringing the two modes of thought together is spelled out clearly by David Hume in 1742: ­There is not a ­Matter of greater Nicety, in our Enquiries concerning ­human Affairs, than to distinguish exactly what is owing to Chance, and what proceeds from ­Causes; nor is ­there any ­Thing, in which an Author is more apt to deceive himself, by false Subtilties and Refinements. To say, that any Event is deriv’d from Chance, cuts short all farther Enquiry concerning it, and leaves the Writer in the same State of Ignorance with all the rest of Mankind. But when the Event is supposed to proceed from certain and stable C ­ auses, he may then display 13 his Ingenuity, in assigning t­ hese ­Causes.

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Hume warns the critic away from inventing supposed laws to explain contingencies away: “­there is no Subject, wherein we must proceed with more Caution, than in tracing the History of the Arts and Sciences; lest we assign C ­ auses that never existed, and reduce what is merely contingent to stable and universal Princi­ples” (Essays, Moral and Po­liti­cal, 2:57). Harris too wrestled with this difficulty, as is evident in his discussion of the nature of history. When he describes the purpose of historical inquiry he identifies three “MODES of History,” of which the first is “Historical Declamation,” in which “the Author, dwelling l­ittle upon Facts, indulges himself in vari­ous and copious Reflections.” This, however, “is not likely to give us much Knowledge of Facts.” The second mode is “General or rather Public History; a Mode, abundant in Facts, where Treaties and Alliances, ­Battles and Sieges, Marches and Retreats are accurately retailed.” Harris acknowledges the “Utility” of this kind of history, but objects that “the sameness of the Events resembles not a ­little the Sameness of ­Human Bodies. One Head, two Shoulders, two Legs, &c. seem equally to characterise an Eu­ro­ pe­an and an African; a native of old Rome, and a native of Modern.” The most impor­tant kind of history is his “third Species,” which “gives a sample of SENTIMENTS and MANNERS .” This is the most valuable: as long as it is accurate, “it cannot fail being instructive.” Histories of this sort tell us “what sort of animal Man is; so that while not only Eu­ro­pe­ans are distinguished from Asiatics, but En­glish from French, French from Italians, and (what is still more) e­ very individual from his neighbour: we view at the same time ONE NATURE, which is common to them all” (Philological Inquiries, 370–372). In other words, he is concerned with the relationship between the general and the specific, the universal and the par­tic­u­lar. At the beginning of the work he states his desire to formulate the laws that govern literary production, laws analogous to the laws Newton formulated nearly a ­century before: As the ­great Events of NATURE led Mankind to Admiration: so Curiosity to learn the Cause, whence such Events should arise, was that, which by due degrees formed NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. What happened in the Natu­r al World, happened also in the Literary. Exquisite Productions both in P­ROSE and VERSE induced men ­here likewise to seek the Cause; and such Inquiries, often repeated, gave birth to PHILOLOGY. PHILOLOGY should hence appear to be of a most comprehensive character, and to include not only all Accounts both of Criticism and Critics, but of ­every t­ hing connected with Letters, be it Speculative or Historical. (Philologi­ cal Inquiries, 2–3)

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1650–1850 As this passage suggests, Harris sees a logic b ­ ehind historical development: ­“N OTHING EXCELLENT IN A LITERARY WAY HAPPENS MERELY BY CHANCE ” (43). In practical terms, this means Harris seeks some way to tie literary history to the general development of a society. “ANTIENT GR­ EECE,” he writes, “in its happy days was the seat of Liberty, of Sciences, and of Arts. In this fair region, fertile of wit, the Epic Writers came first; then the Lyric; then the Tragic; and lastly the Historians, the Comic Writers, and the Orators, each in their turns delighting ­whole multitudes, and commanding the attention and admiration of all” (6). And not only Greece: all socie­ties, he argues, follow parallel tracks in their cultural development, and they can be explained with reference to stages in a broader kind of development. It appears, that not only in GR­ EECE, but in other Countries, more barbarous, the first Writings ­were in Metre, and of an Epic Cast, recording Wars, ­Battles, Heroes, Ghosts; the Marvellous always, and often the Incredible. Men seemed to have thought, that the higher they soared, the more impor­tant they should appear; and that the common Life, which they then lived, was a ­thing too contemptible to merit Imitation. (46) The same pattern can be seen across the ancient world, in Greece, in Rome, and in Arabia: “When Success in Arms has defeated Rivals, and Empire becomes not only extended but established, then is it that Nations begin to think of Letters, and to cultivate Philosophy, and liberal Speculation. This happened to the Athe­ nians ­after they had triumphed over the Persians; to the Romans, a­ fter they triumphed over Carthage; and to the ARABIANS , a­ fter the Caliphate was established at Bagdad” (324). Since socie­ties follow parallel tracks, it is only natu­r al that Harris should be interested in the way the same pro­cesses play out in the same ways in dif­fer­ent cultures. He often notes parallels between vari­ous cultural products, not in the interest of identifying influence among them, but of treating ­these cultural products as expressions of under­lying universal truths. An Arabic proverb is echoed in Aristotle: “In the Comment on the Verses of Tograi,” writes Harris, “we meet an Arabic Sentiment, which says, that a Friend is another self. The same elegant thought occurs in Aristotle’s Ethics, and that in the same words. ῎Εστι γὰρ ὁ φίλος ἄλλος ἀυτός” (356). Even in modern En­glish works ­there are echoes of the Arabs: ­There is a fine Precept among the Arabians—­Let him, to whom THE GATE of Good Fortune is opened, seize his Opportunity; for he knoweth not, how soon it may be shut.

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Compare this with t­ hose admired Lines in Shakespeare— ­There is A TIDE in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, &c. Jul. Cæs. Act IV. Sc. 5. Tho’ the Meta­phors differ, the Sentiment is the same. (355–356) This is not ­because Aristotle or Shakespeare read Arabic, but ­because all three socie­ties lighted on the same fundamental truths. In a letter to Elizabeth Montagu, Harris argues that t­ hese parallels are only natu­ral, and need not be explained with reference to direct influence. He observes many instances of Aristotelian logic in Shakespeare, and even “tho I ­don’t apprehend he ever heard a Syllable of the Peripatetic Categories . . . ​yet his Sentiments contribute not a ­little to their illustration.” Shakespeare’s habit of unconsciously echoing Aristotle is a good Argument in favour of ­these Arrangements, ­because if they ­were not founded in Nature, he, who had no other Guide than Nature, could never have furnished such examples . . . ​[for] pure Nature & Genius & Art co-­incide, like Radii of the same circle; they have a common Centre, which Centre is Truth. (Harris to Elizabeth Montagu, April 17, 1775, in Probyn, The Sociable Human­ ist, 258) Even as he describes the ways universal truths find expression in dif­fer­ent cultures, Harris recognizes that culture does more than simply reflect unchanging princi­ples—­the variety of cultures across centuries and across socie­ties reveals that cultural pro­gress also owes much to contingency. His attempt to describe apparent departures from the laws of cultural development is clearest in his account of the decline and revival of learning. His account of the disaster that was the M ­ iddle Ages is fairly conventional.14 ­After the high point of antiquity, “­things continued, tho’ in a declining way, till, ­after many a severe and unsuccessful plunge, the Roman Empire sunk through the West of Eu­rope. Latin then soon lost its purity; Greek they hardly knew; Classics, and their Scholiasts ­were no longer studied; and an Age succeeded of Legends and Crusades” (Philological Inquiries, 16). In the third part he gives his most thorough account of the decline of ancient learning and lit­ er­a­ture in the ­Middle Ages: The WESTERN EMPIRE soon sunk. So early as in the fifth ­Century, ROME, once the Mistress of Nations, beheld herself at the feet of a G OTHIC Sovereign. . . . ​ The INTERVAL BETWEEN THE FALL OF T­ HESE TWO EMPIRES (the Western or Latin in the fifth ­Century, the Eastern or Grecian in the fifteenth) making a space of near a thousand years, constitutes what we call THE MIDDLE AGE. (238–240)

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1650–1850 The way literary and other cultural phenomena interact with history is noteworthy. This description of the darkness of the ­Middle Ages jumps back and forth among military, religious, prosodic, and po­liti­cal concerns, suggesting the complexity of accounting for cultural development: Dominion past during this interval into the hands of rude, illiterate men; men, who conquered more by multitude, than by military skill; and who, having l­ittle or no taste e­ ither for Sciences or Arts, naturally despised t­ hose ­things, from which they had reaped no advantage. This was the age of Monkery and Legends; of Leonine Verses, (that is of bad Latin put into rhime;) of Proj­ects to decide Truth by Plough-­shares and Battoons; of Crusades to conquer Infidels, and extirpate Heretics; of Princes deposed, not as Crœsus was by Cyrus, but by one, who had no Armies, and who did not even wear a sword. (240–244) Cultural history reflects the social history of a nation. But the external f­ actors he identifies, while influential, are not determinative; even in a barbarous age, not every­one is a barbarian. If the cultural laws that darkened the Dark Ages w ­ ere as strict as Newtonian laws, t­ here would be no exceptions—­and yet “even in ­those dark Ages (as we have too many reasons to call them) ­there ­were Greeks still extant, who had a Taste for the finer Arts, and an Enthusiastic Feeling of their exquisite Beauty” (310–311). Against the background of medieval darkness, therefore, he is always keen to find glimmers of light: some sparks of Intellect ­were at all times vis­i­ble, thro’ the ­whole of this dark and dreary Period. ’Tis ­here we must look for the TASTE and LITERATURE OF THE TIMES . . . . ​The few, who ­were enlightened, when Arts and Sciences ­were thus obscured, may be said to have happily maintained the Continuity of Knowl­ edge; to have been (if I may use the expression) like the Twilight of a Summer’s Night; that auspicious Gleam between the setting and the rising Sun, which, tho’ it cannot retain the Lustre of the day, helps at least to save us from the Totality of Darkness. (245–246) “Even in the darkest periods we have been treating,” he writes near the end of his work, “periods, when Taste is often thought to have been lost, we s­ hall still discover an enlightened few, who ­were by no means insensible to the power of t­ hese beauties” (498). How to account for ­these glimmers?—­why ­were some socie­ties, and some individuals, enlightened even while ­others remained dark and barbarous? Harris rarely asks why individuals managed to transcend their socie­ties; his historical

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HARRIS BEYOND HERMES

account of the M ­ iddle Ages has few portraits of brilliant individuals—­even Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Chaucer get only passing mentions in Philological Inqui­ ries. But Harris does try to account for the reasons one society differs from another. He notices, for instance, that the nations that flourished a­ fter the revival of ­learning are the same as ­those that flourished before the fall: “ ’Tis somewhat singular, that in t­hese Periods, considered as dark and barbarous, the same Nations should still retain their superiority of Taste, tho’ not perhaps in its original purity” (452). Why has Italy demonstrated “superiority of Taste” through so many changes in history? The kind of racialist thinking that became widespread in the nineteenth ­century—­the notion that, in the words of one late Victorian, “In ­every period of history some single race or nation acts the leading part”15—­was not yet available to Harris. He does, however, consider the influence of climate on culture, as did many contemporaries, especially in France, such as Rousseau, Buffon, and Montesquieu.16 When Harris considers “To what are we to attribute this character of FEROCITY, which seems to have then prevailed thro’ THE L AITY OF EUROPE?” he asks himself, “­Shall we say, ’twas CLIMATE , and THE NATURE OF THE COUNTRY?—­These we must confess have in some instances g­ reat Influence” (517). His most impor­tant ­causes, though, have to do not with race or climate but with po­liti­cal structures. ­There was nothing eccentric in this; many seventeenth­and eighteenth-­century thinkers argued for the connections between po­liti­cal systems and the pro­gress of arts and sciences. Jean de la Bruyère, for instance, insisted that “­There is no occasion for Arts and Sciences in the exercise of ­Tyranny.”17 Hume is even more forceful: in considering the “rise and pro­gress of the arts and sciences,” he insists “That it is impossible for the Arts and Sciences to arise, at first, among any P ­ eople, u ­ nless that ­People enjoy the Blessing of a ­free Government” (Essays, Moral and Po­liti­cal, 2:60). For Harris, po­liti­cal liberty promotes cultural development; modern E ­ ngland’s excellence reflects its debts not only to classical learning but to classical government. “When the Athenians had delivered themselves from the tyranny of PISISTRATUS ,” he explains, “and a­ fter this had defeated the vast Efforts of the Persians, and that against two successive Invaders, DARIUS and XERXES , they may be considered as at the summit of their national Glory. . . . ​A s their Taste was naturally good, Arts of ­every kind soon ­rose among them, and flourished” (Philological Inquiries, 255–256). The emphasis on “liberty” is consistent with the Whiggish politics of the day; Harris, an MP beginning in 1761 and a supporter of George Grenville, is comfortable with this

13

1650–1850 rhe­toric. This may be why he is drawn to classical Athens rather than to imperial Rome: THE G RECIAN COMMONWEALTHS , while they maintained their Liberty, ­were the most heroic Confederacy, that ever existed. They w ­ ere the politest, the bravest, and the wisest of men. In the short space of l­ittle more than a C ­ entury, they became such Statesmen, Warriors, Orators, Historians, Physicians, Poets, Critics, Paint­ers, Sculptors, Architects, and (last of all) Phi­los­o­phers, that one can hardly help considering THAT GOLDEN PERIOD, as a Providential Event in honour of h ­ uman Nature, to shew to what perfection the Species might ascend. (Hermes, 415–417) And it is the lack of liberty that condemned the Eastern ­peoples to intellectual darkness: The Eastern World, from the earliest days, has been at all times the Seat of enormous Monarchy. On them fair Liberty never shed its genial influence. If at any time civil Discords arose among them (and arise t­ here did innumerable) the contest was never about the Form of their Government; (for this was an object, of which the Combatants had no conception;) ’twas all from the poor motive of, who should be their MASTER, ­whether a Cyrus or an Artaxerxes, a Mahomet or a Mustapha. (Hermes, 409) Philological Inquiries has found few modern defenders. George Saintsbury, writing in 1911, argued that the third part especially raises the expectation almost to agony-­point. ­Here is what we have been waiting for so long: h ­ ere is the g­ reat gap ­going to be filled. At last a critic not merely takes a philosophic-­historic view of criticism, but actually proposes to supplement it with an inquiry into ­those regions of lit­er­a­ture on which his pre­ de­ces­sors have turned an obstinately blind eye. As is the exaltation of the promise, so is the aggravation of the disappointment.18 Lipking, writing sixty years ­after Saintsbury, notes that “The historian of En­glish literary criticism must approach Philological Inquiries . . . ​with quickening interest. He is likely to come away from it with a dif­fer­ent attitude” (The Ordering of the Arts, 98). Most commentators agree that, in his effort to account for cultural development philosophically, Harris failed. As Lipking puts it, “Philological Inquiries pursues a kind of certitude, an absolute, verifiable, programmatic method of judgment, that never seems quite relevant to any par­tic­u­lar literary work” (102). Even Probyn, who expresses few reservations about Harris’s other books, admits that “it is generally agreed” that “something went wrong in this last one. Harris’s attempt to look at literary history with the eye of a phi­los­o­pher, a challenging and unpre­

14

HARRIS BEYOND HERMES

ce­dented objective, was to reveal the perils of a method which, in his previous books, had too comfortably inscribed the pre­sent in the margin of the past” (The Sociable Humanist, 261). If so many distinguished critics in the last ­century—­virtually all, in fact, who have written about Philological Inquiries—­have found it such a disappointment, it would be perverse to defend it as a triumph. And yet the book is not entirely without interest, nor entirely without merit. Eighteenth-­century readers saw in it much to admire. Harris’s son called Philological Inquiries “a more popu­lar work than any of his former ones.”19 The New Annual Register called it “a very entertaining publication, as it gives an historical view of the pro­gress of criticism among the Greeks and Romans, and exhibits a curious and pleasing account of the state of lit­er­a­ture in the ­middle ages.”20 Vicesimus Knox praised the “peculiar accuracy and elegance” of the Inquiries.21 Even Johnson, remembered for his hostility to Harris, paid Phil­ ological Inquiries a rare compliment: “He owned he had hardly ever read a book through. The posthumous volumes of Mr. Harris of Salisbury (which treated of subjects that ­were congenial with his own professional studies) had attractions that engaged him to the end.”22 It is true that Harris never found a coherent princi­ple or set of princi­ples that allowed him to account for cultural development. Then again, no other critics of the era had much better luck. The more successful attempts at ordering the arts, such as Warton’s History and Johnson’s Lives, dispensed with theories of causation entirely, and t­ hose who attempted to develop their own philosophical systems to explain historical change tended to devolve into a crude kind of determinism. More serious philosophies of cultural history had to await the nineteenth c­ entury, as with Hegel’s Philosophy of History (composed ca. 1830, published 1837) and Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Po­liti­cal Economy (1859). Even if he was unsuccessful, though, Harris was one of the first Britons to attempt this sort of philosophical history. Philological Inquiries shows that he was not only engaged with some of the concerns of his contemporaries—­the Wartons, Johnson, Rousseau, Montesquieu, even Hume—­but also that he anticipated some of the most impor­tant attempts at ordering the arts in the nineteenth ­century.

Notes 1. James Harris, Hermes; or, A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Language and Uni­ versal Grammar (London, 1751) (hereafter cited as Hermes, followed by page number). New editions appeared in 1765, 1771, 1773, 1786, and 1794, though “language and” was removed from the subtitle. See Clive Probyn, The Sociable

15

1650–1850 Humanist: The Life and Works of James Harris, 1709–1780; Provincial and Metro­ politan Culture in Eighteenth-­Century ­England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 150 (hereafter cited as The Sociable Humanist, followed by page number). A three-­page pamphlet, A Short Account of the Four Parts of Speech According to Aristotle, as Explained in Hermes (Salisbury?, 1760?), was also spun off from Hermes. 2. James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G.  B. Hill, rev. L.  F. Powell, 6 vols., 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964), 3:245 (hereafter cited as Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, followed by volume and page number); Hester Thrale Piozzi, Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (­Later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776–1809, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), 1:208. For other Johnsonian witticisms at Harris’s expense, see Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 2:225, 5:377–378; and Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. 1 of The Works of Samuel Johnson, 11 vols. (London, 1787), 255. See also Probyn, The Sociable Humanist, 141. 3. Joseph Cradock, Anecdotes, in Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G.  B. Hill, 2 vols. (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1897), 2:70–71. 4. Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in E ­ ngland, 1780–1860, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 11. 5. David Womersley, review of The Sociable Humanist, in Review of En­glish Studies, n.s., 44, no. 174 (May 1993): 265–266, esp. 266. 6. Daphnis and Amaryllis: A Pastoral (Salisbury, 1761), with further editions in 1763, 1766, and 1779; The Spring: A Pastoral, as It Is Now Performing at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane: The M ­ usic by Mr. Handel, and Other Eminent Masters (London, 1762); Philosophical Arrangements by Iames Harris Esq. (London, 1775), with a second edition in 1799; and Philological Inquiries in Three Parts, 2 vols. paginated continuously (London, 1781) (hereafter cited as Philological Inquiries, followed by page number). Quotations from Philological Inquiries come from this edition. In 1775 t­here appeared Miscellanies by Iames Harris (London, 1775), which gathers Three Treatises, Hermes, and Philosophical Arrangements; ­later editions followed in 1787, 1792, and 1800. In 1801 a collected edition appeared, The Works of James Harris, Esq. with an Account of His Life and Character, by His Son the Earl of Malmesbury, 2 vols. (London, 1801). A fuller bibliography, including many of Harris’s unpublished works, appears in Probyn, The Sociable Humanist. 7. Ian Michael, En­glish Grammatical Categories and the Tradition to 1800 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 172. See also Probyn, The Sociable Humanist, 161–162. 8. Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-­Century ­England (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1970), vii (hereafter cited as The Ordering of the Arts, followed by page number). 9. David Fairer considers “the historical sense that infused criticism and scholarship at mid-­century” and discusses some of the connections between Harris and

16

HARRIS BEYOND HERMES

Upton in “Historical Criticism and the En­glish Canon: A Spenserian Dispute in the 1750s,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 24 (Spring 2000): 43–64. 10. A note “To the Reader” explains that “The two Volumes which now appear w ­ ere entirely printed before the learned and respectable Author of them died, and ­were by him designed for publication in the course of this spring” (Harris, Philological Inquiries, sig. a5r). 11. Thomas Warton, The History of En­glish Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury: To Which are Prefixed, Two Dis­ sertations: I. On the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Eu­rope; II. On the Introduction of Learning into ­England, 4 vols. (London, 1774–1781) (hereafter The History of En­glish Poetry, followed by volume and page numbers). Harris notes the History in Philological Inquiries, 24. 12. The New Annual Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Lit­er­a­ ture, for the Year 1781 (London, 1782), 234. 13. David Hume, “Of the Rise and Pro­gress of the Arts and Sciences,” in Essays, Moral and Po­liti­cal, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1742), 2:53 (hereafter cited as Essays, Moral and Po­liti­cal, followed by volume and page number). It is pos­si­ble that Harris’s Upon the Rise and Pro­gress of Criticism borrowed its title from Hume’s essay, though the phrase “rise and pro­gress” was too common in eighteenth-­ century titles to allow one to be certain. Harris alludes to Hume in print only once, in Philological Inquiries, where in a discussion of Richard I a footnote advises, “See the Histories of Richard’s Life, Rapin, Hume &c.” (449n). ­There is also a passing reference to Hume in Harris’s commonplace book for April  1778: see Donald Burrows and Rosemary Dunhill, ­Music and Theatre in Handel’s World: The F­ amily Papers of James Harris, 1732–1780 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 981. Harris and Hume met several times; see The Sociable Humanist, 243. 14. I discuss eighteenth-­century British conceptions of the ­Middle Ages and Re­nais­ sance in The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. chap. 1. 15. Dexter A. Hawkins, The Anglo-­Saxon Race: Its History, Character, and Destiny: An Address before the Syracuse University, at Commencement, June 21, 1875 (New York: Nelson & Phillips, 1875), I. For another example see Thomas Nichols, The Ped­ igree of the En­glish ­People: An Argument, Historical and Scientific, on the Forma­ tion and Growth of the Nation, Tracing Race-­Admixture in Britain from the Earli­ est Times, with Especial Reference to the Incorporation of the Celtic Aborigines (London, 1868). 16. See, for instance, Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, book 14, and Rousseau’s Social Contract: “from the influence of climate, warm countries should be the seat of despotism, and cold ones the haunt of barbarous ­people; while civilization and good policy should dwell with the inhabitants of the intermediary regions” (An Inquiry into the Nature of the Social Contract; or, Princi­ples of Po­liti­cal Right [London, 1791], 226).

17

1650–1850 17. The Works of Monsieur de la Bruyere, 2 vols., 6th ed. (London, 1713), 2:191. 18. George Saintsbury, A History of En­glish Criticism: Being the En­glish Chapters of a History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Eu­rope (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1911), 207–208. 19. Malmesbury, The Works of James Harris, 1:xix. 20. The New Annual Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Lit­er­a­ ture, for the Year 1781 (London, 1782), 234. 21. Vicesimus Knox, “On the Expediency of Embellishing Composition with Harmonious Periods, and Other Judicious Ornaments,” in Essays Moral and Literary, new ed., 2 vols. (London, 1781), 1:214. 22. Thomas Tyers, in Hill, Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2:344.

18

THE COURIER DE L’EU­ROPE, THE GORDON RIOTS AND T ­ RIALS, AND THE CHANGING FACE OF ANGLO-­FRENCH RELATIONS HOWARD D. WEINBROT

The Courier de l’Eu­rope was conceived by Scott Samuel Swinton in 1776. Though

briefly interrupted, it stayed in print from June 28, 1776, to December 28, 1792. For much of its first thirteen years its variously dominant editors ­were Antoine Joseph de Serres de La Tour (1776–1783), Jacques-­Pierre Brissot de Warville (1754–1793), and Charles Théveneau de Morande (1784–1789). The format changed from folio to octavo in November 1776, ­after which the sixteen-­column, eight-­page French journal was published in London on Tuesday and Friday. It offered courtesy paragraphs to several countries but gave the most space to Britain and secondarily to France.1 The Courier played an impor­tant role in eighteenth-­century Anglo-­French relations. Specifically, in the m ­ atters concerning po­liti­cal unrest and Lord George Gordon, it both mirrored British responses to the decade-­long trauma regarding the 1778 Catholic Relief Act and by 1786 provided its own personal, malicious, response to it.

Subscriptions, Subjects, and Riots The Courier’s front ­matter lists its London address and subscription rates as well as its main Paris venue at the Bureau-­Générale des Gazettes étrangères on the Rue de la Jussienne. Subscriptions could also be purchased at twenty other French cities, and “dans toutes les villes principalles de l’Eu­rope.” The Courier knew that

19

1650–1850 though its language was French, its most compelling news was likely to be British. As “Avis du Rédacteur et des Propriétaires” says, the Courier hopes to satisfy Eu­rope’s “curiosité universelle” regarding the Anglo-­American war. Since readers must also be curious about Britain’s major parliamentary figures “peut-­être le célebre Burke ne sera pas fâché de voir sa véhémente éloquence travestie en François.”2 In the pro­cess of so writing, the “Avis” continues, the Courier ­will glean vital information from thirty British gazettes, and also add foreign news about which British publications are largely ignorant or indifferent (CE 1 [1776]: iii). At its inception, at least, the Courier thus claims to be impartial. Its motto is from Aeneid 1: 574: “Tros, Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur.” ­These are Dido’s words to Ilioneus, who seeks her help before he knows if his friend Aeneas has survived the violent storm that cast them onto her shores: the queen promises that Trojan or Tyrian s­ hall be treated no differently by me. The Courier thus assumes a regal, welcoming, presumably evenhanded journalistic posture, whose promise often w ­ ill not be kept. However that may be, the Courier seeks to be timely with British and colonial news, and with “l’Histoire générale de l’Eu­rope, traitée dans toutes ses branches” and especially “tout ce qui a rapport aux affaires de l’Amérique,” to whom the Courier often was partial (CE 1 [1776]: iii–iv). Swinton and his editors needed official government permission to distribute the Courier in a nation suspicious of a ­free press. The French foreign minister Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, lifted his early ban (July 16–­October 31, 1776) of the Courier ­after Beaumarchais’s intervention and the Courier’s self-­censorship regarding the French court, to which early numbers had seemed hostile. The journal then could be sold in France, its dominant market. It again was ­stopped ­after March 17, 1778, when Britain declared war and prohibited British goods from being shipped to French ports. En­glish copies nevertheless w ­ ere smuggled out and reprinted at Boulogne-­sur-­Mer, near Swinton’s French home. Even with a delay, Vergennes found the Courier instructive. It indeed regularly printed information regarding Parliament and Amer­i­ca, who was siding with or opposing whom, how ­battles and strategy w ­ ere proceeding in Amer­i­ca, what ships w ­ ere sailing when, to where, ­under whose command, and with how many cannon. Vergennes did not read En­glish, and surely used this information to supplement more clandestine sources.3 For example, on November 12, 1776, the Courier reports that the honorable ­Temple Lutterel contradicted Lord Sandwich’s optimistic estimate of the Chanel fleet’s readiness: in fact, “les vaisseaux destinés à garder les côtes n’avoient pas . . . ​ la moieté de leur équipement” (1 [1776]: 29). On November 15 it extracts a letter

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THE COURIER DE L’EU­ROPE

from a British soldier that gives details of his and other regiments’ strength as they prepare to march on Montreal, together with “deux schooners chacun de 16 canons outre les pierriers” and so on through an ample paragraph (36). On November 19 it tells about the Lucy commanded by “le sieur Watson” attacked by rebels but now sailing for New York. Readers like Vergennes learned of the respective strengths of General Washington’s American and General Howe’s British troops, and the tension between the American army and its Congress unable to give proper support (43). All this and much more troubled the British government, which nonetheless was bound by its own laws. The British ambassador David Murray, Viscount Stormont, as he then was, read the Courier in Paris. Upon returning to London in March 1778 he consulted his u ­ ncle, Lord Mansfield, in hopes of shutting down the Courier, which he called “un espionnage public,” and which Brissot l­ater said was worth “cent espions” to Vergennes. Mansfield had in fact already searched for ways to do that, but “la loi était muette, ou plutôt la loi permettait d’imprimer en français, en grec, en hébreu toutes les sottises que les folliculaires bretons imprimaient dans leur langue, et il fallait respecter la loi ou en faire une nouvelle.” 4 Such British news was so valuable that from about 1776 to 1783 the Courier enjoyed the large number of between six thousand and seven thousand subscribers who, in the nature of ­things, regularly shared their copies. French and francophone ancien régime readers needed instruction regarding that strange Protestant country and its succession of Dutch and German kings, banished En­glish royals, almost perpetual wars with France, and bizarre willingness to supply it with so many able soldiers for her Irish brigades. The pedagogical pro­ cess was helped when the national poet Shakespeare was translated and adapted by Pierre Le Tourneur (1776–1782) and “imitated” by Jean-­François Ducis (1770– 1790). Each author had begun to ­counter Voltaire’s critical absurdities regarding Shakespeare as brilliant in certain scenes, but grotesquely ignorant of dramatic, that is French neoclassical, structure. Ducis no doubt caused Voltaire’s shade spectral apoplexy when in 1779 he replaced Voltaire in the Académie Française.5 More importantly, Brissot makes plain that the Courier appeared when ­England and its po­liti­cal system “avait été veritablement une terre étrangère pour le reste de l’Eu­rope” (Brissot, Memoires, 1:138). The Courier’s readers ­were astounded by the eloquence of Fox, Burke, and North, whose names and oratory they came to know, and “chacun s’étonnait que [King] Georges se laissâit si tranquillement insulter par eux, et ne logeât pas à la Tour quelques-­uns de ces beaux parleurs. Quoi! point de lettres de cachet, point de Bastille! C’est là que le peuple est roi, se disait-on” (160). ­Those readers thus confronted Britain’s relative freedom

21

1650–1850 of the press, the nature of parliamentary debate and passage of bills, the concept of loyal opposition, and other terms to help naturalize the aliens. The Courier ­ romwell.” It glosses a harsh reference to “la faction Oliverienne” as “de C explains that in the House of Commons one refers to “l’honorable Membre” ­because “il est de l’ordre de ne jamais nommer la personne qui a parlé, on peut seulement le désigner par l’ honorable member, ou lorsque c’est un Lord le très honorable personage.” One learns that “Votre Seigneurie” is “your Lordship.” Clubs are “pe­tites sociétés.” ­There is comparable instruction in the modes of parliamentary exchange. Serres de La Tour rarely attended parliamentary debates but he, and presumably Brissot, could glean information from British newspapers. He thus could write that Burke may rise to speak with irony, severity, or something ­else, as “Le Sr. Burke parla avec son énergie ordinaire” (CE 7 [1780]: 174, 178). Other named peers or Members of Parliament may merely rise to speak but fill one or more of the Courier’s long columns. The speeches often are eloquent, passionate, and sometimes appear to give both sides of an issue, as on March 17, 1780, above, and an exchange between Burke and William Eden regarding the need for a third secretary of state. Like any newspaper, the Courier was keen on reporting trou­ble, and certainly so with the American war and the terrible Gordon Riots in June 1780, whose international implications still require discussion. Avidly Presbyterian Lord George Gordon was the third son of the power­ful Scottish Duke of Gordon. Though he demanded deference to his rank, he also was adamantly liberal in ways and resigned from the British navy, which he thought anathema to American freedom. From 1774 he was a Member of Parliament for the purchased pocket-­borough seat of Ludgershall in Wiltshire. He ­later would lead efforts to repeal Sir George Savile’s Catholic Relief Act of 1778 that freed Catholics openly to attend their churches, to educate their c­ hildren as Catholics in Britain, and to own land. At least as impor­tant for the harried Crown at war in distant Amer­i­ca, Catholics could join the British military without abjuring the Pope. Many Britons sympathetic to the Americans already ­were alarmed by the 1774 Quebec Act that ceded vast parts of upper midwestern North Amer­i­ca to the religion, law, language, and culture of the defeated recently French subjects. The Act blocked American westward expansion as far as the Mississippi and stoked fears that George III was a Papist and at the least Beelzebub’s kissing-­cousin. According to some of the even more troubled, the king would establish colonial Catholicism and despotism, extirpate Protestantism, impoverish the few survivors, and surely force them to wear wooden shoes. The next step was to import that model to Britain and repeat the pro­cess. An out-­of-­

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THE COURIER DE L’EU­ROPE

touch government oblivious to its own p ­ eople’s long-­nurtured and approved passions, prejudices, and fears inadvertently set the stage for disaster. On June 6, 1780, the Courier quotes the Duke of Richmond reiterating his e­ arlier remarks regarding the law of unintended consequences: “Sa grace répéta qu’elle regardoit le Bill passé en faveur des Catholiques de Quebec comme la cause premiere de tout le mal dont on se plaignoit, & que par conséquence le Gouvernement ‘seul’ en devoit être blâmé.” 6 As president of Edinburgh’s Protestant Association, Lord George led the often violent attacks upon the Catholic Relief Act, which the Kirk and the Scottish parliament rejected in 1778–1779.7 He then assumed the same position in London, and by June 1780 was convinced that he could aggressively but legally force repeal of the controversial Act. He collected at least forty thousand blue-­cockade-­wearing Protestants in St. George’s fields in Southwark and marched them and their massive roll of signed petitions to Parliament. Lord George soon found that it was easier to or­ga­nize than to contain so large a group. It threatened and manhandled Members and Lords seeking to enter parliament and soon was captured by thugs largely interested in plunder, settling old scores, class retribution, eliminating Irish competition, and lots of whiskey. As the Courier reported on June 6, 1780, “lorsque les voitures des Membres commenceront à arriver, ces battallions de Supplicans devinrent insolents” (7 [1780]: 368). The crowds burned down or pulled down the homes of the Act’s Good and ­Great, destroyed foreign embassies in which mass had been held, rubbished prisons, and freed prisoners. The mob had virtual carte blanche ­because the sympathetic and intimidated magistrates refused to order the few soldiers then pre­sent to fire upon the crowds. On June 7 George III declared martial law when it seemed that the next target was the Bank of ­England, Britain’s symbol and seat of commercial and imperial power. Twelve thousand troops soon ­were deployed in London ­under royal control. John Wilkes commanded one thousand such Red Coats guarding the Bank and unhesitatingly ordered them to fire upon aggressors. By the time the riots ­were suppressed, perhaps seven hundred ­were dead from alcohol, bullets, bayonets, drowning, drunks falling into their own fires, ­horses, sabers, summary execution, and wagon wheels crushing the comatose drunks. Thereafter, twenty-­five nominal rioters w ­ ere hanged, seventeen of whom w ­ ere ­under the age of 18, including three yet younger ­children. By the end of the terrors, some 20 ­percent of London and portions of smaller towns like Bath had been destroyed. James Boswell ­later said that the riots exemplified “the most horrid series of outrages that ever disgraced a civilized country.”8 Most fellow ­Britons agreed.

23

1650–1850 Lord George was arrested on June 9, 1780, and sent to the Tower. His trial for constructive treason began at 9:00 A.M. on February 5, 1781, and ended at 5:15 A.M. the next day. He was found not guilty, to the joy of a packed courtroom and indeed of more thoughtful British subjects. Samuel Johnson, for example, was pleased that Gordon was freed, “rather than a pre­ce­dent should be established for hanging a man for constructive treason, which [Boswell reports] . . . ​he considered would be a dangerous engine of arbitrary power.”9 ­There was a decorous but jolly cele­ bration three weeks ­after the trial, in which the ducal Gordons entertained some three hundred well-­wishers, including numerous aristocrats—­and the jurors. The Courier’s reporting of all this is the opening phase of its response to germane En­glish conduct from 1778 to 1781. The Courier would become a cultural intermediary between Britain and France. In the pro­cess, it showed how reporting events became coloring of events, in which Britain could seem both a ­free and liberal nation, but also not fully in control of its p ­ eople. As Brissot said of his se­nior colleague Serres de La Tour, his po­liti­cal princi­ples varied, “mais généralement il était plus dévoué” to royalist France than to ­England. He detested Fox’s republicanism ­because it was incompatible with subordination, which was “l’âme des états” ­(Brissot, Memoires, 1:309). ­These attitudes would emerge in what prob­ably was his treatment of Gordon and the rioters.

The Courier and the Catholic Relief Act That response divides between tonally dif­fer­ent sections before and during Lord George’s trial. The first section laments past British bigotry against Catholics. The largely ignored anti-­Catholic laws remained in force and ­were inconsistent with the En­glish constitution, which regards “la liberté & la tolérance comme inséparables.” The Courier applauds what it thinks Sir George Savile’s “jour glorieux” when he proposed the Catholic Relief Bill on May 14, 1778. This surely would eradicate “des vestiges de barbarie déshonnorante pour la nation” (3 [1778]: 308). The motion was seconded, praised, and unanimously passed (309), as it was on its next ­reading with “le même transport, la même unanimité” (318). The Courier is oddly ­silent, perhaps ignorant, regarding the Act’s clear intention of adding many Catholic soldiers to the British army fighting to suppress the American freedom that the ­Courier warmly supported.10 Within the year, however, Scottish storms darkened the putative glorious En­glish day. Lord George becomes the Presbyterian spokesman, as many other Protestants join him in seeking to revoke an Act that

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for them is hardly glorious (6 [1779]: 69–70). The Courier now takes sides. Rather than merely supporting what it thinks a wise policy, it characterizes Lord George as someone who speaks “trahison” regarding the Catholic Relief Act, and is walking into a labyrinth filled with traps (364). By January 1780 it has drawn clear lines: Lord George, Scotland, and “l’esprit impitoyable de l’intolerance religieuse”contrasts with Savile, ­England, and a ­century celebrated “par l’adoption générale des principes contraires” (7 [1780]: 3). ­England could “donner un si bel exemple à d’ autres Nations” (4n1). By January 28, 1780, the Courier relates a parliamentary debate that characterizes Lord George’s martial intention: in the House of Commons “se lever, revenir à la charge” (62). The Courier had hoped to encourage a world “consolant pour l’humanité” and without “ces prejugés nationaux” (passim). By June and the riots the Courier knows that is impossible. Lord George’s conduct is something “plus qu’extraordinaire” in exciting the mob outside the House of Commons (370). By June, indeed, the Courier, even more than its British colleagues, has stressed the riots’ international implications. It quotes Lord Bathurst asking what Eu­rope and the world ­will say about “un Gouvernement trop foible” to shelter the ambassadors of foreign princes from such insults. The Courier’s own voice adds that the Catholic ambassadors’ troubled ­dispatches to their respective courts scarcely honor the “Gouvernement civil de l’Angleterre” (369, 369n1). Bathurst reflects upon Lord North’s administration. The Courier reflects upon the En­glish nation. That is true as well when it notes a group “distincte de la populace, sans prendre part à ses excès, en approuvoit secrétement le principe” (376); that group nonetheless arms itself against the mob and arrests some of its members. H ­ ere not only is broader ac­cep­tance for the Protestants than the Courier had hoped, but also the seeds of further discord within conflicts among co-­religionists, what it called “cette pe­tite guerre religieuse” (9 [1781]: 51]).11 So dark a perception may be one reason that the Courier stresses its superiority to British reports, though it also misses the implications of its own discovery: “Nous avons rendu compte des horreurs de ces derniers jours avec beaucoup moins de circonspection, par consequent beaucoup plus de verité que l’ont fait les Edi­teurs des Papiers Anglois.” I suspect that it does so ­because Serres was understandably horrified by the dangerous collapse of order that prob­ably would have been treated more quickly and severely in France. Brissot said of Serres’s working method: as for news events “il les puisait dans les gazettes anglais; il faut donc souvent s’en défier” (Brissot, Memoires, 1: 309). ­Perhaps more sympathetically, he also wants to assure his foreign readers that the crimes ­were committed only by ­England’s “vile canaille” (7 [1780]: 376).

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1650–1850 As t­ hese remarks imply, the Courier has viewed Britain from a French perspective and shared some of its host’s class-­based prejudices. So far as I can tell all three primary editors w ­ ere Catholic and prob­ably ­were tutored in the presumed failings of Protestant Chris­tian­ity. They regularly are incensed regarding Anglican ­England’s anti-­Catholicism and the “domination Britannique” that persecuted Catholics in Scotland (7 [1780]: 3). The editors also revealed their own religious biases. Henry VIII established “le culte religieux” that is the Church of E ­ ngland (407). The Protestant Gordon rioters often emerge as “pretendus Protestantes” (408, 410), words that evoke a familiar French term during the brutal era of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) that targeted the “religion prétendue réformée.”12 ­Those Gordon Protestants ­were not from the established church, but “des Pres­ byteriens ou des Méthodistes, & il est à croire que les Protestants sont ceux qui ne savent pas ecrire” (7 [1780]: 407, 410). Scottish Presbyterians embodied “l’esprit aveugle du fanatisme,” especially prominent in Scotland (5 [1779]: 103). Like the British elites, the Courier knows the petitioners only as “la canaille” (7 [1780]: 407 twice). Like the non-­elite, non-­establishment Protestants the Courier had its own bigotry, which it ­either denied or defined as the glorious dawning of a philosophe new day. The Courier thus fell into a trap that the uncomprehending British government set for itself: namely, neither group trusted or respected the vast majority of p ­ eople being ruled. Parliament’s folly in1778 was to think that centuries of official anti-­Catholicism could easily be changed by benevolent speeches. Anglican anti-­Catholic national policy was promulgated by monarchs, preached from pulpits, printed in sermons, confirmed by bishops and archbishops, pronounced by politicians, and written about by men of letters since Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy in 1534. Like Jonathan Swift in A Tale of a Tub (1704), many Anglican Britons also thought that Papists joined with Dissenters to subvert both the national church and the monarchy. A Scottish commentator in 1781 Edinburgh listed several e­ minences who insisted upon restraining Catholics. He soon added Addison to the list: “A Russell—­a Sydney—­a Newton—­a Swift—­a Bolingbroke—­a Tillotson—­a Locke—­ have, in ages as enlightened as the pre­sent, avowed and supported this doctrine.” A contributor to the Protestant Magazine for June 1782 insisted that preaching against Papists was Anglican orthodoxy, witness “Archbishop Tillotson, and ­every divine of the last and pre­sent age . . . ​and he did not know a clergyman of the Church of E ­ ngland . . . ​from whom he had not heard at some time or other, similar discourse” that Popery was dangerous tyranny and must not be allowed to increase.

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The author of Strictures on a Pamphlet (1782) that favored En­glish Catholics shared the assumption that En­glish Catholics w ­ ere as knavish now as ever. Bishop Sherlock had it right: Britain’s worst fear is “the prevailing power of Popery.” It seeks to ruin the state and the Protestant religion. John Butler, Bishop of Oxford, confirmed that commonplace in his sermon to the House of Lords on January 30, 1787. He so spoke ­because he rightly assumed that the, prob­ably few, peers and other bishops in his small audience agreed. The regicide sent the rest of Charles I’s “­family into exile, where they actually and largely imbibed the obnoxious princi­ples of religion and government imputed to him, and became unfit to fill his throne.”13 Three titles, with many siblings in many places in many years, reinforce the enduring breadth of such hostility. For the ­grand or the lowly, the Londoner or the villa­ger, such articles of faith w ­ ere especially urgent during times of stress: Thomas Bray, Papal Usurpation and Persecution, As it has been Exercised in Ancient and Modern Times, With Re­spect both to Princes & ­People; A Fair Warning to all Protestants To Guard Themselves with the utmost Caution against the Encroach­ ments & Invasions of Popery (London, 1712); William Warburton, A Faithful Por­ trait of Popery: By which it is seen to be the Reverse of Chris­tian­ity; As it is the Destruction of Morality, Piety, and Civil Liberty. A Sermon Preach’d at St. James’s Church, Westminster (London, 1745); John Baillie, The Nature and Fatal Influence of Popery on Civil Society. A Sermon (Newcastle, 1780). The extensive fear and anger b ­ ehind such concerns could not be reversed by a vote of 558 wealthy, landed elites in the House of Commons, “about one-­fifth of whom w ­ ere sons of peers or w ­ ere themselves Irish peers.” Like Lord George, many of t­ hese Members had their own purchased seats, and in any case ­were elected by perhaps a maximum of 10 ­percent of eligible Protestants the large majority of whom w ­ ere Anglican and all of whom ­were male. The approximately 197 lords temporal and 26 lords spiritual in the House of Lords ­were even less likely to be sympathetic to the passions and fears of t­ hose they scarcely knew except as menials. Hostile assessors of the Savile Act insisted that both ­houses considered the bill with diminished numbers. It is reasonable to hypothesize that perhaps a combined 300 well-­intentioned but self-­deluded Members and Lords sought to change the religious culture of some nine million subjects by a “glorieux” proclamation.14 On November 15, 1772, Edmund Burke told the Duke of Richmond that aristocrats of his rank ­were the ­great oaks “that shade our country.”15 In 1780 the weeds sought to choke off the oaks, in which they included Burke himself. The Courier de l’Eu­ rope chronicled the series of events for its francophone readers, but from an

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1650–1850 En­glish and French elite point of view. That point of view nonetheless was flexible enough to be admiring where admiration was due as, in 1781 at least, with that system in which a proper trial would replace a lettre de cachet. The Courier thus is respectful when it discusses Lord George’s treason trial. It quietly admires the British ­legal system and Lord George himself; it recounts the habeas corpus that brings Gordon from the Tower to the King’s Bench court; it shows how a bailiff reads the indictment; how Lord George was allowed “un discours succint”complaining about his followers’ exclusion from the court, his long detention in prison, the large jury pool, and the witnesses against him drawn from Scotland in which ­England lacked jurisdiction. Gordon won­ders ­whether he can receive a fair trial, and is reassured by the chief justice Lord Mansfield (9 [1781]: 61–62). The Courier now sees a man on trial for his life but speaking and behaving well in spite of a potential ghastly death sentence of hanging, drawing, and quartering. It sees him accompanied by his two ­brothers, the Duke of Gordon and Lord William, and several other “amis de distinction” within the crowded King’s Bench courtroom: “mais tout se passa décement & avec beaucoup de tranquilité” (9 [1781]: 62). The trial enhances the Courier’s movement from Gordon as villain to Gordon as h ­ uman being within an enveloping pro­cess that substitutes order for disorder. The trial begins with testimony damaging to Lord George and proceeds to his defense. The prisoner no longer is a dangerous fanatic rabble rouser; he is a defendant subject to judicial pro­cess, to “la substance des dépositions pour & contre” (9 [1781]: 93). The courtroom is packed almost wholly with Lord George’s supporters. Many share his anti-­Catholic bias; o ­ thers are troubled by the Crown’s extension of the 1351 treason law, which stated that treason denoted intent to dethrone the monarch. The Crown insists that such indeed was Lord George’s intention as he led 500 armed persons who sought to raise a public war against George III. The defense rejects that charge, discredits the Crown’s witnesses, and includes a handsomely persuasive final argument. The Courier thus offers readers two columns of Thomas Erskine’s brilliant but, as it does not acknowledge, bigoted anti-­Catholic defense of Gordon; it is “un chef-­d’oeuvre de sensibilité & de vehemence” by Gordon’s Scottish kinsman (93). A ­ fter thirteen hours and Lord Mansfield’s prejudicial summing up of the evidence, the jury retires, returns in thirty minutes, and declares Lord George “NON COUPABLE” to “des acclamations, des cris de joie qui s’elevent de toutes les parties de la salle” (94). Erskine and Gordon sink into one another’s arms with relief and perhaps surprise. The courtroom

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explodes with joy. Lord George thanks the jury and in a few weeks has a large cele­ bration for them and for many of the other aristocrats in his ­family and on his side.16 The Courier’s change of attitude ­toward Lord George is stunning: “ce Seigneur s‘est fait admirer, non seulement à raison de la serénité & de la présence, mais même de l’enjouement de son esprit.” Assuming that Serres de La Tour selected and ­shaped the relevant news, that former military man acknowledged and respected grace ­under fire at least as much as he disrespected insubordination. No won­der that at six in the morning the exhausted but joyous crowd “& tout le monde retire content” (94). This is hardly the full story. Lord George now apparently thought himself invulnerable; he continued to side with the American rebels and to berate the government and its ministry still aware of June 1780 and its February 1781 failure at the King’s Bench.17 In 1782 Gordon issued A Speech of Lord George Gordon contain­ ing a Spirited Defence of the Antient Constitution of the Church and State of Scot­ land (London). He rejects royal authority’s right to create “any new and unknown species of army in Scotland” (4) and regularly insists that the Marquis of Graham cannot be president of the assembled lords, for he has not properly declared himself a Presbyterian (8).18 In 1782 as well he wrote to the Earl of Shelburne again urging suppression of Popery. Felix McCarthy replied to what he called this dark and wicked letter with anger, irony, and threats that used Gordon’s own words: “I could not help thinking it high time that your Lordship should be dealt with roundly, freely, and concisely” by his fellow Christians and subjects who abhor his “abominable trumpet of sedition.”19 In 1783 Gordon published Innocence Vindicated and the Intrigues of Popery Displayed, in which he suggested that George III was encouraging Popery and should remember the deposition of James II. In the same year Gordon wrote on behalf of Eu­ro­pean Jews in the Copy of a Letter from the Right Honourable Lord George Gordon to E. Lindo, Esq. And the Portuguese, and N. Salomon, Esq. (London, 1783). His Old Testament prophetic language characterizes an angry God overseeing all Amer­i­ca and all Eu­rope in confusion; the king’s servants are deceived and deceivers; the king’s cabinet is merely a Babel; Jews must join with Protestants to resist and fight Catholics. ­These and other challenges regularly reminded the ministry that Gordon could do again what he had done in 1780.20 It deemed him too dangerous to be f­ ree. What­ever the means, he had to be permanently incarcerated and, if pos­si­ble, die by nominally ­legal means. Lady Justice carried a sword as well as a scale, and she was not always blindfolded. The story of the Gordon Riots was everywhere in the British press, in diaries, in letters, and in numerous pamphlets that memorialized the

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1650–1850 events and praised or blamed them as individual bias suggested. The Courier de l’Eu­rope was among ­those newspapers that covered the Gordon trauma and ­trials from 1780 to 1787, and it did so in radically dif­fer­ent ways. We recall that it begins with deservedly stern reports of pending and a­ ctual destruction, moves to sympathy for the plucky prisoner on trial, and, we s­ hall see, concludes with almost homicidal verbal attacks upon Lord George for insignificant, if not invisible, offenses that would end his life on the felon’s side of Newgate Prison. This change of attitude occurs with the Courier’s change of editors in 1784.

Peut être honni, villipendé, même battu Lord George’s heightened trou­bles began when the Church of E ­ ngland allied with the Crown to find an alternative to the failed treason trial. On May 5, 1786, the Church exercised its authority in Article 33 of the Thirty-­Nine Articles: it excommunicated Lord George, prob­ably for contumacy, when he refused to testify in an ecclesiastical trial regarding the estate of the dissenting clergyman Thomas ­Wilson. Excommunication could have meant incarceration without benefit of trial, defense, or jury u ­ ntil he recanted and cooperated with the Church, as he clearly would not do. Calvinus Minor in Edinburgh properly said that such ­legal action ­violated British subjects’ rights enumerated in the Magna Carta and habeas corpus. ­Under Anglican arbitrary, illegal, and popish law, “deliverance [is] but by death or submission.”21 Thereafter, Gordon was charged with two offenses in June 1787—­a libel against Marie Antoinette and a libel against British justice. The ostensible reason for the charge regarding Marie Antoinette was that he had endangered the amity that the controversial Anglo-­French commercial treaty of 1786–1787 hoped to foster. As the Courier reported on August 24. 1786, Gordon’s unsigned notice in the Public Advertiser complained that “even in this ­free country,” so unlike “an arbitrary kingdom,” the French queen’s circle persecuted and defamed the Comte de Cagliostro.22 He had wisely counseled the queen’s ­enemy, the Cardinal de Rohan, regarding the affair of the diamond necklace “which has never been properly explained to the public in France.” Gordon alludes to “the Queen’s faction” but does not name Marie Antoinette. Considering traditional cross-­border insults, Gordon’s comments w ­ ere mild regarding a major French embarrassment. The British Crown nonetheless mendaciously claimed that the “evil-­minded” mischievous Gordon threatened international harmony and required

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punishment. The Crown ­will “secure the peace of the Country by taking from you the power (at least for a time) of disturbing its tranquil life.”23 The charge of course was nonsense. Oliver Goldsmith recorded a commonplace when in 1760 he wrote that the French and the En­glish “place themselves foremost” among Eu­ro­pean states perpetually fighting one another. Many Members of Parliament agreed. Pitt’s power­ful urging produced a positive vote for the treaty that nonetheless included almost one-­third negatives: 248 ayes against 118 noes. Pitt himself acknowledged that the treaty designed to enhance trade and mutual wealth might only postpone war and temporarily improve relations between hostile powers. The treaty is not “a pledge of perpetual peace, but it tends to put off the season of hostility.” We can have good commerce in good times “without destroying our power of g­ oing to war.”24 The Courier noted, and complained, about abundant and well-­organized British abuse of the proposed treaty: Ce qu’il y a de remarquable dans cette opposition, c’est que les feuilles Angloises, sont, tout à la fois, remplies de commentaires par lesquelles on essaie de prouver le danger de ce Traité pour l’Angleterre, & inondées de prètendues lettres écrites de France, dans lesquelles on fait parler tous les manufacturiers François de la même maniere que parlent ceux de l’Angleterre qui sont opposans. (20 [1786]: 402) According to the charge as well, Gordon libeled British law when he published The Prisoners Petition to the Right Honourable Lord George Gordon, to Preserve Their Lives and Liberties, and Prevent Their Banishment to Botany Bay (London, 1787). The ferociously brilliant Petition could not be mistaken for the work of petty criminals guilty of conventional felonies. Gordon mentions Athelstan, Sir Henry Spellman, Sir Thomas More, Beccaria, Puffendorf, and Sir Matthew Hale (11–13), all of whom, like the Old Testament God, know that only the taking of life requires the law to take life. Lesser and often inconsequential crimes deserve neither the pending banishment to distant and tyrannical Botany Bay, nor “the Hangman and the scaffolding . . . ​already prepared for our execution” (10).25 Each trial ended with an immediate guilty verdict. When sentencing was postponed, however, Gordon absconded to Amsterdam, where he joined Dutch Jews to enhance his growing interest in Judaism. He was discovered, forced back to ­England, and again absconded, now to Birmingham’s Jewish community, where he formally converted, was circumcised, learned Hebrew, and became Yisrael bar Avraham Gordon, before again being discovered and returned to the King’s Bench. He appeared t­ here as an almost unrecognizable Polish Jewish congregant whose

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1650–1850 head covering the court ordered to be forcibly removed, and whose scraggly beard became an object of mingled puzzlement and derision. He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, a £500 fine, a massive £10,000 as security for fourteen years of good be­hav­ior, and two further sureties of £2,500 for which ­others ­were to be bonds on his behalf.26 The Courier would have thought all this a splendid way to stop his “détestable penchant” and “la punition qu’il mérite”—­except that “C’est à Bedlam” to which Lord George should be sent. The Courier agreed with its En­glish hosts that Gordon was “un homme trop dangereux pour lui rendre sa liberté” (21 [1787]: 385). During the second trial year, then, the Courier drastically changed its attitude ­toward Gordon. In 1780–1781 it was properly stern. Its anger was against the abuse of pro­gress, British inability to sustain philosophe initiatives, and the return to religious war. The Courier laments serious failures in British culture and government. Discussion of the trial itself then moves us from the group to the elegant individual and joins with “tout le monde [qui] se retire content” upon his acquittal. Now listen to a cata­logue of terms the Courier uses to describe the unlordly dressed Juif Lord George in 1786–1787. Many of t­ hese are sadistic, ominous, cruel, and ignorant—as with the complex ­matter of the Church of ­England’s excommunication of a Scottish Presbyterian who converts to orthodox Polish Judaism: absurde, attrocité, Bedlam, dangereux, détestable, fanatique, folie, humiliation, inde­ cente, maniaque (three times), pauvre lord (four times), pestiféré, proscrit, sedition, tremblante seigneurie, turbulent. The series of ethnic sneers include Lord ­Circumcis, Lord Israèlite, and Moses ben Gordon. One paragraph captures the Courier’s now general tone regarding Lord George should he not appear for his sentencing before the court: “Il sera procédé contre lui par outlawry, & il sera déclaré exlex: la situation de S. S. sera vraiment digne de pitié; car comme ce lord a déja été excommunié, il sera non-­seulement proscrit de l’église mais déchu de tous les privilèges de loi civile. Un homme qui est exlex peut être honni, villipendé, même battu, sans avoir le droit de faire rendu justice” (21 [1787]: 408). The Courier now implicitly likens Gordon to the cursed, wandering Jew, whom not even other wandering Jews could accept: “Si les Etats de Hollande vous ont chassé de leur territoire, c’est qu’un excommunié, un proscrit, un pestiféré ne peut trouver d’asyle nulle part. Les Juifs même, cette nation si long-­tems proscrits, devenus délicats sur la choix de leurs membres; n’ont pas voulu vous circoncire” (22 [1787]: 62). Gordon’s putative offenses w ­ ere government inventions to eliminate an apparent threat of popu­lar uprisings in an increasingly turbulent de­cade. The Crown

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could neither control nor silence him, but it could put him away forever. Though libels against Marie Antoinette may not yet have been published, malicious gossip regarding her conduct and her roles in the affair of the necklace circulated on both sides of the Channel.27 ­There long had been sanely wise criticism of the brutal ­British penal system and its bloody code that hanged c­ hildren as willingly as it did adults for petty theft.28 Why, though, did the Courier turn from deservedly severe reporting of chaos to a near invitation to beat the prisoner and not be held accountable? The Courier, ­after all, was not threatened by British justice or by reading that the French Court’s scandal discredited all concerned in it. Charles Théveneau de Morande is a probable if not certain answer to the question. Adulterer, blackmailer, bully, con man, ingrate, libeler, pimp, poxed, wife beater, rapist, sodomite, spy, and upstart are appropriate modifiers for a provincial bourgeois who in 1765 assumed the quasi-­aristocratic title Chevalier de Morande. As Simon Burrows puts it, Morande assumed “a criminal alias and a means of rubbing shoulders with the nobility in search of a better class of dupe.” His be­hav­ior in life and as perceived in fictional accounts justifies Brissot’s description of him as “l’infame Morande” and “ce serpent odieux.”29 Morande arrived in London in 1770 to avoid the consequences of a lettre de cachet. He ­there published his Gazetier cuirassé, ou anecdotes scandaleuses de la Cour de France (1771) as an often-­reprinted attack upon the French court and its ministers.30 Several more libellous publications followed this popu­lar text that does scant credit to eighteenth-­century French taste. From 1781 he received a thousand pounds annually as France’s naval spy in London; then in January 1784 he became chief editor of the Courier and radically changed La Tour and Brissot’s balanced tones. Harsh attacks became staples, and perhaps none more so than its extended 1786–1787 savaging of the Italian nominal Comte Alessandro de Cagliostro, the real Giuseppe Balsamo from Palermo. Four overlapping hypotheses suggest themselves regarding Morande and the Courier’s at least thirty-­one attacks upon Cagliostro. The first is psychological. Morande the self-­anointed Chevalier needed to exorcise his own parvenu demon by demonizing Cagliostro. The second is that libel and calumny ­were Morande’s normal modes of proceeding; predation was as natu­r al to him as breathing. The third is that, as Morande’s espionage suggests, he regarded London as an extended temporary meal ticket. He hoped sooner or ­later to return to France and needed at least to be tolerated by the power­ful figures and groups he once had blackmailed or offended. This hypothesis blends with a fourth that expands upon ­these and on Morande’s nostalgie for France. Gordon protected Cagliostro

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1650–1850 from pos­si­ble French persecution and became his public advocate. Gordon also apparently libeled Marie Antoinette and thus was a felon. Morande could appear to defend the French court he hitherto had defamed by in turn defaming the British aristocrat allied with the false Count who tarnished that court in the affair of the necklace. Morande’s brutality ­toward Gordon as libeler might compensate for his own libels. Morande’s Gordon inspires no “sentimens que le mépris” (21 [1787]: 385). Morande’s letter of June 18, 1788, to the Comte de Montmorin supports the hypothesis that Morande adapted the Courier’s rhe­toric for French interests, which in turn supported his own interests—to return to France with power­ful protection. Morande tells the French ambassador in London that he indeed is an admirable spy; knows ­every impor­tant person in the navy, the press, the court, and parliament; and can find what­ever is necessary to know. Thanks to this multiplicity of resources, he rarely makes a ­mistake: “Je n’ai qu’ un mot à ajouter, ma patrie m’est chère et je desire le prouver d’une maniére utile.” He repeats that “j’ai saisi cette occasion de manifester mon zèle pour mon pays” and that he manipulates articles in f­ avor of France and against E ­ ngland. He also purposely includes remarks that are not consistent with French ministerial views: “qui servent à prouver que ces observations ne m’ont pas été dictées.” It seems reasonable again to suggest that one reason he so punishes Cagliostro is to ingratiate himself yet more with authority and “prouver d’une maniére utile.”31 Morande’s Courier thus regularly c­ ouples its two presumed villains. Gordon lowers himself as the charlatan’s “secrétaire & son champion.” The “pauvre lord” has become “un champion si digne” de Cagliostro and, implicitly like C ­ romwell, is “le lord protecteur” (20 [1786]: 125). ­After further insults to the “PRETENDU COMTE” we get the sneering “Voilà l’ami du Lord G—­e G—­n” (21 [1786]: 331). The imposter Cagliostro should follow “le pauvre lord” Gordon to Bedlam (331) and be with “son digne ami Cagliostro” in exile from his and other countries (21 [1787]: 62). Morande seeks to drive Cagliostro out of E ­ ngland, and perhaps back to France and the Bastille. His Courier also sought to limit Gordon’s ability to find refuge in France or continental Eu­rope (62). Hence Morande’s delight when Gordon is sentenced to Newgate where the warden Akerman w ­ ill greet him: “sera sans doute très-­ touchante” (70). ­There are several implications of this brief study. One is that the Anglo-­French Courier de l’Eu­rope had an ample share of scoundrels or, depending upon one’s perspective, patriots in foreign lands. Swinton in France spied for Britain; Morande in London spied for France. An international publication partially designed to illumine British politics as guides for French politics became an espionage tool and

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an instrument of personal ambition and destruction. Another implication is that the bad often drives out the good. The complexity of response to Gordon in La Tour and Brissot’s Courier dis­appears when “l’infame Morande” becomes the chief editor. The Gordon Riots ­were destructive for London, Britain, Gordon himself, and Anglo-­French relations, and for many of ­those associated with him, like Cagliostro. Individuals ­matter. One sad paradox of ­these events is that aspects of the Gordon Riots anticipated some destructive events of the French Revolution.32 ­Whether Morande’s hostility was a function of his personality and private agenda, a sign of changing international journalistic Anglo-­French relations, or yes and yes, in the Gordon m ­ atter the Courier de l’Eu­rope had changed. It once had compiled news, especially British news, for francophone readers and reflected aspects of the f­ ree and argumentative British journalistic and po­liti­cal systems. It then became the instrument for Morande to prove himself useful to the France he had slandered and to which he hoped to return for profit and protection. He succeeded. He died quietly at home in 1805. Brissot also returned to France, but as a Girondist, and was guillotined in 1793. L’époque des Lumières est aussi l’époque des ténèbres, et sur les deux côtés de la Manche.

Notes 1. In many cases the Courier, often spelled Courrier, borrowed ­these paragraphs from Continental gazettes. See W ­ ill Slauter, “The Paragraph as Information Technology: How News Traveled in the Eighteenth-­Century Atlantic World,” Annales H. S. S. (En­glish Version) 67 (2012): 253–278. 2. Courier de l’Eu­rope, Gazette Anglo-­Françoise. Continuée sur un Nouveau Plan. Le Premier Novembre  M. DCCLXXVI, 1 (1776): [ii] (subscriptions), [iii] (Avis and Burke). Subsequent citations to the Courier ­will be given in the text as CE with appropriate volume number, year, and page number. I omit CE when ­there are consecutive and obvious citations to that journal. Burke would have been so pleased. His correspondence apparently does not comment on the Courier, but on May 5, 1780, Jacques Necker wrote warmly to Burke that “Je scais que le Roy a dans Ses mains votre discours [presumably his speech of February 11, 1780, in which he praises Necker’s financial reforms] et qu’il vous avoit deja Suivi dans les papiers Anglois.” Sir Gilbert Elliot, Bart., also wrote from France: “You have no idea of the avidity with which ils s’arrachent le ‘Courier de l’Eu­rope’ and the admiration they have for le g­ rand M. Bourique, and his systems of economy.” See The Correspondence of Edmund Burke: Volume IV July 1778–­June 1782, ed. John A Woods (Cambridge and Chicago: Cambridge University Press and University of Chicago Press, 1963), 233, 233n1. Other Members of Parliament, peers, and ministers, however, sometimes complained about misrepre­sen­ta­tion or misunderstanding.

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1650–1850 See ­Will Slauter, “A Trojan Horse in Parliament: International Publicity in the Age of the American Revolution,” in Into Print: Limits and Legacies of Enlightenment: Essays in Honor of Robert Darnton (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 15–31. 3. For Beaumarchais, Vergennes, and the Courier, see Studies on Voltaire and the Eigh­teenth ­Century, vols. 273, 274; Gunnar and Mavis von Proschwitz, Beau­ marchais et le Courier de l’Eu­rope: Documents inédit ou peu connus (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, 1990). 4. Memoires et Documents relatifs aux XVIIIe et XIXe Siècles, J.-­P. Brissot Mémoires (1754–1793), ed. Claude Perroud (Paris, 1912), 1:161–162 (hereafter cited as Brissot, Mémoires, followed by volume and page number). Brissot claims that as for the Courier, “on se l’arrachait de Paris à Saint-­Pétersbourg; elle compta bientôt des souscripteurs dans tous les coins de l’Eu­rope” (1:160). See 1:305 for “cent espions.” Brissot also reports the “plus ou moins exact” repre­sen­ta­tion of parliamentary debates, largely if not wholly taken from En­glish newspapers (1:161). Brissot’s reputation has evoked a small paper–­skirmish regarding w ­ hether or not he spied for Paris police. Robert Darnton unwittingly began the squabble when he challenged the benign, liberal, image Brissot well established in his Memoires: in order to keep body and soul together, Brissot was in fact a police spy for some years. Darnton so argued first in “The Grub Street Style of Revolution: J.-­P. Brissot, Police Spy,” Journal of Modern History 40 (1968): 301–327. He repeated it, with some modifications, in The Literary Under­ground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 41–70. This latter was answered by Frederick  A. de Luna in “The Dean Street Style of Revolution: J.- ­P. Brissot, Jeune Philosophe,” French Historical Studies 17, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 159–190, to which Darnton in the same journal immediately replied, in “The Brissot Dossier,” 191–205. He continued part of the argument in his helpful biography of Brissot, in “J.-­P. Brissot and the Société Typographique de Neufchâtel (1779– 1787),” Studies on Voltaire and the Eigh­teenth ­Century 10 (2001): 7–47. Leonore Loft, among ­others, continued to take issue with Darnton in her Passion, Politics, and Philosophie: Rediscovering  J.-­P. Brissot (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), and most recently and thoroughly by Simon Burrows in “The Innocence of Jacques-­Pierre Brissot,” The Historical Journal 46 (2003): 843–871. This essay includes several more references to ­others in the debate. By 2002 Darnton had slightly modified his position, for which see his “How Historians Play God,” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 22 (2002): 1–19, reprinted in George Washington’s False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury (New York: Norton, 2003). I am pleased to leave the resolution of this issue to my betters. 5. For example, Brissot reports that upon his first visit to E ­ ngland he saw “avec quelque plaisir” the cliffs of Dover “et d’où l’on dit que l’intéressant roi Lear s’est précipité” (Brissot, Memoires, 1:171). Voltaire’s Letters concerning the En­glish Nation (London, 1734; French as Lettres philosophiques, 1734), reluctantly praised

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Shakespeare as natu­ral and sublime, but he lacked even a spark of good taste. He did not know a single rule of the drama and was responsible for the ruin of the En­glish stage (Letter XVIII, on Tragedy, 166–167). Voltaire is keen on En­glish comedy. Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1765) skewers Voltaire and the French concept of the three unities as unnatural, unnecessary, undramatic, and un-­British. 6. CE 7 (1780): 369. Richmond urged repeal of the Quebec Act but toleration for Catholics within Britain (370). The italicized footnote to this page stresses the riots’ further international implications: “C’est un conséquence de cette vio­lence que les Ambassadeurs des Puissances Catholoques s’assemblerent Dimanche dernier, & expédierent des couriers pour leurs Cours respectives. On ajoute que leurs depéches contiennent des observations qui ne sont guere honneur au Gouver­ nement civil d’Angleterre.” 7. For recent useful information regarding the Protestant Association, see John Seed, “ ‘The Fall of Romish Babylon Anticipated’: Plebeian Dissenters and Anti-­ popery in the Gordon Riots,” in The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrec­ tion in Late Eighteenth-­Century Britain, ed. Ian Haywood and John Seed ­(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 69–92; Mark Knight’s essay in this volume (“The 1780 Protestant Petition and the Culture of Petitioning,” 46–68) also is germane, as are other essays in the collection. 8. James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson Together with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. George Birckbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1950), 3:427. Two older but still valuable books on the Gordon Riots are J. Paul de Castro, The Gordon Riots (London: H. Milford and Oxford University Press, 1926), and Christopher Hibbert, King Mob. The Story of Lord George Gordon and the Riots of 1780 (1958; repr., London: Sutton Publishing, 2004). George Rudé contributed several useful studies, some of whose conclusions have been challenged, but all of which set the riots in the context of crowds, mobs, and group be­hav­ior: “The Gordon Riots: A Study of the Riots and Their Victims,” Transactions of the Royal Society, 5th ser., 6 (1956): 93–114; “The London ‘Mob’ of the Eigh­teenth ­Century,” The Historical Journal 2 (1959): 1–18; The Crowd in History: A Study of Popu­lar Disturbances in France and ­England 1730–1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964); Paris and London in the Eigh­teenth ­Century (New York: Viking, 1971); Hanoverian London 1714–1808 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). More recent studies include ­those by the Tory politician and Member of Parliament Sir Ian Gilmour, Riot, Risings and Revolution: Gover­ nance and Vio­lence in Eighteenth-­Century ­England (London: Pimlico, 1993): see esp. 342–370, 371–390; Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Geor­ gian ­England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 152–175, and Rogers, “The Gordon Riots and the Politics of War,” in Haywood and Seed, The Gordon Riots, 21–45. For illustrations of the riots, see Richard Wendorf, London, June 1780 (Cambridge: The Johnsonians, 2010), and Ronald Paulson The Art of Riot in ­England and Amer­i­ca

37

1650–1850 ([Baltimore]: Owlworks, 2010). As ­these citations suggest, ­there has been a ­great deal of research regarding the crowd, its contents, and its motivation, and on vari­ous contextual ­matters, like empire, domestic politics, and the American war. ­There has been very ­little on the riots’ international repercussions, even less on the Church of ­England’s excommunication of Lord George, and less still on Lord George’s 1787 ­trials and the British justice system’s ­legal lynching of someone they could not control. The pre­sent essay hopes to suggest an international viewpoint. For the other two gaps, see chapters  6 and 7  in Howard  D. Weinbrot, Lit­er­a­ture, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture 1660–1780 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), from which portions of this essay are borrowed. 9. James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 4:87, in a conversation on Friday, April  6, 1781. I assume that Boswell’s italics for “constructive treason” denote Johnson’s vocal contempt for the term. Boswell considers Johnson’s response typical of “his true, manly, constitutional Toryism” (4:87). 10. Such awareness certainly was part of Gordon’s and the Protestant Association’s hostility to the Catholic Relief Act, as noted in the Protestant Association’s Sketch of a Conference with the Earl of Shelburne ([London, 1782?]). Lord George interrogates Shelburne regarding the genesis of the Act in and for Scotland: it was “from a secret negotiation between one of his Majesty’s Judges and the head Bishop of the Roman Catholic clergy in Scotland, about taking the Papists into the new levies, for the American war, ­after General Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga: and not from any mild, enlightened, benevolent intentions of the Legislature” (15). Gordon prob­ably had in mind the new Scottish levies of Catholic soldiers that the Catholic Relief Act allowed. 11. I suspect that the Courier is referring to the volunteer units in the City of London and Westminster, designed to protect local property. As “City” units, they ­were likely to have been pro-­American, Whiggish, anti-­Catholic, and also hostile to the presence of the army and the militia. See Nicholas Rogers, “The Gordon Riots and the Politics of War,” in Haywood and Seed, The Gordon Riots, 36. 12. The 1685 revoked Edit de Nantes, or Edit de Fontainebleau, itself included the term “la Religion Pretendue Réformée” and the abbreviation “P. P. R.” It promptly was translated into En­glish as An Edict of the French King, Prohibiting all Publick Exercise of the Pretended Reformed Religion in his Kingdom. Wherein he Recalls, and totally Annuls the perpetual and irrevocable Edict of Nantes [1598]; full of most gracious Concessions to Protestants (London, 1686). 13. Scottish Commentator, “Appendix: Reasons against repealing the Statutes enacted to suppress the growth of Popery” (in italics), in The Trial of Lord George Gordon, for High Treason, at the Bar of the Court of King’s Bench, On Monday, February 5th, 1781 (Edinburgh, 1781), [187], 190 for Addison. All ­these men “have abhorred its [Catholicism]’s enslaving princi­ples.” Protestant Maga­ zine 2 (1782): 15 (Archbishop); [], Strictures on a Pamphlet, Entitled, “The State

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and Behaviour of E ­ ngland’s Catholics, From the Reformation to the Year 1780 (London, 1780), 11 (upon), 17n (prevailing); John Butler, A Sermon Preached Before the House of Lords at the Abby Church, Westminster, on Tuesday, Janu­ ary 30, 1787 (London, 1787), 14 (­f amily). The title page notes Charles I’s MARTYR­ DOM , but lacks a black mourning-­border or the sermons’ frequent ­earlier terms holy and blessed. The text is the familiar Proverbs 17:14, “The beginning of strife is as when one letteth out ­water.” Butler is appalled by the regicide, but ­will not enter “into the allegations of e­ ither side” (11). Such a remark would have been nearly impossible in a January 30 sermon a ­century ­earlier. For fuller discussion of this legally mandated sermon, see chapter 3 of Weinbrot, Lit­er­a­ture, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture. 14. For the quotation regarding Irish peers and sons of peers in the House of Commons, see Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754–1790 (New York: Published for the History of Parliament Trust by Oxford University Press, 1964), 99. The entire “Introductory Survey” is a valuable introduction to the complexities of parliamentary government in the period. ­Whether a presumed Whig or Tory, radical or conservative, being a Member of Parliament “was a privilege attendant upon property or social position” (180). The property requirement was £600 yearly income from freehold land for a county seat, or £300 for a borough seat. In many cases a wealthy patron would “lease” or temporarily give such an estate to a favored candidate. According to Namier and Brooke, by l­ater in the ­century perhaps one-­third of the Members did not have such a qualification (125). See pp. 103–107 for a discussion of the Members’ wealth, which, w ­ hether inherited or earned, entitled them to think of themselves as the “quality.” For the House of Lords, see John Cannon, Aristocratic ­Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 14–15. According to one of many Protestant commentators hostile to the Savile Act, it “was so suddenly introduced, and so hastily passed, before the sense of the nation at large could be obtained, or any opposition against it.” See Strictures on a Pamphlet, 44. 15. Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume II. July 1768–­ June 1774, ed. Lucy S. Sutherland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 377. Burke’s remarkably mixed meta­phor prognosticates his attitude ­toward ­those beneath him in 1780: he likens his social class to grovelers in the dirt who “while we creep upon the Ground we belly into melons that are exquisite for size and flavour, yet still we are but annual plants that perish with our Season and leave no sort of Traces b ­ ehind us” (377). The Gordon rioters preferred whiskey to melons and left many a trace ­behind them. Burke’s ­house was saved only by a detachment of soldiers. 16. I quote the proceedings from “The Trial of George Gordon, Esq; . . . ​on Monday, Feb. 5 , 1781,” in The Annual Register . . . ​For the Year 1781 (London, 1782), ­here 217–218. For Thomas Erskine’s concluding speech, see Mr. Erskine’s Speech at the Trial of Lord George Gordon in the Court of King’s Bench On Monday, February 5, 1781

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1650–1850 (London, 1781). For the dinner with 300 at a London Tavern, see the London Cou­ rant and Westminster Chronicle, March 16, 1781, and a shorter form in the White­ hall Eve­ning Post, March 15–17, and the Public Advertiser, March 16. The event clearly was well known and apparently approved of by many. For Gordon to the jury, see the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, February 7, 1781, for which a juror ­gently reprimanded him, and for which he apologized. This Gazetteer also includes a description from which the Courier could have borrowed, though other newspapers carried comparable enthusiasms: it was “impossible for any words language can afford, to convey an adequate idea of the extreme joy that seized ­every one upon hearing the verdict announced.” ­There ­were “shouts of applause that shook the very place.” T ­ here is no evidence that Serres attended the trial, and given the crush he might not have gained entrance even if he had tried. 17. It is at the least plausible that the Court was not troubled by its defeat. It faced daunting public relations and tactical concerns: hanging, drawing, and quartering George II’s godson and the ­brother of the Scottish Duke of Gordon would have been po­liti­cally ominous. Exiling him, presumably to France, still would leave a dangerous rabble-­rouser ­free to propagandize among perpetual enemies. Pardoning him would have been a sign of weakness and fear rather than generosity. The Court’s best hope was that Lord George would be a broken man who had learned his lesson and retreated into obscurity. That was a characteristic misconception. 18. Gordon invoked the Old Testament as early as this published 1782 text. If the presumably Catholic troops are rejected and “trusty, staunch Presbyterians” are in charge of Scotland, “the countenance and blessings of the God of Israel may prob­ably continue to rest upon the established government of Scotland, and on her nobles and lairds, and ministers and lieges, and their posterity to the end of the world; and the true church of Jehovah be guarded, in the right stile, against all idolatry and profanation, all h ­ uman inventions, Popery, and Prelacy, and other foreign and domestic enemies” (8). From this point of view, the Roman / Catholic and Anglican / Episcopal churches are ­human inventions alien to Scotland; the Presbyterian and Hebrew churches are indigenous and divinely ordained. Lord George was troubled by the secular consequences of excommunication by the Church of ­England; he could not have been troubled by its putative spiritual consequences. 19. Felix McCarthy, A Serious Answer to Lord George Gordon’s Letters to the Earl of Shelburne ([London], 1782), 16. McCarthy is especially concerned with Gordon’s anger at Irish Catholics. I have not been able to locate Gordon’s own letter to Shelburne. 20. Several of ­these are outlined in Robert Watson’s The Life of Lord George ­Gordon: With a Philosophical Review of his Po­liti­cal Conduct (London, 1795). 21. Calvinus Minor, as a voice of the Protestant Association and perhaps by Archibald Bruce, An Appeal from Scotland in which the Spiritual Court of the Church of ­England, is Demonstrated to be Opposite to the British Constitution, and a Part

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and Pillar of Popery (London, [1786]), 17–18. I draw information regarding excommunication from Giles Jacob and John Morgan, A New Law = Dictionary: ­Containing the Interpretation and Definition of Words and Terms used in the Law, 10th ed. (London, 1782), see “Excommunication.” For Blackstone, see Com­ mentaries on the Laws of ­England, 5th  ed. (Oxford, 1773), 3:103 and especially 4:199: excommunication “by writ de excommunicato capiendo” is among t­ hose crimes “clearly not admissible to bail by the justices.” The excommunication documents remain undiscovered. I have not, yet, been able to find them ­either at the London Metropolitan Archives or at the Lambeth Palace archives. Much of the nonwritten pro­cess is likely to have been done with episcopal and ministerial winks and nods. The germane royal Domestic Papers at Kew and, so far as I can tell, the scattered documents of Bishop Lowth of London and Archbishop Moore of Canterbury remain s­ilent regarding this m ­ atter. The excommunication was anticipated and predicted in the Public Advertiser for May 5, 1786, in the case of Hendry v. Kidd. Notice of Gordon’s excommunication appeared in The Yorkshire Magazine 1 (1786): 157, the General Eve­ning Post, the London Chronicle for May 6, 1786, the Public Advertiser for May 8, and the Gazette and New Daily Advertiser for May  9, no doubt among other places. The notice is virtually identical in all places. No won­der that on November 23 the Public Advertiser reported that “we have from Authority, that the Archbishop of Canterbury is ­going to proceed to the confinement of Lord George Gordon.” Article 33 of the Thirty-­Nine Articles is “Of Excommunicate Persons, how they are to be avoided” as a “Heathen and Publican, ­until he be openly reconciled by Penance, and received into the Church by a Judge that hath Authority thereunto.” Lord George of course hardly wished to be received into the Church of ­England. For the relevant ecclesiastical laws, see Edmund Gibson, Codex juris ecclesiastici anglicani: Or, the Statutes, Constitutions, Canons, Rubricks and Arti­ cles, of the Church of ­England, 2nd  ed. (London, 1761), 2:1049–1064, at 1049 quoted above. Contumacy was so familiar an offense, especially regarding civil ­matters, that from Queen Elizabeth’s reign forward the Church sought to establish a separate and less severe category, De Contumace Capiendo instead of De Excommunicato Capiendo. This required an act of parliament that apparently was not forthcoming. See Gibson, Codex juris ecclesiastici anglicani 2:1049nd1 and 1059n. 22. The putative Comte Alessandro de Cagliostro was the Italian charlatan Giuseppe Balsamo (1743–1795) whom Goethe discusses in Italienische Reise (Italian Journey) of 1786–1787, published in 1816–1817. Cagliostro outlines his case and Gordon’s En­glish role in his Lettre du Comte de Cagliostro au Peuple Anglois, pour Servir de Suite à ses Mémoires ([London?], 1786), 41–48. At least one person thought his meeting with Gordon detrimental to Cagliostro’s fortunes. See the pseudonymous Lucia, The Life of the Count Cagliostro. . . . ​Dedicated to Madame la Com­ tesse de Cagliostro (London, 1787), 97–101: “­Every sincere well-­wisher to the Count

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1650–1850 must lament his intimacy with a nobleman whose ill fated enthusiasm has justly rendered him an object of universal censure” (100). Throughout 1786, and occasionally beyond, the Courier de l’Eu­rope waged a relentless war against Cagliostro as an Italian fraud, imposter, and imposer upon aristocracy. 23. Appendix to the ­Trials of Lord George Gordon, and Thomas Wilkins, For Libels ([London, 1788]), 6. 24. Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, in The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 2:72; The Speech of the Right Honourable William Pitt, in the House of Commons, February 12, 1787 (London, 1787), 57. For discussion of the treaty, see W. O. Henderson, “The Anglo-­ French Commercial Treaty of 1786,” Economic History Review, n.s., 10 (1975): 104–112, and Marie Donaghey, “The Best Laid Plans: French Execution of the Anglo-­French Commercial Treaty of 1786,” Eu­ro­pean History Quarterly 14 (1984): 401–422. 25. By 1787 the Botany Bay ­matter was known and proposed as a subject for a debating society in Hamburg: “Was Lord George Gordon justifiable in justifying his calm address to the new Colony of Botany Bay—­and did he manifest his love of liberty in preferring a residence in Switzerland to St. George’s Fields?” See The En­glish Lyceum, or, Choice of Pieces in Prose and in Verse Selected from the Best ­Periodical Papers, Magazins [sic], Pamphlets and other British Publications, ed. J. W. V. Archenholtz (Hamburg, 1787), 1:364. For other “Gordoniana,” see ­Probationary Odes for the Laureatesip, ed. Sir John Hawkins (London, 1785), xxxv–­x xxvi, 108, in parody. The same volume has a parodic poem putatively by Pepper Arden, Gordon’s chief prosecutor in 1787 (35–38). 26. For Gordon’s Jewish life, see Israel Solomons, “Lord George Gordon’s Conversion to Judaism,” The Jewish Historical Society of ­England: Transactions Sessions 1911–1914 (Edinburgh and London: Ballantyne, Hanson & Co., 1915); Papers Read before the Jewish Historical Society of E ­ ngland, June 2, 1913, 7 (1911–1914). This article remains a valuable contribution to Gordon’s story. For one of the other several attacks on him as a Jew, see Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, “Lord George Gordon turned Jew,” Eu­ro­pean Magazine 13 (1788): 140. Gordon’s appearance when being sentenced in 1787 was radically dif­fer­ent from that in 1780. ­There was ­little “enjouement” during his second trial and sentencing. 27. Simon Burrows has challenged the view that numerous pre-1789 libels of Marie Antoinette circulated in France: too few of ­these survive in any number in French libraries and even fewer in British libraries; some may have circulated in manuscript but w ­ ere not published; t­ hose that did clandestinely circulate w ­ ere indeed very few. See Burrows, Blackmail, Scandal, and Revolution. London’s French Libel­ listes, 1758–92 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 147–170. Robert Darnton points out that “Nasty rumors about the queen began to circulate in ­ ater or the Art of Slander from the mid-1770s”: Darnton, The Devil in the Holy W Louis XIV to Napoleon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 398,

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with fuller discussion of libels upon her, 398–411. The queen also was often discussed in the context of the seedy affair of the necklace involving Cagliostro and Madame de la Motte. For example, see the unsigned Memorial, or brief, for the Comte de Cagliostro, defendant: against the King’s Attorney-­General, Plaintiff: in the cause of the Cardinal De Rohan, Comtesse De La Motte, and o ­ thers. From the French Original, published in Paris in February last; with an introductory preface. By Parkyns Macmahon (London, 1786), 62, and the pseudonymous Lucia, The life of the Count Cagliostro, 86. As one would expect, Marie Antoinette was rudely treated as well in Jeanne de Saint-­Rémy de Valois, comtesse de la Motte Mem­ oires Justificatifs de la Comtesse de Valois de la Motte, écrit par elle-­même ­([London], 1788 [1789]), 101–102, 122, 215. Much of the French, and in this case Valois, objection to Marie Antoinette was that an Austrian archduchess was not a proper Queen of France. 28. For some of the energetic, if often fruitless, efforts to reform eighteenth-­ century prisons, see John Howard’s epochal, The State of Prisons in E ­ ngland and Wales, With Preliminary Observations, and An Account of Some Foreign Pris­ ons (Warrington, 1777), with a third edition in 1784. The Whig pro-­American Manasseh Dawes’s omnibus title could also have included Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith: An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, With a View of and Commentary upon Beccaria, Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Fielding, and Blackstone (1782). Josiah Dornford, Nine Letters, to the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London, on the State of the City Prisons; With Some Account of Eliz. Gurney, Thomas Trimer, and Robert May, Who “died for want of Care and the common Necessities of Life” (London, [1786]), 131, 130. In the same year Dornford also published his comparably troubled and troubling Seven Letters to the Lords and Commons of ­Great Britain, upon the Impolicy, Inhumanity, and Injustice, of our Pre­sent Model of Arresting the Bodies of Debt­ ors; Shewing the Inconsistency of it, with Magna Charta and a F­ ree Constitution (London, [1786]). John Bender has discussed prisons and prison reform in his Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-­ Century ­England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). For discussion immediately relevant to June 1780, see Tim Hitchcock, “Renegotiating the Bloody Code: The Gordon Riots and the Transformation of Popu­lar attitudes to the Criminal Justice System,” in Haywood and Seed, The Gordon Riots, 185–203, and Matthew White, “For the Safety of the City: The Geography and Social Politics of Public Execution ­after the Gordon Riots,” 204–225. 29. Simon Burrows, A King’s Ransom: The Life of Charles Théveneau de Morande, Blackmailer, Scandalmonger, & Master-­Spy (London: Continuum, 2010), 27; Brissot, Memoires, 1:313, 316. Burrows outlines Morande’s reputation as adulterous ­sexual libertine in fact, fiction, and reputation. The Chevalier D’Eon, for example, reported “that Morande had in a single month fathered c­ hildren by his wife, his two domestic servants and several neighbours.” See Burrows, A King’s Ransom,

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1650–1850 25, and 22–27 for comparable adult unsavories. His youthful escapades often ­were brutal as well. Burrows bravely attempts to cleanse some of Morande’s unlovely po­liti­cal traits, in “A Literary Low-­Life Reassessed: Charles Théveneau de Morande in London, 1769–1791,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 22 (1998): 76–91, and in chapter 8 of A King’s Ransom, “The First Revolutionary Journalist,” 180–205. 30. For the popularity of Morande’s book, see Robert Darnton, “The High Enlightenment and the Low Life of Lit­er­a­ture in Prerevolutionary France,” Past and Pre­ sent 51 (1971): 81–115, reprinted in Darnton, Literary Under­ground of the Old Regime, 1–40, and Darnton, The Devil in the Holy ­Water, 24–38, with other scattered references. 31. See von Proschwitz, Beaumarchais et le Courier de l’Eu­rope, 1:183 (je n’ai qu’un mot), 1:186–187 (qui servent). 32. For sensible conjectures regarding Burke’s recollection of the Gordon Riots as he contemplated the French Revolution, see Iain McCalman, “Mad Lord George and Madame La Motte: Riot and Sexuality in the Genesis of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France,” Journal of British Studies 35 (1996): 343–367.

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LAPDOGS/LENSES MICROSCOPY, NARRATIVE, AND THE HISTORY OF POMPEY THE L­ ITTLE MOLLY MAROTTA

Science and lit­er­a­ture in the eigh­teenth c­ entury share a mutual and long-­running

interest in animals. Additionally, one of the most provocative intersections of the two disciplines can be found when the language and tools of one discipline are coopted, in serious, satirical, intentional, or accidental ways, by the other. A prominent instance of this intersection is Francis Coventry’s The History of Pompey the ­Little; Or, the Adventures of a Lap-­dog. Coventry’s Pompey, a beautiful lapdog, wanders around one of his many homes, an eighteenth-­century coffee­house, and proceeds to observe the vari­ous groups of patrons who are deep in conversation, unaware of the creature watching them: “The consistories of wit claimed his first attention, being a dog of a natu­ral turn for humour. . . . ​When he was tired of the clubs of humour, he would go to another t­ able, and listen to politicians . . . ​he heard sea-­fights condemned by ­people who never saw the sea.”1 In a previous scene, with a previous owner, the alehouse-­keeper’s d ­ aughter has just been married. “The fash­ion­able pair had scarce been married three days before they began to quarrel. For the civil well-­bred husband coming home one night from his station, and expecting the cow-­heels to have been ready for supper, found his darling spouse abroad.”2 The narrator ignores the titular protagonist’s actions in ­favor of recording the shallow travesties of a new marriage or the hot air of politicians. Throughout the novel, the narrator, in a satirical tone, reports Pompey’s observations and experiences to the reader. However, at vari­ous points in the novel as well as in the examples above, ­Pompey’s presence seems to be more assumed than explic­itly mentioned, giving

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1650–1850 the sense that the audience has joined the narrator in looking at the scene through Pompey. In the scenes preceding and following t­ hese coffee­house observations, the audience experiences similar narrative moves: Pompey arrives in a new location (usually not by choice); Pompey observes t­hose in his immediate surroundings, and then the narrator gives the audience a report of the happenings therein. ­These scenes extend from a description of Pompey’s parentage before his birth to the point at which Pompey veritably breaks down and dies. ­These vignettes, the public conversations of the coffee­house and the private quarrels of the domestic sphere, are two of many that exemplify the ways in which ­little Pompey serves as the narrator’s lens for observing and critiquing vari­ous social situations. The word “lens” is of par­tic­u­lar importance in framing the function of Coventry’s narrative structure b ­ ecause it invokes the discourse of microscopy, which gained popularity in the eigh­teenth ­century. Microscopy involves looking at an object that has been magnified by a lens. This magnification lets the user see ­things that he or she may not have been able to notice when looking at the object with the naked eye. The operator can rec­ord or draw conclusions from ­those observations. Coventry’s narrative focuses on a series of scenes in a similar fashion. The narrator looks at p ­ eople and events through Pompey and reports them to the reader. In taking a closer look at concepts associated with the use of the microscope—­such as the modest witness, apparatus utility, and its appearances in lit­er­a­ture—­I argue the character of Pompey narratively functions as an optical instrument. T ­ here is a ­great deal of insight that can be found when scientific discourse is applied to the reading of this novel. Coventry embraces the ways in which a lens helps the audience see h ­ uman flaws; in so d ­ oing, he also dismantles the notion that this lens-­assisted, focused form of observation should be relegated to men of science. It-­narratives follow small objects or pets as they get carried around from place to place, traded from owner to own­er.3 In applying princi­ples of scientific discourse to The History of Pompey the ­Little, it becomes evident that Pompey, the narrator, and the ­people they observe correspond in vari­ous ways to a lens, a scientist, and a set of slides. While t­ hese connections are neither simplistic nor direct, they provide a base from which the two disciplines—­scientific observation and narrative observation—­come together. Each episode of the novel corresponds well with the slide aspect of a microscope, and the it-­narrative genre encourages viewing several of ­those slides. Pompey, a veritable pocket lens, is picked up and placed in a new scene. He then observes the ­people in that scene before being moved again to bear witness to another event or group of p ­ eople. Coventry’s satire leaves no

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step of the social ladder unscathed, and his appropriation of scientific practices imbues the entire structure of the novel with an overarching critique of the relegation of such practices to “serious” scientific uses only. This application occurs at the level of narrative structure as well as in the events of the novel and the it-­ narrative genre in general. This text also taps into the anx­i­eties surrounding both the excessive use (and potential misuse) of the microscope and the distracting relationships between w ­ omen and lapdogs. Coventry’s choice to write an it-­narrative seems to be guided by the same impulses that might guide one to use a microscope—­they both suit the task of seeing ­things that the unassisted eye might miss. When looking at the judgmental tone of the narrator, arguably, one impor­ tant difference comes to light: the operator of a microscope does not expect to see his or her image staring back, distorted by the opinions of the apparatus. Critical attention to the it-­narrative genre covers a wide range of subjects and themes. In a single collection, essay topics range from social anx­i­eties and female sexuality to commercialism and imperialism.4 Mark Blackwell, in the introduction to his collection, The Secret Life of ­Things: Animals, Objects, and It-­Narratives in Eighteenth-­Century ­England, states that it-­narratives provide “one of the richest rec­ords of ­things’ growing importance as emblems of ‘a par­tic­u­lar subject-­object relation’ in eighteenth-­century Britain.”5 Pompey the ­Little touches on all of the above topics and more, which is an impressive scope. Additionally, Blackwell mentions that it-­narratives are often topical or socially relevant.6 What makes Pompey the ­Little even more impressive is the ways in which the structure of the novel reflects the internal critique. Pompey’s thing-­ness and wide range of experiences are or­ga­nized using con­temporary experimental philosophies. Liz Bellamy’s chapter, “It-­Narrators and Circulation: Defining a Subgenre,” ­discusses previous attempts to define the it-­narrative genre and ­settles on the ­following two qualifications: “The first is a narrator that, ­whether animal, vegetable, or manufactured object, lacks in­de­pen­dent agency.” According to Bellamy, Pompey is too small to have agency and does not try to run away from his o ­ wners.7 While I agree that Pompey does not exercise a ­great deal of control over his movements—he is an instrumental character ­after all—he is sentient and does choose to escape one of his o ­ wners, saving his own life.8 Additionally, this supposed lack of agency allows Pompey “to circulate through society.” “This highlights the second definitive aspect of the genre, which is the transference of the narrator or protagonist between other­wise unconnected characters . . . ​­these works are dif­ fer­ent means of accumulating stories, which gives them their distinctive looseness of form.”9 In terms of circulation, Pompey’s species—­not his lack of agency—­gives

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1650–1850 him access. Dogs can go where ­people cannot. Blackwell echoes Bellamy’s sentiment that the it-­narrative genre contains a loose menagerie of scenes—­a “crazy quilt of o ­ thers’ tales.”10 In addition to the form, Coventry leverages eighteenth-­ century scientists’ investment in experimental infallibility and productivity. The philosophies of Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, two influential men of microscopy, enrich our reading of Pompey the L­ ittle. In addition to detailing what he saw through his microscope, Hooke’s Micrographia introduces his experimental philosophy. He states, “It is the g­ reat prerogative of Mankind above other Creatures, that we are not only able to behold the works of Nature . . . ​but we have also the power of considering, comparing, altering, assisting, and improving them to vari­ous uses.”11 T ­ hese powers to assist and improve are used on mankind as well as on nature. Hooke describes “the Senses” as having “infirmities,” and ­these “infirmities” must be cured with “Instruments,” such as glasses or a microscope.12 Coventry captures the essentials of Hooke’s philosophy and applies them to the novel. Coventry manipulates ­little Pompey—­improving on nature—in order to assist the narrator in observing vari­ous ­people—­curing the “infirmities” of the narrator’s sight and the “infirmities” of h ­ uman nature. While Hooke focuses on the benefits of apparatuses and experiments, Boyle is interested in how to validate ­those experiments. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-­Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life describe the emphasis Boyle placed on witnessing as a form of experimental validation. This witnessing becomes an integral part of Pompey the L­ ittle. On one level, Pompey must witness t­ hose around him. On another level, the reader must witness Pompey’s adventures and accept the critical terms of Coventry’s literary experiment. “In Boyle’s view the capacity of experiments to yield ­matters of fact depended . . . ​upon the assurance of the relevant community that they had been so performed.”13 The more observers, the more legitimate the results.14 “Another impor­tant way of multiplying witnesses to experimentally produced phenomena was to facilitate their replication. Experimental protocols could be reported in such a way as to enable readers of the reports to perform the experiments for themselves, thus ensuring distant but direct witnesses.”15 Essentially, Boyle’s experiments become written rec­ords, much like the rec­ords of Pompey’s observations. The genre of the it-­narrative expands on this idea of replication. Not only does Coventry pre­sent multiple examples of the ridicu­ lous be­hav­ior of ­those around him, but also the novel form allows ­those experiments to be repeated ad infinitum. While Boyle was skeptical of replication, Coventry found a way to perfect it.16 The audience takes turns looking through the

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same lens at the same slide. The key to understanding Coventry’s novel is the ways in which scientific discourse, especially as it relates to the microscope, affected literary conventions. The history of the microscope and its transition from a lauded apparatus of the Royal Society to a tool purchased by men of vari­ous social classes—­and fi­nally—to a popu­lar ladies’ accessory, has been outlined in ­great detail by Marjorie Nicolson and further explicated by Deborah Armintor. Microscopes w ­ ere redesigned into beautiful, smaller objects and put in special cases, remaking a stuffy, clunky scientific object into a valuable commodity.17 Such widespread knowledge and use of the device did not go unnoticed by authors, both in their writing and in their personal lives. Nicolson describes a correspondence between Jonathan Swift, the famed satirist, and Stella that discussed Swift purchasing a microscope as a gift for her.18 Even if Swift had no interest in the literary potential of the microscope—­and as Armintor skillfully argues, he does—­the fact that a man of the literary community considered purchasing the device for the purpose of pleasing another person demonstrates that the microscope was understood to be desirable and obtainable. In addition to that provocative correspondence, Nicolson and Armintor point to the ways the image of the microscope and the scientist have appeared with frequency in literary works both directly—in satires featuring experiment-­obsessed virtuosos (The Virtuoso, The Bassett T ­ able, The Emperor of the Moon)—­and indirectly—­with characters who function as living microscopes (Gulliver’s Travels). In The Virtuoso, The Bassett ­Table, and The Emperor of the Moon, a character becomes obsessed with an apparatus, and in Gulliver’s Travels the character becomes an apparatus. T ­ hese works provide context for a reading of Coventry’s narrative, giving examples of how scientific apparatuses and discourse have appeared prior to Pompey. In t­ hese plays, the scientific apparatus disrupts the marriage plot as well as other productive h ­ uman relationships, such as male friendships. Typically, for a virtuoso or lady virtuoso, the apparatus becomes an obsession that prevents him or her from seeking out and properly interacting with other ­people. The greatest anxiety-­producing aspect of the apparatus, such as a microscope, a telescope, or a series of experiments, is the fact that it is capable of preventing marriages, which, therefore, prevents the production of legitimate c­ hildren. For example, in The Emperor of the Moon, the Doctor, a male guardian, is so taken with his telescope that he does not realize that his ­daughter and niece are plotting their inheritance—­ securing marriages b ­ ehind his back. In the following scene, Scaramouch reveals the plan to get Elaria’s ­father, the Doctor, to approve of her getting married. “Lunatic

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1650–1850 we may call him, without breaking the Decorum of good Manners; for he is always travelling to the Moon. . . . ​[­There ­will be a farce] wherein your ­Father ­shall be so impos’d on, as s­ hall bring m ­ atters most magnificently about.”19 The Doctor “travels” to the moon by looking through a telescope, and this apparatus has made him believe so strongly in the existence of a society on the moon that the lover plans to masquerade as the Emperor of the Moon in order to coerce the Doctor into blessing his d ­ aughter’s marriage to the faux emperor. In the dialogue presented above, one ­will notice that the younger generation disdains the Doctor’s obsession and sees it as a weakness that can be manipulated in the name of marital unity. ­ able, the female virtuoso cannot bear the thought of leaving her In The Bassett T microscope and eloping with her lover.20 The patriarch of The Virtuoso, much like the one in The Emperor of the Moon, participates in ridicu­lous experiments that alienate him from his peers and ­family. While ­these plot-­level jokes are certainly amusing, Armintor’s study of Gulliver and his role as a man-­turned-­microscope-­ turned-­sex-­toy, gives the audience an example of the ways in which scientific discourse informed eighteenth-­century literary strategy and form. The implications of reading Gulliver as a character that embodies an apparatus opens up many of the same scientific influences found in Pompey. Anx­i­eties about female sexuality, the opening up of private spheres, and the misuse (or abuse) of an apparatus occur in both works, with a major difference between the two being the introduction of a third-­person narrator in Pompey. Armintor concludes that anxiety about the decline of the microscope in serious scientific research and its increasing popularity as a ­woman’s toy manifests itself in Swift’s satire, Gulliver’s Travels, in which Gulliver, a scientist in his own right, when brought down to size, becomes the very ­thing scientists ­were afraid microscopes had become—­ agents for female plea­sure. In Brobdingnag, a city of ­giants, Gulliver is subjected to the female body up close, both in a passive role observing an enormous breast-­ feeding w ­ oman, and in an active way in the chambers of the queen’s maids, “who employ him as a sexual prop.”21 Armintor points to Hooke’s speech to the Royal Acad­emy on the decline of microscopy as a study, the changes in size and power attributed to Gulliver, and erotic comics featuring tiny men as dildos, among other ­things, in order to illustrate the microscope as a locus of misogyny, science, and female sexuality.22 This connection of Gulliver to a microscope and then to a microscope/dildo gives us an example of the ways in which scientific discourse can be imbued into a novel at the level of character construction, not just as something a character

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uses as a prop. However, what seems to be lacking in Gulliver, as illuminated by this explication, is self-­conscious reflection or an integration of this scientific language in the overall narrative structure of the novel. Armintor notes that Gulliver as a comparatively small man has l­imited vision, which prevents him from being able to “reflect philosophically on the new economy that subjects him to this treatment and subjects ­others to worse.”23 That is to say, he misses a chance to share his analy­sis with his audience. Gulliver is able to leave the island of ­giants, but he still cannot get a “bigger picture” among ­people his own size. In the following scene, he has left the island of g­ iants, and his makeshift boat gets picked up by a passing ship: “I was equally confounded at the sight of so many pigmies, for such I took them to be, ­after having so long accustomed mine eyes to the monstrous objects I had left.”24 Even ­after leaving the island of ­giant and devouring female sexuality, Gulliver cannot get away from his focused perspective and expressions of understanding through sight. Additionally, Armintor points to Lockean theories of ­learning which show that Gulliver is merely an object ­because an object can only see; an object cannot make conclusions.25 What is especially in­ter­est­ing about Gulliver’s lack of critique is the fact that he is a first-­person narrator. In making the first-­person narrator a mere object, without a critical voice, the audience gets an apparatus without an operator, and, as Armintor makes clear, the apparatus does not have the ability to gain insight into his observations and interrogate the situation. The third-­person narrator of Pompey is able to provide a critique b ­ ecause he is a consciousness above his instrument. In addition to questioning the effects of microscopy on interpersonal relationships, playwrights and scientists alike ask ­whether or not the microscope can be put to any productive use. Playwrights such as Aphra Behn (The Emperor of the Moon), Thomas Shadwell (The Virtuoso), and Susanna Centlivre (The Basset ­Table) suggest that apparatuses threaten to interrupt the production of c­ hildren. Margaret Cavendish, both a scientific phi­los­o­pher and a literary writer, is also concerned about w ­ hether or not microscopy is productive. In describing the new science of microscopy, Cavendish repeatedly asks, “what benefit is that to us?”26 Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy demands productivity from scientific exploration and claims the superiority of one’s reason in discovering what is correct or true. She is especially skeptical of microscopes: “The truth is, most of t­ hese arts are fallacies, rather than discoveries of truth; for sense deludes more than it gives a true information, and an exterior inspection through an optic glass, is so deceiving that it cannot be relied upon . . . ​reason is best to guide all arts.”27 For her, the microscope

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1650–1850 is neither useful nor productive. It clouds one’s sense of sight as well as distracts from using one’s reason. The same skepticism that Cavendish and the playwrights have t­ oward the productivity of the scientific apparatuses Coventry invokes can be found in attitudes about the comic genre Coventry uses as well. In order to avoid being seen as a comedic virtuoso, Coventry preemptively defends his use of the comic narrative in his introductory letter to Henry Fielding. As with the microscopy, one could argue that satire “deludes more than it gives a true information,” but for Coventry, the satirical it-­narrative produces knowledge. Coventry makes ironic apologies for his work before Fielding arrives at the first chapter: “I know not to whom I can address myself with so much propriety as to yourself, who unquestionably stand foremost in this species of composition . . . ​how unworthy to be ranked in that class of writings which I am now defending.”28 Words such as “species,” “class,” and “composition,” have associations with scientific discourse and taxonomy—­for example, “class” and “species” are two ways of identifying a creature’s biological taxonomy—­but in the introduction, they are invoked in order to garner ac­cep­tance from a comedic playwright for a scattered satire.29 L­ ater, Coventry defends the utility of humor: “To convey instruction in a pleasant manner and mix entertainment with it, is certainly a commend-­able undertaking, perhaps more likely to be attended with success than grave precepts . . . ​and where amusement is chiefly consulted, ­there is merit in making p ­ eople laugh.”30 For Coventry, this “pleasant manner” can be applied to the Enlightenment scientists’ style of writing, making it an enjoyable and educational piece of writing. Enlightenment scientists describe their findings in a flurry of dif­fer­ent images and provide descriptions of every­thing they observe—­regardless of ­whether or not ­those observations are of any importance. Hooke, in his work Micrographia, observes and describes the point of a needle, the edge of a razor, a piece of linen cloth, a piece of silk, seeds, hair, skin, fish scales, eyes of flies, the teeth of a snail, and several species of insects. While t­ hese objects could be easily sorted into categories such as fibers, insects, and small tools, among o ­ thers, Hooke does not make a point to or­ga­nize them into dif­fer­ent sections. He merely addresses them one a­ fter another, as if he set up a random line of slides and proceeded to observe and rec­ord each one. Through the lens of the microscope, each ordinary specimen becomes worthy of a written rec­ord. A prominent feature of ­these written rec­ords is Hooke’s use of similes. Instead of looking into the microscope and writing “silk appears woven when seen through the lens,” Hooke states that the silk looks “like a very con­ve­nient substance to make Bed-­matts, or Door-­matts of, or

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to serve for Bee-­hives, Corn-­scuttles, Chairs, or Corn-­tubs.”31 His descriptions give the reader several points of comparison in order to clarify the image in the reader’s imagination. While Hooke uses the literary convention of similes, Coventry plays on this scientific compulsion to rec­ord all the operator observes. He has the narrator rec­ ord every­thing that occurs in each scene as well as every­thing Pompey does—­ including relieving himself or breeding with other dogs. Chapter 7, “Matrimonial Amusements,” is a particularly strong example of the ways in which the narrative structure of each chapter includes the copious details of one of Hooke’s observations. Upon awaking in one of many new homes, “the first ­thing [Pompey] did was to urine on a pair of velvet breeches which lay in a chair by his lordship’s bedside; ­after which, the door being open, he sallied forth, and performed a much more disreputable action on a rich Turkey carpet.”32 As seen in t­ hese few lines, Coventry provides the audience with many specific details. Instead of simply saying that Pompey soiled the carpet and a pair of breeches, the narrator describes Pompey’s exact actions and specific items. While the narrator faithfully rec­ords most of what he sees through Pompey, this interjection of personal judgment complicates the narrator’s position as the epitome of faithful scientific reporting and discovery: the modest witness. The modest witness, ideally, is a person acting as a meta-­apparatus, one who narrates what he sees through the lens or during the experiment from a completely objective position. The key word that connects the modest witness to Coventry’s narrator and protagonist is “ventriloquist.” Donna Haraway’s critique of Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer on Boyle is especially useful in understanding the above concept. The modest witness is someone—­read, male—­who renders himself invisible in his observations: “The modest witness is the legitimate and authorized ventriloquist for the object world, adding nothing from his mere opinions. . . . ​And so he is endowed with the remarkable power to establish facts . . . ​His subjectivity is his objectivity.”33 Haraway uses the concept of ventriloquism in order to describe aspects of microscopy and animal studies, respectively. The relationship between the narrator and Pompey works as a hinge for both uses of the term. While Pompey and the narrator are far from being invisible, the phrase “authorized ventriloquist” characterizes their relationship. The narrator is authorized by Coventry to ventriloquize ­little Pompey—or more accurately—to look through Pompey to the “objective” repre­sen­ta­tion of social interactions. The narrator’s re­sis­tance to detailing every­thing he sees through Pompey due to social pressures drives the first wedge between expectations of a modest witness and the judgmental tone

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1650–1850 of the narrator, illustrating the obviously impossible task of removing all personal opinions and social pressures from an observation. In addition to the less-­than-­objective narrator, the fact that Pompey—­the apparatus himself—is a sentient being compounds the feeling that neither an ­operator nor an apparatus are without their own biases or distortions. Pompey’s sentience disrupts the dynamic of the speaking ventriloquist and the ­silent dummy, or for our purposes, the modest witness and the apparatus. ­Because of the allowances of the it-­narrative genre, Coventry can explore what the apparatus might say if it could talk back. For example, Pompey is given to a blind man as charity, to help guide him around town. Pompey proceeds to complain about his new position with dramatic proclamations about his newfound “misery” and “misfortunes.”34 ­These complaints disrupt the reader’s understanding of Pompey as a loyal pet, let alone a heroic protagonist. The lens the narrator looks through is as opinionated—­warped—as the not-­so-­modest witness. The fact that Pompey is a sentient creature creates distance between Pompey as a character, or a lens that happens to be a dog, and an accurate repre­sen­ta­tion of an animal in lit­er­a­ture. While accuracy is not the domain of Coventry’s fiction, the ways that Coventry departs from a realistic dog, just as he departed from a true modest witness, illuminate the ways Pompey functions as a lens first, a character second, and a dog third. As evidenced by the passage about Pompey’s professed misfortune to be a guide, Pompey is not a dumbly loyal creature but a somewhat rebellious consciousness, through which the narrator looks. Laura Brown makes note of the fact that even when an author wants to make an accurate rendering of an animal, this rendering is always filtered through h ­ uman terms: the novel “contains sustained passages of social satire only distantly connected to the perspective of the ­little lapdog. But the third-­person narrator does sometimes enter into the consciousness of the canine protagonist” in order to “ventriloquize the animal’s proximity to humankind.” This serves to “[foreground] the prob­lem of language for the dog narrative,” which supposedly represent the dog’s journey, but ends up simply using the dog as a mouthpiece for a person.35 Pompey both is and is not vari­ous ­things: a dog, an apparatus, a sentient being, and a dummy. The composite nature of Pompey destabilizes a basic reading of him as any one of ­those t­ hings, and therefore, the narrative necessitates a third person narrator to negotiate ­these roles. In the context of understanding Pompey as an apparatus, occupying the dual space of pet body and observational tool, his sentience gives the apparatus a voice instead of giving the narrator, or witness, the only voice. Pompey’s feelings, as

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­ reviously mentioned, are not necessarily agreeable, which emphasizes the narrap tor’s impulse to report all—­the good and the bad. Additionally, from the point of realizing Pompey’s sentiency forward, what­ever the narrator “reports,” Pompey’s reaction complicates ­because the audience knows that ­there are two sources of information to negotiate. Unlike in Gulliver’s Travels, the narrator is able to exercise an overarching critique, which mediates Pompey’s be­hav­ior as a dear pet or a spoiled nuisance. Coventry authorizes an observer, his narrator, to guide the conclusions of the reader, as opposed to Swift’s protagonist, whose basic expressions of likes and dislikes go to the reader unremarked. This mediation prevents the reader from simply empathizing with Pompey’s reaction to the situation. The fact that Pompey’s reactions require a mediator to adjust the bent lens for the readers points to the ways in which Pompey’s experiences affect his condition. In an in­ter­est­ing departure from the traditional dynamic of the observer looking through the lens at the slide and the sight of the slide affecting the observer, Coventry enhances ­these observations by having them affect the lens as well. Unlike the narrator, who is safe from the “rabble” of ­these tumultuous tales, the “it” must experience what­ever the author wishes to show, which greatly affects the “it.” “­These things-­on-­the-go gather traces of their ­owners,” as opposed to simply observing the situation, ­until the “it” is moved again.36 Pompey’s “­owners” in the book are dif­fer­ent from his operator, the narrator. In keeping with the tradition of the it-­narrative, Pompey participates in the scenes of the novel as a pet. He is spoiled and beautifully groomed when in the possession of a rich ­family and unrecognizably filthy when guiding a blind beggar. “Pompey was grown up to maturity when he came to Lady Tempest; who soon ushered him into all the fash­ion­able parties of the town. . . . ​He seemed to know, at first sight, w ­ hether a dog had received a good education, by his manner of coming into a room.”37 While Pompey accompanies Lady Tempest, he becomes a dog of the town, with all of the shallow judgments that come with that social position. A dog raised by a rich and indulgent ­woman would, of course, be spoiled. The in­ter­est­ing moment in this example is Pompey’s sight. The ability of the lens to notice a qualitative detail “at first sight” indicates the effect Lady Tempest’s owner­ship has on Pompey. The lens is clearer, lightly used—or if not lightly used, used by a delicate hand. However, ­Pompey’s fortunes change, and, ­after spending time by the side of a homeless ­beggar, Pompey is no longer the pretty favorite, and this almost gets him killed. “Sorrow and ill-­usage had so impaired his beauty . . . ​that he bespoke no favourable opinion in his beholders . . . ​[a] sentence of death was pronounced.”38 The phrase “ill-­usage” indicates the way in which the operator—­the beggar—­has a

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1650–1850 negative effect on the apparatus. In terms of who can “see” in this dynamic, the narrator, Pompey, and the audience are all sentient participants in each scene, which compounds the importance of observation in Coventry’s satire. Once a reader is paying attention, she or he must be shown what to pay attention to. One of the reasons the quality of our object ­matters is its connection to our object’s value in the marketplace. E ­ arlier, I noted that microscopes evolved from rare scientific tools to popu­lar novelties. Production of pocket microscopes increased, and they became “easily obtainable at a not prohibitive price.” 39 The changing prices contributed to a change in how p ­ eople—­potential buyers—­viewed the apparatus. For example, since the microscope became less expensive and more available, p ­ eople ­were more inclined to purchase one. Dogs, too, became commodities. By the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, the tax placed on dogs caused a shift in how society viewed them. Dogs w ­ ere legally understood as commodities, and this move from being animals with some agency to being objects in the same marketplace as the microscope can be used to understand Pompey’s position as an object in the novel: “dog[s] attained ­legal status as a commodity at the end of the eigh­teenth c­ entury when a tax upon dogs was fi­nally instituted.” 40 ­Because of this tax, Pompey is legally a commodity. It is impor­tant to draw the connection between microscopes as commodities and dogs as commodities ­because it changes the way Coventry can use and treat Pompey. At one point, Pompey believes he ­will be settled permanently with Aurora, his kind and doting current own­er.41 However, when Pompey wakes Aurora up in the m ­ iddle of a pleasant dream, which “was an offence she could not p ­ ardon,” 42 he is given to her milliner—­who in turn gives him to another young lady. As with any ­house­hold tool, as soon as he became a nuisance, Pompey was given away to someone who does not yet realize the item might incon­ve­nience her. Interestingly, Aurora does not give Pompey to one of her friends or admirers; she gives him to her milliner—­a craftsperson. In the previous example, it becomes clear that in addition to using Pompey’s commodification to move between individuals, Coventry utilizes it to shuffle Pompey among ­people of dif­fer­ent social standing. Part of the benefit of a nonhuman protagonist is the fact that it does not have the social limitations associated with being a ­human. In fact, Pompey could do, essentially, the only t­ hing that his ­human ­owners could not—­disregard social standing: “such narratives did not re­spect the bound­aries and limits which or­g a­nized eighteenth-­century society . . . ​lap-­dogs could move among . . . ​r anks in a way no ­human subject could. To readers locked within par­tic­u­lar social roles such movement must have been both engrossing and refreshing.” 43 As previously noted, Pom-

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pey can be a guide for a beggar, a favorite of a lady, or a gift for an employee without anyone questioning his presence in that setting. At this time in the eigh­ teenth ­century, since commodities ­were beginning to become available to whomever had money—­not simply the status—­the anxiety about disappearing class bound­aries was heightened.44 In addition to circulating Pompey as a commodity, Coventry examines the ways in which shifting views about the roles of animals in scientific experiments would have affected the apparatus’s treatment. Changes in attitudes ­toward animals in the eigh­teenth ­century, such as a heightened sensitivity to animal cruelty and an investigation into the scientific and ­labor practices that involved animals, ­were caused by every­thing from the discovery of new animals, taxonomy, pet keeping, and experimentation.45 The manipulation and actions of Pompey and his ­human companions reflect the complicated ways that Coventry both grapples with and teaches his audience about shifting moralities. The cruelty of c­ hildren ­toward animals, ladies with lapdogs, and the philosophical debate about animals having souls receive sharp attention.46 Coventry even addresses vivisection—­the live dissection of animals. At one point in the novel, Pompey gets carried off to Cambridge and finds himself in the possession of a young physician who is interested in using him for such an experiment: “And ­here, reader, I am sure it moves thy compassion to think that poor Pompey, ­after suffering already so many misfortunes, must at last be dissected alive to satisfy a physician concerning the peristaltic motion of the intestines. The case would, indeed, be la­men­ta­ble, if it had happened.” 47 Interestingly, in a moment at which Coventry could have made his opinions on vivisection known, he focuses instead on the ­human ele­ment. Coventry clearly takes more delight in comically flaying a scientist than literally flaying a lapdog. What complicates the function of Pompey as an agent of Coventry’s satire are the two following points: Coventry does not just have Pompey observe cruelty, he has him experience it, and Pompey dies at the end of the novel. Pompey’s suffering and death reveal problematic aspects of society in the same way that scientists use live dissections to reveal biological functions. Both actions—­writing and dissecting—­can be ascribed to scientists and the narrator, alike. ­These actions teach something, reveal something, but ­these sources of revelation require some form of sacrifice. The attitude ­toward animals in the eigh­ teenth ­century, especially the place of animals in scientific study, illustrates the way in which Pompey functions as an apparatus that distracts male social interactions. To distract a modern man—­a necessary participant in society, outside of the

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1650–1850 domestic sphere as well as in it—­could stall a nation’s development. Early Enlightenment authors viewed animal dissections in the same way Cavendish viewed the microscope, as material for satire, and authors did not concern themselves with the question of ­whether or not the animal suffered any more than an air pump.48 In this way, the animal ­under the knife becomes the apparatus a scientist uses to learn about biology. Additionally, scientists could receive the same amount of derision as the frivolous h ­ ouse­wives. Authors “warned in all seriousness that ­those who spend all their time in studying the anatomy of minute and low animals would become alienated from the world of h ­ uman affairs.” 49 Even when authors began to consider the way in which dissections affected the animal, the critique still reflected back on the scientist’s character. A scientist who was cruel to animals could easily, according to authors such as Shadwell, “extend their experimentation to helpless h ­ uman beings.”50 ­Here we see a transition in the role of the male scientist. First, animals and experiments distract him; second, cruelty exhibited in t­ hose experiments reflected poorly upon the scientist. It was bad to be distracted but even worse to be cruel and distracted. ­Because “kindness to animals had become fully incorporated in to the moral ideals of British writers,” Coventry manipulates ­these ideas about the animal, the apparatus, and the anxiety surrounding the way in which men treat animals in order to create a layered critique of scientific men.51 He shows that scientific men are not only foolish and distracted but also inclined to cruelty. In the vivisection scene previously mentioned, Coventry describes the young physician as being well dressed for the occasion, but with “a supplemental, and superfluous knowledge of his art.”52 While Coventry does note that it would be terrible if the experiment happened to the living body of Pompey, he clearly takes more issue with the priorities of physicians over the treatment of his hero.53 He spends five paragraphs discussing the physician’s vanity and vari­ous habits and only one discussing the tragedy of the scientific sacrifice of dogs.54 The way in which the narrator and Coventry treat Pompey indicates that the ­little dog is less of a beloved pet and more of an apparatus, a scientific-­turned-­literary tool. Of course, not ­every character views Pompey as a scientific tool. As previously mentioned, Pompey’s beauty and status as a pet give him access to guarded spaces, especially ­women’s guarded spaces. It is this access into t­ hose guarded, female spaces that sparks anxiety about ­women, sexuality, the microscope, and the lapdog ­because ­these spaces are largely un­regu­la­ted by men. Armintor concludes that the anxiety surrounding female use of the microscope stems from a fear of misuse, of w ­ omen using microscopes as dildos, thereby symbolically castrating men of science and disregarding men of

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society.55 Lapdogs served the same purpose as the apparatus in distracting female attention inappropriately, that is, in conflict with dominant ideas of ­human relationships. Brown agrees with this sentiment, claiming “that companion animals fill an empty space of lost h ­ uman intimacy for the modern bourgeoisie, and that they are a crucial antidote to alienation and commodification” felt at the time.56 The corresponding anx­i­eties stemming from apparatuses, in general, and microscopes and lapdogs, specifically, make Pompey’s presence triply threatening. ­There are several moments in the text when Pompey’s presence delights the ladies to the point of male abandonment or, at the very least, heightens the disagreements between married partners, which can all be seen in the example of Lady Tempest, a widowed dog lover who sustains a steady stream of admirers. Her now-­dead husband previously got rid of her dogs, prompting her to develop an obsession: “But from the moment that her angry husband sacrificed one of them to his resentment, she grew more passionately fond of them than ever, and now constantly kept six or eight of vari­ous kinds in her ­house.”57 Lady Tempest also wishes that Pompey had a soul, so that he could accompany her to heaven, instead of her husband or ­family: “ ‘My dear ­little creature,’ said Lady Tempest, catching him up in her arms, ‘­will you go to heaven along with me? I s­ hall be vastly glad of your com­pany, Pompey, if you ­will.’—­From this hint both their ladyships had many bright sallies, till Lady Sophister, flushed.”58 In addition to her desire to possess the “dear l­ittle creature” for all of eternity, Lady Tempest created a buffer between herself and her late husband with several dogs. “She chose rather to divert h ­ erself with a l­ittle favourite dog, than to lose her time in conversing with her husband.”59 Ironically, while she refuses to “lose” any time with her husband, her husband does not waste any time killing off her dogs.60 What is being observed in this scene is a character on the edge—­that is to say, one who invites the imagination of a transgression without giving confirmation of guilt or innocence—­which heightens the comedy of the scene as well as the anxiety. Her name is “Lady Tempest,” ­after all. For another series of “observations,” Coventry plays with the idea of Pompey becoming a visual guide for a blind beggar in addition to being a manner of seeing for the narrator and the audience. This explores the vari­ous ways in which ­Pompey could be a productive apparatus. Without Pompey, the narrator could not transgress the bound­aries of society. Without Pompey, the beggar could not see anything. This moment creates a collision between Pompey as a dog and real guide—in the context of the narrative—­and Pompey as a meta­phorical lens and a fictional way of seeing—­for the audience and narrator. Both show ­things to their

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1650–1850 respective users. Pompey shows the beggar safe places to walk, but he cannot make the beggar see. Pompey is not a lens, but the narrator looks through him. In this way, the apparatus is not the same microscope or air pump that Cavendish and Coventry—to some extent—­disparage. Cavendish wants to be given an example of utility; she has yet to see one. Coventry wants an example of utility, so he creates one. This illustrates the ways in which Coventry, above all, embraces the concept of using a lens or apparatus to focus on t­hings that typically go unnoticed. Pompey becomes a productive apparatus by giving the beggar knowledge of his surroundings. “He presented him that day to a blind beggar of his acquaintance, who had lately lost his dog, and wanted a new guide to conduct him about the streets.” 61 Pompey is essentially entrusted with the safekeeping of the beggar, his new owner, instead of being entrusted to his owner as a pet that receives a person’s care. As previously mentioned, Pompey himself speaks out against this act before the reader becomes aware of the prob­lems that ­will arise from the transfer. “­Here our hero fell into the most desponding meditations. . . . ​Am I destined to lead about the dark footsteps of a blind, decrepid, unworthy beggar? O That a rope was fixed about my neck for a nobler purpose. . . . ​I, who have lived with lords and ladies.” 62 The apparatus feels himself beneath the task of actually being useful. A “nobler purpose” apparently stems from belonging to “lords and ladies” and not from helping a man see. The ­little gossipy apparatus does not wish to be of any use to anyone. Coventry’s description of the dead Pompey sharpens the connection between the operator’s investment in the apparatus and the narrator’s investment in Pompey. This moment solidifies the narrator’s position as a modest witness and critiques the audience’s view of the adored apparatus. As a modest witness, the narrator must not be swayed by his emotions or personal opinions. Therefore, it is only fitting that the death of Pompey be treated with the same purportedly objective distance and satirical tone. The narrator describes how Pompey eventually became an assemblage of broken parts. “His eyes grew dim, his limbs failed him, his teeth dropped out of his head; and at length, a phthisick came very seasonably to relieve him from the pains and calamites of long life.” 63 The narrator, a witness, has no further use for a broken lens but to describe it as a final point of study. Coventry’s tone ­toward the so-­called hero of the novel reveals to his audience that the l­ittle dog and the t­ hings the narrator observes through him are not practical or useful beyond the stories they tell an audience. What is useful for Coventry about this lens is not to tell the dog’s story or even the story of the treatment of animals and apparatuses, but to use the observations made by the modest

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­ itness/narrator to ridicule and cast judgment upon the foolish actions of Pompey’s w many and varied o ­ wners. Coventry’s Pompey the L­ ittle critiques scientific endeavors that do not produce useful knowledge while si­mul­ta­neously illustrating the ways in which scientific techniques could become useful when applied in lit­er­a­ture. ­Little Pompey, as a lapdog and apparatus, becomes the focalizer for several junctures of Enlightenment anx­i­eties, such as female sexuality, the disruption of the marriage plot, and the fluidity of social bound­aries. What makes Pompey ultimately useful is the narrator’s employment of him as a lens or microscope. Once society and p ­ eople have been studied, they are not simply described but also are implicitly judged by the narrator’s satirical tone. Heavi­ly invested in a form of pedagogical satire that drives social change through observation and dissection, Coventry’s use of form and common scientific practices illustrates the ways in which even a lapdog should and can be useful for improving society.

Notes 1. Francis Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle; Or, the Adventures of a Lap-­ dog (London, 1820), 62–63, https://­books​.­google​.­com​/­books​/­about ​/ ­The​_ ­History​ _­of​_ ­Pompey​_­the​_ ­Little​.­html​?­id​=­lq0VAAAAYAAJ. 2. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 61. 3. See Mark Blackwell, “The It-­Narrative in Eighteenth-­Century ­England: Animals and Objects in Circulation,” Lit­er­a­ture Compass 1, no.  1 (2004): 1, doi: 10.1111​ /j.1741-4113.2004.00004.x. 4. See Mark Blackwell, The Secret Life of ­Things: Animals, Objects, and It-­Narratives in Eighteenth-­Century ­England (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 12–13, http://­site​.­ebrary​.­com​.­proxy​.­lib​.­f su​.­edu​/ ­lib​/­f sulibrary​/­reader​.­action​?­ppg​ =­2&docID​=­10537924&tm​=­1452902484273. 5. Blackwell, The Secret Life of ­Things, 10. 6. See Blackwell, The Secret Life of ­Things, 13. 7. See Liz Bellamy, “It-­Narrators and Circulation: Defining a Subgenre,” in Blackwell, The Secret Life of ­Things, 121. 8. See Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 153. 9. Bellamy, “It-­Narrators and Circulation,” 121. 10. Blackwell, The Secret Life of ­Things, 1. 11. Robert Hooke, Micrographia: or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bod­ ies (London, 1665), a. 12. Hooke, Micrographia, a. 13. Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer, and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-­ Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life: Including a Translation of

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1650–1850 Thomas Hobbes, Dialogus Physicus De Natura Aeris by Simon Schaffer (Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985), 55. 14. Shapin, Schaffer, and Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, 56–57. 15. Shapin, Schaffer, and Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, 59. 16. Shapin, Schaffer, and Hobbes, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, 59. 17. See Marjorie Nicolson, Science and Imagination (Ithaca, NY: ­Great Seal Books, 1956), 185. 18. See Nicolson, Science and Imagination, 186. 19. Aphra Behn, The Emperor of the Moon (London: British Library, 2010), https://­ sites​.­google​.­com​/­site​/­italiancommedia ​/­plays​-­and​-­scenari​/­the​-­emperor​-­of​-­the​ -­moon​/­act​-­1. 20. See Susanna Centlivre. The Basset-­Table (Canada: Delphine Lettau & Distributed Proofreaders Canada, 2014), http://­w ww​.­f adedpage​.­com​/­books​/­20141242 ​/­html​ .­php. 21. Deborah Armintor, “The Sexual Politics of Microscopy in Brobdingnag,” SEL: Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 1500–1900 47, no. 3 (2007): 626, 631, doi: 10.1353/ sel.2007.0022. 22. Armintor, “The Sexual Politics of Microscopy,” 624, 632–634. 23. Armintor, “The Sexual Politics of Microscopy,” 629. 24. Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels: Into Several Remote Nations of the World (Proj­ect Gutenberg eBook, 2009), chapter 8, http://­w ww​.­gutenberg​.­org​/ ­files​/­829​ /­829​-­h​/­829​-­h​.­htm. 25. See Armintor, “The Sexual Politics of Microscopy,” 630. 26. Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (Oxford: ­Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9. 27. Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 9. 28. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 1–4. 29. Laura Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: H ­ umans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 19–20. 30. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 1–4. 31. Hooke, Micrographia, 6. 32. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 132. 33. Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMale_Meets_Onco­​ Mouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1996), 23–24. 34. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 74. 35. Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes, 124. 36. Blackwell, “The It-­Narrative in Eighteenth-­Century ­England,” 1. 37. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 33. 38. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 98. 39. Nicolson, Science and Imagination, 185. 40. Jodi Wyett, “The Lap of Luxury: Lapdogs, Lit­er­a­ture, and Social Meaning in the ‘Long’ Eigh­teenth ­Century,” LIT: Lit­er­a­ture Interpretation Theory 10, no. 4 (1999): 277.

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41. See Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 113. 42. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 114–122. 43. Aileen Douglas, “Britannia’s Rule and the It-­Narrator,” Eighteenth-­Century Fic­ tion 6, no. 1 (1993): 67, doi: 10.1353/ecf.1993.0057. 44. Douglas, “Britannia’s Rule and the It-­Narrator,” 68. 45. Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes, 19–20. 46. Andreas-­Holger Maehle, “Literary Responses to Animal Experimentation in Seventeenth-­and Eighteenth-­Century Britain,” Medical History 34 (1990): 44, http://­ www​.­ncbi​.­nlm​.­nih​.­gov​/­pmc​/­articles​/­PMC1035999​/­. 47. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 153. 48. Maehle, “Literary Responses to Animal Experimentation,” 28–31. 49. Maehle, “Literary Responses to Animal Experimentation,” 32. 50. Maehle, “Literary Responses to Animal Experimentation,” 31. 51. Maehle, “Literary Responses to Animal Experimentation,” 36. 52. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 152. 53. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 152. 54. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 151–153. 55. Armintor, “The Sexual Politics of Microscopy,” 624–633. 56. Laura Brown, “The Lady, the Lapdog, and Literary Alterity,” Eigh­teenth ­Century 52, no. 1 (2011): 33, doi: 10.1353/ecy.2011.0001. 57. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 30. 58. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 41. 59. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 29. 60. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 29. 61. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 74. 62. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 74. 63. Coventry, The History of Pompey the L­ ittle, 167.

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DEUS SIVE NATURA THE MONISTIC LINK OF SPINOZA WITH CHINA YU LIU

E ver since the seventeenth c­ entury, Spinoza’s (1632–1677) ambiguous identifica-

tion of God with nature has been a mindboggling puzzle. The fact of the situation remaining the same in the early twenty-­first ­century can be seen in Steven Nadler’s recent categorization of his most famous monistic expression in Proposition 15 of the first part of Ethics as “exasperatingly unclear.”1 Close to his day, Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) at least sensed something daringly dif­fer­ent while denouncing his equation of God with nature as an illogical proposition or as “[the] most absurd and monstrous hypothesis.”2 In the twentieth ­century, Edwin Curley willy-­nilly removed that innovative and iconoclastic ingredient while reading his substance monism as denoting “not the ­whole of Nature, but only its active part, its primary ele­ments.”3 When characterizing Curley as crediting Spinoza “with good sense but not with boldness or originality,” 4 Jonathan Bennett was amply justified, but in his turn he made Spinoza no more bold or original with his depiction of the Dutch phi­ los­o­pher’s all-­inclusive impersonal divinity as based on the belief “that descriptions of God in the Judeo-­Christian tradition come closer to fitting the natu­ral world than to fitting anything ­else”5 or with his summary of Spinoza’s cosmology as an argument “which establishes mono­the­ism only if it establishes pantheism.” 6 As expressed in his Ethics, Spinoza’s worldview is as revolutionary as it is clear, but it can appear as such to us only if we trace his monistic idea to a much wider international conceptual framework, particularly the key Chinese philosophical and religious doctrine of humanity’s ­union with Heaven (tianren heyi), which was first introduced to Eu­rope in the early seventeenth ­century.

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The Monistic Idea of Spinoza “What­ever is, is in God,” so said Spinoza in Proposition 15 of the first part of Eth­ ics, “and nothing can be or be conceived without God.”7 What he said ­here both positively and negatively merely paraphrases what he already enunciated in Proposition 14. “Except God,” so he pronounced t­ here, “no substance can be or be conceived.”8 As the culmination of a geometrically deduced logical argument, ­these two propositions resulted naturally from the meticulously laid-­out prior propositions and their accompanying explanations and clarifications. At the start of his magnum opus, Spinoza already prepared for the clear articulation of his cosmology with definitions and axioms about such concepts as causality, identity, variation, and implications. So noticeably dif­fer­ent from the distinction of an anthropomorphic deity from all other beings in the religious tradition of Judeo-­Christianity and from the similar division of an a priori super­natural creator from all other a posteriori created objects in the philosophical tradition of Eu­rope from Descartes (1596–1650) all the way back to Aristotle (384 B.C.–322 B.C.), Spinoza’s provocative mingling of God with nature is obviously the most defining feature of his metaphysics, but it was not formulated only ­toward the end of his life. At least three years before he was known to have almost completed the first draft of his masterpiece, Spinoza already wrote in 1662 to Henry Oldenburg (1619– 1677), the German-­born first secretary and chief foreign correspondent of the British Royal Society, that he did not separate God from nature as every­one known to him had done.9 In the same letter, he mentioned that he had written a short work devoted to the question of “how t­ hings have begun to be, and by what connection they depend on the first cause” and that he was afraid “that the theologians of our time may be offended.”10 This short work is often thought ­today to be the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, which was published together with Eth­ ics in 1677 ­after Spinoza’s death,11 but being mostly about the nature of philosophical thinking or “the true Method” of seeking truth,12 it could hardly fill the bill of something “which might somewhat offend the preachers.”13 More befitting Spinoza’s description and apprehension seems to be A Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-­Being, which as “a copy of a copy” of a lost Spinoza manuscript was published only in the nineteenth ­century14 but which is strongly evocative of Eth­ ics in general and of the monistic claim of Proposition 15 in par­tic­u­lar with the statement “that outside God, ­there is nothing, and that he is an immanent cause.”15 The compositional history of the Short Treatise has been dated to about the ­middle

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1650–1850 of 1660. Spinoza is believed to have written it then while responding to the repeated requests of his friends for a concise exposition of his metaphysics and ethics; he subsequently revised it but eventually de­cided against publishing it. In hindsight the beginning of Spinoza’s bold equation of God with every­thing in nature could have coincided with the very time when he came into his own as a phi­los­o­pher. Born on November 24, 1632, in Amsterdam to a Sephardic Jewish ­family, Spinoza was brought up in the traditional Jewish way and was educated in the Keter Torah yeshiva of the Talmud Torah congregation, but on July 27, 1656, he was publicly expelled from his synagogue. The cherem or excommunication proclamation condemned him for his “evil opinions and acts” and “the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught.”16 Though not specific, the denunciation provided vital illumination on what he wrote ­toward the end of the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-­Being about his desire “to taste ­union with God, produce true ideas in myself, and make all t­hese ­things known to my fellow men also.”17 In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, he also wrote about “the highest good” or “the knowledge of the ­union that the mind has with the ­whole of Nature” and about his wish “to acquire such a nature, and to strive that many acquire it with me.”18 Spinoza’s Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect has been read as revealing the influence of Stoicism or mysticism.19 This reading is plausible, ­because Spinoza began the work with an autobiographical account of his philosophical journey, which included the renunciation of wealth, honor, and sensual plea­sure and the turn of the mind from the perishable and finite to the eternal and infinite, all stock in trade said long ago by Epictetus (55–135), Seneca (4 B.C.—­A .D. 65), or Marcus Aurelius (121–180). Spinoza’s notion of the highest good as “the ­union that the mind has with the ­whole of Nature”20 is especially reminiscent of what Marcus Aurelius said about the universe as “an organism that is a unity” or “a unity made up of multiplicity: God is one, pervading all ­things; all being is one, all law is one . . . ​ and all truth is one.”21 Written before 1662, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect could have been as much a part of the work Spinoza referred to in 1662 as the Short Treatise. However, if the sought-­after ­union with God in his highest good conveys no more than a Stoic idea or a similar claim of Jewish mysticism about Ein Sof or an impersonal deity bound up with nature for being its creator and sustainer, it is difficult to see why Spinoza could have written that he did not separate God from nature as every­one known to him had done or that he felt sure that the preachers would take offense.

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The Revolutionary Import of the Monistic Idea Spinoza’s identification of God with nature is in real­ity dif­fer­ent from the Stoic idea of an organic universe centered on God or the Jewish mystic notion of Ein Sof ­because the latter two envision a u ­ nion of nature with God only in terms of effects being necessarily subsumed in a prior cause. Nature can thus be thought of as being inextricably linked with God, but not vice versa, ­because the very notion of a primordial original cause includes the idea of its existing on its own and having no dependent connections with its subsequent effects. Via Nicholas of Cusa (1401– 1464) and Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) of the Florentine Acad­emy, a Neo-­Platonist variation of the Stoic worldview was promoted in the sixteenth ­century by ­Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) who, excited by the new astronomy of Copernicus (1473–1543), depicted the universe as a reflection of God in being “the one which is itself the all” and which “cannot be comprehended and is therefore indeterminable and not limitable, and hence infinite and limitless, and consequently immobile.”22 Since Spinoza presented nature in the Short Treatise as “completely infinite and supremely perfect,”23 he has been read as being influenced at an early stage by Bruno. However, in this case, as in the case involving Stoicism or Jewish mysticism, Spinoza needs to be seen as radically and consciously dif­fer­ent ­because he never lists Bruno as his pre­de­ces­sor and his idea of a ­union with God is also fundamentally dif­fer­ent from the mock-­heroic ideal of Bruno, which embodied what Ernst Cassirer aptly calls the revived “Pelagian spirit,” “the basic Faustian attitude of the Re­nais­sance,” or “[the] striving for the infinite, the inability to stop at any ­thing given or attained.”24 The kind of causality in Spinoza’s distinctively dif­fer­ent identification of God with nature, as he makes it clear in the Short Treatise, is “the immanent cause, which does not in any way produce something outside itself.”25 “God,” as he similarly proclaimed in Proposition 18 of the first part of Ethics, “is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all t­ hings.”26 In the late seventeenth c­ entury this unmistakable rejection of the usual externally conceived causality or transitive cause in relation to the idea of divinity was astutely grasped by Bayle as the linchpin of Spinoza’s metaphysics. Prior to Spinoza the conventional frame of religious reference, which separated divinity from humanity and every­thing ­else in nature, also thereby distinguished theism from atheism. Since that mindset permitted only two choices, Spinoza’s repudiation of tradition led Bayle to brand him necessarily

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1650–1850 as “a systematical Atheist.”27 Eu­ro­pean theistic thinking before Spinoza took for granted the dependence of ethics on theism. Since Spinoza was reported by all who knew him as “a sociable, affable, honest, friendly, and a good moral man,” Bayle evidently had a field day with the supposedly atheistic implications of his monistic claim and with the con­ve­nient opportunity of sideswiping ­those who “live an ill life, though they be fully persuaded of the truth of the Gospel.”28 “[All] the phrases made use of to express what men do one against another, have no other true sense but this,” as Bayle emphatically spelled out the supposedly illogical implication of Spinoza’s substance monism, “GOD hates himself; he asks favours of himself, and refuses them to himself; he persecutes himself, kills himself, eats himself, calumniates himself, executes himself, &c.”29 “This would be less incomprehensible,” Bayle went on to say, “if Spinoza had represented God as a collection of many distinct parts; but he reduces him to the most perfect simplicity, to an unity of substance, to indivisibility.”30 In the twentieth c­ entury Edwin Curley was right to point out that the kind of logical confusions which Bayle saw “would not be acceptable to Spinoza.”31 Spinoza obviously needs to be read ­differently, but Curley did not see this as a loud call for a radically dif­fer­ent conceptual framework that would make sense of Spinoza’s unusual cosmology while recognizing his audacious challenge to the traditional paradigm of thinking. ­Preoccupied with neutralizing the objections of Bayle and with keeping intact the theoretical frame of reference that Bayle saw as being undermined, Curley defended Spinoza, but only at the cost of removing the most innovative and most iconoclastic ele­ment of his monism. The crucial concept that Curley seized upon in his alternative reading is the distinction between Natura naturans and Natura naturata, which Spinoza himself used not only explic­itly in Ethics and the Short Treatise but also implicitly in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect via the idea of a need to distinguish “the source and origin of Nature” or “the first ele­ments of the w ­ hole of Nature.”32 The palpable divisibility of nature into an early and active part and a ­later and passive part in the cosmological discussion of Spinoza made Curley feel licensed to dissect Spinoza’s substance monism. By regarding “the distinction between substance or its attributes, on the one hand, and modes, on the other, as marking a division within nature,”33 in par­tic­u­lar, he explained away all the logical contradictions that Bayle saw, but in the pro­cess he also changed the fundamental character of Spinoza’s cosmology. When questioning Curley’s causal interpretation, ­Jonathan Bennett was right to emphasize that “Spinoza identified God with the ­whole of real­ity.”34 However, in his portrayal of Spinoza as “a pantheist” or a

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crypto-­theist who “detoured to rescue something from the Judaeo-­Christian tradition,”35 Bennett was not only oblivious to the fact that god and nature ­were actually differentiable in Spinoza’s cosmological discussion but also amiss about the nature of Spinoza’s challenge to the usual theistic assumptions of Eu­ro­pean philosophy and religion. The key to Spinoza’s metaphysics is not ­whether god and nature are distinguishable or inseparably linked but how they are both differentiable and ultimately not differentiated. Had it been a case of two dif­fer­ent names for the same one ­thing, for instance, he would not have been able to set up any meaningful contrast between Natura naturans and Natura naturata or to depict the highest good as the u ­ nion of the h ­ uman mind with nature. Had the divisibility of nature into an early and active part and a l­ater and passive part or the distinction of the h ­ uman mind from nature been absolute, on the other hand, he would not have been able to talk about a ­union or identification of the one with the other. No ­matter how “inconsistent”36 Spinoza may appear in giving support to Curley or Bennett or both, the alleged textual inconsistencies are, in real­ity, as much as the supposed contradictions that Bayle saw, part and parcel of an intricate new metaphysics which took in stride the sequential or transitive causality of conventional Eu­ro­pean philosophy and religion while concurrently promoting a distinctively dif­fer­ent immanent or self-­generative causality, which has no role for an in­de­pen­dently existent anthropomorphic deity.

The Enigmatic Circumstances of the Monistic Idea Spinoza was a precocious and original thinker, but as W.N.A. Klever points out, “A philosophical genius cannot come from nowhere; ideas have their c­ auses, like other ­things, and need time for their development.”37 Among the influences on Spinoza, the earliest and the most enduring was doubtlessly that of Descartes, whose teaching he apparently came to know sometime ­after he ­stopped attending the Talmud Torah school of the Amsterdam Jewish community in 1646. Instead of g­ oing on to further studies of Jewish theology, which would have prepared him for the rabbinate, he took part in the import business of his f­ amily, first with his f­ ather and then with his younger ­brother. In the ensuing commercial activities he most likely came into contact with religious freethinkers, called Collegiants, who promoted the mathematically formulated new philosophy of Descartes. The geometric method that Spinoza employed in Ethics was not just a telltale sign of Descartes’s

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1650–1850 indelible and lasting impact but also a personal and public tribute to the French phi­los­o­pher. As early as the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, the inspiration of Descartes was already discernible in Spinoza’s passion for clear and distinct ideas. Even though the only work he published ­under his name in his lifetime was an exposition of Descartes’s philosophy, however, he had his friend Lodewijk Meyer (1629–1681) point out for him in the work’s preface that he in fact rejected many of Descartes’s doctrines “concerning which he holds a quite dif­fer­ent opinion.”38 Meyer did not spell it out, but Spinoza’s most impor­tant objection was Descartes’s dualistic understanding of God and nature. From the very beginning Spinoza could have had his qualms about Descartes, but to the French phi­los­o­pher he nevertheless opened himself. Descartes believed that he could “achieve full and certain knowledge of countless ­matters, both ­concerning God himself and other ­things whose nature is intellectual, and also concerning the w ­ hole of that corporeal nature which is the subject-­matter of pure 39 mathe­matics.” In hindsight, this belief as much explains Spinoza’s original attraction to the French phi­los­o­pher as helps to cast light on other influences in ­Spinoza’s youth. As one of the first-­generation students born in Holland and brought up as Jews rather than Marranos or forced Christian converts who kept Judaism in secret, Spinoza studied canonical works of Judaism and Jewish theological authors, such as Maimonides (1135–1204). By all accounts he was a star student, but the intimate knowledge of the Hebrew language and the Jewish scriptural canon led him to critique rather than accept the view of God in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions. In 1670 his criticism fi­nally came out anonymously in A Theologico-­Political Treatise. “[Determined] to examine the Bible afresh in a careful, impartial, and unfettered spirit, making no assumptions concerning it, and attributing to it no doctrines, which I do not find clearly therein set down,” 40 he evidently imitated Descartes in refusing to take on faith any unsupported and unproven suppositions, but Descartes’s idea of God, as A. Wolf bluntly points out, was “that entertained by any ordinary Christian and by many ­others,” 41 and that simply could not have inspired Spinoza’s heretical interpretation of the Judeo-­Christian scripture, including his contention about Moses being not the author of the Pentateuch. In the twelfth c­ entury, the authorship of Moses was already doubted by Aben Ezra (1089–1167), who was one of the most renowned Jewish writers in the medieval period. In the seventeenth c­ entury the same issue was raised by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676), Samuel Fisher (1605–1665), and ­others. Aben Ezra asked questions only through “dark hints,” as Spinoza put it.42

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In contrast, Hobbes openly proclaimed that “the five Books of Moses ­were written ­after his time, though how long ­after it be not so manifest.” 43 In the Theologico-­ Political Treatise, Spinoza praised Aben Ezra as “a man of enlightened intelligence, and no small learning, who was the first, so far as I know, to treat of this opinion.” 44 Even though he paid no comparable homage to any of his contemporaries, he clearly marked his indebtedness through his use of references within the relevant Mosaic text to the death of Moses, which Hobbes had already utilized to disprove the usual attribution of authorship. Far beyond the hermeneutical study of the Old Testament, Spinoza can also be seen as ­under the spell of the British phi­los­o­pher in his view of the right of nature as “co-­extensive with her power” 45 and in his largely pragmatic thinking about the relationship of religion with politics. His contention about the sovereign power as the only authority “for making any laws about religion which it thinks fit” and about every­one ­else as “bound to obey its behests on the subject,” 46 for instance, is plainly derived from Hobbes’s prior emphasis on the need “to reconcile our Obedience to God, with our Obedience to the Civil Soveraign; who is ­either Christian, or infidel.” 47 Just as he was indelibly influenced by Descartes in his methodological understanding of philosophy, so was Spinoza indisputably inspired by Aben Ezra, Thomas Hobbes, and o ­ thers in his thoughts about the Jewish and Christian Bible and about the connections of religion with politics. No m ­ atter how much he took over from ­others, however, he remained fundamentally dif­fer­ent from all of them, b ­ ecause, as Richard H. Popkin insightfully said in relation to his aim of secularizing the Bible as a historical document, “He had a radically dif­fer­ent metaphysics than even his most radical contemporaries, a metaphysics for a world without any super­natural dimension.”  4 8 Spinoza must have always felt this difference of him from o ­ thers. Even in his youth this consciousness could have helped him to withstand the rejection of the Amsterdam Jewish community so much better than Uriel da Costa (1585–1640) and Juan de Prado (1612–­?), who ­were the other two well-­known rebels of the same synagogue. Da Costa shot himself in 1640 while de Prado begged in effect in the late 1650s to have the excommunication order against him revoked. For Spinoza, the break with his synagogue necessitated the change from an importer of dried fruit to a lens grinder, but it was other­wise “not at all a tragic experience in his life.” 49 Given the strikingly unusual character of his metaphysics, it is obviously problematic to label him as a theist as Edwin Curley is inclined to do, or as a so-­called pantheist or crypto-­theist as Jonathan Bennett does, or as “an atheist” as one of his most recent biographers Steven Nadler chooses to ­designate him.50

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1650–1850 For any appreciation of Spinoza’s innovation and iconoclasm, what is needed is a radically dif­fer­ent way of looking at the historical context so that it is not “stipulative and unduly restricts the extent to which alternative theories of deity can be formulated.”51 Close to his day, Bayle already took the first step in this direction. Very early in his lengthy entry about Spinoza in The Dictionary Historical and Critical, he described the ground of Spinoza’s doctrine as “the same with that of several antient and modern Phi­ los­ o­ phers, both in Eu­ rope and the Eastern 52 ­countries.” For the Western antecedents, he lumped together Muslim thinkers, ­Christian heretics, and pagan phi­los­o­phers, but he singled out Stoicism for empha­ sis. “The doctrine of the soul of the world, which was so common among the Antients, and made the principal part of the system of the Stoics,” as he said, “is, at the bottom, the same with that of Spinoza.”53 Recent annotations of ­Spinoza’s works have followed Bayle’s lead in noting similarities between the cosmologies of Spinoza and Stoicism, but no recent scholar has seriously considered Spinoza’s monism as an offshoot of Stoic cosmology. This is b ­ ecause the Stoic identification of nature with God meant no more than effects being subsumable in a prior cause, and back in the late seventeenth ­century Bayle had already implicitly marked Spinoza as dif­fer­ent in this regard from Stoicism by confining his accusation of illogical thinking to the former. In addition to Eu­rope, Bayle brought Asia into his discussion. For the Eastern antecedents of Spinoza, he invoked in par­tic­u­lar two philosophical and religious traditions of China. First, in Note B, he brought up Buddhist cosmology, which via second­hand reports he described as belief in “a certain vacuum and real nothingness.”54 “They say,” so Bayle cited his Jesuit source to explain the view, “our first parents issued from that vacuum, and returned into it when they died, and that it is so with all men, who are resolved into that princi­ple by death; that men, all the ele­ments, and all creatures, make part of that vacuum; and that therefore ­there is but one and the same substance, which is dif­fer­ent in all par­tic­u­lar beings only by figures and qualities, or an internal configuration, much like w ­ ater, which is always essentially ­water, ­whether it has the form of snow, hail, rain, or ice.”55 ­Later, in Note X, Bayle dwelt on “[a] hypothesis, that is very much in vogue among the Chinese.”56 ­After depicting it as supposing “a ­great number of souls in the universe distinct one from another, each of which exists by itself, and acts by an inward and essential princi­ple,” Bayle reported it as acknowledging “an infinity of substances co-­ eternal, and in­de­pen­dent one of another as to existence.”57 Bayle questioned the accuracy of the reported acknowl­edgment as much as the supposedly quietist implication of Chinese Buddhism, but he was eventually as critical of the two

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reported ideas as he was of Spinoza. His attitude then could have discouraged any recent scholar from looking closely into what Yuen-­ting Lai calls “the linkage of Spinoza and China,”58 but can this linkage nevertheless provide the much needed wider international conceptual framework for Spinoza’s metaphysical innovation and iconoclasm?

The Chinese Idea of Monism In his discussion, Bayle characterized the second Chinese philosophical and religious tradition as “the Atheism so generally spread among the Chinese,”59 and he went out of his way to differentiate it from Buddhism. Together, ­these two explanatory details direct attention to the rich but complex sources Bayle used for his information about China. In the early modern period, the first Eu­ro­pe­ans who penetrated into the far away ­Middle Kingdom ­were missionaries from the Society of Jesus. One of the very first two who made the historic entry into that vast country in 1583 was Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who ­today is celebrated as the founder of the Jesuit China mission. The dominant Chinese philosophical and religious tradition was Confucianism, which furthermore formed the basis of a three-­tiered examination system for the se­lection of all government officials. To win official ac­cep­tance or at least tolerance, Ricci simply had to ally himself with Confucianism, but to advance his apostolic agenda, he also had to si­mul­ta­neously confront and repudiate the official Chinese ideology. Out of the contradictory needs of the situation evolved eventually his distinct strategy of evangelism, which had two components: ac­cep­tance of ancient Confucianism as prefiguring Christian mono­the­ ism and rejection of Neo-­Confucianism as corrupted by Buddhism. “The doctrine most commonly held among the Literati at pre­sent,” as Ricci said about Neo-­Confucianism and its corruption by Buddhism in the chronicle of the Jesuit China mission, which he composed in Italian ­toward the end of his life in Beijing and which his Jesuit confrere Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628) translated into Latin and published in Eu­rope for him in 1615, “seems to me to have been taken from the sect of idols, as promulgated about five centuries ago.” 60 “This doctrine,” he explained, “asserts that the entire universe is composed of a common substance; that the creator of the universe is one in a continuous body, a corpus continuum as it ­were, together with heaven and earth, men and beasts, trees and plants, and the four ele­ments, and that each individual ­thing is a member of this body.” 61 “From this unity of substance,” he went on to point out, “they reason to

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1650–1850 the love that should unite the individual constituents and also that man can become like unto God ­because he is created one with God.” 62 “This philosophy,” he concluded, “we endeavor to refute, not only from reason but also from the testimony of their own ancient phi­los­o­phers to whom they are indebted for all the philosophy they have.” 63 In practice, Ricci presented the small group of Jesuit missionaries as what Lionel Jensen calls “a Chinese fundamentalist sect that preached a theology of Christian/Confucian syncretism” 64 so that they could denounce Confucianism while claiming to defend its ancient orthodoxy from the nefarious influence of Buddhism and Daoism. While Ricci was still alive, his division of Confucianism into a pristine early part of primitive theism and a degenerate l­ater part of atheism already proved to be too subtle for some of his own Jesuit confreres. Soon ­after his death in 1610, his hand-­picked successor as the leader of the Jesuit China mission, Niccolò ­Longobardo (1559–1654), launched an internal debate. In his argument against Ricci, Longobardo drew on Jesuit missionaries in Japan (who did not speak ­Chinese but read the Chinese script and knew Chinese philosophy and religion), who confirmed for him that all three main schools of Chinese thought “are totally atheistic” and “they believe the universe to contain nothing but one substance.” 65 Taken advantage of by the enemies of the Jesuit order within the Catholic Church, the disputes of Ricci’s supporters and detractors ­behind closed doors exploded in time into the so-­called terms and rites controversies of the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries.66 Bayle obviously kept abreast of all the ins and outs of the controversy involving the Chinese idea of monism. When he labeled the Chinese belief about an inward and essential princi­ple as atheistic and as “[a] hypothesis, that is very much in vogue among the Chinese,” 67 he evidently echoed the official Jesuit view of Neo-­Confucianism, which could be traced all the way back to Ricci. But when he painstakingly separated it from the cosmological view of Chinese Buddhism, he apparently tapped into the anti-­Ricci view. For the purpose of both befriending and combatting the dominant ideology of China, Ricci ­limited the commonly held idea of the creator being united with every­thing in a common substance or a continuous body to Neo-­Confucianism while ascribing its origin to Buddhism. Since he actually learned about Confucianism from his Chinese friends, he in real­ity knew in his mind that the Chinese concept of tianren heyi (unity of Heaven and humanity) was a defining feature of the entire Confucian tradition. “If one word could characterize the entire history of Chinese philosophy,” as the noted Chinese American scholar Wing-­Tsit Chan says with special emphasis, “that word would be humanism—­not the humanism that

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denies or slights a Supreme Power, but one that professes the unity of man and Heaven.” 68 Given what Ricci knew about the early origin and central position of this monistic doctrine in Chinese philosophy, it is not surprising that in his most impor­tant apostolic work written in Chinese, Tianzhu Shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven), he mobilized most of his conceptual and rhetorical power to confront it. Ricci could not have intended it, but in addition to being instructive about his real knowledge of Confucianism, this treatise is most illuminating for any study of Spinoza’s substance monism. Structured in the form of a dialogue between a Western savant and a Chinese scholar and based on real conversations between Ricci and his Chinese friends, Tianzhu Shiyi contained precious l­ittle about the story of Christ or any related super­natural revelation of the Christian faith but a g­ reat deal about the Aristotelian idea of a substance that was eternal, unchanging, and separate from all other ­things. In variations, Ricci repeated Aristotle’s notion of “something which moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and actuality” 69 or Thomas Aquinas’s (1225–1274) scholastic adaptation of it in terms of “some first mover who is not moved by anyone and [who] every­one understands as God.”70 “At the heart of Confucianism,” as Julia Ching says while explaining Ricci’s conceptual and rhetorical maneuver, “stands the teaching of the oneness of Heaven and Man.” 71 “At the heart of Chris­tian­ity,” as she goes on to remark, “stands Jesus Christ, regarded as the Savior, in whom God has revealed Himself to Man in a unique way.”72 ­“Ricci’s chief task, as evidenced by his Chinese writings,” as John D. Young also tells us, “was to convey to the Chinese that the world was created through a deliberate action, and then externally controlled, by a divine being called Deus in the West.”73 Aside from enlisting the help of scholasticism or Christianized Aristotelianism to push the usual claim of Eu­ro­pean theism, Ricci also faced the Chinese monistic idea of tianren heyi directly. In his annals of the Jesuit China mission, Ricci described the Chinese monistic idea as confined to Neo-­Confucianism, but in Tianzhu Shiyi he readily admitted a dif­fer­ent knowledge. “Our scholars in ancient China w ­ ere clearly aware,” he pointed out, “that the natures of heaven, earth, and all t­ hings are good and they all held to the g­ reat and unchangeable princi­ple that ­whether ­things are large or small, their basic natures are organically one.”74 “It is pos­si­ble, therefore, to say,” Ricci’s Chinese scholar continued, “that the Lord of Heaven who is the Sovereign on High is within all t­ hings, and that he forms a unity with all ­things.”75 In his response to the Chinese idea of tianren heyi (unity of Heaven and humanity) or wanwu yiti (ten thousand ­things in one body), Ricci is retrospectively most interestingly reminiscent

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1650–1850 of Bayle in his reaction to Spinoza’s notion of monistic substance. Just as Bayle invoked the dualistic requirement of Eu­ro­pean theism to construe Spinoza’s metaphysics as illogically making God “the agent and patient, the cause and subject of all the crimes and miseries of men,”76 so Ricci used the same Eu­ro­pean paradigm of thinking to drive home his condemnation of Chinese cosmology as logically confusing or contradictory. “If the Lord of Heaven is ­every kind of ­thing,” as the Western savant who was Ricci’s alter ego asked rhetorically in Tianzhu Shiyi, “does this mean that the Lord of Heaven sets out to harm Himself and refrains from protecting himself?”77 Ricci actually knew the palpable differentiability of divinity and humanity in the Chinese notion of tianren heyi. “Although it is said that heaven, earth, and all phenomena share one material energy,” as he had his Chinese scholar explain in Tianzhu Shiyi, “the forms and images of ­things are, nevertheless, dif­f er­ent, and for this reason they are divided into a variety of categories.”78 Taught Confucianism by his well-­educated Chinese friends who w ­ ere represented collectively by the Chinese scholar in Tianzhu Shiyi, Ricci also knew that both early and late the metaphysics of Confucianism differed from Christian revelation in conceiving life as a self-­adjusted and self-­generative organic pro­cess. Inherent in the ever-­shifting variation, contrast, and equilibrium of the yin-­yang material energy and in the tianren heyi or the unity of heaven and humanity, life was synonomous with the potential or ­actual ability of ­humans to “assist the transforming and nourishing powers of Heaven and Earth” and “with Heaven and Earth form a ternion,” as it is vividly described in The Doctrine of the Mean.79 As one of the four canonical works of the Confucian tradition and its most religious and mystical expression, The Doc­ trine of the Mean attracted continuous attention from Buddhist and Daoist scholars between the fourth and eleventh centuries, a fact which, as Wing-­Tsit Chan rightly points out, “formed a bridge between Taoism and Buddhism and the Confucian school and in this way prepared for the influence of Buddhism and Taoism on Confucianism, thus ushering in the Neo-­Confucian movement.”80 Unlike Ricci, Bayle was not initiated by anyone in his reading of monism, but he knew the Chinese idea of Heaven and humanity being united in one substance or acting by one inward and essential princi­ple, and he saw its heuristic value for Spinoza. If the Chinese tianren heyi is not logically contradictory, as Ricci construed it, but is coherent about life as an ever ongoing, self-­regulated pro­cess of creativity, Spinoza’s ambiguous identification of God and nature could similarly make sense as the championship of the same organic worldview. In The Doctrine of the Mean, Confucius (551 B.C.–479 B.C.) was celebrated by his grand­son Zisi (481 B.C.–402 B.C.)

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as epitomizing the ­union of humanity with Heaven. Confucius can be heard as describing that sense of ­union when he says, “At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.”81 In addition to categorizing the greatest happiness or blessedness as the knowledge of God “by which we are led to do only ­those ­things which love and morality advise,” Spinoza envisioned the wise man in Ethics as “hardly troubled in spirit, but being, by a certain eternal necessity, conscious of himself, and of God, and of ­things.”82 What he said ­here is what he already said in the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-­Being about freedom as “a firm existence, which our intellect acquires through immediate ­union with God, so that it can produce ideas in itself, and outside itself effects agreeing well with its nature, without its effects being subjected, however, to any external ­causes by which they can be changed or transformed.”83 With Confucius, as with Spinoza, the highest ideal is apparently the same as what Kant (1724–1804), in the long wake of Spinoza, calls “­free conformity to law”84 or a satisfying relationship of spontaneous commensurability between ­human actions and divine laws. Conditioned by the dualistic paradigm of Western logic, Ricci condemned the Chinese idea of tianren heyi as atheistic; if only as a foil for the protection of himself, Bayle similarly repudiated Spinoza’s notion of monistic substance. In real­ity the usual Occidental contrast of theism and atheism makes ­little sense in this situation. “By analogy,” as Julia Ching says about the notion of the G ­ reat Ultimate (Taiji), which was the Neo-­Confucian equivalent of Heaven (Tian), “we might say that the G ­ reat Ultimate is like God or necessary being in Thomas Aquinas’s sys­ thers, while all tem, that which subsists, in and of itself, without depending on o 85 ­others exist, in and of the ­Great Ultimate.” “But the analogy is imperfect,” as Ching goes on to point out, “as the ­Great Ultimate is, on another level, immanent as well as transcendent.”86 Just as it is at once above and pre­sent in all ­things, so it is also above motion and rest and yet involved at the same time in the cyclical pro­cess of cosmic movement and equilibrium. No ­matter how divinity can be differentiated from humanity and the former can even be thought of as being prior and having a causal relationship with the latter, they are at the same time always bound up with one another and any idea of the former as a transitive cause, for the latter is merely hy­po­thet­i­cal and never defines their relationship. As much as Spinoza’s worldview, Chinese cosmology is dif­fer­ent from both Eu­ro­pean theism and Eu­ro­ pean atheism ­because it accepts no anthropomorphic deity or any in­de­pen­dently existent external cause nor envisions life as “the spontaneous and casual collision and the multifarious, accidental, random and purposeless congregation and coalescence of atoms.”87

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1650–1850 Fascinated with similarities between China and Spinoza, Bayle invoked the former to help shed light on the latter. Reminiscent of what he did in the late seventeenth ­century, recent scholars of the Jesuit China mission have conversely used descriptive terms in the usual Spinoza discussion, such as “monistic”88 or “monism,”89 to help explain the Chinese idea of tianren heyi. No recent specialists on Spinoza have followed Bayle’s lead in seeing China as a heuristic light on Spinoza, but the currently prevailing interpretations of Spinoza as a theist (Curley), or a pantheist/crypto-­monotheist (Bennett), or an atheist (Nadler) are already obviously problematic in dif­fer­ent ways. The Chinese notion of humanity’s u ­ nion with Heaven was first introduced to Eu­rope in 1615 by Ricci via Trigault and soon became widely known through five Latin editions and translations into several Eu­ro­pean languages. Since Spinoza could not have avoided being exposed to this information, which was so clearly in line with his innovative and iconoclastic mindset, ­shouldn’t this exposure and pos­si­ble influence be recognized as the much needed wider international conceptual framework for the appreciation of his metaphysical innovation and iconoclasm?

The Pos­si­ble Link of Spinoza with China Nothing less than Ricci’s description of tianren heyi in the chronicle of the Jesuit China mission was actually connected in 1939 with the development of Spinoza’s metaphysics by Lewis A. Maverick, who for his argument drew attention in par­tic­ u­lar to a Dutch book published in Amsterdam in 1649 by Bernhard Varen and containing a section about Chinese religion with the information taken from Trigault. Even if Spinoza never found his way to this par­tic­u­lar section in Varen, Maverick contended, “he may have met it in one of the editions or translations of Trigault,” and “the youthful Spinoza may have received a significant influence, even an inspiration.”90 Maverick’s modest proposal was roundly rejected in 1985 by Yuen-­ting Lai, who merely mentioned his contention in a footnote and quickly dismissed it as “weak.”91 “To the question of ­whether Spinoza was influenced by Chinese thought,” Lai said at the beginning of that footnote, “A negative answer must be given.”92 Lai was categorical about his conviction, but he never explained how Spinoza could have been unaware of the Chinese monistic idea or how he could have in­de­pen­dently come up with a worldview that resembled so much the Chinese cosmology.

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Recent scholars of Eu­ro­pean intellectual history have more readily linked ­Spinoza with China in what Jonathan Israel calls the Radical Enlightenment, which “rejected all compromise with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely.”93 In an e­ arlier generation, Ernst Cassirer already pointed out how “the p ­ eoples of the Orient especially attract attention and demand equal recognition for their religious convictions,”94 but recent scholars have more firmly connected China with the early modern onset of a perfect storm for the Ancien Régime in Eu­rope. “In the early stage of the Radical Enlightenment,” as Thijs Westeijn puts it, “reports about the Far East w ­ ere deployed as arguments in controversies about historical, po­liti­cal, and ideological issues.”95 In the late 1660s, freethinkers who ­were also Sinophiles, such as Isaac Vossius (1618–89) and seigneur de Saint-­ Évremond (1613–1703), ­were known to be acquainted with Spinoza. In their effort to undermine the foundation of the religion that the Jesuits wished to transplant to the Far East, they deftly used information about China which Jesuit missionaries provided and praised, such as the antiquity of the Chinese civilization, the Chinese emperor as a philosophical king, and notable Chinese scholar-­officials being ethical but atheistic and which even in the early seventeenth c­ entury already made China “the most admirable this day in the world.”96 Spinoza never said ­whether he was inspired by the Chinese idea of monism, but he was known to be well “aware of the character of the age in which we live” and of the need “to be very careful about communicating ­these ­things to o ­ thers.”97 Given how Bayle, a standard-­ bearer of the Radical Enlightenment, l­ater denounced his metaphysics as much as Ricci condemned Chinese cosmology, it is not surprising in hindsight that Spinoza was discreet about this situation. No one has ever labeled Spinoza a Sinophile, but rare references to the Far East in his writings reveal a well-­informed familiarity and a quietly admiring attitude. While discussing the relationship of faith and politics in A Theologico-­Political Treatise, for instance, he mentioned not only the need for the sovereign power alone to make laws about religion but also instances of Christian rulers ordering their overseas subjects “not to assume more freedom, e­ ither in t­ hings secular or religious, than is set down in the treaty, or allowed by the foreign government.”98 The theoretical point ­here is, as mentioned before, derived from Hobbes, but the ­actual example is about Dutch traders in Japan. The Dutch first reached Japan two years before the founding of the Dutch East India Com­pany in 1602. By differentiating themselves from the Portuguese, who w ­ ere Catholics and who had arrived in the country long before the Dutch arrived, and by aiding the Japa­nese in their

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1650–1850 suppression of Catholicism in 1638, they became the only Eu­ro­pe­ans allowed to trade with Japan ­after 1639, being confined ­after 1641 to the specially made artificial island of Deshima in the port of Nagasaki. They w ­ ere never proud to publicize it, but in compliance with Japa­nese demand, they held no religious ser­vices on the island or aboard ship. In the same Theologico-­Political Treatise, Spinoza brought China into his discussion. The context of this reference is the possibility of the Jewish ­p eople to revive their nation and empire, and the example Spinoza cited is the Chinese. “They, too,” he said, “have some distinctive mark on their heads which they most scrupulously observe, and by which they keep themselves apart from every­one ­else, and have thus kept themselves during so many thousand years that they far surpass all other nations in antiquity.”99 “They have not always retained empire,” he went on to point out, “but they have recovered it when lost, and doubtless w ­ ill do so again a­ fter the spirit of the Tartars becomes relaxed through the luxury of riches and pride.”100 The immediate historical event he alluded to is of course the Manchu conquest of China in 1644, but the allusion also covers the e­ arlier Mongo conquest of the country in 1279 and the ­later revival of the ethnically Chinese rule in 1368. All t­ hese events ­were narrated in De Bello Tartaico Historia, published in 1654 by Martino Martini (1614–1661), a Jesuit missionary to China who lived through the dynastic change from the Ming (1368–1644) to the Qing (1644–1911). Repeatedly published and translated, Martini’s account apparently also served as the informational source for the history of China included in An Embassy from the East-­India Com­pany of the United Provinces to the G ­ rand Tartar Cham, first published in 1665 by Johan Nieuhoff (1618–1672), who acted as steward for the first Dutch trade embassy to China in 1655–1657. Spinoza’s well-­informed interest in and quiet admiration for China evidently went as far back as the early 1650s. He studied then in the Latin school of Van den Enden (1602–1674), who is t­oday thought of as “a kind of ‘Proto-­Spinoza’ ”101 ­because he was known to believe “that nature had to be considered the only God.”102 When Spinoza was expelled from his synagogue in 1656, the excommunication proclamation gave no specific reason, but a recent biographer reported him as being accused of teaching ­children of the Jewish Sabbath school “that the Bible was not the history of the world, that Chinese history was in­de­pen­dent of biblical history, and so on.”103 In addition to the subversive use of China against the traditional authority of the Judeo-­Christian Bible, Spinoza could have gotten the start of his iconoclastic metaphysics from his Latin teacher. What is so impor­tant about this is how Van den Enden could have taught him the unusual idea of a monistic

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cosmology as a person with unusual access to all the informational sources about the key Chinese philosophical and religious doctrine of tianren heyi, ­because between 1619 and 1633 he was an active member of the Jesuit organ­ization. To the public, China was then the pride of the Jesuit mission outside Eu­rope, but ­behind closed doors, debates ­were raging between Ricci’s supporters and detractors, and both sides sent their views back to their Jesuit superiors and confreres in Eu­rope. Given what he could as an insider have easily learned not only about Ricci’s account of Chinese cosmology via Trigault but also about the internal Jesuit debate on the issue, Van den Enden could have helped Spinoza to move most decisively beyond the ­simple condemnation that respectively consumed Ricci and Bayle ­earlier and ­later.

Conclusion Spinoza’s ambiguous identification of God with nature has been recognized since the late seventeenth c­ entury as the key to his metaphysics, but currently prevailing interpretations of the concept have simply not come even close to making clear its innovation and iconoclasm. Both in its revolutionary implication and in the negative responses it provoked from its conventionally minded Eu­ro­pean readers in the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries, Spinoza’s monistic concept is uncannily similar to the key Chinese philosophical and religious idea of tianren heyi, or unity of Heaven and humanity, which Matteo Ricci and his Jesuit supporters and opponents helped to introduce to Eu­rope back in the early seventeenth ­century. In retrospect, Spinoza simply could not have avoided being exposed to and influenced by the cosmological view of the country for which he already had a quiet and well-­informed admiration. Easily accessible to him via Van den Enden and other­wise, the key Chinese philosophical and religious idea was clearly in line with the innovative and iconoclastic bent of his metaphysical thinking. ­Unless he can be shown as somehow completely unaware of the Chinese idea and ­unless he can si­mul­ta­neously be shown persuasively and noncontradictorily as being somehow inspired in his unconventional and revolutionary worldview by a conventional native Eu­ro­pean philosophical or religious tradition, it seems crucially impor­ tant and necessary to use, as part of a much wider international conceptual framework for the appreciation of his metaphysical innovation and iconoclasm, his palpable link with China, which may very well have constituted one of the most impor­tant and most far-­reaching consequences of the fateful cross-­cultural encounter of China and Eu­rope in the early modern period.

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1650–1850 Notes 1. Steven Nadler, “ ‘What­ever Is, Is in God’: Substance and T ­ hings in Spinoza’s Metaphysics,” in Interpreting Spinoza, ed. Charlie Huenemann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 53–70, quotation at 54. 2. Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical, vol. 5, 2nd ed. (London, 1734), 208. 3. E. M. Curley, Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 42. 4. Jonathan Bennett, “Spinoza’s Metaphysics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 61–88, quotation at 69. 5. Bennett, “Spinoza’s Metaphysics,” 65. 6. Jonathan Bennett, “Spinoza’s Monism: A Reply to Curley,” in God and Nature: Spinoza’s Metaphysics, ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 53–59, quotation at 58. 7. Spinoza, Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, trans. and ed. Edwin Curley (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985), 420. ­Unless other­wise noted, all the works of Spinoza, including his letters, are cited from this volume. 8. Spinoza, Ethics, 420. 9. Spinoza, “Letter 6,” 188. 10. Spinoza, “Letter 6,” 188. 11. Edwin Curley, “Editorial Preface,” in The Collected Works of Spinoza, 3. 12. Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, 18. 13. Spinoza, “Letter 6,” 188. 14. Edwin Curley, “Editorial Preface,” in The Collected Works of Spinoza, 47. 15. Spinoza, A Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-­Being, 72. 16. Cited in Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 120. 17. Spinoza, Short Treatise, 149. 18. Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, 10, 11, and 11. 19. Edwin Curley, cited in Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, 11n9. 20. Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, 11. 21. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, vol. 7, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (London: Penguin Books, 1964), 13, quotation at 9. 22. Giordano Bruno, Cause, Princi­ple and Unity, in Cause, Princi­ple and Unity and Essays on Magic, trans. and ed. Robert de Lucca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 101, 87. 23. Spinoza, Short Treatise, 73. 24. Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Re­nais­sance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Dover, 2000), 43, 69, and 69. 25. Spinoza, Short Treatise, 76. 26. Spinoza, Ethics, 428.

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27. Bayle, Dictionary, 199. 28. Bayle, Dictionary, 206. 29. Bayle, Dictionary, 211. 30. Bayle, Dictionary, 211. 31. Curley, Spinoza’s Metaphysics, 13. 32. Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, 33. 33. Edwin Curley, “On Bennett’s Interpretation of Spinoza’s Monism,” in God and Nature: Spinoza’s Metaphysics, ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 35–51, quotation at 47. 34. Bennett, “Spinoza’s Monism,” 57. 35. Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1984), 32, 35. 36. Bennett, “Spinoza’s Monism,” 57. 37. W.N.A. Klever, “Spinoza’s Life and Works,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spi­ noza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17. 38. Spinoza, Parts I and II of Descartes’ “Princi­ple of Philosophy,” 229. 39. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham ­(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 49. 40. Spinoza, A Theologico-­Political Treatise, in A Theologico-­Political Treatise and A Po­liti­cal Treatise, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), 8. 41. A. Wolf, “Introduction,” in The Correspondence of Spinoza, trans. and ed. A. Wolf (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 32. 42. Spinoza, Theologico-­Political Treatise, 121. 43. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard  E. Flathman and David Johnston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 194. 44. Spinoza, Theologico-­Political Treatise, 121. 45. Spinoza, Theologico-­Political Treatise, 200. 46. Spinoza, Theologico-­Political Treatise, 212. 47. Hobbes, Leviathan, 213. 48. Richard H. Popkin, “Spinoza and Bible Scholarship,” in The Books of Nature and Scripture, ed. James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1994), 1–20, quotation at 17. 49. Klever, “Spinoza’s Life and Works,” 16. 50. Nadler, “ ‘What­ever Is, Is in God,’ ” 70. 51. Michael  P. Levine, Pantheism: A Non-­theistic Concept of Deity (London: Routledge, 1994), 4. 52. Bayle, Dictionary, 199. 53. Bayle, Dictionary, 200. 54. Bayle, Dictionary, 202. Bayle also mentioned the similarity of Spinoza’s metaphysics to Japa­nese Buddhism; since the latter was heavi­ly influenced by Chinese Buddhism, Bayle in real­ity talked ­there about the same cosmological view as that of Chinese Buddhism.

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1650–1850 55. Bayle, Dictionary, 202. 56. Bayle, Dictionary, 217. 57. Bayle, Dictionary, 217 and 218. 58. Yuen-­ting Lai, “The Linking of Spinoza to Chinese Thought by Bayle and Malebranche,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (1985): 151–178, quotation at 154. 59. Bayle, Dictionary, 217. 60. Matthew Ricci, China in the Sixteenth C ­ entury: The Journals of Matthew Ricci, 1583–1610, trans. Louis J. Gallagher (New York: Random House, 1953), 95. 61. Ricci, China in the Sixteenth ­Century, 95. 62. Ricci, China in the Sixteenth ­Century, 95. 63. Ricci, China in the Sixteenth ­Century, 95. 64. Lionel Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 34. 65. João Rodrigues, “Letter to the Jesuit General from Macao, 22 January 1616,” in Michael Cooper, “Rodrigues in China: The Letters of João Rodrigues, 1611–1633,” in Kokugoshi e no michi: Doi Sensei shoju kinen ronbunshu (Tokyo, 1981), 311. 66. The first controversy is about w ­ hether Chinese terms such as Tian and Shangdi ­were equivalents to the Christian idea of Deus, whereas the second controversy is about w ­ hether re­spects paid to Confucius in Confucian ceremonies w ­ ere merely civic or religious. 67. Bayle, Dictionary, 217. 68. Wing-­Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1963), 1. 69. Aristotle, Metaphysica, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. W.  D. Ross (New York: Random House, 1941), 879. 70. St. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa of Theology (Summa Theologiae, 1266–1273), in St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, trans. Paul E. Sigmund (New York: Norton, 1988), 31. 71. Julia Ching, Confucianism and Chris­tian­ity (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1977), 146. 72. Ching, Confucianism and Chris­tian­ity, 146. 73. John D. Young, East-­West Synthesis: Matteo Ricci and Confucianism (Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, 1980), 26. 74. Matteo Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (T’ien-­chu Shih-­i), trans. Douglas Lancashire and Peter Hu Kuo-­chen, S.J. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1985), 203. 75. Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, 203. 76. Bayle, Dictionary, 211. 77. Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, 215–217. 78. Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, 199. 79. The Doctrine of the Mean, in Confucius, Confucian Analects, The G ­ reat Learning & The Doctrine of the Mean, trans. James Legge (New York: Dover, 1971), 416.

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80. Wing-­Tsit Chan, A Source Book, 95. 81. Confucian Analects, in Confucius, Confucian Analects, The ­Great Learning & The Doctrine of the Mean, bk. 11, ch. 4, 6. 82. Spinoza, Ethics, 490 and 617. 83. Spinoza, Short Treatise, 149. 84. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.  H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), §22, quotation at 77. 85. Julia Ching, The Religious Thought of Chu Hsi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 52. 86. Ching, The Religious Thought of Chu His, 52. 87. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 64. 88. Paulos Huang, Confronting Confucian Understandings of the Christian Doctrine of Salvation (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 250. 89. Paul A. Rule, K’ung-­t zu or Confucius? The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 5. 90. Lewis A. Maverick, “A Pos­si­ble Chinese Source of Spinoza’s Doctrine,” Revue de Littérature comparée 19 (1939): 417–428, 419, and 428. 91. Yuen-­ting Lai, “The Linking of Spinoza to Chinese Thought,” 152. 92. Yuen-­ting Lai, “The Linking of Spinoza to Chinese Thought,” 152. 93. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11. 94. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1951), 166. 95. Thijs Weststeijn, “Spinoza sinicus: An Asian Paragraph in the History of the Radical Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (2007): 537–561. 96. Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimes, in Five Bookes (London, 1625), 5:435. 97. Spinoza, Short Treatise, 150. 98. Spinoza, A Theologico-­Political Treatise, 213. 99. Spinoza, A Theologico-­Political Treatise, 56. 100. Spinoza, A Theologico-­Political Treatise, 56. 101. W.N.A. Klever, “A New Source of Spinozism: Franciscus Van den Enden,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 29 (1991): 613–631, quotation at 630. 102. Salomon van Til, Het Voor-­Hof der Heydenen, voor alle Ongeloovigen geopent (Dordrecht, 1694), 5. 103. Richard H. Popkin, Spinoza (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2004), 30.

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MURPHY AND JOHNSON PROLEGOMENON TO A NEW EDITION ANTHONY W. LEE

A rthur Murphy was a talented author of the mid-­to late eigh­teenth c­ entury who

excelled in writing plays, periodical essays, and classical translations.1 He is perhaps best remembered t­ oday for his comedies and farces.2 Yet he was also a significant biographer, writing impor­tant lives of his contemporaries, Henry Fielding, David Garrick, and Samuel Johnson. Noted Johnson scholar Arthur Sherbo has written of Murphy: It is, I think, almost equally undeniable, that he [Murphy] is one of the major-­ minor writers of the eigh­teenth ­century whose work, meritorious per se, has been too much neglected. He is, I’m afraid, or at least once was, one of the unread authors of the c­ entury—­that is, by modern scholars. And yet, as Emery and Dunbar, and Botting, and a few ­others have demonstrated in the last two de­cades or so, he ranks high indeed in the roll of the dramatists and periodical essayists of the second half of the c­ entury.3 Despite the modest attention Murphy garnered from a handful of scholars in the 1940s and 1950s, his work has eluded serious critical and editorial attention in recent de­cades. It is one of the goals of the edition elaborated upon in this prolegomenon—­Murphy on Johnson: An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. and Other Johnsonian Writings—to restore this author to the seat of importance he once enjoyed among his contemporaries.4 He is impor­tant ­today both b ­ ecause of the intrinsic aesthetic merit of his authorial achievement and ­because of his unique value as historical witness. Murphy moved with easy

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grace, and at times with vituperative antagonism, through his age, befriending as well as provoking a cast of literary luminaries such as Charles Churchill, Henry Fielding, Samuel Foote, Owen Ruffhead, Christopher Smart, Tobias Smollett, and George Steevens. In addition, he joined the core members of the Johnsonian inner circle, such as James Boswell, Charles and Frances Burney, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and Hester Thrale. Arthur Murphy played a per­sis­tently impor­tant role in the life of Samuel Johnson. It was Murphy who introduced him to the Thrales, and it was Murphy who helped arrange his annual government pension of £300—­the two events that perhaps most profoundly reshaped the day-­to-­day texture of Johnson’s last two de­cades. In the 1750s, Murphy assisted with the production of Johnson’s periodical effort, the Literary Magazine, or Universal Review. At Johnson’s death, Murphy served as one of his executors; a­ fter Johnson’s death Murphy wrote about him a number of times in the Monthly Review. ­Later, Murphy—­along with Boswell, Hester Piozzi, and Sir John Hawkins—­produced one of the quartet of major biographies written by close associates of Johnson. On a personal level, Johnson liked Murphy―or “Mur,” as he affectionately called him―and ushered his entrance into the sanctum sanctorum.5 In a letter to Charles Burney of March 8, 1758, Johnson recalled of his Shakespeare proposals that Murphy “introduced them with a splendid encomium,” and, in a note to King Lear in the Shakespeare edition, Johnson denominated Murphy “a very judicious critic,” and l­ater remarked, “At pre­sent I doubt much w ­ hether we have any t­ hing superiour to Arthur.” 6 Over time, the friendship between t­ hese two proved unusually deep—­according to the report of Johnsonian crony Dr.  William Maxwell, Murphy was a man “whom he [Johnson] very much loved.”7 When the second major edition of Johnson’s Works was published in 1792, Murphy was asked to write the introduction that became the Essay on Johnson. Most of the editions of Johnson’s works printed or reprinted in the nineteenth c­ entury included the Essay on Johnson. As the last of the four major biographies emitted shortly ­after Johnson’s death, Murphy’s is, literally, the last biographical word on Johnson to come from the quill of a trusted friend. It is also a penetrating account written by the biographer who knew Johnson longer than any other, save Hawkins.8 Of t­ hose four biographies, only Murphy’s has failed to receive a critical edition. In 1974 Arthur Sherbo produced a scholarly edition of Piozzi’s Anecdotes and William Shaw’s Memoirs of Dr. Johnson.9 The latter should have included Murphy’s Essay on Johnson. O M Brack Jr. and Robert E. Kelley’s Early Biographies of Samuel

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1650–1850 Johnson includes Shaw’s Memoir, but omits Murphy.10 Boswell has of course been accorded sumptuous treatment from editors ranging from Edmond Malone and J. W. Croker to L. F. Powell and David Womersley. In recent years, two editions of Hawkins’s Life of Johnson have been published: Bertram Davis’s 1961 abridgment and O M Brack’s 2009 definitive version.11 As Johnson’s biographer, then, Murphy has been relegated to the periphery, despite his once central position within the Johnsonian circle and the consequent intimacy of his access. Nearly a quarter of a ­century ago, eminent Johnsonian scholar Donald Greene desiderated a fresh publication of Arthur Murphy’s Essay on Johnson, urgently proclaiming it “a work badly in need of a modern critical edition.”12 In the ensuing years, no one has taken up this challenge—­the most recent publications are the 1968 facsimile reprint prepared by Matthew Grace for Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints and the 1970 reprint of G. B. Hill’s 1897 Johnsonian Miscellanies, which includes an extraordinarily unreliable text. Neither of ­these are critical editions, and neither is readily available (both out of print). Another eminent Johnsonian, Paul Korshin, envisioned in conversation with one of his former students a new edition of the Essay on Johnson, but his untimely death in 2005 unfortunately intercepted this effort.13 In an impor­tant way, then, the current proposed critical proj­ ect seeks to fulfill the intentions of two respected Johnsonian scholars writing during the latter half of the twentieth ­century. Why this interest? Murphy’s Essay on Johnson possesses ele­ments of summoning attraction to Johnsonian students and scholars. B ­ ecause of its prevalence and brevity—­Murphy consciously crafted a work that was “short, yet full, faithful, yet temperate”—­the Essay on Johnson was prob­ably read by far more p ­ eople in the hundred years following Johnson’s death than any other version, even Boswell’s.14 Hence, in terms of sheer influence, Murphy’s biography solicits a par­tic­u­lar historical fascination. But t­ here are numerous additional intrinsic qualities that recommend it as well. It provides details absent from other con­temporary accounts, such as the famous moment when, de­cades ­after the fact, Johnson dramatically revealed his authorship of the Parliamentary Debates to a group of dinner companions. Guthrie the historian had from July  1736 composed the parliamentary speeches for the [Gentleman’s] Magazine; but, from the beginning of the session which opened on the 19th  of November  1740, Johnson succeeded to that department. . . . ​The eloquence, the force of argument, and the splendor of language, displayed in the several speeches, are well known, and universally admired. . . . ​That Johnson was the author of the debates during that period

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was not generally known; but the secret tran­spired several years afterwards, and was avowed by himself on the following occasion: Mr. Wedderburne (now Lord Loughborough,) Dr. Johnson, Dr. Francis, (the translator of Horace,) the pre­sent writer, and o ­ thers, dined with the late Mr. Foote. An impor­tant debate ­towards the end of Sir Robert Walpole’s administration being mentioned, Dr. Francis observed, “That Mr. Pitt’s speech, on that occasion, was the best he had ever read.” He added, “That he had employed eight years of his life in the study of De­mos­the­nes, and finished a translation of that celebrated orator, with all the decorations of style and language within the reach of his capacity; but he had met with nothing equal to the speech above-­mentioned.” Many of the com­pany remembered the debate; and some passages ­were cited, with the approbation and applause of all pre­sent. During the ardour of conversation Johnson remained ­silent. As soon as the warmth of praise subsided, he opened with ­these words: “That speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter-­street.”15 In addition to such sterling set pieces as this, the Essay on Johnson offers scenes and anecdotes that the other con­temporary biographers also included, but with a dif­fer­ent point of emphasis—an emphasis often critical of Murphy’s rivals (especially of Sir John Hawkins and, to a lesser extent, of Boswell). ­Because of the densely intertextual nature of the Essay on Johnson, this edition ­will allow students and scholars to more con­ve­niently compare the agonistic strug­gle over the appropriation of Johnson’s biographical identity and literary legacy that ensued shortly ­after his demise. Murphy himself was a direct participant in many of ­these contested scenes, such as the dinner party with the Jesuit phi­los­o­pher Roger Joseph Boscovich or the account of Johnson’s pension, and thus provides a more historically and biographically valid perspective, in many re­spects, than do Boswell, Hawkins, or Piozzi. Furthermore, Murphy’s Essay on Johnson provides significant documentary evidence absent from his biographical rivals, such as the initial En­glish “paraphrastic translation” of the morosely morbid Latin poem, Gnōthi Seauton (“Know Thyself”) and the letter that he wrote to Samuel Richardson in 1756 when he was arrested for debt.16 In the words of the most recent critic of the Essay on Johnson, Murphy’s work, “the last ­great biography of Johnson,” is “a mature and balanced assessment” offering “a thoughtful, refined, and dispassionate” characterization of Johnson.17 As impor­tant as Murphy’s Essay on Johnson is, the edition proposed h ­ ere goes beyond the pre­sen­ta­tion of this key text. In order to make the volume as complete

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1650–1850 and as useful as pos­si­ble, we ­shall include a wide range of ancillary materials, such as Murphy’s other writings associated with Johnson. Furthermore, we ­shall incorporate Johnson’s collaborations with, and responses to, Murphy, as well as the texts Murphy unknowingly plagiarized from Johnson—­most famously Rambler no. 190, but also se­lections from Johnson’s Miscellaneous Observations of the Tragedy of Macbeth, which Murphy drew from for his November 17, 1753, essay from Gray’s-­Inn Journal. ­These vari­ous pieces w ­ ill enable readers to familiarize themselves with all the Murphy texts that illuminate his relationship with Johnson. They w ­ ill also represent Murphy the writer in an array of dif­fer­ent genres—­biographer, periodical essayist, literary critic, poet, letter writer, satirist, journalist—­allowing for a consideration of his accomplishment as a “major-­minor” man of letters in a fashion that gestures ­toward Johnson’s own masterful realization of this role. In order to contextualize all ­these pieces and thus ensure readers’ ease of access, we plan to include relevant excerpts from Johnsonian writings that relate to Murphy. Fi­nally, the edition w ­ ill pre­sent items relating to Murphy’s own biographical history and help clarify his character and personality, especially in relation to his role as a Johnsonian protégé and habitué: ­these ­will include such ­things as Johnson’s remarks on Murphy recorded in Boswell’s Life and elsewhere, Hester Piozzi’s character sketch of Murphy drawn from her Thraliana, a French sketch by Frances Burney that has languished in obscurity to this very day, and what we can deduce about the now lost autobiographical fragment Murphy composed shortly before his death in 1805. The following and concluding section of this prolegomenon offers a schematic register detailing most of the texts that ­will form this edition and, at times, précis of some of the bibliographical and textual issues involved in the access and definitively critical reproduction of ­these texts. Murphy on Johnson: An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. and Other Johnsonian Writings is to be an old-­spelling, critical edition that ­will consist of three sections: I. The Essay on Johnson; II. Other of Murphy’s writings related to Johnson and his circle; III. A triptych of supplementary appendices. The general editorial policy may be summarized in the following remarks. With printed texts, the first published edition w ­ ill be used as the copy-­texts, collated against any extant ­later impressions or editions. With documentary materials, such as letters, contracts, and autobiographical writings, original MSS w ­ ill be used as copy-­texts, collated against any ­later print publications; in the absence of MS materials, the earliest printed form for each document ­will be used.

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I. An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. A. Text of the Essay on Johnson. A major biographical and critical appraisal of Johnson by a close acquaintance and protégé, this work ­will be the centerpiece of the edition. ­There are four versions that appeared during Murphy’s lifetime: 1. The 1792 discrete edition. 2. The 1st volume of the 1792, 1st edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson. 3. The 1st volume of the 1793, 2nd edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson. 4. The 1st volume of the 1796, 3rd edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson. While J. D. Fleeman observed of the Essay on Johnson, “it is doubtful that Murphy revised it,” the pre­sent editors see the need for a careful collation of all valid versions and rec­ord all accidental and substantive variants.18

B. Ancillary Items Relating to the Essay on Johnson. In addition to providing the definitive critical and annotated text of the Essay on Johnson, this edition ­will offer supplementary materials related to the Essay and the edition of Johnson’s Works that it prefaced.

1. Letters: a) Letter from Lord Chedworth to Thomas Crompton (May 9, 1789), intimating the possibility of Murphy’s undertaking an edition of Johnson’s Works.19 b) Letter to Thomas Cadell (June 21, 1790) accepting invitation to undertake the Essay on Johnson and Johnson’s Works.20

2. Analytic ­Table of Relationship between Murphy’s Essay on Johnson and Hawkins’s Life of Johnson, Thrale’s Anecdotes of Johnson, and Boswell’s Life of Johnson. This apparatus ­will allow readers to distinguish among the vari­ous anecdotes, scenes, and conversations recorded by the four biographers who best knew Johnson. The t­ able ­will prioritize the earliest provenance and note congruencies and discrepancies among the varying accounts. This comparison w ­ ill also note how Murphy at times (as does Boswell) distorts e­arlier biographers—­especially Hawkins—­whom he perceived as rivals.21

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II. Additional Johnson-­Related Works by Murphy A. Gray’s-­Inn Journal Essays. 1. Textual note: In many ways, not least ­because ­there are three distinctly separate textual versions of the Gray’s-­Inn Journal, the bibliographic situation ­here is complex and obstinate. On October  21, 1752, Murphy took over the moribund New Craftsman and added a column entitled “Gray’s-­ Inn Journal,” ­under the pseudonym Joseph D’Anvers, Esq. During this period of time, he also modulated from a po­liti­cally polemic tone ­toward a more urbane and cultured one (à la The Tatler and The Spectator). On Saturday, September  29, 1753, Murphy commenced publication of the Craftsman ­under the new title Gray’s-­Inn Journal, adopting the pseu­ donym Charles Ranger, Esq. He also utilized a print format more akin to that of the Rambler and Adventurer. Many of the e­ arlier New Craftsman columns have not survived; to muddy the textual ­waters even more, Murphy made repeated revisions and additions to the Gray’s-­Inn Journal collection throughout his life, eventually, in 1786, achieving a style of essays that ­ ecause of ­these textual and “have a truly Johnsonian quality to them.”22 B tonal complexities, our h ­ andling of the Gray’s-­Inn Journal texts w ­ ill require careful collation of editions, tabulation of variants and all substantive revisions, and hard decisions with re­spect to which instantiation to ­favor—­a collation that tries to honor the integrity of the original copy-­text while accounting for the Johnsonian inflections found in the l­ater revisions. This promises to be the most challenging textual prob­lem we editors ­shall face in this edition. a) In the 1st edition, Murphy published essays 1–52 (September 29, 1752, through September 21, 1754).23 When the entire series was republished in 1756 and 1786, Murphy expanded the collection to 1–104, drawing upon the original 52, plus se­lections from the 49 essays he had published in the Craftsman. b) In 1786 he included 104 essays as part of his seven-­volume edition of The Works of Arthur Murphy. Where pos­si­ble, t­ hese ­will be collated to check for errors and correction. (At least one Gray’s-­Inn Journal essay, No. 38, which was plagiarized from Johnson, was not reprinted in the ­later collections—­see II.A.2.g.)

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2. Se­lections from the Gray’s-­Inn Journal. a) No. 1. September 29, 1753. Exemplifies how Murphy begins his essay series; to be compared to Johnson’s Rambler No. 1 (see III.C.2.a).24 b) No. 8. November 17, 1753 (14, Murphy Works, 5:117–125). An essay plagiarized (more quietly than Gray’s-­Inn Journal No. 38—­see II.A.2.g) from Johnson.25 Compare with Johnson’s Miscellaneous Obser­ vations of the Tragedy of Macbeth (see III.C.1). c) No. 12. January 6, 1752, Murphy Works; to be compared with Johnson’s allegory of criticism in Rambler 3 (see III.C.2.b). d) No. 14. December 29, 1753. A discussion of En­glish essay-­writing that recommends Johnson’s Rambler. e) No. 40. June 20, 1754 (No. 63, Murphy Works, 6:94–102). On the decay of En­glish vocabulary. Of interest in relation to Johnson’s work on Dictionary; Murphy extols his in-­progress Dictionary as a potentially stabilizing force; compare with III.C.3. f) No. 16. January 12, 1754 (No. 78, Murphy Works, 2:233–244) and No. 17, January 19, 1754 (No. 79, Murphy Works, 2:244–255): King Lear, Macbeth and Othello criticism. See Johnson’s closing note to King Lear in his Shakespeare edition (see III.C.6), where he praises Murphy’s “judicious” criticism; see also Thomas Warton’s Adventurer Nos. 113, 116, and 122 (see III.A.3), which Murphy challenges in Gray’s-­Inn Journal Nos. 16 and 17. g) No. 38. June 15, 1754. An unwitting plagiarism by Murphy of Johnson’s Rambler 190 (see III.C.2.g). Biographically impor­tant as the catalyst of Murphy’s friendship with Johnson.26 h) No. 52. October 6, 1754 (104, Murphy Works, 2:446–452). Exemplifies how Murphy concludes his essay series; to be compared to Johnson’s Rambler No. 208 (see III.C.2.e). i) No. 13. December 22, 1753. Contains William Shipley’s proposals for the founding of an acad­emy devoted to “the Improvement of Science, and of useful Arts and Manufactures”—­which ­later evolved into the Royal Society of Arts, which Johnson joined and periodically attended during the 1750s.27

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B. London Chronicle Pieces. 1. The Theatre No. 17. A column run in the London Chronicle, 26 (February 26–­March 1, 1757): 207– 208. Puff for Johnson’s Observations on Macbeth (see III.C.1). 2. The Theatre No. 33. A column run in the London Chronicle, 45 (April 12–14, 1757): 358–359. Introduction to Johnson’s Proposals for an Edition of Shakespeare (see III.C.3).28

C. Literary Magazine Pieces. Review Essay: “Odes by Mr. Gray.” Literary Magazine, Nos. 18 (September 15 to October 15, 1757) and 19 (October 15 to November 15, 1757). This essay reflects Murphy’s contributions to one of Johnson’s impor­tant literary proj­ects within the most productive de­cade of his literary ­career, the Liter­ ary Magazine; also, compare Murphy’s literary criticism of Gray to Johnson’s in his “Life of Gray” (see III.C.7).29

D. A Letter to M. De Voltaire. Appended to the published play The Orphan of China (1759).30 Among other t­ hings, the Letter takes Voltaire to task for his criticism of Shakespeare. Compare with Johnson’s rebuttal of Voltaire in the Preface to Shakespeare (see III.C.5); see also the anonymous A Letter from Monsieur de Voltaire, attacking Murphy (see III.A.4).

E. To Dr. Johnson, A Poetic Epistle (London: Vaillant, 1760).31 A response to an attack by Thomas Francklin (1721–1784) in Tobias Smollett’s Crit­ ical Review. Impor­tant evidence of Murphy’s early, publicly voiced esteem of Johnson.

F. Ode to the Naiads of Fleet Ditch (London, 1761). A response to Charles Churchill’s The Rosciad (London, 1761) (see III.A.5); attacks Churchill and David Garrick with scatological Swiftian satire. Churchill soon a­ fter pilloried Johnson in The Ghost (London, 1762).

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G. The Examiner, A Satire (London, 1761).32 Murphy’s more tempered response to The Murphiad (see III.A.6).

H. Dedication “To the Malevoli” (1786) (Murphy Works, 7:v–xv). Contains account of Johnson’s intervention in a quarrel between Murphy and “Zoilus.”33

I. Monthly Review Pieces. 1. Two Dialogues, containing a comparative View of the Lives, Characters, and Writings of Philip the late Earl of Chesterfield, and Dr. S. Johnson. 77 (December 1787), 457–459.34 2. Review of The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. with his Life, and Notes on his Lives, by Sir John Hawkins, Knt. 76 (April  1787), 273–292, 76 (May 1787), 369–384, 76 (July 1787), 56–70, 76 (August 1787), 131–140.35 Includes Murphy’s angry riposte to purported negative reflections upon Johnson in Hawkins’s Life of Johnson, included in 1787 edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson. Murphy’s careful sifting of the Johnsonian texts in the Hawkins edition lays the groundwork for his replacement of Hawkins as “editor” of Johnson’s Works and biographer of Johnson in the Essay on Johnson (see I.A).36 3. Review of Letters to and From Samuel Johnson, LL.D. 78 (April 1788), 324–331.37 4. Review of The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, vol. 15, [ed. George Gleig].38 (For Gleig, see Appendix IIIA.1.) Since the Monthly Review essays ­were anonymous, this enabled Murphy to praise a work that Gleig had dedicated to him.

J. Seventeen Hundred and Ninety-­One (1791). An imitation of Juvenal’s 13th satire. Clearly written in the mode of Johnson’s Lon­ ­ uman Wishes (imitation of don (imitation of Juvenal’s 3rd satire) and Vanity of H 39 Juvenal’s 10th satire).

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K. Se­lections from Murphy’s The Life of David Garrick (1801) relating to Johnson (see also III.C.8).

III. Appendices The first appendix consists of miscellaneous items about Murphy and his relation to Johnson and the Johnsonian circle; the second offers a sampling of biographical materials on Murphy himself; the third collects Johnsonian texts related to Murphy’s works.

Appendix A. Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to Murphy. 1. George Gleig’s (1755–1841) dedication to Murphy of his edition, A Voy­ age to Abyssinia, by F­ ather Jerome Lobo, a Portuguese missionary. . . . ​Trans­ lated from the French by Samuel Johnson, LL.D. To which are added, vari­ ous other tracts by the same author, not published by Sir John Hawkins or Mr. Stockdale (London: Printed for Elliot and Kay, and C. Elliot, Edinburgh: 1789); sometimes referred to as the 15th Volume (3rd Supplemental Volume) of the “Hawkins” Edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Also to include passages from Gleig’s Preface that compliment Murphy at the expense of Sir John Hawkins.40 See also Murphy’s review of Gleig’s installment at II.I.3. 2. Notes to Christopher Smart’s satiric poem The Hilliad (1753). Attacks Smart and Murphy’s common e­ nemy, John Hill. At this time, Smart and Johnson w ­ ere friends (Smart providing puffs to Johnson’s ongoing Rambler series in his own periodical, The Midwife); close scrutiny of the notes may provide contextual evidence for Murphy’s knowledge of Johnson at the early stage in Murphy’s ­career.41 3. Thomas Warton, Adventurer Nos. 113, 116, and 122 (1753–1754). ­These sparked Murphy’s response in Gray’s-­Inn Journal (see II.A.2.f), for the debate over a passage in King Lear. 4. An anonymous (not by Voltaire) A Letter from Monsieur de Voltaire (1759). Attacks Murphy, prompting Murphy’s “A Letter to M. De Voltaire” (see II.D).

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5. Charles Churchill’s The Rosciad (1761). A satirical attack upon the London stage involving Murphy; leads to Murphy’s Ode to the Naiads of Fleet Ditch (see II.F). 6. The Murphiad; A Mock Heroic Poem. A satirical attack upon Murphy written by the pseudonymous Philim Moculloch (London: J. Williams, 1761), in response to Murphy’s Ode to the Naiads of Fleet Ditch (see II.F). 7. Se­lections from Murphy’s Commonplace Book.42 Some extracts are relevant to, and reflect Murphy’s reading of Johnson’s attack on the neoclassical unities in the Preface to Shakespeare (see III.C.5) and Rambler Nos. 139–140 (see III.C.2.c). 8. Murphy’s En­glish translations of Johnson’s Latin epitaphs of deceased Thrale ­family members.43

Appendix B. Murphy Biographical Pieces. 1. Murphy’s “Autobiographical Sketch.” MS apparently lost; to be reconstructed from Jesse Foot, Arthur Murphy, passim. 2. Letters and documents relating to Murphy. a) Letters: While this edition does not presume to reprint all of Murphy’s letters, it does seek to include a representative collection, some of biographical interest, mostly relating to Murphy’s relation to Johnson and his circle. i) Houghton Library: Letters of Murphy’s, from or to David Garrick; and a letter to Mrs. Thrale, November 11, 1780.44 ii) Sheffield Archives: [Francis, Philip] A letter from the anonymous author of the letters versified to the anonymous author of The Mon­ itor. London. 36 pp. Also attributed to Arthur Murphy.45 iii) John Rylands Library, Manchester: Murphy’s letters to Thrales.46 iv) Cambridgeshire County Rec­ord Office. Letter; Arthur Murphy, Lincoln’s Inn, London to 4th Earl of Sandwich: “The part he took in a late Business was due to Truth and Justice; could have lent himself to a Faction, and his only merit is that he did not look at the Earl’s character through the medium of calumny and detraction.” v) Victoria and Albert Museum. London: Forster MS 411, letter: Tom’s Coffee House, to David Garrick, March 25, 1769, from Arthur Murphy.

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1650–1850 vi) British Library. Add. MS 60484, fol. 94, Arthur Murphy to G. Robinson, 1794. vii) Miscellaneous letters reprinted from Jesse Foot’s Life of Murphy: 1) ­Family members: ­Mother, ­brother, ­uncle. 2) ­O thers: Garrick (?), December 10, 1761 (pp. 179–180); Frances Abington, December 27, 1772 (pp. 232–236) and December 31, 1772 (p. 236); Dr. William Dodd, April 25, 1777 (holograph facsimile) (p. 465). b) Murphy’s ­Will. July  23, 1805. Rec­ords of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (TNA: PROB 11/1428/260). 3. ­Legal documents: Vari­ous items from London Metropolitan Archives, Guildhall Library, London, Lancashire Rec­ord Office, Jesse Foot’s Life of Murphy. 4. Con­temporary assessments of Murphy. a) Hester Piozzi’s Thumbnail Portrait of Murphy.47 b) A collation of Johnson and Boswell’s remarks about Murphy from Boswell’s Life of Johnson. c) Frances Burney’s Journals and Letters relating to Murphy, a close ­family friend of Charles Burney’s ­family. Especially valuable is the 1802 (third) notebook that Burney (as Madame d’Arblay) used to practice her French, where she pens a biographical sketch of Murphy. The French original has been transcribed48 but has never before been translated into En­glish. This edition w ­ ill provide an En­glish translation, consulting both the Hemlow French transcription and the Berg collection MS. d) Anon. “Biographical Sketch of Arthur Murphy.” In The Monthly Mir­ ror [2nd edition], 6 (November and December 1798). e) Charles George Dyer (1755–1841): Biographical Sketches of the Lives and Characters of Illustrious and Eminent Men (London: C. G. Dyer and H. Setchel and Son, 1819). Includes a short life of Murphy.

Appendix C. Johnson’s Writings Relating to Murphy. 1. From Johnson’s Miscellaneous Observations of the Tragedy of Macbeth (1745). Portions plagiarized by Murphy in Gray’s-­Inn Journal No. 8 (see II.A.2.b).

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2. Se­lections from Johnson’s Rambler essays:49 a) No. 1. Compare with Gray’s-­Inn Journal No. 1 (see II.A.2.a). b) No. 3. Compare with Gray’s-­Inn Journal 12, January 6, 1752, Murphy Works, 101– 109 (see II.A.2.c). c) Nos. 139–140. Compare with Murphy’s Commonplace Book (see III.A.7). d) No. 190. Compare with Gray’s-­Inn Journal 38, Murphy’s plagiarism (see II.A.2.g). e) No. 208. Compare with Gray’s-­Inn Journal No. 52 (104) (see II.A.2.h). 3. Johnson’s Proposals for an Edition of Shakespeare (1756) (Yale, 7:51–58). See Murphy’s Introduction (II.B.2) and Gray’s-­Inn Journal 40 (II.a.2.e). 4. Johnson’s Review of Murphy’s Gray’s-­Inn Journal (1756). The Literary Magazine (vol. 1, no. 1, 32–35). Impor­tant as a reflection of Johnson’s view of Murphy.50 5. From Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare (1765). Compare with Preface to Shakespeare paragraphs 14–28, 59–74 (Yale, 7:65–69, 79–84) to similar passages in Murphy’s “Letter to Voltaire” (see II.D) and Murphy’s Commonplace Book (III.A.7). 6. Se­lections from endnote to King Lear in Johnson’s 1765 Shakespeare edition. Compare with Murphy’s 1754 Gray’s-­Inn Journal Nos. 16 and 17 (see II.A.2.f). 7. From Johnson’s “Life of Gray.” Lives of the Poets, 1783 edition. Compare with Murphy’s criticism of Gray on his Literary Magazine review of Gray’s Odes (see II.C). 8. A quatrain attributed (prob­ably spuriously) to Johnson, written in a copy of Murphy’s Life of Garrick (see II.K).51 A final observation. We suspect that as our ­labors proceed apace upon this edition, we ­will uncover additional documentary texts and hitherto unknown data about Murphy’s participation in the life of Johnson and his circle—­materials which, if found, w ­ ill eventually find their egress at appropriate places within this edition; likewise, some of the pieces listed ­here may eventually be dismissed from the final publication.52 Nevertheless, we are confident that the textual and MS opulence

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1650–1850 delineated within the pages of the pre­sent prolegomenon—­a variety of impor­tant and disparate materials, most of which have never been given sufficient, if indeed any, editorial attention—­amply justifies our prosecution of this proj­ect. Ultimately, our goal consists not only of enlarging scholarly apprehension of the relationship between Arthur Murphy and Samuel Johnson; it furthermore hopes to helpfully enrich our comprehension of the complex and fascinating social, cultural, and literary milieu within which ­these two remarkable men of letters figured and flourished.

Notes 1. I wish to recognize my coeditor, Christine Jackson-­Holzberg, who helped provide a ­great deal of the research collected in this chapter. When I use the pronouns “our” or “we,” this signifies the genuinely collaborative nature of the enterprise. Thanks must also go to Thomas Kinsella, whose fine essay “The Pride of Lit­er­a­ ture: Arthur Murphy’s Essay on Johnson,” in The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, vol. 16 (New York: AMS Press, 2005), 129–156, provided a mine of invaluable information for this chapter; indeed, it was ­after reading Kinsella’s piece that the idea for this edition crystallized in my mind. Tom was also kind enough to read over the final draft, offering suggestions and corrections. 2. In addition to his authorial activities, Murphy also successfully pursued a brief acting c­ areer and, ­later in life, a more extensive ­legal ­career. 3. Arthur Sherbo, ed., New Essays by Murphy (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1963), 185. The works Sherbo refers to include John Pike Emery, Arthur Murphy: An Eminent En­glish Dramatist of the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury (Philadelphia: University ­ areer of Murphy of Pennsylvania Press, 1946); Howard H. Dunbar, The Dramatic C (New York: Modern Language Association of Amer­i­ca, 1946); and Ronald B. Botting, “The Textual History of Murphy’s Gray’s-­Inn Journal,” Research Studies of the State University of Washington 25 (1957): 33–48. 4. Hereafter cited as Essay on Johnson. 5. For the “Mur” nickname, see Piozzi, Anecdotes, in Memoirs and Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson, ed. Arthur Sherbo (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 138. 6. Bruce Redford, ed., The Letters of Samuel Johnson: The Hyde Edition, 5 vols. (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1992–1994), 1:160; The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, gen. ed. Robert DeMaria Jr. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958–); Johnson on Shakespeare, vol. 7, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 705; James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols., 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–1964), 2:127. 7. Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 2:127.

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8. For the length of the Hawkins-­Johnson friendship, see Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. O M Brack, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 379n129, 384n167. 9. Sherbo, Memoirs and Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson. 10. The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson, ed. O M Brack Jr. and Robert E. Kelley (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1974). 11. Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bertram H. Davis (New York: Macmillan, 1961); Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. 12. “The Logia of Samuel Johnson and the Quest for the Historical Johnson,” in The Selected Essays of Samuel Johnson (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 230; the essay was originally published in The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, ed. Paul J. Korshin, vol. 3 (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 1–33. 13. Email communication from Thomas Kinsella. 14. For the quotation, see Murphy’s Essay on Johnson, 6; for the work’s popularity, see David Fleeman, A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 2, prepared for press by James McLaverty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 1641–1712. 15. Murphy, Essay on Johnson, 43–45; see also Yale Edition, Debates in Parliament, vol. 21, ed. Thomas Kaminski and Benjamin Beard Hoover, text ed. O M Brack, Jr. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), xv–­x vi; the speech itself was prob­ably delivered during the Parliamentary session of 1740–1741, in the debate over the “Seamen’s Bill,” see Yale Edition, 337–339. 16. For the poem, see Murphy, Essay on Johnson, 84–87; the phrase “paraphrastic translation” comes from David Nichol Smith, Edward L. McAdam, [and David Fleeman,] eds., The Poems of Samuel Johnson, 2nd  ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). For the Richardson letter (March 16, 1756), see Murphy, Essay on Johnson, 88–89; see also Redford, The Letters of Samuel Johnson, 1:132. 17. Kinsella, “Pride of Lit­er­a­ture,” 145, 130, 133. 18. Fleeman, Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 1649. 19. Letters from the Late Lord Chedworth to the Rev. Thomas Crompton (London, 1828), 159, letter 73, cited in Fleeman, Bibliography of the Works of Samuel John­ son, 1647n2. 20. The R. B. Adam Library Relating to Dr. Samuel Johnson and His Era, 4 vols. (Buffalo, NY: Printed for the Author, 1929–1930), 3:179; original MS, Hyde collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 21. For the richly intertextual relationship between Murphy’s Essay on Johnson and the works of Hawkins, Piozzi, and Boswell, see Kinsella, “Pride of Lit­er­a­ture,” 150. 22. Robert Donald Spector, Arthur Murphy (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 24. For the complex history of the origin of the Gray’s-­Inn Journal, see Simon R. Varey, “The Craftsman 1726–1752: An Historical and Critical Account” (PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 1976).

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1650–1850 23. See Sherbo, New Essays, 1. 24. NB: The first number of the Gray’s-­Inn Journal given in this outline corresponds to the initial issue number, when available; the number in parenthesis refers to the final 1786 edition, Murphy Works. 25. See Bonnie Ferrero, “Johnson, Murphy, and Macbeth,” Review of En­glish Studies, 42, no. 166 (May 1991): 228–232. 26. For vari­ous accounts of this initial meeting, see Murphy, Essay on Johnson, 356; Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1:356; Life Manuscript, 1:194n2, 250; Piozzi, Anecdotes, 138. See also Curtis  B. Bradford, “Arthur Murphy’s Meeting with Johnson,” Philological Quarterly 18 (July  1939): 318–320; Ronald  B. Botting, “The Textual History of Murphy’s Gray’s-­Inn Journal,” Research Studies of the State College of Washington 25 (1957): 33–48; Roy E. Aycock, “Arthur Murphy, the Gray’s-­Inn Journal, and the Craftsman: Some Publication Mysteries,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Amer­i­ca 67 (1973): 255–262; Hugh Amory, “What Murphy Knew: His Interpolations in Fielding’s Works (1762),” Papers of the Biblio­ graphical Society of Amer­i­ca 77 (1983): 133–166. 27. See Garry Headland, William Shipley, Charles Ranger, Esq., Arthur Murphy and the Society of Arts, WSG Occasional Papers no.  9 (2009), 8–27; and John  L. Abbott, “Dr.  Johnson and the Society,” in The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts and Sci­ ences: Studies in the Eighteenth-­Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts, ed. D.G.C. Allan and John L. Abbott (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 7–17. 28. See also Johnson’s letter to Charles Burney in Redford, Letters of Samuel John­ son, 1:159–160. 29. See Fleeman, Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 2:678–690. 30. Republished separately in 1760; also included in Murphy Works, 1:99–105. 31. Also located in the 1786 edition of Murphy Works, 7:1–12. 32. ­Later reprinted as The Expostulation, a Satire (in Murphy Works, 7:15–39). 33. See also “Advertisement” to Alzuma: A Tragedy. As performed at the Theatre Royal in Covent-­Garden, 1773, which suggests that Zoilus may have been David Garrick. The historical Zoilus was a fourth-­century-­B.C. cynic known for his attacks upon Isocrates, Plato, and Homer. 34. Benjamin Christie Nangle, The Monthly Review, First Series: 1749–1789 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 214. 35. Nangle, Monthly Review, First Series, 134. See also Fleeman, Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 1630; Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, xv; and Emery, Arthur Murphy, 152, bibliographic information drawn from Kinsella, “Pride of Lit­er­a­ture,” 152n5. 36. See Sherbo, New Essays, 99; and Robert DeMaria Jr., “Samuel Parr’s Epitaph for Johnson, His Library, and His Unwritten Biography,” in Editing Lives: Essays in Con­ temporary Textual and Biographical Studies in Honor of O M Brack, Jr, ed. Jesse G. Swan (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013): 67–92, esp. 68.

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37. Nangle, Monthly Review, First Series, 209. 38. Benjamin Christie Nangle, The Monthly Review, Second Series: 1790–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 147. 39. Title also glances at Pope’s late poem Seventeen Hundred Thirty Eight, con­ temporary with Johnson’s London. 40. George Gleig, ­later Bishop of Brechin, is better known for writing the Encyclope­ dia Britannica entry “Samuel Johnson” (3rd ed., 1788, 9:296–300), which was ­later replaced by the now notorious Macaulay entry. Gleig’s dedication may have prompted Murphy to include an extended quotation from Johnson’s translation of A Voyage to Abyssinia in his Essay on Johnson (14–25); see Kinsella, “Pride of Lit­er­a­ture,” 134–135. 41. See John P. Emery, “Murphy’s Authorship of the Notes of Smart’s Hilliad,” Mod­ ern Language Notes 61, no. 3 (March 1946): 162–165; and The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, vol. 4: Miscellaneous Poems, En­glish and Latin, ed. Karina Williamson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 443–446. 42. The Lewis Walpole collection, at the Yale Library. See J. Homer Caskey, “Arthur Murphy’s Common-­place Book,” Studies in Philology 37, no. 4 (October 1940): 598–609. 43. In Piozzi, Anecdotes, 103–104; MS, Thraliana, 3:61, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. 44. R.  B. Adam Library, 3:178, MS, Hyde collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 45. Available on Eighteenth-­Century Collections Online, https://­w ww​.­gale​.­com​/­prima​ ry​-­sources​/­eighteenth​-­century​-­collections​-­online. 46. See James  L. Clifford, “Further Letters of the Johnson Circle,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Manchester 20, no. 2 (1936): 268–283, at 274. 47. See Hester Thrale [Piozzi], Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs.  Hester Lynch Thrale (­Later Mrs.  Piozzi), 1706–1809, ed. Katherine  C. Balderston, 2 vols., 2nd  ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 1:150–151. 48. The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Joyce Hemlow et  al., 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972–1984), 5:207–214. 49. Rambler essays to be taken from original Folio edition, t­hose most likely to be read by Murphy during his early ­career as periodical essayist. 50. See Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1:309; Fleeman, Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 2:686. See also Donald Eddy, Samuel Johnson: Book Reviewer in the Literary Magazine (New York: Garland, 1979), 16, 38–39. 51. See James Hayes, “Lines Attributed to Dr. Johnson,” Notes and Queries, 9th ser., 9 (August 26, 1902): 330; Smith, McAdam, [and Fleeman,] The Poems of Samuel Johnson, 469. 52. For example, see Donald D. Eddy’s remarks in Eddy, Samuel Johnson, xiii: “I originally intended to include in this book a discussion of Arthur Murphy’s contributions to the Literary Magazine. . . . ​Much of the material—­especially book reviews—in the

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1650–1850 Literary Magazine of 1757–58 shows Murphy’s hand; in fact indications of Murphy’s authorship are pre­sent to such an extent that I believe it is very probable that Murphy assumed Johnson’s responsibilities a­ fter he left the magazine.” Given the absence of any definitive scholarly corroboration, a close editorial scrutiny of the Literary Magazine ­will be necessary in order to ­either confirm or refute Eddy’s suspicions. If they are confirmed, then a significant and hitherto unknown aspect of Johnson’s literary ­career in the 1750s ­will emerge.

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INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL FEATURE CLAUDE WILLAN All-­piercing sage! who sat not down and dream’d Romantic schemes, defended by the din Of specious words, and tyranny of names; But, bidding his amazing mind attend, And with heroic patience years on years Deep-­searching, saw at last the system dawn, And shine, of all his race, on him alone. —­James Thomson, A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Isaac Newton The purity of speech and the greatness of empire have in all countries met together. —­Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-­Society of London

As a poet, proposer, translator, playwright, critic, and theorist, John Dennis

(1667–1734) was enormously influential in a variety of fields over forty years. He is thoroughly implicated in current debates around the histories of science, literary criticism and the theory of the sublime, the reception of Milton, and eighteenth-­ century dramaturgy and stage management. He is still mostly known as an antagonist, and at that a losing one. In what follows I offer some specific answers as to what we miss about the period’s literary, critical, theatrical, and po­liti­cal cultures as well as Dennis himself when framing Dennis’s oeuvre in that way. Born ­under the Protectorate and grown up u ­ nder Stuart rule, Dennis’s Whiggish po­liti­cal convictions

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1650–1850 compelled him to promote the good of the Commonwealth so as to secure it from perceived encroachments of po­liti­cal and religious tyranny. In this he found himself advocating for Lockean princi­ples of laissez-­faire mixed government with an avidity that bespeaks the felt precarity first of the Williamite succession and then of the f­ uture force of the Act of Settlement.1 Dennis’s commitment to writing ­these defenses was itself a part of his dedication to Whiggism. The variety and extensiveness of his output testify to Dennis’s Platonic conception of a polis that must be governed philosophically to be governed rightly. For Dennis as for Newton, a philosophy was a system by another name, and the more inclusive that system’s articulation the better its chances for success. Therefore, the very existence of a topic was a prima facie justification for writing about it, and for advocating for reforms that would better that part of society and t­ hose parts contiguous to it. Each of Dennis’s tracts forms a part of his ongoing proj­ect to theorize a state systematized down to a level of maximal granularity. The development of Dennis’s thought can be indexed in part by the extent of that granularity. Jonathan Pritchard ends his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biog­ raphy on Dennis writing that “the pity of his life was the moment he looked up from his studies at the world, and more particularly the p ­ eople, around him.”2 As suggested in more than one essay in the following pages, Dennis could not have been unaware of how unappealing was his disputatiousness. However, he clearly judged any risk of ostracism worthwhile. The charge of motiveless malignancy imputed to him is worth fully grounding through careful explication and analy­sis. In sum, Pritchard’s “pity” is more complex than the ­simple fact of Dennis’s fractiousness; rather it is the unusual nature of his cosmology of the state and the way in which the structure of that cosmology determined the character of his interactions. The fields of aesthetics, religion, morality, and economic and military policy are not distinct from one another for Dennis. Rather, they are parts of a single cohesive structure. ­These parts could reinforce one another, but the deformation of any one part posed an existential threat for the integrity of the ­whole. The de­cadence of the Italian opera; excessive spending on luxuries; underpaid seamen; irregular scansion: all could presage the complete fracturing of the social contract. Dennis found himself having to defend this interleaved structure from the imperfections of any one of the actors who made it up. So opposed was Dennis to government by fiat that the social contract was always, in his imagination, in the pro­cess of being collectively devised and implemented. So powerfully did he endorse the mechanics of elective monarchy that

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freedom from bondage could be secured only by recourse to the arts of persuasion. Had a government taken it upon itself to preserve the supposedly organic consensus without the prior urging of the vox populi, it would have called into question the predication of the revolution of 1688/1689 itself. Clifford Siskin writes that “we have forgotten that system, like the novel, is a genre and not just an idea.”3 On this account, Thomas Sprat’s injunction to Fellows of the Royal Society that they employ a form of “mathematical plainness” shows as a more ambitious formal proj­ect than it might at first appear. Sprat asks that writers participate in a genre of systematic writing that is in accord with the larger proj­ect of the Royal Society. ­Whether discovered or in­ven­ted out of ­whole cloth, the idea of a system of the world was the summit of ambitions for Whig writers. James Thomson’s eulogy for Newton speaks to the dearest ambition of Whiggish proposers, innovators, and social reformers: that a system could be discovered for the operation of all ­things. The lines of Thomson’s that I take for my epigraph could just as easily describe Dennis’s ambitions to see “at last the system drawn,” as they could the ambitions of a number of Whig writers.4 In this ambition they followed Newton’s own goals. Newton introduced the third book of the Principia, itself called “Of the System of the World”: “In the preceding books I have laid down the princi­ples of philosophy; princi­ples not philosophical but mathematical; such, to wit, as we may build our reasonings upon in philosophical enquiries.”5 An effective distinction between mathematical princi­ ples and philosophical enquiries would have equated, for proposers of all stripes, to a solid epistemological basis from which to argue for the best normative princi­ ples for the government of the state of E ­ ngland.6 Understanding Dennis offers a way to understand the very ontology of post-1688 Britain. And yet Dennis is now remembered as often as not as the butt of Alexander Pope’s jokes.7 The conflict between the two is well known and much recounted. Pope is the writer, ­after Dennis, most mentioned in the articles connected ­here, and he is both the most egregious obscurer of Dennis’s achievement and its chief vector. The stakes of their contretemps, however, go far beyond offering a sandbox in which to take the usual plea­sure in Pope’s concision, insight, and preternatural capacity to articulate and balance competing ironies in a line or two. The dispute’s ­ ecause origins, surrounding Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, are worth revisiting b they show the full extent of their rival and incompatible philosophies of art and nationhood. The conflict bears examination to show how perversely similar Dennis and Pope are in the logic and content of their claims. This similarity reveals the sheer arbitrariness of preferring one party’s account of the episode—­usually

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1650–1850 Pope’s—­over another. And this is why it is particularly unfortunate that our knowledge of Dennis is so often mediated by Pope: that inevitable partiality biases us not only in the adjudication of a protracted and prodigious spat but in our understanding of the period’s profoundly contentious and complex cultural politics. Pope first referred to Dennis in 1711, in An Essay on Criticism: Appius reddens at each word you speak, And stares, tremendous, with a threat’ning eye, Like some fierce Tyrant in old tapestry.8 This sideways glance marries acute insight with ridicule.9 That Dennis’s ire is provoked by “each word” is Pope’s criticism of Dennis’s critical method.10 In a letter to John Caryll, Pope dismissed as insignificant his reference to Dennis’s flush: “to colour and stare on some occasions . . . ​are revolutions that happen sometimes in the best and most regular f­ aces in Christendom.”11 In the same letter, written shortly ­after Dennis had published his rebuttal to Pope’s Essay, titled Reflections Critical and Satyrical, upon a Late Rhapsody, Call’d, An Essay upon Criticism, Pope addresses what r­ eally irks him: “The manner in which Mr. Dennis takes to pieces several par­tic­u­lar lines detached from their natu­ral places, may show how easy it is to any one to give a new sense, or a new nonsense, to what the author intended, or not intended.”12 The decontextualized “each word” that makes Dennis redden is a reference to this critical practice. Pope’s most revealing characterization of Dennis is not as a critic anachronistically wise to the intentional fallacy, but as an embroidered “Tyrant.” What’s tyrannical about Dennis is his insistence upon artistic proscriptions and rules: in his Remarks on Prince Arthur Dennis criticizes Richard Blackmore’s epic on the grounds of its many failures to abide by the laws of epic poetry as Dennis deduces them from Virgil. But Pope’s characterization reveals as much about Pope, who ­earlier in the same poem instructs his readers to “Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem, / To copy Nature is to copy Them”13—­exactly the princi­ple for which he mocks Dennis. For Dennis to be reduced to “some fierce Tyrant in Old Tapes­ try” is not just a mocking depersonalization (the “some” makes the “fierce Tyrant” into a stock type). The “Old Tapestry” is an art form whose flowering of popularity has passed in E ­ ngland with implicitly l­ittle relevance by comparison to con­ temporary poetry. Pope reimagines Dennis’s criticism as something that fails to participate even in the same milieu as Pope, transfigured as it is ­here into the risible, futile, and generic posturing of a forgotten dictator, rendered in faded embroidery. Dennis’s writing is ineffectual ­because the stock character of the Tyrant belongs to a bygone model of government. It follows that Dennis’s fondness for

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proscription is just as outmoded. Pope’s jab stings all the more ­because Dennis continually professes his highest ambition to be the preservation and the enhancement of liberty. This aside, like the rest of An Essay on Criticism, threatens Dennis’s ­whole cosmology of art, nature, and the state. Dennis’s response to that threat, Reflections Critical and Satyrical, upon a Late Rhapsody, Call’d, An Essay upon Criticism, responds with satire just as complex.14 The Reflections concludes: And this for the pre­sent I take my leave of you and of this l­ittle Critick and his Book; a Book throughout which Folly and Ignorance, ­those Brethren so lame and so impotent, do ridiculously at one and the same time look very big and very dull, and strut, and hobble cheek by jowl with their arms on Kimbo, being led and supported, and Bully-­back’d by that blind Hector Impudence. (30) Dennis h ­ ere borrows a figure from Swift’s ­Battle of the Books: the episode in which Virgil rides out from the party of the Ancients to meet the Moderns in b ­ attle and espies a promising looking figure, in huge armor, making a terrible din as he rides out. As the two approach one another, the figure becomes vis­i­ble: Lifting up the vizard of his Helmet, a Face hardly appeared within . . . ​that of the renowned Dryden. The brave Antient [Virgil] suddenly started, as one possess’d with Surprise and Disappointment together: For the Helmet was nine times too large for the Head, which appeared Situate far in the hinder Part, even like the Lady in a Lobster, or like a Mouse ­under a Canopy of State, or like a shriveled Beau from within the Pent-­house of a modern Periwig.15 Dennis’s allusion to Swift gives Dennis some leeway in his h ­ andling of the analogy. Although Swift’s satire of Dryden focuses on his literary pretensions, the meta­ phor of a man in armor far too large for him is perfect for Dennis’s purposes, since the armored man’s comparative littleness naturally suggests itself. And so Dennis contrasts Pope’s physical littleness with the grandeur of his ambitions, and inverts the line of poetic descent from Dryden that Pope tries to claim in An Essay on Criti­ cism into a legacy of self-­delusion.16 Dennis lampoons Pope’s lameness alongside his smallness.17 In the Reflections Dennis refers to Pope as “that ­little Gentleman,” “this ­little Author,” “a young, squab, short Gentleman,” and describes Pope’s “outward Shape” as “that of downright Monkey” (29). Associatively, Pope’s book is itself “lame” and “impotent.” In Dennis’s formulation, the book’s folly and ignorance depend entirely upon “Impudence”: impudence both leads and supports them, and “bully-­back’d” them. As deeply unpleasant as this meta­phor is, it is worth unpacking for the allusive force it also brings. “Bully-­backing” means that Pope’s physical deformation, the abnormal

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1650–1850 lateral curvature of his spine, is a result of the weight of his impudence.18 The scene in full: Pope’s book, led by folly and impudence and carry­ing impudence on its back, with impudence both “blind” and a “Hector.” This parodic reimagining of Aeneas’s flight from Troy carry­ing his blind ­father, Anchises, snipes at Pope’s aspirations to Virgilian imitations. Rather, Pope’s work is an aimless, corrupted, and crippled incompetence. This meta­phor has one more turn of the screw: in An Essay on Criticism Pope uses the language of legislation, connoting the laws of art with ­those of the state.19 Dennis writes that Pope “struts and affects the Dictatorian Air, he plainly shews that at the same time his is ­under the Rod, and that while he pretends to give Laws to o ­ thers, he is himself a pedantick Slave.” Dennis alleges that Pope “dictates perpetually and pretends to give Law without any ­thing of the Simplicity or Majesty of a Legislator” (2). Dennis’s e­ arlier evocation of the origin myth of Rome is particularly apposite ­here. According to the logic of Dennis’s analogy, if Pope’s art ordained laws for the state, then the state that resulted would not be characterized, as Rome was by Aeneas’s piety, but instead by Pope’s dullness, his crippling impudence, and blind folly and ignorance. We have ­here traveled a long way from Dennis’s endorsements of critical gravity in The Impartial Critic: this is far from a work of “compos’d or majestic assurance,” nor does it seem to proceed from “a tranquility and greatness of Mind.”20 Nonetheless Dennis goes on to taxonomize some of the poem’s inconsistencies that have struck ­later readers, such as its unmeetable standards for writing and judging, and the way its terms have fluid or unclear meanings. In an uncanny pre-­ emption of Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Dennis writes that Pope all but declares in An Essay upon Criticism that “Horace was a Dreamer, and my Lord Roscommon a Dotard, and I, my Masters, only I, am alerte and eueille, only I am the man of importance” (Reflections, 15). Dennis keenly and accurately perceives Pope’s exceptionalism, a man who has “writ a Panegyrick upon himself” (29). Perhaps Pope’s harshest critique of Dennis’s work follows in two lines a­ fter the three devoted explic­itly to Appius. They are generalized, but their placement links them to the critic: Fear most to tax an Honourable Fool, Whose Right it is, uncensur’d to be dull.21 This couplet’s implication is Pope’s most substantive charge: Dennis might be honorable, but he is foolish and dull. Pope’s couplet contains a hidden joke on utile and dulce, in the assonance of dull with dulce: Dennis might be honorable, utile; but he is dull, rather than dulce. The predicate for Dennis’s writing about art had always been that art should instruct before it pleased; that utile was paramount

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over dulce. Pope’s combined ars scrivendi and ars critica upset that hierarchy. Honor takes the dative: calculations of honor are concerned with the strength of social bonds. It is a fundamentally public-­spirited emotion. However, should writers aim only to please, rather than teach, then citizens’ energies w ­ ere taken up with the pursuit of plea­sure, and national decline would follow. Pope’s poem shows the full extent to which he and Dennis disagree about the role of art and the practice of criticism. Pope opposes himself to Dennis’s empirical, quasi-­Newtonian critical iterable method. Several passages in Pope’s An Essay on Criticism address this component of Dennis’s work: Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare, For ­there’s a Happiness as well as Care. Musick resembles Poetry, in each Are nameless Graces which no Methods teach. (ll. 141–144) ­These “nameless graces” are a compelling fudge b ­ ecause resorting to the inexpressibility topos contradicts the key premise of Dennis’s criticism, that poetry can be fully anatomized. Pope’s choice of “Musick” as the comparator to poetry is telling; Pope is implying that the nature of t­hose “Graces” is aural, an implication underscored by the strong end-­rhymes of ­these two couplets. This quatrain’s perfect iambic pentameter is disturbed performatively by the trochaic “Musick.” Pope’s implication is therefore that the “happiness” and “graces” that critics ­can’t access with an iteratable apparatus are precisely t­ hose of his own poetry. Pope tries to disqualify critics’ grounds that go beyond the artistic: But Critic Learning flourish’d most in France. The Rules, a Nation born to serve, obeys, And Boileau still in Right of Horace sways. But we, brave Britons, Foreign Laws despis’d, And kept unconquer’d and unciviliz’d, Fierce for the Liberties of Wit, and bold, We still defy’d the Romans as of old.22 Pope equates preceptual criticism with servility and dictatorship. The liberty of British writing constitutes a defiance of “the Romans as of old”: unusually for Pope, liberated writing is ­here Protestant writing. This passage inverts Dennis’s own preoccupation with Romish tyranny and turns it against him. Dennis’s final charges address this tyranny, resolving on a question with which critics t­ oday still wrestle: ­whether Pope is a Jacobite.23 He has libelle’d two Monarchs and two nations. The two Monarchs are King Charles and King William: The two Nations are the Dutch and our own. . . . ​He

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1650–1850 is graciously pleas’d to pass over in silence that which comes between them. . . . ​ Now I humbly conceive that he who libels our Confederates, must be by Politicks a Jacobite; and he who libels all the Protestant Kings that we have had in this Island t­ hese threescore Years, and who justifies the Dispensing Pow’r so long ­after we are ­free’d from it . . . ​must, I humbly conceive, derive his religion from St. Omer’s, . . . ​and is, I suppose, politckly setting up for Poet-­Laureat against the coming-­over of the Pretender. (Reflections, 27)24 The power of this critique is amplified when one is considering its historical moment. Pope’s Catholicism was public knowledge, and Protestant Britain was still at war with Catholic France. Dennis’s reference to St. Omer’s, the Jesuit college for expatriate Catholic En­glishmen in France supported by Louis XIV and James III, is a sly piece of innuendo: Pope ­didn’t attend St. Omer’s and so could not have been po­liti­cally radicalized ­there. But as a middle-­class Catholic he might well have done so. Dennis’s claim that Pope is positioning himself to be James III’s poet laureate is a quite plausible claim. It explains Dennis’s epithet for Pope, “Mr. Bays,” and, perhaps, one reason for Pope’s scorn for the poets laureate of his lifetime.25 The insults that Pope and Dennis trade have the same stakes and the same roots. Pope charges Dennis’s belief in binding rules of art with making him servile and dispositionally French in a way that is unpatriotic during the War of Spanish Succession; Dennis plays on Pope’s Catholicism for its strongly correlated Jacobitism. Each claims that the other is not truly loyal to the interests of the British public, or to the preservation of British liberty. Dennis did not always manage to achieve his goals in his efforts to theorize and articulate systematic heuristics for each topic he addressed. But the consistency of the gap between Dennis’s ambition and his achievements is itself instructive. The difficulty of achieving a systematic aesthetics did not, for Dennis, have any bearing on its desirability. The extremities to which Dennis could be led in his prose work by his theory of the role of art in the modern state can be seen in his Advancement and Refor­ mation of Modern Poetry (1701). This text shows Dennis refining his aesthetics to integrate the role of religion and religiosity more thoroughly into his theory of poetry. He writes that “the assertion which is the Foundation of this Treatise . . . ​is, that Religion gives a very g­ reat advantage for the exciting of Passion in Poetry” (vi). Dennis argues that both Ancient and Modern poetry are rife with “obscenity.” What sets Ancient poetry apart from Modern is both that “the Religion of the Ancients . . . ​was very consistent with Obscenity” and that accordingly “a way of writing that was authoriz’d by their Religion could never be said to be utterly

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inconsistent with instruction . . . . ​whereas the Divinity of our Religion being utterly abhorrent of any t­ hing which is impure, such Ribaldry inserted in our Poetry can never possibly ­either instruct or move” (vii). To compare the two models of poetry and of religion, Dennis sets Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar beside Sophocles’s Oedipus. The analy­sis that follows ties together Dennis’s commitments to systematizing imaginative writing, to the promotion of a homogeneous national religion, and to writing that furthers the stability of the commonwealth. Dennis finds Oedipus “just and regular” and Julius Caesar “extravagant and irregular”; Oedipus “very Religious” and Julius Caesar “irreligious” (Advancement and Reformation, x). Julius Caesar trou­bles Dennis ­because of a paradox at its heart that makes it particularly apposite for the posing of hy­po­ thet­i­cal questions about succession during the year that the Act of Succession was passed. E ­ ither the death of Caesar was murder, and unlawful, in which case the deaths of Brutus and Cassius are lawful, or vice versa. If the deaths of Brutus and Cassius are unjust, Shakespeare is guilty only of “polluting the scene with the blood of the very best and last of the Romans” (x). The alternative—­that Caesar was unlawfully killed, Brutus and Cassius justly punished—­alarms Dennis: Shakespeare would then be culpable for “committing in the face of the Audience a very horrible murder, and only punishing two of them” (xi). In Dennis’s calculus, the value of the life of a justly appointed leader far outweighs the value of the life of two citizens with even as much worth as Brutus and Cassius. The con­temporary context motivating Dennis to frame the value of Caesar’s life in this way is William III’s fatal illness and Jacobite unrest over the Act of Succession. Dennis argues that Shakespeare “gives an occasion to the p ­ eople to draw a dangerous reference . . . ​ which may be Destructive to Government, and to ­Human Society” (xi) ­because Dennis finds in Shakespeare’s text both irregularity and too lenient a punishment for civic unrest, such that the play practically foments revolution among the audience.26 Dennis finds Oedipus, on the other hand, laudable ­because regular. Regularity is, ­after all, “nothing but the bringing some rules into practice” (Advancement and Re­formation, xi). The associative connection that Dennis made between Julius Caesar’s irregularity and its potentially treasonous and thus heretical effect on audiences implies that a regular play that follows an iterable set of rules, like Oedipus, is good for the stability of the state. Accordingly, regularity is paramount for Dennis: “writing Regularly is writing Morally, Decently, Justly, Naturally, Reasonably” (xiii). The comparison between Shakespeare and Sophocles introduces Dennis’s argument for the value of a systematized literary criticism. Dennis ties his belief in

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1650–1850 systems into party and national loyalty by arguing that systems are themselves innately Godly: As Nature is Order and Rule and Harmony in the vis­i­ble World, so Reason is the very same throughout the invisible Creation. For Reason is Order and the Result of Order. And nothing that is Irregular, as far as it is Irregular, ever was or ever can be e­ ither Natu­ral or Reasonable. What­ever God created he designed it Regular, and as the rest of the Creatures cannot swerve in the least from the Eternal Laws pre-­ordained for them . . . ​for Order at first made the face of ­things so beautiful, and the cessation of that Order would once more bring in Chaos; so Poetry, which is an imitation of Nature, must do the same ­thing. (Advancement and Reformation, xv–­x vi) If systems are godly, and if proper Religion promotes the good of the commonwealth, then the implementation of systems is a godly act and for the good of the commonwealth. Poetry is best suited to this task ­because “Poetry and the Christian Religion being alike to move the affections, they may very well be made instrumental to advancing each other” (Advancement and Reformation, xxvii–­x xviii). The lynchpin role that Dennis sees poetry as occupying is such that not only does writing regular poetry in praise of Nature and of God’s moral order benefit individual readers and the commonwealth at large, but writing irregular poetry encourages bad morality and bad citizenship. It behooves poets to write regularly not only for the sake of better art but for the sake of the commonwealth. Dennis worries about the passage “Abominable Corruptions” from “the manners of private men” into “the administration of publick affairs” (xxviii). When Dennis l­ater writes to John Sheffield that “Your Lordship knows that it was t­ owards the beginning of the last C ­ entury, that the French, a subtle and discerning Nation, . . . ​began to cultivate criticism” (Advancement and Reformation, xviii) he refers specifically to the origins of the Académie Française, which began to meet informally in the 1620s, and which was formalized by Royal patent in 1637. The corresponding En­glish body, the Royal Society, was formalized in 1662. If the writing promoted by the Académie cultivated criticism, what Thomas Sprat recommended in his History of the Royal-­Society of London (1667) was “plain, undeceiving expressions” (40). Sprat suggests that the French prefer “the pleasures of the town” and that accordingly they valued “humour, and wit, and variety, and elegance of language” (41). The En­glish, conversely, prefer the pleasures “of the field”: implicit in this contrast between the urbane French and the georgic En­glish are other contrasts, between talking and d ­ oing, and between a consuming elite

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(cloistered at Versailles) and a producing elite (“our [nobility] . . . ​scattered in country h ­ ouses” [41]). Sprat’s summary praise of the Fellow of the Society is that they reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style, to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men delivered so many t­ hings almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natu­ral way of speaking; positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness bringing all ­things as near the mathematical plainness as they can; and preferring the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants before that of wits or scholars. (History of the Royal-­Society of London, 113) We w ­ ill see that “mathematical plainness” is, throughout, Dennis’s ambition in his prose works. What Morris Croll characterizes as “clearness, brevity and appropriateness.”27 Dennis’s enthusiasm for the brevity of the enumerative list is “such a mathematical style as was contemplated by Bayle and some seventeenth-­century Cartesians, a style admirable of course for scientific exposition, but ­limited to uses in which art has no opportunity” (Advancement and Reformation, 88). Following the Impartial Critick, the Remarks, and the Advancement, Dennis turned his attentions to E ­ ngland’s navy and the wars with France and Spain in three documents, An Essay on the Navy (1702), The Seaman’s Case (1702), and A Pro­ posal for putting a Speedy End to the War (1703). The theory of form to which Dennis was drawn by his po­liti­cal commitments became all the clearer in ­these texts. Dennis attempts to write systematically ­because with an accurately delineated system comes unassailable epistemological, and therefore po­liti­cal, authority.28 That Dennis does not often meet with success does not change the po­liti­cal value of the attempt. The most complex of ­these naval treatises is An Essay on the Navy.29 It offers the clearest example in Dennis’s oeuvre of his determination to systematize where no system exists, or where such a system continues to escape his grasp. The majority of the first part, and about half of the Essay as a ­whole, is taken up by its fourth section. Dennis lists the “Hardships . . . ​principally compain’d of”: 1. The Captain’s promising ­those that enter, that they ­shall be preferred to considerable Employments . . . ​of which ­there is no per­for­mance. 2. Their unkind, and . . . ​cruel Treatment, when on Board. 3. The turning them over from Ship to Ship, contrary to Publication, and the disadvantage that accrues thereby. 4. Keeping them many years out of their Wages.

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1650–1850 5. The uncertain and intricate manner of Payments. 6. Querying them. 7. Making them Run, with many other Hardships of the like nature. (7) Dennis runs spectacularly aground in his reliance on subsequent lists to categorize the subordinate levels of information. When he writes that “Fourthly, another discouragement is the uncertain and intricate manner of payment lately practis’d’ he is writing about part one, section four, point five (1.4.5). Points, reasons, justifications, rebuttals, asides, lists, and sublists and other gobbets of information ramify. By page 22, Dennis’s organ­izing structure has subdivided to 1.4.6.3.5.3.5.5, when Dennis is explaining the reasons given for denying a repeal of an unfairly given sick Query to an ill mari­ner who happened to miss the departure of his boat through misfortune. Dennis’s pamphlet becomes almost impossible to follow quite shortly ­after he has reached the m ­ iddle of the list of seamen’s grievances. ­Whether aware of the woeful insufficiency of his taxonomic gifts or not, Dennis stays committed to his own kind of “mathematical plainness” b ­ ecause of the epistemology and po­liti­ cal ontology of that stylistic choice. For Max Novak, the disjuncture between ambition and achievement was irrelevant to the po­liti­cal charge of this method, common to Dennis and other projectors: “projecting was the mode of the age, even if a ­great many of the schemes ­were unrealizable. . . . ​The acad­emy . . . ​always projected unrealizable and Utopian ideals. Even if the gap between the i­magined and the achievable was too often not bridged by successful proj­ects, the excitement in projecting was an essential and vitalising part of the age.”30 Perhaps his most ambitious design was that contained in The Grounds of Criticism, which constitutes an agenda for Whig letters.31 This agenda is not a programmatic list of distinctions to be drawn, or of genres to be evaluated, but is instead that the mode of programmatic criticism is logically superior, that the purview of the critic is all of lit­er­a­ture, and that synthetic evaluation and writing on a huge scale are within the critic’s grasp. The Grounds of Criticism not only models a taxonomy of verse, it models a mode of artistic criticism and of literary-­critical, religious, and philosophical ambition for ­others to emulate. The grounds that Dennis prepares with The Grounds of Criticism are ­those for intellectual proj­ects of the broadest pos­ si­ble conception. The scale of his intellectual ambition correlated to the single-­minded and possibly perverse nature of his pursuit of it. Dennis remarks that his “numerous Enemies” believe him to have a “Resolution to approve of nothing which is liked by ­others”32—­a belief that can only have been reinforced by Dennis’s Remarks upon

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Cato.33 In this text, Dennis’s goal is to dispute the claims of Addison’s phenomenally successful tragedy Cato to nationalist exemplarity. Since tragedy must be ­ ecause it is an account of a historical event—­Cato’s exemplary, Cato is first flawed b suicide—­and therefore devoid of a “fable” or moral owing to its status as fact. Cato’s suicide “is not a general and Tragical Action, but a par­tic­u­lar ­thing which Cato did and suffer’d” (11). The only instruction that can be drawn from Cato, writes Dennis, is that “the Invaders of Liberty are seen to Triumph, and the Defenders of it to Perish” (10). Dennis asserts that Cato’s suicide was unnecessary ­because “the Cause of Liberty was yet not entirely lost” (14). With a literalism that would be stunning ­were it not so predictable, Dennis goes on to explore the possibilities that ­were left open in the plot of Cato that might yet have delivered Cato and his allies from danger. Dennis quotes the play’s approving critics and responds to them, he marshals arguments from Aristotle, and he impugns inconsistency in all its forms wherever he finds it. Dennis finds Cato to be bad art; which is to say, morally and po­liti­cally irresponsible. Dennis believes that the state ­ought to be formed from the inside outward, so that the state would be founded upon a corporate moral integrity. If citizens are formed from the outside inward, then vanity and its accompanying vicissitudes of taste and fashion w ­ ill override moral and philosophical imperatives. A public that constitutes itself from discrete autonomous private selves into a public body is self-­determining. If the public constitutes a private citizenry based on what is most publically congenial, then plea­sure, not utility, ­will determine the shape of both bodies. Not only did Dennis’s conception of the proper interrelation of private and public not gain ac­cep­tance, the literary style designed to serve that conception faded into obsolescence. Programmatic writing, instead, took the fore. Dennis’s narratives are designed to prompt, didactically, actions in ­others; Addison’s pos­si­ ble narratives are designed to induce replications of ­those narratives in ­others.34 The public that Addison inhabits in Cato as in his periodical writing is irrecoverably polyvocal. The contrast between Addison’s literary Whiggism and Dennis’s represents the way in which Dennis is a kind of Whig alien to current narratives of Whig culture at the turn of the eigh­teenth ­century, as Dan Gustafon notes in ­these pages. The practicality of Dennis’s focus makes him parallel to but markedly dif­fer­ent from figures like John Locke, Steele, Hill, or Shaftesbury. While the goals of Dennis’s systematization may not have endured, his efforts to make religious and aesthetic sensibilities w ­ ere taken up by ­others. His eighteenth-­century legacy is worth glancing at, in part to suggest if only in miniature some of the areas in which his work

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1650–1850 endured, and in part to fill in the blank between him and Words­worth with a more compelling causal chain. Dennis’s determinations that poetry should be ordered and regular so that it can best imitate Nature anticipates Shaftesburyian reasoning on divine order and the interconnectedness of all creatures in An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit.35 Samuel Johnson’s indebtedness of John Dennis goes beyond Dennis’s role as a path-­breaking literary critic who attempted to establish objective values of artistic judgment. Dennis’s “Preface” to the Remarks on Prince Arthur contains a defense of criticism, which enumerates three key charges leveled against it: “Three Objections have been made against Criticism in General: The first, that it is an invidious, ill-­natured ­thing. The Second, that it is a vain and Successless Attempt. And Third, that it tends to the Certain Diminution of the Happiness of the Reader.”36 As Philip Smallwood has recently documented, Samuel Johnson lives the answering of ­these charges, and answers them repeatedly; as in Rambler numbers 3, 92, 93, 145, and 156.37 Perhaps a­ fter his praise of Milton, Dennis is now most celebrated as a theorist of the psy­chol­ogy of the sublime.38 As a modeling of self-­reflexion, Dennis’s account of appreciating the sublime aesthetic object greatly resembles David Hume’s account of the same pro­cess. Dennis writes: I design’d to consider the several sorts of hints that might justly transport the Soul by a conscious view of its own excellency. And to divide them into hints of Thoughts and hints of Images. That the Thought which might justly case ­these motions of Spirits w ­ ere of three sorts, such as discover a greatness of Mind, . . . ​That Images ­were ­either of Sounds or of T ­ hings, that Images of T ­ hings ­were e­ ither Mighty or Vast ones.39 Dennis’s terminology strongly prefigures Hume’s distinction between impressions of sensation and of reflection; and his imagination of “Images” Hume’s dicta that no object can be contemplated in the abstract, but only in the par­tic­u­lar.40 The strongest resemblance to Hume comes close to the end of Dennis’s defense of criticism in general, when he argues for the benefits of the refined discrimination that it fosters. Dennis writes that “a man indeed who is able to Judge is not pleas’d with so many t­ hings. But when he finds that he has Reason to be pleas’d, his Plea­ sure is infinitely greater than that of o ­ thers” (“Preface,” xxx), Hume, in his 1742 essay “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” writes comparably that “in short, delicacy of taste has the same effect as delicacy of passion. It enlarges the sphere both of our happiness and misery, and makes us sensible to pains as well as pleasures which

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escape the rest of mankind.” 41 Hume differs significantly from Dennis in his atheism, but adds the following caveat: Of all speculative errors, t­ hose, which regard religion, are the most excusable in compositions of genius; nor is it ever permitted to judge of the civility or wisdom of any ­people, or even of single persons, by the grossness or refinement of their theological princi­ples. The same good sense, that directs men in the ordinary occurrences of life, is not harkened to in religious ­matters, which are supposed to be placed altogether above the cognizance of h ­ uman 42 reason. Dennis’s aesthetic philosophy is predicated on theological princi­ples, but Hume argues ­here that this false predicate does not preclude Dennis from having “good sense.” Nor can it disbar Dennis’s works from being, in their ways, “compositions of genius.” The genre of the scholarly recovery of overlooked, marginalized, or maligned texts and figures has well-­established conventions: the discovery of countervailing narratives, which in turn give rise to revisionist heuristics; the recasting of the historiography of relevant topics, or challenges to the methodologies that prevail in the field. So too are ­there set rhetorical pieces through which an editor might routinely pro­gress, attesting to the timeliness and necessity of the interventions on offer. Where the essays collected in this special issue do abide by t­ hose conventions and offer ­those set pieces, it is by virtue of assessing Dennis’s achievements on their own terms. The recasting of long eighteenth-­century literary historiography begun by work like Christine Gerrard’s The Patriot Opposition to Walpole (1994), Abigail Williams’s Poetry and the Creation of Whig Literary Culture 1681–1714 (2005), and Pat Rogers and Paul Baines’s Edmund Curll: Bookseller (2007) has borne spectacular and varied fruit. So successful has been the opening of the field to new forms of cultivation that the traditional rhetorical tropes have lost some of their urgency. The essays collected ­here address dif­fer­ent facets of Dennis’s working life. James Horo­witz explores Dennis’s voluminous poetic corpus; Philip S. Palmer his compositional pro­cess and literary-­critical commitments; Daniel Gustafson sets Dennis’s work as a playwright in the overlapping contexts of Whig schism and theaters patent; Sarah  B. Stein examines his work as a translator, and Pat Rogers addresses Dennis’s participation in his febrile and semianarchic con­temporary culture of print. Across them, a complex portrait emerges of a man possessed of a

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1650–1850 power­ful and subtle intelligence driven by an unwavering commitment to a par­ tic­u­lar, consistent set of moral, religious, aesthetic, and po­liti­cal values. That intelligence, and Dennis’s prodigious work ethic, ­were directed strictly to the promotion of t­ hose values. And across t­ hese essays Dennis’s acute sensitivity resonates unmistakably. His responses to adversity, however much they evidence a resilient determination to advocate for his princi­ples, also show his keen longing for justice and especial vulnerability to the smarts of its contrary. In tandem with and testament to t­ hose qualities is Dennis’s enormous body of work: his plays, poems, criticism, pamphlets, and letters. Horo­witz’s essay explores Dennis’s poetic output. Horo­witz argues compellingly that Pope’s substitution of John Oldmixon for Dennis in The Dunciad, along with the specifics of the less familiar original version, bespeaks Dennis’s considerable stature as a Whig poet. Dennis’s occasional verse amounts to “an example, unpre­ce­dented in scale, of Whig history in verse.” 43 Horo­witz finds that this large body of work derives formal and thematic coherence from canny and eloquent adoption of “the language, plot, and thematics of a single antecedent text, Paradise Lost.” Dennis’s Miltonism, Horo­witz finds, is consistent in offering subtle readings of con­temporary politics and Milton’s text alike. Moreover, despite the unmistakably partisan stripe of Dennis’s poetry, his achievement is not only to offer a power­ful and extended case for the fittedness of Milton’s characters as types for po­liti­cal verse commentary, it is to open Milton’s poem up for more vari­ous ­future imitators. Dennis’s acumen as a reader and his compositional pro­cess are illuminated in an essay by Philip Palmer, on a copy of Richard Blackmore’s Prince Arthur bearing extensive manuscript annotations in UCLA’s Clark Library. Palmer argues for the handwriting’s being Dennis’s on internal evidence, through comparison to Dennis’s Remarks on Prince Arthur, and through comparison of letter forms with a manuscript of Dennis’s in the Folger Library. This item, then, has im­mense importance as “one of the earliest surviving textual archives in the history of En­glish literary criticism.” Palmer uses ­these marginalia to argue for the sincerity of Dennis’s claims about his intentions in criticizing Blackmore’s poem and to show how very selective Dennis was in choosing which of his observations to print, how assiduous his exercise of tact, and how carefully he considered his reader’s time and attention. This does much to complicate the perception—­promulgated by Dennis himself—­that he wrote quickly and inattentively and offers crucial insights into Dennis’s thinking about the use of analogy, proper versification, Whig history, and Whig poetry. Gustafson’s analy­sis of Dennis’s dealings with Drury Lane twenty years l­ater shows how that thinking developed.44 Gustafson uses the aftermath of the failure

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of The Invader of His Country (1719)—an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus— at London’s Drury Lane theater to read Dennis’s beliefs about the role and relationship of the theater and the state. He accuses men including Colley Cibber and Richard Steele of “ignorance, commercial rapacity, and a lack of public spirit” and of being “uneducated hacks unfit to direct national culture.” Rather than following Edward Niles Hooker and o ­ thers in interpreting this as mere sour grapes over the failure of the play, Gustafson shows how this episode responds to its context of the “consolidation of oligarchic Whig power” following the Hanoverian succession, the Jacobite threat, and the aftermath of Robert Walpole’s defection. Finding Dennis’s sympathies to be strikingly patrician, Gustafson shows how Drury Lane presented itself as analogous to a separate sovereign state and reads Dennis’s response to the episode as being congruent to Ministry orthodoxy on both Jacobite claims to sovereign authority and Walpole’s betrayal. Profound anxiety over “where public authority was to lie in a post-­Stuart polity,” not personal animus, motivated Dennis’s responses. Accordingly the episode shows his commitment to Drury Lane’s royally appointed role “as the cultural stronghold of post-1714 Whig princi­ples.” Sarah B. Stein’s examination of Dennis’s translation of The Passion of Byblis theorizes his first translation as a forerunner of his ­later, religious translations, of his princi­ples of verification, and of his theory of the religious sublime. In Byblis, Stein suggests, Dennis found a source text especially apt to reflect his own anx­i­ eties about passion, enthusiasm, and their proper regulation. Dennis, like Byblis, transgresses through writing, in Dennis’s case through marked infidelity to his source text. His erasure of metamorphosis, itself alarmingly proximate to transubstantiation, prefigures Dennis’s passage to more straightforwardly orthodox religious texts like Psalm 18 and his remarks on sublimity and religious poetry in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry.45 Moreover, Stein suggests that Dennis found in Byblis an early literary analogue for his theory of the relationship between Milton and the classics, and Milton’s rightful place at the heart of the tradition of British lit­er­a­ture. Pat Rogers closes the issue with a triangulation of Dennis with Pope and Edmund Curll. Though their motives differed widely, Rogers demonstrates the expediency each found in the other. Collaboration between Dennis and Curll was more intentional, rather than the more unconscious symbiosis between Curll and Pope. By setting the three figures together, Rogers allows us to see t­hese participants in a well-­known culture war more as occupying positions that overlapped with one another rather than entrenched adversaries. This also shows the

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1650–1850 fluidity of their positions, especially in response to their dramatically protean po­liti­ cal context. The variance of the three men’s motivations—­for money, literary prestige, national security, longer-­term financial security, revenge, or comparative advantage over each other—­reveals each of them to be both principled and selectively opportunistic. Rogers demonstrates how complexly contingency and intention combine and offers a model for analyzing the war of letters in which each man was involved as something by which each was at times unexpectedly engulfed, rather than a discrete site of contained engagements. We are brought back, via the conflicts memorialized in and perpetuated by the Dunciads, to Pritchard’s suggestion that Dennis’s life is something that has an identifiable “pity.” Rather, it seems, a mesh of circumstances past and pre­sent exert disproportionate control over how we view John Dennis’s life and achievements. The essays gathered h ­ ere represent a first step at untangling that mesh.

Notes Epigraphs: James Thomson, A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Isaac Newton, in Lib­ erty, The ­Castle of Indolence, and Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-­Society of London (London: T[homas]. R[oycroft], 1667), 39, https://­quod​.­lib​.­umich​.­edu​/­e​/­ee​ bo​/­A61158 ​.­0001​.­001​?­rgn​=­main;view​=­fulltext (Text Creation Partnership, EEBO-­TCP Round I). 1. The Act of Settlement bestowed the throne on Anne Stuart, as opposed to the restoration of the man whom Jacobites deemed the lawful heir to the throne, the presumptive James III. Moreover, it settled succession a­ fter Anne on George of Hanover. 2. Jonathan Pritchard, “Dennis, John (1658–1734),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004, https://­doi​.­org ​/­10​.­1093 ​/­ref:odnb​/­7503. 3. Clifford Siskin, “Novels and Systems,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 34, no.  2 (2001): 202–215, www​.­jstor​.­org​/­stable​/­1346215. See also his System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 4. For a wide-­ranging account of the uses and the spread of popu­lar Newtonianism, see Laura Miller, Reading Popu­lar Newtonianism: Print, the Principia, and the Dis­ semination of Newtonian Science (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 2018). 5. Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica, vol. 2, book 3 (London, 1729), 200. 6. See Mark Knights, Repre­sen­ta­tion and Misrepre­sen­ta­tion in ­Later Stuart ­England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). In the preface to the Remarks, Dennis writes that “Expression ­ought to be pure, clear, easy, strong, noble, poetick, harmonious” (xv). That manifesto for poetic writing is deeply uncontroversial, yet

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Dennis inspired deep controversy in Tory writers who nonetheless wanted the very same qualities in poetry. 7. Avon Jack Murphy, John Dennis (Boston: Twayne, 1984), lists a partial biography of work on Dennis up to 1984 (147–150). More recently, the most thorough examination of Dennis’s achievement has come from John Morillo, whose Uneasy Feelings: Lit­er­a­ture, the Passions, and Class from Neoclassicism to Romanticism (New York: AMS Press, 2001) puts Dennis in a line of writers on imagination and passions through Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Words­worth. See also his “Poetic Enthusiasm,” in A Companion to Eighteenth-­Century Poetry, ed. Christine Gerrard (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 69–82. Other impor­tant recent work includes Ann T. Delehanty, “Mapping the Aesthetic Mind: John Dennis and Nicolas Boileau,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (April 1968): 233–253; and Sara Landreth, “ ‘Set His Image in Motion’: John Dennis and Early Eighteenth-­Century Motion Imagery,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 40, no. 1 (2016): 59–83. 8. Alexander Pope, An Essay upon Criticism, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), ll. 584–586. 9. See A. N. Wilkins, “Pope and ‘Appius,’ ” Notes and Queries 7 (1960): 292–294. 10. Pope’s disdain for Dennis’s criticism is most explic­itly on display in Peri Bathous, which parodies many characteristics of Dennis’s work, with numerous lists, comparative quotations, a con­spic­u­ous regard for the fate of the nation shown in parenthetical asides—­“my dear Countrymen” (389, 428)—­and in the remark in the first chapter of Peri Bathous that the author is surprised “that our own Nation should have arriv’d to that Pitch of Greatness it now possesses, without any regular System of Laws” (389). Aubrey Williams, ed., Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969). See also Christine Gerrard, “Pope, Peri Bathous, and the Whig Sublime,” in Cultures of Whiggism, ed. David Womersley, Paddy Bullard, and Abigail Williams (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). 11. Alexander Pope to John Caryll, June 25, 1711, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). 12. Alexander Pope to John Caryll, June 25, 1711, in Sherburn, Correspondence. 13. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 139–140. 14. John Dennis, Reflections Critical and Satyrical, upon a Late Rhapsody, Call’d, An Essay upon Criticism (London: Bernard Lintot, 1711). 15. Jonathan Swift, The B ­ attle of the Books, ed. Robert A. Greenberg and William A. ­Piper (1710; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 390. 16. For an account of Pope’s imagination of his literary origins, see Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the En­glish Literary Past, 1660–1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 17. The unmatched treatment of Pope’s physique and of his relationship to it remains Helen Deutsch’s Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

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1650–1850 18. The charge that the ruination of Pope’s body was commensurate with that of his mind often found its way into the hands of Pope’s critics, most notably to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Verses Addressed to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace (London, 1733). 19. Pope echoes Dennis’s own statements in The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (London, 1701) that thriving arts and thriving states are intermingled: “Thus long succeeding Criticks justly reign’d, / Licence repress’d, and useful Laws ordain’d; / Learning and Rome alike in Empire grew, / And Arts still follow’d where her Ea­gles flew” (ll. 681–684) (hereafter cited as Advancement and Refor­ mation, followed by page number). 20. John Dennis, The Impartial Critic, Or, Some Observations upon a Book, entituled, a Short View of Tragedy, Written by Mr. Rymer and Mr. Dennis (London, 1693). 21. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, ll. 588–589. 22. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, ll. 712–718. 23. For examinations of Pope’s pos­si­ble Jacobitism see Murray Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-­Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Howard Erskine-­Hill, “Alexander Pope: The Po­liti­cal Poet in His Time,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 15, no. 2 (1982): 123–148; and Pat Rogers, The Symbolic Design of Windsor-­Forest: Iconography, Pageant, and Prophecy in Pope’s Early Work (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004). 24. Dennis’s reference to the Dispensing Power is an allusion to this passage in An Essay on Criticism: “But tho’ the Ancients thus their Rules invade, / (As Kings dispense with Laws Themselves have made) / Moderns, beware!” (ll. 161–163). Dennis’s reading of Pope is that Pope asserts h ­ ere the rightness of royal fiat. Given the very strong con­ temporary association between the Dispensing Power and James II’s use of it to promote Catholic interests, Dennis therefore reads Pope as nostalgically harking back to Catholic kingship. The pre­sent active tense of “dispense,” at a point in time when the Dispensary Power had been abolished for more than twenty-­two years, supports this reading of Pope’s Jacobitism, since Jacobites did not recognize William III’s legitimacy, nor the legitimacy of laws enacted u ­ nder his rule. Accordingly, Jacobites considered the Dispensary Power still to be a current component of royal authority. The shortcoming of this reading is “Moderns, beware!” This implies that the latitude the Ancients could take is not available to Moderns, however much they might like it to be. In a more qualified reading, Pope’s understanding of the rules of art might be post-­Lapsarian, as is his Jacobitism: however much he might want artists to have absolute authority over their work, and for royals to have and use dispensary authority (implicitly to exempt Catholics from anti-­Catholic strictures), he would know that that world is irretrievably vanished. ­Whether “Moderns, beware!” nullifies or even outweighs the pre­sent active “dispense” is one ­factor that continues to fuel debate. 25. Several of the poets laureate of Pope’s lifetime received a remarkable share of Pope’s invective: Thomas Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Lawrence Eusden, and Colley

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Cibber. This owes in part to Pope’s sense of defensiveness on Dryden’s behalf, since Dryden had been displaced as poet laureate by Shadwell. Other­wise it was in Pope’s interest to allege a lineage of bad writing against which to oppose himself (and, implicitly, Dryden and Milton). See Terry, Poetry and the Making of the En­glish Literary Past. 26. Dennis also objected to Julius Caesar on the grounds of irreligiosity, perhaps owing to the desired coincidence of heresy and treason. 27. Morris W. Croll, “ ‘Attic Prose’ in the Seventeenth C ­ entury,” in Style, Rhe­toric, and Rhythm (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press. 1966), 85. 28. See Knights, Repre­sen­ta­tion and Misrepre­sen­ta­tion in ­later Stuart ­England, for a full exploration of how, over the period from 1685 to 1715, the notion of truth became a tool to exert po­liti­cal leverage. 29. John Dennis, An Essay on the Navy (London, 1702). 30. Maximillian Novak, “Introduction,” in The Age of Proj­ects, ed. Maximillian Novak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 21–23. Novak remarked at the “Projectors” Special Session at the annual national convention of the American Society for Eigh­teenth ­Century Studies in 2012 that “the spirit of the projector is asymptotic, and lies in the marshalling of ideological claims rather than in the achievement of practical goals.” For an essential overview of the figure of the projector, see David Alff, The Wreckage of Intentions: Proj­ects in British Culture 1660–1730 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 31. John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (London, 1704). 32. John Dennis, An Essay upon Public Spirit (London, 1711), 7, 8. 33. John Dennis, Remarks upon Cato, a Tragedy (London, 1713). 34. Curiously, though Dennis’s ideas about the relationship between public and private moral constitution resemble t­ hose articulated by Habermas ­under the rubric of audience-­oriented subjectivity, the imitative didactic method Habermas posited is more Addisonian. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). 35. Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 36. Dennis, “Preface” to Remarks on Prince Arthur (London, 1696), xvi. 37. Philip Smallwood, “Petty Caviller or ‘Formidable Assailant’? Johnson Reads Dennis,” Cambridge Quarterly 46, no. 4 (December 2017): 305–324. 38. See Delehanty, “Mapping the Aesthetic Mind”; Blakey Vermeule, “Shame and Identity: Pope’s ‘Critique of Judgment,’ ” in An Essay on Criticism,” in 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 4 (1998): 105–136; Jeffrey Barnouw, “The Morality of the Sublime: To John Dennis,” Comparative Lit­er­a­ture 125, no. 1 (1983): 21–42; William P. Albrecht, The Sublime Plea­sure of Tragedy: A Study of Critical Theory from Dennis to Keats (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1975); Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The

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1650–1850 Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959); Morillo, Uneasy Feelings; Wheeler, “John Dennis and the Religious Sublime,” College Language Association Journal 2 (December 1986): 210–218; and Catherine Gimelli Martin, “John Dennis, John Locke, and the Sublimation of Revolt: Samson Agonistes a­ fter the Glorious Revolution,” in Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 121–142. 39. Dennis, “Preface” to Remarks on Prince Arthur, xiv. 40. Consider David Hume’s A Treatise of ­Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1997), 1.1.6 and 1.1.7, in par­tic­u­lar: “all general ideas are nothing but par­tic­ u­lar ones, annex’d to a certain term” (1.1.7.1). 41. David Hume, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” in Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11. Compare also from “Of the Standard of Taste”: “­Every voice is united in elegance, propriety, simplicity, spirit in writing; and in blaming fustian, affectation, coldness, and a false brilliancy” (134) to Dennis on cold and fustian writers (Grounds of Criticism in Poetry [London, 1704]). 42. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Selected Essays, 188. 43. See James Horo­witz, “ ‘Naked Majesty’: The Occasional Sublime and Miltonic Whig History of John Dennis, Poet,” in this volume. 44. See also Daniel Gustafson, “The Rake’s Revival: Steele, Dennis, and the Early Eighteenth- ­Century Repertory,” Modern Philology 112, no. 2 (2014): 358–380. 45. See Sarah B. Stein, “Translating the Bible to Raise the Fallen: John Dennis’s Psalm 18,” Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture 43 (2014): 4–27.

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“A SEPARATE MINISTRY” DENNIS, DRURY LANE, AND OPPOSITION POLITICS DANIEL GUSTAFSON

By the end of his ­career as one of the early eigh­teenth ­century’s leading literary

critics, John Dennis had acquired a reputation for unsociability, a fact he acknowledged in the preface to his Original Letters (1721): “I make no doubt but that upon perusal of the Critical part of [the Letters], the old Accusation ­will be brought against me, and ­there ­will be a fresh Outcry among Thoughtless ­People, that I am an Ill-­natur’d Man.”1 This “old Accusation” had been most recently revived in the years just preceding the Letters’ publication. Following the failure of his tragedy The Invader of His Country (1719)—an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus—at London’s Drury Lane theater, Dennis launched a number of ad hominem attacks in print on the man­ag­ers, particularly Colley Cibber and the patentee Richard Steele. In the dedication to Invader, the four-­part Characters and Conduct of Sir John Edgar (1720), and the correspondence made public in Original Letters, he represented the man­ag­ers as uneducated hacks unfit to direct national culture and accused them of ignorance, commercial rapacity, and a lack of public spirit. Just one of the many personal squabbles that came to define his l­ater ­career, the attack on Drury Lane marked Dennis—­for his contemporaries then and for us still ­today—as an “Ill-­natur’d” elitist critic, distanced from the codes of propriety that ­were coming to dominate the literary public sphere and attached to an archaic gentlemanly ethos that was radically out of touch with modern culture.2 For some scholars, following Edward Niles Hooker’s assessment that Dennis h ­ ere shows himself to be “unhealthily vindictive,” the Drury Lane writings amount to ­little

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1650–1850 more than personal malice over his theatrical flop.3 For o ­ thers, notably theater historians, they showcase Dennis’s thoughts on long-­standing debates about theatrical regulation, placing him in a camp of theorists who favored strong centralized state control over the stage.4 In e­ ither reading, Dennis remains somewhat marginal to the narratives of liberalization, commerce and politeness, and the power of representative public institutions that we have come to associate with eighteenth-­century culture. ­Whether they paint Dennis as personally ­bitter or engaged in abstract philotheatrical debates, however, what such accounts miss are the po­liti­cal events that coincided with his attacks on the Drury Lane management. In this essay, I propose that Dennis’s conflict with the man­ag­ers must be historicized against the backdrop of both the consolidation of oligarchic Whig power that occurred upon the 1714 Hanoverian succession and the challenges that immediately confronted that power: the Jacobite threat and the schism within the Whig party that developed with Robert Walpole’s defection from the ministry between 1717 and 1720. Overlapping with ­these po­liti­cal events, the controversy surrounding Invader of His Country and the Drury Lane management reflected the questions that such events posed for the stability of aristocratic Whig rule. Specifically, in their elitist class politics, Dennis’s writings betray an agenda akin to that of the Whig ministry and in fact draw on the tactics of ministry writers to portray Drury Lane as an organ of opposition that poses a danger to the settlement of the post-1714 British state. Rather than remnants of a disappearing past, I argue, the classist and anticivil sociopolitics that Dennis espouses in his attacks on Drury Lane are actually incredibly timely and entirely consistent with con­temporary reactions to the prob­lems of sovereign legitimacy, po­liti­cal opposition, and the fracturing of Whig ideology that the split within the ruling party raised. Thus part of my motive is to extend the scholarly work already begun on unearthing the cultural politics b ­ ehind Dennis’s aesthetic theories and literary-­ 5 theatrical engagements. The Whig schism launched a conflict—­largely in terms of legitimacy and class—­over where public authority was to lie in a post-­Stuart polity: with the ­people, ­imagined as a social mobile and rights-­bearing commons, or with the traditional centers of power, such as the aristocratic echelons of Parliament? What Dennis’s quarrel with the Drury Lane management reveals is how ­these debates w ­ ere played out in the theater, a cultural space of almost constant negotiation over the terms of what constituted the public and the extent of its powers. Dennis’s views on the theatrical repertory, the neoclassical rules, and the aristocratic arbitration of cultural institutions, I suggest, resonate powerfully with a

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“A Separate Ministry”

historicized understanding of the identity crisis of Whig partisanship and its dueling definitions of public authority during the schism years.

Drury Lane in Opposition If by the time of The Beggar’s Opera (1728) Drury Lane was associated firmly with a centralized court Whig ministry, such was not the case ten years ­earlier. In 1719, the man­ag­ers—­Colley Cibber, Barton Booth, Robert Wilks, and the patentee Richard Steele—­found themselves at odds with the current Lord Chamberlain—­Thomas Pelham-­Holles, the Duke of Newcastle—­over the jurisdiction of the stage.6 The conflict had been building for some time; upon acceding to the post, Newcastle had immediately challenged Steele’s regulatory authority over Drury Lane. But according to popu­lar theatrical anecdote, the situation was exacerbated by Cibber in one par­tic­u­lar instance. A con­temporary observer recounts it thus: My Lord Duke had a mind to have a certain Part perform’d, by a certain Actor, which was generally Acted by one of the Man­ag­ers; my Lord, upon letting Mr. Cibber know his Commands, was plainly told by him, that it could not be done, ­because the Part belonged to one of the Man­ag­ers, and when my Lord urg’d his Authority, to enforce his Commands, Cibber, visibly slighting his Authority, in half a Laugh, said, that they ­were a Sort of a Separate Ministry, and so absolutely refus’d to obey my Lord Chamberlain.7 The story of a private citizen contesting the authority of a state minister over the owner­ship and direction of public culture accords well with some prevalent narratives that continue to shape scholarship of the early eigh­teenth c­ entury: the decline of sovereign power, the recession of the royal court as the center of cultural life, the empowerment of the commercialized arts, civil society, and the public sphere. In terms of theater history, Cibber’s challenge also coincides with a unique moment of the commercial theaters’ in­de­pen­dence from state regulation, a liberty that would be reversed with a vengeance in the 1737 Stage Licensing Act.8 But Cibber’s language deserves careful attention. Declaring the man­ag­ers to be “a Separate Ministry,” he represents their right to dictate the daily practices of Drury Lane as a kind of state authority. In this meta­phor, the man­ag­ers’ power is not that of the public sphere—­that is, a power distinct from but critical of the sovereign state—­but that of another legitimate sovereign state altogether. Cibber’s glib comment was ill-­timed, not only ­because of the Lord Chamberlain’s existing predisposition against Steele’s in­de­pen­dence as patentee but also

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1650–1850 ­ ecause it came at a moment in which competitors to the newly minted Hanoverian b regime ­were no laughing ­matter. The accession of George I to the British throne brought with it the apparent dominance of the Whig party across the po­liti­cal spectrum. By 1715, the new king’s ministry had ensured that Tory officials w ­ ere systematically dismissed from state and local administrative offices; the leading Tory ministers ­under Anne, such as Bolingbroke, Oxford, and Ormonde, ­were ­either impeached or had fled to join the Pretender in France; and the Whigs secured a considerable majority in the House of Commons in the ensuing parliamentary elections.9 Yet, despite the Whigs’ consolidation of po­liti­cal power, the Hanoverian state remained somewhat in a condition of crisis in the de­cade following the succession. This was due in no small part to the lingering presence of the Jacobite court, which allied itself with vari­ous sovereign entities (notably France, Spain, and Sweden) in a series of attempts to reclaim Britain for James II’s exiled heirs. The 1715 Jacobite rebellion has received the most attention, but smaller disturbances occurred regularly u ­ ntil the 1720s. Only a few months before Cibber insulted the sovereign indivisibility of Newcastle’s rule, in fact, the nation had been reminded once again of the Jacobites’ obstinate if increasingly feeble claim to state power in a miniature Spanish-­backed invasion that was quickly quelled at Glen Shiel in the Scottish west Highlands.10 Moreover, despite sweeping Whig electoral victories, the Hanoverian state was hardly unified. As Linda Colley and Kathleen Wilson have demonstrated, Tory and popu­lar disaffection with the new regime remained strong enough to force the Whigs to implement both parliamentary and out-­of-­doors tactics constantly in order to keep their hold over the nation.11 A myriad of personal, religious, and ideological tensions also reigned within the ascendant Whig party itself. The passing of the Septennial Bill in April 1716, for instance—­which legalized the sitting of Parliament for up to seven years—­divided the ministry, many of whom thought it “a violation of a basic Whig ideal of electoral freedom.”12 Fears for the preservation of traditional Whig princi­ples ­were heightened by George’s aggressive foreign policy in the Baltic, for which the king sought diplomatic support from France. Such po­liti­cal disagreements—­combined with jockeying among rival ministers for influence and wealth—­eventually led, in early 1717, to the formation of an or­ga­nized Whig opposition led by Robert Walpole in the Commons and Charles Townshend in the Lords. Historians have long noted that the Whig ascendancy led to the party’s abandonment of many of its more populist princi­ples, ironically ceding the radical ideas of liberty and re­sis­tance to country, Tory, and Jacobite interests.13 Despite forming partially in reaction to a pro-­French ministry, the Walpole-­Townshend

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opposition proved no exception. It took e­ very opportunity to confound Whig values in an attempt to frustrate the goals of ministry loyalists: Walpole allied himself with out­spoken Tories, argued for clemency for Jacobite rebels, and backed High Church efforts to block the repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts against Whig dissenters.14 As J. P. Kenyon notes, such mea­sures prompted immediate and widespread criticism of the opposition for “dividing the Whig party and rendering it vulnerable to the Tory/Jacobite menace.”15 If not engendering “a Separate Ministry” in terms of an in­de­pen­dent sovereign state, Walpole’s oppositionist policies w ­ ere deemed dangerously separatist nonetheless as they opened the door to the threat of a Stuart resurgence. To suggest, then, that Drury Lane operated as “a Separate Ministry” was to raise the specter of current po­liti­cal disaffection within a cultural institution that served as a bedrock to the Whig Hanoverian state. For his loyalty to the succession and for his prestige as the reformist author of The Tatler (1709–1711) and The Spectator (1711–1712), the theatrical patent had been gifted to Steele by George I. The terms of the patent made it clear that Steele was to continue the work of Whig cultural politics; Drury Lane was to be managed so as to police “such Repre­sen­ta­ tions, as any way concern Civil Policy, or the Constitution of Our Government, that ­these may contribute to the Support of Our Sacred Authority, and the Preservation of Order and good Government.”16 That Newcastle remained loyal to the Whig ministry in the face of the Walpole-­Townshend opposition and that Steele had recently sided with the opposition on the divisive Peerage Bill—to which I ­will return in the following sections—­only further emphasizes how Cibber’s language may be construed as an act of dissidence. A stage designed to disseminate ministry Whig values was being directed by man­ag­ers who—in ­matters both theatrical and political—­claimed a kind of separatist, oppositional status. This status only became more apparent as the conflict with the Lord Chamberlain escalated. On December 19, 1719, Newcastle banned Cibber from the stage and began ­legal proceedings to revoke Drury Lane’s theatrical license. In response, Steele published what would be his final periodical, The Theatre (1720), in part as a vehicle to defend Cibber, in part to puff his upcoming comedy The Conscious Lovers (1722), and in part to drum up popu­lar support for his rights as patentee u ­ nder Newcastle’s jurisdiction. As far as the latter objective is concerned, Steele was unsuccessful. On January  23, 1720, Newcastle revoked the license; shortly thereafter, along with having them formally swear allegiance to the Lord Chamberlain’s office, he issued to Cibber, Booth, and Wilks a new one that excluded the former patentee.

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1650–1850 John Loftis and Charles Knight have both noted that, insofar as Newcastle and Steele backed the ministry and the opposition, respectively, their conflict over theatrical regulation reflects that of the divided Whig party.17 But beyond observing their opposing factional allegiances, neither scholar fully addresses the cultural or social politics that underlie the contest between the Lord Chamberlain’s office and the Drury Lane management. Nor, despite his polemical attempts to fashion a link between Drury Lane and opposition, do they give more than scant attention to Dennis. In what follows, I suggest that Dennis’s engagement with the man­ ag­ers illuminates the tensions of class and legitimacy that factionalized the Whig party in the wake of their po­liti­cal ascendancy. Like Steele, Dennis saw the stage as a disciplinary prop for patriotism. His assertion in the preface to his play Lib­ erty Asserted (1704) is one he maintained throughout his ­career: “The Instructions which we receive from the Stage o ­ ught to be for the Benefit of the lawful establish’d Government” (CW, 1:320).18 In this sense, the theater was an arm of the state, and theater man­ag­ers ­were analogous to the man­ag­ers of the nation. Both w ­ ere responsible for the direction of the populace and loyalty to the state’s—­staunchly Whiggish—­princi­ples. What emerged, for Dennis, from the divisions over what constituted lawful po­liti­cal authority raised in the Whig schism was a series of questions that complicated this straightforward platform of the cultural politics of the theater. If theater man­ag­ers ­were analogous to the Whig national man­ag­ers, what happens in times of intraparty factionalism? If the theater is an organ for the hegemonic diffusion of Whig values, what happens when ­those values come ­under internal stress? Who are cultural arbiters supposed to represent when the very idea of government becomes contested ground between the nation and the state? It is to questions like ­these that Dennis turned in the fallout of the production of his Invader of his Country on the Drury Lane stage.

Repertory and Schism Dennis’s plays had never been resounding hits at the patent theaters, but his conflict with the Drury Lane man­ag­ers only began with the postponement and eventual failure of Invader of His Country.19 At Steele’s invitation, he had presented the tragedy to the man­ag­ers; they had in turn enthusiastically accepted it and scheduled it to open at the end of 1718. But the preparations for an extravagant revival of John Dryden’s All for Love (1677) occupied the com­pany for much of November, and in December John Rich produced Shakespeare’s original Coriolanus at

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Lincoln’s Inn Fields.20 Having no interest in competing Coriolani (and perhaps ­little confidence in Dennis as a contender), the man­ag­ers shelved it ­until the following year. Invader of His Country fi­nally opened at Drury Lane on November 11, 1719, ran for three nights with only ­limited success, and closed forever. Dennis’s immediate reaction was to lambast the actor-­managers for their perceived mishandling of the production. Only days ­after it closed, Dennis published Invader of His Country prefaced with a lengthy dedication to Newcastle, of whose antagonism ­toward Drury Lane Dennis was well aware. In it, he expounds upon the premise that “­there was a Conspiracy from the beginning, between the three Members of this separate Ministry, as they are pleas’d to call themselves, for the Destruction of this Play” (CW, 2:177). Dennis elaborates—in minute detail that his critics ­were quick to deride—on how the day-­to-­day ­running of Drury Lane effectively torpedoed what had promised to be a publicly useful tragedy. On top of mismanagement, he suggests, the com­pany—­a nd Cibber in par­tic­u­lar, who replaced Dennis’s epilogue with one that took satirical swipes at the playwright and his adaptation—­had “endeavour’d to give the Audience an ill Impression of the Play.”21 But what is more in­ter­est­ing, for my purposes, is Dennis’s allusion to Cibber’s boast of the man­ag­ers’ separatist power. In the dedication, and in letters he wrote to Steele and Booth, Dennis exploits Cibber’s oppositional language and appropriates con­temporary pro-­ministry rhe­toric to suggest that—in its direction of the national repertory along princi­ples of opposition—­the management has undermined the foundations of the Hanoverian succession. The move that Dennis makes to link the “separate Ministry” with “Conspiracy” effects a close association between the man­ag­ers and Jacobitism. Despite the fact that Dennis most likely composed a draft of Invader as early as 1711, his offer of the tragedy to Drury Lane in 1718 was po­liti­cally apt. “ ’ Tis the noble Cause of Your Country,” he informs Newcastle, “in which this Play was alter’d . . . ​[ The man­ag­ers] ­were engag’d to Act it the last Winter by their Words solemnly given, and the acting of it then had been most seasonable, when the Nation was in the uneasy Expectation of a Double Invasion from Sweden on the North, and from Spain on the West of ­England” (CW, 2:176–177). Referring to two recent Jacobite plots—­the aborted Gyllenborg plot and the Spanish-­backed invasion of the west Highlands—­Dennis contends for the timeliness of his Shakespearean adaptation. Invader of His Country follows the plot of Coriolanus closely in representing the eponymous Roman leader’s conversion from loyal general to rebel aggressor who sides with the Volscians to take revenge on the countrymen whom he felt had

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1650–1850 disrespected him. The play’s closing lines bluntly announce Dennis’s topical anti-­ Jacobite application of this plot: They who thro’ Ambition, or Revenge, Or impious Int’rest, join with foreign Foes, T’ invade or to betray their Native Country, ­Shall find, like Coriolanus, soon or late, From their perfidious Foreign Friends their Fate.22 Dennis’s lament in the dedication to Newcastle is thus that his play was hindered from serving in its country’s “Cause” at a crucial moment due to mismanagement of the repertory. U ­ nder such historical conditions, Dennis suggests, the man­ag­ ers’ “Conspiracy” to damn his loyalist play is rendered a conspiracy against the well-­ being of the state. In this way, the dedication pre­sents Drury Lane’s “separate Ministry” as, at best, distressingly nonchalant about po­liti­cal ­matters urgent to the stability of the Hanoverian state, and, at worst, itself responsible for “betray[ing] their Native Country” for “impious Int’rest.” In Dennis’s reading, such a betrayal is traced back to interests that are distinctly commercial. He informs Newcastle that Invader was canceled ­after the third night, according to the man­ag­ers, ­because they suspected it would not bring in more than “a Hundred Pound” (CW, 2:178). This monetizing of theatrical culture is revealed to have unpatriotic motives: in postponing and dismissing the loyalist Invader from the national repertory, Dennis suggests, the man­ag­ers have replaced “the Crown’s undoubted Prerogative” with their own; they “have not the least Concern for their Country” and “have nothing in their Heads or in their Hearts but low Thoughts, and sordid Designs” (2:176).23 Dennis’s suspicion of the commercialization of culture is a constant in his work. But when placed in the context of con­temporary writing on the Whig schism, it takes on a distinctly po­liti­cal cast. The rhetorical combination of a conspiracy against the legitimate Hanoverian state—in the form of Jacobitism—­and corrupt self-­interest was a common ideological tactic of pro-­ministry authors. One of the opening shots fired in the pamphlet war that accompanied Walpole’s split from the ministry was Matthew Tindal’s popu­lar anti-­opposition tract The Defection Consider’d (1717). Relying on the affective power of historical memory, this pamphlet draws an extended analogy between the current “Unaccountable Divisions” within the Whig party and the civil discord of Britain’s past, especially the intense partisanship ­under Queen Anne that jeopardized “our Laws, Liberties, and Reli­ gion.”24 The blame for renewing this threat is laid squarely on the opposition; throughout the tract, Tindal exhaustively analyzes the actions of its leaders and

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concludes them to be ­doing the work of the nation’s enemies: “­These Mens Proceeding ­after this vile, and infamous Manner, has giv’n new Life to the Cause of Popery, and the Pretender; Hence the Jacobites . . . ​have Now their Hopes reviv’d, and are wonderfully elated; and ev’ry where declare, that the Whiggs ­will do That for them, which all their own Cunning, or Force, cou’d not effect.”25 What proves so “vile” in the opposition’s be­hav­ior is ultimately the selling out of their nation for self-­interested purposes. Tindal represents Walpole’s defection from the ministry as a petty squabble over “Places and Preferments,” an argument that succeeding anti-­ opposition tracts develop.26 The author of The Defection farther Consider’d (1718) suggests that the opposition was formed from its leaders’ “predominate Princi­ples of private Interest” and applies a couplet, slightly misquoted, from Rochester’s “A Very Heroical Epistle from My Lord All-­Pride to Doll-­Common” to describe Walpole’s corruption: In my dear self I Center ­every ­thing: My God, my Friend, my Mistress, and my King.27 Daniel Defoe levels a similar accusation in The Old Whig and Modern Whig Revived in the Pre­sent Divisions at Court (1717): “SELF lies at the Bottom of the most popu­ lar Actions they [the opposition] go about . . . ​the Outside indeed may seem to shew something of the Patriot, but at the Bottom their own Grandeur, Gain, and the unsatiable Desire of Power and Profit, is the Pole Star by which they steer.”28 The burden of most pro-­ministry polemic was to condemn Walpole’s pursuit of private “Power and Profit” as the gateway to national betrayal. As we have seen, Walpole’s policies did involve the forging of new alliances with the Whigs’ traditional enemies. Tindal’s tract accounts for such po­liti­cal machinations as a “Criminal Conspiracy,” and the flood of anti-­opposition pamphlets that ensued replicated the argument that Walpole’s faction was “diligently preparing [the nation] for Disaffection, Treason, and perhaps in the end Confusion and Rebellion.”29 To align the opposition with Jacobite treachery became a parliamentary tactic as well. Writing in 1719 to Lord Stanhope, Newcastle proposed, “The ­great point I think we ­ought to aim at is, that ­there should be but two parties, that for and that against the Government, and I cannot but think that by a new election, Mr. Walpole and the few friends his party w ­ ill be able to bring in w ­ ill be so incorporated with the Jacobites that we ­shall have but ­little difficulty in dealing with them.”30 Much like Dennis repeats Cibber’s declaration of a “separate Ministry” to the tune of “Conspiracy,” the ministry’s policy was to smear the opposition as treasonous. The opposition’s “Traiterous Designs” also resided in their perceived usurpation of the king’s authority.31 Similar to Dennis’s rendering of Drury Lane’s directors,

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1650–1850 pro-­ministry writers labeled Walpole’s faction as a “Self-­interested Management” of overmighty subjects who have turned the proper chain of command on its head; they “think themselves not sufficiently rewarded,” one tract asserts, “­unless they can govern the Prince . . . ​As if being Instrumental to the Establish’d Government, gave them a Right of excepting themselves from being subject; or they claim’d the Directorship of their Prince, ­because their Prince claim’d their Assistance.”32 The rhe­toric of the opposition’s excessive rights ­here is consistent with the post-1714 reframing of traditional Whig ideology in which, as Kathleen Wilson has shown, the liberty of the subject was made to consist in consent to the absolute sovereignty of representative state institutions, and the Lockean right to re­sis­tance was made to accord with treason.33 Thus any form of ministerial separatism is dangerous, as Tindal’s tract implies, b ­ ecause it exposes the nation to the slavery of illegitimate authority: “Whoever is insolent to his Prince, ­will be intolerable, when in Power, to his Fellow-­Subjects; and he must have a vitiated Taste, indeed, who thinks it not better to serve a good King . . . ​than be a Slave to any Fellow-­Subject.”34 In Tindal’s account, a management in opposition is no management at all; it is not governing in the name of king and Parliament, but in that of the tyranny of self. In his critique of the cultural authorities at Drury Lane, then, Dennis’s rhetorical strategies reveal his affinity with the pro-­ministry position on where national authority must lie. He closes Invader’s dedication with a petition to Newcastle to reassert his power, asking that we who have scorn’d to be Slaves to our Princes, may be no longer subject to the ridicu­lous Tyranny of our own wretched Creatures, our own Tools and Instruments; that they may no longer set up for Judges in their own Cause, which En­glishmen would never allow to their Kings; that They may no longer usurp a Government, which they have neither Capacity, nor Equity, nor Authority to support, and of which Your Grace is the Lawful Monarch. (CW, 2:180) Dennis plays on the fact of the actor-­managers’ ­legal status as servants to the crown. As Tindal suggested of the opposition Whig statesmen, the Drury Lane man­ag­ers appear ­here to have ­violated the trust placed in them and, with a liberty bordering on licentious “Tyranny,” have “usurp[ed]” the “Government” of their “Lawful Monarch” in resisting the Lord Chamberlain. In portraying the man­ag­ers as usurping arbitrary rulers, Dennis revives a familiar Whig scenario, casting their contest with Newcastle as a ­battle between the illegitimate Stuarts and the lawful Hanoverians.

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To make this scenario stick, Dennis relies not just on a personal complaint over the mistreatment of Invader but on a more expansive reading of the recent Drury Lane repertory that pillories it for its reanimation of Stuart politics. Reflecting on the 1718–1719 season when Invader was postponed, Dennis tells Newcastle that for his tragedy the man­ag­ers had substituted the most Absurd and Insipid Trifles that ever came upon any Stage. They began the Winter with preaching up Adultery to the Town by the mouth of a Dramatick Priest: They ended it much a­ fter the rate at which they began it, by teaching Ladies how they may cuckold their Husbands without the Apprehension of a Discovery; as if any License, or any Patent, would bear [the man­ag­ers] out in Debauching the ­People. (Dennis, CW, 2:177) Referring to All for Love—­which, as we have seen, contributed to Invader’s delayed opening—­and a number of other Restoration libertine plays revived that season, Dennis describes the sexual politics of the repertory as corrupting the nation and undermining the Hanoverian state’s legitimacy.35 The man­ag­er’s decision to “preach” adultery and cuckoldry to audiences through their repertory choices erodes the foundations of state legitimacy by encouraging a sexual politics of marital usurpation that may be analogized to po­liti­cal revolt. In a 1719 letter to Steele on All for Love—­later reprinted in Original Letters—­Dennis sharpens this comparison, asking, “Is not the Chastity of the Marriage Bed one of the chief Incendiaries of Publick Spirit, and the Frequency of Adulteries one of the chief Extinguishers of it[?]” (Dennis, CW, 2:163). Moreover, accusations of “Debauching the ­People” ­were standard fare in republican critiques of absolute monarchy in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries.36 Dennis uses the phrase h ­ ere to align the repertory with a sexual politics of slavery and tyranny that is distinctly pro-­Stuart. He elaborates further in the same letter to Steele, referring again to the politics of All for Love: “Was ever any ­thing so pernicious, so immoral, so criminal, as the Design of that Play? . . . ​Certainly never could the Design of an Author square more exactly with the Design of White-­Hall, at the time when it was written, which was by debauching the ­People absolutely to enslave them” (2:163). In portraying sympathetically Antony’s illicit love for a foreign queen, All for Love is, for Dennis, a theatrical prop to Charles II’s sexual and po­liti­cal affairs with France in the 1670s, which exposed ­England to Catholic absolutism. In his view, the Whig man­ag­ers foster a reanimation of Stuart rule within the cultural realm of the patent theater as they fashion the repertory to exclude Whig plays like Invader of His Country and to promote licentious Restoration revivals that ­will turn the ­people from loyal subjects into debauched rabble.

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1650–1850 Drury Lane’s production of another Stuart play also caught Dennis’s eye: Thomas Southerne’s The Spartan Dame. Written as early as 1687, but suppressed ­until its appearance at Drury Lane in December 1719, The Spartan Dame contains more than a whiff of Jacobite allegory as it details the plot of a cabal of usurpers (Williamite supporters) to overthrow the rule of the exemplary absolutist Leonidas (James II), which ends in a failed revolution. In choosing to stage it at precisely the moment of their fight with Newcastle, Drury Lane’s “separate Ministry” may very well have been appropriating a Jacobite aesthetic as a means of announcing their sympathy with Walpole’s opposition. As Southerne’s most recent editor’s note, Cibber (who played one of the more flagrant usurping characters, Crites) was silenced on December 19, the day ­after the play was printed, which suggests its role in furthering the conflict between the man­a g­ers and the ministry.37 Dennis critiques the man­ag­ers for having “turn’d Booksellers mal à propos, and [for having] given a Hundred and twenty Pound for the Copy of a Play, for which none of their Pre­de­ces­sors would have given five Pound” (Dennis, CW, 2:184).38 He suggests The Spartan Dame is an inappropriate choice for a Whig repertory and serves as another example of the exorbitant lengths to which the man­ag­ers ­will go to corrupt the nation with oppositional ideology. For Dennis, I suggest, the danger of this repertory resides in its betrayal of the theater’s mission—as appointed by George I—as the cultural stronghold of post-1714 Whig princi­ples. Con­temporary pro-­ministry rhe­toric argued that Walpole’s opposition was formed not in the defense of Whig values, but hypocritically appropriates postrevolutionary princi­ples in the name of illegal personal power and profiteering. In representing Drury Lane as geared ­toward commercial self-­interest and Jacobitism, Dennis reiterates a similar claim: the values that undergird the legitimacy of the Hanoverian succession—­ liberty, property, Protestantism—­were ­under assault. What is most distressing for Dennis is that such an assault comes not from external Stuart or Tory forces but most immediately from within the very cultural politics of institutions established as props to Whig power. Drury Lane’s man­ag­ers, he suggests in a letter to Steele, are “Jacobites in Whig Cloathing” (Dennis, CW, 2:172). Its repertory thus proves to be the site of a contest not so much over philotheatrical ideas of stage regulation but over questions of opposition and its relation to legitimacy that the Whig schism made pertinent. In light of this, then, it seems fortuitous for Dennis’s polemic that, of all Shakespearean tragedies, it was an adaptation of the po­liti­cally ambiguous Coriolanus that was at stake. While recent scholars—­notably Annabel Patterson—­trace a lib-

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eral agenda in Shakespeare’s treatment of the fall of an absolutist military leader in the face of a burgeoning public sphere, Dennis interprets the politics of the plot to radically dif­fer­ent ends in his appeal to Newcastle: Coriolanus throws himself at Your Grace’s feet in order to obtain Justice of You, ­after having received as injurious Treatment from the petulant Deportment of two or three Insolent Players, as ever he formerly did at Rome from the Brutal Rage of the Rabble. He has been banish’d from our Theatre by the one, thro’ a mistaken Greediness of Gain, as the other formerly expell’d him from Rome thro’ a groundless Jealousy of Power. . . . ​That Roman is not the first Nobleman whom [the man­ag­ers] have audaciously dar’d to exclude from [the theater]. (Dennis, CW, 2:176)39 Dennis uses the play’s plot—­specifically the conflict between Coriolanus and the Roman ­people—to script his own quarrel with Drury Lane, casting himself, his play, and Newcastle as unjustly “banish’d” nobility and the man­ag­ers as the self-­ consuming “Rabble” whose decision to expel their leader occasions a sack of their city. His reading complicates the text’s straightforward anti-­Jacobite allegory. The “banish’d” Coriolanus is made a sympathetic figure of legitimate rule rather than a usurper allied with a foreign invasion, and the ­people a guilty party in their own destruction rather than a lawful source of po­liti­cal power. What­ever its original po­liti­cal intent as text, then, the play becomes useful in the context of the Whig schism as it allows Dennis to level a critique at the “separate Ministry” for the way its “Greediness of Gain” and personal power threatens the stability of the state from within.40 Read in light of its per­for­mance history—­r ather than as text—­ Invader is an anti-­opposition rather than an anti-­Jacobite play. In disparaging Drury Lane as run by “Rabble,” Dennis indicates that the class politics of Invader stray far from the liberalism that scholars like Patterson read into the Shakespearean original. The actor-­managers are, for him, inappropriate arbiters of national culture not only b ­ ecause they infuse po­liti­cally damaging taste into less discriminating audiences but b ­ ecause of their status as commoners. In the final section, I turn to the intersection of class and neoclassical aesthetics in Dennis’s engagement with the cultural politics of Drury Lane, specifically in his Characters and Conduct of Sir John Edgar. In mobilizing a classist (and classicist) attack on Steele and the actor-­managers’ right to govern the theater, this text both registers the fears that opposition occasioned over the degeneration of aristocratic power and contributes to a realigning of patriotic discourse in the name of ruling class hegemony. When thus contextualized against the debates over theatrical patents and patents of nobility that occupied the ­later years of the Whig

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1650–1850 schism, I suggest, Dennis’s aesthetics (what Paul Cannan calls his “old-­fashioned, aristocratic school of criticism”) appear not as an archaism of a prior era, but as incredibly relevant to the Whig ministry’s consolidation of sociopo­liti­cal power against the leveling effects perceived in new class relations.41

Pretenders, Patents, and Peers Dennis’s animosity t­ oward Drury Lane only intensified in the months following the publication of Invader of His Country. He was particularly piqued by Steele’s efforts in The Theatre—­composed ­under the pseudonym Sir John Edgar—to defend the actor-­managers and to ­counter Newcastle in the jurisdictional ­battle. First published on January 2, 1720, and continued twice weekly u ­ ntil the following April, the periodical’s self-­proclaimed objectives ­were “the Preservation and Improvement of the En­glish Theatre” and the plea for “Esteem” t­ oward “the Profession of [the] Actor.” 42 By Theatre no. 7, however, the polemic b ­ ehind t­ hese motivations had become clear. Opening with praise for the banished Cibber, Steele in this essay questions “why any Body of ­great Fortune and Quality should desire a Jurisdiction over Players” and turns in the end to a lament over “a g­ reat Man’s [Newcastle] unaccountable and condescending Ambition” to steal Drury Lane’s patent from its “proper Owner [Steele].” 43 Theatre no. 8 continues in the same vein, introducing a letter from Steele to the Lord Chamberlain protesting the legality of his proceedings against the man­ag­ers. But what appears in The Theatre as a reiteration of a seemingly straightforward controversy over the regulation of the stage is actually deeply rooted in a sociopo­liti­cal debate about class. In Theatre no. 7, Steele composes an allegory about a “noble” landlord who grants the rights to cultivate some of his less useful land to a “poor Tenant.” The tenant constructs “a glass Hive for Bees” and markets it to paying audiences; its novelty proves a commercial hit, upon which the “noble Patron” attempts to take the now fruitful land back by “Force” and is “immediately stung from Head to Foot.” 4 4 A warning to Newcastle, Steele casts his opponent as representative of a landed nobility who strips the industrious working classes of the produce of their own ­labor, in this case Steele and the man­ag­ ers’ right to profit from the cultivation of Drury Lane. The allegory suggests that the right to property—­and thus to jurisdictional power—­should lie in merit rather than in inherited titles. Steele’s ­battle for control of the theater thus reiterates a

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number of conflicts—­birth versus worth, land versus trade—­that are commonly understood to structure Augustan sociopo­liti­cal thought. The allegory of a meritorious En­glish commons versus an arbitrary aristocracy takes on par­tic­u­lar resonance, however, in the context of the last major clash between the Whig ministry and the opposition: the 1719 Peerage Bill. Hoping to secure their dominance in the House of Lords for the foreseeable ­future, the ministry introduced a bill that would curb the king’s prerogative to create new patents of nobility, thus preventing accession to the peerage of any MPs hostile to the current ministry’s aims. As Clyve Jones has argued, to make this po­liti­cal maneuver successful, the ministry played on the En­glish elite’s xenophobia and fear of social mobility. Recent events like the financial revolution of the 1690s and the 1707 u ­ nion with Scotland had produced a certain amount of influx of foreigners and new moneyed interests into the peerage; as it became more common for titles to be bought and for members of the lower House to rise through ser­vice for their industry, the social exclusiveness of the aristocracy was viewed as beleaguered.45 The opposition, especially in the House of Commons, challenged the bill on a number of counts. Extinguishing the king’s prerogative, it was argued, subverted the balance of the constitution; it gave undue power to a closed and potentially arbitrary ministerial oligarchy; and, most importantly, it curtailed the social and po­liti­ cal power of the upwardly mobile classes who w ­ ere increasingly responsible for the governance of the nation.46 The bill was defeated in December 1719 due to underwhelming support in the Commons and to the opposition’s po­liti­cal pamphleteering, a campaign in which Steele was actively involved. In The Plebeian (1719) and A Letter to the Earl of O[xfor]d, Concerning the Bill of Peerage (1719), he critiques the ministerial elite as “Judges” made “by the blind Order of Birth” and advocates for the empowerment of “meritorious Commoners” that the bill would disallow.47 Steele’s po­liti­cal backing of Walpole contributed to his dispute with Newcastle and was exacerbated again by Cibber, who defended Steele’s class politics in his dedication to his play Ximena (1719), declaring sarcastically that public ser­vice ­ought “only to come from the Hands of High Birth or Station, and the Honour of our national Spirit is not to be sullied, by owing its greatest Instances to the ignoble Head or Heart of a Commoner.” 48 At the ideological base, then, of Steele and the opposition’s parallel controversies over theatrical patents and patents of nobility was a defense of social mobility, the power of the commons to accede to juridical governance in Britain’s oligarchy and hegemonic governance in public institutions like the stage. Contesting

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1650–1850 this oppositional stance, I suggest, lies at the heart of Dennis’s sociopo­liti­cal logic in The Characters and Conduct of Sir John Edgar. This tract—­which announces its politics in its very title, borrowed from the pro-­ministry pamphlet An Answer to the Character and Conduct of R[obert] W[alpole] (1717)—­challenges Steele and the actor-­managers’ right to run Drury Lane based on their nonaristocratic status. Dennis is unabashedly forthright in claiming that the power of cultural arbitration should remain in the hands of gentlemen: “Ev’n the best Actors, with the most unblameable Conduct, are never to be trusted with Power. The trusting P ­ eople with Power, who have neither Birth nor any Education, is sure to make them insolent” (Dennis, CW, 2:185). Dennis emphasized the necessity of “Education” in both critics and cultural arbiters throughout his c­ areer, but ­here it is linked explic­itly to the well-­born or gentle classes. “Birth”—­and the “Education” that primarily came with a leisured upbringing—is the precondition of power, the stabilizer of a socially ordered universe that the “insolent” lower class man­ag­ers disrupt. Cultural management—as the Whig ministry had tried to make po­liti­cal management—is ­here acknowledged as the privilege of a closed ruling elite. Why this must be so—­especially in the case of Drury Lane—­Dennis clarifies with recourse to the standard Platonic distrust of imitation. Actors, he asserts, are “the Tools and Instruments, the Machines of the Muses . . . ​the Apes of a Poet’s Meaning” (Dennis, CW, 2:186). Their purported lack of agency conflicts with the in­de­pen­dence that was considered a necessary addendum to gentility. But, for Dennis, their status as imitators also makes them “the worst Judges in the World of the very ­Things about which they are eternally employ’d” (2:184). As the only “Education” they receive consists in how to copy mechanistically, actors lose the power of judgment that is so impor­tant for Dennis’s theory of responsible cultural governance. In copying indiscriminately every­thing from the productions of “noble Genius” to “what a wretched Poetaster scribbles,” actors must necessarily fail to direct the nation’s theatrical tastes in such a way as to prove beneficial to the government (2:185). Their status as imitators, for Dennis, places them second in the related categories of class and critical capacity; as such, it renders them unable to act for the public good. The link that Characters forges between in­de­pen­dence and public spirit also serves to disqualify the man­ag­ers as appropriate cultural arbiters on account of their damaging commercial self-­interest. The man­ag­ers, Dennis claims, possess a “sordid Love and Greediness of Gain” which “corrupt[s] their Understanding” and which, in turn, encourages a mercantile view of theater that blinds them to aesthetic merit (Dennis, CW, 2:185). The man­ag­ers are represented as essentially sell-

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ing what critical in­de­pen­dence they do have for upward mobility through the accumulation of wealth. In the same way that ministry propaganda represented social mobility and profit as detrimental to a disinterested national management, Dennis’s tract links the man­ag­er’s financial desires to the destruction of the public good. It does so through an argument about the decay of the nation’s culture. “Has the En­glish Stage made any Improvement,” he asks, “since it has been ­under the Intendency of this separate Ministry? Has it not vilely degenerated?” (2:186). ­These questions, for Dennis, are rhetorical. Throughout his ­career, he joins a host of other Augustan writers in bemoaning the substitution of commercial entertainments for classical drama; as he puts it in his epilogue to Invader of His Country, in place of Shakespeare, “Jack-­Puddings, Eunuchs, and Tumblers s­ hall engage, / To damn the Muses, and destroy the Stage.” 49 The fear that the commercially rapacious Drury Lane man­ag­ers debase the nation’s aesthetic values—­and thus their po­liti­cal values—­with commercially popu­lar but lower-­class “Tumblers” and foreign “Eunuchs” bears an ideological similarity with the Whig ministry’s classist and xenophobic worries about the changing social makeup of the peerage. Read as twinned discourses, the ministry’s politics and Dennis’s cultural politics imagine both the patent stage and the patents of nobility as besieged from below. The class politics that Dennis shares with the Whig ministry are made even clearer in his unpublished The ­Causes of the Decay and Defects of Dramatick Poetry (1725). Before the po­liti­cal and financial revolutions of the late seventeenth ­century, Dennis argues, We had then none of ­those upstarts, who had been meanly born, and more meanly educated, and who had beyond their own expectation acquird pelf enough, some in the Army’s, some in the Fleets, and some in the wrecks of the fraudulent Pacifique Ocean, to make an awkward Figure at our public spectacles, and to assist in Bringing in the Diversions of Smithfield to which They had been usd from their Infancy to be Theatricall entertainments. (Dennis, CW, 2:276) The socially mobile classes—­lacking birth and education, but flush with expendable income—­engender a degeneration of theatrical culture that is only made worse by the man­ag­ers. In Characters, Steele and Cibber are similarly rendered “upstarts” whose “acquird pelf” only gives them the power to m ­ istake crass commercialism for true theater; Dennis proclaims them both to have “risen from very inconsiderable Beginnings” and turned Drury Lane into a “Bear-­Garden,” a profitable but degrading realm of lower-­class blood sport (Dennis, CW, 2:190, 2:216). Whereas a de­cade ­later the Scriblerians would level the accusation of cultural

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1650–1850 decline in their defense of the liberty of the subject against corrupt Whig capitalism, in the wake of the schism Dennis appropriates the rhe­toric of cultural decay in defense of the public good vested in a supposedly disinterested cultural oligarchy that could stem the rising tide of a commercial commons.50 The second part of Characters appears to abandon its sociopo­liti­cal attack in f­ avor of challenging Steele’s fitness to run Drury Lane on the grounds of his contempt for the neoclassical rules. I would argue, however, that this shift to aesthetic argument nonetheless bears the mark of ministry Whig ideology in rendering patriotism in terms of an anti-­oppositional and elitist sociopolitics. Responding to Steele’s own nationalistic derision of the formalities of the neoclassical French stage in Theatre no. 2, Dennis opposes the idea that “a Dramatick Work cannot be gracefully executed u ­ nder the Restraint of Rules,” citing Horace and Lord Roscommon as authorities on this point (Dennis, CW, 2:195). His more idiosyncratic argument, however, relies on a discussion of rules and rule-­breaking in politics and, at first sight, appears at odds with the ministry’s aim of restricting the king’s prerogative in the context of the peerage controversy. To prove to Steele that he is “neither a Bigot, nor a Slave to the Rules,” Dennis admits that as ’tis the Prerogative of a King, to suspend the Execution of a Law, when such a Suspension is, and appears to be absolutely necessary for the Safety and Welfare of the Publick . . . ​So ’tis the Prerogative of a Poet, to set aside a Rule of his Art . . . ​whenever ’tis necessary for the Ennobling of his Art, and the Enriching of the Commonwealth of Learning. . . . ​However, this is a Law of eternal Obligation, That wherever g­ reat Beauties can be shewn with the Rules, as well as they can without them, ­there the Rules ­ought always to remain most sacred and inviolable. (Dennis, CW, 2:198) The po­liti­cal analogy h ­ ere is one of responsible and definitively British government, and Dennis subtly reverses the standard accusation that strict adherence to the neoclassical rules equates with aesthetic slavery of a type associated with absolute French monarchy. Instead, the rules of art are made to equal a set of “Law[s]” that are “sacred and inviolable” as they establish the public good.51 They can only be broken by an equitable and conscientious application of sovereign “Prerogative” that does not in any way undermine their establishment as the foundation of a safe and productive commonwealth. Properly employed, Dennis argues, suspending power furthers the purpose of law without subverting it. The relation he draws between politics and art thus equates the neoclassical rules with the balanced British constitution in which executive and legislative powers hold equal weight.

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The implication, then, ironically becomes that as a cultural arbiter who neglects the rules of art, it is Steele, not Dennis, who figures as a French-­style absolutist. Steele and the actor-­managers’ use of sovereign prerogative—he cites Steele and Cibber’s “Railing at the Rules” and their violation of neoclassical princi­ples in plays like Ximena—­becomes excessive and disturbs the balanced constitution of “the Commonwealth of Learning” (Dennis, CW, 2:199). In an inversion of how the Whig po­liti­cal opposition ­imagined the ministry as upsetting the constitutional balance, the man­ag­ers ­here govern neither responsibly nor constitutionally, but rather enact sovereign vio­lence in f­ avor of their own “Absolute Power” and “Arbitrary Reign” (2:189). This absence of the rule of British constitutional law in the man­ag­ers’ governance of public culture allows Dennis to return to the Jacobite tropes that, as we have seen, structured the ministry’s and his own rhe­toric in ­earlier debates about the “separate Ministry.” Lashing Steele for his lack of understanding of dramatic art, Dennis questions, “Do you pretend to set up for a Preserver and Improver of the publick Tast? You, who have done more to corrupt it, and to destroy it, than any Hundred Men in all ­England?” (Dennis, CW, 2:181–182). Dennis links a perceived cultural degeneration u ­ nder Steele’s tenure as patentee with his status as a pretender to critical authority, a word that is repeated with unmistakable po­liti­cal intent throughout Characters. Steele “is the greatest Pretender but one,” Dennis asserts t­oward the end of the tract, “of the Age in which he lives; a Pretender both to Understanding and Virtue” (2:214). The absence of aesthetic rules-­a s-­ law, Dennis suggests, opens the door not just to cultural decay but to treason. His allegation of Steele’s pretendership reiterates a similarly bold charge against the opposition’s betrayal of Whig princi­ples made in the Defection Consider’d. “Vertue was low enough before,” Tindal complains; but a­ fter the opposition’s move against their own party, “what ­will the World say of the greatest Pretenders to it?”52 The cultural equivalent of the Pretender’s po­liti­cal threat to the nation, Dennis represents Steele’s aesthetic ignorance as devastating to the foundations of British theater. Moreover, for ministry rhe­toric, Jacobitism is associated with a lower-­class sociopolitics in such a way as to align patriotic discourse with consolidation of elite Whig power. As Kathleen Wilson has noted, much post-1714 Whig propaganda construed the Jacobites as a kind of rabble whose brand of low popu­lar politics—­ with which the Whig party was once affiliated—­disrupts the stability of the succession.53 The Defection Consider’d again proves an illuminating example in its suggestion of the willingness of “the common ­People” to “join with the Papists

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1650–1850 for the Destruction of our Laws, Liberties, and Religion.”54 Such associations of class with Jacobite sedition appear in Characters as well, in one of Dennis’s closing images of the man­ag­ers as mountebanks. “You and your Deputies,” he writes to Steele, “are fit to be the Man­ag­ers of no Stage, u ­ nless it be that of a Mountebank; into which you are turning that of Drury-­Lane, as fast as possibly you can. . . . ​ The sure Mark of a Mountebank in any Profession, is declaring against the Rules of his Profession; the bestowing pompous Titles upon himself, and high Encomiums upon himself and his Nostrums” (Dennis, CW, 2:199). Lower class himself, and capable of stirring the lower-­class rabble, the mountebank is, for Dennis, a kind of pretender not only to the public good but also to a kind of elite status belonging to the cultural and po­liti­cal nation’s proper leaders. In “bestowing pompous Titles” upon themselves, the man­ag­ers vainly grasp at a kind of social mobility that Dennis links to a pretendership that would violate the rule of law that protects the nation. The mountebank imagery, in fact, draws together all of the indictments of Steele and the actor-­managers that Dennis has relied on: pretendership, a lack of understanding of and re­spect for the rules-­as-­law, presumptive social mobility, and rapacious self-­aggrandizement at the expense of the public. In The Characters and Conduct of Sir John Edgar, then, Drury Lane appears subject to the same anxiety over degeneration of the power of the traditional elite and social exclusivity that motivated the Whig ministry’s stance on the peerage. Under­neath their rhe­toric of legitimacy and the dangers of pretendership to British law, both Dennis’s and the ministry’s writings betray a similar bias in social politics ­toward the consolidation of power—­political and cultural—in aristocratic hands. In a reversal of the more populist Whig values that had emerged on and off in the po­liti­cal strug­gles of prior de­cades, ­here social mobility, rights discourse, and opposition are made suspect, and patriotism is redefined as submission to the ruling elite in the upper echelons of Parliament. For Dennis, the nation’s cultural institutions must ideally serve as organs of this ideology. Xenophobic, elitist, and antisocial as they may appear, especially in The Characters and Conduct of Sir John Edgar, his cultural politics, I suggest, are distinctly of their par­tic­u­lar moment in the history of Whig governance. The positions on taste, discrimination, and neoclassicism that so often make us consider Dennis as a throwback must not be read as an idiosyncratic stand against a modernizing po­liti­cal and aesthetic realm in the early eigh­teenth ­century, but as the cultural extension of a historically pertinent development of Whig ministry ideology in the face of intraparty schism and increasing class mobility. Dennis’s writings on theater during the Whig schism—­from Invader of His Country forward—­form a part of a sociopo­liti­cal movement that

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sought to restrict the conditions of what counts as gentility as a means of restricting who can direct the nation. That our treatments of Dennis’s cultural politics have been nowhere near as extensive as our treatments of t­ hose of, say, Steele or Pope may be a f­ actor of how successful such authors ­were at marginalizing his work.55 But I would also contend that this dearth speaks volumes about our own critical proclivities as literary scholars of the period. Despite our continued revisionism of Whig history, a narrative of liberalization—­the rise of polite culture, popu­lar politics, a pseudo-­egalitarian public sphere—­still clings to the early eigh­teenth ­century. Dennis is not of a polite and commercial ­people; he is not of a protoliberal public sphere; and he is not of the bourgeois developments in theater. But, when read against the crisis and consolidation of Whig power following 1714, his cultural politics speak to the prevalence of aristocratic aesthetic and social values as defining markers of their moment, capable of competing on the national stage with what are often considered the culture’s more modernizing tendencies. What I hope to have suggested is that Dennis’s “Ill-­natur’d” violations of sociopo­liti­cal and aesthetic propriety in the Drury Lane debates do indeed make him marginal—­not so much from the literary-­historical era of which he forms a part, but perhaps from one of our standard understandings of the contours of that era.

Notes 1. John Dennis, The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1939–1943), 2:414 (hereafter cited as CW, followed by volume and page number). 2. Such eighteenth-­century responses to Dennis’s quarrel over Drury Lane include A Critick no Wit: or, Remarks on Mr Dennis’s Late Play, called the Invader of His Country (London, 1720) and An Answer to a Whimsical Pamphlet, call’d The Char­ acter of Sir John Edgar (London, 1720). For recent readings of Dennis’s anticivility and aristocratic ethos, see Paul D. Cannan, The Emergence of Dramatic Criticism in E ­ ngland: From Jonson to Pope (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 116–124, and Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in ­England, 1670–1740: “Hackney for Bread” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 168–178. 3. Edward Niles Hooker, “Introduction,” in CW, 2:xxxiii–iv. See also Richard Barker, Mr Cibber of Drury Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 118–124, and Charles Knight, A Po­liti­cal Biography of Richard Steele (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 182. 4. See John Loftis, Steele at Drury Lane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 133–169, and Matthew J. Kinservik, “Reconsidering Theatrical Regulation in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century,” in Players, Playwrights, Play­houses: Investigating

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1650–1850 Per­for­mance, 1660–1800, ed. Michael Cordner and Peter Holland (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 160–161. 5. See John Morillo, “John Dennis: Enthusiastic Passions, Cultural Memory, and Literary Theory,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 34 (2000): 21–41; Brett Wilson, A Race of Female Patriots: W ­ omen and the Public Spirit on the British Stage, 1688– 1745 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 69–93; and Daniel Gustafson, “The Rake’s Revival: Steele, Dennis, and the Early Eighteenth-­Century Repertory,” Modern Philology 112 (2014): 358–380. 6. The details of the theatrical conflict that I sketch ­here and in the following paragraphs are documented more minutely in Loftis, Steele at Drury Lane, 121–180; Barker, Mr Cibber, 111–124; and Knight, A Po­liti­cal Biography of Richard Steele, 171–204. 7. The State of the Case, between the Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty’s House­hold, and Sir Richard Steele, as Represented by that Knight. Restated in Vindication of King George, and the Most Noble Duke of Newcastle (London, 1720), 30. For details on this incident see, Loftis, Steele at Drury Lane, 134, and Helene Koon, Colley Cib­ b1er: A Biography (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986), 94–95. 8. Cibber reflects on the man­ag­ers’ in­de­pen­dence from state oversight at this time in his Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), ed. B.R.S. Fone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 152. For the history of the confusion over theatrical licensing that Newcastle was determined to clear up, see Judith Milhous, “Theatre Companies and Regulation,” in The Cambridge History of British The­ atre, ed. Joseph Donohue, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 108–125. 9. For the Whig ascendancy and its aftermath, see Archibald Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition, 1714–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 55–109; J. P. Kenyon, Rev­ olution Princi­ples: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 170–199; Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–60 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 177–203; and Kathleen ­ eople: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in E ­ ngland, 1715– Wilson, The Sense of the P 1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 84–136. 10. That the Jacobites continued to pose a threat to the succession has been documented by Wilson, The Sense of the ­People, 101–117, and Paul Kleber Monod, Jaco­ bitism and the En­glish P ­ eople, 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For the individual uprisings, see Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689–1746 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1980). 11. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy, 177–203; Wilson, The Sense of the ­People, 101–117. 12. Brian  W. Hill, Sir Robert Walpole: Sole and Prime Minister (London: Penguin, 1989), 83. See Kenyon, Revolution Princi­ples, 170–199 for post-1714 internal Whig divisions. 13. See Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition, 60–69, 92–94; Kenyon, Revolution Princi­ ples, 170–199; Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy, 192–195; Monod, Jacobitism, 38–44; and Wilson, The Sense of the ­People, 84–101.

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14. See Kenyon, Revolution Princi­ples, 188–190, and Hill, Sir Robert Walpole, 90–106. 15. Kenyon, Revolution Princi­ples, 189. 16. Steele quotes from the patent in The State of the Case between the Lord Cham­ berlain of His Majesty’s House­hold, and the Governor of the Royal Com­pany of Comedians (London, 1720), 12. 17. See Loftis, Steele at Drury Lane, 127–131, and Knight, A Po­liti­cal Biography of Richard Steele, 186–195, 204. 18. Steele argued a similar position, most pointedly in Town-­Talk no.  2: “The best Vehicle for conveying right Sentiments into the ­People, is certainly the Theatre.” Richard Steele’s Periodical Journalism, 1714–1716, ed. Rae Blanchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 194. 19. Much of this narrative we get from Dennis himself in his 1719 letter to Steele, reproduced in CW, 2:162–165. But it is confirmed in Theo­philus Cibber and Rob­ reat Britain and Ireland, 5 vols. (London, ert Shiells, The Lives of the Poets of G 1753), 4:233–234. 20. All for Love premiered on December  3, 1718, and Coriolanus on December  13, 1718. See The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments, and Afterpieces, part 2, vol. 2, ed. Emmett L. Avery (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960). 21. Dennis, The Invader of His Country; or The Fatal Resentment (London, 1720), n.p. 22. Dennis, The Invader of His Country, 79. For an anti-­Jacobite reading of the play, see John Loftis, The Politics of Drama in Augustan ­England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 81–82. Kristine Johanson’s reading, in Shakespeare Adaptations from the Early Eigh­teenth C ­ entury (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), 24–29, complicates the play’s anti-­Jacobite politics. 23. Dennis repeats his attack on the man­ag­ers’ commercial rapacity in his unpublished The ­Causes of Decay and Defects of Dramatick Poetry (1725): “The Theater . . . ​is now in Hands of Players, illiterate, unthinking, unjust, ungratefull and sordid, who fancy themselves plac’d ­there for their extraordinary merits, and for noe other end but to accumulate Pelf, and bring Dishonour upon the Reign of the Best of Kings by sacrifising the British genius to their Insatiable avarice” (CW, 2:277). 24. Matthew Tindal, The Defection Consider’d (London, 1717), 4, 12. 25. Tindal, The Defection Consider’d, 5. 26. Tindal, The Defection Consider’d, 10. 27. Tindal, The Defection farther Consider’d (London, 1718), 9. 28. Daniel Defoe, The Old Whig and Modern Whig Revived, in the Pre­sent Divisions at Court (London, 1717), 27. 29. Tindal, The Defection Consider’d, 20; Tindal, The Defection farther Consider’d, 12. 30. Quoted in Basil Williams, Stanhope: A Study in Eighteenth-­Century War and Diplomacy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 460.

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1650–1850 31. Tindal, The Defection Consider’d, 22. 32. Defoe, The Old Whig and Modern Whig Revived, 21; Tindal, The Defection far­ ther Consider’d, 15. 33. Wilson, The Sense of the ­People, 100–101. 34. Tindal, The Defection Consider’d, 20. 35. It is unclear precisely which cuckolding play Dennis refers to as closing the season. Drury Lane had recently revived a number of risqué comedies by Etherege, Wycherley, Dryden, Congreve, and Vanbrugh. 36. See, for instance, Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government (1698) and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters (1720–1723). 37. See Robert Jordan and Harold Love, eds., The Works of Thomas Southerne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 2:266–268. 38. Hooker interprets this as a reference to The Spartan Dame by tracing Southerne’s relationship with R. W. Chetwood, publisher and prompter at Drury Lane; see CW, 2:479. 39. See Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popu­lar Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). For a more nuanced review of the po­liti­cal ambiguity in Coriolanus, see James Kuzner, “Unbuilding the City: Coriolanus and the Birth of Republican Rome,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007): 174–199. 40. I might add that Dennis’s revisions of the Shakespearean script place as much blame for the threat to Rome on the corrupt and ignorant masses and on the hypocritical tribunes Sicinius and Brutus (who essentially stage manage the ­people’s rejection of Coriolanus) as it does on the eponymous hero. For a discussion of what Invader changes, see Johanson, Shakespeare Adaptations, 24–29. Dennis’s critique of the En­glish ­people as self-­destructive is repeated in his po­liti­ cal pamphlet Julius Caesar Acquitted (London, 1722), 30–39. 41. Cannan, The Emergence of Dramatic Criticism, 8. 42. Richard Steele, Richard Steele’s The Theatre, 1720, ed. John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 3. 43. Steele, Richard Steele’s The Theatre, 32. 44. Steele, Richard Steele’s The Theatre, 32–33. 45. See Clyve Jones, “ ‘ Venice Preserv’d; or A Plot Discover’d’: The Po­liti­cal and Social Context of the Peerage Bill of 1719,” in A Pillar of the Constitution: The House of Lords in British Politics, 1640–1784, ed. Clyve Jones (London: Hambledon Press, 1989), 79–112. 46. The opposition’s arguments ­were summed up brilliantly in Walpole’s speech before the House of Commons on December 8, 1719; see William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, 4 vols. (London, 1816), 1:229–238. 47. Richard Steele, A Letter to the Earl of O[xfor]d, Concerning the Bill of Peerage (London, 1719), 14–15. 48. Theo­philus Cibber, Ximena; or, the Heroick D ­ aughter (London, 1719), viii.

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49. Dennis, The Invader of His Country, n.p. 50. For a related reading of liberty and commerce at odds, see Kinservik, “Reconsidering Theatrical Regulation.” Some con­temporary writers, however, while critical of Steele and the actor-­managers, ­were also opposed to Dennis’s espousal of peers like Newcastle as appropriate cultural arbiters; see for instance the anonymous author of the Muses Gazette in Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal, May 28, 1720. 51. See also Dennis’s Decay and Defects of Dramatick Poetry for a similar analogy of art and the rules to “a Countrey which hath a Body of Laws” (CW, 2:283). 52. Tindal, The Defection Consider’d, 10. 53. Wilson, The Sense of the ­People, 94–95. 54. Tindal, The Defection Consider’d, 12. 55. A point made by Morillo, “John Dennis,” 21, and Hammond, Professional Imagina­ tive Writing, 204.

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“NAKED MAJESTY” THE OCCASIONAL SUBLIME AND MILTONIC WHIG HISTORY OF JOHN DENNIS, POET JAMES HORO­WITZ

Although the diving contest convened by Goddess Dulness in Book II of The

Dunciad appears in each of the poem’s myriad textual versions, the identity of the first contestant, who bemoans his old age before disappearing, apparently for good, into the cloacal depths of Fleet Ditch, depends on which edition of Pope’s satire the reader consults. In the final and best-­known incarnation of the poem, the 1743 Dunciad in Four Books, Pope identifies the superannuated athlete as the poet, playwright, and Whig historian John Oldmixon: “In naked majesty Oldmixon stands.”1 But Oldmixon was not the first dunce to swim in ­these murky ­waters. Pope initially designed the episode for another, more infamous Whiggish opponent, a figure who in the three-­volume Dunciad of 1728 arrives shrouded in pompous quasi-­anonymity (“­great D—­—”) but in the Variorum edition of the following year bears his full surname: In naked majesty g­ reat Dennis stands, And, Milo-­like, surveys his arms and hands, Then sighing, thus. ‘And am I now threescore? Ah why, ye Gods! should two and two make four?’ He said, and climb’d a stranded Lighter’s height, Shot to the black abyss, and plung’d down-­right. The Se­nior’s judgment all the crowd admire, Who but to sink the deeper, ­rose the higher. (1728, 2:261; 1729, 2:271–278)

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It was only a­ fter Dennis’s death in 1734 that Pope, who had made equivocal gestures of reconciliation ­toward his long-­time adversary ­earlier in the de­cade, altered the hero of this passage, as well as excising some, but far from all, of the unflattering references to Dennis scattered across the poem and its textual apparatus.2 It is as a smear on Oldmixon that the episode has received the most critical attention, including Pat Rogers’s observation that the meter of the modified opening line reminds us that a “mixen” is a “dungheap.”3 Yet the passage is far more pointed when applied to John the First (Dennis) than to John the Second (Oldmixon), and its less familiar original version is, I would like to suggest, uniquely revealing about Dennis’s reputation in his twilight years, not only as a critic, playwright, and Whig patriot but also as a poet of considerable if already insecure stature. Pope, in the diving episode, surveys Dennis’s ­career and personality from a dizzying array of unflattering ­angles. The epithet “­great,” ­later crowded out by the tri-­syllabic “Oldmixon,” neatly conveys the inflated self-­perception and even lordly hauteur that Pope and his friends had long attributed to Dennis, as well as recalling the exclamation of tremendous that they helped to pop­u­lar­ize as his signature verbal tic. Pope also evokes Dennis’s lack of success as a tragic playwright, most recently in his ill-­starred 1719 adaptation of Coriolanus, through the failed histrionics of the expedited lament on devouring time, which rapidly declines from stage fustian (“ye Gods!”) to schoolyard arithmetic (“should two and two make four?”). The passage also skewers, with ingenious obscenity, the central tenets of Dennis’s literary criticism, which Pope had been subjecting to mockery and skepticism for the better part of two de­cades. As John Morillo, Abigail Williams, and, most recently, Philip Connell have helped us to understand, Dennis promoted a Christianized version of the Longinian Sublime, attempting to strip the language of Protestant “enthusiasm” of its anarchic and antinomian potential and repurpose it as a tool for propagating Whig civic virtue and anti-­Gallic militarism.4 In the three-­ book Dunciad, as in Pope’s closely con­temporary parody of Longinus, Peri Bathous, Dennis’s pursuit of an elevated style not only risks a bathetic nosedive but is made to seem like its necessary and even intended prelude, a lofty means to a grubby end: “The Se­nior’s judgment all the crowd admire, / Who but to sink the deeper, r­ ose the higher.” In Pope’s 1729 prose summary of the second book, the diving contest is explicated as an allegory for “profund [sic], dark, and dirty authors,” a reading amplified in 1743 to “profound, dark, and dirty Party-­writers” (1729, 170; 1743, 146; emphasis added). The implication for Dennis of the familiar Scriblerian pun on “profound”—­literally, directed to the fundus or bottom—is that despite his

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1650–1850 high-­minded advocacy for a poetry of transcendence, his motives are no less base or unseemly than ­those of other candidates for Whig patronage. An irreverent allusion to Paradise Lost makes Dennis’s cultivation of the Sublime seem still more suspect. The “naked majesty” of the aged diver recalls that of our first parents, who “Godlike erect, with native honour clad / In naked majesty seemed lords of all,”5 an echo that not only (as Valerie Rumbold observes) punningly prefigures the diver’s own literal fall, but also attributes to “­great Dennis” some of the same Adamic shamelessness as the priapic Edmund Curl(l), who e­ arlier in Book II wins the urination contest thanks to his “manly confidence” and “superior size” (1728, 2:261n; 1729, 2:271, 161, 162). The pedestrian dramatist, the perennially unacknowledged legislator of Whig policies and poetics, the dogmatic and God-­bothering critic with a vaguely unwholesome obsession with scale: all of t­ hese familiar aspects of Dennis’s public persona resonate in this episode from the three-­book Dunciad, with the additional, cruel suggestion that by the end of the 1720s even Dennis’s best years as a nuisance w ­ ere ­behind him and he might as well drown himself—­a deliciously ironic end for someone who had, fifteen years ­earlier, been noisily scandalized by the suicide that concludes Joseph Addison’s Cato. Yet ­there is another shading to Dennis’s profile that preoccupied Pope, and which would have been far more con­spic­u­ous to readers of the 1720s than it is t­ oday. This is Dennis’s protracted, productive, and even occasionally remunerative ­career as a poet, which is dutifully acknowledged in modern studies of his work but which has received almost no sustained critical analy­sis.6 Using Pope’s marvelously condensed and malicious portrait as a field guide, I ­will attempt over the following pages to identify the ways in which Dennis’s unusually sizeable poetic corpus, and especially a series of long occasional poems that span more than two de­cades, mattered to his contemporaries and ­ought to ­matter to modern students of late Stuart and early Hanoverian culture. ­After briefly tracing the contours of Dennis’s poetic c­ areer and the early reception of his verse, I describe the characteristic style of his major poems as a careful synthesis of Pindaric and epic modes of po­liti­cal panegyric, a flexible combination that allows Dennis to respond nimbly to the shifting needs of the Whig cause across a period of fierce partisan contestation.7 Despite their origins as poems of public occasion, I ­will argue that Dennis’s panegyrics feature a formidable unity of narrative and style that is especially con­spic­u­ous when the poems are approached in the way that Dennis wanted posterity to remember them: as a sequence. Read back-­to-­back in the hefty two-­volume anthology of his Select Works that Dennis published in 1719, his po­liti­cal lyr­ics collectively amount to an example,

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unpre­ce­dented in scale, of Whig history in verse. The formal coherence of t­ hese seemingly disparate poems derives in large part, as I ­will demonstrate, from Dennis’s systematic and frequently adroit adoption of the language, plot, and thematics of a single antecedent text, Paradise Lost, of which Dennis was not only an avid promoter in his criticism but also an influential imitator in his po­liti­cal verse. His canny and often surprisingly subtle use of Miltonic allusion in the ser­vice of partisan polemic is especially evident in his hagiographic yet nuanced pre­sen­ta­tion of three controversial Whig figureheads—­William III; John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough; and George I—­who together emerge in Dennis’s poems as a trinity of secular heroes modeled on the multiple protagonists, both ­human and divine, of Milton’s epic. This appreciation of Dennis as a Miltonic Whig historian w ­ ill give us further cause to admire the economy and insight of Pope’s damning portrait in Book II of the Dunciad. The choice of the crusading Whig historian John Oldmixon as an understudy for Dennis a­ fter 1734 suggests that Pope recognized Dennis’s aspirations as a poetic chronicler of the recent po­liti­cal past, while Pope’s alignment of Dennis with Adamic “naked majesty” indicates, I ­will close by arguing, that Pope both credited and blamed Dennis for introducing Miltonic imitation into the mainstream of En­glish poetry through his own worldly, not to say mercenary, but still aspirationally sublime paeans to Whig heroism.

Dennis, “­Great” Whig Panegyrist The critical neglect of Dennis’s metrical writing can be attributed in part to its membership in the much-­maligned canon of eighteenth-­century Whig poetry, still often taken as a byword for prolix mediocrity. Yet Abigail Williams’s ground-­clearing 2005 study of Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, as well as recent appreciative considerations of Daniel Defoe’s own long-­neglected poetic corpus, suggest that the moment may fi­nally have arrived to take seriously Dennis’s cultural contributions not just as a critic of verse but also as a timely and ambitious versifier in his own right.8 Another obstacle to critical attention has been the lack of a scholarly edition, let alone one as thorough as E. N. Hooker’s monumental collection of Dennis’s Critical Works (1939–1943), which has had the ironic effect of casting a shadow over Dennis’s comparably voluminous noncritical output. The reputation of Whig poetry was first defaced, of course, by the acid contempt of Tory satirists such as Pope, who castigates this upstart canon throughout the Dun­ ciad, parodically echoing two of its landmark works, Edward Montagu’s Epistle to

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1650–1850 Dorset and Addison’s The Campaign, and capping the altar of Dulness in the poem’s 1728 frontispiece with Richard Blackmore’s two ample Williamite epics on King Arthur (1728, 2:136n, 3:213–214n, 12). As Pope knew, Dennis was a key link in this genealogy, and not just as a critic: at the base of the 1728 altar, as well as in the new frontispiece to the Dunciad Variorum (1729, 120), we find Dennis’s 1719 Select Works, an imposing collection in two volumes, almost half of which—­more than three hundred and fifty pages—is given over to nondramatic verse, and to which Pope made a perhaps facetious point of subscribing.9 Modern assessments of Dennis as “essentially [a] critic . . . ​who occasionally composed verse,” or even as a “Dramatist, poet, but especially critic,” begin to seem slightly off the mark when one recognizes the sheer bulk of the poetic entries in Select Works.10 Pope may not have considered this carelessly printed anthology, which barely warranted a second edition, as a serious rival in prestige or sales for his own immaculate Works of 1717. But Dennis would nonetheless have stood out by the end of the following de­cade for the exceptional length of his poetic ­career—­the poems in Select Works span from 1692 to 1714—­and for what may have been, a­ fter Blackmore and Defoe, both of whom he would survive, the largest portfolio of original verse by any British writer then living. It is not just in his criticism, in other words, that he earned the mantle “­great Dennis.” To be sure, like Blackmore’s roster of ten-­book-­or-­more poems, the last of which, Alfred, appeared in 1723, the very magnitude and unevenness of Dennis’s output—by his own frequent confession he wrote hastily and with l­ittle revision—­would have made it offensive to a perfectionist such as Pope, whose “miniature epic” The Rape of the Lock can be read in part as a retort to Dennis and Blackmore’s aesthetics of maximalism.11 Yet Pope nonetheless demonstrated close familiarity with a broad range of Dennis’s poetry, as well as a mock-­scholarly expertise about its publishing history. Dennis’s longest poem, the 1706 ­Battle of Ramillia, is briefly anatomized in Pope’s first published prose satire, The Critical Specimen, and Dennis’s early Williamite verses are singled out for ridicule across Peri Bathous, where Pope tends to cite them not, as we might expect, from the Select Works, where they are reproduced, but rather from Dennis’s already obscure Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1693).12 Dennis’s sprawling poetic corpus may have found a careful but hostile reader in Pope, but it also developed a more sympathetic following in other quarters and did not plunge into obscurity ­after Dennis’s death with quite the finality that Pope had prophesied. A posthumous and generally respectful 1734 Life of Mr.  John D ­ ennis reminds us that its subject’s talent as an author of Pindaric odes had been praised, apparently without irony, by no less of a judge than John Dryden, and

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Pope’s eventual friend Matthew Prior counts Dennis among the few Whig poets “of note” (along with William Walsh and Nicholas Rowe) to have celebrated the victory at Ramillies.13 Another short biography, from 1719, tellingly prioritizes Dennis’s poetic ventures above his critical works—­“Mr. Dennis is excellent at Pindarick Writings, perfectly regular in all his Per­for­mances; and a Person of sound Learning”—­and while Dennis did not earn a place among Samuel Johnson’s critical biographies sixty years ­later, he did merit inclusion in a 1753 Lives of the Poets, which, despite deeming his verse productions of the 1700s “cold [and] unspirited,” discusses them at a length that suggests that they still retained some currency at the half-­century mark.14 A 1730 theatrical afterpiece entitled The B ­ attle of the Poets, moreover, associated with Henry Fielding and inspired by the Dunciad, imagines Dennis as a candidate for the newly available laureateship, a scenario that would only have been amusing if audiences still remembered his poetic aspirations.15 Nor should it be overlooked that Dennis’s 1704 verse tribute to the ­battle of Blenheim, Britannia Triumphans, achieved what was surely one of its intended effects, by earning the poem’s author, thanks to the real-­life intercession of its hero, the duke of Marlborough, a modest sinecure at court.16 Dennis, then, was a poet of rare productivity, whose work at times garnered respectful notices. But how to characterize the poems themselves? His well-­timed commemoration of the victory at Blenheim is typical of the verse he chose to preserve in Select Works, and of published poems of his era at large, in its prompt responsiveness to current events. Indeed, J. Paul Hunter has reminded us that occasional poems “constitute by far the most ubiquitous and popu­lar class of poetry in eighteenth-­century ­England,” and the first volume of Dennis’s Select Works shows him to have been an unusually prolific and creative poet of public occasion across a period of extraordinary military, po­liti­cal, and cultural tumult, which also happens to constitute what Hunter elsewhere calls the “Missing Years” of British literary history, roughly the quarter c­ entury between 1689 and 1714.17 The 1719 volume does include a handful of poems that are not ripped from the headlines: some awkward vers de société and a paraphrase of the eigh­teenth Psalm, as well as a rendering of Ovid and a tribute to Dryden’s Virgil, which together show Dennis hovering at the margins of Jacob Tonson’s circle of classical translators in the 1690s.18 (Dennis wisely chose to forget his early forays into fable and burlesque, of which he is a more in­ter­est­ing theorist than practitioner, as well as his sole experiment in Defoevian state satire, a 1700 response to the anti-­Williamite xenophobia of the renegade Whig John Tutchin.)19 But the lion’s share of the verse in Select Works—­the heart of the poetic corpus by which Dennis evidently wanted to be

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1650–1850 remembered—­belongs to the topical, public, and ceremonial form, not always congenial to post-­Romantic tastes, of panegyric. According to one recent study of the genre, late-­Stuart poetry of praise typically “attempts to reconcile two very dif­fer­ent literary goals: the need to rec­ord a ‘real’ h ­ uman past, and the need to celebrate timeless ideals.”20 For Dennis, this “past” was recent indeed—­the po­liti­ cal traumas or military reversals of the latest news cycle, often gleaned from the nascent and unreliable medium of military journalism—­and his “timeless ideals” a militant version of the Court Whig party line.21 To read the first volume of the 1719 Select Works, then, is to take a refresher course on the top news stories and poetic occasions of the preceding three de­cades. We begin with two shorter odes on the comparatively unsung victories at Anghrim (1691) and La Hogue (1692), reproduced respectively from Dennis’s 1693 Miscellanies and The Gentleman’s Journal of Peter Motteux.22 What follows is a parade of long poems, originally published individually, in which Dennis responds to the same milestone events that most ambitious poets without an unusually heavy chip on their shoulder felt obliged to commemorate: the death of Mary in 1694, which provoked a surge of frequently strained elegies; the equally unforeseen demise of her husband eight years ­later, which produced rather fewer tributes, much to the indignation of both Defoe and Dennis; the epochal and widely hymned triumphs at Blenheim (1704) and Ramillies (1706), which occasioned Dennis’s longest efforts; and fi­nally the demise of Anne and the ratification of the Act of Settlement in the form of the accession of George I (1714). Only on the 1709 ­Battle of Oudenarde and the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht did Dennis remain noticeably ­silent: he may have been suffering b ­ attle poetry fatigue by 1709, and like many Whigs have seen Harley’s peace as an act of treason.23 The versified portion of the first volume then comes to a light-­hearted and chronologically regressive conclusion with Dennis’s prologue to a 1707 revival of Julius Caesar written in the voice of the “Ghost of Shakespeare.”24 But this too is a state poem of sorts, denouncing the castrati singers who ­were allegedly sapping ­England’s martial spirit (a pet obsession of Dennis’s) and thus serving as a bridge in Select Works between the e­ arlier patriot verse and the civic-­minded cultural criticism that ends the volume.25 It was thus no less in his poetry than in his prose or drama that Dennis was, as Pope puts it in a note to the 1729 diving episode, “a zealous Politician” in whose work “Poetry and the State are always equally concerned,” and Dennis himself described the most impor­tant verse entries in Select Works as “Poems writ in the Cause of Liberty” (1729, 2:271n; CW, 2:173). His extensive occasional verse is ultimately

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polemical in intent, casting con­temporary events into lyric or narrative form not only to memorialize them but also to sculpt how they w ­ ill be interpreted by readers both pre­sent and ­future, and to t­ hese ends Dennis a­ dopted many of the same formal strategies as other partisan poets of his age. As Abigail Williams and Kevin Sharpe describe, the style of panegyric chosen by Augustan poets was often determined by which public figures they singled out for praise, a decision that was itself ­shaped by partisan pressures.26 Whigs, although necessarily paying a certain amount of tactful deference to the queen, tended to give most of their credit for ­England’s unpre­ce­dented military successes to the courage and preternatural stolidity of the duke of Marlborough himself and, to a lesser extent, to the redoubtable loyalty of his ally, Prince Eugene of Savoy. Tories, on the other hand, who already detected a whiff of demagoguery about the duke, and who loathed his wife Sarah, typically raised hosannas to the queen herself as an inspiriting fount of piety, fortitude, and nourishing maternal warmth, or ­else argued that it was not Marlborough’s land war but rather the capture and defense of Gibraltar ­under admiral George Rooke that had delivered the most damaging blow to France and its allies.27 Attempts to compromise between t­ hese dif­fer­ent ascriptions of administrative and military agency led to a number of ingenious poetic solutions, including imitations of Spenser’s multihero saga about a female monarch (Blackmore published an entire epic in 1705 about Elizabeth and the wars against a Catholic superpower carried out in her name)28 and the characterization of Marlborough, as in Addison’s celebrated simile of the “whirl-­wind,” less as a rational actor than as an elemental instrument of divine might, similar to the fierce storm system that had brought E ­ ngland to its knees in 1703.29 One result of t­ hese countervailing pressures was what has been described as the turn-­of-­the-­century shift from the “Pindaric and explosive style” of panegyric—­ lyr­ics of public address written in metrically irregular stanzas and characterized by rapid changes of tone, of which the odes of Abraham Cowley represented the dominant pre­ce­dent in English—to “the smooth, Virgilian epic, or narrative style,” typically composed in heroic couplets or blank verse.30 As compared to the relentless effusiveness of the Pindaric ode, narrative poems of several hundred lines allowed poets greater nuance of tone, characterization, and narrative with which to finesse sensitive po­liti­cal topics, and the critical success of The Campaign, first issued with considerable fanfare by Jacob Tonson at the end of 1704, is commonly seen as the turning point in this transition from ode to brief epic. Dennis’s poetic ­career, however, suggests the limitations of any strict distinction between Pindaric and Virgilian panegyric. In the preface to his 1706 poem on Ramillies, Dennis

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1650–1850 discriminates between lyric and epic modes of versified praise, the former resembling a “Hymn” and the latter featuring allegorical “Machinery,” and claims to have graduated from the former to the latter since his prior poem on Marlborough two years ­earlier (CW, 1:394). But this attempt at taxonomy should be seen as a misleading act of self-­promotion, for in fact his 1704 poem on Blenheim already includes a cast of super­natural agents, including a vengeful personification of the Danube, and even in his earliest po­liti­cal verse Dennis had deliberately combined Pindaric and epic models. His 1694 stanzaic elegy for Mary, The Court of Death, may nominally be A Pindarick Poem, but it nonetheless includes a long narrative dream vision, a pseudo-­epic preamble in which William’s downfall is plotted in a Miltonic underworld. Likewise, Dennis’s 1702 poem on the death of William, The Monument, may feature an epigraph that alludes obliquely to Pindar,31 but the poem is written not in stanzas but rather in cascading blank verse, and at almost sixty pages tests the limits of what can reasonably be called an ode, anticipating not only the Whig ­battle poems of ­later in the de­cade but also the long, free-­ associative excurses of Mark Akenside and Dennis’s ­later ally James Thomson.32 As for the still lengthier narrative poem on Blenheim from 1704, Britannia Tri­ umphans, it announces its approach to epic by taking its epigraph from Virgil’s sophomore effort, the Georgics, and unfolding in mostly unrhymed heroic verse, but Dennis also includes a choral refrain—­the distich “While the bright Church Triumphant in the Sky, / And the blest Church Triumphing h ­ ere below”—­that reminds us of the poem’s ceremonial purpose as a song of praise, granting an air of ritualistic inevitability to what was in fact a highly improbable victory.33

Dennis, Miltonic Historian and Hagiographer In his characteristic mode of public poetry, then, of which he pre­sents a generous serving in Select Works, Dennis synthesizes ode and epic into substantial narrative panegyrics that accommodate choral repetition and digressive bursts of Pindaric rapture. ­Because Dennis was competing in such a crowded marketplace of po­liti­cal verse, a full assessment of what is original or commonplace in what he calls his “greater Lyrick” poems34 would entail restoring them to the annals of other metrical writing on the same subjects—in the pro­cess making the acquaintance of poetic small fry such as Samuel Cobb and Charles Johnson—­and noting when ­these poems w ­ ere issued relative to one another and to the events they rec­ord, for instance that Britannia Triumphans appeared within four months of Blenheim

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and less than two weeks before, as it ­were, Addison’s storm stole Dennis’s thunder.35 In the space that remains, however, I would instead like to concentrate on two related aspects of Dennis’s poetic achievement that should militate against the impression that he was merely one among many producers of Whig ephemera ­under William and Anne. T ­ hese are the unusual scope and unity of the historical and con­temporary narrative offered by his po­liti­cal verse, as it was collected in Select Works, and his groundbreaking engagement with Milton as a poetic model. A large part of what made Dennis distinctive and even, in Pope’s word, “­great” by the time of the Dunciad was the sweep of his poetic ­career, the way that his initially occasional poetry could by 1719 fit together into a consistent and self-­ contained historical fable. This poetic storyline falls somewhere between a per­ petuum carmen of interlaced tales and a saga that was, by the standard of critical authorities such as Dennis himself or René Le Bossu, characteristic of Virgilian epic in its martial tenor, subject of world-­historical importance (the fate of empires and religions), and both episodic eclecticism and overarching narrative coherence. Dennis unfurls a lineage of Protestant heroes that begins with William, whose arrival in 1688 is narrated in retrospect in the poem on his death, and continues with Marlborough and, in prospect, George I. ­These notables are arrayed against enemies both internal—­agents of priestcraft and crypto-­Jacobite factionalism—­and international: Gallic superstition and tyranny, embodied by Louis XIV himself, whose death in 1715 falls just outside the purview of Dennis’s storyline. This genealogy of male heroism, and the accompanying and characteristically Whig diminishment of Anne, becomes especially pronounced in Select Works as a result of Dennis’s decision to give his 1714 elegy, Upon the Death of her Late Sacred Majesty, a new and more frankly descriptive title, “On the Accession of King George.” This is all to say that Select Works offers a versified rendering of Whig history, making (as I noted ­earlier) John Oldmixon, one of the found­ers of that historical mode in prose, a fit substitute for Dennis in Book II of the Dunciad.36 Dennis, moreover, offers his poetic chronicle not through the oblique medium of a Blackmorean epic on the nation’s medieval or Re­nais­sance past, but rather as a tissue of occasional poems on events of the preceding generation (1689 to 1714), each with a discrete design, local agenda, and patches of epiphanic lyric intensity that stand out against the surrounding historical narrative as what Words­worth’s enthusiasm for Dennis might almost encourage us to call spots of time.37 When Pope mocks Dennis for his roller-­coaster unevenness of tone, then, rising to heights of sublimity only to sink to new prosaic depths, he in fact provides an apt description of the verse in Select Works, where the quasi-­epic fable of

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1650–1850 national regeneration periodically ascends to heights of Pindaric enthusiasm or declines to the inevitable banalities of panegyric, including the presence of proper nouns that we tend to associate with state satire, such as “Godolphin” (SW, 1:268).38 This linsey-­woolsey variety of tone, however, is typical of the strategic eclecticism of style that many partisan poets employed ­under Anne, and it must have been the unusual scale of Dennis’s panegyrics that made his poetic modulations so con­ spic­u­ous to readers of Pope’s sensibility. In his own poem on Blenheim, for instance, Prior describes the challenges of writing persuasive military panegyric in the age of the newspaper, complaining of having to translate ungainly Germanic place names and carnage on a numbing scale—­“In one ­great Day on HOCHSTET’s fatal Plain/ FRENCH and BAVARIANS twenty thousand slain”—­into “sweet Numbers” that w ­ ill outlive the pre­sent day, rather than just “insipid Prose . . . ​a Commissary’s List in Verse.”39 Part of Prior’s solution to this challenge is, with tongue just slightly in cheek, to adopt the affected archaism of Spenser and thus to provide fresh headlines with an air of venerable antiquity. Pope’s Edenic epithet “naked majesty” points ­toward a similar strategy of appropriation by Dennis, a gambit that lends an impressive uniformity to his canon of occasional poetry and arguably constitutes his most impor­tant contribution to En­glish verse: his elaborate and inventive emulation of Milton. It is well known that Dennis was the most prolific and, along with Addison, influential early promoter of Paradise Lost, which Dennis describes as more impressive in its sublime effects than any product of antiquity (he also admired the early poems and Samson Agonistes), but it is less often recognized that Dennis was also a pioneer of Miltonic imitation in his own poetry. The popularization of Miltonic blank verse has traditionally been credited to the Tory poet John Philips, whose 1701 burlesque The Splendid Shilling became a sensation ­after it was republished in 1705, the same year that Philips debuted his more soberly Miltonic poem on Blenheim. In his impor­tant work on the early reception of Milton’s poetry and politics, however, Nicholas von Maltzahn observes that it was Dennis who not only praised Milton before it was fash­ion­able in the 1690s but also introduced Milton’s influence into the mainstream of occasional verse in his 1694 elegy for Mary, where, as Dennis asserts in his preface, “I still had Milton in my Eye” (CW, 1:44).40 It was only by 1706 that Dennis’s fellow Whig poets had come to recognize the potential of Miltonic imitation as a polemical vehicle, and Dennis’s ­Battle of Ramillia appeared in that year amid what Abigail Williams calls a “flood of Whig Miltonic imitations.” 41 So pervasive do echoes of Milton become in Whig verse of the ­later 1700s that they sometimes seem unconscious or irrational, as when Nicholas

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Rowe describes Marlborough, in a variation on Adam’s adoring account of Eve, as God’s “last best Gift” to Eu­rope.42 An affiliation with Milton is apparent at e­ very level of Dennis’s poetry, from its prosody to its narrative architectonics. Dennis shared Milton’s belief in the liberationist potential of blank verse, even declaring in 1704, with all the confidence and predictive accuracy of Neville Chamberlain, that “before this ­Century is half expir’d, Rime ­will be wholly banished from our greater Poetry” (CW, 1:379). In Dennis’s own verse a­ fter 1694 he generally eschews end rhyme, although its periodic appearance amid the acres of enjambment in Britannia Triumphans and The ­Battle of Ramillia suggests that he had in mind not only the mea­sures of Milton’s epic but also the more jagged prosodic texture of Samson Agonistes.43 But Dennis’s Miltonic style extends beyond his rejection of heroic couplets and occasional embrace of Latinate word order to a host of borrowed terms, phrases, meta­phoric vehicles, narrative episodes, and even characters. As Dustin Griffin argues of Miltonic imitations throughout the eigh­teenth ­century, this is influence unbedev­iled by Bloomian anxiety—­a form of self-­aware and systematic appropriation that sometimes approaches pastiche.44 In Select Works we encounter, for instance, no fewer than three reenactments of the parliament in Hell, each time as a conspiratorial gathering to roll back the En­glish Reformation and prop up Catholic tyranny, as well as a close imitation of the heavenly colloquy that opens Milton’s Book III, restaged in Britannia Triumphans as a divine plan to intervene on Marlborough’s behalf on the fields of Blenheim. And although the femmes fatales of sixteenth-­ century Italian epic clearly lie ­behind Dennis’s recurring allegorical fiend Discord, who eggs on Tory leaders at home and Louis XIV abroad, sometimes in the seductive guise of Madame de Mazarin or Maintenon, Dennis also makes a point of aligning this alluring antagonist with Milton’s monstrous Sin.45 In the case of Dennis’s Satan, or for that ­matter his version of the heavenly ­Father, we have less of an homage than an overt revival of a Miltonic personage, and when the dev­ilish antagonist of the ­Battle of Ramillia spontaneously recalls the war in heaven—­“When girt with adamant and glorious Flames, / Against the Empire of ­G reat Heaven we fought”—it is as if he is remembering not only the quasi-­scriptural event itself but also Milton’s rendering of that conflict (SW, 1:243). Dennis also suggests parallels between his characters and their Miltonic pre­ce­ dents through the creative use of verbal echoes, although often, as with Rowe’s “last best Gift,” t­ here seems to be a limit to how far Dennis wants his readers to pursue the implications of ­these fleeting analogies. Dennis’s malevolent Discord, for instance, is rendered “stupidly good” by the pious Mary II, a verbatim allusion

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1650–1850 to one of Satan’s first close encounters with Eve, but presumably without any suggestion that the Queen is similarly vulnerable to temptation, while Dennis’s Satan “Sits brooding ­o’er his dark and damn’d Design,” in an equally curious reminiscence of Milton’s “Dovelike” Holy Spirit “brooding on the vast abyss” of Chaos (SW, 57, 54; PL, 4:465, 1:21). If Dennis partly aligns himself with Milton through a skein of sometimes inscrutable local allusions, his larger narrative elaborations on Para­ dise Lost show a more conscious aesthetic and polemical design. The suitability of supernal machinery and allegorical personification for the modern, Christian epic w ­ ere subjects of roiling controversy across Dennis’s lifetime, with Dennis writing in passionate and subtle defense of ­these practices, although he had initially objected in a persnickety manner to the example provided by Blackmore’s Prince Arthur.46 By adopting Milton’s Christian my­thol­ogy, he avoids the challenge of having to work up his own cast of ethereal figures, instead hitching his narrative of armed Protestantism, which begins in the de­cade ­after Milton’s death, to both the biblical plot and anti-­Stuart subtext of Milton’s epic, so that the war against France in the 1690s and 1700s appears as not just a type but a direct continuation of the cosmic strug­gle between grace and perdition that, in Milton’s account, predates the creation of our species. A modern reader might find Milton’s Christian epic, with its famous preference for “patience and heroic martyrdom” over “knights / In ­battles feigned” (PL, 9:32, 30–31), an unlikely pre­ce­dent for what Abigail Williams calls the “gory bellicosity” of Whig ­battle poetry, and won­der how Dennis could reconcile this bloody subject ­matter with the call in his critical writing for a poetry of evangelical enthusiasm.47 As von Maltzhan and ­others have noted, however, Dennis was characteristic of his age in considering the most sublime portion of Paradise Lost to be its martial sixth book, which Dennis saw not as an episode subordinate to the central tale of Edenic expulsion but rather as the crux of one of two distinct fables in Milton’s poem. Indeed, Dennis considered the Edenic portions of Paradise Lost, with their largely ­human tenor, deficient in the grandeur suitable for epic, and as Leslie M. Moore puts it, “One senses . . . ​that Dennis would have been pleased had Milton never written Books XI and XII and perhaps a good portion of Book X.” 48 As with the angelic combatants of Paradise Lost, moreover, Dennis’s pantheon of Protestant heroes is itself a corrective to e­ arlier or alternative models of heroism in lit­er­a­ture and history. Dennis frequently and predictably insists that William and Marlborough’s Christian stoicism outshines the pagan valor of ancients such as Julius Caesar. But he is no less careful to distinguish what he sees as the ultimately pacific agendas of William and Marlborough from the imperial ambitions

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of modern Catholic monarchs, “­Those Tyrants whom the thoughtless World calls Heroes,” and to discriminate between the awesome self-­restraint and unflappable uxuriousness of the En­glish leaders and the rapacity and incontinence of the Bourbons and Stuarts, “whose glaring Actions the World calls ­Great, / [but which] From Passion chiefly, not from Virtue flow” (SW, 1:96, 69). If part of the appeal of Spenser for Augustan panegyrists lay in his expansive network of interdependent protagonists and Elizabethan avatars, a narrative model that allowed po­liti­cally sensitive poets to distribute praise among Anne and her military leaders, Dennis recognized a similar promise in Milton’s dual figures of male self-­sacrifice, Adam and the Son. (Dennis may have lamented this bifurcation as an aesthetic flaw in Milton’s poem, but he nonetheless exploited its example in his own verse.) Central to Dennis’s Miltonic brand of Whig history is his intricate and audacious pre­sen­ta­tion of William, whose reputation had become a plaything of Whig and Tory polemicists a­ fter his death, as a type of Milton’s alternately fearsome and self-­effacing Christ. In lines from Dennis’s elegy to William that Addison seems to have remembered in The Campaign, Dennis lauds the Prince of Orange as a sublime conduit for both the destructive and seminal forces of the Godhead, inspiriting his unruly Dutch troops with anti-­Gallic fortitude: Can you behold him at the Head of ­these, Informing, moving, animating all, Changing their very Natures like a God; His Bravery kindling thousands with its Fire, His Spirit working like the World’s G ­ reat Soul, And spreading beauteous Order thro them, where Trou­ble, Confusion, Chaos reign’d before? Can you see this, and not be rapt with Won­der? (SW, 105–106) The Christological status of William is confirmed when, l­ater in the elegy, Dennis reimagines the monarch’s untimely passing ­after a riding accident as an act of intentional martyrdom. E ­ ngland’s Dutch savior, in Dennis’s account, consciously succumbs to the secretly pro-­Stuart forces of Faction and Discord as an object lesson for his host nation in the b ­ itter cost of partisanship: “Yet He with indefatigable Soul, / And with almost Divine Resolve, went on, / And knowing He or Liberty must die . . . ​exhausted his Best Blood, / And sav’d it at th’ Expense of ev’n his Life” (SW, 136). Dennis ­here recalls the proclamation of Milton’s ­Father that ­unless an angelic surrogate be found, “Die he [Adam and by extension his progeny] or justice must” (PL, 3:210), an echo suggesting that William combines Old Testament severity with Christ-­like self-­sacrifice and a faith in the Whig shibboleth of “Liberty.” Yet, if William

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1650–1850 falls, it is only to rise again in Dennis’s poems on the War of Spanish Succession. In Britannia Triumphans the deceased monarch, along with past En­glish conquerors such as Edward III and Henry V, enjoys ringside seats in heaven to Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim (SW, 196–197). William plays a still more active posthumous role in the poem on Ramillies, nominating himself in a heavenly tribunal—­yet another reprise of Milton’s Book III—to return “Where he had borne what never Mortal bore, / To rescue Marl’borough[,] his ­adopted Care” from a strategic error on the battlefield (SW, 304). The Christ-­like apotheosis of William leads, as Select Works continues, to the emergence of the collection’s second hero, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who inherits his former commander’s military indomitability but also proves more recognizably h ­ uman in the puzzling contradictions of his character: Dennis calls him a “Wondrous Chief, in whom / Repugnant Qualities are reconciled” (SW, 170).49 ­Here too polemical motives are not far to seek. In Britannia Triumphans, first published late in 1704, Dennis answers the Tory pundits who ­were already arraigning Marlborough for strong-­headedness and overweening ambition. Across another passage that may have influenced Addison, Dennis paints the duke as sublimely self-­denying, wielding “a controuling and a lordly Pow’r” over his own desires for self-­aggrandizement: Marlborough’s “Love of Fame, that urges him away / T’immortal Actions” is, Dennis assures us, still severely curb’d, Always obedient to cool Wisdom’s Voice, And guided like the Chariot of the Sun, Whose animating Fires preserve the World Far, far above the Tempest’s stormy Rage. (SW, 171–172) The artfully Miltonic use of the passive voice to muddy distinctions between divine and ­human agency (we have to stop and won­der who is “guid[ing]” what), and of an epic simile that needs to be unpacked like a nesting doll (the “Tempest’s stormy Rage” is, by the logic of vehicle and tenor, at least two degrees removed from the siege of Blenheim that it nonetheless inevitably evokes), serves to deflect the perception of Marlborough’s continental campaign as an expensive folly led by a self-­ satisfied military careerist. As a retort to this view Dennis cleverly suggests, through both direct argument and a miasma of Miltonic indirection, that the triumphant general earns his laurels in part through his stoic fa­cil­i­t y at “curb[ing]” his notorious “Love of Fame,” sublimating his passion for supremacy into a willing subservience to the weather patterns of historical change, what Dennis elsewhere calls the “amazing Hurricane of Fate” (SW, 103). The attenuated comparison between the

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stoic Marlborough’s repressed hunger for accolades and the confidently driven “Chariot of the Sun” invokes not only Socrates’s well-­known allegory of the self-­ disciplined char­i­ot­eer but also the armed and avenging Son of Milton’s Book VI, seated in the “chariot of paternal diety” that “forth rushed with whirlwind sound” (PL, 6:749–650)—­lines that Addison also recalls, perhaps with Dennis’s closely con­temporary poem as a signpost, in his own defensive portrayal of Marlborough.50 (Any resemblance to Phaeton’s less fortunate turn as solar char­i­ ot­eer is, we must assume, purely coincidental.) Yet, ­earlier in the same verse paragraph, Dennis associates the triumphant general not with the warring Christ but rather with Milton’s more ­humble ­human protagonists. Churchill’s “lofty, awful, and commanding Brow” is, we learn, offset by his “sweet attractive Majesty”—­a phrase that conflates the “sweet reluctant amorous delay” of Eve with the “naked majesty” that, in the same passage from Milton’s Book IV, signals the Edenic ­couple’s status as “lords of all” (SW, 169; PL, 4:311, 290). Dennis’s deftly layered Miltonic allusions thus help to provide his po­liti­cal verse with a panoramic range and continuity of historical vision, as well as with an uncharacteristic delicacy in the characterization of his joint protagonists, William and Marlborough. While Dennis typically recalls Milton’s war in heaven to aggrandize his own militaristic subject m ­ atter, lending the conflict with Louis an almost cosmic significance, not all of his Miltonic allusions pull him in the direction of sublimity, and (as we have seen) references to Milton’s Edenic storyline tend to soften the portrait of the polarizing hero of Blenheim and Ramillies. In Dennis’s rendering, Marlborough combines some of the accessibility, if not quite the fallibility, of Milton’s h ­ uman characters with both the avenging glory and mysterious self-­ nullification of Milton’s Son, the traits that had ­earlier been embodied more imposingly by “Godlike William” (SW, 50). This pro­gress from Williamite transcendence to Churchillian immanence is completed in Select Works by the speculative and comparatively brief portrayal of E ­ ngland’s first Hanoverian monarch. George Ludwig is described by Dennis not only as a soldier of militant Protestantism like William but also, in a defiantly counterfactual characterization of a brusque central Eu­ro­pean who had imprisoned his wife and spoke ­limited En­glish, as a warm and inviting pseudo-­Briton who would “Heal” the nation’s “Divisons, and our Factions calm” (SW, 337). George’s proleptically ameliorative effects on his British subjects build on both the sacrifices of his Dutch pre­de­ces­sor (“For this ­Great William liv’d, and reign’d, and dy’d”) and the military gains of Marlborough (the British and Imperial casualties of Blenheim and Ramillies cheer George’s accession from the clouds), as well as George’s own “native Majesty,” in yet another play on the noble

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1650–1850 yet unassuming bearing of Milton’s first ­couple (SW, 335, 336). Dennis even seems to imply that George ­will outdo his fecund pre­de­ces­sor, Anne, as a figure of sustaining maternal affection, despite her well-­publicized tendency to describe herself as a “nursing ­mother” to a nation scarred by civil strife.51 If Dennis had e­ arlier associated Satanic machinations with the “Dove-­like” creation of the cosmos, he alludes to that Miltonic passage with only slightly more conventional implications in his praise of George, whose reign ­will supposedly bring a “domestick Quiet” that ­will “brood ­o’er Britain with her downy Wings, / To hatch Felicity and Plenty h ­ ere” (PL, 1:121; SW, 348). If, in Dennis’s personal sect of Whig trinitarianism, William and Marlborough share attributes of Milton’s ­Father and Son, each combining sublime destructive power with an equally stupendous penchant for self-­denial, George is imbued with the gentler and life-­bearing influence of the Holy Spirit, soothing his ­adopted nation, in Milton’s already tonally precarious image, like a nesting dove.52

Coda: Dennis, Miltonic Populist From Dennis’s maternal and nesting King George, it is only a short flight to the soporific reign of Pope’s Queen Dulness, a dusky potentate who “rul[es] . . . ​in native Anarchy” (cp. Dennis’s “native Majesty”) and with “mighty wings out-­spread . . . ​ hatch[es] a new Saturnian age of Lead” (1743, 1:16, 27–28). ­Whether Pope’s roosting monarch is a joke primarily on what he saw as an instance of failed sublimity in Milton or ­else on poetasters such as Dennis, who inadvertently burlesqued Milton through their clumsy imitations, his objections to Dennis’s Miltonisms ­were not grounded merely on aesthetic standards or personal pique. As a Tory (perhaps a Jacobite) and a Catholic, Pope had long taken offense at the use of Miltonic machinery to celebrate what he saw as Whig bigotry and bloodthirstiness. In 1711 Pope drolly included the juxtaposition of heavenly and h ­ uman actors among an ironic cata­log of Dennis’s poetic merits, noting “how the Critick ingeniously drew Three Cherubims, and several Myriads of Subaltern Spirits out of Paradise, which since enter’d into the ser­vice of my L[or]d M[arlbr]o . . . ​[and showed] how and in what manner the Soul of a Late King was chang’d into a Seraphim,” and even added a footnote to clarify the reference to Dennis’s “­Battle of Ramillies” (PW, 1:15). Indeed, the mock-­machinery of the revised Rape of the Lock three years l­ater, in which the self-­important but impotent sylphs flutter like a “light Militia” around the court of Queen Anne, might also be seen as wilting commentary on the Miltonic trappings in which Dennis had dressed up his defenses of Whig warfare.53 When Pope leads

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Dennis up to his shaky perch in the original Dunciad, then, and anoints him with “naked majesty,” the Miltonic allusion cuts two ways. The epithet duly acknowledges the aspirations of “­great Dennis” to sublimity not only in his criticism but also and especially in the Miltonic stylings of his formidable body of panegyric poetry, which attempts to elevate William and Marlborough to the status of Milton’s warlike Christ. But since the phrase “naked majesty” originates in Milton’s description not of the angelic warriors in Book VI but rather of the all-­too-­human denizens of Eden in Book IV, a part of the poem that Dennis considered insufficiently ­grand for epic, Pope also reminds us of the futility of Dennis’s Miltonic emulation, and perhaps also of what Pope considered the morally indefensible attempt to ennoble and even apotheosize Whig warmongers. The “naked majesty” of Milton’s Adam and Eve in Eden is of course a tenure that is about to be revoked, and if Pope’s Dennis continues to gaze at the Miltonic stars, it w ­ ill be from the gutter of Fleet Ditch. Yet this carefully calibrated and almost touching characterization of Dennis as a figure of fragile grandeur, caught between the base necessities of a poetic profession and the potentially sublime energies of Miltonic imitation, mirrors what I have described as Dennis’s own elaborate attempts to merge Milton’s divine and ­human protagonists in his portrayals of William, Marlborough, and George, as well as the deliberate irregularity of tone across his Pindaric-­Virgilian po­liti­cal verse. As Pope knew, Dennis faced the almost insurmountable challenge of writing a body of topical and partisan panegyric (rather than satire) that would survive the pre­ sent hour and still be compelling in anthologized form, when the reputations of its subjects had inevitably suffered from the vicissitudes of time and partisan spin. It has been my contention that despite Pope’s contempt, an unbiased reading of the Select Works shows Dennis to have come closer to success in ­these areas than any of his contemporaries, including Defoe and Blackmore, thanks to the remarkable consistency and ingenuity in his use of Miltonic allusions to rec­ord and interpret the ongoing aftermath of the 1688–1689 revolution. Dennis’s engagements with the language and imagery of Paradise Lost may, like eighteenth-­century adaptations of Shakespeare, strike post-­Romantic readers as a case of foolish rushing in, but it is precisely in the irreverence of Dennis’s imitations of Milton that their chief importance is located. For we should credit Dennis’s reckless Miltonic appropriations for helping to lay bare the daring incongruities of tone in Paradise Lost itself—­the potentially risible “brooding” of the Holy Spirit, for instance—­that would contribute to Milton’s epic becoming such a rich quarry for the iconoclastic poetic innovations of the following c­ entury, from Pope’s own mock heroics to a quasi-­epic

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1650–1850 song of selfhood by a more admiring reader of Dennis, The Prelude. Dennis’s self-­ assumed title of poetic “­great”-­ness may have struck Pope as a case of the emperor’s new clothes, but it took a poet as indefatigable and even immodest as Dennis to de­moc­ra­tize the influence of Milton, stripping him of his reputation for learned obscurity, as well as for regicidal malevolence, and exposing what Dennis saw as Milton’s endearingly flawed pursuit of sublimity in his religious verse.54 In Dennis’s eyes, as Jonathan Lamb has explained, to be a faithful reader of the sublime is to cultivate sublimity in one’s own life and work: “Being sublime upon the sublime is, according to Dennis, the reader’s way of seizing the initiative.”55 By seizing the Miltonic initiative in his own occasional—­and, by design, occasionally sublime—­imitations, Dennis makes Milton, like the Whig heroes of Select Works, at once more godlike and more ­human, rendering Paradise Lost an inviting model for both ethereal meditations and partisan ephemera, or, in Dennis’s characteristic poetic mode, something that vacillates, often violently, between the two. It may, then, be the defining irony of Dennis’s poetic c­ areer that despite his tenacious adherence to the Whig party line, he became one of the key figures—­perhaps the key figure—in the establishment of Paradise Lost as the common inheritance of all poets in En­glish, regardless not only of talent and temperament but of po­liti­cal faith.

Notes 1. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books, ed. Valerie Rumbold (Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 2009), 1743, 2:283 (hereafter cited as 1728, 1729, or 1743, depending on the version quoted, followed by volume and page number). My source for the ­earlier texts is The Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 3: The Dunciad (1728) & The Dunciad Variorum (1729), ed. Valerie Rumbold (Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 2007). 2. See Rumbold’s annotation to the above-­quoted lines in 1729, and for the larger context E. N. Hooker, “Pope and Dennis,” En­glish Literary History 7, no. 3 (1940): 188–198; and Norman Ault, New Light on Pope with Some Additions to his Poetry Hitherto Unknown (London: Methuen, 1949), chap. 19. 3. Pat Rogers, An Introduction to Pope (London: Methuen, 1975), 129, as cited in 1743, 2:283n. 4. John Morillo, “John Dennis: Enthusiastic Passions, Cultural Memory, and Literary Theory,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 34, no.  1 (2000): 21–41; John  D. Morillo, Uneasy Feelings: Lit­er­a­ture, the Passions, and Class from Neoclassicism to Roman­ ticism (New York: AMS Press, 2001), chap. 1; Abigail Williams, “The Poetry of the Un-­Enlightened: Politics and Literary Enthusiasm in the Early Eigh­teenth ­Century,” History of Eu­ro­pean Ideas 31, no. 2 (2005): 299–311; Abigail Williams, Poetry and

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the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. chap. 5; and Philip Connell, Secular Chains: Poetry and the Poli­ tics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 144– 151. Other impor­tant treatments of enthusiastic discourse and its opponents include Sharon Achinstein, “Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration: Marvell, Dryden, and Literary Enthusiasm,” Huntington Library Quarterly 59, no. 1 (1997): 1–29; Shaun Irlam, Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and J.G.A. Pocock, “Enthusiasm: The Antiself of Enlightenment,” in Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Eu­rope, 1650– 1850, ed. Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1998), 7–28. 5. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1998), 4:289–290 (hereafter cited as PL, followed by volume and page number). 6. Among the rare exceptions are Avon Jack Murphy, John Dennis (Boston: Twayne, 1984), chap. 5; Sarah B. Stein, “Translating the Bible to Raise the Fallen: John Dennis’s Psalm 18,” Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture 43 (2014): 4–27; and Dustin D. Stewart, “Angel Bodies to Whig Souls: Blank Verse ­after Blenheim,” in Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Ann Baynes Coiro and Blair Hoxby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 204–223, at 211. Dennis’s poetry receives only passing mention in his biographical entry in Gary Day and Jack Lynch, eds., The Encyclopedia of British Lit­er­a­ture, 1660–1789, 3 vols. (Malden: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2015), and although Dennis has several listings in the index to the recent Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660–1800, ed. Jack Lynch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), none of them are to his verse. 7. For po­liti­cal discourse in the “first age of party” (ca. 1678–1714), the best place to begin is Mark Knights’s magisterial study, Repre­sen­ta­tion and Misrepre­sen­ta­tion in Late Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Po­liti­cal Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 8. For Defoe’s poetry see, for example, J. Paul Hunter, “Poetic Footprints: Some Formal Issues in Defoe’s Verse,” in Defoe’s Footprints: Essays in Honour of Maxi­ millian E. Novak, ed. Robert M. Manniquis and Carl Fisher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press; Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Seventeenth-­and Eighteenth-­ Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2009), 55–70, and Andreas K. E. Mueller, A Critical Study of Daniel Defoe’s Verse: Recovering the Neglected Corpus of His Poetic Work (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010). 9. For the textual history of this edition see John Dennis, The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E. N. Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1939– 1943), 2:473–474 (hereafter cited as CW, followed by volume and page number), and Terence P. Logan, “John Dennis’s Select Works,” Papers of the Bibliographi­ cal Society of Amer­i­ca 65 (1971): 155–156, although Logan’s mention of “some occasional verse” in the collection considerably understates the case (155). In his 1729 Remarks upon the Dunciad, Dennis characterizes Pope’s subscription to the

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1650–1850 Select Works, as well as to a collection of Dennis’s Letters two years ­later, as an act of malice (CW, 2:370). Dennis’s two-­volume collection appears as a single folio in both of the Dunciad frontispieces. 10. 1729, 168n; Pat Rogers, The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), s.v. “John Dennis.” 11. The term “miniature epic” belongs to Helen Deutsch: see her Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), chap. 2. 12. The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Norman Ault and Rosemary Cowler, 2 vols. (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1936; Hamden, CT: Archon, 1986), 1:15, 2:209 (hereafter cited as PW, followed by volume and page number). Pope’s decision to cite early editions of Dennis is made all the more striking by his claim in Peri Bathous to have taken his duncical quotations “from the best, the last, and most correct Editions” (PW, 2:193n). 13. The Life of Mr.  John Dennis (London, 1734), 15; Bunker Wright and Monroe  K. Spears, eds., The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 2:896. For the full text of Dryden’s cordial letter, which we only possess ­because Dennis himself printed it in 1696, see The Letters of John Dryden, with Letters Addressed to Him, ed. Charles  E. Ward (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 70–74. Prior and Dennis ­were acquaintances: see Richard B. Kline, “Prior and Dennis,” Notes and Queries 13 (1966): 214–216. 14. Giles Jacob, The Poetical Register, 2 vols. (London, 1719–1720), 1:68; Theo­philus Cibber [and Robert Shiels], The Lives of the Poets, 5 vols. (London, 1753), 4:217. We should, however, take seriously Pope’s accusation that Dennis ghostwrote his own entry in The Poetical Register (1729, 1:104n). 15. Martin  C. and Ruthe  R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London: Routledge, 1989), 102–104. 16. H.  G. Paul, John Dennis: His Life and Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), 36–37; and Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation, 220. 17. J. Paul Hunter, “Poetry: The Poetry of Occasions,” in A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eigh­teenth ­Century, ed. Cynthia Wall (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 202–225, at 208; and Hunter, “Missing Years: On Casualties in En­glish Literary History, Prior to Pope,” Common Knowledge 14, no. 3 (2008): 434–444. 18. Dennis would contribute a chapter to Tonson and Dryden’s 1698 edition of Tacitus; see CW, 2:vii. In The Invention of En­glish Criticism, 1650–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 66–71, Michael Gavin offers a revealing study of Dennis’s short-­lived capacity for witty sociability at the turn of the ­century. It was his failure to gain access to the Kit-­Cat coterie that seems to have permanently embittered him against the literary elite of his own party. 19. For Dennis as critic of burlesque see Richmond P. Bond, En­glish Burlesque Poetry, 1700–1750 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 31–33, and for background on Tutchin and Dennis in 1700, including an annotated edition of Dennis’s satire The

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Parallel, see Frank H. Ellis, ed., Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714, vol. 6: 1697–1704 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 227– 247, and Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation, 130–134. Some of Dennis’s early comic verse was anthologized in his slight 1692 collection Poems in Burlesque. 20. Noelle Dückmann Gallagher, “The Embarrassments of Restoration Panegyric: Reconsidering an Unfashionable Genre,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 39, no.  3 (2015): 33–54, at 34. Other impor­tant studies of the form include James D. Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Arthur S. Williams, “Panegyric Decorum in the Reigns of William III and Anne,” Journal of British Studies 21, no. 1 (1981): 56–67; and Christopher F. Loar, “Exclusion and Desecration: Aphra Behn, Liberalism, and the Politics of the Pindaric Ode,” Restoration 39, no.  1–2 (2015): 125–136. Dennis’s military poetry bears out Williams’s claim that in the 1700s t­ here emerged “a new form of ode in which con­temporary po­liti­cal ideals replaced antique myths as a source of poetic sublimity” (67). 21. William Cowper, writing in the 1780s, has been described by Julie Ellison as “the earliest and most influential adapter of the newspaper,” especially in war reporting, “to reflective poetry,” but the emphasis h ­ ere should be on “reflective” ­because, as Claude Rawson has recently reminded us, poets such as Nicholas Boileau and Matthew Prior had almost a ­century ­earlier found material for both jingoism and absurdist mock heroic in the military dispatches of state-­issued Gazettes. See Julie Ellison, “News, Blues, and Cowper’s Busy World,” Modern Lan­ guage Quarterly 62, no. 3 (2001): 219–237, at 219; Claude Rawson, “War and the Epic Mania in ­England and France: Milton, Boileau, Prior and En­glish Mock-­Heroic,” Review of En­glish Studies 64, no. 265 (2012): 433–453; and, for a broader consideration of military poetry across Dennis’s lifetime, John Richardson, “Modern Warfare in Early-­Eighteenth-­Century En­glish Poetry,” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 45, no. 3 (2005): 557–577. For Dennis as a Court (rather than a Country) Whig, see Connell, Secular Chains, 144–151. 22. See the monthly Gentleman’s Journal for June, October, and November  1692, where Motteux promotes Dennis’s verse with some of the same fervor that John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury did another Whig bard, Elizabeth Singer, over the same years. 23. See CW, 1:380–381 for Dennis’s exhaustion a­ fter finishing Britannia Triumphans. His unsurprising hostility to the peace deal brokered by the Tory ministry is evident from his ­later calls, in his elegy for Anne, for renewed war with France. 24. The Select Works of Mr.  John Dennis, 2 vols. (London, 1718 [i.e., 1719]), 1:354 (hereafter cited as SW, followed by volume and page number). 25. The prologue to Julius Caesar, which was first printed in The Muses Mercury in 1707, is followed in Select Works by Dennis’s fiery 1703 response to Henry Sacheverell, Priestcraft Dangerous to Religion and Government; a tract from the same year recommending the war­time utility of privateering; and fi­nally his essays on Publick

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1650–1850 Spirit and Operas ­after the Italian Manner, which reiterate Dennis’s concerns about the enervating effect of imported crooners. The saber-­rattling prologue also gestures forward to Dennis’s 1704 po­liti­cal tragedy, Liberty Asserted, in the second volume. 26. See Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation, chap. 4, and Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), chap. 13. 27. By the final years of Anne’s reign, Tony Claydon has recently argued, “it is only a slight exaggeration to claim [that] the Duke’s virtue or vice was the point of contention between Whigs and Tories”: see Tony Claydon, “A Eu­ro­pean General in the En­glish Press: The Print Image of Marlborough in the Stuart Realms,” in Marl­ borough: Soldier and Diplomat, ed. John B. Hattendorf, Augustus J. Veenendaal, and Rolof van Hövell tot Westerflier (Rotterdam: Karwansaray, 2012), 300–319, at 301. For a representative Tory attempt to damn Churchill with faint praise, see John Wine, A Welcome to Victory (London, 1704), 10: “Marlborough’s the Hand, but ANNA is the Heart.” The decisive ­battle of Rooke’s campaign, south of Málaga, occurred only eleven days ­after Blenheim, making their comparative significance an inevitable debating point. Dennis, who wrote a stage comedy in 1705 about the occupation of Gibraltar by carousing En­glish sailors, was uncharacteristic of Whig writers during Anne’s reign in his re­spect for the importance of the navy, although he also thought it poorly managed and dehumanizing in its culture of debauchery and corporal punishment: see his Essay on the Navy (London, 1702). 28. So closely was Spenser’s poetry associated with Whig statesmanship that John Somers, the most impor­tant politician to join the Kit-­Cats, was painted by Godfrey Kneller with a copy of the Faerie Queene; see Ophelia Field, The Kit-­Cat Club: Friends Who ­Imagined a Nation (London: Harper Press, 2008), 262–263. 29. See “The Campaign,” ll. 287–292 (“whirl-­wind” at l. 292), in The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 2 vols. (London: G. Bell, 1914), and, for the connection to the storm of 1703, Luis Rene Gámez, “The ‘Angel’ Image in Addison’s The Campaign,” Notes and Queries 33, no. 4 (1986): 486–489. In his 1704 narrative history of this catastrophic weather event, Daniel Defoe describes strong wind as the quin­tes­sen­tial example of the religious sublime: “­there seems to be more of God in the ­whole Appearance, than in any other Part of Operating Nature” (Daniel Defoe, The Storm, ed. Richard Hamblyn [London: Penguin Books, 2005], 11). Dennis himself invokes the “Hurricane” that “by Wrath divine, / Came lately bellowing o ­ ’er the Western Main” as part of his attempt to convey the sublime terror of the drowning of French infantry in the Danube outside Blenheim (SW, 1:214). 30. Robert  D. Horn, Marlborough: A Survey; Panegyrics, Satires, and Biographical Writings, 1688–1788 (New York: Garland, 1975), 2. For conflicting assessments of Pindar’s reputation across the long eigh­teenth ­century see Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Lit­er­a­ture from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge:

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Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 6, and Dustin Griffin, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63–67. The turn against Pindarics is evident from a parody of the form in a 1708 anti-­Jacobite burlesque, The Flight of the Pretender (London, 1708), 6. 31. The epigraph to The Monument comes from Horace’s ode 4.2, which ponders the difficulty of adequately honoring Augustus in verse, and includes a description, famous in Dennis’s day, of the grandly impulsive style of Pindar: see Steven Shankman, “The Pindaric Tradition and the Quest for Pure Poetry,” Comparative Lit­er­a­ture 40, no. 3 (1988): 219–244. 32. Thomson is likely to have known Dennis’s verse, and the two poets ­were at times tarred with the same brush by Tory detractors. As Christine Gerrard explains, Thomson and Dennis w ­ ere both promoted by Aaron Hill, whose stable of Whig authors in the 1720s may have been a primary target of Peri Bathous and The Dunciad: see her “Pope, Peri Bathous, and the Whig Sublime,” in “Cul­ tures of Whiggism”: New Essays on En­g lish Lit­er­a­ture and Culture in the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century, ed. Paddy Bullard, Abigail Williams, and David Womersley (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 200–215, and Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector, 1685–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 106–110. 33. For a recent assessment of the ­battle by a military historian, see Richard Holmes, Marlborough: ­England’s Fragile Genius (London: Harper Press, 2008), 281–297, although the classic account by G. M. Trevelyan, Blenheim (London: Fontana, 1965 [1930]), chap. 18, has yet to be bettered as entertainment. 34. Writing in 1703, Dennis describes “greater Lyrick Poetry” as an “Art,” like epic and tragedy and unlike the so-­called ­little Ode, “by which a Poet justly and reasonably excites g­ reat Passion” (CW, 1:338). 35. Assistance in this area is provided by Kevin Sharpe and James Anderson Winn in their recent studies of the cultural scene u ­ nder William and Anne—­see Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, chaps. 9–16, and James Anderson Winn, Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)—as well as by Horn, Marlborough, and D. F. Foxon, En­glish Verse, 1701–1750: A Cata­logue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Con­temporary Collected Editions, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). For The Campaign in par­tic­u­lar see John D. Baird, “Whig and Tory Panegyrics: Addison’s The Campaign and Philips’s Blenheim Reconsidered,” Lumen 16 (1997): 163–177; Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation, 140–143; and Winn, Queen Anne, 380–390. 36. For Oldmixon as historian see Pat Rogers, The Letters, Life, and Works of John Oldmixon: Politics and Professional Authorship in Early Hanoverian ­England (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), and for early partisan historiography more generally, Mark Knights, “The Tory Interpretation of History in the Rage of Parties,” in The Uses of History in Early Modern ­England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2006), 347–366.

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1650–1850 37. James  A.  W. Heffernan, “Words­worth and Dennis: The Discrimination of Feelings,” PMLA 82, no. 5 (1967): 430–436. 38. This tension between lyric energy and narrative diffuseness is in part a result of what I have described as Dennis’s tendency across his c­ areer to combine Pindaric and epic ele­ments in his poetry of praise. Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation, 192–195, describes the belief among Whig literary theorists, including Dennis, that the presence of the Longinian sublime in long poetry was necessarily “erratic and fleeting” and, like the Pindaric ode, prone to alternating moments of exhilaration and deflation (194). Even Dennis admits the detumescent potential of Pindarics, characterizing their inevitable patches of “false Sublime” as “an Impotent effort of the mind to rise” (CW, 1:43). 39. “A Letter to Monsieur Boileau Despreaux; Occasion’d by the Victory at Blenheim, 1704,” ll. 55–56, 62, 64, 66, in Wright and Spears, eds., Literary Works. 40. Nicholas von Maltzahn, “The War in Heaven and the Miltonic Sublime,” in The Nation Transformed: E ­ ngland ­after the Restoration, ed. Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 154–179, at 174. Stewart, “Angel Bodies,” 212, likewise argues that Philips’s influence as a Miltonic imitator has been exaggerated. On Milton’s early reception, sources I have found useful include Dustin Griffin, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eigh­teenth ­Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Leslie  M. Moore, Beautiful Sublime: The Making of “Paradise Lost” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Nicholas von Maltzahn, “The Whig Milton, 1667–1700,” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 229–253; John Leonard, Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of “Paradise Lost,” 1667–1970, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Connell, Secular Chains, esp. chap. 4; and the contents of Coiro and Hoxby, Milton. Aside from brief mentions, none of ­these sources attend to Dennis’s poetry, and only von Maltzahn, “War in Heaven,” 174–177, and Stewart, “Angel Bodies,” 211, acknowledge its significant place in the history of Miltonic imitation. 41. Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation, 148n. 42. Nicholas Rowe, A Poem Upon the Late Glorious Successes (London, 1707), 15. 43. For Dennis’s approving but uneasy response to Milton’s closet drama, see ­Catherine Gimelli Martin, “John Dennis, John Locke, and the Sublimation of Revolt: Samson Agonistes a­ fter the Glorious Revolution,” in Milton in the Long Restora­ tion, ed. Ann Baynes Coiro and Blair Hoxby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 121–142. 44. Griffin, Regaining Paradise. For one example of Dennis’s Miltonic window-­ dressing see the epic simile beginning “As one who climbs th’ Ethereal Cliff / Of Atlas or of Teneriff ” (SW, 1:54), and cf. PL, 4:985–987. 45. Dennis’s “Gorgonian” Fury is the unwanted child of Pride and Satan, who himself recoils from her as his Miltonic antecedent does from his own daughter-­lover in

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Book II of Milton’s epic (SW, 2:248; PL, 2:744–745). Pope may remember Dennis’s Discord when he describes duncical cocophony as “Dennis and Dissonance” (1729, 2:231). 46. For Augustan theories of epic and allegory, see Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), and Anna M. Foy, “Epic,” in Lynch, Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 473– 494, although both sources neglect Dennis’s criticism. In his extravagantly hostile response to Blackmore, Dennis may have been acting as a cat’s paw for Dryden; see Paul, John Dennis, 29. Dennis and Blackmore ­later became friends and mutual promoters. 47. Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation, 5. But see Anthony Welch, “Paradise Lost and En­glish Mock Heroic,” in Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Ann Baynes Coiro and Blair Hoxby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 465–482, esp. 473, for the argument that an ambivalence about the place of carnage in war poetry was evident in both Tory and Whig writers of Dennis’s era. 48. Moore, Beautiful Sublime, 151, with arabic numerals changed to roman; also see von Maltzahn, “War in Heaven,” and Leonard, Faithful Labourers, 1:268–280. 49. See Stewart, “Angel Bodies,” 211, for a brief account of Dennis’s verse as “reinforc[ing] a contingent new bond” in Whig poetry on Blenheim “between the power of angels—­assumed by Milton and then by Marlborough, and still available to inspired souls—­and the capabilities of blank verse.” For Stewart, Miltonic war poetry such as Dennis’s contributed, despite its jingoistic topicality, to the broadly influential tradition of unrhymed devotional verse that extended from Isaac Watts to Edward Young. In “War, Lyric Poetry, and Politics in the Eigh­teenth ­Century,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 50, no. 4 (2017): 381–399, by contrast, John Richardson cites Dennis’s poetry on Blenheim as a failed attempt to resist a putative “shift from super­natural to secular war poetry” (386) that was already ­under way by the early 1700s. Richardson’s teleological argument for an increased secularization in occasional poetry runs ­counter to recent efforts to stress the centrality of confessional commitments to politics and letters across the eigh­teenth ­century, a line of argument of which Connell, Secular Chains, provides a power­ful example. 50. For Addison, see note 29 above. 51. See, e.g., Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, chap. 14. 52. It would not be long, however, before Dennis lost all hope for po­liti­cal harmony ­under George, asking in his critique of Bernard Mandev­ille, Vice and Luxury Pub­ lic Mischiefs, “­Whether Britain was ever so much divided as it is now?” ([London], 1724, 24). 53. The Rape of the Lock, 5-­canto version, 1:42, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963). 54. In the early eigh­teenth ­century, as von Maltzahn describes, “The republican Milton, Latin orator, strident pamphleteer, servant to the Commonwealth and poet of a stern and urgent Christian vision, became a literary figure of a milder sobriety,

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1650–1850 increasingly freed from the languages of faction and revelation” (“Whig Milton,” 253). Although Connell, Secular Chains, chap. 4, argues that Milton’s posthumous associations with po­liti­cal radicalism and religious heterodoxy endured longer than von Maltzahn suggests, they agree in identifying Dennis’s criticism, along with Addison’s essays on Milton in the Spectator, as an essential catalyst for the Whig embrace of Milton as a poetic model. I hope to have shown h ­ ere that Dennis’s Miltonic verse also played a crucial role in demonstrating how the example of Paradise Lost could accommodate the vision of constitutional monarchy and armed Protestantism that was promoted by the Court Whigs a­ fter 1688 and became hegemonic a­ fter 1714. 55. Jonathan Lamb, “Longinus, the Dialectic, and the Practice of Mastery,” En­glish Literary History 60, no. 3 (1993): 545–567, at 553. For a reading of Pope’s portrait of Dennis in An Essay on Criticism that builds on Lamb’s article and is complementary to my own account of The Dunciad, see Blakey Vermeule, “Shame and Identity: Pope’s ‘Critique of Judgment’ in An Essay on Criticism,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 4 (1998): 105–136. Impor­tant studies of Pope’s well-­informed and daring appropriations of Miltonic models include Barbara K. Lewalski, “On Looking into Pope’s Milton,” Milton Studies 11 (1978): 29–50, and Sophie Gee, Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-­ Century Imagination (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2010), chap. 3.

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ANATOMY OF A PAN JOHN DENNIS’S ANNOTATED COPY OF BLACKMORE’S PRINCE ARTHUR PHILIP S. PALMER I believe Prince Arthur to be neither Admirable nor Contemptible. For if I had the one or the other Opinion, I should certainly never have Written against him. —­John Dennis, Remarks On a Book entituled, Prince Arthur, an Heroick Poem

A copy of Sir Richard Blackmore’s Prince Arthur An Heroick Poem . . . ​Second

Edition (London, 1695) bearing the manuscript marginalia of its most vocal con­ temporary critic—­John Dennis—­has surfaced. Apparently passing unnoticed by scholars and librarians since its acquisition in 1972, the second copy of Sir Richard Blackmore’s Prince Arthur, held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (UCLA), contains a rich body of commentary from Dennis, including his critical appraisals, literary cross-­references, and thoughts on poetic form.1 Though a penciled bookseller’s note on one of the book’s front endleaves claims the manuscript notes belong to John Dryden, internal and paleographical evidence point instead to Dennis, whose Remarks On a Book entituled, Prince Arthur, an Heroick Poem (London, 1696) was quickly written and published a year a­ fter the appearance of Blackmore’s epic.2 The existence of this annotated book makes it pos­si­ble to follow comments on Blackmore’s poem found in Dennis’s printed Remarks back to their conceptual genesis as rough manuscript notes in the marked-up Prince Arthur. This annotated book-­copy is, in essence, a first draft of Dennis’s Remarks, and as such is one of the earliest surviving textual archives in the history of En­glish literary criticism.

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1650–1850 But the relationship between annotated book-­copy and the published text of Remarks is not as straightforward as it may seem, for ­there is much content in the annotations not pre­sent in Remarks, just as ­there is much content in Remarks with no corresponding text in the annotations.3 To read Dennis’s marginalia as a mere precursor to Remarks, then, is to ignore the specific material, textual, and theoretical methods deployed by the two texts. When comparing the manuscript and print commentary, for instance, it becomes quite clear that Dennis’s approach to reading and annotating Blackmore’s epic closely follows a claim he makes in his preface to Remarks, namely that he “never design’d to make an Enquiry into any of Mr. Blackmore’s Princi­ples, which may regard e­ ither Church or State . . . ​[but] only to consider this Gentleman in his poetical capacity and to make some Remarks upon the reasonableness of his Design and upon the felicity of his execution.” 4 Indeed, Dennis’s manuscript annotations focus primarily on the meter, diction, narrative pacing, character development, and literary allusions of Blackmore’s Prince Arthur, and contain hundreds of comments on the poem that never appeared in the printed text of Remarks. The printed book’s extensive critical commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid, by contrast, is absent from Dennis’s handwritten annotations, suggesting that the published text is not simply derivative of them but rather constitutes an amalgam of their content and a now-­lost set of notes on Virgil. Not quite a rough draft or outline but more systematic than a miscellaneous set of critical impressions, Dennis’s manuscript notes offer an intriguingly hybrid text—­one that exists between categories of print and manuscript, published and unpublished, public and private. And while not intended as a recuperative study of Dennis as literary critic—­a role whose reputation has been infamously and unfairly tarnished by Alexander Pope—­this essay explores the nuanced textual mechanics of Dennis’s writing and thus offers a countermea­sure to dismissive accounts of his critical work.5 By analyzing the content and bibliographical context of Dennis’s annotations, I consider the complex textual relationship between the frequently acerbic marginalia in Prince Arthur and the more mea­sured commentary of Remarks. At times, a comparison of the two reveals the specific routes of transmission the text followed from manuscript notes to printed book. But such analy­sis also raises numerous difficult questions. How are both of t­ hese texts “remarks” and how do they embody the genre in dif­fer­ent ways? What can this book-­copy reveal about the kindred pro­cess of reading Prince Arthur and writing Remarks? As a material text, fi­nally, how can this newly discovered copy enrich our understanding of John Dennis as a literary critic and literary criticism as a textual pro­cess?

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Evidence for Attribution to Dennis Perhaps one’s best indication that the marginalia surviving in Clark Library f PR 3318 .B5 P9 1695 cop. 2 are not in the hand of John Dryden is the penciled note asserting they are. Its claim buttressed by a ­later note (mostly likely inscribed by a book dealer) identifying the book as “DRYDEN’s copy,” the penciled attribution to Dryden seems too good to be true, as is typically the case with such confident declarations of association-­copy status involving canonical writers.6 Internal evidence from the marginalia themselves, which occasionally reference “Mr. Dryden,” is further indication that someone besides the En­glish poet laureate marked up the volume. What’s more, the paleographical evidence proves conclusively that the Prince Arthur annotations do not match Dryden’s handwriting. If Dryden is not responsible for the marginalia, then who is? Blackmore had other detractors besides Dryden, ­after all, and since John Dennis wrote an entire book criticizing Prince Arthur he is certainly a strong candidate.7 But does the internal and paleographical evidence support such an attributional claim? As mentioned in the introduction above, not all of the content in Dennis’s printed Remarks has its corresponding note among the Prince Arthur manuscript marginalia. In other words, one cannot follow the two texts line-­by-­line to identify a potential confluence of ideas, rhe­toric, and wording. But in the many cases where one can link the marginalia directly to a passage in Remarks, the similarities are striking. To cite one of the strongest examples, Dennis complains repeatedly in Remarks of the poem’s penchant for episodic digression and “monstrous Gap[s] in the main Action,” the two worst offenders of which he identifies as the relation of the Death of King Uter in book 4 and Arthur’s relation to Hoel in books 2 and 3.8 He even goes so far as to recommend the ­wholesale removal of books 2 and 3 from the poem: “Let the Reader end the first Books with this Verse in the 32d. page. What worship to him, what belief I owe? And begin the fourth Book with ­these words, Then in, instead of In such, and the Action ­will remain as ­whole and entire, as it is at pre­sent, and the Structure of it ­will be more regular.”9 This idea is also pre­sent in the Clark copy’s annotations, which visually signal the changes Dennis suggests by marking (via bracket and cross) the line “What worship to him, what belief I owe?” and noting in manuscript that “if all from this place to the Beginning of the fourth Book ­were left out the poem would be the better The two first words of the 4. lib chang’d to Then in.”10 At the beginning of book 4 t­ here exists another set of relevant annotations: “Then in; this alteration, the second & third book being

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1650–1850 left out & the latter [?] end of the first makes Hoel a Christian in two lines, & clears the poem of a vitious episode.”11 It is quite obvious from ­these passages that Dennis’s idea in Remarks to “let the Reader end the first Books with this Verse” matches perfectly with the ideas laid out in the manuscript notes. But this example of strong internal evidence for Dennis’s role in the annotations, along with many other such examples found throughout the Clark’s Prince Arthur, could also be interpreted as a reader sitting down to mark up the poem with a copy of Remarks at hand—­a reader, in other words, who simply copied Dennis’s ideas into the book they criticize. It was not uncommon, ­after all, for early modern readers to copy printed books (or sections of printed books) into manuscript. Fortunately, enough autograph manuscripts by Dennis survive to enable a paleographical comparison of the annotations to known examples of his handwriting. Folger Shakespeare Library  Y.c.747 (1), which is an autograph letter from Dennis to Henry D’Avenant dated March 20, 1706/7, is one of the earliest surviving pieces of Dennis’s autograph correspondence and offers a range of words and letterforms that help characterize Dennis’s handwriting.12 Though the context is quite dif­fer­ent when comparing the autograph letter to the manuscript annotations in the Clark’s Prince Arthur—­cramped marginal space versus a blank sheet of paper, for example—­there is a remarkable consistency in handwriting across the two texts. Dennis’s distinctive ampersand, minuscule “s” (a shortened “long s”), minuscule “f,” minuscule “t,” and minuscule “h” appear throughout the Clark Prince Arthur annotations; comparing common words such as “is,” “the,” “this,” and “of” further demonstrates how closely the two hands match (see figure 1). Other matching letterforms include descending minuscules (“g” and “y”), majuscule “I/J,” and minuscule “d.” Overall, the handwriting in both Folger Y.c.747(1) and Clark Library f PR 3318 .B5 P9 1695 cop. 2 features the same approach to letter formation across a wide variety of minuscule and majuscule letters. And since Folger  Y.c.747(1) was written in relative haste (Dennis mentions how he is “at pre­sent in a ­little Hurry”), it is perhaps the ideal document to use for paleographical comparison with the annotations, which also would have been written quickly and informally in the margins of the Clark’s Prince Arthur.13 Combined with the internal evidence cited above, it seems more than reasonable to attribute the annotations in Clark Library f PR 3318 .B5 P9 1695 cop. 2 to John Dennis.

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Figure 1.  Paleographical comparison.

1650–1850

Comparing Printed and Manuscript “Remarks” When considering how Dennis’s Remarks and his manuscript notes in the Clark Prince Arthur are both examples of the “remarks” genre, it is useful to survey how the word was used in late seventeenth-­and early eighteenth-­century printed book titles. The first instance of the word is dated 1614 by the Oxford En­glish Dic­ tionary, though the sense of “A verbal or written observation; a comment; a brief expression of opinion or criticism” did not appear ­until 1629. Despite ­these ­earlier seventeenth-­century appearances of “remarks,” the word was not used frequently in book titles ­until the 1680s and 1690s, ­after which it would be used frequently throughout the eigh­teenth ­century. The title formula “remarks on a book” seems to be a phenomenon emerging in the 1680s and 1690s, with the “remarks” in ­these cases being critical reactions by readers to other printed books.14 What makes Dennis’s Remarks stand out from other contemporaneous “remarks on books” is both its length and its subject m ­ atter. Most examples of the genre from the late seventeenth ­century are works of religious controversy; adapting “remarks” for literary criticism was thus an innovative decision on Dennis’s part. Furthermore, most “remarks on books” are fairly short (­under 50 pages) and bear ­simple structures (i.e., no chapter or section breaks/headings). Dennis’s contribution to the genre, on the other hand, runs to 228 pages and has a more complex structure consisting of two parts of eight chapters a piece (plus a 22-­page section of “Annotations” at the end).15 If, formally speaking, Dennis’s Remarks seem too fleshed out and structured to be considered “remarks” in the sense that other authors used the word, then why would Dennis choose such a title for his book? The answer may lie in the textual origins of Remarks, namely the manuscript annotations in the Clark Library’s Prince Arthur. In the Oxford En­glish Dictionary, “remark” n.1.4—­“A verbal or written observation; a comment; a brief expression of opinion or criticism”—­ emphasizes both the brevity and perfunctory qualities of the word’s meaning: though a remark can be formally written down and published, it typically comprises brief pieces of commentary and criticism that do not require an overarching textual structure. Manuscript marginalia, especially t­ hose inscribed by Dennis in his copy of Prince Arthur, match this notion of the remark perfectly. While the book-­ copy bears a dozen or so examples of long discursive marginal notes in Dennis’s hand, the majority of the annotations are short and sharp (e.g., “low and spiritlesse,” “infinitely absurd,” “luxuriant and wrong,” to name only a few). Most of t­ hese

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marginalia also contain Arabic numerals keyed to one or two lines in the printed text. The cumulative effect of the manuscript marginalia in Prince Arthur is not so much the development of a coherent critical argument about the poem as the loose compilation of (typically negative) reactions to individual lines, couplets, meta­phors, and literary figures.16 In many ways, then, the original form of Dennis’s Remarks as manuscript marginalia may explain why he named his book the way he did, as it clearly began its life as brief, unstructured comments in the margins of Prince Arthur. And while it is doubtful one can draw from this example any conclusions about printed versus manuscript remarks, it is evident in this case that the transition from manuscript to print required significant textual editing and reworking, as well as the addition of a large body of material on Virgil’s Aeneid. ­Because of its thorough editing and reframing, Dennis’s Remarks arguably constitutes a set of remarks in name only. Turning now to a detailed comparison of Dennis’s manuscript notes in the Clark Library Prince Arthur with their analogous printed passages in Remarks, I ­will consider the specific textual pro­cesses through which t­ hese notes evolved from cursory marginalia to published critical observations. In the preface to his Remarks, Dennis writes that “­there may be Readers, who may know as soon of the following Criticisms, as they may hear of Prince Arthur, and who consequently may take in the Antidote before or immediately ­after the Poem.”17 The notion of Remarks as an “Antidote” for reading Prince Arthur is a fitting meta­phor for Dennis’s method, which involves a meticulous breakdown of the many artistic flaws in Blackmore’s epic. Dennis’s preface, which summarizes his approach to the poem, constitutes “an account of the Method which [he] propounded to use in the following Remarks,” namely “that Mr. Blackmore’s Action has neither unity, nor integrity, nor morality, nor universality, and consequently that he can have no Fable and no Heroick Poem” and “to shew that it is neither probable, delightful, nor wonderful.”18 The hierarchical structure of Remarks carefully reflects Dennis’s proposed methodology, which amounts to no less than the systematic discrediting of Prince Arthur as an epic poem worth reading. In other parts of his preface Dennis addresses the enterprise of literary criticism—­especially objections to that enterprise (sigs. A5r, A7r)—­while also preempting two objections to Remarks, namely “that it is written against a Book which has been very agreeable to a ­great many Readers” and that “it is intended to expose a Poem which was design’d for the ser­ vice of the Government.”19 Dennis is particularly adamant that he did not intend to criticize the politics or theology of Prince Arthur (sig. b6v), yet he also interrogates the viability of Prince Arthur’s po­liti­cal allegory in general: “Yet of all the

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1650–1850 t­ hings that his Enemies have basely objected to him [William III], not one of them has had courage enough to accuse him of fear. But Mr. Blackmore has made his Prince Arthur afraid upon e­ very occasion as has been manifestly prov’d against him in the following Treatise.”20 As this passage illustrates, Dennis was much more concerned with Prince Arthur as a work of lit­er­a­ture than as a po­liti­cal allegory, though the existence of this allegory (i.e., “pious Arthur represent[s] William III and his ungodly antagonist symboliz[es] James II”) has always been accepted by critics of the poem.21 Both Dennis and Blackmore dedicate space early in their respective works to the definition of epic poetry. For Dennis, who adopts René Le Bossu’s definition, epic is “a Discourse in­ven­ted with Art, to form the Manners by Instructions disguis’d ­under the Allegory of Action, which is impor­tant, which is related in Verse in a delightfull, probable and wonderfull manner.”22 Blackmore, likewise, defines epic in his preface to Prince Arthur: “An Epick Poem is a feign’d or devis’d Story of an Illustrious Action, related in Verse, in an Allegorical, Probable, Delightful and Admi­ rable manner, to cultivate the Mind with Instructions of Virtue.”23 Much of Blackmore’s preface is occupied with impugning the “ill purposes soever [to which] Poetry has been abus’d” on the late-­seventeenth-­century stage, as well as a discussion of vari­ous aspects of epic, including “Aristotle’s excellent Rules of Poetry.”24 Always holding Blackmore accountable to his words, Dennis adds in the margin next to this passage a note reading “He acknowledges the Jurisdiction of Aristotle & therefore is to be tryed by him.”25 This par­tic­u­lar marginal note eventually made its way into Remarks, where it reads, “­because Mr. Blackmore having own’d the Jurisdiction of Aristotle, is obliged to be tried by him.”26 A few pages l­ater in Prince Arthur—­when Blackmore claims “­there are indeed many other Actions besides the Principal one”—­Dennis disparages Blackmore for failing to follow the Aristotelian “Jurisdiction” he cited ­earlier: “This is directly against the Doctrine of Aristotle & his best Interpreters.”27 ­Later in his preface Blackmore articulates and defends his poem’s imitation of Virgil’s Aeneid: “I do not make any Apology for my Imitation of Virgil in so many places of this Poem; for the same ­great Master has imitated Homer as frequently and closely.”28 Dennis takes issue with this point as well: “This is his ­great fault. For this design is to be the poets [sic] own. Virgil imitated Homer in his painting but not in his design nor his fable.”29 Again, Dennis’s marginal remark in Prince Arthur would appear ­later in Remarks (though in an edited form): “He says, he form’d himself upon Virgil’s Model. Nay, he has copied him not only in his Fable, but in his Action episodiz’d. . . .’Tis true indeed, Virgil has imitated Homer, but never in his Fable, nor in the ranging his Episodes.”30 Though

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large parts of both Dennis’s and Blackmore’s respective prefaces have no relation to the manuscript notes in the Clark’s Prince Arthur—­Dennis spends most of his time discussing criticism and preempting objections to Remarks while Blackmore focuses primarily on the moral degeneracy of con­temporary poetry—­the manuscript marginalia that Dennis added to the preface of Prince Arthur nonetheless set the stage for the type of methodical dismantling characteristic of the rest of his annotations. As in the examples from Blackmore’s preface cited above, many of Dennis’s critical marginalia have analogues in the printed text of Remarks. The passage from part I, chapter 5, in which Dennis suggests “the Success of the B ­ attle and Uter’s attempt to rescue the Island from the Usurpation of Octa, ­ought to have been describ’d in the compass of ten lines,” began its life in the Prince Arthur annotations as “all that was necessary to prepare it might have been told in ten verses.”31 I have already mentioned the long marginal notes at the end of book 1 and beginning of book 4 of Prince Arthur that instruct readers to skip over books 2 and 3, though it ­will be useful to recall in that case how closely the wording of the manuscript notes matches the corresponding passage in Remarks. Many other passages in Remarks that focus on prob­lems with Prince Arthur’s character first appeared in Dennis’s manuscript notes. His argument that “­there must besides be an Unity of Character, and the Hero must every-­where appear to be animated with the same Spirit which inspir’d him at first. . . . ​For it is that which distinguishes him from all other Persons, and makes him such an individual Hero; and therefore as soon as he loses that, he certainly loses his Character”32 finds its analogue among the manuscript marginalia as “this destroys the unity of Prince Arthurs [sic] character which is piety & valour, & this alone is enough to spoil a poem.”33 This marginalium is keyed to the underscored line “And their unpunish’d Guilt, becomes your own,” a line cited by Dennis ­later in Remarks to illustrate that “the Hero is neglectfull of his ­People, and impious.”34 In the same section Dennis describes the fear expressed by Arthur at several points in the poem (76–77), which he points out with a marginal note (“the Hero a Coward”) annotating a couplet in book 1: “So when Just Arthur heard the Message first, / His wavering Mind with Fears and wise Distrust.”35 The foregoing examples relate primarily to Dennis’s appraisal of Prince Arthur as an epic poem as well as the unity (or lack thereof) of Arthur’s character. Elsewhere in Remarks Dennis’s commentary on the specific language used in the poem also has corresponding marginalia in the Clark’s Prince Arthur. In a passage commenting on two lines the Angel Gabriel speaks to Arthur—­“But fear not Hoel’s

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1650–1850 Pow’r, tho’ now your Foe, / By Hell incens’d, he w ­ ill not long be so”—­Dennis writes, 36 “this . . . ​is strange Language for an Angel.” The comment closely resembles the manuscript note in Dennis’s Prince Arthur, which reads, “strangely embarrassed” and is accompanied by an underscored and bracketed target text.37 In many instances Dennis criticizes the language used by the character Hoel. Twice Dennis asks in the margins of Prince Arthur, “Is this the speech of a man in fury?”38 ­After citing the second of the two Hoel speeches, Dennis pursues a similar line of questioning in Remarks: “Is this the Language of a Man in Fury? Can ­these Expressions agree with an Air disturb’d? I appeal to any sensible Reader, ­whether, if any one should talk at this rate upon the Stage, with an angry Voice and Air, he should not conclude it to be excellent Comedy?”39 In another speech of Hoel’s, which—­ inexplicably for our critic—­opens with two epic similes, Dennis adds a long manuscript note in the margins claiming “Hoel is certainly the first merry man, who began a speech to one whom he had never seen before with 2 similes.” Dennis continues the note by stating “what is not natu­ral is always absurd ev’n in the greatest poets. Sublimity, like grace, may exalt nature, but it must not invert it.” 40 Though the corresponding passage in Remarks has been further developed by Dennis, its core sentiment remains: “But can any one believe, that ever any one King greeted another so? Is t­ here any ­thing like this in Nature, and in the world? . . . ​ For tho’ true Sublimity, like Grace, may exalt Nature, it can never invert it.” 41 At times Blackmore’s language is so distracting to Dennis that he has to ignore it altogether in Remarks, perhaps reluctantly. ­After citing a long passage about the character of Octa, Dennis writes that he is “oblig’d to take no notice of the Verses yet a-­while, let them be never so obnoxious, for that would make too ­great a Confusion.” 42 In Dennis’s annotated Prince Arthur, the relevant two lines are marked with underscoring, bracketing, and the dismissive comment “plebeian & ungrammatical.” 43 While I ­will discuss Dennis’s penchant for brief and biting criticism shortly, one example of ­these comments illustrates how phrases from his marginalia might appear in radically dif­f er­ent places in the text of Remarks. When describing Blackmore’s long description of a storm in Prince Arthur, Dennis characterizes it as “mortally tedious,” which is a phrase that does not appear at the same place in the Prince Arthur marginalia; t­ here it occurs in a comment describing an epic cata­log of warriors: “This Cata­logue is mortally tedeous [sic].” 4 4 Despite the many close matches between Remarks and the Prince Arthur marginalia, then, ­there are many cases in which Dennis adapted his marginalia for dif­fer­ent uses in print. As I discuss at length in the next section, furthermore, much of Dennis’s marginalia in Prince Arthur did not even make it into the printed Remarks.

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The Raw Materials of Criticism? “Horrid,” “boyish,” “wanton and boyish,” “vile,” “base,” “false,” “fustian,” “obscure,” “conceited,” “pitiful,” “ridicu­lous,” “burlesque,” “barbarous,” “declamatory,” “nonsense,” “execrable,” “very bad,” “horrid m ­ usic,” “hideous,” “ambiguous,” “stuff,” “mere stuff,” “sad stuff,” “a botch,” “an awkward figure,” “weak and impure,” “low and spiritlesse,” “very foolish”: ­these are only some of the many negative comments John Dennis peppered throughout his personal copy of Sir Richard Blackmore’s Prince Arthur.45 For the most part, however, t­ hese comments are absent from Den­ hole offers less harshly worded negative criticism of nis’s Remarks, which on the w Blackmore’s poem. In fact, one prob­lem with characterizing John Dennis’s marginalia in the Clark’s Prince Arthur as a “rough draft” of, or even a manuscript witness to, Remarks, is that much of the marginalia’s content, especially the types of negative commentary cata­loged above, is not carried into the printed version of the text. In the previous section I discussed how Dennis felt “oblig’d to take no notice of the Verses yet a-­while, let them be never so obnoxious, for that would make too ­great a Confusion,” and that this passage in Remarks is a substitution for the original negative marginalia, which reads “plebeian & ungrammatical.” Lest he overload readers with too granular a perspective on the deficiencies of Blackmore’s epic, in other words, Dennis de­cided to overlook prob­lems in specific lines and remain focused on the critical argument at hand, namely the well-­structured “method” he proposes in the book’s preface. But while this note in Remarks might suggest Dennis simply took “no notice of the Verses” when reading Prince Arthur, his annotations in the Clark copy strongly suggest other­wise. Rather, it seems that in the pro­cess of transforming his marginalia into Remarks, Dennis not only made changes to the wording of his notes but also omitted a sizeable corpus of commentary deemed perhaps too specific and localized to individual lines, phrases, and words. In some ways the Prince Arthur marginalia simply encompass too much content, and it is perhaps inevitable that much of that content would be omitted for a printed book that also contains a large amount of material on Virgil’s Aeneid. If critical granularity was a prob­lem for the printed text of Remarks, it clearly was no issue in Dennis’s manuscript marginalia, which are replete with negative comments concerning Blackmore’s use of the En­glish language and conventions of epic poetry. Most of ­these remarks are vari­ous combinations of “ungrammatical” and “not En­glish,” though some are more specific in their objections. One of ­these comments reads, “­Here is a relative referred to a possessive, which I never

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1650–1850 saw in writing before,” while another protests that “The Doctor almost in evry [sic] page changes the tense that cryes for vengeance.”  4 6 Comments regarding the improprieties of Prince Arthur as an epic poem are legion. In a passage from book 1 recounting the “wise instruction” and “discourse divine” Arthur imparts in a postprandial speech to his soldiers, Dennis writes in the margin “Epick poetry instructs by action & not by precept.” 47 On the very next page, annoyed by the long descriptions endemic to Prince Arthur, Dennis highlights “Another tedious description full of bad verses, the action standing still all this while.” 48 Our annotator is also both­ered throughout the poem by what he perceives as Blackmore’s indecorous diction, which is inappropriate for the conventional gravity of epic: “nets,” as he writes next to an underscored instance of the word, “is no word for ­great poetry.” 49 Elsewhere, during the description of dawn at the beginning of book 6, Dennis dismisses the entire passage with “All this is far below the dignity of Heroick Poetry.”50 Dennis is quick to point out Blackmore’s poor imitations of Virgil’s Aeneid and Milton’s Paradise Lost, usually marking the Miltonic passages with a pencil trefoil and the word “Milton,” while also commenting on the Virgilian passages with vari­ous types of critical notes (e.g., “Virgil spoild”).51 One of ­these Miltonic allusions happens to be rather clever and provides a glimpse at Dennis’s own talents as a wit and critic. Marginally adjacent to a description of Satan and the fallen angels in book 3 of Prince Arthur—­“Confounded, and amaz’d they sink, and all / Heav’n’s Plagues, and Wrath, pursu’d them in their Fall”—­Dennis wrote, “Milton! ah how changd, how faln,” thus wittily reimagining the line in Paradise Lost book 1 (“If thou beest he—­but Oh how fallen! how changed / From him”) as a cutting remark on Blackmore’s poem.52 Such allusions to Virgil and Milton accompany several other references to seventeenth-­century poetry in Dennis’s marginalia. Just as Dennis highlights instances of Blackmore poorly imitating the ­great epics of Virgil and Milton, he does the same for a passage he sees as “Cowley’s thought inverted,” as well as another he deems “Comicall & taken from Mr Drydens Epilogue to Sir Fopling.”53 Another reference to Dryden underscores the comparative inadequacy of Blackmore’s verses: “­There are not two lines in all this page, of wch Mr Dryden would be wiling [sic] to be thought the Authour.”54 Other marginalia in the Clark Prince Arthur are written in first person and articulate the (often humorously expressed) personal taste of the annotator. Such comments range from blanket statements of opprobrium (“I like nothing in this page”) and skepticism (“I never heard of any bears in ­England”) to notes about what Dennis would rather do than reread parts of Prince Arthur (“The battell between the Britons & Saxons, I haue read yt, & would chuse to be in the next in

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fflanders rather than goe thro it agen”).55 In a passage describing the destruction of “Gallick Slaves,” Dennis remarks, “All this seems vilely low evn to me who hate the French”; in this case bad poetry trumps even the strongest anti-­French sentiment.56 In other places Dennis’s marginalia essentially take the form of jokes made at the poem’s expense: commenting on one of Blackmore’s epic similes (describing “two adverse Tides”), Dennis writes, with not a l­ittle disbelief at Blackmore’s understanding of tidal dynamics, “I am noe stranger to the sea, but I must confesse I am one to this sport.”57 Remarking on another epic simile that seems to go on a bit too long, Dennis underscored its last phrase (“an endless Rear”) and annotated the passage with the clever remark “An endlesse end.” Despite all of this negative commentary, the evidence also suggests Dennis attempted to temper his negative assessment of the poem for print, replacing curtly dismissive reactions like “scandalously low” and “infinitely absurd” with more general commentary on Blackmore’s literary inadequacies. What’s more, t­here is much evidence among the marginalia that Dennis’s take on the poem was not exclusively negative. G ­ oing back to this essay’s epigraph, it is impor­tant to remember that Dennis “believe[d] Prince Arthur to be neither Admirable nor Contemptible”: “For if I had the one or the other Opinion, I should certainly never have Written against him.”58 Though the text of Remarks does not elaborate on what aspects of the poem Dennis found “not Contemptible,” many handwritten marginalia in the Clark Prince Arthur express positive sentiment, the most common being “good verses” or “2 good verses.”59 Some lines from the poem seemed to impress Dennis even further. Annotating a book 10 epic simile comparing Arthur to the archangel Michael, Dennis brackets the passage and writes “All this is good” in the margin.60 In another passage, one that recounts Tylon’s supplication to Arthur, Dennis brackets the couplet “With words like ­these, and such a moving Art / As ­can’t be told, he touch’d the Prince’s Heart” and adds “fine words to move indeed” in the margin.61 Other marginalia, which blend positive and negative criticism, perfectly express the idea that Dennis found “Prince Arthur to be neither Admirable nor Contemptible.” When annotating a couplet in book 5—­“To the tall Masts the raging Flame aspires, / And neighbor sits to Heav’n’s contiguous Fires”—­Dennis remarks, “good if not too bold.” 62 Elsewhere Dennis admits he likes half a page of Blackmore’s verse, but at the same time cannot help mitigating his praise with a qualifying statement: “All this to the bottom is good but t­ here is too much of it” (see figure 2).63 Likewise, in a series of four lines in book 2, Dennis proclaims, “­These verses I like [“Thrice the swift Sun, his radiant Chariot drove / O’er the blue Hills, and out-­ stretch’d Plains above”]; but T ­ hese two are fustian [“As oft the Moon had shot

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Figure 2. Dennis blending positive and negative remarks in his marginalia, Prince Arthur, 123.

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her paler Light, / In Silver Threads thro’ the brown Vest of Night”].” 64 On the same page Dennis makes an effort to mend the deficiencies he identifies in a passage starting on the previous page, noting that “­Here are more good verses . . . ​/ one place of the Book, but some of them are unequall [?], some / of them are out of their places, & some of them contradict the rest; I have alterd them at the end of this second Book.” 65 As promised, at the end of book 2 Dennis offers a revised version of the passage beginning “For Man he dies, that Heav’n may be aton’d.” For the sake of comparison, I have transcribed the printed version first, followed by Dennis’s revised version: For Man he dies, that Heav’n may be aton’d, He dies, the Vniverse afflicted groan’d; Heav’n’s everlasting Frame shook with the Fright, And the scar’d Sun shrunk back, and hid his Light. Thro’ th’ Earth’s dark Vaults a shiv’ring Horror fled, That whil’st Convuls’d threw up th’ awaken’d Dead: ­ ’er the Grass, Thin pallid Ghosts come sweeping o And howling Wolves glare on them as they pass. Hoarse Thunder rolls in Subterranean Caves, Chaos to hearken stills his raging Waves. Ev’n Hell gap’d horrible, such was the fright, And thro’ the Chasm let thro’ prodigious Night: Night that extinguish’d the Meridian Ray, And with its gloomy Deluge choak’d the Day.66 [Printed version] For man he dyes, that Heavn may be atond, He dyes! the universe afflicted groand. Heavns everlasting frame shook with the fright Th’astonishd Sun shrunk back & hid his light. And nature dreaded an eternall night. Hoarse Thunder rolld in subterranean caves Chaos to hearken stild his rageng waves Evn Hell gapd Horrible, & on the light Thro the Dire Chasm, it pourd prodigious night. Night that extinguishd the Meridian ray And with its gloomy Deluge choakd the Day. [Dennis’s manuscript version]67 Though Dennis does not typically dedicate his time to rewriting Blackmore’s verses, this example illustrates both his ambivalent response to Prince Arthur as well as

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1650–1850 his willingness to ­labor over verses in which he identifies some merit. Cases such as ­these may help explain why Dennis both­ered to write an entire book about Prince Arthur; as Dennis himself says, “[he] should certainly never have Written against” Blackmore if he felt too strongly about the poem’s good or bad qualities. Rather, Dennis’s annotated copy of Prince Arthur embodies a complex set of responses to Blackmore’s epic, presenting readers with a more nuanced understanding of Dennis’s reaction than the printed text of Remarks might suggest. Though the handwritten critical remarks in the Clark Prince Arthur did not always make it into the published version of Remarks, their existence raises several key questions about the relationship between the two books and the textual fabric of literary criticism. Do ­those marginal notes deemed unfit for print somehow pre­sent a less mediated version of Dennis’s literary criticism—­perhaps the raw materials of Remarks? Did audience and genre play a role in determining what was kept and left out of the printed book? And what happens when we consider Dennis’s marginalia on their own terms without proleptically connecting them to the printed text of Remarks? The foregoing pages have attempted to provide some answers, yet the questions remain relevant and open to further interpretation. Simply put, t­ here is still much to be done on the relationship between Remarks and Dennis’s marginalia in the Clark Prince Arthur. As I have argued throughout this essay, the relationship between the two cannot be described as a “rough draft” and “final draft,” for the two texts appear to have dif­fer­ent agendas, and they clearly arose from dif­fer­ent compositional contexts. Further study w ­ ill undoubtedly shed more light on the annotations and continue the work of contextualizing them in the life and ­career of John Dennis. To aid further study, the Clark Library has recently digitized the entire volume and placed the digital facsimile online for public access.68 This essay has only begun the work of teasing out the textual complexities of Dennis’s annotated Prince Arthur, and it is my hope that f­uture TEI encoding of the digital facsimile w ­ ill enable scholars to continue that work and further our understanding of one of E ­ ngland’s first literary critics.

Notes Epigraph: John Dennis, Remarks On a Book entituled, Prince Arthur, an Heroick Poem (London, 1696), sig. *1v. 1. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (UCLA): f PR 3318 .B5 P9 1695 cop. 2. All subsequent references to this copy are cited as Prince Arthur. 2. The note, written in an older, prob­ably nineteenth-­century hand, reads “The Copy of John Dryden the Poet with his numerous Manuscript Critical Notes.” For the

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full attribution argument, see “Evidence for Attribution to Dennis” below. When the book was cata­loged at the Clark a note was made about its “extensive con­ temporary annotations,” but no attribution is given in the cata­log rec­ord. 3. For the distinction among book, book-­copy, and edition, see Joseph  A. Dane, What Is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 7–11. 4. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, sig. b6v. 5. For more on the recent history of recuperative work on Dennis, see John Morillo, “Enthusiastic Passions, Cultural Memory, and Literary Theory,” Eighteenth-­ Century Studies 34, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 21–41. 6. This is particularly true of the recent controversy over “Shakespeare’s Beehive”: according to George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler, two New York–­area antiquarian booksellers, a copy of John Baret’s Aluearie (1580) in their possession was purportedly owned and annotated by William Shakespeare. See Koppelman and Wechsler, Shakespeare’s Beehive: An Annotated Elizabethan Dictionary Comes to Light. Second Edition Revised and Expanded (New York: Axeltree Books, 2016). For one of many trenchant criticisms of their argument, see Adam G. Hooks, “Shakespeare’s Beehive 2.0,” http://­w ww​.­adamghooks​.­net ​/­2016​ /­03 ​/­shakespeares​-­beehive​-­20​.­html#. 7. I am grateful to Maximilian Novak, emeritus professor of En­glish at UCLA, for suggesting Dennis as a possibility. 8. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, part I, chapters V and VI. On p. 22, Dennis asks of the relation of Uter’s death “­Whether it does not constitute an irregular Episode, and make a monstrous Gap in the main Action?” 9. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, 30. 10. Prince Arthur, 32. 11. Prince Arthur, 93; emphasis added. The first two words of book 4—­“In such”—­ are underscored in the Clark copy. 12. Another autograph letter by Dennis is Folger Shakespeare Library C.c.1 (12a–12b), dated 1715. Though the handwriting in this letter is comparable to Folger Y.C.747(1), I have used the latter document for paleographical comparison ­because of its ­earlier date (the Prince Arthur annotations date to not ­after 1696, the year Remarks was published). I am grateful to Meaghan Brown of the Folger Shakespeare Library for providing me with images of Folger Y.C.747(1). I accessed Folger Shakespeare Library C.c.1 (12a–12b) through the Folger Digital Image Collection (http://­luna​ .­folger​.­edu​/­luna ​/­servlet ​/­FOLGERCM1~6~6). 13. In his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on Dennis, Jonathan Pritchard writes that, “by his own admission, Dennis almost always wrote in haste. He revised ­little and left the transmission of what w ­ ere often first and only drafts to the discretion of the printer.” Jonathan Pritchard, “Dennis, John (1658–1734),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://­w ww​.­oxforddnb​.­com​/ ­view​/­article​/­7503.

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1650–1850 14. A few examples include Samuel Johnson, Remarks upon Dr. Sherlock’s book inti­ tuled The case of re­sis­tance of the supreme powers stated and resolved (1689); A.C., Some remarks upon a book, entitled, Christ’s lambs defended against Satan’s rage, &c. Being the Quakers answer to The Quakers unmask’d &c.: In a letter to E.S., Esq. (1691); and John Willes, Remarks of an university-­man upon a late book, falsly called A vindication of the primitive ­fathers (1695). 15. Dennis would publish several other “remarks” in his lifetime, many of which pertain to his feud with Pope: Remarks upon Cato, a tragedy (1713); Remarks upon Mr. Pope’s translation of Homer (1717); Remarks on a play, call’d The conscious lov­ ers (1723); Remarks on Mr. Pope’s Rape of the lock (1728); and Remarks upon sev­ eral passages in the preliminaries to the Dunciad (1729). None of ­these other Remarks ran to over 100 pages or appeared in folio format. For more on Dennis and Pope, see E. N. Hooker, “Pope and Dennis,” ELH: A Journal of En­glish Literary History 7 (1940): 188–198. 16. That said, ­there are certainly exceptions to this appraisal of the Prince Arthur annotations as lacking in critical coherence, primarily in the longer manuscript notes by Dennis, which often appear nearly unaltered in the printed Remarks. 17. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, sig. A8v. A quarrel between Blackmore and Dennis would last for several years ­after the publication of Remarks, with Blackmore’s Satyr against Wit (1699) and the Commendatory Verses of the same year, which was written by several authors, including Dennis. For more on Dennis and Blackmore, including their ­later friendship, see John Dennis, The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1939–1943), 2:xxxv–vi, cxxx. 18. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, sig. A1r–­v; emphases Dennis’s. All subsequent italicized words in quotations from the text of Remarks and Prince Arthur are Dennis’s and Blackmore’s, respectively. 19. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, sig. b4v. 20. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, sig. c2v. 21. Flavio Gregori, “Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654–1729),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., January 2009, http://­w ww​.­oxforddnb​.­com​/ ­view​/­article​/­2528. Gregori goes on to mention that Prince Arthur must have sold well since it went to a third edition. 22. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, 1. 23. Prince Arthur, sig. a4v. 24. Prince Arthur, sig. a2r. 25. Prince Arthur, sig. a2r. See Dennis, Critical Works, 2:lxxxiii–­xci for Dennis’s steadfast belief in literary rules inherited from antiquity, despite widespread opinions that criticized such rules in the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries. 26. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, 2. 27. Prince Arthur, sig. b1v. A l­ittle farther down on that same page Dennis points out that Blackmore’s argument about unity of action “condemns the 2 & 3 lib. [i.e.,

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“libri”] of his own Pr.[oject?].” ­These are the two books of the poem Dennis suggested readers should cut entirely (see above). 28. Prince Arthur, sig. c1v. 29. Prince Arthur. See also Dennis, Critical Works, 2:civ. 30. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, 13–14. 31. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, 25; Prince Arthur, 107. 32. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, 54. 33. Prince Arthur, 184. 34. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, 75. 35. Prince Arthur, 28. 36. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, 77. 37. Prince Arthur, 16. 38. Prince Arthur, 103, 264. On 264 the marginalium reads, “Is this the language of a man in ffury.” 39. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, 155. 40. Prince Arthur, 31. 41. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, 94. See also Dennis, Critical Works, 2:cx. 42. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, 97–98. 43. Prince Arthur, 131. Another phrase from that same speech—­“black Tides of Horrour roll”—is annotated by Dennis with “meer stuff.” 44. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, 151; Prince Arthur, 192. 45. Other comments include “infinitely absurd,” “strange verses,” “not En­glish,” “luxuriant and wrong,” “most childish and luxuriant,” “vicious imitation,” “prosaic and low,” “despicably low,” “­little and low,” “scandalously low,” “not at all artful,” “a wretched point,” “an anticlimax,” “too hyperbolical,” “has no sensible meaning,” “tautology,” “the diction impure,” “a tedious description,” “mortally tedious,” “plebian and ungrammatical,” “a base wandring word,” “a most impertinent digression,” “false syntax,” “false grammar,” “a filthy image,” and “a vile transposing.” 46. Prince Arthur, 206, 210. 47. Prince Arthur, 13. 48. Prince Arthur, 14. 49. Prince Arthur, 30. On that same page Dennis also remarks, “All this is speculative & grovelying & quite contrary to the character of an Heroick Poem.” 50. Prince Arthur, 157. 51. Prince Arthur, 228. 52. Prince Arthur, 89. Milton, Paradise Lost, 1:84–85. 53. Prince Arthur, 189, 172. 54. Prince Arthur, 241. 55. Prince Arthur, 72, 110, 217. 56. Prince Arthur, 153. 57. Prince Arthur, 228.

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1650–1850 58. Dennis, Remarks On a Book, sig. *1v. 59. Other variants include “tolerable good verses,” “five good verses,” and “two indifferent good verses.” 60. Prince Arthur, 290. 61. Prince Arthur, 125. Despite the apparent positive sentiment in this note, it is also pos­si­ble ­here that Dennis is being sarcastic: ­earlier on the page he criticizes Tylon’s speech with the comment “would any petitioner talk at this rate?” 62. Prince Arthur, 138. 63. Prince Arthur, 235. 64. Prince Arthur, 61. 65. Prince Arthur. The ellipsis represents a phrase rendered illegible due to faded ink marginalia and water-­s taining. On the previous page Dennis added two other notes reading, “See the end of this 2d Book” and “a good verse if the tense w ­ ere right” (60). 66. Prince Arthur, 60–61. 67. Prince Arthur. Bold emphases are mine and represent substantive changes Dennis made to the poem. 68. The digital facsimile is available ­here: https://­calisphere​.­org ​/­item​/­c53c3313​- ­693d​ -­41d5​-­a1ff​-­531c87aaf629​/­. I would like to acknowledge the work of Lisa McAulay and Dawn Childress (UCLA Digital Library Program), Stephen Davison (formerly of the UCLA Digital Library Program), and Sherri Berger (California Digital Library) in making a digital copy of this book (and other Clark Library materials) available online.

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MY ­ENEMY’S ­ENEMY DENNIS, POPE, AND EDMUND CURLL PAT ROGERS

It only takes two to forge a literary relationship, for good or ill. But sometimes

we can make more sense of the friendship among writers, or their quarrels, if we introduce a tertium quid. In the case of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, it might be Maxwell Perkins. As for the dealings of Woolf and Mansfield, an examination of the role of John Middleton Murry might cast useful light. The story of John Dennis’s relations with Pope has been told many times, and not always from the perspective of the more famous writer. A new emphasis on the culture of Whiggism, initiated by critics such as David Womersley and Abigail Williams, has come to mean that Pope and his allies no longer have it all their own way in studies of early eighteenth-­century literary controversy.1 One way in which we may seek to refine the picture is by adding a third term to the equation—­namely, the sometimes hidden presence of Edmund Curll. The war of the dunces raged around Pope for more than two de­cades. Two of the most impor­tant combatants ­were Dennis as an author, and Curll as a publisher. Few connections have been detected between t­ hese two men—­the En­glish Short Title Cata­logue lists only one item in which they appear together on a title page, Remarks upon Mr. Pope’s Translation of Homer (1717). As a ­matter of fact, Curll was responsible for several other works written by Dennis, notably A True Character of Mr. Pope, and his Writings (1716). He also recycled shorter items from the same hand in some of his miscellanies. In addition, he claimed to have had Origi­ nal Letters, Familiar, Moral and Critical. By Mr. Dennis (1721) printed for the benefit

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1650–1850 of the aging writer. Two sections on Dennis in Giles Jacob’s Poetical Register, first issued by Curll in 1719, ­were reused in a biography of Pope attributed to “William Ayre” in 1745, a work inspired if not actually compiled by Curll. ­Here Ayre devotes twelve pages to Dennis, taken up chiefly by a citation of the critic’s hostile commentary on The Rape of the Lock before, oddly, he states that t­ hese strictures are now “sunk in Oblivion.” Other stray connections can be discovered. Curll was not the most significant of the publishers Dennis used, and Dennis was not the author who figured most conspicuously in the bookseller’s ­career. Still, their common link with a g­ reat poet ensured that the dealings between the two men illuminate the cultural clash that Pope’s works helped to provoke, and it confirms how central their role was in the b ­ attle of the books taking place before and ­after The Dunciad. Dennis was already well established as a writer when Curll set up as a bookseller around 1706. At first they had no more than desultory contacts: for example, Curll took over as one of the publishers responsible for s a miscellany entitled A Collec­ tion of Divine Hymns and Poems on Several Occasions (1707), to which Dennis contributed a typically rhapsodic paraphrase of the Te deum. No trace of further dealings has been located for the rest of Queen Anne’s reign, while Curll made his name in the world of bookselling. Dennis had already been tagged as a modern-­ day Zoilus by Swift and o ­ thers. At the same time he achieved celebrity for his sturdy Whig opinions, evidenced in works such as The Danger of Priestcraft to Religion and Government: with some Politick Reasons for Toleration. Occasion’d by a Dis­ course of Mr. Sacheverel’s (1702), an early onslaught against the man who was to embody Tory extremism for his opponents over the next few years. By contrast, Curll remained in an ambiguous position po­liti­cally, as he would continue to do throughout most of his c­ areer. Never a confirmed Jacobite, he published several tracts during the Sacheverell controversy in 1710, including attacks on the low church bishop Gilbert Burnet. Some of t­ hese came from the pen of George Sewell, who turned out more pamphlets on topical issues for Curll than anyone, especially during the second de­cade of the c­ entury. However, the bookseller’s links with Tories grew weaker over time, although in City elections he generally voted for anyone but the court candidates when the Whigs held power in the third de­cade. The discrepancy is telling. Dennis was seldom less than forthcoming about his allegiances, ­whether literary or po­liti­cal, and risked disparagement as a result of his views. Curll, a businessman first and a partisan second, rarely exposed himself by supporting an unpop­u­lar creed. He fought his ­battles against individuals, or at most against small groups such as Pope and the Scriblerian

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satirists who represented what was ultimately a minority viewpoint—­this made up an area where he could find common ground with Dennis. Not u ­ ntil 1711 did full hostilities break out between the poet and the critic.2 A rapid summary of the salient events should suffice. The trigger came in verses that appear late in An Essay on Criticism: “But Appius reddens at each Word you speak, / And stares, Tremendous! With a threatening Eye. / Like some fierce Tyrant in Old Tapestry!”3 This allusion to the failed tragedy Appius and ­Virginia that Dennis staged in 1709 has been explained by e­ very editor. I am not sure if as much has been made of the fact that Dennis uses the word “tremendous” in his Whig panegyrics, once in Britannia Triumphans (1704), as well as twice in his poem on the ­battle of Ramillies in 1706.4 T ­ hese references ­were plainly meant to identify the victories of the Duke of Marlborough with a sublime godlike power, something that would not have gained warm endorsement from Pope. The response to the gibe concerning Appius arrived ­after barely a month, in the form of Reflections Critical ­ here is no need and Satyrical, upon a late Rhapsody call’d, An Essay upon Criticism. T ­here to elaborate on the charges Dennis brought against the Essay, other than to remark that Curll would recycle similar accusations from the same hand in years to come. It took only a short time for Pope to reply with a cruel parody of the manner of “Rinaldo Furioso, Critic of the Woful Countenance”5 (PW, 1:3) in The Critical Specimen (1711), followed two years ­later by a more personal attack in The Narra­ tive of Robert Norris, concerning the Strange and Deplorable Frenzy of Mr. John Denn[is] an Officer of the Custom-­house. The new pamphlet may have been inspired by Dennis’s ill-­advised strictures on Addison in Remarks upon the Trag­ edy of Cato, published shortly a­ fter the cleverly staged premiere of the play on April 4, 1713. The Remarks managed to alienate all segments of opinion, and Pope came to the support of Addison with an admiring prologue (TE, 1:96–97)—­this despite the fact that the relation of the two men was on the point of fracturing. Dennis l­ater suggested that Pope had deliberately “teaz’d” the bookseller Bernard Lintot into publishing the work, possibly foreseeing the ridicule which would be thrust on the critic: but no evidence for this has emerged.6 ­These events are familiar to virtually every­body who knows anything about Dennis. They deserve mention ­here only to set the stage for what follows, and to emphasize the fact that Curll took over a quarrel that was already blazing. This time, he did not initiate the encounter. One can only imagine the plea­sure with which he witnessed from the sidelines a literary controversy that seems to promise abundant chances for exploitation, engaging as it did the most prominent writers of the age. He had only to bide his time, and the opportunity would soon arrive to

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1650–1850 intervene in the disputes that set Pope against not just Dennis but also Addison. The curious outcome was to range Addison and Steele more firmly against Pope, as seen in a letter to Lintot that Dennis cited in his response to The Dunciad years ­later.7 This was just the sort of drama in the world of letters on which the bookseller loved to cash in. He enjoyed nothing better than acting as an enabler of literary feuds. For his part, Pope used the Narrative as a rehearsal for the pamphlets that he would write satirizing Curll in 1716, even though Lintot is the bookseller who enters the story on this occasion. By the time of the Hanoverian accession, Curll had already offended some of Pope’s friends and allies, notably Swift, Rowe, and Prior. Now he began to train his sights on Pope, or at least his authors did. In April 1714 came a pamphlet from Charles Gildon, at this date the only rival to Dennis as the nation’s most prominent critic. This was a polemic couched as a drama entitled A New Rehearsal, or Bays the Younger, ostensibly an assessment of the works of Nicholas Rowe, but also featuring “a word or two” on The Rape of the Lock. Pope ­later had his fictional Curll assert that the work “did more harm to me than to Mr. Rowe” (PW, 1:263), but no doubt it was the portrayal of the conceited versifier Sawney Dapper that most irritated Pope. Curll may or may not have been b ­ ehind this attack, which appeared u ­ nder the imprint of the trade publisher James Roberts, with whom he was associated in something like a hundred items. In May 1715 Charles Gildon produced an expanded version with Roberts again named on the title-­page: this was Remarks on Mr. Rowe’s Tragedy of the Lady Jane Gray, and all his Other Plays, which would appear in Curll’s list in the following year along with the ­earlier version. The New Rehearsal is also cited in The Curliad (1729), one of the bookseller’s varied responses to The Dunciad. A few days ­later, a volume of Poems and Translations. By Several Hands emerged from the shop of John Pemberton, Curll’s neighbor in Fleet Street and perhaps his closest collaborator at this time. It contained a bawdy epigram, given the title “A Receipt to make a Cuckold” and identified by the editor, John Oldmixon, as the work of Pope. The poet claimed that the lines had been stolen from him, and from this date identified Oldmixon as fair satiric game. He seems to have thought that Curll was the true instigator of the collection, which may not have been true. The most suspicious circumstance is that the last and longest item is a work by Pope’s friend and mentor, William Walsh (highlighted on the title page), which Curll would reprint three times between 1735 and 1740. More broadly significant ­here is the fact that the contest between poet and bookseller was getting ­under way before Curll had established any known links with Dennis.8

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That association began in November 1715 when Dennis came out with The Real Antichrist: An Essay Fully Proving, that the Vices of the Laity Proceed from the Cor­ ruptions of the Clergy, a work that would only l­ater be properly attributed to him (his biographer H. G. Paul does not mention it ­under this title). The imprint is again that of Roberts. However, Curll advertised it u ­ nder this name in booklists from early 1716. Then, apparently within a ­matter of days, came a second edition, but this time with an altered title, Priestcraft Distinguish’d from Chris­tian­ity. Oddly, the En­glish Short Title Cata­logue and other sources fail to recognize that t­ hese works are identical, differing only by the canceled title page. Curll included the pamphlet u ­ nder its new name in his 1716 cata­log, as well as among booklists found in his publications. The most notable case occurred when Priestcraft was blazoned on the verso opposite the title-­page of Remarks upon Mr. Pope’s Translation of Homer, one of the major blows in the ­running ­battle, which Curll published for Dennis in February 1717. By now the c­ areers of the three men had begun to fall into a pattern of imbrication. It is pos­si­ble, though not certain, that Pope was aware of what Dennis was up to, as regards this side of his activity as an author. If so, he would have taken account of the heretical opening paragraph, in which Dennis observed that the label “Antichrist” had been foisted “upon some par­tic­u­lar Person, as upon the Pope, Mahomet, or some other spiritual or secular Tyrants,” whereas it belongs rather to the clergy who have corrupted the gullible laity. Pope would not have minded much about the anticlerical spirit of the pamphlet, but he might have ruefully noted the conjunction of Antichrist, the Pope, and Mahomet—­this was the sort of triad of opprobious expressions that underlies his work, sometimes with the substitution of “the Turk” as the representative of Moslem faith and the employment of a further term, “Jew.” Meanwhile the combatants awaited their opportunity. The first instalment of the Iliad translation in 1715, as well as the staging of Gay’s hybrid farce The What D’ye Call It (believed by the wits at Button’s coffee­house to be the work of Pope), provoked intense hostility ­toward the Scriblerian group, but neither Dennis nor Curll appears to have taken any share in the new attacks on the poet. The bookseller did cheekily inscribe to Mr. Pope one small volume, The Bath Toasts for the Year 1715, basically recycling the contents of items he had put out in 1713 and 1714.9 Pope initially held his hand, but it was prob­ably in the summer of 1715 that he drew the first sketch of what became the portrait of Addison as “Atticus” in the Epistle to Arbuthnot, and forged a link between Dennis and Gildon as examples of critics whose virulent writings proceeded from “Hunger, not Malice” (TE, 1:142). But this did not see print for another seven years, and it served as ­little more than a prologue

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1650–1850 to the main drama to be acted out subsequently. The momentous events of 1715, such as the impeachment of Oxford and Bolingbroke, had increased the divisions in society, and they came to a climax with the Jacobite rising, which polarized the nation as nothing had done since the Revolution of 1688. According to the l­ater testimony of Dennis, Pope “listed openly in the Tory Ser­vice, and ­every Week publish’d scandalous Invectives on t­ hose very Whigs, who had been his amplest Subscribers.”10 It was an outrageous exaggeration, but the new fault lines which had opened up ensured that many whom Pope had once befriended now came to represent a hostile power that threatened his personal and civic identity. No one had ever doubted Dennis’s fierce allegiance to the Hanoverian cause; and from now on Curll would trim his sails to the favorable breeze. The personal was inevitably overlaid with the po­liti­cal in this fraught atmosphere. It is not necessary to rehearse in detail ­here the stages of Pope’s first major contest with Curll, as the story has been told many times. Brief summary ­will suffice. A flurry of activity between March and May 1716 began with the illicit publication of three Court Poems, purloined for Curll by John Oldmixon. They ­were written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, but the suggestion was made that ­either Pope or Gay might have been responsible. This prompted Pope to a dual response: first with a childish gesture when he gave Curll an emetic, and then with his uproariously funny, and amazingly detailed, depiction of the bookseller’s working life in A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison on the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll. The ­battle continued with a number of aggressive press advertisements by Curll, mostly directed against the translation of Homer, whose second installment had just appeared. This in turn prepared the way for Oldmixon’s ballad The Catholick Poet, attacking Lintot as well as Pope. Curll was prob­ably ­behind this, though he had recently been distracted by his perpetual l­egal trou­bles— he had been arrested for illicitly printing the trial of one of the Jacobite leaders, the Earl of Winton, in a translation from French sources by Oldmixon. He had been brought to the bar of the House of Lords and detained briefly in the custody of Black Rod. On the same day as the ballad, May 31, ­there fi­nally appeared the long-­ expected onslaught by Dennis, entitled A True Character of Mr.  Pope, and his Writings. Curll would bring out a second edition in the next year, and reprint the item in miscellaneous volumes. All this time the bookseller was busy snapping up trifles such as Pope’s poem The Worms, which over the next few years would go into more editions than any other item in the canon. ­After a very short lull, the contest resumed when Curll

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got his hands on Pope’s blasphemous parody of the first Psalm, issued on June 30 by his usual agent at this time, Rebecca Burleigh. This publication caused the poet considerable embarrassment and required him to cobble together a disingenuous notice in the press that sought to distance him from the work. For a time, it looked as though Curll might have gained the upper hand, ­until Pope retrieved the high satiric ground with another brilliant skit, A Further Account of the most Deplor­ able Condition of Mr. Edmund Curll, Bookseller. This may have appeared as early as midsummer or as late as the start of winter. It features a gathering of Curll’s authors in a comic editorial conference, at which they agree to take vari­ous mea­ sures to retaliate against Pope. Such w ­ ere the tumultuous events of 1716. Several minor episodes have been passed over ­here. It was the moment when the onslaughts of Pope’s enemies crystallized around a number of themes, including his attempt to slip popish propaganda into his translation of Homer and other works, his ignorance of Greek, and his tendency t­ oward personal libel, mockery of religion, and obscenity. In The Catholick Poet, one of the livelier ripostes, Oldmixon charged that Pope sat in with the Whig littérateurs at Button’s coffee­house and then betrayed their secrets to the Harley government, writing for the Tory journal The Examiner while he professed friendship for Addison and contributed to the Whig Guardian. The accusation is false, but it does show how party politics would invade every­thing in the Kulturkampf that had sprung up, leaving Pope on one side, and Dennis now with Curll on the other. Equally this was the juncture when Pope found a rhetorical strategy and a satiric idiom that would inform his ­later work, notably Peri Bathous and The Dunciad. In fact the stage was already set for the war of the dunces—­ participants in both camps had already begun to marshal their forces and collect their ammunition for the ­battles to come. Critics used to describe A True Character as verging on madness The word they regularly employed was “frenzied,” and Sherburn referred to its “insane glitter.”11 Even Dennis’s modern-­day apologists must concede that it offers many ­handles for such a view of the work, with its reiteration of Pope’s shameful allegiance to “the worst Religion,” its contention that “like the Ancient Centaurs, he is a Beast and a Man,” its emphasis on the “­great Success with the Rabble” that his poems have achieved, and its insistence that he has merely traduced and “Burlesqu’d” the g­ reat writers of the past. Least defensible to modern eyes is the determination to use Pope’s deformity as an emblem of his innate wickedness, with much use of words like “monkey” and “baboon,” and the statement that his physical state was “the mark of God and Nature upon him, to give us Warning that we

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1650–1850 should hold no Society with him, as a Creature not of our Original, nor of our Species.”12 This attempt to refer the poet as an alien understandably deflects us from any serious objections to Pope’s manner of writing that the essay may contain. Of course, one line of defense would be that Dennis was simply retorting in kind to Pope’s unprovoked attacks in places such as The Narrative of Robert Norris, but this argument tends to fail b ­ ecause of his opponent’s ability to simulate a more temperate tone and to mask any bitterness ­behind a veil of comic invention. Curll’s involvement is crucial to the story for two reasons. First, he went on circulating the attacks for many years to come, advertising them in the press and in his own booklists. This played a key role in keeping the controversy before the public as a prominent ele­ment in general literary discourse. Second, Pope managed in A Further Account to insinuate an easily identifiable Dennis into the group of starveling authors: when Curll summons his troops, he is made to say, “I ­don’t much care if you ask at the Mint for the old Beetle-­brow’d Critick” (PW, 1:279), a wonderfully offhand reference to an individual whose presence is neither ­here nor ­there. As we know, Curll had not published anything much by Dennis u ­ ntil the True Character came out. The effect is to demote the status of Dennis from leading critic and cultural commentator to that of an obscure hack inhabiting some lower rung in the authorial chain of being, shoulder to shoulder with men like Oldmixon, Sewell, and perhaps Robert Samber. Cruel, of course, to remind poor Dennis of the financial difficulties that caused him to secrete himself from the clutches of creditors, prefiguring his penury at the end of his life, but it is fair to add that the critic had enjoyed the advantage of a schooling at Harrow and Cambridge, with a G ­ rand Tour to follow (­things denied to his principal tormentor). In addition, he received the support of some of the greatest patrons of the age, had sold his post in the Custom House for as much as £600, and that would ultimately earn a gesture of active benevolence from Pope. We can sympathize with Dennis when he told Steele that his misfortunes had arisen not from extravagance, but from the “unjust Usage which I have met with in the World,”13 but we can also see how his reverses made him a perfect fit for the cast of the mythological Grub Street opera that Pope was constructing around the operations of book trade operators like Curll. Next year the pace began to slacken a l­ittle. However, Dennis kept ­things rolling with his drawn-­out Remarks upon Mr. Pope’s Translation of Homer, to which he added segments on Windsor-­Forest and The ­Temple of Fame, issued by Curll in February. Much is recycled, but the critic finds space to assert, “I regard [Pope] as an ­Enemy, not so much to me, as to my KING , my COUNTRY, to my RELIGION, and to that LIBERTY which has been the sole Felicity of my Life.”14 ­Here Dennis attempts

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to elevate the quarrel beyond the personal into a fundamental conflict over the state of national culture. His comments on The ­Temple are to a large degree vitiated by his inability to recognize that the poem is an imitation of Chaucer’s Hous of Fame, but his comments on the Iliad have more particularity and bite than previous efforts. Pope allowed some defense of his methods as a translator to ­ attle of Frogs and the appear in his edition of Thomas Parnell’s version of The B Mice, the mock epic of pseudo-­Homeric origin, but for the most part did not respond. Meanwhile Curll had used the name of a Catholic bookseller, E. Berrington, to bring out a short pamphlet implicating Pope and Arbuthnot along with Gay in the farce Three Hours ­after Marriage, supplemented by a reissue of the sheets of A True Character of Mr. Pope. Still, Curll blew his own cover before very long by inserting this piece into the Miscellanies of “Mr. Joseph Gay” (John Breval). As Mr. Gay, the latter produced a farce of his own entitled The Confederates, which features the three Scriblerian coauthors in some undignified squabble among themselves, as well as in the com­pany of Lintot, Colley Cibber, and the actresses Anne Oldfield and Margaret Bicknell. Again, Curll had responsibility both for the original issue and for its appearance in the Miscellanies of 1719. It is a similar case with The Rape of the Smock, by Giles Jacob, published in May, which has only glancing blows against Pope. Curll reused this in his collections and produced new editions in 1716 and 1736 (the last reused in 1743. This was the final contribution of substance in 1717, though Curll did not cease to dredge up new items for his collections that he attributed (sometimes rightly) to Pope. At the start of 1718 Cibber’s virulently anti-­Catholic play The Non-­Juror prompted Pope to write A Clue to the comedy, which Curll gratefully picked up and employed in two slightly dif­fer­ent texts. But this did not mean that he had let up on Pope: shortly afterward came Gildon’s Memoirs of Wycherley, recounting the friendship of the dramatist with the youthful Pope, and alleging that he had been betrayed by the upstart. Curll reprinted more of the Court Poems, now a catch-­all title that allowed the publisher to incorporate any item by Pope that he could purloin. At the same time Dennis was busy collecting his Select Works in prose and verse, perhaps in the spirit that anything Pope could do with his 1717 Works he could do just as well. The tirades against Pope are excluded, and the letters with literary men added at the conclusion of the second volume fortunately date from a period before the Pope affair got started. The conventional narrative has it that the controversy largely went into abeyance for almost a de­cade. True enough, ­there was no major flare-up in the next few

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1650–1850 years, while Pope found his time mortgaged by the toilsome l­abor of the Odyssey and the edition of Shakespeare. Dennis had begun to show signs of tiredness, but he did continue to reissue the works of his hot youth and even hotter ­middle age. As for Curll, he never let up: what is not always recognized is that, when he had nothing more substantial to send to the market, he kept Pope’s name in the forefront of his publishing activity by vari­ous devices. ­These included random citations, irrelevant asides in newspaper ads, the use of lines from Pope in title page epigraphs, and glancing allusions in books with no sort of connection to the poet. Thus, in Giles Jacob’s Historical Account of the Lives and Writings of our most Considerable En­glish Poets (1720), not only does Pope have an admiring entry (approved by the poet, according to a letter from Jacob to Dennis, and paid for by the poet at a cost of two guineas, according to The Curliad), but in addition his name is liberally sprinkled throughout the entire text. Evidently Curll believed the mere vocable “[A.] Pope” would sell more copies. Some rapprochement occurred around his time, or so Dennis evidently thought. L­ ater he mentioned that Pope subscribed to the Select Works and also to Original Letters, Familiar, Moral and Critical (1721). The publisher of this last set of two volumes was named as William Mears, a frequent coadjutor of Curll at this period; and indeed in 1735 Curll would annotate a reference to the Original Let­ ters in one of Pope’s letters with the gloss, “Printed by E. Curll for Mr. Dennis, for whose Benefit only they w ­ ere subscribed at one Guinea a Set.”15 Mears was still alive and for once t­here is no need to doubt the truth of this claim. But no such warming breezes ­were felt in the climate of Pope’s relations with Curll. In 1723 the bookseller released the first publication within a book of Pope’s portrait of Addison as Atticus, d ­ oing his best to stir up the embers of a quarrel that had yielded some copy in the past. In 1724 the bookseller returned to the heartland of the controversy when he issued Madam Dacier’s Remarks upon Mr.  Pope’s Account of Homer, in which the translator of Dacier augments her suggestion that Pope had plagiarized her work in his preface to the Iliad. Again in 1725, Spring Macky, the translator of an allegorical account of French politics entitled The Adventures of Pomponius, a Roman Knight, thrust into the second volume an entirely irrelevant paragraph denouncing Pope. He refers to the poet as “the Undertaker,” that is the one who had undertaken the proj­ect of Homer. Around this time Curll produced a book, The Stamford Toasts, compiled by an obscure author possibly named Thomas Pope: on the title page he employed the formula, “By Mr. Pope; not the Undertaker.”16 The procedure recalls the figure in classical rhe­toric of apophasis. Pope could be used to enhance market potential even by the denial of his presence.

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This brings us to the best-­known sequence of events in the quarrel, and again it is practicable only to give a rapid summary. Peri Bathous came at the start of the third volume of the Swift-­Pope Miscellanies in 1727. ­After some light blows at Dennis’s poetry, Pope devoted his attention to a “proj­ect for the advancement of the stage,” allegedly based on a proposal made by Dennis and Gildon in 1720—­ such a work was indeed advertised in the press by Curll and three other booksellers, substituting “regeneration” for “advancement,” with a second edition announced shortly afterward. But no trace of the volume, if it ever existed, has been found. The ideas attributed to “the two greatest Criticks and Reformers then living” draw on all the baneful associations of the “proj­ect” in the post–­South Sea era. Gildon had indeed passed away, but the words “then living” insinuate the notion that Dennis too, like John Partridge before him, had been dispatched by the satirist to an early grave. Yet the old warrior still had sparks of life left in him. When the first version of The Dunciad came out two months ­later, he could not have been surprised to see that “D—­s ” was forced to play a part in the action, notably in the mud-­diving episode in Book II. Next year the Variorum edition awarded him extensive annotation, most importantly a long entry at 1:104, which gives a tendentious account of his life and relations with Pope. Plainly this treatment aligned him with some of the most undistinguished hack writers of the day, as well as thrusting him into close com­pany with Curll, one of the protagonists in the duncely games. In the preliminary “Testimonies of Authors,” Pope draws more than once on “the high voiced and never enough quoted Mr. JOHN DENNIS ” (TE, 5:38), a way of conveying the idea that the misguided author would always convict himself out of his own mouth. “High voiced” is a brilliant touch: it catches the shrill quality of the critic’s writing, boosted as it ­were by a stylistic amplifier. In July 1729 Dennis brought out his last piece of criticism, Remarks upon Several Passages in the Preliminaries to the Dun­ ciad, some of it reviewing the history of his dealings with the poet, in a tone that seems, in comparison with his e­ arlier attacks, more like sorrow than anger. He enlists on his side Giles Jacob, by now his most fervid ally and natu­ral successor in disparaging Pope.17 Meanwhile Curll, though not involved in the Remarks, churned out at least seven responses to the Dunciad with the help of aggrieved individuals such as William Bond and (possibly) Elizabeth Thomas. In The Popiad he collected together ­earlier assaults on Pope, including a shorter version of the Remarks on Homer. His own pamphlets carried on the b ­ attles of the previous de­cade: A Compleat Key to the Dunciad (1728) enabled him to recruit to the cause Sir Richard Blackmore’s

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1650–1850 Essays, in which he had an interest, thus belatedly carry­ing out revenge on A Fur­ ther Account, and to imply that he was ­doing a public ser­vice by filling in the blanks within Pope’s text. It is not obvious that figures like Dennis and Leonard Welsted would have been grateful to him for this. The Curliad (1729) permits a spot of fun at the expense of Pope over his confusion about the authorship of one attack, variously imputed by the poet to Gildon and Dennis. Dennis, who suffered increasingly hard times as he aged, would be dead within five years, but not before Pope had written an outwardly friendly prologue for a benefit per­for­mance at the Haymarket theater to relieve the veteran in his straits. Its main conceit is that of the doughty warrior who had formerly “braved the Goth, and many a Vandal slain,” but now had outlived his days of triumph. The verses manage to bring back the old topics, now treated with a gentle comedy rather than mordant satire: Such, such Emotions should in Britons rise, When, press’d by Want and Weakness, Dennis lies; Dennis! who long had warr’d with modern Huns, Their Quibbles routed, and defied their Puns; A desp’rate Bulwark, sturdy, firm, and fierce, Against the Gothick Sons of frozen Verse; How chang’d from him who made the Boxes groan, And shook the Stage with Thunders all his own! Stood up to dash each vain Pretender’s Hope, Maul the French Tyrant, or pull down the Pope! If ­there’s a Briton, then, true bred and born, Who holds Dragoons and Wooden-­Shoes in Scorn; If ­there’s a Critick of distinguish’d Rage; If ­there’s a Se­nior who contemns this Age; Let him to Night his just Assistance lend, And be the Critick’s, Briton’s, Old-­man’s Friend. (TE, 6:356) Beneath the bantering tone conventional in dramatic prologues, we see how the poet glances at many of the divisive issues that had torn the nation as Britain sought to define its role in the opening de­cades of the ­century, across the arenas of politics, religion, lit­er­a­ture, and the theater.18 At the very least, it is a backhanded tribute to the central part Dennis had taken in the cultural discourse of his time. ­There would be no more confrontations, and no further triangulation is pos­ si­ble, even though Curll did his best to keep this highly newsworthy contest alive. For example, in the second volume of Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence (1735),

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he went back to what he called Pope’s “submission” to Dennis at the time of the Original Letters. The connection had become close enough for a posthumous biography, The Life of Mr.  John Dennis, appearing ­under the imprint of Roberts in 1734, to state on its title-­page “Not written by Mr. Curll.” Of course, the unsinkable bookseller took that in his stride: Curll continued to belabor Pope long ­after Dennis had left the scene, still devising fresh ways to drag his adversary into any proj­ ect of his own, no m ­ atter how remote and unlikely the connection might seem. But that is another story. So much for the bare narrative. What can we conclude? In the case of Dennis, he found himself drawn into Curll’s orbit, how willingly we do not know, as a result of the campaign waged against Pope by the bookseller. As for Curll, he took advantage when he could of a con­ve­nient ally in exposing the poet’s supposed rec­ord of behaving badly ­toward maligned members of the literary profession. As for Pope, it is tempting to say that he simply went on his merry way, enlisting for example the works of Dennis as valuable copy for his notes to The Dunciad. Each man was useful to the o ­ thers in some re­spect. But was this a m ­ atter of contingent circumstances? We might ask ourselves ­whether Dennis would just as soon have inveigled Lintot into his self-­defense against Pope, which he never quite managed to do; or w ­ hether Curll might have preferred to persuade a less divisive and generally more influential, if not always better respected, figure such as Blackmore or Cibber to sign up for his cause. (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Hervey would have been stronger adherents, too, if they had been willing regularly to take off the gloves and engage in rough Grub Street fisticuffs along with Curll’s bruisers.) Arguably we could imagine Pope finding as much to ridicule in critics such as Gildon or Oldmixon, who had given personal offense to him almost as often as Dennis. Perhaps it was a ­matter of chance collisions between Leibnizian monads, rather than the expression of a deep cultural clash that could have taken no other form. I think this is the wrong way of looking at it. Dennis mattered ­because, as scholars have increasingly recognized, he devised a coherent vision of national identity. This embraced a series of onslaughts on the aspects of con­temporary culture he regarded as destructive of what was truly British and truly modern. His targets included—­but, as the l­awyers say, ­were not l­imited to—­Italian opera; most t­ hings French; the denunciation of the immorality of the stage, promoted by the nonjuror Jeremy Collier and supported by High Church ele­ments in the Society for the Reformation of Manners; many of the Anglican clergy; the irreligion of much

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1650–1850 con­temporary verse; the Stuart legacy; and of course Roman Catholicism. We may recall what Thwackum says in Tom Jones: “When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of E ­ ngland.” When Dennis writes of civil society, as he does in odd places, he means not just a British, a Christian, and a Protestant society, but one resisting the tyranny of the priests and bishops. In this light David Womersley is able to see the Essay on Criticism as partly a rejoinder to works by Dennis such as The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, and to read Pope’s Essay “in the context of the politicized poetics” generated by debates surrounding the War of the Spanish Succession.19 It is easy to see where the two men stood when we recall that Marlborough represented for Dennis the hero of his times, in sharp contrast to Pope’s low esteem for the duke. But more generally we could argue that the En­glishness that Dennis admired—­Protestant, Williamite, and l­ater Hanoverian; hospitable to Whig notions of “pro­gress” in civil society; self-­consciously “manly,” in opposition to the fopperies of the operatic stage—­ embodied a turn to psychogeography. Viewed thus, the fissure opens up not just between Whig and Tory but between North and South. The issues relate to an almost immemorial contest between the Spartan virtues of industry and austerity, sometimes identified with a “Gothic” past, as against the softer world of the Mediterranean. It is a contrast that can be figured in terms of climate and landscape, of sexuality, or even occasionally of the sublime and the beautiful. This make sense of Dennis’s disparagement of court values, as they are expressed in the homage to the last Stuart monarch in Windsor-­Forest (a poem he considered “a wretched Rhapsody”),20 as well as his contempt for the effeminate Italian language, lacking the strong sinews of a Saxon tongue. For his part, Pope stood out not just ­because he was a Catholic, whose papist version of Homer the Whigs took pains to decry, or b ­ ecause he moved in the circle of the proscribed Tory leaders, but also ­because he had been greatly influenced by French lit­er­a­ture and had an extensive familiarity with Italian poetry, especially that of the Re­nais­sance. Why did Curll need a Dennis? In the older man, he found a standard-­bearer against the Scriblerians; a dunce whose long ­career belied some of the belittling commentary in The Dunciad; a vigorous polemicist whose crusades provided lively copy; and a man of unquestioned princi­ple, who had backed the right h ­ orse at a time when the direction that Britain would take remained a m ­ atter of fierce debate. Each of them would have survived without the other, but their conjunction was not just a ­matter of random particles colliding. For a number of years they would

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take advantage of the resources of print culture to engage Pope where the literary, the religious, and the po­liti­cal routinely met.

Notes 1. See for example Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and “Cultures of Whiggism”: New Essays on En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and Culture in the Long Eigh­ teenth ­Century, ed. David Womersley, Paddy Bullard, and Abigail Williams (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). 2. In real­ity Pope had made one passing joke about “­Great D—­s ” in a letter to Henry C ­ romwell in 1707. This was first published by Curll in 1726, and the blank naturally explained. 3. J. Butt, ed., The Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope, 11 vols. (London: Methuen, 1938–1968), 1:306–307 (hereafter cited as TE, followed by volume and page number). 4. John Dennis, Britannia Triumphans: or, the Empire Sav’d, and Eu­rope Deliver’d (London: J. Nutt, 1704), 66; The ­Battle of Ramillia: or, the Power of Union (London: B. Bragg, 1706), 5, 103. Another verse in the Essay on Criticism strikes at Dennis’s literal-­minded adherence to “Aristotle’s Rules” (TE, 1:270). 5. N. Ault, ed., The Prose Works of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936), 1:3 (hereafter cited as PW, followed by volume and page number). 6. John Dennis, A True Character of Mr. Pope, and his Writings (London: S. Popping, 1716), 6. 7. John Dennis, Remarks upon Several Passages in the Preliminaries to the Dunciad (London: H. Whitridge, 1729), 41. 8. In July 1714 Curll included a short epigram, “On a Lady who P—st at the Tragedy of Cato,” in the third edition of Rowe’s Poems on Several Occasions. He reprinted it in subsequent collections, but did not attribute it to its likely author, Pope (the item would ultimately find its way into the Swift-­Pope Miscellanies). 9. Besides this, Curll published in July 1715 a translation by John Ozell of The Works of the Celebrated Monsieur Voiture . . . ​To which is Prefix’d, the Author’s Life and ­ hose familiar with Curll’s methods w ­ ill a Character of his writings, by Mr. Pope. T not be surprised to learn that the contribution by Pope is simply a (doubtless unauthorized) reprint of the “Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture,” first published in Lintot’s miscellany of 1712. For the rest of his life Curll went on playing the same trick. 10. Pope Alexander’s Supremacy and Infallibility Examin’d (London: sold by J. Roberts, 1729), 14. Now commonly attributed to George Duckett, but Pope assigned the work jointly to Duckett and Dennis (TE, 5). In Remarks upon Several Passages in the Preliminaries to the Dunciad (1729), 55, Dennis commends “the ingenious and sagacious Author” of the tract. Curll did not advertise the item, but you

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1650–1850 could no doubt get copies supplied by Roberts (like scores of o ­ thers) at his store. 11. George Sherburn, The Early C ­ areer of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 19. 12. Dennis, A True Character of Mr. Pope, 4, 5, 7, 10. 13. John Dennis, The Characters and Conduct of Sir J. Edgar and His Three Deputy-­ Governors, During the Administration of the Late Separate Ministry (London: J. Roberts, 1720), 27. 14. John Dennis, Remarks upon Mr.  Pope’s Translation of Homer (London: E. Curll, 1717), sig, A1v. 15. Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence (London: E. Curll, 1735), octavo ed., 2:18. 16. The name is a sneering reference to the patent at the head of the Odyssey, which stated that the work had been “undertaken,” rather than fully translated, by Pope. See London Journal, July 17, 1725. 17. ­After Peri Bathous came out, a short attack on Pope, prompted by the forthcoming appearance of The Dunciad, appeared in the London Journal on May 11, 1728. Its manner has something of Dennis about it, though ­there is no external evidence pointing to him. 18. The unexplained verse about dragoons and wooden shoes might seem naturally to point at the Dutch, but it makes more sense when we recall Goldsmith’s common soldier, who hates the French “­because they are all slaves, and wear wooden shoes.” Essays by Mr. Goldsmith (London: Griffin, 1765), 222. The sabot was “popularly taken as typical of the miserable condition of the French peasantry” (Oxford En­glish Dictionary). 19. David Womersley, ed., Augustan Critical Writing (London: Penguin, 1997), xxxii. This collection was one of the earliest harbingers of the recent shift in critical attitudes ­toward Whig writing of the period. 20. Dennis, Remarks upon Mr. Pope’s Translation of Homer, 39.

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OVID MADE EN­GLISH DENNIS’S TRANSLATION OF THE PASSION OF BYBLIS SARAH B. STEIN

John Dennis is not generally presented as a key figure in restoration and

eighteenth-­century translation studies. Although Niles Hooker, editor of the collected works of Dennis, does devote some attention to the topic in his notes on Dennis’s translation of The Passion of Byblis, he does so primarily to point to what he sees as Dennis’s lack of interest in translation. Looking at the relatively meager number of translations that Dennis undertook Hooker argues: “It is difficult to escape the conviction that he considered translation a low form of art.”1 Following from this premise, Hooker primarily reads Dennis’s translation of Ovid’s Byblis as a work that foreshadows his ­later interest in the work of John Milton. While ­these areas of interest undoubtedly played a part in Dennis’s choice of Byblis, Dennis’s unique contribution to translation in the early eigh­teenth ­century deserves closer scrutiny. By identifying himself with both Ovid and Byblis, Dennis embraces writing and translation that temper the dangers of passion as much as they embrace passion. Translating Ovid’s Byblis, Dennis makes bold decisions, both adding to and eliding parts of the text as he renders the story in En­glish. Sarah B. Stein has argued that Dennis’s ­later translation of Psalm 18 in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry provides a unique solution to contradictions pre­sent in his theory of religious sublimity, and that Dennis saw translation of religious texts as a means to the salvation of lit­er­a­ture.2 With Byblis, Dennis’s earliest known work, as in his ­later translations, Dennis uses translation both to express the passion and enthusiasm of the lit­er­a­ture and to tame the dangerous nature of this passion.3 The story of Byblis

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1650–1850 is one of incestuous passion and the dangers of expressing that passion in writing. In his rendering of Byblis, Dennis finds a way to both express and control the dangerous passion that ­causes so much trou­ble for Byblis in her own writing. In Ovid’s version of the story, Byblis becomes aware, by way of an erotic dream, that she is in love with her ­brother Caunus. She is very distressed by her incestuous desire, but eventually decides to send Caunus a letter confessing her desire. The scene of writing, her false starts, and her worry over word choice are described at the heart of the story. When Caunus receives the letter, he is furious and leaves, never to return. Byblis wanders the earth searching for her ­brother and weeping, ­until the gods take pity on her and turn her into a spring.4 It is this final metamorphosis that earns the story its spot in Ovid’s work. Ovid’s retelling of the Byblis myth expands upon literary pre­ce­dents in order to metamorphosize myth itself.5 As Shilpa Rival notes, the letter and monologues within the story refer back to the tradition of Latin elegy and forms from Ovid’s own prior work, the Ars Amatoria, in which he explains how to write love letters, and the Heroides, in which he depicts scenes of ­women writing letters.6 The tale of Byblis had been told many times, and Ovid not only creates a new version but also writes a Byblis that references the ­earlier versions of the text. Thomas E. Jenkins writes: “No other version of the Byblis myth features writing as an integral part of its narrative, though the tale may be found in a surprising number of variations.”7 Ovid’s Byblis considers expressing herself orally, as all other versions of Byblis had done before her, but rejects this option in f­ avor of writing a letter.8 This impulse in Byblis, to both make use of and reject e­ arlier forms of expression, plays out in larger ways throughout the Metamorphoses. Brooks Otis explains that Ovid took part in a revolution in poetry that overthrew the literary norms set down by Virgil.9 E. J. Kenney notes that “Ovid’s ability to produce fresh variations on what was by now a fairly well-­worn theme.”10 In other words, Ovid expanded upon discursive pre­ce­dents in order to fashion something new out of old cloth. Facing the translation of Ovid’s text, John Dennis found himself in a situation similar to Ovid’s. He was taking an old tradition, Ovid’s text and the many transla­ ngland at the time, and tions of stories from the Metamorphoses circulating in E refashioning it. In d ­ oing so, Dennis translates a story that has already been given new form numerous times before. He chooses to take an old form, and, very much in the spirit of Ovid and even Byblis herself, rewrites it and gives it new form and content. Dennis introduces his pro­cess: “When I desired to make it En­glish . . . ​I resolv’d to imitate them in our native Tongue, with as much address as I could.”11 Dennis draws his concept of imitation from John Dryden’s explanation of three

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dif­fer­ent types of translation: metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation. While metaphrase calls for a literal translation and paraphrase calls for the transfer of meaning, imitation gives the translator ­free rein to adjust the text as he sees fit.12 Dennis both adds to and removes parts of Ovid’s text. He writes: “I have made so bold with Ovid; as to insert ­here and ­there a Thought of my own.”13 Dennis goes on to explain that he ­doesn’t want to commit “a Robbery” of the text, and yet certain details of the story troubled him.14 Dennis makes three major changes that I ­will discuss in more detail below: he adds comments about Byblis’s virginal status that do not exist in the original, he amplifies the passion of one of Byblis’s speeches that he finds lacking in “Fury,” and he completely elides the metamorphosis that gives the poem its place in Ovid’s work. Lawrence Venuti writes of the domesticating effect that imitative translations have on work. Taking ­free rein with a foreign work usually results in a text purged of its strangeness and made completely comfortable for the reader of the new text.15 While Dennis does adhere to certain domesticating tendencies in neoclassical translation, he also follows Ovid’s own example in freely editing the text. Dennis’s additions to the text are in the spirit of Ovid’s own commitment to expanding upon stories. Shilpa Raval notes that Byblis is also an expansive writer. In the story, her letter to Caunus spills over onto the margins of the writing tablet. Commenting on the writing that expands into the margins, Micaela Janan writes: “Byblis is an expansive writer—as is her creator, Ovid.”16 Dennis’s imitation could also be called expansive. The very content that breaks from Ovid’s text and is, therefore, the most changed and domesticated, is also the most faithful to Ovid’s form. Ovid, Byblis, and John Dennis are all imitators and all expansive authors. Ovid’s Byblis repeats an old story and plays with the old tropes of both incest and metamorphosis while si­mul­ta­neously expanding into new territory. Similarly, any translation is both a repetition and an original work. Dennis embraces the tension between repetition and innovation in his explanation of his translation. On the one hand he writes about his obligation to repeat Ovid’s story and even the “faults” that he sees t­ here: “As I would not have my faults imputed to Ovid, so, since I have so many of my own to account for, I do not desire to stand charg’d with his, which as his Translator I was oblig’d to copy.”17 As Ovid’s translator, then, he feels an obligation to repeat; thus the translation, even as a f­ ree imitation, w ­ ill still be marked by the “faults” of the original. On the other hand, he feels ­free to both add and subtract from the story; commenting on the final metamorphosis he notes: “I have therefore contracted it in the last few Lines, but at the same time I have alter’d it.”18 He repeats, but with changes that he willingly claims. He sees

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1650–1850 his change as spatial, based on contraction and expansion. For Dennis, imitation, rather than being a colonization of the text by the translator, is an ongoing strug­ gle between author and translator; he alters what he finds, yet, si­mul­ta­neously feels obliged to repeat. The key ele­ment of Byblis that Dennis repeats is the passion found within the story, specifically in the use of meta­phors of fire and burning. To begin, Dennis gives the story the title “The Passion of Byblis.” He also writes about how the passion of the story drew him to it: “The Passion of Byblis seems to be, in the Original, not only one of Ovid’s most masterly pieces, but a Passion in some places most happily touch’d of any that I have seen amongst the Ancients or Moderns.”19 Throughout his ­career, Dennis would return to his conviction that passion is centrally impor­tant to ­great lit­er­a­ture.20 As noted by Hooker, he clearly chose Byblis for his translation as an example of passionate lit­er­a­ture.21 In Ovid, Byblis begins with a moral, which may or may not be tongue in cheek.22 In the Latin t­ here is no reference to flame or fire in t­ hese opening lines. However, Dennis inserts his first flame meta­phor for passion into t­hese very first lines, writing: “Bright Nymphs, the Objects of Mankind’s Desires, From Byblis learnt avoid incestuous fires.”23 He continues throughout to refer back to “flames,” “fires,” and “burning” as a figure for Byblis’s desire for her ­brother. In the preface, Dennis describes Byblis’s incestuous dream, which he claims is “the most immodest ­thing in the Story.” ­Here, “flames” become the figure of sexual ecstasy: Th’ immortal plea­sure ran thro’ all my Frame, Tho all my Bones, and inmost Marrow came, That melted and ran pouring down before th’impetuous Flame.24 Upon waking, Byblis refers to “ye obscene Flames” and “a ­Sisters Flame” in reflecting on her newly recognized desire.25 Dennis takes the fire meta­phor directly from the Latin, which references flames and fires several times: referring to “furor igneus” (angry fires), “flammae” (flame), “ignes” (fires), and “ignem” (fire), but he adds the image throughout, nearly blanketing his translation with the meta­phor. He expands the meta­phor ­until the entire story seems to burn with incestuous fire. Most impor­tant, is that he depicts the scene of writing, where Byblis’s writing spills into the margins, as the expression of a fire in her mind: “Thus all on fire her working Mind indites, / Till ev’ry Page and Margents full, she writes.”26 The story is full of passionate meta­phors of burning, and the author is depicted as one whose mind burns. In the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries, enthusiasm was seen as dangerous. The passion Dennis so identified with in the text was an unaccept-

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able risk in the eyes of t­ hose who had lived through the Revolution and Restoration and did not see a place for enthusiasm in public life.27 In addition to fire meta­ phors, other lines mark Dennis’s translation with his trademark interest in passion and sublimity. Dennis uses vocabulary that would become standard marks of sublimity in the following c­ entury. The word “sublime” appears once in the translation, paired with “hot,” “fierce,” and “furiously”: Let Dotards Slaves to musty Morals be, Austerities and Impotence agree. But in two hot Youth and fierce Desire To sublime Raptures furiously aspire.28 In addition to this mention of sublimity, Dennis also makes several references to “fury” and “rage,” terms that he would l­ater align with the enthusiastic emotions. In fact, an interest in the sublime would become the trademark of Dennis’s criticism in the years following this translation. In The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry and The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, Dennis argues for a revival of British lit­er­a­ture through the inclusion of the Longinian sublime.29 Most previous criticism on Dennis has addressed his complex version of sublimity and his attempt to explain how passionate and enthusiastic emotions could be used in lit­er­a­ture.30 However, as many critics have noted, the attempt to reconcile sublimity with the history of British lit­er­a­ture and with his strong religious convictions caused Dennis many prob­lems. His theories often contradict in troubling ways, and his desire to adhere to specific neoclassical rules often comes into tension with his desire for passion and sublimity.31 Shaun Irlam has described Dennis’s version of sublimity as “the oxymoron of ‘regulated Enthusiasm.’ ”32 In my previous work I have noted how Dennis used a controlled, neoclassical translation of the theophanic, sublime Psalm 18 to overcome the contradictions among his Chris­tian­ity, neoclassical interest in the Roman and Hellenic, and desire for passion in lit­er­a­ture.33 In his translation of Byblis, we can see Dennis’s interest in the Longinian sublime and passion as the basis for lit­ er­a­ture, but also see his first attempts at this “regulated enthusiasm.” Dennis may retain fire meta­phors but he also adds several mentions of honor, virtue, and virginity not pre­sent in the original in any form. In his preface Dennis betrays his anxiety about Byblis’s status as a virgin and a w ­ oman of honor. He says that it trou­bles him that, “she says some ­things that are by no means consistent with that Modesty, which she ­ought to have, as a Lady, a Virgin, and a ­Woman of Honour.”34 In Ovid’s version, Byblis experiences shame, but it occurs in the face of her desire for incest. In Ovid, sexuality is not the issue for Byblis; rather the forbidden nature

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1650–1850 of incest is the prob­lem, and ­there is no discussion or even implication that Byblis is a virgin. Dennis works hard to give Byblis—­and even Caunus—­specifically virtuous qualities.35 When Byblis first wakes from her incestuous dream and tries to decide what to do, she plans: “Yet while awake I can continue chaste.”36 In a relatively short story with few personal details, the phrase “continue chaste” makes chastity a key feature of Byblis’s character. One of the references to Byblis’s shame in the original is transformed to: Thou art a Virgin g­ reat, and modest too. Ah! We are modest, but ­because ­we’re frail, O’er whom does not Almighty Love prevail?37 What was an issue of incest alone in Ovid’s rendition becomes an issue of incest as one form of sexuality. For Dennis, it is Byblis’s expression of sexuality at all that makes her problematic. While contemplating declaring her love for Caunus, Byblis dramatically says farewell to her honor and virtue: “Eternally farewell, O Honour, Vertue, Bliss!”38 ­Here we see the marks of Christian theology on the text. Honor and virtue belong to a ­woman ­until they do not, and then the loss is eternal. ­There are two states of being a sexual being for Dennis: virtuous and eternally not honorable or virtuous. ­These states ­aren’t determined by incest, but by sexual acts outside of marriage. In Dennis’s version of the letter, she specifically refers to herself as a Virgin again: When Honour, Piety, Remorse and Shame, My very vitals tore t’expel the flame. In misery grown obstinate, I bore What never tender Virgin did before. When what I suffer’d other Maids but hear, ’Twill wound their gentle hearts, and force a tear.39 Byblis calls herself a “tender Virgin” and describes a ­battle within herself that “tore” her. This tearing, in Dennis’s rendition, connects (tore/tear) with the tears of the “Maids” who hear the story. Her desire destroys her, and the story has the potential to hurt other virgins. The word “tear” in the context of virginity is also very significant. Although “tear” in this instance clearly rhymes with “hear,” on the printed page it is also a homograph for the word “tear” (as a verb to rip apart, or as a noun a hole created by tearing). The cried tears of the virgins are, then, also the tears that a virgin w ­ ill potentially experience when losing her virginity. In this homographic play, the tear is also then a figure for both what ­will be left of Byblis’s maidenhead (a tear), and what can potentially happen to her letter (it ­will be

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torn); it also prefigures the tears that ­will turn her into a spring in Ovid’s rendition of the story, although Dennis w ­ ill go out of his way to remove t­ hese transformative tears. Dennis’s focus ­here remains on maids, virginity, and the shame of female sexuality. It is the tear to her maidenhead that is the real crime Byblis considers committing. In Ovid’s original, shame does become an issue for both Caunus and Byblis, but the shame is clearly linked to the wrong object of desire and not the desire itself. Specifically, in Ovid’s telling when Byblis ruminates on the failure of her letter to seduce her b ­ rother, and decides that she ­will continue her seduction lest he think it was merely a trap: “And I s­ hall seem, ­because I give them up, / Fickle and frivolous, even to have tried / to trap him.” 40 The trap, it seems clear, would be one of seduction. However, Dennis adds several ele­ments to this, implying that the trap is to catch Caunus admitting incestuous desires in order to ruin him po­liti­cally. Dennis also brings the ele­ment of Caunus’s virtue into the ­imagined ruse: Perhaps he may suspect some close design, Its int’rest with his Fame to undermine. That specious bates ­were for his Virtue laid, To be to public Infamy betray’d.41 The bait is laid to capture his virtue, implying a virtuous Caunus. The possibility of po­liti­cal intrigue mixed with a concern for individual virtue changes the stakes of the trap from solely public to both private and public. Yet personal virtue remains Dennis’s primary interest. In this same speech Byblis discusses her relative innocence, guilt, shame, and even sin. In the Ovidian original she opines: “Denique iam nequeo nil commmisisse nefandum; / Et scripsi et petii: temerata est nostra voluntas; / Ut nihil adiciam, non possum innoxia dici. / Quod superset, multum est in vota, in criminal parvum.” 42 Translators of this passage use the words “sinned,” “innocent,” and “guilty.” 43 Dennis takes this moment in Byblis, and just as he has expanded Ovid’s fire meta­phors to fill the text, he expands this discussion of sin to be a focus of Byblis’s character and actions. In Ovid, she fears that she ­will not get to be with Caunus and her guilt, and shame are almost afterthoughts. In Dennis, the guilt and shame take center stage or at least become equally relevant to her passion. Dennis’s translation, then, obscures the cause of guilt; linking it to incest but also to sexuality and loss of virginity in general. When Dennis calls her “a Lady, a Virgin, and a W ­ oman of Honour” he implies that the story is only worth reading if it is from the point of view of a w ­ oman of honor. He can only justify undertaking the translation if the protagonist stands up to his seventeenth-­century, Christian views of feminine morality.

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1650–1850 Yet, as always in Dennis, he wants passion in the translation. He chose the story for its passionate topic and speeches, and he even faults one of the speeches for not being passionate enough. Although the first fault he sees in Ovid’s original is its immodesty, the second fault he finds is in its lack of passion in certain moments. Referring to Byblis’s speech ­after receiving her reply from Caunus, Dennis writes: “The second Fault in this Passion of Byblis, is in the passage that immediately follows the return of the Messenger. For that which ­ought to be the most moving, is the coldest part of the Story . . . ​where Byblis, who can scarce speak for the Vio­lence of her Grief, is yet for speaking in Allegory.” 4 4 He makes a point of saying that he was “oblig’d to copy” ­these faults. Allegory, which involves distance from the object of discussion, is not adequate to the extreme vio­lence of Byblis’s grief. For Dennis, that level of grief leaves no room for the separation that distances the object of thought from its allegorical substitution. He adds: “In short, no sort of imagery ever can be the Language of Grief. If a Man complains in Simile, I e­ ither laugh or sleep.” 45 The choice of laughter and sleep refers directly back to two states that do not occur in the story of Byblis. Instead of peacefully sleeping, Byblis dreams incestuous dreams all night. Instead of laughing, the characters lust, rage, and grieve. If allegory is equivalent to sleep and laughter, then it has no place in this story. In short, Dennis finds himself in a bind. On the one hand he has chosen this text for its passion and critiques it based on its ability to express passion. On the other hand, he finds the sexuality driving Byblis’s passion problematic and even dangerous. He speaks against imagery, yet he fills his translation with images of fire and burning to reflect the passion that overtakes Byblis. To temper this, he has added an entire vocabulary of virtue, honor, and virginity that is not pre­sent anywhere in Ovid’s account. The tension between passion in lit­er­a­ture and the neoclassical urge to control enthusiasm and bring order to poetry plays out in the tension between Byblis’s virginal status and passionate, incestuous desire. We can see this as Dennis’s first attempt to grapple with enthusiasm and the need to both embrace and control it in his writing. John Dennis styles himself as another Byblis as he explains his pro­cess as a translator. The expansion into the margins that aligns Byblis with Ovid and both with Dennis as authors, also aligns the act of writing with the crime of incest. In addition, the link between the unspeakable crime of incest and the “robbery” of translation is made explicit in Dennis’s account of Byblis’s love for her b ­ rother. Byblis, speaking of how beautiful Caunus is, claims: “Ev’n Envy can contented on him gaze, By liking sullenly it self amaze, And learn to speak a foreign tongue, Praise.” 46

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Although the foreign language for Envy is Praise in this equation, it is quite notable that Dennis uses the meta­phor of speaking a foreign tongue in the course of a translation between tongues. The meta­phor of translation and speech does not appear in the original. One version gives: “True, his good looks / Even jealous eyes admit.” 47 Dennis has added the meta­phor of foreign speech. In ­doing so, he equates loving Caunus with translating. As the translator, he has become the speaker of Byblis’s text in a foreign tongue. His translation repeats her incestuous desire. Thus translation becomes aligned with incest. It is an unspeakable crime to take the text for one’s own language, and yet, the passionate text has forced him into the position of translator, much as Caunus’s looks have forced Byblis to love him in an unsisterly way. In The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701) and in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), Dennis attempts to explain an entire history of poetry that highlights the need for passionate topics. The enthusiastic passions, which Dennis considers the most impor­tant for poetry (admiration, terror, horror, joy, sadness, and desire) circulate in Byblis, and looking back from the vantage of his ­later work, we can see Dennis beginning to develop his theories about lit­er­a­ture and enthusiasm by struggling with the text of Byblis.48 However, a major difference develops in Dennis’s thought between 1684 and 1701. In The Advancement and The Grounds Dennis calls for the use of religious subjects for poetry. He argues that ­these subjects are the most passionate. In other words, he moves away from sexuality as a source of passion and turns, instead, to the awe and terror produced by the divine.49 Yet he still strug­gles to balance this enthusiasm by also calling for translations that ­will take place using neoclassical rules. As discussed by Sarah B. Stein, by translating sublime religious texts using neoclassical rules, Dennis finds a way to reconcile the contradictory forces in his work.50 Although he developed a much more complex system for understanding passion and its regulation in his ­later work, his translation of Byblis also bears the mark of the strug­gle to express and control passion. In each case he seeks a very neoclassical balance that ­will bring symmetry to the work. Byblis’s desire is the most taboo of all desires, incest, while her character has the most perfect of all sexualities, virginity. Dennis takes her immodest passion and words to emphasize every­thing modest about it. The only reason that he is able to translate such a sexually charged and scandalous story is ­because Byblis remains a virgin to her death.51 The “immodest” and nearly pornographic sex scene takes place only in a dream. The expression of sexuality only in fantasy is another example of regulated passion. The incest is desired but unconsummated. The passion is all consuming like fire and yet fails to consume.

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1650–1850 Interestingly, Dennis’s was not the only En­glish translation of Byblis of the 1680s and1690s.52 In his preface and the notes following his translation, Dennis is concerned that his translation may be taken as an affront to ­those who appreciated the recent translation of the lately deceased John Oldham. The crime of translation is reinforced by the apparent crime of calling the skills of Oldham into question. Dennis writes: “I have been told by some, that a g­ reat many ­will never forgive me the attempting it ­after him.”53 But Dennis provides an explanation for why his translation is necessary. His justification is based on what he views as the masculine properties of Oldham’s translation and the more tender feminine properties of his own translation. His argument is complex, attributing gendered properties to languages and writing styles. First, Dennis refers to En­glish as “so strong and masculine a Language as ours.”54 He then claims that Byblis’s story, one of feminine passion, therefore requires a feminine and soft touch in the translation into the masculine language of En­glish. He sees Oldham as too masculine to properly translate Byblis. In reference to what the feminine story requires when translated into a masculine language, Dennis claims: “To succeed in it, requires neither Force nor Genius, but only a Tenderness of Soul (which Mr. Oldham’s Masculine Temper disdain’d) and an extraordinary propensity to that Humane Frailty, Compassion; and a certain Felicity which usually accompanies the Dictates of the softer Passions.”55 Essentially, Dennis claims that the story has a feminine character, frail and compassionate, while both En­glish and Oldham’s use of En­glish serve to give the story a masculine inflection. Dennis sees it as his job to bring the feminine, compassionate, and frail nature of the language into his translation. The gender theories at work h ­ ere are complex, and Dennis does not explain what he means when he refers to En­glish as a strong, masculine language. But one ­thing is clear; he sees himself as returning a feminine voice to the text. H ­ ere, then, is another example of Dennis aligning himself with Byblis. Dennis sees himself having access to the voice of the “softer passions.” In Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation, Liz Oakley-­Brown notes that neoclassical translation in ­England became the place to navigate self and other, particularly in regard to “nation and gender,” and that translations of Ovid ­were particularly impor­tant in this re­spect: “Subject positions are thus constructed and contested in all translated texts, but Ovid’s Metamorphoses, thoroughly inscribed with notions of translation and transformation at the outset, throws the interpellation of identity into relief.”56 We can see Dennis struggling to define how his writing fits into both his national language and the gender politics inherent in writing.

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Many critics have noted Byblis’s own issues with gender transgression as an author. Shilpa Raval discusses how Byblis’s choice of form, the love letter, is a male genre: “The elegiac puella is a constructed and passive object of desire (both erotic and artistic) rather than an active subject, the written rather than the writer . . . ​ Byblis transgresses gender bound­aries when she aligns herself with the male amator and suffers the consequences of her actions.”57 While Byblis is busy writing herself into the male subject position by writing a love letter, Dennis is writing himself as a feminine translator by critiquing Oldham’s “masculine” approach. As Dennis, the translator, and Byblis, the author/character, create their texts, the performative effect is to create a chiastic structure out of gender relations. As a character, Byblis takes on the gender of Dennis, while as a translator Dennis takes on the gender of Byblis. Yet they clearly remain in their own original gender as well. Thus Byblis and Dennis both inhabit two genders, meeting in a space where the rules of gender are absolutely defined, but the gender of each subject is fluid and negotiable.58 The gender bending of both Dennis and Byblis also refers directly back to The Metamorphoses itself, which not only tells stories of gender transformation but takes magical transformation as its entire theme. In the realm of The Metamorphoses, Byblis and Dennis are ­free to play with the gender-­subject that they occupy and perform. Dennis directly links his more tender and compassionate translation to his use of meter and rhyme in the text: “A t­ hing must be much more tender in perfect Rhimes, than imperfect.”59 In his metrical translation Dennis makes use of perfect rhyme, apparently in an attempt to be “more tender.” However, t­ here are also several in­ter­est­ing instances of feminine rhyme. Although the concept of feminine rhyme comes from French poetry, where lines that both end in a muted “e” result in a stressed rhyming syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, constitute what is called feminine rhyme, the term appears in En­glish as early as the 1570s.60 In En­glish, “feminine rhyme” refers to the rhyming of the last two syllables of a line, often with the final syllable unstressed. T ­ here are several clear examples of feminine rhyme in Dennis’s Byblis, including desire and require, smother and ­brother, and lying and ­dying.61 As Dennis tries for “perfect Rhimes” he also includes rhymes that are gendered feminine. The most in­ter­est­ing feminine rhyme occurs in the very first lines of the poem: “Bright Nymphs, the Objects of Mankind’s Desires, / From Byblis learn t’avoid incestuous Fires.” 62 If the lines are read syllabically, desires and fires agree in only one syllable. However, if the poem is read metrically, desires and fires clearly represent

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1650–1850 a feminine rhyme. The poem, then, begins with a feminine rhyme that clearly highlights the words “desires” and “fires,” two of the key themes of the entire poem, and this first rhyme enacts the tender femininity that Dennis seeks to highlight in the poem. Dennis notes the importance of the rhyme in his preface: “I must beg ­Pardon for the Liberty which I have taken in the numbers, which is so ­great that it may well be entitled License.” 63 Dennis has taken ­great care with the numbers and rhymes in his translation. Joseph Farrell has noted that Byblis, too, takes ­great care with her writing. The scene of writing is described in Ovid’s text as one of difficulty. Byblis is unsure of her word choice, starting, then ­going back and starting again, in her letter to Caunus. Farrell writes: “Byblis’ writing sounds like anything other than the spontaneous and genuine outpourings of an impassioned soul. She seems clearly to be striving for some mea­sured effect.” 64 Dennis, then, in taking care with his writing, is merely following the example of his protagonist Byblis. Both strive for a “mea­sured effect.” Dennis shows ­great care and sympathy for Byblis. Betty Rose Nagle has argued that Ovid, as narrator of the story, is similarly sympathetic to Byblis: “Ovid pre­ sents a sympathetic and relatively restrained account of Byblis.” 65 By making Byblis unconscious of her desire in the beginning of the story, Ovid depicts a character whose emotions overtake her.66 This makes the reader much more sympathetic to her plight. Micaela Janan argues that in her scene of writing, Ovid goes so far as to depict Byblis as another version of himself, “an altera Ovid.” 67 In Dennis’s translation the three identities (Ovid, Byblis, and Dennis) commingle. In translating Ovid’s work, Dennis sets himself up as another Ovid; meanwhile, he also identifies with Byblis’s femininity and her passion. Ovid writes Byblis as a struggling author, something with which both Ovid and Dennis would identify. Byblis is a double of Ovid, and Dennis is a double of both Byblis and Ovid. The layers of sympathy compound upon each other. For Dennis, translation is a work of tenderness and compassion for the text, its author, and its characters. Translation, at least in the case of passionate works, is an act that calls for an approach that Dennis characterizes as feminine in opposition to the masculine approach of previous translators. But the most dramatic change that Dennis makes to Byblis comes at the very end of the story. In the original, Caunus flees and Byblis wanders through many countries, crying inconsolably u ­ ntil she falls down, and naiads, unable to help her, take pity on her and turn her into a spring that can cry forever. Dennis makes a point of referring to this section separately as “The Transformation of Byblis” in

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contrast to “The Passion of Byblis” that makes up the rest of the story. Dennis removes the entire transformation, replacing it with a final tercet: Poor, hapless Beauty! Once thy conqu’ring Eyes Could boast the noblest Carian Hearts their Prize, Now mad she lies in solitude, on Caunus raves and dyes. In Dennis’s version, Byblis is not given eternal life and simultaneous death as a spring; she simply dies. Dennis removes the very metamorphosis that made the story fit into Ovid’s proj­ect. Dennis argues that a transformation like Byblis’s is essentially a transubstantiation and is, therefore, not acceptable to his non-­Catholic, En­glish audience: “The Transformation of Byblis might do very well in the time of Augustus Caesar For at that time t­hose Transformations ­were a part of the Roman Religion.” 68 In the only critical work on Dennis’s translation of Byblis aside from Hooker’s notes in his edition of the Critical Works of John Dennis, James M. Horo­witz reads Dennis’s elision of Byblis’s transformation as purely anti-­Catholic sentiment.69 While his notes make it clear that Dennis was suspicious of the transformation on anti-­Catholic grounds, t­ here seems to be more at work in Dennis’s choice. Removing what Dennis labels as “The Transformation of Byblis” also remoes the entire concept of metamorphosis from the story. A translation, in any form but especially is Dennis’s ­free imitation, is clearly a work of metamorphosis. The transformation between languages is akin to Byblis’s transformation. The Latin text turns into En­glish, as Byblis turns into a spring, so that the text, like her pain, can continue to pour forth. The transmission of Byblis’s grief is made eternal by the naiads, just as a text is given a continued life by a translation. The one form loses its life, sacrificed for the continued life of the text or the continued life of Byblis’s grief and desire. ­Earlier, I aligned the transgression of translation with the transgression of incest, where Byblis’s desire required envy to speak in another tongue. Similarly, the continued life of Byblis’s grief requires Ovid’s own story to speak in another tongue. The naiads made her a spring, but her grief ­really lives on in the continued transmission of the story. Ovid has made a version of the story that expresses her desire and simultaneous grief, and Dennis’s translation, similarly, gives continued life to her desire and grief. Translation is transformation. The pro­ cess of translation is the pro­cess of metamorphosis. Eliding the transformation elides the pro­cess of translation itself. Neoclassical translation calls for writing that elides difference and changes the messages of texts to fit the norms of the period and culture of translation. For example, Dennis

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1650–1850 replaces the wax tablets that ­were the writing technology used by Ovid’s Byblis with ink and paper. He also writes that he has removed the transformation to make the story “credible.”70 This sort of change was meant to make the text more accessible to the late seventeenth-­century En­glish audience by removing cultural differences from the text that might make the reader uncomfortable. To elide the transformation is then to meet the expectations of an anti-­Catholic reading public. But, more importantly, removing the metamorphosis covers over the very act of translation. The translation erases the only mark of translation and transformation in the text. Why would Dennis be motivated to erase the mark of his own work? We know that he sees the work of the translator as a crime. He uses criminal meta­phors throughout his preface. He claims, in modest, that he has not “done justice to the admirable Original,” but also that he does not want to be blamed for Ovid’s own ­mistakes, saying he does “not desire to stand charg’d with” any of Ovid’s faults.71 The meta­phors ­here for writing and translation are justice and standing charged with a crime. The work of the translator enters into prob­lems of ­legal transgression and justice. L­ ater he w ­ ill claim that he “takes Liberty” and “License” with the rhyme and that he has “made so bold with Ovid.” 72 He also justifies adding to the text by claiming that it is “less injurious than a Robbery.” This implies that when he does remove ­things from the text, such as the metamorphosis, he does commit robbery. Fi­nally, he also worries that he cannot be forgiven for his transgression against Oldham. He has robbed Ovid and made bold with him, transgressed against Oldham, and taken liberty and license with the poem itself. At ­every turn this translation is a crime. By removing the transformation/translation of Byblis from the text, Dennis covers over his crime. Just as Dennis has balanced the scandal of incestuous desire with references to Byblis’s virginity, he also balances the crime of his translation by removing from the story Byblis’s translation from mourning w ­ oman to spring. Although Dennis changes the materials of Byblis’s writing to pen and paper, referring to her blotting a m ­ istake and also to the pages she writes on, technologies that are not pre­sent in Ovid’s Byblis, he retains a key moment ­after she has finished writing the letter. As Byblis hands off the letter, it falls, and she reads this as a bad omen, although she still sends the letter. The original, “Cum daret, elapsae minibus cecidere tabellae; Ominae turbata est” is translated by Dennis “Now as she from the fatal Writing parts, / It falls: she trembling at the Omen, starts.”73 Byblis’s writing falls, just as she becomes a fallen ­woman by expressing her desire. ­Until this moment, she is innocent, having only dreamed and desired but not hav-

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ing acted. Transmitting the letter is an action that makes her guilty. In Dennis’s Christian imagination, the fallen letter cannot but be linked to the fall of Adam and Eve. Byblis’s fallen letter coincides with her fallen virtue in a way that is very attractive to the Christian imagination. Many years ­later, in The Grounds of Criticism in ­ ill open his argument by declaring poetry as fallen: “That poetry Poetry, Dennis w is miserably fall’n, is, I suppose, granted.”74 Biographer Avon Jack Murphy writes of Dennis: “He sees everywhere sign of our fall” and Jeffrey T. Barnouw notes Dennis locating the origin of the conflict between passion and reason at the moment of the fall.75 In Byblis, the fallen nature of poetry becomes literal when the text falls to the floor. In this fallen moment all the layers of sympathy built between Dennis, Byblis, and Ovid come together. As a writer, each commits the crime of expanding previous texts, of speaking in voices that do not have clear genders, and, most importantly, each is devoted to expressing a dangerous, burning passion. Thus, in The Passion of Byblis, Dennis is able to strug­gle with the issues that ­will fill his l­ater work: the simultaneous need for passion and control of that passion, and the need to keep lit­er­a­ture from the fallen state that it tends t­ oward. However, unlike his l­ater translations, which deal primarily with religious subjects, ­here Dennis delves into a scandalous text of incest and feminine sexuality. The translation feels like a crime to him, and yet the passion Byblis feels draws him to the subject. For Dennis, translation as a work of metamorphosis is already inherently dangerous. In order to transmute one language into another, the translator must become vulnerable. The imitation requires a sensitivity and compassion for the subjects of the text that Dennis pre­sents himself as uniquely able to feel. But ­there is always the danger of being carried away by passion into the realm of enthusiasm where written expression leads to a fall into sin. The theory of translation that emerges in Dennis’s work takes the danger of passion into account, promoting a translation that w ­ ill both express passion and temper it in vari­ous ways. His move to make Byblis an honorable virgin, as well as his elision of metamorphosis, both serve to lessen the level of her sin and Ovid’s sin in having written about transformation and transmutation. However, in choosing to translate Byblis at all, Dennis clearly advocates for passion in lit­er­a­ture. In the end, his anxious preface, full of meta­phors for crime and asking for the forgiveness of his readers, reveals his anxiety over Byblis’s incestuous passion and his own transmittal of it. The interest in and anxiety over passion ­will ­later lead Dennis to translate religious texts. Religious passion, with God as its object, is a passion that is all

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1650–1850 consuming but not sinful. In translation of religious texts, Dennis ­will find the answer to the prob­lem that he has found in translating Ovid. He can combine passion with the tempering influence of religion, which allows for translation that is not a criminal robbery from the text. Translation of religious texts, such as the psalms, become a way to commit the transgression of passion and enthusiasm. In Byblis, however, we see Dennis first struggling with the tension between the crime of enthusiasm (aligned with robbery and incest) and the holy sacrament of metamorphosis (translation). Dennis provides a complex version of neoclassical translation—­one that appropriates text but is also enthralled by the passionate and enthusiastic and seeks to bring t­ hese attributes into the tradition.

Notes 1. John Dennis, The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1939–1943), 1:426. Hooker gives a complete list of Dennis’s few translations: The Passion of Byblis, the Te Deum within The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry, two biblical passages within The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, “a fragment of Hippolytus” in his Remarks on Arthur, and The Faith and Duty of Christians (Dennis, Critical Works, 1:425–426). 2. Sarah B. Stein, “Translating the Bible to Raise the Fallen: John Dennis’s Psalm 18,” Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture 43 (2014): 27–50. David B. Morris writes about the history of the religious sublime and devotes a chapter to explicating Dennis’s role in forging the religious sublime in the eigh­teenth ­century. The sublime passion found in Dennis’s Byblis is not a religious sublime, but it is intimately linked to his ­later inclusion of religion in discussions of sublimity, The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in Eighteenth-­Century ­England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 47–78. 3. Many critics write about Dennis’s concern with passion in lit­er­a­ture and the need to both include and regulate it in his ­later critical writing. Shaun Irlam discusses the ways in which Dennis attempts to regulate passion in his ­later work, Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 60. Jeffrey Barnouw finds a clear conflict between passion and reason in Dennis’s sublime aesthetics in “The Morality of the Sublime to John Dennis,” Comparative Lit­er­a­ture 35, no. 1 (1983): 41. Ann T. Delahanty articulates an aesthetics in which Dennis attempts to harmonize reason and passion in “Mapping the Aesthetic Mind: John Dennis and Nicolas Boileau,” Journal of His­ tory of Ideas 68, no. 2 (2007): 238. John Mee emphasizes how Dennis worked to stress “the regulated nature of the religious sublime” in Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 55.

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4. Ovid’s Latin text w ­ ill be taken throughout this essay from the accepted scholarly edition edited by William S. Anderson, Ovid’s Metamorphoses Books 6–10 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 117–123. No definitive En­glish translation of the text has emerged as the academic standard, although t­ here are several excellent editions, including Metamorphoses, ed. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), 222–229; Metamorphoses: A New Translation, trans. Charles Martin (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 322–331; and Metamor­ phoses, trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 213–219. 5. G. Karl Galinsky, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 4. 6. Shilpa Raval, “ ‘A Lover’s Discourse’: Byblis in Metamorphoses 9,” Arethusa 34, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 286. 7. Thomas  E. Jenkins, “The Writing in (And of) Ovid’s Byblis Episode,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100 (2000): 440. 8. Jenkins, “The Writing in (And of) Ovid’s Byblis Episode,” 441. 9. Brooks Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 19. 10. E. J. Kenney, “The Metamorphoses: A Poet’s Poem,” in A Companion to Ovid, ed. Peter E. Knox (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2013), 150. 11. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:1. 12. John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols., gen. eds. Edward Niles Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg Jr., and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–), 1:114–115. 13. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:3. 14. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:3. 15. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), 53. 16. Micaela Janan, “The Labyrinth and the Mirror: Incest and Influence in Metamor­ phoses,” Arethusa 24, no. 2 (1991): 248. 17. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:1. 18. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:3. 19. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:1. 20. Most notably he ­will make this argument in his critical essays The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry and The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (Dennis, Critical Works, 1:197–278; 1:325–373). 21. Hooker writes of the translation, “It foreshadows the critic’s ­later theory of the function of poetic Enthusiasm” (Dennis, Critical Works, 1:423). 22. In a note to this opening, editor E. J. Kenney argues of Ovid: “his tongue is firmly in his cheek” in Metamorphoses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 428. 23. John Dennis, The Passion of Byblis, Made En­glish (London: Printed for Sam Briscoe, in Convent-­Garden, 1697), xxviii. 24. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:1; Dennis, The Passion of Byblis, 1.

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1650–1850 25. Dennis, The Passion of Byblis, 2. 26. Dennis, The Passion of Byblis, 6. 27. John  D. Morillo makes reference to Dennis’s need to navigate po­liti­cal fears about enthusiasm throughout his ­career in “John Dennis: Enthusiastic Passions, Cultural Memory, and Literary Theory,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 34, no.  1 (2000): 23. 28. Dennis, The Passion of Byblis, 5; emphasis added. 29. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:197–278, 325–373. 30. Please see the previously referenced works of Morris, Irlam, Morillo, Mee, Delahanty, and Barnouw. 31. Stein, “Translating the Bible,” 27. 32. Irlam, Elations, 60. 33. Stein, “Translating the Bible,” 44. 34. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:1. 35. H. G. Paul references “Dennis’s insistence upon religion, or at least morality, as an ele­ment of lit­er­a­ture” in John Dennis: His Life and Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), 144. In Dennis’s Byblis, we do not yet see many religious ele­ments, but his need for sexual morality is strongly implied by his insistence on her virginal status. 36. Dennis, The Passion of Byblis, 3. 37. Dennis, The Passion of Byblis, 3. 38. Dennis, The Passion of Byblis, 3. 39. Dennis, The Passion of Byblis, 4. 40. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Melville, 218. 41. Dennis, The Passion of Byblis, 9. 42. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Melville, 122. Translated by Melville as “In short I’ve sinned and ­can’t unsin my sin;  / I wrote, I wooed, I wanted wickedness.  / Though no more’s done, I’ll not seem innocent” (218). 43. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Melville, 218; Ovid,Metamorphoses, trans. Martin, 330; Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Humphries, 228. 44. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:2. 45. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:2. 46. Dennis, The Passion of Byblis, xxix. 47. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Melville, 214. 48. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:338. 49. Irène Simon has noted the ways in which, even in his ­later work, Dennis places the idea of plea­sure at the center of his understanding of religion. Thus, even though he moves away from explic­itly sexual texts, he retains his interest in plea­ sure and passion. Simon, “John Dennis and Neoclassical Criticism,” Revue belge de philosophie et d’histoire 56, no. 3 (1978): 664. 50. Stein, “Translating the Bible,” 44.

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51. Hooker notes that Collier ­later “scolded the translators of such bawdy poems” and was prob­ably thinking of Dennis’s Byblis (Dennis, Critical Works, 1:423). 52. John Oldham translated the story in 1684 and the poet Harvey translated it in 1684. 53. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:4. 54. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:4. 55. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:5. 56. Liz Oakley-­Brown, Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern ­England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 192. 57. Raval, “A Lover’s Discourse,” 286. 58. In the story following Byblis and Caunus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Iphis changes genders and is given a penis. 59. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:4. 60. Oxford En­glish Dictionary, definition of “feminine rhyme.” 61. Dennis, The Passion of Byblis, 2, 6, 9. 62. Dennis, The Passion of Byblis, xxviii. 63. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:3. 64. Joseph Farrell, “Reading and Writing the Heroides,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 98 (1998): 319. 65. Betty Rose Nagle, “Byblis and Myrrha: Two Incest Narratives in the ‘Metamorphoses,’ ” Classical Journal 78, no. 4 (April–­May 1983): 303. 66. Nagle, “Byblis and Myrrha,” 309. 67. Janan, “The Labyrinth and the Mirror,” 245. 68. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:3. 69. James M. Horo­witz notes: “In the eyes of the eighteenth-­century commentators . . . ​Ovid’s grossest indulgence was his interest in physical transformation,” Horo­w itz, “Ovid in Restoration and Eighteenth-­C entury ­E ngland,” in A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, ed. John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands (London: Wiley, 2014), 357. 70. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:3. 71. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:1. 72. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:3. 73. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Melville, 121; Dennis, The Passion of Byblis, 7. 74. Dennis, Critical Works, 1:328. 75. Avon Jack Murphy, John Dennis (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 10; Barnouw, “Morality of the Sublime,” 41.

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Catherine Ingrassia, ed., The Cambridge Companion to W ­ omen’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xxix + 263. REVIEWED BY SUZANNE L. BARNETT

Catherine Ingrassia’s useful introduction to the excellent Cambridge Compan­

ion to ­Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 opens with an observation by ­Virginia Woolf (also cited by several authors throughout the collection) that the fact that ­women “took to” writing in the seventeenth c­ entury fundamentally “­matters,” and the collection as a w ­ hole negotiates the tense disconnect between any discussion of impor­tant ­women writers of the long eigh­teenth ­century and impor­tant writers, period. Ingrassia notes in her section on “Previous work on ­women’s writing in Britain, 1660–1789” that early twentieth-­century attempts to recover the work of ­women authors tended to elide “differences in age, place, class, education, po­liti­ cal orientation, and cultural perspective” (8) and invited students to read ­women writers through “a preexisting lens” (8) that dictates what female authorship should look like. But, she claims, the example of recent scholarly work on Eliza Haywood in the last twenty or so years sets the pace for what work still needs to be and can be done on w ­ omen writers of this period. For ­every Behn, Haywood, and Wollstonecraft, ­there are dozens of other authors noted in the volume’s helpful chronology that have not yet received “painstaking archival work” long afforded to male writers, and this volume argues that “no longer can (or should) scholars teach or write about the period known as the ‘long eigh­teenth c­ entury’ without meticulous attention to ­women and their texts” (2). The collection’s fourteen essays are arranged into two sections: “­Women in Print Culture” and “Genres, Modes, and Forms.” This first section, comprised of essays by Mark Towsey, Betty A. Schellenberg, Sarah Prescott, Paula R. Backscheider,

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1650–1850 and Kathryn R. King, addresses the roles of ­women in the literary marketplace and their contributions to the “vibrant literary culture” (11) of the period. Towsey’s “­Women as Readers and Writers” traces the evolution of ­women writers who ­were “capable of engaging in the public realm of information and politics to a far greater extent” than before the eigh­teenth ­century (22). Towsey summarizes con­temporary anx­i­eties about novel reading, wealth and class as determining ­women’s access to books, and the “prob­lem of identifying concealed readers” (27), or the ways in which public rec­ords like ­women’s library subscriptions tell only a partial story about their reading habits. Citing Jan Fergus’s examinations of booksellers’ rec­ords (24) as an example of the kind of work that has already been done ­toward solving “the prob­lem of identifying concealed [­women] readers” (27), Towsey also considers the social networks of book sharers, local lending libraries, circulating and subscription libraries, book clubs, and ­women’s behind-­the-­scenes roles as editors and commentators, epistolary interlocutors, and, often, domestic readers-­aloud of texts to their families as demonstrating more fully w ­ omen’s engagement with the literary world. While Towsey ends by considering how private writings in diaries, commonplace books, correspondence, and marginalia reveal that ­women’s reading was “broader in scope than the conventional ste­reo­ type would allow” (28), Schellenberg examines the relationship between “The Professional Female Writer” and the growth of the print marketplace a­ fter 1660 and pre­sents five authors—­Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Car­ter, Charlotte Lennox, and Anna Letitia Barbauld—as case studies for ­women’s negotiations between professionalism and respectability. Schellenberg argues that authorship’s rise to a legitimate profession in the eigh­teenth ­century necessarily marginalized ­women writers due to con­temporary debates about ­women’s participation in a public sphere that was initially, by definition, masculine (39–40). However, the five authors she profiles (and, as she notes, many more) all fulfilled the shifting criteria of “professional writer” while successfully negotiating “the period’s shifting sociopo­liti­cal and literary climate[s]” (41). Prescott’s “Place and Publication” asks us to consider how w ­ omen writers’ geo­graph­i­cal locations ­shaped their publishing, their identities as writers, and their public receptions. ­Doing so suggests not only a more nuanced geo­graph­i­cal divide than that between London and “the country” (broadly construed) but also invites us to consider the circulation of texts between and among ­England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland and how national affiliation ­shaped provincial ­women writers (including Jane Barker, Mary Chandler, Mary Davys, Jane Holt, Mary Monck, Sarah Butler, Jane Brereton, Margaret Davies/Marged Dafydd, Jean Adam, and many

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other examples Prescott highlights) and has the “capacity to transform current understanding of w ­ omen’s literary history” (67). In “­Women and Popu­lar Culture,” Backscheider defines the latter as “available, widely familiar texts and per­for­mances calculated to succeed ­because composed with high awareness of audience-­pleasing ele­ments” (71) and claims that “the heartbeat of modern popu­lar culture is ­women” (72) who turn that space into “an arena of consent and re­sis­tance, a space of perpetual tension and critique” of the dominant “high” culture (71). Her examinations of the ways in which Elizabeth Barry and Behn negotiated the rise of commercial theater and the marketability of public personae, of how Frances Brooke and the actress Mary Ann Yates used the stage to own ­women’s sexual commodification when “forced to compete with society for control of their interpretation as sex objects” (79), and of how Elizabeth Inchbald’s fictional and dramatic ­father figures function as critiques of patriarchal hegemony all speak to “­women writers’ awareness of the inseparability of the private and public and their ability to exploit the dynamic tension between popu­lar and dominant culture to release the potential for po­liti­cal commentary, something ­women tirelessly sought” (80). King’s “Genre Crossings” focuses on a fact that all of t­ hese previous essays had at least mentioned: that ­women writers of the long eigh­teenth ­century ­were particularly ­adept at writing across multiple genres, sometimes within a single text. ­After a helpful survey of the trends in gender/genre study over the last thirty years, King uses Haywood’s Love in Excess—­a “hybrid narrative that falls somewhere between narrative and drama, romance and erotic lyricism” (86)—­and the vari­ous genre-­crossings of Behn, Davys, and Barker to illustrate “some of the ways stories of ­women’s lives ­were told at this time within a Bahktinian contact zone in which prose fiction, poetry, and drama formed a dynamic continuum of expressive possibilities” (92). As a group, ­these five essays in Part I, “­Women in Print Culture,” offer compelling and comprehensive examinations of ­women writers’ negotiations of a wide range of issues that influenced authorship in the long eigh­teenth ­century: of the tension between authorship and reputation, of privacy versus publicity, of self-­ commodification, of location and accessibility, and of generic conventions. That each of the nine essays in Part II, “Genres, Modes, and Forms,” concentrates on a distinct genre might at first seem to contradict King’s emphases on the near-­ubiquitous and significant genre-­crossings of the authors addressed in this collection, but the preceding claims for the importance of generic mutability are taken up by David E. Shuttleton, Felicity Nussbaum, Rivka Swenson, Melinda Rabb, Nicola Parsons, Katherine Binhammer, Harriet Guest, Ruth Perry, and Mary ­Waters within their treatments of a variety of genres. While acknowledging that

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1650–1850 for many ­women writers, “poetry rarely amounted to a full-­time profession but often formed part of a life devoted to lit­er­a­ture that might embrace working in other genres” (106), Shuttleton offers a comprehensive digest of the many forms and modes of poetry produced by ­women in this period and their circulations in manuscripts, periodicals, and published volumes. Nussbaum’s chapter on drama highlights the ­women playwrights who “earned the extremes of praise and censure,” from “infamously licentious” Behn to “very proper” Hannah More (119). Though the number of w ­ omen who successfully staged plays in London was reasonably small—­only around thirty-­two between 1700 and 1800—­the impact of ­women as not only writers but also performers and patrons of tragedies, comedies, and romances was, Nussbaum claims, significant to the development of the theater in the eigh­teenth ­century (119–120). Both history and satire ­were long assumed to be the near-­e xclusive domain of men, but Swenson’s examination of ­women’s historiography focuses on Haywood’s “secret history” Mary, Queen of Scots (1725) as a text that “complicates how we conceive of relationships between ­women and history” (137), while Rabb identifies satire as “the locus of the most intense and, therefore, the most revealing literary strug­gle between cultural constructions of femininity and ­women’s participation in textual production” (148) and offers Mary Evelyn’s Mundus Muliebris (1690) and Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) as examples of understudied women-­authored satires. Within their discussions of early and late fiction, respectively, Parsons and Binhammer argue for “the vital role of w ­ omen novelists in the development of the genre” (166) and question the supposed “­great divide” between early-­century amatory fiction and late-­century sentimental or domestic novels (181). Parsons notes that many accounts of the rise of the novel (like Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel [1957]) have, in drawing “a direct line of influence from Defoe to Richardson,” minimized the links between novels and romances and elided the contributions of ­women like Haywood, Elizabeth Rowe, and Jane Barker (165). According to Binhammer w ­ omen writers of sentimental and domestic fiction “anticipate modern feminist sentiments and critique the disenfranchisement of the female sex” (183) and—in turning from plot to character development and devices like metafiction, embedded storytelling, and ­free indirect discourse—­contribute “original experimentations with narrative voice” (183) to the novel genre. Guest offers readings of Hester Lynch Thrale’s and Mary Robinson’s accounts of their separate trips to Wales in 1774 as examples of how ­women writers used travel writing “to shape and advance their identities as authors in a period in which the cultural and literary authority

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of w ­ omen was markedly increasing” (196), while Perry’s essay on ballads foregrounds the roles of w ­ omen—­especially old ­women—as composers, singers, and hawkers of popu­lar ballads (including Ana Gordon Brown, whose collection “was a significant link in the chain of oral transmission of a valuable repertoire of Scottish ballads” [221]). In this volume’s final essay, W ­ aters considers w ­ omen as both producers and consumers of po­liti­cal journalism and how periodicals enabled ­women to “speak on public concerns, sometimes in unreservedly provocative ways” (231). ­ omen’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 Overall, The Cambridge Companion to W is a valuable pedagogical and reference resource for both students and scholars of British ­women writers and of long-­eighteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture and culture. As Ingrassia notes, this volume cannot cover e­ very mode of writing undertaken by w ­ omen in the period—­children’s lit­er­a­ture and religious writing are notable lacunae—­but the collection offers a far-­reaching overview of the many diverse perspectives and voices of the ­women who ­shaped the lit­er­a­ture, culture, politics, and economy of the long eigh­teenth ­century.

243

Stephen Gaukroger, The Natu­ral and the H ­ uman: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1739–1841. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. viii + 402. REVIEWED BY R.J.W. MILLS

The Natu­ral and the H­ uman is the third volume, a­ fter The Emergence of Scien­

tific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (2006) and The ­Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1680–1760 (2010), in Gaukroger’s ambitious study of how science came to dominate Western culture. The subject ­matter ­here is the emergence of the ­human sciences between the 1730s and 1840s, which came to replace Christian theology as the means by which humanity’s place in the natu­ral world was understood. In the pro­cess, Gaukroger examines the new scientific proj­ects of anthropological medicine, philosophical anthropology, the natu­ral history of humanity, social arithmetic, and the naturalization of religion. ­ These new approaches involved the “naturalisation of the h ­ uman,” meaning the study of h ­ uman nature and society undertaken by empirical rather than theological or a priori means—­ though t­ here was no single method of naturalization but rather a series of distinct and competing methodologies. Driving forward naturalization was the imitation of the natu­ral sciences by the ­human, the uncoupling of historical study from theological explanations and science itself from playing a supporting role to Chris­tian­ity. The following is inevitably piecemeal given the breadth of topics discussed in the volume. The two chapters in Part I set the intellectual scene. The first explores the debate between 1750 and 1850 over ­whether “science” was able to “provide a general mode of enquiry” (23) for studying ­humans. The practices of Eu­ro­pean thinking moved away from highly systematic metaphysics aiming at certainty and

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comprehensiveness and ­toward the goals of scientific endeavor being the avoidance of error on specific and narrow questions studied in empirical fashion and increasingly using probabilistic and statistical methods. The second chapter examines changing Eu­ro­pean understandings of ­matter. Again, all-­encompassing forms of mechanical natu­ral philosophical explanation that characterized seventeenth-­ century thought (e.g., Descartes, Hobbes) ­were replaced by attempts to establish autonomous scientific disciplines with more l­imited focus and which ignored larger questions. By the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, however, science was again returning to attempts at all-­encompassing theories. Gaukroger ably surveys the world-­ redefining discoveries in chemistry, the study of electricity and vital forces, yet the chapter seems tangential to the volume’s central themes. Part II contains four chapters on specific approaches to studying ­humans. Anthropological medicine, led by médecins philosophes associated with the University of Montpellier in the 1730s, viewed “ner­vous sensibility as the route to understanding ­human behaviour” (123). Enlightened physicians emphasized the connection between the maladies of body and soul, challenged the Church’s prerogative to tend to the soul, and emphasized that threats to h ­ uman health w ­ ere caused by wider social and cultural ­factors. Anthropological medicine became the established view but was challenged by the rival movement of Mesmerism and, more conclusively, by the early nineteenth-­century science of cell biology. “Philosophical anthropology,” another of the new h ­ uman sciences, involved the study of the diversity of h ­ uman mentality. Central h ­ ere is Herder and Kant’s dispute over the study of anthropology, which focuses on three naturalizing princi­ples: studying the mind through empirical psy­chol­ogy; viewing language as central to thought; and studying language as a changeable cultural phenomenon. Gaukroger’s analy­ sis ­here is dense and often inaccessible. Philosophical anthropology overlapped with Gaukroger’s following chapter on the “natu­ral history of man.” The latter study emerged against the backdrop of developments in geology that encouraged a decline in belief in biblical time and, in the explanatory space left over, new proto-­evolutionary accounts of the emergence of species gained traction. The specific natu­ral history of ­humans involved three sorts of comparison: comparative anatomy of h ­ umans and animals; the impact of environmental f­ actors on the development and be­hav­ior of animals and ­humans; and the comparisons between distinct h ­ uman types, namely feral c­ hildren, apes, non-­European races, and men and w ­ omen. Next is social arithmetic or the new eighteenth-­century study of the collective properties of ­human be­hav­ior. Prompted by Bernard Mandev­ille’s playful paradox in The Fable of the Bees (1723)

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1650–1850 that private vices lead to public benefits, Eu­rope went through a “fundamental rethinking of the nature of morality” (273). Led by Jeremy Bentham, this involved understanding and judging the morality of be­hav­ior at the aggregate, not personal, level, thereby shifting from an intentionalist individualist morality to a consequentialist collective one. This is supplemented by discussions in two areas where such arithmetic played out: Malthusian population studies and medical statistics. A shorter, final Part III examines the naturalization of myth—or the application of empirical methods to the study of the history of religions. Two methods ­were key. The first w ­ ere historical enquiries that set aside theological and providential explanations, such as Gibbon’s contextualized account of the establishment of early Chris­tian­ity in Decline and Fall and Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu and its reinterpretation as a context-­specific set of myths. The second was the study of comparative religion, which Gaukroger unpersuasively holds was an eighteenth-­century development (e.g., 336), in which religions ­were plotted in “historical quasi-­ evolutionary terms” from primitive to developed, with debate over ­whether Chris­tian­ity was the final or penultimate stage of development. This pro­cess culminates in Feuerbach’s fascinating Das Wesen des Christentums in which religious consciousness develops as the result of collective be­hav­ior tending ­toward the final actualization of h ­ uman capacities and the realization that God has always been made in man’s image. Like his two ­earlier volumes, Gaukroger’s third tome involves some serious thinking about impor­tant topics. The volume laudably brings together the histories of the social and medical sciences, usually kept apart, u ­ nder the banner of the ­human sciences. It ­will repay close reading, but criticisms might be made. The Natu­ ral and the ­Human’s classifications straitjacket often eclectic texts into categories of Gaukroger’s creation, often g­ oing against historical authors’ own understanding of their work. Many of the key claims set out in the introduction are developed implicitly rather than explic­itly. More problematic is the unstated assumption—as Gaukroger jumps from intellectual peak to intellectual peak—­that major cultural change can be explained through examining the activities of leading minds. The worlds of practices—­imperial, institutional, commercial, and so on—­played only a very l­imited role. The central theme of how scientific cultural values became the values of Western culture, however, cannot be understood by only looking at the ideas of the West’s leading scientists and their books. This latter criticism has much weight and has been made repeatedly of Gaukroger’s volumes. It is also uncharitable. To give Gaukroger his considerable due, any author trying to make such big civilizational claims across lengthy periods is

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g­ oing to be criticized for the ahistoricity of his or her concepts and the inability to cover all relevant fields. Gaukroger’s defense has been that it is better to think big than to think antiquarian. But even if we accept that cultural change could be explored in the realm of ideas, the account is incomplete b ­ ecause it does not examine the purported decline of nonscientific values of theology, ancient philosophy, and civic humanism. He examines the winners not the losers, yet incorporation of the latter would qualify and improve analy­sis of the former. Hence historical biblical criticism in late eighteenth-­century Eu­rope exhibits an intellectual vigor quite capable of dealing with Gibbon’s challenge, but this is missed, presumably ­because it is not “scientific.” The Natu­r al and the ­Human cannot reach such promised explanatory heights, but it pre­sents a fascinating, astonishingly broad-­based though occasionally inaccessible overview of the emergence of the ­human sciences, which contributes to large discussions about Western culture.

247

Malcolm Jack, To the Fairest Cape: Eu­ro­pean Encounters in the Cape of Good Hope. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019. Pp. xiii + 231. REVIEWED BY NIGEL PENN

This is a book about written accounts of the Cape produced by Eu­ro­pean visi-

tors between 1488, the year of Bartolomeu Dias’s voyage to Mossel Bay, and the abolition of slavery in 1838. During the 350 years covered by the book a voluminous and varied corpus of work was produced, and it would have been overly ambitious to try to make sense of it all. Instead, Malcolm Jack has attempted to structure this complexity by focusing on three main thematic approaches that appear to him to emerge in the lit­er­a­ture. The first of ­these “is the Adamastor myth in­ven­ted by the Portuguese epic poet Luís Vaz de Camões; the second is that of paradise lost and the noble (and ignoble) savage; and the third is the Arcadian image of British colonial diarists and liberals who w ­ ere enthused by the sublime beauty of the Cape and its diverse flora and fauna and saw g­ reat potential for pro­gress in a harmonious blending of the indigenous and settler community in the growing towns and expanding colony” (xii). To his credit, and no doubt in order to exculpate himself from charges of Eurocentrism, Jack’s first chapter is a survey of the ancient origins of the Cape’s indigenous ­peoples—­the Khoikhoi and the San—­and the myths, legends, and spiritual beliefs associated with them. Although Jack’s treatment of the Khoisan and the Cape’s prehistory is sympathetic and sensitive his account is extremely uneven and in some cases overly simplistic or just plain wrong. Neanderthal man never inhab­ here is no discussion ited the Cape before the appearance of Homo sapiens (2). T of recent debates concerned with the issue of Khoikhoi origins and identity, such

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as w ­ hether livestock was brought into the Cape with an intrusive, self-­defined pastoralist group (the Khoikhoi) or ­whether the means and knowledge of pastoral production w ­ ere passed along from one hunter-­gatherer group to another (diffused). T ­ here is no mention as to the debate concerning the fate of the San—­were they exterminated by genocide and their remnants forced into the Kalahari (as Jack suggests) or w ­ ere they absorbed into neighboring African socie­ties and the agricultural laboring classes of settler farmers where their descendants still exist? Though Jack is aware of the contribution the work of David Lewis-­Williams has made to the interpretation of rock art he nonetheless writes, “In the absence of any written rec­ords, interpreting rock art in terms of the spiritual beliefs of the San is difficult” (24). Lewis-­Williams would, of course, point out that written rec­ ords do exist in the form of the Bleek-­Lloyd manuscripts, Orpen’s reports, and masses of ethnographic material. For the most part, however, Jack bases his observations on the Khoisan on Schapera’s book of 1930; thus his account of the Cape’s prehistory seems rather dated and simplistic. In fairness, the main purpose of the opening chapter is not to pre­sent a survey of the precolonial history of the Khoisan but to give the general reader an idea of their imaginative universe so that it might be compared to that of the Eu­ro­pe­ ans. Jack’s book is subtitled “Eu­ro­pean Encounters in the Cape of Good Hope,” but a large part of it is, in fact, about Eu­ro­pean encounters with the indigenous ­peoples of the Cape of Good Hope, and this is why some account of who they ­were is impor­tant. Having said this, however, chapter 2 deals with the Adamastor myth, which owed less to the nature of the Khoisan than it did to Eu­ro­pean perceptions as to what, following Dante, Eu­ro­pe­ans thought they might find at the end of the world: paradise or purgatory. By far the best treatment of this question is to be found in the work of Malvern van Wyk Smith, whose Shades of Adamastor (1988) Jack acknowledges but whose article on the iconography of the Khoikhoi (in His­ tory and Anthropology 5, no. 3–4, 1992) seems to be unknown to Jack even though it deals brilliantly with many of the questions that he poses. Van Wyk Smith demonstrates that, right from the beginning, ­there was a duality in Eu­ro­pean repre­ sen­ta­tions of the Khoikhoi, who ­were portrayed, si­mul­ta­neously, as being like our first parents—­Adam and Eve (i.e., good)—­and as the most depraved of primitive wild men (i.e., bad). The ideas of the noble and ignoble savage ­were thus intertwined, with the proj­ect of colonization promoting the view that the Khoisan ­were debased and the proj­ect of the enlightenment promoting the idea that the Khoikhoi represented a lost age of innocence.

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1650–1850 In chapter 3 Jack reviews a collection of largely negative descriptions of the Khoikhoi, written before the Dutch settlement of 1652 and collected by R. Raven-­ Hart in his book Before van Riebeeck (1967) and then goes on to discuss, in chapters 4 and 5, the more positive accounts written by eighteenth-­century, “enlightened” writers about the Cape, such as Kolb, Mentzel, La Caille, Sparrman, Thunberg, Paterson, Le Vaillant, and Gordon. ­These writers ­were not so much travel writers as protoscientists who took pains to describe the flora and fauna, the physical features and natu­ral resources of the land, as well as its h ­ uman inhabitants. Jack provides useful summaries of the vari­ous writers and their ideas with characteristic or illuminating passages excerpted for the reader’s edification. He is, of course, following in the footsteps of ­those who have written about ­these explorers before, though ­there are some gaps in his reading (for instance my own work on Kolb), and it is sad to see that Vernon Forbes’s trailblazinging Pioneer Travellers of South Africa (1965) is not cited. Jack’s argument about ­these enlightenment writers is much like that of Siegfried Huigen in his book Knowledge and Colonialism: Eigh­teenth-­Century Travellers in South Africa (2009). Both writers believe that enlightenment science, being more empirical than what went before and imbued with a sense of pro­gress and perfectibility, found much to admire in the Khoisan and chose to portray them as noble savages or unfortunate victims of colonialism. Neither Jack nor Huigens, however, are that critical of the discourse of enlightenment science itself and are not that concerned to reveal its complicity in the proj­ect of colonialism. Jack does not seek to enter the realm of postcolonial literary theory and tease out the relationship between power and knowledge that was at the heart of enlightenment science, although, arguably, this is an impor­ tant theme. Nor does Jack provide more than a sketch of the colony’s history, nor that of its Khoisan inhabitants, during this period, though this too would have been, enlightening. Jack ends his book with an account of British writers of the Cape, such as Barrow, Lady Anne Barnard, Burchell, John Philip, and Pringle. Once again, he provides a useful summary of their work and advances the argument that the British ­were initially inclined to view the indigenous ­peoples of the Cape, particularly the Xhosa of the eastern frontier districts, most favorably. Since the British ­were a progressive, empirically minded p ­ eople they ­were alert to the economic potential of the land and the ­labor potential of its ­people. This approach is made pos­si­ble by focusing on liberal, humanitarian figures, such as missionary John Philip and the romantic poet Pringle, who ­were active in the cause of antislavery; or witty genteel observers of society like Lady Anne Barnard, sympathetic to the social standing

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and emotional needs of o ­ thers. It is also pos­si­ble to find passages where Barrow sympathizes with the plight of the San, denigrates the Boers, and extolls the physical beauty of the Xhosa (alas, my work on Barrow appears to be too obscure to have informed Jack’s account). But what is needed, as far as this reviewer is concerned, is a discussion as to the more complex nature of British imperialism at this time of Imperial Meridian (C. A. Bayly’s term) for we are not too far away, in 1838, from an increase in settler racism, a decline in missionary and humanitarian influence, and an upsurge in frontier vio­lence. Surely t­ here is something in the above writers’ work that hints at this dark side of empire? To the Fairest Cape is a useful summary of the work of most impor­tant Eu­ro­ pean travel writers to the Cape between 1488 and 1838. It is a beautifully produced book, well written and well illustrated with con­temporary color plates. It w ­ ill be most useful in the hands of a general reader wanting a general introduction to Cape travel writers.

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Nan Goodman, The Puritan Cosmopolis: The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 198. REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER TRIGG

American Puritanism has gone global. Over the last thirty years, a transatlantic

turn in colonial studies has successfully reconfigured an older teleological narrative that delineated the emergence of a distinctively American character through the religion, politics, and lit­er­a­ture of seventeenth-­and early eighteenth-­century New ­England. Nan Goodman’s fascinating new book reflects a more recent trend to carry the reinterpretation of Puritan culture even further, by charting its relationship with new understandings of the world’s totality that ­were emerging during the early modern era. In Folded Selves: Colonial New ­England Writing in the World System (2008), Michelle Burnham draws on Immanuel Wallerstein’s theorization of the interrelation of metropolitan cores and colonial peripheries to cast familiar Puritan texts in fresh socioeconomic perspective. Meanwhile, Kristina Bross’s ­Future History: Global Fantasies in Seventeenth-­Century American and British Writings (2017) traces the development of ­England’s expectation that it would become the center of the world through the millennial dreams of colonists, missionaries, and prophets. Where Burnham and Bross traverse economic and religious globes, respectively, Goodman is concerned with a ­legal vision of planetary cohesion. Her argument is that the princi­ple of the “law of nations,” which was developed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by the Protestant thinkers Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, and John Selden, “just as the [settlers] ­were putting down stakes in New E ­ ngland” (3), forms an overlooked and impor­ tant context for American Puritan lit­er­a­ture.

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The law of nations, in Goodman’s account, “was far more open-­ended than the [modern] international law” that superseded it. Claiming that states should be encouraged to recognize a set of rules that oversaw their military and other interactions, as Grotius and his colleagues did, worked to establish a cosmopolitan ideal of “shared humanity” that extended as far as previously ostracized ­peoples, such as the Ottoman Turks (30). A ­ fter an introductory chapter setting out the connections between the law of nations and this new kind of Christian universalism, Goodman explores the cosmopolitan dimensions of four key areas of Puritan culture: the political-­theological covenant that bound New E ­ ngland together, the millennial hopes that determined many Puritans’ understanding of the ­future, the standards of evidence and witness at stake in their 1688 rebellion against Governor Edmund Andros, and the international networks of protoevangelical pietism in which they began to participate at the turn of the eigh­teenth c­ entury. The author concedes that the influence of the law of nations over world politics was relatively brief, as the growing ambition of leading states caused international law to coalesce around jurisdictional disputes rather than pluralistic cooperation. But she argues convincingly that the cosmopolitan world that it envisioned formed an invaluable resource for the Puritans when the revocation of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay Colony’s original charter in 1684 forced them to reckon with a reduction in their administrative and ­legal in­de­pen­dence. Chapter 2, which discusses the rhetorical reworking of New E ­ ngland’s covenant in the aftermath of that po­liti­cal change, provides some of the book’s most compelling material. H ­ ere Goodman shows how in the 1680s the Puritans’ conception of their compact with God and with each other began to mirror the peace treaties drafted u ­ nder the auspices of the law of nations in two ways. First, the possibility that God might choose to break with New E ­ ngland and covenant with another ­people was increasingly seen as a threat to world peace in general as well as a chastisement to the colony specifically. And second, a new emphasis on the importance of renewing the covenant periodically reflected a growing awareness of the provisional and fragile nature of the global status quo. In its willingness to follow Puritan po­liti­cal thought down new and sometimes unexpected pathways, this chapter emerges as a useful companion to Paul Downs’s Hobbes, Sovereignty and Early American Lit­er­a­ture (2015), which, unfortunately, it does not cite. If The Puritan Cosmopolis has a weakness, it lies in its tendency to treat the Puritans of the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries as too much of a unified group. We are given l­ittle sense h ­ ere of the ways in which the necessity of

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1650–1850 opening up New E ­ ngland to the world brought dif­fer­ent factions within the province’s clerical and po­liti­cal establishments into conflict. It would have been in­ter­ est­ing to discover, for instance, how and why Cotton Mather saw Benjamin Colman, the cosmopolitan minister of Boston’s Brattle Street Church, educated at Harvard but ordained by the London Presbytery, as a potential threat. Chapter 3’s account of Puritan millennialism is also too quick to smooth over the significant disagreements between vari­ous ministers over the nature of the new heavens and earth described in the eschatological scriptures. ­Here and elsewhere, Mather is assumed to be more representative of a wider consensus than he in fact was. While Goodman pre­sents some insightful analy­sis of his internationalist aspirations, the book could benefit from a more sustained consideration of the extent to which the par­tic­u­lar brand of Puritan cosmopolitanism that it describes was authored by Mather. This quibble aside, Goodman’s engaging monograph is a welcome addition to the developing field of global Puritan studies. Aside from identifying par­tic­u­lar connections between the law of nations and Protestant theology, she addresses broader questions about the interaction of instrumental ­legal theory and more speculative, imaginative ways of denoting po­liti­cal belonging. In closing, her book makes the provocative argument that Puritan cosmopolitanism may yet have something to offer the twenty-­first c­ entury’s ­futures, insofar as it approached relations between nations in terms of interdependence rather than jurisdictional conflict. ­Whether or not this is so (and I think the argument is somewhat overdrawn), Goodman has certainly succeeded in demonstrating the importance of Puritan thought for globalism’s past.

254

Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Pp. xiv + 256. REVIEWED BY MARK G. SPENCER

Almost textbook-­like in its coverage, Christopher Berry’s fine volume provides

an informative, detailed, and balanced account of its subject m ­ atter. Berry (professor emeritus in po­liti­cal theory at Glasgow University) ­here builds in in­ter­est­ing ways upon his ­earlier work, including books on The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge, 1994) and Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1997). The point of departure for the current volume is Adam Smith’s comment made in the Wealth of Nations: “­Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some mea­sure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society” (vi). The bookends of the study are 1739 (the publication date of the first two books of David Hume’s A Treatise of ­Human Nature) and 1790 (the date of the sixth edition of Smith’s A Theory of Moral Sentiment). The coverage between ­those years is extensive and includes, along with Smith (1723–1790) and Hume (1711–1776), involved discussions of works by Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), Henry Home (Lord Kames) (1696–1782), John Millar (1735–1801), and William Robertson (1721–1793), along with discussions of Hugh Blair (1718–1800), John Dalrymple (1726–1810), James Dunbar (1742–1998), James Steuart (1713–1780), Gilbert Stuart (1742–1786), George Turnbull (1698–1748), and Robert Wallace (1697–1771), among ­others. One of the strengths of this volume is the impressive number of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers covered. Most of the editions of the works of ­these authors are the ones that one might expect to see, with the exception of Hume’s History of ­England—­curiously, Berry does not reference William Todd’s 1983 Liberty Fund edition of the 1777 edition of that work (the

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1650–1850 last over which Hume exercised input), which has become the standard scholarly edition, but a rather obscure nineteenth-­century one. Another of the notable strengths of this volume is its wide-­ranging approach to the history of ideas. The Scottish Enlightenment is presented as being centrally concerned with ideas, of course, but Berry shows how for the Scots the life of the mind is always embedded in real-­world concerns, centrally “improvement” (in part ­because eighteenth-­century Scotland was a place of discernable change), and with discussions that include economics, religion, higher education, clubs and socie­ties, law, art, and so forth. Indeed, as Berry puts it in his concluding chapter, eighteenth-­ century Scots themselves came to see that “the focal point of a commercial society is the inter-­dependency of relations” (206). Illustrative of this is Smith’s example of a coarse woolen coat, the sort that might be worn by a s­ imple day-­ laborer. Smith calculates that “many thousands” are involved in the multiple pro­ cesses of its creation. Much of that flows from the princi­ple of the division of l­abor. Chapter 1, “Scotland, Improvement and Enlightenment,” shows how Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), John Locke (1632–1703), and Montesquieu (1689–1755) provided four pillars on which Scottish Enlightenment thought built. Chapter 2, “Commerce, States and the Natu­ral History of Society,” centers on the Scots’ notion of the “four stages” theory, seeing it as “an instance of ‘natu­ ral history.’ ” “How a commercial society emerged, both as a historical narrative and as an investigation of social causation, was one of the ­great themes in the writings of the Scots,” according to Berry (50). Berry’s Scottish Enlightenment has a central place for historical awareness. Chapter 3, “Prosperity and Poverty,” demonstrates that “a key distinguishing feature of a commercial society [for the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment] is that, compared to e­ arlier ‘stages,’ it is richer in the crucial sense that its inhabitants are better fed, clothed and h ­ oused” (66). Chapters 4 (“Markets, Law, and Politics”) and 5 (Liberty and the Virtues of Commerce”) center on some of the consequences of ­those circumstances, including the “blessings” of “universal opulence” and the liberty u ­ nder the rule of law, or, as Berry puts it ­later, the liberty “to pursue one’s own interests in one’s own way” (195). Chapter 6, “The Dangers of Commerce,” argues that the Scots see “how the unintended consequences of the emergence of commercial markets are not only beneficial in destroying feudal power and instigating the rule of law but also harmful in threatening via debt the ruin of the society that emerged in that manner. Commercial society is not the best of all pos­si­ble worlds” (186). The concluding chapter offers a summing up of the ­whole. For Berry, the Scots are distinctive when they see “that commerce does constitute a distinct type of soci-

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ety” (198). As such, they also exhibit a “self-­conscious attribution of superiority to their society” (204). Berry’s Scottish Enlightenment is an integrated affair, and his writing about it mirrors that theme, masterly overlapping interpretations of primary sources with meaningful discussions of much of the most impor­tant historiography. His notes provide a roll call of most of the impor­tant Scottish Enlightenment scholars, covering historiography old and new: David Allan, Alexander Broadie, Tom Devine, Roger Emerson, Duncan Forbes, Knud Haakonssen, Istvan Hont, Colin Kidd, Bruce Lenman, James Moore, Nicholas Phillipson, John Roberston, Ian Simpson Ross, Richard Sher, Craig Smith, Christopher Smout, Hugh Trevor-­Roper, Charles Withers, Paul Wood, they are all t­ here, along with o ­ thers (the book concludes with a list of references). The resulting synthesis is both an original and expert contribution to Scottish Enlightenment studies and an accessible introduction to the field that might be read by students at many levels.

257

Stewart Pollens, Stradivari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv + 335. REVIEWED BY ROY BOGAS

It is always a plea­sure to peruse a work that is not only well produced but is thor-

ough and au­then­tic in its assertions and its related material. Such is this excellent exposition by Stewart Pollens of the known historical facts of the life and work of Antonio Stradivari. The book is aimed at a specific readership: persons involved in one way or another with the details of violin making as well as musicologists and historians with an interest in the ­great craftsmen of instruments around the turn of the eigh­teenth ­century. The text is supplemented with reproductions of source materials, including early photo­graphs and detailed plans of Stradivari’s workshop and of his forms and drawings from which he worked. A welcome addition is a set of color illustrations of sixteen of the master’s most famous instruments, one of which is personal to this reviewer: the “Soil” violin of 1714, purchased in 1980 by famed violinist Yehudi Menuhin. During my tenure as his accompanist, I was privileged to carry this precious instrument in a double case along with another Stradivarius, the “Khavenhüller” as Menuhin found it tiring to carry the case himself. The Khavenhüller was a remarkably sweet sounding instrument, relatively gentle to the touch, and what it may have lacked in sheer power was more than compensated for by its rich and varied tone colors. The “Soil” on the other hand, was still somewhat reen, meaning that it had not yet been played to the extent necessary for the wood to relax and for all of its component parts to work seamlessly together. It was undeniably a power­ful instrument, however, and Menuhin took it upon himself to tame it by playing on it as much as pos­si­ble.

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A brief survey of the chapter headings ­will give a clear idea of the thrust of the text. Biographical material is concentrated in the first chapter, with information about the Stradivari ­family, the development of Antonio’s craft and influences on his style of violin making, as well as his success and his position in the city of Cremona. All information is attributed to con­temporary reports and existing documents, with rigorous adherence to known facts, fully referenced in the notes and complete bibliography. The following five chapters deal with the specifics of his workshop materials; the forms and patterns that he worked from; vari­ous fittings, such as bass bars, bridges, and scrolls; and application of ­these methods to other string instruments, especially the viola d’amore and the viola da gamba. The next four chapters describe his work on instruments like the lute, mandolin, guitar, and harp. Fi­nally, chapter 11 returns to the workshop and goes into very ­great detail regarding the master pro­cess in making a single instrument, taking into account all known ­factors that might apply, including the acoustical theory of the time and what is known about the varnishes that he used on the finished instruments. Following the color illustrations, which add greatly to the attractiveness of the book, ­there are three appendices, the last of which describes a case study of the history of the “Messiah” violin. An amateur maker of stringed instruments, especially of violins, ­will be greatly intrigued by the mass of detail embodied in this beautifully produced tome. H ­ ere one w ­ ill find the exact length and width of vari­ous parts of the master instruments, as well as a­ ctual drawings of such ­things as scroll heads and bridges. Due to the ­great beauty and value of Stradivari instruments, ­these details are invaluable to the modern-­day instrument maker, and ­every detail is laid out plainly in drawings and charts for all to see. Pollens has painstakingly researched ­every nook and cranny of the work of Stradivari and is to be congratulated for producing this impor­tant work, a scholarly ­labor of love. While the audience for the book may be relatively small, the quality of Pollens’s achievement is extremely high indeed, and must be hailed as a crowning achievement in the field of historical instrument making in general and the work of Antonio Stradivari in par­tic­u­lar.

259

Paul Prescott, Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Per­for­mance from the Eigh­teenth ­Century to the Pre­sent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. x + 216. REVIEWED BY GEFEN BAR-­ON SANTOR

Since the ­middle of the eigh­teenth ­century, journalistic reviews of Shakespear-

ean per­for­mances, which constitute the most “widely circulated” textual response to Shakespeare’s work, “have played a key role in the collective experience of theatregoing and theatre-­talking” (4). Surprisingly, Prescott’s survey is the first book about the subject, and as such makes an impor­tant contribution to correct “the low esteem in which scholars have held journalists and journalistic criticism.” Scholars and theater prac­ti­tion­ers have tended to view journalistic criticism as “secondary, parasitic pursuit” (6)—­a status poignantly captured by the description offered up by the Irish playwright Brendan Behan: “they see it done ­every day but ­ can’t do it themselves” (9). Prescott’s book “explores the conditions—­ theatrical, journalistic, personal and social—in which journalistic critics have received Shakespearean per­for­mance from the origins of newspaper reviewing in the mid eigh­teenth ­century to the pre­sent day” (4). Prescott focuses on the rich reviewing scene of London, with a reminder to other scholars that ­there is much potential for work beyond the British capital. This review covers only the book’s first chapter and the discussion of Garrick in the second chapter, as the remaining three chapters go beyond the eigh­teenth ­century. Prescott concurs with Beerbohm that the individual Shakespearean spectator is “a heavy casket of reminiscence” and stresses that “­those reminiscences can be traced not merely to prior empirical encounters with the same play or performers or theatre spaces, but also to the extent of one’s exposure to the body of second­-­hand memories, gossip and folklore that has built up over four hundred

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years of theatre practice.” With the eighteenth-­century theater, no direct empirical contact is pos­si­ble. Unlike some more recent per­for­mances, which scholars may attend or watch video recordings of, eighteenth-­century per­for­mances are accessible only through scripts, paintings, or the written memories of ­those who attended. The theatrical review is therefore a “surrogate” for the scholar with whom it is in a relationship of “informational de­pen­dency” (5)—an impor­tant reason to study closely the conditions in which t­ hese reviews have been produced. The eigh­teenth ­century is seminal in the history of journalistic theater reviewing. It was in the ­middle of that ­century in London that the genre emerged, theater having become “both sufficiently socially acceptable to discuss in bourgeois com­pany and also a source of apparently endless controversy” that would engage readers as “news” (10). Despite period-­specific variations, the “core functions” of journalistic theater reviewing remained the same since the eigh­teenth ­century: “to respond to per­for­mance immediately, to keep ­people talking about theatre, and so to circulate plea­sure” (11). Since prac­ti­tion­ers are paid, journalistic reviewing is at the “uneasy conjunction of cash and criticism that has so often led to charges of bias, puffery and corruption” (12). Journalism is also often explic­itly tied to politics, and “in the first half of the eigh­teenth ­century, the development of the press was inextricable from the emergence of the party system in politics and the growing need to ventilate, interrogate or lambast, according to taste, the opinions of the Whig or Tory faction” (18). Journalistic reviewing is “governed by a set of restrictions” that make it “hostage to its conditions of production,” including length restrictions, deadlines, and predetermined subjects (18–19)—as well as biases that shape, for instance, reviewers’ response to actors’ gender and race. In Chapter 2, Prescott “examines reviewer responses to six major productions of Macbeth from Garrick (1744) to Irving (1889)” (27)—­a body of data that typifies tendencies in Shakespeare reviewing. This review focuses on Prescott’s discussion of Garrick’s per­for­mance ­because it is of interest to eighteenth-­century scholars. Garrick’s adaptation marked a significant rise in the degree and intensity of journalistic interest directed at a Shakespearean per­for­mance. Reviews of Garrick’s per­ for­mance helped to cement his reputation as an actor who succeeded in “a nearly unplayable role” (32). T ­ hese superlative theatrical reviews encouraged competition among actors, which means that, to this day, the willingness of companies to stage a canonical Shakespearean play often depends on the director’s ability to “find an actor who is exciting or prestigious enough to stimulate anticipatory interest in an over-­crowded market” (35). Following seventy-­two years dominated by Davenant’s adaptation of Macbeth, Garrick created a per­for­mance that claimed

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1650–1850 textual authenticity. Prescott shows, however, that Garrick adapted Macbeth to eighteenth-­century tastes. Macbeth’s masculinity, for instance, corresponds much more closely to the ideals of the eigh­teenth ­century than to ­those of Shakespeare’s time. Garrick modeled Macbeth ­after the “privileged guiding image of masculinity in mid eighteenth-­century ­England—” that of the “man of sensibility” who displays “ostentatious manifestation of remorse” (38). Garrick was so successful in cementing his reputation as the actor deemed by reviewers best qualified to play Macbeth that Charles Macklin, who started to play Macbeth in Covent Garden in 1773, opened his last per­for­mance of the play by appearing before the audience with clippings of newspaper articles “that had rained down on the very idea of his per­ for­mance” (42). Prescott’s study of the role of reviewing in conferring cultural legitimacy on an actor is an impor­tant reminder that “[g]reat caution should be exercised in using con­temporary reviews as evidence for artistic superiority or inferiority” b ­ ecause “[t]o be remembered as the conqueror of a part, the actor must first conquer the press”(43). Garrick’s privileged position in Shakespearean history was in part a result of his ability to forge a favorable relationship with newspaper reviewers. Since this review does not go beyond the eigh­teenth ­century, it ­will not discuss the other case studies analyzed in Prescott’s book. However, the fact that the scope of the book extends to the pre­sent day invites thought-­provoking comparative reflections for the eighteenth-­century scholar. For example, how does the culture of the Internet, in which anyone can write a review, affect the authority of the critic? In the eigh­teenth ­century, newspapers played an impor­tant role in “curat[ing] . . . ​readers’ leisure time” and influencing how they “spend what remains of their disposable income” (19). The novelist Fanny Burney comically depicted how the newly rich felt it their obligation to attend the theater and the opera even as their level of innate interest was low. ­Today, when the theater is no longer obligatory to cementing a person’s social status, one may expect the status of reviewing and conventions that remained relatively stable since the eigh­teenth c­ entury to change rapidly in ways that ­will need to be studied by ­future scholars. A technical error in the book: The pages have been printed right to left.

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Jonathan I. Israel, Demo­cratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and H ­ uman Rights, 1750–1790. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xvi + 1,066. REVIEWED BY MARK G. SPENCER

Jonathan Israel’s readers w­ ill not be shocked to see that his recent book, like

many of his previous ones, is big. The third and final volume in his trilogy on the Enlightenment weighs in at 1,066 pages. Following on the ­earlier two volumes—­ Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001 / 810 pages) and Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emanci­ pation of Man 1600–1752 (Oxford, 2006 / 983 pages)—­this one takes the story of the Enlightenment forward, from 1750 through to 1790, pages  1,794 to 2,859, encompassing the impor­tant years of the American Revolution and the outbreak of the Revolution in France. However, much of the plot in this volume had already been foreshadowed in the ­earlier two, and in a notably shorter stand-­alone volume, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Prince­ton UP, 2010). To readers of that body of work, the volume ­under review ­here contains few surprises. For ­those who have not read the ­earlier works, the first of this book’s thirty-­five chapters offers something of a summary of Israel’s Enlightenment proj­ect as a ­whole. Demo­cratic Enlightenment is divided into five parts: Part 1: “The Radical Enlightenment,” Part 2: “Rationalizing the Ancien Régime,” Part 3: “Eu­rope and the Remaking of the World,” Part 4: “Spinoza Controversies in the L­ ater Enlightenment,” and Part 5: “Revolution.” The primary narrative is that the Radical Enlightenment caused the French Revolution. But the overall scope is much broader in scale and touches not only on the philosophes in France but also Enlightenment figures in Amer­i­ca, Austria, Batavia, China, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Latin Amer­i­ca,

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1650–1850 Rus­sia, Scotland, and Spain. (Actually, ­there is a surprise in that. The volume is curiously framed by nation-­state bound­aries. That is curious ­because Israel has vehemently denied the usefulness of approaching the Enlightenment from the perspective of “national contexts”.) T ­ here are few who could contemplate writing a book of this scale and fewer still who could pull off even one of its parts. As is the case with all of the books in this set, along with Israel’s ­grand story line ­there are many in­ter­est­ing arguments and asides. Anyone writing a short review, such as this is, must pick and choose what to discuss and approve. But ­there is also much to be critical of, so again one must choose. Something worth noting about this volume is that in its introduction Israel mentions some of the many critics of his ­earlier volumes, notably Dan Edelstein, Margaret Jacob, Antoine Lilti, but also o ­ thers. Like his reading of the Enlightenment, Israel’s assessment of his critics is often presented in absolute terms. They are said to offer “absurd objections” and mistakenly to have attributed to him positions that “no sensible historian” would hold (26). T ­ hose who frequent the book review section of history journals w ­ ill know that many solid scholars have argued in their reviews that Israel’s attempt to explain the Enlightenment everywhere as being fundamentally divided between what he styles as the Radical and the Moderate Enlightenments oversimplifies and leaves out as much as it makes clear. Israel ­here dismisses criticisms of his bipolar interpretation of the Enlightenment. Instead, he plows on: “­there was no tenable intermediate ground between radical and moderate Enlightenment. . . . ​Lovers of compromise and gradualism, as always, abounded; but that could not prevent a general polarization driven by real­ity and metaphysical positions locking thinkers into lines of thought allowing no spectrum of intermediate views” (34). As in the ­earlier volumes, ­here, Israel’s way of seeing ­things has the most difficulty when it comes up against the many Enlightenment figures who ­were much more nuanced in what they thought and wrote than Israel’s all-­or-­nothing, black-­or-­white account accommodates. Related to this, many of ­these ­earlier criticisms provide an overarching critique that Israel’s approach is too muted on the historical contexts in which ideas are formed and circulate. In par­tic­u­lar, critics such as Harvey Chisick have brought ­those concerns to bear on Israel’s understanding of the French Revolution. (In Demo­cratic Enlightenment, Israel notes in passing Chisick’s e­ arlier critiques, at least one presumes that Harvey Chisick is the writer Israel refers to on page 2 as “Henry Chiswick.”) But ­those shortcomings are again evident ­here and not only when it comes to the Enlightenment in France. Israel’s accounts of David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment generally, and the American Revolution—­all of which have chap-

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ters devoted to them—­strike this reviewer as not adequate for many reasons. They certainly do not draw on the best available secondary scholarship. And, when Israel tackles the primary sources in ­those chapters he does so in a selective way that may be helpful to the case of building a g­ rand narrative, but it is frustratingly unhelpful if one’s goal is to do justice to the topics at hand and to better understand the Enlightenment in all of its complexity. In short, while most scholars of the Enlightenment w ­ ill be sympathetic to Israel’s claim that the Enlightenment might be seen “as the single most impor­tant topic, internationally, in modern historical studies, and one of crucial significance also to our politics, cultural studies, and philosophy” (1) not many w ­ ill agree with the simplified Enlightenment with which he pre­sents us. ­Those who know parts of the Enlightenment well are likely to be particularly unsatisfied with ­those parts that they know best. But, that criticism is not a new one to be leveled at this proj­ect, and perhaps it is time for all of us to use what we can of his work and move on.

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Andrew Janiak and Eric Schliesser, eds., Interpreting Newton: Critical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. x + 450. REVIEWED BY GEFEN BAR-­ON SANTOR

This collection of fifteen essays in the philosophy of science is an in-­depth and

rigorous exploration of the key concepts of Newton’s methodology and of his relationship to his philosophical contemporaries and pre­de­ces­sors. I was drawn to this book by my interest in the popu­lar culture of Newtonianism but found that the highly specialized philosophical terminology was a barrier for engaging with the essays. The book is thus unlikely to be useful to scholars who are not phi­los­o­phers of science. To ­those with the prerequisite background, however, it is likely to be a worthwhile contribution to the ongoing scholarly proj­ect of analyzing Newton’s work in a nuanced manner that transcends simplistic heroic depictions. The richness of the volume seems to demonstrate that Newton’s methodology, which was “baffling for even his most sophisticated contemporaries,” is still fertile ground for investigation that seeks accurately to define “Newton’s place within the history of philosophy” (1). With my background in lit­er­a­ture, I am unable to assess the philosophical soundness of the authors’ arguments. This review ­will therefore mostly quote highlights from their conclusions in order to provide a flavor and an impression of the breadth, approach, and style of their investigations. The first four essays examine Newton’s relationship to his contemporaries. Newton’s status as a genius who triumphed over other minds and achieved a direct connection with the truth implies that his relationship to his philosophical contemporaries and pre­de­ces­sors may not have been sufficiently considered in some prior scholarship. Katherine Brading discusses Newton’s response to “the prob­ lem of bodies” in Descartes’s Princi­ples of Philosophy (how can a “body” be dis-

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tinguished from space?) and contends that “Newton offers a law-­constitutive solution . . . ​according to which the definition of bodies is incomplete prior to the specification of the laws of nature, and completed by t­ hose laws of nature” (13). The idea that to be defined as a body, an object must move according to laws is pre­sent in Descartes, but Newton developed and asserted it more explic­itly in the course of his discovery of the laws of motion. Daniel Garber discusses “Leibniz, Newton and force” to demonstrate that the two phi­los­o­phers treated force differently ­because Leibnitz was “an inheritor of the natu­ral philosophical tradition of Descartes,” who continued the Aristotelian search for first ­causes, while Newton was “an inheritor of the mathematical tradition that Galileo followed” (47). Mary Domski explains John Locke’s well known characterization of Newton and ­ uman Understanding by Boyle as “master builders” in his An Essay Concerning H illustrating that Locke regarded them as “advancing dif­fer­ent sciences—­Newton astronomy and Boyle physics,” each with its own method, and did not attribute to them “a common method or even a common domain of inquiry” (68). Locke, therefore, celebrated Newton not so much for his general contribution to what ­later came to be known as physics, but more specifically for his understanding of the movement of heavenly bodies. With a focus on the preface to the Principia, Katherine Dunlop analyzes the commonalities, but also the distinctions, between the thought of Newton and his teacher Isaac Barrow who attempted to “reconcile geometry’s precision with the observable crudity of nature” (101). The preface to the Principia, as the editors point out, discussed “postulates as the link between geometry and mechanics” (8). Providing unifying mathematical explanations for apparently confusing phenomena was ultimately Newton’s achievement in that work. The five essays of the book’s second part investigate “philosophical themes in Newton.” Zvi Biener and Chris Smeenk, who focus on m ­ atter theory, “argue that a conflict between two conceptions of ‘quantity of ­matter’ employed in a corollary to proposition III.6 illustrates a deeper conflict between Newton’s view of the nature of extended bodies and the concept of mass appropriate for the Principia.” This conflict, first noted by the editor of the Principia’s second edition, Roger Cotes (105), “highlights linked tensions in Newton’s ­matter theory and empiricist methodology” (6). The authors explore “evidence [that Newton] took Cotes’s criticism to heart and attempted to dispense with [De Gravitatione’s] geometrical conception” (137) in f­ avor of “a dynamical conception” (7). Ori Belkind tackles one of the ideas that made Newton’s universal gravity difficult for many to accept—­the notion that a force can operate without contact or physical mechanism. Newton’s application of the laws of motion beyond the earth to the solar system was also difficult

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1650–1850 to grasp in an intellectual culture not completely ­free of the legacy of geocentricism. The authors show how Newton “followed the method of deduction from phenomenon” (168). William Harper’s analy­sis, which compares Newton to Christian Huygens, considers “a long history of phi­los­o­phers turning power­ful sufficient conditions for some apparently clear cases of knowledge into necessary conditions, which then lead to skeptical arguments designed to undercut other commonly accepted cases of knowledge.” He proposes “that turning the Newtonian ideal of convergent accurate mea­sure­ment of par­ameters from diverse phenomena into a necessary condition for ac­cep­tance of theoretical propositions in natu­ ral philosophy would be an example of this practice that promotes unwarranted skepticism” (195). Nick Huggett discusses “Newton’s views on the foundations of mechanics,” space and motion, and shows that “in ‘true motion’ especially, Newton consciously held an extremely sophisticated conception of motion.” He “cannot be said to have advocated a purely dynamical view in the Scholium, but rather the view that motion with re­spect to absolute space satisfied the dynamical concept” (218). Marco Panza analyzes Newton’s mathematical method and demonstrates his standing as the founder of “eighteenth-­century analytic mathe­matics” (254). His analy­sis, as the editors point out, “helps explain, in part, why in the Principia Newton did not rely on fluxions but instead turned to geometry” (8). The six essays in the book’s third and final part focus on “the reception of Newton.” One of the contributions of the volume is to “force a reconsideration of the relationship between Locke and Newton” who “have been considered intellectual fellow travelers” with “Newton providing the physics, and Locke the metaphysics for the new sciences” (8–9). Graciela De Pierris, as the editors summarize, “argues that Locke remains wedded to the demonstrative ideal of the mechanical philosophy and lacks Newton’s understanding of fruitful inductive generalization” (9). Lisa Downing concludes that “while [Maupertuis’s Discours] maintains that physics can function separately from metaphysics, it suggests that each may still have implications for the other” (298). Her essay, as the editors observe, “helps explain both how Locke and Newton came to be seen as fellow travelers, and how phi­los­o­phers drew on Lockean resources to defend Newtonian natu­ral philosophy” (9). Eric Schliesser discusses “Newton’s challenge,” which refers to the outcome by which, “in the wake of the Principia’s success the authority of science is used to ­settle debates within philosophy” (300). Schliesser contends that “it is the signature achievement of the Newtonian phi­los­o­phers to put the familiar figures of eighteenth-­century philosophy (Leibniz, Berkley, Hume, Wolff) on the defensive about method and the authority of philosophical princi­ples not derived from

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the success of mathematical experimental science.” He further demonstrates how phi­los­o­phers such as Berkeley, Hume, Buffon, and Diderot w ­ ere “distinctly reserved about Newton’s challenge” (319). As the introduction explains, “Schliesser explores how the most able eighteenth-­century Scottish Newtonian, Colin MacLaurin, uses the authority of Newton to attack Spinoza on empirical and moral grounds.” Schliesser demonstrates that “in MacLaurin’s hands Newtonian science recommends a lowering of expectations” that “favours piecemeal pro­gress over the demands of systematicity” (10). Lynn S. Joy examines Newton in relation to Boyle on the subject of dispositional properties, contending, as the editors summarize, that “the very idea of a disposition itself underwent a major conceptual change between Boyle and Newton” and that “Newton turned Boyle’s philosophical theory of dispositions on its head by showing that mass could be conceived as an exclusively dispositional property of bodies without requiring that mass be causally grounded in the categorical properties of Boyle’s ­matter” (7). Michael Friedman discusses the impact of the reception of Newton on philosophy and shows how “Kant . . . ​brings the characteristic mode of metaphysical investigation into the relationships among space, God, and ­matter practiced by his pre­de­ces­ sors to a close, and transforms it—­without remainder—­into transcendental philosophy” (359). George E. Smith concludes the examination of Newton’s impact by exploring nine ways in which Newton changed physics. Taken together, the essays’ sophisticated exploration of fundamental Newtonian concepts and of Newton’s impact and relationship to his contemporaries help more accurately to situate Newton within the history and philosophy of science. Scholars with the prerequisite background ­will likely find the essays engaging and illuminating, but ­those with a more general interest in Newton would have benefited from explanations of the key arguments in plainer language.

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Geordan Hammond, John Wesley in Amer­i­ca: Restoring Primitive Chris­tian­ity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 256. REVIEWED BY ISABEL RIVERS

The main contention of John Wesley in Amer­i­ca: Restoring Primitive Chris­tian­ity

is that John Wesley’s missionary period in Georgia from 1735 to 1737 has been misinterpreted by generations of biographers and interpreters who had par­tic­u­lar theological and denominational axes to grind, did not ask the right questions, and ­were selective in the evidence they used. Most looked backward, assuming that the episode in Georgia was a false start in terms of Wesley’s doctrinal and disciplinary views, that what mattered was the evangelist Wesley became on his return to ­England, the global Methodist churches that grew out of the socie­ties he started, and that the Georgia period represented a spiritual crisis for Wesley and a deplorable and fortunately brief High Church or legalistic phase from which he moved on. (­These objections do not apply to Wesley’s major modern biographers, Frank Baker, Richard Heitzenrater, and Henry Rack, but their accounts are necessarily compressed.) Instead, Hammond sets out the Georgia mission in detail as a laboratory in which Wesley sought to implement his views of primitive Chris­tian­ity. He explores this neglected period of Wesley’s life in a number of contexts: the revival of patristic theology in the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries; the profound influence of the nonjurors on Wesley’s liturgical practices; Wesley’s devotional reading and the uses he made of it; his relations with the Moravians and Lutheran pietists whom he met on the transatlantic voyage and in Georgia, seen from their point of view as much as from his; the achievements of his ministry in Georgia; and the responses of the colonists themselves, not all negative,

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as is sometimes supposed. Hammond also considers the extent to which Wesley’s early interest in primitive Chris­tian­ity continued in l­ater life. Throughout he is scrupulous in his insistence on using the available con­temporary evidence from a variety of sources, and on not interpreting Wesley’s experiences in Georgia from the point of view of his published journals and his ­later accounts of his mission, as many biographers have done. This is an impor­tant and original study that ­will be of value not only to historians of Wesley and Methodism but to scholars in a number of fields, who w ­ ill find a wealth of material h ­ ere to ponder and draw on: students of liturgy, of colonial history, of transatlantic missions, of the relations between ecclesiastical and secular authorities, of socie­ties of religious reading and devotional practices, and of the role of ­women in religion. From a rich and detailed book, which is structured partly chronologically and partly thematically, only a few aspects can be highlighted. The nonjuror Thomas Deacon, to whom Wesley was introduced by his Oxford friend John Clayton in 1732, is one of the key figures. Deacon’s Compleat Collection of Devotions of 1734, a revision of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which restored the usages of the 1549 prayer book, encouraged Wesley to introduce, among other practices, baptism by immersion, oblation (the offering of the ele­ments in communion as a sacrifice), the mixed chalice of ­water and wine, and prayers for the dead, to the dismay of some of his Georgia parishioners. (­After his return to ­England Wesley reverted to the 1662 prayer book.) Other authors and books of par­tic­u­lar importance for Wesley before and during his mission included his ­father Samuel’s Advice to a Young Clergyman, which John Wesley published in 1735; The Christian’s Pattern, his own version of the Imitatio Christi, published the same year; William Beveridge’s Pri­ vate Thoughts upon Religion; Daniel Brevint’s Christian Sacrament and Sacrifice; William Cave’s Primitive Chris­tian­ity; Anthony Horneck’s Holy Lives of the Primi­ tive Christians; and William Law’s Christian Perfection. Hammond notes that some of the works that ­were impor­tant in Georgia made their appearance in Wesley’s Christian Library of 1749–1755, but he could have made more of this in his account of the continuities from the Georgia period in his conclusion. The sources Hammond has scoured in detail for Wesley’s experiences and interactions in Georgia include his manuscript diaries and journals (available in the Heitzenrater edition of 1988) as well as his published one, and the journals and correspondence of the Moravians David Nitschmann, Leonard Dober, Johann Töltschig, and August Spangenberg, and the pietists Johann Boltzius and Israel Gronau. Hammond helpfully balances the tensions and misunderstandings he identifies in the relations of Wesley with the Moravians (as opposed to the tendency of historians to

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1650–1850 see them as harmonious) with the judgment that Wesley came to see them as “an incarnation of the primitive church in his day” (95). Hammond’s account of Wesley’s religious socie­ties in Frederica and Savannah is particularly in­ter­est­ing (139–148). As compared with some of Wesley’s views and practices with re­spect to baptism and communion and his ascetic be­hav­ior, such as sleeping on the ground, which divided his parishioners and provoked much criticism, the vari­ous socie­ties he or­ga­nized seem to have satisfied their members and been remarkably successful. The pattern varied depending on w ­ hether they ­were Saturday, Sunday, or weekday meetings, but typically they involved devotional reading, prayer, and hymn singing, and they continued to meet in his absence and ­after he had left Georgia. Wesley trained two colonists to act as lay pastors in Frederica during his absence in Savannah (141) and prepared his friend Margaret Bovey to be a deaconess to minister to Indian w ­ omen (137–138). Discussion of Wesley’s relations with ­women in Georgia has tended to focus on his unhappy relationship with Sophia Williamson, née Hopkey, but Hammond makes the much more productive observation that the lack of episcopal oversight (the Georgia Trustees prevented the bishop of London from exercising ecclesiastical authority) enabled Wesley to encourage ­women to engage in ministry on the model of the primitive church. Hammond stresses the achievements of the Georgia mission and the practices that Wesley was to develop in his Methodist socie­ties (noting that t­hese points ­were made by Baker): hymn singing (he published his first hymnbook, A Col­ lection of Psalms and Hymns, in Charlestown in 1737—­the importance of this for Anglican and Methodist hymnody is generally agreed); preaching and praying extemporaneously; itinerating; and using lay leaders, w ­ omen as well as men. Wesley continued, as Hammond points out in his conclusion, to think of Methodism as modeled on the primitive church, though at the same time what Wesley understood by that church was not consistent. The Wesley who refused communion to the pietist Boltzius in Savannah in 1737—on the grounds that he was not properly baptized by an episcopally ordained minister—­w as rebuked by the Wesley who publicly acknowledged the shamefulness of this be­hav­ior in his Journal for September 1749 (101–102).

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Geordan Hammond and David Ceri Jones, eds., George Whitefield: Life, Context, and Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv + 329. REVIEWED BY RICHARD P. HEITZENRATER

George Whitefield is fi­nally getting some of the scholarly attention that he

deserves. The first shot over the bow was a conference at Oxford in 2014 of outstanding researchers who presented carefully produced papers on the man and his work. About half of the works, presented at Pembroke College, w ­ ere then published by Oxford University Press, brought together by two of the leading experts in the area, David Ceri Jones and Geordan Hammond. The introduction includes a helpful historiography of major Whitefield biographies. He is seen as generally idolized by supporters or railed by opponents. The former are largely Calvinists, who take him and his friendly biographers at their word; the latter are largely Methodists, who have not dealt seriously with Whitefield except to read Wesley’s attacks on the man’s theology and methodology. In this volume, the ­matters of ideas (theology) predominate. We are given a hint that some other prob­lems would be overlooked in this volume when his mismanagement of money and support of slavery are mentioned in the first chapter but not ­really considered carefully. The description of Whitefield in this book is focused on his thought or ideas, as found in his writings. We learn some impor­tant ­things about his changing understanding of conversion as an Oxford Methodist and the development of his early theology, in which justification by faith (actually, by grace) becomes a central feature of his thought and preaching, as is the case for most eighteenth-­century evangelicals. The reader learns about his ministry on shipboard during his many crossings of the Atlantic, and the spirituality emerging from Whitefield’s almost sole

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1650–1850 emphasis on Christ’s redemptive sacrifice in his Collection of Hymns for Social Worship of 1753. ­There are also a few other ­matters with which authors deal effectively, such as his relationship to Wesley in the leadership of the British revival, to the thinking of Jonathan Edwards​.­in the New E ­ ngland revival, and to the work of Howell Harris, the Erskines, and ­others in the “Celtic” revival. ­There are also in­ter­est­ing chapters on the slippery questions of Whitefield’s relationship to the established Church and of his connection to the emerging concept of empire and the retrospective concept of Enlightenment in the eigh­teenth ­century. In the end, we find out about the reception of Whitefield’s ideas in ­England during the first fifty years ­after his death, and about the subsequent ways of commemorating Whitefield’s place in the history of religious thought and practice in Britain and Amer­i­ca. A number of positions are presented by the authors that represent remarkably fresh and potentially productive perspectives on vari­ous aspects of Whitefield’s work. No one should talk about how large Whitefield’s outdoor crowds might have been or how many p ­ eople could understand his outdoor preaching without reading Braxton Boren’s chapter on Whitefield’s voice, which approaches the question with scientific acuteness. And Emma Salgård Cunha takes on a fresh issue when she shows the context and vari­ous ways by which Whitefield differentiates the “holy affections,” the proper road to conversion, from the empty emotions and religious enthusiasm (such as weeping and crying) in his readers or the listeners to his preaching. ­After discussing the vari­ous definitions of Enlightenment as applied to philosophy and history, Frank Lambert shows how Whitefield differed from the latitudinarian positions of John Tillotson, and the scientific views of ­people like Benjamin Franklin, two exponents of “modern” thought that attempted to be “reasonable” (if not grounded in reason itself), but failed to make the new birth the key to understanding the real­ity of ­human existence and the source of salvation. Some of the chapters reflect only a modest revision of the old hagiography. For instance, Whitefield’s means of diffusing opposition is described in part by his “contrition,” pointing out that his style of language was too apostolic (!) or should have been kept in longer (!), ascribing ­these methods to his zeal for a righ­teous cause and seeing ­those tendencies as perhaps problematic to his listener or reader—­not what he actually meant or did, which he sees as good in themselves and promoting a righ­teous cause. ­These arguments are in fact an extension of Whitefield’s own defense in many cases, which tends to exonerate himself and put the blame on the other person.

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Many dissenting evangelicals felt that the persecution they experienced was evidence of the rightness of their position. Affliction, approached correctly, would bring growth. If this view is correct, Whitefield’s critics provided plenty of evidence for his per­sis­tence in pushing forward. Brett McInelly’s chapter provides a clear picture of the way in which Whitefield used the press as a means of keeping his fight (and his movement) ­going. At the same time, many of the attacks on Whitefield are found in anti-­ Methodist lit­er­a­ture, which deals primarily with his Calvinist positions. So we do not have much of any discussion of his character traits, financial positions, or personal actions. For instance, with regard to finances, which was a constant source of embarrassment to Whitefield, the main person in charge of keeping track of the money that Whitefield raked in, from gifts, preaching, friends, ­wills, congregations, and what­ever other sources came his way, was George Whitefield himself. This situation led to a number of challenges on the part of p ­ eople who (generally opposed to him for other reasons) thought he was not thorough or straightforward in this m ­ atter. And some of the contributors have ignored Isabel Rivers’s point concerning the prevalence of Whitefield’s trans-­denominationalism (or “catholicism,” as she calls it in her excellent chapter). T ­ here is a tendency on the part of a few researchers to look at Whitefield’s writing from a noncritical point of view as though t­ hose words w ­ ere the sole source of truth, an old position that is not helpful. During the conference, an exciting announcement indicated that Dr. Jones had received some funding for the George Whitefield and Transatlantic Protestantism proj­ect, a major endeavor that would, among other ­things, produce an edition of the letters of George Whitefield, the first step in a larger attempt to produce a critical edition of Whitefield’s works, of which this book and the conference that spawned it are harbingers.

275

Felix Waldmann, ed., Further Letters of David Hume. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 2014. Pp. ix + 315. REVIEWED BY MARK G. SPENCER

The editor of The Letters of David Hume (2 vols., Oxford University Press, 1932),

J.Y.T. Greig, wrote of Hume as letter writer “that ‘[w]e would willingly exchange a dozen [letters] written in the year 1766 . . . ​for another like the four to Francis Hutcheson in 1739–43 or the two to Gilbert Elliot about the Dialogues in 1751.” The editor of the volume ­under review ­here quotes Greig’s comment but hopes readers of this collection “­will find something in Further Letters of David Hume which appeals to their interest,” even though it contains no gems like the ones Greig wished for. Further Letters of David Hume publishes sixty previously unpublished Hume “letters” (some are excerpts, or copies) and thirteen instances of what the editor describes in his introductory essay as “controvertibly epistolary manuscripts” by Hume. As all serious students of Hume’s life and thought know, David Raynor has been preparing for publication (with Oxford University Press) the complete Cor­ respondence of David Hume. The editor of the current work submits that Further Letters “is a provisional resource for scholars who are awaiting Dr. Raynor’s monumental Correspondence.” The letters included ­here span more than thirty years of Hume’s life, from 1746 (when Hume was 35) to 1776 (the year of Hume’s death), and are also wide-­ ranging in content. They cast light on Hume’s tutoring of the “mad” third marquess of Annandale, to Hume’s quarrel with Rousseau; from Hume’s financial affairs, to his “abuse of the franking privilege afforded to members of parliament.” ­There are letters of recommendation, official correspondence related to Hume’s time as sec-

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retary to the British embassy in Paris in the 1760s, letters of thanks, ones arranging meetings, and letters to friends, including John Home and Cochrane Stewart. Some of the most in­ter­est­ing letters cast light on the composition of Hume’s six-­ volume History of ­England and, in par­tic­u­lar, Hume’s ongoing historiographical debate with Thomas Birch (1705–1766), author of An inquiry into the share which King Charles I had in the transactions of the earl of Glamorgan . . . ​for bringing over a body of Irish rebels to assist that king (1747). Other letters, such as one to William Strahan, the London publisher of Hume’s History of ­England, remind us (who publish books in the age of computers and email) of just how laborious and uncertain long-­distance proof-­correcting was in the eigh­teenth ­century. The primary sources reproduced in this volume are accompanied by a range of scholarly apparatus. In fact, fewer than 100 pages of reprinted letters and manuscripts are outweighed by more than 200 pages of accompanying apparatus laid out in nine separate appendices. Some of that additional material is very useful. That is especially so for “Appendix V: Census of Manuscripts,” an effort to “provide the first census of Hume’s manuscripts which are to be found outside of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s collection,” and “Appendix VI: Publication of Hume’s Letters, 1766–2014.” But some may think that parts of the scholarly apparatus get in the way of Hume’s own writings, especially since each of Hume’s letters is also introduced with a headnote and dissected with copious annotation. Browsing the letters, it is not always clear where the editor stops and Hume begins. Still, Hume scholars o ­ ught to be grateful for having Waldmann’s Further Letters. But many ­will continue to look forward to Raynor’s complete Correspondence.

277

Henry Hitchings, The World in Thirty-­Eight Chapters, or, Dr Johnson’s Guide to Life. London: Macmillan, 2018. Pp. ix + 354. REVIEWED BY MALCOLM JACK

Henry Hitchings’s objective in his latest book on Samuel Johnson is to enter-

tain, as well as inform, his reader. He succeeds brilliantly in ­doing that in a lively series of essays on vari­ous aspects of the ­great man’s life and thoughts, relating them with subtlety and intelligence to general issues about la condition humaine. Hitchings knows Johnson as one knows a good friend who is also a mentor; he gets b ­ ehind the façade of well-­known Johnsonian aphorisms by considering what led the g­ reat man to reach his par­tic­u­lar conclusions rather than just to dwell on the sharpness of his expression, though he clearly admires that quality as well. Johnson’s life was not an easy one. Brought up in the provincial obscurity of Lichfield and ­after an incomplete time at Oxford, he came as a young man to London with his friend David Garrick to seek fame and fortune. Unlike Garrick, Johnson was full of self-­d oubt to an extent that would now be classified as clinical depression; his bulky, awkward figure did nothing to attract f­ avor. The Grub Street society he entered in the capital was a rough place that offered l­ittle financial security, something that plagued Johnson for many years ­until he became an established figure ­after the publication of his Dictionary in 1755. T ­ hese early experiences, as Hitchings shows, left scars that ­were never to fade; they also contributed to a compassionate side of Johnson that made him sympathetic to the underprivileged and the underdog. Hitchings’s approach in the thirty-­eight chapters is a creative mix of the biographical, literary, and philosophical. Although ­there is the semblance of chronology, a more abstract recognition of mortality, which haunted Johnson, is the

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author’s method of dealing with the circle of his subject’s life. As a moralist Johnson hoped to find “patterns of virtue” in considering the deaths of o ­ thers, but he usually included a hint of the farcical and absurd nature of h ­ uman existence in any observations he made. The uncertainty of death, terrifying though it is, could, in his view, be “the g­ reat support of the ­whole system of life.” Another impor­tant support of life was acquiring knowledge, something Johnson never gave up. He was a relentless reader and a keen observer of his fellow men’s be­hav­ior. Hitchings explores this aspect of Johnson’s thought in the context of the dif­fer­ent views of genius that ­were emerging during the eigh­teenth ­century, prefiguring the high Romantic concept of the inspired genius. In his Con­ jectures on Original Composition (1759) Edward Young advanced the theory that uncovering genius was a ­matter of examining oneself profoundly rather than of applying oneself to study. It was a natu­ral endowment rather than anything acquired. L­ ater in the ­century Immanuel Kant developed the notion that genius was an attribute of artists, inspired by individual spontaneity. The Romantic poets followed his lead. Johnson did not subscribe to this view. Rather he sees the genius as one who is an “exact surveyor” of the world; whose insights arise from examining the nature of t­ hings as they exist. One is reminded of his refutation of Bishop Berkeley’s idealism (suggesting the nonexistence of ­matter) by kicking a large stone and saying, “I refute it thus.” However, the Johnsonian “surveyor” has to work hard and his mind needs the constant stimulation of new challenges. Imlac, the poet portrayed in Rasselas, urges his listener not to give in to inertia or despair but rather to commit himself “again to the current of the world.” Life has to be seen as a progression; though ­there ­will be reverses and suffering, it is imperative to act rather than to dwell on its disappointments and setbacks. One of Johnson’s most endearing qualities, which Hitchings explores, is his attitude ­toward charity. Johnson challenges the view that ­there is a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. For him it is sufficient that someone is in want for them to be assisted. ­Whether that person is a good or bad person cannot be determined by the dispenser of charity. If indeed he is a bad person, then the assistance may help him to repent. Always sensitive to hy­poc­risy, Johnson understood the ele­ment of vanity that was involved in ostentatious benevolence, something he may have learned from reading Bernard Mandev­ille’s Fable of the Bees (1714). He was also a mentor, avant la lettre, to other writers, including Charlotte Lennox and Fanny Burney who had to strug­gle against gender discrimination. In the conclusion to his highly stimulating book Hitchings considers Johnson’s view on the contradictions that we all have to understand in our own makeup.

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1650–1850 ­ here is a need for perspective summarized in one of the most stirring of the ­great T man’s aphorisms: “You are only one atom of the mass of humanity, and have neither such virtue or vice . . . ​that you should be singled out for super­natural favours or afflictions.” We are significant within the l­imited circle of our friends and ­those whom we have dealings with in life, but this should not lead us to illusions of grandeur. It should also serve as a reminder of the basic equality of all persons.

280

Ian Woodfield, Performing Operas for Mozart: Impresarios, Singers and Troupes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xvi + 274. REVIEWED BY KATE QUARTANO BROWN

This book, the third of Ian Woodfield’s books on Mozart’s operas, charts the

singers, the man­ag­ers, and the companies that first brought Mozart’s operas to Prague, Leipzig, and Dresden in the 1780s and 1790s. His exhaustive research into con­temporary accounts, reviews, programs, playbills (including a little-­known collection of posters from Leipzig), and the Indice de’ teatrali spettacoli (for the years 1764–1800. Facsimile edition. R. Verti, Fondazione Rossini, 1996). This research, together with extensive reading of the critical lit­er­a­ture past and pre­sent on the subject, results in an astonishing amount of information contained within just over 200 pages of densely written text. This density brings its own prob­lems. Woodfield is strictly focused on events and p ­ eople in the theaters and concert halls of late eighteenth-­century Prague, Leipzig, and Dresden, and presumes a considerable background knowledge in the reader. ­There is ­little context to serve as literary “anchors.” Similarly, ­there is ­little narrative thread to the chapters, although they are roughly chronological, nor many conventional historical landmarks, such as events in Mozart’s life, whose wedding occasioned the commissioning of Don Giovanni, or the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia celebrated by La Clemenza di Tito. Woodfield also assumes the reader has a substantial knowledge of eighteenth-­century German. Some of the extremely in­ter­est­ing information in the copious footnotes is translated but by no means all, and ­there is no obvious reason for Woodfield’s se­lection. In consequence, Woodfield’s text is clearly intended for informed colleagues rather than students, and the general reader may find it difficult to navigate.

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1650–1850 Difficulties notwithstanding, Wooldfield’s text is a mine of fascinating and minutely detailed information, however difficult the access. The t­ able of contents is deceptively ­simple, nor is the index particularly helpful, although reading the book in electronic format may help one find scattered references that are neither indexed nor footnoted. Following is a brief summary of the material covered. Woodfield begins in Dresden in 1777 with the impresario and singer Pasquale Bondini, who was appointed, rather unexpectedly, director of the Electoral Theatre Com­pany. He spoke very ­little German and consequently delegated the stage management to German actors. He was an excellent impresario, however, and quickly extended the com­pany’s reach to Leipzig, playing a summer season of spoken theater and Singspiel. In 1781 Bondini also took over the Prague opera buffa com­pany, Die Italiänische Opera-­Virtuosen, and established a tripartite presence, performing not only plays and Singspiele in German but also Italian comic opera. Eventually this empire proved too difficult for one man to sustain and Bondini’s companies w ­ ere taken over by new directors, but not before Bondini had been instrumental in bringing the first of Mozart’s Viennese successes, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, to Prague and Leipzig (and ­later also Dresden) in 1783, just a year ­after the Vienna premiere. Bondini, himself, sang in Dresden u ­ ntil 1782, and then moved with his wife Caterina Saporiti Bondini to Prague, leasing two theaters ­there and continuing with a summer season in Leipzig as well as continuing his overall management of the actors in Dresden. Woodfield reconstructs the Leipzig summer season of 1783 in detail from published announcements and playbills and it is clear from this and other evidence that increasing responsibility for the opera productions was transferred from Bondini to Domenico Guardasoni. In a chapter ostensibly devoted to the com­pany in Prague, Woodfield discusses the companies in all three locations, noting, for example, contractual squabbles with the woodwinds in Leipzig (Mozart’s ­music required rather more rehearsal than Salieri’s), and detailing the complex relationships between the families of Bondini, Saporiti, Guardasoni, and other performers. In 1786 Bondini was still in charge of the German actors in Prague, but with con­spic­u­ous lack of success, ­either in straight theater or in Singspiel, so it was imperative that the Italian singers produce an outstanding success for the autumn and winter upon their return from the Leipzig summer season. This duly materialized in the form of Le Nozze di Figaro, which opened to enthusiastic acclaim in December 1786, a mere seven months ­after its Viennese premiere. It also initiated a very productive relationship between Mozart and the Bondini/Guardasoni

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com­pany. Woodfield provides a hy­po­thet­i­cal reconstruction of the probable cast, based on roles they w ­ ere singing in the same or adjoining seasons. Chapter 5 addresses the genesis of Don Giovanni, examining the repertoire sung in Leipzig and Prague in the 1780s by the current com­pany, including the Saporitis (prob­ably ­sisters) and Guardasoni himself. ­There’s a nice summary of recent research on the allusive choice of m ­ usic for the onstage banquet band in the last act, which was prob­ably chosen to reflect the other current roles of the singers playing Don Giovanni and Leporello. As for the ­actual commissioning, Woodfield compares the accounts of Niemetschek and da Ponte and adds Guardasoni’s proposals for the festivities celebrating the wedding of the archduchess Maria Theresa and Anton of Saxony, suggesting that the genesis of the opera may possibly lie more in Vienna than Prague. Mozart arrived in Prague in October 1787 to supervise the final preparations for the premiere, but they ­were clearly not sufficiently advanced, and a per­for­ mance of Figaro was quickly mounted for the festivities. A ­ fter another postponement due to illness, Don Giovanni fi­nally received its premiere on October 29 (the overture famously being completed at the last minute). Woodfield reconstructs a pos­si­ble theater schedule for the last two weeks of October. He discusses the immediate success of the opera, although noting many found it rather challenging. Chapter 7, which follows, is devoted to reconstructing the casting, including the pos­si­ble doubling of the Commendatore and Masetto. Chapter  8 addresses Guardasoni’s 1788 Leipzig season, in which operas by Salieri and Martin y Soler w ­ ere produced as well as Don Giovanni. Woodfield discusses pos­si­ble variants of the score with reference to ­later per­for­mances in Warsaw, also u ­ nder the aegis of Guardasoni. This provokes an examination of the practice of substituting arias from other operas that might have suited a singer’s voice or character. He also analyzes the makeup of the Leipzig orchestra of 1786–1788. The 1788 Prague season also began with Don Giovanni. A letter of Mozart’s from early 1789 reveals a pos­si­ble new commission from Guardasoni, perhaps intended for Warsaw, where Guardasoni was about to take his com­pany (Bauer, ed., Mozart Briefe [Kassel, 1962–1975], 4:80). This is sometimes understood as alluding to La Clemenza di Tito, but Woodfield thinks it might have been Così fan Tutte (an idea he has already suggested in an e­ arlier book: Woodfield, Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte: A Compositional History [Woodbridge, UK, 2008]). The next three chapters (10: “Mozart’s ­Music in Leipzig, 11: “Josepha Duschek’s Acad­emy [22 April 1788],” and 12: “Mozart’s Acad­emy [12 May 1789]”) are concerned

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1650–1850 with concert life in Leipzig and Prague. The director, Johann Gottfried Schicht and his soprano wife Constanza Valdesturla Schicht, w ­ ere indefatigable producers of concerts in the Gewandhaus and other venues. ­These featured Mozart’s orchestral ­music as well as arias and ensembles from Figaro and Don Giovanni. Another celebrated Mozartian soprano, Josepha Duschek, gave many concerts of arias and scenas by Mozart, including a notable concert in the Gewandhaus on May 12, 1789, with the composer himself. This repertoire is extensively discussed, and t­ here is par­tic­u­lar reference to basset-­horns (150–153 passim). Chapter 13 is devoted to a discussion of Guardasoni’s com­pany in Warsaw from 1789 to 1790. The com­pany was well funded ­there, and performed Don Giovanni ­ thers. The makeup and Figaro as well as operas by Paisiello, Martini, Salieri, and o of the com­pany is analyzed, and t­ here are some familiar names from Leipzig. Much is made of the arrival of Domenico Bruni, fresh from St. Petersburg, the first cas­ trato that Guardasoni had worked with since ­there are practically no castrati roles in opera buffa. Bruni performed in oratorio and opere serie by Paisiello, Cimarosa, and Anfossi. Guardasoni returned to Prague in 1791 with a contract to provide an opera seria for the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia. The casting required a leading castrato (not Bruni, but Bedini), and a leading prima donna. For the genesis of La Clemenza di Tito Woodfield refers the reader to Sergio Durante’s 1999 article “The Chronology of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito” in ­Music and Letters (80 [1999]: 560–594), considering only—­and rejecting—­the argument as to ­whether Josepha Duschek may have sung a version of Non più di fiori in early 1791. Guardasoni’s autumn season also included Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte in a curiously accurate version that may indicate direct input from Mozart him­ ecause of the im­mense compeself. Tito was not a success, however, perhaps b tition from all the other coronation festivities. Guardasoni lost money and dismissed the com­pany, reconstituting it over the next months with only his best singers, and performing in Leipzig for the next few summer seasons. H ­ ere he had a tremendous success with Così fan tutte, new to Leipzig, together with other Italian opere buffe such as Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto and works by Paisiello and Salieri. An in­ter­est­ing innovation for ­these Leipzig seasons was the addition of plot synopses on the posters for the operas. Woodfield discusses t­ hose for Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni, but warns the reader, however, not to infer too much, for example, from the omission of both the ­grand party scene and the final ensemble in the Don Giovanni synopsis.

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Così was an enormous success and was taken up in Dresden and elsewhere (advertised as a Singspiel), and even translated into German by Bretzner, the librettist of Die Entführung. In general, the success of Mozart’s works in the original Italian and in translation, on the stage and in the concert hall, reached astonishing saturation in the years immediately following his death. Woodfield’s final chapter (16: “Guardasoni Diversifies”) follows the fortunes of Guardasoni and Mozart’s m ­ usic from 1795 into the new c­ entury. Italian opera in Prague was in decline, partly due to changing tastes but also due to an increasing sense of nationalism, which distrusted anything originating in the Haupstadt—­ Vienna. The Elector’s German-­language troupe (still playing in Dresden and Leipzig) picked up Die Zauberflöte, which enjoyed enormous success. Guardasoni, who remained in Prague, attempted to diversify, producing operettas in Czech, but his singers w ­ ere so deeply identified with opera in Italian t­ hese productions w ­ ere not successful. He had greater success translating German Singspiele into Italian, including a successful run of Il flauto magico in 1794, and also did well with a revival of La Clemenza di Tito (but without a castrato). Clemenza, however, enjoyed a greater success in the concert rooms. ­Here Josepha Duschek, Madame Schicht, and Constanze Mozart (diligently promoting the work of her late spouse) ensured that the m ­ usic of Così, Clemenza, Idomeneo, many other arias and scenes, and instrumental m ­ usic as well, ­were strongly represented in the concert life of Prague and Leipzig. In 1800 Guardasoni began to produce oratorio—­Mozart’s Requiem and Haydn’s Creation—­but neither ­these nor continued productions of Don Giovanni and Clemenza could save him and his troupe, who ­were constantly criticized for their sloppy execution. Although he was remembered fondly in Leipzig, which he left at the height of his powers, his reputation could not save him in Prague. The last we see of the aging impresario is a vignette by Oskar Teuber: “Resplendent in a magnificent blue and gold-­lace coat, and seated in his usual corner stall, he would give the sign for the per­for­mance to begin with a stamp of his foot. No m ­ atter that t­ here ­were often only twenty p ­ eople in the Parterre and sometime as few as five, an opera would be repeated if it pleased him” (Geschichte des Prager The­ aters [Prague, 1885], 2:343). Fashion and time had overtaken him. ­There are seven appendices of source material from Leipzig. T ­ hese include a cata­log of the Leipzig posters frequently referenced in the text, lists of per­for­ mances of m ­ usic by Mozart (separate lists for m ­ usic from La Clemenza di Tito and Idomeneo), and Haydn, and vari­ous lists of other per­for­mance announcements. ­There is an extensive and useful bibliography and a rather thin index.

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1650–1850 The inadequacy of the index is indicative of the general difficulty in approaching this book. Woodfield has an annoying habit of never providing ­either conventional historical context (such as mentioning that Prague needed to commission an opera—­Don Giovanni—­for the wedding of a Habsburg arch-­duchess with a Prince of Saxony ­because the wedding party would necessarily stop off in Prague on their way to Dresden) nor geopo­liti­cal. He also presumes the reader shares his extensive knowledge of eighteenth-­century singers and actors, often mentioning a name without any context, obliging average readers g­ reat anxiety and often a hopeless scouring of previous chapters or other reference works in search of an informative reference. The average reading experience, accordingly, is often frustratingly fragmented. This is exacerbated by the lack of a coherent narrative, and a paucity of explanatory anecdotes and interpretative insights or references. This is not a book for a performer, or indeed for readers who wish to acquire a sense of per­for­mance practice in Mozart’s day. ­There is, however, extensive and well-­sifted source material in the book, which may serve as an invaluable resource for gradu­ate students and scholars researching eighteenth-­century opera per ­for­mance practices.

286

Stephen Rumph, Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Pp. xvi + 265. REVIEWED BY JANE R. STEVENS

In his impressively bold and stimulating series of essays titled Mozart and Enlight­

enment Semiotics, Stephen Rumph has opened up a dizzying variety of ways in which to understand Mozart’s ­music, founded in eighteenth-­century texts not often thought of in connection with the m ­ usic of that or any other ­century. His aim, to uncover and explore the ways in which eighteenth-­century ­music creates meaning, is one that he shares with many ­music analysts of recent de­cades, as is his appeal to semiotics as the basis of his musical analy­sis. What is indisputably new ­here, however, is his invocation of the semiotic theories of the eigh­teenth ­century itself, when interest in theories of language and signs was widespread. While the interpretive analyses that emerge from his discussion are not all equally persuasive, they are nearly always thought provoking. Rumph has or­g a­nized his book as a series of six more or less in­de­pen­dent chapters, preceded by a brief and cogent introduction, and concluded with an even briefer epilogue. Each chapter pairs a small number of pieces by Mozart with the writings of one or more eighteenth-­century writers whose ideas Rumph applies to an understanding of the m ­ usic at hand. Along the way he makes reference to a broad range of modern musicologists, from Leonard Ratner to Susan McClary to Robert Hatten. As he puts it in his introduction, “this book approaches musical meaning in Mozart as a dialogue of heterogeneous practices, each with its own intellectual and so­cio­log­i­cal entailments” (7). The first chapter, “From Rhe­toric to Semiotics,” addresses Cherubino’s entrance aria, “Non so più,” from The Marriage of Figaro, and the first movement

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1650–1850 of the Symphony in G Minor, K. 550, with a brief consideration of the Lacrymosa ­ ere Rumph introduces the text that is central for his interfrom the Requiem. H pretations throughout this book, the Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines (1746) by “the most influential linguist of the age,” Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1746). As Rumph’s argument develops h ­ ere and in subsequent chapters, Condillac’s concept of “natu­r al language,” arising from innate ­human gesture and emotion, and only gradually developed empirically into a system of signs, is set in opposition to language understood as a set collection of arbitrary signs, the basis of traditional rhe­toric and fundamentally Cartesian and rationalist. The symphony movement, like the beginnings of language, begins in confusion and ambiguity (of rhythmic hypermeter, of melodic-­ motivic meaning) and moves (in the closing theme) to clarity. Thus the movement “charts a journey into consciousness, enacting the pro­cess by which reflection emerges from the confused immediacy of experience,” as the opening motive “crystallize[s] as a signe arbitraire, capable of uniting past memory and pre­sent experience” (30–31). Chapters 2 and 6 (both published e­ arlier as individual articles) are similar in structure to chapter 1. In chapter 2, “The Sense of Touch in Don Giovanni,” the ideas of Berkeley and Herder are added to ­those of Condillac, whose Traité des sensa­ tions of 1754 focuses on touch as the sense that above all ­others “alerts” the developing mind to the “immovable Other” of external real­ity (London: Chez de Bure l’ainé, 1754, 55). Herder placed touch as the first of the three senses (with hearing and sight) that underlie the arts of sculpture, ­music, and painting. Rumph calls on a complex of ideas from ­these three writers to analyze three numbers from Don Giovanni”: Zerlina’s “Vedrai, carino,” the Giovanni-­Zerlina duet, “Là ci darem la mano,” and the Statue-­Giovanni dialogue in the finale to Act II, climaxing of course in the fatal touching of hands. In chapter  6, “Archaic Endings,” Rumph addresses the contrasting musical procedures of the beginnings and endings of two works: the Piano Concerto in E-­flat Major, K. 449, and the opera, Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail. He prefaces ­these discussions with a brief analy­sis of the fugue that concludes the Gloria of the Mass in C Minor, K. 427, of 1782, arguing that the stile antico of this final section follows princi­ples of traditional rhe­toric reflective of “an immutable order of ­things ­behind the arbitrary signs of language” (176). The rondo refrain that opens the last movement of the concerto begins with a similar subject in stile antico that—­despite the “brilliant variations” that follow—­“lends the finale . . . ​a

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peculiarly static quality” (177–179). The first movement, by contrast, is characterized as “disruptive” and idiosyncratic, seeming to “mandate” the “predictability” of the finale. As ­these two “diametrically opposed methods of musical development” “coexist” in the concerto, Rumph argues, Mozart has created “a dialogue between heterogeneous, indeed, contradictory methods” (182–183). One might object, however, that Mozart’s “dialogue” constitutes rather a succession of individual monologues, a conflict that is paralleled by “the same ambivalence t­oward method” among Enlightenment language theorists. In a final analytic tour de force, Rumph uncovers similar but far more extensive stylistic contradictions in Osmin’s opening Lied and especially in the Act II quartet of Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail. The three intervening chapters take somewhat dif­fer­ent paths. Chapter 3, “Topics in Context,” begins as a critique of Leonard Ratner’s ground-­breaking theory of “topics” in eighteenth-­century ­music (Classic ­Music: Expression, Form, and Style [New York: Schirmer, 1980]). Invoking the “empiricist” theories of Giambattista Vico, Rumph gradually leaves ­those objections ­behind in ­favor of an elaboration of the modern concept, drawing on ideas especially of Robert Hatten and concluding in an analy­sis of the opening duet in The Marriage of Figaro (Robert S. Hatten. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004]). Chapter 4, “Mozart and Marxism,” does an even more abrupt reversal. Beginning with a brief synopsis of Susan McClary’s dialectical interpretation of the slow movement of the Piano Concerto in G Major, K. 453, which puts a Marxist twist on the common nineteenth-­century idea of the concerto as an embodiment of the strug­gle between the individual and the mass of society, Rumph soon ­counters that interpretation by asserting that the expressive variety, or instability, of both piano and orchestra precludes their ability to embody e­ ither “the bourgeois individual or its collective antagonist” (Susan McClary, “A Musical Dialectic from the Enlightenment: Mozart’s Piano Concerto in G Major, K. 453, Movement 2,” Cultural Critique 4 [Autumn 1986]: 114). Rumph turns, rather, to the ideas of Adam Smith, most famous as the f­ ather of capitalism (and thus a sort of direct opposite to Marx), but also a significant thinker in many more areas of psy­chol­ogy, as well as a sophisticated ­music lover. ­After an in­ter­est­ing and useful overview of some of Smith’s ideas, focusing on the centrality of the imagination, he proceeds to analyze the Piano Concerto in B-­flat, K. 450, “as a Smithian machine,” in which both topics, theory and the notion of instrument agency, play an impor­tant role (Adam

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1650–1850 Smith, Essays on Philosophical Studies, ed. W.P.D. Wightman and U.  C. Bryce [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990]). In chapter 5, “A Dubious Credo” (for this reader the least persuasive of t­ hese essays), Rumph shifts to sacred m ­ usic, analyzing the Credo movements of Mozart’s two “Credo Masses,” K. 192 and 257, in which the opening word is used as a refrain throughout the movement, together with the Credo of K. 317, the “Coronation” Mass. ­Here the stile antico is equated with a universal grammar, which “reflected the systematic spirit of rationalism” (149). Unlike the “naturalism” of galant m ­ usic, “the stile antico . . . ​continued to enshrine the ideal of a purely rational language, grounded in universal princi­ples,” one that “provided an escape from the ­whole system of repre­sen­ta­tion in which topics operate”; through it, “Mozart’s first “Credo Mass” offers a glimpse into the pure structure of the mind and, thereby, into the Divine Mind in whose nature it participates” (53–54). As Rumph fi­nally makes clear, his aim in ­these essays is both to demonstrate the heterogeneity of Mozart’s musical pro­cesses, and, more importantly, to explore the ways in which eighteenth-­century language theory can be mapped onto his ­music. That it is pos­si­ble to map a theory of language onto a piece of m ­ usic does not necessarily mean its composer shared a belief in that theory; on the other hand, composers presumably have the same under­lying assumptions about the world as ­others of their time. A more fundamental challenge to t­ hese analyses is the lack of evidence that Mozart, or any composer, understood a direct equivalence, for instance, between a theory of the origin of language and a musical pro­cess of any kind—an equivalence on which Rumph’s analy­sis of the first movement of K. 550 depends. The following passage, for instance, describing the dramatic opening duet in Die Entführung . . . ​in which the implacable (uncivilized) guardian of females opposes the impetuous (civilized) young lover, can serve as an example of Rumph’s conception of how a philosophical idea can be worked out in a piece of ­music: “The opera thus opens with a dramatic movement from stasis to activity, from the rigidity of the Oriental seraglio (or Singspiel genre) [Osmin’s Lied] to the dynamic of Western man [Belmonte’s interruptions]. H ­ ere, in a nutshell, is the analytical method of Enlightenment thought, which liberates reason from fixed authority and sets in motion the pro­cess of discovery. Belmonte and Mozart both realize the proj­ ect mapped out by George Berkeley: ‘The work of science and speculation is to unravel our prejudices and ­mistakes, untwisting the closest connections, distinguishing t­ hings that are dif­fer­ent, instead of confused and perplexed, giving us distinct views, gradually correcting our judgement, and reducing it to a philosophical

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exactness.’ In this spirit, Mozart (and Belmonte) dissects Osmin’s song, dissolving the rigid form into the teleological drama” (188). Notwithstanding such objections, this is a path-­breaking work that makes an invaluable contribution to eighteenth-­century studies, proposing connections between philosophy and musical practice that are likely to capture the interest, and occupy the time, of eighteenth-­century scholars for some time to come.

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Susan Carlile, Charlotte Lennox: An In­de­pen­dent Mind. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Pp. xx + 528. REVIEWED BY ROBIN RUNIA

I first met Susan Carlile at the 2005 Aphra Behn Society Conference. At that

point Carlile was already engaged in the transformation of Lennox studies through work on an edition of Charlotte Lennox’s Henrietta for the University Press of Kentucky’s “18th-­Century Novels by ­Women” series. Despite the fact that at that moment, Lennox’s reputation as a key figure within the period’s literary world was firmly established, the only work of hers available in a modern edition was The Female Quixote. Nevertheless, as demonstrated by the publication of Carlile and Perry’s edition in 2008, fully understanding the richness and complexity of Lennox’s literary biography required much more scholarly attention. Fortunately, Carlile’s long commitment to recovering the extent of Lennox’s c­ areer has fully paid off in Charlotte Lennox: An In­de­pen­dent Mind. Clearly a ­labor of love, Carlile’s meticulously detailed biography brings to life a ­woman whose commitment to her own personal autonomy and rejection of conventional thought and be­hav­ior make Lennox a ­woman impossible for readers not to re­spect, if not like or even also love. The book’s introduction opens with a description of Charlotte Lennox waiting for her first meeting with Samuel Richardson. Carlile details how Lennox, accompanied by her friend Samuel Johnson, requests he leave her alone for her meeting with the famed author of Pamela. This description exemplifies Carlile’s methodology as well reveals the biography’s critical value. Specifically, through analy­sis of correspondence networks and of Lennox’s own literary output, Carlile demonstrates that Lennox’s literary success was or­g a­nized on her own terms and not t­ hose of the canonical male writers who, according to previous popu­lar

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consensus, propped up the struggling female ingénue. Instead, Carlile explains how Lennox’s ­career demonstrates her intense personal commitment to ­women’s intellectual and physical self-­rule. Carlile also demonstrates how, although such a commitment often came at the expense of potentially lucrative patronage or position, it did not have to come at the expense of respectability. The rest of the volume’s chapters are or­ga­nized roughly chronologically, situating the work Lennox produced according to her own personal and financial circumstances as well as her evolving literary and intellectual interests. Carlile carefully sketches Lennox’s early and tumultuous life in Amer­i­ca as the ­daughter of a Scottish officer stationed near Albany, New York, and as a girl sent back to ­England whose aunt’s sudden death prevents her from enjoying promised care and protection. Carlile details how ­these circumstances and their plunging of Lennox into utter dependence on the whims of her betters u ­ ntil she marries for love show up in her first work of fiction, Harriot Stuart. Carlile’s analy­sis also makes clear that Lennox’s early educational advantages contributed to both the author and her heroine’s refusal, in a significant departure from the fiction of her contemporaries, of victimization. The next part of the book illuminates the immediate critical success of The Female Quixote in order to better introduce Lennox’s intense interest in literary form and function, an interest she goes on to apply to the genre of literary criticism. Carlile establishes how her Shakespeare Illustrated (1753–1754) was not only innovative for its exhaustive tracking down of Shakespeare’s sources but also daring for its willingness to critique the characters of the bard whose literary preeminence was increasingly associated with national identity. Carlile proves how Samuel Johnson’s own l­ater Plays of William Shakespeare was derivative and failed to acknowledge its dependence on Lennox’s scholarship. The third section of the book focuses on Lennox’s repeated attempts to turn her fame, as author of The Female Quixote, into financial stability. Through multiple works of translation and her periodical, the Lady’s Museum, Lennox demonstrated a keen interest in her readers’ ability to garner knowledge through their own experience of the world around them and engage in critical and po­liti­cal thought. Carlile shows how, once again, Lennox eschews offers of patronage that might cramp her ability to freely express her views, even at the expense of her own financial security. Carlile links t­ hese works directly to Lennox’s cele­bration as one of “The Nine Living Muses of G ­ reat Britain,” and, specifically, the muse of History. The book draws to a close by examining the tragic details of Lennox’s ­later life and death in poverty. Years of rocky marriage and the death of a d ­ aughter

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1650–1850 contributed to Lennox’s ongoing health prob­lems, which, combined with age, prevented her from pursuing the literary work so essential to her daily survival. Even with the publication in 1790 of Euphemia, a novel that returns to the transatlantic interrogations of empire circumscribing her first novel, Lennox was not able to support herself. The sad fact of the sums secured to her by the first-­ever literary organ­ization, the Royal Literary Fund, not only testifies to the high esteem in which Lennox was held for her literary contributions to British culture, but it also testifies to the precarity of public intellectualism whose very livelihood depends upon the market. Carlile’s biography is not only an impor­tant and timely contribution to eighteenth-­century scholarship through its thorough recovery of a w ­ oman writer and intellectual, but it demonstrates exemplary attention to detail through its extensive notes, bibliography, index, and illustrations. Color maps and landscape and portrait painting further enliven this compelling narrative, and black and white reproductions of Lennox’s letters and engravings of her portrait further contribute to the beautiful vitality of the au­then­tic life it offers for our sincere understanding and appreciation.

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Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens, introduction by Dominique Poulot, translation by Chris Miller and David Gilks. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute, Getty Publications, 2012. Pp. viii + 184. REVIEWED BY PAULA PINTO

The translation of Antoine-­Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy’s Letters to

Francisco de Miranda (1796) and Antonio Canova (1818) brings to an En­glish reading audience a source text that is still relevant for the open debates on the status of artworks in public museums. It brings current debates back to its origin, to the turn of the nineteenth ­century and the then newborn public museums. Quatremère de Quincy’s letters highlighted the interference of museums in the perception and experience of art works through space and time, thus igniting a vast criticism and reflection on museums’ cultural policies and heritage awareness. ­These letters constitute the original case study that grounded po­liti­cal and cultural interest in the property of world heritage. Quatremère de Quincy’s Letters are also currently acknowledged as a canonical reference of postmodernism, a critic to the age of spectacle, the autonomy and fetishization of art. The pre­sent edition pre­sents two antithetical positions by the same author, criticizing in one case and endorsing in the other, the dislocation and expropriation of art works. Although heavi­ly determined by a transformative historical moment and a specific set of po­liti­cal events, Quatremère’s Letters continue to be critically invoked as their debate is still an open wound. The Greeks recently demonstrated their outrage over heritage methodology and owner­ship, protesting the British Museum’s loan of the figures of the Parthenon pediment to the State Hermitage Museum (St.  Petersburg). The British Museum still refuses to loan the artworks of the Parthenon to Greece, even a­ fter a museum was built for them in Athenas, requiring,

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1650–1850 as a condition of the loan, that Greece relinquish owner­ship of the Elgin marbles to ­Great Britain. Quatremère de Quincy’s pamphlet (Lettres sur le projet d’enlever les mon­ uments de l’Italie, 1796) and his sets of letters (Lettres écrites de Londres à Rome, et adressées à M. Canova, sur les marbres d’Elgin ou les sculptures du ­temple de Minerve à Athènes, originally written in 1818) are more po­liti­cally engaged in art criticism than aesthetic treatises. The forceful reformulation of artistic life triggered by the French Revolution and the Imperialist politics of Napoleon Bonaparte led to an entirely new context of production, reception, and historical understanding of art. Quatremère’s text lays the ground for the cultural “problematization” of the function of art ­after its transfer to “public museums.” Quatremère’s debates are very close to what one would currently call preservation policies, heritage owner­ship, and the institutional construction of art history in this new “Cultural Eu­rope.” ­These letters brought the public museum and its cultural politics ­under historical scrutiny, initiating a polemical path that extends to the current complicated relationship between art and po­liti­cal and cultural power. The continuous transformations imposed by museums on the art of the past always serve as a useful index of society’s concerns with aesthetics and cultural politics, and it is still a useful exercise to expose their dualities and contradictions. Specifically debating ­whether archaeological artworks should be maintained in their original locations, Quatremère’s publications pre­sent us with two dif­fer­ent solutions for apparently similar prob­lems. The contrast between both sets of letters illuminates specific social, historical, and po­liti­cal interpretations of the role of the museum in the expropriation of artworks, creating a dialectic debate. Lettres sur le projet d’enlever les monuments de l’Italie, originally published as a pamphlet in 1796, and hereafter referred to as Letters to Miranda, criticized the looting by the French Directory of the French aristocracy and clergy, and the looting of Napoleon’s troops in Italy. At the end of the eighteenth-­century museums like the Louvre ­were filled with revolutionary dispossessions and war confiscations. The ancient artworks displayed by the French museums w ­ ere ­either ­those left by the nobles that had fled France ­after the Revolution, or the plunder ­after military triumphs. Quatremère expressed the dismay felt at removing antiquities from their original contexts into modern exhibits, even if transfers from Rome to Paris w ­ ere generally the removal from one specific collection or museum to another.

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Quatremère takes the opposite position, however, in his Lettres écrites de Londres à Rome, et adressées à M. Canova, sur les marbres d’Elgin ou les sculptures du t­emple de Minerve à Athènes—­the fictional Letters to Canova. ­These ­were intended as Quatremère’s attempt to influence opinion in support of the transference of the Parthenon marbles to the British Museum, and legitimized the removal of sculptures from the original Greek ­temple to a royal museum. In the ­earlier texts Quatremère criticized the suppression of information regarding the origins, transfers, and appropriations of works of art. He also pointed out that we could not expect artworks to produce the same effects everywhere and on ­every occasion. Nonetheless, in ­later texts he defended Lord Elgin’s purchase and transference of the Parthenon marbles to London. This defense, justified ­under the interest of art and science, was based on what Dominique Poulot calls “the historical geography of art.” While the “­grand tour” of Greece (­under the Ottoman Empire) was deemed unfeasible and most of the original Greek art was already untraceable, Rome and its archaeological peripheries, with the recently discovered Roman statuary copies, ­were then considered the center of the artistic world. With the dismemberment of the French revolutionary and imperial collections of antiquities, which Quatremère openly condemned, and the 1815 international restitutions, Eu­rope’s artistic geography changed once more, and London embraced the idea of becoming Paris’s natu­ral successor. In fact, it was in light of this new center of the arts that the En­glish parliament invoked Winckelmann’s princi­ples concerning the ­union of the masterpieces. The belief that Roman heritage allowed the association of the arts with their cultural structures was further manipulated into cultural politics. How could Lord Elgin’s act of displacing classical art be further legitimized, ­after France was forced to restitute previously confiscated artworks? Given that Antonio Canova, himself, in his role as conservator of Italian heritage, reprinted Letters to Miranda in 1815 to reinforce the reclamation of artworks looted from the Vatican by Napoleon, it is even more ironic that Quatremère de Quincy’s Let­ ters to Canova would legitimize Elgin’s removal of antiquities from their original site. ­After defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, the British earned further gratitude from Antonio Canova for their help in the recovery and return of almost all the looted artworks that had been removed to Paris in 1803. In July 1816 the Vatican and Canova himself sent a group of casts to ­England, in the returning empty ships that had transported the Italian artworks from France. At the Louvre, Visconti

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1650–1850 told Canova that, u ­ ntil he had been to London, he had seen nothing. Subsequently Canova did visit London, and his testimony before Britain’s parliamentary commission was vital for the acquisitions of the British Museum. The neoclassical sculptor had good relations with Elgin’s circle and was even able to acquire some casts from the Parthenon marbles. One significant difference between the French and the British archaeological collecting was that the display of the marbles at the British Museum was not presented as the result of bloody and ambitious wars, but rather as the result of public taste. Described as “the new Athens,” London would not only secure the best examples of classical art from further injury and degradation but would also pre­ sent itself as the place where such art could find the proper developing connections with science, lit­er­a­ture, and philosophy, and as the place where t­ hese classical models could receive the homage to which they w ­ ere entitled and serve as inspiring examples for a prosperous society. Improvements in the way ancient sculptures ­were displayed suggested a passage from pillage and trea­sure hunting to archaeological knowledge. Archibald Archer’s painting The Temporary Elgin Room in 1819 with Portraits of Staff, a Trustee, and Visitors (1919) exemplifies this change. Despite being written twenty years apart, ­these letters define a turning point in French history, following the rupture with the ancient regime and the popu­lar massacres, the seizure and destruction of aristocratic and religious property, and the Napoleonic militaristic looting. T ­ hese filled the French museums and particularly the Louvre, but also witnessed the development of a positive and structural social change based on scientific and technological development. They testify to the establishment of a new geopo­liti­cal order in Eu­rope, both criticizing and empowering it. Édouard Pommier, editor of Letters to Miranda (Paris: Macula, 1989) considered Quatremère de Quincy “the thinker who offered an alternative to revolutionary cultural policies,” notably in his intellectual and perceptual authenticity ­toward the artworks, as opposed to their ideological mobilization. He refused to recognize the end of meaning for heritage related to the Old Regime and recognized in them a new ideology related to the French Revolution. Quatremère condemned the reevaluation of universal aesthetic canons consolidated by the reconfigured public collections. In his introduction, Dominique Poulot historicizes the discredit Quatremère de Quincy felt in the French po­liti­cal and cultural tradition at the turn of the nineteenth c­ entury and the renewed interest in his princi­ples in the 1970s. New approaches to Quatremère’s writings became fash­ion­able during the bicentenary

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of the French revolution, as counter­parts to the era’s revolutionary cultural policies and predatory museum policies. Quatremère de Quincy’s monarchistic positions, the defense of moderate values and public positions in f­avor of local memory and tradition discredited him po­liti­cally and culturally to younger generations. New social and historical o ­ rders challenged the relationship of art to the historical past, to the space of the museum and to new publics. The reevaluation of universal aesthetic canons depended on proximity to the artworks, on the creation of studying museums based on copies, or on the consolidation of public collections with landmark artistic pieces. The g­ reat revolution came in the figure of historical knowledge, and although Quatremère critically acknowledges this difference in the perception of art, his defense of the intellectual and perceptual authenticity of the artworks might have been at the basis of his support of the transfer of the Parthenon marbles to London. Si­mul­ta­neously, while expropriation was not a new subject, evocation of routine vandalism at the Parthenon helped justify the “protection” of the marbles and their museology. Quatremère wrote about the primary influence of the conditions of reception of an artwork on the viewer’s sensitivity, but the unfavorable circumstances for accessing the Parthenon marbles in situ served to legitimize Elgin’s procedures. As the mutilated state of the “architectural sculptures” could no longer “move ­people” as it did in Greek times, but could only serve as “objects for study,” their purpose became didactic. As an example of this changing experience, Quatremère writes about the Parthenon’s frieze in the second letter to Canova, explaining that what was meant to be experienced surrounding the architecture (and not to be placed before the spectator’s eyes) was now displayed in an interior room for academic scrutiny. Another contradiction was therefore established between his defense of “in situ” and the possibility to see, in the museum context, parts that ­were occluded from the spectator’s sight. Quatremère’s positions reflected the relationship between con­temporary society and art, but b ­ ecause he did not forgo a classical ideal of beauty and his theories of imitation, he was considered a reactionary during his own time. It was nonetheless the controversy about the cele­bration of the advent of republican administration of the French national heritage and the influence of Quatremère’s intellectual context (even if opposing it) that made pos­si­ble its subsequent appropriation for activist purposes. As Dominique Poulot explains, Quatremère’s text was determined by a specific set of events and “intended merely to influence con­temporary circumstances” but ended up becoming a foundational text of Eu­ro­pean heritage-­consciousness. Its impact can be ultimately related to the

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1650–1850 international triumph of 1816, when some of the spoils of war exhibited at the Louvre ­were returned to their original countries. Beyond the discussion of ­whether artworks should be preserved in their original location or w ­ hether the museums should be their public beholders, the exaltation of universal aesthetic canons and the withdrawal of the social function of art are still the subjects of an urgent con­temporary debate.

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Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Brontës, Anniversary Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. lii + 640. REVIEWED BY TAMARA S. WAGNER

The anniversary edition of The Oxford Companion to the Brontës is a carefully

compiled, extended reissue of the comprehensive volume of scholarship first published in 2003. Its timely publication contributes to the exciting increase in scholarship on the Brontë siblings to commemorate the bicentenaries of their births: of Charlotte in 1816, followed by Branwell in 1817, Emily in 1818, and Anne in 1820. Edited by two renowned Brontë scholars, Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith, the companion is characterized by academic rigor and based on scholarly research. Its main purpose is to evoke the historical and social milieu in which the Brontës lived and worked, to explain the significance of this context in and to their writing and art, and further to trace connections between their lived experience and their imaginative worlds. Or­ga­nized alphabetically, the entries therefore span from a succinct, pointy characterization of Martha Abbot, “the spiteful, sycophantic lady’s maid to Jane Eyre’s Aunt” (1) to a brief description of the real-­life Yorkshire Gazette as well as the fictitious “Young Men’s Magazine,” part of the Brontës’ juvenilia. Similarly, the companion includes entries both on the historical Napoleon Bonaparte and on the fictional character named Napoleon, the ruler of Branwell Brontë’s Frenchyland in the Glass Town and Angrian saga, one of the best-­known pieces of the Brontës’ juvenilia. Several entries contain more general contextual information on daily life in Victorian Britain or on British history and culture, but they always relate ­these details to the Brontës’ lives or works. Thus the entry on “accomplishments” also includes a discussion of the Brontës’ own accomplishments and how they presented them in their writing. An explanation of the “Church

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1650–1850 of ­England” likewise combines a succinct overview with detailed references to its role in the lives of the Brontës. Comprising the main part of the companion, ­these alphabetically arranged entries are preceded by a detailed chronology of the Brontës’ lives, starting with Patrick Brontë’s birth in 1777 and ending with his death in 1861, a­ fter he had outlived his c­ hildren. The lists of key events in their lives and of the publications of their works as well as of major biographies are juxtaposed with well-­known events in history, including in art and lit­er­a­ture, to establish the historical context. Other supplemental material includes an updated bibliography and also several maps, of both ­England and Ireland at the time, and of the fictional worlds produced by the Brontës, such as “The Glass Town Federation and the kingdom of Angria,” as based on Branwell Brontë’s frontispiece to “the History of the Young Men” (1831), with Angria added, which offers a unique perspective on the fictional worlds of the Brontës’ early works. Such short entries, moreover, are complemented by lengthier essays, which combine overview and interpretation. T ­ hese essays are inserted as extended material on the Brontë siblings themselves and their works, but also on their portraits (395–397) or a comprehensive discussion of the “Glass Town and Angrian Saga” (209–215). T ­ hese minute discussions, copiously supplemented by other­wise rarely accessible illustrative material, guarantee that The Oxford Companion to the Brontës is more than a reference work. It invites browsing, while also providing a reliable starting point to research on the Brontës. Several of the long entries also aim to guide readers through the changing focus points in the critical assessment of the Brontës, their ­family dynamics, and their works, including also their juvenilia and their art. ­These informative overviews provide an objective and fair account of changing approaches that range from biographical or neohistorical accounts to psychoanalytical analy­sis, postcolonial readings, and new developments in narrative theory. This is definitely one of the aspects in which the revised edition ensures that the companion is updated and remains comprehensive. In addition, this anniversary edition contains a preface by Claire Harman, the most recent biographer of Charlotte Brontë. Harman introduces the Brontës as a literary phenomenon unlike any other, stressing that they “­were among the first writers to attract mass fandom” (vii). She rightly terms The Oxford Companion to the Brontës “a classic work of reference” (vii), while the additional material not only makes it more comprehensive but updates the breadth of the scholarship it references. It is enjoyable and impressive as a book that can be read from beginning to end, while it is definitely also invaluable as a detailed work of reference.

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The succeeding preface by Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith then further explains the unique structure of the companion. In par­tic­u­lar, a useful Classified Contents List (xv–­x xv) is “designed to illuminate the active interrelation between the Brontës, their writings and activities, their own time and our time” (ix). The latter aspect ties together the companion’s underpinning idea, to bring to life the specific context, or contexts, of a literary phenomenon. The combination of short, succinct, purely informative entries on aspects of the Brontës’ lives and their time on the one hand and more specific discussions of themes, characters, or widely acknowledged interpretations on the other indisputably ensures the special appeal of The Oxford Companion to the Brontës. However, occasionally a passage in the summary of a narrative, for example, might arguably be regarded as too interpretative for the purpose of a reference work. Thus, in the discussion of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette, the biographical approach dominates to such an extent as to pre­sent it as an acknowledged fact that “Charlotte depicts Constantin Heger, the ‘master’ who most profoundly influenced her life, as the temperamental, unforgettable Paul Emanuel” (521). Within the entry, it is more loosely phrased that this fictitious character is “based on M Constantin Heger,” just as “[o]ther material and other characters used in the novel ­were suggested by Charlotte’s experiences” in Brussels (523). Whereas the overall account of the “related manuscripts” of Villette lets the reader trace the development and transformation of lived experience into dif­fer­ent literary expressions, the nature of a reference work imbues the interpretation of possibly autobiographical material with an authority that might overshadow further interpretations of what is significantly introduced as a “mature and complex novel” (521). Finding the right balance, given the companion’s unique structure, is admittedly tricky, and it might remain up to the reader to separate interpretation from information. The lengthy entry on Jane Eyre, perhaps the best-­known and most often analyzed text, by contrast, is carefully balanced, avoiding one specific interpretation. Instead, the detailed discussion provides a brief overview of the sources and contexts of the narrative as well as a succinct account of its immediate reception in the 1840s. The novel’s subsequent, ongoing, and continuously changing interpretations are rightly covered in entries on specific theoretical viewpoints. The most useful entries might nonetheless remain ­those dedicated to still rarely discussed works, and the companion w ­ ill hopefully inspire more interest in them.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Essay Authors DANIEL GUSTAFSON specializes in Restoration and eighteenth-­century British lit­ er­a­ture and drama. His research focuses on drama, politics, and per­for­mance history across the long eigh­teenth c­ entury (1660–1832). He has published essays on Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and London repertory theater practices, and he is currently finalizing the draft of Lothario’s Corpse, which explores the cultural durability of the Restoration libertine in developments in theater history and in the history of po­liti­cal subjectivity from the early eighteenth-­century stage to the movements of theatrical and po­liti­cal reform in the 1830s. JAMES HORO­WITZ is assistant professor of lit­er­a­ture at Sarah Lawrence College, where he specializes in British culture of the long eigh­teenth c­ entury. He has published on John Dryden’s Jacobitism, eighteenth-­century Ovidianism, and libertine satire, among other topics, and is currently at work on a book proj­ect about gender, sexuality, and po­liti­cal partisanship in Augustan E ­ ngland. ANTHONY W. LEE’S research interests center upon Samuel Johnson and his circle, mentoring, and intertextuality. He has published nearly forty essays on Johnson and eighteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture and culture, and has three books recently published: New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation (2018), Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle (2019), and “Modernity Johnson”: Samuel

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About the Contributors

Johnson among the Modernists (2019). He is finalizing the draft of A “Clubbable Man”: Essays on Eighteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture in Honor of Greg Clingham and is working on the Selected Johnsonian Papers of J. D. Fleeman (1961–1994) and, with Melvyn New, Scholarly Annotation and Eighteenth-­Century Texts. Anthony has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Arkansas, Kentucky Wesleyan College, the University of the District of Columbia, and the University of Mary­land University College, where he also served as director of the En­glish and Humanities Program. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Arkansas Tech University. YU LIU is professor of En­glish at Niagara County Community College in upstate New York. He is the recipient of a 2006–2007 Guggenheim fellowship, a 2012–2013 Fulbright fellowship at City University of Hong Kong, and a spring 2018 Fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. In addition to over thirty-­five essays in peer-­reviewed journals of lit­er­a­ture, history, and philosophy, he is the author of Poetics and Politics: The Revolutions of Words­worth (1999), Seeds of a Dif­fer­ent Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New En­glish Aesthetic Ideal (2008), and Har­ monious Disagreement: Matteo Ricci and His Closest Chinese Friends (2015). JACK LYNCH is professor of En­glish and chair of the En­glish department at Rutgers University–­Newark. He is the author of The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (2002), Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (2008), and You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf from Ancient Babylon to Wikipe­ dia (2016), as well as the editor of The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660– 1800 (2016). With J. T. Scanlan he edits The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual. MOLLY MAROTTA is a doctoral candidate at Florida State University, where she studies restoration and eighteenth-­century British lit­er­a­ture. Her most recent proj­ect focuses on kidnapping, gender, and narrative-­making in the plays and epistolary novels of the long eigh­teenth ­century. She received her MA in En­glish from the University of Mary­land. Most recently, her work has appeared in gender forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies and has been featured at conferences of the South-­Atlantic Modern Language Association, the South-­Central Society for Eighteenth-­Century Studies, the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-­Century Studies, and the American Society for Eighteenth-­Century Studies.

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About the Contributors

PHILIP S. PALMER is head of Research Ser­vices at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. His published scholarship on early modern travel writing and book history includes articles in Re­nais­sance Studies and Huntington Library Quar­ terly, as well as a teaching edition of Thomas Coryate’s Crudities for Broadview Press. In July 2019 he joined the Morgan Library & Museum as the Robert H. Taylor Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts. PAT ROGERS is distinguished professor emeritus at the University of South Florida. Former president of the British Society of Eigh­teenth ­Century Studies, and of the Johnson Society of Lichfield, Rogers has published books, editions, and articles on varied aspects of the eigh­teenth ­century, including the history of culture, society, politics, lit­er­a­ture, ­music, architecture, law, medicine, antiquarianism, topography, and other issues. He is editor of the Oxford Illustrated History of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and associate editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biog­ raphy. Current proj­ects include a bibliography of Edmund Curll (with Paul Baines) and a narrative entitled The Poet and the Publisher: An Account of Alexander Pope, esq. of Twickenham versus Mr. Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street. SARAH B. STEIN is assistant professor of En­glish in the Department of En­glish and World Languages at Arkansas Tech University. Dr. Stein received her PhD in comparative lit­er­a­ture from Emory University. Her work on eighteenth-­century British writers appears in the Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review, Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture, The Words­worth Circle, and The Wiley-­Blackwell Encyclopedia of British Lit­er­a­ture, 1660–1789, among o ­ thers. She has also spoken at many national and international literary conferences. Dr. Stein’s current book proj­ect, The Hebraic Sublime, explores the incorporation of a notion of sublime Hebrew into British lit­ er­a­ture of the long eigh­teenth ­century. HOWARD D. WEINBROT is Ricardo Quintana Professor of En­glish Emeritus and William Freeman Vilas Research Professor Emeritus in the College of Letters and Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison. His latest books are Lit­er­a­ture, Reli­ gion, and the Evolution of Culture 1660–1780 (2013) and the edited compendium Samuel Johnson: New Contexts for a New ­Century (2014). He is currently a reader at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. He recently finished essays on Johnson’s sermons and now is at work on a study of Samuel Johnson’s Shakespeare and Shakespeare in eighteenth-­century France.

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About the Contributors

CLAUDE WILLAN is director of the Digital Research Commons and lecturer in the Department of En­glish at the University of Houston. He works on British lit­er­a­ ture and visual culture of the eigh­teenth ­century, and digital humanities. He has published on subjects including Alexander Pope, Edmund Curll, James Thomson, Jacobitism, and print and manuscript cultures. He is currently working on a book tracing the genealogy of literary authority in the eigh­teenth ­century, from the settlement of 1688 to Samuel Johnson’s Lives.

Reviewers SUZANNE L. BARNETT is assistant professor of En­glish at Francis Marion University. Her book Romantic Paganism: The Politics of Ecstasy in the Shelley Circle (2018) examines the role of the classical world in the imaginations of the second-­ generation Romantic authors. Her forthcoming collection (coedited with Ashley Cross and Kate Singer), entitled Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Bod­ ies, Genders, ­Things, is forthcoming. She has also contributed essays to Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives (2019) and Frankenstein and Its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction (2018), and published essays in The Keats-­Shelley Journal, Essays in Romanticism, and Roman­ tic Circles. ROY BOGAS is professor emeritus of m ­ usic at Holy Names University in Oakland, California, where he taught Advanced Piano Pedagogy, Piano Lit­er­a­ture, and private piano study. He is an acclaimed pianist and has performed nationally as soloist and with many distinguished musicians. He is currently artistic director of MasterGuild chamber concert series at Holy Names University and the Gualala, California, Summer Festival of Chamber ­Music. KATE QUARTANO BROWN, ­after graduating from Oxford (En­glish) and Graz (­music), directed opera in the United Kingdom, Eu­rope, and the United States. The first ­woman to direct at the Handel festivals of Göttingen and Halle, her premieres include Jonathan Dove’s Tobias and the Angel and the first modern productions of operas by Rospigliosi (Pope Clement IX). She has written and produced music-­ dramas based on the m ­ usic of Haydn, Purcell, and Hildegard. Her current research focuses on how e­ arlier stage techniques can illuminate opera productions now. She is a committee member of the Society for Theatre Research.

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About the Contributors

RICHARD P. HEITZENRATER is William Kellon Quick Professor Emeritus of Church History and Wesley Studies at The Divinity School, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and general editor of the Bicentennial Edition of The Works of John Wes­ ley. He is the author or editor of numerous scholarly works on John Wesley and the Methodists, including Wesley and the ­People Called Methodists (2nd ed., 2013). MALCOLM JACK is a specialist in constitutional m ­ atters and was for many years clerk of the House in the British Parliament. His books include Corruption & Pro­ gress: The Eighteenth-­Century Debate (1989), William Beckford: An En­glish Fidalgo (1996), Sintra: A Glorious Eden (2002), Lisbon: City of the Sea (2007), and his most recent book, To The Fairest Cape: Eu­ro­pean Encounters in the Cape of Good Hope (2018). He was appointed Knight Commander of the Bath in 2011 and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 2012. R.J.W. MILLS is currently a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Research Fellow in History at Queen Mary University of London. His research has covered numerous topics relating to early modern British religious and intellectual history, and he is currently exploring how the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment approached the study of religion. Robin has published in several journals and is completing for next year his first monograph, The Scottish Enlightenment Explains the Gods. NIGEL PENN is a professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of Rogues, Rebels and Runaways: Eighteenth-­ Century Cape Characters (1999) and The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th ­Century (2006). PAULA PINTO is a gradu­ate of the University of Rochester, earning a PhD in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies. She has a master’s degree in architecture and urban culture from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain. She is an in­de­pen­dent curator for ­Album Fotográfico (Porto, Portugal, 2014–). She founded and coedited the urban culture journal InSi(s)tu (2001–2006) and served as coeditor of the journal Invisible Culture, vol. 14, Aesthetes and Eaters—­Food and the Arts (Winter 2010). She has curated exhibitions in Figueroa da Foz, Garda, Guimarães, Cerveira, and Lisbon, and is currently preparing several art publications. ISABEL RIVERS is professor of eighteenth-­century En­glish lit­er­a­ture and culture in the School of En­glish and Drama, Queen Mary University of London. She has

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About the Contributors

published widely on the writing, editing, publishing, distribution, and reception of religious books in the long eigh­teenth c­ entury, most recently in Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in ­England, 1720–1800 (2018). She directs the Dissenting Academies Proj­ect (http://­w ww​ .­qmulreligionandliterature​.­co​.­uk ​/­research​/­the​-­dissenting​-­academies​-­project ​/ ­). ROBIN RUNIA is associate professor of En­glish at Xavier University of Louisiana. Her research focuses on ­women’s writing of the long eigh­teenth ­century, and she has published essays on gender and genre in Journal of Early Modern Cultural Stud­ ies, Restoration and Eighteenth-­Century Theatre Research, and a number of edited collections. She has also produced a scholarly edition of Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui (2016) and edited the volume The ­Future of Feminist Eighteenth-­Century Scholarship: Beyond Recovery (2017). Her monograph proj­ect Displaced Britons: Africans and Creoles in the Work of Maria Edgeworth is currently ­under review. GEFEN BAR-­ON SANTOR is a part-­time professor in the Department of En­glish at the University of Ottawa. She has taught courses from the medieval period to the eigh­teenth c­ entury, as well as technical writing and lit­er­a­ture and science. She also teaches academic writing for publication to professors whose primary language is not En­glish at the University of Ottawa’s Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute. Her research and publication focus is the reception of Shakespeare in eighteenth-­century Britain, as well as lit­er­a­ture and science. MARK G. SPENCER is a professor in the Department of History at Brock University. Among his dozen authored or edited volumes are David Hume and Eighteenth-­ Century Amer­i­ca (2005; paperback 2010), The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment (2 vols., 2015), and Hume’s Reception in Early Amer­i­ca: Expanded Edition (2017). JANE R. STEVENS is professor emerita at the University of California San Diego, where she taught ­music history, history of ­music theory, aesthetics, and criticism with an emphasis on integrative studies and humanities. Her principal research interests include ­music of the eigh­teenth ­century, the history of the concerto, and eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century musical thought. Her current work centers on completion of a book on the keyboard concertos of Bach’s sons, and further studies relating to the perceived nature of musical content in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries.

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About the Contributors

CHRISTOPHER TRIGG is assistant professor of American lit­er­a­ture at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His work on colonial and modern American religious culture has appeared in American Lit­er­a­ture, Early American Lit­er­a­ture, and Po­liti­cal Theology. He is currently writing a book on Protestant theologies of resurrection in the early-­modern Atlantic world. TAMARA S. WAGNER is associate professor of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her books include Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration: Settlers, Returnees, and Nineteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture in En­glish (2016), Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction (2010), and Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740–1890 (2004). She has also edited collections on Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand (2014), Victorian Set­ tler Narratives (2011), and Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-­Century ­Women Writers (2009). Wagner currently works on a study of babyhood in Victorian culture.

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